1、专业英语四级（阅读）模拟试卷 203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) My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to b
2、e a cheerful, kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farmhand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a horse of his own, and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farmh
3、ands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Heads saloon crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farmhands. Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten oclock father drove home along a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for the night, and himself
4、went to bed, quite happy in his position in life. He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world. (2) It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, then a country school teacher, and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world. Some
5、thing happened to the two people. They became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them. (3) It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a schoolteacher she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of how Garfield, Lincoln, and
6、 other Americans rose from poverty to fame and greatness, and as I lay beside her in the days of her lying-in she may have dreamed that I would some day rule men and cities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place as a farmhand, sell his horse, and embark on an independent enterprise of
7、his own. She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled gray eyes. For herself she wanted nothing. For father and myself she was incurably ambitious. (4) The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly. They rented ten acres of poor stony land on Griggs Road, eight miles
8、 from Bidwell, and launched into chicken-raising. I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impressions of life there. From the beginning they were impressions of disaster, and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life, I attribute it to the fact that what sho
9、uld have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm. (5) One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured o
10、n Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your fathers brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God
11、s mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disill
12、usioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in ones judgments of life. If disease does not kill them, they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and th
13、en walk under the wheels of a wagon to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders. In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It is intend
14、ed to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you. Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Al
15、aska, put your faith in the honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the world is daily growing better and that good will triumph over evil, but do not read and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen. It was not written for you. 1 In the passage, the narrator describes hi
16、s mother as _. （ A） a school teacher who doesnt talk much （ B） a person who knows a lot （ C） a person who is restless （ D） a person who has a soaring aspiration 2 In the authors opinion, the literature about chicken raising _. （ A） is full of hope and positive energy （ B） proves the victory of good
17、over evil （ C） persuades you to believe in politicians （ D） tends to be blindly optimistic about its rewards 3 Whats the authors attitude towards his parents dream of rise to success? （ A） Approving. （ B） Optimistic. （ C） Skeptical. （ D） Indifferent. 3 (1) The urban population in 2014 accounted for
18、54% of the total global population, up from 34% in 1960, and continues to grow. It is estimated that by 2017, even in less developed countries, a majority of people will be living in urban areas. Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and has 25 of the worlds fastest growing lar
19、ge cities. Half of the worlds urban population now lives in Asia, which also has half of the worlds largest cities and fastest growing large cities. Every year the worlds urban population swells by about 75m people. That extraordinary growth equivalent to adding eight Londons is a wonderful thing. C
20、ities throw people together, encouraging the exchange of ideas. The people who move there tend to grow richer, freer and more tolerant. What is rather less wonderful is the way in which many of the worlds fastest-growing cities are expanding. (2) The trouble is not, as is often claimed, that cities
21、in poor and middle-income countries are spreading like oil slicks. Most of them need to expand. Western cities can often accommodate their growing populations by squeezing more people in. But many poor cities are incredibly dense already: Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is nine times as tightly pa
22、cked as Paris, if you include their suburbs. And no Western city has ever added inhabitants as quickly as the poor and emerging-world champions are doing. African and Asian metropolises are bound to sprawl even if sensible pro-density reforms are passed, such as scrapping height restrictions on buil
23、dings. (3) The real problem is that these metropolises are spreading in the wrong way. Frequently, small housing developments or even individual houses are plunked down wherever a builder can cut a deal with a farmer. In the huge, jumbled districts that result, far too little space is set aside for
24、roads. Manhattan is 36% road (overall, almost half of that capitalist temple is public space). In some unplanned African suburbs as little as 5% of the land is road. Even middle-class districts often lack sewers and mains water. As for amenities like public parks, forget it. Suburbs can eventually b
25、e retrofitted with roads and sewers. But that will be horrifically complicated and expensive too much so for poor countries. It would be vastly cheaper and better to do sprawl properly from the start. (4) Urban and national officials should begin by admitting two things: their cities are going to be
26、come very much larger; and this growth will be too quick to be controlled by comprehensive urban plans. Officials in poor countries often spend many years drawing up detailed plans; by the time they are finished, the city has changed so much that their designs cannot possibly be implemented. (5) It
