单选题The volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 blew a Ugigantic/U amount of sulfates into the stratosphere.

单选题She only needs a U minute /U amount of money

单选题It's impolite to {{U}}cut in{{/U}} when two persons are holding a conversation,

单选题The decision to invade provoked storms of protest.

单选题Have you talked to her {{U}}lately{{/U}}? A. lastly B. finally C. shortly D. recently

单选题 Batteries Built by Viruses What do chicken pox, the common cold, the flu, and AIDS have in common? They're all disease caused by viruses, tiny microorganisms that can pass from person to person. It's no wonder that when most people think about viruses, finding ways to steer clear of viruses is what's on people's minds. Not everyone runs from the tiny disease carriers, though. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, scientists have discovered that some viruses can be helpful in an unusual way. They are putting viruses to work, teaching them to build some of the world's smallest rechargeable batteries. Viruses and batteries may seem like an unusual pair, but they're not so strange for engineer Angela Belcher, who first came up with the idea. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, she and her collaborators bring together different areas of science in new ways. In the case of the virus-built batteries, the scientists combine what they know about biology, technology and production techniques. Belcher's team includes Paula Hammond, who helps put together the tiny batteries, and Yet-Ming Chiang, an expert on how to store energy in the form of a battery. "We're working on things we traditionally don't associate with nature," says Hammond. Many batteries are already pretty small. You can hold A, C and D batteries in your hand. The coin-like batteries that power watches are often smaller than a penny. However, every year, new electronic devices like personal music players or ceil phones get smaller than the year before. As these devices shrink, ordinary batteries won't be small enough to fit inside. The ideal battery will store a lot of energy in a small package. Right now, Belcher's model battery, a metallic disk completely built by viruses, looks like a regular watch battery. But inside, its components are very small—so tiny you can only see them with a powerful microscope. How small are these battery parts? To get some ideas of the size, pluck one hair from your head. Place your hair on a piece of white paper and try to see how wide your hair is—pretty thin, right? Although the width of each person's hair is a bit different, you could probably fit about 10 of these virus-built battery parts, side to side, across one hair. These microbatteries may change the way we look at viruses.

单选题The ice is not thick enough to bear the weight of a tank. A．suffer B．accept C．receive D．support

单选题The new dentist is much better than his Upredecessor/U.

单选题The Cold Places The Arctic is a polar region. It surrounds the North Pole. Like Antarctica, the Arctic is a land of ice and snow. Antarctica holds the record for a low temperature reading—125 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Reading of 85 degrees below zero is common in both the Arctic and Antarctica. Winter temperatures average 30 degrees below zero in the Arctic. At the South Pole the winter average is about 73 degrees below zero. One thing alone makes it almost impossible for men to live in Antarctica and in parts of the Arctic. This one thing is the low temperature—the killing chill of far North and the polar South. To survive, men must wear the warmest possible clothing. They must build windproof shelters. They must keep heaters going at all times. Not ever for a moment can they be unprotected against the below-zero temperatures. Men have a way of providing for themselves. Polar explorers wrap themselves in warm coats and furs. The cold makes life difficult. But the explorers can stay alive. What about animals? Can they survive? Do we find plants? Do we find life in the Arctic and in Antarctica? Yes, we do. There is life in the oceans. There is life on land. Antarctica, as we have seen, is a cold place indeed. But this has not always been the case. Expedition scientists have discovered that Antarctica has not always been a frozen continent. At one time the weather in Antarctica may have much like our own. Explorers have discovered coal in Antarctica. This leads them to believe that Antarctica at one time was a land of swamps and forests. Heat and moisture must have kept the trees in the forests alive.

单选题 Benefited or Hurt For the most part, it seems, workers in rich countries have little to fear from globalization, and a lot to gain. But is the same thing true for workers in poor countries? The answer is that they are even more likely than their rich country counterparts to benefit, because they have less to lose and more to gain. Orthodox economics takes an optimistic line on integration and the developing countries. Openness to foreign trade and investment should encourage capital to flow to poor economies. In the developing world, capital is scarce, so the returns on investment there should be higher than in the industrialized countries, where the best opportunities to make money by adding capital to labor have already been used up. If pool countries lower their barriers to trade and investment, the theory goes: rich foreigners will want to send over some of their capital. If this inflow of resources arrives in the form of loans or portfolio investment, it will supplement domestic savings and loosen the financial constraint on additional investment by local companies. If it arrives in the form of new foreign controlled operations, FDI, so much the better: this kind of capital brings technology and skills from abroad packaged along with it, with less financial risk as well. In either case, the addition to investment ought to push incomes up, partly by raising the demand for labor and partly by making labor more productive. This why workers in FDI receiving countries should be in an even better position to profit from integration than workers in FDI sending countries. Also, with or without inflows of foreign capital, the same static and dynamic gains from trade should apply in developing countries as in rich ones. This gain from trade logic often arouses suspicion, because the benefits seem to come from nowhere. Surely one side or the other must lose. Not so. The benefits that a rich country gets though trade do not come at the expense of its poor country trading partners, or vice versa. Recall that according to the theory, trade is a positive sum game. In all these transactions, sides exporters and importers, borrowers and lenders, shareholders and workers can gain.

单选题The attitude of the author towards the research project is

单选题The weather is a constant subject of conversation in Britain.

