1、专业英语八级（阅读）模拟试卷 55及答案与解析 0 The Internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of lifes fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and if interactive write. Building your own site cer
2、tainly does. Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBMs India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language“ , a cousin of the hypertext markup language
3、 used on conventional websites that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone. The “ spoken web“ Dr. Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in
4、 poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers. Dr. Banavar, h
5、owever, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospit
6、al will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and list
7、ens to subjects of interest. That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr. Banavars approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handse
8、t, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions“ or “most listened to“ items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their ow
9、n voice sites a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes. To build a site the user first selects a suitable template. The system then talks him through the bells and whistles he might wish to add to that template. A carpenter or a
10、utorickshaw driver, for example, can advertise his services, receive and confirm offers of work and even undertake basic commercial transactions through such a site. And the site can store offers of work when its owner is unavailable as often happens in places where several people share a handset. L
11、ike a more conventional website, a voice site has a mechanism by which information can be linked together and browsed, both backwards and forwards. The system IBM employs to achieve this, the hyperspeech transfer protocol(HSTP), is similar in principle to the hypertext transfer protocol that provide
12、s links from one conventional website to another. The HSTP allows, for instance, someone listening to an item on a voice site to hear another linked item and then return to the first one and continue listening from where he left off. India, one of the worlds fastest-growing mobile-phone markets, is
13、an obvious place to try all this out. Although more than a third of its population of 1.2 billion now have a handset, they are often basic devices shared among families and friends. IBM is therefore carrying out trials of the spoken web in several parts of India and, in collaboration with various ot
14、her groups, in other countries. Users will have to make calls, and those calls will cost money. But, Dr. Banavar thinks, there are many ways of paying for them. Public-service sites such as local portals might be toll-free and subsidised by governments. Commercial sites could take a small percentage
15、 of any transaction carried out over them. Advertising might also provide revenue. It would, after all, be more difficult for the listener to screen out than the visual adverts seen on a conventional site. 1 To create their voice sites, the illiterate may need the help of IBM and other groups in the
16、 following aspects EXCEPT_. （ A） offering them hosting computer servers （ B） providing them with templates （ C） teaching them voice extensible markup language （ D） finding a way to pay their phone bill 2 Which of the following statements about voice sites is INCORRECT? （ A） They are in many ways sim
17、ilar to conventional websites. （ B） Blind people may use them too. （ C） They do not require a computer server. （ D） Anyone who can speak and hear is able to use them through phone. 3 The passage implies that voice sites_. （ A） cannot be used by those who dont own a mobile phone （ B） can help the ill
18、iterate workers improve their income （ C） are growing very fast in India （ D） may replace conventional websites one day 4 Which of the following contrasts is NOT implied in the passage? （ A） Voice site and conventional website. （ B） Voice extensible markup language and hypertext markup language. （ C
19、） Voice site and call-center. （ D） Hyperspeech transfer protocol and hypertext transfer protocol. 5 What is the tone of the passage? （ A） Instructive. （ B） Introductory. （ C） Ironical. （ D） Unsatisfied. 5 When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services t
20、o conversation. The distinguished theorist of liberalism was indeed a brilliant talker and feline gossip. Readers of Berlins letters will find that same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page. A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlins centen
21、ary year he lived from 1909 to 1997 his literary executor, Henry Hardy, and a team of co-editors have now brought out a second fat volume. The verbal pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin began dictating to a machine. Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlins professional asc
22、ent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British establishment. Three or four footnotes a page introduce perhaps 1,000 or more politicians, public serva
23、nts, academics, musicians and socialites whom Berlin knew or talked about. For that alone, his letters are a unique record of a bygone milieu. Berlin did not write on oath. He ladles praise on correspondents only to dismiss them in letters to others as gorgons or third-raters. During the Suez crisis
24、 in 1956 he writes to the wife of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that her husband has shown “great moral splendour“. The next letter, to Berlins stepson at Harvard, calls the British action “childish folly“. His capsule judgments are sometimes apt, sometimes sneering. He calls Sir Peter Straw
25、son, an eminent contemporary philosopher, provincial. Berlin is sharper still on his own thin-skinned self. He belittles his large philosophical gifts, finds publication an agony and worries to correspondents that his work is rot. Mr. Hardy says that these letters represent perhaps a fourth of those
26、 Berlin wrote in 1946-1960. There are none back to him. So here is Berlin in his own ironical voice, as selected by editors. A reader only of these letters may well ask why Berlin had such grateful pupils and devoted friends. And why was he among the foremost liberal thinkers of the age? A selection
27、 of old and new tributes, The Book of Isaiah, also edited by the tireless Mr. Hardy, partly answers both questions. Thinkers such as John Rawls defended liberal principles with more argument. Among historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlins
28、gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas. Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others(negative liberty)is more urgent or basic, he argued, than freedom to realise your potential(positive liberty). The left distrusted that distinction and the right
29、misappropriated it, while philosophers continue to pick it over. He thought, secondly, that liberalism fails if it cannot validate the universal need to belong. But perhaps Berlins strongest conviction was that the basic commitments to friendship and truth, fairness and liberty, family and achieveme
30、nt, nation and principleclash routinely and cannot be smoothly reconciled. Thinkers and politicians should admit the conflicts, Berlin implied, and not blanket them with doctrine or tyrannically attempt to subordinate some concerns to others. The first two of those ideas crop up here and there in th
31、ese letters. In personal form, that third conviction that people are to be taken in full, not in formulae runs throughout, and was surely one source of Berlins charm. More volumes of letters are to follow. Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument. He was
32、an erudite wit at the dinner table and, as the reader now sees, in his letters. But he was a thinker first, and for his thought there is no substitute for his essays. 6 Which of the following statements contains a metaphor? （ A） That same bubbling flow of malice.(Paragraph One) （ B） A unique record
33、of a bygone milieu.(Paragraph Three) （ C） Dismiss them.as gorgons or third-raters.(Paragraph Four) （ D） That people are to be taken.not in formulae.(Paragraph Ten) 7 The author probably would NOT describe Berlin as a_. （ A） sarcastic man （ B） modest man （ C） arrogant man （ D） sophisticated man 8 Acc
34、ording to the passage, Berlin would NOT agree on the idea that_. （ A） philosophers should stay away from politics （ B） the commitment to liberty is not always higher than to family and friendship （ C） people are complicated and should not be oversimplified （ D） philosophical theories can be made mor
35、e interesting 9 What does “this growing monument“ in the last paragraph refer to? （ A） Published letters of Berlin. （ B） Berlins philosophical thought. （ C） Published essays of Berlin. （ D） Berlins charm. 10 The last paragraph implies that Berlins letters_. （ A） present a different image of Berlin （
36、 B） reflect conflicts among Berlins three convictions （ C） are not the best source to learn Berlins thought （ D） reveal flaws in Berlins philosophical theory 10 For a man who wants the world to slow down, Carl Honores moment of clarity came in, of all places, an airport. The Canadian journalist was
37、leafing through a newspaper at Romes Fiumicino airport when he spotted an ad for a collection of condensed, one-minute bedtime stories for kids. At first Honore, a self-described“speedaholic“, was delighted at the idea of a more efficient bedtime experience for his 2-year-old son. Then he was horrif
38、ied. “Have I gone completely insane?“ he asked himself, and realized the answer was“Probably. “Out of that epiphany came a best-selling book and a whole new career for Honore as an international spokesman for the concept of leisure. “Im attacking the whole cultural assumption that faster is better a
39、nd we must cram every waking hour with things to do,“says Honore, who now lives in London. In a world of bottom-line bosses and results-oriented parents, he dares speak up in favor of the unabridged fairy tale. Its a message people seem to want to hear. Since it appeared in April, In Praise of Slown
40、ess has been translated into 12 languages and sold some 60,000 copies, landing on best-seller lists in four countries; a British production company has bought television rights. Honore celebrates, perhaps a bit prematurely, a worldwide disillusionment with “the cult of speed“. As evidence he cites t
41、he Slow Food rebellion against McDonalds that began in Italy and has spread its gospel of civilized dining and local products even to the unlikely precincts of New York and Chicago. In a world in which some parents send their offspring to prep courses for preschool, a growing number of schools aroun
42、d the worldabout 800 are following the advice of the early 20th-century German educator Rudolf Steiner to encourage children to play and doodle to their hearts content, putting off learning to read until as late as 7. In his own life, Honore has substituted meditation for tennis and for television-,
43、 he has taken off his wristwatch, which means hes less worried about getting somewhere on time and can drive there without speeding. Oddly, though, Honores book has yet to catch on in the country that arguably needs it most, the one that gave the world the assembly line and the one-minute manager. C
44、hained to cell phones and BlackBerrys, fueled by junk food and forced to work ever longer hours as their employers cut jobs, frazzled American workers suffer from what the Seattle-based independent television producer John de Graaf called“affluenza“in his 2001 book of the same name. It is the collec
45、tive malaise of a materialistic society that equates the good life with“the goods life.“ By contrast, Europeans and even the famously efficient Japanese are more receptive. Slow Food held its second biennial gastronomic fair in Turin last month, drawing tens of thousands of visitors, including Princ
46、e Charles, who took a couple of hours out of a European tour to savor a pint of award-winning pale English ale. The Slow Cities movement has won the backing of municipal officials in more than 100 towns and cities in Europe, Japan and Brazil with a lengthy manifesto urging policies to reduce noise a
47、nd traffic, preserve the local esthetic and gastronomic customs and establish more pedestrian zones and green spaces. The Society for the Deceleration of Time held its 14th annual meeting in Austria last month to promote what its organizers call“ a more conscious way of living. “Mastering relaxation
48、 isnt something to attempt on your own, according to society member Christian Lackner. “When everyone is telling you to go faster, as an individual you do it,“ says Lackner. “You need a movement, a way of building a group of people who want to resist in order to make it easier to say, No, I wont. “
49、Perhaps Americans need to be reassured that the slowness movement is not about fleeing to a cottage in rural Vermont. Its an effort to strike the right balance between work and leisure. A few enlightened companies like the accounting firm Ernst “Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another. “ Pascal believes that we owe different duties to different qualities. So we might say that infatuation is the proper response to charm, and awe the proper response to strength. In this light, Walzer c
