单选题下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题，每题后面有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}} Silence Please If there is one group of workers across the Western world who will be glad that Christmas is over, that group is shop workers. It is not that they like to complain. They realize that they are going to be rushed off their feet at Christmas. They know that their employers need happy customers to make their profits that pay their wages. But there is one thing about working in a shop over Christmas that is too bad to tolerate. That thing is music. These days, all shops and many offices have what is known as "Piped music" or "muzak" playing for all the hours that they are open. Muzak has an odd history. During the 1940s, music was played to cows as part of a scientific experiment. It was found that cows which listened to simple, happy music produced more milk. Perhaps workers and customers who listened to simple, happy music would be more productive and spend more money. In fact, nobody knows what effect playing muzak in shops has on profits. It is simply something that everybody does. But we are learning more about the effect of constantly repeated hearings of songs on the people who have to hear them all the time. Research shows that repeated hearings of complex pieces of music bring greater enjoyment before becoming tiresome. And that point come much sooner with simple songs. "That's especially the case with tunes that are already familiar. Once that tipping point is reached, repeated listening become unpleasant, says Professor John Sloboda of UK's Keele University's music psychology group. "And the less control you have over what you hear, the less you like it. That's why police forces in the US often try and resolve hostage situations by playing pop songs over and over again at high volume. Eventually, it becomes too much for the criminals to stand and they give up. The problem gets particularly bad at Christmas, when the muzak consists entirely of the same few festive tunes played over and over again. What makes it worse for the shop workers is that they already know these runes. They get bored very quickly. Then they get irritated. Then they get angry. Shop workers in Austria recently threatened to go on strike for the right to silence. "Shop workers can't escape the Christmas muzak. They feel as if they are terrorized all day. Especially ‘Jingle Bells’. It arouses aggressive feelings," said Gottfried Rieser, of the Austrian shop worker's union. It is not just shop workers who complain. A survey this year by UK recruitment website Retailchoice. com found that Christmas is not only the most testing time for shop workers, but that almost half had complaints from customers about muzak. And the British Royal National Institute for the Deaf estimates that some stores play Jingle Bells 300 times each year. "That's acoustic torture, says Nigel Rodgers of Pipedown. A group against muzak. "It's not loud but the repetitive nature causes psychological stress. " The group wants the government to legislate against unwanted music in stores, hospitals, airports, swimming pools and other public places, claiming it raises the blood pressure and depresses the immune system. Perhaps groups like Pipedown don't really have much to complain about. After all, surely the real point is that people have money to spend. Why complain about a bit of music?

单选题Living in different cities, Linda and Lisa are still intimate friends. A. close B. good C. friendly D. poor

单选题The Foreign Service is a branch of the Department of State.A. centerB. divisionC. rootD. base

单选题You could Ucondense/U all the worthwhile information in this book into a few pages.

单选题Smoking is not permitted in the office.

单选题These programmes are of{{U}} immense{{/U}} value to old people

单选题This is not only an American problem, but a global one. The energy demand is driven by population growth especially in developing countries, in places that have emerging middle classes. Their focus is now on growth and on providing lifestyle and energy to their population. It's not environment. But they'll have to focus on it and do something about it. Developing countries focus on all the following EXCEPTA. economic growth.B. providing lifestyles to people.C. providing energy to people.D. protecting the environment.

单选题I'm content with the way the campaign has gone. A．tied B．satisfied C．filled D．concerned

单选题The industrial revolution modified the whole structure of English society. A．destroyed B．broke C．smashed D．changed

单选题He spread the excting news in public.A. secretlyB. happilyC. openlyD. quickly

单选题He was kept in {{U}}appalling{{/U}} conditions in prison. A. necessary B. terrible C. critical D. normal

