1、专业八级分类模拟 190及答案解析(总分:100.10,做题时间:90 分钟)一、READING COMPREHENSIO(总题数:1,分数:100.00)Section A Multiple-Choice Questions In this section there are several passages by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice qutestion, there are four suggested answers marked A. B, C and D. Choose the on
2、e that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE FRANKFURTI bumped down in Frankfurt at 10:55 AM. A German landing, I thoughtunsubtle and punctual. The sky was clear, an un-German sky, and the colors that assailed me were pink (Deutsche Telekom), yellow (Luf
3、thansa) and gray: cool colors at some remove from Caspar David Friedrich“s ecstatic dusks in the forests of Gothic gloom. Friedrich“s passionate romanticism is under control these days in a Germany that has become reassuring to the point of dullness. Europe“s most powerful nation is electing its lea
4、der Sundayand nobody really cares. “Welcome to the most boring German election ever,“ former foreign minister Joschka Fischer told me by way of greeting. That was enough to compel me to write about the miracle of German dullness. It is the cause for hope, a commodity the commodity-rich Middle East d
5、oes not trade in. The drudgery is also the cause for concern: more on that later. Lest anyone forget, the world spent a goodly chunk of the last century agonizing over the German question, mining the proximity of the Polish border to Berlin, digesting the crime. It“s just 20 years since this country
6、 was made whole and, with it, Europe. Now mighty Germany chooses its chancellor and, for all people seem to care, the election might be for the Wrzburg city council. It“s not true that everything changes so that everything can remain the same. The German demon got extirpated by American tutelage, Eu
7、ropean convergence and the rule of law. Modem Germany, the Johnny-come-lately of European powers, settled down. The German frisson faded to a yawn. Perhaps B ? rbel Bohley, the former East German dissident, summed up the experience, and let-down, of unification best: “We wanted justice and we got th
8、e rule of law.“ Another protest leader, Joachim Gauck, ran her close: “We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia.“ Such is the way of adrenalin. It dissipates. And along comes Angela Merkel, the adrenalin-free Ossi, who has been a chancellor of unmemorable steadiness, and who, bar
9、ring an upset, will be reelected as the head of her center-right Christian Democratic Union. Merkel has been a leader in the image of a settled Germany. Everything about her screams drama overBrandt on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto; chain-smoking Schmidt (“a politician with vision needs to see an o
10、phthalmologist“) fighting the fight for medium-range U.S. missiles; Kohl clasping Mitterrand“s hand at Verdun and later inhaling unification with unabashed appetite. Every risk-averse fiber in Merkel“s body proclaims the social-market consensus has prevailed, even through financial crisis. The exten
11、t of discord may be measured by the fact that Merkel“s chief opponent is also her foreign minister in the governing Grand Coalition: Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democrat leader. He“s a likeable technocrat who always seems to be wondering how he ever ended up as a politician. None of the abov
12、e should suggest there“s nothing at stake. There is: a little. If Merkel gets her favored optiona center-right coalition with the liberal Free Democratstax cuts, nuclear power and support for the Afghan mission (Germany has sent more than 4,000 troops) will get a boost. If not, well, more of the sam
13、e is in order. My sense is most Germans feel market reforms of recent years have gone far enough. Germans are hunkered down, not unhappy but uninspired. This has been a campaign of astonishing intellectual nullity. I spoke of hope and concern: The former springs from Germany“s absorption of its east
14、ern third and passage into normality, the latter from the country“s numbness. Nothingnot the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, not the faltering direction of the European Union (once a German obsession, now a sideshow), not financial Armageddonseems able to stir Germans from contemplation of
15、 their navels. This is bad for Europe. The world wanted a boring Germany for a while, but not to this degree, and anyway that time has passed. Perhaps the center-right option would be a better outcome if only because the Social Democrats need time in the wilderness to resolve their relationship with
