英二 真题 2000年 (完结)

Section I Use of English




Section II Reading Comprehension

Text 1

A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world's best; its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.

It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea's LG Electronics in July.) Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.

All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well.The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America's industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.

How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted," according to Richard Cavanaugh, executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,"says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as "a golden age of business management in the United States."


一段漫长而轻松的成功历史可能是一个可怕的障碍,但如果处理得当,它可能成为一种动力。当美国在二战结束后进入这样一个辉煌时期时,它拥有比任何竞争对手都大八倍的市场,使其工业具有无与伦比的规模经济。它的科学家是世界上最好的;它的工人是最熟练的。美国和美国人的繁荣程度超出了经济遭到战争破坏的欧洲人和亚洲人的梦想。

随着其他国家日益富裕,这种首要地位的缩小是不可避免的。同样不可避免的是,从优势地位的退让是痛苦的。到20世纪80年代中期,美国人发现自己在日渐衰落的工业竞争力面前不知所措。面对外国的竞争,一些大型的美国产业,如消费电子,已经萎缩或消失。到1987年,美国电视制造商只剩下Zenith一家。(现在一家也没有了:Zenith在今年7月被韩国LG电子收购。)外国制造的汽车和纺织品正在大举进入国内市场。美国的机床工业岌岌可危。半导体制造业是美国人发明的,是新计算机时代的核心,但在一段时间内,半导体制造业似乎将成为下一个受害者。

所有这些都引发了信任危机。美国人不再把繁荣视为理所当然。他们开始相信他们做生意的方式正在失败,因此他们的收入很快也会开始下降。20世纪80年代中期,人们对美国工业衰退的原因进行了一次又一次的调查。他们有时耸人听闻的发现充满了对来自海外竞争日益激烈的警告。

事情发生了多大的变化啊!1995年,美国可以回顾五年的稳固增长,而日本则一直在苦苦挣扎。很少有美国人把这仅仅归因于美元贬值或商业周期转向等显而易见的原因。自我怀疑已经让位于盲目的骄傲。哈佛大学肯尼迪政府学院(Kennedy School of Government)执行院长理查德•卡瓦诺(Richard Cavanaugh)表示。华盛顿特区智库卡托研究所的斯蒂芬•摩尔说:“作为一个美国人,看到我们的企业如何提高生产率,我感到很自豪。”哈佛商学院的威廉·萨尔曼认为,人们在回顾这段时期时,会认为这是“美国企业管理的黄金时代”。

Text 2

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.

There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that

natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.

For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived.Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100, 000 years-even the past 100 years-our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension. " No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.


做一个男人总是很危险的。大约每出生100名女性就有105名男性出生,但这一比例在成年时下降到接近平衡,在70岁的人群中,女性的数量是男性的两倍。但是男性死亡率的普遍现象正在改变。现在,男婴的存活率几乎和女婴一样高。这意味着,在寻找配偶的关键时期,男孩将首次出现过剩现象。更重要的是,另一个自然选择的机会被剥夺了。50年前,婴儿(尤其是男孩)的存活率取决于体重。轻或重一公斤几乎都意味着死亡。今天,这几乎没有什么区别。既然大部分变异是由基因造成的,那么又多了一种进化动因。

还有另一种进化自杀的方式:活着,但少生孩子。很少有人像过去那样有生育能力。除了在一些宗教社区,很少有妇女生育15个孩子。如今,出生人数和死亡年龄一样,已经趋于平均。我们大多数人的后代数量大致相同。人与人之间的差异以及自然选择利用差异的机会再次减少。印度表明正在发生什么。这个国家为大城市里的少数人提供了财富,却为剩下的部落人民提供了贫困。今天的普遍平等——每个人在生存和后代数量上都是一样的——意味着

与部落相比,自然选择在印度中上层阶级中失去了80%的力量。

对我们来说,这意味着进化已经结束;生物学上的乌托邦已经到来。奇怪的是,它几乎没有引起身体上的变化。没有其他物种在自然界中占据如此多的位置。但是在过去的10万年里,甚至在过去的100年里,我们的生活已经改变了,但我们的身体却没有改变。我们没有进化,因为机器和社会替我们做了。达尔文曾用一句话来形容那些对进化论一无所知的人:他们“看有机生物就像野蛮人看船一样,就像看完全无法理解的东西。”毫无疑问,我们会记住20世纪那种丑陋不堪的生活方式。但是,无论我们的后代对我们离乌托邦有多远感到惊讶,他们的长相都会和我们一样。

Text 3

When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for, however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today, it is possible that in years to come they may be regarded as normal. With regard to Futurist poetry, however, the case is rather difficult, for whatever Futurist poetry may be—even admitting that the theory on which it is based may be right—it can hardly be classed as Literature.

