8月阅读预测
8月阅读预测
趴趴教育2024年8月
雅思阅读预测
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雅思考试预测
前言
1. 预测准不准?
趴趴雅思阅读预测近期命中率如下:
2024.3.2 阅读命中1篇
2024.3.9 阅读命中1篇
2024.3.16 阅读命中2篇
2024.3.23 阅读命中3篇
2024.4.6 阅读命中1篇
2024.4.13 阅读命中2篇
2024.4.20 阅读命中2篇
2024.4.27 阅读命中1篇
2024.5.11 阅读命中1篇
2024.5.18 阅读命中2篇
2024.5.25 阅读命中1篇
2024.6.1 阅读命中3篇
2024.6.8 阅读命中1篇
2024.6.22 阅读命中2篇
2024.7.6 阅读命中1篇
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2. 预测如何使用?
本预测包含阅读完整篇章、阅读题目、参考答案,来源于趴趴搜集整理的历年
考试真题。用来做考前刷题练习的材料的话 价值非常高,如果你备考时间紧张,
也可以以熟悉篇章主题+背答案为主。当然如果有时间的话,更建议大家做完整
练习。
阅读预测的宝贵之处不仅仅在于“命中”,更在于提供了非剑雅之外的真题题
源,供大家参考易考的文章主题、考题规律、出现的词汇量词汇等级、甚至篇
章和题目间是如何进行同义替换的等等。希望能带给大家一些备考助力。
3. 预测适用范围
雅思全球题库保持一致,所以本预测适用于纸笔考、机考及海外考场。
祝大家考试顺利!考的都会
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雅思考试预测
Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage One
A
Agatti is one of the Lakshadweep Islands offthe southwest coast of India. These islands
are surrounded by lagoons and coral reefs which are in turn surrounded by the open
ocean. Coral reefs, which are formed from the skeletons of minute sea creatures, give
shelter to a variety of plants and animals, and therefore have the potential to provide a
stream of diverse benefits to the inhabitants of Agatti Island.
B
In the first place, the reefs provide food and other products for consumption by the
islanders themselves. Foods include different types of fish, octopus and molluscs, and
in the case of poorer families these constitute as much as 90% of the protein they
consume. Reef resources are also used for medicinal purposes. For example, the money
cowrie, a shell known locally as Vallakavadi, is commonly made into a paste and used
as a home remedy to treat cysts in the eye.
C
In addition, the reef contributes to income generation. According to a recent survey, 20%
of the households on Agatti report lagoon fishing, or shingle, mollusc, octopus and
cowrie collection as their main occupation (Hoonetal, 2002). For poor households, the
direct contribution of the reef to their financial resources is significant: 12% of poor
households are completely dependent on the reef for their household income, while 59%
of poor households rely on the reef for 70% of their household income, and the
remaining 29% for 50% of their household income.
D
Bartering of reef resources also commonly takes place, both between islanders and
between islands. For example, Agatti Island is known for its abundance of octopus, and
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this is often used to obtain products from nearby Androth Island. Locally, reef products
maybe given by islanders in return for favours, such as help in constructing a house or
net mending, or for other products such as rice, coconuts or fish.
E
The investment required to exploit the reefs is minimal. It involves simple, locally
available tools and equipment, some of which can be used without a boat, such as the
fishing practice known asKat moodsal. This is carried out in the shallow eastern lagoon
of Agatti by children and adults, close to shore at low tide, throughout the year. A small
cast net, a leaf bag, and plastic slippers are all that are required, and the activity can
yield 10–12 small fish (approximately 1 kg) for household consumption. Cast nets are
not expensive, and all the households in Agatti own at least one. Even the boats, which
operate in the lagoon and near-shore reef, are constructed locally and have low running
costs. They are either small, non-mechanised, traditional wooden rowing boats, known
as Thonis, or rafts, known as Tharappam.
F
During more than 400 years of occupation and survival, the Agatti islanders have
developed an intimate knowledge of the reefs. They have knowledge of numerous
different types of fish and where they can be found according to the tide or lunar cycle.
They have also developed a local naming system or folk taxonomy, naming fish
according to their shape. Sometimes the same species is given different names
depending on its size and age. For example, a full grown Emperor fish is called Metti
and a juvenile is called Killokam. The abundance of each species at different fishing
grounds is also well known. Along with this knowledge of reef resources, the islanders
have developed a wide range of skills and techniques for exploiting them. A multitude
of different fishing techniques are still used by the islanders, each targeting different
areas of the reef and particular species.
G
The reef plays an important role in the social lives of the islanders too, being an integral
part of traditions and rituals. Most of the island’s folklore revolves around the reef and
sea. There is hardly any tale or song which does not mention the traditional sailing
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crafts, known as Odams, the journeys of enterprising ‘heroes’, the adventures of sea
fishing and encounters with sea creatures. Songs that women sing recollect women
looking for returning Odams, and requesting the waves to be gentler and the breeze just
right for the sails. There are stories of the benevolent sea ghost baluvam, whose coming
to shore is considered a harbinger of prosperity for that year, bringing more coconuts,
more fish and general well-being.
H
The reef is regarded by the islanders as common property, and all the islanders are
entitled to use the lagoon and reef resources. In the past, fishing groups would obtain
permission from the Amin (island head person) and go fishing in the grounds allotted
by him. On their return, the Amin would be given a share of the catch, normally one of
the best or biggest fish. This practice no longer exists, but there is still a code of conduct
or etiquette for exploiting the reef, and common respect for this is an effective way of
avoiding conflict or disputes.
I
Exploitation of such vast and diverse resources as the reefs and lagoon surrounding the
island has encouraged collaborative efforts, mainly for purposes of safety, but also as a
necessity in the operation of many fishing techniques. For example, an indigenous gear
and operation known as Bala fadal involves 25–30 men. Reef gleaning for cowrie
collection by groups of 6–10 women is also a common activity, and even today,
although its economic significance is marginal, it continues as a recreational activity.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-9
1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
8 Paragraph H
9 Paragraph I
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Questions 10-13
10 What proportion of poor households get all their income from reef products?
A 12%
B 20%
C 29%
D 59%
A is a seasonal activity.
B is a commercial activity.
C requires little investment.
D requires use of a rowing boat.
A physical strength
B fishing expertise
C courage
D imagination
13What do the writers say about the system for using the reef on Agatti?
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参考答案:
1Paragraph A v
2Paragraph B viii
3Paragraph C xi
4Paragraph D ii
5Paragraph E iv
6Paragraph F ix
7Paragraph G i
8Paragraph H xii
9Paragraph I vii
10 A
11C
12 B
13 D
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage Two.
Dubbing, although seemingly more accessible to movie watches, comes with many
disadvantages. For a start, it is expensive, hence it needs a large audience to justify the
cost, yet even big films carry no guarantee of such commercial success. In addition, the
dubbed voices may seem detached or inappropriate to the characters, or otherwise, the
absurdity of having an undereducated American ranffian saying. ‘Je voudrais déclarer
un vol’ becomes too much, affecting appreciation of the film. Finally, films and TV
programs now have an increasingly rapid turnover rate, and subtitling is faster and more
practical in such situations.
However, one should not assume subtitling is easier than dubbing. Subtitling requires
careful strategies, and here I will outline some of them. In order to do this, a sample
movie is needed, and the one examined here is an Italian movie subtitled into English.
Comprehension of subtitles will always be affected by lack of familiarity with the
values, beliefs, and interactive differences between the host and viewing cultures. The
subtitlers need to be aware of this in order to translate true meaning. Thus, before
beginning any work, a brief ‘cultural audit’ is absolutely necessary, involving a
comparison of the two cultures in relation to the storyline of the movie.
The movie is set in the late 1960s, at a time when the wealth and materialism of
American society was very high, contrasting the relative poverty of Italian village life.
The plot tells the story of a poor couple who dream of winning large sums of money by
gambling in a card game against a wealthy elderly American woman, who occasionally
visits Italy just for that purpose. The final thematic assertion that there are more
important factors than money reflects the warmth and solidarity of the Italian village in
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the face of adversity. Although these themes are universal, one could speculate that a
Western audience might not like or identify with them as much, give the increasing
urbanisation and materialism of their own society.
The most immediate translation issue relates to the movie’s title, ‘Lo Scopone
Scientifico’, translates as ‘Scientific Scopone’, whereas the English title is, ‘The
Scientific Card Player’. ‘Scopone’ is the name of a traditional Italian card game of great
antiquity. Obviously, the translators could not use this name, obscure to the Westren
viewers, but they insert a blander and inappropriate term. An even clearer subtitling
lapse is that the betting is always done using, apparently, ludicrously high figures.
Subtitles such as, ‘Let’s start with a million’ regularly jump out. This is a literal
translation of the figures (in Italian lira), yet it is the dollar with which the English-
speaking audience would associate. The result is an apparent lack of plausibility,
changing the comedic nature of the film.
With respect to the specific subtitling used, there are five. Let us begin with the subtitle,
‘The old bag’shere.’ This is idiomatic in English, being an insulting term for an elderly
woman. However, it is a simple expression comprising only two words, one of which
is literally intended (‘old’). I would speculate that the same idiom occurs in Italian (that
is, the direct translation of‘old’ and ‘bag’ in Italian carries the same idiomatic meaning).
This is the strategy of Transfer, where the full expression without time or space
consideration is given. Otherwise, there could well be a closely aligned idiom, in which
case the strategy would be Imitation, where there are similar lexical elements between
both languages.
Continuing with idioms, weread, ‘Catches win matches’. This derives from certain ball
games, such as cricket, where catching the ball after it is struck by the batsman
contributes towards winning the game. There are no such sporting cultures in Italy
followed. Thus, one can be certain that other words were used in the original Italian,
but that these have a similar pragmatic effect (in meaning and idiomatic nature). The
strategy used is thus Paraphrasing, where different expressions specific to the source
language (Italian) and target language (English) are required.
Later on, we read, ‘A sign of destiny’. When this subtitle appears, there are actually
two to three people speaking with equal force at the same time. Space and time
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constraints render it impossible to have them all translated, so only the quoted subtitle
appears, using the strategy known as Condensation. Finally, weread scopa – an Italian
word referring to a variation of the central card game. Being unique to Italy, there is no
equivalent word in English, so the strategy used here is Regination, where the subtitler
leaves the word in the original language. The meaning remains obvious from the
context, and only in such minimal and unlikely situations does this strategy become
acceptable.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-17
14 Dubbing can
15 Cultural audits
17 Scopone
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Questions 18-22
Questions 23-26
A apractical decision
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参考答案:
14 Answer: B
15 Answer: C
16 Answer: A
17 Answer: D
18 Answer: TRUE
21 Answer: FALSE
22 Answer: TRUE
23 Answer: D
24 Answer: C
25 Answer: A
26 Answer: B
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Reading Passage 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage One
Spice plants
A
Spice plants, such as coriander, cardamom or ginger, contain compounds which, when
added to food, give it a distinctive flavour. Spices have been used for centuries in the
preparation of both meat dishes for consumption and meat dishes for long-term storage.
However, an initial analysis of traditional meat-based recipes indicated that spices are
not used equally in different countries and regions, so we set about investigating
global patterns of spice use.
We hypothesized initially that the benefit of spices might lie in their anti-microbial
properties. Those compounds in spice plants which give them their distinctive
flavours probably first evolved to fight enemies such as plant-eating insects, fungi,
and bacteria. Many of the organisms which afflict spice plants attack humans too, in
particular the bacteria and fungi that live on and in dead plant and animal matter. So if
spices kill these organisms, or inhibit their production of toxins1, spice use in food
might reduce our own chances of contracting food poisoning.
The results of our investigation supported this hypothesis. In common with other
researchers,we found that all spices for which we could locate appropriate information
have some antibacterial effects: half inhibit more than 75% of bacteria, and four
(garlic, onion, allspice and oregano) inhibit 100% of those bacteria tested. In addition,
many spices are powerful fungicides.
Studies also show that when combined, spices exhibit even greater anti-
bacterial properties than when each is used alone. This is interesting because the
food recipes we used in our sample specify an average of four different spices. Some
spices are so frequently combined that the blends have acquired special names, such
as ‘chili powder’ (typically a mixture of red pepper, onion, paprika, garlic, cumin
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and oregano) and ‘oriental five spice’ (pepper, cinnamon, anise, fennel and
cloves). One intriguing example is the French ‘quatre epices’ (pepper, cloves,
ginger and nutmeg) which is often used in making sausages. Sausages are a rich
medium for bacterial growth, and have frequently been implicated as the source of
death from the botulism toxin, so the value of the anti-bacterial compounds in spices
used for sausage preparation is obvious.
E
A second hypothesis we made was that spice use would be heaviest in areas where
foods spoil most quickly. Studies indicate that rates of bacterial growth increase
dramatically with air temperature. Meat dishes that are prepared in advance and stored
at room temperatures for more than a few hours, especially in tropical climates,
typically show massive increases in bacterial counts. Of course temperatures within
houses, particularly in areas where food is prepared and stored, may differ from those
of the outside air, but usually it is even hotter in the kitchen.
Our survey of recipes from around the world confirmed this hypothesis: we found that
countries with higher than average temperatures used more spices. Indeed, in hot
countries nearly every meat-based recipe calls for at least one spice, and most include
many spices, whereas in cooler ones, substantial proportions of dishes are prepared
without spices, or with just a few. In other words, there is a significant positive
correlation between mean temperature and the average quantity of spices used in
cooking.
But if the main function of spices is to make food safer to eat, how did our ancestors
know which ones to use in the first place? It seems likely that people who happened to
add spice plants to meat during preparation, especially in hot climates, would have
been less likely to suffer from food poisoning than those who did not. Spice users may
also have been able to store foods for longer before they spoiled, enabling them to
tolerate longer periods of scarcity. Observation and imitation of the eating habits of
these healthier individuals by others could spread spice use rapidly through a society.
Also, families that used appropriate spices would rear a greater number of more
healthy offspring, to whom spice-use traditions had been demonstrated, and who
possessed appropriate taste receptors.
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H
Another question which arises is why did people develop a taste for spicy foods? One
possibility involves learned taste aversions. It is known that when people eat something
that makes them ill, they tend to avoid that taste subsequently. The adaptive value of
such learning is obvious. Adding a spice to a food that caused sickness might alter its
taste enough to make it palatable again (i.e. it tastes like a different food), as well as kill
the micro-organisms that caused the illness, thus rendering it safe for consumption. By
this process, food aversions would more often be associated with unspiced (and
therefore unsafe) foods, and food likings would be associated with spicy foods,
especially in places where foods spoil rapidly. Overtime people would have developed
a natural preference for spicy food.
Of course, spice use is not the only way to avoid food poisoning. Cooking, and
completely consuming wild game immediately after slaughter reduces opportunities for
the growth of micro-organisms. However, this is practical only where fresh meat is
abundant year-round. In areas where fresh meat is not consistently available,
preservation may be accomplished by thoroughly cooking, salting, smoking, drying,
and spicing meats. Indeed, salt has been used worldwide for centuries to preserve food.
We suggest that all these practices have been adopted for essentially the same reason:
to minimize the effects of harmful, food-borne organisms.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-33
Questions 34-39
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Question 40
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参考答案
27 D
28 I
29 F
30 G
31 D
32 C
33 H
34 food poisoning
35 100%/100 percent
36 sausage/sausages
37 cooler ones
38 unspiced foods
39 salt
40 A
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Obesity is a huge problem in many Western countries and one which now attracts
considerable medical interest as researchers take up the challenge to find a 'cure' for the
common condition of being seriously overweight. However, rather than take
responsibility for their weight, obese people have often sought solace in the excuse that
they have a slow metabolism, a genetic hiccup which sentences more than half the
Australian population (63% of men and 47% of women) to a life of battling with their
weight. The argument goes like this: it doesn't matter how little they eat, they gain
weight because their bodies break down food and turn it into energy more slowly than
those with a so-called normal metabolic rate.
'This is nonsense,' says Dr Susan Jebb from the Dunn Nutrition Unit at Cambridge in
England. Despite the persistence of this metabolism myth, science has known for
several years that the exact opposite is in fact true. Fat people have faster metabolisms
than thin people. 'What is very clear,' says Dr Jebb, 'is that overweight people actually
burn off more energy. They have more cells, bigger hearts, bigger lungs and they all
need more energy just to keep going.'
It took only one night, spent in a sealed room at the Dunn Unit to disabuse one of their
patients of the beliefs of a lifetime: her metabolism was fast, not slow. By sealing the
room and measuring the exact amount of oxygen she used, researchers were able to
show her that her metabolism was not the culprit. It wasn't the answershe expected and
probably not the one she wanted but she took the news philosophically.
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Although the metabolism myth has been completely disproved, science has far from
discounted our genes as responsible for making us whatever weight we are, fat or thin.
One of the world's leading obesity researchers, geneticist Professor Stephen O'Rahilly ,
goes so far as to say we are on the threshold of a complete change in the way we view
not only morbid obesity, but also everyday overweight. Prof. O’Rahilly's
groundbreaking work in Cambridge has proven that obesity can be caused by our
genes. 'These people are not weak- willed, slothful or lazy,' says Prof. O'Rahilly,
'They have a medical condition due to a genetic defect and that causes them to be
obese.'
In Australia, the University of Sydney's Professor Ian Caterson says while major
genetic defects may be rare, many people probably have minor genetic variations that
combine to dictate weight and are responsible for things such ashow much we eat, the
amount of exercise we do and the amount of energy we need. When you add up all
these little variations, the result is that some people are genetically predisposed to
putting on weight. He says while the fast/slow metabolism debate may have been settled,
that doesn't mean some other subtle change in the metabolism gene won't be found in
overweight people. He is confident that science will, eventually, be able to 'cure' some
forms of obesity but the only effective way for the vast majority of overweight and
obese people to lose weight is a change of diet and an increase in exercise.
Despite the $500 million a year Australians spend trying to lose weight and the $830
million it costs the community in health care, obesity is at epidemic proportions here,
as it is in all Western nations. Until recently, research and treatment for obesity had
concentrated on behaviour modification, drugs to decrease appetite and surgery. How
the drugs worked was often not understood and many caused severe side effects and
even death in some patients. Surgery for obesity has also claimed many lives.
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It has long been known that apart of the brain called the hypothalamus is responsible
for regulating hunger, among other things. But it wasn't until 1994 that Professor Jeffery
Friedman from Rockerfeller University in the US sent science in a new direction by
studying an obese mouse. Prof. Friedman found that unlike its thin brothers, the fat
mouse did not produce a hitherto unknown hormone called leptin. Manufactured by the
fat cells, leptin acts as a messenger, sending signals to the hypothalamus to turn off the
appetite. Previously, the fat cells were thought to be responsible simply for storing fat.
Prof. Friedman gave the fat mouse leptin and it lost 30% of its body weight in two
weeks.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Prof. O'Rahilly read about this research with great
excitement. For many months two blood samples had lain in the bottom of his freezer,
taken from two extremely obese young cousins. He hired a doctor to develop a test
for leptin in human blood, which eventually resulted in the discovery that neither of the
children's blood contained the hormone. When one cousin was given leptin, she lost a
stone in weight and Prof. O'Rahilly made medical history. Here was the first proofthat
a genetic defect could cause obesity in humans. But leptin deficiency turned out to be
an extremely rare condition and there is a lot more research to be done before the'magic'
cure for obesity is ever found.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-8
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-H.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable headingfor each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers (i-xi) in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i Obesity in animals
ii Hidden dangers
v No known treatment
ix Nature or nurture
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1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
8 Paragraph H
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Questions 9-13
Complete the summary of Reading Passage 1 (Questions 9-13) using words from the
box.
OBESITY
Example
They do this by seeking to blame their 9 for the fact that they are overweight
and erroneously believe that they use _10 energy than thin people to stay alive.
However, recent research has shown that a 11 problem can be responsible for
obesity as some people seem programmed to 12 more than others. The new
research points to a shift from trying to change people’s 13 to seeking an
answer to the problem in the laboratory.
