专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解(二十五)

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专业英语八级(阅读)练习试卷8(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）练习试卷8(题后含答案及解析) 题型有： 2. READING COMPREHENSIONPART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)Directions: In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.Britain’s east midlands were once the picture of English countryside, alive with flocks, shepherds, skylarks and buttercups—the stuff of fairytales. In 1941 George Marsh left school at the age of 14 to work as a herdsman in Nottinghamshire, the East Midlands countryside his parents and grandparents farmed. He recalls skylarks nesting in cereal fields, which when accidentally disturbed would fly singing into the sky. But in his lifetime, Marsh has seen the color and diversity of his native land fade. Farmers used to grow about a ton of wheat per acre; now they grow four tons. Pesticides have killed off the insects upon which skylarks fed, and year-round harvesting has driven the birds from their winter nests. Skylarks are now rare. “Farmers kill anything that affects production,”says Marsh. “Agriculture is too efficient. “Anecdotal evidence of a looming crisis in biodiversity is now being reinforced by science. In their comprehensive surveys of plants, butterflies and birds over the past 20 to 40 years in Britain, ecologists Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens found significant population declines in a third of all native species. Butterflies are the furthest along—71 percent of Britain’s 58 species are shrinking in number, and some, like the large blue and tortoiseshell, are already extinct. In Britain’s grasslands, a key habitat, 20 percent of all animal, plant and insect species are on the path to extinction. There’s hardly a corner of the country’s ecology that isn’t affected by this downward spiral. The problem would be bad enough if it were merely local, but it’s not : because Britain’s temperate ecology is similar to that in so many other parts of the world, it’s the best microcosm scientists have been able to study in detail. Scientists have sounded alarms about species’extinction in the past, but always specific to a particular animal or place—whales in the 1980s or the Amazonian rain forests in the 1990s. This time, though, the implications are much wider. The Amazon is a “biodiversity hot spot”with a unique ecology. But in Britain, “the main drivers of change are the same processes responsible for species’declines worldwide, “says Thomas. The findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first clear evidence that the world is in the throes of a massive extinction. Thomas and Stevens argue that we are facing a loss of 65 to 95 percent of the world’s species, on the scale of an ice age or the meteorite that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If so, this would be only the sixth time such devastation had occurred in the past 600 million years. The other five were associated with one-off events like the ice ages, a volcanic eruption or a meteor. This time, ecosystems are dying a thousanddeaths—from overfishing and the razing of the rain forests, but also from advances in agriculture. The British study, for instance, finds that one of the biggest problems is nitrogen pollution. Nitrogen is released when fossil fuels burn in cars and power plants—but also when ecologically rich heath-lands are plowed and fertilizers are spread. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers fuel the growth of tall grasses, which in turn overshadow and kill off delicate flowers like harebells and eyebrights. Even seemingly innocuous practices are responsible for vast ecological damage. When British farmers stopped feeding horses and cattle with hay and switched to silage, a kind of preserved short grass, they eliminated a favorite nesting spot of corncrakes, birds known for their raspy nightly mating calls; corncrake populations have fallen 76 percent in the past 20 years. The depressing list goes on and on. Many of these practices are being repeated throughout the world, in one form or another, which is why scientists believe that the British study has global implications. Wildlife is getting blander. “We don’t know which species are essential to the web of life so we’re taking a massive risk by eliminating any of them,” says David Wedin, professor of ecology at the University of Nebraska. Chances are we’ll be seeing the results of this experiment before too long.1．From the first paragraph, we get the impression that George MarshA．cherishes his adolescence memories.B．thinks highly of the efficiency of agriculture.C．may not have happy memories of past time.D．cannot remember his adolescence days.正确答案：A解析：推断题。

专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解(五)

专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解(五)Text AFRANKFURT—I bumped down in Frankfurt at 10:55 AM. A German landing, I thought—unsubtle and punctual.The sky was clear, an un-German sky, and the colors that assailed me were pink (Deutsche Telekom), yellow (Lufthansa) and gray: cool colors at some remove from Caspar David Friedrich's ecstatic dusks in the forests of Gothic gloom.Friedrich's passionate romanticism is under control these days in a Germany that has become reassuring to the point of dullness. Europe's most powerful nation is electing its leader Sunday—and nobody really cares."Welcome to the most boring German election ever," former foreign minister Joschka Fischer told me by way of greeting.That was enough to compel me to write about the miracle of German dullness. It is the cause for hope, a commodity the commodity-rich Middle East does not trade in.The drudgery is also the cause for concern: more on that later.Lest anyone forget, the world spent a goodly chunk of the last century agonizing over the German question, ruining the proximity of the Polish border to Berlin, digesting the crime. It's just 20 years since this country was made whole and, with it, Europe. Now mighty Germany chooses its chancellor and, for all people seem to care, the election might be for the Wurzburg city council.It's not true that everything changes so that everything can remain the same. The German demon got extirpated by American tutelage, European convergence and the rule of law.Modern Germany, the Johnny-come-lately of European powers, settled down. The German frisson faded to a yawn.Perhaps Barbel Bohley, the former East German dissident, summed up the experience, and let-down, of unification best: "We wanted justice and we got the rule of law." Another protest leader, Joachim Gauck, ran her close: "We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia."Such is the way of adrenalin. It dissipates.And along comes Angela Merkel, the adrenalin-free Ossi, who has been a chancellor ofunmemorable steadiness, and who, barring an upset, will be re-elected as the head of hercenter-right Christian Democratic Union.Merkel has been a leader in the image of a settled Germany. Everything about her screams drama over—Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto; chain-smoking Schmidt ("a politician with vision needs to see an ophthalmologist") fighting the fight for medium-range U.S. missiles; Kohl clasping Mitterrand's hand at Verdun and later inhaling unification with unabashed appetite. Every risk-averse fiber in Merkel's body proclaims the social-market consensus has prevailed, even through financial crisis.The extent of discord may be measured by the fact that Merkel's chief opponent is also her foreign minister in the governing Grand Coalition: Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democrat leader. He's a likeable technocrat who always seems to be wondering how he ever ended up as a politician.None of the above should suggest there's nothing at stake. There is: a little. If Merkel gets her favored option—a center-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats—tax cuts, nuclear power and support for the Afghan mission (Germany has sent more than 4,000 troops) will get a boost. If not, well, more of the same is in order. My sense is most Germans feel market reforms of recent years have gone far enough.Germans are hunkered down, not unhappy but uninspired. This has been a campaign of astonishing intellectual nullity, l spoke of hope and concern: The former springs from Germany's absorption of its eastern third and passage into normality, the latter from the country's numbness.Nothing—not the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, not the faltering direction of the European Union (once a German obsession, now a sideshow), not financial Armageddon—seems able to stir Germans from contemplation of their navels. This is bad for Europe. The world wanted a boring Germany for a while, but not to this degree, and anyway that time has passed.Perhaps the center-right option would be a better outcome if only because the Social Democrats need time in the wilderness to resolve their relationship with the Left party. The Grand Coalition is an idea-dampening soporific. Prescription for more than four years is ill-advised.Germany is in political transition. If the East has been economically absorbed, its political legacy, in the form of the Left party, has proved inhibiting, even paralyzing.History moves in broad sweeps murky to its hindsight-deprived actors. We can say this: The eruption into the heart of Europe of a German nation state upended the Continent from 1871 to 1945 and a full "normalization" of Germany has taken from 1945 to the present. The long arc has beenpainful but hopeful.The demon of instability, German-prodded, moved to the Middle East, where another modem nation state, Israel, in turn upended the order of things. Perhaps after 74 years (1871-1945), we will see glimmerings of a new, more peaceful regional order there. Hope is almost as stubborn as facts.1. Which of the following is true about the German election?A.People are enthusiastic about it.B.It is hard to say who will win it.C.People are eager for its result.D.No one cares about it.答案：D此题是事实题。

