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The average number of hours of sleep that an adult needs is ______. A. approximately
The average number of hours of sleep that an adult needs is ______.
A. approximately six hours
B. around ten hours
C. about eight hours
D. not stated here
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The average number of hours of sleep that an adult needs is ______.
A. approximately six hours
B. around ten hours
C. about eight hours
D. not stated here
In the early fifties, only eight or nine out of a hundred young men changed their jobs within the first three years with the company. In the past few years, almost thirty-five percent of the college-graduated work force changed jobs within the same period. These people want to intensify their management training. Since most jobs take only a year to a year and a half to master, in order to continue learning, they have to make a job change. Even company presidents tend to be seen as mobile specialists, staying with one company an average of only five years.
Company presidents in the United States today tend to be young men who begin their careers with educational backgrounds in engineering science, or business management. They have worked for a few years as technical specialists and quickly moved into higher management positions. Most of them were making $ 30 000 per year by the time they reached thirty. On an average, these men have only twenty years working experience at management level when they become company presidents. On the way to the top, they have an average of eleven promotions and seven city transfers.
Friendships remain casual and are usually derived from business contracts. Families of these career men have little time to put down roots in and become part of a community.
In the past, a few men attained high positions through family and social connections; today, high positions go to men who are mobile, and have good educational, backgrounds.
According to the passage, an increasing number of future company presidents might be ______.
A.people who have spent a number of years with one company
B.young people who do not want to move often, but are steady and dependable
C.people who have spent a long time concerned with community affairs
D.young people who have good education and are willing to move around
Living alone has become more acceptable in American society.In the past people sometimes think those who lived alone were a little strange.These days,however,several of the most popular TV shows tell the story of men and women who can't meet "the right person" and who plan to be single forever.Many such single people (especially women) feel that they are more free to pursue (追求) their careers (事业) than those who are married.In a way these people are married to their jobs.
1.About 23 million people over the age of 21 were not married in America by 1996.
A.T
B.F
2.Most of men usually get married at the age of 27 in America.
A.T
B.F
3.In the past,people thought it was impossible to live alone.
A.T
B.F
4.Some people in America wouldn't like to get married,because they can't meet "the right person".
A.T
B.F
5.More and more people in the U.S.choose not to marry.
A.T
B.F
How to Find Time to Read
Do you want to know how to improve yourself all the time without having to spend more time reading because you get involved in work everyday? Does it sound too good to be true? Well, read on, please.
An Average Reader
If you are an average reader you can read an average book at the rate of 300 words a minute. You cannot maintain that average, however, unless you read regularly every day. Nor can you reach that speed with hard books in science, mathematics, agriculture, business, or any subject that is new or unfamiliar to you. The chances are that you will never attempt that speed with poetry or want to race through some passages in fiction over which you wish to linger. But for most of the novels, biographies, and books about travel, hobbies or personal interests, if you are an average reader you should have no trouble at all in absorbing meaning and pleasure out of 300 printed words every 60 seconds.
Statistics are not always practical, but consider the following: If the average reader can read 300 words a minute of average reading, then in 15 minutes he can read 4 500 words. Multiplied by 7, the days of the week, the product is 315 000. Another multiplication by 12, the months of the year, results in a grand total of 1 512 000 words. That is the total number of words of average reading an average reader can do in just 15 minutes a day for one year.
Books vary in length from 60 000 to 1 000 000 words. The average is about 75 000 words. In one year of average reading by an average reader for 15 minutes a day, 20 books will be read. That's a lot of books. It is 4 times the number of books read by public-library borrowers in America. And yet it is easily possible.
Sir William Osier
One of the greatest of all modern physicians was Sir William Osier. He taught at the Johns Hopkins Medical School He finished his teaching days at McGill University. Many of the out-standing physicians today were his students. Nearly all of the practicing doctors of today were brought up on his medical textbooks. Among his many remarkable contributions to medicine are his unpublished notes on how the people die.
His greatness is attributed by his biographers and critics not alone to his profound medical knowledge and insight but to his broad general education, for he was a very cultured man. He was very interested in what men have done and taught throughout the ages. And he knew that the only way to find out what the best experiences of the race had been was to read what people had written. But Osler's problem was the same as everyone else's, only more so. He was a busy physician, a teacher of physicians, and a medical-research specialist. There was no time in a 4-hour day that did not rightly belong to one of these three occupations, except the few hours for sleep, meals, and bodily functions.
Osler arrived at his solution early. He would read the last 15 minutes before he want to sleep. If bedtime was set for 11:00 Pm, he read from 11:00 to 11:15. If research kept him up to 2:00 AM, he read from 2:00 to 2:15. Over a very long time, Osler never broke the role once he had established it. We have evidence that after a while he simply could not fall asleep until he had done his 15 minutes of reading.
In his lifetime, Osler read a significant library of books. Just do a mental calculation for halfa century of 15-minute reading periods daily and see how many books you get. Consider what a range of interests and variety of subjects are possible in one lifetime. Osler read widely outside of medical specialty. Indeed, he developed from this 15-minute reading habit a vocational specialty to balance his vocational specialization. Among scholars in English literature, Osler is known as an authority on Sir Thomas Browne, seventeenth century English prose master, and Osler's library on Sir Thomas is considered one of t
A.Y
B.N
C.NG
Muscles are stringly bundles of fibers varying from one five - thousand of an inch to about three inches. They have three unique characteristics, they can become shorter and thicker; they can stretch; and they can retract to their original positions. Under a high -powered microscope, muscle tissue is seen as long, slender cells with a grainy texture like wood.
