单选题Our culture has caused most Americans to assume not only that our language is universal but that the gestures we use are understood by everyone. We do not realize that waving good-bye is the way to summon a person from the Philippines to one"s side, or that in Italy and some Latin-American countries, curling the finger to oneself is a sign of farewell. Those private citizens who sent packages to our troops occupying Germany after World War II and marked them GIFT to escape duty payments did not bother to find out that "Gift" means poison in German. Moreover, we like to think of ourselves as friendly, yet we prefer to be at least 3 feet or an arm"s length away form others. Latins and Middle Easterners like to come closer and touch, which makes Americans uncomfortable. Our linguistic and cultural blindness and the casualness with which we take notice of the developed tastes, gestures, customs and languages of other countries, are losing us friends, business and respect in the world. Even here in the United States, we make few concessions to the needs of foreign visitors. There are no information signs in four languages on our public buildings or monuments; we do not have multilingual guided tours. Very few restaurant menus have translations, and multilingual waiters, bank clerks and policemen are rare. Our transportation systems have maps in English only and often we ourselves have difficulty understanding them. When we go abroad, we tend to cluster in hotels and restaurants where English is spoken. The attitudes and information we pickup are conditioned by those natives—usually the richer—who speak English. Our business dealings, as well as the nation"s diplomacy, are conducted through interpreters. For many years, America and Americans could get by with cultural blindness and linguistic ignorance. After all, America was the most powerful country of the free world, the distributor of needed funds and goods. But all that is past. American dollars no longer buy all good things, and we are slowly beginning to realize that our proper role in the world is changing. A 1979 Harris poll reported that 55 percent of Americans want this country to play a more significant role in world affairs; we want to have a hand in the important decisions of the next century, even though it may not always be the upper hand.

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.

单选题 Some people believe that international sport creates goodwill between the nations and that if countries play games together they will learn to live together. Others say that the opposite is true: that international contests encourage false national pride and lead to misunderstanding and hatred. There is probably some truth in both arguments, but in recent years the Olympic games have done little to support the view that sports encourages international brotherhood. Not only was there the tragic incident involving the murder of athletes, but the Games were also ruined by lesser incidents caused principally by minor national contests. One country received its second-place medals with visible indignation after the hockey final. There had been noisy scenes at the end of the hockey match, the losers objecting to the final decisions. They were convinced that one of their goals should not have been disallowed and that their opponents' victory was unfair. Their manager was in a rage when he said: "This wasn't hockey. Hockey and the International Hockey Federation are finished." The president of the Federation said later that such behavior could result in the suspension of the team for at least three years. The American basketball team announced that they would not yield first place to Russia, after a disputable end to their contest. The game had ended in disturbance. It was thought at first that the United States had won, by a single point, but it was announced that there were three seconds still to play. A Russian player then threw the ball from one end of the court to the other, and another player popped it into the basket. It was the first time the USA had ever lost an Olympic basketball match. An appeal jury debated the matter for four and a half hours before announcing that the result would stand. The American players then voted not to receive the silver medals. Incidents of this kind will continue as long as sport is played competitively rather than for the love of the game. The suggestion that athletes should compete as individuals, or in non-national teams, might be too much to hope for. But in the present organization of the Olympics there is far too much that encourages aggressive patriotism.

单选题Question 6-10 The kids are hanging out. I pass small bands of students in my way to work these mornings. They have become a familiar part of the summer landscape. These kids are not old enough for jobs. Nor are they rich enough for camp. They are school children without school. The calendar called the school year ran out on them a few weeks ago. Once supervised by teachers and principals, they now appear to be "self care". Passing them is like passing through a time zone. For much of our history, after all, Americans arranged the school year around the needs of work and family. In 19th-century cities, schools were open seven or eight hours a day, 11 months a year. In rural America, the year was arranged around the growing season. Now, only 3 percent of families follow the agricultural model, but nearly all schools are scheduled as if our children went home early to milk the cows and took months off to work the crops. Now, three-quarters of the mothers of school-age children work, but the calendar is written as if they were home waiting for the school bus. The six-hour day, the 180-day school year is regarded as something holy. But when parents work an eight-hour day and a 240-day year, it means something different. It means that many kids go home to empty houses. It means that, in the summer, they hang out. "We have a huge mismatch between the school calendar and realities of family life," says Dr. Ernest Boye, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Dr. Boyer is one of many who believe that a radical revision of the school calendar is inevitable. "School, whether we like it or not, is educational. It always has been. " His is not popular idea. Schools are routinely burdened with the job of solving all our social problems. Can they be asked to meet the needs of our work and family lives? It may be easier to promote a longer school year on its educational merits and, indeed, the educational case is compelling. Despite the complaints and studies about our kids" lack of learning, the United State still has a shorter school year than any industrial nation. In most of Europe, the school year is 220 days. In Japan, it is 240 days long. While classroom time alone doesn"t produce a well-educated child, learning takes time and more learning takes more time. The long summers of forgetting take a toll. The opposition to a longer school year comes from families that want to and can provide other experiences for their children. It comes from teachers. It comes from tradition. And surely from kids. But the most important part of the conflict has been over the money.

