单选题Since the Second World War, most urban growth in the United States has occurred on the outskirts of existing metropolitan areas.A counties B edges C streets D intersections

Since the Great Depression,the United States government has protected farmers from damaging drops in grain prices.

A: slight
B: surprising
C: sudden
D: harmful

共用题干
第二篇

The American Industry

A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap,but if properly handled,it may become a driving force.When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War,it had a market eight times larger than any competitor,giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale.Its scientists were the world's best,its workers the most skilled.America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.
It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably,the retreat from predominance proved painful.By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness.Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics,had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition.By 1987 there was only one American television maker left,Zenith.(Now there is none:Zenith was bought by South Korea's LG Electronics in July.)Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes.For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors,which America had which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
All of this caused a crisis of confidence.Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted.They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing,and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America's industrial decline.Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.
How things have changed!In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle.Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride."American industry has changed its structure,has gone on a diet,has learnt to be more quick-witted,"according to Richard Cavanagh,executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,"It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,"says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute,a think-tank in Washington,DC.And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as"a golden age of business management in the United States."

The U.S.achieved its predominance after World War Ⅱ because______.
A:it had made painstaking efforts towards this goal
B:its domestic market was eight times larger than before
C:the war had destroyed the economies of most potential competitors
D:the unparalleled size of its workforce had given an impetus to its economy

资料：Are walkers smarter than drivers?
A report published last month says metropolitan areas in the United States that were found to be more pedestrian-friendly also often had higher levels of GDP -and their citizens were better educated.
The study was conducted by Smart Growth America, an urban advocacy group based in the District of Columbia. It looked at the 30 biggest metro zones in the US, and ranked them by how much office, retail, and residential area was conducive to walking.
The question is, why? Do brainier people just like to walk and not drive? It's a complicated answer. What we don't know is whether walkable places attract educated people, or whether educated people move to certain places that then become more walkable.
That's not all: Education levels aren't just higher in walkable cities. GDP is, too. The gap between the highest and lowest urban metros by GDP in the study is a chasm of 49%, which scholar calls a "first and second world gap. This is serious stuff."
Of course, correlation doesn't equal causation. There's not enough data to definitively say why these urban areas are filled with educated people. But it's definitely a starting point for conversation: Many socioeconomic and generational trends the world over could help explain why university graduates gravitate toward crowded, subway-lined metropolises these days. In fact, such an intellectual influx has started to change the entire faces of some urban areas.
Increased urbanization isn't the only reason car-eschewing cities see smarter citizens. Young people play a role, too. Millennials-those born between around 1981 and 1996-are the most educated generation in history. Nearly half of them hold a bachelor's degree or higher. They're also all moving to cities, unlike their parents. These spikes in the workforce translate into metros with higher GDP and higher overall education levels.

What phenomenon has been found by scholars?

A.Entire faces of urban areas are changing fast.
B.Metropolitan areas are more pedestrian-friendly and richer.
C.Educated people prefer to live in walkable places.
D.Walkable places attract educated people.