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单选题Quick quiz: Who has a more vitriolic relationship with the US? The French or the British. If you guessed the French, consider this: Paris newspaper polls show that 72 percent of the French hold a favorable impression of the United States. Yet UK polls over the past decade show a lower percentage of the British have a favorable impression of the United States. Britain's highbrow newspaper, The Guardian, sets the UK's intellectual tone. On any given day you can easily read a handful of stories sniping at the US and things American. The BBC's Radio 4, which is a domestic news and talk radio station, regularly laments Britain's social wart sand follows them up with something that has become the national mantra, "Well, at least we're not as bad as the Americans. " This isn't a new trend: British abhorrence of America antedates George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. On 9/11 as the second plane was slamming into the World Trade Center towers my wife was on the phone with an English friend of many years. In the background she heard her friend's teenage son shout in front of the TV, "Yeah! The Americans are finally getting theirs. "The animosity may be unfathomable to those raised to think of Britain as "the mother country" for whom we fought two world wars and with whom we won the cold war. So what's it all about? I often asked that during the years I lived in London. One of the best answers came from an Englishwoman with whom I shared a table for coffee. She said, "It's because we used to be big and important and we aren't any more. Now it's America that's big and important and we can never forgive you for that. " A detestation of things American has become as dependable as the tides on the Thames rising and falling four times a day. It feeds a flagging British sense of national self-importance. A new book documenting the virulence of more than 30 years of corrosive British animosity reveals how deeply rooted it has become in the UK's national psyche. "[T]here is no reasoning with people who have come to believe America is now a 'police state' and the USA is a 'disgrace across most of the world,'" writes Carol Gould, an American expatriate novelist and journalist, in her book "Don't Tread on Me. " A brief experience shortly after George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq illustrates that. An American I know was speaking on the street in Lndon one morning. Upon hearing his accent, a British man yelled, "Take your tanks and bombers and go back to America. " Then the British thug punched him repeatedly. No wonder other American friends of mine took to telling locals they were from Canada. The local police recommended prosecution. But upon learning the victim was an American, crown prosecutors dropped the case even though the perpetrator had a history of assaulting foreigners. The examples of this bitterness continue: I recall my wife and I having coffee with a member of our church. The woman, who worked at Buckingham Palace, launched a conversation with, "Have you heard the latest dumb America nioke?" which incidentally turned out to be a racial slur against blacks. It's common to hear Britsroutinely dismiss Americans as racists (even with an African-American president), religious nuts, global polluters, warmongers, cultural philistines, and as intellectual Untermenscher. The United Kingdom's counterintelligence and security agency has identified some 5,000Muslim extremists in the UK hut not even they are denounced with the venom directed at Americans. A British office manager at CNN once informed me that any English high school diploma was equal to an American university degree. This predilection for seeing evil in all things American defies intellect and reason By themselves, these instances might be able to be brushed off, but combined they amount to British bigotry. Oscar Wilde once wrote, "The English mind is always in a rage. " But the energy required to maintain that British rage might be better channeled into paring back what the Economist (a British news magazine) calls "an overreaching, and inefficient state with unaffordable aspirations around the world. " The biggest problem is that, as with all hatred, it tends to be self-destructive. The danger is that as such, it perverts future generations. The UK public's animosity doesn't hurt the United States if Americans don't react in kind. This bigotry does hurt the United Kingdom, however, because there is something sad about a society that must denigrate and malign others to feed its own self-esteem. What Britain needs to understand is that this ill will has poisoned the enormous reservoir of good will Britain used to enjoy in America. And unless the British tweak their attitude, they stand to become increasingly irrelevant to the American people.

