2014同济考博英语阅读真题(五篇)

2013同济考博英语阅读真题原文1.HUMAN NOISE DISTURBS DIFFERENT FISH IN DIFFERENT WAYSIt is well known that animals are affected by human noise pollution. For example, dark-eyed junco birds that live in cities sing both louder and with a different song than their countryside counterparts. However, human noise pollution is not contained to cities, and even our oceans are filled with the noise from ships, motorboats and jet skis.Most research into human noise pollution has looked at how animals deal with communicating when there‟s more noise than what they‟re used to. However, noise can disrupt more than just an animal‟s ability to communicate. Have you ever b een in a bar, and had trouble enjoying your food, just because the music was too obnoxious? Or, if you happen to like pounding beats with your pizza, what about when you‟re in a restaurant and an electric piano version of a Celine Dion song comes on and it makes you feel so physically sick that it‟s hard to digest your soup.While these aren‟t exactly the kind of problems that other animals face, having human-made noise might impair animals‟ ability to find food by stressing it out, making it less hungry, o r more directly through interfering with the animal‟s ability to detect its food.The three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatusA recent study compared the effects of human noise on two fishes: three-spined sticklebacks and European minnows. The researchers played a recording of ships to the fish while they were foraging to see how their behaviour differed from when they foraged with a playback of silence. When being played the sound of ships, both species of fish ate less of their food (the waterflea, Daphnia) and were startled more often than when they had quiet. However, it seems that the noise disrupted the behaviour of the sticklebacks and minnows in different ways.The European Minnow Phoxinus phoxinusWhen the sticklebacks were played the ship noise, they made more errors while they were foraging, whereas the minnows were just less motivated overall to feed.If a fish has this kind of disruption to its feeding it can mean that it then eats more when it is quiet, or spends more time foraging overall. This can in turn increase its chances of being eaten by a predator, if it is forced to search for food during the time or in the areas that predators hunt.The waterflea, Daphnia, a very peculiar-looking invertebrateIn an unexpected twist to this tale, anthropogenic noise (for example of ships), can actually affect the behaviour of the invertebrate prey (like the waterflea prey of these fish) as well as the fish themselves. Such noise can make invertebrates like these waterfleas more alert to danger, and therefore harder to catch by their predators. However, in the current study at least, thesticklebacks seemed to be making more errors to do with attacking non-food items instead of the waterfleas rather than the waterfleas being better at escaping them.As this experiment was carried out in the lab, it‟s not clear how reliably it translates to natural conditions. For example, it is possible that fish that are constantly exposed to anthropogenic noise habituate to it and …learn to live with it‟. Studies in the future will need to address how wild fish populations deal with the anthropogenic noise they are exposed to, and whether it alters t2.THE CULT OF OVERWORKFor decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen hours a day, and forgo anything resembling a normal life. But things may be changing. Last October, Goldman Sachs told its junior investment-banking analysts not to work on Saturdays, and it has said that all analysts, on average, should be working no more than seventy to seventy-five hours a week. A couple of weeks ago, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that analysts are expected to have four weekend days off a month. And, last week, Credit Suisse told its analysts that they should not be in the office on Saturdays.These changes may sound small, but, in the context of the Street, they‟re positively radica l. Alexandra Michel, a former Goldman associate who is now on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, published a nine-year study of two big investment banks and found that people spent up to a hundred and twenty hours a week on the job. In the pre-cell-phone, pre-e-mail days, it was possible for people to find respite when they left the office. But, as David Solomon, the global co-head of investment banking at Goldman, told me, “Today, technology means thatwe‟re all available 24/7. And, because eve ryone demands instant gratification and instant connectivity, there are no boundaries, no breaks.”Cry me a river, you might say. But what happened on Wall Street is just an extreme version of what‟s happened to so-called knowledge workers in general. Thirty years ago, the best-paid workers in the U.S. were much less likely to work long days than low-paid workers were. By 2006, the best paid were twice as likely to work long hours as the poorly paid, and the trend seems to be accelerating. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals found that ninety-four per cent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of sixty-five hours a week. Overwork has become a credential of prosperity.The perplexing thing about the cult of overwork is that, as we‟ve known for a while, long hours diminish both productivity and quality. Among industrial workers, overtime raises the rate of mistakes and safety mishaps; likewise, for knowledge workers fatigue and sleep-deprivation make it hard to perform at a high cognitive level. As Solomon put it, past a certain point overworked people become “less efficient and less effective.” And the effects are cumulative. The bankers Michel studied started to break down in their fourth year on the job. They suffered from depression, anxiety, and immune-system problems, and performance reviews showed that their creativity and judgment declined.If the benefits of working fewer hours are this clear, why has it been so hard for businesses to embrace the idea? Simple economics certainly plays a role: in some cases, such as law firms that bill by the hour, the system can reward you for working longer, not smarter. And even if a person pulling all-nighters is less productive than a well-rested substitute w ould be, it‟s still cheaper to pay one person to work a hundred hours a week than two people to work fifty hours apiece. (In the case of medicine, residents work long hours not just because it‟s good training but also because they‟re a cheap source of labo r.) On top of this, the productivity of most knowledge workers is much harder to quantify than that of, say, an assembly-line worker. So, as Bob Pozen, a former president of Fidelity Management and the author of “Extreme Productivity,” a book on slashing w ork hours, told me, “Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive someone is, even though it doesn‟t have any necessary connection to what they achieve.”Habit, too, is powerful: things are done a certain way because that‟s how they‟ve been doneb efore, and because that‟s the way the people in charge were trained. When new regulations limited medical residents‟ working hours to eighty a week, many doctors complained of declining standards and mollycoddling, and said that it would have a disastrous effect on training, even though residents in Europe work many fewer hours, without harming the quality of medical care. “I went through it, so you should” is a difficult impulse to resist.To make these new policies stick, then, banks have to change not just rules but expectations. Indeed, as Michel told me, “it isn‟t really external rules that force bankers to work the way they do. It‟s an entire cultural system.” She cites the example of a consulting firm that mandated that people stay out of the office on weekends, only to discover that they were working secretly from home. In a culture that venerates overwork, people internalize crazy hours as the norm. As the anthropologist Karen Ho writes in her book “Liquidated,” “On Wall Street, hard work is always o verwork.” Grinding out hundred-hour weeks for years helps bankers think of themselves as tougher and more dedicated than everyone else. And working fifteen hours a day doesn‟t just demonstrate your commitment to a company; it also reinforces that commitment. Over time, the simple fact that you work so much becomes proof that the job is worthwhile, and being in the office day and night becomes a kind of permanent initiation ritual. The challenge for Wall Street is: can it still get bankers to run with the pack if it stops treating them like dogs？3. A VIOLENT DISRUPTION FOR SILICON V ALLEY’S DISRUPTORSTransportation seems like an odd gauge of the tensions engendered by a booming tech economy. But the private buses chartered by technology giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook toferry their highly compensated employees from the heart of San Francisco to Silicon Valley and back have, over the past year, become one of the most potent symbols of the widening class divide in the city, stoking blockades and protests against gentrification. Over the summer, striking Bay Area Rapid Transit workers became representatives of what some in techsee as the inefficiencies of government. And technology-powered car services such as Uber,which passengers beckon by mobile application, have become leading emissaries of Silicon Valley‟s ethos of disruption, as they attempt to bypass, upend, or destroy traditional taxi services andthe regulations that govern them.Since its founding, in 2009, Uber has expanded into more than sixty cities and twenty-two countries, and it appears to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. It‟s easy enough to understand why people who can afford it love Uber: when you order a vehicle with a tap on your smartphone, you‟re able follow a moving cartoon car as it zips toward you on a map, like a game of Pac-Man that you win every time; when the animated automobile arrives at the blue dot, you get in. On the West Coast, according to New York magazine‟s Kevin Roose, many hail it as “the messiah.” But not every terrain that Uber seeks to conquer is quite so ready for its brand of salvation.The same year that Uber launched, the French government adopted a law aimed at modernizing the tourism industry. To alleviate the outsized demand for taxis—which number just fifty-five thousand in the entire country—one of the statutes loosened restrictions on vehicles for hire. Known as “Voitures de Tourisme avec Chauffeurs,” or V.T.C.s, the cars can be reserved in advance by passengers but, much like livery cabs in New York City, do not display a taxi light and cannot accept street hails. Since the law took effect, about twelve thousand V.T.C.s have joined the national fleet from hundreds of private companies, including Allocab, LeCab, SnapCar, Chauffeur-Privé, Drive, Voitures Jaunes, and, of course, “le californien Uber.”Paris became Uber‟s biggest market outside the United States, as Parisians suddenly had an alternative to snaking taxi lines. The emergence of new cars, in tandem with apps that allow vehicles to be summoned at a moment‟s notice, provoked a strong response from cabbies, who feel that their livelihood is threatened. In October, regulators bowed to protests and introduced a measure that requires V.T.C.s to wait fifteen minutes after a customer books a car before picking her up—unless the reservation comes from a four-star or five-star hotel, or from a trade show. But the measure, which went into effect on January 1st, did not placate the taxi drivers, who are now agitating for a thirty-minute delay, and a fixed minimum charge of sixty euros per trip.Last Monday, at dawn, hundreds of cab drivers gathered at Paris‟s two major airports, Orly and Charles de Gaulle, to protest V.T.C.s and to voice their displeasure with