英二真题 1998年 (完结)

Section I Use of English

Section II Reading Comprehension

Text 1

Few creations of big technology capture the imagination like giant dams. Perhaps it is humankind's long suffering at the mercy of flood and drought that makes the idea of forcing the waters to do our bidding so fascinating. But to be fascinated is also, sometimes, to be blind. Several giant dam projects threaten to do more harm than good.

The lesson from dams is that big is not always beautiful. It doesn't help that building a big, powerful dam has become a symbol of achievement for nations and people striving to assert themselves. Egypt's leadership in the Arab world was cemented by the Aswan High Dam. Turkey's bid for First World status includes the giant Ataturk Dam.

But big dams tend not to work as intended. The Aswan Dam, for example, stopped the Nile flooding but deprived Egypt of the fertile silt that floods left - all in return for a giant reservoir of disease which is now so full of silt that it barely generates electricity.

And yet, the myth of controlling the waters persists. This week, in the heart of civilized Europe, Slovaks and Hungarians stopped just short of sending in the troops in their contention over a dam on the Danube. The huge complex wil probably have all the usual problems of big dams. But Slovakia is bidding for independence from the Czechs, and now needs a dam to prove itself.

Meanwhile, in India, the World Bank has given the go-ahead to the even more wrong-headed Narmada Dam. And the bank has done this even though its advisors say the dam will cause hardship for the powerless and environmental destruction. The benefits are for the powerful, but they are far from guaranteed.

Proper, scientific study of the impacts of dams and of the cost and benefits of controlling water can help to resolve these conflicts. Hydroelectric power and flood control and irrigation are possible without building monster dams. But when you are dealing with myths, it is hard to be either proper,or scientific. It is time that the world learned the lessons of Aswan. You don't need a dam to be saved.

很少有大型技术的创造能像巨型水坝一样吸引人们的想象力。也许正是人类长期遭受洪水和干旱的折磨，才使得迫使水服从我们的命令的想法如此迷人。但有时，着迷也是盲目的。几个巨型水坝项目可能弊大于利。

大坝给我们的教训是，大并不总是美丽的。对于那些努力维护自己的国家和人民来说，建造一座强大的大坝已经成为成就的象征，这于事无补。阿斯旺大坝巩固了埃及在阿拉伯世界的领导地位。土耳其争取第一世界地位的项目包括阿塔图尔克大坝。

但大坝往往无法按预期运行。例如，阿斯旺大坝阻止了尼罗河洪水，但剥夺了埃及洪水留下的肥沃淤泥.所有这些都是为了换取一个巨大的疾病库，这个水库现在充满了淤泥，几乎无法发电。

然而，控制水域的神话仍然存在。本周，在文明欧洲的中心地带，斯洛伐克人和匈牙利人在争夺多瑙河上的一座大坝时，几乎没有派遣军队。这个庞大的综合体可能会遇到大坝的所有常见问题。但斯洛伐克正在争取脱离捷克独立，现在需要一座大坝来证明自己。

与此同时，在印度，世界银行已经批准了更错误的纳尔马达大坝。尽管世行顾问表示，大坝将给无权者带来困难，并对环境造成破坏，但世行还是这样做了。这些好处是给有权势的人的，但远不能保证。

对大坝的影响以及控制用水的成本和效益进行适当的科学研究，有助于解决这些冲突。如果不建造巨型水坝，水力发电、防洪和灌溉都是可能的。但当你在处理神话时，很难做到正确或科学。现在是世界吸取阿斯旺教训的时候了。你不需要一座大坝就能被拯救。

Text 2

Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real.

The official statistics are mildly discouraging. They show that, if you lump manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade. And since 1991, productivity has increased by about 2%a year, which is more than twice the 1978-87 average. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at this point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the underlying trend. There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a "disjunction" between the mass of business aneedote that points to a leap in productivity and the picture reflected by the statistics.