This, in brief, is what the Futurist says: for a century, past conditions of life have been conditionally speeding up, till now we live in a world of noise and violence and speed.Consequently, our feelings, thoughts and emotions have undergone a corresponding change. This speeding up of life, says the Futurist, requires a new form of expression. We must speed up our literature too, if we want to interpret modern stress. We must pour out a large stream of essential words, unhampered by stops, or qualifying adjectives, or finite verbs. Instead of describing sounds we must make up words that imitate them; we must use many sizes of type and different colored inks on the same page, and shorten or lengthen words at will.

Certainly their descriptions of battles are confused. But it is a little upsetting to read in the explanatory notes that a certain line describes a fight between a Turkish and a Bulgarian officer on a bridge off which they both fall into the river —and then to find that the line consists of the noise of their falling and the weights of the officers: "Pluff! Pluff! A hundred and eighty-five kilograms."

This, though it fulfills the laws and requirements of Futurist poetry, can hardly be classed as Literature. All the same, no thinking man can refuse to accept their first proposition: that a great change in our emotional life calls for a change of expression. The whole question is really this: have we essentially changed?


当一场新的艺术运动发展成某种时尚时,最好弄清楚它的倡导者的目的是什么,因为,无论他们的原则在今天看来多么牵强和不合理,很可能多年以后他们会被视为正常的。然而,就未来主义诗歌而言,情况就相当困难了,因为无论未来主义诗歌是什么——即使承认它所依据的理论可能是正确的——都很难被归为文学。

简而言之,这就是未来主义者所说的:一个世纪以来,过去的生活条件一直在有条件地加速,直到现在,我们生活在一个充满噪音、暴力和速度的世界里。因此,我们的感觉、思想和情绪也发生了相应的变化。这位未来主义者说,这种生活的加速需要一种新的表达形式。如果我们想要解释现代压力,我们也必须加快文学的发展。我们必须大量使用基本词汇,不受停顿、限定形容词或限定动词的限制。与其描述声音,不如创造模仿声音的词语;我们必须在同一页上使用不同尺寸的字体和不同颜色的墨水,并随意缩短或拉长单词。

当然,他们对战争的描述是混乱的。但是,当我们从注释中读到某句诗描述了一名土耳其军官和一名保加利亚军官在桥上打架并双双掉进河里时,却发现这句诗只写了他们落水的声音和军官们的体重:“扑通!扑通!一百八十五公斤。”

这虽然符合未来主义诗歌的规律和要求,却很难被归类为文学。尽管如此,任何有思想的人都不能拒绝接受他们的第一个命题:情感生活的巨大变化要求表达方式的变化。整个问题其实是:我们在本质上改变了吗?

Text 4

Aimlessness has hardly been typical of the postwar Japan whose productivity and social harmony are the envy of the United States and Europe. But increasingly the Japanese are seeing a decline of the traditional work-moral values. Ten years ago young people were hardworking and saw their jobs as their primary reason for being, but now Japan has largely fulfilled its economic needs, and young people don't know where they should go next.

The coming of age of the postwar baby boom and an entry of women into the male-dominated job market have limited the opportunities of teen-agers who are already questioning the heavy personal sacrifices involved in climbing Japan's rigid social ladder to good schools and jobs. In a recent survey, it was found that only 24.5 percent of Japanese students were fully satisfied with school life, compared with 67.2 percent of students in the United States. In addition, far more Japanese workers expressed dissatisfaction with their jobs than did their counterparts in the 10 other countries surveyed.

While often praised by foreigners for its emphasis on the basics, Japanese education tends to stress test taking and mechanical learning over creativity and self-expression. "Those things that do not show up in the test scores—personality, ability, courage or humanity—are completely ignored," says Toshiki Kaifu, chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's education committee. "Frustration against this kind of thing leads kids to drop out and run wild." Last year Japan experienced 2, 125 incidents of school violence, including 929 assaults on teachers. Amid the outcry, many conservative leaders are seeking a return to the prewar emphasis on moral education. Last year Mitsuo Setoyama, who was then education minister, raised eyebrows when he argued that liberal reforms introduced by the American occupation authorities after World War I had weakened the "Japanese morality of respect for parents.”

