1、2008年武汉大学英语专业（基础英语）真题试卷及答案解析(总分：102.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、选词填空(总题数：1，分数：30.00)Fill in the numbered blank with proper words. Among the 20 words given, only 15 should be used. Make sure the words come in correct forms in terms of spelling, grammar and meaning.（分数：30.00）填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项
2、 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_翻译2.Keep up with the Joneses.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_3.Rub shoulders with the guy.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_4.Turn one“s nose up.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_5.Keep a civil tongue in one“s head.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_6.Read the writing on the wall.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_7.We ar
3、e ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_8.For the mighty army of consumers, the ultimate applications of the computer revolution are still around the bend of a silicon circuit.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_9.I suspect that t
4、here is quite a lot of lore stored away in the Colonel“s otherwise not very interesting mind.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_10.They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_11.The war acted merely as a catalytic
5、agent in this breakdown of the Victorian social structure.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_三、阅读理解(总题数：3，分数：30.00)The decline of traditional religion in the West has not removed the need for men and women to find a deeper meaning behind existence. Why is the world the way it is and how do we, as conscious individuals
6、, fit into the great scheme? There is a growing feeling that science, especially what is known as the new physics, can provide answer where religion remains vague and faltering. Many people in search of a meaning to their lives are finding enlightenment in the revolutionary developments at the front
7、iers of science. Much to the bewilderment of professional scientists, quasi-religious cults are being formed around such unlikely topic as quantum physics, space-time relativity, black holes and the big bang. How can physics, with its reputation for cold precision and objective materialism, provide
8、such fertile soil for the mystical? The truth is that the spirit of scientific inquiry has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past 50 years. The twin revolutions of the theory of relativity, with its space-warps and time-warps, and the quantum theory, which reveals the shadowy and unsubs
9、tantial nature of atoms, have demolished the classical image of a clockwork universe slavishly unfolding along a predetermined pathway. Replacing this sterile mechanism is a world full of shifting indeterminism and subtle interactions which have no counterpart in daily experience. To study the new p
10、hysics is to embark on a journey of wonderment and paradox, to glimpse the universe in a novel perspective, in which subject and object, mind and matter, force and field, become intertwined. Even the creation of the universe itself has fallen within the province of scientific inquiry. The new cosmol
11、ogy provides, for the first time, a consistent picture of how physical structures, including space and time, came to exist out of nothing. We are moving towards an understanding in which matter, force, order and creation are unified into a single descriptive theme. Many of us who work in fundamental
12、 physics are deeply impressed by the harmony and order which pervades the physical world. To me the laws of the universe, from quarks to quasars, dovetail together so felicitously that the impression there is something behind it all seems overwhelming. The laws of physics are so remarkably clever th
13、at they can surely only be a manifestation of genius.（分数：6.00）(1).The writer says people nowadays find that traditional religion is_.（分数：2.00）A.a form of reassuranceB.inadequate to their needsC.responding to scientific progressD.developing in strange was(2).What does the writer probably have in mind
14、 when he in paragraph 3 refers to the classical image of a clockwork universe?（分数：2.00）A.Darwin“s theory of evolution.B.Calvinistic interpretation of the universe.C.Newton“s discovery about the gravity.D.The First Industrial Revolution.(3).The writer of the passage is most likely_.（分数：2.00）A.a minis
15、ter of religionB.a science fiction writerC.a research scientistD.a journalistOnce upon a time there was a prince who unwisely confided to the media that while tending his beloved garden, he often talked to his plants. He also warned his future subjects about losing touch with their natural surroundi
16、ngs and their rich cultural heritage. But the people scoffed and said it was the fuddy-duddy Prince who was out of touch. And as for talking to his plantswell, they shook their heads and remembered the madness of the Prince“s forebear, King George III, who famously struck up a conversation with a tr
17、ee that he had mistaken for the King of Prussia. These days Britain“s Prince of Wales is still considered a tad eccentric: after all, who in his right mind would have lost the love of the fairy-tale Princess Diana? But increasingly, Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor(who is not only Prince of Wale
18、s but also, inter alia, Duke of Cornwall, Lord of the Isle and Great Steward of Scotland)is winning applause for his not-so-crazy campaign to combat what he calls “the wanton destruction that has taken place. in the name of progress.“ For 30 years the Prince has been in the forefront of efforts to p
19、romote kinder, gentler farming methods; protect Britain“s countryside from urban sprawl; improve city landscapes; and safeguard the nation“s architectural heritage. And whereas his was once a lonely if plumy voice crying in the wilderness, the Prince has seen many of his once maverick opinions becom
20、e mainstream. Charles is not the first royal concerned about nature. Mad King George dabbled in botany when he wasn“t losing his mind or the American colonies, and Charles“s father, the Duke of Edinburgh, has long supported wildlife causes. But it is Charles who has become the crusader, with a visio
21、n of Britain that may border on the romantic but is in synch with Britons alarmed by what is happening to their green and pleasant land. He has the energy and dedication to get things done. “My problem,“ he has said, “is that I become carried away by enthusiasm to try to improve things, and also fee
