单选题Oil and Economy Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $ 26 a barrel, up from less than $ 10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979—1980, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to Swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP ( inconstant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $ 22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25 -0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies-to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist's commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70% , and in 1979 by almost 30%.

单选题If headaches only {{U}}Occur{{/U}} at night，lack of fresh air is often the cause．

单选题With regular exercise, the body builds up its levels of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), and the brain's nerve cells start to branch out, join together and communicate with each other in new ways. This is. the process that underlies learning: every change in the junctions between brain cells signifies a new fact or skill that's been picked up and stowed away for future use. BDNF makes that process possible. Brains with more of it have a greater capacity for knowledge. On the other hand, says UCLA neuroscientist Fernando Gámez-Pinilla, a brain that's low on BDNF shuts itself off to new information, What will happen if a person has a brain that's low on BDNF?A. He will be able to learn many new skills.B. He will forget all the information stored in his brain.C. He will be able to learn things quickly.D. He will not pick up new information quickly.

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}} Global Warming{{/B}} At the Kyoto conference on global warming in December 1997, it became abundantly clear how complex it has become to work out international agreements relating to the environment because of economic concerns unique to each country. It is no longer enough to try to forbid certain activities or to reduce emissions of certain substances. The global challenges of the interlink between the environment and development increasingly bring us to the core of the economic life of states. During the late 1980s we were able, through international agreements, to make deep cuts in emissions harmful to the ozone layer, These reductions were made possible because substitutions had been found for many of the harmful chemicals and, more important, because the harmful substances could be replaced without negative effects on employment and the economies of states. Although the threat of global warming has been known to the world for decades and all countries and leaders agree that we need to deal with the problem, we also know that the effects of measures, especially harsh measures taken in some countries, would be nullified (抵消) if others countries do not control their emissions. Whereas the UN team on climate change has found that the emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut globally by 60% to stabilize the content of CO2 in the atmosphere, this path is not feasible for several reasons. Such deep cuts would cause a breakdown of the world economy. Important and populous (人口众多的) low—or medium-income countries are not yet willing to undertake legal commitments about their energy uses. In addition, the state of world technology would not yet permit us to make such a big leap. We must, however, find a solution to the threat of global warming early in the 21st century. Such a commitment would require a degree of shared vision and common responsibilities new to humanity. Success lies in the force of imaginations, in imagining what would happen if we fail to act. Although many living in cold regions would welcome the global-warming effect of a warmer summer, few would cheer the arrival of the subsequent diseases, especially where there had been none.

单选题We are aware of the potential problems.

单选题You should have {{U}}blended{{/U}} the butter with the sugar thoroughly

单选题A．great deal has been done to remedy the situation. A．maintain B．improve C．preserve D．protect

单选题A．Very Slow Ride The surface of the earth may seem very stable to you. But you might be amazed if you knew some of the things that are going on under that surface. The earth has an outer shell of rigid pieces called tectonic plates (地壳构造板块). The plates include both ocean floor and dry land. Some have whole continents on top of them. The continents on top of the plates are just going along for a slow ride, moving only about four inches per year. But even this small movement causes three types of big interactions. One type is ocean ridges. These ridges develop in places where two plates are moving away from each other. As the plates separate, hot magma (岩浆) flows up to fill the space. New crust (地壳) builds up on the plate boundaries and causes ocean ridges. These ridges form long mountain ranges, which only rise above the ocean surface in a few places. Another type of reaction-trenches-occurs between two plates that are moving toward each other. As the plates meet, one bends downward and plunges underneath the other. This forms deep ocean trenches. The Marianas Trench off Guam in the western Pacific Ocean has a depth of more than 36,000 feet. This is the lowest point on the ocean floor. If the leading edges of the two colliding plates carry continents, then the layers of rock in the overriding plate crumple (变皱) and fold. A plate that carried what is now India collided with the southern edge of the plate that carried Europe and most of Asia. This caused the Himalayas, the world's highest mountains. The third reaction is transform faults (转换断层). These faults occur where two plates that are traveling in opposite directions slide past each other. Severe earthquakes can occur. The San Andreas Fault in California is a good example of this type of movement.

