1、专业八级-624 及答案解析(总分：100.10，做题时间：90 分钟)一、READING COMPREHENSIO(总题数：3，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 As video game giants like Sony and Microsoft touted their new gizmos at the Tokyo Game Show this week, industry executives had more than the coming holiday sales season on their minds. Apple“s recent fora
3、y into video gameswith the iPhone, the iPod Touch and its ever-expanding online App Storeis causing as much hand-wringing among old industry players as the global economic slump, which threatens to take the steam out of year-end shopping for the second consecutive year. Among the questions voiced by
4、 video game executives: How can Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft keep consumers hooked on game-only consoles, like the Wii or even the PlayStation Portable, when Apple offers games on popular, everyday devices that double as cellphones and music players? And how can game developers and the makers of big
5、 consoles persuade consumers to buy the latest shoot“em-ups for $30 or more, when Apple“s App store is full of games, created by developers around the world and approved by Apple, that cost as little as 99 centsor even are free? The concerns highlight an accelerating shift away from hard-core games,
6、 which have traditionally driven console sales, to more casual ones played on cellphones. Of the 758 new game titles shown at the Tokyo Game Show, 168 were for cellphone platformsmore than twice as many as in the previous year. Apple did not participate in the Tokyo Game Show, which ends Sunday. But
7、 the company introduced a beefed-up version of the iPod Touch this month, explicitly comparing it as a gaming platform with the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable. Apple“s assault could even eat into sales of home consoles like Nintendo“s Wii, Sony“s PlayStation 3 or Microsoft“s XBox, as game
8、- playing quickly becomes centered on cellphones. Many in the industry say that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft need to explore more radical changes to their businesses, including an emphasis on software rather than hardware and a better way for users to download games. For game makers like Konami, the
9、 iPhone could be an attractive platform because it is cheap and easy to develop games for, with potentially large returns. Developing games for sophisticated machines like PlayStation 3 and XBox, on the other hand, is time-consuming and expensive. Decreasing interest from game makers could further h
10、urt Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, because they rely on solid game lineups to drive console sales. And in turn, lower console sales would mean fewer developers interested in making new games. To bolster sales of its Wii, Nintendo said Thursday that it would cut its price by a fifth in major markets,
11、following similar cuts by Sony and Microsoft for their own consoles. Nintendo is trying to stem a recent slide in popularity of the Wii. The console was a hit with consumers, thanks to its motion-sensitive controller , but sales have stalled, dropping to 2.23 million units in the April-to-June quart
12、er from 5.17 million a year earlier. A year ago, Nintendo also introduced a new version of its DS handheld device that lets users download digital content, including music, photos, videos and games, via a Wi-Fi connectiona clear imitation of Apple“s App Store. Microsoft, meanwhile, is developing tec
13、hnology that lets people play video games using natural body movements instead of hand-held controllers. In June, the company introduced a prototype of a project code-named Natal, a motion system that combines cameras with voice and face-recognition software. Sony has promised even more hardware wiz
14、ardry: 3-D video games and a new controller much like the Wii that is shaped like a lollipop and senses motion. Its PlayStation Go portable console, due next month, does away with memory discs and instead relies on downloads from a virtual store. But analysts say hardware is fast losing center stage
15、 to software in the game-playing world. What will draw consumers, said Hirokazu Hanamura, president of the Tokyo market research company, Enterbrain, is software prowess, like Apple“s App Store, which already has 21,100 gamesfar more than Nintendo and Sony combined. Many within the industry are wary
16、 of change. Still, Japan has experience in developing games for cellphones. According to an industry group, Japan“s cellphone game market reached ￥ 16.25 billion in 2007. Japanese companies have been especially successful in combining mobile phone games with social networking. Gree, a fast-growing s
17、ite with about 12.6 million users, gets visitors hooked on its social networking service, then offers cellphone games on its mobile version. The company makes money on advertisements and by charging for premium accounts . Some Japanese game developers, meanwhile, have jumped on the iPhone bandwagon.
18、 Since Apple first released the iPhone in the United States in 2007, Hudson, a games company, has introduced 26 applications for the App Store and logged 3 million downloads. Hudson plans to increase the pace of development, creating 20 applications a year. (此文选自 The New York Times ) Passage Two For
19、 more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the Westfor the brightest, if not for all, students. The tradition goes back to Plato, who argued in The Republic that “leadership should be entrusted to the philosopher“. More recently, in a World War II-era treatise, a Harvard Unive
20、rsity committee concluded that a liberal education best prepared an individual to become “an expert in the general art of the free man and the citizen.“ The report, which led to the introduction of Harvard“s general education curriculum, concluded, “The fruit of education is intelligence in action.
