专业八级-614及答案解析.doc

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1、专业八级-614 及答案解析(总分：100.10，做题时间：90 分钟)一、READING COMPREHENSIO(总题数：2，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 Social circumstances in Early Modern England mostly served to repress women“s voices. Patriarchal culture and institutions constructed them as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate. At the beginning o

3、f the 17th century, the ideology of patriarchy, political absolutism, and gender hierarchy were reaffirmed powerfully by King James in The Trew Law of Free Monarchie and the Basilikon Doron; by that ideology the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch was seen to be imaged in the absolute monarc

4、h of the state and in the husband and father of a family. Accordingly, a woman“s subjection, first to her father and then to her husband, imaged the subjection of English people to their monarch, and of all Christians to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist ser

5、mons, tracts, and plays, detailing women“s physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrewishness, and natural inferiority to men. Yet some social and cultural conditions served to empower women. During the Elizabethan era (15581603) the culture was dominated by a powerful Queen,

6、 who provided an impressive female example though she left scant cultural space for other women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the 17th century, however, various circumstances enabled women to write original texts in some num

7、bers. For one thing, some counterweight to patriarchy was provided by female communitiesmothers and daughters, extended kinship networks, close female friends, the separate court of Queen Anne (King James“ consort) and her often oppositional masques and political activities. For another, most of the

8、se women had a reasonably good education (modern languages, history, literature, religion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women“s lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious female characters in literature

9、and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any monolithic social construct of women“s nature and role. Most important, perhaps, was the radical potential inherent in the Protestant insistence on every Christian“s immediate relationship with God and primary responsibility to follow his

10、or her individual conscience. There is plenty of support in St Paul“s epistles and elsewhere in the Bible for patriarchy and a wife“s subjection to her husband, but some texts (notably Galatians 3:28) inscribe a very different politics, promoting women“s spiritual equality: “There is neither Jew nor

11、 Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Jesus Christ. “Such texts encouraged some women to claim the support of God the supreme patriarch against the various earthly patriarchs who claimed to stand toward them in his stead. There is also the ga

12、p or slippage between ideology and common experience. English women throughout the 17th century exercised a good deal of accrual power: as managers of estates in their husbands“ absences at court or on military and diplomatic missions; as members of guilds; as wives and mothers who apex during the E

13、nglish Civil War and Interregnum (16401660), as the execution of the King and the attendant disruption of social hierarchies led many women to seize new rolesas preachers, as prophetesses, as deputies for exiled royalist husbands, as writers of religious and political tracts. (此文选自 The Guardian ) Pa

14、ssage Two Another milestone on the journey towards digital cash was passed on November 13th. That date marked the emergence from beta-testing in America of V. me, a “ digital wallet “ that holds multiple payment cards in a virtual repository. Instead of providing their personal details and card numb

15、ers to pay for stuff online, customers just enter a username and a password. The service is provided by Visa, a giant card-payment network whose headquarters is in the heart of Silicon Valley, close to a host of technology firms which would love to get their hands on a chunk of the global payments b

16、usiness. In the short term new technology is actually boosting usage of plastic. Smartphone apps often require users to enter their card details to pay for services. Firms such as Square and PayPal have developed tiny card readers that plug into smartphones and allow small traders using their softwa

17、re to accept payments cheaply. Ed McLaughlin, who oversees emerging payments technologies at MasterCard, reckons such developments have added 1.2m new businesses over the past 12 months to the card firms“ list of merchants. But even if plastic cards eventually go the way of vinyl records, card netwo

18、rks should still prosper because they too are investing heavily in new technology and have several built-in advantages. Visa is betting its member banks can help it to narrow the gap with rivals like PayPal, for instance, which is part of eBay and has grown to 117m active users thanks in part to its

19、 use on the auction site. Over 50 financial institutions are supporting the launch of V. me, which accepts non-Visa cards in its wallet, too. MasterCard and others are also touting digital wallets, some of which can hold digital coupons and tickets as well as card details. Before long all of these w

20、allets are likely to end up on mobile phones, which can be used to buy things in stores and other places. This is where firms such as Square, which has developed its own elegant and easy-to-use mobile wallet, and Google have been focusing plenty of energy. Jennifer Schulz, Visa“s global head of e-co

21、mmerce, predicts there will be a shake-out that leaves only a few wallet providers standing. Thanks to their trusted brands, big budgets and payments savvy, one or more card companies will be among them. Card networks are also taking stakes in innovative firms to keep an eye on potentially disruptiv

22、e technologies. Visa owns part of Square, which recently struck a deal with Starbucks to make its mobile-payment service available in 7,000 of the coffee chain“s outlets in America. Visa has also invested in Monitise, a mobile-banking specialist. American Express, for its part, has set up a $100m di

