单选题All living cells on earth require moisture for their metabolism. Cereal grains when brought in from the field, although they may appear to be dry, may contain 20 per cent of moisture or more. If they are stored in a bin, there is sufficient moisture in them to support several varieties of insects. These insects will, therefore, live and breed and, as they grow and eat the grain, it provides them with biological energy for their life processes. This energy will, just as in man, become manifest as heat. Since the bulk of the grain acts as an insulator, the temperature surrounding the colony of insects will rise so that, not only is part of the grain spoiled by the direct attack of the insects but more may be damaged by the heat. Sometimes, the temperature may even rise to the point where the stored grain catches fire. For safe storage, grain must be dried until its moisture content is 13 per cent or less. The direct drying of other foods has also been used. Fish has been dried in many parts of the world besides Africa. Slices of dried meat are prepared by numerous races. Biltong, a form of dried meat, was a customary food for travelers. The drying of meat or fish, either in the sun or over a fire, quite apart from the degree to which it exposes the food to infection by bacteria and infestation by insects, tends also to harm its quality. Proteins are complex molecular structures which are readily disrupted. This is the reason why dried meat becomes tough and can, with some scientific justification, be likened to leather. The technical process of drying foods indirectly by pickling them in the strong salt solutions commonly called "brine" does less harm to the protein than straightforward drying, particularly if this is carried out at high temperatures. It is for this reason that many of the typical drying processes are not taken to completion. That is to say, the outer parts may be dried leaving a moist inner section. Under these circumstances, preservation is only partial. The dried food keeps longer than it would have undried but it cannot be kept indefinitely. For this reason, traditional processes are to be found in many parts of the world in which a combination of partial drying and pickling in brine is used. Quite often the drying involves exposure to smoke. Foods treated in this way are, besides fish of various sorts, bacon, hams and numerous types of sausages.

单选题A.Thechairmansignaledhisassistanttocrossthestreetatthetrafficlights.B.TheassistantdevelopedthenewkindofDVDhomecinemasystemwithacompany.C.Thechairmansuddenlygotanideaofdevelopingnewhomecinemasystem.D.Theassistantgotthepermissiontogoaheadwiththecooperationwiththatcompany.

单选题Questions 23-26

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

单选题A good marriage is good for the heart, according to new research supported by the Heart and Stroke Foundation. "There's little question that a harmonious state of matrimony gives a healthy edge when it comes to medical matters of the heart," says Dr. Brian Baker, Heart and Stroke Foundation researcher. But he doesn't prescribe wedding bells for his patients because, as he points out, not all marriages are happy. The study is being presented today at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2001, hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society. The three-year study included 118 men and women with mild high blood pressure (hypertension). One third of the participants were women, two thirds were men. All were married, although there were no spousal couples in the study. At the beginning and the end of the three-year study, participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure how happy or unhappy—they were in their marriages. They also had their blood pressure measured, and underwent echocardiography to measure their hearts. "People with thicker heart walls tend to have higher blood pressure. Thinner heart walls indicate lower blood pressure," explains Dr. Baker, a psychiatrist specializing in cardiovascular medicine. For one 24-hour period the participants wore a device that monitored the daily fluctuations of their blood pressure while they went about their normal working lives. In the group whose marriages were under strain, heart wall thickness increased by an average of 8%. In the group who defined themselves as happily married, heart wall thickness actually decreased 5%. Also the unhappily married group showed higher mean blood pressures both over the 24-hour monitoring and over the entire three year period. "In a marriage that is not under strain, commitment and satisfaction are higher," says Dr. Baker. "But, in order to get the cardio protective effect, you have to have lots of contact. We found that when you have both satisfaction and are able to spend time together, then the blood pressure goes down. In a good marriage you spend more time together. Those people who felt they had strong marital support spent nearly twice as much time with their partners." "When the marriage is in trouble, you tend to avoid your partner." Such a marriage appears to encourage high blood pressure and unhealthy lifestyles, risk factors for heart disease and stroke. Dr. Anthony Graham, spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation says, "This study adds to the growing body of evidence indicating that there is a physiological dimension to unhappiness and stress. Living well should mean more than just physical fitness, important though that is. Feeling good about yourself and your relationships may also be good medicine./

