单选题 As Philadelphia grew from a small town into a city in the first half of the eighteenth century, it became an increasingly important marketing center for a vast and growing agricultural hinterland. Market days saw the crowded city even more crowded, as farmers from within a radius of 24 or more kilometers brought their sheep, cows, pigs, vegetables, cider, and other products for direct sale to the townspeople. The High Street Market was continuously enlarged throughout the period until 1736, when it reached from Front Street to Third. By 1745 New Market was opened on Second Street between Pine and Cedar. The next year the Callowhill Market began operation. Along with market days, the institution of twice-yearly fairs persisted in Philadelphia even after similar trading days had been discontinued in other colonial cities. The fairs provided a means of bringing handmade goods from outlying places to would-be buyers in the city. Linens and stockings from Germantown, for example, were popular items. Auctions were another popular form of occasional trade. Because of the competition, retail merchants opposed these as well as the fairs. Although governmental attempts to eradicate fairs and auctions were less than successful, the ordinary course of economic development was on the merchants' side, as increasing business specialization became the order of the day. Export merchants became differentiated from their importing counterparts, and specialty shops began to appear in addition to general stores selling a variety of goods. One of the reasons Philadelphia's merchants generally prospered was because the surrounding area was undergoing tremendous economic and demographic growth. They did their business, after all, in the capital city of the province. Not only did they cater to the governor and his circle, but citizens from all over the colony came to the capital for legislative sessions of the assembly and council and the meetings of the courts of justice.

单选题Which of the following is implied in the sentence "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." in paragraph 3?

单选题There can be no doubt that the emergence of the Negro writer in the post-war period stemmed, in part, from the fact that he was inclined to exploit the opportunity to write about himself. It was more than that, however. The movement that has variously been called the "Harlem Renaissance," the "Black Renaissance," and the "New Negro Movement" was essentially a part of the growing interest of American literary circles in the immediate and pressing social and economic problems. This growing interest coincided with two developments in Negro life that fostered the growth of the New Negro Movement. These two factors, the keener realization of injustice and the improvement of the capacity for expression, produced a crop of Negro writers who constituted the "Harlem Renaissance." The literature of the Harlem Renaissance was, for the most part, the work of a race-conscious group. Through poetry, prose, and song, the writers cried out against social and economic wrongs. They protested against segregation and lynching. They demanded higher wages, shorter hours, and better conditions of work. They stood for full social equality and first-class citizenship. The new vision of social and economic freedom which they had did not force them to embrace the several foreign ideologies that sought to sink their roots in some American groups during the period. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance, bitter and cynical as some of them were, gave little attention to the propaganda of the socialists and communists. The editor of the Messenger ventured the opinion that the New Negro was the "product of the same world-wide forces that have brought into being the great liberal and radical movements that are now seizing the reins of power in all the civilized countries of the world." Such forces may have produced the New Negro, but the more articulate of the group did not resort to advocating the type of political action that would have subverted American constitutional government. Indeed, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance were protesting its inefficient operation. In this approach they proved as characteristically American as any writers of the period. Like his contemporaries, the Negro writer was merely becoming more aware of America"s pressing problems; and like the others, he was willing to use his art, not only to contribute to the great body of American culture but to improve the culture of which he was a part. It seems possible, moreover, for the historian to assign to the Negro writer a role that he did not assume. There were doubtless many who were not immediately concerned with the injustices heaped on the Negro. Some contrived their poems, novels, and songs merely for the sake of art, while others took up their pens to escape the sordid aspects of their writings, it is because the writings flow out of their individual and group experiences. This is not to say that such writings were not effective as protest literature, but rather that not all the authors were conscious crusaders for a better world. As a matter of fact, it was this detachment, this objectivity, that made it possible for many of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance to achieve a mobility of expression and a poignancy of feeling in their writings that placed them among the masters of recent American literature.