21、The aim is mastery of life.“ In recent years, the fruit has spoiled and such high-sounding rhetoric has been increasingly challenged. Critics have charged that liberal arts education is elitist education, based on undefined and empty shibboleths. Caroline Bird, social critic and author, argues in Th
22、e Case Against College that the liberal arts are a religion, “the established religion of the ruling class.“ Bird writes, “The exalted language, the universalistic setting, the ultimate value, the inability to define, the appeal to personal witness.these are all the familiar modes of religious disco
23、urse.“ Students in the 1960s charged that such traditional liberal arts courses as “Western Thought and Institutions“ and “Contemporary Civilization“ were ethnocentric and imperialistic. Other students found little stimulation in a curriculum that emphasized learning to both formulate ideas and enga
24、ge in rational discourse. They preferred, instead, to express themselves in experience and action; they favored feeling over thought, the nonverbal over the verbal, the concrete over the abstract. In the inflationary, job-scarce economy of the 1970s, many students argue that the liberal arts curricu
25、lum is “irrelevant“ because it neither prepares them for careers nor teaches them marketable skills. In its present form, moreover, liberal arts education is expensive education. Partly in response to these charge and, more immediately to faculty discontent, Harvard recently approved a redesigning o
26、f the liberal arts program. Faculty had complained that the growing numbers and varieties of courses had “eroded the purpose of the existing general education program.“ Students, they felt, could use any number of courses to satisfy the university“s minimal requirements, making those requirements me
27、aningless. The new core curriculum will require students to take eight courses carefully distributed among five basic areas of knowledge. The Harvard plan proposed to give students “a critical appreciation of the ways in which we gain knowledge and understanding of ourselves.“ Plausible as this cred
28、o may be, it rests on rhetoric and not solid research evidencebike curriculum innovations of the 1960s. In an era of educational accounting and educational accountability, it would be helpful to have a way of determining what the essential and most valuable “core“ of a university education is and wh
29、at is peripheral and mere tradition. What are the actual effects of a liberal education, this most persistent of Western ideals? It is sobering to realize that we have little firm evidence. Against this background, we recently designed and carried out a new study to get some of the evidence. Our fin
30、dings suggest that liberal arts education does, in fact, change students more or less as Plato envisioned, so that the durability of this educational ideal in western civilization may not be undeserved. In our research, liberal education appears to promote increases in conceptual and social-emotiona
31、l sophistication. Thus, according to a number of new tests we developed, students trained in the liberal arts are better able to formulate valid concepts, analyze arguments, define themselves, and orient themselves maturely to their world. The liberal arts education in at least one college also seem
32、s to increase the leadership motivation patterna desire for power, tempered by self-control. We started our study from two fundamental premises: first, that the evidence to date was probably more a reflection of the testing procedures used than of the efficacy of higher education; and, second, that
33、new tests should be modeled on what university students actually do rather than on what researchers can easily score. If liberal education teaches articulate formation of complex concepts, then student research subjects should be asked to form concepts from complex material and then scored on how we
34、ll they articulate them, rather than being asked to choose the “best“ of five concepts by putting a check mark in one of the boxes. Any study of the effects of higher education has the difficult task of distinguishing educational effects from simply maturational effects. In order to have some contro
35、l over the effects of maturation, therefore, we tested students who were receiving three different kinds of higher education. A traditional four-year liberal arts education at a prestigious Eastern US institution; A four-year undergraduate program for training teachers and other professionals; A two
36、-year community college that offers career programs in data processing, electronics, nursing secreta-rial skills, and business administration. At all three institutions, last-year students scored higher than first-year students, but seniors at the liberal arts college far outdistanced their counterp
37、arts at the teachers“ and community colleges. (此文选自 wiu. edu)Passage Three We“ve spent more than 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, the character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman . Willy is, perhaps, America“s consummate loser, a failure to his family. But if you can bear with
38、 me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid the postwar prosperity of 1949. Sure, his career was ebbing, but Willy kept a job for 38 years, he owned his househe had just made the last mortgage paymentand had a wife and two children. Today he“d be a survivor. Has our view of failu
39、re softened since Willy Loman“s day? In a country with a level of unemployment so high that it is likely to determine the outcome of the midterm elections, and where promotions, bonuses, and retirement savings seem like relics, failure is something many of us are wrestling with right now. But if we
40、begin to accept that success is not a simple, upward career trajectory, this economic crisis may not just reduce the stigma of being sacked but transform the way we think of failing. Shocking as it sounds, failure can be a good thing. It“s true, recessions can wreck self-esteem. In a nation built on
41、 success and a gloriously entrepreneurial spirit, the prospect of failure can make people fearfuland shamefuleven when it is not their fault. “There is a crash in every generation,“ wrote Arthur Miller in 2005, just before he died, “sufficient to mark us with a kind of congenital fear of failure.“ M
42、iller was commenting on a wonderful book by historian Scott Sandage called Born Losers : A History of Failure in America . Sandage believes Willy Loman was a success. But the message of the play, he says, is that “If you are not continuing upwards, if you level off, you have to give up. You might as
43、 well not live.“ We did not always believe this. In his book, Sandage argues that America“s ideas about failure were formed between 1819 and 1893, as busts followed a series of speculative booms. Before then, failure was not associated with individual identity. It just happened to you. Bankruptcy wa
44、s thought to come from overreachliving excessivelynot from lack of ambition. By the end of the 19th century, says Sandage, failure had gone from being a professional mishap to “a name for a deficient self, an identity in the red.“ Ralph Waldo Emerson encapsulated this in his journal in 1842, “Nobody
45、 fails who ought not to fail. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune. “ By the middle of the last century, at the time Willy Loman was hawking his wares, Americans could not face “the possibility of defeat in one“s personal life or one“s work without being morally destroye
46、d,“ according to sociologist David Riesman. This foolish, dangerous idea is under assault right now. Should financial success really be a moral imperative? Why do we think that an ordinary kind of life is of lesser worth? Studies have found that our most potent emotional experiences come from relati
47、onships, not careers. Those who work in palliative care report that, on their deathbeds, most people don“t regret not having clambered a rung higher, but having worked too hard, and having lost touch with friends. And history shows it is only when the economy is in the mud that Americans feel free t
48、o do what they want to do. As the author J. K. Rowling said so succinctly in her 2008 address to Harvard graduates, failure can mean a “stripping away of the inessential.“ When she was an impoverished single mother, she started to write her magical tales: “I stopped pretending to myself that I was a
49、nything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.“ This doesn“t mean it is an uplifting experience to be unemployed, of course. But it may mean we ease up on some of the judgment that springs from the false idea that a person without a job has not just hit bad luck or a poor economybut is a failure. Having a job is hardly the only, or best, measure of a life. It may also mean we can accept plateaus,
