单选题
单选题 Directions: In this part of the test, you
will hear several short talks and conversations. After each of these, you will
hear a few questions. Listen carefully because you will hear the talk or
conversation and questions ONLY ONCE. When you hear a
question read the four answer choices and choose the best answer to that
question. Then write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the
corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.
Questions
11-14
单选题Questions 11-14
单选题
There are several different methods
that can be used to create a forecast. The method a forecaster chooses depends
upon the experience of the forecaster, the amount of information available to
the forecaster, the level of difficulty that the forecast situation presents,
and the degree of accuracy or confidence needed in the forecast.
The first of these methods is the persistence method; the simplest way of
producing a forecast. The persistence method assumes that the conditions at the
time of the forecast will not change. For example, if it is sunny and 87 degree
today, the persistence method predicts that it will be sunny and 87 degree
tomorrow. If two inches of rain fell today, the persistence method would predict
two inches of rain for tomorrow. However, if weather conditions change
significantly from day to day, the persistence method usually breaks down and is
not the best forecasting method to use. The trends method
involves determining the speed and direction of movement for fronts, high and
low pressure centers, and areas of clouds and precipitation. Using this
information, the forecaster can predict where he or she expects those features
to be at some future time. For example, if a storm system is 1,000 miles
west of your location and moving to the east at 250 miles per day, using the
trends method you would predict it to arrive in your area in 4 days. The trends
method works well when systems continue to move at the same speed in the same
direction for a long period of time. If they slow down, speed up, change
intensity, or change direction, the trends forecast will probably not work as
well. The climatology method is another simple way of producing
a forecast. This method involves averaging weather statistics accumulated over
many years to make the forecast. For example, if you were using the climatology
method to predict the weather for New York City on July 4th, you would go
through all the weather data that has been recorded for every July 4th and take
an average. The climatology method only works well when the weather pattern is
similar to that expected for the chosen time of year. If the pattern is quite
unusual for the given time of year, the climatology method will often
fail. The analog method is a slightly more complicated method of
producing a forecast. It involves examining today's forecast scenario and
remembering a day in the past when the weather scenario looked very similar (an
analog). The forecaster would predict that the weather in this forecast will
behave the same as it did in the past. The analog method is difficult to use
because it is virtually impossible to find a predict analog. Various weather
features rarely align themselves in the same locations they were in the previous
time. Even small differences between the current time and the analog can lead to
very different results.
单选题If books had never been discovered, man would have found some other way of recording his communication. But then, for our consideration, we should include as books everything that is a written record. This would include tablets, papyrus and anything else—including computer diskettes. In the case of music, it would be impossible to think that man can live without it. Looking at primitive cultures, it appears that music is actually a part of the human psyche. When two things are knocked together, music is produced. So for the sake of our discussion, it is intended to restrict the meaning of music to the popularly accepted concept. Music is the pleasing combination of sounds that we like to listen to.
Though it is difficult to, we can pretend that these things never existed. In this case we would not miss them today. To compare with recent inventions, let. us look at radio and television. Though we cannot think of life without them today, this is so only from comparatively recent times. There are many of us living today who had seen a time when there was no television. They will tell us that life was not that much different. The same is probably true of radio. But books are a different thing because they, or something akin to them, began thousands of years ago. In the case of music, it goes back even further—perhaps to millions of years. We may be able to imagine a world which never saw books, because books are a human invention. However, in the case" of music this does not seem possible. Pleasing sounds are all around us; like the singing of the birds and the whistling of the wind. Music just seems to be inborn in US and in the world around us.
If books did not exist, the world will be a poorer place indeed. Great philosophies like Plato"s would become unknown and all the pleasures and lessons we could get from them will be lost forever. Then there is literature like the works of the great masters like Shakespeare, Dickens and Jane Austen. What a somber, miserable world it will be without the pleasures of reading. Since mere are so many other things which depend on reading-like plays, songs and movies—we can expect them to disappear also. It would be a dark and unsatisfying world where knowledge is not propagated; where there ale no books to derive pleasure from.