专业英语八级阅读模拟题2019年(5)_真题-无答案(265)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟题2019年(5)(总分100,考试时间155分钟)PART II READING COMPREHENSIONSECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by fourteen 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.(1)That is a lesson Scott Spector, 15, learned the hard way, when his phone started blasting his "American Idol Theme" ringtone as he was pretending to talk into it in the hall at school last month.(2)"I felt like such a dork," said Scott, of Buffalo Grove, III.(3)Dr. Katz of Rutgers said the practice first drew his attention when students in focus groups he had organized to study a wide range of cellphone use began mentioning it, unprompted.(4)The habit, Dr. Katz said, is the latest technological twist in a culture that has long embraced various forms of dissembling in the name of image, from designer knockoff handbags to plastic surgery. Some fakers admit to programming their phones to call them at a certain time to show off their ring tones; others wrap up make-believe Hollywood deals in front of people they want to impress.(5)And phantom callers are often simply trying to cope with social anxiety by showing that they have someone to call, even if they don't. One of Dr. Katz's students said she pretended to use her cellphone when she was out with a group of other college-age women who were all on theirs. Another did it to escape from a fancy boutique where the prices were beyond her means without speaking to a salesperson.(6)In that sense fake callers may not be so different from a lot of real callers, who are always partly performing for others even as they appear to withdraw into their own private space in public.(7)"The cellphone allows people to show strangers that they belong, that they are part of a community somewhere," said Christine Rosen, who studies the social impact of technology at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. "Whether or not it's a fictional call, on some level that's why we're doing it."(8)But the surfeit of counterfeit calls underscores the lengths to which people **pelled to go to project an image for others. Sometimes the impulse is almost subconscious.(9)Mark Konchar, a network administrator in Canton, Ohio, had just hung up after sitting inhis parked car behind a strip mall talking to a friend one afternoon, when he saw people emerging from the employee's entrance to one of the stores. Quickly, he put the phone back up to his ear and pretended to talk.(10)"I guess I thought people might wonder why you're sitting out there in your car; it might look strange," said Mr. Konchar, 33. "It's one of those things where after the situation happens you're wondering, 'Why did I do that?'"(11)Many women rely on fake cell phone calls when they fear for their physical safety. Yessenia Morales, 21, said she recently called a non-existent friend while being followed by a group of men on a train platform.(12)"I'11 see you in a few minutes," she promised the ether.(13)But fake calls are often made by people trying to preserve a more psychological remove. Mike Lupi-ani uses his impersonation of someone on the phone to ignore his chatty next-door neighbors. "They ask how your day is going and stuff," said Mr. Lupiani, of Rochester. "I don't really have time for it."(14)Christina Rohall, 29, said she pretends to use the phone to avoid getting hit on. "I feel awkward just rejecting people," said Ms. Rohall, of San Francisco.(15)How well the fake call works is one of its most appealing qualities, and a testament to how much respect people automatically grant to a cellphone force field. Bartosz Sitarski, 24, said he once pretended to be on a cellphone call for a full 15 minutes when someone he didn't want to speak to was waiting to talk to him at a Milwaukee coffee shop. The other person finally left rather than interrupt the "call."(16)Even security guards seem to respect the cellphone buffer, said Michael McEachern, 16, of San Diego, who has found the fake call a useful way to get to the club level at a Padres game when he doesn't have a pass. Some frequent fakers worry that the wireless charade will be harder to pull off once more people begin to suspect it.(17)But that will not deter Adam Hecht, a radiologist in Berkeley Heights, N.J., whose wife said she is often mortified by his cellphone humor. Mr. Hecht, 40, reserves his fake phoning for places with no reception, like the Tiffany's at the Short Hills, N.J., mall, where cellphones have apparently been rendered unusable to preserve the ambiance: "I usually go through a long medical scenario," he said, "that doesn't exist."1. According to the passage, which of the following statements about the fake cell phone calls is INCORRECT?A. Fake calls can help women callers defend their physical safety.B. Fake calls sometimes can relieve people's anxiety in **munication.C. Fake callers are always granted enough respect rather than suspicion.D. Fake callers try to keep a psychological distance from others.2. In what sense are fake callers not so different from real callers?A. Both real and fake calls serve the function of social interaction.B. Both real and fake calls require performance skills in public.C. Both real and fake callers are really talking to someone, real or imaginary.D. Both real and fake callers want to show they are not alone.3. According to the passage, which categorization of characters is different from others?A. Bartosz Sitarski & Michael McEachern.B. Scott Spector & Adam Hecht.C. Dr. Katz & Christine Rosen.D. Mike Lupiani & Christina Rohall.(1)What a beautiful city. Lights blinking serenely, highways and rivers flowing, bridges on guard like giant eagles. And playgrounds, playgrounds everywhere. New York City is already on the map—specifically, the huge permanent Panorama that takes up an entire gallery at the Queens Museum, displaying all 895,000 buildings in the five boroughs.(2)The organizers of the NYC2012 bid took the Olympic **mittee to the Panorama yesterday to demonstrate what this city would look like during a Summer Games—with just a nip here, a tuck mere and, oh, by the way, a humongous stadium that would bring Western civilization and a bigger cash flow to the West Side of Manhattan. Yesterday these very able organizers trotted out fabled athletes like Billie Jean King, Grete Waitz, Bill Bradley, Nadia Comaneci, Bart Connor, Bob Beamon, Janet Evans and Eamonn Coghlan, who all testified that New York would be a grand host in 2012 and an even better playground in the years afterward.(3)Even with vital needs for more schools, more hospitals, it is hard not to be tantalized by more sports facilities when King tells how her apprenticeship on the public courts of Long Beach, Calif., led directly to her glories at the United States Open in Forest Hills and Flushing Meadows. It is hard not to feel the international dynamics of the Olympics when Bradley relates how he used his minimal Russian to trash-talk a Soviet player at the 1964 Summer Games, before he became a member of the championship Knicks of melancholy and ancient memory. It is hard not to be pulled into the sporting energy of New York when Waitz recalls her first New York marathon, how she plodded through the quiet streets of Queens before crossing the Queensboro Bridge. "I'm dying," she said, recalling that wall of sound in Manhattan, which made her think, "Are they talking to me?" They were indeed talking to her, urging her to run faster. King and Bradley agreed that there was something in the New York air—maybe the legendary New York echo, the one that talks back—that makes people run faster, leap higher, think quicker.(4)Does any of this mean New York needs to be the host of the 2012 Summer Games? The organizers are putting on an impressive dog-and-pony show in New York. Central Park always looks good in snow, but this time it balances out the gaudy and temporary stunt of the bright-orange "Gates". Not needing gimmicks, New York already has the heady confidence of a city deeply involved in its sports teams. The International Olympic Committee's scouts are inspecting the city, but most New Yorkers care more about whether Jason Giambi and Mike Piazza get their power back.(5)The **mittee was taken out to Queens yesterday morning to visit the National Tennis Center. Despite the snowstorm Sunday night, the parking lots and walkways at the center were dry. "I had my five kids out there shoveling at 4 in the morning, paid them $1 an hour," said Jay Kriegel, the executive director of NYC2012, who was, perhaps, joking. The NYC2012 people even organized a sortie to Madison Square Garden, the proposed site of Olympic basketball in 2012. The Garden is run by the Dolan Cablevision people, who are fighting the three-in-one stadium plan, but the visit was gracious on all sides. Bradley, the former three-term senator from New Jersey, was at the Garden, where he used to push Jack Marin of the Baltimore Bullets and get free for backdoor layups. This time he shot baskets with the **mission. There is apparently noI.O.C. law against that.(6)The organizers are planning to build pools and Whitewater canoe courses and equestrian centers that would theoretically benefit New Yorkers for generations. They make a very goodpresentation about the lasting value of the Games to any host city. "The I.O.C. does not want white elephants," King said. To guarantee a lasting impact, the NYC2012 people have organized a Legacy Foundation, which started with a $75 million endowment. Andrew Kimball, the director of operations for NYC2012, addressed the **mittee and said legacy "is a critical issue for them."(7)The drawback is that this entire bid is hinged upon NYC2012's insistence on building a multipurpose center with a retractable dome that would serve as convention center, indoor arena and Jets football stadium. "In fact, we are creating an entirely new neighborhood in New York City," Kriegel said while overlooking the low-slung railroad yards and warehouses alongside the Hudson River.(8)The organizers may have painted themselves into a corner by ignoring the prospect of an Olympic stadium on cheaper, more accessible open space in Queens. New York can always use better sports facilities. But this is one city that does not need the Summer Games to put itself on the map.4. The efforts made by organizers of the NYC2012 include the following aspects EXCEPT that _____.A. they put on an impressive all-around show of New YorkB. they presented the lasting value of Olympics to the host cityC. they planned to provide better playgrounds and sports facilitiesD. they had their children sweep snow in the National Tennis Center5. Which of the following conclusions can we draw from the passage?A. The athletes selected by the NYC2012 are all native New Yorkers.B. New York authority attaches more importance to sports than education.C. IOC's **mittee plays a crucial role in the eventual result.D. The host city of Olympics can be provided financial support by the IOC.6. Which of the following contains a different figure of speech from others?A. Lights blinking serenely, highways and rivers flowing, bridges on guard like giant eagles.B. The organizers are putting on an impressive dog-and-pony show in New York.C. The organizers may have painted themselves into a corner by ignoring the prospect...D. But this is one city that does not need the Summer Games to put itself on the map.(1)The social organization of Egypt was distinguished by a surprising degree of fluidity. No inflexible caste system ever developed. All men were equal in the sight of the law. Although degrees of economic inequality naturally existed, no man's status was unalterably fixed, unless he was a member of the royal family. Even serfs appear to have been capable of rising above their humble condition. Freemen quite regularly made the transition from one social order to another.(2)During the greater part of the history of Egypt the population was divided into five classes: the royal family; the priests; the nobles; the middle class of scribes, merchants, artisans, and farmers; and the serfs. During the Empire a sixth class, the professional soldiers, was added, ranking immediately below the nobles. Thousands of slaves were captured in this period also, and these formed for a time a seventh class. The position of the various ranks of the society shifted from time to time. In the old kingdom the nobles and priests among all of the Pharaoh's subjects held the supremacy. During the Middle Kingdom the classes of commoners came into their own. Scribes, merchants, artisans, and serfs rebelled against the nobles and wrested concessions from the government. Particularly impressive is the dominant role played by the merchants and industrialists in this period. The establishment of the Empire accompanied, as it was by theextension of government functions, resulted in the ascendancy of new nobility, made up primarily of bureaucrats. The priests also waxed in power with the growth of magic and superstition.