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

单选题More than 6000 children were expelled (开除) from US schools last year for bringing guns and bombs to school, the US Department of Education said on May 8. The department gave a report to the expulsions (开除) as saying handguns accounted for 58 percent of the 6093 expulsions in 1996—1997, against 7 percent for rifles (步枪) or shotguns and 35 percent for other types of firearms. "The report is a clear sign that our nation's public schools are cracking down (严惩) on students who bring guns to school," Education Secretary Richard Riley said in a statement. "We need to be tough-minded about keeping guns out of our schools and do everything to keep our children safe." In March 1997, an 11 years old boy and 13 years old boy using handguns and rifles shot dead four children and a teacher at a school in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In October, two were killed and seven wounded in a shooting at a Mississippi school. Two months later, a 14 years old boy killed three high school students and wounded five in Dasucah, Kentucky. Most of the expulsions, 56 percent, were from high school, which have students from about age 13. Thirty-four percent were from junior high school and 9 percent were from elementary schools, the report said.

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 censorship battle between protecting freedom of speech and protecting children from harmful Internet material is being fought on a rather unlikely field—the public library. In almost every city, town and village in the United States there is a public library, and every one of them now has computer terminals for public use. On one side of the battle, the American Library Association (ALA) is opposed to content filters on library computers with Internet access. On the opposing side, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that libraries must install filters to block indecent websites from library patrons under the age of eighteen. For the time being, the battle scene has stilled, but the ultimate winners in the all-out war for access versus control of the Web in public libraries have yet to be declared. The debate first raged in the U. S. due to the enactment of the federal Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) in 1999. Public libraries, including school libraries, were forced to install content filters on Internet access terminals or lose certain federal funding. In response, the ALA started a legal battle to have the requirement reversed. In its 1943 Bill of Rights, the ALA said that libraries should present materials that represent many points of view on current and historical issues and not remove materials with unpopular viewpoints. At the same time, it is the responsibility of libraries to challenge censorship if they suspect it. However, in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the filtering was constitutional, and the law should stand. In its decision, the Supreme Court found that filters are "at least as effective" as government regulation of website operators. Earlier laws imposed criminal punishments on website operators for publishing harmful material. In contrast, CIPA places the burden on those who receive federal funds—public libraries and school districts—to ensure that children do not have access to obscene, pornographic, or other harmful images and text. According to supporters of the law, filters effectively keep out harmful Web content and do not have a negative impact on users. Whereas some libraries such as the San Francisco library system oppose the law and have stated they will not abide by it. Other libraries favor the filters and had even used blocking software on their computers before the law required it. In 1998, 15 percent of U. S. libraries used Internet filters, according to one survey. In the middle are libraries that have compromised by installing filters only on library terminals reserved for children. Opponents rightly argue that legitimate research sites are being blocked by excessive and harmful filters. They point to numerous examples of harmless websites—such as home pages of religious and academic institutions- that are blocked by the filter software. Anti-filter groups also charge that the devices do not filter out a substantial portion of inappropriate Internet material. A recent study found that the filters failed to block the transmission of pornography, violence, and hate speech 25 percent of the time. Dr. Martha McCarthy, an education professor at Indiana University, expects the Web war between law-makers and librarians to continue to produce court battles. "Despite the Supreme Court decision, there may be challenges to the application of CIPA in some public libraries," said McCarthy. For instance, she said that adults may allege that it is too complicated to turn off the filters when they want to use the computers. She went on to say that the battle between freedom of speech and protection of children is likely to continue with regard to content on the Internet. Clearly, the government needs to find a more viable solution, or the free expression war will continue to rage.

单选题

单选题

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

单选题The ad for mineral water is cited as an example of the way popular culture ______.

单选题

单选题 Questions 16-20 If the old maxim that the customer is always right still has meaning, then the airlines that ply the world's busiest air route between London and Paris have a fight on their hands. The Eurostar train service linking the UK and French capitals via the Channel Tunnel is winning customers in increasing numbers. In late May, it carried its one millionth passengers, having run only a limited service between London, Paris and Brussels since November 1994, starting with two trains a day in each direction to Paris and Brussels. By 1997, the company believes that it will be carrying ten million passengers a year, and continue to grow from there. From July, Eurostar steps its service to nine trains each way between London and Paris, and five between London and Brussels. Each train carries almost 800 passengers, 210 of them in first class. The airlines estimate that they will initially lose around 15%- 20% of their London-Paris traffic to the railways once Eurostar starts a full service later this year (1995), with 15 trains a day each way. A similar service will start to Brussels. The damage will be limited, however, the airlines believe, with passenger numbers returning to previous levels within two to three years. In the short term, the damage caused by the 1 million people-levels traveling between London and Paris and Brussels on Eurostar trains means that some air services are already suffering. Some of the major carriers say that their passenger numbers are down by less than 5% and point to their rivals--Particularly Air France--as having suffered the problems. On the Brussels route, the railway company had less success, and the airlines report anything from around a 5% drop to no visible decline in traffic. The airlines' optimism on returning traffic levels is based on historical precedent. British Midland, for example, points to its experience on Heathrow Leeds Bradford service which saw passenger numbers decrease by 15% when British Rail electrified and modernized the railway line between London and Yorkshire. Two years later, travel had risen between the two destinations to the point where the airline was carrying record numbers of passengers.

