It is unimaginable to do research nowadays without the help of a computer.

thusiasm.

When one is in good health, death is ______ unimaginable to him.

A．nothing but

B．after all

C．all but

D．above all

Which one is correct according to this article？

A．Human"s ability of understanding is faster than new technology.

B．The future development of the unimaginable science is harder.

C．Embeding technology with commerce is good only in free trade regimes.

D．Emerging technologies are a challenge for human"s intelligence.

My fellow leaders,

Let me begin by saying it is a great honor to have this unprecedented gathering of world leaders in the United States.We come together not at a remarkable moment on the calendar,but at a dawn of a new era in human affairs,when globalization,revolution and information technology have brought us together than ever before.

To an extent unimaginable just a few years ago,we reach across geographical and cultural divides.We know what is going on in each other's countries.We share experiences,triumphs,tragedies,aspirations.

根据以下材料，回答题

Is the Tie a Necessity？

Ties， or neckties， have been a symbol of politeness and elegance in Britain for centuries. But the casual Prime Minister Tony Blair has problems with them. Reports suggest that even the civil servants may stop wearing ties. So， are the famously formal British really going to abandon the neckties？

Maybe Last week， the UK"s Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull openly welcomed a tieless era. He hinted that civil servants would soon be free of the costliest 12 inches of fabric that most men ever buy in their lives.

In fact， Blair showed this attitude when he had his first guests to a cocktail party. Many of them were celebrities （知名人士） without ties， which would have been unimaginable even in the recent past.

For some more conservative British， the tie is a must for proper appearance. Earlier， Labor leader Jim Callaghan said he would have died rather than have his children seen in public without a tie. For people like Callaghan， the tie was a sign of being complete， of showing respect. Men were supposed to wear a tie when going to church， to work in the office， to a party——almost every social occasion.

But today， people have begun to accept a casual style. even for formal occasions.

The origin of the tie is tricky. It started as something called simply a "band". The term could mean anything around a man"s neck. It appeared in finer ways in the 1630s. Frenchmen showed a love of this particular fashion statement. Their neckwear （颈饰） impressed Charles II， the king of England who was exiled （流放） to France at that time. When he returned to England in 1660， he brought this new fashion item along with him.

It wasn"t， however， until the late 18th century that fancy young men introduced a more colorful， flowing piece of cloth that eventually became known as the tie. Then， clubs military institutions and schools began to use colored and patterned ties to indicate the wearer"s membership in the late 19th century. After that， the tie became a necessary item of clothing for British gentlemen.

But now， even gentlemen are getting tired of ties. Anyway， the day feels a bit easier when you wake up without having to decide which tie suits you and your mood.

The tie symbolizes all of the following except __________. 查看材料

A.respect

B.elegance

C.politeness

D.democracy

China's New Middle Class

Xia Jiaping opened his living room window and gazed out across the city he calls home. "None of this was here when I was young," he said of the glass and steel towers rising in the distance.

The new skyscrapers weren't there before, but then, neither was the new class of Chinese to which Xia belongs.

His membership in that class is loudly proclaimed by the middle-class furnishings that are scattered about his 14th-floor apartment: a leather sofa, a flat-screen television, a flat-screen computer, a violin for his daughter, a microwave oven, and thick carpets. If the country has a history that's five millennia long as it says it has, then the rise of the middle class has occurred in scarcely the blink of an eye. Its emergence is one of the most rapid social transformations in history.

New Change

The creation of this middle class has either come from or has released from large-scale economic, social and cultural change and, in the eyes of many Chinese, it signals the beginning of a permanent transformation of Chinese society.

"Nobody in 1990 could have looked forward 10 years and predicted where China is today," said Shao Yibo, who received his MBA at Harvard University. He returned to Shanghai three years ago to start Eachnet. com, a Chinese version of eBay, the online auctioneer. "There have been some unimaginable changes in China. And people just have to be here to believe it. This is clearly a city where things are happening. Shanghai is an exciting place to be."

Shao's company, which offers Chinese consumers everything from cars to houses, cosmetics to computers, cell phones to antique Hong Kong bonds, is just one of the thousands of new, privately owned concerns appearing in Shanghai. These companies cater to middle class cravings while creating middle-class jobs.