单选题 Questions 27-30

单选题Questions 11～15 Something about Naples just seems to be made for comedy. The name alone conjures up pizza, and lovable, incorrigible innocents warbling "O Sole Mio"; a nutty little corner of the world where the id runs wild and the only answer to the question "Why?" appears to be "Why not?" Naples: the butter-side-down of Italian cities, where even the truth has a strangely fictitious tinge. One day a car rear-ended one of the city"s minibuses. The bus driver got out to investigate. While he stood there talking, his only passenger took the wheel and drove off. Neither passenger nor bus was ever seen again. Then there was that busy lunch hour in the central post office when a crack in the ceiling opened and postal workers were overwhelmed by an avalanche of stale croissants. As the cleaners hauled away garbage bags of moldy breakfast rolls, the questions remained: Who? Why? And what else could still be up there? But Naples actually isn"t so funny. Italy"s third largest city, with 1.1 million people, has a much darker side, where chaos reigns, bag snatching and mugging, clogged streets of stupefying confusion, where traffic moves to mysterious laws of its own through multiple intersections whose traffic lights haven"t functioned for months, maybe years—if they have lights at all. Packs of wild dogs roam the city"s main park. Nineteen policemen on the anti-narcotics squad are arrested for accepting payoffs from the Camorra, the local Mafia. To many Italians, particularly those in the wealthy, industrialized north, none of this is surprising. To them Naples means political corruption, wasted federal subsidies, rampant organized crime, appallingly large families, and cunning, lazy people who prefer to do something shady rather than honest work... Nepolitans know their reputation. "People think nothing ever gets done here," said a young professional woman. "Sometimes they say, "Surely you come from Milan. You come from Naples? Naples?"" Giovanni del Forno, an insurance executive, told me about his flight home from a northern Italian city, the plane waited on the tarmac for half an hour for a gate to become available. "And I began to hear the comments around me. "Well, here we are in Naples,"" he said with a wince. "These comments make me suffer." Neapolitans may complain, but most can"t conceive of living anywhere else. The city has the intimacy, tension, and craziness of a large but intensely devoted family. The people have the same perverse pride as New Yorkers. They love even the things that don"t work, and they love being Neapolitans. They know outsiders don"t get it, and they don"t care. "Even if you go away", one woman said, "you remain a prisoner of this city. My city has many problems, but away from it I feel bad. " This is a city in which living on the brink of collapse is normal. Naples has survived wars, revolutions, floods, earthquakes, and eruptions of nearby Vesuvius. First a wealthy colony founded by the Greeks (who called it Neapolis, or "new city"), then a flourishing Roman resort, it lived through various incarnations under dynasties of Normans, Swabians, Austrians, Spanish, and French, not to mention a glorious period as the resplendent capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was a brilliant, cultivated city that once ranked with London and Paris. The Nunziatella, the oldest military school in Italy, still basks in its two centuries of historic glory; the Teatro San Carlo remains one of the greatest opera houses in the world. The treasures of Pompeii grace the National Museum. Stretched luxuriantly between mountains and sea along the curving coast of the Bay of Naples, full of ornate palaces, gardens, churches, and works of art, with its mild climate and rich folklore, Naples in the last century was beloved by artists and writers. The most famous response to this magnificence was the comment by an unknown admirer, "See Naples and die." Today that remark carries less poetic connotations. The bombardments of World War II were followed by the depredations of profiteers and politicians-for-rent who reduced the city to a demoralized shadow of itself, surviving on government handouts. Until five years ago city governments were cobbled together by warring political factions; some mayors lasted only a few months. A cholera outbreak in 1973 was followed in 1980 by a major earthquake. Its famous port has withered (though the U. S. Sixth Fleet command is still based just up the coast), industries have failed, tourists have fled, natives have moved out—it seems that only drug trafficking is booming. "Unlivable," the Neapolitans say. "Incomprehensible". "Martyred".

