单选题{{B}}第二篇{{/B}} {{B}}Egypt Felled by Famine{{/B}} Even ancient Egypts mighty pyramid builders were powerless in the face of the famine that helped bring down their civilian around 2180 BC. Now evidence gleaned from mud deposited by the River Nile suggests that a shift in climate thousands of kilometers to the south was ultimately to blem and the same or worse could happen today. The ancient Egyptians depended on the Nile's annual floods to irrigate their crops. But any change in climate that pushed the African monsoons southwards out of Ethiopia would have diminished these floods. Dwindling rains in the Ethiopian highlands would have meant fewer plants to stablise the soil. When rain did fall it would have washed large amounts of soil into the Blue Nile and into Egypt, along with sediment from the White Nile. The Blue Nile mud has a different isotope signature from that of the White Nile. So by analyzing isotope differences in mud deposited in the Nile Delta, Michael Krom of Leeds University worked out what proportion of sediment came from each branch of the river. Krom reasons that during periods of drought, the amount of the Blue Nile mud in the river would be relatively high. He found that one of these periods, from 4,500 to 4,200 years ago, immediately predates the fall of the Egypt's Old Kingdom. The weakened waters would have been Catastrophic for the Egyptians. "Changes that affect food supply don't have to be very large to have a ripple effect in societies", says Bill Ryan of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.Similar events today could be even more devastating, says team member Daniel Stanley, a geoarchaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C:" Anything humans do to shift the climate belts would have an even worse effect along the Nile system because the populations have increased dramatically

单选题The contract between the two companies will （expire） soon.

单选题The way one looks, talks and moves depends

单选题For young children, getting dressed is a complicated business.

单选题{{B}}第二篇{{/B}} Long Bus Ride Long bus rides are like television shows. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end-with commercials thrown in every three or four minutes. The commercials are unavoidable. They happen whether you want them or not. Every couple of minutes a billboard glides by outside the bus window. "Buy Super Clean Toothpaste. " "Drink Good'n Wet Root Beer. " "Fill up with Pacific Gas. " Only if you sleep, which is equal to turning the television set off, are you spared the unending cry of "You Need It! Buy It Now!" The beginning of the ride is comfortable and somewhat exciting, even if you've traveled that way before. Usually some things have changed-new houses, new buildings, sometimes even a new road. The bus driver has a style of driving and it's fun to try to figure it out the first hour or so. If the driver is particularly reckless or daring, the ride can be as thrilling as a suspense story. Will the driver pass the truck in time? Will the driver move into the right or the left-hand lane? After a while, of course, the excitement dies down. Sleeping for a while helps pass the middle hours of the ride. Food always makes bus rides more interesting. But you've got to be careful of what kind of food you eat. Too much salty food can make you very thirsty between stops. The end of the ride is somewhat like the beginning. You know it will soon be over and there's a kind of expectation and excitement in that. The seat, of course, has become harder as the hours have passed. By now you've sat with you legs crossed, with your hands crossed behind your head. The end comes just at the right time. There are just no more ways to sit.

单选题There is always excitement at the Olympic Games when an athlete breaks a record

单选题Smart Window Windows not only let light in to cut down an electricity use for lighting, but the light coming through the window also provides heat. However, windows are not something people typically associate with being a cutting edge technology. Researchers are now working on new technologies that enable a window to quickly change from clear to dark and anywhere in between with a flip of a switch. "It took us a long time to figure out what a window really is," says Claes Granqvist. He"s a professor of solid-state physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. "It"s contact with the outside world. You have to have visual contact with the surrounding world to feel well." So, windows and natural light are important for improving the way people feel when they"re stuck indoors. Yet, windows are the weak link in a building when it comes to energy and temperature control. In the winter, cold air leaks in. When it"s hot and sunny, sunlight streams in. All of this sunlight carries lots of heat and energy. And all of this extra heat forces people to turn on their air conditioners. Producing blasts of cold air, which can feel so refreshing, actually suck up enormous amounts of electricity in buildings around the world. Windows have been a major focus of energy research for a long time. Over the years, scientists have come up with a variety of strategies for coating, glazing, and layering windows to make them more energy efficient. Smart windows go a step further. They use chromogenic technologies which involve changes of color. Electrochromic windows use electricity to change color. For example, a sheet of glass coated with thin layers of chemical compound such as tungsten oxide works a bit like a battery. Tungsten oxide is clear when an electric charge is applied and dark when the charge is removed, that is, when the amount of voltage is decreased, the window darkens until it"s completely dark after all electricity is taken away. So applying a voltage determines whether the window looks clear or dark. One important feature that makes a smart window so smart is that it has a sort of "memory". All it takes is a small jolt of voltage to turn the window from one state to the other. Then, it stays that way. Transitions take anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size of the window. The development of smart windows could mean that massive air conditioning systems may no longer need. "In the future," Granqvist says, "our buildings may look different."

单选题Even in a highly modernized country, {{U}}manual{{/U}} work is still needed. A. physical B. mental C. natural D. hard

单选题Their style of playing football is {{U}}utterly{{/U}} different.

