首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
It’s 1997, and it’s raining and you’ll have to walk to work again. Any given subway train breaks down one morning out of five. T
It’s 1997, and it’s raining and you’ll have to walk to work again. Any given subway train breaks down one morning out of five. T
admin
2009-06-24
52
问题
It’s 1997, and it’s raining and you’ll have to walk to work again. Any given subway train breaks down one morning out of five. The buses are gone, and on a day like today, bicycles slosh and slide.
Luckily you have a job in demolition. It’s slow and dirty work but steady. The fading structures of a decaying city are the great mineral mines and hardware shops of the nation. Break them down and reuse the parts. Coal is too difficult to dig up and transport to give us energy in the amounts we need, nuclear fission is judged to be too dangerous, the technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion that we hoped for never took place, and solar batteries are too expensive to maintain on the earth’s surface in sufficient quantity.
66.______.
There are many advantages, if you want to look for them. Our 1997 newspapers continually point them out. The air is cleaner and there seem to be fewer colds. Against predictions, the crime rate has dropped. With the police car too expensive (and too easy a target), policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king in the cities of 1997, and people walk everywhere far into the night. Even the parks are full, and there is mutual protection in crowds.
If the weather isn’t too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air-conditioning they get. And at least the street lights still burn. Indoors, electricity is scarce, and few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper.
67.______.
There is some consolation in the city that it is worse in the suburbs. The suburbs were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. One way out for the suburbanites is to form associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Pushcarts creak from house to house along the suburban roads, and every bad snow-storm is a disaster. It isn’t easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open. There is not much in the way of refrigeration except for the snowbanks, and then the dogs must be fought off.
68.______.
And then, of course, energy must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. We can huddle together when there is a lack of warmth, fan ourselves should there be no cooling breezes, sleep or make love at such times as there is a lack of light—but nothing will for long ameliorate a lack of food. The American population isn’t going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export so that we can pay for some trickle of oil and for other resources.
69.______.
All the statistics point to a rapidly declining rate of population increase, but that is coming about chiefly through a high infant mortality; the first and most helpless victims of starvation are babies, after their mothers have gone dry. A strong current of American opinion, as reflected in the newspapers (some of which still produce their eight pages of bad news), holds that it is just as well. It serves to reduce the population, doesn’t it?
Others point out that it’s more than just starvation. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that there are now nearly 2 billion people in the world who are alive but who are permanently brain-damaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing year by year. It has already occurred to some that it would be "realistic" to wipe them out quietly and rid the earth of an encumbering menace. The American newspapers of 1997 do not report that this is actually being done anywhere, but some travelers bring back horror-tales.
70.______.
Energy continues to decline, and machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours and there is less leisure; but then, with electric lighting restricted, television for only three hours a night, movies three evenings a week, new books few and printed in small editions, what is there to do with leisure? Work, sleep and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed.
A. At least the armies are gone—no one can afford to keep those expensive, energy-gobbling monstrosities. Some soldiers in uniform and with rifles are present in almost every still functioning nation.
B. Where will it end? It must end in a return to the days before 1800, to the days before the fossil fuels powered a vast machine industry and technology. It must end in subsistence farming and in a world population reduced by starvation, disease and violence to less than a billion.
C. The rest of the world, of course, is not as lucky as we are. Some cynics say that it is the knowledge of this that helps keep America from despair. They’re starving out there, because earth’s population has continued to go up. The population on earth is 5.5 billion, and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time.
D. As for the winter—well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn; but sweaters are popular indoor wear and showers are not an everyday luxury. Lukewarm sponge baths will do, and if the air is not always very fragrant in the human vicinity, the automobile fumes are gone.
E. What energy is left cannot be directed into personal comfort. The nation must survive until new energy sources are found, so it is the railroads and subways that are receiving major attention. The railroads must move the coal that is the immediate hope, and the subways can best move the people.
F. Anyone older than ten can remember automobiles. They dwindled. At first the price of gasoline climbed—way up. Finally only the well-to-do drove, and that was too clear an indication that they were filthy rich, so any automobile that dared show itself on a city street was overturned and burned.
选项
答案
C
解析
本题前面一段后面两句提到了美国的人口增长和食品问题,后面一段涉及的则是全世界人口的情况。选项C涉及的是世界其他地区,the rest of the world与前面的America形成对比和衔接,而该项最后一句中的5.5 billion、one in five等则与下一段第一句中的statistics(统计数据)形成衔接。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/XATd777K
本试题收录于:
公共英语五级笔试题库公共英语(PETS)分类
0
公共英语五级笔试
公共英语(PETS)
相关试题推荐
Howdoesthedormousedefenditselfagainstcoldinwinter?Accordingtothepassage,whatis"migration"?
Whatarethetwodeclarationsconcernedwith?WhichofthefollowingisthecurrentdebateNOTrelatedto?
TrafficinOurCitiesThevolumeoftrafficinmanycitiesintheworldtodaycontinuestoexpand.Thiscausesmanyproblems,
TrafficinOurCitiesThevolumeoftrafficinmanycitiesintheworldtodaycontinuestoexpand.Thiscausesmanyproblems,
Hemadeanumberofruderemarksaboutthefood.
HowTwoGreatConflictsHelpedtoChangeEuropeNinetyyearsagoonasunnymorninginNorthernFrance,somethinghappenedt
HowTwoGreatConflictsHelpedtoChangeEuropeNinetyyearsagoonasunnymorninginNorthernFrance,somethinghappenedt
ExplanationWhatdoesascientistdowhenheorshe"explains"something?Scientificexplanationcomesintwoforms:generalizat
WhichofthefollowingisNOTtrueaboutdomesticviolence?Forawomaninanabusiverelationship,leavingprovesdangerousbe
随机试题
急性白血病发生贫血的原因是()。
男,64岁,反复咳嗽、咳痰,痰中带血2周。体温38.3℃,WBC12×109/L,胸片右肺门肿块影,伴远端大片状阴影,抗炎治疗阴影不吸收。有助于尽快明确诊断的检查首选
服用药后需要多饮水的机制A、平喘药(茶碱类)B、利胆药(去氢胆酸)C、抗痛风药(别嘌醇)D、氨基糖苷类抗生素E、双膦酸盐(阿伦膦酸钠)防止尿酸沉积形成结石
国债经营机构代保管的国债券可以与自营的国债券一起保管、分账管理,并确保账券一致。()
在下列各种观点中,体现了合作共赢的价值理念,有利于实现企业经济效益和社会效益统一的财务管理目标是()。
素质教育作为一项教育的基本决策,其制定和实施已经有十年的时间了,然而仍有很多不能令人满意之处。为什么在长达十几年的学校教育之后,相当多的年轻人却越来越感到涉足社会的困难?学校究竟能否使年轻一代得到全面和谐的发展?我们应如何理解和实施素质教育?在这些问题的背
设随机变量X1,X2,…,Xn(n>1)独立同分布,且方差σ2>0,记的相关系数为
在文件存储设备管理中,有三类常用的空闲块管理方法,即位图向量法、空闲块链表链接法和______。
在Word2003中,为使插入的图片具有水印效果,应选择________环绕方式。
若表中已经有字段“终止日期”和“起始日期”,在查询设计视图中的字段栏中要添加一个用于显示的字段“时间长度”,则应在字段栏中填写的表达式是()。
最新回复
(
0
)