(3)The gulf that separated the standards of living of the upper and lower classes of Egypt was perhaps even wider than it is today in Europe and America. The wealthy noble lived in splendid villas that opened into fragrant gardens and shady groves. Their food had all the richness and variety of sundry kinds of meat, poultry, cakes, fruit, wine, beer, and sweets. They are from vessels of alabaster, gold, and silver, and adorned their persons with expensive fabrics and costly jewels. By contrast, the life of the poor was wretched indeed. The labors in the towns inhabited congested **posed of mud-brick hovels with roofs of thatch. Their only furnishings were stools and boxes and a few crude pottery jars. The peasants on the great estates enjoyed a less crowded but no more abundant life.(4)The basic social unit among the Egyptians was the monogamous family. No man, not even the Pharaoh, could have more than one lawful wife. Concubinage, however, was a socially reputable institution. Women occupied an unusually enviable status. Wives were not secluded, and there is no record of any divorce. Women could own and inherit property and engage in business. Almost along among Oriental peoples the Egyptians permitted women to succeed to the throne. Another extraordinary social practice was close inbreeding. The ruler as son of the great sun god was required to marry his sister or some other female of his immediate family lest the divine blood be contaminated. There is evidence that many of his subjects followed the identical custom. As yet, historians have been unable to discover any positive traces of racial degeneration produces by this practice, probably for the reason that the Egyptian stock was genetically sound to begin with.(5)The educational system of this ancient people was about what one would expect in a highly integrated society. Attached to the treasury were a number of public schools equipped for the training of the thousands of scribes whose service were necessary in the keeping of records and accounts and in the administration of government functions. Many of them were also employed in a private capacity by the owners of the landed estates and by the leaders of the business world. Admission to these schools was open to any promising youth regardless of class. Apparently instruction was provided free of charge by the government because of the vital need for trained men. None but thoroughly utilitarian subjects had any place in the curriculum; the purpose was not education in the broader sense, but practical training. In spite of their limitations, these schools did provide for the poor but talented youth an avenue of escape from a life of hopeless drudgery.7. We can infer from the first paragraph all the following EXCEPT _____.A. Egypt enjoyed flexible social systemB. every man enjoyed the same social statusC. man could change from one social order to anotherD. a flexible caste system was developed8. Close inbreeding was popular in Egypt during the ancient time because _____.A. they wanted to maintain their blood's purityB. mere was no other ideal choicesC. nobody knew the reasons by nowD. it was a law during that time9. What is the best title of this article?A. Ancient Egypt's Educational System.B. Social Life in Ancient Egypt.C. Social System in Ancient Egypt.D. Ancient Egypt's Classes System.(1)How is communication actually achieved? It depends, of course, either on a common language or on known conventions, or at least on the beginnings of these. If **mon language and the conventions exist, the contributor, for example, the creative artist, the performer, or the reporter, tries to use them as well as he can. But often, especially with original artists and thinkers, me problem is in one way that of creating a language, or creating a convention, or at least of developing the language and conventions to the point where they are capable of bearing his precise meaning. In literature, in music, in me visual arts, in the sciences, in social thinking, in philosophy, this kind of development has occurred again and again. It often takes a long time to get through, and for many people it will remain difficult. But we need never think that it is impossible; creative energy is much more powerful than we sometimes suppose. While a man is engaged in this struggle to say new things in new ways, he is usually more than ever concentrated on me actual work, and not on its possible audience. Many artists and scientists share this fundamental unconcern about the ways in which their work will be received. They may be glad if it is understood and appreciated, hurt if it is not, but while the work is being done there can be no argument. The thing has to come out as the man himself sees it.(2)In this sense it is true that it is the duty of society to create conditions in which such men can live. For whatever the value of any individual contribution, the general body of work is of immense value to everyone. But of course things are not so formal, in reality. There is not society on the one hand and these individuals on the other. In ordinary living, and in his work, the contributor shares in the life of his society, which often affects him both in minor ways and in ways sometimes so deep mat he is not even aware of them. His ability to make his work public depends on the **munication system: the language itself, or certain visual or musical or scientific conventions, and me institutions through which **munication will be passed. The effect of these on his actual work can be almost infinitely variable. For it is not only a communication system outside him; it is also, however original he may be, a communication system which is in fact part of himself. Many contributors make active use of this kind of **munication system. It is to themselves, in a way, mat they first show their conceptions, play their music, present their arguments. Not only as a way of getting these clear, in me process of almost endless testing mat **position involves. But also, whether consciously or not, as a way of putting the experience intoa communicable form. If one mind has grasped it, then it may be open to other minds.(3)In this deep sense, the society is in some ways already present in the act of composition. This is always very difficult to understand, but often, when we have the advantage of looking back at a period, we can see, even if we cannot explain, how this was so. We can see how much even highly original individuals had in common, in their actual work, and in what is called their "structure of feeling", with other individual workers of the time, and with the society of that time to which they belonged. The historian is also continually struck by the fact that men of this kind felt isolated at the very time when in reality they were beginning to get through. This can also be noticed in our own time, when some of the most deeply influential men feel isolated and even rejected. The society and **munication are there, but it is difficult to recognize them, difficult to be sure.10. Creative artists and thinkers **munication by _____.A. depending on shared conventionsB. fashioning their own conventionsC. adjusting their personal feelingsD. elaborating a common language11. According to the passage, which of the following statements is INCORRECT?A. Individual **bined possess great significance to the public.B. Good contributors don't neglect the use of **munication system.C. Everyone except those original **es under the influence of society.D. Knowing how to communicate is universal among human beings.12. Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of the passage?A. Communication depends on a common language or known conventions.B. Original contributors need create new conventions to communicate their precise meanings.C. The society need create conditions for original contributors to live in.D. New ways of communication by creative contributors originate from the society.SECTION B SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONSIn this section there are eight short-answer questions based on the passages in SECTION A. Answer each question in NO more than 10 words in the space provided.13. What does the phrase "wrap up"(4th paragraph)mean?14. What is the author's attitude towards the topic?15. What's the main purpose of citing athletes' statements in the third paragraph?16. What function does the Legacy Foundation organized by the NYC2012 people serve?17. In which position were farmers ranked during the Empire?18. What is the role of the second paragraph in the development of the topic?19. What's **mon characteristic of artists and scientists involved in creative work?20. Why do highly original individuals feel isolated?。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷50(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷50(题后含答案及解析) 题型有： 2. READING COMPREHENSIONPART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)Directions: In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.The U. S. economy has been dragging along lately, but here’s a small shot in the arm. Gasoline prices have fallen to their lowest level in 33 months. The average price of gasoline nationwide has dropped from $3. 74 per gallon in February to $3. 19 today. In states like Missouri and Texas, gasoline has sunk below $3 per gallon at the pump, a price not seen in years. Economists tend to think a fall in gasoline prices can help stimulate the economy by giving people more money to spend on other goods. Think of it like a tax cut. Earlier this month, the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that falling gas prices could add 0. 3 percentage points to third-quarter GDP growth. But why is this happening? The reasons for the recent fall in gasoline prices are varied, but here are some of the big ones. Gasoline prices typically rise in the summer and go down in the winter. That’s because people take more vacations when the weather’s nice, and refiners have to put out a pricier “summer blend” of gasoline that’s mixed with butane and other ingredients to prevent evaporation in the heat. Once the summer’s over, gas prices typically fall again. So that’s worth mentioning. But this isn’t the only factor here. The supply of gasoline is up—for odd reasons. U. S. stockpiles of gasoline were at 210 million barrels in the first week of November, up about 4 percent from the same period last year. Normally, refineries cut back when stockpiles are high. But there are other forces at play here. Many Gulf Coast refiners are taking advantage of the boom in shale-oil drilling in the Midwest and producing ever more diesel for export to Europe and Asia. That’s a lucrative business. And that refining process also produces more gasoline for domestic consumption. So, as The Wall Street Journal reports, refiners can still make a profit from exporting diesel abroad even if they’re creating a glut of gasoline here at home. —Fewer refinery disruptions. It’s been a fairly quiet hurricane season in the Atlantic this year—with not a single hurricane making landfall. That means U. S. refineries have seen relatively few disruptions of late, apart from Tropical Storm Karen in October and scheduled shutdowns for maintenance. Oil prices have declined moderately. The price of oil typically makes up about 70 percent of the cost of gasoline. And a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude cost just $93.60 on Tuesday, down from around $ 110 in September. Oft-cited factors for the drop include growing U.S. crude supplies and an easing of tensions between the United States and Iran. This also isn’t the whole story, but it’s a factor. Gasoline demand has been fairly restrained. In recent years, Americans have been buying more efficient cars andlight trucks, in part due to new fuel-economy standards by the Obama administration. That’s helped keep a lid on prices. But this trend may not last for long if driving demand picks back up. A bet on weakened ethanol rules. Earlier this year, many refineries were buying up renewable credits, known as “RINs,” in anticipation that the Environmental Protection Agency would tighten its rule on how much ethanol needs to be mixed in with gasoline in 2014. The price of RINs soared, which, in turn, may have driven up gasoline prices. The opposite is happening now as many observers think the EPA could weaken its ethanol targets for 2014(a leaked draft suggested as much). Partly as a result, the price of RINs has fallen sharply since July—and with it, some analysts think, the price of gasoline. The big question is whether prices will keep dropping—or whether they’ll eventually rebound sharply the way they did in 2011 and 2012 after temporary lulls. The winter drop in gasoline demand is obviously seasonal and temporary. And there’s always the possibility that geopolitical unrest could send oil prices soaring. For now, however, the U. S. Energy Information Administration is predicting that U. S. gasoline prices will stay restrained in the year ahead—falling from an average of $3. 50 per gallon in 2013 to $3. 39 per gallon in 2014. That’s still much higher than they were a decade ago. But it would count as a small bit of relief for the broader economy.1．In which way do lower gasoline prices affect U. S. economy?A．It will lead to a little decrease of GDP growth in the third quarter.B．It will reduce the cost of transportation of products.C．It will raise the sale of gasoline and cars.D．It will promote the economy as a whole.正确答案：D解析：细节题。

