[外语类试卷]雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编19及答案与解析.doc
《[外语类试卷]雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编19及答案与解析.doc》由会员分享,可在线阅读,更多相关《[外语类试卷]雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编19及答案与解析.doc(21页珍藏版)》请在麦多课文档分享上搜索。
1、雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编 19及答案与解析 0 Morse Code Morse code is being replaced by a new satellite-based system for sending distress calls at sea. Its dots and dashes have had a good run for their money. A “Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.“ Surprisingly this message, which flashed ove
2、r the airwaves in the dots and dashes of Morse code on January 31st 1997, was not a desperate transmission by a radio operator on a sinking ship. Rather, it was a messagesignalling the end of the use of Morse code for distress calls in French waters. Since 1992 countries around the world have been d
3、ecommissioning their Morse equipment with similar(if less poetic)sign-offs, as the worlds shipping switches over to a new satellite-based arrangement, the Global Mari-time Distress and Safety System. The final deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the e
4、nd of an era. B The code has, however, had a good history. Appropriately for a technology commonly associated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said to have occurred to Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Adantic At the time Morse was a painter and o
5、ccasional inventor, but when another of the ships passengers informed him of recent advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the idea of building an electric telegraph to send messages in codes. Other inventors had been trying to do just that for the best part of a century. Morse
6、 succeeded and is now remembered as “the father of the telegraph“ partly thanks to his single-mindedness it was 12 years, for example, before he secured money from Congress to build his first telegraph line but also for technical reasons. C Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, such as the
7、 needle telegraph developed by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, Morses design was very simple: it required little more than a “key“(essentially, a spring-loaded switch)to send messages, a clicking “sounder“ to receive them, and a wire to link the two. But although Morses hardware was
8、 simple, there was a catch: in order to use his equipment, operators had to learn the special code of dots and dashes that still bears his name. Originally, Morse had not intended to use combinations of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. His first code, sketched in his notebook during
9、that transatlantic voyage, used dots and dashes to represent the digits 0 to 9. Morses idea was that messages would consist of strings of numbers corresponding to words and phrases in a special numbered dictionary. But Morse later abandoned this scheme and, with the help of an associate, Alfred Vail
10、, devised the Morse alphabet, which could be used to spell out messages a letter at a time in dots and dashes. D At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morses telegraph seem impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs. Cookes and Wheatstones telegraph, f
11、or example, used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-shaped grid. But although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires between telegraph stations. Morses telegraph needed only one. And some people, it soon transpired, had a natural facility for Morse code. E As ele
12、ctric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly became dominant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct connections between the telegraph networks of different countries.(Britain chose not to participate, sticking with needle telegraphs for a few m
13、ore years.)By this time Morse code had been revised to allow for accents and other foreign characters, resulting in a split between American and International Morse that continues to this day. F On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light-beam reflected from a tiny rotating m
14、irror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile a distinct telegraphic subculture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary, and a hierarchy based on the speed at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class operators, who could send and receive at speeds of up to 4
15、5 words a minute, handled press traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow, inexperienced rural operators, many of whom worked the wires as part-timers. As their Morse code improved, however, rural operators found that their new-found skill was a passport
16、 to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon swelled the ranks of the emerging middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women. By 1870, a third of the operators in the Western Union office in New York, the largest telegraph office in America, were female. G In a dramatic cerem
17、ony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global community of telegraphers he had brought into being. After a lavish banquet and many adulatory speeches, Morse sat down behind an operators table and, placing his finger on a key connected to every telegraph wire in America, tapped out his final
18、farewell to a standing ovation. By the time of his death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than 650,000 miles of telegraph line and 30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with Morse code; and 20,000 towns and villages were connected to the global network. Just as the Internet
19、 is today often called an “information superhighway“, the telegraph was described in its day as an “instantaneous highway of thought“. H But by the 1890s the Morse telegraphs heyday as a cutting-edge technology was coming to an end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic teleg
20、raphs, precursors of the teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse code, however, was about to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology: wireless. Following the invention of radiotelegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, its potential for use at s
21、ea quickly became apparent. For the first time, ships could communicate with each other, and with the shore, whatever the weather and even when out of visual range. In 1897 Marconi successfully sent Morse code messages between a shore station and an Italian warship 19km(12 miles)away. By 1910, Morse
22、 radio equipment was commonplace on ships. You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 on the following pages. Questions 1-8 Reading passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list of headings below. Write
23、 the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet. List of Headings i The advantage of Morses invention ii A suitable job for women ill Morses invention was developed iv Sea rescue after the invention of radiotelegraphy v The emergence of many job opportunities vi Standard and variations
24、vii Application of Morse code in a new technology viii The discovery of electricity ix International expansion of Morse Code x The beginning of an end xi The move of using code to convey information 1 Paragraph A 2 Paragraph B 3 Paragraph C 4 Paragraph D 5 Paragraph E 6 Paragraph F 7 Paragraph G 8 P
- 1.请仔细阅读文档,确保文档完整性,对于不预览、不比对内容而直接下载带来的问题本站不予受理。
- 2.下载的文档,不会出现我们的网址水印。
- 3、该文档所得收入(下载+内容+预览)归上传者、原创作者;如果您是本文档原作者,请点此认领!既往收益都归您。
下载文档到电脑,查找使用更方便
2000 积分 2人已下载
下载 | 加入VIP,交流精品资源 |
- 配套讲稿:
如PPT文件的首页显示word图标,表示该PPT已包含配套word讲稿。双击word图标可打开word文档。
- 特殊限制:
部分文档作品中含有的国旗、国徽等图片,仅作为作品整体效果示例展示,禁止商用。设计者仅对作品中独创性部分享有著作权。
- 关 键 词:
- 外语类 试卷 雅思 阅读 历年 汇编 19 答案 解析 DOC
