单选题 When you leave a job with a traditional pension, don't assume you've lost the chance to collect it. You're entitled to whatever benefit you've earned — and you might even be entitled to take it now. "A lot of people forget they have it, or they think that by waiting until they're 65, they'll have a bigger benefit," says Wayne Bogosian, president of the PFE Group, which provides corporate pre-retirement education. Your former employers should send you a certificate that says how much your pension is worth. If it's less than $5,000, or if the company offers a lump-sum payout, it will generally close your account and cash you out. It may not seem like much, but $5,000 invested over 20 years at eight percent interest is $23,000. If your pension is worth more than $5,000, or your company doesn't offer the lump-sum option, find out how much money you're eligible for at the plan's normal retirement age, the earlier age at which you can collect the pension, the more severe penalty for collecting it early. You'll probably still come out ahead by taking the money now and investing it. What if you left a job years ago, and you're realizing you may have unwittingly left behind a pension? Get help from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. It has an online search tool that has helped locate $47 million in lost benefits for more than 12,000 workers. If you have a traditional pension, retiring early costs more than you might expect. Most people assume you take a proportional cut for leaving before your plan's normal retirement age. For example, you might think that if you need to accrue 30 years of service and you leave three years early, you'd get a pension 90 percent of the full amount. But that's not how- it works. Instead, you take an actuarial reduction, determined by the employer but often around five percent a year, for each year you leave early. So retiring three years early could leave you with only 85 percent of the total amount. When you retire early with a defined-contribution plan, the problem is you start spending investments on which you could be earning interest. If you retire when you're 55, for example, and start using the traditional pension then, by age 65 you'll have only about half of what you would've had if you'd kept working until 65.

单选题If you own stock, you must {{U}}allow for{{/U}} the possibility that it will lose value sometimes. A. throw doubt to B. take into account C. go ahead with D. go in for

单选题 Rubbish dumps throughout the industrial world are nearly full, heralding a crisis for city authorities as they look at alternative ways of dealing with the global garbage crisis. That problem is peculiar to fast-moving, wealthy societies, which increasingly demand more packaged goods. In New York State alone, residents have doubled their demand for packaged goods in the past thirty years. And the situation is not expected to ease, not least because of social trends. As more women transfer their production and management skills to commercial enterprises, demand for convenience products in the home continues to grow, says a report published by the Washington-based World watch Institute. The only solution for a nation which now spends more on wrapping food than it pays farmers to produce it, is recycling on a grand scale for commercial as well as conservation reasons. The Institute wants multi-layered dustbins to be distributed to households, and people to be obliged to separate their waste into four categories: organic, glass and metals; paper; plastics and miscellaneous. It also believes it can only be a matter of time before such bins have to be made compulsory. Cynthia Pollock, the author of the report, entitled "Mining Urban Wastes: The Potential for Recycling", points out that "consumers and policy makers are just beginning to realize that there is not real 'away' for throwaway". Pollock believes that recycling is the only alternative. "Although household wastes are usually thrown out with little regard for their remaining value, a list of the world's discards would reveal a wealth of materials." And it is not just food; "Simply recovering the print run of the Sunday edition of the New York Times would leave 75,000 trees standing and reduce the energy used per ton of paper by up to three-quarters."

单选题war involves inflicting the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time. A．causing B．avoiding C．compensating D．fabricating

单选题The English writing of college students in China is generally {{U}}redundant{{/U}} for lack of specific words． A.ambiguous B.wordy C.unconvincing D.stereotyped

单选题 As many as one thousand years ago in the Southwest, the Hopi and Zuni tribes of North America were building with adobe-sun-baked brick plastered with mud. Their homes looked remarkably like modern apartment houses. Some were four stories high and contained quarters for perhaps a thousand people, along with storerooms for grain and other goods. These buildings were usually put up against cliffs, both to make construction easier and for defense against enemies. They were really villages in themselves, as later Spanish explorers must have realized since they called them "pueblos", which is Spanish for town. The people of the pueblos raise what are called "the tree sisters" —corn, beans, and squash. They made excellent pottery and wove marvelous baskets, some so fine that they could hold water. The Southwest has always been a dry country, with water scarce. The Hopi and Zuni brought water. The Hopi and Zuni brought water from streams to their fields and gardens through irrigation developed elaborate ceremonies and religious rituals to bring rain. The way of life of less-settled groups was simpler and more strongly influenced by nature. Small tribes such as the Shoshone and Ute wandered the dry and mountainous lands between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. They gathered seeds and hunted small animals such as rabbits and snakes in the Far North the ancestors of today's Inuit hunted seals, walruses, and the great whales. They lived right on the frozen seas in shelters called igloos built of blocks of packed snow. When summer came, they fished for salmon and hunted the lordly caribou. The Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Sioux tribes, known as the Plains Indians, lived on the grasslands between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. They hunted the bison, commonly called the buffalo. Its meat was the chief food of these tribes, and its hide was used to make their clothing and the covering of their tents and tepees.

