单选题______A require B advise C ask D tell

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What can be inferred from the passage?

The farmers know that fertilizer can accelerate the growth of these tomato plants.

The pupils’ attitudes are NOT influenced by __________.

中国海洋事业的发展　　海洋覆盖了地球表面的71％，是全球生命支持系统的一个基本组成部分，也是资源的宝库，环境的重要调节器。人类社会的发展必然会越来越多地依赖海洋。　　二十一世纪是人类开发利用海洋的新世纪。维护《联合国海洋法公约》确定的国际海洋法律原则，维护海洋健康，保护海洋环境，确保海洋资源的可持续利用和海上安全，已成为人类共同遵守的准则和共同担负的使命。　　中国是一个发展中的沿海大国。中国高度重视海洋的开发和保护，把发展海洋事业作为国家发展战略，加强海洋综合管理，不断完善海洋法律制度，积极发展海洋科学技术和教育。中国积极参与联合国系统的海洋事务，推进国家间和地区性海洋领域的合作，并认真履行自己承担的义务，为全球海洋开发和保护事业作出了积极贡献。

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Scarcely had they settled themselves in their seats in the theatre while the curtain went up.

The relationship between politicians and the press　　In the seaside town of Brighton in southern England the ruling Labour Party’s annual conference is getting underway. It’s a time for both Mps and grassroots members to take stock of how the party is doing, to discuss policy and to hear, hopefully inspiring speeches. The party delegates will be hoping too for plenty of coverage from the media assembled there.　　Newspapers in Britain have long had great influence over Governments, much to the resentment of the politicians. Almost seventy-five years ago, the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin accused the two big press barons, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, of running their papers as “engines of propaganda” for the “personal wishes and personal dislikes of two men”. He famously accused them of seeking “power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” It’s hard to imagine the current Prime Minister Tony Blair attacking the tabloid press so publicly.　　The former editor of the Daily Mirror Piers Morgan claimed earlier this year that he met the Labour leader no fewer than fifty-eight times for lunches, dinners or interviews, a statistic which astonished many in Government and the media, who thought a party leader and Prime Minister should have had better ways to spend his time. But Tony Blair has good reason to court the press. In Britain, Labour, left-of-centre governments, have always had problems with national newspapers, most of whose owners traditionally supported the right-of-centre Conservative Party. This came to a head on Election Day in 1992 when Labour seemed set to win power for the first time in eighteen years.　　In those days, Britain’s biggest-selling daily paper, the sun, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, was no friend of Labour, indeed it had been Margaret Thatcher’s biggest cheerleader. That morning, on its front page, it depicted the bald head of the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock as a light bulb. Alongside ran the headline: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?” Labour lost. By the next election, Tony Blair was the party’s leader and determined to win over, or at least neutralize, The Sun and its owner. He succeeded, moving the Labor Party towards the center ground, and gaining The Sun’s endorsement at the last three elections.　　Once in Government, Labour played hardball with the media, relishing its power, and aware that if it did not take charge of the agenda, the media would. Its key figure was the former political editor of the Daily Mirror, Alasdair Campbell, who took charge not just of the Prime Minister’s press office but all government press officers, trying to ensure the Government spoke with one voice. Journalists who reported favorably were given privileged access; those who didn’t were frozen out.　　Mr. Blair maintained his close links with R Murdoch and his newspapers; doing everything he could to maintain their support. Lance Price claims in his diaries that the Government assured the tycoon and his editors that it wouldn’t change its policy on Europe without asking them.

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Elworth’s barn burnt down，but they saved what cattle which were in the barn.

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Robot　　Even before the first robot was built, the subject of robotics was controversial. The word robot was coined in 1921 by a Czech playwright who wrote about a colony of machines endowed with artificial intelligence that eventually turned against3 their human creators. Although that account was fictional, the first industrial robots were in use by the early 1960s. Today, we continue to be intrigued by robots and their potential for both good and evil.　　Basically, a robot is any machine that performs work or other actions normally done by humans. Most robots are used in factories to make products such as cars and electronics. Others are used to explore underwater, in volcanoes and even on other planets.　　Robots consist of three main components: a brain, which is usually a computer; actuators and mechanical parts such as motors, wheels and gears; and sensors for detecting images, sound, temperature, motion and light. With these basic components, robots can interact with their environment and perform the tasks they are designed to carry out.　　The advantages are obvious — robots can do things humans just don’t want to do, and they are usually more cost effective. Robots can also do things more precisely than humans and allow progress in medical science and other useful advances.　　But, as with any machine, a robot can break down and even cause disaster. There’s also the possibility that wicked people will use robots for evil purposes. Yet this is also true with other forms of technology such as weapons and biological material.　　Robots will probably be used even more in the future. They will continue to do tasks where danger, repetition, cost or the need for precision prevents humans from performing. As to whether they will be used for good or evil, that depends on the nature of the humans who create them.

We cannot compromise with those whose principles are directly opposed to our own.

