专八口译考试2010年真题
2010专八真题及答案.doc
2010 专八真题及答案【篇一：2010 英语专八真题及答案(word 完整版)】>test for english majors (2010)-grade eight- part isection a listening comprehension (35 min) mini-lecturein this section you will hear a mini-lecture. you will hear thelecture once only. while listening, take notes on the importantpoints. your notes will not be marked, but you will need themto complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. when thelecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check yournotes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling taskon answer sheet one. use the blank sheet for note-taking.complete the gap-filling task. some of the gaps below mayrequire a maximum of three words. make sure the word(s) youfill in is (are) both grammatically semantically acceptable. youmay refer to your notes.paralinguistic features of languagein face-to-face communication speakers often alter theirtomes of voice or change their physical postures in order toconvey messages. these means are called paralinguisticfeatures of language, which fall into two categories. firstcategory: vocal paralinguistic featuresa. (1)__________: to express attitude or intention(1)__________b. examples1. whispering:need for secrecy2.breathiness:deep emotion3. (2)_________: unimportance (2)__________4. nasality:anxiety5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacysecond category: physical paralinguistic featuresa. facial expressions1. (3)_______ (3)__________----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcome2. less common expressions----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest----- lip biting: (4)________ (4)_________b. gesturegestures are related to culture. 1. britishculture----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________(5)__________----- scratching head: puzzlement2. other cultures----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______ (6)__________----- pointing at nose: secretc. proximity, posture and echoing1. proximity: physical distance between speakers----- closeness: intimacy or threat----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest(7)_________ proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________ -specific. (8)_________2. posture----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indicate(9)_____ (9)________----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challenging attitude3. echoing----- definition: imitation of similar posture----- (10)______: aid in communication (10)___________----- conscious imitation: mockery section b interviewin this section you will hear everything once only. listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. mark the correct answer to each question on answer sheet two.questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. at the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.now listen to the interview.1. according to dr johnson, diversity meansa. merging of different cultural identities.b. more emphasis on homogeneity.c. embracing of more ethnic differences.d. acceptance of more branches of christianity.2. according to the interview, which of the following statements in correct?a. some places are more diverse than others.b. towns are less diverse than large cities.c. diversity can be seen everywhere.d. american is a truly diverse country.3. according to dr johnson, which place will witness a radicalchange in its racial makeup by 2025?a. maineb. selinsgrovec.philadelphia d.california4. during the interview dr johnson indicates thata. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.b. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.c. age diversity could lead to pension problems.d. older populations are more racially diverse.5. according to the interview, religious diversitya. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.b. exists among muslim immigrants.c. is restricted to certain places in the us.d. is spreading to more parts of the country.section c news broadcastin this section you will hear everything once only. listencarefully and then answer the questions that follow. mark thecorrect answer to each question on your coloured answersheet.question 6 is based on the following news. at the end of thenews item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer thequestion.now listen to the news.6. what is the main idea of the news item?a. sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.b. japan will market its wallet phone abroad.c. the wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.d. reader devices are available at stores and stations.question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. at the end ofthe news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer thequestions.now listen to the news.7. which of the following is mentioned as the government ’s measure to control inflation?a. foreign investment.b. donorsupport.c. price control.d. bank prediction.8. according to kingdom bank, what is the current inflationrate in zimbabwe?a. 20 million percent.b. 2.2 million percent.c. 11.2million percent.d. over 11.2 million percent.question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. at the endof the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer thequestion.now listen to the news.9. which of the following is correct? a. a big fireerupted on the nile river.b. helicopters were used to evacuate people.c. five people were taken to hospital for burns.d. a big fire took place on two floors. 10. the likely cause of the bigfire isa. electrical short-cut.b. lack of fire-satefy measures.c. terrorism.d.not known.part ii reading comprehension (30 min)in this section there are four reading passages followed by atotal of 20 multiple-choice questions. read the passages andthen mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.text astill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (sodoes its name, officially changed in 2001 from calcutta tokolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in bengali. conversing in english, i never heard anyone call thecity anything but calcutta.) to westerners, the conveyancemost identified with kolkata is not its modern subway — afacility whose spacious stations have art on the walls andcricket matches on television monitors —but the hand-pulled rickshaw. stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cartwith high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks closeto needing the succor of mother teresa. for years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulledrickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds —principallyon the ground that, as the mayor of kolkata has often said, it isoffensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pullanother man. ”but these days politicians also lament theimpact of 6,000 hand- pulled rickshaws on a modern city ’straffic and, particularly, on its image. “w s e t r s y t e t o r n e rassociate beggars and these rickshaws with the calcuttalandscape, but this is not what calcutta stands for, ”the chiefminister of west bengal, buddhadeb bhattacharjee, said in apress conference in 2006. “our city stands for prosperity anddevel opment. ”the chief minister t h—eequivalent of a state governor —went on to announce thathand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streetsof kolkata.from june to september kolkata can get torrential rains, and itsdrainage system doesn ’t need o t rrential rain to begin backingup. residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that inkolkata “if a stray cat pees, there ’s a flood. ”during my stay itonce rained for about 48 hours. entire neighborhoods couldn ’tbe reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers ’waists. when it ’s raining, the normalcustomer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as doesthe price of a journey. a writer in kolkata told me, t “when irains, even the governor takes rickshaws. ”while i was in kolkata, a magazine called india today publishedits annual ranking of indian states, according to suchmeasurements as prosperity and infrastructure. among india ’s20 largest states, bihar finished dead last, as it has for four ofthe past five years. bihar, a couple hundred miles north ofkolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers comefrom. once in kolkata, they sleep on the street or in theirrickshaws or in a dera —a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed bysomeone called a sardar. for sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about$2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal untilyou’ve visited a dera. they gross between 100 and 150 rupees aday, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of therickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing astreet where rickshaws are prohibited. a 2003 study found that rickshawpullers are near the bottom of kolkata occupations in income,doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. forsomeone without land or education, that still beats trying tomake a living in bihar.there are people in kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sortof thing people of their station do or because they regard thehand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. ironically, someof those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws.the editor of the editorial pages of kolkata ’s telegraph—rudrangshu mukherjee, a former academic who still writeshistory books —told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side ofkeeping hand- pulled rickshaws on the road. “i refuse to be carried by another human being myself, ”he said, “but i question whether we have the right to take away theirlivelihood. ”rickshawsupporters point out that when it comesto demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly uniquein kolkata.when i asked one rickshaw puller if he thought thegovernment ’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on agenuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shakeof his head —a gesture i interpreted to mean, “if【篇二：2010 年英语专八真题及其答案】s (2010) -grade eight- listening comprehension (35 min)section a mini-lecturein this section you will hear a mini-lecture. you will hear thelecture once only. while listening, take notes on the importantpoints. your notes will not be marked, but you will need themto complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. when thelecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check yournotes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling taskon answer sheet one. use the blank sheet for note-taking.complete the gap-filling task. some of the gaps below mayrequire a maximum of three words. make sure the word(s) youfill in is (are) both grammatically semantically acceptable. youmay refer to your notes.。
2010年专八翻译
1821年，《伦敦杂志》发表了德·昆西 年 伦敦杂志》发表了德 昆西 的著名作品《 的著名作品《一个英国鸦片服用者的自 作者于1804年因治 病而服用鸦 白》。作者于 年因治 因而成瘾。 片，因而成瘾。这部作品以他的亲身体 想象,描写了主人公的心理和潜意 验和 想象 描写了主人公的心理和潜意 识活动,预示了 预示了20世纪 识活动 预示了 世纪 现代派文学的题 材和写作方法的出现。 材和写作方法的出现。
and there was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; 译文1：诸山相距空旷 丰草如茵， 相距空旷， 译文 ：诸山相距空旷，丰草如茵，林 地开阔，错落其间； 地开阔，错落其间； 树篱上的白玫瑰娟 娟弥望； 娟弥望； 译文2：而旦在它们之间展开着更大的 译文 ： 草场和林间草地； 草场和林间草地；灌木围篱上长满了白 色的玫瑰； 色的玫瑰；
Friends tend to become more intimated if they have the same interests and temper, they can get along well and keep contacting; otherwise they will separate and end the relationship. Friends who are more familiar and closer can not be too casual and show no respect. Otherwise the harmony and balance will be broken, and the friendship will also be nonexistent any more.