China was not like the United States, Europe and even post-war Japan. Its growing consumer class does not have its roots in any middle-class ancestry. The parents of this new class of people invariably were workers or farmers.

Xia is now a manager at one of the world's largest software companies. He was born in this city in 1965, where he joined four older sisters in his parents' two-room home in a dormitory for factory workers. But, when China's reforms, which began in the late 1970s, meant that universities began accepting freshmen after being closed for a decade, Xia made the move. He was a diligent student, and in 1984 was admitted to Shanghai's Jiaotong University, to study applied mathematics.

Taking the Plunge

When he was about to graduate, an assortment of state-owned companies and research institutes visited Jiaotong to recruit. "I was offered a position by the East China Computer Research Institute, a government institute," Xia said. "At the time there were some other choices but nothing seemed as good as this. Things were in transition at the time but we were not so clear as to what was happening. I'd say most students went to state-owned institutions. " Xia worked for the institute for five years, all the time living with his parents. While he was at the institute he studied programming and became familiar with major software systems. His monthly pay was about US $ 250. Then, in 1993, he got a call that would change his life. "A salesman at this company called me and asked me to join," he explained. "But the first time they asked me I said I wasn't ready."

"I said I hadn't thought about taking the plunge into the sea," said Xia, using the expression common at the time for leaving the safety net of state employment and taking a risk in the private sector. "Then they called me again and came to my home. I was not alone in thinking it was a risk to do something like this, all of society thought it was a risk. You have to remember t

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The Businessman of the Century

Led by people who could take an idea and turn it into an industry, our world reached unheard-of levels of productivity and prosperity. From Henry Ford at one end of the century to Bill Gates at the other, they influenced lives far beyond the business world. American magazine FORTUNE lists four most influential businessmen of the past 100 years and selects one of them to be the Businessman of the Century. The following is how the man is chosen.

What the Business of the Century is Like？

To select one man to be the Businessman of the Century is to look back upon almost unimaginable change. Organization Man rose to challenge the robber baron (强盗式贵族，强盗式资本家). The railroad and telegraph had created mass markets. New machines had made mass production possible. Business had to change to exploit these opportunities; big far-flung enterprises simply couldn't be financed or run by one tycoon(大亨), however rich or brilliant. He needed share-holders, executives, business units, and staff. "Thus came into being," writes historian Alfred D. Chandler, "a new economic institution, the managerial business enterprises, and a new subspecies of economic man, the salaried manager."

The 20th century was the Century of the Manager.

Who is Better, the Manager or the Entrepreneur？

It's impossible to think of America,-without the restless entrepreneurial (企业家的) desire to go someplace new, do something new, become someone new. The peculiar gift of American capitalism seems to be its ability to keep both the manager and the entrepreneur in the ring (拳击场), fighting forever, neither gaining a permanent advantage over the other. At mid-century, the popular ideal of business might have been the manager, but at the century' s beginning -- and certainly now at its conclusion -- our heroes are builder, founders, risk takers.

What Makes the Businessman of the Century？

How to pick one to stand above the rest？ He should, dearly, be someone who was well known at the time he labored and is still famous today -- that is, a person who was noticeably successful in both the short run and the long. He should have been captain of an enterprise of some scale (规模). And we concluded that Businessman of the Century should have been part of an industry that is characteristic of his time.

Why Must the Businessman of the Century be Selected from Car and Computer Industries？

We narrowed the search to a final four. Each was the dominant businessman of a quarter of this century; each created or built a corporation that is still greatly influential today; each played a major role in automobiles or computers, the two industries that, more than any others, distinguish this century from those of the past. As it happens, the men are equally divided between entrepreneurs and managers: Two of them founded great concerns but also managers who brought enormous growth and wealth to their employers. Now, the four candidates were:

HENRY FORD (1865--1946): Founder of Ford Motor Co.

