单选题______A powerfulB hugeC dangerousD disastrous

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“The turtle — along with a few other Cuora species — was once imported into China by the pet trade.” in Paragraph 1 means _________.

The Threatened Environment　　In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment are fundamental. One is acid rain, which is created by the millions of tones of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed out of North American smokestacks and automobile exhaust pipes1. The oxides mix with water vapor in the air to form weak sulphuric and nitric acid, which later falls as acid rain. The result is increased acidity in lakes, which has curtailed the ability of many fish to reproduce, and in the soil, which has slowed the growth of trees and increased their vulnerability to disease.2　　With every news report, the externality dimension of environmental problems3 seems to become clearer. For instance, it was recently reported that Lapp villagers in northern Sweden and Norway were forbidden to eat local reindeer meat after their herds became contaminated by fallout from the nuclear accident at ChernobyI5 in far-off Ukraine. Similarly, Canadian wildlife scientists have found high levels of PCBs6 and other contaminants in polar-bear livers.　　But some pollution problems involve such dramatic externalities that the whole world is affected. One example is the greenhouse effect. The steadily rising and essentially irreversible concentration7 of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere causes it to trap increasing amounts of the heat radiated by the planet. The general warming trend is expected to have disastrous effects, including mass starvation in some less developed countries, flooding of entire coastal areas, and severe droughts on the Canadian Prairies, perhaps within the next fifty years.　　Another worldwide threat is in the upper atmosphere—the thinning of the layer of ozone, a bluish gas that shields the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are depleting the ozone layer. One estimated result is that the chance of getting skin cancer is now 8 to 16 percent greater than it was in 1950.　　Hazardous wastes (such as those from nuclear plants, industrial manufacturing, laboratories, and medical institutions) represent yet another critical environmental problem improperly disposed, they can threaten all forms of organic life. Unfortunately, little has been done so far to solve this problem. Indeed there are many instances in which industrialized countries have literally just shipped the problem off to the poorest of the less developed countries—countries unequipped with the necessary storage and treatment facilities, and certainly too poor to deal with the serious environmental problems that will follow. For example, in 1988 the government of Guinea-Bissau13 signed a contract with two British firms to receive 15 million tones of pharmaceutical wastes over a five-year period. While this arrangement was very inexpensive from the firms’ point of view, the payments to Guinea-Bissau totaled more than four times that county’s national product. It makes it difficult to solve the problem when parts of the world are so poor that they are forced to regard such transactions as “good deals”.　　The users of the world’s resources simply must be made to take the external costs of their actions into consideration when making their decisions. The people who are hacking down the world’s rain forests at the rate of 1200 hectares an hour are literally cutting away the lungs of the earth, since rain forests contribute a large percentage of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. But these individuals are not necessarily evil: in many cases, they are forced to overuse the environment for their own or their country’s immediate survival. For example, some developing countries’ needs for foreign exchange to pay for imports compel them to cut timber faster than it can be regenerated. They simply cannot afford to worry about the future.　　Obviously, many of these problems cannot be solved without political decisions to redistribute income to the less developed countries, and to define property rights. But the right kinds of political and institutional changes will be forthcoming only if they are rooted in an understanding of the externality dimension of environmental issues.

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Why did the professional conduct committee delay its heating of the case under question?

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He told the doctor that he’d not rather having the operation unless it was absolutely necessary.

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全球变暖　　科学家与环保人士担心全球变暖的问题。使用化石燃料(如石油、煤)或大面积砍伐森林，是地球大气“温室气体”不断增加的两大因素。这些气体所吸收的热能越来越多，最终将改变天气型态、造成海平面与海洋温度的上升，以及形成有害于植物、野生动物和人类栖息地的气候反常。　　虽然科学界对全球变暖的影响程度尚有歧见，但若人类对温室效应造成的危险置之不理，无异于玩火自焚。为避免温室效应加剧，从个人角度来看我们可以做的就是降低对化石燃料的依赖、减少用电，并采取最不耗损自然资源的生活方式。在政府这个层面，世界大部份的工业化国家，已在1997年所签定的京都议定书中，宣誓将做到气体排放减量。

The study of law, with its great number of cases, statutes, and contracts, can be a tedious process.

