【考研类试卷】考博英语-230及答案解析.doc

1、考博英语-230 及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Translation(总题数：5，分数：100.00)St. Petersburg. The very name brings to mind some of Russia“s greatest poets, writer sand composers: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky. 1 The 19th century was a golden age for St. Petersburg“s (圣彼得堡) wealthy classes. It was a world of

2、ballets and balls, of art and literature, of tea and caviar (鱼子酱). 2 The golden age ended with the advent of World War I. Working people were growing more and more discontented. In 1917, Communism came, promising peace and prosperity. St. Petersburg had become Petrograd in 1914.People wanted a Russi

3、an name for their city. Ten years later, the city“s name changed again, this time to Leningrad. Then in 1991, Leningraders voted to restore the city“s original name. Some people opposed the name change altogether. 3 Others thought it was just too soon. Old, run-down Soviet Leningrad, they said, was

4、not the St. Petersburg of 19th-centurg literature. What, then, is St. Petersburg? In the confusing post-Communist world, no one really knows. The quiet, if Soviet-style, dignity is gone. The Communist sayings are down and gaudy advertising up. Candy bars and cigarettes are sold from boxy, tasteless

5、kiosks. And clothing? 4 Well, anything goes. Everyone wants to be a little different. But many people do not know the true meaning of freedom. Personal crime has gone up, up, up in the past few years. Yet in spite of this, you can still find some of the city“s grand past. Stand at the western tip of

6、 Vasilievsky Island. To the right is the elegant Winter Palace, former home of the czars. Its light blue sides and white classical columns make it perhaps St. Petersburg“s most graceful building. It houses one of the worlds most famous art museums: the Hermitage. Inside, 20kin of galleries house tho

7、usands of works of art. 5 Look over your right shoulder. The massive golden dome of St. Isaac“s Cathedral (圣以撒大教堂) rises above the skyline. You“ll see, too, why St. Petersburg is called a “float city.“ Standing there, nearly surrounded by water, you can see four of the city“s 42 islands.（分数：20.00）_6

8、 The Banking Act of 1933, known as the Glass-Steagall Act (格拉斯斯蒂格尔法案), separated commercial banking and investment banking, where the latter refers specifically to issuing, underwriting, selling, or distributing stock or bond offerings of corporations. Commercial banks had become deeply involved in

9、the sale and distribution of new stock and bond offerings in the 1920s, not always with happy results. 7 There were suspicions that banks on occasion dumped new offerings into trust funds that they managed because they couldn“t sell them to anyone else. 8 To avoid such conflicts of interest, the Ban

10、king Act of 1933 divorced commercial from investment banking. Banks involved in both areas were forced to choose one or the other. Commercial banks were allowed to distribute new offerings of federal government securities and “full faith and credit“ general obligations of state and local governments

11、 9 But Glass-Steagall provided that banks could not get involved in new offerings of corporate stocks or bonds or municipal revenue bonds. Revenue bonds differ from general municipal obligations in that they are not backed by the full taxing power of the state or local government; bondholders have

12、a claim only on the revenues of a specific project being financed, such as a toll road or a state university dormitory. 10 The Act was also interpreted as meaning that commercial banks could not offer mutual funds, including money market mutual funds. Commercial banks believe they are being discrimi

13、nated against by the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act.（分数：20.00）_11 Real estate, in broad definition, is land and everything made permanently a part thereof, and the nature and extent of one“s interest therein. In law, the word real, as it relates to property, means land as distinguished from pe

14、rsonal property; and estate is defined as the interest one has in property. Real estate may be acquired, owned, and conveyed (or transferred) by individuals; business corporations; charitable, religious, educational, fraternal, and various other nonprofit corporations; fiduciaries, such as trustees

15、and executors; partnerships; and generally by any legal entity as determined and defined by the laws of the various states of the US Limitations are established in connection with sales of real estate by minors, incompetents, and certain types of corporations, and generally in cases involving some f

16、orm of legal disability or lack of capacity. 12 In such instances, it is necessary in some jurisdictions to make application to the courts for permission to sell, in other jurisdictions such transfers are governed by statute. 13 Real property is generally acquired by purchase, by descent and devise,

17、 or by gift. When acquired by purchase, a deed is given by the seller, or grantor, to the purchaser, or grantee. The deed contains a legal description of the property conveyed. It must be drawn, executed, and acknowledged in proper form to be entitled to record. 14 It is customary for the seller and

18、 the purchaser to enter into a contract, at which time the purchaser makes a deposit on account of the purchase price. 15 The purchaser engages an attorney or a title company to search the title to the property. The title company ensures that the seller can convey clear title, the transaction is the

19、n closed.（分数：20.00）_Computers are permeating almost every aspect of our lives, including many areas previously untouched by technology. 16 But unlike such other pervasive technologies as electricity, television and the motor car, computers are on the whole less reliable and less predictable in their

20、 behavior. This is because they are discrete state digital electronic devices that are prone to total and catastrophic failure. Computer systems, when they are “down,“ are completely down, unlike electromechanical devices, which may be only partially down and are thus partially usable. Computers ena

21、ble enormous quantities of information to be stored, retrieved, and transmitted at great speed on a scale not possible before. 17 This is all very well, but it has serious implications for data security and personal privacy because computers are inherently insecure. The recent activities of hackers

