Part Ⅰ Vocabulary and Structure Directions:There are 30 incomplete sentences in this part. For each sentence there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the ONE that best completes the sentence. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.
1. The shortage of food caused widespread ______ among the masses.
4. While some business executives repeated their objections to the new smoking restrictions, others said they wanted more time to ______ the impact of today's decision.
15. Since most, if not all learning occurs through ______, relating one observation to another, it would be strange indeed if the study of other cultures did not also illuminate the study of our own.
17. A major goal of law, to deter potential criminals by punishing wrongdoers is not served when the penalty is so seldom invoked that it ceases to be a(n) ______ threat.
19. By 1817 the United States Congress had ______ all internal taxes and was relying on tariffs on imported goods to provide sufficient revenue to run the government.
21. In denying him a promotion, management cited his ______ decision making, charging that his judgments were based on vagaries rather than careful forethought.
25. Numerous historical examples illustrate both the overriding influence that scientists' ______ have on their interpretation of data and the consequent impairment of their intellectual objectivity.
Part Ⅱ Cloze Directions:There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center. A person's home is as much a reflection of his personality as the clothes he wears, the food he eats and the friends with whom he spends his time. Depending on personality, most have in mind a(n) " 1 home". But in general, and especially for the students or new wage earners, there are practical 2 on cash and location on achieving that idea. Cash 3 , in fact, often means that the only way of 4 when you leave school is to stay at home for a while until things 5 financially. There are obvious 6 of living at home—personal laundry is usually 7 done along with the family wash; meals are provided and there will be a well- established circle of friends to 8 . And there is 9 the responsibility for paying bills, rates, etc. On the other hand, 10 depends on how a family gets on. Do your parents like your friends? You may love your family— 11 do you like them? Are you prepared to be 12 when your parents ask where you are going in the evening and what time you expect to be back? If you find that you cannot manage a(n) 13 , and that you finally have the money to leave, how do you 14 finding somewhere else to live? If you plan to stay in your home area, the possibilities are 15 well-known to you already. Friends and the local paper are always 16 . If you are going to work in a 17 area, again there are papers—and the accommodation agencies, 18 these should be approached with 19 . Agencies are allowed to charge a fee, usually the 20 of the first week's rent, if you take accommodation they have found for you.
[解析] A项意为“几乎没有”;B项意为“足够的”;C项意为“很多”,修饰或用作可数名词;D项意为“很多”,修饰或用作不可数名词。文中此处说的是:另一方面,取决于家庭成员怎么相处。根据上下文:上文说年轻人住在家里有很多优势,这一句以on the other hand开头,表示转折,所以接下来应该是“很大程度上也取决于家庭成员如何相处”,much用作不可数名词,表示很大程度,因此本题的答案为D。
[解析] A项意为“宽容的,容忍的”;B项意为“敌意的”;C项意为“冷漠的”;D项意为“好脾气的”。文中此处说的是:当你父母问你晚上去哪里、打算什么时候回家时,你准备好做一个______人了吗?结合选项,应该是“宽容的”或者“好脾气的”,但是空格前的prepared to be表示准备怎么样,也就是可以做准备的,而good-tempered通常指一个人的天性,是无法准备的,因此本题的答案为A。
Part Ⅲ Reading Comprehension Directions:There are 6 reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or finished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.
Passage One Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, believed that men are divided into three classes: gold, silver and bronze. Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, argued that "the vital few" account for most progress. In the private sector, the best companies struggle relentlessly to find and keep the vital few. They offer them fat pay packets, extra training, powerful mentors and more challenging assignments. As the economy begins to recover, companies are trying harder to nurture raw talent, or to poach it from their rivals. Private-equity firms rely heavily on a few stars. High-tech firms, for all their egalitarianism, are ruthless about recruiting the brightest. Firms in emerging markets are desperate to find young high-flyers to cope with rapid growth and fast-changing environments. Bill Conaty and Ram Charan's recent book The Talent Masters provides a nice mix of portraits of well-known talent factories along with sketches of more recent converts to the cause. "Talent masters" are proud of their elitism. GE divides its employees into three groups based on their promise. Hindustan Unilever compiles a list of people who show innate leadership qualities. Talent masters all seem to agree on the importance of two things: measurement and differentiation. The best companies routinely subject employees to various "reviews" and "assessments". But when it comes to high-flyers they make more effort to build up a three-dimensional picture of their personalities and to provide lots of feedback. A powerful motivator is to single our high-flyers for special training. GE spends $ 1 billion a year on it. Novartis sends high-flyers to regular off-site training sessions. Many companies also embrace on-job training, speaking of "stretch" assignments or "baptisms by fire". The most coveted are foreign postings: these can help young managers understand what it is like to run an entire company with a wide range of problems. Successful companies make sure that senior managers are involved with "talent development". Bosses of GE and P&G spent 40% of their time on personnel. Intel obliged senior managers to spend time teaching high-flyers. Involving the company's top brass in the process prevents lower-level managers from monopolizing high-flyers and creates dialogues between established and future leaders. Successful companies also integrate talent development with their broader strategy to ensure that companies are more than the sum of their parts. P&G likes its managers to be both innovative and worldly. Goodyear replaced 23 of its 24 senior managers in two years as it shifted its target-consumers from carmakers to motorists. Meanwhile, in their rush to classify people, companies can miss potential stars. Those who are singled out for special treatment can become too full of themselves. But the first problem can be fixed by flexibility: people who are average in one job can become stars in another. And people who become too smug can be discarded.