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参考答案
1 Answer: x
2 Answer: vii
3 Answer: iii
4 Answer: iv
5 Answer: xi
6 Answer: ii
7 Answer: vi
8 Answer: viii
9 Answer: metabolism
10 Answer: less
11 Answer: genetic
12 Answer: consume
13 Answer: behaviou
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
Wheel of Fortune
Since moving pictures were invented a century ago, a new way of distributing
entertainment to consumers has emerged about once every generation. Each such
innovation has changed the industry irreversibly; each has been accompanied by a
period of fear mixed with exhilaration. The arrival of digital technology, which
translates music, pictures and text into the zeros and ones of computer language, marks
one of those periods.
This may sound familiar, because the digital revolution, and the explosion of choice
that would go with it, has been heralded for some time. In 1992, John Malone, chief
executive of TCI, an American cable giant, welcomed the '500-channel universe'.
Digital television was about to deliver everything except pizzas to people's living rooms.
When the entertainment companies tried out the technology, it worked fine - but not at
a price that people were prepared to pay.
Those 500 channels eventually arrived but via the Internet and the PC rather than
through television. The digital revolution was starting to affect the entertainment
business in unexpected ways. Eventually it will change every aspect of it, from the way
cartoons are made to the way films are screened to the way people buy music. That
much is clear. What nobody is sure of is how it will affect the economics ofthe business.
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New technologies always contain within them both threats and opportunities. They
have the potential both to make the companies in the business a great deal richer, and
to sweep them away. Old companies always fear new technology. Hollywood was
hostile to television, television terrified by the VCR. Go back far enough, points out
Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, and you find
publishers complaining that 'circulating libraries' would cannibalise their sales. Yet
whenever a new technology has come in, it has made more money for existing
entertainment companies. The proliferation of the means of distribution results,
gratifyingly, in the proliferation of dollars, pounds, pesetas and the rest to pay for it.
All the same, there is something in the old companies' fears. New technologies may
not threaten their lives, but they usually change their role. Once television became
widespread, film and radio stopped being the staple form of entertainment. Cable
television has undermined the power of the broadcasters. And as power has shifted the
movie studios, the radio companies and the television broadcasters have been
swallowed up. These days, the grand old names of entertainment have more resonance
than power. Paramount is part of Viacom,a cable company; Universal, part of Seagram,
a drinks-and-entertainment company; MGM, once the roaring lion of Hollywood, has
been reduced to a whisper because it is not part of one of the giants. And RCA, once
the most important broadcasting company in the world, is now a recording label
belonging to Bertelsmann, a large German entertainment company.
Part of the reason why incumbents got pushed aside was that they did not
see what was coming. But they also faced a tighter regulatory environment
than the present one. In America, laws preventing television broadcasters
from owning programme companies were repealed earlier this decade,
allowing the creation of vertically integrated businesses. Greater freedom,
combined with a sense of history, prompted the smarter companies in the
entertainment business to re-invent themselves. They saw what happened
to those of their predecessors who were stuck with one form of
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happened to those of their predecessors who were stuck with one form
of distribution.So, these days, the powers in the entertainment business are no
longer movie studios, or television broadcasters, or publishers; all those
businesses have become part of bigger businesses still, companies that can both
create content and distribute it in a range of different ways.
Out of all this, seven huge entertainment companies have emerged - Time Warner,
Walt Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corp, Seagram and Sony. They cover pretty
well every bit of the entertainment business except pornography. Three are American,
one is Australian, one Canadian, one German and one Japanese. 'What you are seeing',
says Christopher Dixon, managing director of media research at PaineWebber, a
stockbroker, 'is the creation of a global oligopoly.It happened to the oil and automotive
businesses earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment business.' It
remains to be seen whether the latest technology will weaken those great companies, or
make them stronger than ever.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-21
Write the appropriate letters (A-G) in boxes 14-21 on your answer sheet.
14 the contrasting effects that new technology can have on existing business
15 the fact that a total transformation is going to take place in the future in the delivery
of all forms of entertainment
16 the confused feelings that people are known to have experienced in response to
technological innovation
17 the fact that some companies have learnt from the mistakes of others
20 the fact that some companies were the victims of strict government policy
21 the fact that the digital revolution could undermine the giant entertainment
companies
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Questions 22-25
The writer refers to various individuals and companies in the reading passage.
Match the people or companies (A-E) with the points made in Questions 22-25 about
the introduction of new technology.
Write the appropriate letter (A-E) in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.
A John Malone
B Hal Valarian
C MGM
D Walt Disney
E Christopher Dixon
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24 Major entertainment bodies that have remained independent have lost their influence.
25 News of the mostrecent technological development was published some years ago.
Questions 26-27
Choose the appropriate letters A-D and write them in boxes 26-27 on your
answer sheet.
26 How does the writer put across his views on the digital revolution?
27 Which of the following best summarises the writer’s views in Reading Passage 2?
A The public should cease resisting the introduction of new technology.
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参考答案
14 Answer: D
15 Answer: C
16 Answer: A
17 Answer: F
18 Answer: B
19 Answer: C
20 Answer: F
21 Answer: G
22 Answer: B
23 Answer: E
24 Answer: C
25 Answer: A
26 Answer: D
27 Answer: C
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
What do we mean by being ‘talented’ or ‘gifted’? The most obvious way is to look at
the work someone does and if they are capable of significant success, label them as
talented. The purely quantitative route - ‘percentage definition’ - looks not at
individuals, but at simple percentages, such as the top five per cent of the population,
and labels them - by definition - as gifted. This definition has fallen from favour,
eclipsed by the advent of IQ tests, favoured by luminaries such as Professor
HansEysenck, where a series of written or verbal tests of general intelligence leads to
a score of intelligence.
The IQ test has been eclipsed in turn. Most people studying intelligence and creativity
in the new millennium now prefer a broader definition, using a multifaceted approach
where talents in many areas are recognised rather than purely concentrating on
academic achievement. If we are therefore assuming that talented, creative or gifted
individuals may need to be assessed across a range of abilities, does this mean
intelligence can run in families as a genetic or inherited tendency? Mental dysfunction
- such as schizophrenia - can, so is an efficient mental capacity passed on from parent
to child?
Animal experiments throw some light on this question, and on the whole area of
whether it is genetics, the environment or a combination of the two that allows for
intelligence and creative ability. Different strains of rats show great differences in
intelligence or ‘rat reasoning’. If these are brought up in normal conditions and then mn
through amaze to reach a food goal, the ‘bright’ strain make far fewer wrong turns that
the ‘dull’ ones. But if the environment is made dull and boring the number of errors
becomes equal. Return the rats to an exciting maze and the discrepancy returns as before
- but is much smaller. In other words,a dull rat in a stimulating environment will almost
do as well as a bright rat who is bored in a normal one. This principle applies to humans
too - someone maybe born with innate intelligence, but their environment probably has
the final say over whether they become creative or even a genius.
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Evidence now exists that most young children, if given enough opportunities and
encouragement, are able to achieve significant and sustainable levels of academic or
sporting prowess. Bright or creative children are often physically very active at the
sametime, and so may receive more parental attention as a result - almost by default -
in order to ensure their safety. They may also talk earlier, and this, in turn, breeds
parental interest. This can sometimes cause problems with other siblings who may feel
jealous even though they themselves may be bright. Their creative talents may be
undervalued and so never come to fruition. Two themes seem to run through famously
creative families as a result. The first is that the parents were able to identify the talents
of each child, and nurture and encourage these accordingly but in an even-handed
manner. Individual differences were encouraged, and friendly sibling rivalry was not
seen as a particular problem. If the father is, say, a famous actor, there is no undue
pressure for his children to follow him onto the boards, but instead their chosen interests
are encouraged. There need not even by any obvious talent in such a family since there
always needs to be someone who sets the family career in motion, as in the case of the
Sheen acting dynasty.
Martin Sheen was the seventh often children born to a Spanish immigrant father and
an Irish mother. Despite intense parental disapproval he turned his back on entrance
exams to university and borrowed cash from a local priest to start a fledgling acting
career. His acting successes in films such as Badlands and Apocalypse Now made him
one of the most highly-regarded actors of the 1970s. Three sons - Emilio Estevez,
Ramon Estevez and Charlie Sheen - have followed him into the profession as a
consequence of being inspired by his motivation and enthusiasm.
A stream seems to run through creative families. Such children are not necessarily
smothered with love by their parents. They feel loved and wanted, and are secure in
their home, but are often more surrounded by an atmosphere of work and where
following a calling appears to be important. They may see from their parents that it
takes time and dedication to be master of a craft, and so are in less of a hurry to achieve
for themselves once they start to work.
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an undoubted part. Mozart, considered by many to be the finest composer of all time,
was lucky to be living in an age that encouraged the writing of music. He was brought
up surrounded by it, his father was a musician who encouraged him to the point of
giving up his job to promote his child genius, and he learnt musical composition with
frightening speed - the speed of a genius. Mozart himself simply wanted to create the
finest music ever written but did not necessarily view himself as a genius - he could
write sublime music at will, and so often preferred to lead a hedonistic lifestyle that he
found more exciting than writing music to order.
Albert Einstein and Bill Gates are two more examples of people whose talents have
blossomed by virtue of the times they were living in. Einstein was a solitary, somewhat
slow child who had affection at home but whose phenomenal intelligence emerged
without any obvious parental input. This may have been partly due to the fact that at
the start of the 20th Century a lot of the Newtonian laws of physics were being
questioned, leaving a fertile ground for ideas such as his to be developed. Bill Gates
may have had the creative vision to develop Microsoft, but without the new computer
age dawning at the same time he may never have achieved the position on the world
stage he now occupies.
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Questions 28-40
Questions 28-29
‘percentage definition’
28
29
Questions 30-32
Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 30-32 on your answer sheet.
Which THREE of the following does the writer regard as a feature of creative
families?
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Questions 33-34
Choose the appropriate letters A—D and write them in boxes 33-34 on your answer
sheet.
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Questions 35-39
Do thefollowing statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
36 The brother or sister of a gifted older child may fail to fulfil their own potential.
Question 40
From the list below choose the most suitable titlefor the whole of Reading Passage 3.
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参考答案
28 Answer: IQ/intelligence
30 31 32 B,C E
33 Answer: C
34 Answer: A
36 Answer: YES
37 Answer: YES
38 Answer: NO
39 Answer: NO
40 Answer: D
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Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage One.
Light Pollution
After hours of driving south in the pitch-black darkness of the Nevada desert, a dome
of hazy gold suddenly appears on the horizon. Soon, a road sign confirms the obvious:
Las Vegas 30 miles. Looking skyward, you notice that the Big Dipper is harder to find
than it was an hour ago.
Light pollution—the artificial light that illuminates more than its intended target area—
has become a problem of increasing concern across the country over the past 15 years.
In the suburbs, where over-lit shopping mall parking lots are the norm, only 200 of the
Milky Way’s 2,500 stars are visible on a clear night. Even fewer can be seen from large
cities. In almost every town, big and small, streetlights beam just as much light up and
out as they do down, illuminating much more than just the street. Almost 50 percent of
the light emanating from street lamps misses its intended target, and billboards,
shopping centres, private homes and skyscrapers are similarly over-illuminated.
America has become so bright that in a satellite image of the United States at night, the
outline of the country is visible from its lights alone. The major cities are all there, in
bright clusters: New York, Boston, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago,
and, of course, Las Vegas. Mark Adams, superintendent of the McDonald Observatory
in west Texas, says that the very fact that city lights are visible from on high is proof of
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their wastefulness. “When you’re up in an airplane, all that light you see on the ground
from the city is wasted. It’s going up into the night sky. That’s why you can see it.”
But don’t we need all those lights to ensure our safety? The answer from light engineers,
light pollution control advocates and astronomers is an emphatic “no.” Elizabeth
Alvarez of the International Dark Sky Association (IDA), a non-profit organization in
Tucson, Arizona, says that overly bright security lights can actually force neighbours
to close the shutters, which means that if any criminal activity does occur on the street,
noone will see it. And the old assumption that bright lights deter crime appears to have
been a false one: A new Department of Justice report concludes that there is no
documented correlation between the level of lighting and the level of crime in an area.
And contrary to popular belief, more crimes occur in broad daylight than at night.
For drivers, light can actually create a safety hazard. Glaring lights can temporarily
blind drivers, increasing the likelihood of an accident. To help prevent such accidents,
some cities and states prohibit the use of lights that impair night-time vision. For
instance, New Hampshire law forbids the use of “any light along a highway so
positioned as to blind or dazzle the vision of travellers on the adjacent highway.”
Badly designed lighting can pose a threat to wildlife as well as people. Newly hatched
turtles in Florida move toward beach lights instead of the more muted silver shimmer
of the ocean. Migrating birds, confused by lights on skyscrapers, broadcast towers and
lighthouses, are injured, sometimes fatally, after colliding with high, lighted structures.
And light pollution harms air quality as well: Because most of the country’s power
plants are still powered by fossil fuels, more light means more air pollution.
So what can be done? Tucson, Arizona is taking back the night. The city has one of the
best lighting ordinances in the country, and, not coincidentally, the highest
concentration of observatories in the world. Kitt Peak National Optical Astronomy
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Observatory has 24 telescopes aimed skyward around the city’s perimeter, and its cadre
of astronomers needs a dark sky to work with.
For a while, that darkness was threatened. “We were totally losing the night sky,” Jim
Singleton of Tucson’s Lighting Committee told Tulsa, Oklahoma’s KOTV last March.
Now, after retrofitting inefficient mercury lighting with low-sodium lights that block
light from “trespassing” into unwanted areas like bedroom windows, and by doing away
with some unnecessary lights altogether, the city is softly glowing rather than brightly
beaming. The same thing is happening in a handful of other states, including Texas,
which just passed a light pollution bill last summer. “Astronomers can get what they
need at the same time that citizens get what they need: safety, security and good
visibility at night,” says McDonald Observatory’s Mark Adams, who provided
testimony at the hearings for the bill.
And in the long run, everyone benefits from reduced energy costs. Wasted energy from
inefficient lighting costs us between $1 and $2 billion a year, according to IDA. The
city of San Diego,which installed new, high-efficiency streetlights after passing a light
pollution law in 1985, now saves about $3 million a year in energy costs.
Legislation isn’t the only answer to light pollution problems. Brian Greer, Central Ohio
representative for the Ohio Light Pollution Advisory Council, says that education is just
as important, if not more so. “There are some special situations where regulation is the
only fix,” he says. “But the vast majority of bad lighting is simply the result of not
knowing any better.” Simple actions like replacing old bulbs and fixtures with more
efficient and better-designed ones can make a big difference in preserving the night sky.
*The Big Dipper: a group of seven bright stars visible in the Northern Hemisphere.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-5
Choose the most suitable headingsforparagraphs A-Ffrom the list of headings below.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use them all.
List of Headings
Example Answer
Paragraph A ix
1 Paragraph B ..........
2 Paragraph C ..........
3 Paragraph D ..........
4 Paragraph E ..........
5 Paragraph F ..........
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Questions 6-9
Questions 10-13
NOT GIVEN if there is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
10 One group of scientists find their observations are made more difficult by bright
lights. ..........
11 It is expensive to reduce light pollution. ..........
12 Many countries are now making light pollution illegal. ..........
13 Old types of light often cause more pollution than more modern ones. ..........
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参考答案:
1viii
2 vii
3 vi
4 iv
5 iii
6 deter crime
7 air pollution/pollution
8 block light
9 education
10 YES
11 NO
12 NOT GIVEN
13 YES
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Termite mounds were the inspiration for an innovative design in sustainable living
Africa owes its termite mounds a lot. Trees and shrubs take root in them. Prospectors
mine them, looking for specks of gold carried up by termites from hundreds of metres
below. And of course, they are a special treat to aardvarks and other insectivores.
Termites in Zimbabwe build gigantic mounds inside which they farm a fungus that is
their primary food source. This must be kept at exactly 30.5°C, while the temperatures
on the African veld outside can range from 1.5°C at night only just above freezing to a
baking hot 40°C during the day. The termites achieve this remarkable feat by building
a system of vents in the mound. Those at the base lead down into chambers cooled by
wet mud carried up from water tables far below, and others lead up through a flue to
the peak of the mound. By constantly opening and closing these heating and cooling
vents over the course of the day the termites succeed in keeping the temperature
constant in spite of the wide fluctuations outside.
Architect Mick Pearce used precisely the same strategy when designing
the Eastgate Building, which has no air conditioning and virtually no heating. The
building the country's largest commercial and shopping complex uses less than 10% of
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The complex is actually two buildings linked by bridges across a shady, glass-roofed
atrium open to the breezes. Fans suck fresh air in from the atrium, blow it upstairs
through hollow spaces under the floors and from there into each office
through baseboard vents. As it rises and warms, it is drawn out via ceiling vents and
finally exits through forty- eight brick chimneys.
To keep the harsh, highveld sun from heating the interior, no more than 25% of the
outside is glass, and all the windows are screened by cement arches that just out more
than a metre.
During summer’s cool nights, big fans flush air through the building seven times an
hour to chill the hollow floors. By day, smaller fans blow two changes of air an hour
through the building, to circulate the air which has been in contact with the cool floors.
For winter days, there are small heaters in the vents.
This is all possible only because Harare is 1600 feet above sea level, has cloudless skies,
little humidity and rapid temperature swings days as warm as 31°C commonly drop to
14°C at night. ‘You couldn’t do this in New York, with its fantastically hot summers
and fantastically cold winters,’ Pearce said. But then his eyes lit up at the challenge.'
Perhaps you could store the summer's heat in water somehow.
The engineering firm of Ove Amp & Partners, which worked with him on the design,
monitors daily temperatures outside, under the floors and at knee, desk and ceiling
level. Ove Arup's graphs show that the temperature of the building has generally stayed
between 23"C and 25°C. with the exception of the annual hot spell just before the
summer rains in October, and three days in November, when a janitor accidentally
switched off the fans at night. The atrium, which funnels the winds through, can be
much cooler. And the air is fresh far more so than in air-conditioned buildings, where
up to 30% of the air is recycled.
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Pearce, disdaining smooth glass skins as ‘igloos in the Sahara’, calls his building, with
its exposed girders and pipes, ‘spiky’. The design of the entrances is based on the
porcupine-quill headdresses ofthe local Shona tribe. Elevators are designed to look like
the mineshaft cages used in Zimbabwe's diamond mines. The shape of the fan covers,
and the stone used in their construction, are echoes of Great Zimbabwe, the ruins that
give the country its name.
Standing on a roof catwalk, peering down inside at people as small as termites below.
Pearce said he hoped plants would grow wild in the atrium and pigeons and bats would
move into it. like that termite fungus, further extending the whole 'organic machine’
metaphor. The architecture, he says, is a regionalised style that responds to the
biosphere, to the ancient traditional stone architecture of Zimbabwe's past, and to local
human resources.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-5
3 Why would a building like Eastgate not work efficiently in New York?
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4 What does Ove Arup’s data suggest about Eastgate’s temperature control system?
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Questions 6-10
Warm air leaves the offices through 6 The warm air leaves the building
through 7 Heat from the sun is prevented from reaching the windows
by 8 When the outside temperature drops 9 bring air in from outside.On
cold days 10 raise the temperature in the offices.
Questions 11-13
Answer the question below, using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDSfrom thepassage
for each answer.
Which three parts of the Eastgate Building reflect important features of Zimbabwe’s
history and culture?
A entrances
B quill
C cages
D elevators
E fan covers
F stone
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参考答案:
1、B
2、D
3、A
4、C
5、A
6、ceiling vents
8、cement arches
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
Could brain-scanning technology provide an accurate way to assess the appeal of new
products and the effectiveness of advertising?
MARKETING people are no longer prepared to take your word for it that you favour
one product over another. They want to scan your brain to see which one you really
prefer. Using the tools of neuroscientists, such as electroencephalogram (EEG)
mapping and functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), they are trying to learn
more about the mental processes behind purchasing decisions. The resulting fusion of
neuroscience and marketing is inevitably, being called 'neuromarketing’.
