1、上海外国语大学考研基础英语真题 2008年及答案解析(总分：150.00，做题时间：90 分钟)abrasive adaptable bath behalf challenge clear crowded distracting edge face find foot go gold hospital key land live open other patient ration recognize same soul take trace track world worthy All three winners of this year“s Nobel Prize for Medicine
2、are eminent scientists, but Mario Capecchi is the one with the spiral-staircase stow: the starving, homeless Italian street kid who found his way to America, to Harvard, to Utah, ever the refugee, before finally arriving at eternal glory and the Nobel Prize. It“s in many ways a familiar tale, Oliver
3、 Twist meets Albert Einstein, the pilgrim who comes to the promised land expecting, as he says, “the roads to be paved in 1 . What I found actually was just opportunity.“ But his story also has enough nice serrated edges to 2 our theories about genes and genius and what really makes us who we are. Y
4、ou could say the visionary geneticist had a 3 genetic edge. Capecchi“s grandmother was a painter, his uncle a renowned physicist, and his mother Lucy Ramberg an expat American poet 4 in a chalet in the Italian Alps when Mario was born in 1937. She had fallen in with a group of bohemian writers who b
5、elieved, her son says with just a 5 of bemusement, that “they could wipe out Fascism and Nazism with a pen.“ After the Gestapo came in 1941 to take her to Dachau, Mario 6 on the streets. He was 4 years old. All children have their own normal; they have not yet seen any worlds other than their own. C
6、apecchi“s 7 was an uncontrolled experiment in resilience. “I never felt sorry for myself,“ he recalls. “Children are remarkably 8 . Put them in a situation, and they simply will do whatever it is they need to do.“ For his band of urchins, that meant a cunning methodical pursuit of food and shelter.
7、They worked together like raptors, one child 9 the street vendors so another could steal the fruit. Capecchi finally landed in a 10 in Reggio Emilia, where he could starve more systematically. The daily 11 was a piece of bread and some chicory coffee, and to keep the children from running off, “they
8、 12 all of our clothes away.“ He lay on a bed with no sheets, no blankets, feverish with hunger. It was there he learned the art of 13 plotting as he imagined all the ways he might escape and the obstacles he“d 14 to do so. In 1945, when American soldiers liberated Dachau, Lucy went hunting for her
9、son. She scoured hospital records, searching for more than a year before she 15 him down. It was on his 9th birthday, Oct. 6, 1946, that the mother he scarcely 16 arrived, a new Tyrolean outfit in hand, including the hat with the feather. She took him to Rome, where he had his first 17 in six years,
10、 and ultimately to the New World, where they settled in Quaker Commune outside Philadelphia. Creativity, Capecchi once said, comes from “the 18 juxtaposition“ of life experiences. His old life and new one certainly rubbed each other raw. Some teachers wrote off the feral boy who had never set 19 in
11、a school and spoke no English; but others gave him paints and told him to make murals to communicate. One day he was beating up the 20 third-graders, since that was what he knew how to do. And soon he was beating up older kids on 21 of his peers. “That gave me a position,“ he says, “some social stan
12、ding.“ Capecchi ultimately 22 his way to Harvard, the center of the universe in the early days of molecular biology. But he felt 23 by colleagues whose rivalries consumed them as much as their research. So he set off for the University of Utah, where the sight lines suited him better and collegialit
13、y was the 24 to success. He lives in a house high over a canyon. “I love looking across long distance,“ he says. “I think it sort of 25 up my mind.“ This vista is necessary for his work as well as his 26 . Capecchi looks at science as a series of circles: the smallest circle is the one in which ever
14、yone is doing the 27 thing. As you move farther out “fewer people are willing to go there, but you“re charting new area. 28 too far. Step out of bounds, and you“re in science fiction. So you have to be careful, But you want to be as close to the 29 as possible.“ When he first proposed manipulating m
15、ouse genes to help model disease, the NIH gatekeepers thought he was over the line, “Not 30 of pursuit,“ they said of his grant proposals. Happily Capecchi ignored them. Now he triumphed in spite of his ordeals.（分数：30.00）In his 1988 best seller A Brief history of Time, Stephen Hawking made readers w
