考研英语(二)分类真题20_真题-无答案

考研英语(二)分类真题20
(总分100,考试时间90分钟)
Reading Comprehension
Part A
Text 1
Massive changes in all of the world"s deeply cherished sporting habits are underway. Whether it"s one of London"s parks full of people playing softball, and Russians taking up rugby, or the Superbowl rivaling the British Football Cup Final as a televised spectator event in Britain, the patterns of players and spectators are changing beyond recognition. We are witnessing a globalization of our sporting culture.
That annual bicycle race, the Tour de France, much loved by the French is a good case in point. Just a few years back it was a strictly continental affair with France, Belgium and Holland, Spain and Italy taking part. But in recent years it has been dominated by Colombian mountain climbers, and American and Irish riders. The people who really matter welcome the shift toward globalization. Peugeot, Michelin and Panasonic are multi-national corporations that want worldwide returns for the millions they invest in teams. So it does them literally a world of good to see this unofficial world championship become just that.
This is undoubtedly an economic-based revolution we are witnessing here, one made possible by communications technology, but made to happen because of marketing considerations. Sell the game and you can sell Coca Cola or Budweiser as well.
The skilful way in which American football has been sold to Europe is a good example of how all sports will develop. The aim of course is not really to spread the sport for its own sake, but to increase the number of people interested in the major money-making events. The economics of the Superbowl are already astronomical. With seats at US $125, gate receipts alone were a staggering $10,000,000. The most important statistic of the day, however, was the $100,000,000 in TV advertising fees. Imagine how much that becomes when the eyes of the world are watching.
So it came as a terrible shock, but not really as a surprise, to learn that some people are now suggesting that soccer change from being a game of two 45-minute halves, to one of four 25-minute quarters. The idea is unashamedly to capture more advertising revenue, without giving any thought for the integrity of a sport which relies for its essence on the flowing nature of the action.
Moreover, as sports expand into world markets, and as our choice of sports as consumers also grows, so we will demand to see them played at a higher and higher level. In boxing we have already seen numerous, dubious world title categories because people will not pay to see anything less than a "World Title" fight, and this means that the. title fights have to be held in different countries around the world!
1. Globalization of sporting culture means that ______
A. more people are taking up sports
B. traditional sports are getting popular
C. many local sports are becoming international
D. foreigners are more interested in local sports
2. Which of the following is NOT related to the massive changes?
A. Good economic returns.
B. Revival of traditional games.
C. Communications technology.
D. Marketing strategies.
3. As is used in the passage, "globalization" comes closest in meaning to ______
A. commercialization
B. popularization
C. speculation
D. standardization
4. What is the author"s attitude towards the suggestion to change soccer into one of four 25-minute quarters?
A. Favorable.
B. Unclear.
C. Reserved.
D. Critical.
5. People want to see higher-level **petitions mainly because ______
A. they become more professional than ever
B. they regard sports as consumer goods
C. there exist few world-class championships
D. sports events are exciting and stimulating
Text 2
Introspection is kind of a drag. It requires unpleasant acts like "thinking" and "talking about emotions," and it can rarely be done while watching TV. But like it or not, more and more workers are taking time to reflect on what they do for a living, seeking jobs that aren"t just a means to a paycheck but the fulfilment of some form of calling. Can this supposedly enlightening feeling that your career is "a calling" be a bad thing?
Teresa Cardador, an assistant professor in the school of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Career Assessment that reviewed research on people who find meaning and a sense of purpose in their work. "There has become this idealized notion of work," Cardador said. "A lot of books and stories in the popular press capture this idea of an idealized orientation toward work. But there"s increasing evidence that suggests that despite the perceived desirability, it"s not always beneficial." In a nutshell, what Cardador found is that people who view their work as a calling can get too wrapped up in the job, to the point where it becomes counterproductive.
Some people burn out—it"s called "the fall from the call." Sometimes the person with the calling believes he or she is the only one qualified to handle the work, and that can cause strained relationships with co-workers. Also, the intense focus on work can be depleting, leaving a worker without enough energy to maintain good relationships outside the office. However, "callings can be healthy when individuals inspire and connect with others at work," Cardador said.
Between constantly evolving technology and downsizing that requires more of individual workers, it"s critical that a worker accept the fact that her or his job tasks may not always be the same. We have to be flexible nowadays, even if certain tasks don"t fit our idealized vision of the job. The study said. "People with rigid work identities have a single way of viewing who they are and what they do at work and are unwilling or unable to bend this image to fit with the reality of their work situation. In so doing, they are less able to account for the needs and interests of others in the workplace."
Just because you feel passionate about what you do doesn"t mean you can"t do other things that contribute to the greater good of your organization. You have to step back and examine how you"re handling your work, making sure, in the simplest of terms, that you"re not unwittingly being a selfish jerk. After all, we work, predominantly, because there are no money trees to harvest. The hope is that our labor lets us build the lives we want. If **es with a feeling of fulfillment, fantastic.