In the case of music: Without it the world will be bleak and cold indeed. It would be a terrible world with no cheery runes, no songs to sing and no great music to lose ourselves in. A world which does not listen to the music of the great masters like Chopin and Beethoven would be a very sorry world. There will not be so many smiles on faces anymore. When we lose music. an expression of a deep part of ourselves—from the soul—is lost. With music, connected activities like dancing will be lost too. A world without music and dancing will bring US back to the Stone Age.
Unlike radio, television, telephones and computers, reading and music ale not mere conveniences that we can live without. Reading is crucial for self-expression and for passing on records and knowledge to future generations. Music is part of our very soul. A world without these will not be the world as we know it. In fact. many of us would not want to live in such a world.
单选题
单选题 Every day of our lives we are in danger of instant
death from small high-speed missiles from space—the lumps of rocky or metallic
debris which continuously bombard the Earth. The chances of anyone actually
being hit, however, are very low, although there are recorded instances of
"stones from the sky" hurting people, and numerous accounts of damage to
buildings and other objects. At night this extraterrestrial material can be seen
as "fireballs" or "shooting stars", burning their way through our atmosphere.
Most, on reaching our atmosphere, become completely vaporised.
The height above ground at which these objects become sufficiently heated to be
visible is estimated to be about 60-100 miles. Meteorites that have fallen on
buildings have sometimes ended their long lonely space voyage incongruously
under beds, inside flower pots or even, in the case of one that landed on a
hotel in North Wales, within a chamber pot. Before the era of space exploration
it was confidently predicted that neither men nor space vehicles would survive
for long outside the protective blanket of the Earth's atmosphere. It was,
thought that once in space they would be seriously damaged as a result of the
incessant downpour of meteorites falling towards our planet at the rate of many
millions every day. Even the first satellites showed that the danger from
meteorites had been greatly overestimated by the pessimists, but although it has
not happened yet, it is certain that one day a spacecraft will be badly damaged
by a meteorite. The greatest single potential danger to life on
Earth undoubtedly comes from outside our planet. Collision with another
astronomical body of any size or with a "black hole" could completely destroy
the Earth almost instantly. Near misses of bodies larger than
or comparable in size to our own planet could be equally disastrous to mankind
as they might still result in total or partial disruption. If the velocity of
impact were high, collision with even quite small extraterrestrial bodies might
cause catastrophic damage to the Earth's atmosphere, oceans and outer crust and
thus produce results inimical to life as we know it. The probability of
collision with a large astronomical body from outside our Solar System is
extremely low, possibly less than once in the lifetime of an average star. We
know, however, that our galaxy contains great interstellar dust clouds and some
astronomers have suggested that there might also be immense streams of meteorite
matter in space that the Solar system may occasionally encounter. Even if we
disregard this possibility, our own Solar system itself contains a great number
of small astronomical bodies, such as the minor planets or asteroids and the
comets, some with eccentric orbits that occasionally bring them close to the
Earth's path.
单选题
单选题Anyone who doubts that children are born with a healthy amount of ambition need spend only a few minutes with a baby eagerly learning to walk or a headstrong toddler starting to talk. No matter how many times the little ones stumble in their initial efforts, most keep on trying, determined to master their amazing new skill. It is only several years later, around the start of middle or junior high school, many psychologists and teachers agree, that a good number of kids seem to lose their natural drive to succeed and end up joining the ranks of underachievers. For the parents of such kids, whose own ambition is often inextricably tied to their children's success, it can be a bewildering, painful experience. So it's no wonder some parents find themselves hoping that, just maybe, ambition can be taught like any other subject at school. It's not quite that simple. "Kids can be given the opportunities to become passionate about a subject or activity, but they can't be forced," says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25-year study examining what motivated first-and seventh-graders in three school districts. Even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don't seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve. Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn't suffer from an emotional or learning disability, or isn't involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically somehow isn't cool. "Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term, says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth. " Over the past couple of years, Dweck has helped run an experimental workshop with New York City public school seventh-graders to do just that. Dubbed Brainology, the unorthodox approach uses basic neuroscience to teach kids how the brain works and how it can continue to develop throughout life. "The message is that everything is within the kids' control, that their intelligence is malleable," says Lisa Blackwell, a research scientist at Columbia University who has worked with Dweck to develop and run the program, which has helped increase the students' interest in school and turned around their declining math grades. More than any teacher or workshop, Blackwell says, "parents can play a critical role in conveying this message to their children by praising their effort, strategy and progress rather than emphasizing their 'smartness' or praising high performance alone. Most of all, parents should let their kids know that mistakes are a part of learning. " Some experts say our education system, with its strong emphasis on testing and rigid separation of students into different levels of ability, also bears blame for the disappearance of drive in some kids. "These programs shut down the motivation of all kids who aren't considered gifted and talented. They destroy their confidence," says Jeff Howard, a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, a Boston-area organization that works with teachers and parents in school districts around the country to help improve children's academic performance. Howard and other educators say it's important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. "The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions," says Michael Nakkual, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program called Project IF (Inventing the Future), which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before you can run.
