1、专业八级-610 及答案解析(总分：100.10，做题时间：90 分钟)一、READING COMPREHENSIO(总题数：2，分数：100.00)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 t
2、he one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One The Internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life“s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users
3、being able to read andif interactivewrite. Building your own site certainly does. Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM“s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice e
4、xtensible markup language“, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone. The “spoken web“ Dr. Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an ef
5、fective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer servi
6、ces that rely on mobile phones rather than computers. Dr. Banavar, however, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals thr
7、ough which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands an
8、d key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and listens to subjects of interest. That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr. Banavar“s approach
9、different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions“ or “most listened to“ items in a spoken sub-menu. More important s
10、till, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sitesa process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes. To build a site the user first selects a suitable template. The system then talks him through the bells
11、and whistles he might wish to add to that template. A carpenter or autorickshaw driver, for example, can advertise his services, receive and confirm offers of work and even undertake basic commercial transactions through such a site. And the site can store offers of work when its owner is unavailabl
12、eas often happens in places where several people share a handset. Like a more conventional website, a voice site has a mechanism by which information can be linked together and browsed, both backwards and forwards. The system IBM employs to achieve this, the hyperspeech transfer protocol (HSTP), is
13、similar in principle to the hypertext transfer protocol that provides links from one conventional website to another. The HSTP allows, for instance, someone listening to an item on a voice site to hear another linked item and then return to the first one and continue listening from where he left off
14、. India, one of the world“s fastest-growing mobile-phone markets, is an obvious place to try all this out. Although more than a third of its population of 1.2 billion now have a handset, they are often basic devices shared among families and friends. IBM is therefore carrying out trials of the spoke
15、n web in several parts of Indiaand, in collaboration with various other groups, in other countries. Users will have to make calls, and those calls will cost money. But, Dr. Banavar thinks, there are many ways of paying for them. Public-service sites such as local portals might be toll-free and subsi
16、dised by governments. Commercial sites could take a small percentage of any transaction carried out over them. Advertising might also provide revenue. It would, after all, be more difficult for the listener to screen out than the visual adverts seen on a conventional site. (此文选自 The Economist)Passag
17、e Two When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished theorist of liberalism was indeed a brilliant talker and feline gossip. Readers of Berlin“s letters will find that same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insigh
18、t on the written page. A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlin“s centenary yearhe lived from 1909 to 1997his literary executor, Henry Hardy, and a team of co-editors have now brought out a second fat volume. The verbal pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin bega
19、n dictating to a machine. Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlin“s professional ascent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British e
20、stablishment. Three or four footnotes a page introduce perhaps 1,000 or more politicians, public servants, academics, musicians and socialites whom Berlin knew or talked about. For that alone, his letters are a unique record of a bygone milieu. Berlin did not write on oath. He ladles praise on corre
21、spondents only to dismiss them in letters to others as gorgons or third-raters. During the Suez crisis in 1956 he writes to the wife of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that her husband has shown “great moral splendour“. The next letter, to Berlin“s stepson at Harvard, calls the British action
22、“childish folly“. His capsule judgments are sometimes apt, sometimes sneering. He calls Sir Peter Strawson, an eminent contemporary philosopher, provincial. Berlin is sharper still on his own thin-skinned self. He belittles his large philosophical gifts, finds publication an agony and worries to cor
23、respondents that his work is rot. Mr. Hardy says that these letters represent perhaps a fourth of those Berlin wrote in 1946-1960. There are none back to him. So here is Berlin in his own ironical voice, as selected by editors. A reader only of these letters may well ask why Berlin had such grateful
24、 pupils and devoted friends. And why was he among the foremost liberal thinkers of the age? A selection of old and new tributes, The Book of Isaiah, also edited by the tireless Mr. Hardy, partly answers both questions. Thinkers such as John Rawls defended liberal principles with more argument. Among
25、 historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlin“s gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas. Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others (negative liberty) is more urgent or basic, he argued, tha
26、n freedom to realise your potential (positive liberty). The left distrusted that distinction and the right misappropriated it, while philosophers continue to pick it over. He thought, secondly, that liberalism fails if it cannot validate the universal need to belong. But perhaps Berlin“s strongest c
27、onviction was that the basic commitmentsto friendship and truth, fairness and liberty, family and achievement, nation and principleclash routinely and cannot be smoothly reconciled. Thinkers and politicians should admit the conflicts, Berlin implied, and not blanket them with doctrine or tyrannicall
28、y attempt to subordinate some concerns to others. The first two of those ideas crop up here and there in these letters. In personal form, that third convictionthat people are to be taken in full, not in formulaeruns throughout, and was surely one source of Berlin“s charm. More volumes of letters are
