单选题Conflict between the president and the press indicates that ______.

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单选题Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.

单选题Why did the author mention Senator John McCain and Ted Kennedy in Paragraph 6?

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单选题 Questions 26-30 Cryptic coloring is by far the commonest use of color in the struggle for existence. It is employed for the purpose of attack (aggressive resemblance or anticryptic coloring) as well as of defense (protective resemblance or procryptic coloring). The fact that the same method, concealment, may be used both for attack and defense has been well explained by T. Belt who suggests as an illustration the rapidity of movement which is also made use of by both pursuer and pursued, which is similarly raised to a maximum in both by the gradual dying out of the slowest through a series of generations. Cryptic coloring is commonly associated with other aids in the struggle for life. Thus well-concealed mammals and birds, when discovered, will generally endeavor to escape by speed and will often attempt to defend themselves actively. On the other hand, small animals which have no means of active defense, such as large numbers of insects, frequently depend upon concealment alone. Protective resemblance is far commoner among animals than aggressive resemblance, in correspondence with the fact that predaceous forms are as a rule much larger and much less numerous than their prey. In the case of insectivorous Vertebrata and their prey such differences exist in an exaggerated form. Cryptic coloring, whether used for defense of attack, may be either general or special. In general resemblance the animal, in consequence of its coloring, produces the same effect as its environment, but the conditions do not require any special adaptation of shape and outline. General resemblance is especially common among the animal inhabiting some uniformly colored expanse of the earth's surface, such as an ocean or a desert. In the former, animals of all shapes are frequently protected by their transparent blue color, on the latter, equally diverse forms are defended by their sandy appearance. The effect of a uniform appearance may be produced by a combination of tints in startling contrast. Thus the black and white stripes of the zebra blend together at a little distance, and ';their proportion is such as exactly to match the, pale tint which arid ground possesses when seen by moonlight. " Special resemblance is far commoner than general and is the form which is usually met with on the diversified surface of the earth, on the shores, and in shallow water, as well as on the floating masses of algae on the surface of the ocean, such as the Sargasso Sea. In these environments the cryptic coloring of animals is usually aided by special modifications of shape, and by the instinct which leads them to assume particular attitudes. Complete stillness and the assumption of a certain attitude play an essential part in general resemblance on land; but in special resemblance the attitude is often highly specialized, and perhaps more important than any other element in the complex method by which concealment is effected. In special resemblance the combination of coloring, shape, and attitude is such as to produce a more or less exact resemblance to some one of the objects in the environment, such as a leaf or twig, a patch of lichen, or a flake of bark. In all cases the resemblance is to some object which is of no interest to the enemy or prey respectively. The animal is not hidden from view by becoming indistinguishable from its background as in the case of general resemblance, but it is mistaken for some well-known object. In seeking the interpretation of these most interesting and elaborate adaptations, attempts have been made along two lines. The first seeks to explain the effect as a result of the direct influence of the environment upon the individual (G. L. L. Buffon), or by the inherited effects of efforts and the use and disuse of parts (J. B. P. Lamarck). The second believes that natural selection produced the result and afterwards maintained it by the survival of the best concealed in each generation. The former suggestion breaks down when the complex nature of numerous special resemblances is appreciated. Thus the arrangement of colors of many kinds into an appropriate pattern requires the cooperation of a suitable shape and the rigidly exact adoption of a certain elaborate attitude. The latter is instinctive and thus depends on the central nervous system. The cryptic effect is due to the exact cooperation of all these factors; and in the present state of science, the only possible hope of an interpretation lies in the theory of natural selection, which can accumulate any and every variation which tends toward survival. A few of the chief types of methods by which concealment is effected may be briefly described. The colors of large numbers of vertebrate animals are darkest on the back and become gradually lighter on the sides, passing into white on the belly. Abbot H. Thayer has suggested that this gradation obliterates the appearance of solidity, which is due to shadow. The color harmony, which is also essential to concealment, is produced because the back is of the same tint as the environment (e. g. earth), bathed in the cold blue-white of the sky, while the belly, being cold blue-white and bathed in shadow and yellow earth reflections produces the same effects. This method of neutralizing shadow for the purpose of concealment by increased lightness of tint was first suggested by E. B. Poulton in the case of a larva and a pupa, but he did not appreciate the great importance of the principle. In an analogous method an animal in front of a background of dark shadow may have part of its body obliterated by the existence of a dark tint, the remainder resembling, e. g. , a part of a leaf. This method of rendering invisible any part which would interfere with the resemblance is well known in mimicry.

