1、专业英语八级模拟试卷 848及答案与解析 SECTION A MINI-LECTURE In this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the mini-lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening to the mini-lecture, please complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE and write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each gap. Make sure the word(s) you
2、 fill in is (are) both grammatically and semantically acceptable. You may use the blank sheet for note-taking. You have THIRTY seconds to preview the gap-filling task. 0 Poetry Nowadays, we literary critics are said to talk little about actual literature. Today, I really want to focus on poetry. I .
3、 A course called “Working With Texts“ A. poetry 【 T1】 _: Understanding Poetry【 T1】 _ students:highly dependent on my(subjective)readings of the【 T2】 _【 T2】_ B. fiction just【 T3】 _, no novels【 T3】 _ book: The Best American Short Stories of the Century C. drama book: a generic【 T4】 _【 T4】 _ good drama
4、 texts and【 T5】 _【 T5】 _ D. course blog for students to find out more about the【 T6】 _we were reading【 T6】 _ moderately successful II .【 T7】 _major experience【 T7】 _ A. what you should read upwards of 100【 T8】 _【 T8】 _ 300 -400 poems, and maybe 50【 T9】 _【 T9】 _ B. result scratched the surface of【 T1
5、0】 _【 T10】 _ C. difference from other majors a【 T11】 _when graduated【 T11】 _ a pretty good【 T12】 _【 T12】 _ how to continually find【 T13】 _to read【 T13】 _ III. The importance of poetry A. be familiar with poetry 【 T14】 _and complexity【 T14】 _ B. be aware of the【 T15】 _of poetry【 T15】 _ a dying art 1
6、【 T1】 2 【 T2】 3 【 T3】 4 【 T4】 5 【 T5】 6 【 T6】 7 【 T7】 8 【 T8】 9 【 T9】 10 【 T10】 11 【 T11】 12 【 T12】 13 【 T13】 14 【 T14】 15 【 T15】 SECTION B INTERVIEW In this section you will hear ONE interview. The interview will be divided into TWO parts. At the end of each part, five questions will be asked about
7、 what was said. Both the interview and the questions will be spoken ONCE ONLY. After each question there will be a ten-second pause. During the pause, you should read the four choices of A , B , C and D , and mark the best answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO. You have THIRTY seconds to previ
8、ew the questions. （ A） She is one of the founders of Apple Company. （ B） She is the technology reporter of Wall Street Journal. （ C） She has interviewed lots of people in Apple Company. （ D） She has worked in Apple Company for two years. （ A） How Steve Jobs led Apple to thrive. （ B） How Apple was go
9、ing to survive. （ C） What kind of person Steve Jobs really is. （ D） What the best days of Apple are. （ A） What happens to Apple Company. （ B） What fascinating story Apple has told. （ C） How Apple stays at the top of its game. （ D） How Apple is handling the transition. （ A） He disputes the content of
10、 the book. （ B） He prefers this book to other books. （ C） He thinks it captures Apple. （ D） He finds the book the same as other books. （ A） Much of her information was not correct. （ B） What she said was completely wrong. （ C） It was quite interesting. （ D） Her words were very enlightening. （ A） It
11、has grown for a long time. （ B） It has gone through leadership transition. （ C） It is facing big company issues. （ D） It would go well if Steve Jobs were alive. （ A） A person with vision of technology. （ B） A person with a good business sense. （ C） A person with the power of persuasion. （ D） A perso
12、n with a combination of different abilities. （ A） Its too haunted to predict. （ B） Its coming back up again. （ C） Its an important part of her book. （ D） Its an emotional seesaw. （ A） It is under the risk of bankruptcy. （ B） It is gaining more profits. （ C） It is booming in stock market. （ D） It is
13、in need of a new vision. （ A） It is hard to resolve. （ B） It will be solved pretty soon. （ C） It is kind of slander. （ D） It is unworthy of mention. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice
14、 question, there are four suggested answers marked A , B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. 25 Recent headlines havent made it look easy to be over the hill at work. Washington D. C. , power players are turning to plastic surgery to avoid a “use by“ date for their careers. S
15、ilicon Valley firms are hiring high school students as interns. Twitter got hit with a lawsuit alleging age discrimination last week by a former manager. All of these made us wonder: In todays economy, is age discrimination getting better or worse? The answer, as you might expect, is that its compli
16、cated. While numbers point to a downward trend, and there is some evidence of a warming toward older workers, ageism remains a real issue thats among the hardest complaints by workers to prove. Charges of age discrimination to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission(EEOC)have actually declined s