29、 to follow. Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument . He was an erudite wit at the dinner table and, as the reader now sees, in his letters. But he was a thinker first, and for his thought there is no substitute for his essays. (此文选自 The Economist ) Pass
30、age Three For a man who wants the world to slow down, Carl Honore“s moment of clarity came in, of all places, an airport. The Canadian journalist was leafing through a newspaper at Rome“s Fiumicino airport when he spotted an ad for a collection of condensed, one-minute bedtime stories for kids. At f
31、irst Honore, a self-described “speedaholic“, was delighted at the idea of a more efficient bedtime experience for his 2-year-old son. Then he was horrified. “Have I gone completely insane?“ he asked himself, and realized the answer was “Probably.“ Out of that epiphany came a best-selling book and a
32、whole new career for Honore as an international spokesman for the concept of leisure. “I“m attacking the whole cultural assumption that faster is better and we must cram every waking hour with things to do,“ says Honore, who now lives in London. In a world of bottom-line bosses and results-oriented
33、parents, he dares speak up in favor of the unabridged fairy tale. It“s a message people seem to want to hear. Since it appeared in April, In Praise of Slowness has been translated into 12 languages and sold some 60,000 copies, landing on best-seller lists in four countries; a British production comp
34、any has bought television rights. Honore celebrates, perhaps a bit prematurely, a worldwide disillusionment with “the cult of speed“. As evidence he cites the Slow Food rebellion against McDonald“s that began in Italy and has spread its gospel of civilized dining and local products even to the unlik
35、ely precincts of New York and Chicago. In a world in which some parents send their offspring to prep courses for preschool, a growing number of schools around the worldabout 800are following the advice of the early 20th-century German educator Rudolf Steiner to encourage children to play and doodle
36、to their hearts“ content, putting off learning to read until as late as 7. In his own life, Honore has substituted meditation for tennis and for television; he has taken off his wristwatch, which means he“s less worried about getting somewhere on time and can drive there without speeding. Oddly, tho
37、ugh, Honore“s book has yet to catch on in the country that arguably needs it most , the one that gave the world the assembly line and the one-minute manager. Chained to cell phones and BlackBerrys, fueled by junk food and forced to work ever longer hours as their employers cut jobs, frazzled America
38、n workers suffer from what the Seattle-based independent television producer John de Graaf called “affluenza“ in his 2001 book of the same name. It is the collective malaise of a materialistic society that equates the good life with “the goods life.“ By contrast, Europeans and even the famously effi
39、cient Japanese are more receptive. Slow Food held its second biennial gastronomic fair in Turin last month, drawing tens of thousands of visitors, including Prince Charles, who took a couple of hours out of a European tour to savor a pint of award-winning pale English ale. The Slow Cities movement h
40、as won the backing of municipal officials in more than 100 towns and cities in Europe, Japan and Brazil with a lengthy manifesto urging policies to reduce noise and traffic, preserve the local esthetic and gastronomic customs and establish more pedestrian zones and green spaces. The Society for the
41、Deceleration of Time held its 14th annual meeting in Austria last month to promote what its organizers call “a more conscious way of living. “Mastering relaxation isn“t something to attempt on your own, according to society member Christian Lackner. “When everyone is telling you to go faster, as an
42、individual you do it,“ says Lackner. “You need a movement, a way of building a group of people who want to resist in order to make it easier to say, “No, I won“t“.“ Perhaps Americans need to be reassured that the slowness movement is not about fleeing to a cottage in rural Vermont. It“s an effort to
43、 strike the right balance between work and leisure. A few enlightened companies like the accounting firm Ernst by the year 2050, minorities will make up over 50 percent of the American population. Cultural diversity refers to the differences among people in a work force due to race, ethnicity, and g
44、ender. Increasing cultural diversity is forcing managers to learn to supervise and motivate people with a broader range of values systems. According to a recent survey by the American Management Association, half of all U.S. employers have established some kind of formal initiative to promote and ma
45、nage cultural diversity. Although demographics isn“t the only reason for the growth of these programs, it is a compelling one. An increasing number of organizations have come to believe that diversity, like quality and customer service, is a competitive edge. A more diverse work force provides a wid
46、er range of ideas and perspectives and fosters creativity and innovation. Avenues for encouraging diversity include recruiting at historically black colleges and universities, training and development, mentoring, and revamped promotion review policies. To get out the message about their commitment t
47、o diversity, many organizations establish diversity councils made up of employees, managers, and executives. Although many Fortune 500 companies are making diversity part of their strategic planning process, some programs stand out from the crowd. At Texas Instruments, strategies for enhancing diver
48、sity include an aggressive recruiting plan, diversity training, mentoring, and an incentive compensation program that rewards managers for fostering diversity. Each business unit has a diversity manager who implements these strategies and works closely with the company“s Diversity Network. The netwo
49、rk provides a forum of employees to share ideas, solicit support, and build coalitions. Convinced that strengthening diversity is a business imperative, Du Pont has established several programs to achieve that goal. In addition to training workshops and mentoring, Du Pont has established over 100 multicultural networks through which employees share work and life experiences and strive to help women and minorities reach higher levels of leadership and responsibility within the organization. Over half of Du Pont“s new hires for professional and managerial positions are minorities an