16、 the Left party. The Grand Coalition is an idea-dampening soporific. Prescription for more than four years is ill-advised. Germany is in political transition. If the East has been economically absorbed, its political legacy, in the form of the Left party, has proved inhibiting, even paralyzing. Hist
17、ory moves in broad sweeps murky to its hindsight-deprived actors. We can say this: The eruption into the heart of Europe of a German nation state upended the Continent from 1871 to 1945 and a full “normalization“ of Germany has taken from 1945 to the present. The long arc has been painful but hopefu
18、l. The demon of instability, German-prodded, moved to the Middle East, where another modem nation state, Israel, in turn upended the order of things. Perhaps after 74 years (1871-1945), we will see glimmerings of a new, more peaceful regional order there. Hope is almost as stubborn as facts. PASSAGE
19、 TWO When scientists at the Australian Institute of Sport recently decided to check the Vitamin D status of some of that country“s elite female gymnasts, their findings were fairly alarming. Of the 18 gymnasts tested, 15 had levels that were “below current recommended guidelines for optimal bone hea
20、lth,“ the study“s authors report. Six of these had Vitamin D levels that would qualify as medically deficient. Unlike other nutrients, Vitamin D can be obtained by exposure to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight, as well as through foods or supplements. Of course, female gymnasts are a unique and sp
21、ecialized bunch, not known for the quality or quantity of their diets, or for getting outside much. But in another study presented at a conference earlier this year, researchers found that many of a group of distance runners also had poor Vitamin D status. Forty percent of the runners, who trained o
22、utdoors in sunny Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had insufficient Vitamin D. “It was something of a surprise,“ says D. Enette Larson-Meyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Wyoming and one of the authors of the study. Vitamin D is an often overloo
23、ked element in athletic achievement, a “sleeper nutrient,“ says John Anderson, a professor emeritus of nutrition at the University of North Carolina and one of the authors of a review article published online in May about Vitamin D and athletic performance. Vitamin D once was thought to be primarily
24、 involved in bone development. But a growing body of research suggests that it“s vital in multiple different bodily functions, including allowing body cells to utilize calcium (which is essential for cell metabolism), muscle fibers to develop and grow normally, and the immune system to function prop
25、erly. “Almost every cell in the body has receptors“ for Vitamin D, Anderson says. “It can up-regulate and down-regulate hundreds, maybe even thousands of genes,“ Larson-Meyer says. “We“re only at the start of understanding how important it is.“ But many of us, it seems, no matter how active and scru
26、pulous we are about health, don“t get enough Vitamin D. Nowadays, “many people aren“t going outside very much,“ Johnson says, and most of us assiduously apply sunscreen and take other precautions when we do. The Baton Rouge runners, for instance, most likely “ran early in the morning or late in the
27、day,“ Larson-Meyer says, reducing their chances of heat stroke or sunburn, but also reducing their exposure to sunlight. Meanwhile, dietary sources of Vitamin D are meager. Cod-liver oil provides a whopping dose. But a glass of fortified milk provides a fraction of what scientists now think we need
28、per day. (A major study published online in the journal Pediatrics last month concluded that more than 60 percent of American children, or almost 51 million kids, have “insufficient“ levels of Vitamin D and another 9 percent, or 7.6 million children, are clinically “deficient,“ a serious condition.
29、Cases of childhood rickets, a bone disease caused by lack of Vitamin D, have been rising in the U.S. in recent years.) Although few studies have looked closely at the issue of Vitamin D and athletic performance, those that have are suggestive. A series of strange but evocative studies undertaken dec
30、ades ago in Russia and Germany, for instance, hint that the Eastern Bloc nations may have depended in part on sunlamps and Vitamin D to produce their preternaturally well-muscled and world-beating athletes. In one of the studies, four Russian sprinters were doused with artificial, ultraviolet light.