专业英语-专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解(二十六).doc

专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解（二十六）READING COMPREHENSIONTEXT ACredit card rewards programs have traditionally featured airline miles, gift certificates, and cash back for customers who spend enough on their cards to rack up points. But recently, credit card companies have started offering a different kind of gift: They1 re handing out lower interest rates, refunding interest payments, and using other strategies to provide incentives for cardholders to pay down their debt and make on-time payments • The deals, however, don11 always work in consumers 1 favor.The new Citi Forward card gives cardholders points and reduces their annual interest rate for making on-time payments and for staying under their credit limit. TD Bank1s Simply Flexible card changes customers1interest rates depending on how much of their balance they pay off . If they pay off 10 percent or more of their balance, then they get the lowest available interest rate；paying between the minimum payment and 5 percent of the balance gets them the highest interest rate. And Discover1s Motiva card gives cardholders one month1s worth of interest back after six consecutive on-time payments•Card companies say the idea behind the new rewards is to help customers get on top of their finances. n It1s all about promoting financial fitness and giving customers the choices they need to help them manage their debt, n says Michael Copley, senior vice president of retail lending for TD Bank• He says he thinks the Simply Flexible card motivates cardholders to pay off more of their debt and attributes the companys relatively low delinquency rate to the product•Because of the continuing recession, companies have an incentive to keep their customers from sliding further under water. "This is in response to recognition on the part of issuers that they have to help their cardholders do a better job of managing their money, so customers keep those cards for a long time,n says Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at Aite Group, a research and advisory firm. The challenge for companies, he says, is to balance the profitability of consumers who maintain a balance, and therefore pay interest fees each month, against the increased risk that those cardholders pose because they are more likely to default on their debt. Rewards programs that encourage customers to maintain a balance while paying on time, such as the Motiva card, may help them strike that balance.According to consumer advocates and credit card experts, consumers who carry a balance may be better off selecting a card with the lowest interest rate rather than participating in one of these rewards programs, although they can help consumers improve their credit. H In general, I think these cards are great for people who don 11 have great credit and regularly carry a balance on their cards,n says Adam Jusko, founder of www. . Customers who only occasionally carry a balance, on the other hand, would be better off finding a card with a more appealing rewards program, he adds.TD Bank1s Copley says it1s up to the customer to make the decision as to whether or not the card is a good idea • n 1 We wouldn11 approve them unless we knew they could pay the minimum, H he says, adding, n Whether or not they want to pay more than the minimum payment is their call. nThe recent credit card rewards programs includeA.air miles•B.gift certificates.C.cash back•D.lower interest rates.2、 A cardholder of Simply Flexible Card will get the lowest interest rate if heA.makes six successive on-time payments.B.pays off the balance on time and stay under his credit limit.C.pays off 15 percent of his balance.D.pays off 5 percent of his balance.3、Michael Copley holds that rewards programsA.don11 always work in customers 1 favor.B.can help the customers pay off more of their debt•C.will help the cardholders manage their finance.D.can result in a relative low delinquency rate to the credit card.4、The phrase n to keep.・.from sliding further under water n (Para. Four) implies thatA.the companies aim to help their customers during the recession.B. the companies are g oing to manage the money of their cardholders•C.the companies help the customers manage their finance better so they keepthe cards longer.D.the companies want to give the customers more choices in the recession.5、The consumer advocates and credit card experts suggest thatA.the lowest interest card is a better choice for those who carry a balance .B.the customers who pay off the balance should not participate in any rewards program.C.it is better for those who pay off the balance to select a lower interest card.D.customers who carry a balance should select a card with some rewards programs.TEXTBAs a young child, Buffett was pretty serious about making money. He used to go door-to-door and sell soda pop. He and a friend used math to develop a system for picking winners in horseracing and started selling their l!Stable-Boy Selections11 tip sheets until they were shut down for not having a license. Later, he also worked at his grandfather1s grocery store. At the ripe age of 11, Buffett bought his first stock•When his family moved to Washington, D. C. , Buffett became a paperboy for The Washington Post and its rival the Times-Herald. Buffett ran his five paper routes like an assembly line and even added magazines to round out his product offerings. While still in school, he was making $175 a month, a full-time wage for many young men.When he was 14 z Buffett spent $1,200 on 40 acres of farmland in Nebraska and soon began collecting rent from a tenant farmer• He and a friend also made $50 a week by placing pinball machines in barber shops • They called their venture Wilson Coin Operated Machine Co.Already a successful albeit small-time businessman, Buffett wasn1t keen on going to college but ended up at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania — his father encouraged him to go . After two years at Wharton, Buffett transferred to hisparents 1 Alma Mater, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, for his final year of college. There Buffett took a job with the Lincoln Journal supervising 50 paper boys in six rural coun ties•Buffett applied to Harvard Business School but was turned down in what had tobe one of the worst admissions decisions in Harvard history. The out-come ended up profoundly affecting Buffett1 s life, for he ended up attending Columbia Business School z where he studied under revered mentor Benjamin Graham, the father ofsecurities analysis who provided the foundation for Buffett1s investment strategy.From the beginning, Buffett made his fortune from investing. He started withall the money he had made from selling pop, delivering papers, and operating pinball machines . Between 1950 and 1956, he grew his $9,800 kitty to $140z 000 . From there, he organized investment partnerships with his family and friends z and then gradually drew in other investors through word of mouth and very attractive terms.Buffett1 s goal was to top the Dow Jones Industrial Average by an average of 10% a year. Over the length of the Buffett partnership between 1957 and 1969, Buffett1 s investments grew at a compound annual rate of 29.5%, crushing the Dow1 s return of 7.4% over the same period.Buffett1 s investment strategy mirrors his lifestyle and overall philosophy. He doesn11 collect houses or cars or works of art, and he disdains companies that waste money on such extravagances as limousines z private dining rooms,7、8、Buffett1s critical view of inheritances.Buffett1s lifestyle and overall philosophy.Buffett1s evaluations of philanthropy• Benjamin Graham1s investment conception.the 4th generalizes and the 5th gives an example. each presents one stage of the development.the 5th is the logical result of the 4tb.both illustrate Buffett1s academic life.9、Which of the following is INCORRECT, according to the passage?People usually tend to think of inheritances as being normal.Buffett1s three kids are kept from leading normal, independent lives. Buffett has strict standards for using the money of his Foundation. The Foundation has been intended to grow beforeA.B.C.D.10、According to the passage, BuffettA.B.C.D. wise investor with an unchanged wise investor who gave away all talentedinvestor with a simple talented investor who views charity low.Buffett1s death. is best described as a portfolio. his money.lifestyle.and high-priced real estate • He is a creature of habit — same house, same office, same city, same soda — and dislikes change. In his investments, that means holding on to "core holdings11 such as American Express, Coca-Cola, and The Washington Post Co • n forever11 .Buffett1s view of inherited money also departs from the norm^ Critical of the self- indulgence of the super-rich, Buffett thinks of inheritances as n privately funded food stamps11 that keep children of the rich from leading normal, independent lives • With his own three kids, he gave them each $10,000 a year —the tax-deductible limit —at Christmas. When he gave them a loan, they had to sign a written agreement. When his daughter, also named Susie like her mother, needed $20 to park at the airport, he made her write him a check for it.As for charity, Buffett1s strict standards have made it difficult for him to give much away. He evaluates charities the same way he looks for stocks : value for money, return on invested capital. He has established the Buffett Foundation, designed to accumulate money and give it away after his and his wife1s deaths —though the foundation has given millions to organizations involved withpopulation control, family planning, abortion, andbirth control. The argument goes that Buffett can actually give away a greater sum in the end by growing his money while he1s still alive•6、According to the passage, BuffettA.started to make money as a child working at his grandfather 1s grocery store .B.had already started to run his own business with his friend at the age of 14 ・C.worked full time as a paperboy for two rival newspapers in WashingtonD. C.D.developed the “Stable-Boy Selections11 tip sheets with his friend at age 11.Buffett1 s investment strategy seems to reflect all of the following EXCEPTA.B.C.D.The relationship between the fourth and fifth paragraphs is thatA.B.C.D.TEXTCA night out at the opera to see an adaptation of an obscure 17th-century English play may sound like an expensive nap. But what if audience members were handed Venetian masks and invited to wander around the theater as the action unfolded? That1s exactly what the London-based theater company Punchdrunk and the English National Opera have done with The Duchess of Malf i, which opened July 13 in an empty office complex outside the city. With dancers z opera singers z and musicians roving throughout the three-story building, the audience is turned loose to explore an elaborate set that includes Victorian sitting rooms, rustic teahouses —which offer actual cocktails — a ghostly forest, and macabre offices . Along the way, viewers stumble upon random scenes, which they must piece together before everyone gathers in a warehouse for the grand finale•A.TheyB.TheyC.They They14、own15>What does the last sentence "get your mask at the door, but bring your helmet" of the passage imply?A.B.C.D.Which of the following can be the best title of the passage?A.B.C.D.iiImmersiveImmersiveImmersiveImmersivetheater requires the goers to wear a helmet. theater1s security has not been perfect.theatergoers need to pay attention to safety• theatergoers must obey the theater1s rules.Immersing Oneself in the Drama.Going to the New-style Theater.Theaters Add More Fun.Two Sides of Immersive Theater.The show, which immediately sold out, is just London1s latest example ofimmersive theater, a popular new genre that blends high drama with haunted-house theatrics in a strange mashup of acting, performance art, and choose-your-own-adventure storytelling. n It1s a combination of spectacle and intimacy, 11 says Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk 1s artistic director, who believes the hunger for deeper, more personalized theater experiences reflects a backlash against the shallow immediacy of today1s Internet culture. H Some people have gotten lazy. And The Duchess of Malfi is something that, really, you have to work for. It1s a theatrical puzzle the audience needs to solve themselves. n For David Jubb, the artistic director at London1s Battersea Arts Centre, who has worked closely with Punchdrunk on past productions, having participants construct their own narrative is part of the 11 democratization H of the art form. n Too often, theater is something where you sit, and could happen if you were there or not, H he says. 11It1s an experience that needs to catch up with the times.nAs with any democracy, participation is key, which is why Jubb is staging a One-on- One Festival this month showcasing a variety of short works performed for one viewer at a time. In most of them, all that1s required is a good-natured willingness to play along. For example, in Rotating in a Room of Images, by the group Lundahl & Seitl, audience members wear headphones while a whispering voice and delicate hands guide them alone through dark rooms, past haunting scenes resembling Dutch Renaissance paintings.Immersive moments are also making their way into more standard fare • Some of the best are the least expected• At a staging of La Bohegraveme at the Cock Tavern Theatre in North London earlier this year, ticketholders filed down to the pub at intermission only to be surprised by a song-and-dance routine performed by actors pretending to be patrons sipping their beers•Encouraging audience participation has its risks. n If you are blurring the boundaries between artist and audience, that will lead to moments when your audience is doing things you did not expect, n says Jubb. Blood has even been spilled. During a performance of Money — a piece by the theater company Shunt that takes place on a dystopian, machinelike stage set — an overzealous audience member head-butted one of the actors midscene . Rule No. 1 in immersive theatergoing: get your mask at the door, but bring your own helmet.11> What can we learn about traditional theaters according to the passage?A.Traditional theaters put on performances in the evening.B.Most people could not afford to go to the theaters.C.Sometimes audience was invited to join the play.D.Modern people become uninterested in old-time theaters• 12> Which of the following is true about immersive theater?A.People are reluctant to buy the tickets of such theater.B.It1s more popular than today1s Internet culture.C.The audience needs to participate in the theater.D.Often it can happen whether the audience is there or not.13> What is generally required of audience to join the short works performed on Jubb1s One-on-One Festival?should have experiences of performance before.are willing to play in the short works with actors. had better have learned courses about acting.must have enough courage to join the play.TEXTDForced to pay for once-free sandwich toppings and twice as much for some steak cuts, shoppers are wondering whether higher grocery bills and restaurant tabs trulyreflect the trickle down of a global rise in food prices.Veronica Banks, who lives outside St. Louis, said she suspects thatneighborhood corner stores are charging more for many items under the assumptionthat customers won11 pay the bus fare to go bargain hunting.Without a doubt, basic economic principles account for most of the increase in the wholesale cost of food worldwide • Bad weather has hurt crops. Economic prosperity has driven up demand in developing countries. And soaring fuel prices have raised transportation costs. Mix in investors betting on continued food-price inflation, and you have a recipe for a run-up.Foodstuffs from rice to steak cost more than a year ago —so much, in fact, that some consumers don11 quite believe it all adds up. But food retailers say that consumers 1suspicions of gouging are unjustified and that, if anything, they have refrained from passing along their extra costs.11 People have told me I nickel-and-dime them, n said Kate Oncel, director of operations at the Brown Bag, a deli in Washington. 11 They don11 understand the position we 1re in” of paying dramatically more for meat, produce, bread, packaging and deliveries•Retailers raising prices and shoppers, in turn, raising eyebrows are reasonable and established responses, say economists and historians. While competitivepressures keep most businesses from taking advantage of their customers, some see an opportunity to push prices beyond justified levels.Forgoing pricier items are adjustments many Americans can afford and stomach, especially relative to the crises in the more than 30 countries where food protests have raged.But in the U.S., customers notice when the grocery bill stays the same but the take- home haul lightens. Conversely, most remain quiet when prices stay the same or drop. 111 get upset thinking about bow much we have to pay for things, but then I feel guilty when I see other nations that are dealing with horrible poverty, 11 Helen Strouss of La Mirada, California, said last week at an Albertson1s grocery store.Consumers forking over more to fill their gas tanks and stomachs may feel like they1 ve been hit with an unprecedented one-two punch. But the food-fuel wallop has landed before, said David Hackett Fischer, a professor of history at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. In the 13th century, demand for firewood and grain led to broader price hikes. And sellers have taken advantage of the system throughout the 20th century as free market ideas removed many price controls, he said.The nation1 s 945,000 restaurants expect to set a sales record of $558 billion this year, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research at the National Restaurant Association. Restaurants probably will make some changes on the plate, rej iggering portions, and on the restaurant floor, using more technology to gain efficiency and training programs to bolster sales, Riehle said.At the Brown Bag, where cucumber toppings now cost 50 cents z Oncel has not raised the overall price of sandwiches and salads but said she will if food commodities and gas prices don't fall.At nearby TJ 1s Gourmet Dell, owner Terry Chung said customers can expect to pay 30 cents more per sandwich and up to 4 0 cents more per pound on the salad bar if economic conditions don11 change• His profits are down about 25 percent in recent months, with the biggest cost increase coming in delivery fuel surcharges, which have roughly doubled to $4.50 per order.The hesitancy to raise prices unnecessarily is rooted in competition, said Ann Owen, an economics professor at Hamilton College in Clinton New York, and a former economist at the Federal Reserve. But if the cost increases are more permanent, retailers can confidently raise prices z she added. But that can11 insulate them from skeptical shoppers who see overblown hikes and a panic-hungry media.16、Which of the following is NOT the factor that accounts for the rise of the food price?A.Disadvantageous cultivating environment.rge food demand in developing countries.A. to B ・to C ・to D ・to 19、 WhatC. The operation of basic economic principles.D. The increasing price of fuel and transportation.17> Facing the suspicion from customers, the retailersA. are not concerned with customers 1 suspicion and still raise the price asplanned.B. feel rather uncomfort able to customers 1 suspicion but they won 11 raise theprice•C. complain of being misjudged but they actually take advantage of thecustomers.D. complain of being misunderstood but will still pass the extra cost to customers.18、 The phrase ,f nieke 1 -and-dime n in Paragraph Five meanstake advantage of someone little by little.spend one 1s money frugally. spend as little money as possible. accumulate treasure little by little.is the relationship among the last three paragraphs?A. Paragraph Eleven and Paragraph Twelve provide supportingevidences for Paragraph Thierteen.B. Paragraph Thirteen concludes and provides further explanation for ParagraphsEleven and Twelve.C. The last three paragraphs conclude the whole passage from three perspectives.D. Paragraph Twelve and Paragraph Thirteen provide supporting evidences forParagraph Eleven.20、 The main idea of the passage is thatA. increasing food costs cause business adjustment.B. higher food costs cause customers 1 suspicion•C. a number of factors lead to the rise of food costs.D. higher food prices lead to social crisis.答案：READING COMPREHENSIONTEXT A1> D［解析］事实细节题。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷164含答案和解析

