试卷详情
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专业英语四级阅读-10
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[单项选择]Simply walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood can make you feel more paranoid (偏执) and lower your trust in others.
In a study published in the journal Peer J, student volunteers who spent less than an hour in a more dangerous neighborhood showed significant changes in some of their social perceptions.
The researchers’ goal was to investigate the relationship between lower income neighborhoods and reduced trust and poor mental health. While the association is well known, the scientists, from Newcastle University in the UK, wanted to determine whether the connection was due to people reacting to the environment around them, or because those who are generally less trusting were more likely to live in troubled areas. Prior research showed that kids who grew up in such neighborhoods were less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to develop stress that can lead to depression.
The study took 50 students, sent half of them to a low income, high crime
A. The research showed relationships between trust and mental health.
B. People who are not trustful tend to live in troubled areas.
C. Kids from secure areas are more stressful.
D. Kids from troubled areas are more likely poorly-educated.
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[单项选择]In The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar, a business professor at Columbia University and a leading expert on decision making, tells us that making sound choices is even more difficult than we think. To learn how to make better decisions, we first need to become aware of the pitfalls (陷阱) we typically encounter.
Iyengar reveals, for example, that having many options to choose from does not lead to better outcomes, despite popular assumptions to the contrary. For instance, she found that consumers were far more likely to buy jam when given fewer flavor choices, not more. "We frequently pay a mental and emotional tax for freedom of choice," she writes. To become better choosers, Iyengar proposes that when confronted with an abundance of options, people should focus first on the easiest elements of the decision and work up to the more complex parts.
She illustrates this point using one study in which Audi buyers had to choose among 144 total car features. One group starte
A. only focus on the easiest elements
B. only focus on the hardest elements
C. start from the easiest to the hardest
D. start from the hardest to the easiest
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[单项选择]Wearable gadgets like smart watches and Google Glass can seem like a fad that has all the durability of CB radios or Duran Duran, but they’re important early signs of a new era of technology that will drive investment and innovation for years.
Tech companies are pushing out waves of wearable technology products—all of them clumsy and none of them yet really catching on. Samsung is excitedly hawking its Galaxy Gear smart watch, and Google, Apple, Qualcomm (高通公司), and others are expected to come out with competing versions. Google Glass gets lots of gee-whiz attention, and every other day, someone new introduces a fitness tracker, a GPS kid-monitoring bracelet, or—yeah, seriously—interactive underwear.
These are all part of a powerful trend: Over the past 40 years, digital technology has consistently moved from far away to close to us.
Go back long enough, and computers the size of Buicks stayed in the back rooms of big companies. Most people never touched them. By the lat
A. Wearable products are warmly welcomed by customers.
B. Wearable products are a signal of new technology era.
C. Samsung has launched its wearable gadget.
D. Wearable products are clumsy at this stage.
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[单项选择]Children as young as four will study Shakespeare in a project being launched today by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The RSC is holding its first national conference for primary school teachers to encourage them to use the Bard’s plays imaginatively in the classroom from reception classes onwards. The conference will be told that they should learn how Shakespearian characters like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are "jolly characters" and how to write about them.
At present, the national curriculum does not require pupils to approach Shakespeare until secondary school. All it says is that pupils should study " texts drawn from a variety of cultures and traditions" and "myths, legends and traditional stories".
However, educationists at the RSC believe children will gain a better appreciation of Shakespeare if they are introduced to him at a much younger age. "Even very young children can enjoy Shakespeare’s plays," said Mary Johnson, head of the learning depar
A. How to give pupils a flavour of Shakespeare drama.
B. The fun of reading Shakespeare.
C. RSC project will teach children how to write on Shakespeare.
D. RSC project will help four-year-old children find the fun in Shakespeare.
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[单项选择]Because I married a photographer, once we had children, our holiday cards of course became vehicles for their cuteness and his creativity. In 2000, baby number one’s chubby smiling face in a Santa hat was the cover image. In 2004, our now-four faces were ornaments on a tree. By 2006, we wore stocking caps and lay down in bed together with a thought bubble over our sleeping heads filled with cherries. Our best card was our last, in 2010. We dressed in extravagant holiday finery, gowns, jackets and bow-ties. We titled it: "Don We Now Our Gay Apparel. "
That was two years ago. We mailed it out in envelopes, signed, sealed and delivered by the US Postal Service and its analogues in distant lands. Good cheer and laughs in mailboxes all around! It’s been downhill ever since. By last year, we’d let our mailing list go to seed. We communicated with most of our friends online and no longer had street addresses for them.
I didn’t know it then but my world, my
A. Being used.
B. Out of use.
C. Develop.
D. Available.
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[单项选择]Executive coaching is primarily concerned with confidential one-to-one discussions between the coach and the executive. It is aimed at performance improvement. Primary needs are diagnosed and agreed upon, a "developmental-action plan" is drawn up, the skill base of the executive is broadened by coaching, and then the new skill sets are tested in the workplace under the guidance of the coach. Sometimes, these needs involve team coaching, but individual coaching is the normal starting point. The coach needs to guide the executive outside his or her comfort zone in order to improve performance.
A coaching assignment normally focuses on two or three developmental needs of the individual, and lasts for 6 to 12 months. However, it sometimes involves multiple assignments aimed at bringing about cultural change in an organization. For example, a new chief executive may want to change the culture of his organization. He could then hire a coach,and brief him or her to change the mindset of
A. Teaching executives skills they have not before.
B. Assisting executives to run their businesses.
C. Making a series of rules for executives to manage their subordinates.
D. Improving the team work of staff in the executives’ organizations.
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[单项选择]First the good news: 9 in 10 people said they were satisfied with their jobs or the work that they do—and that remained steady throughout 2008, despite the economy. And now the bad, even if it’s not so surprising: The number of people who said their employer reduced the size of the workforce rose dramatically during the year, from 15% in the first quarter to 23% in the fourth quarter.
That’s according to a survey from Gallup and health management company Healthways. Nearly each day in 2008, about l,000 adults were asked about their physical, emotional, economic and workplace well-being. When it came to their work environment, many of the 355,334 people surveyed by phone were positive. But there were some labor pains.
Just 47% of respondents from Hawaii said they were satisfied with their jobs, used their strengths at work, were treated by a supervisor as a partner and worked in an "open, trusting environment". That was the lowest score of any state on a work environment index
A. The economy of 2008 is still steady.
B. More people had to change their jobs.
C. From Jan. to Apr. , about 54,000 people lost their jobs.
D. Most of the people surveyed felt hopeless.
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[单项选择]Google has an ambitious vision for spectacles. On June 27th Sergey Brin, one of the company’s co-founders, revealed the next stage of Project Glass, its effort to create wireless-connected glasses that allow their wearers to do a host of things, including receiving and responding to messages, and taking and sharing photos and videos. The goal is to get prototypes in the hands of software developers early next year and then to sell a more polished set of specs to consumers in late 2013 or early the following year.
A product of Google’s secretive X Lab, whose mission is to push the boundaries of computing, the glasses were on show at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco along with several other gadgets, including a cheap tablet computer and a new wireless media player for the home. These gadgets attracted plenty of attention, but the longest queues at the event were at booths where folk were trying on Google’s spectacles.
That is hardly surprising because the gla
A. Late 2012.
B. Early 2013.
C. Late 2013.
D. Early 2014.