The first person to apply brain-imaging technology in this way was Gerry Zaltman of
Harvard University, in the late 1990s. The idea remained in obscurity until 2001, when
BrightHouse, a marketing consultancy based in Atlanta, Georgia, set up a dedicated
neuromarketing arm, BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group. (BrightHouse lists Coca-
Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot among its clients.) But the company's name may
itself simply be an example of clever marketing. BrightHouse does not scan people
while showing them specific products or campaign ideas, but bases its work on the
results of more general fMRI-based research into consumer preferences and decision-
making carried out at Emory University in Atlanta.
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Can brain scanning really be applied to marketing? The basic principle is not that
different from focus groups and other traditional forms of market research. A volunteer
lies in an fMRI machine and is shown images or video clips. In place of an interview
or questionnaire, the subject's response is evaluated by monitoring brain activity. fMRI
provides real-time images of brain activity, in which different areas “light up”
depending on the level of blood flow. This provides clues to the subject's subconscious
thought patterns. Neuroscientists know, for example, that the sense of self is associated
with an area of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex. A flow of blood to that
area while the subject is looking at a particular logo suggests that he or she identifies
with that brand.
At first, it seemed that only companies in Europe were prepared to admit that they used
neuromarketing. Two carmakers, DaimlerChrysler in Germany and Ford's European
arm, ran pilot studies in 2003. But more recently, American companies have become
more open about their use of neuromarketing. Lieberman Research Worldwide, a
marketing firm based in Los Angeles, is collaborating with the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) to enable movie studios to market-test film trailers. More
controversially, the New York Times recently reported that a political
consultancy, FKF Research, has been studying the effectiveness of campaign
commercials using neuromarketing techniques.
Whether all this is any more than a modern-day version of phrenology, the Victorian
obsession with linking lumps and bumps in the skull to personality traits, is unclear.
There have been no large-scale studies, so scans of a handful of subjects may not be a
reliable guide to consumer behaviour in general. Of course, focus groups and surveys
are flawed too: strong personalities can steer the outcomes of focus groups, and people
do not always tell opinion pollsters the truth. And even honest people cannot always
explain their preferences.
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That is perhaps where neuromarketing has the most potential. When asked about cola
drinks, most people claim to have a favourite brand, but cannot say why they prefer that
brand’s taste. An unpublished study of attitudes towards two well- known cola drinks.
Brand A and Brand 13. carried out last year in a college of medicine in the US found
that most subjects preferred Brand B in a blind tasting fMRI scanning showed that
drinking Brand B lit up a region called the ventral putamen, which is one of the brain s
‘reward centres’, far more brightly than Brand A. But when told which drink was which,
most subjects said they preferred Brand A, which suggests that its stronger brand
outweighs the more pleasant taste of the other drink.
“People form many unconscious attitudes that are obviously beyond traditional
methods that utilise introspection,” says Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist at Caltech who
is collaborating with Lieberman Research. With over $100 billion spent each year on
marketing in America alone, any firm that can more accurately analyse how customers
respond to products, brands and advertising could make a fortune.
Consumer advocates are wary. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert,a lobby group, thinks
existing marketing techniques are powerful enough. “Already, marketing is deeply
implicated in many serious pathologies,” he says. “That is especially true of children,
who are suffering from an epidemic of marketing- related diseases, including obesity
and type-2 diabetes. Neuromarketing is a tool to amplify these trends.”
Dr Quartz counters that neuromarketing techniques could equally be used for benign
purposes. “There are ways to utilise these technologies to create more responsible
advertising,” he says. Brain-scanning could, for example, be used to determine when
people are capable of making free choices, to ensure that advertising falls within those
bounds.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-19
Choose the correct headingfor Paragraphs B-Gfrom the list of headings below.
Write the correct number (i-x) in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
14 Paragraph B
15 Paragraph C
16 Paragraph D
17 Paragraph E
18 Paragraph F
19 Paragraph G
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List of Headings
v A misleading name
ix Broadening applications
x What is neuromarketing?
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Questions 20-22
Look at the following people (Questions 20-22) and the list of opinions below.
Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 20-22 on your answer sheet.
20 Steven Quartz
21 Gary Ruskin
22 Tim Ambler
List of opinions
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Questions 23-26
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参考答案:
14、 v Paragraph B
15、 i Paragraph C
16、 ix Paragraph D
19、 vi Paragraph G
23、brands
24、untruthful
25、unconscious
26、Children
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
And so it might have remained. But in 1843 British plant collector Joseph Hooker made
a brief call on his return from Antarctica. Surveying the bare earth, he concluded that
the island had suffered some natural calamity that had denuded it of vegetation and
triggered a decline in rainfall that was turning the place into a desert. The British Navy,
which by then maintained a garrison on the island, was keen to improve the place
and asked Hooker's advice. He suggested an ambitious scheme for planting trees and
shrubs that would revive rainfall and stimulate a wider ecological recovery. And,
perhaps lacking anything else to do, the sailors set to with a will.
In 1845, a naval transport ship from Argentina delivered a batch of seedlings. In the
following years, more than 200 species of plant arrived from South Africa, from
England came 700 packets of seeds, including those of two species that especially liked
the place: bamboo and prickly pear. With sailors planting several thousand trees a year,
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the bare white mountain was soon cloaked in green and renamed Green Mountain, and
by the early twentieth century the mountain's slopes were covered with a variety oftrees
and shrubs from all over the world.
Modern ecologists throw up their hands in horror at what they see as Hookers
environmental anarchy. The exotic species wrecked the indigenous ecosystem,
squeezing out the islands endemic plants. In fact. Hooker knew well enough what might
happen. However, he saw greater benefit in improving rainfall and encouraging more
prolific vegetation on the island.
But there is a much deeper issue here than the relative benefits of sparse endemic
species versus luxuriant imported ones. And as botanist David Wilkinson of Liverpool
John Moores University in the UK pointed out after a recent visit to the island, it goes
to the heart of some of the most dearly held tenets of ecology. Conservationists'
understandable concern for the fate of Ascension’s handful of unique species has, he
says, blinded them to something quite astonishing the fact that the introduced species
have been a roaring success.
But that’s not what happened on Green Mountain. And the experience suggests that
perhaps natural rainforests are constructed far more by chance than by evolution.
Species, say some ecologists, don’t so much evolve to create ecosystems as make the
best of what they have. ‘The Green Mountain system is a man-made system that has
produced a tropical rainforest without any co-evolution between its constituent species,’
says Wilkinson.
Not everyone agrees. Alan Gray, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK.
argues that the surviving endemic species on Green Mountain, though small in number,
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may still form the framework of the new' ecosystem. The new arrivals may just be an
adornment, with little structural importance for the ecosystem.
But to Wilkinson this sounds like clutching at straws. And the idea of the instant
formation of rainforests sounds increasingly plausible as research reveals that
supposedly pristine tropical rainforests from the Amazon to south-east Asia may in
places be little more titan the overgrown gardens of past rainforest civilisations.
The most surprising thing of all is that no ecologists have thought to conduct proper
research into this human-made rainforest ecosystem. A survey of the island’s flora
conducted six years ago by the University of Edinburgh was concerned only with
endemic species. They characterised everything else as a threat. And the Ascension
authorities are currently turning Green Mountain into a national park where introduced
species, at least the invasive ones, are earmarked for culling rather than conservation.
‘As you walk through the forest, you see lots of leaves that have had chunks taken out
of them by various insects. There are caterpillars and beetles around.' says Wilkinson.
‘But where did they come from? Are they endemic or alien? If alien, did they come
with the plant on which they feed or discover it on arrival?’ Such questions go to the
heart of how- rainforests happen.
The Green Mountain forest holds many secrets. And the irony is that the most
artificial rainforest in the world could tell us more about rainforest ecology than any
number of natural forests.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
28 The natural vegetation on the island contained some species which were found
nowhere else.
29 Joseph Hooker assumed that human activity had caused the decline in the island's
plant life.
30 British sailors on the island took part in a major tree planting project.
32 The bamboo and prickly pear seeds sent from England were unsuitable for
Ascension.
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Questions 33-37
Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-Gfrom the box below.
Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.
33 The reason for modern conservationists’ concern over Hooker's tree planting
programme is that
35 Wilkinson says the existence of Ascension’s rainforest challenges the theory that
C the species in the original rainforest were more successful than the newer arrivals.
D rainforests can only develop through a process of slow and complex evolution.
G the introduced species may have less ecological significance than the original ones.
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Questions 38-40
40 Overall, what feature of the Ascension rainforest does the writer stress?
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参考答案:
27、NOT GIVEN
28、TRUE
29、FALSE
30、TRUE
31、NOT GIVEN
32、 FALSE
33、B
34、F
35、D
36、G
37、A
38、B
39、A
40、D
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Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-10, which are based on Reading
Passage One
Maize is Mexico’s lifeblood – the country’s history and identity are entwined with it.
But this centuries-old relationship is now threatened by free trade. Laura Carlsen
investigates the threat and profiles a growing activist movement.
On a mountaintop in southern Mexico, Indian families gather. They chant and sprinkle
cornmeal in consecration, praying for the success of their new crops, the unity of their
communities and the health of their families. In this village in Oaxaca people eat corn
tamales, sow maize plots and teach children to care for the plant. The cultural rhythms
of this community, its labours, rituals and celebrations will be defined – as they have
been for millennia – by the lifecycle of corn. Indeed, if it weren’t for the domestication
of teocintle (the ancestor of modern maize) 9,000 years ago mesoamerican civilization
could never have developed. In the Mayan sacred book, the Popol Vuh, the gods create
people out of cornmeal. The ‘people of corn’ flourished and built one of the most
remarkable cultures in human history.
But in Mexico and Central America today maize has come under attack. As a result of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Mexico has been flooded with
imported corn from north of the border in the US. The contamination of native varieties
with genetically modified imported maize could have major consequences for Mexican
campesinos (farmers), for local biodiversity and for the world’s genetic reserves.
A decade ago Mexican bureaucrats and businesspeople had it all figured out. NAFTA
would drive ‘uncompetitive’ maize farmers from the countryside to work in booming
assembly factories across the country. Their standard of living would rise as the cost of
providing services like electricity and water to scattered rural communities would fall.
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Best of all, cheap imported maize from the US – the world’s most efficient and most
heavily subsidized producer – would be a benefit to Mexican consumers.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. There weren’t quite enough of those factory
jobs and the ones that did materialize continued to be along the US border, not further
in Mexico. And despite a huge drop in the price farmers received for their corn,
consumers often ended up paying more. The price of tortillas – the country’s staple
food – rose nearly fivefold as the Government stopped domestic subsidies and giant
agribusiness firms took over the market. Free trade defenders like Mexico’s former
Under-Secretary of Agriculture Luis Tellez suggest: ‘It’s not that NAFTA failed, it’s
just that reality didn’t turn out the way we planned it. ’ Part of that reality was that the
Government did nothing to help campesinos in the supposed transition. Nor did
NAFTA recognize inequalities or create compensation funds to help the victims of free
trade – unlike what occurred with economic integration in the European Union.
Basically, Mexico adopted a sink-or-swim policy for small farmers, opening the
floodgates to tons of imported US corn. Maize imports tripled under NAFTA and
producer prices fell by half. The drop in income immediately hit the most vulnerable
and poorest members of rural society. While more than a third of the corn grown by
small farmers is used to feed their families, the rest is sold on local markets. Without
this critical cash, rural living standards plunged.
The good news is that the free-trade threat to Mexico’s culture and food security has
sparked a lively resistance. ‘In Defence of Corn’, a movement to protect local maize
varieties, is not a membership organization but a series of forums and actions led by
campesinos themselves. It’s a direct challenge to both free trade and the dictums of
corporate science.
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The farmers’ tenacity and refusal to abandon the crop of their ancestors is impressive.
But larger economic conditions continue to shape their lives. Rural poverty and hunger
have soared under free trade – and placed a heavier burden on women left to work the
land. The battle for food sovereignty continues. Movement leaders insist that the
Government reassess its free trade policies and develop a real rural development
programme.
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Questions 1-10
Questions 1-5
1 After NAFTA, a lot of corn from the USA has been sold in Mexico.
2 Following NAFTA, Mexican businesspeople tried to stop maize farmers from
working in factories throughout the country.
3 The Mexican farmers were paid a lot less for their corn after NAFTA.
4 Many Mexican farmers wanted to leave Mexico after the Free Trade
Agreement............
5 The Mexican farmers were not able to do anything to help themselves after the
Trade Agreement............
Questions 6-10
For thousands of years, corn has been a very important 6 in the Mexican
culture. After the North American Free Trade Agreement, 7 corn has
been imported from the USA in very large amounts. Mexican business people hoped
that this would mean that Mexican farmers had to get jobs in factories and that
their 8 would increase. Instead of this result, the farmers suffered from
the low price of corn and people had to pay more for their corn. The farmers wish that
the government had 9 them during this time. As a result of the hardship,
the farmers have organised themselves by forming a 10 .
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参考答案:
1 YES
2 NOT GIVEN
3 YES
4 NOT GIVEN
5 NO
6 crop
7 genetically modified
8 standard of living
9 helped
10 movement
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Young, of course, did more than write encyclopedia entries. He presented his first paper
to the Royal Society of London at the age of 20 and was elected a Fellow a week after
his 21st birthday. In the paper, Young explained the process of accommodation in the
human eye —on how the eye focuses properly on objects at varying distances. Young
hypothesised that this was achieved by changes in the shape of the lens. Young also
theorised that light traveled in waves and ho believed that, to account for the ability to
see in color, there must be three receptors in the eye corresponding to the three
"principal colors" to which the retina could respond: red, green, violet. All these
hypotheses Were subsequently proved to be correct.
Later in his life, when he was in his forties, Young was instrumental in cracking the
code that unlocked the unknown script on the Rosetta Stone, a tablet that was "found"
in Egypt by the Napoleonic army in 1799. The stone contains text in three alphabets:
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Bom in 1773 in Somerset in England, Young lived from an early age with his maternal
grandfather,eventually leaving to attend boarding school. He had devoured books from
the age of two, and through his own initiative he excelled at Latin, Greek, mathematics
and natural philosophy. After leaving school, he was greatly encouraged by his mother's
uncle, Richard Brock-lesby, a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society. Following
Brocklesby's lead, Young decided to pursue a career in medicine. He studied in London,
following the medical circuit, and then moved on to more formal education in
Edinburgh, Gottingen and Cambridge. After completing his medical training at the
University of Cambridge in 1808, Young setup practice as a physician in London. He
soon became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a few years later was
appointed physician at St. George's Hospital.
Young's skill as a physician, however, did not equal his skill as a scholar of natural
philosophy or linguistics. Earlier, in 1801, he had been appointed to a professorship of
natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, where he delivered as many as 60 lectures
in a year. These were published in two volumes in 1807. In 1804 Young had become
secretary to the Royal Society, aposthe would hold until his death. His opinions were
sought on civic and national matters, such as the introduction of gaslighting to London
and methods of ship construction. From 1819 he was superintendent of the Nautical
Almanac and secretary to the Board of Longitude. From 1824 to 1829 he was physician
to and inspector of calculations for the Palladian Insurance Company. Between 1816
and 1825 he contributed his many and various entries to the Encyclopedia Britan-nica,
and throughout his career he authored numerous books, essays andpapers.
Young is a perfect subject for a biography — perfect, but daunting. Few men
contributed so much to so many technical fields. Robinson's aim is to introduce non-
scientists to Young's work and life. He succeeds, providing clear expositions of the
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technical material (especially that on optics and Egyptian hieroglyphs). Some readers
of this book will, like Robinson, find Young's accom-plishments impressive; others will
see him as some historians have —as a dilettante. Yet despite the rich material
presented in this book, readers will not end up knowing Young personally. We catch
glimpses of a playful Young, doodling Greek and Latin phrases in his notes on
medical lectures and translating the verses that a young lady had written on the walls
of a summerhouse into Greek elegiacs. Young was introduced into elite society,
attended the theatre and learned to dance and play the flute. In addition, he was an
accomplished horseman. However, his personal life looks pale next to his vibrant career
and studies.
Young married Eliza Maxwell in 1804, and according to Robinson, "their marriage was
a happy one and she appreciated his work," Almost all we know about her is that she
sustained her husband through some rancorous disputes about optics and that she
worried about money when his medical career was slow to takeoff. Very little evidence
survives about the complexities of Young's relationships with his mother and father.
Robinson does not credit them, or anyone else, with shaping Young's extraordinary
mind. Despite the lack of details concerning Young's rela-tionships, however, anyone
interested in what it means to be a genius should read this book.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
1 ‘The last man who knew everything’ has also been claimed to other people.
5 Young’s advice was sought by people responsible for local and national issues.
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Questions 8-13
8 How many life stories did Young write for the Encyclopedia Britannica?
9 What aspect of scientific research did Young focus on in his first academic paper?
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参考答案
1 Answer: TRUE
2 Answer: FALSE
3 Answer: FALSE
4 Answer: FALSE
5 Answer: TRUE
6 Answer: TRUE
8 Answer: 46
10 Answer: Indo-European
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
A little over a century ago, men of the ilk of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson battled
against Antarctica’s blizzards, cold and deprivation. In the name of Empire and in an
age of heroic deeds they created an image of Antarctica that was to last well into the
20th century—an image of remoteness, hardship, bleakness and isolation that was the
province of only the most courageous of men. The image was one of a place removed
from everyday reality, of a place with no apparent value to anyone.
As we enter the 21st century, our perception of Antarctica has changed. Although
physically Antarctica is no closer and probably no warmer, and to spend time there still
demands a dedication not seen in ordinary life, the continent and its surrounding ocean
are increasingly seen to be an integral part of Planet Earth, and a key component in the
Earth System. Is this because the world seems a little smaller these days, shrunk by TV
and tourism, or is it because Antarctica really does occupy a central spot on Earth’s
mantle? Scientific research during the past half century has revealed—and continues to
reveal—that Antarctica's great mass and low temperature exert a major influence on
climate and ocean circulation, factors which influence the lives of millions of people
all over the globe.
Antarctica was not always cold. The slow break-up of the super-continent Gondwana
with the northward movements of Africa, South America, India and Australia
eventually created enough space around Antarctica for the development of an Antarctic
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Circumpolar Current (ACC), that flowed from west to east under the influence of the
prevailing westerly winds. Antarctica cooled, its vegetation perished, glaciation began
and the continent took on its present-day appearance. Today the ice that overlies the
bedrock is up to 4km thick, and surface temperatures as low as -89.2deg C have been
recorded. The icy blast that howls over the ice cap and out to sea—the so-called
katabatic wind—can reach 300 km/hr, creating fearsome wind-chill effects,
Out of this extreme environment come some powerful forces that reverberate around
the world. The Earth’s rotation, coupled to the generation of cells of low pressure off
the Antarctic coast, would allow Astronauts a view of Antarctica that is as beautiful as
it is awesome. Spinning away to the northeast, the cells grow and deepen, whipping up
the Southern Ocean into the mountainous seas so respected by mariners. Recent work
is showing that the temperature of the ocean may be a better predictor of rainfall in
Australia than is the pressure difference between Darwin and Tahiti—the Southern
Oscillation Index. By receiving more accurate predictions, graziers in northern
Queensland are able to avoid overstocking in years when rainfall will be poor. Not only
does this limit their losses but it prevents serious pasture degradation that may take
decades to repair. CSIRO is developing this as a prototype forecasting system, but we
can confidently predict that as we know more about the Antarctic and Southern Ocean
we will be able to enhance and extend our predictive ability.
The ocean’s surface temperature results from the interplay between deep-water
temperature, air temperature and ice. Each winter between 4 and 19 million square km
of sea ice form, locking up huge quantities of heat close to the continent. Only now can
we start to unravel the influ-ence of sea ice on the weather that is experienced in
southern Australia. But in another way the extent of sea ice extends its influence far
beyond Antarctica. Antarctic krill—the small shrimp-like crustaceans that are the staple
diet for baleen whales, penguins, some seals, flighted seabirds and many fish—breed
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well in years when sea ice is extensive and poorly when it is not. Many species ofbaleen
whales and flighted sea birds migrate between the hemispheres and when the krill are
less abundant they do not thrive.