单选题 Recent years have brought minority-owned businesses in the United States unprecedented opportunities as well as new and significant risks. Civil rights activists have long argued that one of the principal reasons why Blacks, Hispanics, and other minority groups have difficulty establishing themselves in business is that they lack access to the sizable orders and subcontracts that are generated by large companies. Now Congress, in apparent agreement, has required by law that businesses awarded federal contracts of more than $ 500, 000 do their best to find minority subcontractors and record their efforts to do so on forms filed with the government. Indeed, (some federal and local agencies) have gone so far as to set specific percentage goals for apportioning part of public works contracts to minority enterprises. Corporate response appears to have been substantial. (According to figures collected in 1977, the total of corporate contracts with minority businesses rose from $ 77 million in 1972 to $1.1 billion in 1977. ) The projected total of corporate contracts with minority businesses for the early 1980s is estimated to be over $ 3 billion per year with no letup anticipated in the next decade. Promising as it is for minority businesses, this increased patronage poses dangers for them, too. First, minority firms risk expanding too fast and overextending themselves financially, since most are small concerns and, unlike large businesses, they often need to make substantial investments in new plants, staff, equipment, and the like in order to perform work subcontracted to them. If, thereafter, their subcontracts are for some reason reduced, such firms can face potentially crippling fixed expenses. The world of corporate purchasing can be frustrating for small entrepreneurs who get requests for elaborate formal estimates and bids. Both consume valuable time and resources, and a small company's efforts must soon result in orders, or both the morale and the financial health of the business will suffer. A second risk is that White-owned companies may seek to cash in on the increasing apportionments through formation of joint ventures with minority-owned concerns. Of course, in many instances there are legitimate reasons for joint ventures; clearly, White and minority enterprises can team up to acquire business that neither could acquire alone. But civil rights groups and minority business owners have complained to Congress about minorities being set up as "fronts" with White backing, rather than being accepted as full partners in legitimate joint ventures. Third, a minority enterprise that secures the business of one large corporate customer often run the danger of becoming and remaining dependent. Even in the best of circumstances, fierce competition from larger, more established companies makes it difficult for small concerns to broaden their customer bases: when such firms have nearly guaranteed orders from a single corporate benefactor, they may truly have to struggle against complacency arising from their current success.

单选题 Humans have always been fascinated by dreams. The vivid dreams people remember and talk about are REM dream—the type that occur almost continuously during periods of rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep. But people also have NREM dreams—dreams that occur during periods without rapid eye movement called NREM sleep—although they are typically less frequent and less memorable than REM dreams. REM dreams have a story like or dream like quality and are more visual, vivid, and emotional than NREM dreams. Interestingly, blind people who lose their sight before age five usually do not have visual dreams, but they have vivid dreams involving the other senses. A popular belief about dreams is that an entire dream takes place in an instant, but in fact, it is not true. Sleep researchers have discovered that it takes about as long to dream a dream as it would to experience the same thing in real life. Although some people insist that they do not dream at all, researchers say that all people dream unless they consume alcohol or take drugs that suppress REM sleep. Are dreaming and REM sleep essentially one and the same? Some researchers have questioned an assumptionlong held by some sleep experts that dreaming is simply the brain's effort to make sense of the random firing of neurons that occurs during REM sleep. Are the brain mechanisms responsible for REM sleep the same ones that create the rich dream world we experience? The answer may be no. It is known that dreams do occur outside of REM sleep. Moreover, the REM state can exist without dreams. These two facts suggest that different but complementary brain mechanisms are responsible for REM sleep and the dreaming that normally occurs within it. There is mounting evidence, says British researcher Mark Solms, that dreaming and REM sleep, while normally occurring together, are not one and the same. Rather, the REM state is controlled by neural mechanisms in the brain stem, while areas farther up in the forebrain provide the common pathway that gives us the complex and often vivid mental experiences we call dreams. Other researchers suggest that REM sleep aids in information processing, helping people sift through daily experience to organize and store in memory information that is relevant to them. Animal studies provide strong evidence for a relationship between REM sleep and learning. Some studies have revealed that animals increase their REM sleep following learning sessions. Other studies have indicated that when animals are deprived of REM sleep after new learning, their performance of the learned task is impaired the following day. But depriving subjects of NREM sleep had no such effect in the studies. Research has shown that REM sleep serves an information-processing function in humans and is involved in the consolidation of memories after human learning. Researchers found that research participants learning a new perceptual skill showed an improvement in performance, with no additional practice, eight to ten hours later if they had a normal night's sleep or if the researchers disturbed only their NREM sleep. Performance did not improve, however, in those who were deprived of REM sleep. There is no doubt that REM sleep serves an important function, even if psychologists do not know precisely what that function is. The fact that newborns have such a high percentage of REM sleep has led to the conclusion that REM sleep is necessary for maturation of the brain in infants. Furthermore, when people are deprived of REM sleep as a result of general sleep loss or illness, they will make up for the loss by getting an increased amount of REM sleep after the deprivation. This increase in the percentage of REM sleep to make up for REM deprivation is called a "REM rebound." Because the intensity of REM sleep is increased during a REM rebound, nightmares often occur.