Some of this can be easily explained. New ways of organizing the workplace - all that re-engineering and downsizing - are only one contribution to the overall productivity of an economy, which is driven by many other factors such as joint investment in equipment and machinery, new technology, and investment in education and training. Moreover, most of the changes that companies make are intended to keep them profitable, and this need not always mean increasing productivity: switching to new markets or improving quality can matter just as much.

Two other explanations are more speculative. First, some of the business restructuring of recent years may have been ineptly done. Second, even if it was well done, it may have spread much less widely than people suppose.

Leonard Schlesinger, a Harvard academic and former chief executive of Au Bong Pain, a rapidly growing chain of bakery cafes, says that much "re-engineering" has been crude. In many cases, he believes, the loss of revenue has been greater than the reductions in cost. His colleague, Michael Beer, says that far too many companies have applied re-engineering in a mechanistic fashion, chopping out costs without giving sufficient thought to long-term profitability. BBDO's Al Rosenshine is blunter. He dismisses a lot of the work of re-engineering consultants as mere rubbish - "the worst sort of ambulance chasing."

他们说，没有痛苦就没有收获。但是没有收获的痛苦又如何呢？在美国，无论你走到哪里，都会听到企业复兴的故事。更难确定的是，商人们认为他们正在主持的生产力革命是否是真的。

官方统计数据有点令人沮丧。他们表明，如果将制造业和服务业混为一谈，自1987年以来，生产率平均增长了1.2%。这比前十年的平均水平要快一些。自1991年以来，生产率每年增长约2%，是1978-87年平均水平的两倍多。问题是，最近的加速部分是由于商业周期中此时出现的通常的反弹，因此并不是潜在趋势复苏的确凿证据。正如财政部长罗伯特·鲁宾所说，大量企业倒闭与统计数据所反映的情况之间存在“脱节”，这表明生产力有所飞跃。

其中一些可以很容易地解释。组织工作场所的新方式——所有这些重新设计和缩小规模——只是对经济整体生产力的一种贡献，而整体生产力是由许多其他因素驱动的，如对设备和机械的联合投资、新技术以及对教育和培训的投资。此外，公司做出的大多数改变都是为了保持盈利，这并不总是意味着提高生产力：转向新市场或提高质量也同样重要。

另外两种解释更具推测性。首先，近年来的一些业务重组可能做得不够好。其次，即使它做得很好，它的传播范围也可能比人们想象的要小得多。

哈佛大学学者、快速发展的面包连锁咖啡馆Au Bong Pain的前首席执行官伦纳德·施莱辛格表示，许多“重新设计”都很粗糙。他认为，在许多情况下，收入的损失大于成本的减少。他的同事迈克尔·比尔说，太多的公司以机械的方式应用了重新设计，在没有充分考虑长期盈利能力的情况下削减了成本。BBDO的Al Rosenshine更为直率。他将许多重新设计顾问的工作斥为垃圾——“最糟糕的救护车追逐。”

Text 3

Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gollileo's 17th-century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century.

Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its crities- but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked "anti-science" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

Defenders of science have also voiced their concems at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason," held in New York City in 1995, and "Science in the Age of (Mis) information," which assembled last June near Buffalo.

Anti-science clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned science's objectivity. Sagan is more concemed with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.

A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the anti-science tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.

Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, whose manifesto, published in 1995, scoms science and longs for retum to a pre-technological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are anti-science, as an essay in U/S News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.

The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.

Indeed, some observers fear that the anti-science epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. "The term 'anti-science' can lump together too many, quite different things,"notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti-Science. "They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."