The circulatory system of the world’s oceans is like a huge conveyor belt, moving water
and dis-solved minerals and nutrients from one hemisphere to the other, and from the
ocean's abyssal depths to the surface. The ACC is the longest current in the world, and
has the largest flow. Through it, the deep flows of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific
Oceans are joined to form part of a single global thermohaline circulation, During
winter, the howling katabatics sometimes scour the ice off patches of the sea's surface
leaving large ice-locked lagoons, or ’polynyas'. Recent research has shown that as fresh
sea ice forms, it is continuously stripped away by the wind and may be blown up to
90km in a single day. Since only fresh water freezes into ice, the water that remains
becomes increasingly salty and dense, sinking until it spills over the continental
shelf. Cold water carries more oxygen than warm water, so when it rises, well into the
northern hemi-sphere, it reoxygenates and revitalises the ocean. The state of the
northern oceans, and their biological productivity, owe much to what happens in the
Antarctic.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-18
18 The reference of how Antarctica was once thought to be a forgotten and insig-
nificant continent
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Questions 19-21
The ocean temperature and index based on air pressure can help predict
21 in Australia.
B katabatic winds
C rainfall
D temperature
E glaciers
F pressure
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Questions 22-26
A show Antarctica has been a central topic of global warming discussion in Mass media.
B illustrate how its huge sea ice brings food to millions of lives in the world.
C emphasise the significance of Antarctica to the global climate and ocean currents.
D illustrate the geographical location of Antarctica as the central spot on Earth.
23 Why should Australian farmers keep an eye on the Antarctic ocean temperature?
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26 What factor drives Antarctic water to move beyond the continental shelf?
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参考答案
14 Answer: D
15 Answer: F
16 Answer: E
17 Answer: C
18 Answer: A
19 Answer: D
20 Answer: A
21 Answer: C
22 Answer: C
23 Answer:A
24 Answer:C
25 Answer:C
26 Answer:A
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
Source of Knowledge
A
What counts as knowledge? What do we mean when we say that we know some-thing?
What is the status of different. kinds of knowledge? In order to explore those questions
we are going to focus on one particular area of knowledge medicine.
How do you know when you are ill? This may seem to be an absurd question. You
know you are ill because you feel ill; your body tells you that you are ill. You may
know that you feel pain or discomfort Iml knowing you are ill is a bit. more complex.
At times, people experience the symptoms of illness, but intact they are simply tired or
over-worked or they may just have a hangover. At other limes, people maybe suffering
from a disease and fail to be aware of the illness until it has reached a late stage in its
development. So how do we know we are ill, and what counts as knowledge?
Think about this example. You feel unwell. You have a bad cough and always seem to
be tired. Perhaps it could be stress at work, or maybe you should give up smoking. You
tool worse. You visit the doctor who listens to your chest and heart, take's your
temperature and blood pressure, and then finally prescribes antibiotics lor your cough.
Things do not improve but you struggle on thinking you should pull yourself together,
perhaps things will ease offat work soon. A return visit to your doctor shocks you. This
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time the doctor, drawing on yours of training and experience, diagnoses pneumonia.
This means that you will need bed rest and a consider able time off work. The scenario
is transformed. Although you still have the same symptoms, you no longer think that
these are caused by pressure at work. You now have proof that you are ill. This is the
result of the combination of your own subjective experience and the diagnosis of
someone who has the stains of a medical expert. You have a medically authenticated
diagnosis and it appears that you are seriously ill; you know you are ill and have
evidence upon which to base this knowledge.
This scenario shows many different sources of knowledge. For example, you decide to
consult the doctor in the first place because you feel unwell - this is personal knowledge
about your own body. However, the doctor's expert diagno-sis is based on experience
and training, with sources of knowledge as diverse as other experts, laboratory reports,
medical textbooks and yours of experience.
One source of knowledge is the experience of our own bodies; the personal knowledge
we have of change's that might be significant, as well as the subjec-tive experience of
poin and physical distress. These experiences are mediated by other forms of
knowledge such as the words we have available to describe our experience and the
common sense of our families and friends as well as that drown from popular culture.
Over the post decade, for example, Western culture has seen a significant emphasis on
stress-related illness in the media. Refer-ence to being ‘stressed end' has become a
common response in daily exchanges in the workplace and has become port of popular
common-sense knowledge. It is thus not surprising that we might seek such an
explanation of physical symp-toms of discomfort.
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We might also rely on Ihe observations of others who know us. Comments from friends
and family such as ‘you do look ill' or 'that's a bad cough' might be another source of
knowledge. Complementary health practices, such as holistic medicine, produce their
own sets of knowledge upon which we might also draw in deciding the nature and
degree of our ill health and about possible treatments.
Perhaps the most influential and authoritative source of knowledge is the medical
knowledge provided by the general practitioner. We expect he doctor to hove access to
expert knowledge. This is socially sanctioned. It would not be acceptable to notify our
employer Unit we simply felt too unwell to turn up for work or that our faith healer,
astrologer, therapist or even our priest thought it was not a good idea. We need on expert
medical diagnosis in order to obtain the necessary certificate it we need to be off work
for more than the statutory self-certificaion period. The knowledge of the medical
sciences is privileged in this respect in contemporary Western culture. Medical
practitioners are also seen as having the required expert knowledge that permits then
legally to pre-scribe drugs and treatment to which patients would not. otherwise have
access. However there is a rauge of different knowledge upon which we draw
when making decisions about our own state of health.
However, there is more than existing knowledge in this little story; new knowledge is
constructed within it.Given the doctor's medical training and background, she may
hypothrsie 'is this now pneumonia?' and then proceed to look for eevidence about it.
She will use observations and instruments to assess the evidence and-critically-interpret
it in the light of her training and new experience both for you and for the doctor. This
will then be added to the doctor's medical knowledge and may help in future diagnosis
of pneumonia.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-34
27 the contrast between the nature of personal judgment and the nature of doctor ’s
diagnosis
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Questions 35-40
Source of Examples
knowledge
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参考答案
27 Answer: E
28 Answer: F
29 Answer: H
30 Answer: H
31 Answer: I
32 Answer: G
33 Answer: D
34 Answer: B
38 Answer: practitioner
39 Answer: diagnosis
40 Answer: background/experience
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Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14, which are based on Reading
Passage One.
In the last decade a revolution has occurred in the way that scientists think about the
brain. We now know that the decisions humans make can be traced to the firing patterns
of neurons in specific parts of the brain. These discoveries have led to the field known
as neuroeconomics, which studies the brain's secrets to success in an economic
environment that demands innovation and being able to do things differently from
competitors. A brain that can do this is an iconoclastic one. Briefly, an iconoclast is a
person who does something that others say can't be done.
This definition implies that iconoclasts are different from other people, but more
precisely, it is their brains that are different in three distinct ways: perception, fear
response, and social intelligence. Each of these three functions utilizes a different
circuit in the brain. Naysayers might suggest that the brain is irrelevant, that thinking
in an original, even revolutionary, way is more a matter of personality than brain
function. But the field of neuroeconomics was born out of the realization that the
physical workings of the brain place limitations on the way we make decisions. By
understanding these constraints, we begin to understand why some people march to a
different drumbeat.
The first thing to realize is that the brain suffers from limited resources. It has a fixed
energy budget, about the same as a 40 watt light bulb, so it has evolved to work as
efficiently as possible. This is where most people are impeded from being an iconoclast.
For example, when confronted with information streaming from the eyes, the brain will
interpret this information in the quickest way possible. Thus it will draw on both past
experience and any other source of information, such as what other people say, to make
sense of what it is seeing. This happens all the time. The brain takes shortcuts that work
so well we are hardly ever aware of them. We think our perceptions of the world are
real, but they are only biological and electrical rumblings. Perception is not simply a
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product of what your eyes or ears transmit to your brain. More than the physical reality
of photons or sound waves, perception is a product of the brain.
The best way to see things differently to other people is to bombard the brain with
things it has never encountered before. Novelty releases the perceptual process from
the chains of past experience and forces the brain to make new judgments. Successful
iconoclasts have an extraordinary willingness to be exposed to what is fresh and
different. Observation of iconoclasts shows that they embrace novelty while most
people avoid things that are different.
The problem with novelty, however, is that it tends to trigger the brain's fear system.
Fear is a major impediment to thinking like an iconoclast and stops the average person
in his tracks. There are many types of fear, but the two that inhibit iconoclastic thinking
and people generally find difficult to deal with are fear of uncertainty and fear of public
ridicule. These may seem like trivial phobias. But fear of public speaking, which
everyone must do from time to time, afflicts one-third of the population. This makes it
too common to be considered a mental disorder. It is simply a common variant of
human nature, one which iconoclasts do not let inhibit their reactions.
Finally, to be successful iconoclasts, individuals must sell their ideas to other people.
This is where social intelligence comes in. Social intelligence is the ability to
understand and manage people in a business setting. In the last decade there has been
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an explosion of knowledge about the social brain and how the brain works when groups
coordinate decision making. Neuroscience has revealed which brain circuits are
responsible for functions like understanding what other people think, empathy, fairness,
and social identity. These brain regions play key roles in whether people convince
others of their ideas. Perception is important in social cognition too. The perception of
someone's enthusiasm, or reputation, can make or break a deal. Understanding how
perception becomes intertwined with social decision making shows why successful
iconoclasts are sorare.
Iconoclasts create new opportunities in every area from artistic expression to
technology to business. They supply creativity and innovation not easily accomplished
by committees. Rules aren't important to them. Iconoclasts face alienation and failure,
but can also be a major asset to any organization. It is crucial for success in any field to
understand how the iconoclastic mind works.
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Questions 1-14
Questions 1-5
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Questions 6-11
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Questions 12-14
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参考答案:
1C
2B
3D
4C
5B
6 YES
7 YES
8 NOT GIVEN
9 NO
10 NOT GIVEN
11 NO
12 A
13 B
14 C
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, scientists from the Parks and Wildlife Commission
of the Northern Territory monitored these two populations. At first it seemed that they
were holding their own. Then in late 1987, every one of the individuals of the second
and smaller of the wild colonies was killed. From examination of the tracks in the sand,
it seemed that just one single fox had been responsible. And then, in October 1991, a
wild-fire destroyed the entire area occupied by the remaining colony. Thus the mala
was finally pronounced extinct in the wild.
Fortunately, ten years earlier, seven individuals had been captured, and had become the
founders of a captive breeding programme at the Arid Zone Research Institute in Alice
Springs; and that group had thrived. Part ofthis success is due to the fact that the female
can breed when she is just five months old and can produce up to three young a year.
Like other kangaroo species, the mother carries her young - known as a joey - in her
pouch for about 15 weeks, and she can have more than one joey at the sametime.
In the early 1980s, there were enough mala in the captive population to make it feasible
to start a reintroduction programme. But first it was necessary to discuss this with the
leaders of the Yapa people. Traditionally, the mala had been an important animal in
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their culture, with strong medicinal powers for old people. It had also been an important
food source, and there were concerns that any mala returned to the wild would be killed
for the pot. And so, in 1980,a group of key Yapa men was invited to visit the proposed
reintroduction area. The skills and knowledge of the Yapa would play a significant and
enduring role in this and all other mala projects.
With the help of the local Yapa, an electric fence was erected around 250 acres of
suitable habitat, about 300 miles'northwest ofAlice Springs so that the mala could adapt
while protected from predators. By 1992, there were about 150 mala in their enclosure,
which became known as the Mala Paddock. However, all attempts to reintroduce mala
from the paddocks into the unfenced wild were unsuccessful, so in the end the
reintroduction programme was abandoned. The team now faced a situation where mala
could be bred, but not released into the wild again.
Thus, in 1993, a Mala Recovery Team was established to boost mala numbers, and
goals for a new programme were set: the team concentrated on finding suitable
predator-free or predator-controlled conservation sites within the mala’s known range.
Finally, in March 1999, twelve adult females, eight adult males, and eight joeys were
transferred from the Mala Paddock to Dryandra Woodland in Western Australia. Then,
a few months later,a second group was transferred to Trimouille, an island offthe coast
of western Australia. First, it had been necessary to rid the island of rats and cats - a
task that had taken two years of hard work.
Six weeks after their release into this conservation site, a team returned to the island to
find out how things were going. Each of the malas had been fitted with a radio collar
that transmits for about 14 months, after which it falls off. The team was able to locate
29 out of the 30 transmitters - only one came from the collar of a mala that had died of
unknown causes. So far the recovery programme had gone even better than expected.
Today, there are many signs suggesting that the mala population on the island is
continuing to dowell.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-5
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passagefor
each answer.
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Questions 6-9
7 For about how long do young malas stay inside their mother’spouch?
8 Apart from being a food source, what value did malas have for the Yapa people?
9 What was the Yapa’s lasting contribution to the mala reintroduction programme?
Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
Write
10 Natural defences were sufficient to protect the area called Mala Paddock.
11 Scientists eventually gave up their efforts to release captive mala into the
unprotected wild.
13 Scientists were satisfied with the initial results of the recovery programme.
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参考答案
3 Answer: monitored
4 Answer: (awild-)fire
5 Answer: extinct
10 Answer: FALSE
11 Answer: TRUE
13 Answer: TRUE
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
In the second half of the seventeenth century, Russian authorities began implementing
controls at the borders of their empire to prevent the importation of plague, a highly
infectious and dangerous disease. Information on disease outbreak occurring abroad
was regularly reported to the tsar’s court through various means, including commercial
channels (travelling merchants), military personnel deployed abroad, undercover agents,
the network of Imperial Foreign Office embassies and representations abroad, and the
customs offices. For instance, the heads of customs offices were instructed to question
foreigners entering Russia about possible epidemics of dangerous diseases in their
respective countries.
If news of an outbreak came from abroad, relations with the affected country were
suspended. For instance, foreign vessels were not allowed to dock in Russian ports if
there was credible information about the existence of epidemics in countries from
whence they had departed. In addition, all foreigners entering Russia from those
countries had to undergo quarantine. In 1665, after receiving news about a plague
epidemic in England, Tsar Alexei wrote a letter to King Charles II in which he
announced the cessation of Russian trade relations with England and other foreign
states. These protective measures appeared to have been effective, as the country did
not record any cases of plague during that year and in the next three decades. It was not
until 1692 that another plague outbreak was recorded in the Russian province of
Astrakhan. This epidemic continued for five months and killed 10,383 people, or about
65 percent of the city’s population. By the end of the seventeenth century, preventative
measures had been widely introduced in Russia, including the isolation of persons ill
with plague, the imposition of quarantines, and the distribution of explanatory public
health notices about plague outbreaks.
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During the eighteenth century, although none of the occurrences was of the same scale
as in the past, plague appeared in Russia several times. For instance, from 1703 to 1705,
a plague outbreak that had ravaged Istanbul spread to the Podolsk and Kiev provinces
in Russia, and then to Poland and Hungary. After defeating the Swedes in the battle of
Poltava in 1709, Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) dispatched part of his army to Poland,
where plague had been raging for two years. Despite preventive measures, the disease
spread among the Russian troops. In 1710, the plague reached Riga (then part of
Sweden, now the capital of Latvia), where it was active until 1711 and claimed 60,000
lives. During this period, the Russians besieged Riga and, after the Swedes had
surrendered the city in 1710, the Russian army lost 9.800 soldiers to the plague. Russian
military chronicles of the time note that more soldiers died of the disease after the
capture of Riga than from enemy fire during the siege of that city.
Tsar Peter I imposed strict measures to prevent the spread of plague during these
conflicts. Soldiers suspected of being infected were isolated and taken to areas far from
military camps. In addition, camps were designed to separate divisions, detachments,
and smaller units of soldiers. When plague reached Narva (located in present-day
Estonia) and threatened to spread to St. Petersburg, the newly built capital of Russia,
Tsar Peter I ordered the army to cordon off the entire boundary along the Luga River,
including temporarily halting all activity on the river.In order to prevent the movement
of people and goods from Narva to St Petersburg and Novgorod, roadblocks and
checkpoints were set up on all roads. The tsar’s orders were rigorously enforced, and
those who disobeyed were hung.
However, although the Russian authorities applied such methods to contain the spread
of the disease and limit the number of victims, all of the measures had a provisional
character: they were intended to respond to a specific outbreak, and were not designed
as a coherent set of measures to be implemented systematically at the first sign of
plague. The advent of such a standard response system came a few years later.
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The first attempts to organise procedures and carryout proactive steps to control plague
date to the aftermath of the 1727- 1728 epidemic in Astrakhan. In response to this, the
Russian imperial authorities issued several decrees aimed at controlling the future
spread of plague. Among these decrees, the ‘Instructions for Governors and Heads of
Townships’ required that all governors immediately inform the Senate - a government
body created by Tsar Peter I in 1711 to advise the monarch - if plague cases were
detected in their respective provinces.Furthermore, the decree required that governors
ensure the physical examination of all persons suspected of carrying the disease and
their subsequent isolation. In addition, it was ordered that sites where plague victims
were found had to be encircled by checkpoints and isolated for the duration of the
outbreak. These checkpoints were to remain operational for at least six weeks.The
houses of infected persons were to be burned along with all of the personal property
they contained, including farm animals and cattle. The governors were instructed to
inform the neighbouring provinces and cities about every plague case occurring on their
territories. Finally, letters brought by couriers were heated above a fire before being
copied.
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Questions 1-6
Reading Passage 2 has SEVEN sections, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for sections A-F from the list of headings
below. Write the correct number, i-viii.
List of Headings
i Outbreaks of plague as a result of military campaigns.
1....................... Section A
2....................... Section B
3....................... Section C
4....................... Section D
5....................... Section E
6....................... Section F
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Questions 7-8
Choose TWO letters, A—E.
Which TWO measures did Russia take in the seventeenth century to avoid
plague outbreaks?
A Cooperation with foreign
leaders. B Spying.
C Military campaigns.
E Expulsion of foreigners.
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Questions 9-10
Choose TWO
letters, A-E. Write
the correct letters.
Which TWO statements are made about Russia in the early eighteenth
century? A Plague outbreaks were consistently smaller than before.
D The tsar’s plan to protect St Petersburg from plague was not strictly
implemented. E Anti-plague measures were generally reactive rather than
strategic.
Questions 11-13
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
11 An outbreak of plague in 11..................... prompted the publication of a
coherent
preventative strategy.
12 Provincial governors were ordered to burn the 12..................... and
possessions of
plague victims.
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Solution:
8. B OR D IN
1. ii
EITHER ORDER
9. A OR E IN
2. v
EITHER ORDER
10. A OR E IN
3. i
EITHER ORDER
4. vii 11. Astrakhan
5. iv 12. houses
6. viii 13. fire
7. B OR D IN
EITHER ORDER
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
In 2009, it was revealed that some of the information published by the University of
East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK, concerning climate change,
had been inaccurate. Furthermore, it was alleged that some of the relevant statistics had
been withheld from publication. The ensuing controversy affected the reputation not
only of that institution, but also of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), with which the CRU is closely involved, and of climate scientists in general.
Even if the claims of misconduct and incompetence were eventually proven to be
largely untrue, or confined to a few individuals, the damage was done. The perceived
wrongdoings of a few people had raised doubts about the many.
The response of most climate scientists was to cross their fingers and hope for the
best, and they kept a low profile. Many no doubt hoped that subsequent independent
inquiries into the IPCC and CRU would draw a line under their problems. However,
although these were likely to help, they were unlikely to undo the harm caused by
months of hostile news reports and attacks by critics.
The damage that has been done should not be underestimated. As Ralph Cicerone, the
President of the US National Academy of Sciences, wrote in an editorial in the
journal Science: ‘Public opinion has moved toward the view that scientists often try
to suppress alternative hypotheses and ideas and that scientists will withhold data and
try to manipulate some aspects of peer review to prevent dissent. ’ He concluded that
‘the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of
science as a whole.
