1、专业英语八级（作文）模拟试卷 89及答案与解析 一、 PART V WRITING 1 In a frantic society where efficiency is put great emphasis on, maybe it is high time we should take a breath and think about the bad consequences brought about by the head-spinning life. In the following excerpt, the author presents his opinion on the slo
2、w lifestyle versus the fast one. Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly the authors opinion; 2. give your comment. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to
3、 follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks. Fast-free Living What Americans would do if they were serious about stopping to smell the flowers? Is the American lifestyle slowing down, in a response to national trauma and the onset of war? Judging from commentaries by cultural analys
4、ts and newspaper columnists, the answer is yes. A Boston Globe editorial looked back on a hard year: “But it brought growth, too, and a deeper understanding of just how fragile life is, and what we often take for grantedthe kiss goodbye in the morning, the chat with a friend, the Saturday soccer gam
5、e is what matters most.“ An observation from The Washington Post: “People seem to walk more slowly. They are off their brisk, self-important stride. Motorists are driving better. They lay off their horns. They dont jump lights.“ From The Dallas Morning News: “ Americans are experiencing a sort of co
6、cooning of the heart, cultural experts say. Theyre using this time to reconnect with their families and friends.“ If Americans really were beginning to slow down, the contemporary simplicity movement would not be adding another meeting or two a month to our schedules. The antidote to a frenetic work
7、 life wouldnt be something called “power leisure“. The celebration of the new slowness may not reflect reality, but it surely does reflect some degree of yearning. Yet there may be a few bold steps we should take to get us on the path to fast-free living. Backpacks. The task of slowing the country d
8、own must begin with efforts aimed at prevention. It should begin early, as an inspection of any schoolchilds backpack will reveal. These encumbrances typically have a capacity of one and a half cubic feet and hold loads of forty pounds. The contents, unpacked and spread out like a GIs battle kit, re
9、present hyper-achievement in microcosm. A simple yet revolutionary reform would be to decree that the capacity of school backpacks be reduced by two thirds. Drive-thru windows. The whole point of these amenities is speed, and without intervention drive-thru service will only get faster. According to
10、 The Futurist, McDonalds will soon introduce e-mail billing at some of its drive-thru facilities in southern California. Other chains are experimenting with an E-Z Pass system, similar to the one used for bridge and highway tolls; a transponder in the car would permit purchases to be deducted automa
11、tically from prepaid accounts. Electric light. Another issue related to biorhythms is the seemingly inexorable drift toward a 24/7 economy. The rule of thumb is that if anything can be done twenty-four hours a day, it will be; daycare centers and dentists offices are now open at midnight. Almost by
12、definition, the maintenance of basic diurnal rhythms is essential to a humane way of life. Political arithmetic may forever doom a significant rise in the gasoline tax, but what about levying a ten-cent-a-watt tax on light bulbs? One happy consequence might be a shift back to daytime baseball. Compu
13、ter keyboards. Yes, computers have made many aspects of modern life more tolerable, enabling stupendous feats of calculation, storage and management. But they are also an attractive nuisance, putting unimaginable amounts of sheer capability to buy, to pry, to surf, to meddle into the hands of people
14、 unaccustomed to its wise use. One way would be to decide that every computer must have two separate keyboards one with all the vowels and the other with the consonants. The measures outlined above would be a start. Should more impetus be needed, we could ban cup holders from cars, demand that break
15、ing news be delivered only by mail, and add a ball and a strike to the standard at-bat. If Americans intend to take slowness seriously, they need to start picking up the pace. Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR. 2 A unique social phenomenon exists exclusively in China chunyun, or Spring Festiv
16、al Travel Rush. The following excerpt is about how a foreign reporter views this issue. Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly the content of the excerpt; 2. give your comment. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, cont
17、ent sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks. Tootling back to the Village The lunar new year holiday shows the strength of rural ties. It is often described as the worlds biggest recurring movement of people; a 40-day per
18、iod spanning the lunar new year, during which astonishing numbers of people travel to join distant family members to celebrate the Spring Festival. Officials call this period chunyun, or spring transportation. The term evokes horror in the minds of many; trains are so jammed that the only place to s
19、it is on lavatory floors. This year the projected number of journeys on public transport during chunyun, which will end on March 15th, is nearly 2. 9 billion, a 10% increase over the comparable period a year ago. Yet there are reasons to be a little less gloomy about what this entails. The numbers s
20、uggest that despite rapid urbanization, the pull of the countryside remains strong. Many of the journeys involve mingong, or peasant workers, as the nearly 300m migrants from the countryside who work in urban areas are often snootily called. Their families are often divided. Children stay in the vil
21、lages, because a fragmented social-security system makes it difficult for migrants to enjoy subsidized education and health care in the cities. Many migrants think it a good idea that some relatives remain; the stay-behinds can help retain land-use rights which might come in handy for the migrants i
22、f urban work dries up. The authorities themselves are keen for migrants to keep this backstop. But migration patterns are changing. Wang Kan of the China Institute of Industrial Relations says that, during chunyun, trips between provinces have been declining. This is because migrants are often worki
23、ng closer to home, thanks to the relocation of some industries away from the coast to inland provinces where labour is cheaper. “We can see the emergence of more regional hubs,“ says Mr. Wang. No longer is the chunyun rush so concentrated in the biggest and wealthiest cities. Analyzing chunyun data
24、is difficult. Xiaohui Liang of Renmin University of China says that companies have recently begun providing private long-distance coach transport for their workers. These trips do not get counted in official statistics. Other workers, he says, get counted twice if they go by train to a regional hub
25、and from there continue by bus to their hometowns. A single worker doing this in both directions would account for four chunyun journeys. The growth of an urban middle class further complicates the picture. Journeys made by holiday tourists, with no rural reunion in mind, are on the rise. Researcher
