单选题A: Front desk. Can I help you?B: ______. A. May I ask who you are? B. Yes, I need your help. C. This is Mr. Burton speaking. D. This is Mr. Burton in 1205. Can I get a wake-up call, please?

单选题The comprehension passages on this course are designed to help you increase your speed. A higher reading rate, with no loss of comprehension, will help you in other subjects as well as English, and the general principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will 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 gain 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. If you get to the point where you can read books of average difficulty at between 400 and 50 w. p. m. with 70% or more comprehension, you will be doing quite well, though of course any further improvement of speed with comprehension will be a good thing. When you practice reading with passages shorter than book length, do not try to take in each word separately, one after the other. It is much more difficult to grasp the broad theme of the passage this way, and you will also get stuck on individual words which may not be absolutely essential to a general understanding of the passage. It is a good idea to skim through the passage very quickly first (say 500 words in a minute or so) to get the general idea of each paragraph. Titles, paragraph headings and emphasized words (underlined or in italics) can be a great help in getting this skeleton outline of the passage.

单选题Man: Well, what did you think of the movie? Woman: I don't know why I let you talk me into going. I just don't like violence. Next time you'd better choose a comedy. Question: What can be inferred from the conversation? A. The woman hated the man talking throughout the movie. B. The woman prefers light movies before sleep. C. The woman regrets going to the movie. D. The woman saw a comedy instead of a horror movie.

单选题A：I can't seem to find a color TV of the new model.B: ______. A. Why don't you try the new store on King's Road? B. There's also something wrong with my TV set. C. Don't you know the new model you want is not on the market yet? D. The new model is far more expensive than those old ones.

单选题Just seven years ago, the Jarvik-7 artificial heart was being cheered as the model of human creativeness. The sight of Barney Clark alive and conscious after trading his diseased heart for a metal and plastic pump the press, the public and many doctors convinced that the future had arrived. It hadn"t. After monitoring production of the Jarvik-7, and reviewing its effects on the 150 or so patients (most of whom got the device as a temporary measure) in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded that the machine was doing more to endanger lives than to save them. Last week the agency cancelled its earlier approval, effectively banning the device. The recall may hurt Symbion Inc. , maker of the Jarvik-7, but it won"t end the request for an artificial heart. One problem with the banned model is that the tubes connecting it to an external power source created a passage for infection. Inventors are now working on new devices that would be fully placed, along with a tiny power pack, in the patient"s chest. The first sample products aren"t expected for another 10 or 20 years. But some people are already worrying that they"ll work and that America"s overextended health care programs will lose a precious $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year providing them for a relatively few dying patients. If such expenditures cut into funding for more basic care, the net effect could actually be a decline in the nation"s health.

单选题 Opinion polls are now beginning to show an unwilling general agreement that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on. high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should we riot rather encourage many other ways for self-respecting people to work? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household and the neighborhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centers of production and work? The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people's work has taken the form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a discouraging thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future for work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom. Employment became widespread when the enclosures (圈地运动) of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people traveled longer distances to their places employment until eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and places in which they lived. Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. It became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the impractical goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full-time jobs.

单选题Man: I was expecting another hot, muggy day. Woman: But the wind has cooled things off, hasn't it? Question: What does the woman mean? A. It's uncomfortable because of the wind. B. It isn't as hot as the man thought. C. The man expected it to be windy. D. The wind hasn't made it any cooler.

单选题M: What would you like for dessert? I think I'll have apple pie and ice cream.W: The chocolate cake looks great, but I have to watch my weight. You go and get yours.Q: What will the woman most probably do? A. She'll have some chocolate cake. B. She'll take a look at the menu. C. She'll go without dessert. D. She'll prepare the dinner.

单选题Speaker A: I need a book, Critical Review on Nineteenth Century for History. Speaker B: ______

单选题 In 1965, the United States made important changes in its immigration laws, allowing many more immigrants to come and entirely eliminating the older laws' bias (偏见，偏向) in favor of white European immigrants. As a result, the United States is now confronted with a new challenge-taking in large numbers of new immigrants who are nonwhite and non-European. About 90 percent are from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In addition to the large numbers of legal immigrants, for the first time the United States has significant numbers o{ illegal immigrants. Many worry about what the impact will be on the American society. Can the American economy expand enough to offer these new immigrants the same opportunities that others have had? What will be the effect on the traditional value system that has defined the United States for over 200 years? Many Americans see wonderful benefits for their country. Ben Wattenberg, a respected expert on American culture, believes that the "new immigration" will be of great help to the nation. According to Wattenberg, something very important is happening to the United States. It is becoming the first universal nation in history. Wattenberg believes that the United States will be the first nation where large numbers of people from every region on earth live in freedom under one government. This diversity, he says, will give the nation great influence and appeal to the rest of the world during the 21st century. Perhaps the United States will be described not as a "melting pot" or a "salad bowl" but as a "mosaic"—a picture made up of many tiny pieces of different colors. If one looks closely at the nation, the individuals of different colors and ethnic groups are still distinct and recognizable, but together they create a picture that is uniquely American. "E Pluribus Unum"—the motto of the United States from its beginning—means one composed of many. "Out of many, one."

