单选题Why does the author mention that Japan "ranks only 30th in the world as a tourist destination— about the same as Tunisia and Croatia" in Paragraph 8?

单选题 {{B}}Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.{{/B}}

单选题 It is Monday morning, and you are having trouble waking your teenagers. You are not alone. Indeed, each morning, few of the country's 17 million high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts before 8 am. Sure, many of them stayed up too late the night before, but not because they wanted to. Research shows that teenagers' body clocks are set to as schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 pm, when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 am when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep; according to a National Sleep foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they do not even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates. Here is an idea: stop focusing on testing and instead support changing the hours of the school day, starting it later for teenagers and ending it later for all children. Indeed, no one does well when they are sleep-deprived, but insufficient sleep among children has been linked to obesity and to learning issues like attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. You would think this would spur educators to take action, and a few have. In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 am, from 7:30 am. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minnesota, which instituted high school start times of 8:40 am and 8:30 am respectively in 1997, students' grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreases. Later is also safer. When high schools in Fayette County in Kentucky delayed their start times to 8:30 am, the number of teenagers involved in car crashes dropped, even as they rose in the state. So why has not every school board moved back that first bell? Well, it seems that improving teenagers' performance takes a back seat to more pressing concerns: the cost of additional bus service, the difficulty of adjusting after school activity schedules and the inconvenience to teachers and parents. But few of these problems actually come to pass, according to the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota. In Kentucky and Minnesota, simply flipping the starting times for the elementary and high schools meant no extra cost for buses. There are other reasons to start and end school at a later time. According to Paul Reville, a professor of education policy at Harvard and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, "trying to cram everything out 21th-century students need into a 19th-century six-and-a-half-hour day just isn't working". He said that children learn more at a less frantic pace, and that lengthening the school day would help "close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers".

单选题 An industrial society, especially one as centralized and concentrated as that of Britain, is heavily dependent on certain essential services: for instance, electricity supply, water, rail and road transport, the harbours. The area of dependency has widened to include removing rubbish, hospital and ambulance services, and, as the economy develops, central computer and information services as well. If any of these services ceases to operate, the whole economic system is in danger. It is this interdependency of the economic system which makes the power of trade unions such an important issue. Single trade unions have the ability to cut off many countries' economic blood supply. This can happen more easily in Britain than in some other countries, in part because the labour force is highly organized. About 55 per cent of British workers belong to unions, compared to under a quarter in the United States. For historical reasons, Britain's unions have tended to develop along trade and occupational lines, rather than on an industry-by-industry basis, which makes a wages policy, democracy in industry and the improvement of procedures for fixing wage levels difficult to achieve. There are considerable strains and tensions in the trade union movement, some of them arising from their outdated and inefficient structure. Some unions have lost many members because of industrial changes. Others are involved in arguments about who should represent workers in new trades. Unions for skilled trades are separate from general unions, which means that different levels of wages for certain jobs are often a source of bad feeling between unions. In traditional trades which are being pushed out of existence by advancing technologies, unions can fight for their members' disappearing jobs to the point where the jobs of other unions' members are threatened or destroyed. The printing of newspapers both in the United States and in Britain has Frequently been halted by the efforts of printers to hold onto their traditional highly-paid jobs. Trade unions have problems of internal communication just as managers in companies do, problems which multiply in very large unions or in those which bring workers in very different industries together into a single general union. Some trade union officials have to be re-elected regularly; others are elected, or even appointed, for life. Trade union officials have to work with a system of "shop stewards" in many unions, "shop stewards" being workers elected by other workers as their representatives at factory or works level.