16、onder: if the universe is expanding, where is it expanding to? Now Hawking has teamed up his daughter, Lucy 1 Hawking, to write George“s Secret Key to the Universe, the first in a trilogy of novels directed at the fertile minds of children. In an interview on e-mail, Hawking explains: 2 “The aim of
17、the book is to encourage children“s sense of wonder at the universe. We want them to look up outward. 3 Only then will they be able to make the right decisions to safeguard the future of the human race.“ George“s Secret Key to the Universe , aimed 9-to 11-year-olds, 4 tells the story of a young boy,
18、 George, and a cheery astrophysicist, Eric, who talking computer opens a portal to the known 5 universe. The duo don spacesuits and use the portal to search for planets to which humanity can escape the irreversible 6 warming of the earth. Along the way, George and the reader learn from the basics of
19、 astrophysics and astronomy through 7 illustrations and captioned photographs. “You don“t need actual secret key to explore the universe,“ George ultimately 8 discovers. “There“s one that everyone can use. It“s called physics.“ The Hawkings portray the universe as harmony and 9 largely benign. But o
20、ur present know ledge of the universe suggests that it is, in fact, a desolate and often violent expanse place in 10 which humankind plays an inconsequential role.（分数：20.00）四、Passage One(总题数：1，分数：9.00)This dictionary is for people who want to use modern English. It offers accurate and detailed infor
21、mation on the way modern English is used in all kinds of communication. It is a useful guide to writing and speaking English as well as an aid to reading and understanding. This dictionary looks rather like most others if you don“t look too closely. Actually it is quite new and different. The techni
22、ques used to compile it are new and use advanced computer technology. For the user, the kind of information is different, the quality of information is different, and the presentation of the information is different. For the first time, a dictionary has been compiled by the thorough examination of a
23、 representative group of English text, spoken and written, running to many millions of words. This means that in addition to all the tools of the conventional dictionary makerswide reading and experience of English, other dictionaries and of course eyes and earsthis dictionary is based on hard, meas
24、urable evidence. No major uses are missed, and the number of times a use occurs has a strong influence on the way the entries are organized. Equally, the large group of texts, called the corpus, gives us reasonable grounds for omitting many uses and word-forms that do not occur in it. It is difficul
25、t for a conventional dictionary, in the absence of evidence, to decide what to leave out, and a lot of quite misleading information is thus preserved in the tradition of lexicography. This dictionary makes a break with such traditions. We have gone back to basics and collected many millions of words
26、, and put them into a very large computer. The dictionary team has had daily access to about 20 million words, with many more in specialized stores. The words came from books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, conversation, radio and television broadcasts. The sources are gratefully acknow
27、ledged on page xxii. The aim was to provide a fair representation of contemporary English. No set of texts, however large, can be fully relied on; all the time the information from the texts has been analysed and appraised by a team of lexicographers, whose professional knowledge has also been used
28、wherever there is only a small amount of evidence of the usage of a word or phrase. The quality of information in this dictionary is different from others. With our textural evidence it is possible to be precise about the shape of phrases and the extent of their variation; the relative importance of
29、 different senses of a word; and the typical environment in which a word or phrase is used. Even when statements like this are already familiar, they are made with a different kind of authority in this book.（分数：9.00）(1).According to the passage, this dictionary differs from most others, except in _.
