1、专业英语八级模拟试卷 462及答案与解析 SECTION A MINI-LECTURE Directions: In this section you sill hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture.
2、 When the lecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for note-taking. 0 The American Dream: Myth or Reality I. Coining of the term: A. became widely used (1)_ B. first appeared
3、in a (2)_written by Horatio Alger C. message sent by the story: Regardless of background, people with honesty, hard work and (3)_would always succeed. II. Basic definition: hopes for a better quality of life and a higher standard of living hopes for better jobs, more (4)_, or ownership of land or a
4、home III. Associations: A. in the past: desire to improve the quality of ones life today: an out-of-control (5)_and materialism B. desire to create opportunities through hard work a hallmark: the classic (6)_ an example: Abraham Lincoln C. (7)_and their stories and quests: often a narrative of upwar
5、d mobility D. (8) the frontier: symbols of (9)_and a fresh start the negtive side: meeting resistance from native American Indians E. equality an example: Martin Luther King Jr. s (10)_ a harsh reality: not everyone had the same opportunities SECTION B INTERVIEW Directions: In this section you will
6、hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions. Now listen to the interview. 11 Where do the worst accidents hap
7、pen according to Kiplingers Personal Finance magazine? （ A） In the car factory. （ B） On the show room floor. （ C） On the highway. （ D） In your own garage. 12 According to Dave, a wise use of dollars is （ A） to buy a new brand car in cash. （ B） to lease a car without car payments. （ C） to pay cash fo
8、r a good used car. （ D） to get an employee-discounted car. 13 Which of the following statements is CORRECT according to Dave? （ A） Leasing a car is a cheap way to operate a vehicle. （ B） Buying a used car according to the money you have. （ C） People shouldnt pay cash when they buy a used car. （ D） P
9、eople should have a vehicle worth half annual income. 14 People can make sure theyre getting a good used car in the following ways EXCEPT （ A） getting services like car factory. （ B） checking the history of the car. （ C） having your mechanic check it. （ D） driving the car in hours without stop. 15 W
10、hich of the following is NOT Daves advice? （ A） Leasing a car. （ B） Saving up for a better car. （ C） Buying a used car. （ D） Buying a car of 2 years old or more. SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions th
11、at follow. At the end of each news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. 16 According to the news item, people can get the following help from the HIV/AIDS camps EXCEPT （ A） having HIV tests. （ B） learning health knowledge. （ C） setting up future plans. （ D） preparing for futur
12、e work. 17 The bomb that exploded outside the police station （ A） killed only two men. （ B） was a 200-pound one. （ C） exploded in rush hours. （ D） was placed under a car. 18 We can learn from the news item that the taxi driver （ A） was forced to drive to the police station. （ B） informed the police
13、about the explosion. （ C） was badly wounded because of the explosion. （ D） tried to get the object out of the car but failed. 19 Which of the following statements is INCORRECT? （ A） The Reno collision caused six deaths and 20 people injured. （ B） The tractor-trailer driver was responsible for the ac
14、cident. （ C） Collisions on and around railroad tracks were not rare. （ D） Since the Reno crash, there have been six such collisions in the US. 20 Operation Lifesavers Inc. is an organization that （ A） was first founded by railroad companies. （ B） has designed an online course for drivers. （ C） has h
15、elped 15, 000 drivers to get their licenses. （ D） collects membership fees from professional truckers. 20 How exercise affects body weight is one of the more intriguing and vexing issues in physiology. Exercise burns calories.no one doubts that, and so it should, in theory, produce weight loss, a fa
16、ct that has prompted countless people to undertake exercise programs to shed pounds. Without significantly changing their diets, few succeed. “Anecdotally, all of us have been cornered by people claiming to have spent hours each week walking, running, stair-stepping, etc. , and are displeased with t
17、he results on the scale or in the mirror, “wrote Barry Braun.an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. But a growing body of science suggests that exercise does have an important role in weight loss. That role, however, is different from what many people ex
