1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 481 及答案解析(总分：60.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：6，分数：60.00)1.Section II Reading Comprehension（分数：10.00）_2.Part B（分数：10.00）_AHowever, the culture of Atlantis began to decay. Plato recounts that the people changed their law-respecting way of life. They began to disregard their re
2、ligion, gradually living with less restraint and piety. They began to value luxuries, wealth, and idleness. Then in one day and one night the continent was completely destroyed. Plato concludes that a decadent society deserved such punishment. But two questions remain unanswered. Where was Atlantis,
3、 and where did it go? BThis story intrigues people so much that many have been searching for the explanation of the “lost continent“ for 23 centuries. There are three probable locations for Atlantis: the Azores, in the Atlantic Ocean:the Bimini Islands, in the Caribbean Sea:and Santorini, or Kallist
4、e, in the Aegean Sea. Several facts make the Azores a possible location. In the Azores and near Iceland there have been many volcanic islands that have risen from the sea and then disappeared later. Also, Plato was sure that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, as the name implies. The theory that Atlantis
5、 was in the Azores has only recently been refuted. CThe Greek philosopher Plato(approximately 427 to 347 B.C.)is the primary source for the legend of Atlantis. His description of the “lost continent“ still excites the modern mind. Plato s Atlantis was a kind of paradisea vast island “larger than Lib
6、ya and Asia put together“with magnificent mountain ranges, green plains that were full of every variety of animal, and luxuriant gardens where the fruit was “fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance.“ The earth was rich with precious metals, especially the one prized most highly by the ancients,
7、orichalc, an alloy of copper, perhaps brass. DThe second credible possibility for Atlantis is in the Bahamas, in the Biminis. In 1958 some strange structures were noticed on the seabed under the water. Curious geometric structuresregular polygons, circles, triangles, rectangles , and completely stra
8、ight linesextend over several miles. A giant “wall“ several hundred yards long was found submerged in the waters off the small island of North Bimini. The wall has two branches, running at right angles, in perfectly straight lines. The construction, which is precisely perpendicular, is made of massi
9、ve stone blocks over 16 feet square. Part of the structure even resembles a harbor with a dock for boats. The geology of the Bahamas shows, however, that the submersion of the plateau had been caused by the melting of the polar glaciers that raised the level of the worlds oceans. This diminishes the
10、 possibility that Atlantis was in the Caribbean Sea. There were no violent eruptions, merely the slowly rising ocean from approximately 8, 000 to 7, 000 B.C EThe capital of Atlantis was beautifully constructed in white, black, and red stone. The city was carefully planned in five zones built in perf
11、ect concentric circles. Each circular zone was built inside a larger one. Plato says that the capital s canals and its nearby port were “full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who kept up din and clatter night and day.“ The city was full of life, activity and culture. FThe last reasona
12、ble possibility to date is that Atlantis was located in the Aegean, not far from Crete. However, mis assumption cannot be proved beyond doubt, and the disappearance of Atlantis remains a lasting mystery. GThirty-five hundred years ago, a tremendous explosion blew apart an island and completely destr
13、oyed a civilization called Atlantis. Where was Atlantis? What kind of people lived there? Why and how was it destroyed? No one knows the answers to these questions , but there have been hundreds of guesses and theories. Order: （分数：10.00）填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_AMost of us know what its li
14、ke to stay in a job after its stopped being satisfying, or to take on a project thats too big and be reluctant to admit it. CEOs have been known to allocate manpower and money to projects long after it becomes clear that they are failing. The costs to a person who does not know when to quit can be e
15、normous. In economics its known as sunk cost fallacy. While we recognize the fallacy almost immediately in others, it s harder to see in ourselves. Why? BIn one of their studies, they put participants into either a promotion or prevention focus. Next, each participant was told to imagine that he or
16、she was CEO of an aviation company that had committed $ 10 million to developing a plane that can t be detected by radar. With the project near completion and $ 9 million already spent, a rival company announces the availability of their own radar-blank plane, which is both superior in performance a
17、nd lower in cost. The question put to CEOs was simple: do you invest the remaining $ 1 million and finish your company s plane, or cut your losses and move on? CSunk costs are the investments that youve put into something that you cant get back out. They are the years you spent training for a profes
18、sion you hate. They are the thousands of dollars you spent on redecorating your living room, only to find that you hate living in it. Once youve realized that you probably won t succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn t matter how much time and effort you ve already put into so
19、mething. DRecent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui demonstrates an effective way to be sure you are making the best decisions when things go awry: Focus on what you have to gain by moving on, rather than what you have to lose. When people think about g
20、oals in terms of potential gain, thats a “promotion focus“, which makes them more comfortable making mistakes and accepting losses. When people adopt a “prevention focus“ , they think about goals in terms of what they could lose if they dont succeed, so they become more sensitive to sunk costs. This
21、 is the focus people usually adopt, if unconsciously, when deciding whether or not to walk away. It usually tells us not to walk away, even when we should. EThere are several powerful, largely unconscious psychological forces at work. We may throw good money after bad or waste time in a dead-end rel
22、ationship because we haven t come up with an alternative: or because we dont want to admit to our friends and family, or to ourselves, that we were wrong. But the most likely cause is this innate, overwhelming aversion to sunk costs. FThe two researchers found that participants with a prevention foc
23、us stayed the course and invested the remaining $ 1 million roughly 80 percent of the time. The odds of making that mistake were significantly reduced by adopting a promotion focus: those people invested the remaining $ 1 million less than 60 percent of the time. When we see our goals in terms of wh
24、at we can gain, rather than what we might lose, we are more likely to see a doomed endeavor for what it is. GAs studies by behavioral economists like Daniel Kahnemen and Dan Ariely show, people are gene-rally loss-averse. Putting in a lot, only to end up with nothing to show for it, is just too awfu