单选题

单选题Which of the following is NOT true about inflation?

单选题Every summer, the peacocks that roam free within Whipsnade Wild Animal Park in Bedfordshire expose their magnificent trains to the critical and often disdainful gaze of the hens. They re-enact the mystery that tormented Charles Darwin to his dying day. how in this competitive world, where nature—as Tennyson said—is red in tooth and claw, could birds have evolved such an obvious extravagance? How do they get away with it? The zoologist Marion Petrie and her colleagues of the Open University are now exploiting the quasi-wild conditions of Whipsnade to try, a century after Darwin"s death, to settle the matter. Darwin argued that living creatures came to be the way they are by evolution, rather than by special creation; and that the principal mechanism of evolution was natural selection. That is, in a crowded and hence competitive world, the individuals best suited to the circumstances—the "fittest"—are the most likely to survive and have offspring. But the implication is that fittest would generally mean toughest, swiftest, cleverest, most alert. The peacock"s tail, by contrast, was at best a waste of space and in practice a severe encumbrance; and Darwin felt obliged to invoke what he felt was a separate mechanism of evolution, which he called "sexual selection". The driving mechanism was simply that females liked in his words—"beauty for beauty"s sake". But Darwin"s friend and collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace, though in many ways more "romantic" than Darwin, was in others even more Darwinian. "Beauty for beauty"s sake" he wanted nothing of. If peahens chose cocks with the showiest trains, he felt, then it must be that they knew what they were about. The cocks must have some other quality, which was not necessarily obvious to the human observer, but which the hens themselves could appreciate. According to Wallace, then, the train was not an end in itself, but an advertisement for some genuine contribution to survival. Now, 100 years later, the wrangle is still unresolved, for the natural behavior of peafowl is much harder to study than might be imagined. But 200 birds at Whipsnade, which live like wild birds yet are used to human beings, offer unique opportunities for study. Marion Petrie and her colleagues at Whipsnade have identified two main questions. First, is the premise correct—do peahens really choose the males with the showiest trains? And, secondly, do the peacocks with the showiest trains have some extra, genuinely advantageous quality, as Wallace supposed, or is it really all show, as Darwin felt? In practice, the mature cocks display in groups at a number of sites around Whipsnade, and the hens judge one against the other. Long observation from hides, backed up by photographs, suggests that the hens really do like the showiest males. What seems to count is the number of eye, spots on the train, which is related to its length; the cocks with the most eye-spots do indeed attract the most mates. But whether the males with the best trains are also "better" in other ways remains to be pinned down. William Hamilton of Oxford University has put forward the hypothesis that showy male birds in general, of whatever species, are the most parasite free, and that their plumage advertises their disease-free state. There is evidence that this is so in other birds. But Dr. Petrie and her colleagues have not been able to assess the internal parasites in the Whipsnade peacocks to test this hypothesis. This year, however, she is comparing the offspring of cocks that have in the past proved attractive to hens with the offspring of cocks that hens find unattractive. Do the children of the attractive cocks grow faster? Are they more healthy? If so, then the females" choice will be seen to be utilitarian after all, just as Wallace predicted. There is a final twist to this continuing story. The great mathematician and biologist R.A. Fisher in the thirties proposed what has become known as "Fisher"s Runaway". Just suppose, for example, that for whatever reason—perhaps for a sound "Wallacian" reason—a female first picks a male with a slightly better tail than the rest. The sons of that mating will inherit their father"s tail, and the daughters will inherit their mother"s predilection for long tails. This is how the runaway begins. Within each generation, the males with the longest tails will get most mates and leave most offspring; and the females" predilection for long tails will increase commensurately. Modern computer models show that such a feedback mechanism would alone be enough to produce a peacock"s tail. Oddly, too, this would vindicate Darwin"s apparently fanciful notion—once the process gets going, the females would indeed be selecting "beauty for beauty"s sake".