单选题The test produced disappointing results.A. indirectB. similarC. positiveD. unsatisfactory

单选题The cheetah is considered the fastest of all land animals.

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} ‘I. Q.' stands for Intelligence Quotient which is a measure of a person's intelligence found by means of an intelligence test. Before marks gained in such a test can be useful as information about a person, they must be compared with some standard, or norm. It is not enough simply to know that a boy of thirteen has scored, say, ninety marks in a particular test. To know whether he is clever, average or dull, his marks must be Compared with the average achieved by boys of thirteen in that test. In 1906 the psychologist, Alfred Binet(1857—1911), devised the standard in relation to which intelligence has since been assessed. Binet was asked to find a method of selecting all children in the schools of Paris who should be taken out of ordinary classes and put in special classes for defectives. The problem brought home to him the need for a atandard of intelligence, and he hit upon the very simple concept of "mental age". First of all, he invented a variety of tests and put large numbers of children of different ages through them. He then found at what age each test was passed by the average child. For instance, he found that the average child of seven could count backwards from 20 to 1 and the average child of three could repeat the sentence: "We are going to have a good time in the country." Binet arranged the various tests in order of difficulty, and used them as a scale against which he could measure every individual. If, for example, a boy aged twelve could only do tests that were passed by the average boy of nine, Binet held that he was three years below ave rage, and that he had a mental age of nine. The concept of mental age provided Binet, and through him, other psychologists, with the required standard. It enabled him to state scores in intelligence tests in terms of a norm. At first, it was usual to express the result of a test by the difference between the "mental" and the "chronological" age. Then the boy in the example given would be "three years retarded". Soon, however, the "mental ratio" was introduced; that is to say, the ratio of the mental age to the chronological age. Thus a boy of twelve with a mental age of nine has a mental ratio of 0.75. The mental age was replaced by the "intelligence quotient" or "I. Q. '. The "I. Q." is the mental ratio multiplied by 100. For example, a boy of twelve with a mental age of nine has an "I. Q." of 75. Clearly, since the mental age of the average child is equal to the chronological age, the average 'I. Q.' is 100.

单选题Sonic Device The other day, Dr. Robert Smith, who is blind, took a remarkable stroll through the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. As Dr. Smith walked along the campus, places and impediments (障碍物) in his path seemed to call out their names to him, "library here, library here", "bench here, bench here". Dr. Smith was testing a prototype (样机) navigation system for the blind that announced the surrounding objects through stereo headphones that were mounted to a computer in his back-pack (背包), creating virtual reality landscape (仿真景象). The information came not from some miniature radar but from the signals broadcast by the military's network of global positioning satellites (全球定位卫星). One day, its developers hope, miniaturized (小型化) versions of this navigation device, which now weighs 28 pounds, will help the blind navigate unfamiliar neighborhoods. "With this system you do not need to know a thing in advance about where you are going," said Dr. Roberta Klatzky, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who is working with Dr. Smith to develop the navigating device. Dr. Michael Oberdor of the National Eye Institute said, "A blind person could walk down the street and know not just that he was at 80th and Broadway, but what stores are around, and that Zabar's delicatessen (熟食店) was up ahead. This navigation system tells you not just where there are obstacles, but your overall location geographically." It lets blind users construct a mental map of new surroundings and learn their way around. The navigation system uses signals from a computerized map to create a "virtual acoustic display (仿真声音显示)". This is a talking map in which large objects seem to announce themselves in the headphones with the precise timing and loudness that would be the case if the objects were actually making a sound. This allows the blind person to sense immediately his or her distance or direction, and use that information for guidance. While no one knows whether it is because blind people tend to develop a sharper sense of hearing. Those who have tried the system say that they quickly adapt to locating an object through the sounds. "One of the crucial features of this system is that it takes advantage of sensory psychophysics (感官心理物理学)—how the brain interprets signals from outside to make a map of your surroundings so you can navigate, " Dr. Oberdor said.