22、and data thieves in the United States, Germany, and Britain have shown how all-too-easy it still is to break into even the most-sophisticated financial and military systems. The list of scares perpetrated by the new breed of hi-tech criminals, ranging from fraud in airline-ticket reservations to the

23、 reprogramming of the chips inside mobile phones, is growing daily. Computer systems are often incredibly complex-so complex, in fact, that they are not always understood even by their creators (although few are willing to admit it). This often makes them completely unmanageable. Unmanageable comple

24、xity, can result in massive foul-ups or spectacular budget “runaways.“ For example, Jeffrey Rothfeder in Business Week reports that Bank of America in 1988 had to abandon a $20 million computer system after spending five years and a further $60 million trying to make it work. Allstate Insurance saw

25、the cost of its new system rise from $8 million to a staggering $100 million and estimated completion was delayed from 1987 to 1993. Moreover, the problem seems to be getting worse: in 1988 the American Arbitration. Association took on 190 computer disputes, most of which involved defective systems.

26、 The claims totaled $200 millionup from only $31 million in 1984. 18 Complexity can also result in disaster: no computer is 100 percent guaranteed because it is virtually impossible to anticipate all sorts of critical applications, such as saving lives, flying air craft, running nuclear power statio

27、ns, transferring vast sums of money, and controlling missile systemssometimes with tragic consequences. For example, between 1982 and 1987, some twenty-two servicemen died in five separate crashes of the United States Air Force“s sophisticated Blackhawk helicopter before the problem was traced to it

28、s computer-based “fig-by-wire“ system. At least two people died after receiving overdoses of radiation emitted by the computerized. There are 25 X-ray machines, and there are many other examples of fatal computer-based foul-ups. Popular areas for less life-threatening computer malfunctions include t

29、elephone billing and telephone switching software, bank statements and bank-teller machines, electronic funds-transfer systems, and motor-vehicle license data bases. Although computers have often taken the “blame“ on these occasions, the ultimate cause of failure in most cases is, in fact, human err

30、or. Every new technology creates new problemsas well as new benefits for society, and computers are no exception. 19 But digital computers have rendered society especially vulnerable to hardware and software malfunctions. Sometimes industrial robots go crazy., while heart pacemakers and automatic ga

31、rage door openers are rendered useless by electromagnetic radiation or “electronic smog“ emitted from point-of-sale terminals, personal computers, and video games. Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) and pumps at gas stations are closed down because of unforeseen software snafus. The cost of all this d

32、owntime is huge. 20 For example, it has been reported that British businesses suffer around thirty major mishaps a year. revolving losses running into millions of pounds. These are caused by machine or human error and do not include human misuse in the form of fraud and sabotage. The cost of failure

33、s in domestically produced software in the United Kingdom alone is conservatively estimated at $900 million per year. In 1989, a British Computer Society committee, reported that much software was now so complex that current skills in safety assessment were inadequate and that therefore the safety o

34、f people could not be guaranteed.（分数：20.00）_Intelligence at best is an assumptive construct the meaning of the word has never been clear. 21 There is more agreement on the kinds of behavior referred to by the term than there is on how to interpret or classify them. But it is generally agreed that a

35、person of high intelligence is one who can grasp ideas readily, make distinctions, reason logically, and make use of verbal and mathematical symbols in solving problems. Art intelligence test is a rough measure of a child“s capacity for learning, particularly for learning the kinds of things require

36、d in school. It does not measure character, social adjustment, physical endurance, manual skills, or artistic abilities. It is not supposed to. It was not designed for such purposes. 22 To criticize it for such failure is roughly comparable to criticizing a thermometer for not measuring wind velocit

37、y. The other thing we have to notice is that the assessment of the intelligence of any subject is essentially a comparative affair. 23 Now since the assessment of intelligence is a comparative matter we must be sure that the scale with which we are comparing our subjects provides a “valid“ or “fair“

38、 comparison. It is here that some of the difficulties which interest us begin. Any test performed involves at least three factors: the intention to do one“s best, the knowledge required for understanding what you have to do, and the intellectual ability to do it. 24 The first two must be equal for a

39、ll who are being compared, if any comparison in terms of intelligence is to be made. In school populations in our culture these assumptions can be made fair and reasonable, and the value of intelligence testing has been proved thoroughly. Its value lies, of course, in its providing a satisfactory ba

40、sis for prediction. No one is in the least interested in the marks a little child gets on his test; what we are interested in is whether we can conclude from his mark on the test that the child win do better or worse than other children of his age at tasks which we think require “general intelligenc

41、e“. 25 On the whole such a conclusion can be drawn with a certain degree of confidence, but only if the child can be assumed to have had the same attitude towards the test as the other with whom he is being compared, and only if he was not punished by lack of relevant information which they possesse

42、d.（分数：20.00）_考博英语-230 答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Translation(总题数：5，分数：100.00)St. Petersburg. The very name brings to mind some of Russia“s greatest poets, writer sand composers: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky. 1 The 19th century was a golden age for St. Petersburg“s (圣彼得堡) wealthy classes. It was a world of ballets and balls, of art and literature, of tea and caviar (鱼子酱). 2 The golden age ended with the advent of World War I. Working people we