长期以来，科学与文化的其他方面一直存在着不稳定的关系。想想17世纪Gollileo在天主教会面前对其反叛信仰的审判，或者诗人William Blake对Isaac Newton的机械世界观的严厉言论。科学和人文学科之间的分歧在本世纪加深了。

直到最近，科学界还是如此强大，以至于它可以无视其批评——但现在已经不行了。随着对科学的资助减少，科学家们在几本书中抨击了“反科学”，尤其是弗吉尼亚大学生物学家保罗·R·格罗斯和罗格斯大学数学家诺曼·莱维特的《高等迷信》；以及康奈尔大学的卡尔·萨根的《魔鬼出没的世界》。

科学捍卫者也在1995年在纽约市举行的“逃离科学与理性”和去年6月在布法罗附近举行的“信息时代的科学”等会议上表达了他们的不满。

反科学对不同的人来说显然意味着不同的事情。格罗斯和莱维特主要指责社会学家、哲学家和其他质疑科学客观性的学者。萨根更关注那些相信鬼魂、神创论和其他与科学世界观相矛盾的现象的人。

1996年对新闻报道的一项调查显示，反科学的标签也被贴在了许多其他团体身上，从主张消灭最后一批天花病毒的当局到主张减少基础研究资金的共和党人。

很少有人会质疑这个词适用于Unabomber，该组织于1995年发表的宣言蔑视科学，渴望回归前技术乌托邦。但这当然并不意味着担心工业增长失控的环保主义者是反科学的，正如去年5月《美国新闻与世界报道》上的一篇文章所暗示的那样。

环保主义者不可避免地会对这些批评做出回应。斯坦福大学的Paul Ehrlich是环境研究的先驱，他认为，科学的真正敌人是那些质疑支持全球变暖、臭氧层消耗和工业增长的其他后果的证据的人。

事实上，一些观察家担心，反科学的称谓有变得毫无意义的危险。哈佛大学哲学家杰拉尔德·霍尔顿在1993年的著作《科学与反科学》中指出：“‘反科学’一词可以把太多、完全不同的东西混为一谈。”。“他们只有一个共同点，那就是他们往往会惹恼或威胁那些认为自己更开明的人。”

Text 4

Emerging from the 1980 census is the picture of a nation developing more and more regional competition, as population growth in the Northeast and Midwest reaches a near standstill.

This development - and its strong implications for US polities and economy in years ahead - has enthroned the South as America's most densely populated region for the first time in the history of the nation's head counting.

Altogether, the US population rose in the 1970s by 23.2 million people - numerically the third-largest growth ever recorded in a single decade. Even so, that gain adds up to only 11.4 percent, lowest in American annual records except for the Depression years.

Americans have been migrating south and west in larger numbers since World War ll, and the pattern still prevails.

Three sun-belt states - Florida, Texas and California - together had nearly 10 million more people in 1980 than a decade earlier. Among large cities, San Diego moved from 14th to 8th and San Antonio from 15th to l0th - with Cleveland and Washington. D. C, dropping out of the top 10.

Not all that shift can be attributed to the movement out of the snow belt, census officials say. Nonstop waves of immigrants played a role, too - and so did bigger crops of babies as yesterday's "baby boom" generation reached is child bearing years.

Moreover, demographers see the continuing shift south and west as joined by a related but newer phenomenon: More and more, Americans apparently are looking not just for places with more jobs but with fewer people, too. Some instances--

Regionally, the Rocky Mountain states reported the mast rapid growth rate - 37.I percent since 1970 in a vast area with only 5 percent of the US population

Among states, Nevada and Arizona grew fastest of all: 63.5 and 53.I percent respectively. Except for Florida and Texas, the top 10 in rate of growth is composed of Western states with 7.5 million people -- about 9 per square mile.

The flight from overcrowdedness affects the migration from snow belt to more bearable climates.

Nowhere do 1980 census statistics dramatize more the American search for spacious living than in the Far West There, California added 3.7 million to its population in the 1970s, more than any other state.

In that decade, however, large numbers also migrated from California, mostly to other parts of the West. Often they chose -- and still are choosing- - somewhat colder climates such as Oregon, Idaho and Alaska in order to escape smog, crime and other plagues of urbanization in the Golden State.

As a result, California's growth rate dropped during the 1970s, to 18.5 percent -- litle more than two thirds the 1960s' growth figure and considerably below that of other Western states.

