单选题Man: The snow is really coming down, isn't it? Woman: Rarely do we get so much snow in December. Question: What does the woman mean? A. It's typical December weather for this region. B. It won't really snow until December. C. Such a large amount of snow is unusual for this month. D. There has never been much snow down South.

单选题______ all the possible disasters mentioned, the one promoting most discussions was a major release of radioactivity from a nuclear power station.

单选题You did tell me what to do. If only I ______ your advice!

单选题The winter just ending was ______ severe, causing great hardship to the poorer people in this area. A. exceptionally B. explosively C. extensively D. expressively

单选题M: The taxi driver must have been speeding. W: Well, not really. He crashed into the tree because he was trying not to hit a box that had fallen off the truck ahead of him. Question: What do we learn about the taxi driver? A. He turned suddenly and ran into a tree. B. He was hit by a fallen box from a truck. C. He drove too fast and crashed into a truck. D. He was trying to overtake the truck ahead of him.

单选题A lot of efforts have to be made in order to make this show ______.

单选题W: Professor Clark suggested I get a tutor for advanced physics. M: Well, that might help. Advanced physics is a pretty difficult course. Q: What does the man mean? A. Female students are unfit for studying physics. B. He can serve as the woman's tutor. C. Physics is an important course at school. D. The professor's suggestion is constructive.

单选题The agricultural revolution in the nineteenth century involved two things, the invention of labor-saving machinery and the development of scientific agriculture. Labor-saving machinery naturally appeared first where labor was scarce. "In Europe," said Thomas Jefferson, "the object is to make the most of their land, labor being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labor, land being abundant." It was in America, therefore, that the great advances in nineteenth century agricultural machinery first came. At the opening of the century, with the exception of a crude plow, farmers could have carried practically all of the existing agricultural implements on their backs; by 1860, most of the machinery in use today had been designed in an early form. The most important of the early inventions was the iron plow. As early as 1790 Charles Newbold of New Jersey had been working on the idea of a castiron plow and spent his entire fortune in introducing his invention. The farmers, however, would have none of it, claiming that the iron poisoned the soil and made the weeds grow. Nevertheless, many people devoted their attention to the plow, until in 1869 James Oliver of South Bend, Indiana, turned out the first chilled-steel plow.

单选题Man: Did you notice after almost 10 years in the United States, Mr. Lee still speaks English with such a strong accent. Woman: Yes, but he is proud of it. He says it is part of his identity. Question: What does the conversation tell us about Mr. Lee? A. His English is still poor after ten years in America. B. He doesn't like the way Americans speak. C. He doesn't mind speaking English with an accent. D. He speaks English as if he were a native speaker.

单选题Speaker A. Did you hear about those people who got hurt when going mountain climbing? I think they shouldn't allow people to go mountain climbing. It's too dangerous.Speaker B: ______

单选题"With two friends I started a journey to Greece, the most horrendous of all journeys. It had all the details of a nightmare: barefoot walking in rough roads, risking death in the dark, police dogs hunting us, drinking water from the rain pools in the road and a rude awakening at gunpoint from the police under a bridge. My parents were terrified and decided that it would be better to pay someone to hide me in the back of a car. " This 16-year-old Albanian high-school drop-out, desperate to leave his impoverished country for the nirvana of clearing tables in an Athens restaurant, might equally well have been a Mexican heading for Texas or an Algerian youngster sneaking into France. He had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of a line that now divides the world: the line between those whose passports allow them to move and settle reasonably freely across the richer world's borders, and those who can do so only hidden in the back of a truck, and with forged papers. Tearing down that divide would be one of the fastest ways to boost global economic growth. The gap between labour's rewards in the poor world and the rich, even for something as menial as clearing tables, dwarfs the gap between the prices of traded goods from different parts of the world. The potential gains from liberalizing migration therefore dwarf those from removing barriers to world trade. But those gains can be made only at great political cost. Countries rarely welcome strangers into their midst. Everywhere, international migration has shot up the list of political concerns. The horror of September 11th has toughened America's approach to immigrants, especially students from Muslim countries, and blocked the agreement being negotiated with Mexico. In Europe, the far right has flourished in elections in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Although many more immigrants arrive legally than hidden in trucks or boats, voters fret that governments have lost control of who enters their country. The result has been a string of measures to try to tighten and enforce immigration rules. But however much governments clamp down, both immigration and immigrants are here to stay. Powerful economic forces are at work. It is impossible to separate the globalisation of trade and capital from the global movement of people. Borders will leak; companies will want to be able to move staff; and liberal democracies will balk at introducing the draconian measures required to make controls truly watertight. If the European Union admits ten new members, it will eventually need to accept not just their goods but their workers too. Technology also aids migration. The fall in transport costs has made it cheaper to risk a trip, and cheap international telephone calls allow Bulgarians in Spain to tip off their cousins back home that there are fruit-picking jobs available. The United States shares a long border with a developing country; Europe is a bus-ride from the former Soviet block and a boat-ride across the Mediterranean from the world's poorest continent. The rich economies create millions of jobs that the underemployed young in the poor world willingly fill. So demand and supply will constantly conspire to undermine even the most determined restrictions on immigration.