单选题The political future of the president is now hanging by a thread. A. concerted B. grave C. stable D. unprecedented

单选题November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This day was recognized by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1999 with a view to raising public awareness of violations of the rights of women. Why was this step necessary? In many cultures women are viewed and treated as inferior or as second class citizens．Prejudices against them are deep rooted．Gender-based violence in all its forms is an ongoing problem, even in the so-called developed world. According to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, "Violence against women is global in reach, and takes place in all societies and cultures. It affects women no matter what their race, social origin, birth or other status may be. " Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN expert of the Commission on Human Rights on Violence Against Women, says in his report that for the vast majority of women, violence against women is "a taboo issue, invisible in society and a shameful fact of life. " Statistics issued by a victim study institution in Holland indicate that 23 percent of women in one South American country, or about 1 in 4, suffer some form of domestic violence. Likewise, the Council of Europe estimates that 1 in 4 European women suffer domestic violence during their lifetime. According tO the British Home Office in England and Wales in one recent year, an average of two women each week were killed by current or former partners. The magazine India Today International reported that " for women across India, fear is a constant companion and rape is the stranger they may have tO confront at every corner, on any road，in any public place at any hour." UN experts described violence against women and girls as " today's most serious human rightS challenge. /

单选题The most interesting thing ______ Americans is that they are brought up to believe they are the best at everything. A. with B. in C. from D. about

单选题An earthquake of 8-______ struck some parts of this province, causing a death toll of over 30,000. A. altitude B. aptitude C. magnitude D. gratitude

单选题Those infected with the virus of hepatitis B enjoy equal rights under the provisions of the law.

单选题Passage Five For much of its history, psychology has seemed obsessed with human failings and pathology. The very idea of psychotherapy, first formalized by Freud, rests on a view of human beings as troubled creatures in need of repair. Freud himself was profoundly pessimistic about human nature, which he felt was governed by deep, dark drives that we could hardly control. The scientists who followed developed a model of human life that seemed to many mechanical if not robotic: humans were passive beings harshly shaped by the stimuli and the rewards and punishments that surrounded them. After World War Ⅱ, psychologists tried to explain how so many ordinary citizens could have agreed with fascism, and did work symbolized in the 1950 classic The Authoritarian Personality by T.W. Adorno, et al. Social psychologists followed on. Some of the most famous experiments proved that normal folk could become coldly insensitive to suffering when obeying "legitimate" orders or cruelly aggressive when playing the role of prison guard. A watershed moment arrived in 1998, when University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, urged psychology to "turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage." That speech launched today's positive psychology movement. Though not denying humanity's flaws, the new positive psychologists recommend focusing on people's strengths and virtues as a point of departure. Rather than analyze the psychopathology underlying alcoholism, for example, positive psychologists might study the toughness of those who have managed a successful recovery--for example, through organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of viewing religion as a delusion and a support, as did Freud, they might identify the mechanisms through which a spiritual practice like meditation enhances mental and physical health. Their lab experiments might seek to define not the conditions that induce wicked behavior, but those that foster generosity, courage, creativity, and laughter. Seligman's idea quickly caught on. The Gallup Organization founded the Gallup Positive Psychology Institute to sponsor scholarly work in the field. In 1999, 60 scholars gathered for the first Gallup Positive Psychology Summit; two years later, the conference went international, and ever since has drawn about 400 attendees annually.

单选题Low interest rates created easy credit conditions, fueling a housing construction boom and encouraging consumption. A．contaminating B．extinguishing C．stimulating D．transporting

单选题If a country turned inward and insulated itself, the result would be a diminished standard of living. A. worshiped B. split C. innovated D. isolated

单选题I think she hurt my feelings______rather than by accident as she claimed. A. virtually B. literally C. appropriately D. deliberately

单选题 Passage Six To produce the upheaval in the United States that changed and modernized the domain of higher education from the mid-1860's to the mid-1880's, three primary causes interacted. The emergence of a half-dozen leaders in education provided the personal force that was needed. Moreover, an outcry for a fresher, more practical, and more advanced kind of instruction arose among the alumni and friends of nearly all of the old colleges and grew into a movement that overrode all conservative opposition. The aggressive "Young Yale" movement appeared, demanding partial alumni control, a more liberal spirit, and a broader course of study. The graduates of Harvard College simultaneously rallied to relieve the college's poverty and demand new enterprise. Education was pushing toward higher standards in the East by throwing off church leadership everywhere, and in the West by finding a wider range of studies and a new sense of public duty. The old-style classical education received its most crushing blow in the citadel of Harvard College, where Dr. Charles Eliot, a young captain thirty-five, son of a former treasurer of Harvard, led the progressive forces. Five revolutionary advances were made during the first years of Dr. Eliot's administration. They were the elevation and amplification of entrance requirements, the enlargement of the curriculum and the development of the elective system, the recognition of graduate study in the liberal arts, the raising of professional training in law, medicine, and engineering to a postgraduate level, and the fostering of greater maturity in student life. Standards of admission were sharply advanced in 1872-1873 and 1876-1877. By the appointment of a dean to take charge of student affairs, and a wise handling of discipline, the undergraduates were led to regard themselves more as young gentlemen and less as young animals. One new course of study after another was opened up science, music, the history of the fine arts, advanced Spanish, political economy, physic, classical philology, and international law.

单选题The belief that it's healthy to let oft steam no longer ____, for we are working under heavy pressure.

单选题I walked down the corridor, my footsteps ______ frighteningly through the empty deserted building. A. echoing B. echoed C. to echo D. having echoed

单选题There's nothing worse than a boss who gives {{U}}implicit{{/U}} instructions and then gets disappointed by the work you give in. A. explicit B. ambiguous C. considerable D. coherent

单选题These graduates are more than obliged to the college for the happy four years of college life. A. obligatory B. reluctant C. indifferent D. grateful