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An opinion poll taken at the beginning of 2010 found that the proportion of people in
the US who trust scientists as a source of information about global warming had
dropped from 83 percent, in 2008, to 74 percent. Another survey carried out by the
British Broadcasting Corporation in February 2010 found that just 26 percent of British
people now believe that climate change is confirmed as being largely human-made,
down from 41 percent in November 2009。
.Regaining the confidence and trust of the public is never easy. Hunkering down
and hoping for the best - climate science’s current strategy - makes it almost
impossible. It is much better to learn from the successes and failures of organisations
that have dealt with similar blows to their public standing.
In fact, climate science needs professional help to rebuild its reputation. It could do
worse than follow the advice given by Leslie Gaines-Ross, a ‘reputation strategist’ at
Public Relations (PR) company Webef Shandwick, in her recent book Corporate
Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation. Gaines-
Ross’s strategy is based on her analysis of how various organisations
responded to crises, such as desktop-printer firm Xerox, whose business plummeted
during the 1990s, and the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003.
The first step she suggests is to ‘take the heat - leader first’. In many cases, chief
executives who publicly accept responsibility for corporate failings can begin to
reverse the freefall of their company’s reputations, but not always. If the leader is
held at least partly responsible for the fall from grace, it can be almost impossible
to convince critics that a new direction can be charted with that same person at the
helm.
This is the dilemma facing the heads of the IPCC and CRU. Both have been
blamed for their organisations’ problems, not least for the way in which they have
dealt with critics, and both have been subjected to public calls for their removal. Yet
both organisations appear to believe they can repair their reputations without a change
of leadership.
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Remaining visible is only a start, though; climate scientists also need to be careful
what they say. They must realise that they face doubts not just about their published
results, but also about their conduct and honesty. It simply won’t work for scientists
to continue to appeal to the weight of the evidence, while refusing to discuss the
integrity of their profession. The harm has been increased by a perceived reluctance
to admit even the possibility of mistakes or wrongdoing.
The third step put forward by Gaines-Ross is ‘don’t underestimate your critics and
competitors’ . This means not only recognising the skill with which the opponents of
climate research have executed their campaigns through Internet blogs and other
media, but also acknowledging the validity of some of their criticisms. It is clear,
for instance, that climate scientists need better standards of transparency, to allow
for scrutiny not just by their peers, but also by critics from outside the world of
research.
It is also important to engage with those critics. That doesn’t mean conceding to
unfounded arguments which are based on prejudice rather than evidence, but there is
an obligation to help the public understand the causes of climate change, as well as the
options for avoiding and dealing with the consequences.
Winning back public confidence is a marathon, not a sprint, but you can’twin at all if
you don’t step up to the starting line.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-32
Do thefollowing statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
Write
27 If a majority of scientists at the CRU were cleared of misconduct, the public would
be satisfied.
29 Journalists have defended the CRU and the IPCC against their critics.
30 Ralph Cicerone regarded the damage caused by the CRU as extending beyond the
field of climate science.
31 Since 2010, confidence in climate science has risen slightly in the US.
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Questions 33-36
33 In accordance with Gaines-Ross’s views, the heads of the CRU and IPCC should
have
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Questions 37-40
The revelation, in 2009, that scientists at the CRU had presented inaccurate information
and concealed some of their 37 had a serious effect on their reputation. In
order to address the problem, the scientists should turn to experts in 38 .
A critics
B corruption
C statistics
D guidelines
E managers
F public relations
G sources
H computer modelling
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参考答案
27 Answer: NO
28 Answer: YES
29 Answer: NO
30 Answer: YES
32 Answer: YES
33 Answer: A
34 Answer: C
35 Answer: C
36 Answer: D
37 Answer: C
38 Answer: F
39 Answer: D
40 Answer: A
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Breeze-drying is a technique that can help to provide food for astronauts. But it also has
other applications nearer home.
Freeze-drying is like suspended animation for food: you can store a freeze-dried meal
for years, and then, when you’re finally ready to eat it. you can completely revitalise it
with a little hot water. Even after several years, the original foodstuff will be virtually
unchanged.
The technique basically involves completely removing the water from some material,
such as food while leaving the rest of the material virtually intact. The main reason for
doing this is either to preserve the food or to reduce its weight. Removing the water
from food keeps it from spoiling, because the microorganisms such as bacteria that
cause spoiling cannot survive without it. Similarly, the enzymes which occur naturally
in food cannot cause ripening without water, so removing water from food will also
stop the ripening process.
Freeze-drying significantly reduces the total weight of the food because most food is
largely made up of water; for example, many fruits are more than 80 00% water.
Removing this makes the food much lighter and therefore makes transportation less
difficult. The military and camping-supply companies freeze-dry foods to make them
easier for an individual to carry and NASA has also freeze-dried foods for the cramped
quarters onboard spacecraft.
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The process is also used to preserve other sorts of material, such as pharmaceuticals.
Chemists can greatly extend pharmaceutical shelf life by freeze-drying the material and
storing it in a container free of oxygen and water. Similarly, research scientists may use
freeze-drying to preserve biological samples for long periods of time. Even valuable
manuscripts that had been water damaged have been saved by using this process.
Freeze-drying is different from simple drying because it is able to remove almost all
the water from materials, whereas simple drying techniques can only remove 90-95%.
This means that the damage caused by bacteria and enzymes can virtually be stopped
rather than just slowed down. In addition, the composition and structure of the material
is not significantly changed, so materials can be revitalised without compromising the
quality of the original.
This is possible because in freeze-drying, solid water - ice - is converted directly into
water vapour, missing out the liquid phase entirely. This is called ‘sublimation’, the
shift from a solid directly into a gas. Just like evaporation, sublimation occurs when a
molecule gains enough energy to break free from the molecules around it. Water will
sublime from a solid (ice) to a gas (vapour) when the molecules have enough energy to
break free but the conditions aren't right for a liquid to form. These conditions arc
determined by heat and atmospheric pressure. When the temperature is above freezing
point, so that ice can thaw, but the atmospheric pressure is too low for a liquid to form
(below 0.06 atmospheres (ATM)) then it becomes a gas.
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The process continues for many hours (even days) while the material gradually dries
out. This time is necessary to avoid overheating, which might affect the structure of the
material. Once it has dried sufficiently, it is sealed in a moisture-free package. As long
as the package is secure, the material can sit on a shelf for years and years without
degrading, until it is restored to its original form with a little hot water. If everything
works correctly, the material will go through the entire process almost completely
unscathed.
In fact, freeze-drying, as a general concept, is not new but has been around for centuries.
The ancient Incas of Peru used mountain peaks along the Andes as natural food
preservers. The extremely cold temperatures and low pressure at those high altitudes
prevented food from spoiling in the same basic way as a modern freeze-drying machine
and a freezer.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-5
Uses of freeze-drying:
food preservation
preservation of precious 3
Freeze-drying
food preservation
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Questions 6-9
Label the diagram below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the
passage for each answer.
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Questions 10-13
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参考答案
1 Answer: transportation
2 Answer: pharmaceuticals
3 Answer: manuscripts
4 Answer: sublimation
7 Answer: shelves
10 Answer: enzymes
11 Answer: composition
12 Answer: overheating
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
The countryside is no longer the place to see wildlife, according to Chris Barnes. These
days you are more likely to find impressive numbers of skylarks, dragonflies and toads
in your own back garden.
The past half century has seen an interesting reversal in the fortunes ofmuch of Britain's
wildlife. Whilst the rural countryside has become poorer and poorer, wildlife habitat in
towns has burgeoned. Now, if you want to hear a deafening dawn chorus of birds or
familiarise yourself with foxes, you can head for the urban forest.
Whilst species that depend on wide open spaces such as the hare, the eagle and the red
deer may still be restricted to remote rural landscapes, many of our wild plants and
animals find the urban ecosystem ideal. This really should be no surprise, since it is the
fragmentation and agrochemical pollution in the farming lowlands that has led to the
catastrophic decline of so many species.
By contrast, most urban open spaces have escaped the worst of the pesticide revolution,
and they are an intimate mosaic of interconnected habitats. Over the years, the cutting
down of hedgerows on farmland has contributed to habitat isolation and species loss.
In towns, the tangle of canals, railway embankments, road verges and boundary hedges
lace the landscape together, providing first-class ecological corridors for species such
as hedgehogs, kingfishers and dragonflies.
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Urban parks and formal recreation grounds are valuable for some species, and many of
them are increasingly managed with wildlife in mind. But in many places their
significance is eclipsed by the huge legacy of post-industrial land demolished factories,
waste tips, quarries, redundant railway yards and other so-called ‘brownfield’ sites.
In Merseyside, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, much of this has been
spectacularly colonised with birch and willow woodland, herb-rich grassland and
shallow wetlands. As a consequence, there are song birds and predators in abundance
over these once-industrial landscapes.
There are fifteen million domestic gardens in the UK. and whilst some are still managed
as lifeless chemical war zones, most benefit the local wildlife, either through benign
neglect or positive encouragement. Those that do best tend to be woodland species, and
the garden lawns and flower borders, climber-covered fences, shrubberies and fruit
trees are a plausible alternative. Indeed, in some respects gardens are rather better than
the real thing, especially with exotic flowers extending the nectar
season. Birdfeeders can also supplement the natural seed supply, and only the millions
of domestic cats may spoil the scene.
As Britain’s gardeners have embraced the idea of ‘gardening with nature’, wildlife’s
response has been spectacular. Between 1990 and the year 2000. the number of different
bird species seen at artificial feeders in gardens increased from 17 to an amazing 81.
The BUGS project (Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield) calculates that there
are 25.000 garden ponds and 100.000 nest boxes in that one city alone.
We are at last acknowledging that the wildlife habitat in towns provides a valuable life
support system. The canopy ofthe urban forest is filtering air pollution, and intercepting
rainstorms, allowing the water to drip more gradually to the ground. Sustainable urban
drainage relies on ponds and wetlands to contain storm water runoff, thus reducing the
risk of flooding, whilst reed beds and other wetland wildlife communities also help to
clean up the water. We now have scientific proof that contact with wildlife close to
home can help to reduce stress and anger. Hospital patients with a view of natural green
space make a more rapid recovery and suffer less pain.
Traditionally,nature conservation in the UK has been seen as marginal and largely rural.
Now we are beginning to place it at the heart of urban environmental and economic
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policy. There are now dozens of schemes to create new habitats and restore old ones in
and around our big cities. Biodiversity is big in parts of London. thanks to schemes
such as the London Wetland Centre in the southwest of the city.
This is a unique scheme masterminded by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust to create a
wildlife reserve out of a redundant Victorian reservoir. Within five years of its creation
the Centre has been hailed as one of the top sites for nature in England and made a Site
of Special Scientific Interest. It consists of a 105-acre wetland site, which is made up
of different wetland habitats of shallow, open water and grazing marsh. The site attracts
more than 104 species of bird, including nationally important rarities like the bittern.
We need to remember that if we work with wildlife, then wildlife will work for us and
this is the very essence of sustainable development.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-19
17 New urban environments are planned to provide ecological corridors for wildlife.
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Questions 20-23
Answer the questions below, using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A
NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
23 At the last count, how many species of bird were spotted in urban gardens?
Question 24-26
Choose THREE letters A-G. Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.
In which THREE ways can wildlife habitats benefit people living in urban areas?
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Question 27
D government projects.
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参考答案
15 Answer: TRUE
16 Answer: TRUE
19 Answer: FALSE
23 Answer: 81
24-26 Answer: C,E,G
27 Answer: C
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
Running on empty
For almost a century, scientists have presumed, not unreasonably, that fatigue - or
exhaustion in athletes originates in the muscles. Precise explanations have varied but
all have been based on the ‘limitations theory’. In other words, muscles tire because
they hit a physical limit: they either run out of fuel or oxygen or they drown in toxic
by-products.
In the past few years, however, Timothy Noakes and Alan St Clair Gibson from the
University of Cape Town, South Africa, have examined this standard theory. The
deeper they dig, the more convinced they have become that physical fatigue simply isn't
the same as a car running out of petrol. Fatigue, they argue, is caused not by distress
signals springing from overtaxed muscles, but is an emotional response which begins
in the brain. The essence of their new theory is that the brain, using a mix of
physiological, subconscious and conscious cues, paces the muscles to keep them well
back from the brink of exhaustion. When the brain decides its time to quit, it creates the
distressing sensations we interpret as unbearable muscle fatigue. This ‘central
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governor* theory remains controversial, but it does explain many puzzling aspects of
athletic performance.
A recent discovery that Noakes calls the ‘lactic acid paradox' made him start
researching this area seriously. Lactic acid is a by-product of exercise, and its
accumulation is often cited as a cause of fatigue. But when research subjects exercise
in conditions simulating high altitude, they become fatigued even though lactic acid
levels remain low. Nor has the oxygen content of their blood fallen too low for them to
keep going. Obviously, Noakes deduced, something else was making them tire before
they hit either of these physiological limits.
Probing further, Noakes conducted an experiment with seven cyclists who had sensors
taped to their legs to measure the nerve impulses travelling through their muscles. It
has long been known that during exercise, the body never uses 100% of the available
muscle fibres in a single contraction. The amount used varies, but in endurance tasks
such as this cycling test the body calls on about 30%.
Noakes reasoned that if the limitations theory was correct and fatigue was due to
muscle fibres hitting some limit, the number of fibres used for each pedal stroke should
increase as the fibres tired and the cyclist’s body attempted to compensate by recruiting
an ever-larger proportion of the total. But his team found exactly the opposite. As
fatigue set in, the electrical activity in the cyclists' legs declined - even during sprinting,
when they were striving to cycle as fast as they could.
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To Noakes, this was strong evidence that the old theory was wrong. ‘The cyclists may
have felt completely exhausted,’ he says, ‘but their bodies actually had considerable
reserves that they could theoretically tap by using a greater proportion of the resting
fibres.’ This, he believes,is proof that the brain is regulating the pace of the workout to
hold the cyclists well back from the point of catastrophic exhaustion.
More evidence comes from the fact that fatigued muscles don’t actually run out of
anything critical. Levels of glycogen, which is the muscles’ primary fuel, and ATP. the
chemical they use for temporary energy storage, decline with exercise but never bottom
out. Even at the end of a marathon, ATP levels are 80-90% of the resting norm, and
glycogen levels never get to zero.
Further support for the central regulator comes from the fact that top athletes usually
manage to go their fastest at the end of a race, even though, theoretically, that's when
their muscles should be closest to exhaustion. But Noakes believes the end spurt makes
no sense if fatigue is caused by muscles poisoning themselves with lactic acid as this
would cause racers to slowdown rather than enable them to sprint for the finish line. In
the new theory, the explanation is obvious. Knowing the end is near, the brain slightly
relaxes its vigil, allowing the athlete to tap some of the body’s carefully hoarded
reserves.
But the central governor theory does not mean that what's happening in the muscles is
irrelevant. The governor constantly monitors physiological signals from the muscles,
along with other information, to set the level of fatigue. A large number of signals are
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probably involved but, unlike the limitations theory, the central governor theory
suggests that these physiological factors are not the direct determinants of fatigue, but
simply information to take into account.
Conscious factors can also intervene. Noakes believes that the central regulator
evaluates the planned workout, and sets a pacing strategy accordingly. Experienced
runners know that if they set out on a 10-kilometre run. the first kilometre feels easier
than the first kilometre of a 5-kilometre run, eventhough there should be no difference.
That, Noakes says, is because the central governor knows you have farther to go in the
longer run and has programmed itself to dole out fatigue symptoms accordingly.
St Clair Gibson believes there is a good reason why our bodies arc designed to keep
something back. That way, there's always something left in the tank for an emergency.
In ancient times, and still today, life would be too dangerous ifour bodies allowed us
to become so tired that we couldn't move quickly when faced with an unexpected need.
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Questions 28-40
Questions 28-33
Choose the correct headingfor Paragraphs A-Ffrom the list of headings below.
Write the correct number (i-viii) in boxes 28-33 on your answer sheet.
vi A new hypothesis
28 Paragraph A
29 Paragraph B
30 Paragraph C
31 Paragraph D
32 Paragraph E
33 Paragraph F
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Questions 34-40
35 Athletes can keep going until they use up all their available resources.
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参考答案
28 Answer: iii
29 Answer: vi
30 Answer: ii
31 Answer: vii
32 Answer: viii
33 Answer: iv
34 Answer: C
35 Answer: A
36 Answer: B
37 Answer: C
38 Answer: B
39 Answer: A
40 Answer: B
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage One.
Nature or Nurture?
A
A few years ago, in one of the most fascinating and disturbing experiments in
behavioural psychology, Stanley Milgram of Yale University tested 40 subjects from
all walks of life for their willingness to obey instructions given by a'leader'in a situation
in which the subjects might feel a personal distaste for the actions they were called upon
to perform. Specifically, Milgram told each volunteer 'teacher-subject' that the
experiment was in the noble cause of education, and was designed to test whether or
not punishing pupils for their mistakes would have a positive effect on the pupils'ability
to learn.
B
Milgram's experimental set-up involved placing the teacher-subject before a panel of
thirty switches with labels ranging from '15 volts of electricity (slight shock)' to '450
volts (danger - severe shock)' in steps of 15 volts each. The teacher-subject was told
that whenever the pupil gave the wrong answer to a question, a shock was to be
administered, beginning at the lowest level and increasing in severity with each
successive wrong answer. The supposed'pupil' was in reality an actor hired by Milgram
to simulate receiving the shocks by emitting a spectrum of groans, screams and
writhings together with an assortment of statements and expletives denouncing both the
experiment and the experimenter. Milgram told the teacher-subject to ignore the
reactions of the pupil, and to administer whatever level of shock was called for, as per
the rule governing the experimental situation of the moment.
C
As the experiment unfolded, the pupil would deliberately give the wrong answers to
questions posed by the teacher, thereby bringing on various electrical punishments,
even up to the danger level of 300 volts and beyond. Many of the teacher-subjects
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balked at administering the higher levels of punishment, and turned to Milgram with
questioning looks and/or complaints about continuing the experiment. In these
situations, Milgram calmly explained that the teacher-subject was to ignore the pupil's
cries for mercy and carry on with the experiment. If the subject was still reluctant to
proceed, Milgram said that it was important for the sake of the experiment that the
procedure be followed through to the end. His final argument was, 'You have no other
choice. You must go on.' What Milgram was trying to discover was the number of
teacher-subjects who would be willing to administer the highest levels of shock, even
in the face of strong personal and moral revulsion against the rules and conditions of
the experiment.
D
Prior to carrying out the experiment, Milgram explained his idea to a group of 39
psychiatrists and asked them to predict the average percentage of people in an ordinary
population who would be willing to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts.
The overwhelming consensus was that virtually all the teacher-subjects would refuse to
obey the experimenter. The psychiatrists felt that 'most subjects would not go beyond
150 volts' and they further anticipated that only four per cent would go up to 300 volts.
Furthermore, they thought that only a lunatic fringe of about one in 1,000 would give
the highest shock of 450 volts. Furthermore, they thought that only a lunatic cringe of
about one in 1,000 would give the highest shock of 450 volts.
E
What were the actual results? Well, over 60 per cent of the teacher-subjects continued
to obey Milgram up to the 450-volt limit! In repetitions of the experiment in other
countries, the percentage of obedient teacher-subjects was even higher, reaching 85 per
cent in one country. How can we possibly account for this vast discrepancy between
what calm, rational, knowledgeable people predict in the comfort of their study and
what pressured, flustered, but cooperative teachers' actually do in the laboratory of real
life?
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One's first inclination might be to argue that there must be some sort of built-in animal
aggression instinct that was activated by the experiment, and that Milgram's teacher-
subjects were just following a genetic need to discharge this pent-up primal urge onto
the pupil by administering the electrical shock. A modern hard-core sociobiologist
might even gosofaras to claim that this aggressive instinct evolved as an advantageous
trait, having been of survival value to our ancestors in their struggle against the
hardships of life on the plains and in the caves, ultimately finding its way into our
genetic make-up as a remnant of our ancient animal ways.
