Text 1 If there is one word I'm rapidly growing tired of, it's passion. Not the sex and love type, but the workplace kind. Irately, it seems, I keep hearing career counselors advising the unemployed to identify and develop their passion. Then they need to turn that passion into paid work and presto! They're now in a career they love. I know I'm being somewhat flippant, but I do wonder if passion is being oversold. Are we falling into a trap of believing that our work, and indeed, our lives, should always be fascinating and all-consuming? Are we somehow lacking if we're bored at times or buried under routine tasks or failing to challenge ourselves at every turn? In these economic times, fewer of us are worried about being fulfilled and more of us are concerned about simply being paid. But as switching jobs and careers becomes increasingly common, as whole professions are disappearing, we're more frequently forced to ask ourselves what we want to do with the rest of our lives. That's where passion comes in. Professor Wart, who co-wrote the book "The Joy of Work? Jobs, Happiness and You", mentioned three factors for the workplace: supportive supervision, job security and the possibility of promotion, and fair treatment. He acknowledges that it is not easy to attain these goals, especially now. But it can still make a difference in your job satisfaction, he says, to examine what your strengths and needs are, and try, as much as possible, to match your work with those attributes. It doesn't always mean getting a new job or career, but perhaps changing some things in your current employment. It would probably be better, Professor Warr suggested, to think less in terms of passion, and the inflated sense of drama that can go with that, and more in terms of job satisfaction or finding meaning in your work. The drive for passion or excitement, or whatever you call it, is deep in our genes. We feel good when the neurotransmitter dopamine is activated, and that's what happens when we accomplish a given goal, said Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University. In fact, playing video games may not seem to be much of a passion, but if you've ever watched teenage boys going at it, their intensity and obliviousness to the outside world is the embodiment of flow. And that's no accident. So maybe searching for a passion is not so bad. But it is also important to remember that there is no one way to find it, and someone else's passion may be your idea of drudgery. And sometimes life—and work—is simply going to be putting one foot in front of the other. Or as Professor Warr said, "On the way to happiness, there must be unhappiness."
1. Why is the author tired of "passion"?
A.Because he thinks passion exists only in love and sex.
B.Because it is a word overused in career counseling.
C.Because it is difficult for people to put passion into work.
D.Because passion is a slippery feeling that needs clarification.
A B C D
B
[解析] 在第一段中作者说,“激情”这个词不断被职业顾问们使用,他们建议那些失业的人要注意把激情带到自己的工作中,以便使自己爱上自己的工作。所以第二段第一句说,“激情”被oversold。这里,oversell的意思是exaggerate the merits of something(夸大某个东西的益处或优点)。作者指责那些职业顾问过多使用passion这个词,似乎它是灵丹妙药。
2. It is implied in the second paragraph that ______
Text 2 There is a fashionable new science, behavioral economics, which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did. the " bandwagon effect." Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like "loss aversion", how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got. But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that "in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence." Public servants are human, too. Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence. In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave students a list of five pairs of countries and asked which nation in each pair had the higher infant-mortality rate. The students got 1.8 right out of 5. Mr. Rosling noted that if he gave the test to chimpanzees they would get 2.5 right. So his students' problem was not ignorance, but that they knew with confidence things that were false. The issue of action bias is better known in England as the "dangerous dogs act," after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cases in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legislation that worked poorly. Undoubtedly the hasty legislation following the current financial crisis will include some equivalents of dangerous dogs acts. It takes unusual courage for a regulator to stand up and say "something must not be done," lest "something" makes the problem worse. Motivated reasoning means that we tend to believe what it is convenient for us to believe. The focusing illusion partly stems from the fact that people tend to see the benefits of a policy but not the hidden costs. "Affect heuristic" is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. If lawmakers are to understand how laws get applied in the real world, they need to know and understand the habits of mind of their officials.
