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"This is a really exciting time—a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device-makers, content producers and mobile- network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are " streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device , including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125 million mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.It can be inferred from the last paragraph of the text that______.

A．mobile TV is coming—but how the market will develop is still unclear
B．consumers favor mobile TV if they need not pay for it
C．few mobile technologies failed to live up to expectations
D．the three uncertainties referred to at the end of the text are hopefully overcome in no time
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Menorca or Majorca It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator"s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.Based on the first paragraph, the best title of the text could be______.

A．An annual holiday
B．A High Court ruling
C．A new package
D．A British innovation
单项选择题

They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world"s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent"s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa"s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d"Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over 2 million Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey"s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece— hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.The statistics are employed in the first paragraph so as to indicate sort of______.

A．disparity
B．numbness
C．conformity
D．stagnation
单项选择题

The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco. com and dynamiteticketz, corn act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.UK is mentioned in the text with the intention to______.

A．define re-selling tickets for profits
B．stress the prosperity of the industry
C．shed light on the booming of scalping
D．cast doubt on the profits of online ticket market
单项选择题

"This is a really exciting time—a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device-makers, content producers and mobile- network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are " streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device , including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125 million mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.The word "nascent" in the first paragraph of the text most probably means______.

A．distinctive
B．statutory
C．naive
D．emerging
问答题

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about laughing. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A-F for each numbered paragraph (41-45). The first paragraph of the text is not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. [A] What have they found [B] Is it true that laughing can make us healthier [C] So why do people laugh so much [D] What makes you laugh [E] How did you come to research it [F] So what"s it for Why are you interested in laughter It"s a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour There"s so much we don"t know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter. 41. Only 10 or 20 per cent of laughing is a response to humour. Most of the time it"s a message we send to other people—communicating joyful disposition, a willingness to bond and so on. It occupies a special place in social interaction and is a fascinating feature of our biology, with motor, emotional and cognitive components. Scientists study all kinds of emotions and behaviour, but few focus on this most basic ingredient. Laughter gives us a clue that we have powerful systems in our brain which respond to pleasure, happiness and joy. It"s also involved in events such as release of fear. 42. My professional focus has always been on emotional behaviour. I spent many years investigating the neural basis of fear in rats, and came to laughter via that route. When I was working with rats, I noticed that when they were alone, in an exposed environment, they were scared and quite uncomfortable. Back in a cage with others, they seemed much happier. It looked as if they played with one another—real rough-and-tumble—and I wondered whether they were also laughing. The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp had shown that juvenile rats make short vocalisations, pitched too high for humans to hear, during rough-and- tumble play. He thinks these are similar to laughter. This made me wonder about the roots of laughter. 43. Everything humans do has a function, and laughing is no exception. Its function is surely communication. We need to build social structures in order to live well in our society and evolution has selected laughter as a useful device for promoting social communication. In other words, it must have a survival advantage for the species. 44. The brain scans are usually done while people are responding to humorous material. You see brainwave activity spread from the sensory processing area of the occipital lobe, the bit at the back of the brain that processes Visual signals, to the brain"s frontal lobe. It seems that the frontal lobe is involved in recognising things as funny. The left side of the frontal lobe analyses the words and structure of jokes while the right side does the intellectual analyses required to "get" jokes. Finally, activity spreads to the motor areas of the brain controlling the physical task of laughing. We also know about these complex pathways involved in laughter from neurological illness and injury. Sometimes after brain damage, tumours, stroke or brain disorders such as Parkinson"s disease, people get "stonefaced syndrome" and can"t laugh. 45. I laugh a lot when I watch amateur videos of children, because they"re so natural. I"m sure they"re not forcing anything funny to happen. I don"t particularly laugh hard at jokes, but rather at situations. I also love old comedy movies such as Laurel and Hardy and an extremely ticklish. After starting to study laughter in depth, I began to laugh and smile more in social situations, those involving either closeness or hostility. Laughter really creates a bridge between people, disarms them, and facilitates amicable behaviour.
答案： 正确答案：C
单项选择题

Menorca or Majorca It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator"s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.According to the text, the shift in the method of holiday booking in UK is associated with______.