ALFR1ED P. SLOAN JR. (1876--1966): CEO of GM

THOMAS J. WATSON JR. (1914--1993): CEO. of IBM

WILLIAM H. GATES (1955--): Founder of MICROSOFT

What's the Difficulty in Choosing One Out of the Four？

How can one pick among these four men, each being extraordinary leader, each amazingly successful, each the founder of a legacy that has -- or will have -- long outlived him？

Of the four men, Watson -- businessman, pilot, sailor, diplomat -- had the most soul and probably the most fun. If size mattered most, then Sloan or Watson might win the nod -- Microsoft is no smaller, but it' s only No. 109 on the FORTUNE 500. And it was Sloan who showed the world how to build a giant corporation and make it work. Sloan has the added merit of having competed directly with one of his fellow finalists, leaving Henr

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ar reaches of space, hoping to discover in them some mathematical pattern indicating that the waves were sent out by other intelligent beings. Someday the experiment may succeed.

What reason is there to think that we may actually detect intelligent life in outer space？ To begin with, modern theories of the development of stars suggest that almost every star has some sort of family of planets. So any star like our own sun (and there are billions of such stars in the universe) is likely to have a planet situated at such a distance that it would receive about the same amount of radiation as the earth.

Furthermore, such a planet would probably have the same general composition as our own; so, allowing a billion years or two--or three--there would be a very good chances for life to develop, if current theories of the origin of life are correct.

But intelligent life7 Life that has reached the stage of being able to send radio waves out into space in a conscious pattern7 Our own planet may have been in existence for five billion years and may have had life on it for two billion, but it is only in the last fifty years that we are capable of sending radio waves into space. From this it might seem that even if there were no technical problems involved, the chance of receiving signals from another planet would be extremely small.

This does not mean that intelligent life at our level does not exist somewhere. There are such an unimaginable number of stars that, even at such miserable odds, it seems certain that there are millions of intelligent life forms scattered through space. The only trouble is, none may be within our reach. Perhaps none never will be; perhaps the distances that separate us from our fellow inhabitants of this universe will forever remain too great to be conquered. And yet it is conceivable that someday we may come across one of them or one of them may come across us. What would they be like, these extraterrestrial(地球以外的) creatures？

If the radio waves had reached our planet one hundred years before, we would have______.

A．sent an immediate answer

B．sent an alarm against extraterrestrial attack

C．sent a short reply

D．sent no answer

ver Germany in 1944, Royal Air Force Gunnery Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade jumped from 18, 000 feet without a parachute (降落伞), calculating that this would be a quicker and less painful death.Unbelievably, he suffered only slight injuries. The last part of his 122-mile-per-hour fall was broken by the branches of young pine trees, thick springy undergrowth, and finally deep snow. "It was rather like bouncing on a trampoline, " he recalled.Sergeant Alkemade's experience is a dramatic rebuttal of the idea that people falling from great heights are dead before they hit the ground. Asphyxia, brought about by the speed of the fall, and heart failure through shock were thought to occur long before the final impact.The fallacy of this belief has been amply (充分地) demonstrated by free-fall parachutists who regularly drop several miles before opening their parachutes. In 1960 Capt. Joseph Kittinger jumped from a balloon in the United States and fell 16 miles before opening his parachute. He landed conscious and unhurt.

1.According to the passage, Nicholas Alkemade ____.

A、was a German officer during the Second World War

B、had often jumped from a height of about 18, 000 feet

C、was a British officer

D、calculated the height with a special instrument

2.Nicholas jumped out of his plane because ____.

A、he was a good parachutist

B、he would otherwise be burned to death

C、he wanted to become a hero

D、the Royal Air Force instructed him to do so

3.Nicholas's experience was ____.

A、only an experiment

B、just as he had expected it to be

C、something painful and quick

D、quite unimaginable

4.Which of the following in the passage was the name of Nicholas's plane？ ____

A、Lancaster

B、Gunnery

C、Trampoline

D、Asphyxia

5.The passage tells us that Capt. Joseph Kittinger ____.

A、served as a pilot during the Second World War

B、did not believe that people would die if they jumped from a plane without parachutes

C、made a successful free-fall land from a balloon

D、often forgot to open his parachute when jumping from a plane