单选题Go to the Live Concert or CD Shelf? The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever since the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least. "Hooray! At last!" wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-sided classical-music critic. One of the reasons why the appointment came as such a surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert"s appointment in the Times, calls him "an unpretentious musician with no air of the formidable conductor about him." As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise. For my part, I have no idea whether Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good one. To be sure, he performs an impressive variety of interesting compositions, but it is not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall, or anywhere else, to hear interesting orchestral music. All I have to do is to go to my CD shelf, or boot up my computer and download still more recorded music from iTunes. Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are no substitute for live performance are missing the point. For the time, attention, and money of the art-loving public, classical instrumentalists must compete not only with opera houses, dance troupes, theater companies, and museums, but also with the recorded performances of the great classical musicians of the 20th century. There recordings are cheap, available everywhere, and very often much higher in artistic quality than today"s live performances, moreover, they can be "consumed" at a time and place of the listener"s choosing. The widespread availability of such recordings has thus brought about a crisis in the institution of the traditional classical concert. One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert"s own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, a classical-music critic, has described him as a man who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into "a markedly different, more vibrant organization." But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely expanding the orchestra"s repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America"s oldest orchestra and the new audience it hops to attract.

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}} "Salty" Rice Plant Boosts Harvests{{/B}} British scientists are breeding a new generation of rice plants that will be able to grow in soil containing salt water. Their work may enable abandoned farms to become productive once more. Tim Flowers and Tony Yeo, from Sussex University's School of Biological Sciences, have spent several years researching how crops, such as rice, could be made to grow in water that has become salty. The pair have recently begun a three-year programme, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, to establish which genes enable some plants to survive salty conditions. The aim is to breed this capability into crops, starting with rice. It is estimated that each year more than 10m hectares (公顷) of agricultural land are lost because salt gets into the soil and stunts (妨碍生长) plants. The problem is caused by several factors. In the tropics, mangroves (红树林) that create swamps (沼泽) and traditionally formed barriers to sea water have been cut down. In the Mediterranean, a series of droughts have caused the water table to drop, allowing sea water to seep (渗透) in. In Latin America, irrigation often causes problems when water is evaporated (蒸发) by the heat, leaving salt deposits behind. Excess salt then enters the plants and prevents them functioning normally. Heavy concentrations of minerals in the plants stop them drawing up the water they need to survive. To overcome these problems, Flowers and Yeo decided to breed rice plants that take in very little salt and store what they do absorb in cells that do not affect the plants' growth. They have started to breed these characteristics into a new rice crop, but it will take about eight harvests before the resulting seeds are ready to be considered for commercial use. Once the characteristics for surviving salty soil are known, Flowers and Yeo will try to breed the appropriate genes into all manners of crops and plants. Land that has been abandoned to nature will then be able to bloom again, providing much needed food in the poorer countries of the world.

单选题Almost all economists agree that nations {{U}}gain{{/U}} by trading with one another. A. work B. profit C. rely D. prove

单选题New England town meetings, in their most highly developed form, are {{U}}assemblies{{/U}} of the voters.

单选题As soon as Jennifer asked his name and address the man rang off. A. rang back B. rang up C. hung up D. hung on

单选题It has been said that the history of Uhumanity/U is one of the survival of the fittest.

单选题The American Industry A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap (阻碍), but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world"s best, its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed. It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea"s LG Electronics in July.) Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America"s machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty. All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America"s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas. How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. "American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, and has learnt to be more quick-witted," according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard"s Kennedy School of Government. "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity," says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as "a golden age of business management in the United States".

单选题 Sony's Vision For the Future As the television, communications and telecommunications industries emerge, compatibility(兼容性) becomes a big issue for consumers. I think we should maintain open and compatible standards and create features particular to Sony, in other words, the system should be open but the services could be distinctive—like restaurants. The menus may be alike but the services are different. Being president of Sony Corporation, I am often asked by this question: With digital cameras and digital camcorders(摄像机), what will be the future of digital imaging? In 1997, optimists see non-traditional cameras—digital cameras achieving sales of one million units in Japan. We are selling a new digital camera. Even though the price is quite high, it is selling well. And laser and ink-jet printers have improved greatly for printing colour pictures. But traditional pictures are still more popular than those from today's electronic cameras. Because of that, traditional cameras and digital cameras will co-exist for a long time. If you want me to sum up Sony's vision for the next few years, all I can say is that there will be a big change. We can run our business at Sony based on today's technologies, which means the digitalisation of audio and video. But beyond 2000, there will be a big change and we should be prepared. This will be the network environment. So we are preparing for a big change in technologies and for a change in the way of thinking as well. We celebrate our 50 anniversary this year (1997), and this coincides(与……一致) with what I call the transistor cycle, which has also lasted fifty years since we started using transistors in radios. The electronic industry has undergone a big evolution. But a new technology wave started .with the invention of the microprocessor, about 14 or 15 years ago. My theory is that each business cycle lasts 50 years, with one cycle overlapping(重叠) another. The information age started 15 years ago with microprocessors and for another 10 years it will be in the takeoff stage. Like an airport, a 747 approaching the end of the runway is still gathering speed. So for information technology, for another five to seven years there will not be so much change, only increasing speed. But after that you fly. What that will mean, I cannot foresee. I'm just preparing for the takeoff stage while I'm president. The job of the next generation will be more important. I'm just in-between.