1、专业英语四级（阅读）模拟试卷 186及答案与解析 SECTION A In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each 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 walks these three girls in nothing but bathing
2、 suits. Im in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I dont see them until theyre over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white j
3、ust under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. Shes one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fift
4、y with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. Shed been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before. (2) By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bagshe gives me a little snort in passing, if shed been
5、 born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salemby the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didnt even have shoes on. T
6、here was this chunky one, with the two-pieceit was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a
7、 tall one, with black hair that hadnt quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too longyou know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking“ and “attractive“ but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her
8、so muchand then the third one, that wasnt quite so tail. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didnt look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little har
9、d on her heels, as if she didnt walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls minds work (do you really th
10、ink its a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight. (3) She had on a kind of dirty-pinkbeige maybe, I dont knowbathin
11、g suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadnt been the
12、re you wouldnt have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of m
13、etal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty. (4) She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A folk songs are disappearing one after another. Thus wrote Ludolf Parisius, a German song coll
14、ector, nearly two centuries ago. Others have since said the same, for just as spoken languages can die, so too can musical ones. (2) A century ago song-collection was an important part of the study of musical languages. There were archives of “field recordings“ in Berlin, London and Washington DC, w
15、hich could express deep social truth; they were the heartbeat of humanity. They served other purposes, too. Like many of their contemporaries, Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok, two Hungarians who visited Magyar villages in the early 1900s, used the folk music they hoovered up to enrich their own compos
16、itions. (3) Meanwhile, the nascent record companies were also getting in on the act. But the British Gramophone Company and its German and American rivals had little interest in musicology. The songs and dances they recorded in Central and South-East Asia were for sale back to the people of those re
17、gions, who would, it was hoped, buy the expensive equipment needed to play them. It is a sweet historical irony that their shellac discs are now musicological treasures: some antique Balinese pieces are known solely because in the early 1930s a Canadian composer bought some of those records in a sho
18、p in Bali. The warehouse manager, angry that his wares were not selling, smashed the rest in a rage. (4) It was only in 1933, when John Lomax, an American folklorist, began making his marathon collection of recordings from the American South for the Library of Congress, that the significance of fiel
19、d recordings became generally realised. By the mid-1900s the world was being scoured by musicologists seeking to document and preserve, with ethnographic labels giving them altruistic support: Folkways in America, Topic in Britain and Ocora, set up by the French government initially to record the mu
20、sic of the French West African colonies as they moved towards independence. It was a measure of the prestige attached to field-recordings that, in 1977, one of the Nonesuch labels recordings of traditional Balinese gamelan music was sent into outer space as part of the Voyager Golden Record. (5) The
21、 world music boom of the 1990s was galvanised by a best-selling Cuban album, “Buena Vista Social Club“. Who could not be fired by the spectacle of some very old men and women (and their label) striking gold with forgotten music of irresistible charm? Record companies rushed to join the bonanza, but
22、it lasted only a few years. The growth of digital media and the decline in the market for specialist CDs (and record shops increasing reluctance to stock them) turned boom into bust. This slump hit the ethnographic companies hard. Some closed down, and others abandoned CDs in favour of digital distr
23、ibution. The long-awaited release of Dust-to-Digitals box of Moroccan field recordings, made in the 1950s by Paul Bowles, author of “The Sheltering Sky“, highlights another marketing ploy: with Bowless notes handsomely presented in a leather-bound book, the box is an art-object in itself. But Topic
24、now survives on its backlist, and is no longer able to finance new field recordings; Ocora still bravely continues to produce them, though its director Serge Noel-Ranaivo admits the labels future is “not assured“. (6) Smithsonian Folkways is in fine fettle, in large part because of its unparalleled
25、resources. The not-for-profit label of the American museum follows the policy of Moses Asch, whose company, Folkways, it acquired in 1987: every release should be kept available to the public, whether profitable or not. Smithsonians distribution is increasingly digital and it is expanding its collec
26、tion by acquiring others, including 127 unreleased albums of traditional music that were made by UNESCO in over 70 countries. It still releases new field recordings, but its splendid ten-CD survey of the music of Central Asia was only possible thanks to a subsidy from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
27、 A projected African series will not happen without similar help. (7) Professor Theodore Levin, producer of that Central Asian series, is a rare optimist. “ Ethnographic recordings have never been easier to make and disseminate,“ he says. “ Anyone with a Zoom recorder and a laptop can make digital f
28、ield recordings and put them online. “ He also points to the proliferation of cross-cultural fusions now being recorded. (8) But there are more reasons to be pessimistic. YouTube recordings are no substitute for the scrupulously curated products of Smithsonian and Ocora, and although some inspired f