27、is wiser to keep things simple. At a minimum, work out where the main thoroughfares and parks will go as the city expands. Again, New York is a good model. In 1811, when the city was still confined to the southern tip of Manhattan, it planned for a sevenfold expansion and laid out a street grid. Acq
28、uiring rights of way for future roads and amenities can be both costly and politically difficult (though not nearly as much as waiting until it is too late). Almost all fast-growing cities are in countries where landholdings are small, and small farmers do not take kindly to being booted off their l
29、and. But a few countries have developed a promising technique known as land readjustment. Instead of evicting farmers in the path of a new road, officials offer to reorganize a whole district. Everybody loses some land, and the biggest winners those closest to the new road compensate those who fare
30、less well. Japanese cities used this technique when they were growing quickly. Today the Indian state of Gujarat makes it work. (6) Increasingly, the worlds fastest-growing cities will be African. And those are especially hard to corral. Many African countries persist with some form of collective la
31、nd ownership, which is anathema to professional developers: why buy land that you cannot formally own? Until farmers are given full rights to their lands, including the ability to transfer legal title, cities are likely to grow in a messy way. Good planning and secure property rights make for a bett
32、er kind of sprawl. 4 Which of the following is the best title for the passage? （ A） The Urban Population. （ B） The Right Kind of Sprawl. （ C） The Worlds Fastest-growing Cities. （ D） African and Asian Metropolises. 5 The people who move to cities tend to grow to all the following achievements EXCEPT
33、to be _. （ A） richer （ B） freer （ C） more tolerant （ D） more civilized 6 Whats the authors purpose of mentioning New York in Para.5? （ A） To explain the importance of planning in advance. （ B） To indicate New York is going to become larger. （ C） To imply the city grows too quickly to control. （ D） T
34、o show officials spend too long time on planning. 7 Which place has benefited from land readjustment recently? （ A） New York. （ B） London. （ C） Gujarat. （ D） Japanese cities. 7 (1) Browsers, pieces of internet software that people probably spend more time with than they do in bed, have long been bor
35、ing affairs. Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Save for occasional innovations such as tabs, these programs have remained fundamentally th
36、e same since the release of Mosaic, the first mainstream browser, nearly a quarter of a century ago. Just four browsers account for nearly all users: Apples Safari, Googles Chrome, Microsofts Internet Explorer and Mozillas Firefox. It is difficult to tell them apart. All these major web browsers all
37、ow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from “popping up“ without the users consent. Most web browsers can display a list o
38、f web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called “Favorites“ in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. (2) New, more interesting browsers have started cropping up. In August
39、 internet users will be able to download the first full version of Brave, the brainchild of a co-founder of Mozilla. Mozilla itself is working on a new type of browser which will give users suggestions on where to navigate next. Both are only the latest in a series of such efforts: last year Microso
40、ft unveiled Edge, meant to replace Internet Explorer; March saw the release of Cliqz, a browser developed in Germany; a month later came Vivaldi. (3) If most browsers are boring and unwieldy, it is because they are expected to do more than ever before: not just surfing the web, but editing documents
41、, streaming music and much more besides. As a result, priority is given to stability and ease of use. Too many fiddly buttons could scare away novice users. Innovation is outsourced to developers of “plug-ins“, which add features to a browser. (4) Building a new browser from scratch is a fiendishly
42、difficult and expensive undertaking. Only Apple, Google and Microsoft have the money and resources to throw at developing a fast “engine“, as the core of a browser is called. Their dominance also scares off investors. Few venture capitalists are foolhardy enough to invest in a product that needs to
43、take on three of the worlds most powerful tech companies. Mozilla is a non-profit which partially relies on volunteer developers and donations. (5) Insurgents are trying to overcome the obstacles in three ways. To reduce development costs, their products are based on existing open-source projects, s
44、uch as Chromium, which also powers Googles Chrome. They get money from angel investors, who have an appetite for risk. And most important, they aim their products at niche segments. Brave, for instance, is for surfers who prize privacy. It can block annoying online advertisements and privacy-invadin
45、g “trackers“, which lurk on websites to follow users around. Cliqz also blocks trackers and is integrated with a new search engine. Vivaldi pitches itself as a browser for “power users“. It is packed with customizable features and comes bundled with an e-mail client. (6) Such small browser-makers do
46、 not need the scale of their competitors to make money (Chrome has more than 1 billion users). Both Vivaldi and Brave say they can break even with a few million users apiece. The easiest source of revenue is search deals. Companies such as Google pay roughly one dollar per user per year to be the de
47、fault search engine on rival browsers. Vivaldi is also experimenting with charging firms to be featured on its home page. Brave is trying to subvert the dominant online-advertising model: it blocks intrusive advertisements such as self-starting videos, replaces them with less irksome ones and shares
48、 the revenues with publishers and users. (7) The market for browsers has grown large enough to sustain such niche players. But the chances that these small fry will turn into big businesses are low. Most people will continue using the boring browsers if only because they are too lazy to install a sl
49、ightly more interesting one. 8 It is difficult to tell apart the four mainstream browsers because of all the following reasons EXCEPT that _. （ A） they all allow users to open multiple information resources at the same time （ B） they all have pop-up blockers to block unwanted windows （ C） they all have some form of built-in web feed aggregator （ D） they all have bookmarks called “Favorites“ 9 In Para.4, the phrase “from scratch“ probably means _. （ A） from nothing （ B） from reaching out to users （ C） from debris （ D
