Text 1 The close relationship between poetry and music scarcely needs to be argued. Both are aural modes which employ rhythm, rime, and pitch as major devices; to these the one adds linguistic meaning, connotation, and various traditional figures, and the other can add, at least in theory, all of these plus harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration techniques. In English the two are closely bound historically. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry seems certainly to have been read or chanted to a harpist's accompaniment; the verb used in "Beowulf" for such a performance, the Finn episode, is singan, to sing, and the noun gyd, song. A major source of the lyric tradition in English poetry is the songs of the troubadours. The distance between the gyd in "Beowulf" and the songs of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan may seem great, but is one of time rather than aesthetics. The lyric poem as a literary work and the lyrics of a popular song are both still essentially the same thing: poetry. Whether the title of the work be "Gerontion", or "Hound Dog", our criteria for evaluating the work must remain the same. The most important prerequisite for both a significant poem and significant lyrics in a popular song is that the writer be faithful to his own personal vision or to the vision of the poem he is writing. Skill and craft for writing poetry are indeed necessary because these are the only means by which a poet can preserve the integrity of this vision in the poem. A poet must not, either because of lack of skill or because of worship of popularity, wealth, or critical acclaim, go outside of his own or his own poem's vision—on pain of writing only the derivative or the trivial. Historically, the writers and singers of the lyrics of popular songs have seemed often to be incapable of personal vision, and to have confused both originality and morality with a servile compliance to popular taste.
1. According to the writer, the relationship between poetry and music ______.
A.is a debatable topic
B.can be made but in a limited way
C.is indisputable if you analyse history
D.needs to be acknowledged more by poets
A B C D
C
[解析] 作者在第1段指出,诗歌与音乐自古就密不可分。据此可知,C项为正确答案。
2. The author cites "Beowulf" in order to show that ______.
A.the distance between song and poetry is not so great
Text 2 Whatever their chosen method, Americans bathe zealously. A study conducted found that we take an average of 4.5 baths and 7.5 showers each week and in the ranks of non-edible items purchased by store customers, bar soap ranks second, right after toilet paper. We spend more than $700 million annually on soaps, but all work the same way. Soap is composed of molecules that at one end attract water and at the other end attract oil and dirt, while repelling water. With a kind of pushing and pulling action, the soap loosens the bonds holding dirt to the skin. Unless you're using a germicidal soap, it usually doesn't kill the bacteria—soap simply removes bacteria along with dirt and oil. Neither baths nor showers are all that necessary and unless you're in a Third World country where infectious diseases are common, or you have open sores on your skin, the dirt and bacteria aren't going to hurt. The only reason for showering or bathing is to feel clean and refreshed. There is a physiological basis for this relaxed feeling. Your limbs become slightly buoyant in bathwater, which takes a load off muscles and tension. Moreover, if the water is hotter than normal body temperature, the body attempts to shed heat by expanding the blood vessels near the surface of the skin, lessening the circulatory system's resistance to blood flow, and dropping blood pressure gently. A bath is also the most effective way to hydrate the skin. The longer you soak, the more water gets into the skin and because soap lowers the surface tension of the water, it helps you hydrate rapidly and remove dry skin flakes. However, in a bath, all the dirt and grime and the soap in which it's suspended float on the surface. So when you stand up, it covers your body like a film. The real solution is to take a bath and then rinse off with a shower, however, after leaving a tub or freshly exposed skin becomes a playground for microbes. In two hours, you probably have as many bacteria on certain parts of the body, such as the armpits, as before the bath.
1. The statement "Americans bathe zealously" (Line 1, Para. 1) is closest to saying ______.
A.Americans bathe wastefully
B.Americans are rather ambivalent to bathing
C.Americans bathe with intense enthusiasm
D.Americans bathe too much
A B C D
C
[解析] 从第1段可知,美国人对洗澡狂热,对肥皂的消费巨大,因此题中该词应理解为“狂热地”。
2. Which of the following is mentioned as one of the benefits of bathing?
A.Dry skins flakes will disappear from the body once you get out of the bathtub.