2010年英语专业八级真题与参考答案
2010年英语专业八级真题与参考答案PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION (35 MIN)SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for note-taking.Paralinguistic Features of LanguageIn face-to-face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voice or change their physical postures in order to convey messages. These means are called paralinguistic features of language, which fall into two categories.I. First category: vocal paralinguistic features(1)__________: to express attitude or intention (1)__________Examples1. whispering: need for secrecy2. breathiness: deep emotion3. (2)_________: unimportance (2)__________4. nasality: anxiety5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacyII.Second category: physical paralinguistic featuresA.facial expressions(3)_______ (3)__________----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcomeless common expressions----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest----- lip biting: (4)________ (4)_________B.gesturegestures are related to culture.British culture----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________ (5)__________----- scratching head: puzzlementother cultures----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______ (6)__________----- pointing at nose: secretC.proximity, posture and echoing1.proximity: physical distance between speakers----- closeness: intimacy or threat----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest (7)_________Proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________ -specific. (8)_________2.posture----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indicate(9)_____ (9)________ ----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challenging attitude3.echoing----- definition: imitation of similar posture----- (10)______: aid in communication (10)___________----- conscious imitation: mockerySECTION B INTERVIEWIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.Now listen to the interview.1. According to Dr Johnson, diversity meansA. merging of different cultural identities.B. more emphasis on homogeneity.C. embracing of more ethnic differences.D. acceptance of more branches of Christianity.2. According to the interview, which of the following statements in CORRECT?A. Some places are more diverse than others.B. Towns are less diverse than large cities.C. Diversity can be seen everywhere.D. American is a truly diverse country.3. According to Dr Johnson, which place will witness a radical change in its racial makeup by 2025?A. MaineB. SelinsgroveC. PhiladelphiaD. California4. During the interview Dr Johnson indicates thatA. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.B. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.C. age diversity could lead to pension problems.D. older populations are more racially diverse.5. According to the interview, religious diversityA. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.B. exists among Muslim immigrants.C. is restricted to certain places in the US.D. is spreading to more parts of the country.SECTION C NEWS BROADCASTIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your coloured answer sheet. Question 6 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.6. What is the main idea of the news item?A. Sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.B. Japan will market its wallet phone abroad.C. The wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.D. Reader devices are available at stores and stations.Question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions.Now listen to the news.7. Which of the following is mentioned as the government’s measure to control inflation?A. Foreign investment.B. Donor support.C. Price control.D. Bank prediction.8. According to Kingdom Bank, what is the current inflation rate in Zimbabwe?A. 20 million percent.B. 2.2 million percent.C. 11.2 million percent.D. Over 11.2 million percent.Question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.9. Which of the following is CORRECT?A. A big fire erupted on the Nile River.B. Helicopters were used to evacuate people.C. Five people were taken to hospital for burns.D. A big fire took place on two floors.10. The likely cause of the big fire isA. electrical short-cut.B. lack of fire-satefy measures.C. terrorism.D. not known.PART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t needtorrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statementshave been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.“Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.“When will it be decided?”“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPTA. taking foreign tourists around the city.B. providing transport to school children.C. carrying store supplies and purchasesD. carrying people over short distances.12. Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers from Bihar?A. They come from a relatively poor area.B. They are provided with decent accommodation.C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13. That “For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar” (4 paragraph) means that even so,A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.14. We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware peopleA. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.15. Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?A. “…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.” (2 paragraph)B. “…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.” (4 paragraph)C. Kolkata, a resident told me, “ has difficulty letting go.” (7 paragraph).D.“…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas.” (6 paragraph)16. The dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passage seems to suggestA. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.D. the slowness in processing options.TEXT BDepending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty experts).The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.Airports resemble France before the Revolution: first-class passengers enjoy "élite" security lines and priority boarding, and disembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flight attendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line. This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use in most major American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World, where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics: that the rich are more important than you, especially when it comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else."Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S. cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist, prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or "placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people. This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or at least the ride, is shorter.As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the line is an unethical act, which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millions of people."Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S. Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators, lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore notjust civilization but civility during the Great Flood.How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come, first-served festival seating. But for $5 per flight, an unaffiliated company called will secure you a coveted "A" boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours before departure. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when he or she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, some cultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving into two groups: Very Important Persons, who don't wait, and Very Impatient Persons, who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereft of Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do we do? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait. We are bored."17. What does the following sentence mean? “Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.” (2 paragraph)A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.18. Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.C. First-class passenger status at airports.D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.19. We can infer from the passage that politicians (including mayors and Congressmen)A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.20. What is the tone of the passage?A. Instructive.B. Humorous.C. Serious.D. Teasing.TEXT CA bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights. It toweredabove the other building like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the upper storeys, and a cold science working in the basement. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury. The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were al there. It seemed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station. The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery. Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls, scented air, the sensuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, s sleek grave man, older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: “ For one, sir? This way, please,” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.21. That “behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel” suggests thatA. modern realistic commercialism existed behind the luxurious appearance.B. there was a fundamental falseness in the style and the appeal of the café..C. the architect had made a sensible blend of old and new building materials.D. the café was based on physical foundations and real economic strength.22. The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of the tea-shop EXCEPTA. “…turned Babylonian”.B. “perhaps a new barbarism’.C. “acres of white napery”.D. “balanced to the last halfpenny”.23. In its context the statement that “ the place was built for him” means that the caféwas intended toA. please simple people in a simple way.B. exploit gullible people like him.C. satisfy a demand that already existed.D. provide relaxation for tired young men.24. Which of the following statements about the second paragraph is NOT true?A. The café appealed to most senses simultaneously.B. The café was both full of people and full of warmth.C. The inside of the café was contrasted with the weather outside.D. It stressed the commercial determination of the café owners.25. The following are comparisons made by the author in the second paragraph EXCEPT thatA. the entrance hall is compared to a railway station.B. the orchestra is compared to a magnet.C. Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier.D. the interior of the café is compared to warm countries.26. The author’s attitude to the café isA. fundamentally critical.B. slightly admiring.C. quite undecided.D. completely neutral.TEXT DI Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one can’t do anything about. But the truth is, once you’re off the beat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhab-itants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the “Mona Lisa.”When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, those who had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of want, hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions—the remoteand sparsely populated east—where the way of life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many indi-vidual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing every-thing they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. “Smelter or death.”The contract with Alcoa would infuse the re-gion with foreign capital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that potentially could be sold to the rest of the world; diversify an economy historically dependent on fish; and, in an appealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all of Iceland, once and for all, from the unpredictability of life itself.“We have to live,” Halldór Ásgrímsson said in his sad, sonorous voice. Halldór, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving force behind the project. “We have a right to live.”27. According to the passage, most Icelanders view land as something ofA. environmental value.B. commercial value.C. potential value for tourism.D. great value for livelihood.28. What is Iceland’s old-aged advocates’ feeling towards the Alcoa project?A. Iceland is wealthy enough to reject the project.B. The project would lower life expectancy.C. The project would cause environmental problems.D. The project symbolizes and end to the colonial legacies.29. The disappearance of the old way of life was due to all the following EXCEPTA. fewer fishing companies.B. fewer jobs available.C. migration of young people.D. impostion of fishing quotas.30. The 4 paragraph in the passageA. sums up the main points of the passage.B. starts to discuss an entirely new point.C. elaborates on the last part of the 3 paragraph.D. continues to depict the bleak economic situation.PART IIIGENERAL KNOWLEDGE (10 MIN)There are ten multiple-choice questions in this section. Choose the best answer to each question.。
2005--2010专八真题翻译部分与答案
2005—2010年专八真题 翻译部分原题及答案2005 年真题 Section A Chinese to English一个人的生命究竟有多大意义，这有什么标准可以衡量吗？提出一个绝对的标准当然很困难；但是，大体上看一个人对待生命的态度是否严肃认真，看他对待劳动、工作等等的态度如何，也就不难对这个人的存在意义做出适当的估计了。
古来一切有成就的人，都很严肃地对待自己的生命，当他活着一天，总要尽量多劳动、多工作、多学习，不肯虚度年华，不让时间白白地浪费掉。
我国历代的劳动人民及大政治家、大思想家等等都莫不如此。
治家、大思想家等等都莫不如此。
参考译文：How significant is a person s life? Is there any standard to measure it? It will be very difficult to put forward an absolute standard, but in general, the significance of one s existence can be estimated by how he treats his life, by what attitude he takes to work and what ways he chooses to live. From ancient times up to now, all the accomplished people treat their lives very seriously. They work and, learn as much as possible. They hate to spend the best of their lives in vain, they do not want to let their time slip by. All the laboring people, great statesmen and thinkers of our country at all ages treasure their time in this way. Section B English to ChineseIt is simple enough to say that since books have classes fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconception when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author. try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible finess, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. 参考译文：然而几乎没有什么人会从书中提问：书能给我们什么。
2010年度八级口试参考答案
纪念
1
4
Change/unrelenting
变化的步伐（变化的速度，前进的步伐，发展的速度）/毫不松懈（不放松，永不停止）
改革的步伐
Firm/determination
坚定决心，下定决心，坚决要，决定要，要坚持
保证
Deliver/excellent
提供/优质（顶级，一流，卓越）
更好的，完美的
快速发展
Develop at fast pace (fast, rapid)
2007年/底
By(at) the end of 2007
城镇人口/4056万
Urban population (city residents)/ 40.56(over 40) million
Urban population…, accounting for 53% of the total population
Economics
2
2
和谐的/城镇化
Harmonious urbanization
Citilization
社会、经济、环境
Society(communities), economy, environment(ecology)[说出两个给2分，三个给4分]
economic
协调/发展
Coordinated(balanced, concerted, harmonious, unified) development (growth)
先进的（一流的）/汽车
1
2
Four(short)/years
短短四年时间，短短几年时间，四年间
Phenomenal/progress
取得巨大（显著，长足，极大）/进步（进展，成绩，成就，成功）
专八翻译真题(1995-2010)
2010年专八翻译真题(208)朋友关系的存续是以相互尊重为前提的, 容不得半点强求、干涉和控制。
朋友之间, 情趣相投、脾气对味则合、则交; 反之, 则离、则绝。
朋友之间再熟悉, 再亲密, 也不能随便过头，不恭不敬。
不然，默契和平衡将被打破, 友好关系将不复存在。
每个人都希望拥有自己的私密空间，朋友之间过于随便，就容易侵入这片禁区，从而引起冲突，造成隔阂。
待友不敬，或许只是一件小事，却可能已埋下了破坏性的种子。
维持朋友亲密关系的最好办法是往来有节，互不干涉。
To keep the relationship between friends is based on the mutual respect, without any importunity, interference or control. Between friends, if they have the similar taste and suitable temperament when they get together, then they will get along well, and make friends for long; if the other way around, they may separate from each other, and break the relationship. No matter how familiar or intimate with one another between friends, they could never be too over, without respect. Or else, the tacit understanding and the balance will be broken, and the friendship will not be there forever. Every body wants to keep their own privacies, and if too free, it is easy to intrude the forbidden region, thus causing conflicts, creating resistance. Treating friends without appropriate respect, which may be a small event, but a destructive result can be lain ahead. The best way to keep intimate friendship is contacting with restriction, without interference.2009年专八翻译真题(286字)我想不起来哪一个熟人没有手机。
2010年专八口译真题
2009.12 长安福特1.Together with my colleagues from Changan and Ford, I want to thank you for joining us during inauguration of the most advanced automotive manufacturing plant in China.我代表长安和福特集团的全体员工，感谢各位来参加中国最先进的汽车生产厂的落成典礼2.In just four short years, Changan Ford automobile have made phenomenal process in delivering great market success. This is the result of the shared vision and determination of the partners在短短的四年时间里，长安福特汽车公司在市场上获得巨大成功，这正是各位同仁达成共识，共同合作的结果。
