1、专业八级-605 及答案解析(总分：100.10，做题时间：90 分钟)一、READING COMPREHENSIO(总题数：2，分数：100.00)Section A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In 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 t
2、he one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One The sudden death of an admired public person always seems an impossibility. People ascribe invulnerability, near immortality to our centers of attention. John Kennedy dies, and it could not happen. John L
3、ennon dies, and it could not happen. Elvis, and Grace Kelly, and shock after shock. And now this death of a young woman by whom the world had remained shocked from the moment she first appeared before it, whose name contained the shadow of her end: Princess Di. But who would have believed it? People
4、 thought every thought that could be thought about Diana, but not death. She was beauty, death“s opposite. Beauty is given not only a special place of honor in the world but also a kind of permanence, as if it were an example of the tendency of nature to perfect itself, and therefore something that
5、once achieved, lives forever. Her life never seemed as tragic as it was often made outjust sad, and a little off. She married the wrong man. Her in-laws could be vindictive. For every photographer eager to capture a picture of her in one of those astonishing evening gowns or hats, another was hiding
6、 in the bushes ready to bring her down. One cannot think of any public statement of hers that was especially brilliant or witty. She was more innocent than clever; even her confession of an affair to a reporter sounded girlish. If pressed, few could say exactly what it was that made her so important
7、, especially to people outside England, except for the fact that one could not take one“s eyes off the woman. Yet that was no small thing. Diana was someone one had to look at, and such a person comes along once in a blue moon . She had a soft heart; that was evident. She had a knack for helping peo
8、ple in distress. And all such qualities rose in a face that everyone was simply pleased to see. In a way, she was more royal than the royals. She had a higher station than the Queen of England; she was the nominal young monarch of her own country and of every other place in the world. She was the se
9、ntimental favorite figurehead, who was authorized to sign no treaties, command no armies, make no wars. All she had was the way she looked and sounded and behaved. No model or actress could hold a candle to her. She was the image every child has of a princessthe one who can feel the pea under the ma
10、ttresses, who kisses the frog, who lets down her hair from the tower window. Her marriage was gone long before her death. As the years went on, it is likely that there would have been other romances after Dodi AI Fayed to tickle the throngs. Exactly how her life would have progressed is hard to imag
11、ine. She would have continued to be a good mother and a worker for the ill and the poor; she would have been pictured from time to time at a dinner party or on a boat. In older age she might have become the King“s mother, welcomed back into the royal family at a time of life that is automatically ac
12、corded status. How would she have looked? The hair whiter, the skin a bit more lined, but the eyes would still have had that sweet mixture of kindness and longing. By then the story of her and Charles, the scandals and accusations, might have been lost in smoke. Yet if people now were asked how they
13、 will remember Diana, what picture among the thousands they will hold in their mind, it would not be Diana at an official ceremony, or with a boyfriend, or even with her children. It would be her on the day of her wedding, when all the world was glad to be her subject and when she gave everyone who
14、looked at her the improbable idea that life was beautiful. (此文选自 Time ) Passage Two We all know that we don“t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance rema
15、ined intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the daywhere they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee. Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at Univer
16、sity of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world. In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study, some
17、 slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hoursfor two weeks in the lab. Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects“ ability to sustain attention with what“s known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P. V. T., considered a gold stan
18、dard of sleepiness measures. During the P. V. T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep. Th
19、e P. V. T. is tedious but simple if you“ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the e
20、quivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic. Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four-and six-hour groups had P. V.
21、 T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsin
22、g fives times as much as they did the first day. The six-hour subjects fared no bettersteadily declining over the two weekson a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures
23、speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straightthe cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. So, for most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no
24、 good, but what about if we split the difference? What is the threshold below which cognitive function begins to flag? While Dinges“s study was under way, his colleague Gregory Belenky, then director of the division of neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md.