1. The author cites the needs of different types of firms in the second paragraph to show that ______.
Passage Two Only two countries in the advanced world provide no guarantee for paid leave from work to care for a newborn child. Last spring one of the two, Australia gave up the dubious distinction by establishing paid family leave starting in 2011. I wasn't surprised when this didn't make the news here in the United States—we're now the only wealthy country without such a policy. The United States does have one explicit family policy, the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993. It entitles workers to as much as 12 weeks' unpaid leave for care of a newborn or dealing with a family medical problem. Despite the modesty of the benefit, the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups fought it bitterly, describing it as "government-run personnel management" and a "dangerous precedent". In fact, every step of the way, as (usually) Democratic leaders have tried to introduce work-family balance measures into the law, business groups have been strongly opposed. As Yale law professor Anne Alstott argues, justifying parental support depends on defining the family as a social good that, in some sense, society must pay for. In her book No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents, she argues that parents are burdened in many ways in their lives; there is "no exit" when it comes to children. "Society expects and needs parents to provide their children with continuity of care, meaning the intensive, intimate care that human beings need to develop their intellectual, emotional and moral capabilities. And society expects and needs parents to persist in their roles for 18 years, or longer if needed." While most parents do this out of love, there are public penalties for not providing care. What parents do, in other words, is of deep concern to the state, for the obvious reason that caring for children is not only morally urgent but essential for the future of society. The state recognizes this in the large body of family laws that govern children's welfare, yet parents receive little help in meeting the life-changing obligations society imposes. To classify parenting as a personal choice for which there is no collective responsibility is not merely to ignore the social benefits of good parenting; really, it is to steal those benefits because they accrue to the whole of society as today's children become tomorrow's productive citizenry. In fact, by some estimates, the value of parental investments in children, investments of time and money (including lost wages) is equal to 20-30% of gross domestic product. If these investments generate huge social benefits—as they clearly do—the benefits of providing more social support for the family should be that much clearer.
1. What do we learn about paid family leave from the first paragraph? ______
A.America is now the only developed country without the policy.
B.It has now become a hot topic in the United States.
C.It came as a surprise when Australia adopted the policy.
D.Its meaning was clarified when it was established in Australia.
Passage Three Over the last 25 years, British society has changed a great deal—or at least many parts of it have. In some ways, however, very little has changed, particularly where attitudes are concerned. Ideas about social class—whether a person is "working-class" or "middle-class"—are one area in which changes have been extremely slow. In the past, the working-class tended to be paid less than middle-class people, such as teachers and doctors. As a result of this and also of the fact that workers' jobs were generally much less secure, distinct differences in life-styles and attitudes came into existence. The typical working man would collect his wages on Friday evening and then, it was widely believed, having given his wife her "housekeeping" would go out and squander the rest on beer and betting. The stereotype of what a middle-class man did with his money was perhaps nearer to the truth. He was and still is inclined to take a longer-term view. Not only did he regard buying a house as a top priority, but he also considered the education of his children as extremely important. Both of these provided him and his family with security. Only in very few cases did workers have the opportunity (or the education and training) to make such long-term plans. Nowadays, a great deal has changed. In a large number of cases factory workers earn as much, if not more, than their middle-class supervisors. Social security and laws to improve job-security, combined with a general rise in the standard of living since the mid-fifties of the 20th century, have made it less necessary than before to worry about "tomorrow". Working-class people seem slowly to be losing the feeling of inferiority they had in the past. In fact there has been a growing tendency in the past few years for the middle-classes to feel slightly ashamed of their position. The changes in both life-styles and attitudes are probably most easily seen amongst younger people. They generally tend to share very similar tastes in music and clothes, they spend their money in having a good time, and save for holidays or longer-term plans when necessary. There seems to be much less difference than in previous generations. Nevertheless, we still have a wide gap between the well-paid (whatever the type of job they may have) and the low-paid. As long as this gap exists, there will always be a possibility that new conflicts and jealousies will emerge, or rather that the old conflicts will re-appear, but between different groups.
