单选题Facebook Wants to "Listen" to Your Music and TV Facebook is to release a new feature on its mobile app that "listens" to your music and TV shows. If the song or show is recognized by the app, users can publish the information on their profile or to selected friends. The service hopes to take advantage of the "second screen" trend, which sees fans of TV shows, in particular sharing their experiences on social networks. However, some users have privacy concerns. The feature, which will be available in a few weeks" time, uses the microphones inside users" smartphones to detect nearby music or TV shows. As the user begins writing a status update, a small animated icon will appear at the top of the app. If the app detects the appropriate audio signals and finds a match from its database, the user can then share what he or she is watching or listening to. Facebook says the feature can be turned off at any time, the audio recording is not stored anywhere and the device cannot identify background noise or conversations. "If you share music, your friends can see a 30-second preview of the song. For TV shows, the story in News Feed will highlight the specific season and episode you"re watching," Facebook said in a statement. The company hopes this new method of sharing user listening and watching habits will take advantage of the five billion status updates related to TV and music experiences that the social networking giant sees on a yearly basis. However, automating part of the sharing process has left some users suspicious, with Nicole Simon commenting on TechCrunch that: "While the idea is nice and technology really interesting, I have no interest in Facebook "observing" my audio and surrounding. Yes, it starts currently as opt-in, and only on occasion, but there is no trust from my side for even that." The BBC understands that this new feature was not specifically designed to enhance Facebook"s advertising. However, the company could push an advertisement to a user"s phone based on their tracked listening habits. This is in keeping with Facebook"s current approach to advertising, which uses publicly provided information on users" profiles to push advertisements that are more relevant to each individual user. The basic idea behind Facebook"s feature is not a new one—since 2002 Shazam, which has recently seen a $3 million investment from Sony Music Entertainment, has been providing a similar audio recognition service, with its website describing itself as "a mobile app that recognizes music and TV around you". Facebook"s much larger user base could pose a future threat to the comparatively smaller company.

单选题They agreed to modify their policy. A．clarify B．change C．define D．develop

单选题Which of the following statements, according to the passage, is NOT true?

单选题Hundreds of buildings were {{U}}wrecked{{/U}} by the earthquake. A. shaken B. fallen C. damaged D. trembled

单选题 阅读下面的短文，文中有15处空白，每处空白给出了4个选项，请根据短文的内容从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案。 {{B}}Stinking (发臭的) Buses{{/B}} Stinking buses jam(挤满) the crowded street. Drivers{{U}} (51) {{/U}}at one another and honk(鸣喇叭)their horns. Smog(烟雾)hurts the eyes and chokes(窒息) the senses. The{{U}} (52) {{/U}}is Athens at rush hour. The city is in a sorry state of affairs, built{{U}} (53) {{/U}}a plan, lacking even adequate sewerage facilities (排水设施) ,its 135 square miles packed with 3.7 million people. So great has been the population flow toward the city that neighboring villages stand {{U}}(54) {{/U}}or nearly so. About 120,000 people from distant provinces move to Athens every year. The migrants come for the few available{{U}} (55) {{/U}}. Because of migration, Athens by the year 2000 will have a population of 6.5 million, more than half the nation. Aside from overcrowding and poor public transport, the biggest{{U}} (56) {{/U}}facing Athenians are noise and pollution. A government study{{U}} (57) {{/U}}that Athens was the noisiest city in the world. Smog is almost at killing levels: up to four times the level that the World Health Organization considers safe. Nearly half the pollution comes from cars.{{U}} (58) {{/U}}high prices for vehicles and fuel, nearly 100,000 automobiles are sold in Greece each year: 3,000 drivers' licenses are {{U}}(59) {{/U}}in Athens monthly. After decades of neglect, Athens is at{{U}} (60) {{/U}}getting some attention. In March a government meeting was held to discuss a plan to make the city{{U}} (61) {{/U}}and clean up its environment. A save-Athens ministry will propose heavy taxes to{{U}} (62) {{/U}}immigration and a minimum of ＄5 billion in public spending for Athens alone. A master plan that will move many government offices to the city's{{U}} (63) {{/U}}is already in the works. Meanwhile, more Greeks{{U}} (64) {{/U}}moving into Athens. With few parks and few oxygen-producing plants, the city and its citizens are{{U}} (65) {{/U}} suffocating(窒息).

