阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best Choice. Write your answers on the answer sheet.Passage OneHow should one read a book? In the first place, I want to emphasize the question mark at the end of my beginning sentence. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusion. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to restrict that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question of himself. To admit authorities. however heavily furred and gowned into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.But to enjoy freedom, if this old statement is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves we must not waste our powers, helplessly and ignorantly. Spraying water around half the house in order to water a single rose- bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is “the very spot” ? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue- books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?

阅读理解Below each of the following four passages you

阅读理解Directions: in this section there are 3 passages followed by multiple-choice questions. Read the passage and then mark your answers on your answer sheet.Passage threeIs language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged?Judging from the drastic experiment of Federick in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Federick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly, inadequate responses from mother dull the language interaction between mother and child because the child gets discouraged. If these sensitive periods are neglected and the ideal time for acquiring skills passes, they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel — like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1, 000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’ s brain, compared with that of the monkey is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy bear with the sound pattern “toy bear” . And even more incredible is the young brain’ s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new sentences.

阅读理解There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the hyper-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country; The city’s public high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10 percent. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This is a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists and various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe— whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.“There’s no way around the uncertainty”, says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you aren’t going to know if they do”. A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of a sudden. That’s why I’ve rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line for more than 12 years, I still haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.

阅读理解Directions: There are 4 passages followed by somequestions or unfinished statements, you should answer thequestions or decide on the best choice on the AnswerSheet.Passage 2The question of ethics in the legal profession is one thathas plagued industry since its inception. The common imageof an attorney is one who will resort to any unethicaltrick to twist the laws to fit his purposes. In the morespecific industry of criminal law, defense attorneys areoften criticized for advocating on behalf of defendantswho are “obviously guilty, ” thus becoming roadblocks onthe path to justice; much to the contrary, however,defense attorneys provide a valuable serve that shouldearn them praise, not scorn.While it is true that every lawyer will do everythingwithin his power to interpret the laws in the manner mostbeneficial to his client, such a characterization is by nomeans limited to defense attorneys. The prosecution willdo the same thing, employing all his legal knowledge andknow-how to establish the guilt of the defendant. In thisrespect, the vague nature of the law is highlighted, andit becomes a virtual necessity for each side to use everytool at their disposal, on the assumption that the otherside will also use every tool at his. The net resultemerges as a positive, in which the tricks of the opposingattorneys cancel one another out, leaving only the truth,clearer and devoid of manipulation, presented for thejury’ s consideration.Further, the defense attorney is a vital element of theAmerican judicial system, in that without him thedefendant would stand no chance whatsoever. Under theconstitution, even the most “obviously guilty”defendants are guaranteed the fight to a fair trial,involving someone able and willing to advocate on hisbehalf. Of course, industry who are unethical and carenothing for actual justice, and whose only concerns aretheir wallets. Generally speaking, however, withoutdefense attorneys, the system would crumble into a meremachine in which defendants are assumed guilty, without achance to argue or prove otherwise, and many innocentpeople falsely charged with crimes would be severelypunished for transgressions that they didn’ t commit.It is a basic fact that the adversarial system, of justicein the United States is necessary in order to ensure thefairest and most unbiased presentation and evaluation ofthe facts possible. Without defense attorneys, thatsystem, cannot be carried out, and would result in a lossof the civil liberties that the nation enjoys andtreasures: to that end, all of those who make that processa reality, including defense attorneys, deserve oursupport and admiration, not our suspicion and disdain.

阅读理解Section A1． The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.2． The concept of integrated rural transport’ was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was coordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government. Section B 1． When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains. 2． Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase 1, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills. Section C 1． Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase II, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport. 2． An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labor. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network. 3． Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges. 4． It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow. Section D 1． At the end of Phase II, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete’ s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase III, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutionalization of these activities. 2． The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before. 3． Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed. 4． The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorized vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than US$20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people. 5． Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys. 6． It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20, 000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household’ s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor Section E 1． It would have been easy to criticize the MIRTP for using in the early phases a ‘ top-down’ approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitant without the support and understanding of district authorities. Section F 1． Today, nobody in the district argues about the importance of improved paths and inexpensive means of transport. But this is the result of dedicated work over a long period, particularly from the officers in charge of community development. They played an essential role in raising awareness and interest among the rural communities. 2． The concept of integrated rural transport is now well established in Tanzania, where a major program of rural transport is just about to start. The experiences from Makete will help in this initiative, and Makete District will act as a reference for future work.Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading passage 3? In boxes 31-35 on your answer sheet, write