More than half of a person' s body is composed of muscle fibers, most of which are involuntary, in other words, work without conscious direction. The voluntary muscles, those that we move consciously to perform. particular actions, number more than five hundred. Women have only 60 to 70 percent as much muscle as men for their body mass. That is why an average woman can' t lift as much, throw as far, or hit as hard as an average man.
According to the selection, the muscular sense is responsible for ______ .
A.the efficiency of our muscles
B.the normal breathing function
C.directing our muscles intelligently
D.the work of only our involuntary muscles
Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and declining middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machine or foreign workers.
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average is just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genins. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra – their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment.
Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “ In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs – about 6 millions in total – disappeared.”
There will always be change – new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution , the beat jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average.
In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.
The joke in Paragraph 1 is used to illustrate
A.the impact of technological advances
B.the alleviation of jobs pressure
C.the shrinkages of textile mills
D.the decline of middle-class incomes
The fastest transatlantic voyage by a packet mentioned by the author was from ______.
A.Liverpool to New York
B.New York to Liverpool
C.Liverpool to Baltimore
D.Baltimore to Liverpool
Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
The planet's wild creatures face a new threat—from yuppies (雅皮士), empty nesters and one parent families.
Biologists studying the pressure on the planet's dwindling biodiversity today report on a new reason for alarm. Although the rate of growth in the human population is decreasing, the number of individual households is exploding.
Even where populations have actually dwindled in some regions of New Zealand, for instance— the numbers of individual households has increased, because of divorce, career choice, smaller families and longer lifespan.
Jianguo Lin of Michigan State University and colleagues from Stanford University in California report in Nature, in a paper published online in advance, that a greater number of individual households, each containing on average fewer people, meant more pressure on natural resources.
Towns and cities began to sprawl (蔓生,蔓延) as new homes were built. Each household needed fuel to heat and light it; each household required its own plumbing, cooking and refrigeration.
"In larger households, the efficiency of resource consumption will be a lot higher, because more people share things," Dr Liu said. He and his colleagues looked at the population patterns of life in 141 countries, including 76 "hotspot' regions unusually rich in a variety of local wildlife. These hot spots included Australia, New Zealand, the US, Brazil, China, India, Kenya, and Italy. They found that between 1985 and 2000 in the "hotspot" parts of the globe, the annual 3.1% growth rate in the number of households was far higher than the population growth rate of 1.8%.
"Had the average household size remained at the 1985 level," the scientists report, "there would have been 155 million fewer households in hotspot countries in 2000.
Dr Liu's work grew from the alarming discovery that the giant pandas living in China's Wolong reserve are more at risk now than they were when the reserve was first established. The local population had grown, but the total number of homes had increased more swiftly, to make greater inroads into the bamboo forests.
Only around 1.75 million species on the planet have been named and described. Biologists estimate that there could be 7 million, or even 17 million, as yet to be identified. But human numbers have grown more than sixfold in the past 200 years, and humans and their livestock are now the greatest single consumer group on the planet. The world population will continue to soar, perhaps leveling off around 9 billion in the next century. Environmental campaigners have claimed that between a quarter and a half of all the species on earth could become extinct in the next century.
Biologists report that the biodiversity is decreasing because ______.
A.more individual households are increasing greatly
B.human beings are threatening many wild creatures
C.human populations have been decreasing in recent years
D.wild creatures depend on more individual households
Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and declining middle-class incomes today is also because of the advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign worker.
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job,could earn an average lifestyle. ,But ,today ,average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra-their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment.
Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes,” In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs-about 6 million in total -disappeared.
There will always be changed-new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average.
In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to support employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I.Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to poet-high school education.
The joke in Paragraph 1 is used to illustrate_______ .
A.the impact of technological advances
B.the alleviation of job pressure
C.the shrinkage of textile mills
D.the decline of middle-class incomes
The quotation in Paragraph 4 explains that ______ .A.gains of technology have been erased
B.job opportunities are disappearing at a high speed
C.factories are making much less money than before
D.new jobs and services have been offered
According to the author, to reduce unemployment, the most important is_____ .A.to accelerate the I.T. revolution
B.to ensure more education for people
C.ro advance economic globalization
D.to pass more bills in the 21st century
Which of the following would be the most appropriate title for the text?A.New Law Takes Effect
B.Technology Goes Cheap
C.Average Is Over
D.Recession Is Bad
According to Paragraph 3, to be a successful employee, one has to______ .A.work on cheap software
B.ask for a moderate salary
C.adopt an average lifestyle
D.contribute something unique
Why do women earn less than men do? Are the differences explained by the fact that women are looked down upon? If so, the government has to intervene (干预), to force the employers to pay equal wages to equal jobs. However, there is no agreement among economists about the causes of the gap. One view argues that women on the average have chosen low-paid jobs in which workers enjoy the freedom of entering and leaving the labor force, which reduces their years of experience relative to men. Other people say the gap can also be explained by the difference in educational background.
Much of the gap, however, has not been fully explained. It might be the result of some prejudice (偏见) against women. It is this part that has produced calls for government action. What would happen if the government did intervene to increase the wages paid to women? One possibility is that in comes for women as a group might actually decline (下降). An increase in wage decreases the quantity of labor imput demanded, resulting in decreased employment as the rate of hiring new workers declines The result will be a surplus (过剩) of labor. Those who can find jobs might be better off while those who had jobs might find themselves out of work.
The difference in labor incomes is most obvious between ______.
A.young men and young women
B.young women in the same industry
C.middle-aged men and middle-aged women
D.middle-aged women in the same industry