单选题Military victories, trade, missionary zeal, racial arrogance and a genius for bureaucracy all played well-documented roles in making the British Empire the largest the world has known. Rather less well understood was the importance of the moustache. A monumental new history, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire by Piers Brendon, promises to restore this neglected narrative to its rightful place in the national story. Dr. Brendon, a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, argues that colonial moustaches had a clear practical purpose: to demonstrate virility and intimidate the Empire's subject peoples. The waxing and waning of the British moustache precisely mirrored the fortunes of the Empire-blooming beneath the noses of the East India Company's officers, finding full expression in Lord Kitchener's bushy appendage and fading out with the Suez crisis in Anthony Eden's apologetic wisps. This analysis of the growth of the stiff upper lip is an essential strand of Dr. Brendon's epic 650-page political, cultural, economic and social history of the Empire, which is published on October 18. "It is a running gag in a serious book, but it does give one a point of reference," he said yesterday. In the 18th and early 19th century, sophisticated Britons wore wigs but spurned facial hair. The exception was the King, George III, whose unshaven appearance was mocked as a sign of his madness. However, by the 1830s the "moustache movement" was in the ascendancy. British officers, copying the impressive moustaches that they encountered on French and Spanish soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars, started the craze, but the real impetus came form India. Just as British troops in Afghanistan today are encouraged to grow beards to ease their dealings with local tribesmen, so the attitudes of Indian troops under the command of East India Company officers in the first half of the 19th century altered the appearance of the British soldier. "For the Indian sepoy the moustache was a symbol of virility. They laughed at the unshaven British officers," Dr. Brendon said. In 1854 moustaches were made compulsory for the company's Bombay regiment. The fashion took Britain by storm as civilians imitated their heroes. Dr. Brendon writes. "During and after the Crimean War, barbers advertised different patterns in their windows such as the 'Raglan' and the Cardigan'." Moustaches were clipped, trimmed and waxed "until they curved like sabres and bristled like bayonets". After 1918 moustaches became thinner and humbler as the Empire began to gasp for breath, even as it continued to expand territorially. It had been fatally wounded, Dr. Brendon suggests, by the very belief in the freedom that it had preached. After the victory over Germany and Japan in 1945, independence movements across the red-painted sections of the world map, and Britain's own urgent domestic priorities, meant that the Empire was doomed. The moustache too was in terminal decline. "It had become a joke thanks to Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx. It had become an international symbol of 'villainy' thanks to Hitler's toothbrush," writes Dr. Brendon. In Britain it was also synonymous with the "Colonel Blimps"o clinging to an outmoded idea of colonial greatness. In Eden's faint moustache Britain's diminished international status found a fitting symbol. It all but disappeared on TV and, moments before his broadcast on the eve of the fateful occupation of the Suez Canal in 1956, his wife had to blacken the bristles with mascara. His successor, Harold Macmillan, was the last British Prime Minister to furnish his upper lip. Harold Wilson, the self-styled man of the people, had been clean shaven since the 1940s, Dr. Brendon notes. "He obviously believed that the white hot technological revolution was not to be operated with a moustache./

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

单选题We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person"s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person"s true ability and aptitude. As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn"t matter that you weren"t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don"t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students? A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress. The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge"s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner"s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person"s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."

单选题 The United States has moved beyond the industrial economy stage to the point where it has become the world's first service economy. Almost three-fourths of the nonfarm labor force is employed in service industries, and over two-thirds of the nation's gross national product is accounted for by services. Also, service jobs typically hold up better during a recession than do jobs in industries producing tangible goods. During the 20-year period of 1966 to 1986, about 36 million new jobs were created in the United States—far more than in Japan and Western Europe combined. About 90 percent of these jobs were in service industries. During this same time span, some 22 million women joined the labor force—and 97 percent of these women went to work in the service sector. These employment trends are expected to continue at least until the year 2010. For the period 1986—2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that over 21 million new jobs were created and 93 percent of them were in service industries. Moreover, most of this explosive growth in services employment is not in low-paying jobs, contrary to the beliefs of many economists, business and labor leaders, and politicians. These people argue that manufacturing jobs, which have been the economic foundation of America's middle class, are vanishing. They claim that factory workers are being replaced with a host of low-wage earners. It is true that manufacturing jobs have declined, with many of them going to foreign countries. It is also true that there has been growth in some low- paying service jobs. Yet cooks and counter people still represent only 1 percent of the U.S. labor force today. Furthermore, for many years the fastest-growing occupational category has been "professional, technical, and related work." These jobs pay well above the average, and most are in service industries. About one-half of consumer expenditures are for the purchase of services. Projections to the year 2010 indicate that services will attract an even larger share of consumer spending. A drawback of the service economy boom is that the prices of most services have been going up at a considerably faster rate than the prices of most tangible products. You are undoubtedly aware of this if you have had your car or TV set repaired, had your shoes half-soled, or paid a medical bill in recent years. When we say that services account for close to one-half of consumer expenditures, we still grossly understate the economic importance of services. These figures do not include the vast amounts spent for business services. By all indications, spending for business services has increased even more rapidly than spending for consumer services.

