单选题I once attended a Downing Street reception where Tony Blair invited questions from leading magazine editors. One woman, from a big consumer title, asked if New Labour had plans to tax one-use plastic bags that were destroying the environment. Blair pulled a mock-baffled "Hey, guys, I"m busy running the country here" face and answered in a tone of purest condescension. This was around 2005, a few years after Ireland, with little fuss at all, had introduced a small charge for plastic bags. Within a year, everyone had learnt to keep a jute sack or string shopper under their desk, and this young, adaptable, upbeat nation had cut the number of bags cluttering Irish hedgerows by 94%. It is such an easy, clever bit of nudge politics, which has already worked right across northern Europe. (Is it not strange that we each use 158 plastic bags a year but a Dane only four?) And yet here we are in England—four years after Wales, two after Northern Ireland, a year after Scotland—bringing it in at last on Monday. And unlike the devolved nations, England can"t just keep it simple and charge 5p for bags in all stores, but only those with more than 250 employees. Corner shops in Aberdeen have coped, yet those in London can"t. The light from an explosion in deep space can take billions of years to be seen on Earth. And the gap between a social ill being identified, backed by irrefutable scientific evidence, and parliament changing the law, is often almost as long. That cigarettes are poisonous and young lungs fragile have been beyond doubt since the 1950s, yet it only became illegal for smokers to inflict their fumes upon children in cars this week. Even now, some libertarians grumble that enjoying an après school pick-up fag is every parent"s right and, besides, haven"t the police got better things to do? Yes, they have. But, still, progress is worth defending. And improvements in our lives are rarely brought about by vast, sweeping changes but by small, incremental shifts. Those simple life-savers, the Clean Air Acts, seatbelt and motorcycle helmet legislation: all regarded as quirky and inconvenient in their time. Every generation looks upon the unthinking habits of its parents and asks: why the hell did you do that? In Mad Men Don Draper is shown taking a last swig of his beer in a picnic, then lobbing the bottle deep into the forest. According to creator Matthew Weiner this was the show"s most controversial scene., horrified young people would ask him if their grandparents were really so crass? But in early-1960s America there was little stigma in dumping your trash. Back in the 1970s being capable of driving when lashed was a prized adult skill, we let our dogs defile parks and would have thought anyone who scooped up still-warm poop in little bags totally mad. And maybe we will look back at the plastic bag era in similar terms. How could these people use up all the oil, choke turtles and block flood defences, just to make carrying shopping home easier? A non-brand plastic bag flapping about on a tree, too high up to reach, is the ensign of our age. It is the saddest, most hopeless manifestation of a disposable age built upon laziness and greed. In the film American Beauty the misfit Ricky videos a bag dancing in the wind. the peculiar poignancy comes from seeing the most unloved, worthless object on Earth appearing to express joy. "Do you need a bag?" I"ve come to resent that question. Because I don"t want to say "yes". But my handbag is small. I don"t want to crease this book I"ve bought as a present. And sometimes a purchase without nice packaging feels less of a treat. But usually I say "no". Ten virtue points for that. Twenty for remembering to carry my bags-for-life from the car. It is irksome to forget, then watch the checkout lady unfurl dozens from the roll, pull each one open with a flourish: all that waste just to get my shopping home. Really this is just pretence of virtue. The 5p charge may reduce bags, and in Scotland usage has declined by 80% in a year: that"s 147 million fewer. But the oceans are already clogged with every other type of plastic: vast islands of detritus, micro-particles of broken-up Evian bottles and biscuit wrappers absorbed by sea life and then, in due course, us. But sometimes laws are there as much for society to declare intent as to have an effect. With smoking in cars I wonder if it is not a proxy for more sweeping legislation that would forbid low-life mums in supermarkets screaming swear words at their sobbing toddlers or pouring Coke in a baby"s tippy cup. It is a way of saying, we are watching, we have standards: your parenting is being judged. We"d like to police your home; but we can"t, so let"s start with your car. Likewise, the plastic bag law is a displacement activity for the bigger, dreary, ecological changes that are too daunting for us to make. Those five pences are tithes to the Church of Green. And dragging home our hessian totes of virtue we can feel less hopeless. The world is broken: but don"t blame me.

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.

单选题What is the general attitude of the OECD towards GDP?

单选题Which of the following best explains the sentence "France has more to fear from globalization, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain." in Paragraph 6?

单选题 Quick quiz: Who has a more vitriolic relationship with the U.S.? 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 U.K. 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 U.K.'s intellectual tone. On any given day you can easily read a handful of stories sniping at the U.S. and things American. The BBC's Radio 4, which is a domestic news and talk radio station, regularly laments Britain's social warts and 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 U.K.'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 London 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 American joke?" which incidentally turned out to be a racial slur against blacks. It's common to hear Brits routinely dismiss Americans as racists (even with an African-American president), religious nuts, global polluters, warmongers, cultural philistines, and as intellectual Untermenschen. The United Kingdom's counterintelligence and security agency has identified some 5,000 Muslim extremists in the U.K. but 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 U.K. 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

单选题 {{B}}Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following talk.{{/B}}

单选题Howoftendoesthewomangotothefitnessclass?[A]Onceaweek.[B]Twiceaweek.[C]Threetimesaweek.

单选题

单选题 {{B}}Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.{{/B}}

单选题Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview.

单选题

单选题 Questions 15—18

单选题 {{B}}Questions 15-18{{/B}}

单选题

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Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following conversation.

单选题

单选题{{B}}Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.{{/B}}

单选题"Unfold" means ______.