30、（分数：1.50）A.the quality of printingB.the quality of informationC.the use of advanced technologyD.the use of measurable evidence(2).This dictionary differs from a traditional one in that the compilers _.（分数：1.50）A.collect relevant dataB.count word frequenciesC.read as widely as possibleD.refer to exis
31、ting dictionaries(3).This dictionary does not claim to include _.（分数：1.50）A.all the existing wordsB.frequently used wordsC.modem usage of wordsD.a wide coverage of words(4).Which of the following is omitted in this dictionary?（分数：1.50）A.The different form of phrases.B.The context in which a word is
32、used.C.The full scope of meaning of a word.D.The order of importance of meanings of a word.(5).In the passage the author mainly emphasizes the difference in data _.（分数：1.50）A.collectingB.presentingC.preservingD.processing(6).The whole passage is _ the dictionary.（分数：1.50）A.a user“s guide toB.an intr
33、oduction toC.a research essay onD.an advertisement for五、Passage Two(总题数：1，分数：7.50)When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is “debt“. And from “debt“ it“s just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like “payola“, “kickback“, and “bribery“. At least, that“s
34、 how it“s been since this spring, when news broke that student-loan companies had been using unsavory and possibly illegal tactics to get preferential treatment from university financial-aid-officers. At some universities, officers were given stock options in companies whose loans they recommended t
35、o incoming students, while at others lenders offered millions of dollars in perks to schools that would stop doing business with competitors. In response, the Senate passed a bill toughening rules against “inducements“ from lenders to administrators. All well and good, but it leaves untouched a more
36、 fundamental scandal: the huge profits that lenders make from student loans are being earned on the government“s dime. For decades, student-loan companies have one of the cushiest businesses in America. We want collage students to be able to finance their education a reasonable rates. But banks are
37、understandably leery of lending to people with no collateral and uncertain future earnings. So we provide incentives to lend. The federal government, for instance, guarantees the so-called Stafford loans that college students get if a student defaults, the government will pay off almost the entire l
38、oan. On top of that, the government hands out billions of dollars in subsidies to lenders every year, all but insuring them a steady profit. In effect, lenders get a guaranteed return with very little risk. This convoluted process is good at making student-loan companies rich-Sallie Mac, the biggest
39、 issuer of student loans, earned $1.3 billion last year, with a return on equity that dwarf most other companies. But it“s not very good at getting government money to students cheaply and efficiently. President Bush“s 2007 budget show, for instance, that it“s four times as expensive for the governm
40、ent to subsidize and guarantee private loans as for it to issue those loans itself. In other words, the current system is not just corrupt. It“s also inefficient. So what“s to be done? At it happens, there“s evidence in the history of student aid itself, which stretches back to the G. I. Bill, when
41、the government committed itself to paying for the college education of returning veterans. An overwhelming success, the bill involved no middlemen: the government paid tuition fees directly to colleges. Talking of the government running anything, of course, makes people anxious, but the truth is tha
42、t the government is already running the student-loan market. The problem is that up to now it“s been run in the interests of student-loan companies. Maybe it“s time to start running it in the interests of students.（分数：7.50）(1).What is the author“s revelation about student-loan companies?（分数：1.50）A.T
43、hey bribe university financial-aid officers.B.They make profits on the government“s money.C.They try to “induce“ administrators for benefits.D.They use unlawful methods to get preferential treatment.(2).What will happen if a student does not pay back his loan to the lender?（分数：1.50）A.The lender will
44、 lose the money.B.The government will pay the lender.C.The university will have to intervene.D.The student will have uncertain future earnings.(3).What does “it“ (para. 3, line 5) refer to?（分数：1.50）A.the U.S. government.B.the current loan system.C.the private loan company.D.President Bush“s 2007 bud
45、get.(4).The author seems to think it is better for the government _.（分数：1.50）A.to pass a new bill like the G. I. BillB.to run the student-loan market itselfC.to pay tuition fees directly to collegesD.to reduce the subsidies for private lenders(5).What is the passage mainly about?（分数：1.50）A.Problems
46、in student loansB.Misuse of government subsidiesC.Bribery of student-loan companiesD.Corruption of university financial-aid officers六、Passage Three(总题数：1，分数：9.00)It can be argued that the best known baby boomer of all is the computer itself. But it would be unfair to say that the computer has transf
47、ormed the lives of boomers (those born in the years following World War ) and leave it at that. The boomers themselves can take credit for shaping the course of this technology if not the entire direction of the digital revolution. In the 1950s, computers were like. the 1950s. They were giant monoch
48、rome machines tended by people wearing white shirts and black ties. They filled a room and were used for tasks like accounting, code-breaking and statistical calculation. Even after huge breakthroughs in transistors and microprocessors in the early 1970s, those in charge of companies like IBM or Dig
49、ital Equipment Corporation felt that nothing could be more absurd than a personal computer. Who could possibly want a computer of one“s own? What would you use it for? What really led the boomers to become pioneers of the PC revolution was a sense of possibility. “They saw the technology as mind-expanding,“ says John Markoff, author of “What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry“, “It was one of a series of quests going on, part of an attempt to break out the confines of the suburban realities of the 1950s.“ That
