[简答题]The term "business model" first came into widespread use with the invention of the personal computer and the spreadsheet (空白表格程序). Before the spreadsheet, business planning usually meant producing a single forecast. At best, you did a little sensitivity analysis around the projection. The spreadsheet ushered in a much more analytic approach to planning because every major line item could be pulled apart, its components and subcomponents analyzed and tested. You could ask what-if questions about the critical assumptions on which your business depended—for example, what if customers are more price-sensitive than we thought—and with a few keystrokes, you could see how any change would play out on every aspect of the whole. In other words, you could model the behavior of a business. Before the computer changed the nature of business planning, most successful business models were created more by accident than by elaborate design. By enabling companies to tie their marketplace insights much

[单项选择]The first person I came across who’d got the measure of e-mall was an American friend who was high up in a big corporation. Some years ago, when this method of communication first seeped into business life from academia, his company in New York and its satellites across the globe were among the first to get it. In the world’s great seats of learning, e-mail had for some years allowed researchers to share vital new jokes. And if there was cutting-edge wit to be had, there was no way my friend’s corporation would be without it.
One evening in New York, he was late for a drink we’d arranged. "Sorry," he said, "I’ve been away and had to deal with 998 e-mails in my queue." "Wow," I said, "I’m really surprised you made it before midnight."
"It doesn’t really take that tong," be explained, "if you simply delete them all."
True to form, he had developed a strategy before most of us had even heard of e-mail. If any information he was sent was sufficiently vital, his lack of
A. so that employees could contact academics more easily.
B. to avoid missing out on any musing novelty.
C. because it had been tried and tested in universities.
D. to cope with the vast mount of correspondence they received.

[单项选择]Who first used the term "communicative competence" in deliberate contrast to Chomsky's "linguistic competence"（）
A. Stem.
B. Asher.
C. Krashen.
D. Hymes.

[单项选择]

How the First Stars in the Universe Came into Existence

How the first stars formed from this dust and gas has been a burning question for years, but a state-of-the-art computer simulation now offers the most detailed picture yet of how these first stars in the universe came into existence, researchers say.
The composition of the early universe was quite different from that of today, and the physics that governed the early universe were also somewhat simpler. Dr. Naoki Yoshida and colleagues in Japan and the U.S. incorporated these conditions of the early universe, sometimes referred to as the "cosmic dark ages," to simulate the formation of an astronomical object that would eventually shine its light into this darkness.
The result is a detailed description of the formation of a protostar--the early stage of a massive primordial star of our universe, and the researchers’ computer simulation, which has been called a "cosmic Ro
A. How the Big Bang occurred about 13 billion years ago.
B. How "cosmic dark ages" came into existence.
C. How dust grains and gases were formed after the Big Bang.
D. How the first stars came into being after the Big Ban