单选题 Directions: In this part of the test there will be some short talks and conversations. After each one, you will be asked some questions. The talks, conversations and questions will be spoken ONLY ONCE. Now listen carefully and choose the right answer to each question you have heard and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.

单选题 BQuestions 27-30/B

单选题 Questions 27-30

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单选题 For 20 years, Trevor Rowley has worked as an optician in York. Less than five years ago, he put into motion a long-standing idea to build a mail-order contact lens business. "It should be easy to order lenses and supplies," says Rowley. "People should not have to contend with an errand they could easily do from home." He began offering his services through a catalogue and a free phone number, and gained a good deal of notice and sales. Two years ago, Rowley began Google keyword-search advertising. The result of steady growth and persistent vision, Postoptics today claims 80% of the mail order and online contact lens business in the UK.Rowley has been recognized as a "Future Entrepreneur of the Year" for his efforts. Even better, he has grown his business by giving excellent service. One way Postoptics achieves this is by providing customers easy access to their orders and to staff. "We like to communicate with customers any way they choose—online, on the phone, or by post," Rowley says. {{B}}Approach{{/B}} Rowley was not one to rush into online advertising simply because others were. "We have invested a lot of time studying back-end systems to learn which ones provide the most data on our sales," says Rowley. He appreciated that Google is used as a tool by what he calls "Internet savvy" people "who know what they are looking for." And since Google AdWords is built upon the search queries those users made, it has proved to be a good fit for Postoptics. "The goal of online ads should not be about the amount of traffic they create," he says, "but about knowing who is buying, and the amount of each sale. When you study that over time, you know your return on investment as well as quite a bit about your customers." {{B}}Results{{/B}} "Google gives us 35% of our traffic and 58% of our orders," Rowley says. And given Postoptics' interest in scrutinizing traffic and purchase patterns, he notes that "day in, day out, month in, month out, Google consistently produces 10% or 15% higher value per order—that much more revenue per sale. It's so cost-effective to pay per click for Google customers, because we know the quality of leads is very high." Now that Google advertising is a key part of Postoptics' marketing strategy, Rowley says, "We've pretty much abandoned offline advertising. We don't get a good return from running in the Sunday papers. We find that working a combination of Google advertising and direct mail gives us the customer base we need and the most accurate way to calculate in advance pounds per sale. We're quite ruthless about it." By his own admission, Rowley is a cautious entrepreneur. He takes a leap, but only after understanding the variables and the risks. As far as Postoptics goes, he says, "Google has been very, very good—and I don't praise things lightly." {{B}}About Google Advertising{{/B}} Google AdWordsTM is the world's largest search advertising programme, currently used by more than 100,000 businesses to gain new customers cost-effectively. AdWords uses keywords to precisely target ad delivery to web users seeking information about a particular product or service. The programme is based on cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, so advertisers only pay when an ad is clicked on. Advertisers can take advantage of an extremely broad distribution network, and choose the level of support and spending appropriate for their business.