阅读理解Read the following passages carefully and choose one best answer for each question in passage 1, 2 and 3, and answer the questions in passage 4 based on your understanding of the passage.(2)He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we will know him he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died. The knuckles of the doctor’ s hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe and after his wife’ s death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once on a hot day in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all about it. Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something very fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods Company’ s store, he worked ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids. Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets, a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man. “That is to confound you, you blithering old sentimentalist, ” he cried, shaking with laughter. The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded grey horse and went slowly along country roads. On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts. One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again. The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a series of circumstances also curious. The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike. They talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who were different were much unlike each other. One of them, a slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing at all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to kiss her. For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler’ s son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and then she began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times, then she became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed. After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her that she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had happened to her. In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old- fashioned country practitioners, Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on the woman’s white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. When the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled. “I will take you driving into the country with me, ” he said.For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together almost every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in an illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments. In the fall after the beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy and in the following spring she died. During the winter he read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to become round hard balls.

阅读理解Directions: In this section there are three passages followed by fifteen multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then choose the one answer that you think is the correct to each question.Text 2The Internet, E-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. In the future, capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on networked relationships, contractual arrangements and access rights.Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportion to all the new Internet and business-to-business Internet services being introduced into our lives? I have asked this question of hundreds of CEOS and corporate executives in Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, “No, quite contrary. ” The very people responsible for ushering in what some have called a “technological renaissance” say they are working longer hours, feel more stressed, are more impatient, and are even less civil in their dealings with colleagues and friends—not to mention strangers. And what’ s more revealing, they place much of the blame on the very same technologies they are so aggressively championing.The techno gurus promised us that access would make life more convenient and give us more time. Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to liberate us have begun to enslave us in a web of connections from which there seems to be no easy escape.If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast geographic frontier, the . com generation, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. Every spare moment of our time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the most scarce of all resources. Our e-mail, voice mail and cell phones, our 24-hour Interact news and entertainment all seize for our attention.And while we have created every kind of labor-and time- saving device to service our needs, we are beginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history. That is because the great proliferation of labor-and-time-saving services only increases the diversity, pace and flow of commodified activity around us. For example, e-mail is a great convenience. However, we now find ourselves spending much of our day frantically responding to each other’ s electronic messages. The cell phone is a great time-saver, except now we are always potentially in reach of someone else who wants our attention.Social conservatives talk about the decline in civility and blame it on the loss of a moral compass and religious values. Has anyone bothered to ask whether the hyper speed culture is making all of us less patient and less willing to listen and defer, consider and reflect?Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really count and what types of access really matter in the e- economy era. If this new technology revolution is only about hyper efficiency, then we risk losing something even precious than time—our sense of what it means to be a caring human being.

阅读理解The history of English since 1700 is filled with many movements and countermovements, of which we can notice only a couple. One of these is the vigorous attempt made in the eighteenth century, and the rather half-hearted attempts made since, to regulate and control the English language. Many people of the eighteenth century, not understanding very well the forces which govern language, proposed to polish and prune and restrict English, which they felt was proliferating too wildly. There was much talk of an academy which would rule on what people could and could not say and write. The academy never came into being, but the 18th century did succeed in establishing certain attitudes which, though they haven’ t had much effect on the development of the language itself, have certainly changed the native speaker’ s feeling about the language.In part, a product of the wish to fix and establish the language was the development of the dictionary. The first English dictionary was published in 1603; it was a list of 2, 500 words briefly defined. Another product of the eighteenth century was the invention of “English grammar. ” As English came to replace Latin as the language of scholarship, it was felt that one should also be able to control and dissect it, parse and analyze it, as one could Latin. What happened in practice was that the grammatical description that applied to Latin was removed and superimposed on English. This was silly, because English is an entirely different kind of language, with its own forms and signals and ways of producing meaning. Nevertheless, English grammars on the Latin model were worked out and taught in the schools. In many schools they are still being taught. This activity is not often popular with school children, but it is sometimes an interesting and instructive exercise in logic. The principal harm in it is that it has tended to keep people from being interested in English and has obscured the real features of English structure.

