1、专业八级模拟608及答案解析 (总分：192.60，做题时间：90分钟)一、PART LISTENING COM(总题数：0，分数：0.00)二、SECTION A MINI-LECTU(总题数：1，分数：15.00)Volunteering1. Introduction. 1) Volunteering gives people an opportunity to 1 . 2) Volunteering plays an important role in Americans 2 and many high schools require their students to spend so
2、me time volunteering so as to graduate. 2. How to go about volunteering? 1) Find out what is right for you, namely, your 3 . Help kids 4 . 5 at a local animal shelter. Volunteer for a political 6 . Help the environment etc. If you have more than one thing you love, find a way to 7 the two. 2) Decide
3、 how much time you want to spend. Give 8 a set amount of time every week or two. Take part in daylong activities. Volunteer through a 9 internship or other program that lasts longer than a week. 3) Find out where you can volunteer. Search the Internet. Look in your local phone book under volunteer.
4、Call an organization directly. Ask friends or relatives for ideas and contacts. Look on 10 in your library or in bookstores. 3. 11 of volunteering. 1) 12 your mind A great way to learn new skills. Give you chance to discover what kinds of things you are best at and enjoy the most. Help you shape ide
5、as about your career goals. Provide you with a sense of responsibility. Develop a new 13 of people who are different from you. 2) Make you feel good. Feel like you have the power to change things for the better. Get a 14 on your own life. Save you from being bored. 3) Make you look good. It looks 15
6、 on college or job applications. It also shows that you believe in making the world a better place and you are willing to sacrifice your time and energy to do it. （分数：15.00）三、SECTION B INTERVIEW(总题数：2，分数：25.00)（分数：20.00）A.They are convenient.B.They are easy to book.C.They provide standard service.D.
7、They offer greater options.A.The guests can cook for themselves.B.The guests can surf the Internet.C.The guests can park their cars.D.The guests can play in their own backyard.A.They can provide better service with lower price.B.They can provide better service with higher price.C.They can provide th
8、e same level of service with lower price.D.They can provide lower level of service with lower price.A.20 dollars.B.30 dollars.C.34 dollars.D.95 dollars.A.Complaint handling.B.Living condition.C.Personal security.D.Supporting facility.（分数：5.00）A.To get on the clothes more easily.B.To keep health work
9、ers from making mistakes.C.To prevent health workers from infecting themselves.D.To keep watch on each other.A.Medical advancement.B.Countries cooperation.C.Efficient medicine.D.More hospitals.A.Six.B.Five.C.Four.D.Three.A.Ebola is a global crisis.B.Ebola is difficult to be stopped.C.Ebola epidemic
10、is slowly controlled though has many difficulties.D.Ebola killed so many people.A.Pessimistic.B.Indifferent.C.Hopeful.D.Objective.四、PART READING COMPR(总题数：1，分数：100.00)Section A In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice questio
11、n, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the 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 lifes fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most we
12、bsites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read andif interactivewrite. Building your own site certainly does. Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBMs India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his col
13、leagues have devised a system based on what is known as voice extensible 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 wil
14、l be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective 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
15、 are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services 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
16、basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through 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 t
17、he website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and 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 la
18、rge company by telephone. What makes Dr. Banavars approach 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 l
19、istened to items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites 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
20、template. The system then talks him through the bells 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
21、 can store offers of work when its owner is unavailableas 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 achie
22、ve this, the hyperspeech transfer protocol (HSTP), is 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 f
23、irst one and continue listening from where he left off. India, one of the worlds 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 frien
24、ds. IBM is therefore carrying out trials of the spoken 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 sit
25、es such as local portals might be toll-free and subsidised 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 se
26、en on a conventional site. (此文选自 The Economist)Passage 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 Berlins letters will find tha
27、t same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page. A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlins 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 verba
28、l pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin began dictating to a machine. Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlins professional ascent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position
29、as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British establishment. 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. Berli
30、n did not write on oath. He ladles praise on correspondents 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
31、s stepson at Harvard, calls the British action 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,
32、finds publication an agony and worries to correspondents 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 lett
33、ers may well ask why Berlin had such grateful 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
34、 liberal principles with more argument. Among historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlins gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas. Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others (negative libe
35、rty) is more urgent or basic, he argued, than 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
36、 to belong. But perhaps Berlins strongest conviction 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 no
37、t blanket them with doctrine or tyrannically 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
38、Berlins charm. More volumes of letters are 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 f
39、or his essays. (此文选自 The Economist)Passage Three For a man who wants the world to slow down, Carl Honores moment of clarity came in, of all places, an airport. The Canadian journalist was leafing through a newspaper at Romes Fiumicino airport when he spotted an ad for a collection of condensed, one-
40、minute bedtime stories for kids. At first 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
41、came a best-selling book and a whole new career for Honore as an international spokesman for the concept of leisure. Im 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
42、bosses and results-oriented parents, he dares speak up in favor of the unabridged fairy tale. Its 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
43、; a British production company 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 McDonalds that began in Italy and has spread its gospel of civilized dining and local pr
44、oducts even to the unlikely 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 chil
45、dren to play and doodle 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 hes less worried about getting somewhere on time and can drive there withou
46、t speeding. Oddly, though, Honores 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 jo
47、bs, frazzled American 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 withthe goods life. By contrast, Europeans and even th
48、e famously efficient 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 has 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 custom