26、s had long felt it safe to assume that trips taken on pricey high-speed trains were made by such travellers. But according to Mr. Wang, migrant workers are increasingly opting for the speed and comfort of the more expensive trains. This, he says, suggests that the purchasing power of migrants is on
27、the rise. Some are even heading back to their villages in newly bought cars (perhaps with paying passengers to offset some of the cost). One source of data on this years travel rush is Alibaba, an e-commerce firm which has analysed the sale of train tickets through Alitrip, its online travel busines
28、s. In a new trend this year, the company says, some families are migrating in reverse for their holiday reunions. Alibaba says there has been a “tremendous increase“ in the number of elderly parents travelling from their rural homes to industrial centres, such as the southern city of Guangzhou, to s
29、pend the festival with their children. That implies that some migrants are now proud enough of their new urban homes to begin showing off. Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR. 3 A lightly mockery word has been coined to define the single female group above the average age for marriage “leftover
30、 women“. Is this a personal business or a social issue? Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly the authors opinion; 2. give your comment. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and langu
31、age quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks. Young, Single and What About It? In her tiny flat, which she shares with two cats and a flock of porcelain owls, Chi Yingying describes her parents as wanting to be the controlling shareholders in her life. Even whe
32、n she was in her early 20s, her mother raged at her for being unmarried. At 28, Ms. Chi made “the most courageous decision of my life“ and moved into her own home. Now 33, she relishes the privacy at a price: her monthly rent of 4,000 yuan swallows nearly half her salary. In many countries, leaving
33、the family home well before marriage is a rite of passage. But in China choosing to live alone and unmarried is eccentric verging on taboo. Chinese culture attaches a particularly high value to the idea that families should live together. Yet ever more people are living alone. In the decade to 2010,
34、 the number of single-person households doubled. Today, over 58m Chinese live by themselves, according to census data, a bigger number of one-person homes than in America, Britain and France combined. Solo dwellers make up 14% of all households. The pattern of Chinese living alone is somewhat differ
35、ent from that in the West, because tens of millions of (mainly poor) migrant workers have moved away from home to find work in more prosperous regions of China; many in this group live alone, often in shoe boxes. Yet for the most part, younger Chinese living alone are from or among the better-off. “
36、Freedom and new wealth“ have broken Chinas traditional family structures, says Jing Jun of Tsinghua University in Beijing. For the better-educated under-30-year-olds, the more money they have, the more likely they are to live alone. Rich parts of China have more non-widowed single dwellers: in Beiji
37、ng a fifth of homes house only one person. The marriage age is rising, particularly in big cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, where the average man marries after 30 and the average woman at 28, older than their American counterparts. Divorce rates are also increasing, though they are still much
38、lower than in America. More than 3.5m Chinese couples split up each year, which adds to the number of single households. For some, living alone is a transitional stage on the way to marriage, remarriage or family reunification. But for a growing number of people it may be a permanent state. In citie
39、s, many educated, urban women stay single, often as a positive choice a sign of rising status and better employment opportunities. Rural areas, by contrast, have a skewed sex ratio in which men outnumber women, a consequence of families preferring sons and aborting female fetuses or abandoning baby
40、girls. The consequence is millions of reluctant bachelors. In the past, adulthood in China used to, almost without exception, mean marriage and having children within supervised rural or urban structures. Now a growing number of Chinese live beyond prying eyes, able to pursue the social and sexual l
41、ives they choose. Living alone does not have to mean breaching social norms phones and the Internet make it easier than ever to keep in touch with relations, after all. Yet loosening family ties may open up space for new social networks, interest groups, even political aspirations. For now those who
42、 live alone are often subject to mockery. Unmarried females are labelled “leftover women“ ; unmarried men, “bare branches“ for the family tree they will never grow. An online group called “women living alone“ is stacked with complaints about being told to “get a boyfriend“. Write your response on AN
43、SWER SHEET FOUR. 4 For a long time, paying kids to do chores has been one of the most hotly-debated parenting topics. Is it appropriate to pay children for their doing chores? Read the excerpts carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly the differ
44、ent opinions; 2. give your comment. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks. Ted (the US) We should pay kids to do their jobs. If they dont do their jobs, the children
45、dont get paid, therefore teaching them that a good work ethic shall be rewarded and a bad work ethic will get nothing. Also, paying kids for chores is like leading childrens steps into the real world, which makes them learn and take more responsibilities. Stella (China) Children are sometimes paid t
46、o do chores around the house. Thats not efficient. What you are doing is preparing them for something that they will have to do when they grow up. Adults get paid to do their jobs; children, however, dont have jobs and shouldnt get paid. Your parents dont get paid to clean the house or set the table
47、. If they arent allowed to get paid neither should you. Sally (the UK) Paying kids for chores sends kids a clearly wrong message. In the absence of a payment, some children would willingly set the table, empty the garbage or make their beds. It converts a family obligation into just another commerci
48、al transaction and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment. Wow, that is not the message parents want to send. We want kids to contribute because they are important members of our family and everyone has to contribute. Jessica (Mongoli
49、a) Ridiculous! As a child myself, I do believe that it is absolutely ridiculous to pay your kids for doing household duties. I dont receive pocket money (even though my parents are capable of giving) because I believe that my parents earn that money out of hard work, not out of cleaning up their own house. Susan (Spain) I think “earn money for chores“ is the most common type of compensation. Kids are expected to do certain chores around the house in exchange for money. The benefits are that the child sees a direct correlation between effort and th
