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The 1973 Endangered Species Act made into legal policy the concept that endangered species of wildlife are precious as part of a natural ecosystem. The nearly unanimous passage of this act in the United States Congress, reflecting the rising national popularity of environmentalism, masked a bitter debate. Affected industries clung to the former wildlife policy of valuing individual species according to their economic usefulness. They fought to minimize the law’s impact by limiting definitions of key terms, but they lost on nearly every issue. The act defined "wildlife" as almost all kinds of animals—from large mammals to invertebrates—and plants. "Taking" wildlife was defined broadly as any action that threatened an endangered species; areas vital to a species’ survival could be federally protected as "critical habitats". Though these definitions legislated strong environmentalist goals, political compromises made in the enforcement of the act were to determine just what economic interests would be set aside for the sake of ecological stabilization. The author refers to the terms "wildlife" "taking" and "critical habitats" most likely in order to:

A. illustrate the misuse of scientific language and concepts in political processes.
B. emphasize the importance of selecting precise language in transforming scientific concepts into law.
C. represent terminology whose definition was crucial in writing environmentalist goals into law.
D. demonstrate the triviality of the issues debated by industries before Congress passed the Endangered Species Act.
E. show that broad definitions of key terms in many types of laws resulted in ambiguity and thus left room for disagreement about how the law should be enforced.

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Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and services that took place in eighteenth-century England. McKendrick has explored the Wedgwood firm’s remarkable success in marketing luxury pottery; Plumb has written about the proliferation of provincial theaters, musical festivals, and children’s toys and books. While the fact of this consumer revolution is hardly in doubt, three key questions remain: Who were the consumers What were their motives And what were the effects of the new demand for luxuries In the first paragraph, the author mentions McKendrick and Plumb most probably in order to:

A. contrast their views on the subject of luxury consumerism in eighteenth-century England.
B. indicate the inadequacy of historiographical approaches to eighteenth-century English history.
C. give examples of historians who have helped to establish the fact of growing consumerism in eighteenth-century England.
D. support the contention that key questions about eighteenth-century consumerism remain to be answered.
E. compare one historian’s interest in luxury goods such as pottery to another historian’s interest in luxury services such as musical festivals.

单项选择题

When literary periods are defined on the basis of men’s writing, women’s writing must be forcibly assimilated into an irrelevant grid: a Renaissance that is not a renaissance for women, a Romantic period in which women played very little part, a modernism with which women conflict. Simultaneously, the history of women’s writing has been suppressed, leaving large, mysterious gaps in accounts of the development of various genres. Feminist criticism is beginning to correct this situation. Margaret Anne Doody, for example, suggests that during the period between the death of Richardson and the appearance of the novels of Scott and Austen, which has been regarded as a dead period, late- eighteenth-century women writers actually developed the paradigm for women’s fiction of the nineteenth century—something hardly less than the paradigm of the nineteenth-century novel itself. Feminist critics have also pointed out that the twentieth-century writer Virginia Woolf belonged to a tradition other than modernism and that this tradition surfaces in her work precisely where criticism has hitherto found obscurities, evasions, implausibilities, and imperfections. The author quotes Doody most probably in order to illustrate

A. a contribution that feminist criticism can make to literary criticism.
B. a modernist approach that conflicts with women’s writing.
C. writing by a woman which had previously been ignored.
D. the hitherto overlooked significance of Scott’s and Austen’s novels.
E. a standard system of defining literary periods.