You are busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let's assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn't it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University? More and more people are turning to an utter deception like this to land their first job or to move head in their careers. For personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars at most well-known colleges say that they deal with dishonest claims like these at the rate of about one per week. Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms. If it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are unwilling to accuse the applicant directly. One lvy League school refers to them as "special cases", One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says these claims are made by "no such people". To avoid complete lies, some job seekers claim that they "attended" or "were associated with" a college or university. After careful checking, a personnel officer may discover that "attending" means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that "being as sociated with" a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century--that's when they began keeping records, anyhow. If you don't want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a fake diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of non-existent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a... We can learn from the passage that _ . A) US employers value their job applicants with a degree from top universities B) University of Purdue and Purdue University are the same school C) people with fake diplomas can get their first jobs in the US easily D) people pay the same price for a fake diploma from different universities
A
(Question)
What will people die of 100 years from now? If you think that is a simple question, you have not been paying attention to the revolution that is taking place in bio-technology . With the help of new medicine, the human body will last a very long time. Death will come mainly from accidents, murder and war. Today's leading killers, such as heart diseases, cancer, and aging itself, will become distant memory. In discussion of technological changes, the Internet gets most of the attention these days. But the change in medicine can be the real technological event of our times. How long can humans live? Human brains were known to decide the final death. Cells are the basic units of all living things, and until recently, scientists were sure that the life of cells could not go much beyond 120 years because the basic materials of cells, such as those of brain cells, would not last forever. But the upper limits will be broken by new medicine. Sometime between 2050 and 2100, medicine will have advanced to the point at which every 10 years or so, people will be able to take medicine to repair their organs . The medicine, made up of the basic building materials of life, will build new brain cells, heart cells, and so on---in much the same way our bodies make new skin cells to take the place of old ones. It is exciting to imagine that the advance in technology may be changing the most basic conditional human existence, but many technical problems still must be cleared up on the way to this wonderful future. Humans may live longer in the future because _ . A) heart disease will be far away from us B) human brains can decide the final death C) the basic materials of cells will last forever D) human organs can be repaired by new medicine
(Answer)
D
When a magazine for high school students asked its readers what life would be like in twenty years, they said: Machines would be run by solar power. Buildings would rotate so they could follow the sun to take maximum advantage of its light and heat. Walls would "give light" and "change color with the push of a button." Food would be replaced by pills. School would be taught by electrical impulse while we sleep. Cars would have radar . Does this sound like the year 2000? Actually, this article was written in 1958 and the question was, "what will life be like in 1978? The future is much too important to simply guess about, the way the high school students did, so experts are regularly asked to predict accuately. By carefully studying the present, skilled businessmen, scientists, and politicians are supposedly able to figure out in advance what will happen. But can they? One expert on Cities wrote: Cities of the future would not be crowded, but would have space for farms and fields. People would travel to work in "airbuses", large all-weather helicopters carrying up to 200 passengers. When a person left the airbus station he could drive a coin-operated car equipped with radar. The radar equipment of cars would make traffic accidents "almost unheard of". Does that sound familiar? If the expert had been accurate it would, because he was writing in 1957. His subject was "The city of 1982". If the professionals sometimes sound like high school students, it's probably because future study is still a new field. But economic forecasting, or predicting what the economy will do, has been around for a long time. It should be accuate, and generally it is. But there have been some big mistakes in the field, too. In early 1929, most forecasters saw an excellent future for the stock market. In October of that year, the stock market had its worst losses ever, ruining thousands of investors who had put their faith in financial foreseers. One forecaster knew that predictions about the future would always be subject to... The high school students' answers to "What would life be like in 1978?" sound _ . A) accurate B) imaginative C) correct D) foolish
B