[外语类试卷]专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷121及答案与解析.doc

1、专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷 121及答案与解析 SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A , B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. 0 The s

2、udden death of an admired public person always seems an impossibility. People ascribe invulnerability, near immortality to our centers of attention. John Kennedy dies, and it could not happen. John Lennon dies, and it could not happen. Elvis, and Grace Kelly, and shock after shock. And now this deat

3、h of a young woman by whom the world had remained shocked from the moment she first appeared before it, whose name contained the shadow of her end: Princess Di. But who would have believed it? People thought every thought that could be thought about Diana, but not death. She was beauty, deaths oppos

4、ite. Beauty is given not only a special place of honor in the world but also a kind of permanence, as if it were an example of the tendency of nature to perfect itself, and therefore something that once achieved, lives forever. Her life never seemed as tragic as it was often made out just sad, and a

5、 little off. She married the wrong man. Her in-laws could be vindictive. For every photographer eager to capture a picture of her in one of those astonishing evening gowns or hats, another was hiding in the bushes ready to bring her down. One cannot think of any public statement of hers that was esp

6、ecially brilliant or witty. She was more innocent than clever; even her confession of an affair to a reporter sounded girlish. If pressed, few could say exactly what it was that made her so important, especially to people outside England, except for the fact that one could not take ones eyes off the

7、 woman. Yet that was no small thing. Diana was someone one had to look at, and such a person comes along once in a blue moon. She had a soft heart; that was evident. She had a knack for helping people in distress. And all such qualities rose in a face that everyone was simply pleased to see. In a wa

8、y, she was more royal than the royals. She had a higher station than the Queen of England; she was the nominal young monarch of her own country and of every other place in the world. She was the sentimental favorite figurehead, who was authorized to sign no treaties, command no armies, make no wars.

9、 All she had was the way she looked and sounded and behaved. No model or actress could hold a candle to her. She was the image every child has of a princess the one who can feel the pea under the mattresses, who kisses the frog, who lets down her hair from the tower window. Her marriage was gone lon

10、g before her death. As the years went on, it is likely that there would have been other romances after Dodi Al Fayed to tickle the throngs. Exactly how her life would have progressed is hard to imagine. She would have continued to be a good mother and a worker for the ill and the poor: she would hav

11、e been pictured from time to time at a dinner party or on a boat. In older age she might have become the Kings mother, welcomed back into the royal family at a time of life that is automatically accorded status. How would she have looked? The hair whiter, the skin a bit more lined, but the eyes woul

12、d still have had that sweet mixture of kindness and longing. By then the story of her and Charles, the scandals and accusations, might have been lost in smoke. Yet if people now were asked how they will remember Diana, what picture among the thousands they will hold in their mind, it would not be Di

13、ana at an official ceremony, or with a boyfriend, or even with her children. It would be her on the day of her wedding, when all the world was glad to be her subject and when she gave everyone who looked at her the improbable idea that life was beautiful. 1 The authors main purpose of mentioning Joh

14、n Kennedy, John Lennon, Elvis and Grace Kelly in the first paragraph is to_. （ A） show that Dianas death is as sudden and unexpected as theirs （ B） illustrate that Diana was as prominent and popular as they were （ C） express how regretful people felt for the loss of Diana （ D） imply that people coul

15、d not accept the fact that they had died 2 “ That“ in the first sentence of Paragraph Five refers to_. （ A） any of Dianas brilliant or witty public statements （ B） Dianas innocent confession of an affair to a reporter （ C） what made Diana so important （ D） the fact that one could not take ones eyes

16、off Diana 3 Which of the following word is used literally, NOT metaphorically? （ A） Moon (Paragraph Five). （ B） Candle (Paragraph Six). （ C） Smoke (Paragraph Seven). （ D） Subject (Paragraph Eight). 4 The author does NOT mention Princess Dianas_. （ A） outer and inner beauty （ B） personal life （ C） ch

17、aritable heart （ D） political influences 4 We all know that we dont get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to l

18、ess sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee. Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinc

19、tion of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world. In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and o

20、thers, for the lucky control group, eight hours for two weeks in the lab. Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects ability to sustain attention with whats known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P. V. T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P.