单选题Questions 6~10
Gail Pasterczyk, the principal of Indian Pines Elementary in Palm Beach County, Fla. , has added two or three new teaching positions each of the past three years. She"s adding two more teachers next year as well as replacing those she"ll lose to maternity leave, transfers, and retirement. She doesn"t know where the new teachers will come from, if the new hires will be any good, and where she"ll find room for all of them. Indian Pines already has 27 portable classrooms and is waiting to break ground on a two-story, 25-classroom addition. "When you start reducing class size, you"ve got to find more teachers, and you run out of space," she says. "That"s the reality. " Her school district, one of the nation"s largest, has sent recruiters across the country, and even to Mexico and the Philippines, to fill an expected 1,700 teaching vacancies before the fall. "We are in a race to keep the schools staffed," says Robert Pinkos, a Palm Beach County recruiter who will travel to Baltimore and Madrid next month to troll for teachers.
Two and a half years after Florida voters adopted a constitutional amendment to reduce class sizes, Palm Beach County—and every other school district in the state—are tripping over a major stumbling block: There just aren"t enough good teachers to go around. With classes in kindergarten through third grade capped at 18 students, fourth through eighth held at 22, and high school limited to 25, the state will need to hire an estimated 29,604 new teachers by 2009—a prospect that has many people worried. "I have every reason to expect that the quality of teachers will suffer," says John Winn, the state"s education commissioner.
Nationwide, 33 states now have laws that restrict class size. And the politically popular educational reform has proved successful in some areas, particularly among the lowest-performing students. In Burke County, N. C. , for example, discipline problems are down and test scores are up, even for the most disadvantaged students in the district. "On paper these kids should not be succeeding, but they are," says Susan Wilson, a former teacher and now director of elementary education in the rural county.
But this success comes at a price. It means hiring more teachers, building more classrooms, and retraining teachers to work with smaller groups of students. And it means, critics maintain, that states pit their own districts against one another in the race to hire. "When you mandate class-size reduction statewide, the suburban schools tend to draw the best new teachers, and the more urban schools, which already have trouble attracting teachers, can"t attract the best candidates," says Steven Rivkin, an economics professor at Amherst College who has studied the effects of class-size reduction on teacher quality. Any gains from cutting class size could be undermined by hiring lower quality teachers.
Resources. Proponents contend that the reform would be relatively pain-less if existing resources were managed well. "Hiring more teachers is only part of the solution," says Charles Achilles, one of the first researchers to study the effects of reducing class sizes. "The best programs for class-size reduction not only hire more teachers but reassign existing specialty teachers to get them back in the classroom. "
Florida policymakers are trying to find their own way out of the class-size quandary. This month, the Legislature is considering a proposal to roll back some of the size limits in exchange for an increase in teacher pay. Gov. Jeb Bush, who opposed the constitutional amendment in 2002, argues that the compromise will attract more top-quality teachers to the state while reining in costs. Voters could see the proposed change on the ballot as early as September. In the meantime, recruiter Pinkos continues his search for new teachers, sometimes working 10-hour days. His pitch? "Palm Beach is very beautiful, but the small classes are one of the most attractive things I can tell them."
