1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 156 及答案与解析Part ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)0 A truly informed diner would choose a restaurant based on the quality of the menu and the chefs experience. The discerning investor would decide which c
2、ompany to back after studying the business plan and meeting the founders. In reality, people often copy the choices of others. 【R1】_Such bandwagon effects are not necessarily irrational.【R2】_ It can also be a way of coping with a surplus of choice: rather than study 100 models of music player, why n
3、ot assume the market has already figured out the worse?The existence of bandwagon behavior can be hard to prove. A product or an asset usually becomes popular(or unpopular)in the first place because it is genuinely superior(or inferior). But some have tried to isolate the self-fulfilling effects of
4、popularity. In a 2008 study by Matthew Salganik of Princeton University and Duncan Watts, now at Microsoft Research, participants tricked into believing a song was more popular than it actually was were more likely to download it.Scholars are now asking whether bandwagon behavior also prevails in la
5、bor markets. Although the number of long-term unemployed in America is coming down, is still near an all-time high. Such workers may simply be losing out to candidates with more qualifications or experience for the jobs that come open. A worse possibility is that long-term unemployment is at least p
6、artly self-fulfilling: employers may be reluctant to hire someone others have already passed over.【R3 】_The submissions were designed so that applicants with similar backgrounds, education and experience went for the same job. The only difference was how long the applicant had been jobless, a period
7、 that ranged from no time at all to as much as 36 months.【R4 】_These results strongly suggest that long-term unemployment is at least partly self-fulfilling. Like patrons who avoid restaurants purely because they are empty, employers were reluctant to hire someone other employers didnt want.Although
8、 such bandwagon behavior may be rational, it can also lead to poor outcomes.【R5 】_One near miss can increase the odds of protracted failure.AOften, the buyer knows less about a product than the seller; the collective wisdom of the crowd can correct for such “asymmetric information“.BThese results, t
9、he authors say, cannot be because employers found some qualitative flaw in the longer-term unemployed that was hidden from outsiders, since the applicants were similar in other respects.CDiners pick the crowded restaurant over the empty one. Investors go with the company that already has multiple ba
10、ckers.DTheir study suggests that taking some work is better than none for the recently unemployed.EImagine a newly unemployed worker who narrowly misses out on the first job he applies for. That initial failure reduces his odds of landing the second job he applies for, and so on, until he ends up as
11、 one of the long-term unemployed.FThey found that the odds of an applicant being called back by an employer declined steadily as the duration of unemployment rose, from 7.4% after one month without work down to 4-5% at the eight-month mark, where the call-back rate stabilized.GTo find out, Kory Krof
12、t of the University of Toronto, Fabian Lange of McGill University and Matthew Notowidigdo of the University of Chicago devised an experiment in which they applied for 3,000 clerical, administrative, sales and customer-service jobs advertised online by submitting 12,000 fictitious CVs.1 【R1 】2 【R2 】3
13、 【R3 】4 【R4 】5 【R5 】5 AOleg Baranov is a 27-year-old Russian earning his Ph. D. in economics at the University of Maryland. But for the last month hes been more actor than academic. His unenviable role: playing the part of an American bank with a balance sheet riddled with toxic mortgage-backed secu
14、rities.BSo what will work? A reverse auction shouldnt be ruled out, say Ausubel and Cramton. Unlike regular auctions,in which buyers outbid each other to win goods or services, the sellers in a reverse auction lower their prices in order to win new business. The benefits are twofold, say the Stanfor
15、d-trained professors.CAfter crunching the final results, Ausubel and Cramton feel their experiment did exactly what they hoped it would: prove that a reverse auction would result in the best use of taxpayer dollars spent through the bailout. They never paid more than a dollar for a dollars worth of
16、assets they bought from studentsan even deal at worst. But in many cases, they were able to buy about a $1.20 of assets for every dollar they spent. Applied to the real world, this means that taxpayers wont be overpaying for what Treasury buys; in fact, they may get a bargain.DThe $700 billion rescu
17、e plan initially focused on buying bad debt from banks that were left with nearly worthless securities after the housing market collapsed. Paulson said a worsening situation called for a change of strategy, and he started making cash infusions into financial companies, with the government taking an