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷164讲座会话听力大题型(1) On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.(2) New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader, and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of me public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at me Metropolitan Opera and only 112 blocks from me spot where Clarence Day me elder was washed of his sins in me Church of me Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely). And for mat matter I am probably occupying me very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of mem on hot, breamless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.(3) New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating me individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants orneeds it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events mat are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all me world took place in town. I didn't attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn't even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this air shaft to fly over.The biggest oceangoing ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn't notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with 650 miles of waterfront, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I've happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss.(4) I mention these events merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on itsinhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions. The Lions are overwhelming; the event is unavoidable.(5) Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city's tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation—a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless. I think that although many persons are here from some excess of spirit (which caused them to break away from their small town), some, too, are here from a deficiency of spirit, who find in New York a protection, or an easy substitution.1.According to Para. 1, the author seems to believe that______.(B)A. New York is not suitable for people to live inB. whether an individual enjoys living in New York depends on luckC. most residents of New York lead an isolated lifeD. New York is a city full of bizarreness and mystery解析：细节题。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷194(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷194(题后含答案及解析)题型有： 2. READING COMPREHENSIONPART II READING COMPREHENSIONSECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by fourteen 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.(1)It’s hard to miss them: the epitome of casual “geek chic” and organized within the warranty of their Palm Pilots, they sip labor-intensive caf6 lattes, chat on sleek cell phones and ponder the road to enlightenment. In the US they worry about the environment as they drive their gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles to emporiums of haute design to buy a $50 titanium spatula; they think about their tech stocks as they explore specialty shops for Tibetan artifacts in Everest-worthy hiking boots. They think nothing of laying out $5 for a wheat grass muff, much less $500 for some alternative rejuvenation at the day-spa—but don’t talk about raising their taxes.(2)They are “Bourgeois Bohemians”—or “Bobos”—and they’re the new “enlightened elite”of the information age, their lucratively busy lives a seeming synthesis of comfort and conscience, corporate success and creative rebellion. Well-educated thirty-to-forty something, they have forged a new social ethos from a logic-defying fusion of 1960s counter-culture and 1980s entrepreneurial materialism.(3)Combining the free-spirited, artistic rebelliousness of the Bohemian beatnik or hippie with the worldly ambitions of their bourgeois corporate forefathers, the Bobo is a comfortable contortion of caring capitalism. “It’s not about making money; it’s about doing something you love. Life should be an extended hobby. It’s all about working for a company as cool as you are.”(4)It is a world inhabited by dotcom millionaires, management consultants, “culture industry”entrepreneurs and all manner of media folk, most earning upwards of $100,000 a year—their money an incidental byproduct of their maverick mores, the kind of money they happen to earn while they are pursuing their creative vision. Often sporting such unconventional job titles as “creative paradox”, “corporate jester” or “learning person”, Bobos work with a monk-like self-discipline because they view their jobs as intellectual, even spiritual. It is a reverse the Midas touch: everything a Bobo touches turns to spirituality, everything has to be about enlightenment. Even their jobs are a mission to improve the world. (5)It is now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker, but it isn’t just a matter of style. If you investigate people’s attitudes towards sex, morality, leisure time and work, it is getting harder and harder to separate the anti-establishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together. (6)These Bobos are just normal middle-classpeople who are living out a protracted adolescence. Their political interests are either “intensely close and personal”(abortion or gun control), or very remote(the rainforests, Tibet or Third World poverty). But they will most likely express their conscience in their consumerism, relieved to be helping someone somewhere by collecting the hand-carved artifacts of distant cultures. (7)Motivated by spiritual participation, but cautious of moral crusades and religious enthusiasms, they tolerate a little lifestyle experimentation, so long as it is done safely and moderately. They are offended by concrete wrongs, such as cruelty and racial injustice, but are relatively unmoved by lies or transgressions that don’t seem to do anyone any obvious harm. (8)It is an elite mat has been raised to oppose elites. They are by instinct anti-establishmentarian, yet in some sense they have become a new establishment. They are prosperous without seeming greedy; they have pleased their elders, without seeming conformists; they have risen toward the top without too obviously looking down on those below.1．Bobos do all of the following EXCEPT ______.A．buying stylish mobile phonesB．relying on new technologies to get organizedC．driving battery-powered utility vehiclesD．worrying about environmental issues正确答案：C解析：第1段第2句表明C中的battery-powered ulility vehicles与原文不符，故选C。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷80(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷80(题后含答案及解析) 题型有： 2. READING COMPREHENSIONPART II READING COMPREHENSIONSECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by fourteen 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.(1)One school night this month I sidled up to Alexander, my 15-year-old son, and stroked his cheek in a manner I hoped would seem casual. Alex knew better, sensing by my touch, which lingered just a moment too long, that I was sneaking a touch of the stubble that had begun to sprout near his ears. A year ago he would have ignored this intrusion and returned my gesture with a squeeze. But now he recoiled, retreating stormily to his computer screen. That, and a peevish roll of his eyes, told me more forcefully than words, Mom, you are so busted! (2)I had committed the ultimate folly: invading my teenager’s personal space. “The average teenager has pretty strong feelings about his privacy,” Lara Fox, a recent young acquaintance, told me with an assurance that brooked no debate. Her friend Hilary Frankel chimed in: “What Alex is saying is: “This is my body changing. It’s not yours.’”Intruding, however discreetly, risked making him feel babied “at a time when feeling like an adult is very important to him,” she added. (3)O.K., score one for the two of you. These young women, after all, are experts. Ms. Frankel and Ms. Fox, both 17, are the authors of Breaking the Code(New American Library), a new book that seeks to bridge the generational divide between parents and adolescents. It is being promoted by its publisher as the first self-help guide by teenagers for their parents, a kind of Kids Are From Mars, Parents Are From Venus that demystifies the language and actions of teenagers. The girls tackled issues including curfews, money, school pressures, smoking and sibling rivalry. (4)Personally, I welcomed insights into teenagers from any qualified experts, and that included the authors. The most common missteps in interacting with teenagers, they instructed me, stem from the turf war between parents asserting their right to know what goes on under their roof and teenagers zealously guarding their privacy. When a child is younger, they write, every decision revolves around the parents. But now, as Ms. Fox told me, “often your teenager is in this bubble that doesn’t include you.”(5)Ms. Fox and Ms. Frankel acknowledge that they and their peers can be quick to interpret their parents’ remarks as dismissive or condescending and respond with hostility that masks their vulnerability. “What we want above all is your approval,” they write. “Don’t forget, no matter how much we act as if we don’t care what you say, we believe the things you say about us.”(6)Nancy Samalin, a New York child-rearing expert and the author of Loving Without Spoiling(McGraw-Hill, 2003), said she didn’t agree witheverything the authors suggested but found their arguments reasonable. “When your kids are saying, ‘You don’t get it, and you never will,’there are lots of ways to respond so that they will listen,”she said, “and that’s what the writers point out.”(7)As for my teenager, Alex, Ms. Fox and Ms. Frankel told me I would have done better to back off or to have asked “Is your skin feeling rougher these days?”(8)A more successful approach, the authors suggest in their book, would have been for the mother to offer, as Ms. Fox’s own parents did, a later curfew once a month, along with an explanation of her concerns. “My parents helped me see,” Ms. Fox told me, “mat even though they used to stay out late and ride their bicycles to school, times have changed. These days there is a major fear factor in bringing up kids. Parents worry about their child crossing me street.”(9)The writers said they hoped simply to shed light on teenage thinking. For their parents it did. Reminded by Ms. Fox that teenagers can be quite territorial, her father, Steven Fox, a dentist, said, “These days I’m better about knocking on the door when I want to come into Lara’s room.”“I try to talk to her in a more respectful way, more as an adultish type of teenager rather than a childish type of teenager,” he added.1．The book Kids Are From Mars, Parents Are From Venus is mentioned in the third paragraph because ______.A．it has the same theme of the book written by the two girlsB．it has the opposite opinion to the book written by the two girlsC．it has ranked first on the list of best sellers for several timesD．it is another book that the two girls have ever written正确答案：A解析：第3段倒数第2句指出，这两位少女作家写的书类似《孩子来自火星，父母来自金星》这类书，剖析了青少年的言行举止，因此选A。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷171(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷171(题后含答案及解析)题型有： 2. READING COMPREHENSIONPART II READING COMPREHENSIONSECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by fourteen 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.(1) Letty the old lady lived in a “ Single Room Occupancy” hotel approved by the New York City welfare department and occupied by old losers, junkies, cockroaches and rats. Whenever she left her room—a tiny cubicle with a cot, a chair, a seven-year-old calendar and a window so filthy it blended with the unspeakable walls—she would pack all her valuables in two large shopping bags and carry them with her. If she didn’t, everything would disappear when she left the hotel. Her “things” were also a burden. Everything she managed to possess was portable and had multiple uses. A shawl is more versatile than a sweater, and hats are no good at all, although she used to have lots of nice hats, she told me. (2) The first day I saw Letty I had left my apartment in search of a “bag lady”. I had seen these women round the city frequently, had spoken to a few. Sitting around the parks had taught me more about these city vagabonds. As a group, few were eligible for social security. They had always been flotsam and jetsam, floating from place to place and from job to job —waitress, short order cook, sales clerk, stock boy, maid, mechanic, porter—all those jobs held by faceless people. The “bag ladies” were a special breed. They looked and acted and dressed strangely in some of the most determinedly conformist areas of the city. They frequented Fourteen Street downtown, and the fancy shopping districts. They seemed to like crowds but remained alone. They held long conversations with themselves, with telephone poles, with unexpected cracks in the sidewalk. They hung around lunch counters and cafeterias, and could remain impervious to the rudeness ofa determined waitress and sit for hours clutching a coffee cup full of cold memories.(3) Letty was my representative bag lady. I picked her up on the corner of Fourteenth and Third Avenue. She had the most suspicious face I had encountered; her entire body, in fact, was pulled forward in one large question mark. She was carrying a double plain brown shopping bag and a larger white bag ordering you to vote for some obscure man for some obscure office and we began talking about whether or not she was an unpaid advertisement. I asked her if she would have lunch with me, and let me treat, as a matter of fact. After some hesitation and a few sharp glances over the top of her glasses, Letty the Bag Lady let me come into her life. We had lunch that day, the next, and later the next week. (4) Being a bag lady was a full-time job. Take the problem of the hotels. You can’t stay to long in any one of those welfare hotels, Letty told me, because the junkies figure out your routine, and when you get your checks,and you’ll be robbed, even killed. So you have to move a lot. And every time you move, you have to make three trips to the welfare office to get them to approve the new place, even if it’s just another cockroach-filled, rat-infested hole in the wall. During the last five years, Letty tried to move every two or three months. (5) Most of our conversations took place standing in line. New York State had just changed the regulations governing Medicaid cards and Letty had to get a new card. That took two hours in line, one hour sitting in a large dank-smelling room, and two minutes with a social worker who never once looked up. Another time, her case worker at the welfare office sent Letty to try and get food stamps, and after standing in line for three hours she found out she didn’t qualify because she didn’t have cooking facilities in her room. “This is my social life,” she said. “ I run around the city and stand in line. You stand in line to see one of them fancy movies and calling it art; I stand in line for medicine, for food, for glasses, for the cards to get pills, for the pills; I stand in line to see people who never see who I am; at the hotel, sometimes I even have to stand in line to go to the john. When I die there’ll probably be a line to get through the gate, and when I get up to the front of the line, somebody will push it closed and say, ‘ Sorry. Come back after lunch. ‘ These agencies, I figure they have to make it as hard for you to get help as they can, so only really strong people or really stubborn people like me can survive. “(6) Letty would talk and talk; sometimes, she didn’t seem to know I was even there. She never remembered my name, and would give a little start of surprise whenever I said hers, as if it had been a long time since anyone had said “Letty. “ I don’t think she thought of herself as a person, anymore; I think she had accepted the view that she was a welfare case, a Mediaid card, a nuisance in the bus depot in the winter time, a victim to any petty criminal, existing on about the same level as cockroaches.1．Which of the following is closest in meaning to “flotsam and jetsam” in the second paragraph?A．Old losers.B．Junkies.C．Vagabonds.D．Bag ladies.正确答案：C解析：语义题。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷45(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷45(题后含答案及解析) 题型有： 2. READING COMPREHENSIONPART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)Directions: In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.Education Standards Are Not the Answer Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Vernon Ehlers have recently proposed a bill to create a national curriculum in reading and math. The bill’s supporters rightly tell us that by the end of high school, American students have fallen behind their international peers. Dodd and Ehlers use that observation to conclude that we need such a curriculum “to compete in the global economy.” But how exactly would homogenizing our curriculum and testing make us more competitive? “National standards would help propel U.S. economic competitiveness, because they would allow the country to set expectations higher than those of our international competitors,”write Rudy Crew and Paul Vallas, the superintendents of the Miami and Philadelphia school districts, in a recent Education Week commentary. This idea of higher standards has a certain appeal. In many other areas of life, higher standards are associated with better performance. It’s much harder to qualify for a U. S. Olympic team than for a typical high school sports team —and Olympic teams are demonstrably better. Japanese automakers generally set higher reliability standards in the 1970s than did American automakers, and they produced more reliable vehicles. But sports and manufacturing are competitive fields, while public schooling currently is not. Standards advocates mistakenly assume that high external standards produce excellence, but in fact it is the competitive pursuit of excellence that produces high standards. Michael Petrilli, a scholar at the Ford-ham Foundation, recognizes the role of competition in education, but contends that national standards are necessary to facilitate it. In order for any market to work effectively, Petrilli claims, “consumers need good information,” and in his view, that information can only be delivered by a national system of standards and tests. Yet around the world, free education markets are already thriving with no such standards in place. One such market exists in the United States: after-school tutoring. By contrast, there is no evidence that imposing government standards improves the performance of true education markets. On the contrary, by placing all intellectual eggs in the same basket, a single national curriculum would hamper competition and magnify the damage done by every bad decision. As Jared Diamond so compellingly argued in his Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs , and Steel, diversity is as important to the health of human societies as it is to the survival of ecosystems. We need education diversity as much as we need biodiversity. A dynamic, competitive system is better able to survive mishaps than a monolithic, centralized one. It isironic that standards advocates urge us to improve our schools in response to competitive pressures from abroad, but then discount the ability of the same competition and consumer choice to drive improvement at home. It is the competitive pursuit of excellence spurred by market forces that drives up standards, not the other way around. The sooner we realize that, the better off our children will be.1．The national curriculum in America was proposed to______ .A．increase the academic competence of studentsB．narrow the achievement gap among schoolsC．improve the current educational systemD．improve high-school level education正确答案：A解析：本题考查事实细节。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷200(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷200(题后含答案及解析)题型有：1.5 million euros in grants toward the conservation of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum, and local companies like the Compagnia di San Paolo have funded restorations of the Terme Suburbane and the Lupanare brothel. (6)That, however, hasn’t curbed criticism from people like Pompeii’s superintendent Pietro Giovanni Guz-zo. Guzzo insists that limiting visitors should only be for the enhancement of services and not to turn a privately generated profit, even if the proceeds would go directly to the local cultural ministry for reinvestment. While Pompeii is considered an active archaeological dig, most funds allocated to the ruins are strictly for conservation and upkeep rather than any further exploration. Only two-thirds(44 hectares, or 107 acres)of the buried city has been excavated since the first digs began in the 18th century. An estimated 350 million euros would be needed to dig up the remaining third, but some conservationists would prefer to keep it underground as a way of preserving it for future generations. Velardi argues that renting out the site could even fund future digs. (7)Other opponents say that the plan also blurs the line between Italy’s public cultural heritage and private enterprise. Michele Trimarchi, professor of arts economics at the University of Bologna, worries that opening up the site for private sponsors will backfire. He points to failed experiments like the privatization of some of Rome’s major monuments—and the fact that they eventually had to revert to public administrators. “Restricted entry on its own is pointless,”he says. “It serves a purpose if it ensures an enhanced visitor experience, which will not come from handing the site over to private sponsors who have already proved disappointing in the heritage sector.”(8)Velardi counters by saying that any corporation hoping to use the site would be subject to a rigorous selection process and would be required to contribute to improving on the premises. This could include renovating an existing excavation or providing funds to upgrade basic infrastructure, like lighting or restrooms. “This is not some sort of scandalous plan,” says Velardi. “It’s what they do at the MoMA, the Prado and the Louvre.” In ancient Pompeii, though, that may just be too modern an idea.10．In most Italians’ eyes, part of Pompeian city was dug out just to _____.A．see crowding people have conflict with each otherB．close it to the foreign visitors for enhancementC．show their heritage spots to the whole worldD．generate lots of income from the commercial activities正确答案：C解析：根据题干查到第2段第2句，该句说明表明意大利人努力向世人展示他们引以为豪的历史文物。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷161含答案和解析