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

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单选题 At eight o' clock every morning from Tuesday to Saturday, French television viewers can watch a subtitled version of the previous evening's CBS news from New York. Not long ago, this would have provoked growls of protesting about America's cultural invasion of France. But the remarkable fact is that Mr. Dan Rather's arrival on French television screens has gone virtually unremarked. This calmness requires an explanation. Is it that France has simply given up trying to protect itself from a seductive flood of American films, food, television programmes and music? Not quite. Calmness need not mean submission. The French film industry, for example, is calling for help against competition from French television, whose programming is padded out with old American films and series. Is it rather that France has overcome its old cultural fears and dislike of America? Again, no. On the whole, French people have always had a rather positive image of America. True, the French can be snobbish about American culture—often intensely so; but, whether of right or left, this snobbery is usually confined to elites. The anniversaries of the 1787 American constitution and the 1789 French revolution are giving many French and American academics an excuse to celebrate how much the two republics have in common. No, the calmness on the French side has a lot to do with a growing knowledge of America in France. As piecemeal, factual views of America replace more fanciful or all-or-nothing ones, France is waking up to the fact that the cultural trade between it and America is more of a two-way street than the periodic excitement about "American cultural imperialism" suggests. American studies in France are enjoying, if not a boom, at least a slow and comfortable growth, according to Professor Rene Vincent, the director of the Revue Francoise des Etudies Americans. This has taken a while. French universities did not take America seriously enough until some years after the Second World War, when young French scholars on Fulbright scholarships came back to France to teach American literature and history. Even then, America lurked in Britain's shadow in French universities. But American study has won its independence from les Anglicistes. And, as it does so, American study in France is drifting away from literature towards history and politics. Helping, of course, is the fact that learning English in France is now widely felt to be indispensable to getting ahead. About half of France's universities now offer courses in American studies. At the French equivalent of post-graduate level, some 50 doctorates on American topics are awarded each year. But American studies in France still have a long way to go. Paris has flourishing British, German, Latin-American and Spanish institutes; it will soon have an Arab institute. But there is no American institute. Talks about starting one have dragged on for years. One reason for the lack of enthusiasm—and money—on the American side is the absence of a large community of French immigrants in the United States. Though the Fulbright programme provides many university exchanges, there is no proper equivalent of the West German Marshall Fund. There are plenty of American banks and companies in Paris, but the trickle-down from American business is small. The Franco-American Foundation promotes scholarly exchanges but has a tiny budget. Another case of sad neglect is the once-famous American library in Paris. Set up after the First World War, it is so short of money it opens only part-time. This neglect is all the more regrettable because many of the best American universities have a keen interest in France. Despite the fact that Spanish might seem the obvious choice, French is still, at least on the east coast, the favoured foreign language in universities. For politics, Harvard's French studies programme is famous. At the beginning of October, New York and Columbia Universities brought to America a large part of the teaching faculty of France's Institute des Etudes Politiques for three days of talk with American experts about the state of France. Yale has long been an American centre of "French studies". As an import point for French philosophy and literary theory, Yale's dockside has been worn bare by the sheer volume of traffic. However quickly schools changed in Paris, Yale was able to tool up on the latest one: structuralism, Lacanian theories of psychoanalysis, deconstructionism. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore is another big entrepot for French ideas in the United States. Historians of the school stress geography, population and social change, not the dramas of princes. Binghampton University in New York has a Braudel Institute; Harvard University Press is publishing a "History of Private Life" edited by Mr. Georges Duby and the late Philippe Aries, both colleagues of Braudel. The Statue of Liberty has not been France's only gift to America.

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单选题After a century and a half as cordial neighbors, two of the nation"s biggest ranches find themselves feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys over wind energy and wildlife and whether the two can coexist. The storied King and Kenedy ranches, which together cover nearly 1.3 million acres in sparsely populated south Texas, are at odds over plans to erect 240-plus wind-powered turbines on the smaller Kenedy property. The structures and their massive blades can stand 400 feet tall—taller than most 30-story buildings. The King Ranch, with 825,000 acres near the Texas Gulf Coast, says the turbines will interfere with migratory birds" flight patterns, threaten other wildlife and create an eyesore—though the nearest highway is nearly 20 miles away. Managers of the charitable trust and foundation that oversee the Kenedy Ranch—a mere 400,000 acres—are resisting a public brawl, but the companies leasing their land for the wind farms say the King Ranch essentially ought to mind its own business. Besides, they say, they"ve spent two years studying migratory birds" flight patterns and are convinced the environmental impact will be minimal. Already, Texas leads the nation in wind-generated power, and numerous proposed projects are under way. But none have garnered attention like the Kenedy wind farms—in part because of the King vs. Kenedy skirmish. Wind farms generate electricity by using wind to turn giant blades that rotate on turbines, an alternative to power created by utilities using coal, natural gas and other sources. King Ranch President Jack Hunt has called for state legislation to regulate the farms—the lack of such laws governing wind farms making Texas a favorite spot for potential wind projects. Hunt said he met with Kenedy Ranch overseers when the wind farms were first proposed a couple of years ago, hoping to get them to understand they"re "sacrificing the long-term value of a rare resource for short-term revenue. "But it sort of fell on deaf ears," he said. Marc Cisneros, who runs the John G. and Marie Stella Kenedy Memorial Foundation from nearby Corpus Christi, has declined to shout back. But he said the project on his section of the ranch not only is environmentally sound but will allow the foundation"s charitable work to continue in an impoverished pan of the state. Led largely by Texas, the United States grew its wind-power capacity faster than anyone in the world in 2005 and 2006, arid wind farms now operate in 36 states. A recent study for Congress by the National Research Council said wind farms could generate up to 7 percent of the nation"s electricity in 15 years—up from less than 1 percent today. That report also said more study was needed on the effect wind farms have on birds and bats. Besides the skyline of turbines endangering birds, Hunt bristles the most at the lack of regulation of the turbine-laden farms. Developers need neither state nor federal approval to erect the towers on private land. Hunt supported state legislation to require permitting for such sites, but it failed. Congress also considered such requirements, but nothing materialized.

