1、专业英语八级-阅读理解(十一)及答案解析 (总分：20.00，做题时间：90分钟)一、Text A(总题数：1，分数：5.00)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 the infamous $640 toilet seat. A
2、mid 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 youre going to build a stronger defense and build it fast, a bit of corruption is a necessary
3、 by-product.Todays 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 entrepreneurial economy? A bit of exce
4、ss 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 explained by Adam Smith and his followers, is th
5、at 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, economists argue and history demonstrates
6、, 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 line and attempt to place itbetween greed t
7、hat helps other people and greed that hurts other people. Inevitably, though, some will take greed too far. And thats a good thing (goes the argument I lack the courage to make). Why? Because you cant regulate greed with precision.Keynes used the term animal spirits to describe the motivation of bus
8、iness people. A successful economy needs a culture that encourages them, up to a point. Its a Goldilocks-type situation. You dont want too much greed, and you dont want too littleyou want an amount thats just right. But the dials are not all that sensitive. A culture that encourages enough greed in
9、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 argument. Instead, they offer inconsistent theories to
10、 explain the obvious. Lawyers for the Rigas family, which performed the remarkable feat of bankrupting a cable company, say their clients cant be guilty of a conspiracy to loot the company because they are too dimwitted: one is not the savviest guy, another is clueless. Martha Stewarts defense, by c
11、ontrast, 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 the brazenness defense. Kozlowski made no secret of the fa
12、ct 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, Scott Sullivan, former CFO of WorldCom, engaged in a more tr
13、aditional 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 no one step forward to say clearly that these seeming malefactor
14、s 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 many individual investors. Nevertheless, taken together, they are
15、a sign of the economys 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 producing.In fact, think of these unpopular figures as the canaries o
16、f 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 others may prosper. Does no one have the simple guts to tell this trut
17、h?Well, I certainly dont.（分数：5.00）(1).According to the passage, which of the following is NOT the defense made by the lawyers?（分数：1.00）A.The Rigas family are not so clever as to bankrupt the company.B.Martha Stewart is so clever as not to break the securities law.C.Kozlowski does not intend to commi
18、t a crime since everything is in the open.D.Greed is good for the economy to develop.(2).Malefactors in the eighth paragraph is closest in meaning to _.（分数：1.00）A.entrepreneursB.male presidentsC.criminalsD.heroes(3).What is the authors attitude toward those malefactors?（分数：1.00）A.appreciativeB.angry
19、C.contemptuousD.negative(4).According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true?（分数：1.00）A.The economy will not develop if too few people are taking greed too far.B.Greed can stimulate economy.C.People like Mother Teresa help enhance the economy.D.The cases of those malefactors show the bus
20、inessmen the farthest place they can go.(5).The main purpose of the passage is to _.（分数：1.00）A.show that financial abuse is a bad thing.B.defend excess.C.criticize a few peoples financial abuse.D.look for the cause of financial excess.二、Text B(总题数：1，分数：5.00)At a chess tournament in Tunisia in 1967,
21、Bobby Fischer, then 24, was pitted against another American grand master, Samuel Reshevsky. At game time, Fischer was nowhere to be found, so Reshevsky sat down opposite Fischers empty chair, made his first move, punched the game clock and waited. And waited. With five minutes left, Fischer suddenly
22、 strode onstage and, with a series of blindingly quick moves, hammered Reshevsky into defeat. Two days later, Fischer quit the tournament and abandoned 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
23、?In Bobby Fischer Goes to War (Ecco; 342 pages),David Edmonds and John Eidinow tell the story of Fischers most famous match, the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik. Fischer faced Soviet grand master Boris Spassky in a chess game that was not only an epic staring match between two intellectual glad
24、iators 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 missile crisis all rolled into one.The drama was hopelessly miscast. Fischer, the champion of the American way, was an antisocial, anti-Semitic ego-maniac
25、who complained about the lighting, the auditorium, the prize money, even the marble the chessboard was made of. Spassky, the cog in the Soviet machine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He was Ali to Fischers Foreman. Of course, Fischer ate him alive. Bobby Fischer Go
26、es 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 nongeniuses and conveying the richness of the world beyond the chessboard through details plucked from FBI and KGB records. We see, for example, Soviet exper
27、ts whisking Spasskys orange juice back to Moscow to test for suspicious capitalist contaminants.It seems to be in the nature of genius to zero 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 L
28、atin and Greek hut also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel 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 Egyptia
29、n language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone, a chunk of gray and pink rock with the same text written on it in both Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no one had yet deciphered. Unlocking hieroglyphics was Champollions great work, and Meyerson tells t
30、he story as a passionate linguistic love affair. After finally solving the mystery, Champollion collapsed in a coma for eight days.Champollion 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 divorc
31、ed, clueless parents living in a David Lynchperfect Michigan suburb in the mid-1990s. A loner and a compulsive tinkerer, Hahn somehow got it into his head in high school to build a nuclear reactor in his moms potting shed, and damn if he didnt come close. In The Radioactive Boy Scout (Random House;
32、209 pages), Ken Silverstein describes how Hahn extracted radioactive elements from household objectsamericium from smoke detectors, 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 MacGyv
33、er look like Jessica Simpson. When public-health officials finally caught on to what Hahn was up to, the potting shed was so hot that 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.
34、S. Enterprise, but his officers wouldnt even let him tour the engine room. Champollion died at 40. Fischer never defended his world 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 somethi
35、ng 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 well. Reading these books, one feels grateful for being just a little stupid.（分数：5.00）(1).According to the passage, which of the following about the 1972 match is NOT true
36、?（分数：1.00）A.Fischer defeated Spassky.B.It was a match between two cleverest men.C.It was an embodiment of strength of the two coutries.D.Fischer lost the match hopelessly.(2).Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?（分数：1.00）A.Champollion was linguistically gifted.B.Champollion be
37、came great for what he did.C.Champollion made great efforts to decipher the dead language.D.Champollion died of hard working at 40.(3).What is the main idea of the passage?（分数：1.00）A.Geniuses are great people.B.Geniuses are strange people.C.Geniuses always lead a sad life.D.To be too gifted is not g
38、ood for peopl(4).What is the authors attitude toward the geniuses?（分数：1.00）A.appreciativeB.sympatheticC.indifferentD.admiring(5).The book Bobby Fischer Goes to War describes the following except _.（分数：1.00）A.The Vietnam War Fischer went toB.Fischers most famous matchC.Stories beyond the matchD.Fisch
39、ers character三、Text C(总题数：1，分数：5.00)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 through his telescope one evening in 1877 and discovered what he
40、 took to be the Red Planets 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 awash in water. Photographs shot from orbit show vast plai
41、ns 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 their Mars rovers, having crawled across the planet for five w
42、eeks, finally determined that Mars, at some point in its deep past, was indeed drenchedto use NASAs termwith liquid water?Part of their excitement probably stems from sheer failure fatigue. NASA has had its share of setbacks in recent yearsincluding a few disastrous missions to Mars. So it was with
43、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 fell into place a few days ago.But there was also, for the NASA team,
44、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 that water was. At least some of the surface formations that look water
45、 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 evaporated.The experiments that put that theory to restand nailed down the pr
46、esence of water for goodwere largely conducted on one 10-in.-high, 65-ft.-wide rock outcropping in the Meridiani Planum that mission scientists dubbed El Capitan. The surface of the formation is made up of fine layerscalled parallel laminationsthat are often laid down by minerals settling out of wat
47、er. 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 El Capitan, performed with two different spectrometers, support the visual evidence. They show that it is rich in sulfates known
48、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 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 eruptionstrongly suggests the latter.None of these findings are disposit