阅读理解Directions: There are 4 passages followed by somequestions or unfinished statements, you should answer thequestions or decide on the best choice on the AnswerSheet.Passage 1The ordinary family in colonial North America wasprimarily concerned with sheer physical survival andbeyond that, its own economic prosperity. Thus, childrenwere valued in terms of their productivity and theyassumed the role of producer quite early. Until theyfulfilled this role, their position, in the structure ofthe family was one of subordination, and theirpsychological need and capacities received littleconsideration.As the society became more complex, the status of childrenin the family and in the society became more important. Inthe complex technological society that the United Stateshas become, each member must fulfill a number of personaland occupational roles and be in constant contact with agreat many other members. Consequently, viewing childrenas potentially acceptable and necessarily multifacetedmember of society means that they are regarded more aspeople in their own right than as utilitarian organisms.This acceptance of children as equal participants in thecontemporary family is reflected in the variety ofstatutes protecting the rights of children and in thesocial and public welfare programs devoted exclusively totheir well-being.This new view of children and the increasing contactbetween the members of society has also resulted in asurge of interest in child-rearing techniques. Peopletoday spend a considerable portion of their timeconferring on the proper way to bring up children. It isnow possible to influence the details of the socializationof another person’ s child by spreading the gospel ofcurrent and fashionable theories and methods of childrearing.The socialization of the contemporary child in the UnitedStates is a two-way transaction between parent and childrather than a one-way parent-to-child training program. Asa consequence, socializing children and living with themover a long period of time is for parents a mixture ofpleasure, satisfaction, and problem.

阅读理解Directions: There are 7 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice.Passage 6For most thinkers since the Greek philosophers, it was self-evident that there is something called human nature, something that constitutes the essence of man. There were various views about what constitutes it, but there was agreement that such an essence exists—that is to say, that there is something by virtue of which man is man. Thus man was defined as a rational being, as a social animal, an animal that can make tools, or a symbol-making animal.More recently, this traditional view has begun to be questioned. One reason for this change was the increasing emphasis given to the historical approach to man. An examination of the history of humanity suggested that man in our epoch is so different from man in previous times that it seemed unrealistic to assume that men in every age have had in common something that can be called “human nature. ” The historical approach was reinforced, particularly in the United States, by studies in the field of cultural anthropology. The study of primitive peoples has discovered such a diversity of customs, values, feelings, and thoughts that many anthropologists arrived at the concept that man is born as a blank sheet of paper on which each culture writes its text. Another factor contributing to the tendency to deny the assumption of a fixed human nature was that the concept has so often been abused as a shield behind which the most inhuman acts are committed. In the name of human nature, for example, Aristotle and most thinkers up to the eighteenth century defended slavery. Or in order to prove the rationality and necessity of the capitalist form. of society, scholars have tried to make a case for acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and selfishness as innate human traits. Popularly, one refers cynically to “human nature” in accepting the inevitability of such undesirable human behavior. as greed, murder, cheating and lying.Another reason for skepticism about the concept of human nature probably lies in the influence of evolutionary thinking. Once man came to be seen as developing in the process of evolution, the idea of a substance which is contained in his essence seemed untenable. Yet I believe it is precisely from an evolutionary standpoint that we can expect new insight into the problem of the nature of man.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best Choice. Write your answers on the answer sheet.Passage ThreeOne thing the tour books don’ t tell you about London is that 2, 000 of its residents are foxes. As native as the royal family, they fled the city about centuries ago after developers and pollution moved in. But now that the environment is cleaner, the foxes have come home, one of the many wild animals that have moved into urban areas sound the world.“The number and variety of wild animals in urban areas is increasing, ” says Gomer Jones, president of the National Institute for Urban Wildlife, in Columbia Maryland. A survey of the wildlife in New York’ s Central Park last year tallied the species of mammals including muskrats, shrews and flying squirrels. A similar survey conducted in the 1890s counted only five species. One of the country’ s largest populations of raccoons（浣熊） now lives in Washington D. C. , and moose（驼鹿） are regularly seen wandering into Maine towns. Peregrine falcons（游隼） dive from the window ledges of buildings in the largest U. S. cities to prey on pigeons.Several changes have brought wild animals to the cities. Foremost is that air and water quality in many cities has improved as a result of the 1970s’ pollution-control efforts. Meanwhile rural areas have been built up, leaving many animals on the edges of suburbia. In addition, conservationists have created urban wildlife refuges.The Greater London Council last year spent $750, 000 to buy land and build 10 permanent wildlife refuges in the city. Over 1, 000 volunteers have donated money and cleared rubble from derelict lots. As a result, pheasants now strut in the East End and badgers scuttle across lawns near the center of town. A colony of rare house martins nests on a window ledge beside Harrods, and one evening last year a fox was seen on Westminster Bridge looking up at Big Ben.For peregrine falcons, cities are actually safer than rural cliff dwellings. By 1970 the birds were extinct east of the Mississippi because the DDT had made their eggs too thin to support life. That year, ornithologist Tom Cede of Cornell University began rising the birds for release in cities, for cities afforded abundant food and contained none of the peregrine’ s natural predators.“Before they were exterminated, some migrated to cities on their own because they bad run out of cliff space, ” Cade says, “To peregrines, buildings are just like cliffs. ” He has released about 30 birds since 1975 in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Norfolk, and of the 20 pairs now living in the East, half are urbanites. “A few of the young ones have gotten into trouble by falling down chimneys and crashing into window-glass, but overall their adjustment has been successful. ”