1. A "calling" is different from a job in that it ______
A. gives the worker a sense of fulfillment
B. involves relationship with co-workers
C. gives enlightenment to the worker himself
D. requires more flexibility in handling tasks
2. Cardador and her co-author find that treating a job as calling ______
A. enables workers to find meaning and purpose in their work
B. has the bad effect of letting workers idealize their work
C. makes many workers less productive on their jobs
D. gives more flexibility to workers in handling their work
3. The writer seems to imply there is a direct connection between calling and ______
A. flexibility
B. downsizing
C. rigidity
D. identity
4. In the last paragraph the readers are advised to ______
A. treat their jobs as callings
B. give up the idea of work as a calling
C. constantly reflect on their jobs
D. keep a balance between work and life
5. Callings can be beneficial when ______
A. they become sources of inspiration and cooperation
B. they leave workers concentrated on their work
C. they are changed constantly during lifetime
D. they become the idealized notions of jobs
Text 3
The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may seem innocuous—so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy **e from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered. If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it"s loaded with spam, it"s undoubtedly because at some point in time you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong Web site.
Do you think your telephone number or address is handled differently? A cottage industry of **panies with names you"ve probably never heard of—like Acxiom or Merlin—buy and sell your personal information the way **modities like corn or cattle futures are bartered. You may think your cell phone is unlisted, but if you"ve ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of **mercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone **piled from various sources—including pizza **panies. These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with.
In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of "Big Brother" —the government is watching you or a big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don"t necessarily involve large faceless institutions. A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband"s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus. While very little of this is news to anyone—people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere—there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department"s antitrust case against Microsoft.
And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns. The general defense for such indifference is summed up a single phrase. "I have nothing to hide." If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn"t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It"s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over.
It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they"re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.
1. The email example shows ______
A. email has become the predominant means of communication
B. careless surrendering of personal information can be harmful
C. **munication via email is replacing that via telephone
D. email will become an area for potential attacks on privacy
2. Companies like Acxiom or Merlin ______
A. make a profit by acquiring and selling personal information
B. compile telephone directories for local business transaction
C. are law firms specializing in dealing with privacy issues
D. are agencies whose major mission is to protect privacy
3. We can infer from the third paragraph that ______
A. cases of intrusion on privacy are the most serious in large institutions
B. people are now clearly aware how their privacy can be invaded
C. the Justice Department has done nothing about privacy issues so far
D. Bill Gates" email messages have been used against him in his lawsuit
4. To the popular saying "I have nothing to hide", the author"s response is one of ______
A. admiration
B. contempt
C. disapproval
D. puzzlement
5. What advice might the author give to the ordinary people ?
A. Never leave your telephone number anywhere.
B. Raise your awareness of self-protection.
C. Use your cell phone and email wisely.
D. Don"t respond too readily to telephone messages.
Text 4
The richest man in America stepped to the podium and declared war on the nation"s school systems. High schools had become "obsolete" and were "limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year." The situation had become "almost shameful." Bill Gates, prep-school grad and college dropout, **e before the National Governors Association seeking converts to his plan to do something about it—a plan he would back with $2 billion of his own cash.
Gates"s speech, in February 2005, was a signature moment in what has become a decade-long campaign to improve test scores and graduation rates, waged by a loose alliance of wealthy CEOs who arrived with no particular background in education policy—a fact that has led critics to dismiss them as "the billionaire boys" club." Their bets on poor urban schools have been as big as their egos and their bank accounts.
Has this big money made the big impact that they—as well as teachers, administrators, parents, and students—hoped for? The results, though mixed, are dispiriting proof that money alone can"t repair the desperate state of urban education. For all the millions spent on reforms, nine of the 10 school districts studied substantially trailed their state"s proficiency and graduation rates—often by 10 points or more. That"s not to say that the urban districts didn"t make gains.
The good news is many did improve and at a rate faster than their states" 60 percent of the time—proof that the billionaires made some solid bets. But those spikes up weren"t enough to erase the deep gulf between poor, inner-city schools, where the big givers focused, and their suburban and rural counterparts.
The confidence that marked Gates"s landmark speech to the governors" association in 2005 has given way to humility. The billionaires have not retreated. But they have improved their approach, and learned a valuable lesson about their limitations. "It"s so hard in this country to spread good practice. When we started funding, we hoped it would spread more readily," acknowledges Vicki Phillips, the director of K-12 education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "What we learned is that the only things that spread well in school are kids" viruses."
The business titans entered the education arena convinced that America"s schools would benefit greatly from the tools of the boardroom. They sought to boost incentives for improving performance, deploy new technologies, and back innovators willing to shatter old orthodoxies.