单选题His new movie depiets an ambitious American.A. writesB. sketchesC. describesD. indicates

单选题She likes to visit exotic islands. A. distant B. interesting C. remote D. backwards

单选题The phrase "wary of" in paragraph 8 could be best replaced by

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}}Prolonging Human Life{{/B}} Prolonging human life has increased the size of the human population. Many people alive today would have died of childhood diseases if they had been born 100 years ago. Because more people live longer, there are more people around at any given time. In fact, it is a decrease in death rates, not an increase in birthrates, that has led to the population explosion. Prolonging human life has also increased the dependency load. In all societies, people who are disabled or too young or too old to work are dependent on the rest of society to provide for them. In hunting and gathering cultures, old people who could not keep up might be left behind to die. In times of famine, infants might be allowed to die because they could not survive if their parents starved, whereas if the parents survived they could have another child. In most contemporary societies, people feel a moral obligation to keep people alive whether they can work or not. We have a great many people today who live past the age at which they want to work or are able to work; we also have roles which require people to retire at a certain age. Unless these people were able to save money for their retirement, somebody else must support them. In the United States many retired people live on social security checks which are so little that they must live in near poverty. Older people have more illness than young or middle-aged people; unless they have wealth or private or government insurance, they must often "go on welfare” if they have a serious illness. When older people become senile or too weak and ill to care for themselves, they create grave problems for their families. In the past and in some traditional cultures, they would be cared for at home until they died. Today, with must members of a household working or in school, there is often no one at home who can care for a sick or weak person. To meet {{B}}this need{{/B}}, a great many nursing homes and convalescent hospitals have been built. These are often profit-making organizations, although some are sponsored by religious and other nonprofit groups. While a few of these institutions are good, most of them are simply "dumping grounds" for the dying in which "care" is given by poorly paid, overworked, and underskilled personnel.

单选题The quakes recorded during the first week of April in the area of Mount Saint Helens warned scientists of a new eruption.

单选题Medicine depends on other fields for basic information, particularly some of their specialized branches.A. conventionallyB. obviouslyC. especiallyD. clearly

单选题阅读下面这篇短文，短文后列出7个句子，请根据短文的内容对每个句子做出判断。 {{B}}Easy Learning{{/B}} Students should be jealous. Not only do babies get to doze their days away, but they've also mastered the fine art of learning in their sleep. By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected that they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake. To test the theory, Cheour and her colleagues studied 45 newborn babies in the first few days of their lives. They exposed all the infants to an hour of Finnish vowel sounds -- one that sounds like "oo", another like "ee" and a third boundary vowel peculiar to Finnish and similar languages that sounds like something in between. EEG recordings of the infants brains before and after the session showed that the newborns could not distinguish the sounds. Fifteen of the babies then went back with their mothers, while the rest were split into two sleep-study groups. One group was exposed throughout their night-time sleeping hours to the same three vowels, while the others listened to other, easier-to-distinguish vowel sounds. When tested in the morning, and again in the evening, the babies who'd heard the tricky boundary vowel all night showed brainwave activity indicating that they could now recognise this new sound. They could identify the sound even when its pitch was changed, while none of the other babies could pick up the boundary vowel at all. Cheour doesn't know how babies accomplish this night-time learning, but she suspects that the special ability might indicate that unlike adults, babies don't "turn off" their cerebral cortex while they sleep. The skill probably fades in the course of the first year of life, she adds -- so forget the idea that you can pick up tricky French vowels as an adult just by slipping a language tape under your pillow. But while it may not help grown-ups, Cheour is hoping to use the sleeping hours to give remedial help to babies who are genetically at risk of language disorders.