A．the popularity of electronics
B．the costly licences
C．car rental firms
D．the traditional ideology
单项选择题

They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world"s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent"s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa"s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d"Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over 2 million Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey"s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece— hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.It can be inferred from the fourth paragraph of the text that African optimism is______.

A．detrimental
B．fragile
C．transient
D．constant
单项选择题

The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco. com and dynamiteticketz, corn act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.In both the second and the third paragraphs, the author employs which of the following writing device

A．Emphasis.
B．Contrast.
C．Exaggeration.
D．Interrogation.
单项选择题

"This is a really exciting time—a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device-makers, content producers and mobile- network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are " streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device , including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125 million mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.Paragraph 2 is written to______.

A．indicate the test of mobile-TV networks
B．illustrate the widespread interests in mobile TV
C．stress the selection of television channels
D．assess the third-generation (3G) networks
单项选择题

Menorca or Majorca It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator"s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.According to the text, which of the following is true

A．To put together a trip using a traditional travel agent is not hard at present.
B．To sound the death knell for tour operator is unacceptable and inhumane.
C．Some high-street travel agents defy the model of surviving with the internet.
D．Traditional tour firms grapple with the internet.
单项选择题

They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world"s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent"s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa"s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d"Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over 2 million Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey"s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece— hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.The conclusion made by Ms James, according to the text, is______.

A．tentative
B．immutable
C．impeccable
D．moderate
问答题

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about laughing. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A-F for each numbered paragraph (41-45). The first paragraph of the text is not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. [A] What have they found [B] Is it true that laughing can make us healthier [C] So why do people laugh so much [D] What makes you laugh [E] How did you come to research it [F] So what"s it for Why are you interested in laughter It"s a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour There"s so much we don"t know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter. 41. Only 10 or 20 per cent of laughing is a response to humour. Most of the time it"s a message we send to other people—communicating joyful disposition, a willingness to bond and so on. It occupies a special place in social interaction and is a fascinating feature of our biology, with motor, emotional and cognitive components. Scientists study all kinds of emotions and behaviour, but few focus on this most basic ingredient. Laughter gives us a clue that we have powerful systems in our brain which respond to pleasure, happiness and joy. It"s also involved in events such as release of fear. 42. My professional focus has always been on emotional behaviour. I spent many years investigating the neural basis of fear in rats, and came to laughter via that route. When I was working with rats, I noticed that when they were alone, in an exposed environment, they were scared and quite uncomfortable. Back in a cage with others, they seemed much happier. It looked as if they played with one another—real rough-and-tumble—and I wondered whether they were also laughing. The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp had shown that juvenile rats make short vocalisations, pitched too high for humans to hear, during rough-and- tumble play. He thinks these are similar to laughter. This made me wonder about the roots of laughter. 43. Everything humans do has a function, and laughing is no exception. Its function is surely communication. We need to build social structures in order to live well in our society and evolution has selected laughter as a useful device for promoting social communication. In other words, it must have a survival advantage for the species. 44. The brain scans are usually done while people are responding to humorous material. You see brainwave activity spread from the sensory processing area of the occipital lobe, the bit at the back of the brain that processes Visual signals, to the brain"s frontal lobe. It seems that the frontal lobe is involved in recognising things as funny. The left side of the frontal lobe analyses the words and structure of jokes while the right side does the intellectual analyses required to "get" jokes. Finally, activity spreads to the motor areas of the brain controlling the physical task of laughing. We also know about these complex pathways involved in laughter from neurological illness and injury. Sometimes after brain damage, tumours, stroke or brain disorders such as Parkinson"s disease, people get "stonefaced syndrome" and can"t laugh. 45. I laugh a lot when I watch amateur videos of children, because they"re so natural. I"m sure they"re not forcing anything funny to happen. I don"t particularly laugh hard at jokes, but rather at situations. I also love old comedy movies such as Laurel and Hardy and an extremely ticklish. After starting to study laughter in depth, I began to laugh and smile more in social situations, those involving either closeness or hostility. Laughter really creates a bridge between people, disarms them, and facilitates amicable behaviour.
答案： 正确答案：E
单项选择题

The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco. com and dynamiteticketz, corn act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.The word "juicy" in the last sentence of the second paragraph most probably denotes______.

