题目列表

题目内容
Columnist: Until very recently, Presorbin and Veltrex, two medications used to block excess stomach acid, were both available only with a prescription written by a doctor. In an advertisement for Presorbin, its makers argue that Presorbin is superior on the grounds that doctors have written 200 million prescriptions for Presorbin, as compared to 100 million for Veltrex. It can be argued that the number of prescriptions written is never a worthwhile criterion for comparing the merits of medicines, but that the advertisement`s argument is absurd is quite adequately revealed by observing that Presorbin was available as a prescription medicine years before Veltrex was.
In the columnist`s argument, the two highlighted portions play which of the following roles?
We now know that what constitutes practically all matter is empty space; relatively enormous voids in which revolve with lightening velocity infinitesimal particles so utterly small that they have never been seen or photographed. The existence of these particles has been demonstrated by mathematical physicists and their operations determined by ingenious laboratory experiments. It was not until 1911 that experiments by Sir Ernest Rutherford revealed the architecture of the mysterious atom. Moseley, Bohr, Fermi, Milliken, Compton, Urey, and others have also worked on the problem.

Matter is composed of molecules whose average diameter is about 1/125 millionth of an inch. Molecules are composed of atoms so small that about 5 million could be placed in a row on the period at the end of this sentence. Long thought to be the ultimate, indivisible constituent of matter, the atom has been found to consist roughly of a proton, the positive electrical element in the atomic nucleus, surrounded by electrons, the negative electric elements swirling about the proton.
According to the passage, all of the following were true of the center of an atom EXCEPT that it
Given the context of social change in the early 1960s, black history was now the object of unprecedented attention among wide segments of the American population, black and white. In academe nothing demonstrated this growing legitimacy of black history better than the way in which certain scholars of both races, who had previously been ambivalent about being identified as specialists in the field, now reversed themselves.

Thus Frenise Logan, returning to an academic career, decided to attempt to publish his doctoral dissertation on blacks in late nineteenth-century North Carolina. A 1960 award encouraged him to do further research, and his expanded The Negro in North Carolina, 1876–1894 appeared in 1964. It is true that as late as 1963 a white professor advised John W. Blassingame to avoid black history if he wanted to have "a future in the historical profession." Yet more indicative of how things were going was that 1964–1965 marked a turning point for two of Kenneth Stampp`s former students-Nathan Huggins and Leon Litwack. The changing intellectual milieu seems to have permitted Huggins, whose original intention of specializing in African and Afro-American history had been overruled by practical concerns, to move into what became his long-range commitment to the field. By 1965 when his interest in intellectual history found expression in the idea of doing a book on the Harlem Renaissance, the factors that earlier would have discouraged him from such a study had dissipated. For Litwack the return to black history was an especially vivid experience, and he recalls the day he spoke at the University of Rochester, lecturing on Jacksonian democracy. Some students in the audience, sensing that his heart was just not in that topic, urged him to undertake research once again in the field to which he had already contributed so significantly. He settled on the study that became Been in the Storm So Long (1979). In short, both Huggins and Litwack now felt able to dismiss the professional considerations that had loomed so large in their earlier decision to work in other specialties and to identify themselves with what had hitherto been a marginal field of inquiry.
Throughout the passage the author seeks to support his point primarily by the use of
Statistics indicate that, on the average, women executives` salaries are about 20% lower than the salaries of men in comparable jobs. This is true despite the job discrimination suits filed in the 1970`s by the federal government against firms such as A.T. & T. and the Bank of America, as well as despite the passage of laws forbidding job discrimination by gender in many states and localities. In the face of this unrelenting prejudice against women, it is manifest that only an amendment to the U.S. Constitution can fully remedy the iniquities under which today`s women are laboring.
All of the following are weaknesses of the above argument EXCEPT that
In the days of sailing ships, fresh food was unavailable on board, and at the end of long voyages many sailors would contract scurvy, a potentially life-threatening condition. Today we recognize ascorbic acid as a cure for this condition, but in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century medical practitioners and scientists had no such surety. Shakespeare`s son-in-law, the seventeenth-century herbalist and surgeon John Hall, cured several cases of scurvy by administering an acidic brew composed of brooklime, scurvy grass and watercress, all herbs rich in ascorbic acid. The celebrated physician William Harvey suggested that sailors take lemon juice to ward off scurvy; he hypothesized that citric acid, the specific acid in lemon juice, would prevent the disease. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Scottish naval surgeon James Lind conducted an experiment involving 12 sick sailors to discover whether the acid was responsible for the cure. All of the sailors received the same diet except that in addition each day two of the men were given small amounts of dilute sulfuric acid, two others some spoonfuls of vinegar (acetic acid), two more a quart of cider, two more half a pint of seawater, two more a paste of spices with some barley water, and the remaining two a lemon and two oranges. Only those given the lemon and oranges recovered from the disease.
The hypothesis tested by Lind was that
Present day Benin was the site of Dahomey, a prominent West African kingdom that rose in the 15th century. The territory became a French Colony in 1872 and achieved independence on 1 August 1960, as the Republic of Benin. A succession of military governments ended in 1972 with the rise to power of Mathieu Kerekou and the establishment of a government based on Marxist-Leninist principles. A move to representative government began in 1989. Two years later, free elections ushered in former Prime Minister Nicephore Soglo as president, marking the first successful transfer of power in Africa from a dictatorship to a democracy. Kerekou was returned to power by elections held in 1996 and 2001, though some irregularities were alleged. Kerekou stepped down at the end of his second term in 2006 and was succeeded by Thomas Yayi Boni, a political outsider and independent. Yayi has begun a high profile fight against corruption and has strongly promoted accelerating Benin's economic growth.
The passage indicates that all of the following were true of Benin between 1989 and 2006 EXCEPT:
In their hunt for energy, fungi have become the earth`s predominant source of rot and decay. Whenever you observe mold forming on a piece of bread, or a pile of leaves decaying into compost, or a blown-down tree moldering into pulp on the ground, you are watching a fungus eating. Without fungus action the earth would be piled high with the dead plant life of past centuries. In fact, certain plants that contain resins toxic to fungi will last indefinitely; specimens of redwood trees, for instance, can still be found resting on the forest floor centuries after having been blown down.
The passage`s statement that "you are watching a fungus eating" is best described as
The establishment of the Third Reich influenced events in American history by starting a chain of events that culminated in war between Germany and the United States. The complete destruction of democracy in Germany, the persecution of the Jews, the war on religion, the cruelty and barbarism of the Nazis, and especially the plans of Germany and her allies, Italy and Japan, for world conquest caused great indignation in this country and brought on fear of another world war. While speaking out against Hitler`s atrocities, the American people generally favored isolationist policies and neutrality. The Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 prohibited trade with any belligerents or loans to them. In 1937 the President was empowered to declare an arms embargo in wars between nations at his discretion.
During the years 1933–1936, American foreign policy may best be described as a policy of
In the early 1960s, many historians and ethnographers who studied pre-Columbian Quechua civilizations (which we may identify here as encompassing the territories that formed the Inca state known as Tawantinsuyu, the "Land of the Four Quarters"), were of an almost mystical bent, relying on metaphor and symbol rather than on factual data to illuminate the nature of Quechua society. Unlike those of their contemporaries who based their conclusions on archaeological findings and on new interpretations of the quipu (the knotted cords used by the preliterate Quechua for account-keeping and historical recording), these magic-loving writers expressed themselves in a prose that was often more obscure than the mysteries they sought to elucidate.