29、usions are being created in Central Asia, most come and go without a trace. Traditional music typically evolves slowly, and in a stable environment. If its ecosystem is destroyed, it can wither and die. New musical forms, rap included, continue emerging. But, as sound archives now recognise, local m
30、usic is fading away. Parisius, the German collector of early song, was spot-on. 4 It can be inferred from Para. 1 that_. （ A） some spoken languages are in danger of disappearing （ B） Ludolf Parisius knew German folk songs the best （ C） folk songs can die out like some spoken languages （ D） German fo
31、lk songs began to disappear two centuries ago 5 Why have some antique Balinese pieces become sole? （ A） Because people just dont like those Balinese pieces. （ B） Because the rest of them were destroyed back in the 1930s. （ C） Because they were all sold out to overseas customers. （ D） Because they ne
32、ed expensive equipment to be played. 6 Which of the following can best summarize Para. 4? （ A） Efforts had been made to save folk music. （ B） Some folk music were sent into outer space. （ C） Folk music of French West African colonies. （ D） John Lomax and his auto-biography. 7 Why did record companie
33、s start to abandon CDs? （ A） Because they are in favour of specialist albums. （ B） Because they are in favour of the best-selling album. （ C） Because they are in favour of Bowless notes. （ D） Because they are in favour of digital distribution. 7 (1) The cement industry is one of me worlds most pollu
34、ting: it accounts for 5% of man-made carbon-dioxide emissions each year. Making this most useful of glues requires vast quantities of energy and water. Calcium carbonate (generally in the form of limestone), silica, iron oxide and alumina are partially melted by heating them to 1450C in a special ki
35、ln. The result, clinker, is mixed with gypsum and ground to make cement, a basic ingredient of concrete. Breaking down the limestone produces about half of the emissions; almost all the rest come from the burning of fossil fuels to heat the kiln. (2) About 4. 3 billion tonnes of cement were consumed
36、 in 2014. The industry brings in about $ 250 billion a year. Cement firms have not attracted the ire of environmental campaigners in the way that oil firms have. But that could change if they shirk efforts to cut emissions in a manner consistent with keeping the world less than 2 C warmer than it wa
37、s in pre-industrial times (as agreed at UN climate talks last year). For now, few cement companies are setting environmental targets that are tough enough. (3) The main reason is a lack so far of strong enough financial imperatives, but that is changing. And as is the case for many industries, going
38、 green could save firms money. Around a third of cements production costs come from energy bills. Retrofitting old kilns to improve thermal efficiency can lower the industrys energy needs by two-fifths, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project, a research body. Another way to go green is to reduce
39、 the amount of clinker in cement by using waste substitutes such as fly ash from coal plants or slag from steel blast furnaces, but these are becoming scarcer and more expensive. (4) Capturing carbon and then sequestering it, often underground, is another method for cutting emissions. But the bother
40、 and expense of such schemes makes them a rarity. There are variations that can cut costs in rich countries. Rather than stuffing the CO2 spewed out of cement and other plants underground, Blue Planet, a carbon-capture company based in California, creates building materials from it in the form of ag
41、gregates. These can be recycled into making new concrete, avoiding the need for more limestone. (5) As almost all big cement firms also produce building materials such as concrete and asphalt, capturing emissions to create such products is worthwhile. It could also reduce open-pit mining for limesto
42、ne, which is especially destructive. Blue Planet is providing materials for San Franciscos new airport and has other projects across North America. Concrete is the “900-pound gorilla in the carbon footprint of any building“ , says its CEO, Brent Constanz. (6) The group of cement bosses that environm
43、entalists need to win round is small. Just six firms LafargeHolcim, Anhui Conch, CNBM, Cemex, Heidelberg and Italcementidominate the global market. The last two are set to merge this year, leaving just five behemoths. The nature of the industry helps explain its propensity for consolidation. The gre
44、at weight of cement and its ingredients makes the materials tough to transport, creating localised markets. Companies prefer to serve distant markets by buying firms that are already there. Deals have multiplied as firms from the rich world have splurged on those in developing countries, and, occasi
45、onally, vice versa. (7) Further consolidation, bringing economies of scale, ought to help the industry to clean up. One industrial country in Asia is to introduce a national carbon-trading scheme in 2017, and the EUs own scheme will reduce its emissions cap by 2.2% every year after 2020. The industr
46、y is becoming more vulnerable to emissions-curbing legislation, says Phil Roseberg of Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm. Some cement giants are at last taking action. LafargeHolcim already uses an internal carbon price of $ 32 per tonne; Heidelberg works with one of $23. In a changing regulatory
47、 and political environment, investors may start to see nasty cracks in the business model of any firm still stuck in the industrys old, polluting ways. 8 Which of the following draw(s) more fury than the others to environmental campaigners? （ A） The oil firms. （ B） The cement companies. （ C） The cli
48、nker production. （ D） The burning of fossil fuels. 9 The following are all possible ways “to go green“ EXCEPT_. （ A） cutting energy bills by improving thermal efficiency （ B） using substitutes to reduce the amount of clinker in cement （ C） capturing carbon and then sequestering it underground （ D） i
49、nvesting on environmental research bodies all over the world 10 What does Brent Constanz mean by saying concrete is the “900-pound gorilla in the carbon footprint of any building“ ? （ A） Almost all big cement firms produce concrete. （ B） Capturing emissions to create concrete is worthwhile. （ C） Concrete is polluting but an essential part of construction. （ D） Concrete is being provided for San Franciscos new airport. SECTION B In this section there are five short answer questions based on the passages in Section A. Answer the ques