Some advanced economies, notably Japan and Germany, fared better than others during the 1970s and 1980s.

Spearmint is distilled for flavoring chewing gum and candy and used as a disguise for disagreeable tastes in medicine.

The author of this passage tries to __________.

Effect of the Great Depression　　It is difficult to measure the human cost of the Great Depression. The material hardships were bad enough. Men and women lived in lean-tos made of scrap wood and metal, and families went without meat and fresh vegetables for months, existing on a diet of soup and beans. The psychological burden was even greater4: Americans suffered through year after year of grinding poverty with no letup in sight. The unemployed stood in line for hours waiting for relief checks, veterans sold apples or pencils on street comers, their manhood—once prized so highly by the nation—now in question. People left the city for the countryside but found no salvation on the farm. Crops rotted in the fields because prices were too low to make harvesting worthwhile; sheriffs fended off angry crowds as banks foreclosed long overdue mortgages on once prosperous farms.　　Few escaped the suffering. African Americans who had left the poverty of the rural South for factory jobs in the North were among the first to be laid off. Mexican Americans, who had flowed in to replace European immigrants, met with competition from angry citizens, now willing to do stoop labor in the fields and work as track layers on the railroads. Immigration officials used technicalities to halt the flow across the Rio Grande and even to reverse it; nearly a half million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, including families with children born in the United States.　　The poor—black, brown, and white—survived because they knew better than most Americans how to exist in poverty. They stayed in bed in cold weather, both to keep warm and to avoid unnecessary burning up of calories; they patched their shoes with pieces of rubber from discarded tires, heated only the kitchens of their homes, and ate scraps of food that others would reject.　　The middle class, which had always lived with high expectations, was hit hard. Professionals and white-collar workers refused to ask for charity even while their families went without food; one New York dentist and his wife turned on the gas and left a note saying, “We want to get out of the way before we are forced to accept relief money.” People who fell behind in their mortgage payments lost their homes and then faced eviction when they could not pay the rent. Health care declined. Middle-class people stopped going to doctors and dentists regularly, unable to make the required cash payment in advance for services rendered.　　Even the well-to-do were affected, giving up many of their former luxuries and weighed down with guilt as they watched former friends and business associates join the ranks of the impoverished. “My father lost everything in the Depression” became an all-too-familiar refrain among young people who dropped out of college.　　Many Americans sought escape in movement. Men, boys, and some women, rode the rails in search of jobs, hopping freights to move south in the winter or west in the summer. On the Missouri Pacific alone, the number of vagrants increased from just over 13,000 in 1929 to nearly 200,000 in 1931. One town in the Southwest hired special policemen to keep vagrants from leaving the boxcars. Those who became tramps had to keep on the move, but they did find a sense of community in the hobo jungles that sprang up along the major railroad routes. Here a man could find a place to eat and sleep, and people with whom to share his misery. Louis Banks, a black veteran, told interviewer Studs Terkel what these informal camps were like:　　Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, cause everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. We used to take a big pot and cook food, cabbage, meat and beans all together. We all set together, we made a tent. Twenty-five or thirty would be out on the side of the rail, white and colored: They didn’t have no mothers or sisters, they didn’t have no home, they were dirty, they had overalls on, they didn’t have no food, they didn’t have anything.

The plane was circling over the landing field for l5 minutes when the pilot was told that he should use the Westside Field.

Incredible as it sounds, that is now the policy of a certain faction of Parliament.

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Gooseneck barnacles attach themselves to objects such as decks and boats.

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The ice cream cone, the hamburger, and iced tea were all introduced at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition informally known as the St. Louis Fair.

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