单选题 American education is every bit as polarized, red and blue, as American politics. On the crimson, conservative end of the spectrum are those who adhere to the back-to-basics credo: Kids, practice those spelling words and times tables, sit still and listen to the teacher; school isn't meant to be fun—hard work builds character. On the opposite, indigo extreme are the currently unfashionable "progressives", who believe that learning should be like breathing— natural and relaxed, that school should take its cues from a child's interests. As in politics, good sense lies toward the center, but the pendulum keeps sweeping sharply from right to left and back again. And the kids end up whiplashed. Since the Reading Wars of the 1990s, the U.S. has largely gone red. Remember the Reading Wars? In the 1980s, educators embraced "whole language" as the key to teaching kids to love reading. Instead of using "See Dick and Jane Run" primers, grade-school teachers taught reading with authentic kid lit: storybooks by respected authors, like Eric Carle (Polar Bear, Polar Bear). They encouraged 5-and 6-year-olds to write with "inventive spelling". It was fun. Teachers felt creative. The founders of whole language never intended it to displace the teaching of phonics or proper spelling, but that's what happened in many places. The result was a generation of kids who couldn't spell, including a high percentage who had to be turned over to special Ed instructors to learn how to read. That eventually ushered in the current joyless back-to-phonics movement, with its endless hours of reading-skill drills. Welcome back, Dick and Jane. Now we're into the Math Wars. With American kids foundering on state math exams and getting clobbered on international tests by their peers in Singapore and Belgium, parents and policymakers have been searching for a culprit. They've found it in the math equivalent of whole language—so-called fuzzy math, an object of parental contempt from coast to coast. Fuzzy math, properly called reform math, is the bastard child of teaching standards introduced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (N.C.T.M) in 1989. Like whole language, it was a sensible approach that got distorted into a parody of itself. The reform standards, for instance, called for teaching the uses of a calculator and estimation, but some educators took that as a license to stop drilling the multiplication tables, skip past long division and give lots of partial credit for wrong answers. "Some of the textbooks and materials were absolutely hideous," says R. James Milgram, a professor of mathematics at Stanford. Adding to the math morass was the fact that 49 states (all but Iowa) devised their own math standards, with up to 100 different goals for each grade level. Textbook publishers responded with textbooks that tried to incorporate every goal of every state. "There are some 700-page third-grade math books out there," says N.C.T.M.'s current president Francis Fennell, professor of education at Maryland's McDaniel College. Now the N.C.T.M. itself has come riding to the rescue. In a notably slim document, it has identified just three essential goals, or "focal points", for each grade from pre-K to eighth, none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance, the group recommends focusing on the quick recall of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of decimals and the ability to measure and compute the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes. "Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get conversations going at the state level about what really is important." In recent weeks, that's begun to happen. Florida and Utah and half a dozen other states are talking about revising their math standards to match the pared-down approach. That pleases academic mathematicians like Milgram, who notes that this kind of instruction is what works in math-proficient nations like Singapore. So do we have a solution to the national math problem? We certainly have the correct formula. The question is, can we apply it? Already the N.C.T.M.'s focal points are being called a back-to-basics movement, another swing of the ideological pendulum rather than a fresh look at what it would take to get more kids to calculus by 12th grade. If the script follows that of the Reading Wars, what comes next will be dreary times tables recitals in unison, dull new books that fail to inspire understanding, and drill, drill, drill, much like the unhappy scenes in many of today's "Reading First" classrooms. And that would be just another kind of math fiasco—of the red variety. Kids will learn their times tables for sure, but they'll also learn to hate math.

单选题 From the health point of view we are living in a marvelous age. We are immunized from birth against many of the most dangerous diseases. A large number of once fatal illnesses can now be cured by modem drugs and surgery. It is almost certain that one day remedies will be found for the most stubborn remaining diseases. The expectation of life has increased enormously. But though the possibility of living a long and happy life is greater than ever before, every day we witness the incredible slaughter of men, women and children on the roads. Man versus the motor-car! It is a never-ending battle which man is losing. Thousands of people the world over are killed or horribly killed each year and we are quietly sitting back and letting it happen. It has been rightly said that when a man is sitting behind a steering wheel, his car becomes the extension of his personality. There is no doubt that the motor-car often brings out a man's very worst qualities. People who are normally quiet and pleasant may become unrecognizable when they are behind a steering-wheel. They swear, they are ill-mannered and aggressive, willful as two-years-olds and utterly selfish. All their hidden frustrations, disappointments and jealousies seem to be brought to the surface by the act of driving. The surprising thing is that society smiles so benignly on the motorist and seems to condone his behaviour. Everything is done for his convenience. Cities are allowed to become almost uninhabitable because of heavy tragic; towns are made ugly by huge car parks; the countryside is desecrated by road networks; and the mass annual slaughter becomes nothing more than a statistic, to be conveniently forgotten. It is high time a world code were created to reduce this senseless waste of human life. With regard to driving, the laws of some countries are notoriously lax and even the strictest are not strict enough. A code which was universally accepted could only have a dramatically beneficial effect on the accident rate. Here are a few examples of some the things that might be done. The driving test should be standardized and made far more difficult than it is; all the drivers should be made to take a test every three years or so; the age at which young people are allowed to drive any vehicle should be raised to at least 21; all vehicles should be put through stringent annual tests for safety. Even the smallest amount of alcohol in the blood can impair a person's driving ability. Present drinking and driving laws (where they exist) should be made much stricter. Maximum and minimum speed limits should be imposed on all roads. Governments should lay down safety specifications for manufacturers, as has been done in the USA. All advertising stressing power and performance should be banned. These measures may sound inordinately harsh. But surely nothing should be considered as to severe if it results in reducing the annual toll of human life. After all, the world is for human beings, not motor-cars.

