专业八级分类模拟357及答案解析.doc

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1、专业八级分类模拟 357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 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 the one that you think i

2、s 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 of the 17th century, the

3、 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 monarch of the state and in t

4、he 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 sermons, tracts, and plays

5、, 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, who provided an impres

6、sive 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 numbers. For one thing, so

7、me 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 these women had a reasonab

8、ly 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 and especially on the s

9、tage 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 or her individual consc

10、ience. 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 Greek, there is neithe

11、r 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 gap or slippage between i

12、deology 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 English Civil War and In

13、terregnum (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)Passage Two Another milesto

14、ne 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 numbers to pay for stuff online

15、, 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 business. In the short term

16、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 software to accept payments cheap

17、ly. 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 networks should still prosper be

18、cause 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 use on the auction site. O

19、ver 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 wallets are likely to end up

20、 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-commerce, predicts there will

21、 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 disruptive technologies. Visa owns p

22、art 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 digital-commerce fund, one o

23、f 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 and painful to deal with reg

24、ulators, 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 promote alternatives to credit

25、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, by offering them incentives

26、 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 years ago“ he says, “and t

27、here 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 involves cash and cheques. As m

28、obile 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. Visa has snapped up Fundam

29、o, which specialises in payment services for the unbanked and underbanked in emerging markets; MasterCard has set up a joint venture called Wanda with Telefnica, a Spanish telecoms firm, which aims to boost mobile payments across Latin America. The payments world is changing fast but the card firms

30、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 are quick to claimthe company

31、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 anticipation? This curious pursuit,

32、 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 lived up to the hype. Recent

33、ly, 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 contraption together would be onl

34、y 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 the cardboard container it was

35、 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 predictable as a roulette wheel. If you

36、 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 transmissions on food molecules to p

37、roperlyand 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 the human user in mind? Rec

38、all 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 or wipers, or possibly lowe

39、ring 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 backsupport? As with most of today“s products, the only thing we really know about car seats is that, give

40、n the correct incentive, they will move. Beyond that, youand your ergonomically inspired intuition are 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 simple rules will keep you, not fro

41、m 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 her mouth open while he counted.

42、 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 habits of hedgehogs, I should not c

43、ommit 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 never seen one of them. Many mat

44、ters, 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, that is a sign that you are subc

45、onsciously 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 contrary conviction. The most sa

46、vage 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 about a difference of opinion,

47、 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 was young, I lived much outside m

48、y 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 the people and the newspaper se

49、em 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 steamboats and machinery; he wo