3.The world's first automobile assembly line began operation of Ford’s plant over a hundred and six years ago. What a journey it has been since then, bring us all the way here to celebrate this milestone today.106年前，世界是第一条汽车装配生产线在福特工厂投入运营，时光荏苒，今天，我们在此庆祝这个里程碑的时刻，这是多么伟大的历程啊。
4.The pace of change will be unrelenting and we must be firm in our determination to bea company that not only delivers excellent products and services but also strive to make the world a better place to live.变化的脚步永不停止，我们要坚定信念，不仅仅要提供优良的产品和服务，还要创造一个更加美好的世界。
2010英语专八真题及阅读详解
2010英语专八真题TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2010)-GRADE EIGHT-PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION (35 MIN) SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for note-taking.Complete the gap-filling task. Some of the gaps below may require a maximum of THREE words. Make sure the word(s) you fill in is (are) both grammatically & semantically acceptable. You may refer to your notes.Paralinguistic Features of LanguageIn face-to-face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voice or change their physical postures in order to convey messages. These means are called paralinguistic features of language, which fall into two categories.First category: vocal paralinguistic featuresA.(1)__________: to express attitude or intention (1)__________B.Examples1. whispering: need for secrecy2. breathiness: deep emotion3. (2)_________: unimportance (2)__________4. nasality: anxiety5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacySecond category: physical paralinguistic featuresA.facial expressions1.(3)_______ (3)__________----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcome2.less common expressions----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest----- lip biting: (4)________ (4)_________B.gesturegestures are related to culture.1.British culture----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________ (5)__________----- scratching head: puzzlement2.other cultures----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______ (6)__________ ----- pointing at nose: secretC.proximity, posture and echoing1.proximity: physical distance between speakers----- closeness: intimacy or threat----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest (7)_________Proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________ -specific. (8)_________2.posture----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indicate(9)_____ (9)________----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challenging attitude3.echoing----- definition: imitation of similar posture----- (10)______: aid in communication (10)___________----- conscious imitation: mockerySECTION B INTERVIEWIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.Now listen to the interview.1. According to Dr Johnson, diversity meansA. merging of different cultural identities.B. more emphasis on homogeneity.C. embracing of more ethnic differences.D. acceptance of more branches of Christianity.2. According to the interview, which of the following statements in CORRECT?A. Some places are more diverse than others.B. Towns are less diverse than large cities.C. Diversity can be seen everywhere.D. American is a truly diverse country.3. According to Dr Johnson, which place will witness a radical change in its racialmakeup by 2025?A. MaineB. SelinsgroveC. PhiladelphiaD. California4. During the interview Dr Johnson indicates thatA. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.B. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.C. age diversity could lead to pension problems.D. older populations are more racially diverse.5. According to the interview, religious diversityA. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.B. exists among Muslim immigrants.C. is restricted to certain places in the US.D. is spreading to more parts of the country.SECTION C NEWS BROADCASTIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your coloured answer sheet.Question 6 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.6. What is the main idea of the news item?A. Sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.B. Japan will market its wallet phone abroad.C. The wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.D. Reader devices are available at stores and stations.Question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions.Now listen to the news.7. Which of the following is mentioned as the government’s measure to controlinflation?A. Foreign investment.B. Donor support.C. Price control.D. Bank prediction.8. According to Kingdom Bank, what is the current inflation rate in Zimbabwe?A. 20 million percent.B. 2.2 million percent.C. 11.2 million percent.D. Over 11.2 million percent.Question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.9. Which of the following is CORRECT?A. A big fire erupted on the Nile River.B. Helicopters were used to evacuate people.C. Five people were taken to hospital for burns.D. A big fire took place on two floors.10. The likely cause of the big fire isA. electrical short-cut.B. lack of fire-satefy measures.C. terrorism.D. not known.PART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN) In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Wes terners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists.(黄包车并不是在那招呼游客的No.11答案) (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Re sidents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached bymotorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar.(在加尔各答, 他们谁在街上、睡在他们的黄包车内或在”dera”内, 那是由某个酋长管理的由车库、修理店和宿舍的结合. 由此推出拉黄包车的人生活水平很低, 即No.12答案) For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.(对于那些没有土地又没接受教育的人来说, 在Kolkata的生活总好过在Bihar那赚钱, 推出在Kolkata的收入更高, 即No.13答案)There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws.(因为他们抵触人拉人这样的做法, 又或者是因为这不是他们这种有地位的人该做的事情, 又有可能是因为他们认为拉黄包车的人是殖民主义的遗留物. 但讽刺的是, 他们中的一些人并不热心去反对黄包车, 由此推出这些人的态度是很复杂的, 即NO.14答案) The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Ric kshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as toask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas.(又或者是, 就像我在2天的下雨天里, 能找到卖各种各样东西的人, 却找不到一个卖伞的, 表现作者幽默感.即NO.15答案) “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.“Which option has been chosen?”(哪个意见被采纳了?) I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.“That ha sn’t been decided,”(还没决定) he said.“When will it be decided?”(什么时候能决定下来?)“That hasn’t been decided,”(那也还没决定) he said.(由对话推出很难找到解决方法, 即NO.16答案)11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for thefollowing EXCEPTA. taking foreign tourists around the city.B. providing transport to school children.C. carrying store supplies and purchasesD. carrying people over short distances.12. Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers fromBihar?A. They come from a relatively poor area.B. They are provided with decent accommodation.C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13. That “For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make aliving in Bihar” (4 paragraph) means that even so,A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.14. We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware peopleA. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.15. Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?A. “…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.”(2paragraph)B. “…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.”(4paragraph)C. Kolkata, a resident told me, “ has difficulty letting go.” (7 paragraph).D.“…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything butumbrellas.” (6 paragraph)16. The dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passageseems to suggestA. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.D. the slowness in processing options.TEXT BDepending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty experts).The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.(在最民主的机构, 只有以受骗的人才会去排队, 这些人仍有信念, 并在队伍中慢慢等待. 多数的可怜的人啊. 根据上下文推出只有普通人才需要排队. 即NO.17答案)Airports resemble France before the Revolution: first-class passengers enjoy "élite" security lines and priority boarding(NO.18 C), and disembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flight attendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line (NO.18 B). This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use in most major American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World, where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics: that the rich are more important than you, especially when it comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else."Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S. cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist, prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or "placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores (NO.18 D).Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people.(必然地, 一些半平民主义者的政治家发现了他们和平民百姓一齐排队的好处NO.19) This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaire New Y ork mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or at least the ride, is shorter.As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the line is an unethical act,which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millions of people."Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S. Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators, lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore not just civilization but civility during the Great Flood.How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come, first-served festival seating. But for $5 per flight, an unaffiliated company called will secure you a coveted "A" boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours before departure. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when he or she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, some cultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving into two groups: V ery Important Persons, who don't wait, and V ery Impatient Persons, who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereft of Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do we do? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait. We are bored."17. What does the following sentence mean? “Once the most democratic ofinstitutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.” (2 paragraph)A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.18. Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.C. First-class passenger status at airports.D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.19. We can infer from the passage that politicians (including mayors andCongressmen)A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.20. What is the tone of the passage?A. Instructive.B. Humorous.C. Serious.D. Teasing.TEXT CA bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the caféof his choice, a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights. It towered above the other building like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel,(在薄薄的大理石板背后是水泥和钢筋. NO.21) just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the upper storeys, and a cold science working in the basement. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury. The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were al there. It seemed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station.(NO.25 A) The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery.(NO.25 D) Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls,(NO.25 B) scented air, the sensuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, s sleek grave man, older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: “ For one,sir? This way, please,” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.21. That “behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel” suggests thatA. modern realistic commercialism existed behind the luxurious appearance. (在华丽外表的背后是现实的商业主义)B. there was a fundamental falseness in the style and the appeal of the café..C. the architect had made a sensible blend of old and new building materials.D. the café was based on physical foundations and real economic strength.22. The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of the tea-shop EXCEPTA. “…turned Babylonian”.B. “perhaps a new barbarism’.C. “acres of white napery”.D. “balanced to the last halfpenny”.23. In its context the statement that “ the place was built for him” means that the caféwas intended toA. please simple people in a simple way.B. exploit(剥削) gullible(以受骗的) people like him.C. satisfy a demand that already existed.D. provide relaxation for tired young men.24. Which of the following statements about the second paragraph is NOT true?A. The café appealed to most senses simultaneously.B. The café was both full of people and full of warmth.(没提有没人)C. The inside of the café was contrasted with the weather outside.D. It stressed the commercial determination of the café owners.25. The following are comparisons made by the author in the second paragraphEXCEPT thatA. the entrance hall is compared to a railway station.B. the orchestra is compared to a magnet.C. Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier.D. the interior of the café is compared to warm countries.26. The author’s attitude to the café isA. fundamentally critical.B. slightly admiring.C. quite undecided.D. completely neutral.TEXT DI Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe’s last pristine w ilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one can’t do anything about.(NO.27) But the truth is, once you’re off the beat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhab-itants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the “Mona Lisa.”When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, those who had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of wan t, hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh.(NO. 28) For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope,children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—where the way of life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas were imposed(29 D) in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many indi-vidual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands(29 B), and the people were seeing every-thing they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away(29 C). With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. “Smelter or death.”The contract with Alcoa would infuse the re-gion with foreign capital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to。
2010年英语专业八级真题及答案
2010年英语专业八级真题及答案PART IIREADING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhad eb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rai n to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigne d to the imminent end of their livelihoodand pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.“Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.“When will it be decided?”“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPTA. taking foreign tourists around the city.B. providing transport to school children.C. carrying store supplies and purchasesD. carrying people over short distances.12. Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers from Bihar?A. They come from a relatively poor area.B. They are provided with decent accommodation.C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13. That “For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar” (4 paragraph) means that even so,A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.14. We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware peopleA. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.15. Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?A. “…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.” (2 paragraph)B. “…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.” (4 paragraph)C. Kolkata, a resident told me, “ has difficulty letting go.” (7 paragraph).D.“…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas.” (6 paragraph)16. The dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passage seems to suggestA. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.D. the slowness in processing options.TEXT BDepending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty experts).The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.Airports resemble France before the Revolution: first-class passengers enjoy "élite" security lines and priority boarding, and disembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flight a ttendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line. This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use inmost major American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World, where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics: that the rich are more important than you, especially when it comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else."Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S. cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist, prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or "placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people. This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or at least the ride, is shorter.As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the line is an unethical act, which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millions of people."Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S. Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators, lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore not just civilization but civility during the Great Flood.How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come, first-served festival seating. But for $5 per flight, an unaffiliated company called will secure you a coveted "A" boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours before departure. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when he or she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, some cultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving into two groups: Very Important Persons, who don't wait, and Very Impatient Persons, who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereft of Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do we do? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait. We are bored."17. What does the following sentence mean? “Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly bec oming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.” (2 paragraph)A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.18. Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.C. First-class passenger status at airports.D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.19. We can infer from the passage that politicians (including mayors and Congressmen)A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.20. What is the tone of the passage?A. Instructive.B. Humorous.C. Serious.D. Teasing.TEXT CA bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights. It towered above the other building like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in thebackground, hidden away, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the upper storeys, and a cold science working in the basement. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury. The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were al there. It seemed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station. The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery. Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls, scented air, the sensuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, s sleek grave man, older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: “ For one, sir? This way, please,” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.21. That “behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel” suggests thatA. modern realistic commercialism existed behind the luxurious appearance.B. there was a fundamental falseness in the style and the appeal of the café..C. the architect had made a sensible blend of old and new building materials.D. the café was based on physical foundations and real economic strength.22. The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of the tea-shop EXCEPTA. “…turned Babylonian”.B. “perhaps a new barbarism’.C. “acres of white napery”.D. “balanced to the last halfpenny”.23. In its context the statement that “ the place was built for him” means that the café was intended toA. please simple people in a simple way.B. exploit gullible people like him.C. satisfy a demand that already existed.D. provide relaxation for tired young men.24. Which of the following statements about the second paragraph is NOT true?A. The café appealed to most senses simultaneously.B. The café was both full of people and full of warmth.C. The inside of the café was contrasted with the weather outside.D. It stressed the commercial determination of the café owners.25. The following are comparisons made by the author in the second paragraph EXCEPT thatA. the entrance hall is compared to a railway station.B. the orchestra is compared to a magnet.C. Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier.D. the interior of the café is compared to warm countries.26. The author’s attitude to the café isA. fundamentally critical.B. slightly admiring.C. quite undecided.D. completely neutral.TEXT DI Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as wester n Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one ca n’t do anything about. But the truth is, once you’re off the beat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhab-itants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the “Mona Lisa.”When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, thosewho had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century u pon century of want, hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—where the way of life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many indi-vidual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing every-thing they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects l ike this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. “Smelter or death.”The contract with Alcoa would infuse the re-gion with foreign capital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that potentially could be sold to the rest of the world; diversify an economy historically dependent on fish; and, in an appealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all of Iceland, once and for all, from the unpredictability of life itself.“We have to live,” Halldór Ásgrímsson said in his sad, sonorous voice. Halldór, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving force behind the project. “We have a right to live.”27. According to the passage, most Icelanders view land as something ofA. environmental value.B. commercial value.C. potential value for tourism.D. great value for livelihood.28. What is Iceland’s old-aged advocates’ feeling towards the Alcoa project?A. Iceland is wealthy enough to reject the project.B. The project would lower life expectancy.C. The project would cause environmental problems.D. The project symbolizes and end to the colonial legacies.29. The disappearance of the old way of life was due to all the following EXCEPTA. fewer fishing companies.B. fewer jobs available.C. migration of young people.D. impostion of fishing quotas.30. The 4 paragraph in the passageA. sums up the main points of the passage.B. starts to discuss an entirely new point.C. elaborates on the last part of the 3 paragraph.D. continues to depict the bleak economic situation.PART III GENERAL KNOWLEDGE (10 MIN)There are ten multiple-choice questions in this section. Choose the best answer to each question. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.31. Which of the following statements in INCORRECT?A. The British constitution includes the Magna Carta of 1215.B. The British constitution includes Parliamentary acts.C. The British constitution includes decisions made by courts of law.D. The British constitution includes one single written constitution.32. The first city ever founded in Canada isA. Quebec.B. Vancouver.C. Toronto.D. Montreal.33. When did the Australian Federation officially come into being?A. 1770.B. 1788.C. 1900.D. 1901.34. The Emancipation Proclamation to end the slavery plantation system in the South of the U.S. was issued byA. Abraham Lincoln.B. Thomas Paine.C. George Washington.D. Thomas Jefferson.35. ________ is best known for the technique of dramatic monologue in his poems..A. Will BlakeB. W.B. YeatsC. Robert BrowningD. William Wordsworth36. The Financier is written byA. Mark Twain.B. Henry James.C. William Faulkner.D. Theodore Dreiser.37. In literature a story in verse or prose with a double meaning is defined asA. allegory.B. sonnet.C. blank verse.D. rhyme.38. ________ refers to the learning and development of a language.A. Language acquisitionB. Language comprehensionC. Language productionD. Language instruction39. The word “ Motel” comes from “motor + hotel”. This is an example of________ in morphology.A. backformationB. conversionC. blendingD. acronym40. Language i s t tool of communication. The symbol “ Highway Closed” on a highway servesA. an expressive function.B. an informative function.C. a performative function.D. a p=ersuasive function.Part IV Proofreading & Error Correction (15 min)The passage contains TEN errors. Each indicated line contains a maximum of ONE error. In each case, only ONE word is involved. You should proofread the passage and correct it in the following way:For a wrong word,underline the wrong word and write the correct one in the bla nk provided at the end of the line.For a missing word, mark the position of the missing word with a "∧" sign and write the word you believe to be missing in the blank provided at the end of the line.For a unnecessary word,cross the unnecessary word with a slash "/" and put the word in the blank provided at the end of the line.EXAMPLEWhen ∧ art museum wants a new exhibit,it buys things in finished form and hangsthem on the wall. When a natural historymuseum wants an exhibition, it must often build it.So far as we can tell, all human languages are equally complete and perfect asinstruments of communication: that is, every language appears to be well equipped asany other to say the things their speakers want to say.There may or may not be appropriate to talk about primitive peoples or cultures, butthat is another matter. Certainly, not all groups of people are equally competent innuclear physics or psychology or the cultivation of rice or the engraving of Benaresbrass. Whereas this is not the fault of their language. The Eskimos can speak aboutsnow with a great deal more precision and subtlety than we can in English, but this isnot because the Eskimo language (one of those sometimes miscalled 'primitive') isinherently more precise and subtle than English. This example does not come to light adefect in English, a show of unexpected 'primitiveness'. The position is simply andobviously that the Eskimos and the English live in similar environments. The Englishlanguage will be just as rich in terms for similar kinds of snow, presumably, if the environments in which English was habitually used made such distinction asimportant.Similarly, we have no reason to doubt that the Eskimo language could be as precise。
专八2010年真题
TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS(2010)-GRADE EIGHT-TIME LIMIT:115MIN PARTⅠLISTENING COMPREHENSION（25MIN）SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini-lecture.You will hear the mini-lecture ONCE ONLY.While listening to the mini-lecture,please complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE and write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each gap.Make sure the word(s)you fill in is(are)both grammatically and semantically acceptable.You may use the blank sheet for note-taking.You have THIRTY seconds to preview the gap-filling task.Now listen to the mini-lecture.When it is over,you will be given THREE minutes to check your work.SECTION B INTERVIEWIn this section you will hear ONE interview.The interview will be divided into TWO parts.At the end of each part,five questions will be asked about what was said.Both the interview and the questions will be spoken ONCE ONLY.After each question there will be a ten-second pause.During the pause,you should read the four choices of[A],[B],[C],and[D],and mark the best answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.You have THIRTY seconds to preview the choices.Now,listen to Part One of the interview1.[A]Because many Asian and African people came to the U.S.[B]Because many people in the U.S.shared the same religion.[C]Because when people came to the U.S.,the became the same.[D]Because people with different cultural background blended into one nation.2.[A]Merging of different cultural identities.[B]More emphasis on homogeneity.[C]Embracing of more ethnic differences.[D]Acceptance of more branches of Christianity.3.[A]Some places are more diverse than others.[B]Towns are less diverse than large cities.[C]Diversity can be seen everywhere.[D]America is truly diverse country.4.[A]The population of Pennsylvania remains the same in the last ten years.[B]Different regions show different degrees of diversity.[C]The U.S.is no longer a diverse nation.[D]Diversity only occurs in the region with a large population of white people.5.[A]Maine.[B]Selinsgrove.[C]Philadelpia.[D]California.Now,listen to Part Two of the interview.6.[A]57%.[B]98%.[C]97%.[D]34%.7.[A]Greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.[B]Both older and younger populations are racially diverse.[C]Age diversity could lead to pension problems.[D]Older populations are more racially diverse.8.[A]Workers will become wealthy.[B]In the future,the older white population will become wealthy.[C]The retirees will benefit a lot from social security.[D]The younger minorities will possess a large amount of wealth.9.[A]It was most evident between1990and2000.[B]It exists among Muslim immigrants.[C]It is restricted to certain places in the U.S.[D]The central part of the U.S.still remains the same.10.[A]Different parts of the U.S.display different degrees of diversity.[B]Many parts of the U.S.become increasingly diverse in terms of race and religion.[C]Immigrants bring diversity to the U.S.[D]The central part of the U.S.still remains the same.PARTⅡREADING COMPREHENSION（45MIN）SECTION 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 and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.PASSAGE ONEAmong the great cities of the world,Kolkata(formerly spelt as Calcutta),the capital of India’s West Bengal, and the home of nearly15million people,is often mentioned as the only one that still has a large fleet of hand-pulled rickshaws.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists.It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.They are people who tend to travel short distances,through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver.An older woman with marketing to do,for instance,can arrive in a rickshaw,have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases,and then be taken home.People in the lanes use rickshaws as a24-hour ambulance service.Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies.The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren.Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up;the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains.During my stay it once rained for about48hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles,and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’waists.When it’s raining,the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly,as does the price of a journey.A writer in Kolkata told me,“When it rains,even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata,a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states,according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure.Among India’s20largest states,Bihar finished dead last,as it has for four of the past five years.Bihar,a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata,is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from.Once in Kolkata,they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar.For sleeping privileges in a dera,pullers pay100rupees(about$2.50)a month,which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.They gross between100and150rupees a day,out of which they have to pay20rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional75or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for,say,crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited.A2003study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income,doing better than only the beggars.For someone without land or education,that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata,particularly educated and politically aware people,who will not ride in a rickshaw,because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism.Ironically,some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws.The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee,a former academic who still writes history books—told me,for instance,that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road.“I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,”he said,“but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.”Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes todemeaning occupations,rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare,he smiled,with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean,“If you are so naive as to ask such a question,I will answer it,but it is not worth wasting words on.”Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place.As migrant workers,they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by,say,Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who,after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive,still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or,as I found during the48hours of rain,absolutely everything but umbrellas.