单选题 Questions 15-18

单选题Questions 11-14

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单选题 In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences, that it is not even questioned. There are countries where the white man imposes his rule by brute force; there are countries where the black man protests by setting fire to cities and by looting and pillaging. Important people on both sides, who would in other respects appear to be reasonable men, get up and calmly argue in favor of violence-as if it were a legitimate solution, like any other. What is really frightening, what really fills you with despair, is the realization that when it comes to the crunch, we have made no actual progress at all. We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged. The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed, the suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us. The truly reasonable men who know where the solutions lie are finding it harder and harder to get a hearing. They are despised, mistrusted and even persecuted by their own kind because they advocate such apparently outrageous things as law enforcement. If half the energy that goes into violent acts were put to good use, if our efforts were directed at cleaning up the slums and ghettos, at improving living-standards and providing education and employment for all, we would have gone a long way to arriving at a solution. Our strength is sapped by having to mop up the mess that violence leaves in its wake. In a well-directed effort, it would not be impossible to fulfill the ideals of a stable social program. The benefits that can be derived from constructive solutions are everywhere apparent in the world around us. Genuine and lasting solutions are always possible, providing we work within the framework of the law. Before we can even begin to contemplate peaceful co-existence between the races, we must appreciate each other's problems. And to do this, we must learn about them., it is a simple exercise in communication, in exchanging information. "Talk, talk, talk," the advocates of violence say, "all you ever do is talk, and we are none the wiser. " It's rather like the story of the famous barrister who painstakingly explained his case to the judge. After listening to a lengthy argument the judge complained that after all this talk, he was none the wiser. "Possible, my lord," the barrister replied, "none the wiser, but surely far better informed. " Knowledge is the necessary prerequisite to wisdom, the knowledge that violence creates the evils it pretends to solve.

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

单选题BRITAIN locks up more of its people than any other country in western Europe: 145 out of every 100,000 compared with France"s 88 (though a fraction of America"s 738). Sentences have got tougher, with longer stints in prison for pettier offences. Crime is, broadly, falling. Yet the British have less confidence in their government"s ability to crack down on violence and crime than the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish or Americans, an Ipsos-MORl poll revealed last week. For that, thank a run of bad news which has Britons reeling from headline to headline. If one were to believe the tabloids, pedophiles are rampaging through the schools and unreported foreign felons through the countryside. A string of crimes by convicts on early release culminated in a particularly sad and nasty sexual assault on a three-year-old girl, which came before the courts this month. Carefully stoked by the press, popular passions are running high against everyone involved with the administration of justice. One home secretary (the minister in charge of prisons, the police and immigration) got the boot in May. His successor, John Reid, is busily putting the boot into everyone else, lambasting judges for being soft on crime and scaring the daylights out of his department. The Tories are demanding more prisons. Meanwhile, Tony Blair was due on June 23rd to urge a new balance between the rights of offenders and those of victims in favour of the latter. Mr. Blair is right to ask whether society"s interests are best served by the status quo. The criminal justice system requires a degree of public trust that at the moment is lacking. This is a chance not for lock-"emup posturing, but for a dispassionate look at how to make the administration of justice more effective. Start with one simple fact behind most of the headlines: Britain"s prisons are bursting at the seams. At current rates of sentencing, the inspector of prisons warns, jails will be full by September. This matters: the shunting of prisoners from pillar to post by harried staff is undermining efforts to return offenders to society in a state fit to stay there. They lose touch with their families; they leave courses and drug-detox programmes; wardens they knew lose track of them. Two out of three re offend within two years of release. If politicians and judges, egged on by the press, insist on locking people up for longer, it will get worse. How to fix things? Building more prisons is the obvious answer. Labour has already added thousands of new places, and both main parties talk of adding more. But Britain"s jails always fill up, no matter how many there are. And new cells cost about ￡100,000 ($184,000) apiece. A better answer than banging more people up inside is to strengthen facilities to deal with them outside. Society is protected in the short run when offenders are locked up, and in the long run when they are reformed. Violent and dangerous criminals belong behind bars. But many others end up in prison for want of anywhere else to go. What about them? Many mentally ill criminals would be more easily reclaimed in facilities other than catch-all prisons, though prison drug programmes are in fact quite successful. So would many women prisoners, who tend to show violence only to themselves and elsewhere thrive in smaller detention centres close to home. Halfway houses are a plausible place for non-violent offenders of both sexes on short sentences or nearing the end of their time. Those in touch with their families are less likely to re-offend, and so are those who have jobs to go to when they leave. Non-custodial community sentences have yet to prove their worth; the rate of recidivism seems disappointingly close to that of people who serve prison terms. But those figures may change as the approach becomes more common and new cohorts of offenders affect the statistics. These suggestions are not new. The Home Office itself has espoused many of them, only to drag feet in their implementation or be swamped by sheer numbers. Of course there are risks in diverting offenders to less secure facilities; some will run off and make headlines. But the risk of keeping increasing numbers under lock and key, to emerge later skilled only in tougher sorts of crime, is greater. It was a Tory home secretary who said, a decade and a half ago, that "prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse". Not much has changed.