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单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} In this section, you will read several passages. Each passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to choose {{B}}ONE {{/B}}best answer to each question. Answer all the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your {{B}}ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}} The journalism bug bit me at a young age and I chased my dream in high school and college. Guess it was the Mary Tyler Moore and Lou Grant shows that inspired me. Unfortunately, that was TV; this was reality. I worked in TV and at newspapers. Movies and television often make these out to be glamorous jobs, but let me assure you nothing could be further from the truth. For the rookie, it's often very long hours (50—70 per week not uncommon) and the pay is just a crime. Many in management don't believe in paying overtime, even when it's due. I had to file complaints against one employer (the owner of a small newspaper chain) and my last employer at the Labor Department. They were burning people out like there was no tomorrow. We should've installed revolving doors. Working in the press (TV or newsprint) can often be VERY stressful. There is ALWAYS a push on to get the information out (in its complete form) first and to get it out completely accurately. TV stations succeed greatly at the former, but quite often blow it on the latter. And you rarely hear a TV reporter or anchor man apologize or admit a mistake. Newspapers do it every day, and some feel that blows their credibility, but it should do the opposite. With about 20 years in the field and four years at my last job as editor in chief, I was released for political reasons. My publishers were high-ranking members of a political party. They were drinking buddies with the governor and many US senators. Despite their efforts to "draft" me, I refused to sign the dotted line on application forms (for the party) and was fired. The day after election day, I was told I was being released because I did not live in the community. Only two people of the 25—30 working there lived in the community. My greatest sense of accomplishment in this business has come from enlightening the public, making them aware of politicians and government officials breaking laws or just outright lying. You would not believe all the mess I have seen. Some of my stories and editorials have earned me awards and a number of them have sparked investigations by the state police and FBI. All in a day's work. Yes, it's an ego thing at first, but that quickly wears off. It's a VERY cut-throat business. I began to see that in college and grade school. Working in a news room you have to get over the personalities, the egos and try to work around management's pet peeves. We've had to spike (kill, censor) stories in TV and at papers because some stupid advertiser would be upset. Usually a friend of a friend, or a friend of an advertiser. It's SUCH a joke. I now wish I had not changed my major from computer science to journalism. Ouch! I would be making more money and living an easier life. My dream is to own a newspaper—probably a niche publication or a trade journal, somewhere in North Carolina or Colorado. Wish me luck.

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单选题Questions 16～20 Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspaper. Pamela Goodwin, a labor-relations expert at General Motors, happened to see a computer printout. Stephanie Odle, an assistant manager at a Sam"s Club store, was slipped a co-worker"s tax form Purely by accident, these women learned they were making less than their male or, in Goodwin"s case, white colleagues at work. Each sued for pay discrimination under federal law, lucky enough to discover what typically stays a secret. "People don"t just stand around the watercooler to talk about how much they make," says McMillan. This, as they say, is the real world, one in which people would rather discuss their sex lives than salaries. And about a third of private employers actually prohibit employees from sharing pay information. It is also a world that the U. S. Supreme Court seems unfamiliar with. The Justices recently decided 5 to 4 that workers are out of luck if they file a complaint under Title Ⅶ—the main federal antidiscrimination law—more than 180 days after their salary is set. That"s six measly months to find out what your co-workers are making so that you can tell whether you"re getting chiseled because of your sex, race, religion or national origin. How many of the roughly 2,800 such complaints pending before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will fizzle because of this new rule is hard to say. Less of a mystery, though just as troubling, is how the court reached its decision. Lilly Ledbetter filed the case against Goodyear Tire ＆ Rubber Co. because at the end of a 19-year career, she was making far less than any of 15 men at her level She argued that Goodyear violated Title Ⅶ every time it gave her a smaller paycheck. Her complaint was timely, she said, because she filed it within 180 days of her last check. But the court majority read the statute to mean that only an actual decision to pay Ledbetter less could be illegal, and that happened well outside the 180-day period. A statute"s ambiguous wording is fair game, but why read it to frustrate Title Ⅶ"s purpose: to ease pay discrimination in a nation where women make only 77￠ on average for every $1 that men earn? And while employers might like this decision, they could end up choking on the torrent of lawsuits that might now come their way. "The real message is that if you have any inkling that you are being paid differently, you need to file now, before the 180 days are up," says Michael Foreman of the Lawyers" Committee for Civil Rights. All this sounds familiar. In June 1989, the Supreme Court issued three decisions that sharply limited the right to sue over employment discrimination. A day after the most prominent ruling, in Wards Cove v. Atonio, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D., Ohio) declared that he would introduce a bill to overturn the decisions. It took civil rights advocates and their congressional allies eight months to introduce legislation. President George H. W. Bush vetoed the first version, arguing that it would encourage hiring quotas. Finally, in late 1991, the Democratic Congress and the Republican President reached a compromise fashioned by Senators John Danforth (R., Mo.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.). It became the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturned parts of eight high-court decisions. Now, Foreman and others are working on a bill to overturn the Ledbetter case, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have expressed interest. A Democratic Congress may well cooperate, though with a Republican again in the White House, final legislation before next year"s elections isn"t guaranteed. In any event, we probably won"t see the kind of groundswell that shifted the law toward workers in 1991 because civil rights advocates aren"t sure these Justices are a threat to workers" rights. Last June, for example, they made it harder for employers to retaliate against employees who complain of discrimination. That left the Ledbetter ruling looking particularly clueless. "I heard the decision and thought, what is wrong with this court?" says McMillan. "It just doesn"t live in the real world. "