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单选题He placed the ladder ______ the wall and climbed onto the top of the house. [A] on [B] against [C] before [D] in

单选题There is evidence to believe that gambling in many forms has been engaged in for almost as long as civilization. Even in primitive tribes today there exist games of chance that give rise to our suspicion that gambling may have begun when our ancestors were wearing skins and hunting and gathering food. There seems to be something in the human psyche that is fascinated by the prospect of gaining much by venturing little. Yet it is clearly stated in all religions, at least in the better known ones, that gambling is abominable. In several countries of the world gambling is prohibited at least in certain forms and sometimes severely restricted. This gives rise to the assumption that most governments, if not all, see gambling as evil. Now what is it in gambling that has so much appeal? Strange though it may seem, many people who gamble and aim to win are those who do not need the large amounts of money that they want to win. We see rich men and women, who have enough wealth to live more than comfortably their whole lives, gambling and hoping to win large sums of money which they really don"t need. Often it has turned out that these people gamble for the thrill of it. It seems that the possibility that they might lose large sums of money or even be mined is a thrill much like motor racing or bungy jumping. Rich men and women have been known to spend almost their whole lives frequenting gambling houses and there trying to ruin people and run the risk of ruining themselves. Since gamblers consider this a game and all they seek are thrills, they believe they are harming no one but people who seek similar thrills. Hence the popular appeal of gambling. Another appeal is of course that if a player who is not so rich should suddenly make a big strike, then he is assured of a comfortable life. Gambling which can make a man rich beyond his dreams may be comparatively the harmless types—like lotteries, many of which are state run. In some countries many of the lotteries are means of raising money for charity. The appeal is that one hopes to spend a few dollars on tickets and hopes to win enormous sums of money. If he fails then his contribution helps some charitable cause. In spite of its appeal, gambling has the reputation of having mined countless men and women all over the world. One main drawback is that gambling is addictive. Some people can take gambling so seriously that it becomes an obsession. They spend everything they have and all their time gambling—at the neglect of family, friends and even their own health. It is intriguing that people who win at gambling and people who lose too can become hopeless addicts. People who win seem to think that since they have a "lucky streak" they can win even more, often they indulge in it until they have lost what they had won and more. As for those who lose, the temptation is even greater. They want so much to win what they have lost that they play with money they do not have—like borrowed money. Everyone wants that one great opportunity to win a great stun and retire, but alas!, such a situation seldom, if ever, rises. Eventually there are very few winners in gambling. Most gamblers lose. Hence the drawbacks of gambling are most destructive. They can wipe out families and ruin the lives of individuals. Whatever appeal they may have, it is well that in most countries in the world they are kept under strict rules and are sometimes banned.