A prime example of this "poetic" school of historical writing can be found in the Organization of American States` publication Américas (vol. 15, 1963), in which one writer describes the Quechua as "submerged, so to speak, in a cosmic magma that weighs heavily upon it. It possesses the rare quality of being, as it were, interjected into the midst of antagonistic forces, which in turn implies a whole body of social and aesthetic structures whose innermost meaning must be the administration of energy."

What sense are we to derive from this somewhat feverish piece of description? The writer is attempting to create a metaphor for the pressures-physical, economic, spiritual-that the Quechua people endured. That much we can comprehend. But the metaphor is flawed-the Quechua world is simultaneously weighed or pressed down by the magma in which it is submerged and interjected or inserted into some welter of antagonistic forces-a fact that the writer himself appears to acknowledge by qualifying his assertions with "so to speak" and "as it were." The difficulty with this approach is that it provides no measurable data that we can use to assess the degree of adversity the Quechua bore and its effect on them as a culture. True, life on the high Andean plateau was harsh: the Quechua faced extremes of temperature, cycles of flooding and drought, thin soil, an inhospitably steep terrain. But the very harshness of these living conditions inspired the Quechua to make advances in agricultural technique that allowed them to feed the millions of people who constituted the Inca Empire, advances that unfortunately are obscured or masked by this writer`s approach.
The author`s attitude toward the school of historical writing he discusses can best be described as one of
Unlike the carefully weighted and planned compositions of Dante, Goethe`s writings have always the sense of immediacy and enthusiasm. He was a constant experimenter with life, with ideas, and with forms of writing. For the same reason, his works seldom have the qualities of finish or formal beauty which distinguishes the masterpieces of Dante and Virgil. He came to love the beauties of classicism but these were never an essential part of his make-up. Instead, the urgency of the moment, the spirit of the thing, guided his pen. As a result, nearly all his works have serious flaws of structure, of inconsistencies, of excesses and redundancies and extraneities. In the large sense, Goethe represents the fullest development of the romanticists. It has been argued that he should not be so designated because he so clearly matured and outgrew the kind of romanticism exhibited by Wordsworth, Shelly, and Keats. Shelly and Keats died young; Wordsworth lived narrowly and abandoned his early attitudes. In contrast, Goethe lived abundantly and developed his faith in the spirit, his understanding of nature and human nature, and his reliance on feelings as man`s essential motivating force. The result was an all-encompassing vision of reality and a philosophy of life broader and deeper than the partial visions and attitudes of other romanticists. Yet the spirit of youthfulness, the impatience with close reasoning or "logic-chopping," and the continued faith in nature remained his to the end, together with an occasional waywardness and impulsiveness and a disregard of artistic or logical propriety which savor strongly of romantic individualism. Since so many twentieth-century thoughts and attitudes are similarly based on the stimulus of the Romantic Movement, Goethe stands as particularly the poet of modern times as Dante stood for medieval times and as Shakespeare for the Renaissance.
A characteristic of romanticism NOT mentioned in this passage is its

共收录:

25000 +道题目

4本备考书籍

最新提问