25、, was running a similar study. He purposely restricted his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hoursthree, five, seven and nine hoursso that together the studies would offer a fuller picture of sleep-restriction. Belenky“s nine-hour subjects performed much like Dinges“s eight-hour ones. But in the seve
26、n-hour group, their response time on the P. V.T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thi
27、nking as clearly as we could be. Of course our lives are more stimulating than a sleep lab. we have coffee, bright lights, the social buzz of the office, all of which work as “countermeasures“ to sleepiness. They can do the job for only so long, however. As Belenky, who now heads up the Sleep and Pe
28、rformance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane, where Van Dongen is also a professor, told me about cognitive deficits: “You don“t see it the first day. But you do in five to seven days.“ And it“s not clear that we can rely on weekends to make up for sleep deprivation. Dinges is n
29、ow running a long-term sleep restriction and recovery study to see how many nights we need to erase our sleep debt. But past studies suggest that, at least in many cases, one night alone won“t do it. (此文选自 International Herald Tribune)Passage Three There are more than 300 million of us in the United
30、 States, and sometimes it seems like we“re all friends on Facebook. But the sad truth is that Americans are lonelier than ever. Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, to 25 percent, according to Duke University resear
31、chers. Unfortunately, as a new study linking women to increased risk of heart disease shows, all this loneliness can be detrimental to our health. The bad news doesn“t just affect women. Social isolation in all adults has been linked to a raft of physical and mental ailments, including sleep disorde
32、rs, high blood pressure, and an increased risk of depression and suicide. How lonely you feel today actually predicts how well you“ll sleep tonight and how depressed you“ll feel a year from now, says John T. Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and coauthor of Loneliness: Human Na
33、ture and the Need for Social Connection . Studies have shown that loneliness can cause stress levels to rise and can weaken the immune system. Lonely people also tend to have less healthy lifestyles, drinking more alcohol, eating more fattening food, and exercising less than those who are not lonely
34、. Though more Americans than ever are living alone (25 percent of US households, up from 7 percent in 1940), the connection between single-living and loneliness is in fact quite weak. “Some of the most profound loneliness can happen when other people are present,“ says Harry Reis, professor of psych
35、ology at the University of Rochester. Take college freshmen: even though they“re surrounded by people almost all the time, many feel incredibly isolated during the first quarter of the school year with their friends and family members far away, Cacioppo says. Studies have shown that how lonely fresh
36、men will feel can be predicted by how many miles they are from home. By the second quarter, however, most freshmen have found social replacements for their high-school friends. Unfortunately, as we age, it becomes more difficult to recreate those social relationships. And that can be a big problem a
37、s America becomes a more transient society, with an increasing number of Americans who say that they“re willing to move away from home for a job. Loneliness can be relative: it has been defined as an aversive emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between a person“s desired levels of social i
38、nteraction and the contact they“re actually receiving. People tend to measure themselves against others, feeling particularly alone in communities where social connection is the norm. That“s why collectivist cultures, like those in Southern Europe, have higher levels of loneliness than individualist
39、 cultures, Cacioppo says. For the same reason, isolated individuals feel most acutely alone on holidays like Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving, when most people are surrounded by family and friends. Still, loneliness is a natural biological signal that we all have. Indeed, loneliness serves an adaptive
40、purpose, making us protect and care for one another. Loneliness essentially puts the brain on high alert, encouraging us not to eat leftovers from the refrigerator but to call a friend and eat out. Certain situational factors can trigger loneliness, but long-term feelings of emptiness and isolation
41、are partly genetic, Cacioppo says. What“s inherited is not loneliness itself, but rather sensitivity to disconnection. Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites shou
42、ld serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction, Cacioppo says. For people who feel satisfied and loved in their day-to-day life, social media can be a reassuring extension. For those who are already lonely, Facebook status updates are just a reminder of how much better e
43、veryone else is at making friends and having fun. So how many friends do you need to avoid loneliness? An introvert might need one confidante not to feel lonely, whereas an extrovert might require two, three, or four bosom buddies. Experts say it“s not the quantity of social relationships but the qu
44、ality that really matters. “The most popular kid in school may still feel lonely,“ Cacioppo says. “There are a lot of stars who have been idols and lived lonely lives.“ (此文选自 Newsweek)Passage Four Laos, a poor country of 6 million people wedged between Vietnam and Thailand, has no openings to the se
45、a and few routes to world attention. But it is now enjoying a rare moment in the sun. Last month it won approval to join the World Trade Organisation. This week it hosted the ninth Asia-Europe meeting, which brings together leaders from the world“s most and least dynamic regions. Its small economy,
46、which exports gold, copper and hydropower, is distinguishing itself. Its growth rate is not only one of the fastest in the world but also one of the steadiest. In spite of the fluctuated growth rate worldwide, growth in developing Asia, especially in Indonesia and Bangladesh, is now steadier, as wel
47、l as faster, than growth in the “mature“ economies of the G7. The “Great Moderation“ is the name given to the era of economic tranquility that prevailed in America and elsewhere in the rich world before the financial crisis. Should the label now be applied to Asia? Asia“s economies are better known
48、for their speed than their stability. Even now some highly open economies, such as Thailand, Singapore, remain more volatile than the global average. Exposed to international trade flows, their industrial output fluctuates like a twirling ribbon with every twitch of demand. But developing Asia (whic
49、h excludes rich economies like Singapore, South Korea) is dominated by populous countries that rely increasingly on domestic demand to drive their economies. Household consumption contributed half of the growth of just over 6% Indonesia enjoyed in the year to the third quarter. Developing Asia“s combined current-account surplus, which reflects its dependence on foreign demand, more than halved from 2008 to 2011 and is expected to fall further this year. Asia“s stability also owes something to demand management. During the Asian financial crisis, policymakers faced a dilemma. They coul