“The government was the government of the poor people,”one sardar told me.“Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances.Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee,after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months.Similar statements have been made as far back as1976.The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers.It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century.Kolkata,a resident told me,“has difficulty letting go.”One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.“Which option has been chosen?”I asked,noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.“That hasn’t been decided,”he said.“When will it be decided?”“That hasn’t been decided,”he said.11.According to the passage,rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPT________.[A]taking foreign tourists around the city[B]providing transport to school children[C]carrying store supplies and purchases[D]carrying people over short distances12.Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers from Bihar?[A]They come from a relatively poor area.[B]They are provided with decent accommodation.[C]Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.[D]They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13.That“For someone without land or education,that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar”(4paragraph) means that even so,________.[A]the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar[B]the poor from Bihar fare better than back home[C]the poor never try to make a living in Bihar[D]the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata14.We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware people________.[A]hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws[B]strongly support the ban on rickshaws[C]call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers[D]keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws15.Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?[A]“…—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.”(2nd paragraph)[B]“…,which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.”(4th paragraph)[C]Kolkata,a resident told me,“has difficulty letting go.”(7th paragraph)[D]“…or,as I found during the48hours of rain,absolutely everything but umbrellas.”(6th paragraph)PASSAGE TWODepending on whom you believe,the average American will,over a lifetime,wait in lines for two years(says National Public Radio)or five years(according to customer-loyalty experts).The crucial word is average,as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether.Once the most democratic of institutions,lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines).Poor suckers,mostly.Airports resemble France before the Revolution:first-class passengers enjoy“élite”security lines and priority boarding,and disembark before the unwashed in coach,held at bay by a flight attendant,are allowed to foul the Jet-way.At amusement parks,too,you can now buy your way out of line.This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England,and similar systems are in use in most major American theme parks,from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World,where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics:that the rich are more important than you,especially when it comes to waiting.An NBA player once said to me,with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada—get this—“we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else.”Almost every line can be breached for a price.In several U.S.cities this summer,early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines.On Craigslist,prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay“waiters”or“placeholders”to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.Inevitably,some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people.This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from3:30a.m.to11:30a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business.And billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens,though he’s first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station22blocks away,where the wait,or at least the ride,is shorter.As early as elementary school,we’re told that jumping the line is an unethical act,which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line.Alabama Senator Richard Shelby,to cite just one legislator,said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants“to cut in line ahead of millions of people.”Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line,unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S.Capitol,where Senators and Representatives use private elevators,lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic,it’s out-of-date.There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah’s Ark,two by two,that seemed to restore not just civilization but civility during the Great Flood.How civil was your last flight?Southwest Airlines has first-come,first-served festival seating.But for$5per flight,an unaffiliated company called will secure you a coveted“A”boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in24hours before departure.Thus,the savvy traveler doesn’t even wait in line when he or she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up.Then again,some cultures are too adept at lining up:a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S.,where society seems to be cleaving into two groups:Very Important Persons,who don’t wait,and Very Impatient Persons,who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group—consigned to coach,bereft of Flash Pass,too poor or proper to pay a placeholder—what do we do?We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot:“We wait.We are bored.”16.What does the following sentence mean?“Once the most democratic of institutions,lines are rapidlybecoming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers,mostly.”(2paragraph)[A]Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.[B]Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.[C]Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.[D]Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.17.Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?[A]Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.[B]Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.[C]First-class passenger status at airports.[D]Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.18.We can infer from the passage that politicians(including mayors and Congressmen)_________.[A]prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people[B]advocate the value of waiting in lines[C]believe in and practice waiting in lines[D]exploit waiting in lines for their own goodPASSAGE THREEA bus took him to the West End,where,among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination,shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire,he found the caféof his choice,a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Babylonian,a while palace with ten thousand lights.It towered above the other building like a citadel,which indeed it was,the outpost of a new age,perhaps a new civilization,perhaps a new barbarism;and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel,just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny.Somewhere in the background,hidden away,behind the ten thousand lights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots,behind the thousand waitresses and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists,behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak,the vanloads of ices,were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming,who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress(five feet four in height and in average health)would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table in the far corner.In short,there was a warm,sensuous,vulgar life flowering in the upper storeys,and a cold science working in the basement.Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched,in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury.Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world,looted whole kingdoms,and never arrived in such luxury.The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too,and,as usual,they were all there.It seemed with humanity.The marble entrance hall,piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes,was as crowded and bustling as a railway station.The gloom and grime of the streets,the raw air,all November,were at once left behind,forgotten:the atmosphere inside was golden,tropical,belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery.Disdaining the lifts,Turgis,once more excited by the sight,sound,and smell of it all,climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor,where an orchestra,led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects,acted as a magnet to a thousand girls.The door was swung open for him by a page;there burst,scented air,the sensuous clamour of the strings,and,as he stood hesitating a moment,half dazed,there came,bowing,s sleek grave man,older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be,who murmured deferentially:“For one,sir?This way,please,”Shyly,yet proudly,Turgis followed him.19.The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of the tea-shop EXCEPT________.[A]“…turned Babylonian”[B]“perhaps a new barbarism’[C]“acres of white napery”[D]“balanced to the last halfpenny”20.Which of the following statements about the second paragraph is NOT true?[A]The caféappealed to most senses simultaneously.[B]The caféwas both full of people and full of warmth.[C]The inside of the caféwas contrasted with the weather outside.[D]It stressed the commercial determination of the caféowners.21.The following are comparisons made by the author in the second paragraph EXCEPT that_______.[A]the entrance hall is compared to a railway station[B]the orchestra is compared to a magnet[C]Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier[D]the interior of the caféis compared to warm countriesPASSAGE FOURNow elsewhere in the world,Iceland may be spoken of,somewhat breathlessly,as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness.But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders.Certainly they were connected to their land,the way one is complicatedly connected to,or encumbered by,family one can’t do anything about.But the truth is,once you’re off the beat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives,the roads are few,and they’re all bad,so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhabitants.For them the land has always just been there,something that had to be dealt with and,if possible,exploited—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as,well, priceless art on the scale of the“Mona Lisa.”When the opportunity arose in2003for the national power company to enter into a40-year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter（冶炼厂）,those who had been dreaming of something like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back.Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries,with a99percent literacy rate and long life expectancy.But the project’s advocates,some of them getting on in years,were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of want,hardship,and colonial servitude to Denmark,which officially had ended only in1944and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh.For the longest time,life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter,cold,no hope,children dying left and right,earthquakes,plagues,starvation,volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegetation and livestock,all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and,later,on how good the cod catch was.In the outlying regions,it still largely does.Ostensibly,the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—where the way of life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom.After fishing quotas were imposed in the early1980s to protect fish stocks,many individual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away,fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies,and small fishermen were virtually wiped out.Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands,and the people were seeing everything they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away.With the old way of life doomed,aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived,wisely or not,as a last chance.“Smelter or death.”The contract with Alcoa would infuse the region with foreign capital,an estimated400jobs,and spin-off service industries.It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that potentially could be sold to the rest of the world;diversify an economy historically dependent on fish;and,in an appealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all of Iceland,once and for all,from the unpredictability of life itself.“We have to live,”Halldor Asgrimsson.Halldor,a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region,was a driving force behind the project.“We have a right to live.”22.According to the passage,most Icelanders view land as something of________.[A]environmental value[B]commercial value[C]potential value for tourism[D]great value for livelihood23.What is Iceland’s old-aged advocates’feeling towards the Alcoa project?[A]Iceland is wealthy enough to reject the project.[B]The project would lower life expectancy.[C]The project would cause environmental problems.[D]The project symbolizes and end to the colonial legacies.24.The disappearance of the old way of life was due to all the following EXCEPT________.[A]fewer fishing companies[B]fewer jobs available[C]migration of young people[D]imposition of fishing quotasSECTION 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 than10words in the space provided on ANSWER SHEET TWO.PASSAGE ONE25.What does the dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passage seem to suggest?PASSAGE TWO26.What is the tone of the passage?PASSAGE THREE27.What does“behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel”suggest?28.What does“The place was built for him”in Paragraph One mean?29.What’s the author’s attitude toward the café?PASSAGE FOUR30.Why didn’t the majority of Icelanders have environmental awareness?31.What does“Smelter or death”in the third paragraph mean?32.What’s the function of the4th paragraph in the passage?PARTⅢLANGUAGE USAGE（15MIN）The passage contains TEN errors.Each indicated line contains a maximum of ONE error.In each case, only ONE word is involved.You should proofread the passage and correct it in the following way: For a wrong word，underline the wrong word and write the correct one in the blankprovided at the end of the line．For a missing word,mark the position of the missing word with a“∧”sign and write theword you believe to be missing in the blank provided at the end ofthe line．For an unnecessary word，cross the unnecessary word with a slash“／”and put the word in theblank provided at the end of the line．EXAMPLE__________ When∧art museum wants a new exhibit，(1)an__________ it never buys things in finished form and hangs(2)neverthem on the wall．When a natural history museum__________ wants an exhibition,it must often build it．(3)exhibitProofread the given passage on ANSWER SHEET THREE as instructed.PARTⅣTRANSLATION（25MIN）Translate the underlined part of the following text into English.Write your translation on ANSWER SHEET THREE.朋友关系的存续是以相互尊重为前提的，容不得半点强求、干涉和控制。
2010年专八真题翻译答卷分析解析
朋友之间再熟悉、再亲密, 也不能随便过头、不恭不 敬。不然默契和平衡将被打破, 友好关系将不复存在。 学生版本一：No matter how familiar or how close between the friends are, we can’t be too causal, namely, we shouldn’t disrespect with each other. Otherwise the balance between friends will be broken and the good friendship will go forever. 学生版本二：No matter how familiar and intimate between friends, it is better not to be too casual or disrespect. Otherwise, it will damage to the feeling of understanding each other without words and a kind of balance and then the friendship goes away.
10. 最后一句，用therefore来加强连贯；“往 来有节”指“注意分寸”。
参考译文版本一： Friends tend to become more intimate and get along well if they have the same interests and temperament or they will cease to be friends and to separate ways. No matter how close they are, friends cannot stay together without courtesy and mutual respect, or the harmony and balance will be disrupted, and the friendship will no longer exist. Generally, everyone, when in such friendship, still respects a private space of his own. But by frequently doing as he pleases in interacting with friends, one may risk intruding into that forbidden zone, thus causing discord or estrangement. Though failing to show respect for friends only seems to be a trifle, it may turn out to be a seed sown only to lead to the destruction of the relationship over time. Therefore, the best way to keep good friendship is never to go beyond a certain limit in dealing with friends or meddle in friends’ affairs.
