问答题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1)Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man: very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy. "The Lord helps us!" he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected advent.
    (2)Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. "Wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones.
    (3)Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door; above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date "1500", and the name "Hareton Earnshaw". I would have made a few comments, and requested a short history of the place from the surly owner; but his attitude at the door appeared to demand my speedy entrance, or complete departure, and I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium.
    (4)One step brought us into the family sitting-room, without any introductory lobby or passage: they call it here "the house" preeminently. It includes kitchen and parlour, generally; but I believe at Wuthering Heights the kitchen is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter: at least I distinguished a chatter of tongues, and a clatter of culinary utensils (厨房用具), deep within; and I observed no signs of roasting, boiling, or baking, about the huge fireplace; nor any glitter of copper saucepans and tin cullenders (滤锅) on the walls. One end, indeed, reflected splendidly both light and heat from ranks of immense pewter dishes, interspersed with silver jugs and tankards, towering row after row, on a vast oak dresser, to the very roof. The latter had never been under-drawn: its entire anatomy lay bare to an inquiring eye, except where a frame of wood laden with oatcakes and clusters of legs of beef, mutton, and ham, concealed it. Above the chimney were sundry villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of ornament, three gaudily-painted canisters disposed along its ledge. The floor was of smooth, white stone; the chairs, high-backed, primitive structures, painted green: one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade. In an arch under the dresser reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer, surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and other dogs haunted other recesses.
    (5)The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaiters (绑腿). Such an individual seated in his arm-chair, his mug of ale (麦芽啤酒) frothing on the round table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the right time after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose. Possibly, some people might suspect him of a degree of under-bred pride; I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort: I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling—to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No, I'm running on too fast: I bestow my own attributes over liberally on him. Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate me. Let me hope my constitution is almost peculiar: my dear mother used to say I should never have a comfortable home; and only last summer I proved myself perfectly unworthy of one.
    (6)While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return—the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame—shrank icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
    (7)I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch. My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1)After a long day at the office, many of us find ourselves taking out our stress on friends, children, or significant others. And if we're not careful, we allow our work stress to become home stress, often at the expense of our families and relationships or our health.
    (2)In the U.K. the Health and Safety Executive found that 43% of days lost to illness were stress-related. Another study, by the American Psychological Association (APA), found that the two most common stressors among those surveyed were work and money, and the incidence of stress often results in irritability, anger, nervousness, and anxiousness—all behavior that can cause tension when brought home after work.
    (3)We've previously written about how couples can help each other cope with professional stress. But even couples who cope well together can become overwhelmed if work stress becomes too prominent an element of their relationship.
    (4)How can you minimize the impact that work stress has on your relationship with your significant other, family, and friends? Below are five tips for keeping work stress from becoming home stress.
    (5)Confine your work to particular times and locations. A study by Scott Schieman of the University of Toronto found that 50% of people bring their work home and that incidence of work-life interference are higher among those who "hold professional jobs with more authority, decision-making latitude, pressure, and longer hours." In today's ever-connected world, many of us are expected to be on 24/7 and work full-time or part-time from home. When Jackie was a counselor, she often was called to meet clients in moments of crisis at all hours of the day. When John was a management consultant, he often was on his laptop working late into the evenings. But if work is constantly seeping into your home life, the stresses of work will too.
    (6)So leave your work at the office. Make a rule to work from home only in exceptional circumstances, and keep work folders, computers, and notebooks at your desk. If that's not feasible for your position, designate a few hours each day for home life only—an hour during dinner or bedtime with the kids—when you can eliminate distractions and focus on family. If you work at home, don't bring your laptop to bed or use it on your couch. Work in an office or a specified workspace. Doing this will mentally help you shut off work when you leave the room, giving you an incentive to work as efficiently as possible rather than lingering over tasks.
    (7)Develop good mobile device habits. Perhaps the most common way in which work distraction seeps into a person's relationships today is through smartphones. Have you ever finally decompressed in an evening only to look at your email, see something alarming, and become stressed? The average person now checks their phone 46 times per day, spending nearly five hours per day on mobile devices, leading 30% of users to consider their smartphones a "leash".
    (8)Develop good habits and rules that keep your tablets and phones from tethering you to work. Keep two separate mobile phones—one for work and one for personal use—and leave the work phone in an out-of-the-way place (or turned off) on nights and weekends. And never check your work email in the hour or two prior to bed. Multiple studies have found that staring at a phone before bed can negatively impact your brain's ability to prepare for sleep, and sleep deprivation is linked closely to stress. When on vacation, lock work-related mobile devices in the hotel safe and check them only at predetermined times.
    (9)Establish a good support network. Significant others can be amazing partners in dealing with stress. But to place all your work stress on a spouse or partner is unfair to them and dangerous to your relationship. Develop a support network of friends and mentors who can help you manage your professional stress so that it isn't the burden solely of your significant other. The APA survey referenced above noted lower stress levels in people with a strong social support network. Having people to lean on in times of stress can increase your ability to cope with problems independent of your network, as being supported increases autonomy and self-esteem.
    (10)Have an end-of-work habit. Sometimes your brain needs a signal to prepare you for time at home. It's even better if this signal can help you decompress. For example, John uses his afternoon commute to unwind—taking a more scenic route home, listening to music or the news, and giving himself time to switch gears for family life. Others we've spoken to have mentioned hitting the gym, running, meditating, and other rituals. Think about what helps you unwind, and find space in your schedule for this habit—particularly at the end of a long day at work—so that when you return home you're free of the baggage that's built up throughout the day.
    (11)Create a third space. When professionals have families, their entire lives can revolve around their responsibilities at work and at home. Busy executives run home to help with kids—changing diapers or shuttling preteens to soccer games—or to do the little things that keep a home humming, like laundry, yard work, or cooking. But having a third space outside of work and home can help enormously with stress management.
