西南政法大学外语学院研究生2008年基础英语真题 (1)

西南政法大学

2008年招收攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试试题

学科专业：外国语言学及应用语言学

考试科目：605 基础英语（150分）

共7页

考生注意：请在答题纸上答题，在试题上答题不给分。试题和答题纸同时交回，否则成绩无效。

I. Paraphrase the following underlined sentences and tell their implications. (35 points, 5 for each)

1. “Those are my lucky birds. Each day that I escape death, each day of suffering that helps me earthly cares, I make a new little paper bird, and add it to the others. This way I look at them and congratulate myself on the good fortune that my illness has brought me. Because, thanks to it, I have the opportunity to improve my character.”

2. The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally, but rather in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology

of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key change will be in the way we think about the institution of warfare and about the relationship between states.

3. This is no time to moralize on the follies of countries and governments which have allowed themselves to be stricken down one by one, when by united action they could have saved themselves and saved the world from this catastrophe.

4. Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire.

5. “Today it is the teachers,” he continued, “and tomorrow the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

6. But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. “How long can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?”

7. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom, and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by ridding the back of the tiger ended inside.

II. Tell which of the following figures of speech is used in the following sentences: metaphor, zeugma, simile, allusion, transferred epithet, pun, personification, alliteration, irony, paradox, hyperbole, euphemism. (10 points, 1 for each)

1. He was a beautiful horse that looked as though he had come out of a painting by

Velasquez.

2. There is a mixture of the tiger and the ape in the character of a Frenchman.

3. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called pneumonia,

stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers.

4. This diligent student seldom reads more than an hour per month.

5. Why are lawyers all uneasy sleepers? Because they lie first on one side, and then

on the other, and remain wide awake all the time.

6. Unaware of the sword of Damocles hanging on them, they indulged in

fun-making with abandon.

7. The oldest profession in the world is reviving in the booming towns.

8. An ounce of wisdom is worth a million tons of books.

9. The murderer has been put into the condemned cell.

10. I believe, though, that praise should be measured. If there must be any, it should

be negative to be constructive.