1. The "bandwagon effect" is one in which people ______
A.follow a popular trend blindly
B.turn attention to asset values
C.develop a strong dislike for losses
D.believe the insights of psychologists
A B C D
A
[解析] 英语中经常使用Jump/climb on the bandwagon这个同组,其意思是“跟风,赶时髦”。在第一段中,bandwagon effect和herd instinct都指“从众心理”。在第二句中,that lead...others did这个定语从句就解释了herd instinct的意思。
2. What Mr. Tasic says amounts to arguing that ______
A.the mistakes market participants make are seldom serious ones
B.behavioral economics should study the mental habits of the officials
C.public servants are well justified when they make regulatory mistakes
D.the psychology and neuroscience of markets are very complicated subjects
3. The most important finding from Rosling's experiment is that ______
A.the students make mistakes in their judgment
B.the students are ignorant of infant-mortality rates
C.chimpanzees are better judges than humans
D.the students often misjudge their competence
A B C D
D
[解析] 第三段中作者提到。Rosling的实验,为了说明官员身上存在的illusions of competence。第二句对这种现象进行了解释,它主要指的是官员高估自己的理解力。本段最后一句也对这个实验进行了总结:学生的问题不是无知,而是他们满怀信心地知道一些错误的东西,即对于自己的知识和理解力过于自信。
4. The inclination to act without adequate information and analysis is a case of ______
A.action bias
B.motivated reasoning
C.the affect heuristic
D.illusions of competence
A B C D
A
[解析] 第四段对action bias进行了举例说明,提到了英国的dangerous dogs act和legislation following the current financial crisis。从这两个例子来推断,这里都是批评了英国在制定法律时欠考虑,很草率(rash),结果都没有达到预期效果。作者总结说,有时候官员们需要有勇气阻止某个行为,因为它可能使形势变得更糟。最后一段对motivated reasoning和affect heuristic也进行了说明。第三段则对illusions of competence进行了详细的说明。
5. The text is mainly about ______
A.the herd instinct
B.the bandwagon effect
C.the loss aversion
D.the biases of bureaucrats
A B C D
D
[解析] 本文第一段总体介绍了行为经济学的研究对象。第二段第一句引出本文要谈到的话题(特别是本句后半句):行为心理学要研究政府的行为。第三段更具体地提到了这些行为包括的主要方面,即政府官员常犯的五种错误或偏见,然后描述了这五种错误的性质和表现。全文最后一句总结说,如果立法者想理解法律的实施方式,他们需要知道the habits of mind of their officials,这里再次强调了研究政府官员心理习惯的重要性。实际上,所谓“五种错误”,也都是属于心理习惯方面的问题。 本文第一段只是在概括地介绍行为经济学研究的内容,尚没有切入本文的主题,因此其他三个选项都不正确。
Text 3 By now, the idea of airline baggage charges, extra legroom at a cost, paying for food and so on, has become for travellers a bit like the pre-flight safety explanation about how seat belts work. It may annoy. Or perhaps it has become so common that it no longer elicits much response. But these transactions are helping keep the planes flying, and they illustrate a market reality increasingly faced by a wide spectrum of consumers and businesses. Efforts by airlines around the world to increase revenue apart from ticket prices have grown almost tenfold since 2008 to $22.6 billion. And, even with that, the International Air Transport Association is projecting overall global airline profits will be down in 2012 for a second successive year to about $3 billion. That's a profit margin of just 0.5 percent, so what some see as nickel-and-diming is viewed within the turbulent airline industry as pennies from heaven. "The whole economics of the business have been an absolute disaster since the fuel crisis of 2008," IdeaWorks President Jay Sorensen explained. "Airlines are just desperate for money." The economy has ensured that this desperation is not unique to airlines or even the travel business, where hotels may look to charge for a Wi-Fi connection that Starbucks will give you for free, or charge extra fee on top of the cost of whatever the resort's room rate is and maybe tack on a housekeeping extra charge. You see this batteries-not-included mentality elsewhere. Cellphone companies that once advertised all-inclusive services look to sell data and voice separately. Banks try to assess new fees to cover costs they once absorbed. "In an industry cycle, in the beginning, when you're in a high-growth period, you tend to see a lot of bundling, giving a lot of things at one price," Jean-Manuel Izaret said by phone. "At the other extreme, when you are in the super-mature area, you'll have low-cost providers entering certain markets with no-frills offers. So in a mature market, where low-cost challengers have come in and undercut the prices of established players, the only option for established players is to unbundle and price every little thing separately." "Airlines are going to have to be careful of nuisance fees, like checked bags and seating, and focus instead on inventing services that have not been offered before that people value," Sorensen said. That proposition is critical. But within a company the ability to generate revenue through a service often means more resources will be devoted to improving it. So the baggage service, for example, not only has benefited from fewer checked items in the system but greater investment in that system by airlines. Charging for specific services like baggage handling lets airlines invest to provide greater reliability for those who check a bag, without passing on the cost to customers who don't.