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

单选题Somewhere in astronomer heaven, Percival Lowell must be smiling. A century after Lowell trained his telescope on Mars and claimed he saw canals built by intelligent beings, scientists are once again in the grip of the Red Planet"s most seductive mystery—the possibility that life has existed there. Did a microscopic race of Martians leave their traces inside a potato-size rock that fell on Antarctica 13,000 years ago? Even as a new wave of Mars exploration begins this month— NASA"s Mars Pathfinder lander arrives on July 4—researchers on Earth have begun a massive effort to answer that question, which has become one of the most controversial in science. No doubt Lowell, whose name has come to be synonymous with scientific wishful thinking, would want to know how it all turns out. So will the hundreds of researchers who gathered in March at NASA"s Johnson Space Center near Houston to attend the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Presentations at the meeting usually concern such topics as ancient lunar volcanism, or the icy satellites of Jupiter, or the surface composition of a distant asteroid. The subject of extraterrestrial life is rarely mentioned. This year, however, the star of the conference was the meteorite officially designated ALH84001: No less than 37 papers were devoted to it, and to the claims by a research team led by the space center"s Dave McKay that the rock contains signs of ancient martian microbes. The first reports of those claims last August jolted the small community of meteorite researchers. Some feared they were about to witness a scientific fiasco that would capsize not just the McKay team"s careers, but their own. "We"re all very dependent upon NASA," explains Alan Treiman of Houston"s Lunar and Planetary Institute. "I was really worried that if this turned out to be (similar to the controversy over) cold fusion, that NASA was going to go down in disgrace. And that we were going to go with it." But it soon became clear that the debate about ALH84001 bears no resemblance to the one that sank cold fusion. Indeed, the McKay team"s report in the journal Science won high praise from such respected scientists as Edward Anders, a University of Chicago professor who is considered the dean of meteorite science. He wrote that the work "sets a new standard for the study for the extraterrestrial materials." At the same time, Anders and others have been critical to the way the McKay team interprets the three things it saw: first, molecules called PAHs (short for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), which McKay and his colleagues believe were formed from the decay of simple organic matter; second, tiny crystals of iron oxide and iron sulfide, which the team says are identical to grains secreted by certain types of terrestrial bacteria; and finally oblong structures that the team tentatively calls fossil "nanobacteria." The strongly worded conclusion of the McKay team"s report—that although each individual finding can be explained nonbiologically, taken together they represent compelling evidence for fossil life—strikes many scientists as wildly overreaching. UCLA"s William Schopf, who pioneered the study of fossil bacteria on Earth, an effort fraught with false alarms, has summed up the attitude of many skeptics with a quote from Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Gathering evidence from ALH84001 has required a technological assault that Percival Lowell could never have imagined. Using electron microscopes and other state-of-the-art instruments, scientists have analyzed chips the size of rice grains, examining features measured in billionths of a meter (nanometers). At that scale, says McKay team member Chris Romanek of the University of Georgia, touring ALH84001 is "like walking in a jungle." Says the University of Tennesee"s Harry McSween: "This is a complex rock. After all, it"s 4.5 billion years old, and it"s resided on more than one planet." Furthermore, the mixture of geological and biological questions has required the expertise of researchers in a host of specialties, within and outside planetary science, who have devoted much of the past year to the effort. That is to say that everything in the life-on-Mars debate has gone according to scientific discipline. Emotions have run high in this controversy, a fact that doesn"t surprise science historian Steven Dick of the U. S. Naval Observatory. The notion of extraterrestrial life is more than just a theory, Dick says; it is the cornerstone of a new cosmology, every bit as much as Copernicus" declaration that Earth goes around the sun. "It has to do with our place in the universe," Dick explains, "and that"s why it"s so passionate."