单选题Ads are everywhere. They are on our trains, they are on our planes, they are wrapped around our automobiles. They are even on the homeless. Yes, really; homeless people have been used as media space by marketers thinking outside the box; charmingly, it"s called "bumvertising". Still, despite the constant creep of commercialism there is one final frontier that has, as yet, remained blissfully ad-free: the graveyard. This isn"t to say that death doesn"t sell. On the contrary, posthumous fame is often the most lucrative. In Mark Twain"s play Is He Dead?, an artist fakes his death to increase the value of his work. As one of the characters explains: "A painter has so much more talent when he"s dead. Indeed, the deader he is, the better he is." However, death normally doesn"t sell consumer brands. Nobody wants to see ads for burgers at a crematorium. Or be reminded that the unstoppable march of time means we are all going to die. Death is not aspirational and exploiting loss for money is inappropriate. Well, perhaps it"s not quite clear to everyone that it is. Last week, McDonald"s got a lot of grief for a TV advert that seemingly exploited bereaved children to flog fish sandwiches. More than 150 people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the dead dad ad and it has now been pulled with the usual PR fauxpology. "We respect our customers and their money very much and regret implying that a fried fish fillet could replace a father"s love etc etc." McDonald"s execs can take some solace in the fact that they aren"t the only marketing minds to have inexplicably decided that invoking family tragedy would be a winning strategy. In 2015 Nationwide aired an ad featuring a drowned child during the Super Bowl. The camera cuts abruptly away to an ominously overflowing bath before reminding you that Nationwide can "make safe happen". And, hey, if safe doesn"t happen then at least you"ll get some life insurance money. Now, to be clear, I don"t think that the McDonald"s or Nationwide ads were made by Machiavellian monsters, cynically mining pain for profit. They were just bad ads created by an industry so high on its own puffery that it truly believes fast food brands have important things to say about bereavement. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a growing trend of brands engaging in griefsploitation. For instance, every time a celebrity dies, there follows a flurry of very bad tweets by companies trying to muscle their brand into the conversation. When Prince died last year, for example, Cheerios tweeted "Rest in peace" on a purple background—with a cheerio replacing the dot above the i. Fans were not impressed and Cheerios quickly deleted the tweet. But Homebase didn"t even bother making it look as if they cared about anything other than promoting themselves. Brands aren"t just leveraging celebrity deaths for product placement; national tragedies also make great content opportunities. Who could forget AT&T"s twin towers tweets? In 2013, the telecommunications company posted a tweet on 11 September that showed someone holding a phone up over the Tribute in Light memorial in New York City with the caption "Never Forget". And, after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, the food website Epicurious tweeted: "In honor of Boston......may we suggest: wholegrain cranberry scones!" Shoehorning your brand into a social media conversation about a tragedy may be tasteless but it is a fairly rudimentary form of griefsploitation. Far more insidious is the way in which brands are now using our personal data to target us at the moments when we"re feeling most vulnerable. Facebook has told advertisers it can identify when teenagers are feeling "stressed", "defeated", "overwhelmed", "anxious" and "useless", for example. It has also explicitly furnished advertisers with advice on how best to exploit—sorry, I mean "help"—people dealing with the grief of a breakup. Facebook"s research explains that heartbreak is the ideal marketing opportunity for those in the travel business: in the month after a newly single Facebook user has announced their breakup, there is an "increase of 25% more travel-related purchases". Apparently "travel therapy has replaced retail therapy": 55% of people surveyed by Facebook said that travelling after their breakup helped them move on, while only 8% of people said that shoes helped them move on. To be honest, some of these people probably just aren"t buying the right shoes. I mean, if you get boots that are made for walking, then that"s just what they"ll do. Anyway, if you break up with someone and find yourself suddenly bombarded with online ads for Virgin Holidays, this is probably why. Facebook is trying to help you heal. They care. They don"t want grief to consume you, they want you to consume your way out of grief. It"s really very sweet of them. At the very least, it"s better than a slap in the face with a wet filet of fish.

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

单选题 The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx once widely spoken on the isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning, however, has helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe's regional languages, spoken by more than a half million of the country's three million people. The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster, implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the club-Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union. The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western Europe-only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living. Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue. And Wales now boasts a national airline. Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means "land of compatriots", is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation's symbol since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere-on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell phone covers. "Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-class citizens," said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod, Wales's annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the sounds of new Welsh bands. "There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence", Dyfan continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago. "We used to think. We can't do anything, we're only Welsh. Now I think that's changing."

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单选题 {{B}}Questions 15-18{{/B}}