2010 专八真题附带答案与解析
2010 年英语专八试题及答案PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION (35 MIN)SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lectureONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Yournotes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete agap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture is over, youwill be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutesto complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blanksheet for note-taking.Complete the gap-filling task. Some of the gaps below may require amaximum of THREE words. Make sure the word(s) you fill in is (are) bothgrammatically & semantically acceptable. You may refer to your notes.Paralinguistic Features of LanguageIn face-to-face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voiceor change their physical postures in order to convey messages. Thesemeans are called paralinguistic features of language, which fall intotwo categories.First category: vocal paralinguistic featuresA. (1)__________: to express attitude or intention(1)__________B. Examples1. whispering: need for secrecy2. breathiness: deep emotion3. (2)_________: unimportance(2)__________4. nasality: anxiety5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacySecond category: physical paralinguistic featuresA. facial expressions1. (3)_______(3)__________----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcome2. less common expressions----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest----- lip biting: (4)________(4)_________B. gesturegestures are related to culture.4291. British culture----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________(5)__________----- scratching head: puzzlement2. other cultures----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______(6)__________----- pointing at nose: secretC. proximity, posture and echoing1. proximity: physical distance between speakers----- closeness: intimacy or threat----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest (7)_________Proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________-specific.(8)_________2. posture----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indeicate(9)_____(9)________----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challengingattitude3. echoing----- definition: imitation of similar posture----- (10)______: aid in communication(10)___________----- conscious imitation: mockerySECTION B INTERVIEWIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefullyand then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer toeach question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the endyou will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following fivequestions.Now listen to the interview.1. According to Dr Johnson, diversity meansA. merging of different cultural identities.B. more emphasis on homogeneity.C. embracing of more ethnic differences.D. acceptance of more branches of Christianity.2. According to the interview, which of the following statements in430CORRECT?A. Some places are more diverse than others.B. Towns are less diverse than large cities.C. Diversity can be seen everywhere.D. American is a truly diverse country.3. According to Dr Johnson, which place will witnessa radical changein its racial makeup by 2025?A. MaineB. SelinsgroveC. PhiladelphiaD. California4. During the interview Dr Johnson indicates thatA. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.B. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.C. age diversity could lead to pension problems.D. older populations are more racially diverse.5. According to the interview, religious diversityA. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.B. exists among Muslim immigrants.C. is restricted to certain places in the US.D. is spreading to more parts of the country. SECTION C NEWS BROADCASTIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefullyand then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer toeach question on your coloured answer sheet. Question 6 is based on the following news. At the endyou will be given 10 seconds to answer the question. Now listen to the news.6. What is the main idea of the news item?A. Sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.B. Japan will market its wallet phone abroad.C. The wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.D. Reader devices are available at stores and stations. Question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. At the end of the newsitem, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions.Now listen to the news.7. Which of the following is mentioned as the government’s measureto control inflation?A. Foreign investment.431B. Donor support.C. Price control.D. Bank prediction.8. According to Kingdom Bank, what is the current inflation rate inZimbabwe?A. 20 million percent.B. 2.2 million percent.C. 11.2 million percent.D. Over 11.2 million percent.Question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of thenews item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.9. Which of the following is CORRECT?A. A big fire erupted on the Nile River.B. Helicopters were used to evacuate people.C. Five people were taken to hospital for burns.D. A big fire took place on two floors.10. The likely cause of the big fire isA. electrical short-cut.B. lack of fire-satefy measures.C. terrorism.D. not known.PART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)In this section there are four reading passages followed by a totalof 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark youranswers on your coloured answer sheet.TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (Sodoes its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata,which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversingin English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.)To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not itsmodern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the wallsand cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulledrickshaw. Stories and films celebrate aprimitive-looking cart withhigh wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the432succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking abouteliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitariangrounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata hasoften said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and strainingto pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impactof 6,000 hand-pulled ri ckshaws on a modern city’s traffic and,particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars andthese rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not whatCalcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, BuddhadebBhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Ourcity standsfor prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalentof a state governor—went on to announce thathand-pulled rickshawssoon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata. Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I sawalmost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers onSudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now saidto be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw pulleroffers may include providing female company to a gentleman for theevening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly userickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes thatare sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An olderwoman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw,have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stallsto load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes userickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés orcorner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morningI saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairsby the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded backcanopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carryingabout a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told metheir steadiest customers are schoolchildren.Middle-class familiescontract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; thepuller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and itsdrainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up.Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if astray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained forabout 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized433vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulledthrough water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining,the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as doesthe price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains,even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today publishedits annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurementsas prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states,Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years.Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vastmajority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleepon the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garageand repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. Forsleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50)a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visiteda dera（防护评估和研究机构）. They gross between 100 and150 rupeesa day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshawand an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops themfor, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 studyfound that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupationsin income, doing better than only the ragpickers（拾破烂的人） and thebeggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats tryingto make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politicallyaware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offendedby the idea of being pulled by another human being or because theyconsider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or becausethey regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism.Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banningrickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’sTelegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writeshistory books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarianconsiderations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulledrickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human beingmyself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to takeaway their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when itcomes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique inKolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s434plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest inhis welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture Iinterpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question,I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshawpullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihoodand pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrantworkers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say,Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled backat the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks,selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours ofrain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was thegovernment of the poor people,” one sardar（司令官） told me. “Nowthey shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poorpeople.”But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply beconfined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view ofWorld Bank traffic consultants and California investmentdelegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally asthey’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. BuddhadebBhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal officialto say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matterof months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. Theban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and bya widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlementought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayedby a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of thefabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident toldme, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed mea report from the municipal government laying out options for howrickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.“Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the reportwas dated almost exactly a year before my visit. “That hasn’t been decided,” he sa id.“When will it be decided?”“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly forthe following EXCEPTA. taking foreign tourists around the city.B. providing transport to school children.435C. carrying store supplies and purchasesD. carrying people over short distances.12. Which of the following statements best describes the rickshawpullers from Bihar?A. They come from a relatively poor area.B. They are provided with decent accommodation.C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13. That “For someone without land or education, that still beatstrying to make a living in Bihar” (4 paragraph) means that evenso,A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.14. We can infer from the passage that some educated and politicallyaware peopleA. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.15. Which of the following statements conveys the author’s s ense ofhumor?A. “…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.”(2 paragraph)B. “…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visiteda dera.” (4 paragraph)C. Kolkata, a resident told me, “ has difficulty letting go.” (7paragraph).D.“…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutelyeverything but umbrellas.” (6 paragraph)16. The dialogue between the author and the city official at the endof the passage seems to suggestA. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.D. the slowness in processing options.TEXT B436Depending on whom you believe, the average American will, over alifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) orfive years (according to customer-loyalty experts). The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoidlines altogether. Once the most democratic ofinstitutions, lines arerapidly becoming the exclusive province ofsuckers(people who stillbelieve in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.Airports resemble France before the Revolution:first-classpassengers enjoy "élite" security lines and priority boarding, anddisembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flightattendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line. Thissummer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump thelines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use in mostmajor American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World,where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their wayto their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson inreal-worldeconomics: that the rich are more important than you, especially whenit comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemusedchuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we haveto wait in the same customs line as everybody else." Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S.cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waitingto buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist,prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or"placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value ofsort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people. This summerPhiladelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stoodin for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaireNew York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with hisfellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stopnearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or atleast the ride, is shorter.As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the lineis an unethical act, which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framedthe immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch437line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, saidamnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millionsof people."Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will notwait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S.Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators,lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about theorderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore notjust civilization but civility during the Great Flood. How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come,first-served festival seating. But for $5 per flight, an unaffiliatedcompany called will secure you a coveted "A" boardingpass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours beforedeparture. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when heor she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, somecultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former SovietUnion would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queueand see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving intotwo groups: Very Important Persons, who don't wait, and Very ImpatientPersons, who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereftof Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do wedo? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait.We are bored."17. What does the following sentence mean? “Once the most democraticof institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive provinceof suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.” (2 paragraph)A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.18. Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching theline?A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.438C. First-class passenger status at airports.D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.19. We can infer from the passage that politicians(including mayorsand Congressmen)A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.20. What is the tone of the passage?A. Instructive.B. Humorous.C. Serious.D. Teasing.TEXT CA bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy colouredfountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green andcrimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a tea-shop that had gonemad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights.It towered above the other building like a citadel, which indeed itwas, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps anew barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel,just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence,balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hiddenaway, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery andbewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitressesand cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamentallong-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak,the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling withfractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it tookto finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and secondsa waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would needto carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table inthe far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life439flowering in the upper storeys, and a cold science working in thebasement. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, insearch not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliarluxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half theknown world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury.The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, theywere al there. It seemed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, pileddizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railwaystation. The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November,were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden,tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery.Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound,and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached hisfavourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinistwith wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, actedas a magnet to a thousand girls, scented air, the sensuous clamour ofthe strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, therecame, bowing, s sleek grave man, older than he was and far moredistinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially:“ For one, sir? This way, please,” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followedhim.21. That “behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel”suggests thatA. modern realistic commercialism existed behind the luxuriousappearance.B. there was a fundamental falseness in the style and the appealof the café..C. the architect had made a sensible blend of old and new buildingmaterials.D. the café was based on physical foundations and real economicstrength.22. The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of thetea-shop EXCEPTA. “…turned Babylonian”.B. “perhaps a new barbarism’.C. “acres of white napery”.D. “balanced to the last halfpenny”.23. In its context the statement that “ the place was built for him”440means that the café was intended toA. please simple people in a simple way.B. exploit gullible people like him.C. satisfy a demand that already existed.D. provide relaxation for tired young men.24. Which of the following statements about the second paragraph isNOT true?A. The café appealed to most senses simultaneously.B. The café was both full of people and full of warmth.C. The inside of the café was contrasted with the weather outside.D. It stressed the commercial determination of the café owners.25. The following are comparisons made by the author in the secondparagraph EXCEPT thatA. the entrance hall is compared to a railway station.B. the orchestra is compared to a magnet.C. Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier.D. the interior of the café is compared to warm countries.26. The author’s attitude to the café isA. fundamentally critical.B. slightly admiring.C. quite undecided.D. completely neutral.TEXT DI Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhatbreathlessly, as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But theenvironmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed themajority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land,the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, familyone can’t do anything about. But the truth is, once you’re off thebeat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, theroads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders havebeen out of reach and unknown even to its owninhab-itants. For themthe land has always just been there, something that had to be dealtwith and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one of land as441commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the“Mona Lisa.”When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power companyto enter into a 40-year contract with the American aluminum companyAlcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, those who hadbeen dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and neverlooked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richestcountries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy.But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, weremore emotionally attuned to the count ry’s century upon century of want,hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had endedonly in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh.For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut,dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right,earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroyingall vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almostentirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how goodthe cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of thesedying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—where the wayof life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom. Afterfishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks,many indi-vidual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away,fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, andsmall fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advancesdrained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the。
专八 2010 年真题 及其答案 大家顶起啊 !!
TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2010)-GRADE EIGHT-PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION (35 MIN)SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for note-taking. Complete the gap-filling task. Some of the gaps below may require a maximum of THREE words. Make sure the word(s) you fill in is (are) both grammatically & semantically acceptable. You may refer to your notes.Paralinguistic Features of LanguageIn face-to-face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voice or change their physical postures in order to convey messages. These means are called paralinguistic features of language, which fall into two categories.First category: vocal paralinguistic features(1)__________: to express attitude or intention (1)__________Examples1. whispering: need for secrecy2. breathiness: deep emotion3. (2)_________: unimportance (2)__________4. nasality: anxiety5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacySecond category: physical paralinguistic featuresfacial expressions(3)_______ (3)__________----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcomeless common expressions----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest----- lip biting: (4)________ (4)_________gesturegestures are related to culture.British culture----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________ (5)__________----- scratching head: puzzlementother cultures----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______ (6)__________----- pointing at nose: secretproximity, posture and echoingproximity: physical distance between speakers----- closeness: intimacy or threat----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest (7)_________Proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________ -specific. (8)_________posture----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indicate(9)_____ (9)________----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challenging attitudeechoing----- definition: imitation of similar posture----- (10)______: aid in communication (10)___________----- conscious imitation: mockerySECTION B INTERVIEWIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.Now listen to the interview.1. According to Dr Johnson, diversity meansA. merging of different cultural identities.B. more emphasis on homogeneity.C. embracing of more ethnic differences.D. acceptance of more branches of Christianity.2. According to the interview, which of the following statements in CORRECT?A. Some places are more diverse than others.B. Towns are less diverse than large cities.C. Diversity can be seen everywhere.D. American is a truly diverse country.3. According to Dr Johnson, which place will witness a radical change in its racial makeup by 2025?A. MaineB. SelinsgroveC. PhiladelphiaD. California4. During the interview Dr Johnson indicates thatA. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.B. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.C. age diversity could lead to pension problems.D. older populations are more racially diverse.5. According to the interview, religious diversityA. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.B. exists among Muslim immigrants.C. is restricted to certain places in the US.D. is spreading to more parts of the country.SECTION C NEWS BROADCASTIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your coloured answer sheet.Question 6 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.6. What is the main idea of the news item?A. Sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.B. Japan will market its wallet phone abroad.C. The wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.D. Reader devices are available at stores and stations.Question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions.Now listen to the news.7. Which of the following is mentioned as the government’s measure to control inflation?A. Foreign investment.B. Donor support.C. Price control.D. Bank prediction.8. According to Kingdom Bank, what is the current inflation rate in Zimbabwe?A. 20 million percent.B. 2.2 million percent.C. 11.2 million percent.D. Over 11.2 million percent.Question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.9. Which of the following is CORRECT?A. A big fire erupted on the Nile River.B. Helicopters were used to evacuate people.C. Five people were taken to hospital for burns.D. A big fire took place on two floors.10. The likely cause of the big fire isA. electrical short-cut.B. lack of fire-satefy measures.C. terrorism.D. not known.PART IIREADING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground tha t, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see ―one man sweating and straining to pull another man.‖ But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its im age. ―Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,‖ the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. ―Our city stands for prosperity and development.‖ The chief minister—theequivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata ―if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.‖ During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for ricks haw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, ―When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.‖While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rup ees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. ―I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,‖ he said, ―but I questio n whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.‖ Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, ―If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.‖ So me rickshawpullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. ―The government was the government of the poor p eople,‖ one sardar told me. ―Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.‖But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, ―has difficulty letting go.‖ One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.―Which option has been chosen?‖ I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.―That hasn’t been decided,‖ he said.―When will it be decided?‖―That hasn’t been decided,‖ he said.11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPTA. taking foreign tourists around the city.B. providing transport to school children.C. carrying store supplies and purchasesD. carrying people over short distances.12. Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers from Bihar?A. They come from a relatively poor area.B. They are provided with decent accommodation.C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13. That ―For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar‖ (4 paragraph) means that even so,A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.14. We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware peopleA. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.15. Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?A. ―…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.‖ (2 paragraph)B. ―…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.‖ (4 paragraph)C. Kolkata, a resident told me, ― has difficulty letting go.‖ (7 paragraph).D.―…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas.‖ (6 paragraph)16. The dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passage seems to suggestA. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.D. the slowness in processing options.TEXT BDepending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty experts).The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.Airports resemble France before the Revolution: first-class passengers enjoy "élite" security lines and priority boarding, and disembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flight attendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line. This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use in most major American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World, where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics: that the rich are more important than you, especially when it comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else."Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S. cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist, prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or "placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people. This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or at least the ride, is shorter.As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the line is an unethical act, which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millions of people."Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S. Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators, lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore not just civilization but civility during the Great Flood.How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come, first-served festival seating. But for $5 perflight, an unaffiliated company called will secure you a coveted "A" boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours before departure. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when he or she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, some cultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving into two groups: Very Important Persons, who don't wait, and Very Impatient Persons, who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereft of Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do we do? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait. We are bored."17. What does the following sentence mean? ―Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.‖ (2 paragraph)A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.18. Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.C. First-class passenger status at airports.D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.19. We can infer from the passage that politicians (including mayors and Congressmen)A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.20. What is the tone of the passage?A. Instructive.B. Humorous.C. Serious.D. Teasing.TEXT CA bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights. It towered above the other building like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchenlife to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the upper storeys, and a cold science working in the basement. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury. The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were al there. It seemed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station. The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery. Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls, scented air, the sensuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, s sleek grave man, older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: ― For one, sir? This way, please,‖ Shy ly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.21. That ―behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel‖ suggests thatA. modern realistic commercialism existed behind the luxurious appearance.B. there was a fundamental falseness in the style and the appeal of the café..C. the architect had made a sensible blend of old and new building materials.D. the café was based on physical foundations and real economic strength.22. The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of the tea-shop EXCEPTA. ―…turned Babylonian‖.B. ―perhaps a new barbarism’.C. ―acres of white napery‖.D. ―balanced to the last halfpenny‖.23. In its context the statement that ― the place was built for him‖ means that the café was intended toA. please simple people in a simple way.B. exploit gullible people like him.C. satisfy a demand that already existed.D. provide relaxation for tired young men.24. Which of the following statements about the second paragraph is NOT true?A. The café appealed to most senses simultaneously.B. The café was both full of people and full of warmth.C. The inside of the café was contrasted with the weather outside.D. It stressed the commercial determination of the café owners.25. The following are comparisons made by the author in the second paragraph EXCEPT thatA. the entrance hall is compared to a railway station.B. the orchestra is compared to a magnet.C. Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier.D. the interior of the café is compared to warm countries.26. The author’s attitude to the café isA. fundamentally critical.B. slightly admiring.C. quite undecided.D. completely neutral.TEXT DI Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one can’t do anything about. But the truth is, once you’re off the beat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhab-itants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the ―Mona Lisa.‖When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, those who had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of want, hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—where the way of life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many indi-vidual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing every-thing they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. ―Smelter or death.‖The contract with Alcoa would infuse the re-gion with foreign capital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that potentially could be sold to the rest of the world; diversify an economy historically dependent on fish; and, in an appealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all of Iceland, once and for all, from the unpredictability of life itself.―We have to live,‖ Halldór Ásgrímsson said in his sad, sonorous voice. Halldór, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving force behind the project. ―We have a right to live.‖27. According to the passage, most Icelanders view land as something ofA. environmental value.B. commercial value.C. potential value for tourism.D. great value for livelihood.28. What is Iceland’s old-aged advocates’ feeling towards the Alcoa project?A. Iceland is wealthy enough to reject the project.B. The project would lower life expectancy.C. The project would cause environmental problems.D. The project symbolizes and end to the colonial legacies.。
2010年英语专八真题及其答案
TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS （2010）—GRADE EIGHT-PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION （35 MIN）SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini—lecture。
You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY。
While listening，take notes on the important points。
Your notes will not be marked，but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture。
When the lecture is over，you will be given two minutes to check your notes，and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE。
Use the blank sheet for note—taking。
Complete the gap—filling task。
Some of the gaps below may require a maximum of THREE words。
Make sure the word（s）you fill in is （are) both grammatically ＆semantically acceptable。
You may refer to your notes。
Paralinguistic Features of LanguageIn face-to—face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voice or change their physical postures in order to convey messages。
2010tem8 答案
2010年专八真题参考答案PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSIONSECTION A MINI-LECTURE1. function/ purpose/ intention/ aim/ goal/ objective2 huskiness3 universal signal(s)/ universal expression(s)/ common expression(s)4 thought or uncertainty/ meditation or uncertainty/ contemplation or uncertainty/ thinking/ deep in thinking or thought/ deep thinking5 indifference/ lack of knowledge/ I don’t know/ I don’t care6 truth-telling/ honesty7 distance8 situation/ context/ occasion9 mood/ happy or mot/ happy or unhappy10 unconsciously same posture/ unconscious imitationSECTION B INTERVIEW1.C2.A3.D4.A5.CSECTION C NEWS BROADCAST6.B7.C8.A/ D9.D 10.APART II READING COMPREHENSION11.A 12.C 13.B 14.A 15.D16.C 17.C 18.A 19.D 20.D/ B21.A 22.C/ B 23.C/ B24.D/ B25.C26.A 27.B/ D28.D 29.A 30.CPART III GENERAL KNOWLEDGE31.D 32.A 33.D 34.A 35.C36.D 37.A 38.A 39.C 40.BPART IV PROOFREADING & ERROR CORRECTION1 be well中间插入as；OR as 改为like2 their改为its3 There改为It4 Whereas改为But5 further 改为much/ far 或去掉further6 come改为bring7 similar改为different8 will改为would9 as important去掉as；OR as改为so10 the part去掉thePART V TRANSLATIONSECTION A CHINESE TO ENGLISHFriends tend to become more intimate and get along well if they have the same temperament and interests, or they will cease to be friends and go separate ways. No matter how close they are, friends cannot stay together without courtesy and mutual respect, or the harmony and balance will be disrupted, and the friendship will no longer exist. Generally, everyone, when in such friendship, still expects a private space of his own. But by frequently doing as he pleases in interacting with friends, one may risk intruding into that forbidden zone, thus causing discord or estrangement. Though failing to show respect for friends only seems to be a trifle, it may turn out to be a seed sown only to lead to the destruction of the relationship over time. Therefore, the best way to keep good friendship is never to go beyond a certain limit in dealing with friends or meddle in friends’ affairs.SECTION B ENGLISH TO CHINESE我想那是五月一个星期天的清晨；那天是复活节，而且还是一大早天才朦朦亮的时候。
1997-2010年英语专八翻译真题及答案
1997年:English to ChineseOpera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are inevitably the province（范围）of the rich unless we abdicate（退位、放弃）society’s power of choice. We can choose to make opera and other expensive forms of culture, accessible（易接近的，可达到的）to those who cannot individually pay for it. The question is: why should we? No body denies the imperatives（必要的）of food, shelter, defence, health and education. But even in a prehistoric cave, man-kind stretched out a hand of not just to eat, drink or fight, but also to draw. The impulse（冲动）towards culture, the desire to express and explore the world through imagination and representation（表述、陈述）is fundamental. In Europe, this desire has found fulfillment（完成、成就）in the masterpieces of our music, art, literature and theatre. These masterpieces are the touchstones（标准、试金石）for all our efforts; they are the touchstones for the possibilities to which human thought and imagination may aspire（立志、追求目标、渴望）; they carry the most profound （深厚的、深刻的）messages that can be sent from one human to another.欣赏歌剧是一种奢侈：你必须为此支付昂贵的票价。