1. Which of the following is seen as the main cause of class differences in the past? ______
Passage Four The biographer has to dance between two shaky positions with the subject. Too close a relation, and the writer may lose objectivity. Not close enough, and the writer may lack the sympathy necessary to any effort to portray a mind, a soul—the quality of life. Who should write the biography of a family, for example? Because of their closeness to the subject, family members may have special information, but by the same token, they may not have the distance that would allow them to be fair. Similarly, a king's servant might not be the best one to write a biography of that king. But a foreigner might not have the knowledge and sympathy necessary to write the king's biography—not for a readership from within the kingdom, at any rate. There is no ideal position for such a task. The biographer has to work with the position he or she has in the world, adjusting that position as necessary to deal with the subject. Every position has strengths and weaknesses: to thrive, a writer must try to become aware of these, evaluate them in terms of the subject, and select a position accordingly. When their subjects are heroes or famous figures, biographies often reveal a democratic motive: they attempt to show that their subjects are only human, no better than anyone else. Other biographies are meant to change us. To invite us to become better than we are. The biographies of Jesus found in the Bible are in this class. Biographers may claim that their account is the "authentic" one. In advancing this claim, they are helped if the biography is "authorized" by the subject, this presumably allows the biographer special access to private information. "Unauthorized" biographies also have their appeal, however, since they can suggest an independence of mind in the biographer. In book promotions, the "unauthorized" characterization usually suggests the prospect of juicy gossip that the subject had hoped to suppress. A subject might have several biographies even several "authentic" ones. We sense intuitively that no one is in a position to tell "the" story of a life, perhaps not even the subject, and this has been proved by the history of biography.
1. According to the author, an ideal biographer would be one who ______.
A.knows the subject very well and yet maintains a proper distance from him
B.is close to the subject and knows the techniques of biography writing
C.is independent and treats the subject with fairness and objectivity
D.possesses special private information and is sympathetic toward the subject
Passage Five Some pioneering work that began as an attempt to discover ways to increase production efficiency led to the founding of the human relations movement in industry and to the development of motivational skills and tools for managers. In 1927 researchers were involved in determining the optimum amount of lighting, temperature, and humidity (with lighting being considered the most important) for the assembly of electronic components at Western Electric. The researchers found that lighting had no consistent effect on production. In fact, production sometimes increased when lighting was reduced to the level of ordinary moonlight! The important part of this experiment began when two Harvard researchers, Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, were brought in to investigate these unexpected results further. They found that workers were responding not to the level of lighting but to the fact that they were being observed by the experimenters. This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect since the experiments were conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant. This was the first documented and widely published evidence of the psychological effects on doing work, and it led to the first serious effort aimed at examining psychological and social factors in the workplace. Further experiments were continued for five years. Generally, the researchers concluded from their experiments that economic motivation (pay) was not the sole source of productivity and, in some cases, not even the most important source. Through interviews and test results, the researchers focused on the effects of work attitudes, supervision, and the peer group and other social forces, on productivity. Their findings laid the groundwork for modem motivation theory, and the study of human factors on the job, which continues to this day in such common practices as selection and training, establishing favorable work conditions counseling, and personnel operations. The contributions of this experiment shifted the focus of human motivation from economics to a multifaceted approach including psychological and social forces.
1. What is the passage primarily about? ______
A.The first widely published development in modem motivation theory.
B.Shifting the focus of human motivation from economics to a multifaceted approach.
C.The importance of careful research.
D.The results of a pioneering study at Western Electric.
Passage Six What our society suffers from most today is the absence of consensus about what it and life in it ought to be. Such consensus cannot be gained from society's present stage, or from fantasies about what it ought to be. For that the present is too close and too diversified, and the future too uncertain, to make believable claims about it. A consensus in the present hence can be achieved only through a shared understanding of the past, as Homer's epics informed those who lived centuries later what it meant to be Greek, and by what images and ideals they were to live their lives and organized their societies. Most societies derive consensus from a long history, a language all their own, a common religion, common ancestry. The myths by which they live are based on all of these. But the United States is a country of immigrants, coming from a great variety of nations. Lately, it has been emphasized that an asocial, narcissistic personality has become characteristic of Americans, and that it is this type of personality that makes for the lack of well-being, because it prevents us from achieving consensus that would counteract a tendency to withdraw into private worlds. In his study of narcissism, Christopher Lasch says that modern man, "tortured by self-consciousness, turns to new therapies not to free himself of his personal worries but to find meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for". There is widespread distress because national moral has declined, and we have lost an earlier sense of national vision and purpose. Contrary to rigid religions or political beliefs, as are found in totalitarian societies, our culture is one of great individual differences, at least in principle and in theory. But this leads to disunity, even chaos. Americans believe in the value of diversity, but just because ours is a society based on individual diversity, it needs consensus about some dominating ideas more than societies based on uniform origin of their citizens. Hence, if we are to have consensus, it must be based on a myth—a vision—about a common experience, a conquest that made us Americans, as the myth about the conquest of Troy formed the Greeks. Only a common myth can offer relief from the fear that life is without meaning or purpose. Myths permit us to examine our place in the world by comparing it to a shared idea. Myths are shared fantasies that form the tie that binds the individual to other members of his group. Such myths help to ward off feelings of isolation, guilt, anxiety, and purposelessness—in short, they combat isolation and the breakdown of social standards and values.
1. In the author's view, the greatest trouble with the U.S. society lies in the ______.
A.lack of serious disagreement over the organization of social life
B.non-existence of unanimity on the forms the society should take
C.general denying of its conformity with what it was unexpected to be
D.public negation of the consensus on how to conduct social reforms