单选题 Questions 11-15 Yet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it is philosophy that speaks: that change should remind us that even if the function of religion and that of reason coincide, this function is performed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many, reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourishes by prayer. Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on which indeed we may come to reflect but which exists in us ideally only, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not conform to it; it does not urge or chide us, not call for any emotions on our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects which it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings some order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to the natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into them. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal constitution which experience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience itself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate principle, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this struggling and changing force of religion seems to direct man toward something eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the soul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all that the soul depends upon. Religion, in its intent, is a more conscious and direct pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art, for these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and piecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimate justification of the instinctive aims. Religion also has an instinctive and blind side and bubbles up in all manner of chance practices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the heart of things, and from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the direction of the ultimate. Nevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life of Reason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of each religion may prevail upon themselves, to express satisfaction with its results, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generous draughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the various religions at once and comparing their achievements with what reason requires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they have one and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offer imaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurable essentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directed effort. The Greed oracles, for instance, pretended to heal our natural ignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while the Christian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our natural death--the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing and conditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done for the real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocate sentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuing happiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a one-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. When these come, the real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxed vitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spirits untrained in and natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauches the morality it comes to sanction and impedes the science it ought to fulfill. What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to rationality in its purpose, fall so short of it in its results? The answer is easy: religion pursues rationality through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it is an imaginative substitute for science. When it gives precepts, insinuates ideals, or remolds aspiration, it is an imaginative substitute for wisdom--I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit of all good. The condition and the aims of life are both represented in religion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the depth and importance of religion becomes intelligible no less than its contradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that of reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked poetical conceits.

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单选题Questions 15-18

单选题If books had never been discovered, man would have found some other way of recording his communication. But then, for our consideration, we should include as books everything that is a written record. This would include tablets, papyrus and anything else—including computer diskettes. In the case of music, it would be impossible to think that man can live without it. Looking at primitive cultures, it appears that music is actually a part of the human psyche. When two things are knocked together, music is produced. So for the sake of our discussion, it is intended to restrict the meaning of music to the popularly accepted concept. Music is the pleasing combination of sounds that we like to listen to. Though it is difficult to, we can pretend that these things never existed. In this case we would not miss them today. To compare with recent inventions, let. us look at radio and television. Though we cannot think of life without them today, this is so only from comparatively recent times. There are many of us living today who had seen a time when there was no television. They will tell us that life was not that much different. The same is probably true of radio. But books are a different thing because they, or something akin to them, began thousands of years ago. In the case of music, it goes back even further—perhaps to millions of years. We may be able to imagine a world which never saw books, because books are a human invention. However, in the case' of music this does not seem possible. Pleasing sounds are all around us; like the singing of the birds and the whistling of the wind. Music just seems to be inborn in US and in the world around us. If books did not exist, the world will be a poorer place indeed. Great philosophies like Plato's would become unknown and all the pleasures and lessons we could get from them will be lost forever. Then there is literature like the works of the great masters like Shakespeare, Dickens and Jane Austen. What a somber, miserable world it will be without the pleasures of reading. Since mere are so many other things which depend on reading-like plays, songs and movies—we can expect them to disappear also. It would be a dark and unsatisfying world where knowledge is not propagated; where there ale no books to derive pleasure from. In the case of music: Without it the world will be bleak and cold indeed. It would be a terrible world with no cheery runes, no songs to sing and no great music to lose ourselves in. A world which does not listen to the music of the great masters like Chopin and Beethoven would be a very sorry world. There will not be so many smiles on faces anymore. When we lose music. an expression of a deep part of ourselves—from the soul—is lost. With music, connected activities like dancing will be lost too. A world without music and dancing will bring US back to the Stone Age. Unlike radio, television, telephones and computers, reading and music ale not mere conveniences that we can live without. Reading is crucial for self-expression and for passing on records and knowledge to future generations. Music is part of our very soul. A world without these will not be the world as we know it. In fact. many of us would not want to live in such a world.

单选题What is the best rifle of the passage?