阅读理解It is 3 A. M. Everything on the university campus seems ghostlike in the quiet, misty darkness--everything except the computer center. Here, twenty students untidy and blurred-eyed, sit transfixed at their consoles, tapping away on the terminal keys. With eyes glued to the video screen, they tap on for hours. For the rest of the world, it might be the middle of the night, but here time does not exist. This is a world unto itself. These young computer “hackers” are pursuing a kind of impulse, a drive so consuming it overshadows nearly every other part of their lives and forms the focal point of their existence. They are compulsive computer programmers. Some of these students have been at the console for thirty hours or more without a break for meals or sleep. Some have fallen asleep on sofas or chairs in the computer center, trying to catch a few winks but hate to get too far away from their beloved machines.Most of these students don’ t have to be at the computer center in the middle of the night. They aren’ t working on assignments. They are there because they want to be--they are irresistibly drawn there.And they are not alone. There are hackers at computer centers all across the country. In their extreme form, they focus on nothing else. They flunk out of school and lose contact with friends; they might have difficulty finding jobs, choosing instead to wander from one computer center to another. They may even decline personal cleanliness.“I remember one hacker. We literally had to carry him off his chair to feed him and put him to sleep. We really feared for his health, ” says a computer science professor at MIT.Computer science teachers are now more aware of the implications of this hacker phenomenon and are on the lookout for potential hackers and cases of computer addiction that are already severe. They know that the case of the hackers is not just the story of one person’ s relationship with a machine. It is the story of a society’ s relationship to the so-called thinking machines, which are becoming almost everywhere.

