1、考博英语-206 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)Doing a PhD is certainly not for everybody, and I do not recommend it for most people. However, I am really glad I got my PhD rather than just getting a job after finishing my Bachelor“s. The number one reason is that I learned a hell
2、 of a lot doing the PhD, and most of the things I learned I would never get exposed to in a typical software engineering job. 1 The process of doing a PhD trains you to do research: to read research papers, to run experiments, to write papers, to give talks. It also teaches you how to figure out wha
3、t problem needs to be solved. You gain a very sophisticated technical background doing the PhD, and having your work subject to the intense scrutiny of the academic peer-review process-not to mention your thesis committee. I think of the PhD a little like the Grand Tour, a tradition in the 16th and
4、17th centuries where youths would travel around Europe, getting a rich exposure to high society in France, Italy, and Germany, learning about art, architecture, language, literature, fencing, riding all of the essential liberal arts that a gentleman was expected to have experience with to be an infl
5、uential member of society. Doing a PhD is similar: You get an intense exposure to every subfield of Computer Science, and have to become the leading world“s expert in the area of your dissertation work. 2 The top PhD programs set an incredibly high bar: a lot of coursework, teaching experience, qual
6、ifying exams, a thesis defense, and of course making a groundbreaking research contribution in your area. Having to go through this process gives you a tremendous amount of technical breadth and depth. Some important stuff I learned doing a PhD: How to read and critique research papers. As a grad st
7、udent you have to read thousands of research papers, extract their main ideas, critique the methods and presentation, and synthesize their contributions with your own research. As a result you are exposed to a wide range of CS topics, approaches for solving problems, sophisticated algorithms, and sy
8、stem designs. This is not just about gaining the knowledge in those papers (which is pretty important), but also about becoming conversant in the scientific literature. How to write papers and give talks. Being fluent in technical communications is a really important skill for engineers. I“ve notice
9、d a big gap between the software engineers I“ve worked with who have PhDs and those who don“t in this regard. 3 PhD-trained folks tend to give clear, well-organized talks and know how to write up their work and visualize the result of experiments. As a result they can be much more influential. How t
10、o run experiments and interpret the results: I can“t overstate how important this is. A systems-oriented PhD requires that you run a zillion measurements and present the results in a way that is both bullet-proof to peer-review criticism (in order to publish) and visually compelling. Every aspect of
11、 your methodology will be critiqued (by your advisor, your co-authors, your paper reviewers) and you will quickly learn how to run the right experiments, and do it right. 4 How to figure out what problem to work on: This is probably the most important aspect of PhD training. Doing a PhD will force y
12、ou to cast away from shore and explore the boundary of human knowledge. (Matt Might“s cartoon on this is a great visualization of this.) I think that at least 80% of making a scientific contribution is figuring out what problem to tackle: a problem that is at once interesting, open, and going to hav
13、e impact if you solve it. There are lots of open problems that the research community is not interested in (c.f., writing an operating system kernel in Haskell). There are many interesting problems that have been solved over and over and over (c.f., file system block layout optimization; wireless mu
14、lti hop routing). There“s a real trick to picking good problems, and developing a taste for it is a key skill if you want to become a technical leader. 5 So I think it“s worth having a PhD, especially if you want to work on the hardest and most interesting problems. This is true whether you want a c
15、areer in academia, a research lab, or a more traditional engineering role. But as my PhD advisor was fond of saying, “doing a PhD costs you a house.“ (In terms of the lost salary during the PhD years-these days it“s probably more like several houses.（分数：20.00）_6 In the past even as our power grew, m
16、uch of the world saw us, rightly or wrongly, as a moral beacon, as a country somehow largely outside the bloody, gory, oft-tyrannical history that carved its swath across so much of the world during the American Century. Indeed, in many ways, even as cultural elites in once-glorious Old World nation
17、s sneered at upstart, crass, consumerist America, the masses in those nations idealized America as some sort of Promised Land. In many ways, the American Dream of the last 100-some years has been more something dreamed by foreigners from afar, especially those who experienced fascism or Stalinism, t
18、han lived as a universal reality on the ground in the United States. 7 Things look simpler from a distance than they do on the ground. Today, I fear, foreigners slumber (酣睡) with dreamy American smiles on their sleeping faces no more; that intangible faith in the pastel-colored hue and soft contours
19、 of the Dream risks being shattered, replaced instead by an equally simplistic dislike of all things and peoples American. The Pew survey, for example, found that sizable majorities in countries such as Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, Germany, and France believed the war on terror to be largely about the U
20、nited States wanting to control Middle Eastern oil supplies. 8 In other words, the perceptionnever universally held, but held by enough people to help shape our global imageis changing. Once our image abroad was of an exceptional country accruing all the power of empire without the psychology of emp
21、ire; now it is being replaced by something more historically normalthat of a great power determined to preserve and expand its might, for its own selfish interests and not much else. 9 Maybe the American Dream always was little more than marketing hype. But as the savagery_ of the images coming out
22、of Iraq demonstrate all too well, we live in a world where image is if not everything, at least crucial. Perhaps I“m wrong and the American Dream will continue to sweeten the sleep of those living overseas for another century. I certainly hope, very much, that I“m wrongfor a world denuded of the Dre
