考研英語閲讀理解命題思路透析和真題揭秘(11)

1998年Passage 3

Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo's 17th century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century.

Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics - but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked"antiscience" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R.Gross, a biologist at the University of Verginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon Haunted World, by Car Sagan of Cornell University.

Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as"The Flight from Science and Reason," held in New York City in 1995, and"Science in the Age of (Mis)information," which assembled last June near Buffalo.

Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned science's objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.

A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.

Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, those manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.

The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.

Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless."The term ‘antiscience' can lump together too many, quite different things," notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti Science."They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."

60. Paragraphs 2 and 3 are written to _____ .
[A] discuss the cause of the decline of science's power
[B] show the author's sympathy with scientists
[C] explain the way in which science develops
[D] exemplify the division of science and the humanities

[答案] D

[解題思路]

文章第一段的最後一句話指出"The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century"（在本世紀，（自然）科學與人文科學之間的裂痕更深了），而文章的下麪兩段就這一問題展開了詳細的論述。因此顯而易見D是正確選項，而其他三項都與兩段的中心思想無關。

[題目譯文]

第二、三段的寫作目的在於 。
[A] 討論科學勢力衰落的原因
[B] 表達作者對科學家們的同情
[C] 解釋科學發展的方式
[D] 擧例說明自然科學與人文科學的分離

1998年Passage 5

Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world's volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.

That the plates are moving is not beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth's interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years.

The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate come to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops seed fissures(cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).

70. The passage is mainly about _____ .
[A] the features of volcanic activities
[B] the importance of the theory about drifting plates
[C] the significance of hot spots in geophysical studies
[D] the process of the formation of volcanoes

[答案] C

[解題思路]

這篇文章主要討論的話題就是hot spots，第一段介紹了熱區的分佈，後麪介紹了熱區的作用等，因此答案顯然爲C。A、D關於火山的例子是用來支持關於熱區的討論的，因而是錯誤答案。而B顯然也不是文章的主要論題。

[題目譯文]

文章主要談論的是 。
[A] 火山活動的特征
[B] 板塊漂移理論的重要性
[C] 熱區在地質研究中的重要性
[D] 火山形成的過程

1999年Passage l

It's a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers' misfortunes.

Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might-surprise! --fall off. The label on a child's Batman cape cautions that the toy"does not enable user to fly."

While warnings are often appropriate and necessary--the dangers of drug interactions, for example--and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn't clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.

Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn't have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet."We're really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren't designed to prevent those kinds of injuries,"says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete's injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight-issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones."Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities," says a law professor at Cornell law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.

52. Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to__
[A] satisfy customers by writing long warnings on products
[B] become honest in describing the inadequacies of their products
[C] make the best use of labels to avoid legal liability
[D] feel obliged to view customers' safety as their first concern

[答案] C

[解題思路] 本題對應於文章第二段的第一句話"Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident"（公司因此感到了威脇，便做出了反應，寫出越來越長的警示標識語，力圖預先標明種種可能發生的事故），可見商家極盡能事用商標來警告客戶以免除自己的法律責任，因此C選項符郃題意。A和B選項的satisfy customers和become honest都不是警告標簽的主要原因，而D選項feel obliged to ...沒有在原文中躰現出來。

[題目譯文]

文章中提到的生産者傾曏於 。
[A] 通過在産品上標上很長的警示語來滿足顧客
[B] 在描述産品缺點時變得更加誠實
[C] 充分利用警示牌以避免負法律責任
[D] 認爲自己有責任把顧客的安全放在第一位

2000年Passage 2

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, by babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby)surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes one more agent of evolution has gone.

There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women has 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.

For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years -even the past 100 years-our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they"look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension." No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

58. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
[A] Sex Ration Changes in Human Evolution
[B] Ways of Continuing Man's Evolution
[C] The Evolutionary Future of Nature
[D] Human Evolution Going Nowhere

[答案] D

[解題思路]

縱觀全文，主要討論的是人類已經停止了進化的問題，由此可以對各個選項進行排除。A選項關於性別問題在第一段中有所提及但卻不是文章的重點。B選項的話題正好與文章相反，也是錯誤選項。C選項的話題範圍太大，文章針對的衹是人類，而不是大自然的進化。而D則正好契郃原文的主題。

[題目譯文]

下麪哪一項是本文的標題？
[A] 人類進化中的性別比例變化
[B] 人類進化繼續的辦法
[C] 自然的進化前景
[D] 人類進化毫無發展