25、l for most of us to seriously consider. The problem is one of focus. We worry far too much about what we 11 lose if we just move on, instead of focusing on the costs of not moving on: more wasted time and effort, more unhap-piness, and more missed opportunities. Order: （分数：10.00）填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:
26、_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_A“I just don t know how to motivate them to do a better job. We re in a budget crunch and I have absolutely no financial rewards at my disposal. In fact, we11 probably have to lay some people off in the near future. It s hard for me to make the job interesting and challenging because
27、it isn t it s boring, routine paperwork, and there isn t much you can do about it.“ B“Finally, I cant say to them that their promotions will hinge on the excellence of their paperwork. First of all, they know its not true. If their performance is adequate, most are more likely to get promoted just b
28、y staying on the force a certain number of years than for some specific outstanding act. Second, they were trained to do the job they do out in the streets, not to fill out forms. All through their career it is the arrests and interventions that get noticed.“ C“Ive got a real problem with my officer
29、s. They come on the force as young, inexperienced men, and we send them out on the street, either in cars or on a walk. They seem to like the contact they have with the public, the action involved in crime prevention, and the apprehension of criminals. They also like helping people out at fires, acc
30、idents, and other emergencies.“ D“Some people have suggested a number of things like using conviction records as a performance criterion. However, we know thats not fairtoo many other things are involved. Bad paperwork increases the chance that you lose in court, but good paperwork doesn t necessari
31、ly mean you 11 win. We tried setting up team competitions based on the excellence of the reports, but the guys caught on to that pretty quickly. No one was getting any type of reward for winning the competition, and they figured why should they labor when there was no payoff.“ E“The problem occurs w
32、hen they get back to the station. They hate to do the paperwork, and because they dislike it, the job is frequently put off or done inadequately. This lack of attention hurts us later on when we get to court. We need clear, factual reports. They must be highly detailed and unambiguous. As soon as on
33、e part of a report is shown to be inadequate or incorrect, the rest of the report is suspect. Poor reporting probably causes us to lose more cases than any other factor.“ F“So I just dont know what to do. Ive been groping in the dark in a number of years. And I hope that this seminar will shed some
34、light on this problem of mine and help me out in my future work.“ GA large metropolitan city government was putting on a number of seminars for administrators, managers and executives of various departments throughout the city. At one of these sessions the topic to be discussed was motivationhow we
35、can get public servants motivated to do a good job. The difficulty of a police captain became the central focus of the discussion. Order: （分数：10.00）填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_AAll in all, the numbers suggest that aging is simply different in the active. BAs it turned out, the cyclists did no
36、t show their age. On almost all measures, their physical functioning remained fairly stable across the decades and was much closer to that of young adults than of people their age. As a group, even the oldest cyclists had younger peoples levels of balance, reflexes, metabolic health and memory abili
37、ty. CActive older people resemble much younger people physiologically, according to a new study of the effects of exercise on aging. The findings suggest that many of our expectations about the inevitability of physical decline with advancing years may be incorrect and that how we age is, to a large
38、 degree, up to us. Aging remains a surprisingly mysterious process. A wealth of past scientific research has shown that many bodily and cellular processes change in undesirable ways as we grow older. But science has not been able to establish definitively whether such changes result primarily from t
39、he passage of time or result at least in part from lifestyle. DThis conundrum is particularly true in terms of inactivity. Older people tend to be quite sedentary nowadays, and being sedentary affects health, making it difficult to separate the effects of not moving from those of getting older. In t
40、he new study, which was published this week in The Journal of Physiology, scientists at Kings College London and the University of Birmingham in England decided to use a different approach. They removed inactivity as a factor in their study of aging by looking at the health of older people who move
41、quite a bit. EThe scientists then ran each volunteer through a large array of physical and cognitive tests. The scientists determined each cyclists endurance capacity, muscular mass and strength, pedaling power, metabolic health, balance, memory function, bone density and reflexes. The researchers c
42、ompared the results of cyclists in the study against each other and also against standard benchmarks of supposedly normal aging. If a particular tests numbers were similar among the cyclists of all ages, the researchers considered, then that measure would seem to be more dependent on activity than o
43、n age. FTo accomplish that goal, the scientists recruited 85 men and 41 women aged between 55 and 79 who bicycle regularly. The volunteers were all serious recreational riders but not competitive athletes. The men had to be able to ride at least 62 miles in six and a half hours and the women 37 mile
44、s in five and a half hours, benchmarks typical of a high degree of fitness in older people. GSome aspects of aging did, however, prove to be ineluctable. The oldest cyclists had less muscular power and mass than those in their 50s and early 60s and considerably lower overall aerobic capacities. Age
45、does seem to reduce our endurance and strength to some extent, Dr. Harridge said, even if we exercise. But even so, both of those measures were higher among the oldest cyclists than would be considered average among people aged 70 or above. Order: （分数：10.00）填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_填空项 1:_考研英语（阅读
46、）模拟试卷 481 答案解析(总分：60.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：6，分数：60.00)1.Section II Reading Comprehension（分数：10.00）_解析：2.Part B（分数：10.00）_解析：AHowever, the culture of Atlantis began to decay. Plato recounts that the people changed their law-respecting way of life. They began to disregard their reli
47、gion, gradually living with less restraint and piety. They began to value luxuries, wealth, and idleness. Then in one day and one night the continent was completely destroyed. Plato concludes that a decadent society deserved such punishment. But two questions remain unanswered. Where was Atlantis, and where did it go? BThis story intrigues people so much that many have been searching for the e