1980年人口普查显示，随着东北部和中西部的人口增长几乎停滞，一个国家正在发展越来越多的地区竞争。

这一发展及其对未来几年美国政治和经济的强烈影响，在美国人口统计史上首次使南部成为美国人口最稠密的地区。

总的来说，美国人口在20世纪70年代增加了2320万，这是有史以来单十年内第三大增长。即便如此，这一增长加起来只有11.4%，是除大萧条时期外美国年度记录中的最低值。

自第二次世界大战以来，美国人一直在向南和向西迁移，这种模式仍然盛行。

1980年，佛罗里达州、得克萨斯州和加利福尼亚州这三个太阳带州的人口比十年前增加了近1000万。在大城市中，圣地亚哥从第14位升至第8位，圣安东尼奥从第15位升至第10位，还有克利夫兰和华盛顿。从前十名中掉了出来。

人口普查官员表示，并非所有这些变化都可以归因于雪带的移动。源源不断的移民潮也起到了一定作用，随着昨天“婴儿潮”一代的生育年龄越来越大，婴儿数量也越来越多。

此外，人口统计学家认为，南部和西部的持续转变伴随着一个相关但新的现象：越来越多的美国人显然不仅在寻找工作岗位更多的地方，而且也在寻找人口更少的地方。某些实例--

从地区来看，落基山州的人口增长速度最快，自1970年以来，该州的人口仅占美国人口的5%。

在各州中，内华达州和亚利桑那州增长最快，分别为63.5%和53。除佛罗里达州和得克萨斯州外，增长率排名前十的州是西部各州，人口为750万，约为每平方英里9人。

过度拥挤的飞行影响了从雪带到更容易忍受的气候的迁移。

1980年的人口普查统计数据最能说明美国人对宽敞生活的追求。20世纪70年代，加利福尼亚州的人口增加了370万，比其他任何州都多。

然而，在那十年里，大量移民也从加利福尼亚州迁移到了西部其他地区。他们经常选择——现在仍然在选择——俄勒冈州、爱达荷州和阿拉斯加等稍冷的气候，以躲避烟雾、犯罪和金州城市化的其他困扰。

因此，加州的增长率在20世纪70年代下降到18.5%，略高于20世纪60年代增长率的三分之二，远低于其他西部州。

Text 5

Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world's volcanoes,they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.

That the plates are moving is now beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them.The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined.The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth's interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots， anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot-spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years.

The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate come to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layers creates a broad dome.As the dome grows, it develops deep fissures (cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).

地球上散布着100多个孤立的火山活动小区域，地质学家称之为热点。与世界上的大多数火山不同，它们并不总是在构成地球表面的巨大漂流板块之间的边界上出现;相反，它们中的许多位于板块的内部深处。大多数热点运动缓慢，在某些情况下，板块运动经过它们时留下了死火山的痕迹。热点和它们的火山痕迹是标志着板块移动的里程碑。

板块正在移动这一点现在已无可争议。例如，由于新的物质注入到非洲和南美洲之间的海底，它们正在相互远离。互补的海岸线和某些似乎跨越海洋的地质特征提醒着我们，这两个大陆曾经是在哪里相连的。携带这些大陆板块的相对运动已经被详细地构造出来了，但是一个板块相对于另一个板块的运动还不能轻易地解释为它们相对于地球内部的运动。不可能确定两个大陆是在向相反的方向移动，还是一个大陆静止不动而另一个大陆正在远离它。位于地球深层的热点提供了解决这一问题所需的测量仪器。从对热点人口的分析来看，非洲板块似乎是静止的，在过去的3000万年里没有移动过。

热点的意义并不局限于它们作为参照系的作用。现在看来，它们对推动板块在全球移动的地球物理过程也有重要影响。当大陆板块在热点上停留时，从深层上升的物质就会形成一个宽阔的圆顶。随着穹顶的增大，它会出现深深的裂缝;至少在一些情况下，大陆可能会沿着这些裂缝完全破裂，因此热点启动了一个新海洋的形成。因此，就像早期的理论解释了大陆的流动性一样，热点可以解释它们的可变性(不稳定性)。

Part B