1、专业英语八级（阅读）-试卷121及答案解析 (总分：44.00，做题时间：90分钟)一、READING COMPREHENSIO(总题数：11，分数：44.00)1.PART II READING COMPREHENSION_2.SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested
2、 answers marked A , B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer._The sudden death of an admired public person always seems an impossibility. People ascribe invulnerability, near immortality to our centers of attention. John Kennedy dies, and it could not happen. John Lennon dies, an
3、d it could not happen. Elvis, and Grace Kelly, and shock after shock. And now this death of a young woman by whom the world had remained shocked from the moment she first appeared before it, whose name contained the shadow of her end: Princess Di. But who would have believed it? People thought every
4、 thought that could be thought about Diana, but not death. She was beauty, deaths opposite. Beauty is given not only a special place of honor in the world but also a kind of permanence, as if it were an example of the tendency of nature to perfect itself, and therefore something that once achieved,
5、lives forever. Her life never seemed as tragic as it was often made outjust sad, and a little off. She married the wrong man. Her in-laws could be vindictive. For every photographer eager to capture a picture of her in one of those astonishing evening gowns or hats, another was hiding in the bushes
6、ready to bring her down. One cannot think of any public statement of hers that was especially brilliant or witty. She was more innocent than clever; even her confession of an affair to a reporter sounded girlish. If pressed, few could say exactly what it was that made her so important, especially to
7、 people outside England, except for the fact that one could not take ones eyes off the woman. Yet that was no small thing. Diana was someone one had to look at, and such a person comes along once in a blue moon. She had a soft heart; that was evident. She had a knack for helping people in distress.
8、And all such qualities rose in a face that everyone was simply pleased to see. In a way, she was more royal than the royals. She had a higher station than the Queen of England; she was the nominal young monarch of her own country and of every other place in the world. She was the sentimental favorit
9、e figurehead, who was authorized to sign no treaties, command no armies, make no wars. All she had was the way she looked and sounded and behaved. No model or actress could hold a candle to her. She was the image every child has of a princessthe one who can feel the pea under the mattresses, who kis
10、ses the frog, who lets down her hair from the tower window. Her marriage was gone long before her death. As the years went on, it is likely that there would have been other romances after Dodi Al Fayed to tickle the throngs. Exactly how her life would have progressed is hard to imagine. She would ha
11、ve continued to be a good mother and a worker for the ill and the poor: she would have been pictured from time to time at a dinner party or on a boat. In older age she might have become the Kings mother, welcomed back into the royal family at a time of life that is automatically accorded status. How
12、 would she have looked? The hair whiter, the skin a bit more lined, but the eyes would still have had that sweet mixture of kindness and longing. By then the story of her and Charles, the scandals and accusations, might have been lost in smoke. Yet if people now were asked how they will remember Dia
13、na, what picture among the thousands they will hold in their mind, it would not be Diana at an official ceremony, or with a boyfriend, or even with her children. It would be her on the day of her wedding, when all the world was glad to be her subject and when she gave everyone who looked at her the
14、improbable idea that life was beautiful.（分数：8.00）(1).The authors main purpose of mentioning John Kennedy, John Lennon, Elvis and Grace Kelly in the first paragraph is to_.（分数：2.00）A.show that Dianas death is as sudden and unexpected as theirsB.illustrate that Diana was as prominent and popular as th
15、ey wereC.express how regretful people felt for the loss of DianaD.imply that people could not accept the fact that they had died(2). That in the first sentence of Paragraph Five refers to_.（分数：2.00）A.any of Dianas brilliant or witty public statementsB.Dianas innocent confession of an affair to a rep
16、orterC.what made Diana so importantD.the fact that one could not take ones eyes off Diana(3).Which of the following word is used literally, NOT metaphorically?（分数：2.00）A.Moon (Paragraph Five).B.Candle (Paragraph Six).C.Smoke (Paragraph Seven).D.Subject (Paragraph Eight).(4).The author does NOT menti
17、on Princess Dianas_.（分数：2.00）A.outer and inner beautyB.personal lifeC.charitable heartD.political influencesWe all know that we dont get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cog
18、nitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the daywhere they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee. Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at
19、 the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world. In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for
20、 their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours for two weeks in the lab. Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects ability to sustain attention with whats known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P. V. T.,
21、considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P. V. T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, kno
22、wn as a microsleep. The P. V. T. is tedious but simple if youve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving
23、a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic. Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four-and six-
24、hour groups had P. V. T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the st
25、udy, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day. The six-hour subjects fared no bettersteadily declining over the two weekson a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtractio
26、n task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straightthe cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. So, for most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellen
