2017年在职申硕英语考试真题第2页-在职
申硕英语考试
2017年在职申硕英语考试真题
Passage Two
Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered cond-class citizens.
As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of paration. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choo to give up an immediate (lesr) food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when tho friends die.
Pigs respond meaningfully to human symbols. When a rearch team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the 0's. Then the team swit
ched
from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols Still, the pigs ventured only toward the 0-shirtcd people: they had transferred thrir knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not-inconsiderable feat of reasoning.
Fairly soon, I came to e that along with our clost living relatives, cetaceans (鲸目动物)too are masters of cultural learning，and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on the mammals helped to fuel a perspective shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedures in laboratories, elephants forced to perfonn in circus, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks
Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chicken, pigs, goats, ami cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will the breadth of our ethics start to catch up with the breadth of our science?
Animal activists are already there, of cour, committed to not eating the animals. But what about
the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of the animals lead us to make
changes in who we eat?
26. According to Annie Potts, hens' choice of a later and better reward indicates their ability of _____ .
A. social interaction
B. facial recognition
C. logical reasoning
D. mutual learning
27.The expression "not-inconsiderable feat'' (Para. 3) shows what pigs can do is _____ .
A. extraordinary
B. weird
C. unique
D. understandable
28.What is Paragraph 4 mainly about?
A. The similarities between mammals and humans.
B. The necessity of long-term studies on mammals
C. A change of public attitude to the treatment of mammals.
D.A new discovery of how mammals think and feel.
29.What is the author's view on eating "food animals''?
A.He regrets eating them before.
B. He considers eating them justifiable.
C. He is not concerned about the issue
D.He calls for a change in what we eat.
30.What is the best title for the passage?
A.In Prai of Food Animals
B. Food Animals in Science Reports
C. The Inner Lives of Food Animals
D.Food Animals: Past, Prent and Future
Passage Four
In 1902, Georges Melies made and relead a movie called A TVip to the Moon. In this movie, the spaceship was a small capsule, shaped like a bullet, that was loaded into a giant cannon and aimed at the moon.
This movie was bad on a book that came out many years earlier by an author named Jules Verne. One of the fans of the book was a Russian man, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The book made him think. Could one really shoot people out of a cannon and have them get safely to the moon? He decided one couldn't, but it got him thinking of other ways one could get people to the moon. He speni
his life considering this problem and came up with many solutions.
Some of Tsiolkovsky’s solutions gave scientists in America and Russia ideas when they began to think about space travel. They also thought about airplanes they and other people had made, and even big bombs that could fly themlves very long distances.
Many scientists spent years working together to solve the problem. They drew and discusd different designs until they agreed on the ones that were the best. Then, they built small models of tho designs, and tested and tested them until they felt ready to build even bigger models. They made full-scale rockets, which they launched without any people inside, to test for safety. Often the rockets weren't safe, and they exploded right there on the launch pad, or shot off in crazy directions like a balloon that you blow up and relea without tying it first After many, many tests, they started to nd small animals into space. Only after a long time did they ever put a person inside a rocket and shoot him into space.
Even after they began nding people into space, scientists were still trying to improve the shape of the rockets. The design changed many times, and eventually ended up looking like a half-rocket and half-airplane. The machine called space shuttle was ud for many years. Now, the government lets private companies
