考研英语(二)分类真题4
(总分：100.00，做题时间：90分钟)
一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：0，分数：0.00)
二、Part A(总题数：0，分数：0.00)
三、Text 1(总题数：1，分数：20.00)
If there is one word I"m rapidly growing tired of, it"s passion. Not the x and love type, but the workplace kind. Irately, it ems, I keep hearing career counlors advising the unemployed to identify and develop their passion. Then they need to turn that passion into paid work and presto! They"re now in a career they love.
I know I"m being somewhat flippant, but I do wonder if passion is being oversold. Are we falling into a trap of believing that our work, and indeed, our lives, should always be fascinating and all-consuming? Are we somehow lacking if we"re bored at times or buried under routine tasks or failing to challenge ourlves at every turn?
In the economic times, fewer of us are worried about being fulfilled and more of us are concerned about simply being paid. But as switching jobs and careers becomes increasingly common, as whole professions are disappearing, we"re more frequently forced to ask ourlves what we want to do with the rest of our lives. That"s where passion comes in.
Professor Wart, who co-wrote the book "The Joy of Work? Jobs, Happiness and You", mentioned three factors for the workplace: supportive supervision, job curity and the possibility of promotion, and fair treatment. He acknowledges that it is not easy to attain the goals, especially now. But it can still make a difference in your job satisfaction, he says, to examine what your strengths and needs are, and try, as much as possible, to match your work with tho attributes. It doesn"t always mean getting a new job or career, but perhaps changing some things in your current employment. It would probably be better, Professor Warr suggested, to think less in terms of passion, and the inflated n of drama that can go with that, and more in terms of job satisfaction or finding meaning in your work.
The drive for passion or excitement, or whatever you call it, is deep in our genes. We feel good when the neurotransmitter dopamine is activated, and that"s what happens when we accomplish a given goal, said Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University. In fact, playing video games may not em to be much of a passion, but if you"ve ever watched teenage boys going at it, their intensity and obliviousness to the outside world is the embodiment of flow. And that"s no accident.
So maybe arching for a passion is not so bad. But it is also important to remember that there is no one way to find it, and someone el"s passion may be your idea of drudgery. And sometimes life—and work—is simply going to be putting one foot in front of the other. Or as Professor Warr said, "On the way to happiness, there must be unhappiness."（分数：20.00）
(1).Why is the author tired of "passion"?（分数：4.00）
A.Becau he thinks passion exists only in love and x
B.Becau it is a word overud in career counling
C.Becau it is difficult for people to put passion into work
D.Becau passion is a slippery feeling that needs clarification
(2).It is implied in the cond paragraph that ______（分数：4.00）
A.passion is not necessary in some cas
B.passion is indispensable to our work
C.passion is badly needed where boredom aris
D.passion is the key to success in one"s career
(3).One of the reasons why passion is mentioned so frequently is that ______（分数：4.00）
A.people are paid less than they were before
B.people care more about what they do after retirement
C.people are not treated fairly by their boss
D.people care less about deriving satisfaction from work
(4).Prof. Warr would advi that a worker ______（分数：4.00）
A.put passion into his work
B.t high goals for his career
C.think more about job satisfaction
D.change his job when he feels bored
(5).The author"s attitude to Professor Wart"s argument is one of ______（分数：4.00）
&ved connt
&al indifference
&us commendation
D.harsh satire
四、Text 2(总题数：1，分数：20.00)
There is a fashionable new science, behavioral economics, which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common n and believe things about ast values becau others did. the " bandwagon effect." Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like "loss aversion", how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got.
But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that "in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete abnce of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence." Public
rvants are human, too.
Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence. In the last ca, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the caus and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave students a list of five pairs of countries and asked which nation in each pair had the higher infant-mortality rate. The students got 1.8 right out of 5. Mr. Rosling noted that if he gave the test to chimpanzees they would get 2.5 right. So his students" problem was not ignorance, but that they knew with confidence things that were fal.
