1、专业八级分类模拟 196 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 o
2、ne that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE Every political period has its characteristic form of scandal. During the Reagan defense buildup of the mid-1980s, the scandal of the day was “waste, fraud and mismanagement“ at the Pentagon, symbolized by th
3、e infamous $640 toilet seat. Amid the general embarrassment and excuse-making, only one defense hawk was bold enough to declare that waste and fraud were actually good things. “We need more“ of them, wrote Edward Luttwak in Commentary. If you“re going to build a stronger defense and build it fast, a
4、 bit of corruption is a necessary by-product. Today“s characteristic form of scandal is financial abuse and excess. So where is the Luttwak of today who will cut through all the demagoguery and the whining, the outraged criticism and the mealymouthed apologies, and say, “Look, you want a vigorous en
5、trepreneurial economy?“ A bit of excess is a necessary by-product. “We need more“ financial abuseit is a sign that capitalism is working. Who has the courage to make this argument? I am not that man. But if 1 were that man, the case would run something like this: the magic of capitalism, as explaine
6、d by Adam Smith and his followers, is that it channels individual greed into activities that benefit all of us. “Greed is good,“ declared Michael Douglas, playing a corrupt financier in the movie Wall Street. More accurately, greed is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. And in moderation,
7、 economists argue and history demonstrates, greed is no bad thing. Free-market economies could not function if we were all Mother Teresa. But there is nothing inherent in the human condition that keeps greed in moderation. So there are laws, and there are appearances. Both these forces draw a rough
8、lineand attempt to place itbetween greed that helps other people and greed that hurts other people. Inevitably, though, some will take greed too far. And that“s a good thing (goes the argument I lack the courage to make). Why? Because you can“t regulate greed with precision. Keynes used the term “an
9、imal spirits“ to describe the motivation of business people. A successful economy needs a culture that encourages them, up to a point. It“s a Goldilocks-type situation. You don“t want too much greed, and you don“t want too littleyou want an amount that“s just right. But the dials are not all that se
10、nsitive. A culture that encourages enough greed in enough people will encourage too much in a few. If nobody is taking greed too far, you can be certain that too few people are taking it far enough. For some reason, none of the lawyers who are defending the big greedheads have chosen to make this ar
11、gument. Instead, they offer inconsistent theories to explain the obvious. Lawyers for the Rigas family, which performed the remarkable feat of bankrupting a cable company, say their clients can“t be guilty of a conspiracy to loot the company because they are too dimwitted: one is “not the savviest g
12、uy,“ another is “clueless.“ Martha Stewart“s defense, by contrast, was in part that she is too clever to have done anything as dumb as conspiring to break the securities laws. Lawyers for Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco, take this line of reasoning further. The Wall Street Journal called theirs
13、 the “brazenness defense.“ Kozlowski made no secret of the fact that he used Tyco money for a yacht, kept his mistresses on the payroll and (possibly therefore) also let Tyco finance a $5 million diamond ring for his wife. How could he have criminal intent if it was all out in the open? By contrast,
14、 Scott Sullivan, former CFO of WorldCom, engaged in a more traditional form of gall in pleading guilty to $11 billion worth of accounting fraud. It was a “misguided effort to save the company,“ he said. Call this the Vietnam defense: it was necessary to destroy the company in order to save it. Will
15、no one step forward to say clearly that these seeming malefactors are actually heroes? That we need more of them, not fewer? True, Martha has been found guilty (though she is appealing), and others may lose in court as well. True, these people may have personally harmed the economy and ripped off ma
16、ny individual investors. Nevertheless, taken together, they are a sign of the economy“s robust health. Far better that a few greedheads get carried away than that we are worried that we are not getting the benefit of all the good, healthy, productive sort of greed that this county is capable of prod
17、ucing. In fact, think of these unpopular figures as the canaries of capitalism. They precede us into the coal mine of greed, going farther than the rest of us dare, showing us where far enough becomes too far and perishing in the effort. They are martyrs of capitalism, dying financially so that othe
