单选题Which of the following does not support the statement "Yet there are some crucial ways in which Google differs from Microsoft."

单选题 {{B}}Questions 23-26{{/B}}

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单选题Ordinarily, I"m hardly what you"d call a nosy neighbor—each to his own is my credo. Yet, without moving from my desk, I"ve learned what my neighbors paid for their houses, whether they*ye refinanced, how many bathrooms they have, and what their median income is. I know their birth dates, social security numbers, and driving records. And with a bit more digging I could unearth many of their legal and business dealing. Do you find this unsettling? You might. But consider this: None of this information is considered private. All of it, and much more, is available online to anyone with a computer and a modem. What does the online world know about you? Plenty—whether you"re online or not. Using a pseudonym (handsome@service.com) won"t help, either. That"s because most of the information about you isn"t coming from you, at least not directly. It"s coming from myriad government records and business transactions, which are being digitized, linked, packaged, sold, and re-sold. All of this is legal, or at least it is not clearly illegal. In one sense, the availability of "public records" online is merely an electronic extension of how things have always worked. With a few dollars and a trip to the right city, county, or state agency, you can get copies of many publicly filed records, such as real estate transactions or birth certificates. But a funny thing happened on the way to city hall in the 1990s. Actually, it"s a confluence of four factors: PCs are everywhere, the Internet is connecting millions of them, business and government records are now routinely stored on computers, and government agencies (especially at the state and local levels) are desperately seeking new sources of revenue. In short, the market-place for online information, and the ability or desire to deliver it, are gelling at roughly the same moment in time. Who wants this personal information? Private investigators performing background checks or searching for deadbeat parents want it. Lawyers want it to track down court records and personal assets. So do prospective employers and landlords, to give you an electronic once-over before rolling out the welcome mat. And before you feel too affronted, it"s to find a missing branch in the family tree or to check out a child-care worker. Naturally, marketers want it as well—preferably in large quantities—to try to do what they always do. sell you stuff. They are using cyberspace to snap up e-mail lists and demographics databases to send solicitations to your onscreen in-box, as well as your postal mailbox. And as shopping by computer takes off, they"ll want to know more about your online buying habits as well. One compromise in the works: commerce Net and the Electronic Frontier foundation are testing a system called eTrust that displays standard symbols informing you prior to buying anything online whether information about the transaction will be anonymous, customer-to-merchant only, or shared with other. To be sure, the online arena is not the only place where your personal information is being collected and passed along. Smart cards and codes are being used to learn more about you in places as diverse as your state government and your local supermarket. Often, they will share the knowledge they gather with others. But nothing is spreading the information, or fueling the demand for it, faster than online connections. The demand, coupled with a delivery vehicle of unprecedented efficiency and reach called the Internet, had spawned a booming market for services offering to help you find out more about other people (or them about you). Demand has also spawned a number of new privacy groups bent on curbing, or at least keeping close tabs on the inline information-for-sale industry. Many of these groups are themselves rooted online, and somewhat ironically, are populated by the same brand of free thinkers who routinely oppose any attempts to regulate cyberspace or censor the electronic exchange of information. But for many, the sale of personal information hits a little too close to home.

单选题Questions 16-20 Computers monitor everything in Singapore from soil composition to location of manholes. At the airport, it took just 15 seconds for the computerized immigration system to scan and approve my passport. It takes only one minute to be checked into a public hospital. By 1998, almost every household will be wired for interactive cable TV and the Internet, the global computer network. Shoppers will be able to view and pay for products electronically. A 24- hour community telecomputing network will allow users to communicate with elected representatives and retrieve information about government services. It is all part of the government"s plan to transform the nation into what it calls the "Intelligent Island". In so many ways, Singapore has elevated the concept of efficiency to a kind of national ideology. For the past ten years, Singapore"s work force was rated the best in the world--ahead of Japan and the U. S. --in terms of productivity, skill and attitude by the Business Environment Risk Intelligence service. Behind the "Singapore miracle" is a man Richard Nixon described as one of "the ablest leaders I have met," one who, "in other times and other places, might have attained the world stature of a Churchill. " Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore"s struggle for independence in the 1950s, serving as Prime Minister from 1959 until 1990. Today (1995), at 71, he has nominally retired to the office of Senior Minister, where he continues to influence his country"s future. Lee offered companies tax breaks, political stability, cheap labor and strike-free environment. Nearly 90 percent of Singaporean adults now own their own homes and thanks to strict adherence to the principle of merit, personal opportunities abound. "If you"ve got talent and work hard, you can be anything here," says a Malaysian-born woman who holds a high-level civil-service position. Lee likes to boast that Singapore has avoided the "moral breakdown" of Western countries. He attributes his nation"s success to strong family ties, a reliance on education as the engine of advancement and social philosophy that he claims is superior to America"s. In an interview with Reader"s Digest, he said that the United States has "lost its bearings" by emphasizing individual rights at the expense of society. "An ethical society," he said, "is one which matches human rights with responsibilities. "

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

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单选题Questions 19—22

单选题Nick is unusually bright, so his great success has been ______. [A] hoped [B] expected [C] promised [D] asked