18、pect and probably wish. The newest science suggests that exercise alone will not make you thin, but it may determine whether you stay thin, if you can achieve that state. Until recently, the bodily mechanisms involved were mysterious. But scientists are slowly teasing out exercises impact on metabol
19、ism, appetite and body composition, though the consequences of exercise can vary. Womens bodies, for instance, seem to react differently than mens bodies to the metabolic effects of exercise. None of which is a reason to abandon exercise as a weight-loss tool. You just have to understand what exerci
20、se can and cannot do. “In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss, “says Eric Ravussin.an expert on weight loss. Its especially useless because people often end up consuming more calories when they exercise.The mathematics of weight loss is, in fact, quite simple, involving onl
21、y subtraction. “Take in fewer calories than you burn.put yourself in negative energy balance, lose weight, “says Braun.who has been studying exercise and weight loss for years. The deficit in calorics can result from cutting back your food intake or from increasing your energy output the amount of e
22、xercise you complete or both. When researchers affiliated with the Pennington center had volunteers reduce their energy balance for a study by either cutting their caloric intakes by 25 percent or increasing their daily exercise by 12. 5 percent and cutting their calories by 12.5 percent, everyone i
23、nvolved lost weight.They all lost about the same amount of weight too about a pound a week. But in the exercising group, the dose of exercise required was nearly an hour a day of moderate-intensity activity. What the federal government currently recommends for weight loss is “a lot more than what ma
24、ny people would be able or willing to do, “ Ravussin says. At the same time, as many people have found after starting a new exercise regimen, working out can have a significant effect on appetite. The mechanisms that control appetite and energy balance in the human body are elegantly calibrated. “Th
25、e body aims for homeostasis, “Braun says. It likes to remain at whatever weight its used to. So even small changes in energy balance can produce rapid changes in certain hormones associated with appetite, particularly acylated ghrelin, which is known to increase the desire for food, as well as insul
26、in and leptin, hormones that affect how the body burns fuel. The effects of exercise on the appetite and energy systems, however, are by no means consistent. In one study presented last year at the annual conference of the American College of Sports Medicine, when healthy young men ran for an hour a
27、nd a half on a treadmill at a fairly high intensity, their blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin fell, and food held little appeal for the rest of that day. Exercise blunted their appetites. A study that Braun oversaw had a slightly different outcome. In it, 18 overweight men and women walked on
28、treadmills in multiple sessions while either eating enough that day to replace the calories burned during exercise or not. Afterward, the men displayed little or no changes in their energy-regulating hormones or their appetites, much as in the other study. But the women uniformly had increased blood
29、 concentrations of acylated ghrelin and decreased concentrations of insulin after the sessions in which they had eaten less than they had burned. Their bodies were directing them to replace the lost calories. In physiological terms, the rcsults“arc consistent with the paradigm that mechanisms to mai
30、ntain body fat are more effective in women, “Braun and his colleagues wrote. In practical terms, the results are scientific proof that life is unfair. Female bodies, inspired almost certainly“by a biological need to maintain energy stores for reproduction, “Braun says, fight hard to hold on to every
31、 ounce of fat. Exercise for many women increases the desire to eat. 21 We can infer from the text that （ A） going on diet will definitely lead to weight loss. （ B） the theory of exercise burning calories is challenged. （ C） it is often disappointing to lose weight by doing exercise. （ D） most people
32、 tend to spend hours walking, running, etc. 22 The phrase “teasing out“ in Paragraph 2 probably means succeeding in （ A） testing out something that is unknown. （ B） learning information that is hidden. （ C） making use of information that is hidden. （ D） putting effort into something that is unknown.