1. To supplement its revenues, airlines have ______
A.raised the price of flight tickets
B.tightened their security check
C.charged extra fees for specific services
D.increased the items of their services
A B C D
C
[解析] 第一段提到,为了keep the planes flying(即为了不减少飞行航线),航空公司开始收取一些额外费用(即最后一段所说的charging specific services),如查验行李费,对需要更大腿部活动空间的乘客收费,甚至收取用餐费。第二段提到,除了机票以外,航空公司收取的额外费用总数额还不小,有效地帮助了它们度过目前经营上的财政困难。
2. The expression "nickel-and-diming" refers to ______
A.a big sum of money
B.a small amount of money
C.reduced revenue
D.revenue from ticket prices
A B C D
B
[解析] 在美元中,一个nickel是5美分,一个dime是10美分,这里形容钱少,用来形容从一些小的服务中收取的额外费用。但是在航空公司看来,积少成多,在目前航空业面临经济困难的情况下,这些钱无疑是pennies from heaven(直译作“天上掉下来的便士”,可以意译作“天上掉下来的馅饼”),根据统计,自2008年发生燃料危机以来,航空公司在机票以外收取的费用达到了226亿,增加了10倍。
3. According to Jean-Manuel Izaret, in a mature market, ______
A.customers enjoy the best service at the lowest cost
B.customers have to pay extra fees for the specific services
C.established businesses monopolize the market
D.newcomers compete by lowering the prices of services
A B C D
D
[解析] 第四段提到,Jean-Manuel Izaret对行业市场周期的分析,他指出,在成熟的市场阶段,低成本的供应商带着最基本的服务项目(no-frills offers指a product or a service that is basic and has no additional or unnecessary details)进入市场,这些提供低成本服务的供应商迫使已经占领市场的公司unbundle其服务,即对原来捆绑在一起不单独收费的一些小服务项目开始进行分别收费。
4. Sorensen advises airlines to ______
A.further unbundle their services
B.increase the price of their services
C.stop charging nuisance fees
D.innovate their services for customers
A B C D
D
[解析] 在最后一段,Sorensen为航空公司提出两个建议:一是inventing services that have not been offered before that people value,在这里,两个that引导的从句都是定语从句,修饰services,即以前没有提供过的、人们喜欢的服务项目;二是在收取额外服务费时区别对待顾客,只向那些有特殊需要的人收取额外费用,不要把成本转嫁给所有顾客。
5. The text is mainly about ______
A.how the economic recession has affected customer service
B.what measures have airlines taken to reduce operating cost
C.why baggage handling should be charged an extra fee
D.why airlines should not charge customer nuisance fees
A B C D
A
[解析] 本文提到航空公司给一些小的服务项目明码标价,收取额外费用,以便度过燃料危机带来的行业危机,补贴它们的机票收入。第一段最后一句是本文的主题句,从这句话来看,提到航空公司收取各种费用仅仅是作为例子,用来illustrate a market reality increasingly faced by a wide spectrum of consumers and businesses。例如,第三、四段就提到了其他行业如何unbundle their services,对一些原来捆绑在一起不单独收费的服务项目开始单独收费,以增加公司的收入。
Text 4 Over the past few days, the U.S. has been in the world's crosshairs. Political argument in Washington produced a debt agreement widely criticized as insufficient and incomplete. Standard & Poor's downgraded America's credit rating, raising concerns about the health of the world's most important economy. Slow growth in the U.S. is threatening the entire global recovery. Stock-market turmoil on Wall Street has turned markets from London to Seoul into roller coasters. Yes, the U.S. has been a source of much uncertainty in recent days. But in my opinion, the real danger for the global economy lies elsewhere: in Europe. If we're going to have another financial crisis, chances are it will start in the euro zone, not Washington. On a macro level, you could say the U.S. is worse off economically than Europe right now. Economists were frantically reducing their 2011 growth forecasts for the U.S. as its GDP limped along in the first half of the year. In Europe, growth is holding up. The IMF raised its growth projection for the euro zone in late June to 2%. And as a recent HSBC report noted, the state of American national finances is actually more feeble than the euro zone's taken as a whole. Even before the financial crisis, the U.S. fiscal path was unsustainable, an ageing population combined with extravagant social security commitments suggested either the need for massive tax increases or dramatic spending cuts. The crisis, however, made matters a lot worse. According to the OECD, the US federal, state and local government deficit (NOT the federal deficit alone) jumped from 2.9% of GDP in 2007 to 10.6% in 2010. Though that may be true, the U.S. has one huge advantage over Europe at this moment, the luxury of time. Ironically, the reaction of the world's investor community to the recent financial turmoil has been to rush into U.S. debt—yes, the very bonds downgraded by S&P. What that means is U.S. borrowing costs will continue to decline, and that buys Washington time to get its act together and put in place a real plan to fill the deficit and restore American growth. The euro zone, on the other hand, has no such luck. Borrowing costs for the zone's weakest economies—the PIIGS, including Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy—remain highly elevated. That puts pressure on those governments to implement reform programs with great haste as well as pressure on the rest of the euro zone to take more and more dramatic action to stem the contagion. The European Central Bank swooped in to buy billions of dollars of Italian and Spanish debt, which is a major deviation from the ECB's usual policy. But it is unlikely that the ECB can handle the crisis on its own over an extended period of time.