22、l very strongly that his only way to progress is by setting examples and then hoping others will eventually follow.“ An example people are following is organic farming, which Charles has adopted wholeheartedly on his own farmlands in the Duchy of Cornwall and surrounding his country home at Highgrov
23、e in western England. Charles once noted that when he decided to go organic, which means forswearing artificial fertilizers and pesticides, the experts were very polite, “but what they were saying about this latest demonstration of insanity once they were out of earshot can only be surmised.“ Today
24、the experts have been confounded. The Duchy“s Home Farm near Highgrove is 100% organic and organic produce is in high demand, fetching premium prices in shops and supermarkets. “Seeing is believing“ is one of Charles“ favorite saying, no doubt repeated when the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture recently
25、 paid Highgrove a visit. And it“s a safe bet that the American visitor received an earful on Charles“ other farming concern: genetically modified crops. Once again the Prince has shown himself to be ahead of the curve. Back in December 1995 he pronounced himself “profoundly apprehensive“ about the b
26、rave new world of genetically modified organisms and complained of the “confidence bordering on arrogance“ with which they are promoted. The Prince practices what he preaches, and a sign by the lane leading up to his Home Farm announces that “you are entering a gmofree zone.“ Charles“ philosophy is
27、simply expressed. “We should,“ he says, be adopting a “gentler, more considered approach, seeking always to work with the grain of nature in making better, more sustainable use of what we have.“（分数：8.00）(1).According to the last sentence in the second paragraph, Charles“s view on the saving of natur
28、e was once regarded as_.（分数：2.00）A.sentimentalB.idealisticC.independentD.peculiar(2).“in synch with“ in the third paragraph may probably be closet in meaning to_.（分数：2.00）A.correspondinglyB.synonymouslyC.similarlyD.simultaneously(3).When he first decided to go organic, Charles said that the experts_
29、.（分数：2.00）A.politely showed their worriesB.thought that his view was mandC.were uncertain about his decisionD.resisted on their own opinions(4).In the writer“s opinion, the most important difference between Charles and his forbear in their concern about nature is that the former is_.（分数：2.00）A.actio
30、n-drivenB.less eccentricC.more romanticD.more energeticEveryone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people w
31、ith crazy-sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they“re turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get it touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, sayin
32、g, “Our computer was in error, and adjustment is being made in your account.“ I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computer is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe. A good computer can think clea
33、rly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides. It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. When you walk into one of t
34、hose great halls now built for the huge machines, and stand listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But re
35、al thinking, and dreaming, are other matters. On the other hand, the evidences of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in pos
36、sibilities. Mistakes are at very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choi
37、ces have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We built to make mistakes, coded for error. A good laboratory, like a good bank or a corporation or government, has to run like a computer. Almost everything is done flawlessly, by the book, and all the numbers add u
38、p to the predicted sums. The days go by. And then, if it is a lucky day, and a lucky laboratory, somebody makes a mistake: the wrong buffer, something in one of the blanks, a decimal misplaced in reading counts, the warm room off by a degree and a half, a mouse out of his box, or just misreading of
39、the day“s protocol. Whatever, when the results come in, something is obviously screwed up, and then the action can begin.The misreading is not the important error; it opens the way. The next step is the crucial one. If the investigator can bring himself to say, “But even so, look at that!“ then the
40、new finding, whatever it is, is ready for snatching. What is needed, for progress to be made, is the base on the error. Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand. With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing
41、, there is an amiable understanding that One is right and the other wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides, and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountai
42、ns of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments. It may be that this is a uniquely human gift, perhaps even stipulated in our genetic instructions. Other creatures do not seem to have DNA sequences for making mistakes as a routine part of daily living,
43、certainly not for programmed error as a guide for action. We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of selection in such situations can lift us o
44、nto totally new ground. This process is called exploration and is based on human fallibility. If we had only a single center in our brain, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made, instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurons that provide
45、for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we could only stay the way we are today, struck fast. The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all
46、their good side, never make mistake charming minor mistakes, but they get this way by trying to mimic their masters. Fish are flawless in everything they do. Individual cells in a tissue are mindless machines, perfect in their performance, as absolutely inhuman as bees. We should have this in mind a
47、s we become dependent on more complex computers for the arrangement of our affairs. Give the computers their heads, I say; let them go their way. If we learn to do this, turning our heads to one side and wincing while the work proceeds, the possibilities for the future of mankind, and computer kind,
48、 are limitless. Your average good computer can make calculations in all instant, which would take a lifetime of slide rules or any of us. Think of what we could gain from the near infinity of precise, machine-made miscomputation which is now so easily within our grasp. We could begin the solving of some of our hardest problems. How, for instance, should we go about organizing ourselves for social living on a planetary scale, now that we hav