A．succulent
B．interesting
C．lucrative
D．liquid
单项选择题

"This is a really exciting time—a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device-makers, content producers and mobile- network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are " streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device , including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125 million mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.According to the text, substantial work in mobile-TV networks has been conducted in______.

A．an oriental nation
B．USA
C．an European nation
D．Japan
单项选择题

Menorca or Majorca It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator"s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.The word " hustle" in the topic sentence of the fourth paragraph most probably denotes______.

A．demand
B．hostility
C．sale
D．prejudice
单项选择题

They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world"s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent"s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa"s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d"Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over 2 million Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey"s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece— hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.The tone of the author in discussing African status can be defined as being______.

A．radical
B．impartial
C．hesitant
D．self-centered
问答题

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about laughing. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A-F for each numbered paragraph (41-45). The first paragraph of the text is not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. [A] What have they found [B] Is it true that laughing can make us healthier [C] So why do people laugh so much [D] What makes you laugh [E] How did you come to research it [F] So what"s it for Why are you interested in laughter It"s a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour There"s so much we don"t know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter. 41. Only 10 or 20 per cent of laughing is a response to humour. Most of the time it"s a message we send to other people—communicating joyful disposition, a willingness to bond and so on. It occupies a special place in social interaction and is a fascinating feature of our biology, with motor, emotional and cognitive components. Scientists study all kinds of emotions and behaviour, but few focus on this most basic ingredient. Laughter gives us a clue that we have powerful systems in our brain which respond to pleasure, happiness and joy. It"s also involved in events such as release of fear. 42. My professional focus has always been on emotional behaviour. I spent many years investigating the neural basis of fear in rats, and came to laughter via that route. When I was working with rats, I noticed that when they were alone, in an exposed environment, they were scared and quite uncomfortable. Back in a cage with others, they seemed much happier. It looked as if they played with one another—real rough-and-tumble—and I wondered whether they were also laughing. The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp had shown that juvenile rats make short vocalisations, pitched too high for humans to hear, during rough-and- tumble play. He thinks these are similar to laughter. This made me wonder about the roots of laughter. 43. Everything humans do has a function, and laughing is no exception. Its function is surely communication. We need to build social structures in order to live well in our society and evolution has selected laughter as a useful device for promoting social communication. In other words, it must have a survival advantage for the species. 44. The brain scans are usually done while people are responding to humorous material. You see brainwave activity spread from the sensory processing area of the occipital lobe, the bit at the back of the brain that processes Visual signals, to the brain"s frontal lobe. It seems that the frontal lobe is involved in recognising things as funny. The left side of the frontal lobe analyses the words and structure of jokes while the right side does the intellectual analyses required to "get" jokes. Finally, activity spreads to the motor areas of the brain controlling the physical task of laughing. We also know about these complex pathways involved in laughter from neurological illness and injury. Sometimes after brain damage, tumours, stroke or brain disorders such as Parkinson"s disease, people get "stonefaced syndrome" and can"t laugh. 45. I laugh a lot when I watch amateur videos of children, because they"re so natural. I"m sure they"re not forcing anything funny to happen. I don"t particularly laugh hard at jokes, but rather at situations. I also love old comedy movies such as Laurel and Hardy and an extremely ticklish. After starting to study laughter in depth, I began to laugh and smile more in social situations, those involving either closeness or hostility. Laughter really creates a bridge between people, disarms them, and facilitates amicable behaviour.
答案： 正确答案：F
单项选择题

The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco. com and dynamiteticketz, corn act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.Severe measures to discourage re-selling tickets for profits are illustrated with______.

A．U2 concert
B．Super Bowl in early February
C．Rolling Stones concerts
D．the soccer World Cup in Germany
单项选择题

"This is a really exciting time—a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device-makers, content producers and mobile- network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are " streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device , including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125 million mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.The word "device" in the first sentence of the third paragraph denotes______.

