单选题 Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has been going on so long, babies have been born, and they" re already walking and talking. That"s nothing. The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they"re already dead.
It"s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow delivered his famous "Two Cultures" lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the "gulf of mutual incomprehension", the "hostility and dislike" that divided the world"s "natural scientists", its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its "literary intellectuals", a group that, by Snow"s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn"t a scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of desperation that continues to this day, particularly"in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers lament the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.
Yet a few scholars believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson"s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published "Evolution for Everyone". In Dr. Wilson"s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally? "There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences, and some of the stereotypes have to be altered," Dr. Wilson said, "Darwin, for example, established his entire evolutionary theory on the basis of his observations of natural history, and most of that information was qualitative, not quantitative. "
As he and Dr. Heywood envision the program, courses under the New Humanities rubric would be offered campus-wide, in any number of departments, including history, literature, philosophy, sociology, law and business. The students would be introduced to basic scientific tools like statistics and experimental design and to liberal arts staples like the importance of analyzing specific texts or documents closely, identifying their animating ideas and comparing them with the texts of other immortal minds.

单选题 In the opening paragraph, the author introduces his topic by______.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[解析] 写作手法
[解析] 此类题型在考研阅读理解中不常见。仅在2005年考题第21题中出现过，但是其考查方式比较独特，主要考查考生对文章结构框架的了解。本题对引入话题的方式进行提问，因此，必须先找到本文的话题。第一段先以政界的玩笑开篇，说“the battle for the Democratic，presidential nomination has been going on so long”；紧接着说“这不算什么(That’s nothing)”，这个句子有转折的意味，说明真正重视的问题在后面；后文进而转入话题“The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long”；本文的议题从这里开始——自然科学与人文科学纷争已久，长期割裂。首段把政界的长期斗争与学界的长期纷争进行比较，取其共性，体现两种科学间的争执为时已久。因此，本题正确答案为C选项，comparison指将二者比较，取其共性。
[干扰项分析] A选项中，contrast意思是比较事物的不同点，因此错误。B选项和C选项都与第一段的写作手法无关。

单选题 The word "balkanization" (Line 7, Paragraph 2) most probably means______.

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 词汇短语
[解析] 此题考查根据语境判断生词的含义。Balkanization是超纲词汇，对它的理解依赖上下文的线索。原文第二段开始，作者引用斯诺演讲时的观点——批判(decried)对自然科学和人文科学的割裂；末句说这种批判(critique)引起空前的绝望；同时，教育家等也在哀叹(lament)知识的“Balkanization”、大众对科学的无知以及学界的领域之争。综合考虑这些信息，可以发现斯诺的批判和教育家的哀叹有对应关系，其批判或哀叹的内容中，“两种科学的割裂”和“知识的……”有对应关系，而且后文中给出的“学术领域之争”再度暗示我们所缺的信息与“割裂”或“斗争”相关，因此可以判断B选项正确。
[干扰项分析] A、C和D选项，无法与原文句子形成逻辑上的一致性，也无法与主题呼应。

单选题 According to Paragraph 3, New Humanities Initiative is a program that______.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 事实细节
[解析] 此题考查对文章中相关细节的理解。问题对New Humanities Initiative的特征进行提问，根据题干信息“New Humanities Initiative”，我们可以定位至第三段末句，由该句得知New Humanities Initiative是一种课程设置，它从属于“融合思想的运用”；代词these提示我们这个概念即前文所述的内容——the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets(自然科学和人文科学结合而成的应用两种思维定势的新学科)。因此，New Humanities Initiative所具备的特性为D选项所描述的“自然科学与人文科学的结合”，选项中arts为“文科、人文”的意思。
[干扰项分析] A选项错误，该项只不过是本段前后两句话不相关片段的简单叠加。B选项内容属于无中生有的信息。C选项属于偷换概念，将humanities偷换成了human。

单选题 By citing the example of Darwin, Dr. Wilson intends to show that______.

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 推理判断
[解析] 此题考查基于原文多处细节的推理及理解句子之间关系的能力。根据题干中的词汇Darwin及Dr.Wilson，我们可以得知所考内容集中在第四段，题目问：威尔逊博士举达尔文的例子，想要表明什么?当问及举例的目的时，我们需要找到例子所对应的观点。原文中“In Dr.Wilson’s view，...demands a crossover approach，the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously，so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?”就是威尔逊博士的观点，其中the two cultures指的是自然科学和人文科学，那么他的观点就是“需要运用同时运用两种思维方式，并将其作为统合两种科学的模板”。综合以上信息，可以得知B选项正确。
[干扰项分析] A选项属于无中生有的选项；而C选项与原文内容不符，偷换了比较的内容，是篡改的信息；D选项与原文内容截然相反。因此A、C、D三个选项错误。