G An alternative to this notion of genetic programming is to see the teacher-subjects'
actions as a result of the social environment under which the experiment was carried
out. As Milgram himself pointed out, 'Most subjects in the experiment see their
behaviour in a larger context that is benevolent and useful to society - the pursuit of
scientific truth. The psychological laboratory has a strong claim to legitimacy and
evokes trust and confidence in those who perform there. An action such as shocking a
victim, which in isolation appears evil, acquires a completely different meaning when
placed in this setting.'
H
Thus, in this explanation the subject merges his unique personality and personal and
moral code with that of larger institutional structures, surrendering individual properties
like loyalty, self-sacrifice and discipline to the service of malevolent systems of
authority.
I
Here we have two radically different explanations for why so many teacher-subjects
were willing to forgo their sense of personal responsibility for the sake of an
institutional authority figure. The problem for biologists, psychologists and
anthropologists is to sort out which of these two polar explanations is more plausible.
This, in essence, is the problem of modern sociobiology - to discover the degree to
which hard-wired genetic programming dictates, or at least strongly biases, the
interaction of animals and humans with their environment, that is, their behaviour. Put
another way, sociobiology is concerned with elucidating the biological basis of all
behaviour.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-19
Which paragraphs contains thefollowing information?
Write the correct letter A-I in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
Questions 20-22
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Questions 23-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given inReading Passage 2?
In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
23 Several of the subjects were psychology students at Yale University.
24 Some people may believe that the teacher-subjects' behaviour could be
explained as a positive survival mechanism.
25 In a sociological explanation, personal values are more powerful than
authority.
26 Milgram's experiment solves an important question in sociobiology.
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参考答案:
14 F
15A
16 B
17 D
18 I
19 C
20 B
21 D
22 C
23 NOT GIVEN
24 TRUE
25 FALSE
26 FALSE
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage Three.
Continents Collide!
The idea that the continents are moving was first proposed by a German
meteorologist,.Alfred Wegener, in a book published in 1915. He had gathered a great
deal of careful and tantalising evidence, the most obvious being the simple observation
that the great landmasses of the world seem to fit together, jigsaw-like, a striking
example being the coastlines of either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Wegener was even
able to theorise, correctly, that all the continents were once assembled into a
supercontinent (now called Pangaea). Pangaea broke up into Laurasia (which became
North America and Eurasia) and Gondwana (which became the remaining continents).
Unfortunately, Wegener could propose no propulsive force for this movement, apart
from the vague and erroneous suggestion that it might be centrifugal forces. He also
severely overestimated the speed of this motion. These problems, and the fact that he
was a meteorologist (rather than a geologist), meant that, upon publishing his ideas, the
scientific community was resolutely and implacably hostile. It is an interesting example
of that not uncommon instance in which a scientist who was fundamentally correct was
denied any recognition in his lifetime. Semmelweis, who advocated the washing of
hands before surgery as away to reduce hospital fatalities, is another example. Wegener
was to unexpectedly die on an expedition in Greenland, probably of a heart attack - in
his death, as in his life, left out in the cold.
The first hints of the existence of Gondwana came from the similarity of fossil plants
and animals distributed in the same geological period over South America, Africa,
Antarctica, India, and Australia. Similarly, the composition and nature of the rocks
along relevant coastlines spoke the same story, yet to become scientifically credible,
the theory needed evidence of a propulsive force to move such huge continents (in the
same way that Semmelweis’s ideas needed the germ theory of disease). It was only in
the 1960s, decades after Wegener’s death, that hard evidence for his theory began
amassing to eventually become overwhelming.
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The theory is now called ‘plate tectonics’, since it was proven that the Earth’s surface
is fractured into ‘plates’. These bump and grind as they steadily move at infinitesimally
slow rates in given directions, driven by ‘convention forces’. These are formed by the
vast circular rising of superheated rock from the planet’s molten interior. This material
cools as it nears the surface, eventually sinking once again towards the centre. Add to
this the rotation of the Earth itself, and there is a complicated and barely understood set
of cyclic swirls of molten rock, producing drags and pulls on each tectonic plate, the
sum of which results in a steady migration.
Of course, this motion is slow, typically at the speed at which fingernails grow, and at
its fastest, the rate at which hair does. But by being consistent and essentially
unstoppable, the results can be spectacular, particularly when plates meet. Here, the
release of heat, as well as the buckling and melting which results, gives rise to
geological events such as earthquakes, and geological features such as mountains,
volcanoes, and oceanic ridges and trenches. Plate boundaries see most of the world’s
active volcanoes, with the Pacific Plate’s ‘Ring of Fire’ being a good example.
Volcanism may sometimes occur in the middle of plates, but this has been theorised to
be a result of ‘hotspots’: anomalously hot areas of interior rock which melt through the
plate, forcing an escape to the surface.
Plate boundaries come in three types. First, Transform boundaries, where the plates
grind past each other. It was once thought that the well-known Aegir Ridge was an
example, until studies showed that it had never been active, whereas the periodic
earthquakes along California’s San Andreas Fault show the very opposite case. The
second type is Divergent boundaries, where the two plates slide apart from each other.
Mid-oceanic ridges, such as in the Atlantic, and active rift zones, such as in East Africa,
are examples. Finally, there are Convergent boundaries, where the two plates slide
towards each other. This can form either a subduction zone (if one plate moves
underneath the other) or a continental collision. Deep marine trenches are formed in the
former case, and with the descending plate releasing its trapped water on being heated
in the Earth’s interior, huge amounts of heat and pressure rise to the surface, causing
mountains and volcanoes to form, such as in the Andes mountain range.
The best example of a continental collision is the Indian plate, which is steadily and
implacably migrating straight into central Asia. The Himalayas of Nepal and Northern
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India, the Karakoram Ranges of Northern Pakistan, and the highlands of Afghanistan,
are all part of the complex fold system that resulted, producing some of the highest
peaks in the world. There are also some deep valleys receiving the run-off melt-water
from the far side of these mountains, creating some mighty rivers, such as the Indus,
theIrrawaddy, and the Mekong. Interestingly, the Himalayas are still growing, meaning
that the summit of Mount Everest is perhaps a couple of metres higher now than when
people first stood there in 1953, presumably making it just that little bit harder to reach.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-28
Questions 29-32
A was German.
B made simple observations.
C was a meteorologist.
D made too many suggestions.
A died prematurely.
B lacked crucial evidence.
C were never given recognition.
D were German.
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Questions 33-35
Questions 36-40
Transform 36
Convergent
Andes Mountains
II: 40
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参考答案:
27 Answer: Laurasia
28 Answer: Pangaea
29 Answer: C
30 Answer: B
31 Answer: B
32 Answer: D
34 Answer: cools
35 Answer: rotation
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Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage One
A
While cities and their metropolitan areas have always interacted with and shaped the
natural environment, it is only recently that historians have begun to consider this
relationship. During our own time, the tension between natural and urbanized areas has
increased, as the spread of metropolitan populations and urban land uses has reshaped
and destroyed natural landscapes and environments.
B
The relationship between the city and the natural environment has actually been circular,
with cities having massive effects on the natural environment, while the natural
environment, in turn, has profoundly shaped urban configurations. Urban history is
filled with stories about how city dwellers contended with the forces of nature that
threatened their lives. Nature not only caused many of the annoyances of daily urban
life, such as bad weather and pests, but it also gave rise to natural disasters and
catastrophes such as floods, fires, and earthquakes. In order to protect themselves and
their settlements against the forces of nature, cities built many defences including flood
walls and dams, earthquake-resistant buildings, and storage places for food and water.
At times, such protective steps sheltered urbanites against the worst natural furies, but
often their own actions – such as building under the shadow of volcanoes, or in
earthquake-prone zones – exposed them to danger from natural hazards.
C
City populations require food, water, fuel, and construction materials, while urban
industries need natural materials for production purposes. In order to fulfill these needs,
urbanites increasingly had to reach far beyond their boundaries. In the nineteenth
century, for instance, the demands of city dwellers for food produced rings of garden
farms around cities. In the twentieth century, as urban populations increased, the
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demand for food drove the rise of large factory farms. Cities also require fresh water
supplies in order to exist – engineers built waterworks, dug wells deeper and deeper
into the earth looking for groundwater, and dammed and diverted rivers to obtain water
supplies for domestic and industrial uses. In the process of obtaining water from distant
locales, cities often transformed them, making deserts where there had been fertile
agricultural areas.
D
Urbanites had to seek locations to dispose of the wastes they produced. Initially, they
placed wastes on sites within the city, polluting the air, land, and water with industrial
and domestic effluents. As cities grew larger, they disposed of their wastes by
transporting them to more distant locations. Thus, cities constructed sewerage systems
for domestic wastes. They usually discharged the sewage into neighbouring waterways,
often polluting the water supply of downstream cities.
The air and the land also became dumps for waste disposal. In the late nineteenth
century, coal became the preferred fuel for industrial, transportation, and domestic use.
But while providing an inexpensive and plentiful energy supply, coal was also very
dirty. The cities that used it suffered from air contamination and reduced sunlight, while
the cleaning tasks of householders were greatly increased.
E
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers began demanding urban
environmental cleanups and public health improvements. Women's groups often took
the lead in agitating for clean air and clean water, showing a greater concern than men
in regard to quality of life and health-related issues. The replacement of the horse, first
by electric trolleys and then by the car, brought about substantial improvements in street
and air sanitation. The movements demanding clean air, however, and reduction of
waterway pollution were largely unsuccessful. On balance, urban sanitary conditions
were probably somewhat better in the 1920s than in the late nineteenth century, but the
cost of improvement often was the exploitation of urban hinterlands for water supplies,
increased downstream water pollution, and growing automobile congestion and
pollution.
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F
In the decades after the 1940s, city environments suffered from heavy pollution as they
sought to cope with increased automobile usage, pollution from industrial production,
new varieties of chemical pesticides and the wastes of an increasingly consumer-
oriented economy. Cleaner fuels and smoke control laws largely freed cities during the
1940s and 1950s of the dense smoke that they had previously suffered from. Improved
urban air quality resulted largely from the substitution of natural gas and oil for coal
and the replacement of the steam locomotive by the diesel-electric. However, great
increases in automobile usage in some larger cities produced the new phenomenon of
smog, and air pollution replaced smoke as a major concern.
G
During these decades, the suburban out-migration, which had begun in the nineteenth
century with commuter trains and streetcars and accelerated because of the availability
and convenience of the automobile, now increased to a torrent, putting major strains on
the formerly rural and undeveloped metropolitan fringes. To a great extent, suburban
layouts ignored environmental considerations, making little provision for open space,
producing endless rows of resource-consuming and fertilizer-dependent lawns,
contaminating groundwater through leaking septic tanks, and absorbing excessive
amounts of fresh water and energy. The growth of the outer city since the 1970s
reflected a continued preference on the part of many people in the western world for
space-intensive single-family houses surrounded by lawns, for private automobiles over
public transit, and for the development of previously untouched areas. Without better
planning for land use and environmental protection, urban life will, as it has in the past,
continue to damage and stress the natural environment.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-7
1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E ...........
6 Paragraph F ...........
7 Paragraph G .........
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Questions 8-13
13 Many governments in the developed world are trying to halt the spread of the
suburbs.
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参考答案:
1 iii
2 iv
3 viii
4 ix
5v
6i
7 ii
8 FALSE
9 TRUE
10 NOT GIVEN
11 TRUE
12 TRUE
13 NOT GIVEN
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
The 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and
Gilbert. The impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist,
also the accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism, an Englishman of
learning and a physician at the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of
electricity and magnetism was what the ancients knew, nothing more than that the
lodestone possessed magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when rubbed, would
attract bits of paper or other substances of small specific gravity. However, he is less
well known than he deserves.
Gilbert’s birth pre-dated Galileo. Born in an eminent local family in Colchester County
in the UK, on May 24, 1544, he went to grammar school, and then studied medicine at
St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1573. Later he travelled in the continent
and eventually settled down in London.
He was a very successful and eminent doctor. All this culminated in his election to the
president of the Royal Science Society. He was also appointed personal physician to
the Queen (Elizabeth I), and later knighted by the Queen. He faithfully served her until
her death. However, he didn’t outlive the Queen for long and died on November 30,
1603, only a few months after his appointment as personal physician to King James.
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Gilbert was first interested in chemistry but later changed his focus due to the large
portion of mysticism of alchemy involved (such as the transmutation of metal). He
gradually developed his interest in physics after the great minds of the ancient,
particularly about the knowledge the ancient Greeks had about lodestones, strange
minerals with the power to attract iron. In the meantime, Britain became a major
seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was defeat-ed, opening the way to
British settlement of America. British ships depended on the magnetic compass, yet no
one understood why it worked. Did the Pole Star attract it, as Columbus once speculated;
or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in Odyssey, which ships
would never approach, because the sail-ors thought its pull would yank out all their iron
nails and fittings? For nearly 20 years, William Gilbert conducted ingenious
experiments to understand magnet-ism. His works include On the Magnet, Magnetic
Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth.
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His research method was revolutionary in that he used experiments rather than pure
logic and reasoning like the ancient Greek philosophers did. It was a new attitude
towards scientific investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion.
It was because of this scientific attitude, together with his contri-bution to our
knowledge of magnetism, that a unit of magneto motive force, also known as magnetic
potential, was named Gilbert in his honour. His approach of careful observation and
experimentation rather than the authoritative opinion or deductive philosophy ofothers
had laid the very foundation for modern science.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-7
Choose the correct headingfor each paragraphfrom the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-x in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
List of headings
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1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
Questions 8-10
Questions 11-13
Choose THREE letters A-F. Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
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参考答案
1 Answer: v
2 Answer: i
3 Answer: vi
4 Answer: x
5 Answer: ix
6 Answer: iv
7 Answer: ii
8 Answer: TRUE
9 Answer: TRUE
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.
It was the summer, scientists now realise, when global warming at last made itself
unmistakably felt. We knew that summer 2003 was remarkable: Britain experienced its
record high temperature and continental Europe saw forest fires raging out of control,
great rivers drying to a trickle and thousands of heat-related deaths. But just how
remarkable is only now becoming clear.
The three months of June, July and August were the warmest ever recorded in western
and central Europe, with record national highs in Portugal, Germany and Switzerland
as well as in Britain. And they were the warmest by a very long way. Over a great
rectangular block of the earth stretching from west of Paris to northern Italy, taking in
Switzerland and southern Germany, the average temperature for the summer months
was 3.78°C above the long-term norm, said the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the
University of East Anglia in Norwich, which is one of the world's leading institutions
for the monitoring and analysis of temperature records.
That excess might not seem a lot until you are aware ofthe context - but then you realise
it is enormous. There is nothing like this in previous data, anywhere. It is considered so
exceptional that Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director, is prepared to say openly - in
away few scientists have done before - that the 2003 extreme maybe directly attributed,
not to natural climate variability, but to global warming caused by human actions.
Meteorologists have hitherto contented themselves with the formula that recent high
temperatures are “consistent with predictions” of climate change. For the great block
of the map - that stretching between 35-50N and 0-20E - the CRU has reliable
temperature records dating back to 1781. Using as a baseline the average summer
temperature recorded between 1961 and 1990, departures from the temperature norm,
or “anomalies”, over the area as a whole can easily be plotted. As the graph shows, such
is the variability of our climate that over the past 200 years,there have been at least half
a dozen anomalies, in terms of excess temperature - the peaks on the graph denoting
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very hot years - approaching, or even exceeding, 2°C. But there has been nothing
remotely like 2003, when the anomaly is nearly four degrees.
“This is quite remarkable,’ Professor Jones told The Independent. “It’s very unusual in
a statistical sense. If this series had a normal statistical distribution, you wouldn’t get
this number. The return period [how often it could be expected to recur] would be
something like one in a thousand years. If we look at an excess above the average of
nearly four degrees, then perhaps nearly three degrees of that is natural variability,
because we’ve seen that in past summers. But the final degree of it is likely to be due
to global warming, caused by human actions.”
The summer of 2003 has, in a sense, been one that climate scientists have long been
expecting. Until now, the warming has been manifesting itself mainly in winters that
have been less cold than in summers that have been much hotter. Last week, the United
Nations predicted that winters were warming so quickly that winter sports would die
out in Europe’s lower-level ski resorts. But sooner or later, the unprecedented hot
summer was bound to come, and this year it did.
One of the most dramatic features of the summer was the hot nights, especially in the
first half of August. In Paris, the temperature never dropped below 23°C (73.4°F) at all
between 7 and 14 August, and the city recorded its warmest-ever night on 11-12 August,
when the mercury did not drop below 25.5°C (77.9°F). Germany recorded its warmest-
ever night at Weinbiet in the Rhine Valley with a lowest figure of 27.6°C (80.6°F) on
13 August, and similar record-breaking nighttime temperatures were recorded in
Switzerland and Italy.
The 15,000 excess deaths in France during August, compared with previous years, have
been related to the high night-time temperatures. The number gradually increased
during the first 12 days of the month, peaking at about 2,000 per day on the night of
12-13 August, then fell off dramatically after 14 August when the minimum
temperatures fell by about 5°C. The elderly were most affected, with a 70 per cent
increase in mortality rate in those aged 75-94.
For Britain, the year as a whole is likely to be the warmest ever recorded, but despite
the high temperature record on 10 August, the summer itself - defined as the June, July
and August period - still comes behind 1976 and 1995, when there were longer periods
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of intense heat. “At the moment, the year is on course to be the third hottest ever in the
global temperature record, which goes back to 1856, behind 1998 and 2002,but when
all the records for October, November and December are collated, it might move into
second place/' Professor Jones said. The ten hottest years in the record have all now
occurred since 1990. Professor Jones is in no doubt about the astonishing nature of
European summer of 2003. “The temperatures recorded were out of all proportion to
the previous record," he said.“It was the warmest summer in the past 500 years and
probably way beyond that. It was enormously exceptional."
His colleagues at the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research are now planning a special study of it. “It was a summer that has not been
experienced before, either in terms of the temperature extremes that were reached, or
the range and diversity of the impacts of the extreme heat," said the centre's executive
director, Professor Mike Hulme.
“It will certainly have left its mark on a number of countries, as to how they think and
plan for climate change in the future, much as the 2000 floods have revolutionised the
way the Government is thinking about flooding in the UK. The 2003 heatwave will
have similar repercussions across Europe."
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-19
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet write
14 The average summer temperature in 2003 is almost 4 degrees higher than the
average temperature of the past.
15 Global warming is caused by human activities.
16 Jones believes the temperature variation is within the normal range.
17 The temperature is measured twice a day in major cities.
18 There were milder winters rather than hotter summers.
19 Governments are building new high-altitude ski resorts.
Questions 20-21
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR
NUMBERS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.
What are the other two hottest years in Britain besides 2003?
20
What has also influenced government policies like the hot summer in 2003?
21
Questions 22-25
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the
passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.
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22
The ten hottest years on record all come after the year
23
24
25
Question 26
26 Which one of the following can be best used as the title of this passage?
A Global Warming
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参考答案:
14 Answer: YES
15 Answer: YES
16 Answer: NO
18 Answer: YES
23 Answer: 1990
24 Answer: 1781
25 Answer: France
26 Answer: D
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
A war has been going on for almost a hundred years between the sheep farmers of
Australia and the dingo, Australia’s wild dog. To protect their livelihood, the farmers
built a wire fence, 3,307 miles of continuous wire mesh, reaching from the coast of
South Australia all the way to the cotton fields of eastern Queensland, just short of the
Pacific Ocean.
The Fence is Australia’s version of the Great Wall of China, but even longer, erected
to keep out hostile invaders, in this case hordes of yellow dogs. The empire it preserves
is that of the woolgrowers, sovereigns of the world’s second largest sheep flock, after
China’s - some 123 million head - and keepers of a wool export business worth four
billion dollars. Never mind that more and more people - conservationists, politicians,
taxpayers and animal lovers - say that such a barrier would never be allowed today on
ecological grounds. With sections of it almost a hundred years old, the dog fence has
become, as conservationist Lindsay Fairweather ruefully admits, ‘an icon of Australian
frontier ingenuity’ .
To appreciate this unusual outback monument and to meet the people whose livelihoods
depend on it, I spent part of an Australian autumn travelling the wire. It’s known by
different names in different states: the Dog Fence in South Australia, the Border Fence
in New South Wales and the Barrier Fence in Queensland. I would call it simply the
Fence.