18、rs may prosper. Does no one have the simple guts to tell this truth? Well, I certainly don“t. PASSAGE TWO At a chess tournament in Tunisia in 1967, Bobby Fischer, then 24, was pitted against another American grand master, Samuel Reshevsky. At game time, Fischer was nowhere to be found, so Reshevsky
19、sat down opposite Fischer“s empty chair, made his first move, punched the game clock and waited. And waited. With five minutes left, Fischer suddenly strode onstage and, with a series of blindingly quick moves, hammered Reshevsky into defeat. Two days later, Fischer quit the tournament and abandoned
20、 competitive chess for two years. Which raises the question, Why is the gift of genius so often given to people too stupid to know what to do with it? In “Bobby Fischer Goes to War“ (Ecco; 342 pages), David Edmonds and John Eidinow tell the story of Fischer“s most famous match, the 1972 world champi
21、onship in Reykjavik. Fischer faced Soviet grand master Boris Spassky in a chess game that was not only an epic staring match between two intellectual gladiators but also the focus of all kinds of weird, free-floating cold war cultural-political energy. It was the Rumble in the Jungle and the Cuban m
22、issile crisis all rolled into one. The drama was hopelessly miscast. Fischer, the champion of the American way, was an antisocial, anti-Semitic ego-maniac who complained about the lighting, the auditorium, the prize money, even the marble the chessboard was made of. Spassky, the cog in the Soviet ma
23、chine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He was All to Fischer“s Foreman. Of course, Fischer ate him alive. “Bobby Fischer Goes to War“ tells the story in fine, brisk style, interpreting the red-hot chess-fu actionthe Ruy Lopez opening! The Nimzo-Indian defense!for us
24、 nongeniuses and conveying the richness of the world beyond the chessboard through details plucked from FBI and KGB records. We see, for example, Soviet experts whisking Spassky“s orange juice back to Moscow to test for suspicious capitalist contaminants. It seems to be in the nature of genius to ze
25、ro in on its purpose. In the 1790s a young French boy named Jean-Francois Champollion, the son of a bookseller, became obsessed with ancient languagesnot only Latin and Greek hut also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to “The Linguist and the Emperor“ (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel
26、 Meyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed oft in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a 2,000-page dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone, a chunk of gray and pink rock with the same text
27、written on it in both Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no one had yet deciphered. Unlocking hieroglyphics was Champollion“s great work, and Meyerson tells the story as a passionate linguistic love affair. After finally solving the mystery, Champollion collapsed in a coma for eight days. Champ
28、ollion and Fischer were lucky: they were heroes in their time. Deprived of the spotlight, genius can grow up twisted and strange. David Hahn was the child of divorced, clueless parents living in a David Lynchperfect Michigan suburb in the mid-1990s. A loner and a compulsive tinkerer, Hahn somehow go
29、t it into his head in high school to build a nuclear reactor in his mom“s potting shed, and damn if he didn“t come close. In “The Radioactive Boy Scout“ (Random House; 209 pages), Ken Silverstein describes how Hahn extracted radioactive elements from household objectsamericium from smoke detectors,
30、thorium from Coleman lanterns, deadly radium from the glow-in-the-dark paint used on the hands of vintage clocks. For sheer improvisational ingenuity, Hahn makes MacGyver look like Jessica Simpson. When public-health officials finally caught on to what Hahn was up to, the potting shed was so hot tha
31、t it had to be classified as a Superfund site. Stories about geniuses rarely end well. Hahn wound up in the Navy, assigned to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the U.S. Enterprise, but his officers wouldn“t even let him tour the engine room. Champollion died at 40. Fischer never defended his worl
32、d title. He declined into irascibility and then obscurity. What happened to him? A chess master once said, “Chess is not something that drives people mad. Chess is something that keeps mad people sane.“ Which is to say that genius may lie not only in having a gift but in lacking something crucial as
33、 well. Reading these books, one feels grateful for being just a little stupid. PASSAGE THREE Was the Red Planet once a wet planet? A plucky Martian rover finally delivers some hard evidence. Giovanni Schiaparelli could have told you there had been water on Mars. It was Schiaparelli who peered throug
34、h his telescope one evening in 1877 and discovered what he took to be the Red Planet“s famous canals. As it turned out, the canals were an optical illusion, but as more powerful telescopes and, later, spacecraft zoomed in for closer looks, there was no shortage of clues suggesting that Mars was once