Although the Moon has not held great prominence in the history of religion, the veneration of the Moon by some societies has been practiced since early times.

In the near future, starvation will be prevented by __________.

Public Schools　　However good the state schools may be, it is still true that if an English parent has enough money to pay the fees to send his children to an independent school he will most probably do so.　　In independent schools boys and girls above the age of eight are usually educated separately. The terms “primary” and “secondary” are not usually applied to independent schools at the different levels because the age of transfer from a lower to a higher school is normally thirteen or fourteen instead of eleven. The principal schools for boys of over thirteen are called “public schools” and those for younger boys are usually called “preparatory” (or colloquially “prep”) schools.　　For girls there are some preparatory schools and public schools which are female imitations of the boys’ institutions.　　A typical “preparatory school’“—or private primary school—is very small, with between fifty and a hundred boys, either all boarders or all dayboys, or some of each. Many of these schools are in adapted houses in the country or in small towns, houses built in the nineteenth century and too big to be inhabited by families in the conditions of the modern world. If there are fifty boys, aged between eight-plus and thirteen-plus, they will probably be taught in five or six grades (or “forms”); the headmaster will himself work as an ordinary teacher, and he will have four or five assistants working for him. The preparatory schools prepare boys for the public schools’ common entrance examination and for public school life. The, schools in the state system do not prepare boys for the public schools’ common entrance examination, so a boy who tried to change from the states system to the independent school system at the age of thirteen would find difficulty in entering a public school at all.　　With a few exceptions public schools are all boarding schools, providing residential accommodation for their pupils, though many of them take some day-boys also. Most are in the southern half of England. Some of them are several hundred years old, but many others, including some of the most prominent thirty, were founded during the past 140 years. Most public schools, particularly the most eminent ones, are called by the name of the town or village in which they are situated; some are called “College” and some are not. The four most famous of all are Eton College, Harrow School, Winchester College and Rugby School.　　Public schools are inspected by the inspectors of the Department of Education, but otherwise they are quite independent. Each has a board of governors. They control the finances and appoint the headmaster, who in his turn appoints the other teachers. To send a boy to .a leading public school costs about 900 to 1,100 pounds a year, though some of the less prominent schools may cost as little as 600 pounds. All the schools award “scholarships” to some of their boys who do very good work in an examination on entering or during their first year, and the boys who win scholarships pay reduced fees or in a few cases no fees at all.

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The Environment in Perspective:Is Everything Getting Steadily Worse?　　Much of the discussion of environmental problems in the popular press leaves the reader with the impression that matters have been growing steadily worse, and that pollution is largely a product of the profit system and modern industrialization. There are environmental problems today that are both enormous and pressing, but in fact pollution is nothing new. Medieval cities were pestholes—the streets and rivers were littered with garbage and the air stank of rotting wastes. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a German traveler reported that to get a view of London from the tower of St. Paul’s, one had to get there very early in the morning “before the air was full of coal smoke.”　　Since 1960 there has been progress in solving some pollution problems, much of it the result of concerted efforts to protect the environment. The quality of the air in most Canadian cities has improved. In Toronto, for example, the concentration of suspended particulates, or soot, in the air has fallen dramatically since 1962. To put this figure in perspective, it should be noted that the current health advisory level for the index is 32. At a level of 58, people with chronic respiratory diseases may be affected. At 100, even healthy people may be affected by prolonged conditions, and those with cardiac and respiratory diseases could suffer severe effects　　Recently in Toronto, the index has exceeded 32 on fewer than half a dozen days annually. Similar improvements have occurred elsewhere in Canada and in other industrialized countries. Even the famous, or rather infamous, “fogs” of London are almost a thing of the past. There have been two high readings of particular note in the British capital in 1959 (when the index rose to 275 and there was a 10 percent increase over the normal number of deaths) and in 1962 (when the index rose to 575 and there was a 20 percent increase in mortality). But more recently, London’s, cleaner air has resulted in an astounding 50 percent increase in the number of hours of winter sunshine. In short, pollution problems are not a uniquely modem phenomenon, nor is every part of the environment deteriorating relentlessly.　　Environmental problems do not occur exclusively in capitalist economies. For example, in the People’s Republic of China, coal soot from factory smokestacks in Beijing envelops the city in a thick black haze. Similarly, smoke from brown-coal furnaces pollutes the air almost everywhere in Eastern Europe. It has been estimated that a third of Poland’s citizens live in areas of “ecological disaster”. The citizens of Leipzig, a major industrial city in what was formerly East Germany, have a life expectancy a full six years shorter than the national average.　　However, we do not mean to suggest that all is well with the environment in market-oriented economies or that there is nothing more to do. While there have been some improvements, serious problems remain. Our world is now subject to a number of new pollutants, most of which are far more dangerous than those we have reduced, even though they may be less visible and less malodorous　　While environmental problems are neither new nor confined only to capitalist, industrialized economies, these facts are not legitimate grounds for complacency. The potential damage that we are inflicting on ourselves and on our surroundings is very real and very substantial.

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