    (12)Each partner in a relationship should maintain habits and times that allow them to explore their interests, relax and seek fulfillment, and find space outside of home and work. These spaces are different for everyone—quiet cafes, book clubs, trout streams, karate classes, poker nights—but they are important for maintaining our identities and our sense of peace. Make the sacrifice of offering your partner a third space to find themselves, maintain their friendships, and explore their interests, and ask that they do the same for you. Third spaces mean no person runs from responsibility to responsibility without having time to breathe.
    (13)Work stress can be a challenge for home life. Learning to manage stress—by working with your partner to cope and by keeping some of your professional stress outside the house—can contribute to better relationships and better physical and mental health.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)Which would you prefer to be: a medieval monarch or a modern office-worker? The king has armies of servants. He wears the finest silks and eats the richest foods. But he is also a martyr to toothache. He is prone to fatal infections. It takes him a week by carriage to travel between palaces. And he is tired of listening to the same jesters (小丑). Life as a 21st-century office drone looks more appealing once you think about modern dentistry, antibiotics, air travel, smartphones and YouTube.
    (2)The question is more than just a parlour game. It shows how tricky it is to compare living standards over time. Yet such comparisons are not just routinely made, but rely heavily on a single metric (衡量标准): gross domestic product (GDP). This one number has become shorthand for material well-being, even though it is a deeply flawed gauge of prosperity, and getting worse all the time. That may in turn be distorting levels of anxiety in the rich world about everything from stagnant incomes to disappointing productivity growth.
    Faulty speedometer
    (3)Defenders of GDP say that the statistic is not designed to do what is now asked of it. A creature of the 1930s slump and the exigencies of war in the 1940s, its original purpose was to measure the economy's capacity to produce. Since then, GDP has become a lodestar for policies to set taxes, fix unemployment and manage inflation.
    (4)Yet it is often wildly inaccurate: Nigeria's GDP was bumped up by 89% in 2014, after number-crunchers (做财务统计的人) adjusted their methods. Guesswork prevails: the size of the paid-sex market in Britain is assumed to expand in line with the male population; charges at lap-dancing clubs are a proxy for prices. Revisions are common, and in big, rich countries, bar America, tend to be upwards. Since less attention is paid to revised figures, this adds to an often exaggerated impression that America is doing far better than Europe. It also means that policymakers take decisions based on faulty data.
    (5)If GDP is failing on its own terms, as a measurement of the value-added in an economy, its use as a welfare benchmark is even more dubious. That has always been so: the benefits of sanitation, better health care and the comforts of heating or air-conditioning meant that GDP growth almost certainly understated the true advance in living standards in the decades after the Second World War. But at least the direction of travel was the same. GDP grew rapidly; so did quality of life. Now GDP is still growing (albeit more slowly), but living standards are thought to be stuck. Part of the problem is widening inequality: median household income in America, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for 25 years. But increasingly, too, the things that people hold dear are not being captured by the main yardstick of value.
    (6)With a few exceptions, such as computers, what is produced and consumed is assumed to be of constant quality. That assumption worked well enough in an era of mass-produced, standardized goods. It is less reliable when a growing share of the economy consists of services. Firms compete for custom on the quality of output and how tailored it is to individual tastes. If restaurants serve fewer but more expensive meals, it pushes up inflation and lowers GDP, even if this reflects changes, such as fresher ingredients or fewer tables, which customers want. The services to consumers provided by Google and Facebook are free, so are excluded from GDP. When paid-for goods, such as maps and music recordings, become free digital services they too drop out of GDP. The convenience of online shopping and banking is a boon to consumers. But if it means less investment in buildings, it detracts from GDP.
    Stop counting, start grading
    (7)Measuring prosperity better requires three changes. The easiest is to improve GDP as a gauge of production. Junking it altogether is no answer: GDP's enduring appeal is that it offers, or seems to, a summary statistic that tells people how well an economy is doing. Instead, statisticians should improve how GDP data are collected and presented. To minimize revisions, they should rely more on tax records, Internet searches and other troves of contemporaneous statistics, such as credit-card transactions, than on the standard surveys of businesses or consumers. Private firms are already showing the way—scraping vast quantities of prices from e-commerce sites to produce improved inflation data, for example.
    (8)Second, services-dominated rich countries should start to pioneer a new, broader annual measure, which would aim to capture production and living standards more accurately. This new metric—call it GDP-plus—would begin with a long-overdue conceptual change: the inclusion in GDP of unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives. GDP-plus would also measure changes in the quality of services by, for instance, recognizing increased longevity in estimates of health care's output. It would also take greater account of the benefits of brand-new products and of increased choice. And, ideally, it would be sliced up to reflect the actual spending patterns of people at the top, middle and bottom of the earnings scale: poorer people tend to spend more on goods than on Harvard tuition fees.
    (9)Although a big improvement on today's measure, GDP-plus would still be an assessment of the flow of income. To provide a cross-check on a country's prosperity, a third gauge would take stock, each decade, of its wealth. This balance-sheet would include government assets such as roads and parks as well as private wealth. Intangible capital—skills, brands, designs, scientific ideas and online networks—would all be valued. The ledger should also account for the depletion of capital: the wear-and-tear of machinery, the deterioration of roads and public spaces, and damage to the environment.
    (10)Building these benchmarks will demand a revolution in national statistical agencies as bold as the one that created GDP in the first place. Even then, since so much of what people value is a matter of judgment, no reckoning can be perfect. But the current measurement of prosperity is riddled with errors and omissions. Better to embrace a new approach than to ignore the progress that pervades modern life.1.  The phrase "as if craving alms of the sun" in Para. 2 is used as a(n) ______. (PASSAGE ONE)