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷161讲座会话听力大题型(1) Distant indeed seem the days when the two great rivals of commercial aviation, Boeing and Airbus, would use big air shows to trumpet hundreds of new orders. This year's Paris Air Show was a much more sombre affair, even if the Boeing-Airbus feud still took centre stage.(2) There were one or two bright spots. Airbus was able to boast of a firm order for ten of its wide-body A350s from AirAsia X. John Leahy, its top salesman, expects deliveries in 2009 to match the record 483 in 2008. Boeing, which was hit by a prolonged strike last year, will probably deliver more aircraft this year than last. Both firms built up huge backlogs in the fat years; each has orders for about 3,500 planes.(3) But many of those may soon evaporate. Giovanni Bisignani, the boss of IATA, the trade body that speaks for most airlines, gave warning earlier this month mat his members might defer as many as 30% of aircraft deliveries next year. He also almost doubled his forecast for the industry's cumulative losses in 2009, to$ 9 billion.(4) Both Mr. Leahy and Jim McNerney, the chief executive of Boeing,think that Mr. Bisignani is overdoing the gloom. But they concede that potential customers may find purchases hard to finance. Another issue is the cost of fuel. Mr. McNerney thinks the recent increase in the oil price should encourage carriers to replace elderly gas guzzlers with efficient new planes. But if the price \1.It can be inferred from Para. 1 that Boeing and Airbus______.(C)A. have not suffered from a reduction of new orders until this yearB. did not compete with each other intensely in the pastC. used to advertise their success in business at air showsD. would have to resolve their rivalry as early as possible解析：推断题。

