The word "staple" in Paragraph 1 means...

单项选择题As much as murder is a staple in mystery stories, so is love. Love may be a four-letter word, or the greatest of the trio of faith, hope, and love. It may appear in a mystery as the driving force behind the plot and the characters. Or it may appear as an aside in a sub-plot, a light spot in a heavy story. But it’s there. Even Valentine knew love was worth dying for.
An emotion this strong gets a lot of attention. Love has its own special day, St. Valentine’s Day. According to legend, the Roman emperor Claudius Ⅱ needed soldiers to fight for him in the far reaches of the Roman Empire. He thought married men would rather stay home than go to war for a couple of years, so he outlawed marriage and engagements. This did not stop people from falling in love. Valentine, a priest, secretly married many young couples. For this crime, he was arrested and executed on February 14.
St. Valentine’s Day was off to a rocky start. Love, secrecy, crime and death, love prevailed, and the day lost its seamy side. Valentine’s Day became a day to exchange expressions of love. Small children give each other paper hearts. Adults exchange flowers and chocolates. Everyone has an attack of the warm fuzzies.
Valentine’s Day was popular in Europe in the early 1800s as a day men brought gifts to the women they loved. Gradually the expectations grew higher, the gifts got bigger, and eventually the holiday collapsed under the weight of the bills.
It was revived when the custom of exchanging love letters and love cards replaced the mandatory gifts. A young man’s love was measured in how much time he spent making a card with paper, lace, feathers, beads, and fabric. If the young man wasn’t good with scissors and glue, the job could be hired out to an artist who made house calls.
Valentine’s Day grew more popular when machine-made cards became available, and people didn’t have to make their own. In England in 1840, the nation-wide Penny Post made it cheap for everyone to send Valentine cards. In the United States, national cheap postal rates were set in 1845, and valentines filled the mail.
"Roses are red, violets are blue" was a popular verse on Valentine cards. Other holidays are associated with particular flowers—the Christmas poinsettia, the Easter lily—but Valentine’s Day has no specific flower. Instead, it has colors—red, pink, and white. Red symbolizes warmth and feeling. White stands for purity. According to one romantic rower’code, messages can be spelled out with flowers. Gardenias say "I love you secretly". Violets say "I return your love". Roses say "I love you passionately". Not surprisingly, the rose is now the top-seeded flower of love.
But love mostly goes wrong in mystery stories. Very badly wrong. Somebody do something wrong. Husbands, wives, and lovers kill each other. Or kill for each other. Stack the characters up in any kind of love triangle, and watch how the angles are knocked off. Love is unrequited, thwarted and scorned. Murders are motivated by real or imaginary love, or the lack of it. That famous novelist Ernest Hemingway said, "If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it". So it goes in the mystery. Justice may win, but love is often the loser.
In addition to plots driven by love, or the lack of it, there are sleuths who encounter love in the solving of the crime. The handsome or beautiful detective meets the suspect or the client. Their affair grows around, and in spite of, the murder. Think of the movies Casablanca and Chinatown. Barbara D’Amato offers a different twist on this theme in "Hard Feelings". The amateur sleuth meets a suspect or investigating officer and love smolders around the crime. Rose DeShaw’s "Love with the Proper Killer" is such a story.
In a series of novels, if the continuing character is living a full life, love enters the storyline somewhere. Dorothy L. Sayers’ sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey fell in love with Harriet Vane while he sleuthed his way through a few books. Sherlock Holmes remained aloof, but Dr. Watson fell in love and married between impossible crimes. There were no such temptations for Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple, but Agatha Christie created Tuppence and Tommy Beresford as a detecting couple.
Real crimes are sometimes motivated by love, and are written about in true crime books. E.W. Count describes one such case in "Love is a Risk." "Married to a Murderer," by Alan Russell, follows the crime one step further.
Feeling an attack of the warm fuzzies Do something sweet for someone you love. Then do something sweet for yourself. Settle back with soft music and savor the online mysteries of love and romance in the Valentine and Romance Mysteries sections of this site.
The word "staple" in Paragraph 1 means ______.

A. necessary element
B. romantic thing
C. unacceptable pattern
D. horrific thing

点击查看答案&解析

你可能感兴趣的试题

1.单项选择题1 For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to call—lamely, enviously—whole persons. If it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a person’s "inside" and "outside," they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive—and so ugly. One of Socrates’ main pedagogical acts was to be ugly—and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of his how full of paradoxes life really was.
2 They may have resisted Socrates’ lesson. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off—with the greatest facility—the "inside"(character, intellect) from the "outside" (looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.
3 It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human excellence. By limiting excellence (virtus in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity set beauty adrift—as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes, the sex which, however fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.
4 A beautiful woman, we say in English, but a handsome man. "Handsome" is the masculine equivalent of—and refusal of—a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtones, by being reserved for women only. That one can call a man "beautiful" in French and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries—unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant version of Christianity—still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if one exists, is of degree only. In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex—to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.
The author means ______ by "whole persons" in Para. 1.