what they consider thenew law‟s lax measures. They planned to depart at 8 A.M. and, three hours later, converge at the Invalides—a splendid mélange of museum, military monument, and mausoleum. The cars arranged themselves to form a bottleneck: some blocked off lanes, while others slowly crept along the route. The procession, which the newspaper Les Echos dubbed “L‟opération escargot” (Operation Snail), caused “extremely difficult” traffic j ams that stretched for two hundred and forty kilometers, according to the National Traffic Information Center.One car that had the misfortune of being on the road was an Uber vehicle carrying Renaud Visage, the chief technology officer of Eventbrite, an online ticketing platform that prides itself on providing the “tools you need to bring people together,” and Kat Borlongan, a co-founder of Five by Five, a data firm. According to Borlongan, the “parked cabs blocked several lanes to filter traffic, singling out c ar services and cab drivers not on strike.” The scene, she wrote, more closely resembled “checkpoints than picket lines.” When their car—visibly branded as a V.T.C.—passed, assailants threw rocks and paint, shattered its windows, and slashed its back tire, forcing it to pull over. Borlongan tweeted, “Got attacked in an @uber by cab drivers on strike near Paris airport: smashed windows, flat tires, vandalized vehicle and b leeding hands.” Then, she added, “Attackers tried to get in the car but our brave @uber driver manoeuvred us to safety, changed the tire on the freeway and got us home.” Afterward, Visage tweeted that he wouldn‟t use cabs anymore, “just @Uber.” Uber eventually confirmed that a dozen such skirmishes took place throughout the day in Paris and Lyon, involving “flat tires, eggs, broken windows,” and called the violence by cab drivers “unacceptable.”The tensions are ultimately something of a stereotypical French stalemate: it‟s evident that m ore taxicabs are needed and, broadly speaking, that more French citizens need jobs. But instead of licensing more cabs and mitigating the disparity between license rates for V.T.C.s and traditional cars—as a driver from the Force Ouvrière union put it last week, “We pay 230,000 for a license. V.T.C.s pay 120 euros. Do you find this f air?”—there are protests over privatization and the mercilessness of raw capitalism.This is partly because, for all its talk of struggle and upheaval, France is a country of heavier regulation and protectionism than the U.S.; technological novelty doesn‟t carry the same inherent value in France that it does in Silicon Valley. Bookstores are not permitted to offer discounts deeper than five per cent below the publisher-set price, to Amazon‟s detriment. The government also maintains tight quotas and rules to protect the country‟s film and music industries, around which Netflix must tiptoe as it prepares to enter the market. In France, many still have a local bakery, butcher, and produce market, and citizens buy books, music, tickets, and electronics at the FNAC, a shop that can still feel like the socialist coöperative it once was.The upending of industry moves more slowly there, where greater thought is given to the imperiled worker‟s plight.But the dawn of Uber and the popularity of V.T.C.s are already a lesson to the French that a new model must be found for shuttling and shepherding; right now, neither drivers nor riders are pleased. Uber received praise last week for crossing picket lines to get its passengers safely home and, indeed, it‟s hard to see how roadway fisticuffs produce anything but regret. And yet, the cabbies‟ curbside concerns may have reverberated across the Atlantic, onto Uber‟s home turf: following the most recent blockade of Google buses, yesterday, the city of San Franciscoapproved a measure to charge tech companies for their usage of public bus stops. Somewhere between the status quo and disruption, beyond résistance and overregulation, there‟s a fairer way to travel.4.CAN WE REVERSE AGING BY CHANGING HOW WE THINK?Filed Under:CultureImagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It's 1989. Madonna is topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to "Cheers" and "Murphy Brown." Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated.But most important, you're 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you're at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men's mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness.Langer's findings were stunning: After just one week, the men in the experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) had more joint flexibility, increased dexterity and less arthritis in their hands. Their mental acuity had risen measurably, and they had improved gait and posture. Outsiders who were shown the men's photographs judged them to be significantlyyounger than the controls. In other words, the aging process had in some measure been reversed.Try Newsweek Print + Digital for only $1.25 per weekI know this sounds a bit woo-wooey, but stay with me. Langer and her Harvard colleagues have been running similarly inventive experiments for decades, and the accumulated weight of the evidence is convincing. Her theory, argued in her new book, "Counterclockwise," is that we are all victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health. We mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our self-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative clichés that dominate our thinking about health, we can "mindfully" open ourselves to possibilities for more productive lives even into old age.Consider another of Langer's mindfulness studies, this one using an ordinary optometrist's eye chart. That's the chart with the huge E on top, and descending lines of smaller and smaller letters that eventually become unreadable. Langer and her colleagues wondered: what if we reversed it? The regular chart creates the expectation that at some point you will be unable to