单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.
单选题
Question
6-10 How many really suffer as a result of labor market
problems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policy
questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of
hardship. Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences
today as it did in the 1930's when most of the unemployed were primary
breadwinners, when income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of
subsistence, and when there were no countervailing social programs for those
failing in the labor market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families
with more than one wage earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners
among the unemployed, and improved social welfare protection have unquestionably
mitigated the consequences of joblessness. Earnings and income data also
overstate the dimensions of hardship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at
or below the minimum wage level, the overwhelming majority are from
multiple-earner, relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the
poverty statistics are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities
which keep them out of the labor force, so the poverty statistics are by no
means an accurate indicator of labor market pathologies. Yet
there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of
labor-market- related hardship. The unemployment counts exclude the
millions of fully employed workers whose wages are so low that their families
remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemployment
frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support. Since the number
experiencing joblessness at some time during the year is several times the
number unemployed in any month, those who suffer as a result of forced idleness
can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even though only a minority of
the jobless in any month really suffer. For every person counted in the monthly
unemployment tallies, there is another working part-time because of the
inability to find full-time work, or else outside the labor force but wanting a
job. Finally, income transfers in our country have always focused on the
elderly, disabled, and dependent, neglecting the needs of the working
poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in-kind transfers does
not necessarily mean that those failing in the labor market are adequately
protected. As a result of such contradictory evidence, it is
uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of thousands or the tens
of millions, and, hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or
must be countered by job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area
of agreement in this debate--that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings
statistics are inadequate for one of their primary applications, measuring the
consequences of labor market problems.
单选题Most growing plants contain much more water than all other materials combined. C. R. Barnes has suggested that it is as proper to term the plant a water structure as to call a house composed mainly of brick a brick building. Certain it is that all essential processes of plant growth and development occur in water. The mineral elements from the soil that are usable by the plant must be dissolved in the soil solution before they can be taken into the root. They are carried to all parts of the growing plant and are built into essential plant materials while in a dissolved state. The carbon dioxide from the air may enter the leaf as a gas but is dissolved in water in the leaf before it is combined with a part of the water to form simple sugars—the base material from which the plant body is mainly built. Actively growing plant parts are generally 75 to 90 percent water. Structural parts of plants, such as woody stems no longer actively growing, may have much less water than growing tissues. The actual amount of water in the plant at any one time, however, is only a very small part of what passes through it during its development. The processes of photosynthesis, by which carbon dioxide and water are combined-in the presence of chlorophyll and with energy derived from light-to form sugars, require that carbon dioxide from the air enter the plant. This occurs mainly in the leaves. The leaf surface is not solid but contains great numbers of minute openings, through which the carbon dioxide enters. The same structure that permits the one gas to enter the leaf, however, permits another gas—water vapor—to be lost from it. Since carbon dioxide is present in the air only in trace quantities (3 to 4 parts in 10,000 parts of air) and water vapor is near saturation in the air spaces within the leaf (at 80°F, saturated air would contain about 186 parts of water vapor in 10,000 parts of air), the total amount of water vapor lost is many times the carbon dioxide intake. Actually, because of wind and other factors, the loss of water in proportion to carbon dioxide intake may be even greater than the relative concentrations of the two gases. Also, not all of the carbon dioxide that enters the leaf is synthesized into carbohydrates.
单选题Everyone seems to hate America"s latest stab at immigration reform, which went before the full Senate this week. Immigrant groups think it offers little hope to low-skilled, mostly Hispanic would-be migrants. Right-wingers snarl that it is nothing but an "amnesty" for illegals. Companies, who it had been hoped would support the new compromise, hate it because it imposes bureaucratic burdens on employers. And the left is complaining because it fears it will depress low-end wages. It would be nice to be able to report that opposition across so full a spectrum is a sign that the bill is a well-crafted compromise. In fact, it may well tom out to be doomed.