单选题 {{B}}Questions 27—30{{/B}}

单选题 Directions: In this section, you will read several passages. Each passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to choose ONE best answer, (A), (B), (C) or (D), 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 ANSWER BOOKLET. Questions 1-5 This view may be correct: it has the advantage that the currents are driven by temperature differences that themselves depend on the position of the continents. Such a back-coupling, in which the position of the moving plate has an impact on the forces that move it, could produce complicated and varying motions. On the other hand, the theory is implausible because convection does not normally occur along lines, and it certainly does not occur along lines broken by frequent offsets or changes in direction, as the ridge is. Also it is difficult to see how the theory applies to the plate between the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the ridge in the Indian Ocean. This plate is growing on both sides, and since there is no intermediate trench, the two ridges must be moving apart. It would be odd if the rising convection currents kept exact pace with them. An alternative theory is that the sinking part of the plate, which is denser than the hotter surrounding mantle, pulls the rest of the plate after it. Again it is difficult to see how this applies to the ridge in the South Atlantic, where neither the African nor the American plate has a sinking part. Another possibility is that the sinking plate cools the neighboring mantle and produces convection currents that move the plates. This last theory is attractive because it gives some hope of explaining the enclosed seas, such as the Sea of Japan. These seas have a typical oceanic floor, except that the floor is overlaid by several kilometers of sediment. Their floors have probably been sinking for long periods. It seems possible that a sinking current of cooled mantle material on the upper side of the plate might be the cause of such deep basins. The enclosed seas are an important feature of the earth's surface and seriously require explanation because, in addition to the enclosed seas that are developing at present behind island arcs, there are a number of older ones of possibly similar origin, such as the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea, and perhaps the North Sea.

单选题Questions 23-26

单选题 {{B}}Questions 27—30{{/B}}

单选题WhoissmokingaFrenchcigarette?[A]Thewoman.[B]Theman.[C]Anewperson.

单选题Some people have very good memories, and can easily learn quite long poems by hearts. There are other people who can only remember things when they have said them over and over. Charles Dickens, the famous English author, said that he could walk down any long street in London and then tell you the name of every shop he had passed. Many great men of the world have had wonderful memories. A good memory is a great help in learning a language. Everybody learns his own language by remembering what he hears when he is a small child. Some children — like boys and girls who live in foreign countries with their parents — seem to learn two languages almost as easily as one. In schools it is not easy to learn a second language because the pupils have so little time for it, and they are busy with other subjects as well. The human mind is rather like a camera, but it takes photographs not only of what we see but of what we feel, hear, smell and taste. When we take a real photograph with a camera, there is much to do before the photograph is finished and ready to show to our friends. In the same way there is much work to be done before we can make a picture remain forever in the mind. Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

单选题The momentum towards open publishing looks unstoppable but more still needs to be done to make science truly accessible, says Stephen Curry. If you would like to read the latest research from my lab, be my guest. Our report on a protein from a mouse version of the winter vomiting virus has just been published in the journal PLoS One and is available online for free—to anyone. Contrast that with my first paper, published in 1990, which you could only have read if you had access to a university library with an expensive subscription to the journal Biochemistry. Back in 1990—before the world wide web—that was how scientific publishing was done. Today it is being transformed by open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. Rather than being funded by journal subscriptions, these publishers charge authors or their institutions the cost of publication and make their papers available for free online. Many scientists are passionate supporters of open access and want to see the old model swept away. They have launched a protest movement dubbed the Academic Spring and organised a high-profile boycott of journals published by Elsevier. And the tide appears to be turning in their favour. This week the Finch Report, commissioned by the U.K. government, recommended that research papers—especially those funded by the taxpayer—should be made freely available to anyone who wants to read them. Advocates of open access claim it has major advantages over the subscription model that has been around since academic journals were invented in the 17th century. They argue that science operates more effectively when findings can be accessed freely and immediately by scientists around the world. Better yet, it allows new results to be data-mined using powerful web-crawling technology that might spot connections between data—insights that no individual would be likely to make. But if open access is so clearly superior, why has it not swept all before it? The model has been around for a decade but about nine-tenths of the approximately 2 million research papers that appear every year are still published behind a paywall. Part of the reason is scientists" reluctance to abandon traditional journals and the established ranking among them. Not all journals are equal—they are graded by impact factor, which reflects the average number of times that the papers they publish are cited by others. Nature"s impact factor is 36, one of the highest going, whereas Biochemistry"s is around 3.2. Biochemistry is well regarded—many journals have lower factors—but a paper in Nature is still a much greater prize. Unfortunately, it is prized for the wrong reasons. Impact factors apply to journals as a whole, not individual papers or their authors. Despite this, scientists are still judged on publications in high-impact journals; funding and promotion often depend on it. Consequently few are willing to risk bucking the trend. This has allowed several publishers to resist calls to abandon the subscription model. Another reason for the slowness of the revolution is concern about quality. Unlike many traditional journals, PLoS One does not assess the significance of research during peer review; it simply publishes all papers judged to be technically sound. However, this concern proved unfounded. PLoS One now publishes more papers than any other life science journal and has an impact factor of 4.4. The world of scientific publishing is slowly changing and the hegemony of established journals is being challenged. Shaken by the competition, more of them are offering variants of open access. At the high end of the market, Nature is about to face competition from eLife , an open access journal to be launched later this year. Adding to the momentum, U.K. government research councils are increasingly insisting that the research they pay for be published in open access journals. The European Union is poised to do the same for the science it funds. In the U.S., a bill now before Congress would require all large federal funders to make papers freely available no later than six months after publication.