They pressed to close schools that were failing, and sought to launch new, smaller ones. They sent principals to boot camp. Battling the long-term worry that the best and brightest passed up the classroom for more lucrative professions, they opened their checkbooks to boost teacher pay. It was an impressive amount of industry. And in some places, it has worked out—but with **plications.
1. Bill Gates believes that the high school systems ______
A. have failed to develop proper education programs for students
B. are running well except that they need enormous investments
C. have not made students academically ready for college education
D. have converted brilliant young students into dull learners
2. One of the important purposes of Bill Gates" speech was to ______
A. call on the rich people to sign contracts with schools
B. enlist the rich people"s effort to save failing schools
C. call on the governors to make proper education policies
D. call attention to the nation"s low test scores and graduation rates
3. The author thinks that the rich men"s money ______
A. will fuel the nation"s efforts to save urban schools
B. is not big enough for saving the failing school programs
C. has bet on the wrong target which could not possibly be met
D. could hardly transform failing classrooms as they hoped for
4. Vicki Phillips admits that ______
A. urban schools have not improved as much as suburban schools
B. the donated money has been misused by school boards
C. schools have failed to prevent kids" viruses from spreading
D. good teaching practice has not spread to more schools
5. The rich donors expect their money to be used for all the following except ______
A. purchasing new teaching technological devices
B. working out innovative methods of teaching
C. closing failing schools and redeploying the teachers
D. developing training programs for school principals
Text 5
Over the last decade, Dr. Benjamin Van Voorhees has been trying to find the best way to teach coping strategies to adolescents who are at risk of suffering from severe depression. The idea is to help them keep depression at bay so that it doesn"t become a devastating part of their lives. The goal is to identify kids at risk and then use a combination of traditional counseling and Internet-based learning to keep off mental disorders and their accompanying medicines.
Van Voorhees said he wants to change the way doctors, especially pediatricians, deal with mental illness by moving the focus, which is now so heavily trained on treatment, to prevention. He said, "We"re trying to develop a type of behavioral vaccine that functions the same way vaccines work in fighting infections. We hope this approach will be simple, culturally acceptable, universally deployable—and inexpensive." He said that initial depressive episodes tend to strike between the
ages of 13 and 17. Once an adolescent develops into severe depression, episodes can recur across his or her lifetime.
Van V oorhees said young people establish patterns of coping in adolescence and young adulthood. "There"s a period of plasticity in the brain during which it"s developing the capacity for learning new coping skills," he said. "You want to make youths elastic against mental disorders, and you try to give them ways to cope so that they don"t fall into substance abuse." His research has been testing the effectiveness of Internet use and other techniques to hone such skills.
Project CATCH-IT is a multimillion-dollar study. CA TCH-IT includes an initial motivational interview with a physician to get the young person to understand the importance of the program. It also has a self-contained **ponent on the Internet that focuses on changing behavior and improving cognitive thinking and social skills. The website, which has evolved over time, teaches plasticity skills in part by allowing patients to read stories about other teens to learn how they overcame adversity and became more successful in school, their relationships or on the job.
Van Voorhees said the goal is to reach as many young people as possible. They want to develop a model that will be embedded in primary care with pediatricians screening kids who are at risk for mental disorders and trying to prevent them ahead of time. Over the years CATCH-IT has shown some evidence of being effective. But in February a new study, called PA TH, was begun to determine whether CA TCH-IT does a better job of preventing depression than routine mental health care and health education that teens can find online. "With CA TCH-IT alone, we saw depression dropping over the years, but we didn"t have anything to compare it to," said Monika Marko-Holguin, PATH"s project manager.
1. The expression "keep depression at bay" probably means ______
A. prevent depression from happening
B. minimize the effect of depression
C. stop treating depression as a mental disorder
D. using effective medicines to cure depression
2. The behavioral vaccine differs from traditional vaccines in that it ______
A. is a medicine culturally acceptable and inexpensive
B. can cure **pletely at its beginning stages
C. focuses on prevention rather than on medical treatment
D. is used for fighting infections in initial depressive episodes
3. The main objective of Project CA TCH-IT is to ______
A. save these adolescents who fall into drug abuse
B. teach young people how to cope with depression
C. help depressed adolescents to cope with relationships
D. let young people know the danger of depressive episodes
4. High-risk young adolescents are interviewed to ______
A. evaluate the effectiveness of the project
B. test their cognitive thinking and social skills
C. diagnose the seriousness of their mental disorder
D. get them encouraged to participate in the project
5. Project PATH ______
A. has enhanced the effectiveness of Project CA TCH-IT
B. helps pediatricians to identify high-risk adolescents
C. evaluates CATCH-IT against the traditional approach
D. educates young people on how to prevent depression。