单选题Psychological testing is a measurement of some aspect of human behavior by procedures consisting of carefully prescribed content, methods of administration, and interpretation. Test content may be addressed to almost any aspect of intellectual or emotional functioning, including personality traits, attitudes, intelligence, or emotional concerns. Tests usually are administered by a qualified clinical, school, or industrial psychologist, according to professional and ethical principles. Interpretation is based on a comparison of the individual"s responses with those previously obtained to establish appropriate standards for test scores. The usefulness of psychological tests depends on their accuracy in predicting behavior. By providing information about the probability of a person"s responses or performance, tests aid in making a variety of decisions. The primary impetus for the development of the major tests used today was the need for practical guidelines for solving social problems. The first useful intelligence test was prepared in 1905 by the French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1873-1961). The two developed a 30-item scale to ensure that no child could be denied instruction in the Paris school system without formal examination. In 1916 the American psychologist Lewis Terman produced the first Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon scale to provide comparison standards for Americans from age three to adulthood. The test was further revised in 1937 and 1960, and today the Stanford-Binet remains one of the most widely used intelligence tests. The need to classify soldiers during World War I resulted in the development of two group intelligence tests—Army Alpha and Army Beta. To help detect soldiers who might break down in combat, the American psychologist Robert Woodworth (1869—1962) designed the Personal Data Sheet, a forerunner of the modern personality inventory. During the 1930s controversies over the nature of intelligence led to the development of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, which not only provided an index of general mental ability but also revealed patterns of intellectual strengths and weaknesses. The Wechsler tests now extend from the preschool through the adult age range and are at least as prominent as the Stanford-Binet. As interest in the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis grew in the 1930s, two important projective techniques introduced systematic ways to study unconscious motivation: the Rorschach test—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884—1922)— using a series of inkblots on cards, and a story-telling procedure called the Thematic Apperception Test—developed by the American psychologists Henry A. Murray (1893— 1988) and C. D. Morgan. Both of these tests are frequently included in contemporary personality assessment. During World War II the need for improved methods of personnel selection led to the expansion of large-scale programs involving multiple methods of personality assessment. Following the war, training programs in clinical psychology were systematically supported by U.S. government funding, to ensure availability of mental-health services to returning war veterans. As part of these services, psychological testing flourished, reaching an estimated several million Americans each year. Since the late 1960s increased awareness and criticism from both the public and professional sectors have led to greater efforts to establish legal controls and more explicit safeguards against misuse of testing materials.

单选题A.Ispentanhoureachonpsychologyandliterature.B.ThenumberonetaskIfinishedlastnightwasliterature.C.Ishouldhavestudiesliteraturefirstlastnight.D.Ifinishedhalfofmyworkinmathematicslastnight.

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单选题There are hundreds of TV channels in the United States. Americans get a lot of entertainment and information from TV. Most people probably watch it for entertainment only. For some people, however, TV is where they get the news of the day. But some new TV programs or shows put entertainment and news together. This new kind of program in the United States is called "infotainment", which means information (info-) and entertainment (-tainment). These kinds of programs use actors to act out news stories, making the news of the flay more interesting and exciting to people. The shows also use special effects. An example of infotainment is the show "America's Most Wanted". The producers of this pro- gram get stories from real cases that the police have dealt with. In most of these cases, the; police never found the person who committed the crime. Sometimes they caught the criminal, but he or she ran away again. The people who make "America' s Most Wanted" film it in the city where the crime happened. They use actors to play the parts of all the people in the case. At the end of the story, however, they always show "mug shots" of the real criminals, or police photographs.

