2019年宁波大学考博英语真题（A卷）
最后一天的英文(总分50,考试时间180分钟)
Part A
Text 1When musing on cities over time and in our time, from the first (whenever it was) to today, we must always remember that cities are artifacts. Forests, jungles, derts, plains, oceans—the organic environment is born and dies and is reborn endlessly, beautifully, **pletely without moral constraint or ethical control. But cities—despite the metaphors that we apply to them from biology or nature (“The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism”), despite the ntimental or anthropomorphic devices we ud to describe cities—are artificial. Nature has never made a city, and what Nature makes that may em like a city—an anthill, for instance—only ems like one. It is not a city.Human beings made and make cities, and only human beings kill cities, or let them die. And human beings do both—make cities and unmake them—by the same means: by acts of choice. We enjoy deluding ourlves in this as in oth
er things. We enjoy believing that there are forces out **pletely determining our fate, natural forces—or forces so strong and overwhelming as to be like natural forces—that nd cities through organic or biological phas of birth, growth, and decay. We avoid the knowledge that cities are at best works of art, and at worst ungainly artifacts—but never flowers or even weeds—and that we, not some mysterious force or cosmic biological system, control the creation and life of a city.We control the creation and life of a city by the choices and agreements we make—the basic choice being, for instance, not to live alone, the basic agreement being to live together. When people choo to ttle, like the starts, not wander like the moon, they create cities as sites and symbols of their choice to stop and their agreement not to parate. Now stasis and proximity, not movement and distance, define human relationships. Mutual defen, control of a river or harbor, shelter from natural forces—all the and other reasons may lead people to aggregate, but once congregated, they then live differently and become different.A city is not an extended family. That is a tribe or clan. A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to function: They agree to live as if they were as clo in blood or ties of kinship as they are
in physical proximity. Choosing life in an artifact, people agree to live in a state of similitude. A city is a place where ties of considerable pact, a city. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination—through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
1. The author’s purpo is primarily to________.
A. identify the sources of popular discontent with cities
B. define the city as growing out of a social contract
C. illustrate the difference between cities and villages
D. compare cities with blood families
2. The author cites the ntence “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism”(Paragraph 1) as________.
A. an example of one type of figurative languages
B. a simple statement of scientific fact
C. a momentary digression from his central thesis
D. a paradox with ironic implications
3. The author’s attitude toward the statements quoted in “The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism” in Paragraph 1 is________.
A. respectful
B. ambivalent
C. skeptical
D. approving
toa4. According to this passage, why is an anthill by definition unlike a city?
A. It can be casually destroyed by human beings.
B. Its inhabitants outnumber the inhabitants of even the largest city.
ponzi schemeC. It is a work of instinct rather than of imagination.
D. It exists on a far smaller scale than any city does.
marauder5. Mutual defen, control of waterways, and shelter from the forces of nature are prented primarily an example of motives for people to________.
A. move away from their enemies
B. gather together in ttlements
C. welcome help from their kinfolk
D. redefine their family relationships
U of English
A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info (information) rich and the info poor. And that (1)________ does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less (2)________ then, however, were the new, positive (3)________ that work against the digital divide. (4)________, there are reasons to be (5)________.There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more (6)________, it is in the interest of business to universalize access-after all, the more people online, the more potential (7)________ there are. More and more (8)________, afraid their countries will be left(9)________, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be (10)________ together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will (11)________ rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news becau the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for (12)________ world poverty that we’ve ever had. Of cour, the u of the Internet isn't the only way to (13)________ poverty. And the Inte
rnet is not the only tool we have. But it has(14)________ potential.To (15)________ advantage of this tool, some poor countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices (16)________ respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is a/an (17)________ of their sovereignty might well study the history of (18)________ (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is (19)________ America’s Second Wave infrastructure-(20)________ roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on-were built with foreign investment.
6.
A. divide
B. information
C. world
D. lecture
7.
A. obscure
B. visible
C. invisible
D. indistinct
8.
A. forces
B. obstacles
C. events
D. surpris
9.
A. Seriously
国外中学B. Entirely
C. Actually
D. Continuously
10.
A. negative
B. optimistic
C. pleasant
D. disappointed
11.
A. developed
B. centralized
C. realized
D. commercialized
12.
A. urs
B. producers
C. customers
D. citizens
13.
A. enterpris
B. governments
C. officials
D. customers
14.
A. away B. for
C. aside D. behind
15.
A. netted
B. worked
C. put
D. organized
16.
A. decrea
B. narrow
C. neglect
D. low
17.
A. containing
B. preventing
C. keeping
D. combating
18.
A. win B. detail
C. defeat D. fear
19.
A. enormous
B. countless日文翻译在线
C. numerical
D. big
20.
A. bring B. keep
C. hold D. take
21.
A. at B. with
C. of D. for
22.
显学A. offence
B. investment
C. invasion
竞争上岗演讲稿范文D. insult
23.
A. construction
B. facility
qmsC. infrastructure
jaci velasquez destinyD. institution
24.
A. why B. where
C. when D. how
25.
A. concerning
B. concluding
C. according
D. including
Part A
Text 2Democritus was fascinated by the question of what principle underlay the material univer and developed a solution that revealed the brilliance of his thought. Every materi
al thing, Democritus believed, is made up of a finite number of discrete particles, or atoms, as he called them, who joining together and subquent paration account for **ing to be of things and for their passing away. The atoms themlves, he said, are infinite in number and eternal. They move, according to a necessary motion, in the void, which we would call space.Most of the main tenets of the atomism of Democritus were astonishingly modern. First, the atoms were invisibly small. They were all of the same stuff, or nature, but they came in a multitude of different shapes and sizes. Though impermeable (Democritus did not know that atoms could be split), they acted upon one another, aggregating and clinging to one another so as to produce the great variety of bodies that we e. The space outside the atoms was empty, a concept that most of Democritus’contemporaries could not accept.Second, the atoms were in perpetual motion, in every direction, throughout empty space. There is no above or below, before or behind, in empty space, said Democritus. In modern terms, empty space did not vary according to direction. This was an extremely sophisticated notion.Third, the continual motion of the atoms was inherent. They possd what would call inertial mass. The not
ion that the atoms kept on moving without being pushed, besides being another remarkable intellectual concept, was not acceptable to Aristotle and others. Only the celestial bodies, Aristotle thought, kept on moving of any by themlves, becau they were divine. The general refusal by Aristotle and his influential followers to accept the law of inertia stood as an obstacle to the development of physics for two thousand years.Fourth, weight or gravity was not a property of atoms or indeed of aggregates thereof. Here Democritus was as wrong as wrong could be.Whether Democritus was right or wrong about a fifth point is not definitely decided to this day. He held that the soul is breath and becau breath is material, and therefore made up of atoms, so must the soul be. He maintained that, becau the soul is a physical thing, it must be determined by physical laws; it cannot be free. Even the hardy thinkers who claim to accept this theory do not act as if they do. They may deny the innate freedom of others, but they act as if they believe in their own.The tension built up by this antinomy has proved to be fruitful over the centuries. However, the notion that the soul was material proved so unacceptable to both the Aristotelians and the Christians that for nearly two millennia the atomic hypothesis languished.