18、equity share, in order to get the institutions lending again.EWhats the point of this little academic role playing game? The professors wanted to prove that a relatively obscure financial transaction known as a reverse auction might just be the best way to implement the $700 billion rescue plan Cong
19、ress passed Oct. 3. Instead, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is now favoring a plan to inject capital directly into struggling banks and companies. Whether or not that plan of attack will work or is a good use of taxpayer money is debatable.FAusubel and Cramton ran their final experiment on the nig
20、ht of Nov. 11. The next morning, though, they, along with the rest of the world, learned that Treasury had changed its mind when Secretary Henry Paulson announced he had scrapped the plan to buy assets from banks in favor of something a bit more fuzzy: offering aid not just to banks but to firms tha
21、t issue consumer debt by somehow jump-starting the market that provides financing for these companies.GTo prove their point, they made their auction experiment as real as possible by giving each student a portfolio of assets similar to the mortgage-backed securities that are weighing down the books
22、of hundreds of banks and financial institutions. And for an extra bit of reality, they had their students play with real money: $20,000 each. The students that established the best prices and ended up with the most money received cash awards. After four lengthy sessions, Baranov came away as the top
23、 earner with a little more than $1,500. Ausubel and Cramton have been touting that kind of win-win situation during regular conversations with Treasury officials, with whom theyve shared their results. They hope to convince officials that not only does a reverse auction work, but, in the event the T
24、reasury conducts one, to run it off their patented software platform.HWhile agreeing that the financial crisis has clearly seeped from the balance sheets of banks into the consumer lending market, Ausubel and Cramton were more than a little disappointed by the news. Rather than buy assets from banks
25、, Treasury has decided to buy equity in them instead. The hope was that it would prod them to increase lending, but so far that hasnt happened. Two days after Paulson made his announcement, lawmakers at a Senate Finance Committee hearing discussed how some recipients have continued to pay dividends
26、to stockholders and give pay raises and bonuses to executives and other employees. As a friendly reminder, the Federal Reserve issued a statement last week reminding banks that they should be lending to creditworthy institutions.Order:10 If you have lots of unused storage space on your hard disk, th
27、en why not share it with others on the Internet? The benefit could be distributed storage for your own files, making them available any time via the web, even if you are nowhere near your computerindeed, even if your computer is switched off. That idea is what a Zurich-based firm called Caleido is a
28、iming to provide, with a free online storage service known as Wuala that was recently introduced to the public.【R1 】_In particular, its developers, Dominik Grolimund and Luzius Meisser, have used a clever mathematical trick to compensate for the fact that the participating computers will come and go
29、 from the internet in an unpredictable way.【R2 】_Copying costs participants both storage space and bandwidth.Yet there have to be enough copies to ensure that there is at least one available most of the time. If, for example, each computer is online 25% of the time, then a quick calculation shows th
30、at you would have to copy each file to 100 different computers to ensure that 999,999 times out of a million there is at least one copy available when a user looks.【R3 】_Instead, Mr. Grolimund and Mr. Meisser plan to break each file into chunks, which can be scattered liberally around the hard disks
31、 of participating computers, and then to use a mathematical trick to reconstruct the original file from those chunks.【R4 】_The first step is to convert the file(which is, regardless of what it represents, simply a long string of ones and zeros)into a mathematical function called a polynomial. This i
32、s done by splitting it into 100 fragments, which are smaller binary numbers. It is these numbers that are used to define the polynomial. All you have to do is select a suitable number of points from along the polynomial and convert their values into the appropriate mathematical constructs. Scatter t
33、hese around the host computers and, when someone wants to look at the file, he need recover only 100 of them to have enough data to reconstruct the file from scratch. To have 100 points available 999,999 times out of a million it turns out that you need to scatter a total of 600 of them around. That
