单选题 Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute's school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study conducted in Sweden, of all places--showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men to win research grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities.
Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia's school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7 000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year's meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around ￡ 1 500 ($ 2850 ) a year.
That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men's and women's lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy, Male professors, for example, earn over ￡ 4 000 a year more than female ones.
To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr. Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantia123% gap in pay, which Dr. Connolly attributes to discrimination.
Besides pay, her study also looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect--namely that at all stages of a woman' s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman to settle into a professorial chair:
Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr. Connolly's compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.

单选题 The phrase "crop up" in the first paragraph most probably means ______.
[A] plant [B] thrive [C] elevate [D] happen
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[考点解析] 这是一道词汇题，测试考生对原文词语的准确理解能力。原文第一段第二句中的“crop up”是一个固定用法，其含义是“发生，出现”，故本题的正确选项应该是D。考生在解答词汇试题时应注意运用原句信息、上下文内容以及全文中心主旨思想这三种方法。本题可以利用上下句之间的语义关系进行推导。
单选题 Which of the followings can be attributed to Dr. connolly's study?
[A] Pay discrimination between male and female scientists.
[B] Fewer resources for research by women scientists.
[C] The super qualities possessed by male scientists.
[D] The role of analyzing the results of a survey.
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】[考点解析] 这是一道细节分析题，测试考生准确理解分析原文细节信息的能力。本题的答案信息来源在首段尾句和第二段的首句。第一段尾句(即全文的中心主旨句)中所提到的“a much larger study”所指代的就是从第二段至尾段作者所详细阐述的Sara Connolly(Dr. Connolly)的研究，其研究发现就是第一段尾句中所谈到的“歧视在英国大学男女科学家收入差距的问题上起着作用”。由此可以推断本题的正确选项是A。考生在阅读时要注意捕捉全文中心主旨句以及各段落之间的关系。
单选题 According to the text, the author places interpretation on ______.
[A] a term [B] a slang [C] a humor [D] a motto
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】[考点解析] 这是一道比较难的另类题型，测试考生对原文作者所运用的写作方式的准确识别与把握。本题的答案信息来源在第五段的首句，在该句中作者对本句所涉及的“glass-ceiling”(玻璃屋顶)这一词语进行了解释说明(即：第五段横线后面的部分)，故本题的正确选项应该是A。考生在阅读时要注意原文作者在论述时所使用的写作方法与手段。
单选题 In contrast to Dr. Connolly's study, the previous ones failed to ______.
[A] make a comparison between the experience of scientists in others kinds of laboratory and that of those in universities
[B] make themselves more eligible for promotion
[C] make a difference for a woman to settle into a professorial chair
[D] make the supposedly egalitarian world of academia deliver more equality
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】[考点解析] 这是一道细节理解推导题，测试考生对原文重要细节信息的识别理解以及推导能力。本题的答案信息来源在尾段的第三句，其大意是：“与以往的研究不同，Connolly博士的研究把大学里科学家的经验与其他种类试验室里科学家的经验进行了比较”。由此可以推断本题的正确选项是A。考生在阅读时应注意原文中的对立对比关系。
单选题 Which of followings could be the best title for the text?
[A] Take the Lead. [B] Free to Flutter.
[C] The Hardest Move. [D] Mind the Gap.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[考点解析] 这是一道中心主旨题，测试考生对原文整体把握以及对中心主旨理解的能力。本题的答案信息在原文首段的尾句(即本文的中心主旨句)，其大意是：“现在，一次更大规模的研究(即Sara Connolly的研究)已经发现歧视在英国大学男女科学家收入差距(pay gap)方面起着作用”。由此可以推断出本题的正确选项应该是D。考生在阅读时要注意识别和理解原文的中心主旨句。