A．a satellite and terrestrial broadcast
B．a video-capable version of Apple iPod portable music-player
C．an individual show which is "streamed" across a 3G network
D．a pioneer personal video recorder
单项选择题

Menorca or Majorca It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator"s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.According to the first and last paragraphs, which of the following is still in suspense

A．A legal definition.
B．A congestion charge.
C．Financial guarantee.
D．An adventure trip.
单项选择题

They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world"s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent"s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa"s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d"Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over 2 million Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey"s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece— hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.France is mentioned in the text with the aim to______.

A．contrast Nigerians and French
B．defend Meril James" remarks
C．attach importance to the gloom-and-doom chart
D．refute Ms James concept of religion
问答题

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about laughing. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A-F for each numbered paragraph (41-45). The first paragraph of the text is not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. [A] What have they found [B] Is it true that laughing can make us healthier [C] So why do people laugh so much [D] What makes you laugh [E] How did you come to research it [F] So what"s it for Why are you interested in laughter It"s a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour There"s so much we don"t know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter. 41. Only 10 or 20 per cent of laughing is a response to humour. Most of the time it"s a message we send to other people—communicating joyful disposition, a willingness to bond and so on. It occupies a special place in social interaction and is a fascinating feature of our biology, with motor, emotional and cognitive components. Scientists study all kinds of emotions and behaviour, but few focus on this most basic ingredient. Laughter gives us a clue that we have powerful systems in our brain which respond to pleasure, happiness and joy. It"s also involved in events such as release of fear. 42. My professional focus has always been on emotional behaviour. I spent many years investigating the neural basis of fear in rats, and came to laughter via that route. When I was working with rats, I noticed that when they were alone, in an exposed environment, they were scared and quite uncomfortable. Back in a cage with others, they seemed much happier. It looked as if they played with one another—real rough-and-tumble—and I wondered whether they were also laughing. The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp had shown that juvenile rats make short vocalisations, pitched too high for humans to hear, during rough-and- tumble play. He thinks these are similar to laughter. This made me wonder about the roots of laughter. 43. Everything humans do has a function, and laughing is no exception. Its function is surely communication. We need to build social structures in order to live well in our society and evolution has selected laughter as a useful device for promoting social communication. In other words, it must have a survival advantage for the species. 44. The brain scans are usually done while people are responding to humorous material. You see brainwave activity spread from the sensory processing area of the occipital lobe, the bit at the back of the brain that processes Visual signals, to the brain"s frontal lobe. It seems that the frontal lobe is involved in recognising things as funny. The left side of the frontal lobe analyses the words and structure of jokes while the right side does the intellectual analyses required to "get" jokes. Finally, activity spreads to the motor areas of the brain controlling the physical task of laughing. We also know about these complex pathways involved in laughter from neurological illness and injury. Sometimes after brain damage, tumours, stroke or brain disorders such as Parkinson"s disease, people get "stonefaced syndrome" and can"t laugh. 45. I laugh a lot when I watch amateur videos of children, because they"re so natural. I"m sure they"re not forcing anything funny to happen. I don"t particularly laugh hard at jokes, but rather at situations. I also love old comedy movies such as Laurel and Hardy and an extremely ticklish. After starting to study laughter in depth, I began to laugh and smile more in social situations, those involving either closeness or hostility. Laughter really creates a bridge between people, disarms them, and facilitates amicable behaviour.
答案： 正确答案：A
单项选择题

The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco. com and dynamiteticketz, corn act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.It can be inferred from the last paragraph that______.

A．more than a dozen states in US have anti-scalping laws of various kinds
B．there are still legal worries about the American re-selling tickets for a profit
C．most states in US have yet to show positive response in crackdown on ticket touting
D．16 companies were taken to court by one fan for reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value
单项选择题

"This is a really exciting time—a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device-makers, content producers and mobile- network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are " streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device , including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125 million mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.It can be inferred from the last paragraph of the text that______.