单选题The author introduces Martin Hughes at the beginning of the passage ______.

单选题A wise man once said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. So, as a police officer, I have some urgent things to say to good people. Day after day my men and I struggle to hold back a tidal wave of crime. Something has gone terribly wrong with our once-proud American way of life. It has happened in the area of values. A key ingredient is disappearing, and I think I know what it is: accountability. Accountability isn"t hard to define. It means that every person is responsible for his or her actions and liable for their consequences. Of the many values that hold civilization together—honesty, kindness, and so on— accountability may be the most important of all. Without it, there can be no respect, no trust, no law-and, ultimately, no society. My job as a police officer is to impose accountability on people who refuse, or have never learned, to impose it on themselves. But as every policeman knows, external controls on people"s behavior are far less effective than internal restraints such as guilt, shame and embarrassment. Fortunately there are still communities—smaller towns, usually—where schools maintain discipline and where parents hole up standards that proclaim: "In this family certain things are not tolerated—they simply are not done!" Yet more and more, especially in our larger cities and suburbs, these inner restraints are loosening. Your typical robber has none. He considers your property his property; he takes what he wants, including your life if you enrage him. The main cause of this break-down is a radical shift in attitudes. Thirty years ago, if a crime was committed, society was considered the victim. Now, in a shocking reversal, it"s the criminal who is considered victimized: by his underprivileged upbringing, by the school that didn"t teach him to read, by the church that failed to reach him with moral guidance, by the parents who didn"t provide a stable home. I don"t believe it. Many others in equally disadvantaged circumstances choose not to engage in criminal activities. If we free the criminal, even partly, from accountability, we become a society of endless excuses where no one accepts responsibility for anything. We in America desperately need more people who believe that the person who commits a crime is the one responsible for it.

单选题The biggest danger facing the global airline industry is not the effects of terrorism, war, SARS and economic downturn. It is that these blows, which have helped ground three national flag carriers and force two American airlines into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, will divert attention from the inherent weaknesses of aviation, which they have exacerbated. As in the crisis that attended the first Gulf war, many airlines hope that traffic will soon bounce back, and a few catastrophic years will be followed by fuller planes, happier passengers and a return to profitability. Yet the industry"s problems are deeper—and older—than the trauma of the past two years implies. As the centenary of the first powered flight approaches in December, the industry it launched is still remarkably primitive. The car industry, created not long after the Wright Brothers made history, is now a global industry dominated by a dozen firms, at least half of which make good profits. Yet commercial aviation consists of 267 international carriers and another 500-plus domestic ones. The world"s biggest carrier, American Airlines, has barely 7% of the global market, whereas the world"s biggest carmaker, General Motors, has (with its associated firms) about a quarter of the world"s automobile market. Aviation has been incompletely deregulated, and in only two markets: America and Europe. Everywhere else deals between governments dictate who flies under what rules. These aim to preserve state-owned national flag-carriers, run for prestige rather than profit. And numerous restrictions on foreign ownership impede cross-border airline mergers. In America, the big network carders face barriers to exit, which have kept their route networks too large. Trade unions resisting job cuts and Congressmen opposing route closures in their territory conspire to block change. In Europe, liberalization is limited by bilateral deals that prevent, for instance, British Airways (BA) flying to America from Frankfurt or Paris, or Lufthansa offering transatlantic flights from London"s Heathrow. To use the car industry analogy, it is as if only Renaults were allowed to drive on French motorways. In airlines, the optimists are those who think that things are now so bad that the industry has no option but to evolve. Frederick Reid, president of Delta Air Lines. said earlier this year that events since the September llth attacks are the equivalent of a meteor strike, changing the climate, creating a sort of nuclear winter and leading to a "compressed evolutionary cycle". So how. looking on the bright side. might the industry look after five years of accelerated development?

