Part Ⅱ VocabularyDirections: 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 and then mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter in the brackets.
Part Ⅲ READING COMPREHENSIONBelow each of the following passages you will find some questions or incomplete statements. Each question or statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. Read each passage carefully, and then select the choice that best answers the question or completes the statement. Mark the letter of your choice with a single bar across the square brackets on your Machine-scoring Answer Sheet.
In addition to redistributing incomes, inflation may affect the total real income and production of the community. An increase in prices is usually associated with high employment. In moderate inflation, industries are operating efficiently and output is near capacity. There is a great deal of private investment and jobs are plentiful. Such has been the historical pattern. Thus many business persons and union leaders, in evaluating a little deflation and a little inflation, consider the latter to be the lesser of two evils. In mild inflation, the losses to fixed-income groups are usually less than gains to the rest of the community. Even worker with relatively fixed wages are often better off because of improved employment opportunities and greater take-home pay, a rise in interest rates on new securities may partly compensate for any losses to creditor, and increases in pension benefits may partly make losses to retirees.
In deflation, on the other hand, the growing unemployment of labor and capital causes the community's total well-being to be less; so in a sense, the gainers get less than the losers lose. As a matter of fact, in a depression, or a time of severe deflation, almost everyone suffers, including the creditor who is left with uncollectible debts.
For these reasons as increase in consumption of investment spending is considered good in times of unemployment, even if this tends to increase prices slightly. When the economic system is suffering from severe depression, few people will criticize private or public spending on the ground that this might be inflationary. Actually, most of this increased spending will increase production and create jobs. once, full employment and full plant capacity have been reached, however, any further increases in spending are likely to be completely wasted in prices increase. Perhaps all criminals should be required to carry cards which read: Fragile; Handle with Care. It will never so, these days to go around referring to criminals as violent thugs. You must refer to them politely as "social misfits". The professional killer who wouldn't think twice about using his club or knife to batter some harmless old lady to death in order to rob her of her meager life-savings must never be given a dose of his own medicine. He is in need of "hospital treatment". According to his misguided defenders, society is to blame. A wicked society breeds evil--or so the argument goes. When you listen to this kind of talk, it makes you wonder why we aren't all criminals. We have done away with the absurdly harsh laws of the nineteenth century and this is only right. But surely enough is enough. The most senseless piece of criminal legislation in Britain and a number of other countries has been the suspension of capital punishment.
The violent criminal has become akin of hero-figure in our time. He is glorified on the screen; he is pursued by the press and paid vast sums of money for his "memoirs". Newspapers which specialize in crime reporting enjoy enormous circulations and the publishers of trashy cops and robbers stories or "murder mysteries" have never had it so good. When you read about the achievements of the great train robbers, it makes you wonder whether you are reading about the some glorious resistance movement. The hardened criminal is cuddled and cosseted by the sociologists on the one hand and adored as a hero by the masses on the other. It's no wonder he is a privileged person who expects and receives VIP treatment wherever he goes.
Capital punishment used to be a major deterrent. It made the violent robber think twice before pulling the trigger. It gave the cold-blooded poisoner something to ponder about while he was shaking up or serving his arsenic cocktail. It prevented unarmed policemen from being killed while pursuing their duty by killers armed with automatic weapons. Above all, it protected the most vulnerable members of society, young children, from brutal violence. It is horrifying to think that the criminal can literally get away with murder. We all know that "life sentence" does not mean what it says. After ten years or so of good comfortably, thank you, on the proceeds of his crime, of he will go on committing offences until he is caught again. People axe always willing to hold liberal views at the expense of others. It's always fashionable to pose as the defender of under-dog, so long as you, personally, remain unaffected. Did the defenders of crime, one wonders, in their desire for fair-play, consult the victims before they suspended capital punishment? Hardly. You see, they couldn't, because all the victims were dead. The gravitational pull of the Earth and moon is important to us as we attempt to conquer more and more of outer-space. Here's why.
As a rocket leaves the Earth, the pull of the Earth on it becomes less and less as the rocket roars out into space. If you imagine a line between the Earth the pull of the Earth and the moon, there is a point somewhere along that line, nearer to the moon than to the Earth, at which the gravitation pull of both the Earth and the moon on an object is just about equal. An object placed on the moon side of that point would be drawn to the moon. An object placed on the Earth side of that point would be drawn to the Earth. Therefore, a rocket need be sent only to this "point of no return" in order to get it to the moon. The moon's gravity will pull it the rest of the way.
The return trip of the rocket to Earth is, in some ways, less of a problem. The Earth's gravitational field reaches far closer to the moon than does the moon's to Earth. Thus it will be necessary to fire an Earthbound rocket only a few thousand miles away from the moon to reach a point where the rocket will drift to earth under the Earth's gravitational pull.
The problem of rocket travel is not so much concerned with getting the rocket into space as it is with guiding the rocket after it leaves the Earth's surface. Remember that the moon is constantly circling the Earth. A rocket fired at the moon and continuing in the direction in which it was fired would miss the moon by a wide margin and perhaps continue to drift out into space until "captured" in another planet's gravitational field. to reach the moon, a rocket must be fired toward the point where the moon will be when the rocket has traveled the required distance. This requires precise calculations of the speed and direction of the rocket and of the speed and direction of the moon.