1. The United States is blamed by the world for ______
A.threatening the health of the world's economy
B.failing to correct the world's economic ills
C.causing the stock-market instability on Wall Street
Text 5 As all schoolchildren know, water freezes to solid, barren, cracked ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. So maybe it is more than a mere coincidence that 32 percent of U.S. public and private-school students in the class of 2011 are deemed proficient in mathematics, placing the United States 32nd among the 65 nations that participated in the latest international tests administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). President Obama, to his credit, has highlighted the problem repeatedly. But too many state education officials have done their best to conceal the low performance of their students. Under the educational accountability rules set down by the federal law No Child Left Behind, each state may set its own proficiency standard, and most have set their standards well below the world-class level. As a result, most state proficiency reports grossly inflate the percentage of students who are proficient, if we account for the fact that our students need to compete not just with others from the same state but also with those across the globe. When not complicating the problem, apologists explain away the depressing results with misleading arguments. Some point to the country's large immigrant and disadvantaged populations, which, to be sure, do pose difficult educational challenges. Proficiency rates among African-Americans and Hispanics are very low. But if one compares only the white students in the U.S. with all students in other countries, the U.S. still falls short. Some also take false comfort in the belief that it takes only a limited number of high-flying students to fill the jobs at Google, Facebook, IBM, and all the other businesses and professions that need highly skilled talent. Still others say the low math scores are offset by a better record in reading. Admittedly the proficiency rate in only 10 countries is significantly higher than in the U.S. Nonetheless, the set of skills most needed for sustained growth in economic productivity—and the skills in shortest supply today—are those rooted in math competencies. It is easy for political leaders to shortsightedly put off considerations of effective school reform. The economic benefits from reform would not be felt immediately, as it takes time for an educated generation to become a productive workforce. But just as the continuing debt crisis, if not fixed, will escalate out of control only over the longer term, so the best available solution to that crisis—a fully unfrozen, high-functioning, constantly improving educational system—could raise the level of human capital to the point where resources would be available to address much of this future debt crisis. In the simplest terms, the impending fiscal crises with Social Security and Medicare are most effectively dealt with by enhanced growth of the economy, growth that will not be achieved without a highly skilled workforce.
1. The freezing point of water is mentioned to demonstrate ______
A.American children don't know what every schoolchild knows
B.American schools are indifferent to their students' incompetence
C.children in America are worse at physics than those of other nations
D.low math performance in the US schools demands immediate attention
A.do not take the No Child Left Behind law seriously
B.are complacent about their schoolchildren's performance
C.agree that American children are less proficient
D.complain the federal proficiency standards are too high
A B C D
B
[解析] 第二段提到,各州试图conceal the low performance of their students,根据下文,这里的意思并非是把坏成绩隐瞒下来不上报联邦政府,而是说由于州政府制定的水平标准低,所以学生单从成绩表面来看似乎不存在问题。但是在作者看来,这种做法grossly inflate the percentage of students who are proficient,其中inflate此处意为“夸大,使膨胀”。这样,表面看来,学生的达标率很高,所以州政府不思进取,没有看到自己的学生与其他国家的学生存在的差距。
3. Some apologists have the mistaken idea that ______
A.most Asian-American students are more proficient than those of other nations
B.deficiency at mathematics does not prevent one from taking up highly skilled jobs
C.the reading proficiency of Americans is higher than that of the rest of the world
D.sustained economic growth will not be hindered by low proficiency in math