23、gital-commerce fund, one of whose investments is in iZettle, a Square-like firm based in Sweden. So far few have tried to create new payments systems from scratch. Those that have toyed with the idea, such as ISIS, a consortium of telecoms companies in America, have concluded it is far too costly an

24、d painful to deal with regulators, set up anti-fraud systems and so forth. Fears about the security of new-fangled payment systems also play into the hands of established card firms. Still, they cannot relax. Bryan Keane, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, points out that rival digital wallets could promo

25、te alternatives to credit and debit cards, including stored-value cards and direct bank-account-to-bank-account payments. Big retailers in America have clubbed together to create their own digital wallet and are likely to prompt users to choose the payment options that are cheapest for the chains, b

26、y offering them incentives like coupons. Jack Dorsey, the boss of Square and a co-founder of Twitter, agrees that digital wallets will make the trade-offs between various payment options clearer to consumers and reckons this will force card networks to up their game. “They had a major innovation 60

27、years ago“ he says, “and there have been very, very few innovations since.“ Some in the payments world might quibble with that but one thing they can all agree on is that the spread of mobile payments will bring many more customers. MasterCard“s Mr. McLaughlin claims that 85% of commerce still invol

28、ves cash and cheques. As mobile purchases take off, more of this activity will move online. The biggest prize of all lies in emerging markets, where a lack of financial infrastructure is hastening the rise of phone-based payments systems such as M-Pesa, which serves Kenya and several other markets.

29、Visa has snapped up Fundamo, which specialises in payment services for the unbanked and underbanked in emerging markets; MasterCard has set up a joint venture called Wanda with Telef6nica, a Spanish telecoms firm, which aims to boost mobile payments across Latin America. The payments world is changi

30、ng fast but the card firms are not about to let rivals swipe their business. (此文选自 The Economist ) Passage Three My car“s gear lever does more than dispense transmission rations. It panders to me. It cajoles and beckons. It wears out its chrome heart to make my life easier, foras its manufacturers a

31、re quick to claimthe company devotes hundreds of man-hours to testing and retesting each possible design and configuration to see which does the job best. Which shape fits most naturally into a human hand? Which covering is most pleasing? And which overall look makes your fingers tremble with antici

32、pation? This curious pursuit, reputedly espoused by and entrenched within all of today“s major manufacturing firms, is called ergonomics, defined as “the degree to which the system has been developed with the human user in mind“. Personally, I like the sound of the word. I wish only that the results

33、 lived up to the hype. Recently, for example, I purchased a rowing machine for home exercise. Within minutes of unwrapping my booty, I realized the unit I was so cautiously dissecting did not in any way match the color picture on the box. The assembly instructions hinted darkly that putting the cont

34、raption together would be only slightly less complex than building a nuclear reactor. Perseverance paid off, however. After applying equal amounts of time and luck, I was finally able to make my rower. But the only cogent ergonomic thought that went into the design of this product was the shape of t

35、he cardboard container it was packed in. That“s ergonomics in the real world. Take videocassette recorders, VCRs are like snowflakesno two are quite alike. While all are intended to do more or less the same thingsplay, record now, record laterthe actual designs are about as consistent and predictabl

36、e as a roulette wheel. If you lose or misplace the manual, you end up with little more than a digital clock. And then there is the ubiquitous microwave oven. What do those “low“, “medium“ and “high“ settings really hint at? Show me a consumer sufficiently schooled in the effect of microwave transmis

37、sions on food molecules to properlyand intuitivelyselect the optimal setting! Only small children, bless then, seem to know how to make these machines bend to their wills. “Put it on high and blast it,“ says my nine-year-old niece. I do. It works. Can anyone truly say the modern car is designed with

38、 the human user in mind? Recall the last time you plopped behind the wheel of your neighbor“s new vehicle. How quickly did you find the knob that popped open the bonnet or the hood? Were you able to adjust the left-side mirror without adjusting the right-side mirror, activating the headlight washers

39、 or wipers, or possibly lowering the convertible top? Did you know which lever to push or pull to slide the seat forward without simultaneously upsetting the angle of the seat back or exploding the pneumatically pressured back- support? As with most of today“s products, the only thing we really know

40、 about car seats is that, given the correct incentive, they will move. Beyond that, youand your ergonomically inspired intuitionare completely on your own. (此文选自 The Economist ) Passage Four To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind is prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simp

41、le rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error. If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep h

42、er mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don“t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habi

43、ts of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had n

44、ever seen one of them. Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, t

45、hat is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own c

46、ontrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry

47、 about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants. A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I wa

48、s young, I lived much outside my own countryin France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If

49、the people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution. For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject to the same limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi deplored railways and s