单选题 Single mums are better at raising their kids than two parents—at least in the bird world. Mother zebra finches have to work harder and raise fewer chicks on their own, but they also produce more attractive sons who are more likely to get a mate. The finding shows that family conflict is as important an evolutionary driving force as ecological factors such as hunting and food supply. With two parents around, there's always a conflict of interests, which can have a detrimental effect on the quality of the offspring. In evolutionary terms, the best strategy for any parent in the animal world is to find someone else to care for their offspring, so they can concentrate on breeding again. So it's normal for parents to try to pass the buck to each other. But Ian Hartley from the University of Lancaster and his team wondered how families solve this conflict, and how the conflict itself affects the offspring. To find out, they measured how much effort zebra finch parents put into raising their babies. They compared single females with pairs, by monitoring the amount of food each parent collected, and removing or adding chicks so that each pair of birds was raising four chicks, and each single mum had two--supposedly the same amount of work. But single mums, they found, put in about 25 percent more effort than females rearing with their mate. To avoid being exploited, mothers with a partner hold back from working too hard if the father is being lazy, and it's the chicks that pay the price. "The offspring suffer some of the cost of this conflict," says Hartley. The cost does not show in any obvious decrease in size or weight, but in how attractive they are to the opposite sex. When the chicks were mature, the researchers tested the "fitness" of the male offspring by offering females their choice of partner. Those males reared by single mums were chosen more often than those from two-parent families. Sexual conflict has long been thought to affect the quality of care given to offspring, says zoologist Rebecca Kilner at Cambridge University, who works on conflict of parents in birds. "But the experimental evidence is not great. The breakthrough here is showing it empirically." More surprising, says Kilner, is Hartley's statement that conflict may be a strong influence on the evolution of behaviour, clutch size and even appearance. "People have not really made that link," says Hartley. A female's reproductive strategy is usually thought to be affected by hunting and food supply. Kilner says conflict of parents should now be taken into account as well.

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单选题Questions 26-30 The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation. All high school graduates ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become "better" people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don't go. But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don't fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students interfere with each other's experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the intense competition for admission to graduate school. Others find no stimulation in their studies, and drop out often encouraged by college administrators. Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves--they are spoiled and they are expecting too much. But that is a condemnation of the students as a whole, and doesn't explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We have been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can't absorb an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either. Some adventuresome educators and watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps college doesn't make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things--may be it is just the other way around, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merely the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But contrary evidence is beginning to mount up.

单选题Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.

单选题 Congress can pass laws, regulators can beef up enforcement, and shareholders can demand more accountability. But when it comes right down to it, making sure a company is operating well is really an inside job. That's where internal auditing comes in. It doesn't sound glamorous, but it's an expanding field beckoning to people with a lot of pent up we-can-do-better energy. Internal auditors keep an eye on a company's "controls"—not just financial systems, but all sorts of functions designed to make the business run smoothly and protect the interests of shareholders. The recent string of corporate scandals provided a rude awakening to the importance of these internal checks. In the case of WorldCom, it was internal auditor Cynthia Cooper who blew the whistle on the company for inflating profits by $3.8 billion. She didn't intend to be a hero, she said to Time magazine when it named her one of its Persons of the Year. She was just doing her job. A lot more of those jobs are opening up as companies turn to internal auditors for help in complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Top executives of publicly held companies now have to sign off on their financial statements and vouch for the effectiveness of internal controls. "Up until now, CEOs and CFOs have been going to bed and sleeping well at night, knowing that they've got good controls or financial reporting because they've got good people ... But what's missing is the documentation that really supports that gut feel," says Trent Gazzaway, the national director of corporate governance advisory services for Grant Thornton, an accounting and business consultancy firm. "I cannot think of a time in history when there's been a greater opportunity to enter the internal-audit field," he adds. Job postings on the website of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) in Altamonte Springs, Fla., have more than doubled in the past year, says IIA president William Bishop III. And in the organization's survey for 2002, half the internal-audit directors said they planned to make one or more new hires that year. People who can assess computerized systems are especially in demand. Privately held companies are voluntarily adding more scrutiny, as well. In a recent survey that drew responses from 1,400 CFOs in such businesses, 58 percent said they are responding to new corporate-governance standards. Of those, 36 percent are creating or expanding internal auditing, according to Robert Half Management Resources. An American company with $3 billion to $4 billion in revenue typically has about 16 internal auditors. The job is often a training ground for future management positions, but those who stay in the field and become directors earn an average of just under $100,000. The IIA offers certification for internal auditors, but many firms do not require it. Assessing "the tone at the top"—the culture and the ethical environment of a company—is one of the key charges for internal auditors, Mr. Bishop says. But their effectiveness depends on the resources and independence senior managers give them. As auditors have a perspective that encompasses every aspect of the company, executives sometimes want to hear their recommendations for improving systems. But their main goal is to make sure the systems already in place are working properly. The balancing act can be tricky. "If I make a recommendation ... and then I come and evaluate it, I'm not going to be criticizing it," says Parveen Gupta, who teaches corporate governance and accounting at Lehigh University. Ideally, the internal auditor should be an extra set of eyes, a consultant who knows the company well but has enough independence to give honest feedback. Regulations "are pushing internal auditors to become a bit more policeman-oriented," he says, "but if employees perceive it as someone second-guessing them, that is very dangerous." One tool designed to avoid that adversarial feeling is "control self-assessment". The auditor sets up discussions among employees to find out, for instance, if a written ethics policy is being implemented, or if workers are feeling such intense pressures that they might be prompted to push ethical boundaries. The power of the new laws can go only so far. "This entire issue of corporate governance—trying to run the company as if you were managing your own money—is a matter of heart and soul," Dr. Gupta says. And guts. Anyone considering a career in internal auditing, he says, "should have the guts to speak out, to tell the truth."

