The law says that women should have the chance of doing the same jobs as men and earn the same as them.
The reality is very different. Women lose because, 25 years after the Equal Pay Act, many of them still get paid less than men.
They lose because they do lower-paid jobs which men just won’t consider. And they lose because they are the ones who interrupt a career to have children.
All this is reported in an independent study ordered by the Government’s Women’s Unite.
The biggest problem isn’t equal pay in workplaces such as factories. It is a sort of work women do.
Make a list of the low-paid jobs, then consider who does them.
Try nurses, secretaries, cleaners, clerks, teachers in primary schools, dinner ladies, and child care helpers. Not a lot of men among that group, are there
Yet some of those jobs are really important. Surely no one would deny that about nurses and teachers, for a start.
So why do we reward the people who do them so poorly There can be only one answer —— because they are women.
This is not going to be put right overnight. But the Government which employs a lot of them, and other bosses have to make a start.
It is disgraceful (可耻的) that we have gone into the 21st Century but still treat women as second-class citizens.
When the writer says, "This is not going to be put right overnight", he means ______.

A:we must solve the problem very quickly B:there is no completely fair thing all over the world C:we need a long time to change the unfair reality D:the problem that women lose will be solved soon

Text 3
To walk among me stars has been a dream of human kind since the beginning of time, wandering among the heavens that inspire legends and fantasies across the ages. Today, that dream has become a reality, a memory of some of the greatest human achievements in history: walking on the moon, sending probes to distant planets and discovering the secrets behind the mysteries of the cosmos. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, humans were at the halfway point between viewing space travel as a dream and as a reality. To them it was a goal rather than a memory, and the two main forces working toward that goal were the world’s two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Both of the great nations, on the advent of incredibly efficient rocket thrusters capable of propelling manmade objects into space, strove to achieve the victory of finding a place among the stars and securing the considerable international prestige associated with that monumental achievement. The Soviet Union gained the initial upper hand in the "Space Race," as it is commonly called, sending the first animal into space with. its Sputnik program. Its success and momentum carried it forward, achieving the second remarkable goal of putting a human cosmonaut into orbit around the earth and, more importantly, bringing him safely back to earth.
The United States, sensing its losing position in the Space Race, set out to achieve the most ambitious goal yeti, to put a man on the moon. The resources of the entire nation were mobilized to work toward that goal under the orders of President John F. Kennedy, in an attempt to assert itself as a contender in the Space Race despite the Soviet Union’ s early victories. After several years, all the efforts bore fruit, when Neil Armstrong, an American became the first man to walk on file moon.
With the utterance of his famous words, "That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong stated what everyone was thinking. The impossible has been achieved, for such a feat was considered impossible a scant hundred years prior. With the space program continuing forward, the future does indeed seem to hold unlimited possibilities for human kind. An international space station is now orbiting the earth and there are even plans for colonizing planets, bringing the dreams and fantasies of yesterday in line with the reality of today.

Which of the following is NOT considered a result of the "Space Race"（）

A:Great upsurges in technological development. B:Tense relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, who were competitors. C:A closer alignment between fantasies and reality. D:International prestige for the nations involved.

Text 2
The Tuscan town of Vinci, birthplace of Leonardo and home to a museum of his machines, should fittingly put on a show of the television-robot sculptures of Nam Jun Paik. This Korean-born American artist and the Renaissance master are kindred spirits: Leonardo saw humanistic potential in his scientific experiments, Mr. Paik endeavors to harness media technology for artistic purposes. A pioneer of video art in the late 1960s, he treats television as a space for art images and as material for robots and interactive sculptures.
Mr. Paik was not alone. He and fellow artists picked on the video cameras because they offered an easy way to record their performance art. Now, to mark video art’s coming of age, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is looking back at their efforts in a film series called "The First Decade". It celebrates the early days of video by screening the archives of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading distributors of video and new media art, founded 30 years ago.
One of EAI’s most famous alumni is Bill Viola. Part of the second generation of video artists, who emerged in the 1970s, Mr. Viola experimented with video’s expressive potential His camera explores religious ritual and universal ideas. The Viola show at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin shows us moving-image frescoes that cover the gallery walls and envelop the viewer in all-embracing cycles of life and death.
One new star is a Californian, Doug Aitken, who took over London’s Serpentine Gallery last October with an installation called "New Ocean". Some say Mr. Aitken is to video what Jackson Pollock was to painting. He drips his images from floor to ceiling, creating sequences of rooms in which the space surrounds the viewer in hallucinatory images, of sound and light.
At the Serpentine, Mr. Aitken created a collage of moving images, on the theme of water’s flow around the planet as a force of life. "I wanted to create a new topography in this work, a liquid image, to show a world that never stands still," he says. The boundary between the physical world and the world of images and information, he thinks, is blurring.
The interplay of illusion and reality, sound and image, references to art history, politics, film and television in this art form that is barely 30 years old can make video art difficult to define. Many call it film-based or moving-image art to include artists who work with other cinematic media. At its best, the appeal of video art lies in its versatility, its power to capture the passing of time and on its ability to communicate both inside and outside gallery walls.

