1、大学英语四级改革适用（阅读）模拟试卷 193及答案与解析 Section A 0 For many people in the U.S., sports are not just for fun. They are almost a religion. Thousands of sports fans buy expensive tickets to watch their favorite teams and athletes play in【 C1】 _. Other fans watch the games at home, not leaving their TV sets a min
2、ute. The most【 C2】 _sports fans never miss a game. Many a wife becomes a “sports widow“ during her husbands favorite season. Americas devotion to athletics has created a new class of【 C3】 _people: professional athletes. Sports stars often receive million-dollar salaries. Some even make big money app
3、earing in【 C4】_for soft drinks, shoes and so on. Not all Americans【 C5】 _sports, but athletics are an important part of their culture. Throughout their school life, Americans learn to play many sports. All students take physical education classes in school. Athletic events at universities attract ma
4、ny fans and【 C6】 _the whole community. Many people also enjoy non-competitive【 C7】 _like hiking, biking, horseback riding, camping or hunting. To communicate with American, it helps if you can talk sports. Sports in America represent the international【 C8】 _of the people who play. Many sports were【
5、C9】 _from other countries. European immigrants(移民 )brought tennis, golf, bowling and boxing to America. Football and baseball came from other Old World games. Only basketball has a truly American origin. Even today some【 C10】 _“foreign“ sports like soccer are gaining American fans. In 1994 the U.S.
6、hosted the World Cup for the first time ever. A wealthy B. benefit C. duration D. constant E. imported F. activities G. devoted H. necessarily I. worship J. person K. comprised L. advertisements M. heritage N. sufficient O. formerly 1 【 C1】 2 【 C2】 3 【 C3】 4 【 C4】 5 【 C5】 6 【 C6】 7 【 C7】 8 【 C8】 9 【
7、 C9】 10 【 C10】 Section B 10 Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest? A)Ive drawn up a list. And theres one thing I know about this list: You wont agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all ab
8、out starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: Im starting at the year zero. Otherwise, wed never get out of prehistory. And Im limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity dont count the
9、y are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along. B)This is a list of end products. That is, Im excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, wed scarce
10、ly have any machines at all. But we never say, “Oh, damn, Im out of gears!“ Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions. 1. The Mechanical Clock C)Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the m
11、ain one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they cr
12、eated public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and app
13、ointments possible. 2. The Printing Press D)Unoriginal, I know, but still its true. Gutenbergs press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and th
14、e sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanitys consensual picture of reality was shaped
15、by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, if the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture
16、of reality is founded on facts archived as text. 3. Immunization and Antibiotics E)Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly half of Europe in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduc
17、ed the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the
18、United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. Its a different world, folks. 4. The Telephone F)Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began t
19、o form. Thats the actual invention the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyones real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this fro
20、m the start. 5. The Electrical Grid G)Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street stati
21、on was the worlds first electric power station. Nikola Teslas invention of alternating current(AC)technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid
22、 to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity. 6. The Automobile H)Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And
23、 thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East And here we are today. 7. The Television I)Wherever a telev
24、ision set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our firs
25、t interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus. 8. The Computer J)My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is
26、 with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed “friends,“ but the human embodiments of those “friends“ are rarely with me. My conc
27、rete relationship is with this object on my desk(or in my lap). 11 Endangered Minds suggests that television has something to do with the change of our brain. 12 In the era before birth of immunization, old people were respected because almost no one died of old age then. 13 Nikola Tesla invented al
28、ternating current technology that enabled electricity to be transmitted over long distances. 14 Gear, though a great invention, is excluded from the list because it doesnt have independent function. 15 The political and economic unrest in the Middle East is principally attributed to oil. 16 The tele
29、phone network enables people communicate to anyone anywhere at any time. 17 Electricity is something existed all along that cant be described as an invention. 18 The plague that killed nearly half of Europe broke out in 1347. 19 Before the clock was invented, there was not a universal reference of t
30、ime. 20 After the invention of printing press, people no longer had to live by oral tradition and memory. Section C 20 The communications explosion is on the scale of the rail, automobile or telephone revolution. Very soon youll be able to record your entire life electronically anything a microphone