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}}Hawaii{{/B}} Hawaii’s native minority is demanding a greater degree of sovereignty over its own affairs. But much of the archipelago’s political establishment, which includes the White Americans who dominated until the Second World War and people of Japanese, Chinese and Filipino origin, is opposed to the idea. The islands were annexed by the US in 1898 and since then Hawaii’s native peoples have fared worse than any of its other ethnic groups. They make up over 60 percent of the state’s homeless, suffer levels of unemployment and their life span is five years less than the average Hawaiians. They are the only major US native group without some degree of autonomy. But a sovereignty advisory committee set up by Hawaii’s first native governor, John Waihee, has given the natives’ cause a major boost be recommending that the Hawaiian natives decide by themselves whether to re-establish a sovereign Hawaiian nation. However, the Hawaiian natives are not united in their demands. Some just want greater autonomy with the state—as enjoyed by many American Indian natives over matters such as education. This is a position supported by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), a state agency set up in 1978 to represent to natives’ interests and which has now become the moderate face of the native sovereignty movement. More ambitious in the Ka Lahui group, which declared itself a new nation in 1987 and wants full, official independence from the US. But if Hawaiian natives are given greater autonomy, it is far from clear how many people this will apply to. The state authorities only count as native those people with more than 50 percent Hawaiian blood. Native demands are not just based on political grievances, though. They also want their claim on 660,000 hectares of Hawaiian crown land to be accepted. It is on this issue that native groups are facing most opposition from the state authorities. In 1933, the state government paid the OHA US $136 million in back rent on the crown land and many officials say that by accepting this payment the agency has given up its claims to legally own the land. The OHA has vigorously disputed this.

单选题 Winged Robot Learns to Fly Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error—but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles. Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology (CUT) in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it. To begin with, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated—simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut. After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favor of a more effective flapping technique where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down. "This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion," says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. But while the robot had worked out how best to produce lift, it was not about to take off. "There's only so much that evolution can do," Bentley says. "This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it," he says. The robot had metre-long wings made from balsa wood and covered with a light plastic film. Small motors on the robot let it move its wings forwards or backwards, up or down or twist them in either direction. The team attached the robot to two vertical rods, so it could slide up and down. At the start of a test, the robot was suspended by an elastic band. A movement detector measured how much lift, if any, the robot produced for any given movement. A computer program fed the robot random instructions, at the rate of 20 per second, to test its flapping abilities. Each instruction told the robot either to do nothing or to move the wings slightly in the various directions. Feedback from the movement detector let the program work out which sets of instructions were best at producing lift. The most successful ones were paired up and "offspring" sets of instructions were generated by swapping instructions randomly between successful pairs. These next-generation instructions were then sent to the robot and evaluated before breeding a new generation, and the process was repeated.

单选题 下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题，每题后面有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}} {{B}} A Society without a Formal Authority{{/B}} In the seventeenth century, European soldiers who came across some Indian groups in the western Great Lakes found that several native tribes were living in the area without a formal leadership system. They appeared to be "quite friendly with each other without a formal authority ! Not only did the Indians appear to lack a formal system of authority, but they also deeply hated any efforts to control their actions. All members of the tribes knew what was required of them by lifelong familiarity with the tasks of the area. These tasks tended to be simple, since the Indian's rate of social change was slow. Thus, although subgroups such as soldiers had recognized leaders, no real authority was required. Rather than giving direct orders (which were considered rough), members of the tribes would arouse others to action by examples. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to carry out such a system in our own society. Most of us have grown up under one authority or another for as long as we can remember. Our parents, our teachers, our bosses, our government all have the recognized right under certain conditions to tell us what to do. The authority is so much a part of our culture that it is hard for us to imagine a workable society without it. We have been used to relying on authority to get things done and would probably be uncomfortable with the Indian methods of examples on a large scale. Of course, the major reason why the Indian system would not be suitable for us is that our society is too large. The number of tasks that various members of our society have to perform often under tight time and resource limitations could not be treated by the Indian system. In modern societies, the formal authority system is necessary to achieve any social objectives.