单选题 BQuestions 27-30/B

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单选题Questions 15-18

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单选题 Once upon a time, in the "dominion of new haven", it was illegal to kiss your children on Sunday. Or make a bed or cut your hair or eat mince pies or cross a river unless you were a clergyman riding your circuit. If you lived in Connecticut in 1650, there was no mistaking Sunday for just another shopping day; regardless of whether you'd go to hell for breaking the Sabbath, you could certainly go to jail. Centuries later, the sense that Sunday is special is still wired in us, a miniature sabbatical during which to peel off the rest of the week and savor ritual, religious or otherwise. Sunday worship, Sunday football, Sunday papers, Sunday brunch, the day you call your mother, the night the family gathers around the TV to watch, once upon a time, The Wonderful World of Disney and, now The Sim psons. The idea that rest is a right has deep roots in our history. Blue laws were a gift as much as a duty, a command to relax and reflect. That tension, explains Sunday historian Alexis McCrossen, has always been less between sacred and secular than between work and respite; America does not readily sit still, even for a day. The Civil War and a demand for news begat the Sunday paper; industrialization inspired progressives to argue that libraries and museums should open on Sundays so working people could elevate themselves. Major league baseball held its first Sunday game in 1892. Joseph Pulitzer realized the Sunday paper was less about news than about fun, comics and book reviews, and soon the theaters, amusement parks and fairs were open too. Over time, Sunday has gone from a day we could do only a very few things to the only day we can do just about anything we want. The U.S. is too diverse, our lives too busy, our economy too global and our appetites too vast to lose a whole day that could be spent working or playing or power shopping. Pulled between piety and profit, even Christian bookstores are open. Children come to Sunday school dressed in their soccer uniforms; some churches have started their own leagues just to control the schedule. Politicians recite their liturgies in TV studios. Post offices may still be closed, but once you miss that first Sunday e-mail from the boss, it becomes forever harder not to log on and check in. Even the casinos are open. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan, Albert Schweitzer said—which raises a question for our times. What do we lose if Sunday becomes just like any other day? Lawmakers in Virginia got to spend part of their summer break debating that question, thanks to a mistake they made last winter when they inadvertently revived a "day of rest" rule; hotels and hospitals and nuclear power plants would have had to give workers a weekend day off or be fined $500. After a special legislative session was convened to fix the error, Virginia's workers, like the rest of us, are once more potentially on call 24/7. Meanwhile, Rhode Island just became the 32nd state to let liquor stores open every Sunday; until this month, they could do so only in December, perhaps because even George Washington's eggnog recipe called for brandy, whiskey and rum. Social conservatives may want to honor the Fourth Commandment, but businesses want the income, states need the tax revenues, and busy families want the flexibility. With progress, of course, comes backlash from those who desperately want to preserve the old ways. Morn-and-pop liquor stores in New York fought to keep the blue laws to have more time with their families. Car dealers in Kansas City pushed for a law to make them close on Sundays so they could have a day off without losing out to competition. Chick-Fil-A, a chain of more than 1,100 restaurants in 37 states, closes on Sundays because its founder, Truett Cathy, promised employees time to "worship, spend time with family and friends or just plain rest from the work week," says the chain's website. "Made sense then, still makes sense now." Pope John Paul Ⅱ even wrote an apostolic letter in defense of Sunday.. "When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes merely part of a 'weekend'," he wrote, "people stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see 'the heavens'." In an age with no free time, we buy it through hard choices. Do we skip church so we can sleep in or skip soccer so we can go to church or find a family ritual—cook together, read together—that we treat as sacred? That way, at least some part of Sunday faces in a different direction, whether toward heaven or toward one another.

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

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单选题Professional language translators labor in a business that is unorganized and haphazard. Most are freelancers, contracting with book publishers, marketing companies, product document producers, or anyone else requiring language translation. While many large cities boast resources for translation, like the German cultural center Goethe Institute, corporations looking for professional translators usually hire locally, especially for the more obscure languages. The result is that language translation remains one of the few services in the globalized economy not networked in a significant way. World Point, a management-software developer, wants to change that by consolidating the language-translation business. Deploying its network of 6,000 independent translators from around the world, the company can translate a corporate Web site into potentially 75 languages and then provide software to manage the resulting multilingual site. Word Point"s Passport software works like other Web-site management packages, offering webmasters a way to centrally administer Web development, such as iteration controls, HTML authoring, reporting, cookie manipulation, and a built-in database-scripting language. Where the software distinguishes itself is in its ability to support multiple languages. The multilingual-content management tool has such innovations as single-click language addition, easy localization to target languages using the company"s translation service, speedy language importation, and an automatic language search engine and site map generation. "Before the Internet, translators were limited to their local translation shops," said Michael Demetrios, chief architect at World Point. "Our system is designed to facilitate collaboration. You can use someone locally, but you really don"t want someone who left, say, Germany, 15 years ago and isn"t current on the latest words. Especially on the Web, new words are coming into languages at a very fast rate." The translation business is set to boom, according to researchers. The market for text-based language translation is predicted to climb from US$10.4 billion in 1998 to $17.2 billion in 2003, according to a report recently released by Allied Business Intelligence, an analyst group in Oyster Bay, New York. The Internet has spurred the explosive growth of translation, according to the report, calling it the "single most significant future market" for translation. World Point, whose customers include Kodak and Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, plans to capture part of that growth by offering the largest network of independent translators. World Point pays its translators by the word. Asian languages cost more than European, and the average cost to establish a multilingual Web site usually runs from $20,000 to $1 million. The company"s translators are proficient in everything from Spanish to dead languages like Old English. World Point guarantees the sites will read fluently and be culturally sensitive. World Point"s software leverages economies of scale by allowing translators to work as a team, with each translator converting about 2,000 to 3,000 words a day into another language. Despite the logic of networking, translators remain wary of affiliating their services with centralized companies, according to Demetrios. "A lot of them are watching us to see how it goes," he says. If the Internet is responsible for translators finding more business at their doorsteps, computers also provide a cautionary flip side: speeding the day in which consolidation and specialization will be necessary. Automation in particular may play a role in the conversion of the translation business from mom-and-pop operators to an organized industry. While Demetrios dismisses the near-term impact of computer-translation software, the European Union reports that machine translation of documents rose from 2,000 pages in 1988 to 250,000 pages last year.

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