TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2011)
In this ction there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. R
襄樊战役
TEXT A
Whenever we could, Joan and I took refuge in the streets of Gibraltar. The Englishman's home is his castle becau he has not much choice. There is nowhere to sit in the streets of England, not even, after twilight, in the public gardens. The climate, very often, does not even permit him to walk outside. Naturally, he stays indoors and creates a cocoon of comfort. That was the way we lived in Leeds.
The southern people, on the other hand, look outwards. The Gibraltarian home is, typically, a small and crowded apartment up veral flights of dark and dirty stairs. In it, one, two or even three old people share a few ill-lit rooms with the young family. Once he has eaten, changed his clothes, embraced his wife, kisd his children and his parents, there is nothing to keep the southern man at home. He hurries out, taking even his breakfast coffee at his local bar. He comes home late for his afternoon meal after an appetitive hour at his café. He sleeps for an hour, dress, goes out again and stays out until late at night. His wife does not miss him, for she is out, too —at the market in the morning and in the afternoon sitting with other mothers, baby-minding in the sun.
The usual Gibraltarian home has no sitting-room, living-room or lounge. The parlour of our working-class hous would be an intolerable waste of space. Easy-chairs, sofas and such-like furniture are unknown. There are no bookshelves, becau there are no books. Talking and drinking, as well as eating, are done on hard chairs round the dining-table, between a sideboard decorated with the best glass and an inevitable display cabinet full of family treasures, photographs and souvenirs. The elaborate chandelier over this table proclaims it as the hub of the houhold and of the family. "Hearth and home" makes very little n in Gibraltar. One's home is one's town or village, and one's hearth is the sunshine.
Our northern towns are dormitories with cubicles, by comparison. When we congregate —in the churches it ud to be, now in the cinema, say, impersonally, or at public meetings, formally —we are scarcely ever man to man. Only in our pubs can you find the truly gregarious and communal spirit surviving, and in England even the pubs are divided along class lines.
Along this Mediterranean coast, home is only a refuge and a retreat. The people live together in the open air — in the street, market-place. Down here, there is a far stronger feeling of community than we had ever known. In crowded and circumscribed Gibraltar, with its complicated inter-marriages, its identity of interests, its surviving n of siege, one can e and feel an integrated society.
To live in a tiny town with all the organization of a state, with Viceroy (总督), Premier, Parliament, Press and Pentagon, all in miniature, all within arm's reach, is an intensive cour in civics. In such an environment, nothing can be hidden, for better or for wor. One's success are en and recognized; one's failures are immediately expod. Social consciousness is at its strongest, with the result that there is a constant and firm pressure towards good social behaviour, towards courtesy and kindness. Gibraltar, with all its faults, is the friendliest and most tolerant of places. Straight from the cynical anonymity of a big city, we luxuriated in its happy personalism. We look back on it, like all its exiled sons and daughters, with true affection.
11. Which of the following best explains the differences in ways of living between the English and the Gibraltarians?
A. The family structure.
B. Religious belief.
C. The climate.
D. Eating habit.
参考答案： A
TIP：选A。文章对英国人和直布罗陀的居民的不同生活方式进行描写，对比了两种迥异的社会习俗和社会结构。
12. The italicized part in the third paragraph implies that ____________.
A. English working-class homes are similar to Gibraltarian ones
B. English working-class homes have spacious sitting-rooms
C. English working-class homes waste a lot of space
D. the English working-class parlour is intolerable in Gibraltar
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参考答案： C
TIP：选C。斜体字部分的含义是“英国工人阶级的会客厅对直布罗陀的居民来说是一种不能容忍的对空间的浪费”。
13. We learn from the description of the Gibraltarian home that it is _________.芸豆角
A. modern
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B. luxurious
C. stark
D. simple
参考答案： D
TIP：选D。文章提到直布罗陀的居民家里没有安乐椅、沙发、书柜等类似的家具，因此很简朴。
14. There is a much stronger n of _______ among the Gibraltarians.
A. togetherness
B. survival
C. identity
D. leisure
参考答案： A
TIP：选A。文章好几处的用词如congregate、gregarious、communal spirit等都体现了直布罗陀人彼此之间较亲密。
15. According to the passage people in Gibraltar tend to be well-behaved becau of the following EXCEPT _______.
A. the entirety of the state structure
B. constant pressure from the state
C. the small size of the town
D. transparency of occurrences
参考答案： B
TIP：选B。A、C、D在文章中均有提及，只有B错误，直布罗陀只是一个小城镇，不是一个state。
TEXT B
For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the "paperless" office is a classic example of high-tech hubris (傲慢). Today's office drone is drowning in more paper than ever before.
But after decades of hype, American offices may finally be losing their paper obssion. The demand for paper ud to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three years have en a marked slowdown in sales — despite a healthy economic scene.
Analysts attribute the decline to such factors as advances in digital databas and communication systems. Escaping our craving for paper, however, will be anything but an easy affair.
"Old habits are hard to break," says Merilyn Dunn, a communications supplies director. "There are some functions that paper rves where a screen display doesn't work. Tho functions are both its strength and its weakness."
In the early to mid-1990s, a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year. The convenience of desktop printing allowed office workers to indulge in printing anything and everything at very little effort or cost.
But now, the growth rate of paper sales in the United States is flattening by about half a percent eac
h year. Between 2004 and 2005, Ms. Dunn says, plain white office paper will e less than a 4 percent growth rate, despite the strong overall economy. A primary reason for the change, says Dunn, is that for the first time ever, some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices.