阅读理解EDUCATING PSYCHEEducating Psyche by Bernie Neville is a book which looks at radical new approaches to learning, describing the effects of emotion, imagination and the unconscious on learning. One theory discussed in the book is that proposed by George Lozanov, which focuses on the power of suggestion.Lozanov’ s instructional technique is based on the evidence that the connections made in the brain through unconscious processing (which he calls non-specific mental reactivity) are more durable than those made through conscious processing. Besides the laboratory evidence for this, we know from our experience that we often remember what we have perceived peripherally, long after we have forgotten what we set out to learn. If we think of a book we studied months or years ago, we will find it easier to recall peripheral details—the color, the binding, the typeface, the table at the library where we sat while studying it—than the content on which we were concentrating.If we think of a lecture we listened to with great concentration, we will recall the lecturer’ s appearance and mannerisms, our place in the auditorium, the failure of the air-conditioning, much more easily than the ideas we went to learn. Even if these peripheral details are a bit elusive, they come back readily in hypnosis or when we relive the event imaginatively, as in psychodrama. The details of the content of the lecture, on the other hand, seem to have gone forever.This phenomenon can be partly attributed to the common counterproductive approach to study (making extreme efforts to memorize, tensing muscles, inducing fatigue) , but it also simply reflects the way the brain functions. Lozanov therefore made indirect instruction (suggestion) central to his teaching system. In suggestopedia, as he called his method, consciousness is shifted away from the curriculum to focus on something peripheral. The curriculum then becomes peripheral and is dealt with by the reserve capacity of the brain.The suggestopedic approach to foreign language learning provides a good illustration. In its most recent variant (1980) , it consists of the reading of vocabulary and text while the class is listening to music. The first session is in two parts. In the first part, the music is classical (Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms) and the teacher reads the text slowly and solemnly, with attention to the dynamics of the music. The students follow the text in their books. This is followed by several minutes of silence. In the second part, they listen to baroque music (Bach, Corelli, Handel) while the teacher reads the text in a normal speaking voice. During this time they have their books closed. During the whole of this session, their attention is passive; they listen to the music but make no attempt to learn the material.Beforehand, the students have been carefully prepared for the language learning experience. Through meeting with the staff and satisfied students they develop the expectation that learning will be easy and pleasant and that they will successfully learn several hundred words of the foreign language during the class. In a preliminary talk, the teacher introduces them to the material to be covered, but does not ‘ teach’ it. Likewise, the students are instructed not to try to learn it during this introduction.Some hours after the two-part session, there is a follow-up class at which the students are stimulated to recall the material presented. Once again the approach is indirect. The students do not focus their attention on trying to remember the vocabulary, but focus on using the language to communicate (e. g. through games or improvised dramatizations) . Such methods are not unusual in language teaching. What is distinctive in the suggestopedic method is that they are devoted entirely to assisting recall. The ‘ learning’ of the material is assumed to be automatic and effortless, accomplished while listening to music. The teacher’ s task is to assist the students to apply what they have learned para-consciously, and in doing so to make it easily accessible to consciousness. Another difference from conventional leaching is the evidence that students can regularly learn 1000 new words of a foreign language during a suggestopedic session, as well as grammar and idiom.Lozanov experimented with teaching by direct suggestion during sleep, hypnosis and trance states, but found such procedures unnecessary. Hypnosis, yoga, Silva mind-control, religious ceremonies and faith healing are all associated with successful suggestion, but none of their techniques seem to be essential to it. Such rituals may be seen as placebos. Lozanov acknowledges that the ritual surrounding suggestion in his own system is also a placebo, but maintains that without such a placebo people are unable or afraid to tap the reserve capacity of their brains. Like any placebo, it must be dispensed with authority to be effective. Just as a doctor calls on the full power of autocratic suggestion by insisting that the patient take precisely this white capsule precisely three times a day before meals, Lozanov is categorical in insisting that the suggestopedic session be conducted exactly in the manner designated, by trained and accredited suggestopedic teachers.While suggestopedia has gained some notoriety through success in the teaching of modern languages, few teachers are able to emulate the spectacular results of Lozanov and his associates. We can, perhaps, attribute mediocre results to an inadequate placebo effect. The students have not developed the appropriate mind set. They are often not motivated to learn through this method. They do not have enough ‘ faith’ . They do not see it as ‘ real teaching’ , especially as it does not seem to involve the ‘ work’ they have learned to believe is essential to learning.QuestionsChoose the correct, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter on your answer sheet.