But that may have more to do with Japanese life-styles. "In Japan," says educator Yoko Muro, "it's never a question of whether you enjoy your job and your life, but only how much you can endure." With economic growth has come centralization; fully 76 percent of Japan's 119 million citizens live in cities where community and the extended family have been abandoned in favor of isolated, two-generation households. Urban Japanese have long endured lengthy commutes (travels to and from work) and crowded living conditions, but as the old group and family values weaken, the discomfort is beginning to tell. In the past decade, the Japanese divorce rate, while still well below that of the United States, has increased by more than 50 percent, and suicides have increased by nearly one-quarter.


战后日本的生产力和社会和谐令美国和欧洲羡慕不已,但漫无目的并不是战后日本的典型特征。但是,日本人正越来越多地看到传统的职业道德价值观的衰落。十年前,年轻人勤奋工作,把工作视为他们存在的主要原因,但现在日本已经基本满足了经济需求,年轻人不知道他们下一步应该去哪里。

战后婴儿潮的成年和女性进入男性主导的就业市场,限制了青少年的机会,他们已经在质疑为了爬上日本僵化的社会阶梯、进入好学校和找到好工作而做出的巨大个人牺牲。最近的一项调查发现,只有24.5%的日本学生对学校生活完全满意,而美国学生的这一比例为67.2%。此外,与接受调查的其他10个国家相比,日本员工对工作表示不满的人数要多得多。

虽然日本教育经常因强调基础知识而受到外国人的称赞,但日本教育倾向于强调考试和机械学习,而不是创造力和自我表达。执政的自民党教育委员会主席Toshiki Kaifu说:“那些在考试分数中没有体现出来的东西——性格、能力、勇气或人性——完全被忽略了。”“对这类事情的挫折感会导致孩子们辍学,变得放荡不羁。”去年日本发生了2125起校园暴力事件,其中929起针对教师的袭击。在一片抗议声中,许多保守派领导人正在寻求恢复战前对道德教育的重视。去年,当时的文部科学大臣濑山光夫(Mitsuo Setoyama)提出,一战后美国占领当局引入的自由主义改革削弱了“日本尊重父母的道德”,这引起了人们的不满。

但这可能更多地与日本人的生活方式有关。教育家Yoko Muro说:“在日本,问题从来不在于你是否享受你的工作和生活,而在于你能忍受多少。”随着经济增长,出现了中央集权;在日本1.19亿人口中,有76%的人居住在城市,在那里,社区和大家庭已经被抛弃,取而代之的是与世隔绝的两代同堂的家庭。城市日本人长期以来忍受着漫长的通勤(上下班)和拥挤的生活条件,但随着旧的群体和家庭价值观的削弱,这种不适开始显现出来。在过去十年中,日本的离婚率虽然仍远低于美国,但却增长了50%以上,自杀率增加了近四分之一。

Text 5

If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition—wealth, distinction, control over one' s destiny—must be deemed worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition's behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be highly regarded by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. In an odd way, however, it is the educated who have claimed to have given up on ambition as an ideal. What is odd is that they have perhaps most benefited from ambition— if not always their own then that of their parents and grandparents. There is a heavy note of hypocrisy in this, a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped—with the educated themselves riding on them.

Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its signs now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs-the locations, place names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago.What has happened is that people cannot confess fully to their dreams, as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushing, acquisitive and vulgar. Instead, we are treated to fine hypocritical spectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three-star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools. For such people and many more perhaps not so exceptional, the proper formulation is, "Succeed at all costs but avoid appearing ambitious.”

The attacks on ambition are many and come from various angles; its public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and fixed in the mind of the young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings and promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less openly professed. Consequences follow from this, of course, some of which are that ambition is driven underground, or made sly. Such, then, is the way things stand: on the left angry critics, on the right stupid supporters, and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life.


如果野心被正确看待,那么它的回报——财富、声望、对命运的掌控——必须被认为值得为之牺牲。如果雄心的传统具有生命力,那么它一定会被广泛分享;尤其是那些自己也受人尊敬的人,尤其是受过良好教育的人。然而,奇怪的是,正是受过良好教育的人声称已经放弃了把雄心作为理想的想法。奇怪的是,他们最大的受益者可能是雄心壮志——如果不总是他们自己的雄心,那么就是他们父母和祖父母的雄心。这里面有一种浓重的虚伪,就像马跑了之后再关上马厩的门——而受过教育的人自己也骑在上面。