A．mobile TV is coming—but how the market will develop is still unclear
B．consumers favor mobile TV if they need not pay for it
C．few mobile technologies failed to live up to expectations
D．the three uncertainties referred to at the end of the text are hopefully overcome in no time
问答题

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about laughing. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A-F for each numbered paragraph (41-45). The first paragraph of the text is not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. [A] What have they found [B] Is it true that laughing can make us healthier [C] So why do people laugh so much [D] What makes you laugh [E] How did you come to research it [F] So what"s it for Why are you interested in laughter It"s a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour There"s so much we don"t know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter. 41. Only 10 or 20 per cent of laughing is a response to humour. Most of the time it"s a message we send to other people—communicating joyful disposition, a willingness to bond and so on. It occupies a special place in social interaction and is a fascinating feature of our biology, with motor, emotional and cognitive components. Scientists study all kinds of emotions and behaviour, but few focus on this most basic ingredient. Laughter gives us a clue that we have powerful systems in our brain which respond to pleasure, happiness and joy. It"s also involved in events such as release of fear. 42. My professional focus has always been on emotional behaviour. I spent many years investigating the neural basis of fear in rats, and came to laughter via that route. When I was working with rats, I noticed that when they were alone, in an exposed environment, they were scared and quite uncomfortable. Back in a cage with others, they seemed much happier. It looked as if they played with one another—real rough-and-tumble—and I wondered whether they were also laughing. The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp had shown that juvenile rats make short vocalisations, pitched too high for humans to hear, during rough-and- tumble play. He thinks these are similar to laughter. This made me wonder about the roots of laughter. 43. Everything humans do has a function, and laughing is no exception. Its function is surely communication. We need to build social structures in order to live well in our society and evolution has selected laughter as a useful device for promoting social communication. In other words, it must have a survival advantage for the species. 44. The brain scans are usually done while people are responding to humorous material. You see brainwave activity spread from the sensory processing area of the occipital lobe, the bit at the back of the brain that processes Visual signals, to the brain"s frontal lobe. It seems that the frontal lobe is involved in recognising things as funny. The left side of the frontal lobe analyses the words and structure of jokes while the right side does the intellectual analyses required to "get" jokes. Finally, activity spreads to the motor areas of the brain controlling the physical task of laughing. We also know about these complex pathways involved in laughter from neurological illness and injury. Sometimes after brain damage, tumours, stroke or brain disorders such as Parkinson"s disease, people get "stonefaced syndrome" and can"t laugh. 45. I laugh a lot when I watch amateur videos of children, because they"re so natural. I"m sure they"re not forcing anything funny to happen. I don"t particularly laugh hard at jokes, but rather at situations. I also love old comedy movies such as Laurel and Hardy and an extremely ticklish. After starting to study laughter in depth, I began to laugh and smile more in social situations, those involving either closeness or hostility. Laughter really creates a bridge between people, disarms them, and facilitates amicable behaviour.
答案： 正确答案：D
问答题

Henri Matisse originally trained as a lawyer, turning to art whilst recovering from appendicitis. (46) Initially seduced by the Impressionists and, in particular. by Cezanne, Matisse brought together a circle of like—minded artists who became known as the Fauves(the Beasts)after their sensational exhibition of 1905. These early paintings revealed an intuitive and explosive colour sense which was to become the defining feature of Matisse"s long career. (47) Believing art to be "something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue", he was dedicated to producing work that expressed a harmony close to a musical composition. (48) There are two versions of La Danse, originally produced with another enormous panel entitled Musique for a Russian collector. Dance was a popular topic at the time as Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet had just visited Paris. (49) Despite, or because of, the simplification of colour, form, and line, the figures appear to be full of life. Matisse made sculptures, designed sets and costumes and illustrated books. (50) He was also an important graphic artist who, in his bed—ridden final years, evolved his own method of arranging cut—out paper shapes. He is indisputably the greatest decorative artist of the twentieth century.
答案： 正确答案：马蒂斯最初迷恋于印象派，特别是塞尚，而后他召集形成了一个志同道合的艺术家圈子，1905年轰动一时的展览之后，他...
问答题