单选题 Questions 21-25 A naked mole rat colony, like a beehive, wasp's nest, or termite mound, is ruled by its queen, or reproducing female. Other adult female mole rats neither ovulate nor breed. The queen is the largest member of the colony, and she maintains her breeding status through a mixture of behavioral and, presumably, chemical control. Queens have been long-lived in captivity, and when they die or are removed from a colony one sees violent fighting for breeding status among the larger remaining females, leading to a takeover by a new queen. Eusocial insect societies have rigid caste systems, each insect's role being defined by its behavior, body shape, and physiology. In naked mole rat societies, on the other hand, differences in behavior are related primarily to reproductive status (reproduction being limited to the queen and a few males), body size, and perhaps age. Smaller non-breeding members, both male and female, seem to participate primarily in gathering food, transporting nest material, and tunneling, larger non-breeders are active in defending the colony and perhaps in removing dirt from the tunnels. One work has suggested that differences in growth rates may influence the length of time that an individual performs a task, regardless of its age. Cooperative breeding has evolved many times in vertebrates, but unlike naked mole rats, most cooperatively breeding vertebrates (except the wild dog, Lycaon pictus) are dominated by a pair of breeders rather than by a single breeding female. The division of labor within social groups is less pronounced among other vertebrates than among naked mole rats, colony size is much smaller, and mating by subordinate females may not be totally suppressed, whereas in naked mole rat colonies subordinate females are not sexually active, and many never breed.

单选题A.YouneedtogotoBraziltodoatranslationcourse.B.YourPortugueseisnotgoodenoughfortranslatingthiscontract.C.OurnewsecretarycantypethecontractinPortugueseforyou.D.Thesecretarymightbeabletohelpyouwiththetranslation.