35、 awash in water. Photographs shot from orbit show vast plains that resemble ancient sea floors, steep gorges that would dwarf the Grand Canyon and sinuous surface scars that look an awful lot like dry riverbeds. Given all that, why were NASA scientists so excited last week to announce that one of th
36、eir Mars rovers, having crawled across the planet for five weeks, finally determined that Mars, at some point in its deep past, was indeed “drenched“to use NASA“s termwith liquid water? Part of their excitement probably stems from sheer failure fatigue. NASA has had its share of setbacks in recent y
37、earsincluding a few disastrous missions to Mars. So it was with some relief that leading investigator Steve Squyres announced that the rover Opportunity had accomplished its primary mission. “The puzzle pieces have been falling into place,“ he told a crowded press conference, “and the last piece fel
38、l into place a few days ago.“ But there was also, for the NASA team, the pleasure that comes from making a genuine contribution to space science. For despite all the signs pointing to Mars“ watery past, until Opportunity poked its instruments into the Martian rocks, nobody was really sure how real t
39、hat water was. At least some of the surface formations that look water carved could have been formed by volcanism and wind. Just two years ago, University of Colorado researchers published a persuasive paper suggesting that any water on Mars was carried in by crashing comets and then quickly evapora
40、ted. The experiments that put that theory to restand nailed down the presence of water for goodwere largely conducted on one 10-in.-high, 65-ft.-wide rock outcropping in the Meridiani Planum that mission scientists dubbed E1 Capitan. The surface of the formation is made up of fine layerscalled paral
41、lel laminationsthat are often laid down by minerals settling out of water. The rock is also randomly pitted with cavities called vugs that created when salt crystals form in briny water and then fall out or dissolve away. Chemical analyses of E1 Capitan, performed with two different spectrometers, s
42、upport the visual evidence. They show that it is rich in sulfates known to form in the presence of water as well as a mineral called jarosite, which not only forms in water but also actually contains a bit of water trapped in its matrix. The most intriguing evidence comes in the form of the BB-size
43、spherulesor “blueberries,“ as NASA calls themscattered throughout the rock. Spheres like these can be formed either by volcanism or by minerals accreting under water, but the way the blueberries are mixed randomly through the rocknot layered on top, as they would have been after a volcanic eruptions
44、trongly suggests the latter. None of these findings are dispositive, but their combined weight persuaded NASA scientists to summarize their findings in unusually explicit language. “We have concluded that the rocks here were soaked with liquid water,“ said Squyres flatly. “The ground would have been
45、 suitable for life.“ Does that mean that there wasor still islife on Mars? The fossil record on Earth suggests that given enough time and H 2 O, life will eventually emerge, but there“s nothing in the current findings to prove that this happened on Mars. Without more knowledge of such variables as t
46、emperature, atmosphere and the length of time Martian water existed, we can“t simply assume that what happened on our planet would necessarily occur on another. Opportunity and its twin robot Spirit are not equipped to search for life. Their mission is limited to looking for signs of water. But ther
47、e“s still a lot for them to do. Just knowing that rocks were wet doesn“t tell you if the water was flowing or stationary, if it melted down from ice caps or seeped up through the ground. And if water was once there in such abundance, where did it go? Opportunity, which is very likely to exceed its p
48、lanned 90-day mission, is already looking for those answers, toddling off to investigate other rocks farther and farther from its landing site. Spirit is conducting its own studies in Gusev Crater, on the opposite side of the planet. The next stepthe search for lifewill have to wait until 2013 or so
49、. That“s when NASA has tentatively scheduled the first round trip to Marsa mission that will pluck selected rocks off the Red Planet and bring them back home for closer study. Whether humans will ever follow those machinesPresident Bush“s January announcement notwithstandingis impossible to say. PASSAGE FOUR Even if prices shoot back toward $50 a barrel, that won“t wean the world from oil. Only government can do that. Is the internal-combustion engine dead? Listening to all the voices calling hybrid vehicles the future of transportation, you might think so. Alternati
