2015年北京师范大学考博英语真题及详解【圣才出品】

2015年北京师范大学考博英语真题及详解

Part I Reading Comprehension (45%)

Directions: Read the following passages carefully and then select the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D by marking the

corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET with a single line through

the center.

1

The Pacific Northwest coast of north America is temperate rain forest, where trees like the red cedar grow straight trunks more than two meters thick at the base and sixty meters high. Western red cedar is often called the canoe cedar because it supplied the native people of the region with the raw material for their seagoing dugout canoes. These extraordinary crafts, as much as twenty meters in length, were fashioned from a single tree trunk and carried as many as forty on fishing and whaling expeditions into the open ocean.

The Haida people from the Queen Charlottes Islands off British Columbia were noted for their skill in canoe building. After felling a giant tree with controlled burning, the canoe makers split the log into lengthwise sections with stone wedges. They burned away some of the heartwood, leaving a rough but strong cedar shell. They then carved away wood from the inside, keeping the sections below the waterline thickest and heaviest to help keep the canoe upright in stormy seas. To further enhance the canoe’s stability, they filled the hull with water and heated it

to boiling by dropping in hot stones. This rendered the wood temporarily flexible, so the sides of the hull could be forced apart and held with sturdy wooden thwarts, which served as both cross braces and seats. The canoes were often painted with elaborate designs of cultural significance to the tribe.

The Haida raised canoe building to a high art, designing boats of such beauty and utility that neighboring tribes were willing to exchange quantities of hides, meats, and oils for a Haida canoe. These graceful vessels became the tribe’s chief item of export. In their swift and staunch canoes, the first people of the Northwest were able to take full advantage of the riches provided by the sea. With harpoons of yew wood, baited hooks of red cedar, and lines of twisted and braided bark fibers, they fished for cod, sturgeon, and halibut, and hunted whales, seals, and sea otters.

1. Why did the canoe makers keep the sections of the canoe below the waterline thickest and heaviest?

A. To prevent the canoe from overturning in rough water.

B. To shorten the work of carving wood from the inside.

C. To avoid having to paint the bottom of the canoe.

D. To make the canoe strong enough to hold forty people.

2. Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph two?

A. Carving changed the texture and strength of the wood.

B. It took the canoe makers several months to build a canoe.

C. The wood was beaten with stone tools to make it flexible.