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单选题 Over the years, Allan Rechtschaffen has killed a lot of rats just by keeping them awake. In his sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago, Rechtschaffen places each rat on an enclosed turntable contraption that begins spinning whenever the rodent's brain waves suggest it is beginning to nod off-forcing the rodent to keep moving so that it doesn't bump into a wall. After about a week of enforced consciousness, the rat begins showing some signs of strain. Odd lesions break out on its tail and paws. It becomes irritable. Its body temperature drops even as it attempts to make itself warmer than usual. It eats twice as much food as normal but loses 10 to 15 percent of its body weight. After about 17 days of sleeplessness, the rat dies. What kills it? "We don't know," says Rechtschaffen. Thus it goes in the science of sleep. Rats can last about 16 days without eating, suggesting that sleep is nearly as vital to life as is food. Yet scientists are far from answering the seemingly simple question of what, exactly, sleep is good for. Of course, there's no shortage of hypotheses; insomniacs hoping for some shut-eye might do well to count sleep theories instead of sheep. Many of the most popular theories are extensions of common-sense propositions from human experience. Since we feel rested after sleep, some researchers argue-that sleep must be for rest. Harold Zepelin, professor emeritus in psychology at Michigan's Oakland University, regards sleep as a period of mandatory energy conservation. "We can't afford to be active 24 hours per day," syas Zepelin, so evolution dictated this daily period of hibernation. (Some even argue that one reason sleep evolved in humans was to keep us unconscious and out of harm's way during the night, when we are not exactly the king of beasts.) Smaller animals such as rodents, which have high metabolisms and expend proportionately more energy to make up for the rapid loss of heat that is a geometric consequence of smallness, do tend to sleep more. Larger animals such as giraffes sleep less than five hours each day. But the energy savings from sleep in large animals are so small it is hard to see why they would sleep at all by this theory. Humans save merely 120 kilocalories a night (about the equivalent of an apple) by sleeping rather than staying awake. Moreover, even hibernating animals arouse themselves from torpor to enter sleep and then fall back into hibernation, suggesting that there is a deeper need for sleep than a mere recharging of the body's batteries. Dennis McGinty believes part of the function of sleep is to cool off the brain. The chief of neurophysiology research at Los Angeles's Sepulveda Veterans Hospital, McQmty points to a feedback loop in the brain that seems to trigger sleep when the brain gets too hot. When provided with a bar to increase cage temperature, rats that are kept awake jack up the heat about 10 degrees Celsius. By attempting to get warmer than usual, the rats may be hoping to trigger sleep-inducing neurons. The phenomenon also occurs in humans. "If you exercise in the extreme heat, it practically knocks you out," McGinty notes. Well-trained athletes who are able to increase their body temperature during exercise—unlike us weekend workout warriors—sleep about one hour longer than normal. In essence, a jump in body temperature activates heat-sensitive neurons to slow down the body's metabolism—preferably by sleep—and thus cool down the brain. The body's minimum temperature comes during the deepest sleep, typically at around 5 a.m.

单选题Once it was possible to define male and female roles easily by the division of labor. Men worked outside the home and earned the income to support their families, while women cooked the meals and took care of the home and the children. These roles were firmly fixed for most people, and there was not much opportunity for women to exchange their roles. But by the middle of this century, men"s and women"s roles were becoming less firmly fixed. In the 1950s, economic and social success was the goal of the typical American. But in the 1960s a new force developed called the counterculture. The people involved in this movement did not value the middle-class American goals. The counterculture presented men and women with new role choices. Taking more interest in childcare, men began to share child-raising tasks with their wives. In fact, some young men and women moved to communal homes or farms where the economic and childcare responsibilities were shared equally by both sexes. In addition, many Americans did not value the traditional male role of soldier. Some young men refused to be drafted as soldiers to fight in the war in Vietnam. In terms of numbers, the counterculture was not a very large group of people. But its influence spread to many parts of American society. Working men of all classes began to change their economic and social patterns. Industrial workers and business executives alike cut down on "overtime" work so that they could spend more leisure time with their families. Some doctors, lawyers, and teachers turned away from high paying situations to practice their professions in poorer neighborhoods. In the 1970s, the feminist movement, or women"s liberation, produced additional economic and social changes. Women of all ages and at all levels of society were entering the work force in greater numbers. Most of them still took traditional women"s jobs as public school teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. But some women began to enter traditionally male occupations: police work, banking, dentistry, and construction work. Women were asking for equal work, and equal opportunities for promotion. Today the experts generally agree that important changes are taking place in the roles of men and women. Naturally, there are difficulties in adjusting to these transformations.