For a rocket to arrive at a point where the moon's gravity will pull it the rest of the way, it must reach a speed called velocity of escape. This speed is about 25, 000 miles per hour. At a speed less than this, a rocket will merely circle the Earth in an orbit and eventually fall back to Earth. A hundred years ago it was assumed and scientifically "proved" by economists that the laws of society make it necessary to have a vast army of poor and jobless people in order to keep the economy going. today, hardly anybody would dare to voice the principle. It is generally accepted that nobody should be excluded from the wealth of the nation, either by the law of nature or by those of society. The opinions are outdated, which were current a hundred years ago, that the poor owed their conditions to their ignorance, lack of responsibility. In all western industrialized countries, a system of insurance has been introduced which guarantees everyone a minimum of subsistence in case of unemployment, sickness and old age. I would go one step further and argue that, even if these conditions are not present, in other words, one can claim this substance minimum without having to have any "reason". I would suggest, however, that it should be limited to a definite period of time, let's say two years, so as to avoid the encouragement of an abnormal attitude which refuses any kind of social obligation.
This may sound like a fantastic proposal, but so, I think, our insurance system would have sounded to people a hundred years ago. The main objection to such a scheme would be that if each person were entitled to receive minimum support, people would not work. This assumption rests on the fallacy of the inherent laziness. In human nature, actually, aside from abnormally lazy people, there would be very few who would not want to earn more than the minimum, and who would prefer to do nothing rather than work.
However, the suspicions against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not groundless from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer. If nobody were forced to accept work in order not to starve, work would be sufficiently interesting and attractive in order to induce one to accept it. Freedom of contract is possible only if both parties are free to accept and reject if; in the present capitalist system this is not the case.
But such a system would not only be the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees, its principal advantage would be the improvement of freedom in interpersonal relationships in every sphere of daily life. If sustainable competitive advantage depends on work force skills, American firms have a problem. Human management is not traditionally seen as a central to the competitive survival of the firm in the United States. Skill Acquisition is considered as individual responsibility. Labor is simply another force of production to be hired/rented at the lowest possible cost, which is a must as one buys raw material or equipment.
The lack of importance attached to human resource management can be seen in the corporate pecking order. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. The post of head of human resource management is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of the corporate hierarchy. The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions and has no chance to move up to Chief Executive officer. By way of contrast, in Japan the head of human resource management is central-usually the second most important executive, after the CEO, in the firm's hierarchy.
While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work force, in fact, they invest less in the skills of their employees than do either Japanese or German firms. The money they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional or managerial employees. And the limited investments that made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on the specific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make it possible to absorb new technologies.
As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. If American workers, for example take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workers in Germany
(as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in the United States. More time is required before equipment is up and running at the speed with which new equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need for extensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which new equipment can be employed. The result is a slower pace of technological change. And in the
end the skills of the bottom half of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can't effectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear. Part Ⅲ Cloze TestDirections: Fill in each numbered blank in the following passage with ONE suitable word to complete the passage. Put your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10%)
Flowers for the Dead
Since flowers symbolize new life, it may seem inappropriate to have them at funerals. Yet people in many cultures top coffins or caskets with wreaths and garlands and put blossoms on the graves of the 1 . This custom is part of a widespread, long-lived pattern. Edwin Daniel Wolff speculated that floral tributes to the dead are an outgrowth of the grave goods of ancient 2 . In cultures that firmly believed in an 3 , and that believed further that the departed could enter that afterlife only 4 they took with them indications of their worldly status, it was a necessity to bury the dead with material goods: hence the wives and animals that were killed to accompany 5 rulers, the riches 6 with Egyptian pharaohs, and the coins that Europeans used to place on the departed person's eyes as payment for the Stygian ferryman. In time, as economy modified tradition, the actual 7 goods were replaced 8 symbolic representations. In China, for example, gold and silver paper became a stand-in 9 real money. Eventually even the symbolic significance became obscured. Thus, Wolff said, flowers may be the 10 step in "three well-marked stages of offerings to the dead: the actual object, its substitute in various forms, and finally mere tributes of respect." Part Ⅴ Chinese-English TranslationDirections: Translate the following paragraph into English and write your translation on the ANSWER SHEET.
1. 新闻与我们的日常生活息息相关。报纸、杂志、广播、电视这些大众传播工具,是我们认识周围事物的耳目。踏入21世纪,我们虽然已经走在高速信息公路上,可以借助因特网获取资讯,然而,就功能和特征,受众的接受程度以及传播信息的方式来说,传统的大众传播工具仍旧发挥着重要的作用。
News is closely related to our daily life. Such mass media as newspapers, magazines, radio and television are our means to know the world around us. Having entered the 21th century, we are "walking" on the information highway and acquire information by means of the Internet. But traditional mass media still play a very important role as far as their functions and features, the receiver's receptivity and the way information is spread are concerned.