单选题Animal Testing Controversy To paraphrase 18thcentury statesman Edmund Burke, "all that is needed for the triumph of a misguided cause is that good people do nothing. " One such cause now seeks to end biomedical research because of the theory that animals have rights ruling out their use in research. Scientists need to respond forcefully to animal rights advocates, whose arguments are confusing the public and thereby threatening advances in health knowledge and care. Leaders of the animal rights movement target biomedical research because it depends on public funding, and few people understand the process of health care research. Hearing allegations of cruelty to animals in research settings, many are perplexed that anyone would deliberately harm an animal. For example, a grandmotherly woman staffing an animal rights booth at a recent street fair was distributing a brochure that encouraged readers not to use anything that comes from or is animals-no meat, no fur, no medicines, Asked if she opposed immunizations, she wanted to know if vaccines come from animal research. When assured that they do, she replied, "Then I would have to say yes. " Asked what will happen when epidemics return, she said, "Don't worry, scientists will find some way of using computers. " Such well-meaning people just don't understand. Scientists must communicate their message to the public in a compassionate, understandable way-in human terms, not in the language of molecular biology. We need to make clear the connection between animal research and a grandmother's hip replacement, a father's bypass operation, a baby's vaccinations, and even a pet's shots. To those who are unaware that animal research was needed to produce these treatments, as well as new treatments and vaccines, animal research seems wasteful at best and cruel at worst. Much can be done. Scientists could "adopt" middle school classes and present their own research. They should be quick to respond to letters to the editor, lest animal rights misinformation go unchallenged and acquire a deceptive appearance of truth. Research institutions could be opened to tours, to show that laboratory animals receive humane care. Finally, because the ultimate stakeholders are patients, the health research community should actively recruit to its cause not only well-known personalities such as Stephen Cooper, who has made courageous statements about the value of animal research, but all who receive medical treatment. If good people do nothing there is a real possibility that an uninformed citizenry will extinguish the precious embers of medical progress.

单选题Savitskiy works for a company that imports spare parts for foreign cars, a {{U}}thriving{{/U}} business. A. booming B. blooming C. dooming D' glooming

单选题Academic records from other institutions often become part of a university's official file and can neither be returned to a student nor duplicated. A. borrowed B. purchased C. copied D. rewritten

单选题Michael is now {{U}}merely{{/U}} a good friend. A. largely B. possibly C. just D. rarely

单选题As nineteenth-century American cultural {{U}}aspirations{{/U}} expanded, women stepped into a new role as interpreters of art, both by writing works on art history and by teaching art.

单选题 Pushbike Peril Low speed bicycle crashes can badly injure or even kill children if they fall onto the ends of the handlebars (车把) so a team of engineers is redesigning the humble handlebar in a bid to make it safer. Kristy Arbogast, a bioengineer at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, began the project with her colleagues after a study of serious abdominal (腹部的) injuries in children in the past 30 years which showed that more than a third were caused by bicycle accidents. "The task was to identify how the injuries occurred and come up with some countermeasures (对策)," she says. By interviewing the children and their parents, Arbogast and her team were able to reconstruct (重建；重构) many of the accidents and identified a common mechanism responsible for serious injures. They discovered that most occur when children hit an obstacle at a slow speed, causing them to topple over. To maintain their balance they turn the handlebars through 90 degrees, but their momentum (冲力) forces them into the end of the handlebars. The bike then falls over and the other end of the handlebars hits the ground, ramming it into their abdomen. The solution the group came up with is a handgrip (握柄) fitted with a spring and damping (制动的；减速的，缓冲的) system. The spring absorbs up to 50 percent of the forces transmitted through the handlebars in an impact. The group hopes to commercialize (使商品化) the device, which should add only a few dollars to the cost of a bike. "But our task has been one of education because up until now, bicycle manufacturers were unaware of the problem," says Arbogast. The team has also approached the US Consumer Product Safety Commission to try to persuade manufacturers to adopt the new design. A decision is expected later this year.