The videos created by Dough Aitken is used to show a combination of（）

A:television and robotics. B:illusion and reality, C:sculptures and paintings. D:space and planets.

What do you think is the relationship between the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and the way language is used to classify reality Illustrate your view with examples.

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. According to Saussure, the arbitrariness nature of language refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. For instance, we cannot explain why a book is called a book, read as /buk/, or a pen a/pen/ or笔 in Chinese instead of something else. However, there seems to be different levels of ARBITRARINESS.
(A)Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning. You may object this when you think of words with different degrees of onomatopoeia namely, words that sounds like the sounds they describe. For example, in Chinese we use 叮咚, 轰隆, 叽里咕噜 to describe some sounds. These linguistic forms seem to have a natural basis. But in English; totally different words are used to describe these sounds. For example, a dog barks wow wow in English while 汪汪 in Chinese. As a matter of fact, arbitrariness and onomatopoeia effects may work at the same time.
(B)At the same time, the arbitrariness of language is not absolute. According to systemic- functionalists and American functionalists, the most strictly arbitrary level of language exists in the distinctive units of sounds by which we distinguish pairs of words like pin and bin, or fish and dish. Therefore language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level Otherwise, it would be impossible for people to understand and communicate.
On the other hand, we should be aware that while language is arbitrary by nature, it is not entirely arbitrary. The link between a linguistic sign and its meaning has to do with convention. It means that in any language there are certain sequences of sounds that have a conventionally accepted meaning. Those words are customarily used by all speakers with the same intended meaning and understood by all listeners in the same way. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative and conventionality of communication via language possible. There are two different schools of belief concerning arbitrariness. Most people, especially structural linguists believe that language is arbitrary by nature. Other people, however, hold that language is iconic, that is, there is a direct relation or correspondence between sound and meaning, such as onomatopoeia (e.g.: cuckoo; crash). For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it. And for them, the sets of signals used in communication are finite.

At first, the __________ of color pictures over a long distance seemed impossible, but, with painstaking efforts and at great expense, it became a reality.

A:transaction B:transmission C:transformation D:transition

When dreaming, however, one tends to believe fully in the reality of the dream world, however inconsistent, illogical and odd it may be.

无论所做的梦是多么与事实不符，多么不合逻辑，多么荒诞

Conflict is an organizational reality that is inherently neither good nor bad in and of itself. It can be destructive, but it can also play a productive role both within a person and between persons.

I tried to （detach） myself from the reality of these terrible events.

A:bring B:separate C:put D:set

A

The law says that women should have the chance of doing the same jobs as men and earn the same as them.
The reality is very different. Women lose because, 25 years after the Equal Pay Act, many of them still get paid less than men.
They lose because they do lower-paid jobs which men just won’ t consider. And they lose be- cause they are the ones who interrupt a career to have children.
All this is reported in an independent study ordered by the Government’s Women’s Unite.
The biggest problem isn’ t equal pay in workplaces such as factories. It is a sort of work women do.
Make a list of the low-paid jobs, then consider who does them.
Try nurses, secretaries, cleaners, clerks, teachers in primary schools, dinner ladies, and child care helpers. Not a lot of men among that group, are there
Yet some of those jobs are really important. Surely no one would deny that about nurses and teachers, for a start.
So why do we reward the people who do them so poorly There can be only one answer—because they are women.
This is not going to be put right overnight. But the Government which employs a lot of them, and other bosses have to make a start.
It is disgraceful(可耻的) that we have gone into the 21st Century but still treat women as second-class citizens.

When the writer says, "This is not going to be put right overnight", he means（）.

A:we must solve the problem very quickly B:there is no completely fair thing all over the world C:we need a long time to change the unfair reality D:the problem that women lose will be solved soon