单选题
. Section A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One (1) It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that
he had lived centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook. But he was baffled by lack of preparation. He attempted to read books that required years of preliminary specialization. One day he would read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the next day one that was ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists. On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete. He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know. He had become interested, in a day, in economics, industry, and politics. Passing through the City Hall Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the center of which were half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly carrying on a discussion. He joined the listeners, and heard a new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people. One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a law school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen. For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies. He heard hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never touched upon. Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that WHAT IS RIGHT, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the father-atom and the mother-atom.
(2) Martin Eden's head was in a state of addlement when he went away after several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the definitions of a dozen unusual words. And when he left the library, he carried under his arm four volumes: Madam Blavatsky's
Secret Doctrine, Progress and Poverty, The Quintessence of Socialism, and,
Warfare of Religion and Science. Unfortunately, he began on the Secret Doctrine. Every line bristled with many-syllabled words he did not understand. He sat up in bed, and the dictionary was in front of him more often than the book. He looked up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten their meaning and had to look them up again. He devised the plan of writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after page with them. And still he could not understand. He read until three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but not one essential thought in the text had he grasped. He looked up, and it seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship upon the sea. Then be hurled the "Secret Doctrine" and many curses across the room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep. Nor did he have much better luck with the other three books. It was not that his brain was weak or incapable; it could think these thoughts were it not for lack of training in thinking and lack of the thought-tools with which to think. He guessed this, and for a while entertained the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary until he had mastered every word in it.
(3) Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding his greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more understandable. He loved beauty, and there he found beauty. Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, though he did not know it, he was preparing his mind for the heavier work that was to come. The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much he read and liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those pages, so that he was soon able to extract great joy from chanting aloud or under his breath the music and the beauty of the printed words he had read. Then he stumbled upon Gayley's Classic Myths and Bulfinch's
Age of Fable, side by side on a library shelf. It was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance, and he read poetry more avidly than ever.
(本文选自Martin Eden)
Passage Two (1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton's law of gravitation to Hanaoka Seinshu's use of
anesthesia (麻醉), there's no shortage of discoveries that have been scoffed at, ridiculed, and wholly rejected by prominent thinkers before eventually settling into the human narrative. But too often, significant damage is done—and sometimes lives are lost—while these debates play out. After centuries of dismissing scientific discoveries, only to be proven wrong time and again, you'd think we'd learn to have a little more faith in the experts.
(2) In the era of social media, around-the-clock cable news, and Donald Trump, preventing the spread of misinformation has become one of the greatest challenges facing the scientific community. That's especially true when it comes to politics. On this week's episode of the
Inquiring Minds podcast, science journalist and author Dave Levitan calls out some of Washington's worst offenders.
(3) Levitan has spent countless hours pouring over statements made by politicians about science. Sometimes our leaders get the facts right. But frequently, says Levitan, they distort, misrepresent, or fiat-out fabricate the data in order to pander to their audience or push an agenda. That's the subject of Levitan's forthcoming book,
Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science. (4) While misleading rhetoric is nothing new in politics, the danger it poses to environmental and public health may be at an all-time high. In a country where scientific literacy is already in decline, misinformation about topics as significant as climate change or infectious diseases can have devastating consequences. Yet many politicians, purposely or not, continue to get the science wrong. Levitan points to Sen. James Inhofe as an example of the perfect "denier-in-chief." Last year, Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor to dispute the science of global warming. His implication: Because there was snow on the ground, the Earth couldn't possibly be getting warmer. It was a classic display of a cherry-picking politician using a single data point to obscure an indisputable trend:
(5) Two years ago, as Sen. Rand Paul was gearing up to run for president, he slammed the National Institutes of Health for funding research on fruit flies. "Have you seen what the NIH spends money on?" Paul said, according to the
Washington Post. "Nine hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars spent to discover whether or not male fruit flies would like to consort with younger female fruit flies." When you put it like that, the N/H sounds ridiculous. But
Paul missed the mark completely. As Levitan wrote at the time:
(6)
The characterization of the project as simply testing "whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies" is misleading. The study was in fact part of ongoing work looking into olfaction and other sensory perception, the aging process and how it relates to sexual and social activity. A paper that came out of the same line of inquiry appeared in the prestigious journal Science in 2013, showing that exposure to female pheromones without the opportunity to mate actually decreased male flies' life spans. In short, sexual reward "specifically promoted healthy aging," according to [Scott] Pletcher [the scientist whose research Paul was criticizing]. "His lab's work could yield insights both into how humans age and into aging-related diseases... Paul is entitled to his opinions on where government funds are best spent, but the study of flies has yielded important benefits to human health." (7) Misrepresenting research is "a way to get people to not want the government to spend money," Levitan says. "The effect, though, is that people don't understand the importance of basic science research."