阅读理解The nature of geniusA. There has always been an interest in geniuses and prodigies. The word ‘ genius’ , from the Latin gens ( family) and the term ‘ genius’ , meaning ‘ begetter’ , comes from the early Roman cult of a divinity as the head of the family. In its earliest form, genius was concerned with the ability of the head of the family, the paterfamilias, to perpetuate himself Gradually, genius came to represent a person’ s characteristics and hence an individual’ s highest attributes derived from his ‘ genius’ or guiding spirit. Today, people still look to stars or genes, astrology or genetics, in the hope of finding the source of exceptional abilities or personal characteristics.B. The concept of genius and of gifts has become part of our folk culture, and attitudes are ambivalent towards them. We envy the gifted and mistrust them. In the mythology of giftedness, it is popularly believed that if people are talented in one area, they must be defective in another, that intellectuals are impractical, that prodigies burn too brightly too soon and burn out, that gifted people are eccentric, that they are physical weaklings, that there’ s a thin line between genius and madness, that genius runs in families, that the gifted are so clever they don’ t need special help, that giftedness is the same as having a high IQ, that some races are more intelligent or musical or mathematical than others, that genius goes unrecognized and unrewarded, that adversity makes men wise or that people with gifts have a responsibility to use them. Language has been enriched with such terms as ‘ highbrow’ , ‘ egghead’ , ‘ blue- stocking’ , ‘ wiseacre’ , ‘ know-all’ , ‘ boffin’ and, for many, ‘ intellectual’ is a term of denigration.C. The nineteenth century saw- considerable interest in the nature of genius, and produced not a few studies of famous prodigies. Perhaps for us today, two of the most significant aspects of most of these studies of genius are the frequency with which early encouragement and teaching by parents and tutors had beneficial effects on the intellectual, artistic or musical development of the children but caused great difficulties of adjustment later in their lives, and the frequency with which abilities went unrecognized by teachers and schools. However, the difficulty with the evidence produced by these studies, fascinating as they are in collecting together anecdotes and apparent similarities and exceptions, is that they are not what we would today call norm-referenced. In other words, when, for instance, information is collated about early illnesses, methods of upbringing, schooling, etc. , we must also take into account information from other historical sources about how- common or exceptional these were at the time. For instance, infant mortality was high and life expectancy much shorter than today, home tutoring was common in the families of the nobility and wealthy, bullying and corporal punishment were common at the best independent schools and, for the most part, the cases studied were members of the privileged classes. It was only with the growth of pediatrics and psychology in the twentieth century that studies could be carried out on a more objective, if still not always very scientific, basis.D. Geniuses, however they are defined, are but the peaks which stand out through the mist of history and are visible to the particular observer from his or her particular vantage point. Change the observers and the vantage points, clear away some of the mist, and a different lot of peaks appear. Genius is a term we apply to those whom we recognize for their outstanding achievements and who stand near the end of the continuum of human abilities which reaches back through the mundane and mediocre to the incapable. There is still much truth in Dr Samuel Johnson’ s observation, ‘ The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction’ . We may disagree with the ‘ general’ , for we doubt if all musicians of genius could have become scientists of genius or vice versa, but there is no doubting the accidental determination which nurtured or triggered their gifts into those channels into which they have poured their powers so successfully. Along the continuum of abilities are hundreds of thousands of gifted men and women, boys and girls.E. What we appreciate, enjoy or marvel at in the works of genius or the achievements of prodigies are the manifestations of skills or abilities which are similar to, but so much superior to, our own. But that their minds are, not different from our own is demonstrated by the fact that the hard-won discoveries of scientists like Kepler or Einstein become the commonplace knowledge of schoolchildren and the once outrageous shapes and colors of an artist like Paul Klee so soon appear on the fabrics we wear. This does not minimize the supremacy of their achievements.F. To think of geniuses and the gifted as having uniquely different brains is only reasonable if we accept that each human brain is uniquely different. The purpose of instruction is to make us even more different from one another, and in the process of being educated we can learn from the achievements of those more gifted than ourselves. But before we try to emulate geniuses or encourage our children to do so we should note that some of the things we learn from them may prove unpalatable. We may envy their achievements and fame, but we should also recognize the price they may have paid in terms of perseverance, single-mindedness, dedication, restrictions on their personal lives, the demands upon their energies and time, and how often they had to display great courage to preserve their integrity or to make their way to the top.G. Genius and giftedness are relative descriptive terms of no real substance. We may, at best, give them some precision by defining them and placing them in a context but, whatever we do, we should never delude ourselves into believing that gifted children or geniuses are different from the rest of humanity.Questions(1)-(7)：Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer in Passage?TRUEifthestatementreflects”theclaimsofthewriterFALSEifthestatementcontradicts”theclaimsofthewriterNOTGIVENifitisimpossibletosaywhatthewriterthinksaboutthis