21、 V. T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep. The P. V. T. is tedious but simple if youve

22、been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a

23、driver to veer into oncoming traffic. Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four-and six-hour groups had P. V. T. results that declined steadily with alm

24、ost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first

25、 day. The six-hour subjects fared no bettersteadily declining over the two weeks on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end o

26、f two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. So, for most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the dif

27、ference? What is the threshold below which cognitive function begins to flag? While Dingess study was under way, his colleague Gregory Belenky, then director of the division of neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md. , was running a similar study. He purposel

28、y restricted his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hours three, five, seven and nine hours so that together the studies would offer a fuller picture of sleep-restriction. Belenkys nine-hour subjects performed much like Dingess eight-hour ones. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P

29、. V. T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6. 9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be. Of cour

30、se our lives are more stimulating than a sleep lab: we have coffee, bright lights, the social buzz of the office, all of which work as “countermeasures“ to sleepiness. They can do the job for only so long, however. As Belenky, who now heads up the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington

31、State University, Spokane, where Van Dongen is also a professor, told me about cognitive deficits: “You dont see it the first day. But you do in five to seven days.“ And its not clear that we can rely on weekends to make up for sleep deprivation. Dinges is now running a long-term sleep restriction a

32、nd recovery study to see how many nights we need to erase our sleep debt. But past studies suggest that, at least in many cases, one night alone wont do it. 5 The old common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night,_. （ A） your performance would be poor because of cognitive d

33、eficits （ B） you would fall asleep in front of the computer （ C） you would become energetic because your life was stimulating （ D） you would work normally because your body could adapt to it 6 Which of the following statements is NOT true about P. V. T. ? （ A） It is a standard of sleepiness measures

34、. （ B） It is an easy but thought-provoking test. （ C） It can tell a lapse into sleepiness. （ D） It can measure the sustained attention. 7 It can be learned from Paragraph Five that_. （ A） 8-hour subjects fared the best among three groups （ B） the 6-hour subjects began to decline in the middle of the

35、 study （ C） half of the 6-hour subjects fell asleep at the computer （ D） 4-hour subjects were more impaired than 6-hour subjects 8 Why did Gregory Belenky restrict his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hours? （ A） Because he could acquire more precise information. （ B） Because he could provide differ

36、ent tests. （ C） Because he could find out the utmost effects of sleep. （ D） Because he could observe the relationship between sleep and cognition. 8 There are more than 300 million of us in the United States, and sometimes it seems like were all friends on Facebook. But the sad truth is that America

37、ns are lonelier than ever. Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, to 25 percent, according to Duke University researchers. Unfortunately, as a new study linking women to increased risk of heart disease shows, all this

38、 loneliness can be detrimental to our health. The bad news doesnt just affect women. Social isolation in all adults has been linked to a raft of physical and mental ailments, including sleep disorders, high blood pressure, and an increased risk of depression and suicide. How lonely you feel today ac

39、tually predicts how well youll sleep tonight and how depressed youll feel a year from now, says John T. Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and coauthor of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. Studies have shown that loneliness can cause stress levels to r

40、ise and can weaken the immune system. Lonely people also tend to have less healthy lifestyles, drinking more alcohol, eating more fattening food, and exercising less than those who are not lonely. Though more Americans than ever are living alone (25 percent of US households, up from 7 percent in 194

41、0), the connection between single-living and loneliness is in fact quite weak. “Some of the most profound loneliness can happen when other people are present,“ says Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. Take college freshmen: even though theyre surrounded by people almo

42、st all the time, many feel incredibly isolated during the first quarter of the school year with their friends and family members far away, Cacioppo says. Studies have shown that how lonely freshmen will feel can be predicted by how many miles they are from home. By the second quarter, however, most

43、freshmen have found social replacements for their high-school friends. Unfortunately, as we age, it becomes more difficult to recreate those social relationships. And that can be a big problem as America becomes a more transient society, with an increasing number of Americans who say that theyre wil

44、ling to move away from home for a job. Loneliness can be relative; it has been defined as an aversive emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between a persons desired levels of social interaction and the contact theyre actually receiving. People tend to measure themselves against others, feel

45、ing particularly alone in communities where social connection is the norm. Thats why collectivist cultures, like those in Southern Europe, have higher levels of loneliness than individualist cultures, Cacioppo says. For the same reason, isolated individuals feel most acutely alone on holidays like C

46、hristmas Eve or Thanksgiving, when most people are surrounded by family and friends. Still, loneliness is a natural biological signal that we all have. Indeed, loneliness serves an adaptive purpose, making us protect and care for one another. Loneliness essentially puts the brain on high alert, enco

47、uraging us not to eat leftovers from the refrigerator but to call a friend and eat out. Certain situational factors can trigger loneliness, but long-term feelings of emptiness and isolation are partly genetic, Cacioppo says. Whats inherited is not loneliness itself, but rather sensitivity to disconn

48、ection. Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites should serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction, Cacioppo says. For people who feel

49、 satisfied and loved in their day-to-day life, social media can be a reassuring extension. For those who are already lonely, Facebook status updates are just a reminder of how much better everyone else is at making friends and having fun. So how many friends do you need to avoid loneliness? An introvert might need one confidante not to feel lonely, whereas an extrovert might require two, three, or four bosom buddies. Experts say its not the quantity of social relationships but the quality that really matt