单选题The gap between what companies might be expected to pay in tax and what they actually pay amounts to billions of pounds--on that much, everyone can agree. The surprising truth is that no- one can agree how many billions are missing, or even how to define "tax gap". Estimates range from anything between ￡3bn to nearly ￡14bn, depending on who is doing the calculations. Even the people in charge of colleting the taxes--Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC)--admit they have only the vaguest idea of how many further billions of pounds they could be getting.., and it took a freedom of information request before they would admit the extent of their lack of knowledge. Any media organization or MP attempting to pursue the subject will find themselves hampered by the same difficulties faced by the tax collectors--secrecy and complexity. The Guardian 's investigation, which we publish over the coming two weeks, is no different. The difficulty starts with an inability of anyone to agree a definition of "tax avoidance". It continues through the limited amount of information in the public domain. And it is further hampered by the extraordinary complexity of modern global corporations. International companies based in the UK may have hundreds of subsidiary companies, which many use to take advantage of differing tax regimes as they move goods, services and intellectual property around the world. It is estimated that more than half of world trade consists of such movements (known as transfer-pricing) within corporations. Companies are legally required publicly to declare these subsidiaries. But they generally tell shareholders of only the main subsidiaries. The Guardian's investigation found five major UK-based corporations which had ignored the requirements of the Companies Act by failing to identify offshore subsidiaries. This is just one example of the atmosphere of secrecy and non-disclosure in Britain which has allowed tax avoidance to flourish. The result is that few outside of the lucrative industries of banking, accountancy and tax law have understood the scale of the capital flight that is now taking place. British tax inspectors privately describe as formidable the mountain outsiders have to climb in order to comb through the accounts of international companies based in London. "The companies hold all the cards," said one senior former tax inspector. "It's very difficult because you don't always know what you are looking for... You are confronted with delay, obstruction and a lot of whingeing from companies who complain about "unreasonable requests. Sometimes you are just piecing together a jigsaw. " Another former senior tax inspector said. "One of the problems the Revenue has is that the company doesn't have to disclose the amount of tax actually paid in any year and the accounts won' t reveal the liability. Each company has its own method of accounting for tax: there's no uniform way of declaring it all. " For journalists trying to probe these murky waters, the problems are so substantial that few media organizations attempt it. A trawl through the published accounts of even a single major group of companies can involve hunting around in the registers of several different countries. It takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Companies--with some far-sighted British exceptions--simply refuse to disclose any more than what appears in the published figures. The legal fiction that a public company is a "legal person", entitled to total tax secrecy and even to "human rights", makes it normally impossible for a journalist to penetrate the tax strategies of big business. HMRC refuse, far example, to identify the 12 major companies who used tax avoidance schemes to avoid paying any corporation tax whatever. It is difficult to access experts to guide the media or MPs through this semantic jungle. The "Big Four" accountants and tax QCs who make a living out of tax avoidance, have no interest in helping outsiders understand their world. Few others have the necessary knowledge, and those that do, do not come cheap or may be conflicted. "Secrecy is the of shore world's great protector," writes William Brittan-Caitlin, London-based former Kroll investigator in his book, Offshore. "Government and states are generally at a loss to diagnose in detail what is really going on inside corporate internal markets. Corporations are extremely secretive about the special tax advantages these structures give them. /

单选题Questions 6-10 Most of us are taught to pay attention to what is said—the words. Words do provide us with some information, but meanings are derived from so many other sources that it would hinder our effectiveness as a partner to a relationship to rely too heavily on words alone. Words are used to describe only a small part of the many ideas we associate with any given message. Sometimes we can gain insight into some of those associations if we listen for more than words. We don't always say what we mean or mean what we say. Sometimes our words don't mean anything except " I'm letting off some steam. I don't really want you to pay close attention to what I'm saying. Just pay attention to what I'm feeling. " Mostly we mean several things at once. A person wanting to purchase a house says to the current owner, "This step has to be fixed before I'll buy. " The owner says, " It's been like that for years." Actually, the step hasn't been like that for years, but the unspoken message is.. " I don't want to fix it. We put up with it. Why can't you?" The search for a more expansive view of meaning can be developed of examining a message in terms of who said it, when it occurred, the related conditions or situations, and how it was said. When a message occurs can also reveal associated meaning. Let us assume two couples do exactly the same amount of kissing and arguing. But one couple always kisses after an argument and the other couple always argues after a kiss. The ordering of the behaviors may mean a great deal more than the frequency of the behavior. A friend's unusually docile behavior may only be understood by noting that it was preceded by situations that required an abnormal amount of assertiveness. Some responses may be directly linked to a developing pattern of responses and defy logic. For example, a person who says "No!" to a series of charges like "You're dumb," "You're lazy," and "You're dishonest," may also say "No!" and try to justify his or her response if the next statement is "And you're good looking. " We would do well to listen for how messages are presented. The words, "It sure has been nice to have you over," can be said with emphasis and excitement or ritualistically. The phrase can be said once or repeated several times. And the meanings we associate with the phrase will change accordingly. Sometimes if we say something infrequently it assumes more importance; sometimes the more we say something, the less importance it assumes.