31、 Another group wasn“t. Both trained identically for the 100-meter dash. The control group lowered their sprint times by 1.7 percent. The radiated runners, in comparison, improved by an impressive 7.4 percent. More recently, when researchers tested the vertical jumping ability of a small group of ado
32、lescent athletes, Larson-Meyer says, “they found that those who had the lowest levels of Vitamin D tended not to jump as high,“ intimating that too little of the nutrient may impair muscle power. Low levels might also contribute to sports injuries, in part because Vitamin D is so important for bone
33、and muscle health. In a Creighton University study of female naval recruits, stress fractures were reduced significantly after the women started taking supplements of Vitamin D and calcium. A number of recent studies also have shown that, among athletes who train outside year-round, maximal oxygen i
34、ntake tends to be highest in late summer, Johnson says. The athletes, in other words, are fittest in August, when ultraviolet radiation from the sun is near its zenith. They often then experience an abrupt drop in maximal oxygen intake, beginning as early as September, even though they continue to t
35、rain just as hard. This decline coincides with the autumnal lengthening of the angle of sunlight. Less ultraviolet radiation reaches the earth and, apparently, sports performance suffers. PASSAGE THREE “What“s done cannot be undone,“ moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke
36、up in the 21st century, she would be pleased to discover that whatever can be done can be undone, too. Or perhaps it just seems that way in the new social spaces we are carving for ourselves online. On popular web sites devoted to social networking, innovative verbs have been springing up to describ
37、e equally innovative forms of interactions: you can friend someone on Facebook; follow a fellow user on Twitter; or favorite a video on YouTube. Change your mind? You can just as easily unfriend, unfollow or unfavorite with a click of the mouse. The recent un-trend has also seeped into the world of
38、advertising. KFC is marketing its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken with the tagline “UNthink: Taste the UNfried Side of KFC.“ The cellphone company MetroPCS challenges you to “Unlimit Yourself,“ while its competitor Boost Mobile wants you to get “UNoverage“D“ and “UNcontract“D“ (ridding yourself of burd
39、ensome overage fees and contracts). Even victims of the financial downturn can seek solace in un-: ABC broadcast a special report in May telling viewers how to get “Un-Broke.“ Where did all of this un- activity come from? Ever since Old English, the un-prefix has come in two basic flavors. It can be
40、 used like the word “not“ to negate adjectives (unkind, uncertain, unfair) and the occasional noun (unreason, unrest, unemployment). Or it can attach to a verb to indicate the reversal of an action (unbend, unfasten, unmask). Both kinds of un-are ripe for creating new words. The negative variety of
41、the prefix has been particularly fertile for spinning off nouns, at least since 7-Up first branded itself as the “Un-Cola“ in the late 1960s. In the business world we now find unconferences and unmarketing, predicated on the notion that we need to rethink traditional models of conferences and market
42、ing. And beware of unnovation, the opposite of innovation. But it“s the reversible un-that has really been getting a workout lately, even more so than its semantic sibling de-(as in declutter or defragment). Our expectations that any action can be taken back have been primed by a few decades of pers
43、onal computing, which injected the founding metaphor of “undoing“ into the common consciousness. An early glimmer of our Age of Undoing appeared in a prescient 1976 research report by Lance A. Miller and John C. Thomas of I.B.M., drably titled “Behavioral Issues in the Use of Interactive Systems.“ “
44、It would be quite useful,“ Miller and Thomas observe, “to permit users to “take back“ at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special “undo“ command).“ Useful indeed! The undo command would become a crucial feature of text editors and word processors in the PC era, assigned the n
45、ow-familiar keyboard shortcut of Control-Z by programmers at the research center Xerox PARC. In the software of the 80“s, some undo commands became “multilevel,“ allowing users to take back a whole series of actions (called the undo stack), not just the most recent one. Ad- hoc un- verbs began to em
46、erge for these reversible innovations. In 1984, the software company NewStar introduced the unerase command for its word-processing program NewWord, while I.B.M.“s VisiWord countered with undelete. From there it was a quick step to unbolding, unitalicizing and even un-underlining your errantly forma
47、tted text. The Yale University linguist Laurence R. Horn sees an earlier technological metaphor at work in the flurry of un- verbs. As Horn writes in “Uncovering the Un-Word,“ a paper in the journal Sophia Linguistica: “The prevailing sense is that for something to unhappen, the tape of reality must
48、 be set to Rewind. That this is a practical impossibility . does not make the metaphor any the less attractive.“ Rewinding the tape of reality is an appealing metaphor in science fiction, unsurprisingly. Nancy Etchemendy“s young-adult novel, “The Power of Un,“ features a middle-school student who op
49、erates a gizmo called “The Unner“ to go back in time and undo past events. Songwriters have also made poetic use of the un- prefix to imagine the reversal of irreversible things, notably falling in and out of love. It“s a useful lyrical trick in such genres as folk rock (Lucinda Williams“s “Unsuffer Me“), R I could not unlove him now.“ What sets latter-day un-verbs apart from these historical examples is that the “reality rewind“ is no longer a flight of counterfactual fancy: it“s built right into the interfaces that we use to make sense of our shared virtual worlds. PASSAGE FOUR Curr