单选题Woman: Don"t you know Jim works as a dish washer at a restaurant around the comer? Man: It isn"t a bad job to start with. I wouldn"t mind that job for the summer if no others are available. Question: What does the man mean?

单选题A: May I see your driver"s license and vehicle registration card, please? B: ______

单选题Man: Did you see Martha just now? I want to ask her to go with us to the concert tonight.Woman: She must be around somewhere. You may still be able to catch her.Question: What does the woman mean?

单选题Woman: Next, shouldn't we get a telephone installed in the hall? Man: Fixing the shower pipe is far more important. Question: What do we learn from the conversation? A. They have different opinions as to what to do next. B. They have to pay for the house by installments. C. They will fix a telephone in the bathroom. D. The man's attitude is more sensible than the woman's.

单选题In the Chinese mind the Spring Festival is ______ with nice food and new clothes.

单选题Every year, the American Lung Association (ALA) releases its annual report card on smog, and every year it gives an "F" to over half the nation's counties and cities. When ALA's "State of the Air 2002" recently came out, dozens of credulous local journalists once again took the bait, ominously reporting that their corner of the nation received a failing grade. The national coverage was no better, repeating as fact ALA's statement that it is "gravely concerned" about air quality, and neglecting to solicit the views of even one scientist with a differing view. Too bad, because this report card says a lot less about actual air quality than it does about the tactics and motives of the ALA. The very fact that 60 percent of counties were giver an "F" seems to be alarmist. This is particularly true given that smog levels have been trending downward for several decades. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) statistics, ozone, the primary constituent of smog, progress will likely continue, even without the wave of new regulations ALA is now demanding. ALA is correct that some areas still occasionally exceed the federal standard for ozone, but such spikes are far less frequent than in the past. Even Los Angeles, the undisputed smog capital of America, has cleaned up its act considerably. Los Angeles, which exceeded federal smog standards for 154 days in 1989, has had 75 percent fewer such spikes in recent years. But an ALA-assigned "F" misleadingly implies that air quality has not improved at all. Most of the nation is currently in attainment with the current smog standard, and much of the rest is getting close. Nonetheless, ALA chose to assign an "F" to entire county based on just a few readings above a strict new EPA standard enacted in 1997 but not yet in force. In effect, ALA demanded a standard even more stringent than the federal government's, which allows some leeway for a few anomalously high readings in otherwise clean areas. ALA further exaggerated the public-health hazard by grossly overstating the risks of these relatively minor and sporadic increases above the standard.

单选题There are many kinds of synthetic materials, ______ plastics are the most common.

单选题______ that the formation of the sun, the planets, and other stars began with the condensation of an interstellar gas cloud.

单选题A chain of shops in East Yorkshire, England has been told that it would be a criminal offence to sell thousands of tubes of toothpaste made by a leading French manufacturer simply because the small print giving the firm importing it does not include the letters "UK". Under cosmetics regulations implementing 25 separate European Union instructions, unless the address is London, which is "a major city", the letters UK must be added. The suppliers response, when Gordon Rodgers's A2Z chain asked them to take back the toothpaste, was that this would pose no problem, because trading standards officials elsewhere in Britain do not bother about such fault-finding to a very minute detail. A2Z, which sells a range of more than 10000 household items from its 14 discount stores in Hull and East Yorkshire, first stumbled into these mysterious requirements of cosmetic labelling when summoned by East Yorkshire trading standards officials on a criminal charge of selling tubes of the same brand of toothpaste, Mentadent, designed for the South African market. These carried the name of a German distributor but no UK supplier. The council had no complaint about the toothpaste itself. It is common and legal practice for supermarkets and discount stores to buy up a wide range of branded products packaged by leading European and American manufacturers for non-EU markets. These can then be sold at prices lower than those recommended for identical products in Europe, which are only more expensive because EU consumers can supposedly afford to pay more. Council officials were quick to point out that they support the contribution this gray economy makes to "healthy competition". The only problem was that importers' details must be given by the regulation formula. For a major city such as London only a postcode is necessary, but for other cities and towns the letters UK must be added. When A2Z asked how it was expected to examine the small print on the labelling of each of 10000 products it carries, East Yorkshire replied that it was up to the firm to improve the quality of their inspection procedures. A22 then supplied the council three weeks running with examples of similar products carrying "illegal labelling", bought from major supermarkets in the same area~ asking why these large firms were not also prosecuted. The council said it "did not have the resources" to chase up every case of illegality, to which Mr. Rodgers responded that he "did not have the resources" to improve the quality of their inspection procedures, which the council was asking of him. Last week his firm's case was adjourned.

单选题It was ______ the chief engineer came ______ we began the experiment.