单选题 However attractive the figures may look on paper, in the long run the success or failure of a merger depends on the human factor. When the agreement has been signed and the accountants have departed, the real problems may only just be beginning. If there is a culture clash between the two companies in the way their people work, then all the efforts of the financiers and lawyers to strike a deal may have been in vain. According to Chris Bolton of KS Management Consultants, 70% of mergers fail to live up to their promise of shareholder value, not through any failure in economic terms but because the integration of people is unsuccessful. Corporates, he explains, concentrate their efforts before a merger on legal, technical and financial matters. They employ a range of experts to obtain the most favourable contract possible. But even at these early stages, people issues must be taken into consideration. The strengths and weaknesses of both organisations should be assessed and, if it is a merger of equals, then careful thought should be given to which personnel, from which side, should take on the key roles. This was the issue in 2001 when the proposed merger between two pharmaceutical companies promised to create one of the largest players in the industry. For both companies the merger was intended to reverse falling market share and shareholder value. However, although the companies' skill bases were compatible, the chief executives of the two companies could not agree which of them was to head up the new organisation. This illustrates the need to compromise if a merger is to take place. But even in mergers that do go ahead, there can be culture clashes. One way to avoid this is to work with focus groups to see how employees view the existing culture of their organisation. In one example, where two global organisations in the food sector were planning to merge, focus groups discovered that the companies displayed very different profiles. One was sales-focused, knew exactly what it wanted to achieve and pushed initiatives through. The other got involved in lengthy discussions, trying out options methodically and making contingency plans. The first responded quickly to changes in the marketplace; the second took longer, but the option it eventually chose was usually the correct one. Neither company's approach would have worked for the other. The answer is not to adopt one company's approach, or even to try to incorporate every aspect of both organisations, but to create a totally new culture. This means taking the best from both sides and making a new organisation that everyone can accept. Or almost everyone. Inevitably there will be those who cannot adapt to a different culture. Research into the impact of mergers has found that companies with differing management styles are the ones that need to work hardest at creating a new culture. Another tool that can help to get the right cultural mix is intercultural analysis. This involves carrying out research that looks at the culture of a company and the business culture of the country in which it is based. It identifies how people, money and time are managed in a company, and investigates the business customs of the country and how its politics, economics and history impact on the way business is done.

单选题A.Smallcarsareeasytoparkquickly.B.Smallcarsarecheaperthanbigcars.C.Smallcarsareconvenientonlongtrips.D.Smallcarsneedsmallerparkingspaces.

单选题 The purpose of the American court system is to protect the rights of the people. According to American law, if someone is accused of a crime, he or she is considered innocent until the court proves that the person is guilty. In other words, it is the responsibility of the court to prove that a person is guilty. It is not the responsibility of the person to prove that he or she is innocent. In order to arrest a person, the police have to be reasonably sure that a crime has been committed. The police must give the suspect the reasons why they are arresting him and tell him his rights under the law. Then the police take the suspect to the police station to "book" him. "Booking" means that the name of the person and the charges against him are formally listed at the police station. The next step is for the suspect to go before a judge. The judge decides whether the suspect should be kept in jail or released. If the suspect has no previous criminal record and the judge feels that he will return to court rather than run away — for example, because he owns a house and has a family — he can go free. Otherwise, the suspect must put up bail. At this time, too, the judge will appoint a court layer to defend the suspect if he can't afford one. The suspect returns to court a week or two later. A lawyer from the district attorney's office presents a case against the suspect. This is called a hearing. The attorney may present evidence as well as witnesses. The judge at the hearing then decides whether there is enough reason to hold a trial. If the judge decides that there is sufficient evidence to call for a trial, he or she sets a date for the suspect to appear in court to formally plead guilty or not guilty. At the trial, a jury of 12 people listens to the evidence from both attorneys and hears the testimony of the witnesses. Then the jury goes into a private room to consider the evidence and decide whether the defendant is guilty of the crime. If the jury decides that the defendant is innocent, he goes free. However, if he is convicted, the judge sets a dale for the defendant to appear in court again for sentencing. At this time, the judge tells the convicted person what his punishment will be. The judge may sentence him to prison, order him to pay a fine, or place him on probation. The American justice system is very complex and sometimes operates slowly. However, every step is designed to protect the rights of the people. These individual rights are the basis, or foundation, of the American government.

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单选题A.Wewentswimming.B.Hewentswimming.C.Wedidn'tgoswimming.D.Hedidn'tgoswimming.