单选题Despite much loose talk about the new global economy, today's international economic integration is not unprecedented. The 50 years before the first world war saw large cross-border flows of goods, capital and people. That period of globalization, like the present one, was driven by reductions in trade barriers and by sharp falls in transport costs, thanks to the development of railways and steamships. The present surge of globalization is in a way, a resumption (恢复) of that previous trend. The earlier attempt at globalization ended abruptly with the first world war. after which the world moved into a period of fierce trade protectionism and tight restrictions on capital movement. During the early 1930s, America sharply increased its. tariffs, and other countries retaliated (报复), making the Great Depression even greater. The volume of world trade fell sharply. International capital flows virtually dried up in the interwar period as governments imposed controls to try to insulate (隔离) their economies from the impact of a global slump. Capital controls were maintained after the second world war, as the victors decided to keep their exchange rates fixed on arrangement known as the Bretton Woods System, named after the American town in which it was approved. But the big economic powers also agreed that reducing trade barriers was vital to recovery. They set up the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which organized a series of negotiations that gradually reduced import tariffs. GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Trade flourished. In the early 1970s, the Bretton Woods System collapsed and currencies were allowed to float against one another at whatever rates the markets set. This signaled the rebirth of global capital market. America and Germany quickly stopped trying to control the inflow and outflow of capital, Britain abolished capital controls in 1979 and Japan (mostly) in 1980. This is part of the reason why continental Europeans tend to worry more about the power of global capital markets. America has been exposed to them for much longer. Two forces have been driving these increased flows of goods and money. The first is technology. With the costs of communication and computing falling rapidly, the natural barriers of time and space that separate national markets have been falling too. The second driving force has been liberalization. As a result of both the GATT negotiations and unilateral (单方面的，单边的) decisions, almost all countries have lowered barriers to foreign trade. Most countries have welcomed international capital as well.

单选题{{B}}Passage Two{{/B}} When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in any part of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on Earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist, and even this is doubtful. But there may be other kinds of life based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At least we cannot prove at present that they do not. Even more interesting is the possibility that life on their planets may be in a more advanced stage of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man's societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power and effectiveness than the individuals have. It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand years from now man's societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organism and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and the nerve cells that set them in motion. The explorers of space should be prepared for some such situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units. The units may be "secondary"—machines created millions of years ago by a previous form of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable (耐用的) materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar carbon cycle. Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet.

单选题The tanker broke in the middle, ______ out a great amount of oil into the sea.

单选题Woman: We heard about you and Julie! Man: You mean about our engagement? Who's got the big mouth? Question: What does the man imply about his engagement to Julie?

单选题It"s very ______ of you not to talk aloud while the baby is asleep.

单选题Man: Brother! The guys next door are making so much noise. I can't focus on my homework. Woman: Why don't you go to the library, Tom? It's much quieter there. Question: What does the woman imply?

单选题Man: This is Mr. Jones. My heater is not getting any power and the temperature is going to get down below freezing. Woman: This is our busiest time of the year, but I"ll speak to one of our men about getting over there sometime today. Question: What did the woman mean?

单选题Speaker A: Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to the railway station? Speaker B: ______ A. Yes, of course I can. B. Well, you'd better not ask a stranger. C. Sorry. I'm a stranger here myself. D. Yes, you can take a taxi. It's more expensive, but it's quicker.

单选题When the Western European nations rose to power in the 15th and 16th centuries, their aim was to find a trade route to the East. Competition for the priceless Eastern trade was intense, and France, with ports on the Medi-terranean, was a special rival of England. During the 17th and 18th centuries she considered the possibility of piercing the Isthmus of Suez for a shortcut waterway to the East. With Napoleon when he occupied Egypt went a noted French engineer, to study the problem. But it was not until 1859 that a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had long been fasci-nated by the idea of a canal, turned the first spadeful of earth to start the excavations. De Lesseps, by virtue of his diplomacy and charm, had found favor with the Egyptian vice-roy. Over bitter opposition from the British, who saw communication with their Indian empire threatened, he had won concessions from the Egyptians and Turks, making possible for the work to go forward. Although de Lesseps had hoped to have the enterprise financed by all the great western pow-ers, most of the capital was provided by France and Egypt. Finally de Lesseps" dream was real-ized, and in the summer of 1869 the waters of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean were united.