单选题Car Thieves Could Be Stepped Remotely(远程) Speeding off(超速行驶)in a stolen car, the thief thinks he has got a great catch. But he is in a nasty surprise. The car is fitted with a remote immobilizer(使车辆不能调动的装置), and a radio signal from a control center miles away will ensure that once the thief switches the engine 1 , he will not be able to start it again. For now, such devices 2 only available for fleets of trucks and specialist vehicles used on construction sites. But remote immobilization technology could soon start to trickle(慢慢地移动) down to ordinary cars, and 3 be available to ordinary cars in the UK 4 two months. The idea goes like this. A control box fitted to the car incorporates 5 miniature cellphone(移动电话，手机), a microprocessor and memory, and a GPS satellite positioning receiver. 6 the car is stolen, a coded cellphone signal will tell the unit to block the vehicle"s engine management system and prevent the engine 7 restarted. There are even plans for immobilizers 8 shut down vehicles on the move, though there are fears over the safety implications of such a system. In the UK, an array of technical fixes is already making 9 harder for car thieves. "The pattern of vehicles crime has changed," says Martyn Randall of Thatcham, a security research organization based in Berkshire that is funded in part 10 the motor insurance industry. He says it would only take him a few minutes to 11 a novice(新手，初学者) how to steal a car using a bare minimum of tools. But only if the car is more than 10 years old. Modern cars are a far tougher(艰苦的)proposition(任务), as their engine management computer will not 12 them to start unless they receive a unique ID code beamed out by the ignition(点火)key. In the UK, technologies like this 13 achieve a 31 percent drop in vehicle-related crime since 1997. But determined criminals are still managing to find other ways to steal cars. Often by getting hold of the owner"s keys in a burglary(盗窃). In 2000,12 percent of vehicles stolen in the UK were taken using the owner"s keys double the previous year"s figure. Remote-controlled immobilization system would 14 a major new obstacle in the criminal"s way by making such thefts pointless. A group that includes Thatcham, the police, insurance companies and security technology firms have developed standards for a system that could go on the market sooner than the 15 expects.

单选题Careful consideration should be given to issues of health and safety.

单选题Venice is celebrated for its beautiful buildings.A. outstandingB. praisedC. notedD. regarded

单选题All the students were excited at the {{U}}idea{{/U}} of a weekend sports competition.

单选题Nicotine gum is used to help a smoker

单选题Cameras take the sharpest pictures when they are held still.A. clearestB. fastestC. most interestingD. most beautiful

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}} Faster Effective Reading{{/B}} A higher reading rate, with no loss of comprehension, will help you in other subjects as well as in English, and the general principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will not read every book at the same speed. You would expect to read a newspaper, for example, much more rapidly than a physics or economics textbook-but you can raise your average reading speed over the whole range of materials you wish to cover so that the percentage (百分比) gained will be the same whatever kind of reading you are concerned with. The reading passages which follow are all of an average level of difficulty for your stage of instruction. They are all about five hundred words long. They are about topics of general interest which do not require a great deal of specialized knowledge. Thus they fall between the kind of reading you might find in your textbooks and the much less demanding kind you will find in a newspaper or light novel. If you read this kind of English, with understanding at, say, four hundred words per minute, you might drop to two hundred or two hundred and fifty. Perhaps you would like to know what reading speeds are common among native English speaking university students and how those speeds can be improved. Tests in Minnesota, U.S.A, for example, have shown that students without special training can read English of average difficulty, for example, Tolstoy's War and Peace in translation, at speeds of between 240 and 250 words per minute with about seventy percent comprehension. Students in Minnesota claim that after twelve half-hour lessons, one a week, the reading speed can be increased, with no loss of comprehension, to around five hundred words per minute.

单选题The Mona Lisa, ______ in Italy, is now in the Louvre, a museum in Paris.A. who paintedB. who was paintedC. which paintedD. which was painted

单选题We had an exceptionally warm last year, but it was extremely cold this winter.A. slightB. mildC. lightD. tender

单选题The two sisters have entirely different{{U}} temperament{{/U}}.

单选题 Germs (细菌) on Banknotes People in different countries use different types of money: yuan in China, pesos in Mexico, pounds in the United Kingdom, dollars in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. They may use different currencies, but these countries, and probably all countries, still have one thing in {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}: germs on the banknotes. Scientists have been studying the germs on money for well over 100 years. At the turn of the 20th {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}, some researchers began to suspect that germs living on money could spread disease. Most studies of germy money have looked at the germs on the currency {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}one country. In a new study, Frank Vriesekoop and other researchers compared the germ populations found on bills of different {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Vriesekoop is a microbiologist at the University of Ballarat in Australia. He led the study, which compared the germ populations found on money {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}from 10 nations. The scientists studied 1,280 banknotes in total; all came from places where people buy food, like supermarkets, street vendors and cafes, {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}those businesses often rely on cash. Overall, the Australian dollars hosted the fewest live bacteria—no more than 10 per square centimeter. Chinese yuan had the {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}—about 100 per square centimeter. Most of the germs on money probably would not cause harm. What we call "paper money" {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}isn't made from paper. The U.S. dollar, for example, is printed on fabric that is mostly cotton. Different countries may use different {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}to print their money. Some of the currencies studied by Vriesekoop and his team, such as the American dollar, were made from cotton. Others were made from polymers. The three {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}with the lowest numbers of bacteria were all printed on polymers. They included the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and some Mexican pesos. The {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}currencies were printed on fabric made mostly of cotton. Fewer germs lived on the polymer notes. This {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}suggests that germs have a harder time staying alive on polymer surfaces. Scientists need to do more studies to understand {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}germs live on money—and whether or not we need to be concerned. Vriesekoop is now starting a study that will {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}the amounts of time bacteria can stay alive on different types of bills. Whatever Vriesekoop finds, the fact remains: Paper money {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}germs. We should wash our hands after touching it; After all, you never know where your money's been. Or what's living on it.