单选题______A capable B cheap C practical D affordable

With the increased use of high-tech communications equipment, business people __________.

Mary happened to meet her best friend in the middle school while she was in Paris on business.

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She told me that she has already gone to the United States four times before she attended that conference.

Which of the following is NOT true about the Hawthorne study?

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They know that strong winds, mild and humid air, and cold air near to each other might trigger a really explosive weather situation.

Water Crisis in Spain　　There’ve been floods, gales and heat waves across Europe-and some lay the blame for the unpredictable weather on climate change.　　Spain is undergoing its worst drought for sixty years with many areas in the south of the country not seeing a drop of rain for months. Some reservoirs are nearly empty while the volume of water in some rivers is down to a third of its normal level.　　Guadalajara, in the centre of the country, used to be a prosperous tourist area. Its old Moorish name, ironically, means water running through rocks. But when Emma Jane Kirby visited the small town of Buendia, she found an ecological disaster area in the marketing.　　There’s a strange smell around the lake at Buendia, the sort of smell that greets you when you first open the fridge after a week or two away from home—a putrid stench of salad leaves that’ve begun to turn to compost in their cellophane bag. I’m reluctant to mention this to my companion, Marco ObisP0 because this after are is the place where he has spent every one of his summer holidays and a just few hours ago we were pouting over the family photograph books while he reminisced wistfully about his idyllic childhood.　　The problem is I don’t recognize this place as being the same one he showed me in the pictures Those images boasted bronzed children racing joyfully down a bank of emerald green grass towards a vast expanse of water so blue that the cornflower sky above looked dazzled. But this landscape is bleached and barren, the banks crusted white, the ponds patchy and the colour of thin ink.　　Guadalajara in the centre of Spain has been hit hard by drought. The rains haven’t come since spring last year, leaving the soil parched and lifeless, as cracked and scarred as the face of a small pox victim. The sun has sucked the life from anything that once had the energy to be green and stealthily, its hot tongue has lapped away at the lake’s edge reducing the reservoirs to a fifth of the size they were twenty years ago. As quickly as the water’s evaporated, so have the tourists—the holidaymakers from all over Europe with whom Marco played as a child have been lured away to other areas of Spain where swimming or sailing a boat can be done without fear of scraping knees or hulls on the lake bed.　　If the landscape is crying out for new water management, then it’s weeping with painful dust-dry tears. North east of Buendia, only the ancient Spanish pine forests seem able to sustain life, some atavistic survival instinct wing them triumph over droughts which long ago killed off the weaker competition. But the trees are now so dehydrated and sapless they’ve become irresistible to fire-two weeks ago, thirteen thousand hectares were lost to a spark from a barbecue-an inferno that also claimed the lives of eleven men. As far as the eye can see now, the hills are almost bare.

The phrase “call-outs” in the passage is used to____________.

A newly developed plastic, prized by engineers for its low weight and its durability , has been developed.

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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 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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Innovative approaches to manufacturing, coupled with the tremendous size of the domestic market, led to the emergence of the United States as an industrial giant.

重视儿童肥胖问题　　如今，由于肥胖，年轻人正受到像糖尿病等一些潜在的病魔的折磨。伦敦卫生及热带医学学院的安德鲁．普伦蒂斯(Andrew Prentice)教授认为，高脂肪的快餐饮食，加上电视和电脑使得孩子们养成了久坐不动的生活方式，极有可能大大缩短年轻一代的寿命。　　与此同时，人类的体形正在发生着革命性的变化，因为成人正越长越胖。最新的研究表明，1972年，英国男性的平均腰围仅为32.6英寸，目前是36～38英寸。而女性的平均腰围则从1920年的22英寸增加到50年代的24英寸，现在，则是30英寸。　　仅仅在英国，就有100多万l6岁以下的儿童被归为超重或者肥胖一族，比80年代中期多了一倍。每10个4岁的孩子中就有1个有医学上的肥胖症。这股源于美国的肥胖风已经传遍了欧洲、澳大利亚、美洲中部和中东。目前许多国家记录在案的医学肥胖者有20%，而超重人口已经占到总人数的一半以上。　　普伦蒂斯教授说，导致我们体形变化的原因是，高热量食物随手可得，而科技的发展使得人们每天消耗的热量却大大减少。

If only I am enough vitality，I could probably do without my one-o’clock nap.

Treading the world stage　　Yet this is not a time for the usual Brussels name game. The idea of a permanent president of the European Council was resisted by many smaller countries. But now it is being created, it would be ludicrous to fill it with a minor figure; a Juncker or a Schüssel. To the outside world—India or China, say—the president will speak for Europe. If the EU wants to be a serious global actor, that points to a world figure. Unless Ms Merkel steps forward, which is improbable, the only such person in the running is Mr. Blair.　　And there are two other arguments for him. First, he would disprove the notion that senior EU people must come from countries that join in all EU policies, including the euro, defence and justice and home affairs.This line was used to block Chris Patten as a commission president in 2004. But in an increasingly multispeed Europe, it would rule out nominees from more than half the EU countries. The EU president will not represent his government—indeed, though Mr. Brown says he backs Mr. Blair, few believe he is wholly sincere.  If the criterion is “Europeanness”, France, Italy and Germany should be disqualified as they are the worst offenders when it comes to breaching EU rules. Europe might end up being run only by Belgians and Luxembourgeois.　　Mr. Blair has a second advantage: he would remind the notoriously sceptical British that they are important players. This worked only up to a point with Roy Jenkins as commission president in the late 1970s. Three decades on, a British EU president would give pause to those who maintain that Britain never has any influence in Brussels. As one top Eurocrat sums it up, “the boldest choice for Europe would be the three Bs: Blair, Barroso and Bildt.” If it works in classical music, why not for Europe?

为应对国际金融危机冲击、保持经济平稳较快发展，中国及时调整宏观经济政策，果断实施积极的财政政策和适度宽松的货币政策，形成了进一步扩大内需、促进经济增长的一揽子计划。我们大规模增加政府支出，实施总额4万亿元人民币的两年投资计划，实行结构性减税政策，多次降息和增加银行体系流动性，大范围实施产业调整振兴规划，大力推进科技创新和技术改造，大力加强节能减排和生态环境保护，继续调整国民收入分配格局，大力拓展国内市场特别是农村市场，大幅度提高社会保障水平。现在，这些措施已取得初步成效、呈现出积极迹象，国内消费需求比较旺盛，投资需求稳步提高，社会大局保持稳定。这表明中国的应对思路是符合实际的，政策是积极有效的。中国为应对国际金融危机冲击采取的一系列举措不仅对本国经济、而且对区域经济乃至世界经济都将产生积极影响。　　面对国际金融危机冲击，我们将继续坚持对外开放的基本国策，始终不渝奉行互利共赢的开放战略。我们坚信，一个充满活力、更加开放的中国，不仅有利于保持中国经济平稳较快发展势头，而且有利于国际社会共同应对国际金融危机、促进世界和平与发展。

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Luther Whitney, the perfectionist cat burglar played by Clint Eastwood in Absolute Power, is as meticulous in his craftsmanship as Vermeer, as adept at disguise as Alec, as elusive as Houdini.

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