【考研类试卷】考研英语(二)分类真题4及答案解析.doc

1、考研英语(二)分类真题 4 及答案解析(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 sex and love type, but the workplace kind. Irately, it seems, I keep hearing career counselors advisin

2、g 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 indee

3、d, 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 ourselves at every turn? In these economic times, fewer of us are worried about being fulfilled and more of us are concerned about simply

4、 being paid. But as switching jobs and careers becomes increasingly common, as whole professions are disappearing, we“re more frequently forced to ask ourselves 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,

5、 Happiness and You“, mentioned three factors for the workplace: supportive supervision, job security and the possibility of promotion, and fair treatment. He acknowledges that it is not easy to attain these goals, especially now. But it can still make a difference in your job satisfaction, he says,

6、to examine what your strengths and needs are, and try, as much as possible, to match your work with those 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

7、in terms of passion, and the inflated sense 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 tha

8、t“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 seem 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

9、embodiment of flow. And that“s no accident. So maybe searching 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 else“s passion may be your idea of drudgery. And sometimes lifeand workis simply going to be putting one foot in front of

10、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.Because he thinks passion exists only in love and sexB.Because it is a word overused in career counselingC.Because it is difficult for people to pu

11、t passion into workD.Because passion is a slippery feeling that needs clarification(2).It is implied in the second paragraph that _（分数：4.00）A.passion is not necessary in some casesB.passion is indispensable to our workC.passion is badly needed where boredom arisesD.passion is the key to success in o

12、ne“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 beforeB.people care more about what they do after retirementC.people are not treated fairly by their bossesD.people care less about deriving satisfaction from work(4).Prof

13、. Warr would advise that a worker _（分数：4.00）A.put passion into his workB.set high goals for his careerC.think more about job satisfactionD.change his job when he feels bored(5).The author“s attitude to Professor Wart“s argument is one of _（分数：4.00）A.reserved consentB.total indifferenceC.generous com

14、mendationD.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 se

15、nse and believe things about asset values because 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 psycho

16、logy 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 mistake

17、s, yet he notes drily that “in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence.“ Public servants are human, too. Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated

18、 reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence. In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave

19、 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 kne

20、w with confidence things that were false. The issue of action bias is better known in England as the “dangerous dogs act,“ after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cases in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legisla

21、tion 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 regulator to stand up and say “something must not be done,“ lest “something“ makes the problem worse. Motivated reaso

22、ning 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 see 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 drawbac

23、ks 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 blindlyB.turn atte

24、ntion to asset valuesC.develop a strong dislike for lossesD.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 seldom serious onesB.behavioral economics should study the mental habits of the officialsC.public ser

25、vants are well justified when they make regulatory mistakesD.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 judgmentB.the students are ignorant of infant-mortalit

26、y ratesC.chimpanzees are better judges than humansD.the students often misjudge their competence(4).The inclination to act without adequate information and analysis is a case of _（分数：4.00）A.action biasB.motivated reasoningC.the affect heuristicD.illusions of competence(5).The text is mainly about _（

27、分数：4.00）A.the herd instinctB.the bandwagon effectC.the loss aversionD.the biases 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 sea

28、t belts work. It may annoy. Or perhaps it has become so common that it no longer elicits much response. But these transactions are helping keep the planes flying, and they illustrate a market reality increasingly faced by a wide spectrum of consumers and businesses. Efforts by airlines around the wo

29、rld to increase 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 second successive year to about $3 billion. That“s a profit

30、 margin of just 0.5 percent, so what some see 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 Sorensen explained. “Airlines are jus

31、t 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

32、maybe tack on a housekeeping extra charge. You see this batteries-not-included mentality elsewhere. Cellphone companies that once advertised all-inclusive services look to sell data and voice separately. Banks try to assess new fees to cover costs they once absorbed. “In an industry cycle, in the be

33、ginning, when you“re in a high-growth period, you tend to see 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

34、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 separately.“ “Airlines are going to have to be careful of nuisance fees, like checked bags and seating, and foc

