单项选择题One thing that distinguishes the online world from the real one is that it is very easy to find things. To find a copy of The Economist in print, one has to go to a news-stand, which may or may not carry it. Finding it online, though, is a different proposition. Just go to Google, type in "economist" and you will be instantly directed to economist.com. Though it is difficult to remember now, this was not always the case. Indeed, until Google, now the world’s most popular search engine, came on to the scene in September 1998, it was not the case at all. As in the physical world, searching online was a hit-or-miss affair.
Google was vastly better than anything that had come before: so much better, in fact, that it changed the way many people use the web. Almost overnight, it made the web far more useful, particularly for non- specialist users, many of whom now regard Google as the internet’s front door. The recent fuss over Google’s stock market flotation obscures its far wider social significance: few technologies, after all, are so influential that their names become used as verbs.
Google began in 1998 as an academic research project by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, who were then graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was not the first search engine, of course. Existing search engines were able to scan or "crawl" a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words. But they were less good at presenting those pages, which might number in the hundreds of thousands, in a useful way.
Mr Brin’s and Mr Page’s accomplishment was to devise a way to sort the results by determining which pages were likely to be most relevant. They did so using a mathematical recipe, or algorithm, called PageRank. This algorithm is at the heart of Google’s success, distinguishing it from all previous search engines and accounting for its apparently magical ability to find the most useful web pages.
Untangling the web
PageRank works by analysing the structure of the web itself. Each of its billions of pages can link to other pages, and can also, in turn, be linked to. Mr Brin and Mr Page reasoned that if a page was linked to many other pages, it was likely to be important. Furthermore, if the pages that linked to a page were important, then that page was even. more likely to be important. There is, of course, an inherent circularity to this formula—the importance of one page depends on the importance of pages that link to it, the importance of which depends in turn on the importance of pages that link to them. But using some mathematical tricks, this circularity can be resolved, and each page can be given a score that reflects its importance.
The simplest way to calculate the score for each page is to perform a repeating or "iterative" calculation I see article). To start with, all pages are given the same score. Then each link from one page to another is counted as a "vote" for the destination page. Each page’s score is recalculated by adding up the contribution from each incoming link, which is simply the score of the linking page divided by the number of outgoing links on that page. (Each page’s score is thus shared out among the pages it links to.)
Once all the scores have been recalculated, the process is repeated using the new scores, until the scores settle down and stop changing (in mathematical jargon, the calculation "converges". The final scores can then be used to rank search results: pages that match a particular set of search terms are displayed in order of. descending score, so that the page deemed most important appears at the top of the list.
We can infer from the 1st paragraph that by "hit-or-miss" it is meant ______.

A.before Google, searching online was .impossible
B.before Google, searching online lacked accuracy
C.before Google, searching online was difficult
D.Google is easy to use


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A.The girl was living with her mother.
B.The landlady witnessed the crime.
C.The girl and the suspect probably were dating.
D.The girl was found dead on the floor.

2.单项选择题Tell an investment banker that a picture bought in 1950 for $30,000 sold this month for $104.1 million and you will be unlucky if you fail to get his attention. That was the case with the portrait of a young boy by Picasso when Sotheby’s dispersed on May 5 the tail end of the famous collection formed by the late John Hay Whitney and his wife Betsy Cushing Whitney. Sales added up to almost $190 million within two hours.
If you then go on to explain that Whitney bought the 1905 portrait not for investment but for art’s sake, because he loved 19th- and 20th-century painting, you might well be greeted with a stare of compassionate irony.
Yet that was exactly so. Had the heir to a vast fortune consulted experts at the time, most would have advised against the acquisition. Received wisdom in the 1950s had it that it was Picasso’s breakthrough in modern art that made him truly important, i. e. his early Cubist work.
The Picasso case, which is probably the greatest success story ever in the art market, neatly illustrates the financial gamble that buying art represents. The biggest winners are not investors, but art lovers with a great eye who follow their intuition.
Art cannot be an investment because perception determines everything. No two works are ever identical. One Picasso does not equal another Picasso. On May 6, one day after the Whitney sale, Sotheby’s was offering another five Picassos. All fetched different prices.
That night the market was on a roll and two of the Picassos sold extremely well. Even so, their diverging fates illustrate the impossibility of predicting prices. Presale calculations are frequently belied, up or down. "Le Nu Accroupi" (describing a seated woman), dated "21/24.6.59," was expected to bring $3 million to $4 million plus the 12 percent sale charge. Furious bidding sent it climbing to $11,768,000.
The second of the two most expensive Picassos sold within the expected price bracket, costing $14,792,000."Le Sauvetage" ("The ReScue") was painted in November 1932.This is seen as a seminal year. Why did it not arouse enthusiasm in proportion to the "Nu Accroupi" and increase the estimate by 250 percent
One reason, in favor of the "Nu Accroupi", is that the figure of the seated woman is distorted in a manner that best fits the general public’s idea of what Picasso’s art looks like. The face broken up in separate halves that can be read as seen sideways or full front is typical of this stereotype even if in reality Picasso was the most versatile artist of his time.
Another reason works against "Le Sauvetage". A jarring note is introduced by the spiky rendition of the human figures. Moreover, some deem the composition to be loose. Others, by contrast, praise its rhythm. The argument can go on indefinitely. In short, no complete agreement is ever reached over the aesthetic characterization of a painting. Nor is there ever total agreement over the assessment of its importance relative to the artist’s oeuvre. How good within the 1932 style "Le Sauvetage" is will be seen differently by different viewers.
Cubism was a crucial phase of Picasso’s art in the view of virtually all art historians today and yet the-1909 to 1914 revolutionary works are not always well received by the public at auction.
Immediately before the "Nu Accroupi", a large charcoal sketch of a man’s head done by Picasso in 1909 in his first Cubist manner reflecting the impact that African sculpture had on its emergence came up with a $400,000 to $600,000 estimate. The drawing came from a European estate, and works with an estate provenance generally do well because they have long been out of sight. Moreover, it had previously passed through the hands of one of the greatest 20th-century dealers, Heinz Berggruen, while he was based in Paris. All to no avail. The drawing fell unsold, probably too ungainly for its art historical importance to weigh sufficiently in its favor. But both these characterizations are a matter of perception.
The price of a painting is determined by ______.

A.its art historical importance
B.its aesthetic characterization
C.the general public’s idea
D.its beauty

3.单项选择题Questions 9 and 10 are based on the following news. 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 lives of many young people

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A.To have a talk with exhibitor.
B.To purchase a lab.
C.To discuss the possibility of negotiation with the Universal Computers Ltd.
D.To inquire more information about the scientific apparatus.

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参考答案:product and service
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10.填空题
参考答案:application