Lesspilgrims go to Bethlehem this year because ________

单选题 Lesspilgrims go to Bethlehem this year because _________.

A．theyare afraid of violence
B．theyare forbidden to go there
C．thereis great economic crisis there
D．citizens there are fleeing the city

参考答案A

解析: 本题的出题点在重要细节处。新闻提到，今年来到基督降生教堂的人就更少了，由于害怕发生暴力冲突以及以色列设置了安全屏障，去那里朝拜的人越来越少，故选A。

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单选题听音频，回答下列问题：.
Foreign ambassadors in Zimbabwe will bethrown out except for

A．backing its opposition
B．downfalling its government
C．disclosing its police outrage
D．meddlingin its internal affairs

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单选题 According to the news, which of the following is an illustration of theso-called police brutality?

A．Fourcountries have been charged of supporting MDC．
B．Thepolitical campaign aimed at bringing down its government.
C．Someopposition leaders were spotted seriously injured from police detention.
D．Mugabe's government would expel diplomats for violating the rules.

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单选题回答题：
　　The first performance of Tchaikovsky's TheNutcracker, in St. Petersburg in 1892, was a flop. Wrote one critic the nextday: "For dancers there is rather little in it; for art absolutelynothing, and for the artistic fate of our ballet, one more step downwarD．"Two decades passed before another production was attempted．
　　A century later, the ballet constitutesthe single biggest fine-arts moneymaker in the United States, which has claimedthe ballet as its own. In 1996, box-office receipts for some 2,400 Americanperformances of the work by more than 20,000 dancers totaled nearly U.S. $50million. Despite the ballet's popularity, however, few Americans are aware ofits history--or of some of the twists and turns of fate that have changed itfrom its original form.
　　Choreographer Maurice Petipa (known as the"father of classical ballet") prepared the first production for Tchaikovskyin 1892. He based his scenario not on the macabre 1816 short story TheNutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A．Hoffmann, which the composer hadthought to use for his inspiration, but on Alexander Dumas's more benign1845 French adaptation. Petipa did use the Hoffmann version to name hischaracters, but mixed up some names because he could not read German.
　　In the original story the Mouse King hadseven heads and terrified the seven-year-old Marie by foaming blood from allseven mouths and grinding and chattering all seven sets of teeth. Thesememorable characteristics, along with other sinister qualities in Hoffmann'sstory, are among those aspects of the original that have been removed in mostmodem adaptations.
　　Removed from the ballet altogether byPetipa is a vital plot-within-a-plot in the Hoffmann story. This is the fairytalerelated to Marie while she recovers from injuries sustained in the battlebetween the forces of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. As a result, thestoryline in the ballet does not really make sense.
　　In the fairytale, we learn that the MouseKing's desire for vengeance has its origins in his evil mother, the wily MadamMouserinks, whose first seven sons have been executed by the royal court foreating all the fat from the royal family's sausages. In retribution, MadamMouserinks has attacked the little Princess Pirlipat in her cradle, turning herinto a misshapen creature whose beauty can be restored only if she eats acertain rare, difficult-to-crack nut called Krakatuk.
　　After many years the nut is finallylocated in Asia by the court clockmaker and wizard, Drosselmeyer, whose youngnephew is identified as a prime candidate to crack it. The young man is alreadyknown as "the Nutcracker" for the gallantry he shows in cracking nutsfor young ladies in his father's shop. As predicted, he alone is able to crackthe hard nut. He offers it to the princess to eat, and her beauty is restoreD．At that moment, however, the Nutcracker chances to step backwards, trampling onnone other than Madam Mouserinks. She is fatally injured, but manages to placea curse on the young man before she dies. He is transformed into a grotesqueparody of his former self, with a monstrous head, a yawning mouth and a leverin the back by which his jaw may be moved up and down. Madam Mouserinkssentences him to battle her son, the Mouse King, whom she bore after the deathof her seven previous sons, and who has their seven heads. The curse may beremoved only when the Nutcracker is able to win the love of a young lady inspite of his ugliness...
　　Hoffmann, the author of the originalNutcracker story, was as peculiar as many of his characters. Small and wiry,with sunken eyes and dark bushy hair, he had nervous tics that caused hishands, feet and face to twitch constantly. He adored the music of Mozart, wassubject to bouts of deep melancholy and was an alcoholic who sold the rights tohis first book for a cellar of wine. He eventually died of a combination ofliver disease and a neural illness that gradually paralyzed his body, startingwith his feet.
　　Several of Hoffmann's stories provided thebasis for operas and ballets. The French composer Jacques Offenbach, forexample, used three of his short stories as the basis for The Tales of Hoffmann--aquite serious piece, breaking with Offenbach's earlier light-hearted style.
　　Tchaikovsky, composer of The Nutcracker, wasinvited to conduct his work but refuseD．He was terrified that if he were tomount the podium and try to conduct an orchestra his head might fall off. Hedied shortly after the first performance of The Nutcracker, during a choleraepidemic--it was supposed he had been drinking impure water, but a more recenttheory suggests that he killed himself out of fear of exposure for a sexualscandal involving the Russian royal family.
　　The author and the composer may have hadunusual characteristics, and the story of the Nutcracker itself may be bizarre,but its popularity endures. In recent years American choreographers have playedwith the formula to bring it up to date. Kirk Peterson's The AmericanNutcracker is set in the redwood forests of Northern California and replaces someof the characters with legendary or famous American names---notably19th-century writer Mark Twain as a party guest.
　　Americans wanting to reclaim some of thepsychology of the Hoffmann short story have been investigating choreographerMark Morris's dark 1991 update since it became available on video. Set in the1960s, Morris's visionary The Hard Nut probes many of the same moral issues asthe Hoffmann original, most of which are lost in today's conventional versions.
Theword "flop" in the first paragraph means __

A．failure
B．popularity
C．hit
D．criticism

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