题目内容

When Olson say “We’re really there for when the processes fall down” (Line 4, Para. 5), she means that

A. they will provide help whenever taxpayers make claims.
B. they will get involved in the normal appeals process.
C. they will offer counseling when citizen calls.
D. they will give help when procedural problems occur.

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The word “languish” (Line 4, Para. 4) is closest in meaning to

A. wither.
B. abort.
C. lose vigor.
D. lose appeal.

Another factor in the display of art objects (concerns their continued preservation). Because of the sensitivity of some of the materials (used in their creation), it is necessary to control (within narrow limits) the temperature, humidity, and lighting (

A. concerns their continued preservation
B. used in their creation
C. within narrow limits
D. which

Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
In the last ten years, the Internet has opened up incredible amounts of information to ordinary citizens. But using the Internet can he like walking into a library where the books are all lying on the floor in piles. While tools like Google allow some structured search, much of the data from such searches is outdated or of questionable value. Some web enthusiasts have taken up the task of organizing information through a democratic means that only the Internet allows: an encyclopedia of the people, by the people, and completely free to copy and distribute.
This ‘people’s encyclopedia’ of the Web — a free site called Wikipedia — has provided a unique solution by inviting individuals to participate in the process of rationalizing and updating web content. At the heart of this movement are wikis, web sites that allow users to directly edit any web page with one click of the mouse.
Wikipedia — the largest example of these collaborative efforts — is a functioning, user-contributed online encyclopedia that has become a popular and highly regarded reference in just three years of existence. The goal of Wikipedia was to create an encyclopedia that could he shared and copied freely while encouraging people to change and improve the content. Each and every article has an “Edit this page” button, allowing anyone, even anonymous passersby, to add or delete any content on the page. It seems like a recipe for disaster and chaos, but it has produced surprisingly credible content that has been evaluated and revised by the thousands of international visitors to the site. For many, it finally realizes the original concept of World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee — an online environment where people not only browse content, but freely and actively exchange information.
The Wikipedia project was started by Jimmy Wales, head of Internet startup Bomis.com, after his original project for a volunteer, hut strictly controlled, free encyclopedia ran out of money and resources after two years. Editors with PhD degrees were at the helm of the project then, but it produced only a few hundred articles. Not wanting the content to languish, Wales placed the pages on a wiki website in January 2001 and invited any Internet visitors to edit or add to the collection.
The site became a runaway success in the first year and gained a loyal following, generating over 20,000 articles and spawning over a dozen language translations. After two years, it had 100,000 articles, and in April 2004, it exceeded 250,000 articles in English and 600,000 articles in 50 other languages. Over 2,000 new articles are added each day across all the various languages. And according to website rankings at Alexa.com, it has become more popular than traditional online encyclopedias such as Britannica.com and is one of the top 600 most heavily visited websites on the internet.
The author called Wikipedia ‘people’s encyclopedia’ because

A. it is accessible to all the passersby.
B. it can be edited by everyone.
C. it is run by ordinary people.
D. it is built to the taste of common citizens.

What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly, Davis decries the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascription by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important, and undeniable, differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in motives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences.
However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the strong religious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan colonies appears to Davis to be peculiarly Southern—acquisitiveness, a strong interest in politics and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models—was not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost certainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern—but the Puritan 'colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the late Colonial period.
The author is primarily concerned with ______.

A. refuting a claim about the influence of Puritan culture on the early American South
B. refuting a thesis about the distinctiveness of the culture of the early American South
C. refuting the two premises that underlie Davis' discussion of the culture of the American
D. challenging the hypothesis that early American culture was homogeneous in nature

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