33、 23 Which of the following statements may be CORRECT about exercise? （ A） The more exercise you do, the more weight you will lose. （ B） The dose of exercise recommended now might be reduced. （ C） Moderate-intensity activities are the best exercise for dieters. （ D） Dieters should take various forms
34、of exercise to lose weight. 24 It can be inferred from the passage that_can give you an appetite. （ A） increased blood concentrations of insulin （ B） decreased blood concentrations of insulin （ C） decreased blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin （ D） increased blood concentrations of acylated ghre
35、lin 25 The best title for the passage is probably （ A） Exercise and Weight Loss. （ B） Weighing the Evidence on Exercise. （ C） Effect of Exercise on Men and Women. （ D） Calories, Exercise and Weight Loss. 25 The spectacular collapse of so many big financial firms during the crisis of 2008 has provide
36、d new evidence for the belief that stockmarket capitalism is dangerously short-termist. After all, shareholders in publicly traded financial institutions cheered them on as they boosted their short-term profits and share prices by taking risky bets with enormous amounts of borrowed money. Those bets
37、, it turns out, did terrible damage in the longer term, to the firms and their shareholders as well as to the economy as a whole. Shareholders can no longer with a straight face cite the efficient-market hypothesis as evidence that rising share prices are always evidence of better prospects, rather
38、than of an unsustainable bubble. If the stockmarket can get wildly out of whack in the short run, companies and investors that base their decisions solely on passing movements in share prices should not be surprised if they pay a penalty over the long term. But what can be done to encourage a longer
39、-term perspective? One idea that is increasingly touted as a solution is to give those investors who keep hold of their shares for a decent length of time more say over the management of a company than mere interlopers hoping to make a quick buck. Shareholders of longer tenure could get extra voting
40、 rights, say, or new ones could be barred from voting for a spell. An advisory committee in the Netherlands has proposed loyalty bonuses for long-term shareholders, such as increased dividends or additional voting rights after holding a share for four years. Likewise, Britains minister for financial
41、 services, Paul Myners.has suggested that short-term holders of shares should have inferior voting rights. The theory behind these proposals is that those who hold shares longer are more likely to behave like owners than those who trade frequently to bet on short-term movements in prices. Disenfranc
42、hising the punters would not only give investors an incentive to hang onto their shares for longer, the argument runs, but would also encourage those with voting rights to use them, as they would know their votes would be more likely to count in board elections and so forth. Would it work? Happily,
43、an experiment in dual classes of shareholders has long been under way in France, where shares often gain double voting rights after being held for a specified period usually two years, although sometimes as long as ten. A recent paper, “Disclosure and Minority Expropriation:A Study of French Listed
44、Firms“, by Chiraz Ben Ali, an economist at the University of Paris Dauphine, found that the main impact of the dual-class structure was to increase the exploitation of minority shareholders (which tended to own the shares with weaker voting rights) by the controlling majority. Accounting practices,
45、for example, tend to be much less transparent. Admittedly, Frances feeble safeguards for minority shareholders may be partly responsible for this resultbut at the very least that suggests that extra voting rights are no cure-all. Equally, there is some evidence, albeit not conclusive, that short-ter
46、m shareholders from activist hedge funds and the like can improve the performance of poorly run companies through brief campaigns to improve their strategy or management. As Colin Melvin, the boss of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, an advisory firm with activist leanings, points out, “Disproportio
47、nate voting rights can (and often do) serve to insulate management and make it less accountable to shareholders.“In short, the length of time that an investor holds a share does not tell you a lot about how much interest he will take in the management of the firm concerned. Many long-term index inve
48、stors hold shares for years without taking the slightest interest in how the firms they invest in are run, let alone doing anything to improve matters. There is also a moral argument, of course, against depriving property-owners of their rights, no matter how seldom they make use of them. The real i
49、ssue is not how to encourage investors to keep hold of their shares for longer, but how to encourage more of them to take their duties as owners seriously, irrespective of the length of their tenure. Instead of creating multiple classes of shareholders, governments and regulators may want to think about how they define fiduciary duties in the financial realm. Better yet, the investing public, whose retirement savings have atrophied in the financial crisis thanks in part to the short-term way in