Henri Matisse originally trained as a lawyer, turning to art whilst recovering from appendicitis. (46) Initially seduced by the Impressionists and, in particular. by Cezanne, Matisse brought together a circle of like—minded artists who became known as the Fauves(the Beasts)after their sensational exhibition of 1905. These early paintings revealed an intuitive and explosive colour sense which was to become the defining feature of Matisse"s long career. (47) Believing art to be "something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue", he was dedicated to producing work that expressed a harmony close to a musical composition. (48) There are two versions of La Danse, originally produced with another enormous panel entitled Musique for a Russian collector. Dance was a popular topic at the time as Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet had just visited Paris. (49) Despite, or because of, the simplification of colour, form, and line, the figures appear to be full of life. Matisse made sculptures, designed sets and costumes and illustrated books. (50) He was also an important graphic artist who, in his bed—ridden final years, evolved his own method of arranging cut—out paper shapes. He is indisputably the greatest decorative artist of the twentieth century.
答案： 正确答案：马蒂斯相信艺术“类似于一把舒适的沙发椅，在其中人们可以休息疲惫的身躯”，所以致力于创造表达几近音乐作品的那种和...
问答题

Henri Matisse originally trained as a lawyer, turning to art whilst recovering from appendicitis. (46) Initially seduced by the Impressionists and, in particular. by Cezanne, Matisse brought together a circle of like—minded artists who became known as the Fauves(the Beasts)after their sensational exhibition of 1905. These early paintings revealed an intuitive and explosive colour sense which was to become the defining feature of Matisse"s long career. (47) Believing art to be "something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue", he was dedicated to producing work that expressed a harmony close to a musical composition. (48) There are two versions of La Danse, originally produced with another enormous panel entitled Musique for a Russian collector. Dance was a popular topic at the time as Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet had just visited Paris. (49) Despite, or because of, the simplification of colour, form, and line, the figures appear to be full of life. Matisse made sculptures, designed sets and costumes and illustrated books. (50) He was also an important graphic artist who, in his bed—ridden final years, evolved his own method of arranging cut—out paper shapes. He is indisputably the greatest decorative artist of the twentieth century.
答案： 正确答案：《舞蹈》有两个版本，起初是和另一幅题为《音乐》的巨大板面油画一起为一个俄罗斯收藏家创作的。
问答题

Henri Matisse originally trained as a lawyer, turning to art whilst recovering from appendicitis. (46) Initially seduced by the Impressionists and, in particular. by Cezanne, Matisse brought together a circle of like—minded artists who became known as the Fauves(the Beasts)after their sensational exhibition of 1905. These early paintings revealed an intuitive and explosive colour sense which was to become the defining feature of Matisse"s long career. (47) Believing art to be "something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue", he was dedicated to producing work that expressed a harmony close to a musical composition. (48) There are two versions of La Danse, originally produced with another enormous panel entitled Musique for a Russian collector. Dance was a popular topic at the time as Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet had just visited Paris. (49) Despite, or because of, the simplification of colour, form, and line, the figures appear to be full of life. Matisse made sculptures, designed sets and costumes and illustrated books. (50) He was also an important graphic artist who, in his bed—ridden final years, evolved his own method of arranging cut—out paper shapes. He is indisputably the greatest decorative artist of the twentieth century.
答案： 正确答案：尽管色彩、形状和线条力求简单，或者恰恰是因为这个原因，人物显得充满了生命力。
问答题

Henri Matisse originally trained as a lawyer, turning to art whilst recovering from appendicitis. (46) Initially seduced by the Impressionists and, in particular. by Cezanne, Matisse brought together a circle of like—minded artists who became known as the Fauves(the Beasts)after their sensational exhibition of 1905. These early paintings revealed an intuitive and explosive colour sense which was to become the defining feature of Matisse"s long career. (47) Believing art to be "something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue", he was dedicated to producing work that expressed a harmony close to a musical composition. (48) There are two versions of La Danse, originally produced with another enormous panel entitled Musique for a Russian collector. Dance was a popular topic at the time as Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet had just visited Paris. (49) Despite, or because of, the simplification of colour, form, and line, the figures appear to be full of life. Matisse made sculptures, designed sets and costumes and illustrated books. (50) He was also an important graphic artist who, in his bed—ridden final years, evolved his own method of arranging cut—out paper shapes. He is indisputably the greatest decorative artist of the twentieth century.
答案： 正确答案：马蒂斯还是重要的平面造型艺术家，在他卧床的最后几年，他发展出自己的一套剪纸造型的方法。
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