read. Would turning the chart upside down reverse that expectation, so that people would expect the letters to become readable? That's exactly what they found. The subjects still couldn't read the tiniest letters, but when they were expecting the letters to get more legible, they were able to read smaller letters than they could have normally. Their expectation—their mindset—improved their actual vision.That means that some people may be able to change prescriptions if they change the way they think about seeing. But other health consequences might be more important than that. Here's another study, this one using clothing as a trigger for aging stereotypes. Most people try to dress appropriately for their age, so clothing in effect becomes a cue for ingrained attitudes about age. But what if this cue disappeared? Langer decided to study people who routinely wear uniforms as part of their work life, and compare them with people who dress in street clothes. She found that people who wear uniforms missed fewer days owing to illness or injury, had fewer doctors' visits and hospitalizations, and had fewer chronic diseases—even though they all had the same socioeconomic status. That's because they were not constantly reminded of their own aging bytheir fashion choices. The health differences were even more exaggerated when Langer looked at affluent people: presumably the means to buy even more clothes provides a steady stream of new aging cues, which wealthy people internalize as unhealthy attitudes and expectations.Langer is not advocating that we all don uniforms. Her point is that we are surrounded every day by subtle signals that aging is an undesirable period of decline. These signals make it difficult to age gracefully. Similar signals also lock all of us—regardless of age—into pigeonholes for disease. We are too quick to accept diagnostic categories like cancer and depression, and let them define us. Doing so preempts the possibility of a healthful future.That's not to say that we won't encounter illness, bad moods or a stiff back—or that dressing like a teenager will eliminate those things. But with a little mindfulness, we can try to embrace uncertainty and understand that the way we feel today may or may not connect to the way we will feel tomorrow. Who knows, if we're open to the idea that things can improve, we just might wake up feeling 20 years younger.Passage 5."In every known human society the male's needs for achievement can be recognized... In agreat n umber of human societies men's sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, orability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness in facthas to be un derwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing somefeat."This is the conclusion of the anthropologist Margaret Mead about the way in which the rolesof m en and women in society should be distinguished.If talk and print are considered it would seem that the formal emancipation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of womenand a bout the complicated system of defences which men have thrown up around theirhitherto accept ed advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types ofoccupation and soci able groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubtof the seriousness of wo men's pretensions to the level of intellect and resolution that men, itis supposed, bring to the bus iness of running the world.There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men's status. In thefirst pla ce, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the woman Prime Minister, inIndia, Sri Lank a and Israel.Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. More diffusely there are the increasingly numerousconvergence s between male and female behaviour: the approximation to identical styles indress and coiffure, the sharing of domestic tasks, and the admission of women to all sorts ofhitherto exclusively mal e leisure-time activities.Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive or natural conditions ofhu man life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaelology, butthat do es not matter since it is not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardlyfelt expecta tions of people's sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiationbetween the roles of the two sexes. In this rudimentary natural society men go out to huntand fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women keep the fire going. Amorousinitiative is firmly reserved to the man, who sets about courtship with a club.1. The phrase "men's sureness of their sex role" in the first paragraph suggests that theyA. are confident in their ability to charm women.B. take the initiative in courtship.C. have a clear idea of what is considered "manly".D. tend to be more immoral than women are.2. The third paragraph does NOT claim that menA. prevent women from taking up certain professions.B. secretly admire women's intellect and resolution.C. doubt whether women really mean to succeed in business.D. forbid women to join certain clubs and societies.3. The third paragraphA. generally agrees with the first paragraphB. has no connection with the first paragraphC. repeats the argument of the second paragraphD. contradicts the last paragraph4. At the end of the last paragraph the author uses humorous exaggeration in order toA. show that men are stronger than womenB. carry further the ideas of the earliest paragraphsC. support the first sentence of the same paragraphD. disown the ideas he is expressing5. The usual idea of the cave man in the last paragraphA. is based on the study of archaeologyB. illustrates how people expect men to behaveC. is dismissed by the author as an irrelevant jokeD. proves that the man, not woman, should be the wooer60. The opening quotation from Margaret Mead sums up a relationship between man andwoma n which the authorA. approves ofB. argues is naturalC. completely rejectsD. expects to go on changing。