31、 or a camera can sense youll be able to store. In particular, the number of images a person captures in a lifetime is sure to rise dramatically. The thousand images a year I take of my children on a digital camera are all precious to me. In a generations time, my childrens children will have total i
32、mage documentation of their entire lives a visual diary of tremendous personal value. In Cambridge, were already working on millimeter-sguare(平方毫米 )computing and sensing devices that can be linked to the Internet through the radio network This sort of connectivity will expand dramatically as tiny co
33、mmunications devices become dirt-cheap and multiply. Just imagine what the paint on the wall could do if it had this sort of communications dust in it: change color, play music, show movies or even speak to you. Falling costs raise other possibilities too. Because launching space vehicles is about t
34、o become very much cheaper, the number of satellites is likely to go up greatly. Theres lots of space up there so we could have millions of them. And if you have millions of low-orbit satellites you can establish a global communications network that completely does away with towers and poles. Speech
35、 is so flexible that I expect voice communication to become almost free eventually: youll pay just a monthly fixed charge and be able to make as many calls as you want By then people will also have fixed links with business contacts, friends and relatives. One day I anticipate being able to keep in
36、touch with my family in Poland on an optical-fiber audio-video link; well be able to sit down “together“ to eat. Cars are an interesting IT-platform because they have big batteries and lots of so far unconnected digital devices. Soon each one will be on the Internet so your children can play games w
37、hile youre traveling and your partner can deal with their email. And every lamppost could be on the Internet too each one with sensors to monitor light, pollution, air quality and traffic flow. 21 By saying that he takes many images of his children, the author wants to _. （ A） show his great interes
38、t in photography （ B） compare his own life with his childrens （ C） display the influence of communications on life （ D） demonstrate the ease of enjoying life electronically 22 The author most probably thinks that the communications dust is_. （ A） worthless （ B） amazing （ C） small （ D） cheap 23 Which
39、 of the following statements about the low-orbit satellites is true? （ A） The low-orbit satellites can help reduce the costs of communications network. （ B） The low-orbit satellites will enable all the communications networks to combine. （ C） The low-orbit satellites would replace towers and poles f
40、unctionally. （ D） There will be more low-orbit satellites than other kinds of satellites. 24 According to the passage, an optical-fiber audio-video link can enable us to _. （ A） talk and see each other no matter where we are （ B） eat with our family no matter where we are （ C） talk or see anyone we
41、want free of charge （ D） find more business partners and friends 25 The phrase “each one“(Line 2, Para. 5)can be best replaced by _. （ A） each digital device （ B） each car （ C） each battery （ D） each person 25 The small coastal town of Broome, in northwest Australia, is a remote village in the vast
42、countryside. There are no traffic jams and hardly any roads. There is only the massive Australian wild land, where some houses are 500 miles apart and some driveways are 50 miles long. There seem to be only two main sources of entertainment out here: the sunset at the beach and Sun Pictures. Sun Pic
43、tures is a very different movie theater: The seats are park benches and deck chairs, but youre also welcome to sit on the grass. It is the worlds oldest outdoor movie garden. Sun Pictures was built in 1916 on the other side of the globe from Hollywood. AD the big films were shipped here and the lone
44、ly country was amazed. Broome resident Pearl Hamaguchi has never traveled far from home. But in the Sun Pictures chairs, under the deep blue night sky, she has been almost everywhere. “And we came back excited about Gregory Peck,“ she recalled. This is one of the few places left in the world where y
45、ou can see two sets of stars at the same time one set in the sky, the other in the film. Each night, dozens of people from around the world line up at the old wooden stand, with no computer in sight, and buy their tickets to the latest films. Sun Pictures is also a museum, exhibiting projectors(放映机
46、)that date back to the silent films, a portrait gallery of the famous people who never knew about this placeeven though they came here all the time. Every once in a while, Im told, you might find a non-ticket holder in your seat. Thats why its always a good idea to shake out your chair to make sure
47、there are no spiders or scorpions. “Weve only had a couple of scorpion incidents but no ones been stung yet,“ said Aaron Mestemaker, a tourist visiting from Michigan. Sun Pictures is a holy hall of movie history and a reminder that air conditioning and carpet are no match for grass and fresh air eve
48、n when the lizards steal the scene. 26 The first two paragraphs want to show that_. （ A） living in Broome is inconvenient （ B） the life in Broome is boring （ C） few people like to live in Broome （ D） Broome is simple but vast 27 Sun Pictures is different from other theater in that _. （ A） it is the
49、most historical outdoor theater in the world （ B） the audience can either sit on chairs or on the grass （ C） it was built by some constructor from Hollywood （ D） all the films were imported here from Hollywood 28 Gregory Peck is most probably the name of_. （ A） a place （ B） a film （ C） a movie star （ D） a country fellow 29 The “non-ticket holder“, as is mentioned in the passage, refers to_. （ A） a country fellow who does not buy the film ticket （ B） an elde