34、 is an amount of data equivalent to six versions of the original file. Moreover, the system needs the computers linked to it to be available for only 17% of the time, rather than 25% , for this to apply.【R5 】_Most commercial online-storage services use centralized servers. Although these are general
35、ly reliable, they do sometimes fail. And when they do, the results are embarrassing.Though some people may feel sick about scattering their data over hundreds of other computers(even though it will be encrypted), or storing unknown file fragments on their own, Mr Grolimund is sure that Caleido has l
36、earnt from other “peer-to-peer“ file-sharing systems, and that Wuala is built to handle concerns about the illegal distribution of copyrighted or “ inappropriate“ content.AThis trick, known as Reed-Solomon error correction, is employed routinely to interpret the data on DVDs, but it has not been use
37、d before in the volatile world of private computers on the Internet.BOne of the characteristics of a polynomial is that a few numbers can nail it down precisely. If a simple polynomial is plotted out on a graph it forms a line.COnline storage is a growing market, especially for backing up data, wher
38、e reliability is a big concern.DThe challenge is how to minimize the number of copies of the same file that have to be distributed.EIt has been proved that for online data storage, Wuala is as good to give as it is to receive.FThough the idea underlying it is simple, Wuala requires some nifty techno
39、logy to make its distributed system work reliably.GBut copying every file a hundred times is hugely inefficient.11 【R1 】12 【R2 】13 【R3 】14 【R4 】15 【R5 】15 AThe Development of Food Aid AgenciesBThe Upcoming Revisions to Present PoliciesCThe Dilemma and Hope of Present SituationDThe Problem of Malnutr
40、itionEThe Consequences Caused by Increased Food PriceFThe Shortcomings of the Present Food Aid SystemGThe Wrong Idea of Food ShortageFor years, anti-poverty campaigners railed against low commodity prices, which depressed farmers incomes in developing countries. In recent months, the world price of
41、virtually all staples has shot up, but the activists are still not cheering.【R1】 _High food prices do help poor farmers, but they also hurt the more numerous category of people who must buy food to survive, which has caused serious problems for the organisations that bring food aid to the poorest. T
42、he World Food Programme(WFP)has just issued an urgent appeal for $500m to cover higher food costs. Americas Agency for International Development(USAID)is asking for $350m.【R2】 _The short-term outlook seems grim, both for the poor and the agencies that supposedly help them. The WFP says hunger is on
43、the rise in the countries it watches. It classifies as “hotspots“ the placesmost of central Africa, plus Afghanistanwhere more than a third of the people do not get as much food as is needed. A second tier, where between a fifth and a third lack adequate food, includes much of West Africa, the India
44、n sub-continent and Bolivia. Dim as all this sounds, there are some grounds for hope. Todays woes may lead to fundamental changes for the better in the worlds approach to hunger and food shortages.【R3】 _One mistake is the very idea of defining the main problem as massive hunger, and hence the soluti
45、on as providing food by any means necessary. “There is simply no shortage of food,“ insists Rachel Nugent of Americas Centre for Global Development. Of course, there are places where political(and in some cases ecological)factors cause an intense local shortage of food. In those cases, food aid is t
46、he only option. But leaving aside those extraordinary events, most pundits agree that the world now has plenty of food. The real challenge is not the volume of food available; it is the problem of food being in the wrong place and at a price the poorest cannot afford. Michael Hess of USAID adds that
47、 famines are made inevitable by poor governance, not natural disasters.【R4】 _Moreover, hunger is transient and hard to measure, but malnutrition is a fatal killer. South Asia, which has plentiful food, suffers from twice the level of malnutrition as crisis-prone sub-Saharan Africa. The snag is that
48、tackling malnutrition is harder than sending bags of grain. It means fixing health systems, improving the delivery of nutrients in the food chain, educating people about hygiene and other unpopular and unprofitable jobs.【R5】 _Change may be coming. Over the objections of some tough lobbies, George Bu
49、sh has proposed fixing some of the distorting aspects of Americas food policies. The president has called for more emphasis on procuring produce from local farmers in poor countries. And in a bold gesture, CARE has said it will no longer accept any American government donations using the mon-etization approach. Most encouraging are some proposed changes at the WFP. Ms Sheeran hopes to persuade her board at a meeting in June to shift her age