For most of its prodigious length, this epic fence winds like a river across a landscape
that, unless a big rain has fallen, scarcely has rivers. The eccentric route, prescribed
mostly by property lines, provides a sampler of outback topography: the Fence goes
over sand dunes, past salt lakes, up and down rock-strewn hills, through dense scrub
and across barren plains.
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The Fence stays away from towns. Where it passes near a town, it has actually become
a tourist attraction visited on bus tours. It marks the traditional dividing line between
cattle and sheep. Inside, where the dingoes are legally classified as vermin, they are
shot, poisoned and trapped. Sheep and dingoes do not mix and the Fence sends that
message mile after mile.
What is this creature that by itselfthreatens an entire industry, inflicting several millions
of dollars of damage a year despite the presence of the world’s most obsessive fence?
Cousin to the coyote and the jackal, descended from the Asian wolf, Cam's lupus
dingo is an introduced species of wild dog. Skeletal remains indicate that the dingo was
introduced to Australia more than 3,500 years ago probably with Asian seafarers who
landed on the north coast. The adaptable dingo spread rapidly and in a short time
became the top predator, killing offall its marsupial competitors. The dingo looks like
a small wolf with a long nose, short pointed ears and a bushy tail. Dingoes rarely bark;
they yelp and howl. Standing about 22 inches at the shoulder - slightly taller than a
coyote - the dingo is Australia’s largest land carnivore.
The woolgrowers’ war against dingoes, which is similar to the sheep ranchers’ rage
against coyotes in the US, started not long after the first European settlers disembarked
in 1788, bringing with them a cargo of sheep. Dingoes officially became outlaws in
1830 when governments placed a bounty on their heads. Today bounties for problem
dogs killing sheep inside the Fence can reach $500. As pioneers penetrated the interior
with their flocks of sheep, fences replaced shepherds until, by the end of the 19th
century, thousands of miles of barrier fencing crisscrossed the vast grazing lands.
The dingo started out as a quiet observer,’ writes Roland Breckwoldt, in A Very Elegant
Animal: The Dingo, ‘but soon came to represent everything that was dark and
dangerous on the continent. ’ It is estimated that since sheep arrived in Australia, dingo
numbers have increased a hundredfold. Though dingoes have been eradicated from
parts of Australia, an educated guess puts the population at more than a million.
Eventually government officials and graziers agreed that one well-maintained fence,
placed on the outer rim of sheep country and paid for by taxes levied on woolgrowers,
should supplant the maze of private netting. By 1960, three states joined their barriers
to form a single dog fence.
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The intense private battles between woolgrowers and dingoes have usually served to
define the Fence only in economic terms. It marks the difference between profit and
loss. Yet the Fence casts a much broader ecological shadow for it has become a kind of
terrestrial dam, deflecting the flow of animals inside and out. The ecological side effects
appear most vividly at Sturt National Park. In 1845, explorer Charles Sturt led an
expedition through these parts on a futile search for an inland sea. For Sturt and other
early explorers, it was a rare event to see a kangaroo. Now they are ubiquitous for
without a native predator the kangaroo population has exploded inside the Fence.
Kangaroos are now cursed more than dingoes. They have become the rivals of sheep,
competing for water and grass. In response state governments cull* more than three
million kangaroos a year to keep Australia’s national symbol from overrunning the
pastoral lands. Park officials, who recognise that the fence is to blame, respond to the
excess of kangaroos by saying The fence is there, and we have to live with it.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-4
Choose the appropriate letters A-D and write them in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.
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A impressed
B delighted
C shocked
D annoyed
Questions 5-11
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
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Questions 12-13
Choose the appropriate letters A-D andwrite them in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet.
A 1788
B 1830
C 1845
D 1960
A philosophical
B angry
C pleased
proud
D
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参考答案
1 Answer: D
2 Answer: B
3 Answer: C
4 Answer: A
5 Answer: NO
6 Answer: YES
7 Answer: NO
8 Answer: YES
10 Answer: YES
12 Answer: B
13 Answer: A
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
IT’S ECO-LOGICAL
Planning an eco-friendly holiday can be a minefield for the well- meaning traveller,
says Steve Watkins. But help is now at hand.
If there were awards for tourism phrases that have been hijacked, diluted and misused
then ‘ecotourism’ would earn top prize. The term first surfaced in the early 1980s
reflecting a surge in environmental awareness and a realisation by tour operators that
many travellers wanted to believe their presence abroad would not have a negative
impact. It rapidly became the hottest marketing tag a holiday could carry.
These days the ecotourism label is used to cover anything from a two-week tour living
with remote Indonesian tribes, to a one-hour motorboat trip through an Australian gorge.
In fact, any tour that involves cultural interaction, natural beauty spots, wildlife or a
dash of soft adventure is likely to be included in the overflowing ecotourism folder.
There is no doubt the original motives behind the movement were honourable attempts
to provide a way for those who cared to make informed choices, but the lack of
regulations and a standard industry definition left many travellers lost in
an ecotourism jungle.
It is easier to understand why the ecotourism market has become so overcrowded when
we look at its wider role in the world economy. According to World Tourism
Organisation figures, ecotourism is worth US$20 billion a year and makes up one-fifth
of all international tourism. Add to this an annual growth rate of around five per cent
and the pressure for many operators, both in developed and developing countries, to
jump on the accelerating bandwagon is compelling. Without any widely recognised
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accreditation system, the consumer has been left to investigate the credentials of an
operator themselves. This is a time-consuming process and many travellers usually take
an operator’s claims at face value, only addingto the proliferation of fake ecotours.
However, there are several simple questions that will provide qualifying evidence of a
company’s commitment to minimise its impact on the environment and maximise the
benefits to the tourism area’s local community. For example, does the company use
recycled or sustainable, locally harvested materials to build its tourist properties? Do
they pay fair wages to all employees? Do they offer training to employees? It is
common for city entrepreneurs to own tour companies in country areas, which can mean
the money you pay ends up in the city rather than in the community being visited. By
taking a little extra time to investigate the ecotourism options, it is not only possible to
guide your custom to worthy operators but you will often find that the experience they
offer is far more rewarding.
The ecotourism business is still very much in need of a shake-up and a standardised
approach. There are a few organisations that have sprung up in the last ten years or so
that endeavour to educate travellers and operators about the benefits of
responsible ecotourism. Founded in 1990, the Ecotourism Society (TES) is anon-profit
organisation of travel industry, conservation and ecological professionals, which aims
to make ecotourism a genuine tool for conservation and sustainable development.
Helping to create inherent economic value in wilderness environments and threatened
cultures has undoubtedly been one of the ecotourism movement’s most notable
achievements. TES organises an annual initiative to further aid development of
the ecotourism industry. This year it is launching ‘Your Travel Choice Makes a
Difference’, an educational campaign aimed at helping consumers understand the
potential positive and negative impacts of their travel decisions. TES also offers
guidance on the choice of ecotour and has established a register of
approved ecotourism operators around the world.
A leading ecotourism operator in the United Kingdom is Tribes, which won the 1999
Tourism Concern and Independent Traveller’s World ‘Award for Most Responsible
Tour Operator’. Amanda Marks, owner and director of Tribes, believes that
the ecotourism industry still has some way to go to get its house in order. Until now,
no ecotourism accreditation scheme has really worked, principally because there has
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been no systematic way of checking that accredited companies actually comply with
the code of practice. Amanda believes that the most promising system is the recently
re-launched Green Globe 21 scheme. The Green Globe 21 award is based on the
sustainable development standards contained in Agenda 21 from the 1992 Earth
Summit and was originally coordinated by the World Travel & Tourism Council
(WTTC). The scheme is now an independent concern, though the WTTC still supports
it. Until recently, tour companies became affiliates and could use the Green Globe logo
merely on payment of an annual fee, hardly a suitable qualifying standard. However, in
November 1999 Green Globe 21 introduced an annual, independent check on operators
wishing to use the logo.
Miriam Cain, from the Green Globe 21 marketing development, explains that current
and new affiliates will now have one year to ensure that their operations comply with
Agenda 21 standards. If they fail the first inspection, they can only reapply once. The
inspection process is not a cheap option, especially for large companies, but the benefits
of having Green Globe status and the potential operational cost savings that complying
with the standards can bring should be significant. ‘We have joint ventures with
organisations around the world, including Australia and the Caribbean, that will allow
us to effectively check all affiliate operators,’ says Miriam. The scheme also allows
destination communities to become Green Globe 21 approved.
For a relatively new industry it is not surprising that ecotourism has undergone teething
pains. However, there are signs that things are changing for the better. With a
committed and unified approach by the travel industry, local communities, travellers
and environmental experts could make ecotourism a tag to be proud of and trusted.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 25-27
Write your answers in boxes 25-27 on your answer sheet. Which body provides
information on global tourist numbers?
27 Which meeting provided the principles behind the Green Globe 21 regulations?
Questions 14-19
Do thefollowing statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 2?
15 The intentions of those who coined the term ‘ecotourism’ were sincere.
18 Tourists have learnt to make investigations about tour operators before using
them.
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Questions 20-22
According to the information given in the reading passage, which THREE of the
following are true of the Ecotourism Society (TES)?
Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 20-22 on your answer sheet.
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Questions 23-24
Write the appropriate letters A-D in boxes 23-24 on your answer sheet.
D Both tour operators and tour sites can apply for affiliation.
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参考答案
14 Answer: YES
15 Answer: YES
17 Answer: NO
18 Answer: NO
26 Answer:city entrepreneurs
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
Is perfect pitch a rare talent possessed solely by the likes of Beethoven? Kathryn Brown
discusses this much sought-after musical ability.
The uncanny, if sometimes distracting, ability to name a solitary note out of the blue,
without any other notes for reference, is a prized musical talent - and a scientific
mystery. Musicians with perfect pitch - or, as many researchers prefer to call it, absolute
pitch - can often play pieces by ear, and many can transcribe music brilliantly. That’s
because they perceive the position of a note in the musical stave - its pitch - as clearly
as the fact that they heard it. Hearing and naming the pitch gohand in hand.
By contrast, most musicians follow not the notes, but the relationship between them.
They may easily recognise two notes as being a certain number of tones apart, but could
name the higher note as an E only if they are told the lower one is a C, for example.
This is relative pitch. Useful, but much less mysterious.
For centuries, absolute pitch has been thought of as the preserve of the musical elite.
Some estimates suggest that maybe fewer than 1 in 2,000 people possess it. But a
growing number of studies, from speech experiments to brain scans, are now suggesting
that a knack for absolute pitch may be far more common, and more varied, than
previously thought. ‘Absolute pitch is not an all or nothing feature,’ says Marvin, a
music theorist at the University of Rochester in New York state. Some researchers even
claim that we could all develop the skill, regardless of our musical talent. And their
work may finally settle a decades-old debate about whether absolute pitch depends on
melodious genes - or early music lessons.
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Music psychologist Diana Deutsch at the University of California in San Diego is the
leading voice. Last month at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Columbus,
Ohio, Deutsch reported a study that suggests we all have the potential to acquire
absolute pitch - and that speakers of tone languages use it every day. A third of the
world’s population - chiefly people in Asia and Africa - speak tone languages, in which
a word’s meaning can vary depending on the pitch a speaker uses.
Deutsch and her colleagues asked seven native Vietnamese speakers and 15 native
Mandarin speakers to read out lists of words on different days. The chosen words
spanned a range of pitches, to force the speakers to raise and lower their voices
considerably. By recording these recited lists and taking the average pitch for each
whole word, the researchers compared the pitches used by each person to say each word
on different days.
Both groups showed strikingly consistent pitch for any given word - often less than a
quarter-tone difference between days. ‘The similarity,’ Deutsch says, ‘is mind-
boggling. ’ It’s also, she says, a real example of absolute pitch. As babies, the speakers
learnt to associate certain pitches with meaningful words -just as a musician labels one
tone A and another B - and they demonstrate this precise use of pitch regardless of
whether or not they have had any musical training, she adds.
Deutsch isn’t the only researcher turning up everyday evidence of absolute pitch. At
least three other experiments have found that people can launch into familiar songs at
or very near the correct pitches. Some researchers have nicknamed this ability ‘absolute
memory’, and they say it pops upon other senses, too. Given studies like these, the real
mystery is why we don’t all have absolute pitch, says cognitive psychologist
Daniel Levitin of McGill University in Montreal.
Over the past decade, researchers have confirmed that absolute pitch often runs in
families. Nelson Freimer of the University of California in San Francisco, for example,
is just completing a study that he says strongly suggests the right genes help create this
brand of musical genius. Freimer gave tone tests to people with absolute pitch and to
their relatives. He also tested several hundred other people who had taken early music
lessons. He found that relatives of people with absolute pitch were far more likely to
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develop the skill than people who simply had the music lessons. There is clearly a
familial aggregation of absolute pitch,’ Freimer says.
Freimer says some children are probably genetically predisposed toward absolute pitch
- and this innate inclination blossoms during childhood music lessons. Indeed, many
researchers now point to this harmony of nature and nurture to explain why musicians
with absolute pitch show different levels of the talent.
Indeed, researchers are finding more and more evidence suggesting music lessons are
critical to the development of absolute pitch. In a survey of 2,700 students in American
music conservatories and college programmes, New York University geneticist
Peter Gregersen and his colleagues found that a whopping 32 per cent of the Asian
students reported having absolute pitch, compared with just 7 per cent of non-Asian
students. While that might suggest a genetic tendency towards absolute pitch in the
Asian population, Gregersen says that the type and timing of music lessons probably
explains much of the difference.
For one thing, those with absolute pitch started lessons, on average, when they were
five years old, while those without absolute pitch started around the age of eight.
Moreover, adds Gregersen, the type of music lessons favoured in Asia, and by many of
the Asian families in his study, such as the Suzuki method, often focus on playing by
ear and learning the names of musical notes, while those more commonly used in the
US tend to emphasise learning scales in a relative pitch way. In Japanese pre-school
music programmes,he says, children often have to listen to notes played on a piano and
hold up a coloured flag to signal the pitch. ‘There’s a distinct cultural difference,’ he
says.
Deutsch predicts that further studies will reveal absolute pitch - in its imperfect, latent
form - inside all of us. The Western emphasis on relative pitch simply obscures it, she
contends. ‘It’s very likely that scientists will end up concluding that we’re all born with
the potential to acquire very fine-grained absolute pitch. It’s really just a matter of
life getting in the way.’
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Questions 28-40
Questions 28-35
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Questions 36-40
A Levitin
B Deutsch
C Gregersen
D Marvin
E Freimer
You may use any of the people A-E more than once.
40 The important thing is the age at which music lessons are started.
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参考答案
28 Answer: ability
29 Answer: note
30 Answer: relative
32 Answer: tone
33 Answer: words
34 Answer: pitch
35 Answer: cultures
36 Answer: D
37 Answer: B
38 Answer: A
39 Answer: E
40 Answer: C
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage One.
An Essential Intermediary
There is a strange irony about the blue whale. With fully grown adults reaching up to
30 metres long, and weighing in at almost 200 tons, it is not only the largest animal in
the world, but also the largest to have ever existed. Yes, not even the most imposing of
the dinosaurs from the Jurassic era can match this sleek streamlined aquatic mammal
in scale. So, where is the irony? It lies in the fact that this huge beast feeds primarily on
one of the smallest life forms in the oceans, a tiny crustacean known as krill.
Krill live in every ocean of the world. They thus come in many varieties, although all
sporting a similar shrimp-like appearance, with an exoskeleton divided into three parts,
and with two large antennae at the front, and pairs of legs running down the underside.
These creatures are distinguishable from shrimp by their gills, which are externally
mounted, and resemble rows of fibrous combs alongside their bodies. Another oddity
is that their exoskeleton is usually transparent. This, and their small size, lead to the
deceptive conclusion that they are an insubstantial presence, of little importance, until
one is informed that an adult blue whale can consume almost 40 million krill, with a
total weight of 3,600 kilograms, in just one day.
It is this, their huge numbers, which makes these mysterious ghost-like crustaceans so
important. Just looking at one species, the Antarctic krill, their collective weight (or
bio-mass) is estimated to be about 500 million tons. Putting this another way, that is
over twice the weight of all human beings currently on Earth. Some scientists estimate
that, each year, as much as half of this is eaten by whales, seals, penguins, squid, and
fish, illustrating that krill constitute an enormous food resource for other animals. The
question is whether humans can get in on the act.
Antarctic krill are the largest species, at six centimeters. Most other species are about
two centimeters, and this makes them awkward to catch. Very fine fishing nets are
needed, but these are difficult to drag through the water, quickly clogged, and easily
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broken. In addition, when lifted in large piles, the delicate krill crush each other, forcing
out their internal fluids. They must also be peeled due to the dangerously high levels of
fluoride in their exoskeleton, and finally, they must be quickly prepared and frozen due
to the strong enzymes in their gut, which would otherwise cause rapid putrefaction. It
is problems such as these which have limited processed krill to being mostly used as
fish food in aquariums or aquaculture, or bait in commercial fishing operations,
but otherwise very much out of the public’smind.
Seafood-loving Japan is the only country in the world in which some krill end up on
the table. The boiled, peeled, then frozen tail-meat is sold on the market, and there is
some lower-grade krill-paste used as a food flavouring or colouring agent. These
products originate from the small North-Pacific krill, yet it is the large Antarctic species
which would seem to offer the best commercial prospects, and perhaps a more
appetising meal. The majority of krill trawlers thus target the waters around coastal
Antarctica, but it is a remote region, subject to harsh weather conditions,
making operations there difficult and expensive, as well as raising issues of the
ecological consequences, especially given the importance of krill as the basis of the
food chain in that pristine and untouched environment.
Yet to explore this food chain fully, one must go smaller still. Krill themselves are filter
feeders, using very fine comb-like appendages on the front of their bodies to extract
microscopic organisms known as phytoplankton. These live in almost every body of
water in the world, but only in the well-lit surface layers, since these organisms need
exposure to sunlight, from which they obtain their energy. In the same way that plants
on land are ultimately the basis of all food chains there, so too are phytoplankton in the
oceans. Since krill exist in such large numbers, logically then, their primary food source
must be even more numerous. There is, in fact, so much phytoplankton that their
collective photosynthesis accounts for up to half of the oxygen produced in the world.
However, as with krill, the vast numbers of phytoplankton live unnoticed and
unobserved. Their presence can only be indirectly deduced when they are pressed
together by currents, where there can be correspondingly high concentrations of krill
feeding on them. This can similarly result in the usually solitary blue whales being
found together, and revealing one of the most remarkable and elusive food chains in
nature: from phytoplankton, to krill, to the blue whale. In other words, from the tiniest
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elements in nature, in two short steps leading to a mighty and awe-inspiring leviathan of
the deep, the largest animal that has ever existed. And the small ghostly krill are the
essential intermediary in this wondrous process.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-4
Do thefollowing statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?
Write
Questions 5-9
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6 ——————
7 __________
8 __________
9 __________
Questions 10-13
11 Krill
12 Phytoplankton
A outnumber krill.
B produce over half of the oxygen in the world.
C can be seen with the naked eye.
D can live anywhere in the ocean.
13 Blue whales
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参考答案
1 Answer: FALSE
2 Answer: TRUE
4 Answer: FALSE
5 Answer: transparent
6 Answer: fluoride
7 Answer: enzymes
8 Answer: gills
9 Answer: phytoplankton
10 Answer: B
11 Answer: B
12 Answer: A
13 Answer: C
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage Two.
A Meat-Eater’s Counter
A.
You might be forgiven sometimes for thinking that vegetarians are somehow superior
human beings. In today’s climate of New Age spiritualism, animal rights, and
Mother Earth naturalism, confirmed meat-eaters must necessarily be categorised as
selfish, environmentally-irresponsible, spiritually-deprived gluttons, whose dietary
desire is akin to cannibalism. Each lamb chop, carving of roast beef, or chicken
drumstick, signifies a brutal execution of a sentient animal, to whose suffering we
remain callously indifferent. Here, I would like to offer some arguments to counter the
more extreme claims of the bean-sprout crowd.