2003-2010年英语专八（TEM8）口试真题及答案
ORAL TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (April 2003)-GRADE EIGHT-Task One: Interpreting from English into ChineseDirections: Please do not do interpreting when you listen to the speech this time.The Speech by a World Bank Group Official at the 2002Western China International Economy and T rade Fair Governor Zhang, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,I am delighted to be here this morning to open the Western China International Economy and Trade Fair. I would like to thank the Peoples Government of Sichuan for inviting us to attend this important event where government leaders from Beijing and twelve other provinces meet to discuss strategies for developing China’s Western Region.This event reflects the strong commitment of the Government and the people of China to develop its Western Regions. I am very impressed with the enthusiasm and determination demonstrated not only by the public sector but also by the increasing level of private sector interest in supporting the Western development goals set forth by the government.The purpose of my current visit to China is to assess recent economic developments in China and to discuss with senior leaders of the Government the World Bank Groups assistance strategy for China after its accession to the WTO. I started my visit two days ago in the western province of Y unnan and have now come to Sichuan. I have seen good examples of how the World Bank Group can offer assistance to the Government and the private sector to develop China’s West. There are 11 provinces, autonomous regions and one municipality in west China, with a total area of about 6.8 million square kilometers and a population of 364 million. The government’s desire to accelerate the development of the western provinces is vital to the success of achieving a sustained growth for China in the long run. There are also challenges, however, that should not be overlooked. These include continue efforts to create and improve the business environment. But I am confident that these challenges will be met.In closing, I would like to thank the Government of Sichuan for its support to the World Bank and IFC operations in Sichuan. We look forward to working with all of you to contribute to the development of China’s West and to improve people’s lives in this important part of the country.Thank you!Directions: Now listen again. Please begin interpreting when you hear a beep.1. The purpose of my current visit to China is to evaluate recent economic developments in China, and discuss with Chinese leaders the World Bank Group’s assistance strategy for China after its entry into the WTO.2. I started my visit two days ago in the western province of Y unnan and have now come to Sichuan. I have seen good examples of how the World Bank Group can offer assistance to the Government and the private sectors to develop China’s West.3. There are 11 provinces, autonomous regions and one municipality in west China, with a total area of about 6.8 million square kilometers and a population of 364 million.4. The Government’s desire to accelerate the development of the western provinces is vital to the success of achieving a sustained growth for China in the long run.5. There are also challenges, however, that should not be overlooked. These include continued efforts to create and improve the business environment. But I am confident that these challenges will be met.Task Two: Interpreting from Chinese into EnglishDirections: Please do not do interpreting when you listen to the speech this time.阳光国际展览中心副总经理在举办2002年中国（阳光）国际乐器展览新闻发布会上的讲话各位来宾、新闻界的朋友：下午好! 首先，请允许我代表阳光国际展览中心有限公司向出席今天新闻发布会的各位来宾表示热烈的欢迎和衷心的感谢!国际乐器业界的盛大聚会—MUSIC CHINA中国(阳光)国际乐器展览会将于2002 年10 月16 日-19 日在阳光国际展览中心隆重开幕。
2010年英语专八真题下载版
2010年英语专八真题TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2010)-GRADE EIGHT-PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION (35 MIN)SECTION A MINI-LECTUREIn this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after themini-lecture. When the lecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for note-taking.Complete the gap-filling task. Some of the gaps below may require a maximum of THREE words. Make sure the word(s) you fill in is (are) both grammatically & semantically acceptable. You may refer to your notes.Paralinguistic Features of LanguageIn face-to-face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voice or change their physical postures in order to convey messages. These means are called paralinguistic features of language, which fall into two categories.First category: vocal paralinguistic features(1)__________: to express attitude or intention (1)__________Examples1. whispering: need for secrecy2. breathiness: deep emotion3. (2)_________: unimportance (2)__________4. nasality: anxiety5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacySecond category: physical paralinguistic featuresfacial expressions(3)_______ (3)__________----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcomeless common expressions----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest----- lip biting: (4)________ (4)_________gesturegestures are related to culture.British culture----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________ (5)__________----- scratching head: puzzlementother cultures----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______ (6)__________----- pointing at nose: secretproximity, posture and echoingproximity: physical distance between speakers----- closeness: intimacy or threat----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest (7)_________Proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________ -specific. (8)_________ posture----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indicate(9)_____(9)________----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challenging attitude echoing----- definition: imitation of similar posture----- (10)______: aid in communication (10)___________----- conscious imitation: mockerySECTION B INTERVIEWIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.Now listen to the interview.1. According to Dr Johnson, diversity meansA. merging of different cultural identities.B. more emphasis on homogeneity.C. embracing of more ethnic differences.D. acceptance of more branches of Christianity.2. According to the interview, which of the following statements in CORRECT?A. Some places are more diverse than others.B. Towns are less diverse than large cities.C. Diversity can be seen everywhere.D. American is a truly diverse country.3. According to Dr Johnson, which place will witness a radical change in its racial makeup by 2025?A. MaineB. SelinsgroveC. PhiladelphiaD. California4. During the interview Dr Johnson indicates thatA. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.B. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.C. age diversity could lead to pension problems.D. older populations are more racially diverse.5. According to the interview, religious diversityA. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.B. exists among Muslim immigrants.C. is restricted to certain places in the US.D. is spreading to more parts of the country.SECTION C NEWS BROADCASTIn this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your coloured answer sheet.Question 6 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.6. What is the main idea of the news item?A. Sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.B. Japan will market its wallet phone abroad.C. The wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.D. Reader devices are available at stores and stations.Question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions.Now listen to the news.7. Which of the following is mentioned as the government’s measure to control inflation?A. Foreign investment.B. Donor support.C. Price control.D. Bank prediction.8. According to Kingdom Bank, what is the current inflation rate in Zimbabwe?A. 20 million percent.B. 2.2 million percent.C. 11.2 million percent.D. Over 11.2 million percent.Question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.9. Which of the following is CORRECT?A. A big fire erupted on the Nile River.B. Helicopters were used to evacuate people.C. Five people were taken to hospital for burns.D. A big fire took place on two floors.10. The likely cause of the big fire isA. electrical short-cut.B. lack of fire-satefy measures.C. terrorism.D. not known.PART IIREADING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but thehand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a stategovernor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a g entleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren.Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was u p to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and thebeggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” S ome rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.“Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.“When will it be decided?”“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPTA. taking foreign tourists around the city.B. providing transport to school children.C. carrying store supplies and purchasesD. carrying people over short distances.12. Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers from Bihar?A. They come from a relatively poor area.B. They are provided with decent accommodation.C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.13. That “For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar” (4 paragraph) means that even so,A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.14. We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware peopleA. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.15. Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?A. “…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.” (2 paragraph)B. “…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.” (4 paragraph)C. Kolkata, a resident told me, “ has difficulty letting go.” (7 paragraph).D.“…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, abs olutely everything but umbrellas.” (6 paragraph)16. The dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passage seems to suggestA. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.D. the slowness in processing options.TEXT BDepending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty experts).The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.Airports resemble France before the Revolution: first-class passengers enjoy "élite" security lines and priority boarding, and disembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flight attendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line. This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use in most major American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World, where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics: that the rich are more important than you, especially when it comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else."Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S. cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist, prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or "placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people. This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or at least the ride, is shorter.As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the line isan unethical act, which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millions of people."Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S. Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators, lest they have to queue with their constituents.But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore not just civilization but civility during the Great Flood.How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come,first-served festival seating. But for $5 per flight, an unaffiliated company called will secure you a coveted "A" boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours before departure. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when he or she is online.Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, some cultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving into two groups: Very Important Persons, who don't wait, and Very Impatient Persons, who do--unhappily.For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereft of Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do we do? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait. We are bored."17. What does the following sentence mean? “Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.” (2 paragraph)A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.18. Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.C. First-class passenger status at airports.D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.19. We can infer from the passage that politicians (including mayors and Congressmen)A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.20. What is the tone of the passage?A. Instructive.B. Humorous.C. Serious.D. Teasing.TEXT CA bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights. It towered above the other building like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the upper storeys, and a cold science working in the basement. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury. The place was built for him.It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were al there. It seemed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station. Thegloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery. Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls, scented air, the sensuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, s sleek grave man, older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: “ For one, sir? This way, please,” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.21. That “behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel” suggests thatA. modern realistic commercialism existed behind the luxurious appearance.B. there was a fundamental falseness in the style and the appeal of the café..C. the architect had made a sensible blend of old and new building materials.D. the café was based on physical foundations and real economic strength.22. The following words or phrases are somewhat critical of the tea-shop EXCEPTA. “…turned Babylonian”.B. “perhaps a new barbarism’.C. “acres of white napery”.D. “balanced to the last halfpenny”.23. In its context the statement that “ the place was built for him” means that the café was intended toA. please simple people in a simple way.B. exploit gullible people like him.C. satisfy a demand that already existed.D. provide relaxation for tired young men.24. Which of the following statements about the second paragraph is NOT true?A. The café appealed to most senses simultaneously.B. The café was both full of people and full of warmth.C. The inside of the café was contrasted with the weather outside.D. It stressed the commercial determination of the café owners.25. The following are comparisons made by the author in the second paragraph EXCEPT thatA. the entrance hall is compared to a railway station.B. the orchestra is compared to a magnet.C. Turgis welcomed the lift like a conquering soldier.D. the interior of the café is compared to warm countries.26. The author’s attitude to the café isA. fundamentally critical.B. slightly admiring.C. quite undecided.D. completely neutral.TEXT DI Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathless ly, as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one can’t do anything about. But the truth is, once you’re off the beat-en paths of thelow-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhab-itants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the “Mona Lisa.”When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, those who had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the coun try’s century upon century of want, hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how go od the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of thesedying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—where the way oflife had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many indi-vidual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing every-thing they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. “Smelter or death.”The contract with Alcoa would infuse the re-gion with foreign capital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that potentially could be sold to the rest of the world; diversify an economy historically dependent on fish; and, in an appealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all of Iceland, once and for all, from the unpredictability of life itself.“We have to live,” Halldór Ásgrímsson said in his sad, sonorous voice. Halldór, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving force behind the project. “We have a right to live.”27. According to the passage, most Icelanders view land as something ofA. environmental value.B. commercial value.C. potential value for tourism.D. great value for livelihood.28. What is Iceland’s old-aged advocates’ feeling towar ds theAlcoa project?A. Iceland is wealthy enough to reject the project.B. The project would lower life expectancy.C. The project would cause environmental problems.D. The project symbolizes and end to the colonial legacies.29. The disappearance of the old way of life was due to all the following EXCEPTA. fewer fishing companies.B. fewer jobs available.C. migration of young people.D. impostion of fishing quotas.30. The 4 paragraph in the passageA. sums up the main points of the passage.B. starts to discuss an entirely new point.C. elaborates on the last part of the 3 paragraph.。