27、t and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the difference? What is the threshold below which cognitive function begins to flag? While Dingess study was under way, his colleague Gregory Belenky, then director of the division of neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in
28、 Silver Spring, Md. , was running a similar study. He purposely restricted his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hoursthree, five, seven and nine hoursso that together the studies would offer a fuller picture of sleep-restriction. Belenkys nine-hour subjects performed much like Dingess eight-hour one
29、s. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P. V. T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6. 9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or
30、 not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be. Of course our lives are more stimulating than a sleep lab: we have coffee, bright lights, the social buzz of the office, all of which work as countermeasures to sleepiness. They can do the job for only so long, however. As Belenky, who now heads u
31、p the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane, where Van Dongen is also a professor, told me about cognitive deficits: You dont see it the first day. But you do in five to seven days. And its not clear that we can rely on weekends to make up for sleep deprivatio
32、n. Dinges is now running a long-term sleep restriction and recovery study to see how many nights we need to erase our sleep debt. But past studies suggest that, at least in many cases, one night alone wont do it.（分数：8.00）(1).The old common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a n
33、ight,_.（分数：2.00）A.your performance would be poor because of cognitive deficitsB.you would fall asleep in front of the computerC.you would become energetic because your life was stimulatingD.you would work normally because your body could adapt to it(2).Which of the following statements is NOT true a
34、bout P. V. T. ?（分数：2.00）A.It is a standard of sleepiness measures.B.It is an easy but thought-provoking test.C.It can tell a lapse into sleepiness.D.It can measure the sustained attention.(3).It can be learned from Paragraph Five that_.（分数：2.00）A.8-hour subjects fared the best among three groupsB.th
35、e 6-hour subjects began to decline in the middle of the studyC.half of the 6-hour subjects fell asleep at the computerD.4-hour subjects were more impaired than 6-hour subjects(4).Why did Gregory Belenky restrict his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hours?（分数：2.00）A.Because he could acquire more prec
36、ise information.B.Because he could provide different tests.C.Because he could find out the utmost effects of sleep.D.Because he could observe the relationship between sleep and cognition.There are more than 300 million of us in the United States, and sometimes it seems like were all friends on Faceb
37、ook. But the sad truth is that Americans are lonelier than ever. Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, to 25 percent, according to Duke University researchers. Unfortunately, as a new study linking women to increased
38、 risk of heart disease shows, all this loneliness can be detrimental to our health. The bad news doesnt just affect women. Social isolation in all adults has been linked to a raft of physical and mental ailments, including sleep disorders, high blood pressure, and an increased risk of depression and
39、 suicide. How lonely you feel today actually predicts how well youll sleep tonight and how depressed youll feel a year from now, says John T. Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and coauthor of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. Studies have shown that l
40、oneliness can cause stress levels to rise and can weaken the immune system. Lonely people also tend to have less healthy lifestyles, drinking more alcohol, eating more fattening food, and exercising less than those who are not lonely. Though more Americans than ever are living alone (25 percent of U
41、S households, up from 7 percent in 1940), the connection between single-living and loneliness is in fact quite weak. Some of the most profound loneliness can happen when other people are present, says Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. Take college freshmen: even tho
42、ugh theyre surrounded by people almost all the time, many feel incredibly isolated during the first quarter of the school year with their friends and family members far away, Cacioppo says. Studies have shown that how lonely freshmen will feel can be predicted by how many miles they are from home. B
43、y the second quarter, however, most freshmen have found social replacements for their high-school friends. Unfortunately, as we age, it becomes more difficult to recreate those social relationships. And that can be a big problem as America becomes a more transient society, with an increasing number
44、of Americans who say that theyre willing to move away from home for a job. Loneliness can be relative; it has been defined as an aversive emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between a persons desired levels of social interaction and the contact theyre actually receiving. People tend to mea
45、sure themselves against others, feeling particularly alone in communities where social connection is the norm. Thats why collectivist cultures, like those in Southern Europe, have higher levels of loneliness than individualist cultures, Cacioppo says. For the same reason, isolated individuals feel m
46、ost acutely alone on holidays like Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving, when most people are surrounded by family and friends. Still, loneliness is a natural biological signal that we all have. Indeed, loneliness serves an adaptive purpose, making us protect and care for one another. Loneliness essentiall
47、y puts the brain on high alert, encouraging us not to eat leftovers from the refrigerator but to call a friend and eat out. Certain situational factors can trigger loneliness, but long-term feelings of emptiness and isolation are partly genetic, Cacioppo says. Whats inherited is not loneliness itsel
48、f, but rather sensitivity to disconnection. Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites should serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction, Cacioppo says. For people who feel satisfied and loved in their day-to-day life, social media can be a reassuring extension. For those who are already lonely, Facebook status updates are just a reminde