B.It kills bacteria better than showering.
C.It reduces your blood circulation if it is nice and warm.
D.The floating action can reduce the stress on your muscles.
Text 3 Very soon, unimaginably powerful technologies will remake our lives. This could have dangerous consequences, especially because we may not even understand the basic science underlying them. There's a growing gap between our technological capability and our underlying scientific understanding. We can do very clever things with the technology of the future without necessarily understanding some of the science underneath, and that is very dangerous. The technologies that are particularly dangerous over the next hundred years are nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The benefits they will bring are beyond doubt but they are potentially very dangerous. In the field of artificial intelligence there are prototype designs for something that might be 50,000 million times smarter than the human brain by the year 2010. The only thing not feasible in the film "Terminator" is that the people win. If you're fighting against technology that is that much smarter than you, you probably will not win. We've all heard of the grey goo problem that self-replicating nanotech devices might keep on replicating until the world has been reduced to sticky goo, and certainly in biotechnology, we've really got a big problem because it's converging with nanotechnology. Once you start mixing nanotech with organisms and you start feeding nanotech—enabled bacteria, we can go much further than the Borg in "Star Trek", and those superhuman organisms might not like us very much. We are in a world now where science and commerce are increasingly bedfellows. The development of technology is happening in the context of global free trade regimes which see technological diffusion embedded with commerce as intrinsically a good. We should prepare for new and unfamiliar forms of argument around emerging technologies.
1. From the text, we know that the author's greatest worry is ______.
A.our lack of technological understanding of the process involved
B.our lack of technological capability
C.creating technology without really understanding the issues
D.our refusal to face the consequences of the technology we create
Text 4 The long, wet summer here in the northeastern U.S. notwithstanding, there's a world shortage of pure, fresh water. As demand for water hits the limits of finite supply, potential conflicts are brewing between nations that share transboundary freshwater reserves. Many people ask why we cannot simply take it from the sea, using our sophisticated technology of desalinization. But a good water supply must be hygienically safe and pleasant tasting and water containing salt would corrode machinery used in manufacturing in addition to producing chemical impurities. Since more than 95% of our water sits in the salty seas, man is left to face the reality that most water on the surface of the earth is not available for us. One very feasible way of sustaining our supply of freshwater is to protect the ecology of our mountains. Mountains and water go together, a fact to which Secretary General Kofi Annan has drawn attention more than once. From 30% to 60% of downstream fresh water in humid areas and up to 95% in arid and semi-arid environments are supplied by mountains. Without interference nature has its own way of purifying water—even though chlorination and filtration are still necessary as a precaution. In a mountainous area, aeration, due to turbulent flow and waterfalls, causes an exchange of gases between the atmosphere and the water. Agriculture, industry, hydroelectric generators and homes that need water to drink and for domestic use depend on these resources and, thus, we must protect mountainous areas as a means of survival.
1. The author of this text states that ______.
A.the problem of obtaining good drinking water has plagued man throughout time
B.palatability is synonymous with purity of water
C.most of the world's water is unusable as a water supply
D.man no longer depends on desalinization for his water supply
A B C D
C
[解析] 从第2段的末尾可知,地球表面的大部分水资源我们无法获得。因此C项为正确答案。
2. The author believes that industry avoids salt water because ______.
A.water is needed for livestock
B.crops must be considered before man-made products
C.it is used in desalinization plants
D.it causes corrosion
A B C D
D
[解析] 从第2段可知,海水腐蚀生产设备。因此D项为正确答案。
3. Streams would purify themselves if not for ______.
A.human beings
B.nature
C.chlorination
D.mountains
A B C D
A
[解析] 从第3段可知,在没有干预的情况下,大自然用自己的方式净化水源。因此A项为正确答案。
4. By saying that nature "has its own way of purifying water" (Line 5, Para. 3) the author is referring to ______.