A. persons of beauty
B. persons of virtue
C. persons of excellence
D. none of the above

点击查看答案&解析

2.单项选择题We all know that programming language is the system of syntax, grammar, and symbols or words used to give instructions to a computer. Because computers work with binary numbers, first-generation languages, called machine languages, required the writing of long strings of binary numbers to represent such operations as add, subtract, and compare. Later improvements allowed octal, decimal, or hexadecimal representation of binary strings. It is difficult to write error-free programs in machine language; many languages have been created to make programming easier and faster. Symbolic, or assembly, languages-- second-generation languages-- were introduced in the early 1950s. They use simple mnemonics such as "A" for add or "M" for multiply, which are translated into machine language by a computer program called an assembler. An extension of such a language is the macro instruction, a mnemonic (such as "READ" ) for which the assembler substitutes a series of simpler mnemonics. In the mid-1950s, a third generation of languages came into use. Called high-level languages because they are largely independent of the hardware, these algorithmic, or procedural, languages are designed for solving a particular type of problem. Unlike machine or symbolic languages, they vary little between computers. They must be translated into machine code by a program called a compiler or interpreter. The first such language was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), developed about 1956 and best used for scientific calculation. The first commercial language, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), was developed about 1959. ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language), developed in Europe about 1958, is used primarily in mathematics and science, as is APL (A Programming Language), published in 1962. PI/1 (programming Language I), developed in the late 1960s, and ADA (for Ada Augusta, countess of Lovelace, biographer of Charles Babbage), developed in 1981, are designed for both business and scientific use. For personal computers the most popular languages are BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), developed in 1967 and similar to FORTRAN, and Pascal (for Blaise Pascal, who built the first successful mechanical calculator), introduced in 1971 as a teaching language. Modula 2, a Pacal-like language for commercial and mathematical applications, was introduced in 1982. The C language, introduced (1972) to implement the Unix operating system, has been extended to C ++ to deal with the rigors of object-oriented programming. Fourth-generation languages are nonprocedural. They specify what is to be accomplished without describing how. The first one, FORTH, developed in 1970, is used in scientific and industrial control applications. Most fourth-generation languages are written for specific purposes. Fifth-generation languages, which are still in infancy, are an outgrowth of artificial intelligence research. PROLOG (PRO gramming Logic) is useful for programming logical processes and making deductions automatically.
Many other languages have been designed to meet specialized needs. GPSS (General Purpose System Simulator) is used for modeling physical and environmental events, and SNOBOL (String-Oriented Symbolic Language) and LISP (LISt Processing) are designed for pattern matching and list processing. LOGO, a version of LISP, was developed in the 1960s to help children learn about computers. PILOT (Programmed Instruction Learning, Or Testing) is used in writing instructional software, and Occam is a nonsequential language that optimizes the execution of a program’ s instructions in parallel processing systems.
The 3rd generation of programming language shares all the following characteristics EXCEPT ______.

A. it is used in designing software
B. it is hardware-independent
C. is should be translated into the computer language by software
D. it is designed to solve some specific problem