专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解（八）

专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解（八）专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解(八)Text AIf there's a sensitive investigation into the flaws of crime fighters, the man the feds often call in to do the job is William H. Webster. Over the decades, the former FBI and CIA chief has headed numerous high-profile investigations into public agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department's response to the 1992 Rodney King riots and the FBI's failure to catch Soviet and Russian mole Robert Hanssen.But the probe into whether the FBI mishandled information about Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who is charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 at Fort Hood in Texas, could be Webster's trickiest assignment yet. The Nov. 5 shootings have raised a host of nettlesome issues regarding Hasan and his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric in Yemen, and why the FBI decided not to raise the alarm about Hasan even though it had tracked his suspect communications. In the aftermath of the shootings, critics have raised questions not only about intelligence-sharing, but also about whether the U.S. Army psychiatrist successfully used the cloak of research as a smoke screen for his personal extremism and, perhaps, murderous intentions.At the heart of the inquiry is the troublesome revelation that the FBI knew that Hasan, who became more religiously devout after his parents' deaths, corresponded with al- Awlaki, an American-born imam who led a northern Virginia mosque where two of the Sept. 11hijackers worshipped. After al-Awlaki departed the U.S. in2002, eventually ending up in Yemen, his sermons and teachings—delivered in English—apparently became a source of inspiration for the Fort Dix six and some of the young men who eventually left the U.S. tojoin al-Shabaab, the Islamist group in Somalia.E-mail surveillance turned up as many as 20 messages between al-Awlaki and Hasan, which an FBI-headed Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington reviewed. At the time, the task force concluded that the correspondence matched Hasan's research into the mind-set of Muslim soldiers who turn on their comrades and was insufficient evidence to launch an investigation. Separately, U.S. Army colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington have said they raised concerns with supervisors about Hasan, his statements about Islam and whether he was mentally stable or possibly even dangerous. The Army, however, did not share the information with the FBI.It's not yet clear how wide-ranging Webster's probe will be, and opinions vary on its scope. Bill Burck, a former deputy counsel toPresident George W. Bush, said that while Webster's previous probes tended to look for policy lapses or fault, this review may be more difficult. The review could go to the heart of assessing threats posed by radicalized Americans, who have rights that terrorists from outside the country do not. "That presents a very difficult set of questions about how do you balance the traditional law-enforcement approach to deal with those threats—which is typically how we'vedealt with those things in the past—with the reality that you're dealing with people that are much harder to deter," Burcksays.The FBI has already turned over to the White House a preliminary internal review of the agency's actions before the shootings.Director Robert Mueller appointed Webster, who headed the FBI from 1978 until 1987 before becoming CIA director, to perform an open-ended, independent review of FBI policies, practices and actions preceding the incident. That will include a review of the initial findings as well as any additional issues that Webster has the discretion to take up.In a statement, Mueller said Webster would have complete access to necessary information and resources that Webster would coordinatewith existing Department of Defense probes. "It is essential to determine whether there are improvements to our current practices or other authorities that could make us all safer in the future," he said.1、 According to the passage, which of the following is NOT trueabout Hasan?A. He was mentally unstable.B. He was a psychiatrist in the U.S. Army.C. He kept in touch with a clergyman in Yemen.D. He killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood.2、 What can be inferred from the appointment of Webster to investigate the incident?A. He headed the FBI and knew it well.B. The Fort Hood incident is no easy case.C. Director Robert Mueller had confidence in Webster.D. He has headed many investigations into public agencies.3、 It can be inferred from the Fort Hood incident thatA. There was something wrong with Hasan's mentality.B. The FBI did not have sufficient evidence to start a probe.C. It could have been stopped if the FBI had taken some measures.D. The Army did not share with the FBI the information about Hasan.4、 What does "discretion" mean in Paragraph 6?A. freedomB. judgmentC. responsibilityD. ability5、 Which of the following has made Webster's probe more difficult?A. It is lacking in evidence on Hasan's motives for the murder.B. It is an investigation into the FBI policies, practices and actions.C. It deals with terrorism from Americans which is even harder to stop.D. It deals with a case related to an imam in Yemen to whom it can do nothing.Text BLooking back, it was naive to expect Wikipedia's joyride to last forever. Since its inception in 2001, the user-written online encyclopedia has expanded just as everything else online has: exponentially. Up until about two years ago, Wikipedians were adding, on average, some 2,200 new articles to the project every day. The English version hit the 2 million—article mark in September 2007 and then the 3 million mark in August 2009—surpassing the 600-year-old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia as thelargest collection of general knowledge ever compiled (well, at least according to Wikipedia's entry on itself).But early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia's growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages. "When we first noticed it, we thought it was a blip," says Ed Chi, a computer scientist at California's Palo Alto Research Center whose lab has studied Wikipedia extensively. But Wikipedia peaked in March 2007 at about 820,000 contributors; the site hasn't seen as many editors before. "By the middle of 2009, we have realized that this was a real phenomenon," says Chi. "It's no longer growing exponentially. Something very different is happening now."What stunted Wikipedia's growth? And what does the slump tell us about the long- term viability of such strange and invaluable online experiments? Perhaps the Web has limits after all, particularly when it comes to the phenomenon known as crowd sourcing. Wikipedians—the volunteers who run the site, especially the approximately 1,000 editors who wield the most power over what you see—have been in a self-reflective mood. Not only is Wikipedia slowing, but also new stats suggest that hard-core participants are a pretty homogeneous set—the opposite of the ecumenical wiki ideal. Women, for instance, make up only 13% of contributors. The project's annual conference in Buenos Aires this summer bustled with discussions about the numbersand how the movement can attract a wider class of participants.At the same time, volunteers have been trying to improveWikipedia's trustworthiness, which has been sullied by a fewdefamatory hoaxes—most notably, one involving the journalist John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia entry falsely stated that he'd been a suspect in the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations. They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer ofeditorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company heads—but those changes will become live only once they've been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator. "Few articles on Wikipedia are more important than those that are about people who are actually walking the earth," says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the encyclopedia. "What we want to do is to find ways to be more fair, accurate, and to do better—to be nicer—to those people."Yet that gets to Wikipedia's central dilemma. Chi's research suggests that the encyclopedia thrives on chaos—that the more freewheeling it is, the better it can attract committed volunteers who keep adding to its corpus. But over the years, as Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness, it has developed a kind of bureaucracy. "It may be that the bureaucracy is inevitable when a project like this becomes sufficiently important," Chi says. But who wants to participate in a project lousy with bureaucrats?There is a benign explanation for Wikipedia's slackening pace: the site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies ofall the world's species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else—well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are "janitorial"—making sure that articles are well formatted and readable.Chi thinks something more drastic has occurred: the Web's first major ecosystem collapses. Think of Wikipedia's community of volunteer editors as a family of bunnies left to roam freely over an abundant green prairie. In early, fat times, their numbers grow geometrically. More bunnies consume more resources, though, and at some point, the prairie becomes depleted, and the population crashes. Instead of prairie grasses, Wikipedia's natural resource is an emotion. "There's the rush of joy that you get the first time youmake an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live," says Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation's executive director. In Wikipedia's early days, every new addition to the site had a roughly equal chance of surviving editors' scrutiny. Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by 61ite Wikipedians. Chi also notes the rise of wiki-lawyering: for your editors to stick, you've got to learn to cite the complex laws of Wikipedia in arguments with other editors. Together, these changes have created a community not very hospitable to newcomers. Chi says, "People begin to wonder, 'Why should I contribute anymore?'"— and suddenly, like rabbits out of food, Wikipedia's population stops growing.The foundation has been working to address some of these issues; for example, it is improving the site's antiquated, oftenincomprehensible editing interface. But as for the larger issue of trying to attract a more diverse constituency, it has no specific plan—only a goal. "The average Wikipedian is a young man in a wealthy country who's probably a graduate student—somebody who's smart, literate, engaged in the world of ideas, thinking, learning, writing all the time," Gardner says. Those people are invaluable, she notes, but the encyclopedia is missing the voices of people in developing countries, women and experts in various specialties that have traditionally been divorced from tech. "We're just starting to get our heads around this. It's a genuinely difficult problem," Gardner says. "Obviously, Wikipedia is pretty good now. It works. But our challenge is to build a rich, diverse, broad culture of people, which is harder than it looks."Before Wikipedia, nobody would have believed that an anonymous band of strangers could create something so useful. So is it crazy to imagine that, given the difficulties it faces, someday the whole experiment might blow up? "There are some bloggers out there who say, 'Oh, yeah, Wikipedia will be gone in five years,'" Chi says. "I think that's sensational. But our data does suggest its existence in 10 or 15 years may be in question."Ten years is a long time on the Internet—longer than Wikipedia has even existed. Michael Snow, the foundation's chairman, says he's got a "fair amount of confidence" that Wikipedia will go on. It remains a precious resource—a completely free journal available to anyone and the model for a mode of online collaboration once hailed as revolutionary. Still, Wikipedia's troubles suggest the limits of Web 2.0—that when an idealized community gets too big, it starts becoming dysfunctional. Just like every other human organization.6、 Which of the following is TRUE about Wikipedia?A. It is growing very fast.B. It is the oldest online encyclopedia.C. It is an online encyclopedia run by users.D. It is said to be the second largest encyclopedia.7、 What does "blip" mean in Paragraph 2?A. a tricky problemB. a strange problemC. a temporary problemD. an unexpected problem8、 Which of the following is NOT the factor that impededWikipedia's development?A. There are many other online encyclopedias.B. The constituency is not as diverse as possible.C. Some people have spoiled the reputation of Wikipedia.D. The web is limited in its capability to deal with so many contributors.9、 What is the situation Wikipedia now faces?A. Wikipedia's control system is working effectively.B. Wikipedia is trying to get rid of bureaucracy.C. Wikipedia is developing healthily.D. Wikipedia is facing a dilemma.10、 What can be inferred from the passage?A. Wikipedia is an accurate and fair system.B. Wikipedia is a victim of its own success.C. Wikipedia faces severe competition from other websites.D. Wikipedia is getting better under the new plan of control.Text CEven if they produced no other positive result, the attacks on the London Underground have compelled Europeans of all faiths to think with new urgency about the Continent's Muslim minority.Such a reckoning was long overdue. Some left-wing politicians, like London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, have chosen to emphasize the proximate causes of Muslim anger, focusing on the outrage widely felt in Islamic immigrant communities over the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the harsh reality is that the crisis in relations between the European mainstream and the Islamic diaspora has far deeper roots, consoling as it might be to pretend otherwise. Indeed, the news could scarcely be worse. What Europeans arewaking up to is a difficult truth: the immigrants who perform the Continent's menial jobs, and, as is often forgotten, began coming to Europe in the 1950's because European governments and businesses encouraged their mass migration, are profoundly alienated from European society for reasons that have little to do with the Middle East and everything to do with Europe. This alienation is cultural, historical and above all religious, as much if not more than it is political. Immigrants who were drawn to Europe because of the Continent's economic success are in rebellion against the cultural, social and even psychological sources of that success.In a sense, Europe's bad fortune is that Islam is in crisis. Imagine that Mexican Catholicism was in a similar state, and that a powerful, well-financed minority of anti-modem purists was doing its most successful proselytizing among Mexican immigrants in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago, above all among the discontented, underemployed youth of the barrios. The predictable, perhaps even the inevitable, result would be the same sort of estrangement between Hispanics and the American mainstream.Whatever the roots of the present troubles, what isundeniable is that many immigrant Muslims and their children remain unreconciled to their situation in Europe. Some find their traditional religious values scorned, while others find themselves alienated by the independence of women, with all its implications for the future ofthe "traditional" Muslim family. In response, many have turned to the most obscurantist interpretation of the Islamic faith as a salve. At the fringes of the diaspora, some have turned to violence.So far, at least, neither the carrot nor the stick has worked. Politicians talk of tighter immigration controls. Yet the reality is that a Europe in demographic freefall needs more, not fewer, immigrants if it is to maintain its prosperity. Tony Blair just proposed new laws allowing the deportation of radical mullahs and the shutting of mosques and other sites associated with Islamic extremism. But given the sheer size of the Muslim population in England and throughout the rest of Europe, the security services are always going to be playing catch-up. Working together, and in a much morefavorable political and security context, French and Spanish authorities have, after more than 20 years, been unable to put an end to the terrorism of the Basque separatist group ETA. And there are at least twice as many Muslims in France as there are Basques in Spain. At the same time, it is difficult to see how the extremists' grievances can ever be placated by conciliatory gestures. It is doubtful that the British government's proposed ban on blasphemy against Islam and other religions will have a demonstrable effect. (What would have happened to Salman Rushdie had such a ban been inforce when "The Satanic Verses" was published?) Meanwhile,the French government has tried to create an "official" state-sanctioned French Islam. This approach may be worth the effort, but the chances of success are uncertain. It will require the enthusiastic participation of an Islamic religious establishment whose influence overdisaffected youth is unclear. What seems clearer is that European governments have very little time and nowhere near enough knowledge about which members of the Islamic community really are "preachers of hate" and which, however unpalatable their views, are part of the immigrant mainstream.The multicultural fantasy in Europe—-its eclipse can be seen most poignantly in Holland, that most self-definedly liberal of all European countries—was that, in due course, assuming that the proper resources were committed and benevolence deployed, Islamic and other immigrants would eventually become liberals. As it's said, they would come to "accept" the values of their new countries. It was neverclear how this vision was supposed to coexist with multiculturalism's other main assumption, which was that group identity should be maintained. But by now that question is largely academic: the European vision of multiculturalism, in all its simultaneous goodwill and self-congratulation, is no longer sustainable. And most Europeans know it. What they don't know is what to do next. If the broad-brush anti-Muslim discourse of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France or the Vlaams Belang Party in Belgium entered the political mainstream, it would only turn the Islamic diaspora in Europe into the fifth column that, for the moment, it is certainly not. But Europeans can hardly accept an immigrant veto over their own mores, whether those mores involve women'srights or, for that matter, the right to blaspheme, which the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh so bravely asserted—and died for.Figuring out how to prevent Europe's multicultural reality from becoming a war of all against all is the challenge that confronts the Continent. It makes all of Europe's other problems, from the economyto the euro to the sclerosis of social democracy, seem trivial by comparison. Unfortunately, unlike those challenges, this one is existential and urgent and has no obvious answers.11、 According to the passage, which of the following is the major cause for the attacks on the London Underground?A. The anger among Islamic immigrants over the Iraqi War.B. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.C. The Islamic alienation from European society.D. The Islamic diaspora.12、 According to the passage, which of the following is the major lesson learned from the attacks on the London Underground?A. The government should propose new laws stopping the Islamic diaspora.B. The British army should pull out from the Iraqi war.C. The government should guard against the Islamic bombers.D. Europeans should draw their attention to the Muslim minority.13、The situation of the Muslims in Europe is what the following state except ______.A. Their own religion is looked down upon.B. They are satisfied with the economic success.C. They are alienated in culture, history and religion.D. The independence of women has an impact on the future of their family.14、The following are the measures mentioned in the passage to the solution of the Islamic problems except ______.A. Tighter immigration laws should be proposed.B. Tougher measures like the deportation of radical mullahs should be taken.C. The ban on blasphemy against Islam is proposed.D. The security of the Middle East should be maintained.15、Which of the following is NOT true about multiculturalism in Europe?A. Multiculturalism might become a war of all against all.B. Islamic and other immigrants will become liberals in Holland.C. Group identity should be maintained in multiculturalism.D. Multiculturalism fails to exist in Europe.Text DShelly's snack shop was the name that Brian Egemo of Badger, Iowa, applied to his wife's side of the bed. In 1994 Shelly, who had been a sleepwalker as a child, began sleepwalking again. But this time, her nightly rambles took her to the kitchen for cookies, candies and potato chips, which she would bring back to bed and devour whilestill asleep. "In the morning, there would be frosting in my hair and M&M's stuck to my husband's back," she says. Worse yet, she woke up feeling exhausted and sick from all the junk food. After years ofthis "sleep eating," her nerves were so jangled that she became unglued at the slightest upset. "Someone would knock over the salt shaker and I'd go into orbit," she says. It wasn't until2001 that Egemo, now 37, found a doctor who could tell her what her problem wasand how to treat it.Egemo's condition is called sleep-related eating disorder (SRFD), and it's one of two night eating problems that doctors are just beginning to take seriously. The other is night eating syndrome (NES), in which patients wake multiple times during the night and are unable to fall asleep again unless they eat something. Although the twodiffer in some important ways—most notably, whether the person is conscious or not—they share many similarities. Both are hybrids of sleep and eating disorders. And both take over the lives of patients, destroying good nutrition, instilling deep shame and often causing depression and weight gain. According to psychiatrist John Winkelmanof Harvard Medical School, the two conditions may affect 1 percent of the population— nearly 3 million Americans. "People who suffer from this think they're alone," says Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania Weight and Eating Disorders Program, who identified both NES and binge eating in the 1950s. "They need to know that it'sa real disorder and there are treatments." With psychologist Kelly Allison, Stunkard has written a book called "Overcoming Night Eating Syndrome," due out in early May.The consequences of night eating disorders are profound. In addition to sabotaging good-quality sleep, both conditions can seriously undermine attempts to maintain a well-balanced diet. People with SRED occasionally try to eat such bizarre concoctions asbuttered cigarettes or smoothies of egg shells, coffeegrounds and soda. But the real problem is that in the middle of the night, no one gets up and fixes healthful salads, fish or vegetables. Instead, people reach for food that's ready to eat—most often, junk food. "It sets up a vicious cycle, where they feel bloated so they don't wantto eat during the day," says Dr. Carlos Schenck of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, who identified SRED in 1993. Not surprisingly, night eating often contributes to weight gain. Stunkard has found NES in 6 to 7 percent of people in weight-loss programs and up to 28 percent of those seeking gastric -bypass surgery.Frustrated patients say their behavior seems totally beyond their control. "I wasn't even hungry," says pediatrician Edward Rosof, 58,of Cherry Hill, N.J., who suffered from NES for 35 years. "It was a craving, like being an alcoholic. Every night I promised myself itwas the last time." But even when he tried to resist the impulse,he'd lose the battle after 10 or 15 minutes because he feared that he wouldn't get back to sleep. Other desperate patients have asked spouses to put locks on the refrigerator or even lock the bedroomdoor at night.At last, new treatments are helping them unlock those doors. In a pilot study, Stunkard and psychiatrist John O'Reardon have discoveredthat the antidepressant Zoloft may help NES patients like Rosof,who's dropped 40 pounds since he started taking it a yearago. And Schneck and Winkelman have found two drug cocktails that appear tohelp 70 percent of SRED patients. Within two weeks of starting one of them, Shelly Egemo was feeling better. Her good humor is back. Bestof all, Shelly's Snack Shop is out of business.16、 "Rambles" in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to ______.A. eating habitsB. sleepwalkC. dreamsD. hunger17、Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?A. Shelly owned a snack shop.B. Shelly was a sleep walker.C. Shelly suffered from SRED. D. Shelly is recovering now.18、 What's the biggest difference between SRED and NES?A. The patients can't fall asleep without eating anything.B. NES patients are conscious when they are suffering from NESwhile SRED patients are not.C. The patients suffer from both sleep and eating disorders.D. Both may have similar harmful consequences.19、The following are the consequences of night eating disorderswith the exception of ______.A. The patients cannot have a good-quality sleep.B. The patients cannot have a well-balanced diet.C. The patients are putting on weight.D. The patients' habits annoy their families.20、Which of the following concerning SRED and NES is NOT true according to the passage?A. Both are psychologically related.B. They have the same cause but different symptoms.C. New treatments are offering hope for the diseases.D. Patients of the diseases are suffering from depression.答案:Text A1、A此题是事实题。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷190(题后含答案及解析)