23、am, however far from complex reality that Dream might have been, would be impoverished indeed. 10 But I worry that that encore I mentioned earlier won“t be nearly as breathtaking or as splendid as the original performance that shaped the first American century.（分数：20.00）_11 When we talk about the da
24、nger of romantic love, we don“t mean danger in the obvious heartbreak wagthe cheap betrayals, the broken promiseswe mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible, educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. Every day, thousands of films, b
25、ooks, articles and TV programs hammer home this messagethat without romance, life is somehow barren. However, there are women who entertain the subversive notion, like an intellectual mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway t
26、o absolute happiness. 12 Their empirical side kicks in and they observe that couples who marry in a haze of adoration and sex are, ten years later throwing china and fighting bitterly over who gets the dog. 13 But the women who notice these contradictions are often afraid to speak them in case they
27、should be labelled cynics. Surely only the most jaded and damaged would challenge the orthodoxy of romantic love. The received wisdom that there is not something wrong with the modern idea of sexual love as ultimate panacea, but that if you don“t get it, there is something wrong with you. You freak,
28、 go back and read the label. 14 We say: the privileging of romantic love over all others, the insistence that it is the one essential incontrovertible element of human happiness, traced all the way back to the caves, is a trap and a snare. The idea that every human heart, since the invention of the
29、wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth. 15 Love is a human constant; it is the interpretation of it that changes. The way that love has been expressed, its significance in daily life have never been immutable or constant. The different kind of love and what they signify are not fixed, what
30、ever the traditionalists may like to tell you. So the modern idea that romantic love is a woman“s highest calling, that she is somehow only half a person without it that if she questions it she is going against all human history, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not an imperative carved in stone
31、; it is a human idea, and human beings are frail and suggestible and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.（分数：20.00）_Genius is something that is difficult to measure quantitatively since it is a unique quality, although most of us can recognize genius when we see it or hear it. 16 By contrast in
32、telligence is possibly easier to quantify and like genius is a polymeric character that can be molded by the environment. Intelligence is a qualitative trait, which does have a genetic component, but it has a single dimension of expression. 17 There are several limitations in measuring intelligence
33、by a linear scale ranging from dull to bright, since individuals differ greatly in their genotypes. Any number of gene combination may predispose an individual to musical genius, or to painting, or to designing computer programs, etc. The possession of any one of these abilities may or may not be as
34、sociated with another. Moreover, the same genotype may be expressed in markedly different ways in markedly different environments. 18 For example, intelligence quotient test scores vary considerably with illness and disease, educational, social and economic levels even the skin color of the examiner
35、 conducting the IQ test may have a significant effect! There is also difficulty in deciding what intelligence should be applied to lean? Is it related to the enquiring mind or to motivation? Consequently comparisons between an IQ test given to a University student and to an Aborigine in Australia wi
36、ll give meaningless results, since the test is most unlikely to measure the same behavior. 19 Not only are the genotypes and the environments of these two individuals totally different, but their motivations for achievement in particular activities will be different. Indeed, as some articles, which
37、the problems mentioned above show, people who believe they can estimate genetic and environmental contributions to differences in intelligence between races are statistically naive. 20 If some races or social groups in the human population can be inferior in intelligence, it opens up the possibility
38、 that some segregationists or politicians could bring in legislation or policies to suppress or even eliminate such races or groups in the population.（分数：20.00）_21 When you are in the business of sending spacecraft to other planets, it is probably wise to do everything you can to keep your space-pro
39、bes sterile (无菌的). NASA, America“s space agency, certainly does so. After all, you would not want bugs from one planet to contaminate another where they might possibly thrive. But according to Curt Mileikowsky, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, this may already have happened natural
40、ly billions of years ago when the solar system was young. For Dr Mileikowsky has taken a century-old idea called panspermia (有生源说), and shown that it is plausible. 22 Panspermia is the theory that life does not start independently on each planet that has it (assuming that other planets do). Rather,
41、it hops from place to place, “infecting“ new worlds as it goes. Supported by experts in biology, geology and celestial mechanics, Dr Mileikowsky argued to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta that this is not as outlandish as it sounds. 23 Bungling (笨手笨脚的) space organizations apart,
42、the only mode of travel open to microbes seems to be meteorites (流星). Most of these are small bits of junk from the asteroid (小行星) belt that have gone off course. But some are rocks that have been flung into space from the surfaces of planets as a result of those planets having been struck by even l
43、arger bits of rock-decent-sized asteroids or comets. 24 If there is life on such a planet, microscopic forms of it will probably live deep inside rocks, as they do on earth. The acceleration of lift-off would not kill something that size. 25 If a rock is large enough, the heat generated as it is thrown clear will be negligible except at its surfacewhere, if anything, melting may even produce an airtight skin to protect any microbes deeper down from the unpleasant vacuum of space.（分数：20.00）_