单选题Many people leave their hearing problem untreated because

单选题It is postulated that a cure for the disease will have been found by the year 2000.

单选题I doubt they"ll be able to help but it"s worth trying .

单选题A Phone That Knows You're Busy It's a modern problem: You're too busy to be disturbed by incessant (连续不断的) phone calls so you turn your cellphone off. But if you don't remember to turn it back on when you're less busy, you could miss some important calls. If only the phone knew when it was wise to interrupt you, you wouldn't have to turn it off at all. Instead, it could let calls through when you are not too busy. A bunch of behavior sensors (传感器) and a clever piece of software could do just that, by analyzing your behavior to determine if it's a good time to interrupt you. If built into a phone, the system may decide you're too busy and ask the caller to leave a message or ring back later. James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Camegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania based their system on tiny microphones, cameras and touch sensors that reveal body language and activity. First they had to study different behaviors to find out which ones strongly predict whether your mind is interrupted. The potential "busyness" signals they focused on included whether the office doors were left open or closed, the time of day, if other people were with the person in question, how close they were to each other, and whether or not the computer was in use. The sensors monitored these and many other factors while four subjects were at work. At random intervals, the subjects rated how interruptible they were on a scale ranging from "highly interruptible" to "highly not-interruptible". Their ratings were then correlated with the various behaviors. "It is a shotgun (随意的) approach: we used all the indicators we could think of and then let statistics find out which were important," says Hudson. The model showed that using the keyboard, and talking on a landline or to someone else in the office correlated most strongly with how interruptible the subjects judged themselves to be. Interestingly, the computer was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be interrupted. The computer got it right 82 per cent of the time, humans 77 per cent. Fogarty speculates that this might be because people doing the interrupting are inevitably biased towards delivering their message, whereas computers don't care. The first application for Hudson and Fogarty's system is likely to be in an instant messaging system, followed by office phones and cellphones. "There is no technological roadblock (障碍) to it being deployed in a couple of years," says Hudson.

单选题Lower taxes would {{U}}spur{{/U}} investment and help economic growth. A. attract B. spend C. encourage D. require

单选题Foreign money can be {{U}}converted{{/U}} into the local currency at this bank. A altered B. changed C. bought D. sold

单选题 Age Discrimination By the year 2000 nearly half the workforce in Europe are over 40 and yet throughout Europe there is a deep ambivalence (犹豫)—if not outright suspicion-towards the capabilities of older workers. Those over the age of 40 generally take longer to find new employment, but European governments have done little to protect their employment rights. Only Germany, with incentives to business to encourage the employment of older people, and France, with the introduction of legislation making it illegal to use age barriers in recruitment-or to make employees redundant because of their age done anything substantive to combat age discrimination. Yet even in these two countries, there has been no noticeable improvement in the lot of the older workers; indeed, in France, job advertisements flout (轻视，反对) the law openly by asking for applicants of a certain age. So, should France and Germany be tightening up their laws and should the rest of Europe follow suit? Bill Robbins, a careers consultant said, "Legislation against age discrimination has been in existence for well over ten year in the U.S. and Canada, but has had no effect. Employers will always be able to find some reasons for turning down an older applicant without appearing to break the law." Ironically, it was governments which played a leading role in hardening business culture against older workers in the first place. In the late 1970s, many European countries were extremely concerned about the levels of youth unemployment, and France, Germany and Belgium even initiated incentive schemes for businesses to encourage older employees to take early retirement provided that younger trainees were taken on in their place. As more and more employees took early retirement, often willingly, a new, youth-oriented culture permeated business throughout most of Europe-even in those countries that had taken no active measures to promote it. Demographic (人口统计学的) trends mean that governments are now anxious to slow down the policy of early retirement as they realize that they simply do not have the funds to meet their pension promises. But reversing business attitudes is no easy matter. Dianah Worman a policy adviser said, "There is a widely held belief that older people are less adaptable and trainable. This is just not true: research has shown that differences in capability are as wide within age groups as they are between them."

单选题They planned to cover 150 miles on the first day of their journey.A. walkB. flyC. reachD. travel