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷190(题后含答案及解析)题型有：1.2 percent in 2008. Some analysts believe that if the trend continues for much longer, further consolidation in the automotive sector(already under competitive pressure)is likely. (4)Japanese demographics have something to do with the problem. The country’s urban population has grown by nearly 20 percent since 1990, and most city dwellers use mass transit(the country’s system is one of the best developed in the world)on a daily basis, making it less essential to own a car. Experts say Europe, where the car market is also quite mature, may be in for a similar shift.(5)But in Japan, the “demotorization”process, or kuruma banare, is also driven by cost factors. Owning and driving a car can cost up to $500 per month in Japan, including parking fees, car insurance, toll roads and various taxes. Taxes on a $17,000 car in Japan are 4.1 times higher than in the United States, 1.7 times higher than in Germany and 1.25 times higher than in the U.K., according to JAMA. “Automobiles used to represent a symbol of our status, a Western, modern lifestyle that we aspired for,”says Kitamura. For today’s young people, he argues, “such thinking is completely gone.”(6)Cars are increasingly just a mobile utility; the real consumer time and effort goes into picking the coolest mobile phones and personal computers, not the hippest hatchback. The rental-car industry has grown by more than 30 percent in the past eight years, as urbanites book weekend wheels over the Internet. Meanwhile, government surveys show that spending on cars per household per year fell by 14 percent, to $600, between 2000 and 2005, while spending on Net and mobile-phone subscriptions rose by 39 percent, to $1,500, during the same period.(7)For Japanese car companies, the implications are enormous. “Japan is the world’s second largest market, with a 17 to 18 percent share of our global sales. It’s important,”says Takao Katagiri, corporate vice president at Nissan Motor Co. The domestic market is where Japanese carmakers develop technology and build their know-how, and if it falters, it could gut an industry that employs 7.8 percent of the Japanese work force. (8)While surging exports, particularly to emerging markets, have more than offset the decline in domestic sales so far, companies are looking for ways to turn the tide. Nissan, for example, is trying to appeal to the digital generation with promotional blogs and even a videogame. A racing game for Sony’s PlayStation, for example, offers players the chance to virtually drive the company’s latest sporty model, the GT-R—a new marketing approach to create buzz and tempt them into buying cars. Toyota Motors has opened an auto mall as part of a suburban shopping complex near Tokyo, hoping to attract the kinds of shoppers who have long since stopped thinking about dropping by a car dealership. It’s a bit akin to the Apple strategy of moving electronics out of the soulless superstore, and into more appealing and well-trafficked retail spaces. It worked for Apple, but then Apple is so 21st century.1．It can be inferred from the passage all of the following EXCEPT that _____.A．Japanese carmakers develop technology in overseas marketB．the young in Japan have little interest in having a carC．Japan’s minicar industry didn’t lose its market shareD．Japan can be regarded as a nation at the wheel正确答案：A解析：第7段第3句提到，日本主要在国内市场创新技术，A与原文不符，故为答案。

职称英语综合类阅读理解第二十五篇Income逐句翻译

Income收入Income may be national income and personal income. 收入可以是国民收入和个人收入。

Whereas national income is defined as the total earned income of all the factors of production—namely, profits, interest, rent, wages, and other compensation for labor, 国民收人被规定为所有生产要素所得收人，即所获利润、利息、房租、工资和其他的劳动报酬的总和。

personal income may be defined as total money income received by individuals before personal taxes are paid. 个人收人可以被规定为在支付个人所得税前的个人收入的总和。

National income does not equal GNP(Gross National Product)because the factors of production do not receive payment for either capital consumption allowances or indirect business taxes, 国民收入不等于国民生产总值，因为生产要素不能从资本消费限额支付或间接商业税中得到补偿，both of which are included in GNP.这两方面都包括在国民生产总值中。

The money put aside for capital consumption is for replacement and thus is not counted as income.为资本消费而储蓄的那一部分钱用于自换设备，因此不能算作收人。

专业英语八级(阅读)模拟试卷150含答案和解析

专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷150讲座会话听力大题型(1)So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men's memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his arm. His grey beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way he turned himself? And whitherwas he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade(颠茄), dogwood(山茱萸), henbane(天仙子), and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier, the higher he rose towards heaven?(2)\1.According to Para. 1, people are most impressed by ChilUngworth’s______.(A)A. spiritB. figureC. ageD. appearance解析：推断题。

专业英语八级阅读理解模拟题带答案

专业英语八级阅读理解模拟题带答案专业英语八级阅读理解模拟题带答案The mountain turns around, but towards the peak extension.以下是店铺为大家搜索整理的专业英语八级阅读理解模拟题带答案，希望能给大家带来帮助!Joy and sadness are experienced by people in all cultures around the world, but how can we tell when other people are happy or despondent? It turns out that the expression of many emotions may be universal. Smiling is apparently a universal sign of friendliness and approval. Baring the teeth in a hostile way, asnoted by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, may be a universe sign of anger. As the originator of the theory of evolution, Darwin believed that the universal recognition of facial expressions would have survival value. For example, facial expressions could signal the approach of enemies (or friends) in the absence of language.Most investigators concur that certain facial expressions suggest the same emotions in a people. Moreover, people in diverse cultures recognize the emotions manifested by the facial expressions. In classic research Paul Ekman took photographs of people exhibiting the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. He then asked people around the world to indicate what emotions were being depicted in them. Those queried ranged from European college students to members of the Fore, a tribe that dwells in the New Guinea highlands. All groups including the Fore, who had almost no contact with Western culture, agreed on the portrayed emotions. The Fore also displayed familiar facial expressions when asked how they would respond if they were the characters in stories that called for basicemotional responses. Ekman and his colleagues morerecently obtained similar results in a study of ten cultures in which participants were permitted to report that multiple emotions were shown by facial expressions. The participants generally agreed on which two emotions were being shown and which emotion was more intense.Psychological researchers generally recognize that facial expressions reflect emotional states. Infact, various emotional states give rise to certain patterns of electrical activity in the facial muscles and in the brain. The facial-feedback hypothesis argues, however, that the causal relationship between emotions and facial expressions can also work in the opposite direction. According to this hypothesis, signals from the facial muscles ("feedback") are sent back to emotion centers of the brain, and so a person's facial expression can influence that person's emotional state.ConsiderDarwin's words: "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the otherhand, the repression, as far as possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions." Can smiling giverise to feelings of good will, for example, and frowning to anger?Psychological research has given rise to some interesting findings concerning the facial-feedback hypothesis. Causing participants in experiments to smile, for example, leads them to report morepositive feelings and to rate cartoons (humorous drawings of people or situations) as being morehumorous. When they are caused to frown, they rate cartoons as being more aggressive.What are the possible links between facial expressions and emotion? One link is arousal, which is the level of activity orpreparedness for activity in an organism. Intense contraction of facial muscles,such as those used in signifying fear, heightens arousal. Self-perception of heightened arousal then leads to heightened emotional activity. Other links may involve changes in brain temperature and the release of neurotransmitters (substances that transmit nerve impulses.) The contraction of facial muscles both influences the internal emotional state and reflects it. Ekman has found that theso-called Duchenne smile, which is characterized by "crow's feet" wrinkles around the eyes and asubtle drop in the eye cover fold so that the skin above the eye moves down slightly toward theeyeball, can lead to pleasant feelings.Ekman's observation may be relevant to the British expression "keep a stiff upper lip" as are commendation for handling stress. It might be that a "stiff" lip suppresses emotional response-as long as the lip is not quivering with fear or tension. But when the emotion that leads to stiffening the lip is more intense, and involves strong muscle tension, facial feedback may heighten emotional response.1. The word despondent in the passage is closest in meaning toA curiousB unhappyC thoughtfulD uncertain2. The author mentions "Baring the teeth in a hostile way" in order toA differentiate one possible meaning of a particular facial expression from other meanings of itB upport Darwin's theory of evolutionC provide an example of a facial expression whose meaning is widely understoodD contrast a facial expression that is easily understood with other facial expressions3. The word concur in the passage is closest in meaning toA estimateB agreeC expectD understand4. According to paragraph 2, which of the following was true of the Fore people ofNew Guinea?A They did not want to be shown photographs.B They were famous for their story-telling skills.C They knew very little about Western culture.D They did not encourage the expression of emotions.5. According to the passage, what did Darwin believe would happen to human emotions that werenot expressed?A They would become less intense.B They would last longer than usual.C They would cause problems later.D They would become more negative.参考答案：B C B C A。

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专业英语八级分类模拟题阅读理解(二十五)READING COMPREHENSIONTEXT AThere are more than 300 million of us in the United States, and sometimes it seems like we're all friends on Facebook. But the sad truth is that Americans are lonelier than ever. Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people who said there was no one with whelm they discussed important matters tripled, to 25 percent, according to Duke University researchers. Unfortunately, as a new study linking women to increased risk of heart disease shows, all this loneliness can be detrimental to our health. The bad news doesn't just affect women. Social isolation in all adults has been linked to a raft of physical and mental ailments, including sleep disorders, high blood pressure, and an increased risk of depression and suicide. How lonely you feel today actually predicts how well you'll sleep tonight and how depressed you'll feel a year from now, says John T. Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and coauthor of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. Studies have shown that loneliness can cause stress levels to rise and can weaken the immune system. Lonely people also tend to have less healthy lifestyles, drinking more alcohol, eating more fattening food, and exercising less than those who are not lonely.Though more Americans than ever are living alone (25 percent of U.S. households, up from 7 percent in 1940), the connection between single-living and loneliness is in fact quite weak. "Some of the most profound loneliness can happen when other people are present," says Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. Take college freshmen: even though they're surrounded by people almost all the time, many feel incredibly isolated during the first quarter of the school year with their friends and family members far away, Cacioppo says. Studies have shown that how lonely freshmen will feel can be predicted by how many miles they are from home. By the second quarter, however, most freshmen have found social replacements for their high-school friends. Unfortunately, as we age, it becomes more difficult to recreate those social relationships. And that can be a big problem as America becomes a more transient society, with an increasing number of Americans who say that they're willing to move away from home for a job.Loneliness can be relative: it has been defined as an aversive emotional response to a perceiveddiscrepancy between a person's desired levels of social interaction and the contact they're actually receiving. People tend to measure themselves against others, feeling particularly alone in communities where social connection is the norm. That's why collectivist cultures, like those in Southern Europe, have higher levels of loneliness than individualist cultures, Cacioppo says. For the same reason, isolated individuals feel most acutely alone on holidays like Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving, when most people are surrounded by family and friends.Still, loneliness is a natural biological signal that we all have. Indeed, loneliness serves an adaptive purpose, making us protect and care for one another. Loneliness essentially puts the brain on high alert, encouraging us not to eat leftovers from the refrigerator but to call a friend and eat out. Certain situational factors can trigger loneliness, but long-term feelings of emptiness and isolation are partly genetic, Cacioppo says. What's inherited is not loneliness itself, but rather sensitivity to disconnection. Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites should serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction, Cacioppo says. He compares connecting on a Web site to eating celery: "It feels good immediately, but it doesn't give you the same sustenance," he says. For people who feel satisfied and loved in their day-to-day life, social media can be a reassuring extension. For those who are already lonely, Facebook status updates are just a reminder of how much better everyone else is at making friends and having fun.So how many friends do you need to avoid loneliness? There's no magic number, according to Cacioppo. An introvert might need one confidante not to feel lonely, whereas an extrovert might require two, three, or four bosom buddies. Experts say it's not the quantity of social relationships but the quality that really matters. "The most popular kid in school may still feel lonely," Cacioppo says. "There axe a lot of stars who have been idols and lived lonely lives."1. Which of the following is NOT among the factors which may cause people to feel lonely?A.Less healthy lifestyles.B.Being far away from family and friends.C.Holiday atmosphere.D.Sensitivity to isolation.答案：A[解答] 事实细节题。