单选题Physician-assisted Suicide The Supreme Court's decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering. Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect" , a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects—a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen—is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect. Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients' pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient. Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient mediation to control their pain if that might hasten death. " George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It's like surgery," he says. "We don't call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn't intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you're a physician, you can risk your patient's suicide as long as you don't intend their suicide." On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modem medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying. Just three weeks before the Court's ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. It identifies the undertreatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end-of-life care. The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a Medicare billing code for hospital-based care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life. Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse." He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension./

单选题Dark Forces Dominate Universe The earth, moon, sun and all visible stars in the sky make up less than one percent of the universe. Almost all the rest is dark matter and dark energy, unknown forces that (1) astronomers. Observations in recent years have changed the basic (2) of how the universe evolved and have indicated how little is known about the major forces and substances that (3) our world. Astronomers now know that luminous (发光的) matter—stars, planets and hot gas—accounts (4) only about 0.4 percent of the universe. Non-luminous components, such as black holes and intergalactic (星系间的) gas, (5) up 3.6 percent. The rest is either dark matter, about 23 percent, or dark energy, about 73 percent. Dark matter, sometimes (6) "cold dark matter." has been known for some time. Only recently have researchers come to understand the key role it (7) in the formation of stars, planets and even people. "We (8) our very existence to dark matter, " said physicist Paul Steinhardt and a co-author of a review on dark matter which (9) not long ago in the journal Science. "Dark matter dominated the structure (10) in the early universe," Steinhardt said. "For the first few billion years dark matter contained most of the mass of the universe. You can think of ordinary matter (11) a froth (泡沫) of an ocean of dark matter. The dark matter clumps (结成块) and the ordinary matter falls into it. That (12) to the formation of the stars and galaxies (星系)." Without dark matter, "there would be virtually no structures in the universe. " The nature of dark matter is (13) . It cannot be seen or detected directly. Astronomers know it is there because of its (14) on celestial (天体的) objects that can be seen and measured. But the most dominating force of all in the universe is called dark energy, a recently (15) power that astronomers say is causing the galaxies in the universe to separate at a faster and faster speed.

单选题They have the capability to complete the task in a week.A. possibilityB. competenceC. courageD. mixture

单选题Your teacher will take your illness into account when marking your exams.

单选题 Some People Do Not Taste Salt Like Others Low-salt foods may be harder for some people to like than others, according to a study by a Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences food scientist. The research indicates that genetic factors influence some of the difference in the levels of salt we like to eat. Those conclusions are important because recent, well-publicized efforts to reduce the salt content in food have left many people struggling to accept fare that simply does not taste as good to them as it does to others, pointed out John Hayes, assistant professor of food science, who was lead investigator on the study. Diets high in salt can increase the risk of high blood pressure and stroke. That is why public health experts and food companies are working together on ways to help consumers lower salt intake through foods that are enjoyable to eat. This study increases understanding of salt preference and consumption. The research involved 87 carefully screened participants who sampled salty foods such as soup and chips, on multiple occasions, spread out over weeks. Test subjects were 45 men and 42 women, reportedly healthy, ranging in age from 20 to 40 years. The sample was composed of individuals who were not actively modifying their dietary intake and did not smoke cigarettes. They rated the intensity of taste on a commonly used scientific scale, ranging from barely detectable to strongest sensation of any kind. "Most of us like the taste of salt. However, some individuals eat more salt, both because they like the taste of saltiness more, and also because it is needed to block other unpleasant tastes in food," said Hayes. "Supertasters, people who experience tastes more tensely, consume more salt than nontasters do. Snack foods have saltiness as their primary flavor, and at least for these foods, more is better, so the supertasters seem to like them more. " However, supertasters also need higher levels of salt to block unpleasant bitter tastes in foods such as cheese, Hayes noted. "For example, cheese is a wonderful blend of dairy flavors from fermented, milk, but also bitter tastes from ripening that are blocked by salt," he said. "A supertaster finds low-salt cheese unpleasant because the bitterness is too pronounced". Hayes cited research done more than 75 years ago by a chemist named Fox and a geneticist named Blakeslee, showing that individuals differ in their ability to taste certain chemicals. As a result, Hayes explained, we know that a wide range in taste acuity exists, and this variation is as normal as variations in eye and hair color. "Some people, called supertasters, describe bitter compounds as being extremely bitter, while others, called nontasters, find these same bitter compounds to be tasteless or only weary bitter," he said. "Response to bitter compounds is one of many ways to identify biological differences in food preference because supertasting is not limited to bitterness."

单选题Fourteen people were charged with offences including obstruction and resisting arrest.

单选题We came across an old man lying in the road.A. savedB. sawC. facedD. encountered

单选题In the countryside, there were villages with winding brooks and fruitful trees.A. pathsB. roadsC. streamsD. blocks