If America had a national poet in the 20th century, it is certainly______.

A . sudden B . moment C . minute D . once

A:正确; B:错误

听力原文： In America, self-improvement is a national pastime. Every year, more and more Americans spend their leisure time trying to improve themselves one way or another. One popular form. of self-improvement is the search for physical fitness. Thousands of Americans who never exercised are now out on the streets jogging in fashionable running suits and expensive gym shoes. They boast of how many miles they nm each day and of how many pounds they lose each week. Others are turning to swimming, tennis, dance and the martial arts to improve their physical fitness. Instead of running around the park in the morning or evening, other Americans are studying yoga or meditating quietly in their homes. They are seeking to improve themselves by finding peace and quiet. Adult education is another form. of self-improvement. After a hard day's work, many Americans take evening courses at a kraal high school or a community college. There they can study a variety of subjects. Often these people am preparing to return to the job market or trying to qualify themselves for better jobs. For example, a mother busy raising her children might attend a night school to learn secretarial skills. A secretary might return to study accounting. Some retired people may go back for the education they missed at an earlier age. (30) A．Entertainment. B．Studying in a local college. C．Seeking physical fitness. D．Finding peace and quiet.

A．customs B．civilizations C．cultures D．habits

B．drive C．drove D．have driven

An American explorer John Charles Fremont travelled through the area in the early 1800's. He found the land shaped like a bowl. So he named it the Great Basin. It is a land of unusual beauty and sharp differences. For example, you can climb a mountain covered with green forests, then cool yourself in a field of snow as you arrive at the top. Here and there, sharp rocks push out through the snow. Among the rocks you might see homes of the golden hawk (鹰), a bird that was once in danger of dying out. You can camp in a campground on the edge of Lehman Caves. These caves are a group of large underground rooms made of limestone (石灰石). You can walk through them for about a kilometre. Before the park opened, the caves were the centre of interests for anyone travelling through this area. The state of Nevada has wanted a national park for more than 60 years. There have always been the opposite ideas from people who believes that a park would harm(损害) mining and agriculture. The bill that set up the park, however, promises that mines will remain open, and that sheep and cows will continue to feed on the mountainsides. Lehman Caves are______. A．about a kilometre each B．separated from each other C．rooms made of limestone D．what interest visitors most

A．could B．did C．would D．was

A．would be B．is C．will be D．would have been

A．are B．would be C．have been D．should be

"There is no excuse for this, "President Bill Clinton had already chided." These results are, entirely unacceptable, "admonished the secretary of education. The head of the National Education Association declared U.S. schools to be in a state of crisis. And now Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that he, too, saw in this report "all the elements of an education tragedy." "Americans have always risen to a crisis," he added. "We see clearly that the future is threatened. 2. Let us act now to heed this important wake-up call." And so, with editorial writers and educators across the country obligingly sounding the alarm, American education lurched yet again into crisis mode. It is a cyclical ritual, repeated in every decade since the 1940s, observes Gregory William of the University of Toledo. 3. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 set off an orgy of anxiety culminating in Admiral Hyman Rickover's 1963 book American Education, A National Failure, in which he famously predicted that "the Russians will bury us" thanks to their more rigorous science and math courses. 4. Beginning with the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, one blue-ribbon panel after another warned that massive educational failure had ceded the United State's technological lead to Japan and other competitors—a conclusion that proved premature. 5. Although the particulars vary from one education crisis to the next, the episodes are connected by common threads. Each has surged into public discourse on an unrelenting torrent of angst flowing from the educational research profession, William says. Combing through the education literature of the past 30 years, he recently turned up more than 4,000 articles and books in which scholars declared some sort of crisis in the schools—but rarely bothered to spell out what cataclysm was imminent. Each episode has also eaten away at public confidence in schools, which fell 38 percent from 1973 to 1996, according to surveys by the National Opinion Research Center.

The performance of the US labour market in the late 1990s is as much a feature of the puzzlingly benign so-called New Economy. For the past four years the US has enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 4 percent— up from an average of about 3 percent in the previous decade. Productivity improvements account for about two-thirds of that elevated output, as workers have increased their output per hour. The rest has come from a rapid increase in the total number of workers, what economists call labour inputs. There has been a surge in new jobs—7m in the last three years—that has pushed the unemployment rate down into the uncharted territory of barely 4 percent. Recent economic history suggests that, whenever unemployment has gone this low, the scramble for workers becomes so difficult that wages are rapidly bid up, and an inflationary spiral follows. But in the US in the past five years, wage growth has been muted. In the last year, total employee compensation in the private sector rose by just 3.3 percent, almost unchanged on the figure three years ago, when the unemployment rate was 5.4 percent. "In some ways it's a bigger puzzle than the productivity puzzle," says Paul Krugman, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "How can we have such a low unemployment rate without an explosion of wages？" A number of factors appear to have contributed. In their search for workers to fill positions, companies have reached out to places they have not looked at in the past. As a result, more people are working than ever. The proportion of the population in employment reached a record high this year of more than 64 percent. This expanded labour supply helps explain why companies have kept the lid on pay over the last few years. The availability of new sources of labour—women, retirees, college students among them—means companies may not have to give big pay rises to hire new workers. It also helps explain why the benefits of the New Economy are not always widely felt—more people seem to be working longer hours than ever. But an expanded labour supply can only explain part of what has changed in the US in recent years. After all, unemployment—the proportion of the labour force out of work—has still declined, indicating that companies have drawn new workers not just from the pool of those not previously in the labour force, but also from the unemployed. And yet still wage costs have remained muted. One possible explanation is that companies have become more flexible in how they pay. "At Newfield, we use a much broader variety of means to reward workers, including performance related pay, year-end bonuses, and extended contracts," says Mr. Ostop. Why does Connecticut have the tightest labour market in the U. S. ？

对 错

A．＄500 B．＄200 C．＄350 D．＄488

A．The National Treasure B．Avatar C．Transformers D．

是 否