TEXT D The senior partner, Oliver Lambert, studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was married, and that was mandatory. The firm had never hired an unmarried lawyer, and it frowned heavily on divorce, as well as womanizing and drinking. Drug testing was in the contract. He had a degree in accounting, passed the CPA exam the first time he took it and wanted to be a tax lawyer, which of course was a requirement with a tax firm. He was white, and the firm had never hired a black. They managed this by being secretive and cubbish and never soliciting job applications. Other firms solicited, and hired blacks. This firm recruited, and remained lily white. Plus, the firm was in Memphis, and the top blacks wanted New York or Washington or Chicago. McDeere was a male, and there were no women in the firm. That mistake had been made in the mid-seventies when they recruited the number one grad from Harvard, who happened to be a she and a wizard at taxation. She lasted four turbulent years and was killed in a car wreck. He looked good, on paper. He was their top choice. In fact, for this year there were no other prospects. The list was very short. It was McDeere, or no one. The managing partner, Royce McKnight, studied a dossier labeled "Mitchell Y. McDeere-Harvard." An inch thick with small print and a few photographs; it had been prepared by some ex-CIA agents in a private intelligence outfit in Bethesda. They were clients of the firm and each year did the investigating for no fee. It was easy work, they said, checking out unsuspecting law students. They learned, for instance, that he preferred to leave the Northeast, that he was holding three job offers, two in New York and one in Chicago, and that the highest offer was $76,000 and the lowest was $68,000. He was in demand. He had been given the opportunity to cheat on a securities exam during his second year. He declined, and made the highest grade in the class. Two months ago he had been offered cocaine at a law school party. He said no and left when everyone began snortihg. He drank an occasional beer, but drinking was expensive and he had no money. He owed close to$23,000 in student loans. He was hungry. Royce McKnight flipped through the dossier and smiled. McDeere was their man. Lamar Quin was thirty-two and not yet a partner. He had been brought along to look young and act young and project a youthful image for Bendini, Lambert & Locke, which in fact was a young firm, since most of the partners retired in their late forties or early fifties with money to bum. He would make partner in this firm. With a six-figure income guaranteed for the rest of his life, Lamar could enjoy the twelve-hundred-dollar tailored suits that hung so comfortably from his tall, athletic frame. He strolled nonchalantly across the thousand-dollar- a-day suite and poured another cup of decaf. He checked his, watch. He glanced at the two partners sitting at the small conference table near the windows. Precisely at two-thirty someone knocked on the door. Lamar looked at the parmers, who slid the resume and dossier into an open briefcase. All three reached for their jackets. Immar buttoned his top button and opened the door. According to the passage, the main reason Lama Quin was there at the interview was that______.
A. his image could help impress McDereer
B. he would soon become a partner himself
C. he was good at interviewing applicants
D. his background was similar to MeDereer’s
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TEXT E The world’s last known case of smallpox was reported in Somalia, the Horn of Africa, in October 1977. The victim was a young cook called Ali Maow Maalin. His case becomes a landmark in medical history, for smallpox is the first communicable disease ever to be eradicated. The remarkable campaign to free the world of smallpox has been led by the World Health Organization. The Hom of Africa, embracing the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and Somalia, was one of the last few smallpox ridden areas of the world when the WHO-sponsored Smallpox Eradication Programme (SEP) got underway there in 1971. Many of the 25 million inhabitants, mostly farmers and nomads living in a wildness of desert, bush and mountains, already had smallpox. The problem of tracing the disease in such formidable country was exacerbated further by the continuous warfare in the area. The programme concentrated on an imaginative policy of "search and containment." Vaccination was used to reduce the widespread incidence of the disease, but the success of the campaign depended on the work of volunteers. These were men paid by the day, who walked hundreds of miles in search of "rumours"—information about possible smallpox cases. Often these rumours turned out to be cases of measles, chicken pox or syphilis-but nothing could be left to chance. As the campaign progressed the disease was gradually brought under control. By September 1976 the SEP made its first report that no new cases had been reported. But that first optimism was short-lived. A three-year-old girl called Amina Salat, from a dusty village in the Ogaden in the south-east of Ethiopia, had given smallpox to a young nomad visitor. Leaving the village the nomad had walked across the border into Somalia. There he infected 3,000 people, and among them had been the cook, Ali. It was a further 14 months before the elusive "target zero"—no further cases—was reached. Even now, the search continues in "high risk" areas and in parts of the country unchecked for some time. The flow of rumours has now diminished to a trickle--but each must still be checked by a qualified person. Victory is in sight, but two years must pass since the" last case" before an International Commission can declare that the world is entirely free from smallpox. The volunteers mentioned were paid to______.
