单选题下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题，每道题后面有4个选项。请仔细阅读短文并根据短文回答其后面的问题，从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案。{{B}}第一篇{{/B}} A Debate on the English Language A measure declaring English the national language is under intense debate in the United States. The US Senate passed two declarations last week. One calls English the nation's official language and the other says it is the "common and unifying(统一的)" tongue. But Americans found themselves divided on the issue. Since people worldwide know that most Americans speak only English, many can't understand why the issue is so controversial(有争议的). "The discussion is related to fears of immigration issues," says Dick Tucker, a social scientist at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. "It's related to a worry about the changing demography (人口统计) of the US. It's a worry about who will continue to have political and economic influence. In fact, the notion of protecting the language has been kicked around almost since the nation's founding. John Adams lobbied(游说) in 1780 for the creation of a national academy to correct and improve the English language. But his proposal died, since lawmakers saw it as a royalist(保皇主义者) attempt to define personal behavior. Since then, the country hasn't had a national language, but the idea of recognizing the special status of English lived on. "The emotions surrounding language resurface(再次浮现) not because people feel comfortable with English. It is more about the discomfort many Americans feel with the flew languages," says Walt Wolfram, a professor at North Carolina State University. "Language is never about language," he says. According to the 2000 US Census Bureau report, of 209 million Americans over 18 years old, 172 million speak only English at home. About 37 million speak languages other than English. Among them, 6.5 million speak poor English and 3.1 million don't speak English at all.

单选题 Differences of Policemen Real policemen hardly recognize any resemblance between their lives and what they see on TV. The first difference is that a policeman's real life revolves round criminal law. He has to know exactly what actions are crimes and what evidence can be used to prove them in court. He has to know nearly as much law as a professional lawyer, and what is more, he has to apply it on his feet, in the dark and rain, running down a street after someone he wants to talk to. Little of his time is spent in chatting, he will spend most of his working life typing mil- lions of words on thousands of forms about hundreds of sad, unimportant people who are guilty of stupid, petty crimes. Most television crime drama is about finding the criminal: as soon as he's arrested, the story is over. In real life, finding criminals is seldom much of a problem. Except in very serious cases like murders and terrorist attacks little effort is spent on searching. Having made an arrest, a detective really starts to work. He has to prove his case in court and to do that he often has to gather a lot of difference evidence. At third big difference between the drama detective and the real one is the unpleasant pressures: first, as members of a police force they always have to behave absolutely in accordance with the law; secondly, as expensive public servants they have to get results. They can hardly ever do both. Most of the time some of them have to break the rules in small ways. If the detective has to deceive the world, the world often deceives him. Hardly anyone he meets tells him the truth. And this separation the detective feels between himself and the rest of the world is deepened by the simple-mindedness—as he sees it—of citizens, social workers, doctors, law-makers, and judges, who, instead of eliminating crime punish the criminals less severely in the hope that this will make them reform. The result, detectives feel, is that nine tenths of their work is recatching people who should have stayed behind bars. This makes them rather cynical.

单选题The lecture is so dull that he can't focus his attention on it.A. dependB. concentrateC. relyD. put

单选题The director of the factory felt no individual responsibility for the deficit.A. undividedB. indicativeC. personalD. personnel

单选题Communications Revolution Cyberspace, data superhighway, multi-media—for those who have seen the future, the linking of computers, television and telephones will change our lives forever. Yet for all the talk of a forthcoming technological utopia little attention has been given to the implications of these developments for the poor. As with all new high technology, while the West concerns itself with the "how", the question of "for whom" is put aside once again. Economists are only now realizing the full extent to which the communications revolution has affected the world economy, Information technology allows the extension of trade across geographical and industrial boundaries, and transnational corporations take full advantage of it. Terms of trade, exchange and interest rates and money movements are more important than the production of goods. The electronic economy made possible by information technology allows the haves to increase their control on global markets—with destructive impact on the have-nots. For them the result is instability. Developing countries which rely on the production of a small range of goods for export are made to feel like small parts in the international economic machine. As "futures" are traded on computer screens, developing countries simply have less and less control of their destinies. So what are the options for regaining control? One alternative is for developing countries to buy in the latest computers and telecommunications themselves—so-called "development communications" modernization. Yet this leads to long-term dependency and perhaps permanent constraints on developing countries" economies. Communications technology is generally exported from the U.S., Europe or Japan l the patents, skills and ability to manufacture remain in the hands of a few industrialized countries. It is also expensive, and imported products and services must therefore be bought on credit—credit usually provided by the very countries whose companies stand to gain. Furthermore, when new technology is introduced there is often too low a level of expertise to exploit it for native development. This means that while local elites, foreign communities and subsidiaries of transnational corporations may benefit, those whose lives depend on access to the information are denied by it.

单选题Did Uanyone/U call when I was out?

