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.
Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it's the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can't take it too seriously, because "ever" really means "as long as the records go back," which is only as far as the late 1800s. Scientists have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though-- not for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of a given year by such proxy measurements as growth marks in corals, deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as there were hundreds of years ago compared with today.
And in the most comprehensive compilation of such data to date, says a new report from the National Research Council, it looks pretty certain that the last few decades have been hotter than any comparable period in the last 400 years. That's a blow to those who claim the current warm spell is just part of the natural up and down of average temperatures-- a frequent assertion of the global-warming-doubters crowd.
The report was triggered by doubts about past-climate claims made last year by climatologist Michael Mann, of the University of Virginia (he's the creator of the "hockey stick" graph Al Gore used in "An Inconvenient Truth" to dramatize the rise in carbon dioxide in recent years). Mann claimed that the recent warming was unprecedented in the past thousand years-- that led Congress to order up an assessment by the prestigious Research Council. Their conclusion was that a thousand years was reasonable, but not overwhelmingly supported by the data. But the past 400 was-- so resoundingly that it fully supports the claim that today's temperatures are unnaturally warm, just as global warming theory has been predicting for a hundred years. And if there's any doubt about whether these proxy measurements are really legitimate, the NRC scientists compared them with actual temperature data from the most recent century, when real thermometers were in widespread use. The match was more or less right on.
In the past nearly two decades since TIME first put global warming on the cover, then, the argument against it has gone from "it isn't happening" to "it's happening, but it's natural," to "it's mostly natural"-- and now, it seems, that assertion too is going to have to drop away. Indeed, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee and who asked for the report declared that it did nothing to support the notion of a controversy over global warming science-- a controversy that opponents keep insisting is alive. Whether President Bush will finally take serious action to deal with the warming, however, is a much less settled question.
What does this passage mainly deal with？
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听力原文： The poverty line is the lowest income that people need for an acceptable standard of living. People with incomes below the poverty line are considered poor. Economists study the causes of poverty in order to find solutions to the problem.
As the general standard of living in the country rises, the poverty line does, too. Therefore, even with today's relatively high standard of living; about 10 percent of the people in the United States are below the poverty line. However, if these people had stable jobs, they could have an acceptable standard of living. Economists suggest several reasons why poor people do not have jobs.
For one thing, more than half of the poor people in the United States are not qualified to work. Over 40 percent of the poor people axe children. By law, children less than 16 years old cannot work in many industries. A large number of poor people are old. Many companies do not hire people over 65 years old, the normal retirement age.
Some poor adults do not look for jobs for a variety of personal reasons: they are sick, they do not have any motivation, they have family problems, or they do not believe they can find a job.
Other poor people look for a job but cannot find one. Many poor adults never went to high school. Therefore, when they look for jobs, they have few skills they can offer.
Some economists are looking for better solutions to the poverty problem. However, at the present time, many people depend on welfare for a living.
(33)
A．Notice the way the person is talking.B．Take a good look at the person talking.C．Mind
听力原文：M: Are you enjoying this tour？
W: Yes. It's my first time to visit New York.
M: Mine, too. New York is such a big and fascinating place.
W: Do you know how New York came to be the largest city in the United States？
M: Well, I suppose because it is one of the country's oldest cities. Besides that, it has a good harbor.
W: That's true, but there are other old port cities in the U.S. like Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In fact, in our early history, the first two played a much larger role than New York.
M: The big difference is that New York had a water route to travel to the interior. Other cities lacked that.
W: Do you mean a river？
M: Not a natural one; it was a canal. The Erie Canal, which was completed in 1823, connected New York's port to the Great Lakes in the Midwest.
W: So even before the railroad was invented, goods and supplies could travel via a water route from New York to the West.
M: Yes, and corn and wheat from that area could travel to New York for sale elsewhere.
W: So New York began to grow faster than the other cities.
M: Yes. In fact, within fifteen years after the canal opened in 1823. New York doubled in size. It became the trading capital of the U.S., attracting business, banking and industry, and providing work for thousands of new immigrants.
(23)
听力原文： Senators are people who are elected every 6 years and they represent a whole state. This means there are fewer Senators than Congress Representatives but they do have the power to defeat any bill that has been passed by the Congress. Their function is to provide more security over the decisions and actions of the Congress Representatives, and to make sure that bills, passed by the House of Representatives, are not driven by narrow local interests. In England, the British have an appointed House of Lords to provide a "second sober thought" about new laws. In America, Senators are thought to do the same thing but the primary difference is that they are elected and are very responsive to public opinion. However, because they do not have to face elections for 6 years, it was thought that they may be more rational than populists, although in practice the Senate and the Congress are still very much swayed by the views of public opinion or by powerful lobby groups. If the bill is passed in the Senate, then it goes to the President to either sign or reject. If he signs it, it becomes law, but if he rejects it, that is to say he vetoes the bill, or refuses to sign it, or as they say, "pocket vetoes it", it will be sent back to the Congress. If the Congress disagrees with the President enough and does not Want to change or amend the bill, they can override the President's rejection called overriding the veto.
(30)
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