阅读理解(2) In the 16th century, an age of great marine and terrestrial exploration, Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the world. As a young Portuguese noble, he served the king of Portugal but he became involved in the quagmire of political intrigue at court and lost the king s favor. After he was dismissed from service by the king of Portugal, he offered to serve the future Emperor Charles V of Spain. A papal decree of 1493 had assigned all land in the New World west of 50 degrees W longitude to Spain and all the land east of that line to Portugal. Magellan offered to prove that the East Indies fell under Spanish authority. On September 20, 1519, Magellan set sail from Spain with five ships. More than a year later, one of these ships was exploring the topography of South America in search of a water route across the continent. This ship sank, but the remaining four ships searched along the southern peninsula of South America. Finally they found the passage they sought near 50 degrees S latitude. Magellan named this passage the Strait of All Saints, but today it is known as the Strait of Magellan. One ship deserted while in this passage and returned to Spain, so fewer sailors were privileged to gaze at that first panorama of the Pacific Ocean. Those who remained crossed the meridian now known as the International Date Line in the early spring of 1521 after 98 days on the Pacific Ocean. During those long days at sea, many of Magellan s men died of starvation and disease. Later, Magellan became involved in an insular conflict in the Philippines and was killed in a tribal battle. Only one ship and 17 sailors under the command of the Basque navigator Elcano survived to complete the westward journey to Spain and thus prove once and for all that the world is round, with no precipice at the edge.

阅读理解Take the case of public education alone. The principal difficulty faced by the schools has been the tremendous increase in the number of pupils. This has been caused by the legal age for going into industry and the impossibility of finding a job even when the legal age has been reached. In view of the technological improvements in the last few years, business will require in the future proportionately fewer workers than ever before. The result will be still further raising of the legal age for going into employment, and still further difficulty in finding employment when that age has been attained. If we cannot put our children to work, we must put them in school.We may also be quite confident that the present trend toward a shorter day and a shorter week will be maintained. We have developed and shall continue to have a new leisure class. Already the public agencies for adult education are swamped by the tide that has swept over them since the depression began. They will be little better off when it is over. Their support must come from the taxpayer.It is surely too much to hope that these increases in the cost of public education can be borne by the local communities. They cannot care for the present restricted and inadequate system. The local communities have failed in their efforts to cope with unemployment. They cannot expect to cope with public education on the scale on which we must attempt it. The answer to the problem of unemployment has been Federal relief. The answer to the problem of public education may have to be much the same, and properly so. If there is one thing in which the citizens of all parts of the country have an interest, it is in the decent education of the citizens of all parts of the country. Our income tax now goes in part to keep our neighbors alive. It may have to go in part as well to make our neighbors intelligent. We are now attempting to preserve the present generation through Federal relief of the destitute. Only a people determined to ruin the next generation will refuse such Federal funds as public education may require.

阅读理解People have been painting pictures for at least 30, 000 years. The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals. They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill. Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain. No one knows why they were painted there. Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals. Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures.About 5, 000 years ago, the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet. The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place, where he was buried. Some of these pictures are like modern comic strip stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it.By the year 1, 000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world.These days, we can write down a story, or record information, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawing, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting.

阅读理解Directions: There are 7 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice.Passage 3Given the lack of fit between gifted students and their schools, it is not surprising that such students often have little good to say about their school experience. In one study of 400 adults who had achieved distinction in all areas of life, researchers found that three-fifths of these individuals either did badly in school or were unhappy in school. Few MacArthur Prize fellows, winners of the MacArthur Award for creative accomplishment, had good things to say about their precollegiate schooling if they had not been placed in advanced programs. Anecdotal (名人轶事) reports support this. Pablo Picasso, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Butler Yeats all disliked school. So did Winston Churchill, who almost failed out of Harrow, an elite British school. About Oliver Goldsmith, one of his teachers remarked, Never was so dull a boy. Often these children realize that they know more than their teachers, and their teachers often feel that these children are arrogant, inattentive, or unmotivated. Some of these gifted people may have done poorly in school because their gifts were not scholastic. Maybe we can account for Picasso in this way. But most fared poorly in school not because they lacked ability but because they found school unchallenging and consequently lost interest. Yeats described the lack of fit between his mind and school: Because I had found it difficult to attend to anything less interesting than my own thoughts, I was difficult to teach. As noted earlier, gifted children of all kinds tend to be strong-willed nonconformists. Nonconformity and stubbornness (and Yeats’ s level of arrogance and self-absorption) are likely to lead to conflicts with teachers.When highly gifted students in any domain talk about what was important to the development of their abilities, they are far more likely to mention their families than their schools or teachers. A writing prodigy studied by David Feldman and Lynn Goldsmith was taught far more about writing by his journalist father than his English teacher. High-IQ children, in Australia studied by Miraca Gross had much more positive feelings about their families than their schools. About half of the mathematicians studied by Benjamin Bloom had little good to say about school. They all did well in school and took honors classes when available, and some skipped grades.