35、us instead on inventing services that have not been offered before that people value,“ Sorensen said. That proposition is critical. But within a company the ability to generate revenue through a service often means more resources will be devoted to improving it. So the baggage service, for example,

36、not only has benefited from fewer checked items in the system but greater investment in that system by airlines. Charging for specific services like baggage handling lets airlines invest to provide greater reliability for those who check a bag, without passing on the cost to customers who don“t.（分数：

37、20.00）(1).To supplement its revenues, airlines have _（分数：4.00）A.raised the price of flight ticketsB.tightened their security checkC.charged extra fees for specific servicesD.increased the items of their services(2).The expression “nickel-and-diming“ refers to _（分数：4.00）A.a big sum of moneyB.a small

38、amount of moneyC.reduced revenueD.revenue from ticket prices(3).According to Jean-Manuel Izaret, in a mature market, _（分数：4.00）A.customers enjoy the best service at the lowest costB.customers have to pay extra fees for the specific servicesC.established businesses monopolize the marketD.newcomers co

39、mpete by lowering the prices of services(4).Sorensen advises airlines to _（分数：4.00）A.further unbundle their servicesB.increase the price of their servicesC.stop charging nuisance feesD.innovate their services for customers(5).The text is mainly about _（分数：4.00）A.how the economic recession has affect

40、ed customer serviceB.what measures have airlines taken to reduce operating costC.why baggage handling should be charged an extra feeD.why airlines should not charge customer nuisance fees六、Text 4(总题数：1，分数：20.00)Over the past few days, the U.S. has been in the world“s crosshairs. Political argument i

41、n Washington produced a debt agreement widely criticized as insufficient and incomplete. Standard & Poor“s downgraded America“s credit rating, raising concerns about the health of the world“s most important economy. Slow growth in the U.S. is threatening the entire global recovery. Stock-market turm

42、oil on Wall Street has turned markets from London to Seoul into roller coasters. Yes, the U.S. has been a source of much uncertainty in recent days. But in my opinion, the real danger for the global economy lies elsewhere: in Europe. If we“re going to have another financial crisis, chances are it wi

43、ll start in the euro zone, not Washington. On a macro level, you could say the U.S. is worse off economically than Europe right now. Economists were frantically reducing their 2011 growth forecasts for the U.S. as its GDP limped along in the first half of the year. In Europe, growth is holding up. T

44、he IMF raised its growth projection for the euro zone in late June to 2%. And as a recent HSBC report noted, the state of American national finances is actually more feeble than the euro zone“s taken as a whole. Even before the financial crisis, the U.S. fiscal path was unsustainable, an ageing popu

45、lation combined with extravagant social security commitments suggested either the need for massive tax increases or dramatic spending cuts. The crisis, however, made matters a lot worse. According to the OECD, the US federal, state and local government deficit (NOT the federal deficit alone) jumped

46、from 2.9% of GDP in 2007 to 10.6% in 2010. Though that may be true, the U.S. has one huge advantage over Europe at this moment, the luxury of time. Ironically, the reaction of the world“s investor community to the recent financial turmoil has been to rush into U.S. debtyes, the very bonds downgraded

47、 by S&P. What that means is U.S. borrowing costs will continue to decline, and that buys Washington time to get its act together and put in place a real plan to fill the deficit and restore American growth. The euro zone, on the other hand, has no such luck. Borrowing costs for the zone“s weakest ec

48、onomiesthe PIIGS, including Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italyremain highly elevated. That puts pressure on those governments to implement reform programs with great haste as well as pressure on the rest of the euro zone to take more and more dramatic action to stem the contagion. The Europe

49、an Central Bank swooped in to buy billions of dollars of Italian and Spanish debt, which is a major deviation from the ECB“s usual policy. But it is unlikely that the ECB can handle the crisis on its own over an extended period of time.（分数：20.00）(1).The United States is blamed by the world for _（分数：4.00）A.threatening the health of the world“s economyB.failing to correct the world“s economic illsC.causing the stock-market instability on Wall StreetD.reaching an agreement on the debt issue(2).By saying “In Europe, gr