B.
Vegetarians’ first justification is that eating meat is cruel to animals. But when
pondering cruelty, it may pay to reflect on how animals fare in the wild. I was recently
watching a documentary concerning herbivores on the African plains — where the
parasite and insect-tormented herds lead lives of hair-raising and nerve-jittering bolts
and dashes as they are constantly stalked by a range of predators. Now, compare this to
the animals munching grass in our domestic pastures. Our four-legged friends, watered,
well-fed, and attended to when sick, have an essentially stress-free and easy existence.
C.
But, the vegetarians claim, our slaughterhouses deal out brutal deaths. Brutal? Let us
reflect again on that documentary. At one point, it showed an injured zebra, an animal
which was quickly spotted by a pack of hyenas. The rest was a display of such cruelty
and barbarity that it would make vegetarians think twice before intoning the mantra that
‘nature is good’. Yet being viciously torn to pieces by snapping jaws is more or less the
inevitable end of most animals in the wild. It is simply a fact that they do not expire
peacefully — they face, instead, brutalising and painful exits. If not becoming another
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animal’s dinner, they starve to death, or are victims of floods, droughts, and other
merciless acts of nature. Compared to this, the relatively quick and clean death that we
humans deliver to our cud-chewing cousins must be considered a privileged way togo.
D.
So, eating meat is not ‘cruel’ — at least, not compared to the natural world, and in fact
can even allow the animals in question a certain quality of life that they would almost
certainly never enjoy in the wild. But the vegetarians counter that, we, the human
species, have a higher awareness, and should avail ourselves of other forms of food,
rather than causing the deaths of living creatures. Yet it is worth realising that for tens
of thousands of years our species did not have this luxury of choice. Killing animals
was essential in staying alive. It is only very recently (in terms of human history), that
society has reached a stage of affluence whereby a sufficiently high amount of non-
animal nutrition can be obtained, and then only by a privileged and small percentage of
the world’s population. Thus, the argument from moral high ground is, at best, an
arbitrary one.
E.
But then the vegetarians come out with their next core claim to superiority — that their
diet is healthier. Eating meat is going to have such nasty consequences for the heart,
lungs, kidneys, and immune system that we will end up in anearly grave. One can agree
that this maybe true for people who eat too much meat, but is it true for those who eat
meat in proportion with an otherwise balanced diet? So many dubious facts and figures
are produced to ‘prove’ the vegetarians’ viewpoint that I would recommend a quick
read of a well-known book entitled, ‘How to lie with statistics’. This emphasises two
foundations for statistical validity: gaining truly representative samples, and
eliminating outside variables, both of which the green-eaters ignore.
F.
It is the second point I would like to look at. The lean and fit, health-conscious
vegetarian doing his daily yoga and nightly guitar-strumming will certainly live
much longer, on average, than the meat-eating, chain-smoking, beer-swilling,
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donut- chomping couch potatoes of this world, but not necessarily due (or in anyway
related) to the former’s abstinence from meat. It is not hard to deduce that those
cigarettes, beer, donuts, and sedentary lifestyle are almost certainly responsible for
the meat-eater’s diminished life expectancy. For a true comparison, one must
compare lean and fit, health-conscious vegetarians with lean and fit, health-
conscious non-vegetarians, the latter of whommix moderate amounts of meat in their
diet.
G.
And this is the point. It is almost impossible in this complex, mixed, and multi-faceted
modern society to find enough people who can constitute a truly representative
sample, while eliminating the many outside variables. Any assertion that statistics
‘prove’ vegetarians live longer must note that these vegetarians have already made
(compared to the average sofa sprouts) a very rigorous and disciplined health-
enhancing lifestyle change, which is probably accompanied with many other similar
choices, all of which are almost certainly the real cause of any statistical trends. Factor
these into the equation, and so far there is no convincing statistical evidence that
vegetarianism is better for the health.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-G.
Choose the correct headingfor Paragraphs B-Gfrom the list of headings.
Write the correct number, i-x,for each answer
List of Headings
i Animals attack
ii Needless killing countered
iii Better people?
iv A need for statistics
v The real cause of longer lives
vi Untrustworthy numbers
vii Cruel killing countered
viii Comparing lives
ix Quick efficient killing
x The real cause of early deaths
Example Answer
Paragraph A --------iii---------
14 Paragraph B
15 Paragraph C
16 Paragraph D
17 Paragraph E
18 Paragraph F
19 Paragraph G
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Questions 20-23
Complete the table.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDSfrom the passagefor each answer.
threatened by numerous
20
Life is 21
22
Death is brutalising and painful.
have some
are unlikely to have this easy
They 23
existence.
Questions 24-26
Complete the table.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDSfrom the passagefor each term.
24
vegetarians. bean-sprout crowd
25
sheep and cattle. cud-chewing cousins
26
lazy people. couch potatoes
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参考答案:
14 Answer: viii
15 Answer: vii
16 Answer: ii
17 Answer: vi
18 Answer: x
19 Answer: v
21 Answer: predators
24 Answer: green-eaters
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on
Reading Passage Three.
Cubism
When the name of Picasso is spoken, the concept of ‘Cubism’ usually springs to mind.
That this happens indicates just how deep and long-lasting has been its influence on
the world, yet although many people know of the name ‘Cubism’, few can speak
about it with any degree of conversancy. It is Georges Braque who is now credited as
an equal pioneer in this revolutionary art movement, but claiming that these two
artists alone created cubism oversimplifies a very complex issue.
Defining Cubism itself is difficult. At its simplest, the three-dimensional object being
painted can be considered broken into pieces, sometimes square or cube-shaped (hence
the name). These are reassembled in less than coherent order, and often at different
angles. They can overlap, and sometimes more than one view is presented at the same
time, moving beyond the limits of a fixed observer. The terms ‘multiple
viewpoints’ and ‘mobile perspectives’ are often used — that is, the subject is captured
from different angles, at different times, with the corresponding images fused into a
single picture.
Braque’s pre-war paintings began experimenting with this idea, which inevitably led
to an association with Picasso, who had been dabbling also in rendering three-
dimensional views into two-dimensional geometric shapes — for example, in his
painting Young Ladies of Avignon — often labelled ‘proto-cubist’ . Some even
consider this painting to be the true beginning of Cubism itself, as it inspired
Braque to follow the lead, developing the movement towards its trademark features.
Yet both artists were influenced by earlier painters, in particular, the later works
of Cezanne. Cezanne was one of the first to divide the canvas into several views, as
well as to begin presenting natural objects in geometric figures.
Paul Cezanne had died in 1906, but a year later several museums exhibited his
paintings in a retrospective of the artist’s life. Inevitably, young painters in the
Parisian art scene, including Picasso and Braque, would have seen these. Whilst not
yet fractured into facets or cubes, Cezanne occasionally implanted an underlying
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geometry—for example,in one of his most famous (and unfinished) paintings, The
Bathers. This work breaks tradition in its unflattering portrait of the women, whose
naked forms are rendered in sharp symmetry, also forming a triangular pattern with
the river and trees. It is said to have inspired Picasso’s very similarly styled work,
mentioned previously.
Moving beyond those early years of Cubism, many other artists were exploring the
same idea, but taking it in individual directions. They are often unfairly considered as
having played less significant roles simply because they did not adhere to the strict
perspectives of Braque or Picasso. Yet, conceivably they could have evolved their own
awareness of Cubism more from Cezanne’s pervading and almost universal influence
on the Parisian art scene of that day, meaning that they must now be considered true
innovators in their own right. Juan Gris, for example, produced many interesting works,
yet now remains little regarded. Interestingly, being a compatriot of Picasso, the two
artists became personally acquainted, to the extent that Gris painted his well-
known Portrait of Picasso, now regarded as one ofthe best examples ofthe Cubist style.
Gris ventured beyond the monochromatic (or single family of colours) employed by
Picasso and Braque. He combined vibrant hues in interesting and sometimes unusual
combinations, such as in his still life, Newspaper and Fruit Dish. Similarly exploratory
were the Orphic Cubists (as they would later become known), who moved further
towards abstraction, but with Gris’s similar use of bright colours. These were used to
convey meaning but blended in a way that went beyond the physical subject. Its main
proponent was the Frenchman, Robert Delaunay, who, together with his wife, regularly
exhibited in Parisian salons with increasingly non-representational forms.
His Simultaneous Windows is barely recognisable as a window—just a blend of
prismatic hues with one prominent square, giving a hint of three-dimensionality.
Léger also followed a more personal form of Cubism. As with most of his generation,
he had seen the Cezanne 1907 retrospective, which enkindled interest in
experimentation with geometric forms. This eventually led to the completely abstract,
in which tubes, cones, and cubes, are all splayed on the canvas in bold primary colours
— seen, for example, in his Railway Crossing. Merc, in spite of its non-representational
quality, is the suggestion of the harsh mechanisation and alienation of modern life, a
theme which the artist’s experiences in World War One only accentuated, and
which pre-dates similar trends (such as pop art) by decades.
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Clearly, Cubism was a complex art movement, and names such as Analytical, Synthetic,
and Orphic Cubism are constructs which were invented long after the events and
artworks which theyattempt to describe. These names appear to give a coherent order
to what was actually a collective movement in which many individuals contributed.
Among all this confusion, one does not doubt that the early years of last century were
a fascinating period in the Parisian art scene.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-31
Which painter
A Braque
B Cezanne
C Delaunay
D Gris
E Léger
F Picasso
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Questions 32-37
B Portrait of Picasso
C Railway Crossing
D Simultaneous Windows
E The Bathers
Which painting is
32 a confusing abstraction in many colours?
33 a darker view, ahead of its time?
34 probably the first of its kind?
35 an intriguing and multi-chromatic view?
36 very representative of its type?
37 an early painting which influenced another?
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Questions 38-40
40 Cubism
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参考答案:
27 Answer: C
28 Answer: B
29 Answer: E
30 Answer: F
31 Answer: C
32 Answer: D
33 Answer: C
34 Answer: F
35 Answer: A
36 Answer: B
37 Answer: E
38 Answer: D
39 Answer: D
40 Answer: C
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Floods can occur in rivers when the flow rate exceeds the capacity ofthe river channel,
particularly at bends or meanders in the waterway. Floods often cause damage to homes
and businesses if they are in the natural flood plains of rivers. While riverine flood
damage can be eliminated by moving away from rivers and other bodies of water,
people have traditionally lived and worked by rivers because the landis usually flat and
fertile and because rivers provide easy travel and access to commerce and industry.
Fire and flood are two of humanity’s worst nightmares. People have,therefore,always
sought to control them. Forest fires are snuffed out quickly. The flow of rivers is
regulated by weirs and dams. At least, that is how it used to be. But foresters have
learned that forests need fires to clear out the brash and even to get seeds to germinate.
And asimilar revelation is now – dawning on hydrologists. Rivers – and the ecosystems
they support – need floods. That is why a man-made torrent has been surging down the
Grand Canyon. By Thursday March 6th it was running at full throttle, which was
expected to be sustained for 60 hours.
Floods once raged through the canyon every year. Spring Snow from as far away as
Wyoming would melt and swell the Colorado river to a flow that averaged around 1,500
cubic metres (50,000 cubic feet) a second. Every eight years or so, that figure rose to
almost 3,000 cubic metres. These floods infused the river with sediment, carved its
beaches and built its sandbars.
C
However, in the four decades since the building of the Glen Canyon dam, just upstream
of the Grand Canyon, the only sediment that it has collected has come from tiny,
undammed tributaries. Even that has not been much use as those tributaries are not
powerful enough to distribute the sediment in an ecologically valuable way.
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This lack of flooding has harmed local wildlife. The humpback chub,for example,
thrived in the rust-redwaters of the Colorado. Recently, though, its population has
crashed. At first sight, it looked as if the reason was that the chub were being eaten by
trout introduced for sport fishing in the mid-20th century. But trout and chub co-existed
until the Glen Canyon dam was built, so something else is going on. Steve Gloss, of the
United States’ Geological Survey (USGS), reckons that the chub’s decline is the result
of their losing their most valuable natural defense, the Colorado’s rusty sediment. The
chub were well adapted to the poor visibility created by the thick, red water which gave
the river its name,and depended on it to hide from predators. Without the cloudy water
the chub became vulnerable.
And the chub are not alone. In the years since the Glen Canyon dam was built, several
species have vanished altogether. These include the Colorado pike-minnow, the
razorback sucker and the round-tail chub. Meanwhile, aliens including fathead
minnows, channel catfish and common carp, which would have been hard, put to
survive in the savage waters of the undammed canyon, have moved in.
So flooding is the obvious answer. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. Floods
were sent down the Grand Canyon in 1996 and 2004 and the results were mixed. In
1996 the flood was allowed to go on too long. To start with,all seemed well. The
floodwaters built up sandbanks and infused the river with sediment.
Eventually,however, the continued flow washed most of the sediment out of the
canyon. This problem was avoided in 2004, but unfortunately, on that occasion, the
volume of sand available behind the dam was too low to rebuild the sandbanks. This
time, the USGS is convinced that things will be better. The amount of sediment
available is three times greater than it was in 2004. So if a flood is going to do some
good, this is the time to unleash one.
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Even so, it may turn out to be an empty gesture. At less than 1,200 cubic metres a
second, this flood is smaller than even an average spring flood, let alone one of the
mightier deluges of the past. Those glorious inundations moved massive quantities of
sediment through the Grand Canyon,wiping the slate dirty, and making a muddy mess
of silt and muck that would make modern river rafters cringe.
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Questions 1-13
Questions 1-7
2 The flood peaks at almost 1500 cubic meters every eight years.
4 Decreasing number of chubs is always caused by introducing of trout since mid 20th
century.
5 It seemed that the artificial flood in 1996 had achieved success partly at the very
beginning.
6 In fact, the yield of artificial flood water is smaller than an average natural flood at
present.
7 Mighty floods drove fast moving flows with clean and high quality water.
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Questions 8-13
Floods are people’s nightmare. In the past, canyon was raged by flood every year. The
snow from far Wyoming would melt in the season of 8 and caused a flood
flow peak in Colorado river. In the four decades after people built the Glen Canyon
dam, it only could gather 9 together from tiny, undammed tributaries.
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参考答案
2 Answer: FALSE
3 Answer: TRUE
4 Answer: FALSE
5 Answer: TRUE
6 Answer: TRUE
8 Answer: spring
9 Answer: sediment
12 Answer: visibility
13 Answer: sand
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below:
Twenty-five years ago, children in London walked to school and played in parks
and playing fields after school and at the weekend. Today they are usually driven to
school by parents anxious about safety and spend hours glued to television screens or
computer games. Meanwhile, community playing fields are being sold off to property
developers at an alarming rate. ‘This change in lifestyle has, sadly, meant greater
restrictions on children,’ says Neil Armstrong, Professor of Health and Exercise
Sciences at the University of Exeter. ‘If children continue to be this inactive, they’ll
be storing up big problems for the future.’
Physical education is under pressure in the UK – most schools devote little more than
100 minutes a week to it in curriculum time, which is less than many other European
countries. Three European countries are giving children a head start in PE, France,
Austria and Switzerland – offer at least two hours in primary and secondary schools.
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The good news,however, is that a few small companies and children’s activity
groups have reacted positively and creatively to the problem. Take That, shouts Gloria
Thomas, striking a disco pose astride her mini-spacehopper. Take That, echo a flock
of toddlers, adopt outrageous postures astride their space hoppers. ‘Michael Jackson,
she shouts,and they all do a spoof fan-crazed shriek. During the wild and chaotic
hopper race across the studio floor, commands like this are issued and
responded to with untrammelled glee. The sight of 15 bouncing seven-year-olds who
seem about to launch nto orbit at every bounce brings tears to the eyes. Uncoordinated,
loud, excited and emotional, children provide raw comedy.
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Questions 14-26
Questions 14-17
Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
Questions 18-21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
18 According to American Heart Foundation, cholesterol levels of boys are higher than
girls’.
19 British children generally do less exercise than some other European countries.
21 According to Healthy Kids, the first task is for parents to encourage their children
to keep the same healthy body weight.
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Questions 22-26
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参考答案
14 Answer: A
15 Answer: B
16 Answer: C
17 Answer: D
19 Answer: TRUE
21 Answer: FALSE
22 Answer: C
23 Answer: B
24 Answer:C
25 Answer: A
26 Answer: B
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
The changes that have caused the most disagreement are those in pronunciation. We
have various sources of evidence for the pronunciations of earlier times, such as the
spellings, the treatment of words borrowed from otherlanguages or borrowed by them,
the descriptions of contemporary grammarians and spelling-reformers, and the modern
pronunciations in all the languages and dialects concerned From the middle of the
sixteenth century, there are in England writers who attempt to describe the position of
the speech-organs for the production of English phonemes, and who invent what are in
effect systems of phonetic symbols. These various kinds of evidence, combined with a
knowledge of the mechanisms of speech-production, can often give usa very good idea
of the pronunciation of an earlier age, though absolute certainty is never possible.
When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations
or more, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example,
over a certain period of time, just about all the long [a:] vowels in a language may
change into long [e:] vowels, or all the [b] consonants in a certain position (for example
at the end of a word) may change into [p] consonants. Such regular changes are often
called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws (even though sound laws often
reflect universal tendencies), but simply particular sound laws for one given language
(or dialect) at one given period
C
It is also possible that fashion plays apart in the process of change. It certainly plays a
part in the spread of change: one person imitates another, and people with the most
prestige are most likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in one social
group maybe imitated (more or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a
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social group goes up or down in the world, its pronunciation of Russian, which had
formerly been considered desirable, became on the contrary an undesirable kind of
accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the changes in accepted
English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been shown to
consist in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already
existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the great social changes
of the period: the increased power and wealth of the middle classes, and their steady
infiltration upwards into the ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of
middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.
A less specific variant of the argument is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they
copy their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly. This is true, but it is also true
that such deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood. Perhaps
it is more significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in
their pronunciation of a given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is kept unchanged.
This, however, cannot explain changes in pronunciation unless it can be shown that
there is some systematic trend in the failures of imitation: if they are merely random
deviations they will cancel one another out and there will be no net change in the
language.
One such force which is often invoked is the principle of ease, or minimization of effort.
The change from fussy to fuzzy would be an example of assimilation, which is a very
common kind of change. Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence
of a neighbouring one. For example, the word scant was once skamt, but the /m/ has
been changed to /n/ under the influence of the following /t/. Greater efficiency has
hereby been achieved, because /n/ and /t/ are articulated in the same place (with the tip
of the tongue against the teeth-ridge), whereas /m/ is articulated elsewhere (with the
two lips). So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has been changed to
conform with that of the following plosive. A more recent example of the same kind of
thing is the common pronunciation of football as football.
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Assimilation is not the only way in which we change our pronunciation in order to
increase efficiency. It is very common for consonants to be lost at the end of a word: in
Middle English, word-final [-n] was often lost in unstressed syllables, so that baken ‘to
bake’ changed from [‘ba:kan] to [‘ba:k3],and later to [ba:k]. Consonant-clusters are
often simplified. At one time there was a [t] in words like castle and Christmas, and an
initial [k] in words like knight and know
Sometimes a whole syllable is dropped out when two successive syllables begin with
the same consonant (haplology): a recent example is temporary, which in Britain is
often pronounced as if it were tempory.
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Questions 27-40
Questions 27-30
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Questions 31-37
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
32 The great change of language in Russian history is related to the rising status and
fortune of middle classes.
33 All the children learn speeches from adults while they assume that certain language
is difficult to imitate exactly.
34 Pronunciation with causal inaccuracy will not exert big influence on language
changes.
36 The [g] in gnat not being pronounced will not be spelt out in the future.
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Questions 38-40
D Because the speaker can pronounce [n] and [t] both in the sametime
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参考答案
28 Answer: fashion
29 Answer: imperfect
31 Answer: FALSE
34 Answer: TRUE
37 Answer: TRUE
38 Answer: C
39 Answer: B
40 Answer: A
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