问题 单项选择题

Questions 6-10 are based on Passage Two:Passage TwoEducating girls quite possibly yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world. Women’s education may be unusual territory for economists, but enhancing women’s contribution to development is actually as much an economic as a social issue. And economics, with its emphasis on incentives, provides guideposts that point to an explanation for why so many girls are deprived of an education.Parents in low-income countries fail to invest in their daughters because they do not expect them to make an economic contribution to the family: girls grow up only to marry into somebody else’s family and bear children. Girls are thus seen as less valuable than boys and kept at home to do housework while their brothers are sent to school- the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling, trapping women in a vicious circle of neglect.An educated mother, on the other hand, has greater earning abilities outside the home and faces an entirely different set of choices. She is likely to have fewer but healthier children and can insist on the development of all her children, ensuring that her daughters are given a fair chance. The education of her daughters then makes it much more likely that the next generation of girls, as well as of boys, will be educated and healthy. The vicious circle is thus transformed into a virtuous circle.Few will dispute that educating women has great social benefits. But it has enormous economic advantages as well. Most obviously, there is the direct effect of education on the wages of female workers. Wages rise by lo t0 20 percent for each additional year of schooling. Such big returns are impressive by the standard of other available investments, but they are just the beginning. Educating women also has a significant impact on health practices, including family planning.

What does the author say about women’s education ( )

A. It deserves greater attention than other social issues

B.It is now given top priority in many developing countries

C.It will yield greater returns than other known investments

D.It has aroused the interest of a growing number of economists

答案

参考答案:C

解析:本文的第一段提到在发展中国家,同其他可行的投资相比,教育培养女孩很可能会产生更高的回报率。因此,正确答案为C。

单项选择题
单项选择题

Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists’ only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling.

Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed his " Ode to Joy " . In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultra-violent antihero.

You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite: there is too much happiness in the world today.

In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Today the messages that the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Since these messages have an agenda—to pry our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. " Celebrate! " commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attack.

What we forget—what our economy depends on us forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us, as religion once did, that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, is a breath of fresh air.

What is the strangest about artists()

A. They wear special clothes

B. They rarely work in the daytime

C. They mainly depict distressing things

D. They are liable to take illegal drugs