That would be a pity, because there are some good things in the proposal. Most important, it produces a reasonably fair solution to the problem of what to do about the 12 minion or so illegal immigrants already in America, most of them working hard at low-paid and disagreeable jobs. Deporting a population the size of Ohio"s is impossible, economically illiterate and morally wrong. The new bill would make the 12 million legal, and offer them a path, though a winding one, to full citizenship.
The right doesn"t like this, of course, and points out that amnesties (which this really isn"t, given the fines and hurdles involved) have in the past drawn fresh waves of migrants. So the other side of the bargain gives conservatives everything they could wish for in terms of razor-wired fences, surveillance drones, armed border guards and a programme that will force companies to check the legality of their workers. Such measures are probably necessary to win support and rebuild trust in the immigration system. No bill would pass without them.
The bad part of the deal is what happens to would-be immigrants once all those sensors and spy-planes are in place. The bill proposes a dual system. A guest-worker programme would allow 400,000 people a year to enter the country to work for two years, after which they must go home for a year, with a six-year cap on the total time they can spend in America. The other part is a new method of granting residence permits, carrying the right to work. Such "green cards" currently go mostly to relatives of American citizens or to people sponsored by an employer. The bill would bring in a "points" system for 380,000 people a year, similar to those in use in Canada and Australia. Permits for family members would be restricted, to cover only spouses and young children. Employers would have less ability to sponsor the people they need.
There are several problems. One is that extended families help build vibrant communities in a way that guest workers don"t. Second, the government should not be in the business of telling companies whom they ought to him. There are ways round this, such as awarding points not for specific jobs, but still the problem is that most of the green cards will be used up by Indian software designers, Bosnian engineers or the similarly blessed. America does indeed need such folk, but it also needs legions of the less-skilled, too.
That will continue to mean a large, poorly paid and constantly rotating alien underclass with little stake in American society. On May 23rd, the Senate voted to scale the guest worker programme back to 200,000. So the illegals will keep coming—except that now their journey will be still more dangerous and they will be even further beyond the law. The current bill is better than nothing; but unless it is improved, it will not solve the main problem of the illegals.
单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} In this part of the test, you will hear several short
talks and conversations. After each of these, you will hear a few questions.
Listen carefully because you will hear the talk or conversation and questions
{{B}}ONLY ONCE.{{/B}} When you hear a question, read the four answer choices and
choose the best answer to that question. Then write the letter of the answer you
have chosen in the corresponding space in your {{B}}ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}
{{B}}Questions
11—14{{/B}}
单选题
One day, drought may be a thing of the
past, at least in any country not too far from the sea. Vast areas of desert
throughout the world may for the first time come to life and provide millions of
hectares of cultivated land where now nothing grows. By the end
of this century this may not be mere speculation. Scientists are already looking
into the possibility of using some of the available ice in the Arctic and
Antarctic. In these regions there are vast ice-caps formed by snow that has
fallen over the past 50,000 years. Layer upon layer of deep snow means that,
when melted, the snow water would be pure, not salty as sea-ice would be. There
is so much potential pure water here that it would need only a fraction to turn
much of the desert or poorly irrigated parts of the world into rich farmland.
And what useful packages would come in! It should be possible to hack off a bit
of ice and transport it! Alternatively perhaps a passing iceberg could be
captured. They are always breaking away from the main caps and floating around,
pushed by currents, until they eventually melt and are wasted.
Many icebergs are, of course, much too small to be towed any distance, and
would melt before they reached a country that needed them anywhere. It would be
necessary to harness one that was manageable and that was big enough to provide
a good supply when it reached us. Engineers think that an iceberg up to 11
kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide could be transported if the tug pulling it
was as big as a supertanker! Even then they would cover only 32 kilometres every
day. However, once the iceberg was at its destination, say at one end of Hong
Kong harbour, more than 7,000 million cubic metres of water could be taken from
it! That would probably be more than enough for Hong Kong even in the hottest
summer! But no doubt a use could be found for it. Apparently,
scientists say, there would not be too much wastage in such a journey. The
larger the iceberg, the slower it melts, even if it is towed through the
tropics. This is because when the sun has a bigger area to warm up, less heat
actually gets into the iceberg. The vast frozen center would be
unaffected. Even with the giant tug that would have to be
available to tow an iceberg seven miles long, the voyage would take many months
from the Antarctic to Hong Kong, for example, but as stronger engines are built
and more is known about sea currents, the journey could get shorter and shorter
and thus the wastage less and less. Airline pilots have learnt to use jet
streams ten miles above the earth to increase speed and save fuel so, surely, a
boat towing an iceberg could make use of fast-flowing currents and avoid warmer
water.