单选题In the immediate post-war years, the city of Birmingham scheduled some 50,000 small working class cottages as slums due for demolition. Today that process is nearly complete Yet it is dear that, quite apart from any question of race, an environmental problem remains. The expectation built into the planning policies of 1945 was that in the foreseeable future the city would be a better place to live in. But now that slum clearance has run its course, there seems to be universal agreement that the total environment where the slums once stood is more depressing than ever. For the past ten years the slum clearance areas have looked like bomb sites. The buildings and places which survive do so on islands in a sea of rubble and ash. When the slums were there they supported an organic community life and each building, each activity, fitted in as part of the whole. But now that they have been destroyed, nothing meaningful appears to remain, or rather those activities which do go on do not seem to have any meaningful relation to the place. They happen there because it is an empty stage which no-one is using any more. Typical of the inner city in this sense is the Birmingham City Football Ground. Standing in un-splendid isolation on what is now wasteland on the edge of Small Heath, it brings into the area a stage army on twenty or so Saturdays a year who come and cheer and then go away again with little concern any more for the place where they have done their cheering. Even they, however, have revolted recently. "The ground," says the leader of the revolt, "is a slum", thus putting his finger on the fact that the demolition of houses creates rather than solves problems of the inner city. A new element has now come upon the scene in the inner-city in the form of the tower block. Somehow it doesn"t seem to be what Le Corbusier and the planners who wrote those post war Pelicans intended. The public spaces either haven"t yet been developed or are more meanly conceived, and the corridors and lifts are places of horror. In fact these places were always suspect. They had no legitimacy in the minds of the public as suburban family housing had, and those who were placed there felt that they had been cheated. Along with the decaying elements, therefore, that which had been conceived as part of the brave new world was part of the problem.

单选题 I am afraid to sleep. I have been afraid to sleep for the last few weeks. I am so tired that, finally, I do sleep, but only for a few minutes. It is not a bad dream that wakes me; it is the reality I took with me into sleep. I try to think of something else. Immediately the woman in the marketplace comes into my mind. I was on my way to dinner last night when I saw her. She was selling skirts. She moved with the same ease and loveliness I often saw in the women of Laos. Her long black hair was as shiny as the black silk of the skirts she was selling. In her hair, she wore three silk ribbons, blue, green, and white. They reminded me of my childhood and how my girlfriends and I used to spend hours braiding ribbons into our hair. I don't know the word for "ribbons", so I put my hand to my own hair and , with three fingers against my head , I looked at her ribbons and said "Beautiful. " She lowered her eyes and said nothing. I wasn't sure if she understood me (I don't speak Laotian very well). I looked back down at the skirts. They had designs on them: squares and triangles and circles of pink and green silk. They were very pretty. I decided to buy one of those skirts, and I began to bargain with her over the price. It is the custom to bargain in Asia. In Laos bargaining is done in soft voices and easy moves with the sort of quiet peacefulness. She smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. She was pleased by the few words I was able to say in her language, although they were mostly numbers, and she saw that I understood something about the soft playfulness of bargaining. We shook our heads in disagreement over the price; then, immediately, we made another offer and then another shake of the head. She was so pleased that unexpectedly, she accepted the last offer I made. But it was too soon. The price was too low. She was being too generous and wouldn't make enough money. I moved quickly and picked up two more skirts and paid for all three at the price set; that way I was able to pay her three times as much before she had a chance to lower the price for the larger purchase. She smiled openly then, and, for the first time in months, my spirit lifted. I almost felt happy. The feeling stayed with me while she wrapped the skirts in a newspaper and handed them to me. When I left, though, the feeling left, too. It was as though it stayed behind in marketplace. I left tears in my throat. I wanted to cry. I didn't, of course. I have learned to defend myself against what is hard; without knowing it, I have also learned to defend myself against what is soft and what should be easy. I get up, light a candle and want to look at the skirts. They are still in the newspaper that the woman wrapped them in. I remove the paper, and raise the skirts up to look at them again before I pack them. Something falls to the floor. I reach down and feel something cool in my hand. I move close to the candlelight to see what I have. There are five long silk ribbons in my hand, all different colors. The woman in the marketplace! She has given these ribbons to me! There is no defense against a generous spirit, and this time I cry, and very hard, as if I could make up for all the months that I didn't cry.

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单选题Why does the author mention his father Jim Alter in the passage?

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单选题 American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English. But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper. Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.