(8) Of course, scientists share the burden of communicating their findings clearly, but most of them don't have the public megaphones that elected officials do. "Politicians have a lot of responsibility," Levitan says. "They're the ones legislating and governing where money goes and what science actually can get done. Some random scientist can't just decide he's going to give a speech and everyone will watch."
(9)In the end, Levitan offers voters a simple way to sift through the BS: Have a healthy degree of skepticism when politicians talk about science. "If they're making fun of basic research," he says, "they're probably wrong." And his advice to the politicians: Let the scientific consensus be your talking point.
(本文选自Newsweek)
Passage Three (1) Council leaders are calling on the government to give them greater powers to check on the growing number of children who are apparently being home-educated—a trend that is thought to be linked to a rise in the number of illegal schools across England.
(2) The schools watchdog Ofsted has previously said unregistered schools are exploiting the rules on home education. The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales, wants local authorities to be given powers to enter homes and premises to check on the suitability of education being offered. It also wants to be able to compel parents to register home-educated children to help councils monitor their education and prevent children from disappearing under the radar. The LGA raised concerns that some illegal schools had been linked to the teaching of extremist views.
(3) In recent months Ofsted inspectors have launched a crackdown on what they say is a growing number of illegal or unregistered schools, some of which have been found operating in unsafe and unhygienic premises, run by staff who have not been vetted.
(4) The chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has claimed that some unregistered schools are "using the freedoms that parents have to home-educate their children as a cover for their activities" and are exploiting weaknesses in the current legislation to "operate on the cusp of the law".
(5) Any parent has the right to withdraw their child from mainstream education, and they do not have to give a reason for doing so. Other children remain hidden from the authorities because they have never been to school. Council officials can enter premises to check up on the education of a child only if they have specific concerns about a child's safety.
(6) Colin Diamond, the executive director for education in Birmingham, said a number of illegal schools in the city had been closed down in the last year after joint inspections by Ofsted and the council. He said he was particularly concerned about the regulation of elective home education (EHE)—where parents decide to provide education for their child at home rather than sending them to school—which he believes is inadequate.
(7) "We feel that any EHE learning situation potentially puts a child in a very vulnerable position," said Diamond. "We recognise that parents elect to educate their children at home for a very wide range of reasons, and in many cases they do a great job. But because the child is isolated, they are not visible to their peer group and professionals don't keep an eye on them, we would like more powers to be able to make sure every child who is EHE is safe,, well and learning well."
(8) At the moment 900 children are registered as EHE in Birmingham. "Those numbers have been growing in the last couple of years. We are very interested in finding out the deeper reasons why," said Diamond.
(9) Wilshaw said in May that more than 100 suspected unregistered schools had been uncovered by inspectors in a five-month period. "Evidence inspectors have gathered over recent weeks has reaffirmed my belief that there is a clear link between the growth of unregistered schools and the steep rise in the number of children recorded as being home-educated in England over the past few years," he wrote.
(10) Diamond said one of the reasons families were choosing not to use state schools was that they wanted their daughters taught separately from boys. Other reasons included concerns about bullying in schools or special educational needs not being adequately met.
(11) He called for local authorities to be given more powers to oversee supplementary schools, which typically hold classes in the evening and are not required to be inspected. "As education gets more complex and fragmented, local authorities are in that unique position of being able to hold it together locally on the ground," he said.
(12) A Department for Education spokesperson said, "It is unacceptable for any child of compulsory school age not to be receiving a suitable education. We recognize parents may choose to home school their children and many do a good job, but it must be of a suitable quality. That's why we have taken steps to ensure the system is as robust as it can be when it comes to protecting young people, while at the same time safeguarding the rights of parents to determine how and where to educate their children. We have also announced an escalation of Ofsted investigations into unregistered schools, with additional inspectors dedicated to rooting them out, a new tougher approach to prosecuting them and a call to local authorities to help identify any settings of concern."
(本文选自Newsweek)
1. It is suggested that the City Hall Park was where ______.
(Passage One)