单选题 0分

Text 4 In recent weeks media outlets in the U.S. have been fretting over what would ordinarily b...

Text 4
In recent weeks media outlets in the U.S. have been fretting over what would ordinarily be considered good news-the roaring American economy, which has brought low unemployment and, in some places, a labour shortage. Owners and managers have complained about their problems in finding people to fill low-wage positions. "Nobody wants to do manual labour any more:' as one trade association grandee told The Baltimore Sun, and so the manual labour simply goes undone.
Company bosses talk about the things they have done to fix the situation: the ads they've published; the guest-worker visas for which they've applied; how they are going into schools to encourage kids to learn construction skills or to drive trucks. But nothing seems to work. Blame for the labour shortage is sprayed all over the US map: opioids are said to be the problem. And welfare, and inadequate parking spaces, and a fallinp: birthrate. and mass incarceration. and-above all-the Trump administration's immigration policies. But no one really knows for sure.
The textbook solution to the labour shortage problem-paying workers more-rarely merits more than a line or two, if it's mentioned at all. So unwilling are business leaders to talk about or consider this obvious answer that Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, scolded them last year: "If you're not raising wages, then it just sounds like whining."
If you study the Bureau of Labor Statistics' numbers on wages for nonsupervisory workers over the past few decades, you will notice that wage growth has been strangely slow to pick up. Hot economies usually drive wages up pretty promptly; this recovery has been running since 2009 and it has barely moved the needle.
How could such a thing happen in this modern and enlightened age? Well, for starters, think of all that whining we're hearing from the US's management, who will apparently blame anyone and do anything to avoid paying workers more. Every labour-management innovation seems to have been designed with this amazing goal in mind. Every great bipartisan political initiative, from free trade to welfare reform, points the same way.
37. What can we learn from Paragraph 2?
  • A. Reasons for labour shortage beyond number.
  • B. Bosses have done all they can do about labour shortage.
  • C. It is Trump administration's immigration policies to be blame.
  • D. Reasons for labour shortage proposed by bosses are groundless.

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1 单选题 0分
Text 1
Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.
Even so. emerging research suggests that a kev Droblem remains underaDDreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.
Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend morc time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly Iow-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children's lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I'm not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn't have survived infancy ifl'd had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.
To argue that parents' use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn't to discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today's preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of "regular" screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.
Some of the newer interactive games kids play on phones or tablets may be more benign than watching TV or YouTube, in that they better mimic children's natural play behaviors. And, of course, many well-functioning adults survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching a lot of cognitive garbage. (My mother-unusually for her time-prohibited Speed Racer and Gilligan's Island on the grounds of insipidness. That I somehow managed to watch every single episode of each show scores of times has never been explained.) Still, no one really disputes the tremendous opportunity costs to young children who are plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not spent actively exploring the world and relating to other human beings.
21. We can learn from the first two paragraphs that smartphones .
  • A. hardly have any advantages
  • B. bring numerous bad effects
  • C. bear the most severed criticism
  • D. have little effect on parents
2 单选题 0分
Text 1
Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.
Even so. emerging research suggests that a kev Droblem remains underaDDreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.
Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend morc time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly Iow-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children's lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I'm not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn't have survived infancy ifl'd had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.
To argue that parents' use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn't to discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today's preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of "regular" screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.
Some of the newer interactive games kids play on phones or tablets may be more benign than watching TV or YouTube, in that they better mimic children's natural play behaviors. And, of course, many well-functioning adults survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching a lot of cognitive garbage. (My mother-unusually for her time-prohibited Speed Racer and Gilligan's Island on the grounds of insipidness. That I somehow managed to watch every single episode of each show scores of times has never been explained.) Still, no one really disputes the tremendous opportunity costs to young children who are plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not spent actively exploring the world and relating to other human beings.
22. The word "ersatz" (Para. 3) most probably means .
  • A. invalid
  • B. disputable
  • C. unreal
  • D. insufficient
3 单选题 0分
Text 1
Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.
Even so. emerging research suggests that a kev Droblem remains underaDDreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.
Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend morc time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly Iow-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children's lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I'm not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn't have survived infancy ifl'd had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.
To argue that parents' use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn't to discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today's preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of "regular" screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.
Some of the newer interactive games kids play on phones or tablets may be more benign than watching TV or YouTube, in that they better mimic children's natural play behaviors. And, of course, many well-functioning adults survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching a lot of cognitive garbage. (My mother-unusually for her time-prohibited Speed Racer and Gilligan's Island on the grounds of insipidness. That I somehow managed to watch every single episode of each show scores of times has never been explained.) Still, no one really disputes the tremendous opportunity costs to young children who are plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not spent actively exploring the world and relating to other human beings.
23. The contact between parents and cluldren is poorer because
  • A. parents hardly have spare time
  • B. children are distracted by digital devices
  • C. affective interaction is hardly involved
  • D. parents may be addicted to smartphones
4 单选题 0分
Text 1
Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.
Even so. emerging research suggests that a kev Droblem remains underaDDreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.
Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend morc time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly Iow-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children's lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I'm not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn't have survived infancy ifl'd had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.
To argue that parents' use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn't to discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today's preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of "regular" screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.
Some of the newer interactive games kids play on phones or tablets may be more benign than watching TV or YouTube, in that they better mimic children's natural play behaviors. And, of course, many well-functioning adults survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching a lot of cognitive garbage. (My mother-unusually for her time-prohibited Speed Racer and Gilligan's Island on the grounds of insipidness. That I somehow managed to watch every single episode of each show scores of times has never been explained.) Still, no one really disputes the tremendous opportunity costs to young children who are plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not spent actively exploring the world and relating to other human beings.
24. According to Paragraph 4, we can learn that risks of use of screen
  • A. should be viewed correctly
  • B. need more credible evidence
  • C. are higher among parents
  • D. are overestimated among children