A. find out about the reported cases of smallpox
B. vaccinate people in remote areas
C. teach people how to treat smallpox
D. prevent infected people from moving around
TEXT B Hostility to Gypsies has existed almost from the time they first appeared in Europe in the 14th century. The origins of the Gypsies, with little written history, were shrouded in mystery. What is known now from clues in the various dialects of their language, Romany, is that they came from northern India to the Middle East a thousand years ago, working as minstrels and mercenaries, metal-smiths and servants. Europeans misnamed them Egyptians, soon shortened to Gypsies. A clan system, based mostly on their traditional crafts and geography, has made them a deeply fragmented and fractious people, only really unifying in the face of enmity from non-Gypsies, whom they call gadje. Today many Gypsy activists prefer to be called Roma, which comes from the Romany word for "man". But on my travels among them most still referred to themselves as Gypsies. In Europe their persecution by the gadje began quickly, with the church seeing heresy in their fortune-telling and the state seeing anti-social behaviour in their nomadism. At various times they have been forbidden to wear their distinctive bright clothes, to speak their own language, to travel, to marry One another, or to ply their traditional crafts. In some countries they were reduced to slavery. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Gypsy slaves were freed in Romania. In more recent times the Gypsies were caught up in Nazi ethnic hysteria, and perhaps half a million perished in the Holocaust. Their horses have been shot and the wheels removed from their wagons, their names have been changed, their women have been sterilized, and their children have been forcibly given for adoption to non-Gypsy families. But the Gypsies have confounded predictions of their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group and their numbers have burgeoned. Today there are an estimated 8 to 12 million Gypsies scattered across Europe, making them the continent’s largest minority. The exact number is hard to pin down. Gypsies have regularly been undercounted, both by regimes anxious to downplay their profile and by Gypsies themselves, seeking to avoid bureaucracies. Attempting to remedy past inequities, activist groups may overcount. Hundreds of thousands more have emigrated to the Americas and elsewhere. With very few exceptions Gypsies have expressed no great desire for a country to call their own-unlike the Jews, to whom the Gypsy experience is often compared. "Romanestan" said Ronald Lee, the Canadian Gypsy writer, "is where my two feet stand. " The reason for the undercounting of Gypsies lies in the fact that ______.
A. they themselves refuse to be counted
B. those who control a country are eager to despise their image, seeking to avoid bureaucracies
C. those who control a country refuse to count them since they are ugly
D. both A and B
SECTION C Questions 6 to 8 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each question. Now listen to the news. How many militants were killed in Wednesday’s attacks
TEXT A Large part as a consequence of the feminist movement, historians have focused a great deal of attention in recent years on determining more accurately the status of women in various periods. Although much has been accomplished for the modern period, premodern cultures have proved more difficult: sources are restricted in number, fragmentary, difficult to interpret, and often contradictory. Thus it is not particularly surprising that some earlier scholarship concerning such cultures has so far gone unchallenged. An example is Johann Bachofen’s 1861 treatise on Amazons, women-ruled societies of questionable existence contemporary with ancient Greece. Starting from the premise that mythology and legend preserve at least a nucleus of historical fact, Bachofen argued that women were dominant in many ancient societies. His work was based on a comprehensive survey of references in the ancient sources to Amazonian and other societies with matrilineal customs--societies in which descent and property rights are traced through the female line. Some support for his theory can be found in evidence such as that drawn from Herodotus, the Greek "historian" of the fifth century B. C, who speaks of an Amazonian society, the Sauromatae, where the women hunted and fought in wars. A woman in this society was not allowed to marry until she had killed a person in battle. Nonetheless, this assumption that the first recorders of ancient myths have preserved facts is problematic. If one begins by examining why ancients refer to Amazons, it becomes clear that ancient Greek descriptions of such societies were meant not so much to represent observed historical fact--real Amazonian societies--but rather to offer "moral lessons" on the supposed outcome of women’s rule in their own society. The Amazons were often characterized, for example, as the equivalents of giants and centaurs, enemies to be slain by Greek heroes. Their customs were presented not as those of a respectable society, but as the very antitheses of ordinary Greek practices. Thus, I would argue the purpose of accounts of the Amazons for their male Greek recorders was didactic, to teach both male and female Greeks that all-female groups, formed by withdrawal from traditional society, are destructive and dangerous. Myths about the Amazons were used as arguments for the male-dominated status quo, in which groups composed exclusively of either sex were not permitted to segregate themselves permanently from society. Bachofen was thus misled in his reliance on myths for information about the status of women. The sources that will probably tell contemporary historians most about women in the ancient world are such social documents as gravestones, wills and marriage contracts. Studies of such documents have already begun to show how mistaken we are when we try to derive our picture of the ancient world exclusively from literary sources, especially myths. It can be inferred from the passage that the probable reactions of many males in ancient Greece to the idea of a society ruled by women could best be characterized as ______.
A. confused and dismayed
B. wary and hostile
C. cynical and disinterested
D. curious but fearful