单选题Questions 26-30 Most people can remember a phone number for up to thirty seconds. When this short amount of time elapses, however, the numbers are erased from the memory. How did the information get there in the first place? Information that makes its way to the short term memory (STM). does so via the sensory storage area. The brain has a filter which only allows stimuli that is of immediate interest to pass on to the STM, also known as the working memory. There is much debate about the capacity and duration of the short term memory. The most accepted theory comes from George A. Miller, a cognitive psychologist who suggested that humans can remember approximately seven chunks of information. A chunk is defined as a meaningful unit of information, such as a word or name rather than just a letter or number. Modern theorists suggest that one can increase the capacity of the short term memory by chunking, or classifying similar information together. By organizing information, one can optimize the STM, and improve the chances of a memory being passed on to long term storage. When making a conscious effort to memorize something, such as information for an exam, many people engage in "rote rehearsal". By repeating something over and over again, we are able to keep a memory alive. Unfortunately, this type of memory maintenance only succeeds if there are no interruptions. As soon as a person stops rehearsing the information, it has the tendency to disappear. When a pen and paper are not handy, you might attempt to remember a phone number by repeating it aloud. If the doorbell rings or the dog barks to come in before you get the opportunity to make your phone call, you will forget the number instantly. Therefore, rote rehearsal is not an efficient way to pass information from the short term to long term memory. A better way is to practice "elaborate rehearsal". This involves assigning semantic meaning to a piece of information so that it can be filed along with other pre-existing long term memories. Encoding information semantically also makes it more retrievable. Retrieving information can be done by recognition or recall. Humans can recall memories that are stored in the long term memory and used often. However, if a memory seems to be forgotten, it may eventually be retrieved by prompting. The more cues a person is given (such as pictures. , the more likely a memory can be retrieved. This is why multiple choice tests are often used for subjects that require a lot of memorization.

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单选题 Questions 11～15 Ten years ago, in settling the largest civil lawsuit in the US history, the tobacco industry agreed to pay the 50 states $246 billion, to be used in part to finance efforts to prevent smoking. The percentage of American adults who smoke has fallen since then to just over 20 percent from nearly 30 percent, but smoking is still the No. 1 preventable cause of death in the United States, and smoking-related health care costs more than $167 billion a year. To reduce this cost, the incoming Obama administration should abandon one anti-smoking strategy that is not working. A key component of the Food and Drug Administration's approach to smoking prevention is to warn about health dangers: Smoking causes fatal lung cancer; smoking causes emphasema; smoking while pregnant cause birth defects. Compared with warnings issued by other nations, these statements are low-key. From Canada to Thailand, Australia to Brazil, warnings on cigarette packs include vivid images of lung tumors, limbs turned gangrenous by peripheral vascular disease and open sores and deteriorating teeth caused by mouth and throat cancers. In October, Britain became the first European country to require similar gruesome images on packaging. But such warnings do not work Worldwide, people continue to inhale 5.7 trillion cigarettes annually—a figure that does not even take into account duty-free or black-market cigarettes. According to World Bank projections, the number of smokers is expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2025, from the current 1.3 billion. A brain-imaging experiment I conducted in 2006 explains why anti-smoking scare tactics have been so futile. I examined people's brain activity as they reacted to cigarette warning labels by using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a scanning technique that can show how much oxygen and glucose a particular area of the brain uses while it works, allowing us to observe which specific regions are active at any given time. We tested 32 people (from Britain, China, Germany, Japan and the United States), some of whom were social smokers and some of whom were two-pack-a-day addicts. Most of these subjects reported that cigarette warning labels reduced their craving for a cigarette, but their brains told us a different story. Each subject lay in the scanner for about an hour while we projected on a small screen a series of cigarette package labels from various countries—including statements like "smoking kills" and "smoking cause fatal lung cancers". We found that the warnings prompted no blood flow to the amygdale, the part of the brain that registers alarm, or to the part of the cortex that would be involved in any effort to register disapproval. To the contrary, the warning labels backfired. They stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the "craving spot", which lights up on functional magnetic resonance imaging whenever a person craves something, whether it is alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling. Further investigation is needed, but our study has already revealed an unintended consequence of anti-smoking health warning. They appear to work mainly as a marketing tool to keep smokers smoking. Barack Obama has said he has been using nicotine gum to fight his own cigarette habit. His new administration can help other smokers quit, too, by eliminating the government scare tactics that only increase people's craving.

单选题The word "doldrums" in the sentence "Even the euro area is emerging from the doldrums".

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单选题Questions 11—14