题目内容

Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
Communications technologies are far from equal when it comes to conveying the truth. The first study to compare honesty across a range of communications media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The fact that emails are automatically recorded--and can come back to haunt(困扰) you--appears to be the key to the finding.
Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told. Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and an astonishing 37 per cent of phone calls.
His results, to be presented at the conference on human-computer interaction in Vienna, Austria, in April have surprised psychologists. Some expected mailers to be the biggest liars, reasoning that because deception makes people uncomfortable, the detachment(非直接接触) of emailing would make it easier to lie. Others expected people to lie more in face-to-face exchanges because we are most practised at that form. of communication.
But Hancock says it is also crucial whether a conversation is being recorded and could be reread, and whether it occurs in real time. People appear to be afraid to lie when they know the communication could later be used to hold them to account, he says. This is why fewer lies appear in email than on the phone.
People are also more likely to lie in real time--in an instant message or phone call, say--than if they have time to think of a response, says Hancock. He found many lies are spontaneous(脱口而出的) responses to an unexpected demand, such as: "Do you like my dress?"
Hancock hopes his research will help companies work out the best ways for their employees to communicate. For instance, the phone might be the best medium for sales where employees are encouraged to stretch the truth. But given his results, work assessment, where honesty is a priority, might be best done using email.
Hancock's study focuses on ______.

A. the consequences of lying in various communications media
B. the success of communications technologies in conveying ideas
C. people's preferences in selecting communications technologies
D. people's honesty levels across a range of communications media

查看答案
更多问题

听力原文: Today, we are going to talk about a special way some plants respond to being invaded by pests. The plants react by emitting a chemical signal, which acts like a call for help. Let's take corn plants for example. Sometimes, caterpillars chew on the corn leaves. When the caterpillar saliva mixes with the chew portion of a leave, the plant releases a chemical scream that attracts wasps. The wasps respond to the signal by flying to the chewed on leave, and laying their eggs on the caterpillars. The caterpillars die in the next few days as the wasp offspring nourish themselves by feeding of them. Thus the corn plant prevents all its leaves from being eaten by the caterpillars. This chemical scream is specific. It's only released after the plant has detected the caterpillar saliva. A plant that is cut by in the other means does not give off the same signal, nor doesn't undamaged plants. This also explains how a wasp can find a caterpillar in a huge field of corn. Soybean, cotton and probably many other plants use similar type of defense against pests. By enhancing this natural response in plants, researchers might reduce, some day even eliminate, the need for chemical pesticide, which can cause ecological damage. For example, scientists might breed plants for this screaming trait, or they might transplant specific genes to increase the release of the chemical signals.
(40)

A. To describe ways pests can damage plants
B. To examine the life cycle of caterpillars
C. To explain how com plants develop
D. To describe how a natural pesticide works

______. widely used in the chemical industry, sodium carbonate is principally consumed by

A. Despite
B. Whether
C. Though
D. Except for

A.By flying in circles around a fieldB.By detecting a chemical signalC.By inspecting i

A. By flying in circles around a field
By detecting a chemical signal
C. By inspecting individual corn leaves
D. By noticing the caterpillar's coloration

听力原文: About 200 years ago, the United States economy was growing quickly, mainly because a booming trade in grain and cotton. This trade is grain and cotton went on near areas near or at the cost, or near navigable rivers. It took place there because it was so expensive to transport goods over the roads that existed. They were muddy, narrow, and hard to travel on. At that time, don't forget there was only one continuous road that existed in the US, and it was made up of north to south local country roads, linked together to get one long road. Within a short time, the first east-to-west roads were built. They were called turnpikes. Private companies built these roads, and collected fees from all vehicles traveled on them. Eventually, a network of dirt, gravel or plank roadways connected some major cities and towns. But even these turnpike roads were still very slow, and traveling on them was too costly for farmers. They would spend more money to move their crops than they got by selling them. So, we see that even with some major improvement in roadways, farmers still had to rely on rivers to move their crops to markets.
(48)

A. The advantages of an economy based on farming
B. Reasons farmers continued using river transpertation
C. The role of cotton in the United States economy
D. Improved methods of transporting farm crops

答案查题题库