当然,人们现在对成功及其种种标志的兴趣似乎并不比以前减少。避暑别墅、欧洲之旅、宝马车——地点、地名和品牌可能会改变,但这些项目在今天的需求似乎并不比十年前或二十年前少。现在的情况是,人们不能像以前那样轻易、公开地完全承认自己的梦想,以免别人认为他们急于求成、贪得无厌和庸俗。相反,我们看到了一些虚伪的壮观景象,这些景象似乎比以往任何时候都多:美国式物质主义的批评者却拥有南安普顿的避暑别墅;激进书籍的出版商在三星级餐厅用餐;倡导人生各阶段参与民主的记者,自己的孩子却在私立学校就读。对于这样的人,以及更多可能不那么杰出的人,正确的说法是:“不惜一切代价取得成功,但不要显得雄心勃勃。”

对野心的攻击有很多,而且来自不同的角度;它的公开辩护者很少,也不引人注目,当然他们也不是毫无吸引力。因此,在美国,把雄心壮志作为一种健康的冲动、一种值得钦佩并在年轻人心中根深蒂固的品质来支持的人,可能比以往任何时候都要少。这并不意味着雄心壮志已经终结,人们不再感受到它的刺激和激励,而只是说,它不再被公开推崇,也不再被公开宣称。当然,随之而来的后果是,野心被埋没了,或者说变得狡猾了。那么,现在的情况就是这样:左边是愤怒的批评者,右边是愚蠢的支持者,而在中间,像往常一样,是大多数想过上好日子的认真的人。




Part B

Part B

Governments throughout the world act on the assumption that the welfare of their people depends largely on the economic strength and wealth of the community. 31) Under modern conditions, this requires varying measures of centralized control and hence the help of specialized scientists such as economists and operational research experts. 32) Furthermore, it is obvious that the strength of a country's economy is directly bound up with the efficiency of its agriculture and industry, and that this in turn rests upon the efforts of scientists and technologists of all kinds. It also means that governments are increasingly compelled to interfere in these sectors in order to step up production and ensure that it is utilized to the best advantage. For example, they may encourage research in various ways, including the setting up of their own research centers; they may alter the structure of education, or interfere in order to reduce the wastage of natural resources or tap resources hitherto unexploited; or they may cooperate directly in the growing number of international projects related to science, economics and industry. In any case, all such interventions are heavily dependent on scientific advice and also scientific and technological manpower of all kinds.

33) Owing to the remarkable development in mass-communications, people everywhere are feeling new wants and are being exposed to new customs and ideas, while governments are often forced to introduce still further innovations for the reasons given above. At the same time, the normal rate of social change throughout the world is taking place at a vastly accelerated speed compared with the past. For example, 34) in the early industrialized countries of Europe the process of industrialization-with all the far-reaching changes in social patterns that followed-was spread over nearly a century, whereas nowadays a developing nation may undergo the same process in a decade or so. All this has the effect of building up unusual pressures and tensions within the community and consequently presents serious problems for the governments concerned. 35) Additional social stresses may also occur because of the population explosion or problems arising from mass migration movements—themselves made relatively easy nowadays by modern means of transport. As a result of all these factors, governments are becoming increasingly dependent on biologists and social scientists for planning the appropriate programs and putting them into effect.


世界各国政府的行动都基于这样一个假设:人民的福利在很大程度上取决于社会的经济实力和财富。在现代条件下,这需要各种集中控制措施,因此需要经济学家和运筹学专家等专业科学家的帮助。此外,很明显,一个国家的经济实力与其工农业的效率直接相关,而工农业的效率又有赖于各类科学家和技术人员的努力。这也意味着政府越来越被迫干预这些部门,以加快生产,并确保其得到最佳利用。例如,他们可能以各种方式鼓励研究,包括建立自己的研究中心;它们可能改变教育结构,或进行干预以减少自然资源的浪费,或开发迄今未开发的资源;或者,他们可以在日益增多的与科学、经济和工业有关的国际项目中直接合作。无论如何,所有这些干预都严重依赖于科学建议和各种科技人力。

由于大众通信的显著发展,各地的人们都感到有新的需求,并接触到新的习俗和思想,而出于上述原因,政府常常被迫进行进一步的创新。与此同时,全世界社会变革的正常速度正在以比过去大大加快的速度发生。例如,欧洲早期工业化国家的工业化过程——以及随之而来的社会形态的深远变化——持续了近一个世纪,而今天一个发展中国家可能在十年左右的时间内就完成了同样的过程。所有这些都在社会内部造成了不同寻常的压力和紧张局势,从而给有关政府带来了严重的问题。由于人口的激增或大规模人口流动(现代交通工具使这种流动相对容易)所引起的种种问题也可能对社会造成新的压力。由于所有这些因素,政府越来越依赖生物学家和社会科学家来规划适当的项目并付诸实施。

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