单选题 下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题，每道题后面有4个选项。{{B}}第一篇{{/B}} {{B}}Taxi Riding{{/B}} In a moment of personal crisis, how much help can you expect from a New York taxi driver? I began studying this question after watching the "Taxicab Confessions," a series of documentaries in which hidden cameras record the secrets of unsuspecting taxi riders. I found the results varied. One morning I got into three different taxis and announced: "Well, it's my first day back in New York in seven years. I've been in prison." Not a single driver replied, so I tried again. "Yeah, I shot a man in Reno," I explained, hoping the driver would ask me why, so I could say casually, "Just to watch him die." But nobody asked. The only response came from a Ghanaian driver:" Reno? That is in Nevada?" Taxi drivers were uniformly sympathetic when I said I'd just been fired. "This is America," a Haitian driver said. "One door is closed. Another is open." He argued against my plan to bum down my boss's house: "If you do something silly and they put you away, you cannot look for another job." A Pakistani driver even turned down a chance to profit from my loss of hope: he refused to take me to the middle of the George Washington Bridge, a $20 trip. "Why you want to go there? Go home and relax. Don't worry. Take a new job." One very hot weekday in July, while wearing a red ski mask and holding a stuffed pillowcase with the word "BANK" on it, I tried hailing a taxi five times outside different banks. The driver picked me up every time. My ride with Guy-Caaude Thevenain, a Haitian driver, was typical of the superb assistance I received. "Is anyone following us?" "No," said the driver, looking in his rearview mirror at traffic and me. "Let's go across the park," I said. "I just robbed the bank there, I got $25,000." "$25,000?" he asked. "Yeah, you think it was wrong to take it?" "No, man. I work 8 hours and I don't make almost $70. If I can do that, I do it too." As we approached 86th and Lexington, I pointed to the Chemical Bank. "Hey, there's another bank," I said, "could you wait here a minute while I go inside?" "No, I can't wait. Pay me now." His reluctance may have had something to do with money—taxi drivers think the rate for waiting time is too low—but I think he wanted me to learn that even a bank robber can't expect unconditional support.

单选题The temperatures are somewhat lower than the average temperature in May this year.A. ratherB. veryC. a littleD. less

单选题Many {{U}}residents{{/U}} of the apartment all dissatisfied to noisy neighbors. A. managers B. occupants C. landlords D. caretakers

单选题{{U}}Although {{/U}}I sympathize．I can’t really do very much to help

单选题This is not {{U}}typical{{/U}} of English, but is a feature of the Chinese language.

单选题The repair work involved modifying two of the windows.

单选题Don't Count on Dung (粪) Conservationists (自然保护主义者) may be miscalculating the numbers of the threatened animals such as elephants, say African and American researchers. The error occurs because of a flaw in the way they estimate animal numbers from the piles of dung the creatures leave behind. The mistake could lead researchers to think that there are twice as many elephants as there really are in some regions according to Andrew Plumptre of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York. Biologist Katy Payne of Comell University in Ithaca, New York, agrees, "We really need to know elephant numbers and the evidence that we have is quite indirect, " says Payne, who electronically tracks elephants. Counting elephants from planes is impossible in the vast rainforests of Central Africa. So researchers often estimate elephant numbers by counting dung piles in a given area. They also need to know the rate at which dung decays because it's extremely difficult to determine these rates. However, researchers counting elephants in one region tend to rely on standard decay rates established elsewhere. But researchers at the WCS have found that this decay rate varies from region to region depending on the climate and environment. Using the wrong values can lead the census astray (离开正道), says Plumptre. He and his colleague Anthony Chifu Nchanji studied decaying elephant dung in the forests of Cameroon. They found that the dung decayed between 55 and 65 per cent more slowly than the dung in the rainforests of neighboring Gabon. If researchers use decay rates from Gabon to count elephants in Cameroon, they would probably find more elephants than are actually around. This could mean estimates in Cameroon are at least twice as high as those derived from decay rates calculated locally, Plumptre says, "However accurate your dung density estimate might be, the decay rate can severely affect the result". Plumptre also says that the dung-pile census should be carried out over a region similar in size to an elephant's natural range. The usual technique of monitoring only small, protected areas distorts numbers because elephants move in and out of these regions, he says, "If the elephant population increases within the protected area, you can not determine whether. It is a real increase or whether it is due to elephants moving in because they are being poached (入侵偷猎) outside." Plumptre says that similar problems may also affect other animal census studies that rely on indirect evidence such as nests, tracks or burrows (地洞).

单选题Nuclear Power and Its Danger Nuclear power"s danger to health, safety, and even life itself can be summed up in one word: radiation. Nuclear radiation has a certain mystery about it, partly because it cannot be detected by human senses. It can"t be seen or heard, or touched, or tasted, even though it may be all around There are other things like that. For example, radio waves are all around us but we can"t detect them, sense them, without a radio receiver. Similarly, we can"t sense radioactivity without a radiation detector. But unlike common radio waves, nuclear radiation is not harmless to human beings and other living things. At very high levels, radiation can kill an animal or human being outright by killing masses of cells in vital organs. But even the lowest level of radiation can do serious damage. There is no level of radiation that is completely safe. If the radiation does not hit anything important, the damage may not be significant. This is the case when only a few cells are hit, and if they are killed outright. Your body will replace the dead cells with healthy ones. But if the few cells are only damaged, and if they reproduce themselves, you may be in trouble. They reproduce themselves in a deformed way. They can grow into cancer. Sometimes this does not show up for many years. This is another reason for some of the mystery about nuclear radiation. Serious damage can be done without the victim being aware at the time that damage has occurred. A person can be irradiated and feel fine, then die of cancer five, ten, or twenty years later as a result. Or a child can be born weak or liable to serious illness as a result of radiation absorbed by its grandparents. Radiation can hurt us. We must know the truth.

单选题Patricia stared at the other girls with resentment .

单选题Michael is now merely a good friend.

单选题She's one of the {{U}}smartest{{/U}} students in the whole school.

单选题She was grateful to him for being so good to her.

单选题He was （tempted） by the high salary offered by the company.

单选题The great changes of the city astonished every visitor to it.