点击查看答案&解析

3.单项选择题Every silver lining has its cloud. At the moment, the world’s oceans absorb a million tonnes of carbon dioxide an hour. Admittedly that is only a third of the rate at which humanity dumps the stuff into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, but it certainly helps to slow down global warming. However, what is a blessing for the atmosphere turns out to be a curse for the oceans. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid. At the moment, seawater is naturally alkaline -but it is becoming less so all the time.
The biological significance of this acidification was a topic of debate among scientists. Many species of invertebrate have shells or skeletons made of calcium carbonate. It is these, fossilized, that form rocks such as chalk and limestone. And, as anyone who has studied chemistry at school knows, if you drop chalk into acid it fizzes away to nothing. Many marine biologists therefore worry that some species will soon be unable to make their protective homes. Many of the species most at risk are corals.
The end of the Permian period, 252m years ago, was marked by the biggest extinction of life known to have happened on Earth. At least part of the cause of this extinction seems to have been huge volcanic eruptions that poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But some groups of animals became more extinct than others. Sponges, corals and brachiopods were particularly badly hit.
Rather than counting individual species of fossils, which vary over time, paleontologists who study extinction usually count entire groups of related species, called genera. More than 90% of Permian genera of sponges, corals and brachiopods vanished in the extinction. By contrast, only half of the genera of mollusks and arthropods disappeared.
This is because mollusks and arthropods are able to buffer the chemistry of the internal fluids from which they create their shells. This keeps the acidity of those fluids constant. Sponges, corals and brachiopods, however, cannot do this.
The situation at the moment is not as bad as it was at the end of the Permian. Nevertheless, calculations suggest that if today’s trends continue, the alkalinity of the ocean will have fallen by half a pH unit by 2100. That would make some places, such as the Southern Ocean, uninhabitable for corals. Since corals provide habitat and food sources for many other denizens of the deep, this could have a profound effect on the marine food web.
No corals, no sea urchins and no who-knows-what-else would be bad news indeed for the sea. Those who blithely factor oceanic uptake into the equations of what people can get away with when it comes to greenhouse-gas pollution should, perhaps, have second thoughts.
The sentence "Every silver lining has its cloud" in the first paragraph probably means______.

A. there is always a difficult side to a hopeful situation
B. there is always a comforting side to a sad situation
C. there is always a chink of light before the sun comes pouring in
D. visible water vapor floating in the sky can join up to make a silver line

点击查看答案&解析

4.单项选择题The reasons why the church wanted to burn Harry Potter books didn’t include that ______.

A. it believed that the books were an abhorrence to God
B. it believed that the books would weaken the communication with God
C. it believed that the existence of God had been confused by the book
D. it believed that the books would ruin the lifves of many young people

点击查看答案&解析

5.单项选择题How long had the border between Egypt and Israel been closed

A. Three years.
B. Four years.
C. Forty years.
D. Three months.

点击查看答案&解析

6.单项选择题

点击查看答案&解析

7.单项选择题

点击查看答案&解析

8.填空题Why People work
We may fully realize the role of work in providing us the
(1)______things of life. But we may ignore its role in 1. ______
contributing to our (2)______well-being. For most people, 2. ______
work is not only a necessity, but also the (3)______of 3. ______
their lives. Many doctors have observed its (4)______ 4. ______
effect. For many people, the absence of job is (5)______to 5. ______
their health.
Why people need work Firstly, people get their
(6) ______rewards from work. Everybody wants to do 6. ______
something that can serve as a (7)______to our ability. 7. ______
Secondly, people need to be (8)______recognized. A good 8. ______
job can provide people with both status and (9)______ 9. ______
We are often misled by people’s complaints about difficult
work. In fact, most of them regard their own capacity to do
the tough job as the mark of their unique personality. For us
human beings, it is energy (10)______that is satisfying. 10. ______

参考答案：expenditure

9.填空题Why People work
We may fully realize the role of work in providing us the
(1)______things of life. But we may ignore its role in 1. ______
contributing to our (2)______well-being. For most people, 2. ______
work is not only a necessity, but also the (3)______of 3. ______
their lives. Many doctors have observed its (4)______ 4. ______
effect. For many people, the absence of job is (5)______to 5. ______
their health.
Why people need work Firstly, people get their
(6) ______rewards from work. Everybody wants to do 6. ______
something that can serve as a (7)______to our ability. 7. ______
Secondly, people need to be (8)______recognized. A good 8. ______
job can provide people with both status and (9)______ 9. ______
We are often misled by people’s complaints about difficult
work. In fact, most of them regard their own capacity to do
the tough job as the mark of their unique personality. For us
human beings, it is energy (10)______that is satisfying. 10. ______

参考答案：self-confidence

10.填空题Why People work
We may fully realize the role of work in providing us the
(1)______things of life. But we may ignore its role in 1. ______
contributing to our (2)______well-being. For most people, 2. ______
work is not only a necessity, but also the (3)______of 3. ______
their lives. Many doctors have observed its (4)______ 4. ______
effect. For many people, the absence of job is (5)______to 5. ______
their health.
Why people need work Firstly, people get their
(6) ______rewards from work. Everybody wants to do 6. ______
something that can serve as a (7)______to our ability. 7. ______
Secondly, people need to be (8)______recognized. A good 8. ______
job can provide people with both status and (9)______ 9. ______
We are often misled by people’s complaints about difficult
work. In fact, most of them regard their own capacity to do
the tough job as the mark of their unique personality. For us
human beings, it is energy (10)______that is satisfying. 10. ______

参考答案：socially

延伸阅读

你可能感兴趣的试题