阅读理解Reading Passage 2A.For more than forty years the cost of food has been rising. It has now reached a point where a growing number of people believe that it is far too high, and that bringing it down will be one of the great challenges of the twenty first century. That cost, however, is not in immediate cash. In the West at least, most food is now far cheaper to buy in relative terms than it was in 1960. The cost is in the collateral damage of the very methods of food production that have made the food cheaper: in the pollution of water, the enervation of soil, the destruction of wildlife, the harm to animal welfare and the threat to human health caused by modem industrial agriculture. B. First mechanization, then mass use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, then monocultures, then battery rearing of livestock, and now genetic engineering —the onward march of intensive farming has seemed unstoppable in the last half-century, as the yields of produce have soared. But the damage it has caused has been colossal. In Britain, for example, many of our best-loved farmland birds, such as the skylark, the grey partridge, the lapwing and the corn bunting, have vanished from huge stretches of countryside, as have even more wild flowers and insects. This is a direct result of the way we have produced our food in the last four decades. Thousands of miles of hedgerows, thousands of ponds, have disappeared from the landscape. The fecal filth of salmon farming has driven wild salmon from many of the sea lochs and rivers of Scotland. Natural soil fertility is dropping in many areas because of continuous industrial fertilizer and pesticide use, while the growth of algae is increasing in lakes because of the fertilizer run-off. C. Put it all together and it looks like a battlefield, but consumers rarely make the connection at the dinner table. That is mainly because the costs of all this damage are what economists refer to as externalities: they are outside the main transaction, which is for example producing and selling a field of wheat, and are borne directly by neither producers nor consumers. To many, the costs may not even appear to be financial at all, but merely aesthetic—a terrible shame, but nothing to do with money. And anyway they, as consumers of food, certainly aren’ t paying for it, are they? D. But the costs to society can actually be quantified and, when added up, can amount to staggering sums. A remarkable exercise in doing this has been carried out by one of the world’ s leading thinkers on the future of agriculture, Professor Jules Pretty, Director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex. Professor Pretty and his colleagues calculated the externalities of British agriculture for one particular year. They added up the costs of repairing the damage it caused, and came up with a total figure of ￡ 2, 343m. This is equivalent to ￡ 208 for every hectare of arable land and permanent pasture, almost as much again as the total government and EU spend on British farming in that year. And according to Professor Pretty, it was a conservative estimate. E. The costs included: ￡ 120m for removal of pesticides; ￡ 16m for removal of nitrates; ￡ 55m for removal of phosphates and soil; ￡ 23m for the removal of the bug cryptosporidium from drinking water by water companies; ￡ 125m for damage to wildlife habitats, hedgerows and dry stone walls; ￡ 1, 113m from emissions of gases likely to contribute to climate change; ￡ 106m from soil erosion and organic carbon losses; ￡ 169m from food poisoning; and ￡ 607m from cattle disease. Professor Pretty draws a simple but memorable conclusion from all this: our food bills are actually threefold. We are paying for our supposedly cheaper food in three separate ways: once over the counter, secondly through our taxes, which provide the enormous subsidies propping up modern intensive fanning, and thirdly to clean up the mess that modem farming leaves behind. F. So can the true cost of food be brought down? Breaking away from industrial agriculture as the solution to hunger may be very hard for some countries, but in Britain, where the immediate need to supply food is less urgent, and the costs and the damage of intensive farming have been clearly seen, it may be more feasible. The government needs to create sustainable, competitive and diverse fanning and food sectors, which will contribute to a thriving and sustainable rural economy, and advance environmental, economic, health, and animal welfare goals. G. But if industrial agriculture is to be replaced, what is a viable alternative? Professor Pretty feels that organic farming would be too big a jump in thinking and in practices for many farmers. Furthermore, the price premium would put the produce out of reach of many poorer consumers. He is recommending the immediate introduction of a ‘ Greener Food Standard’ , which would push the market towards more sustainable environmental practices than the current norm, while not requiring the full commitment to organic production. Such a standard would comprise agreed practices for different kinds of farming, covering agrochemical use, soil health, land management, water and energy use, food safety and animal health. It could go a long way, he says, to shifting consumers as well as farmers towards a more sustainable system of agriculture.Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?In boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet, write: