1、专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷 104及答案与解析 SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A , B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. 0 (1)In
2、 a decade working as a nanny, Andreia Soares finally clambered up the ladder into Brazils middle class. (2)With the money she saved, she bought a two-bedroom apartment with granite kitchen countertops and a small veranda, a house for her mother, a plot of land for her brother and a Louis Vuitton pur
3、se from Paris that she proudly pulls from a closet. (3)While she has done better than many of her counterparts, Ms. Soares is part of a nanny revolution that is shattering the colonial stereotype of inexpensive but dedicated domestic help in Latin America. (4)As their expectations for a better quali
4、ty of life rise, nannies are increasingly seeking to work for the very wealthy and becoming less affordable for many middle-class families. The shift is causing ripples of class tension, posing an irritating problem in a society in which more women are entering the work force without the sort of ela
5、borate system of day care that exists in some industrialized nations. (5)Fading fast are the days when white-frocked nannies worked for a menial salary, with only two days off every 15 days. Better-qualified nannies are refusing to work weekends and are demanding salaries that are two to four times
6、what they were paid just five years ago. A growing number are refusing to sleep over or are leaving the field, choosing jobs that allow more time for a private life, according to parents, nannies and directors of nanny placement agencies. (6)The supply of nannies has thinned as some have sought othe
7、r work in the expanding job market, driving up salaries for those who stay in the field, economists, nannies and nanny agency directors said. Many remaining nannies are taking courses to become better qualified and to help them find work in wealthier homes, where they can charge much more. (7)While
8、some mothers embrace the changes as good for Brazils development, many are up in arms. Once isolated, nannies now trade information about the market and working conditions through e-mail, blogs and social networks. (8)Six years ago, Evanice dos Santos, a former nanny turned blogger, had no Internet
9、access and caught up with fellow nannies at a Sao Paulo athletic club where her employers were members. Now married, she has dedicated herself to helping nanny friends online “find a better path“ toward more money and better hours. (9)Some well-paid nannies in Sao Paulo are employing nannies of thei
10、r own. Ms. Soares said nanny friends earning more than $4,300 a month were paying less-qualified nannies a little over $900 a month to baby-sit for their own children. (10)Marilia Toledo, the owner of the Masa nanny agency, said the market in Sao Paulo, South Americas largest city, had become a “war
11、“ between demanding nannies and parents trying to hold back nanny inflation. “Things are changing too quickly and abruptly,“ said Ms. Toledo, who has owned the agency for 20 years. “No one was prepared for this.“ (11)Ms. Toledo and some economists are skeptical about how long the revolution can last
12、. Dr. Neri said Brazilians still had low education levels: an average of seven years of study for adults older than 25. Rodrigo Constantino, an economist at Graphus Capital, said a lack of investment in education in Brazil would prevent many domestic workers from finding other, better-paying work, a
13、nd incessant salary demands could ignite inflation. (12)“Brazil is riding this wave, and each class is moving up the ladder,“ Mr. Constantino said. “The problem I see is how this is going to be sustainable.“ 1 To say that Ms. Soares is “part of a nanny revolution“(Para. 3)implies that _. （ A） nannie
14、s have moved up into the Brazilian middle class （ B） nannies are seeking better pay and higher social status （ C） nannies are leaving their field and seeking other jobs （ D） nannies have become better educated and qualified 2 Which of the following is NOT true about Brazilian nannies in the past? （
15、A） They had low social status. （ B） They were underpaid. （ C） They worked long hours. （ D） They attended training courses. 3 The role of Internet in the nanny revolution includes all the following EXCEPT _. （ A） keeping nannies informed of the market （ B） helping nannies find better-paid jobs （ C） h
16、elping nannies become better-qualified （ D） helping nannies find jobs of better hours 3 (1)Desertification, drought, and despair thats what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. (2)Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures coul
17、d benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.
18、This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush plain some 12,000 years ago. (3)The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara
19、to the south mat stretches some 2,400 miles. (4)Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in me journal Biogeosciences. The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan. The transit
20、ion may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in me new study. (5)“The water-holding capacity of the air is the main driving force
21、,“ Claussen said. (6)While satellite images cant distinguish temporary plants like grasses that come and go with the rains, ground surveys suggest recent vegetation change is firmly rooted. In the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, new trees are flourishing, according to S
22、tefan Kropelin, a climate scientist at the University of Colognes Africa Research Unit in Germany. (7)“Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass,“ said Kropelin, who has studied the region for two decades. In 2008 Kroepelin not i
23、nvolved in the new satellite research visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco. “The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years,“ Kropelin said. “They have never seen so much grazing land.“ (8)“Before, there was not a single scorpion, not
24、 a single blade of grass,“ he said. “Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back,“ he said. “The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is i
25、ndisputable.“ (9)An explosion in plant growth has been predicted by some climate models. For instance, in 2005 a team led by Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, forecast significantly more future rainfall in the Sahel. The study in Geophysi
26、cal Research Letters predicted that rainfall in the July to September wet season would rise by up to two millimeters a day by 2080. (10)Satellite data shows “that indeed during the last decade, the Sahel is becoming more green,“ Haarsma said. Even so, climate scientists dont agree on how future clim
27、ate change will affect the Sahel: Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall. “This issue is still rather uncertain,“ Haarsma said. (11)Max Plancks Claussen said North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modelers. Forecasting how global warming will affect the region i
28、s complicated by its vast size and the unpredictable influence of high-altitude winds that disperse monsoon rains, Claussen added. “Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend.“ 4 What is the role of the 7th and 8th paragraphs in the development of the topic? （ A） To make a transit
29、ion to a new topic. （ B） To work as a hook to the following paragraphs. （ C） To provide a contrast to the preceding paragraphs. （ D） To offer supporting evidence to the preceding paragraphs. 5 The sentence “. North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modelers.“ in the la
30、st paragraph suggests that_. （ A） half of me area will follow a wetter trend, while half a drier trend （ B） the scientists in North Africa hold different opinions in climate models （ C） it is not easy to predict how the climate change influences the district （ D） there are different climate models t
31、o be built in North Africa 5 (1)Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes. Most people also read great meaning into their nocturnal(夜间的 )visions. In fact, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and So
32、cial Psychology, the vast majority of people in three very different countries India, South Korea and the United States believe that their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths. (2)But after so many years of brain research showing that most of our everyday cognitions result from a complex but obser
33、vable interaction of proteins and neurons and other mostly uncontrolled cellular activity, how can so many otherwise rational people think dreams should be taken seriously? After all, brain activity isnt mystical but for the most part highly predictable. (3)The authors of the study psychologists Car
34、ey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard offer a few theories. For one, dreams often feature familiar people and locations, which means we are less willing to dismiss mem outright. Also, because we cant trace me content of dreams to an external sourcebecause that cont
35、ent seems to arise spontaneously and from within we cant explain it the way we can explain random thoughts that occur to us during waking hours. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and thinking about a bomb exploding in your office, you might say to yourself, “Oh, I watched 24 last night, so I
36、m just remembering that episode.“ But people have a harder time making sense of dreams. Maybe 24 caused the dream, we think or maybe were having a premonition of an attack. We love to interpret dreams widely, and those acts of interpretation give dreams meaning. (4)Human beings are irrational about
37、dreams the same way they are irrational about a lot of things. We make dumb choices all the time on the basis of silly information like racial bias or a misunderstanding of statistics or dreams. Morewedge and Norton quote one of the most famous modern studies to demonstrate our collective folly, fro
38、m a paper written by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that was published in Science in 1974. In that paper, Tversky and Kahneman discuss an experiment in which subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries represented in the U.N. Before they guessed, a researcher
39、spun a wheel of fortune in front of them that landed on a random number between 0 and 100. People tended to pick an answer that wasnt far from the number on the wheel, even though the wheel had nothing to do with African countries. (5)As I said, we all make dumb choices based on silly information. T
40、hats why we invest meaning in dreams. That being said, dumb choices arent necessarily bad ones. A final finding from the study: When people have dreams about good things happening to their good friends, they are more likely to say those dreams are meaningful than when they have dreams about bad thin
41、gs happening to their friends. Similarly, we invest more meaning in dreams in which our enemies are punished and less meaning in dreams in which our enemies emerge victorious. In short, our interpretation of dreams may say a lot less about some quixotic search for hidden truth than it does about ano
42、ther enduring human quality: optimistic thinking. 6 The relationship between the second and third paragraph is that _. （ A） each presents one side of the topic （ B） the second generalizes, the third offers support （ C） the third is the logical result of the second （ D） the third makes a contrast to
43、the second 7 Which of the following details shows peoples irrationality and absurdness in dealing with things? （ A） People tend to choose the closer number on the wheel when telling the percentage of African countries. （ B） People would link the thought of a bomb explosion with last nights episode o
44、f 24. （ C） People would rather see their enemies being punished in their dreams. （ D） When thinking about a bomb explosion in the office, people tend to interpret it as a premonition. 8 According to the last paragraph, peoples varied interpretation of different kind of dreams mainly suggests _. （ A）
45、 the clear line between hatred and love of the human beings （ B） the tendency to make foolish decision based on irrelevant information （ C） our curiosity about the hidden truth behind the dreams （ D） our inclination to think good things rather than bad ones 8 (1)Nothing attracts me to a city as much
46、 as an exaggerated but pervasive generalization that discourages timid travelers, keeps prices down and lines short, and makes people like me very happy. (2)But Im an Italy novice, and this was my first time in Naples. So while I love wandering and discovering rather than touring established sights,
47、 I wondered if I could skip the most famous pizzerias and churches in the world? Dispense with Pompeii? (3)My solution is to do some must-sees, and some see-what-happens. (4)When I stepped out of the subway near Napless historic center it took about 10 seconds for me to fall in love. A soccer ball r
48、olled past me with kids chasing after it; pedestrians gestured on street corners like overacting extras on a movie set; motorbikes zoomed by haphazardly; and drying laundry fluttered in the breeze from just about every ancient balcony. I love cities with no clothes dryers. (5)Things got even better
49、when I found I Fiori di Napoli, my 35 euro a night bed-and-breakfast, hidden away in a building without a street number, let alone a sign. Walking up marble steps to the third floor of this 18th-century building just off the narrow streets of the Spanish Quarter, I was greeted by Manuela Colosimo, one of the owners. Manuela, who spoke in Naples-seasoned but fluent English, would provide me with endless suggestions(and maps, and guidebooks, and strong coffee)over the week. Her first suggestion: Trattoria Nennella, just two bl