"We're finally eing a reduction in the amount of paper being ud per worker in the workplace," says John Maine, vice president of a pulp and paper economic consulting firm. "More information is being transmitted electronically, and more and more people are comfortable with the information residing only in electronic form without printing multiple backups."
In addition, Mr. Maine points to the lackluster employment market for white-collar workers — the primary driver of office paper consumption for the shift in paper usage.
The real paradigm shift may be in the way paper is ud. Since the advent of advanced and reliable office-network systems, data storage has moved away from paper archives. The cretarial art of "filing" is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of today's data may never leave its original digital format.
The changing attitudes toward paper have finally caught the attention of paper companies, says Rich
ard Harper, a rearcher at Microsoft. "All of a sudden, the paper industry has started thinking, 'We need to learn more about the behavioural aspects of paper u,'" he says. "They had never asked, they'd just assumed that 70 million sheets would be bought per year as a literal function of economic growth."
To reduce paper u, some companies are working to combine digital and paper capabilities. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be erad or saved digitally.
榴莲图片真实
Another idea, intelligent paper, comes from Anoto Group. It would allow notations made with a stylus on a page printed with a special magnetic ink to simultaneously appear on a computer screen.
Even with such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage continue to act against "paperlessness," argues Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster. In his prophetic
and metaphorical 1989 essay, "The Electronic Piñata (彩罐)," he suggests that the increasing amounts of electronic data necessarily require more paper.
The information industry today is like a huge electronic piñata, compod of a thin paper crust surrou
nding an electronic core," Mr. Saffo wrote. The growing paper crust "is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger — and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all."
In the same way that digital innovations have incread paper consumption, Saffo says, so has video conferencing —with its promi of fewer in-person meetings —boosting business travel.
"That's one of the great ironies of the information age," Saffo says. "It's just common n that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting. The best thing for the aviation industry was the Internet."
16. What function does the cond ntence in the first paragraph rve?
A. It further explains high-tech hubris.
B. It confirms the effect of high-tech hubris.
C. It offers a cau for high-tech hubris.
D. It offers a contrast to high-tech hubris.
参考答案： B
TIP：选B。文章第一句话“对办公室的创新者来说，…无纸‟办公室这一尚未实现的梦想是一种典型的高科技傲慢表现”，第二句话接着说“今天的办公室正逐渐被有史以来最多的纸淹没”，这正是傲慢的表现和后果，因此是证实了high-tech hubris。
17. Which of the following is NOT a reason for the slowdown in paper sales?
A. Workforce with better computer skills.
B. Slow growth of the US economy.
C. Changing patterns in paper u.
D. Changing employment trends.
参考答案： B
TIP：选B。文章第二段第二句提到“过去，人们对纸的需求增长超过美国经济的增长速度，但在近两三年里，尽管有健康的经济局面，纸张销售却产生了明显下降”，因此B项正确。
18. The two innovations by Xerox Corp. and Anoto Group feature ________.
A. integrated u of paper and digital form
B. a shift from paper to digital form
C. the u of computer screen
D. a new style of writing
参考答案： A
TIP：选A。文章第十一段提到，为了减少用纸，一些公司致力于将数字和纸的性能相结合，接着以Xerox Corp.和Anoto Group为例进行了说明，因此A项正确。
19. What does the author mean by ''irony of the information age"?
A. The dream of the "paperless" office will be realized.
B. People usually prefer to have face-to-face meetings.
C. More digital data u leads to greater paper u.
D. Some people are oppod to video-conferencing.
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参考答案： C环顾
TIP：选C。文章倒数第二段中论述道“数字化的革新实际上增加了纸的消耗”，因此选C。
20. What is the author's attitude towards "paperlessness"?
A. He reviews the situation from different perspectives.中国正省级城市
B. He agrees with some of the people quoted in the passage.
C. He has a preference for digital innovations.
D. He thinks airlines benefit most from the digital age.
参考答案： B
TIP：选B。文章第三段第二句话，作者认为不能忽略人们对纸的渴求，并在接下来的段落里引用Merilyn Dunn的话加以证明。在文章结尾的四段中，作者也多处引用Paul Saffo的话，认为更多的靠科技手段没有减少反而增加了人们对纸的使用。
TEXT C
When George Orwell wrote in 1941 that England was "the most class-ridden country under the sun", he was only partly right. Societies have always had their hierarchies, with some group perched at the top. In the Indian state of Bihar the Ranveer Sena, an upper-caste private army, even killed to stay there.
By that measure class in Britain hardly ems entrenched (根深蒂固的). But in another way Orwell was right, and continues to be. As a new Y ouGov poll shows, Britons are surprisingly alert to class — both their own and that of others. And they still think class is sticky. According to the poll, 48% of people aged 30 or over say they expect to end up better off than their parents. But only 28% expect to end up in a different class. More than two-thirds think neither they nor their children will leave the class they were born into.
What does this thing that people cannot escape consist of the days? And what do people look at when decoding which class someone belongs to? The most uful identifying markers, according to the poll, are occupation, address, accent and income, in that order. The fact that income comes fourth is revealing: though some of the habits and attitudes that class ud to define are more widely spread than they were, class still indicates something less blunt than mere wealth.
Occupation is the most trusted guide to class, but changes in the labour market have made that harder to read than when Orwell was writing. Manual workers have shrunk along with farming and heavy industry as a proportion of the workforce, while the number of people in white-collar jobs has surged. Despite this striking change, when they were asked to place themlves in a class, Brits in 2006 huddled in much the same categories as they did when they were asked in 1949. So, jobs, which were once a fairly reliable guide to class, have become misleading.