单选题Which of the following is true about the author's attitude towards the current GDP evaluation system adopted by the American government?

单选题Whereisthespeechtakingplace?A.AtaconstructionsiteB.Inaconcerthall.C.Inamusicclassroom.

单选题Questions 6～10 There are still many things that Peter Cooke would like to try his hand at—paper-making and feather-work are on his list. For the moment though, he will stick to the skill that he has been delighted to perfect over the past ten years: making delicate and unusual objects out of shells. "Tell me if I am boring you," he says, as he leads me round his apartment showing me his work. There is a fine line between being a bore and being an enthusiast, but Cooke need not worry: he fits into the latter category, helped both by his charm and by the beauty of the things he makes. He points to a pair of shell-covered ornaments above a fireplace. "I shan't be at all bothered if people don't buy them because I have got so used to them, and to me they're adorable. I never meant to sell my work commercially. Some friends came to see me about five years ago and said, You must have an exhibition—people ought to see these. We'll talk to a man who owns an art gallery'. " The result was an exhibition in London, at which 70 per cent of the objects were sold. His second exhibition opened at the gallery yesterday. Considering the enormous prices the pieces command—around ￡2,000 for the ornaments—and empty space above the fireplace would seem a small sacrifice for Cooke to make. There are 86 pieces in the exhibition, with prices starting at ￡225 for a shell-flower in a crystal vase. Cooke insists that he has nothing to do with the prices and is cheerily open about their level: he claims there is nobody else in the world who produces work like his, and, as the gallery-owner told him, "Well, you're going to stop one day and everybody will want your pieces because there won't be any more. " "I do wish, though," says Cooke, "that I'd taken this up a lot earlier, because then I would have been able to produce really wonderful things—at least the potential would have been there. Although the ideas are still there and I'm doing the best I can now, I'm more limited physically than I was when I started. " Still, the work that he has managed to produce is a long way from the common shell constructions that can be found in seaside shops. "I have a miniature mind," he says, and this has resulted in boxes covered in thousands of tiny shells, little shaded pictures made from shells and baskets of astonishingly realistic flowers.

单选题 Which is safer--staying at home, traveling to work on public transport, or working in the office? Surprisingly, each of these carries the same risk, which is very low: However, what about flying compared to working in the chemical industry? Unfortunately, the former is 65 times riskier than the latter! In fact, the accident rate of workers in the chemical industry is less than that of almost any of human activity, and almost as safe as staying at home. The trouble with the chemical industry is that when things go wrong they often cause death to those living nearby. It is this which makes chemical accidents so newsworthy. Fortunately, they are extremely rare. The most famous ones happened at Texas City (1947), Flixborough (1974), Seveso (1976), Pemex (1984) and Bhopal (1984). Some of these are always in the minds of the people even though the loss of life was small. No one died at Seveso, and only 28 workers at Flixborough. The worst accident of all was Bhopal, where up to 3,000 were killed. The Texas City explosion of fertilizer killed 552. The Pemex fire at a storage plant for natural gas in the suburbs of Mexico City took 542 lives, just a month before the unfortunate event at Bhopal. Some experts have discussed these accidents and used each accident to illustrate a particular danger. Thus the Texas City explosion was caused by tons of ammonium nitrate, which is safe unless stored in great quantity. The Flixborough fireball was the fault of management, which took risks to keep production going during essential repairs. The Seveso accident shows what happens if the local authorities lack knowledge of the danger on their doorstep. When the poisonous gas drifted over the town, local leaders were incapable of taking effective action. The Pemex fire was made worse by an overloaded site in an overcrowded suburb. The fire set off a chain reaction of exploding storage tanks. Yet, by a miracle, the two largest tanks did not explode. Had these caught fire, then 3,000 strong rescue team and fire fighters would all have died.

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

单选题