17、lightly in recent years. The number of age-related filings went from 22,857 in 2012(23 percent of all claims)to 21,396 in 2013(22.8 percent of the total). Both numbers are down from a high of 24,582 in 2008(or nearly 26 percent of all filings). But those numbers only offer part of the picture. While
18、 charges are down, total monetary awards are up, reaching $97. 9 million for 2013, the highest level since 1997. Some workers may file charges at a state Fair Employment Practice Agency(FEPA), says Ray Peeler, a senior attorney adviser for the EEOC. And of course, many employees dont actually take a
19、ction after facing age discrimination at work. There are at least two possible explanations for why the number of charges has started to fall. For one, the economy has been on an upswing. “Its a well-established phenomenon that if the economy is going down, the number of job discrimination claims in
20、 various categories goes way up,“ says Garry Mathiason, a senior partner with Littler Mendelson, a global employment law firm. Another potential rationale is that years after the worst of the recessions cutbacks, more older workers are experiencing age discrimination as they try to get hired rather
21、than on their way out the door. Older employees, says Laurie McCann, senior attorney with the AARP Foundation, are overrepresented among the ranks of the long-term unemployed. While they may suspect age is limiting them from getting interviews or callbacks, its typically not enough for them to file
22、an actual claim. A 2012 AARP survey found that 77 percent of unemployed respondents aged 45 to 54 said workers face age discrimination in the workplace, based on their experience. Just 58 percent of those employed full-time said the same. Increases in online job applications, McCann says, also creat
23、e more stumbling blocks for older workers. Candidates who might have left the year they graduated from college off of a paper or e-mailed resume cant do that if a web-based application requires them to complete every field before it can be submitted. As a result of such practices, says Norman Matlof
24、f, a computer science professor at University of California, Davis who has studied age discrimination in the tech industry, many older workers “cant even get to first base. They cant get past H. R. “ The tech industry has been under particular scrutiny recently for its youth-oriented culture. Big Si
25、licon Valley firms have been called out for explicitly requesting “new grads“ in job,descriptions a no-no in the eyes of the EEOC. Bay Area venture capitalists have a reputation for bias against older founders. And plastic surgeons in San Francisco say theyre getting queries from the under-40 crowd
26、about Botox and baldness. In the tech industry, says Matloff, “its a funny definition of old. Were not talking about 55. Were talking about 35.“ But despite techs reputation for valuing youth, some see a thawing in the attention given to older workers. Kris Stadelman, the director of NOVA, a work fo
27、rce development and training agency in the Bay Area, says shes watched an interesting shift happen over the past year or so. Top-tier tech companies still have a reputation among job seekers and recruiters as wanting younger workers, she says. “ We still hear things like stale degreeused as a euphem
28、ism for age,“ she says. That said,Stadelman has seen a “warming trend“ toward older workers among more mid-tier firms. Theres more hiring going on, for one. But she also believes the “feeding frenzy“ for young tech whizzes and the high salaries theyve commanded have produced some anecdotal evidence
29、of a trend in reverse. At the more mid-tier companies, she says, “their impression is that theyve created this false marketplace. Now, theyre looking at the relatively less expensive older employees. “ Whether age discrimination is actually rising or falling, one thing is clear: Proving these claims
30、 is particularly hard. With other types of discrimination, such as race, employees have to show that race was just one of the factors in, say, losing their job. But if the complaint is about age, the standard of proof is higher. Employees, says the EEOCs Peeler, have to show “it was the reason that
31、tipped the scales. “ 26 It is implied in the second paragraph that_. （ A） age has become a major obstacle for people to get jobs （ B） the existence of ageism doesnt just show from the number of cases （ C） employees dont believe EEOC can help them solve the problems （ D） employees may not know that t
32、hey are victims of age discrimination 27 Which of the following is implied in the fourth paragraph? （ A） The lack of Internet skills is a setback for older employees. （ B） Paper or e-mailed resumes are no longer in use. （ C） H. R. takes full responsibility on new recruitment. （ D） Experience is of n
33、o importance in IT firms. 28 Mid-tier firms show more favor toward older employees as they have_. （ A） rich experience （ B） less family burden （ C） lower request of salary （ D） greater enthusiasm 28 Weve long been eager to believe that mastery of a skill is primarily the result of how much effort on
34、e has put in. Extensive practice “ is probably the most reasonable explanation we have today not only for success in any line, but even for genius,“ said the behaviorist John B. Watson almost a century ago. In the 1990s K. Anders Ericsson and a colleague at Florida State University reported data tha
35、t seemed to confirm this view: What separates the expert from the amateur, a first-rate musician or chess player from a wannabe, isnt talent: its thousands of hours of work. Its daunting to imagine putting in that kind of commitment, but were comforted nonetheless by the idea that practice is the pr
36、imary contributor to excellence. Thats true for three reasons: 1. Common sense. It seems obvious that the more time you spend trying to get better at something, the more proficient youll become. Common sense, however, isnt always correct. Researchers have found that only when “ achievement“ is defin
37、ed as rote recall do we discover a strong, linear relationship with time. When the focus is on depth of understanding and sophisticated problem solving, time on task doesnt predict outcome very well at all either in reading or math. 2. Protestant work ethic. Many people simply dont like the idea tha
38、t someone could succeed without having paid his or her dues or, conversely, that lots of deliberate practice might prove fruitless. Either of these possibilities threatens peoples belief in what social psychologists call a “just world“. 3. Nurture over nature. “Innate? Necessarily so!“ is what weve
39、heard for centuries. Given the tawdry history of biological reductionism(生物还原论 ), which usually manages to rationalize current arrangements of power as being due to the natural superiority of privileged groups, is it any wonder we remain leery(猜疑的 )of attributing success to inherited talent? Its mor
40、e egalitarian to declare that geniuses are made, not born. Indeed, that skepticism is bolstered by evidence indicating that students are more likely to embrace learning if they believe their performance results from effort, something under their control, rather than from a fixed level of intelligenc
41、e that they either possess or lack. For many of us, then, Anderssons conclusion has been deeply reassuring: Practice hard and youll do well. But along comes a brand-new meta-analysis, a statistical summary of 157 separate comparisons in 88 recent studies, that finds practice actually doesnt play nea
42、rly as significant a role as wed like to think. “ The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious(丰富的 )practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice,“ wrote Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald in Psychologic
43、al Science. In fact, they calculated that, overall, the amount of deliberate practice in which someone engages explains only 12 percent of the variance in the quality of performance, which means 88 percent is explained by other factors. But what other factors? Its common to assume that if practice m
44、atters less than we thought, then inborn ability matters more as if there are only two contributors to excellence and theyre reciprocally related. Thats not necessarily true, however. The question posed by Macnamara and her colleagues was appropriately open-ended: “We have empirical evidence that de
45、liberate practice, while important, does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters. “ And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effect
46、s that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity. That last one intrinsic motivation has a huge empirical base of support in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere. Weve long known that
47、the pleasure one takes from an activity is a powerful predictor of success. For example, one group of researchers tried to sort out the factors that helped third and fourth graders remember what they had been reading. They found that how interested the students were in the passage was thirty times m
48、ore important than how “readable“ the passage was. All of these factors overlap(重叠 )and serve as catalysts for one another, which means that even if practice does predict success to some degree, that doesnt mean it caused the success. Maybe the right question to ask is: Why do some people decide to
49、practice a lot in the first place? Could it be because their first efforts proved mostly successful? 29 Which of the following is NOT a reason for people to value practice? （ A） There are numerous examples to prove that practice means success. （ B） It is well-received in the world that hard work always pay