The issue of action bias is better known in England as the "dangerous dogs act," after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cas in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legislation that worked poorly. Undoubtedly the hasty legislation following the current financial crisis will include some equivalents of dangerous dogs acts. It takes unusual courage for a regulato
r to stand up and say "something must not be done," lest "something" makes the problem wor.
Motivated reasoning means that we tend to believe what it is convenient for us to believe. The focusing illusion partly stems from the fact that people tend to e the benefits of a policy but not the hidden costs. "Affect heuristic" is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. If lawmakers are to understand how laws get applied in the real world, they need to know and understand the habits of mind of their officials.（分数：20.00）
(1).The "bandwagon effect" is one in which people ______（分数：4.00）
A.follow a popular trend blindly
B.turn attention to ast values
C.develop a strong dislike for loss
D.believe the insights of psychologists
(2).What Mr. Tasic says amounts to arguing that ______（分数：4.00）
A.the mistakes market participants make are ldom rious ones
B.behavioral economics should study the mental habits of the officials
C.public rvants are well justified when they make regulatory mistakes
D.the psychology and neuroscience of markets are very complicated subjects
(3).The most important finding from Rosling"s experiment is that ______（分数：4.00）
A.the students make mistakes in their judgment
B.the students are ignorant of infant-mortality rates
C.chimpanzees are better judges than humans
D.the students often misjudge their competence
(4).The inclination to act without adequate information and analysis is a ca of ______（分数：4.00）
A.action bias
&ivated reasoning
C.the affect heuristic
D.illusions of competence
(5).The text is mainly about ______（分数：4.00）
A.the herd instinct
B.the bandwagon effect
C.the loss aversion
D.the bias of bureaucrats
五、Text 3(总题数：1，分数：20.00)
By now, the idea of airline baggage charges, extra legroom at a cost, paying for food and so on, has become for travellers a bit like the pre-flight safety explanation about how at belts work. It may annoy. Or perhaps it has become so common that it no longer elicits much respon. But the transactions are helping keep the planes flying, and they illustrate a market reality increasingly faced by a wide spectrum of consumers and business.
Efforts by airlines around the world to increa revenue apart from ticket prices have grown almost tenfold since 2008 to $22.6 billion. And, even with that, the International Air Transport Association is projecting overall global airline profits will be down in 2012 for a cond successive year to about $3 billion. That"s a profit margin of just 0.5 percent, so what some e as nickel-and-diming is viewed within the turbulent airline industry as pennies from heaven. "The whole economics of the business have been an absolute disaster since the fuel crisis of 2008," IdeaWorks President Jay Sorenn explained. "Airlines are just desperate for money."
The economy has ensured that this desperation is not unique to airlines or even the travel business, where hotels may look to charge for a Wi-Fi connection that Starbucks will give you for free, or charge extra fee on top of the cost of whatever the resort"s room rate is and maybe tack on a houkeeping extra charge. You e this batteries-not-included mentality elwhere. Cellphone companies that once advertid all-inclusive rvices look to ll data and voice parately. Banks try to asss new fees to cover costs they once absorbed.
"In an industry cycle, in the beginning, when you"re in a high-growth period, you tend to e a lot of bundling, giving a lot of things at one price," Jean-Manuel Izaret said by phone. "At the other extreme, when you are in the super-mature area, you"ll have low-cost providers entering certain markets with no-frills offers. So in a mature market, where low-cost challengers have come in and undercut the prices of established players, the only option for established players is to unbundle and price every little thing parately."
"Airlines are going to have to be careful of nuisance fees, like checked bags and ating, and focus instead on inventing rvices that have not been offered before that people val
ue," Sorenn said. That proposition is critical. But within a company the ability to generate revenue through a rvice often means more resources will be devoted to improving it. So the baggage rvice, for example, not only has benefited from fewer checked items in the system but greater investment in that system by airlines. Charging for specific rvices like baggage handling lets airlines invest to provide greater reliability for tho who check a bag, without passing on the cost to customers who don"t.（分数：20.00）