单选题

单选题On a hot Friday afternoon in the last week of August, cars, pickup trucks, campers, and school buses slowly pull into a park on the edge of Fargo, North Dakota. Families carve out small pieces of territory around their vehicles, making the park into a series of encampments. As they have done for generations, American Indians of the Great Plains gather once again for an annual powwow. Donning their traditional clothing, Ojibwa, Lakota, and Dakota people assemble for several days of celebration and ceremony. To an outside observer attending for the first time, this year"s powwow may appear chaotic. Even though posted signs promise that dances will begin at four o"clock, there is still no dancing at five-thirty, and the scheduled drummers never arrive. No one is in charge; the announcer acts as a facilitator of ceremonies, but no chief rises to demand anything of anyone. Everyone shows great respect for the elders and for the dancers, who are repeatedly singled out for recognition, but at the same time children receive attention for dancing, as does the audience for watching. Eventually the program grows in an organic fashion as dancers slowly become activated by drums and singing. Each participant responds to the mood of the whole group but not to a single, directing voice, and the event flows in an orderly fashion like hundreds of powwows before it. This apparent penchant for respectful individualism and equality within an American Indian group seems as strong today to a non-Indian observer in Fargo as it did five centuries ago to early European explorers. Much to the shock of the first European observers and to the dismay of bureaucratic individuals, American Indian societies have traditionally operated without strong positions of leadership or coercive political institutions. Adventure novels and Hollywood films set in the past often portray strong chiefs commanding their tribes. More often, however, as in the case of the Iroquois people, a council of sachems, or legislators, ruled, and any person called the "head" of file tribe usually occupied a largely honorary position of respect rather than power. Chiefs mostly played ceremonial and religious roles rather than political or economic ones. Unlike the familiar words "caucus" and "powwow," which are Indian-derived and indicative of American Indian political traditions, the word "chief" is an English word of French origin that British officials tried to force onto American Indian tribes in order that they might have someone with whom to trade and sign treaties. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts the British tried to make one leader, Metacom of the Wampanoag people, into King Philip, thereby, imputing monarchy to the American Indian system when no such institution existed. Thus while certain English settlers learned from groups like the Iroquois people how to speak and act in group councils, others simultaneously tried to push American Indians toward a monarchical and therefore less democratic system. By the late 1600"s the Huron people of Canada had already interacted for decades with European explorers and traders and were thus able to compare their own way of life with that of the Europeans. The Hurons particularly decried the European obsession with money. By contrast, the Hurons lived a life of liberty and equality and believed that the Europeans lost their freedom in their incessant use of "thine" and "mine." One Huron explained to the French adventurer and writer Baron de La Hontan, who lived among the Hurons for eleven years, that his people were born free and united, each as great as the other, while Europeans were all the slaves of one sole person. "I am the master of my body," he said, "... I am the first and the last of my nation... subject only to the great Spirit." These words recorded by La Hontan may have reflected the Frenchman"s own philosophical bias, but his book rested on a solid factual base: the Huron people lived without social classes, without a government separate from their kinship system, and without private property. To describe this situation, La Hontan revived the Greek-derived word "anarchy," using it in the literal sense to mean "no ruler." La Hontan found an orderly society, but one lacking a formal government that compelled such order. The descriptions by La Hontan and other European travelers of the so-called anarchy among the American Indians contributed to several different brands of anarchistic theory in the nineteenth century. Today, anarchism is often equated with terrorism and nihilism (denial of values), but early anarchism lacked those characteristics. Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), the author of modern anarchistic theory stressed the notion of "mutualism" in a society based on cooperation without the use of coercion from any quarter. Like certain American plants that were introduced throughout the world and that found new surroundings in which to flourish, the examples of liberty and individuality in American Indian societies spread and survived in other surroundings. Today, in the ordered anarchy of a powwow in North Dakota, these same values are articulated more eloquently than in the writings of most political theorists.

单选题

单选题Questions 15—18