1、大学英语四级改革适用（阅读）模拟试卷 297及答案与解析 Section A 0 Each artist knows in his heart that he is saying something to the public. He hopes the public will listen and understand he wants to teach them, and he wants them to learn from him. What visual artist like painters want to teach is easy to make out but diffic
2、ult to【 C1】_, because painters translate their experience into shapes and colors, not【 C2】_. They seem to feel that a certain selection of shapes and colors, out of the【 C3】_billions possibles, is exceptionally interesting for them and worth showing to us. Without their works we should never have no
3、ticed these【 C4】 _shapes and colors, or have felt the【 C5】 _which they brought to the artist. Most artists take their shapes and colors from the world of nature and from human bodies in【 C6】 _and at rest; their choices indicate that these aspects of the world are worth looking at, that they contain
4、beautiful sights. Contemporary artists might say that they【 C7】 _choose subjects that provide an interesting pattern, that there is nothing more in it Yet even they do not choose entirely without【 C8】 _to the character of their subjects. If one painter chooses to paint a decaying leg and another a l
5、ake in moonlight, each of them is【 C9】 _our attention to a certain aspect of the world. Each painter is telling us something, showing us something,【 C10】 _something all of which means that, consciously or unconsciously, he is trying to teach us. A. words B. directing C. countless D. crawl E. referen
6、ce F. merely G. erect H. motion I. explain J. emphasizing K. sympathetic L. gloriously M. delight N. crisis O. particular 1 【 C1】 2 【 C2】 3 【 C3】 4 【 C4】 5 【 C5】 6 【 C6】 7 【 C7】 8 【 C8】 9 【 C9】 10 【 C10】 Section B 10 Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest? A) Ive drawn up a list.
7、 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 about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine:
8、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 they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along. B) T
9、his 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 scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, “Oh, damn, Im out of gears! “ Ditto microchips, transistors, a
10、nd 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 main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed
11、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 created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the unive
12、rse, 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 appointments possible. 2. The Printing Press D) Unoriginal, I know, but still its true. Gutenbergs press, with
13、 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 the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing uni
14、versalized 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 by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, if the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they ha
15、d 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 of reality is founded on facts archived as text. 3. Immunization and Antibiotics E) Three centuries ago, a
16、lmost 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 reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of
17、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 United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. Its a different world, folk
18、s. 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 to form. Thats the actual invention the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any give
19、n 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 from the start 5. The Electrical Grid G) Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to
20、 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 station was the worlds first electric power station. Nikola Teslas invention of alternating current (AC) tech
21、nology 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 to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by ele
22、ctricity. 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 thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the
23、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 television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book End
24、angered 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 first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largel
25、y with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, oneway, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus. 8. The Computer J) My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I
26、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 concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap). 11 Endangered Minds suggests that
27、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 alternating current technology that enabled electricity to be transmitted over long distances. 14 Ge
28、ar, 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 telephone network enables people communicate to anyone anywhere at any time. 17 Electricity is somethi
29、ng 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 time. 20 After the invention of printing press, people no longer had to live by oral tradition and
30、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 or a camera can sense youll be able to store. In particular, the number of images a person captur
31、es 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 image documentation of their entire lives a visual diary of tremendous personal value. In Cambridge
32、, were already working on millimeter-square(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 communications devices become dirt-cheap and multiply. Just imagine what the paint on the wall cou
33、ld 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 to become very much cheaper, the number of satellites is likely to go up greatly. Theres lots of
34、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 is so flexible that I expect voice communication to become almost free eventually: youll pay ju
35、st 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 touch with my family in Poland on an optical-fiber audio-video link; well be able to sit down “
36、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 while youre traveling and your partner can deal with their email. And every lamppost could be on
37、 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 interest in photography （ B） compare his own life with his childrens （ C） display the influence of com
38、munications 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 of the following statements about the low-orbit satellites is true? （ A） The low-orbit satell
39、ites 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 functionally. （ D） There will be more low-orbit satellites than other kinds of satellites. 24 A
40、ccording 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 want free of charge （ D） find more business partners and friends 25 The phrase “each one“ (Lin
41、e 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 countryside. There are no traffic jams and hardly any roads. There is only the massive Austr
42、alian 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 Pictures is a very different movie theater: The seats are park benches and deck chairs, but you
43、re 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. All the big films were shipped here and the lonely country was amazed. Broome resident Pearl Hamaguchi has never traveled far from home. Bu
44、t 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 you can see two sets of stars at the same time one set in the sky, the other in the film. Ea
45、ch 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 ) that date back to the silent films, a portrait gallery of the famous people who never kn
46、ew 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 there are no spiders or scorpions. “Weve only had a couple of scorpion incidents but no o
47、nes 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 even when the lizards steal the scene. 26 The first two paragraphs want to show that _. （ A）
48、 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 most historical outdoor theater in the world （ B） the audience can either sit on chairs
49、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 elderly people who enjoys free-ticket privilege （ C） an insect which comes to the theater b