单选题Just as human history has been shaped by the rise and fall of successive empires, so the computer industry has, in the few decades of its existence, been dominated by one large company after another. During the mainframe era, IBM wore the crown. But it fumbled the transition to smaller machines in the personal-computer era, and the throne was usurped by Microsoft. Now, at the dawn of the new era of Internet services, Google is widely seen as the heir to the kingdom. As the upstart has matured into a powerful industry giant, the suggestion that "Google is the new Microsoft" has become commonplace in computing circles. Is it true?
The comparison is both a compliment and a reproach. It is a compliment because it implies that Google has now become the company that defines the environment in which other technology firms operate, just as IBM and Microsoft once did. As with Microsoft in its heyday, Google is the technology firm where the smartest geeks aspire to work; it embodies the technological zeitgeist; and it is a highly regarded company that has become a household name. But the comparison is also a reproach, because it highlights growing concern that Google is now powerful for its own good, or that of the industry, or indeed that of the world at large.
For many people, Google provides the front door to the internet. For many online businesses, their position in its search ranking—the workings of which are a closely guarded secret—is a matter of life or death. Too much power is thus concentrated in Google"s hands, say critics, including Microsoft"s Bill Gates. Microsoft and other big internet firms, including eBay, Amazon and Yahoo!, are now said to be negotiating various alliances in order to provide a counterweight to the new behemoth. Smaller firms feel even more vulnerable. As soon as Google says it is moving into a particular market, small fry in that market now dart for cover, unless they are lucky enough to be acquired by Google.
Yet there are some crucial ways in which Google differs from Microsoft. For a start, it is a far more innovative company, and its use of small, flexible teams has so far allowed it to remain innovative even as it has grown. Microsoft, in contrast, has stagnated as a result of its size and dominance. It is least innovative in the markets in which it faces the least competition—operating system, office software and web browser—though it is, curiously, still capable of innovating in markets in which it has strong rivals (notably video gaming).
More important, however, are the differences that suggest that Google will not be able to establish an IBM—or—Microsoft-style lock on the industry. IBM"s dominance was based on its ownership of the proprietary hardware and software of its mainframe computers. In the PC era hardware became commodity and Microsoft established a lucrative monopoly centered on its proprietary operating system, Windows. But in the new era of internet services, open standards predominate, rivals are always just a click away, and there is far less scope for companies to establish a proprietary lock-in.
Try to avoid using Microsoft"s software for a day, particularly if you work in an office, and you will have difficulty; but surviving a day without Google is relatively easy. It has strong competitors in all the markets in which it operates: search, online advertising, mapping, software services, and so on. Large firms such as Yahoo!, which previously farmed searches out to Google, have switched to other technologies. Google"s market share in search has fallen from a high of around 80% to around 50% today. Perhaps the clearest evidence that Google"s continued dominance is not inevitable in the fate of Alta Vista, the former top dog in internet search. Who remembers it to today?
Without a proprietary lock-in to protect its dominant position, Google will have to work hard to stay on top. And that, ultimately, is where the comparison with Micorsoft breaks down. Google may be the nearest thing to the new Microsoft of the internet era, and the two companies clearly regard each other as their main rivals. But one of the best things about the internet age is that it may well not end up being dominated by a single, Microsoft-like giant at all.
单选题
单选题Which of the following statements can be inferred from the sentence "Alas, such interviews can fall foul of America's tight rules on stock market flotations, which are designed to prevent companies from hyping their stock ahead of a listing" in Paragraph 2?
单选题[此试题无题干]
