1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 212 及答案与解析Part B (10 points) 0 In their idle moments, historians occasionally speculate on how the world would be different if Adolf Hitler had passed the entrance exam to the Art Academy of Vienna, where he applied twice in the early years of the 20th century.【F1 】_.On the contrary, th
2、e world is better off that a certain British statesman with a gift for inspiringrhetoric never allowed his love of painting to interfere with his career in politics.【F2】_One cant helpwishing that Hitler had been a better artistand being grateful that Winston Churchill wasnt.That, anyway, is one less
3、on to be drawn from the PBS documentary series, whose first segment airs this week, “Chasing Churchill,“ a travelogue narrated by the late prime ministers granddaughter Celia Sandys, of the places he visited and loved. Whether he was headed for the gentle flower-draped hills of Provence or the stark
4、 deserts of North Africa, his habit, except during the war, was the same painting. He was especially partial to romantically rugged scenery by sunset; if the light was better at dawn, says Sandys, he would not have been awake to see it.Churchill bonded over painting with the American general, later
5、president, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhowers tastes ran to plashing streams, run-down barns and birch-studded snowscapes in a style that might be called Greeting Card Pastoral. He was appropriately modest about his works, which he described as “daubs.“ Churchill, a far more accomplished and ambitious a
6、rtist, was well aware of his amateur status.【F3】 _Politics is not a profession that ordinarily rewards creativity, which may be why so few politicians are willing to display it; its probably no coincidence that these three were among the most conspicuously self-assured world leaders of the 20th cent
7、ury. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 interrupted plans to release a novel by Saddam Hussein with the forthright title Get Out of Here, Curse You! He had published three others, all critically acclaimed in the Iraqi press and best sellers, presumably because they were required reading in Iraqi
8、schools.【F4】_Safely out of office in 1995, former president Jimmy Carter published a book of poetry on subjects ranging from childhood reminiscence to geopolitics. The habits of a longtime politician die hard, even when he turns his hand to poetry; the slim volume bears 14 dedications spread over tw
9、o pages.Poetry is, of course, the most self-revelatory of arts.【F5】_.Hitler,too,was theonly oneof thethree who occasionally populated his drawings with human figures, usually drawn badly and tiny compared with the real estate Admittedly people are harder to draw than mountains and clouds, but perhap
10、s the choice of subject by men who ruled vast territories is no coincidence. Alone in his aerie, the great man surveys his unpopulated domain: the artist as commander in chief.A.The 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote 18 novels, some of them fairly racy by the standards of th
11、e time.B.Unfortunately, doubt has been cast on his literary credentials in the form of allegations that the books were actually written by a committee of officials from the Ministry of Information and Culture.C.But paintings, too, can reveal something about the hands that made them: Eisenhowers blan
12、dness; Hitlers bombastic obsession with monumental buildings such as the Vienna and Munich opera houses.D.Presumably, if hed been allowed to pursue his dream, he would have inflicted on the world only a large number of mediocre watercolors, rather than World War II and the Holocaust.E.Otherwise Brit
13、ain might have gained a collection of derivative post-impressionist landscapes to clutter the antiques shops of Portobello Road, and lost the war to Nazi Germany.F.Equipped with canvas, oils and camels-hair brushes, he parked himself behind an easel and in front of the landscape and commenced to smo
14、ke cigars, drink champagne and paint.G. But Hitler for many years regarded himself as an artist by profession. An authorized book of his watercolors referred to him in 1937 as “at once the First Fuehrer and the First Artist of our Reich.“1 【F1】2 【F2】3 【F3】4 【F4】5 【F5】5 American schools arent exactly
15、 frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out
16、of date by the time they are printed.For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap“ between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation.【F1】_.This week the conversation will burst onto the fr
17、ont page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor releases a blueprint for rethinking American education to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While tha
18、t report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. Right now were aiming too low. Competency in reading and math is t
19、he meager minimum.Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient.【F2 】_Heres what they are:Knowing more about the world.【F3】_Mike Eskew,CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are “global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different la
20、nguages“not exactly strorig points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economythe ones that wont get outsourced or automat
21、ed“put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,“ says Marc Tucker, a lead author of the skills-commission report. Thats a problem for U.S. schools.【F4 】_.Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing infor
22、mation and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process whats coming at them and distinguish between whats reliable and what isnt.【F5 】_.Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in todays workplace. “Most innovations today involve large tea
23、ms of people,“ says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. “We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.“A.Kids are global citizens now, whether they know it or not, and they need to behave that way.B.“Its important that stude
24、nts know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,“ says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.C.Todays economy demands not only a hi
25、gh-evel competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills.D.This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left
26、 behind“ but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they cant think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.E. Can our public schools, originally desi
27、gned to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts?F.But without waiting for such a revolution, enterprising administrators around the country have begun to update their schools, often with ideas and support from local businesses.G. Kids also must learn
28、 to think across disciplines, since thats where most new breakthroughs are made. Its interdisciplinary combinationsdesign and technology, mathematics and art“that produce YouTube and Google,“ says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.6 【F1】7 【F2】8 【F3】9 【F4】10 【F5】Part CDire
29、ctions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. (10 points) 10 It is a familiar scene these days: employees taking newly laid-off coworkers out for a comfort drink. But which side deserves sympathy more, the jobless or the still employed?【 F1】Resear
30、chers at the University of Cambridge heard data suggesting its the latter compared with people who are straight-up laid off, those who keep their job but are under a constant threat of losing it suffer agreater decline in mental well-being.【F2】Brendan Burchell, a Cambridge sociologist who presented
31、his analysis based on various surveys conducted across Europe argues that policymakers and employers should prepare for the consequence from the stress and anxiety that the existing workforce is currently suffering. Burchells study wasnt designed to offer direct explanations of the data, but there a
32、re established psychological patterns that may suggest them. For example, psychologists have documented an “impact bias in affective forecasting,“ which is the tendency for people to overestimate how strongly they will react to emotional events.Also pertinent is the theorybacked by so-called positiv
33、e psychologiststhat human beings have an inherited base level of happiness that fluctuates only during periods of change.【F3】Evolutionary psychologists support this theory by arguing that human beings feel more stress during times of insecurity because they sense an immediate but hard-to-discern thr
34、eatthe modern-day equivalent of an unseen predator roaring in the trees.Its better to get the bad news and start doing something about it rather than languish in silence. When the uncertainty is prolonged, people stay in a sustained “fight or flight“ response, which leads to damaging stress.But not
35、every employee in insecure industries has such a gloomy view, Burchell says. Entrepreneurs seem to thrive. In general, women fare better too.【F4】While reporting higher levels of anxiety than men when directly questioned, women scored lower in stress, even when they had a job they felt insecure about
36、 losing.As Burchell explains, “For women, most studies show that any jobit doesnt matter whether it is secure or insecuregives psychological improvement over unemployment.“ Burchell hypothesizes that the difference in men is that they tend to feel pressure not only to be employed, but also to be the
37、 primary breadwinner, and that more of a mans self-worth depends on his job.So what kind of advice can Burchell offer to those lucky millions across the globe who are still employed but are worried about losing their job?【F5】After examining in detail the surveys in search of the key to an even menta
38、l health, Burchell came up with, “Nothing. Certainly some individuals cope better, but we dont know why.“ 11 【F1】12 【F2】13 【F3】14 【F4】15 【F5】15 Genius is said to have two forms. There are ordinary geniuses, whose achievements one can imagine others might have emulated, so long as they worked extreme
39、ly hard and had a dollop of luck.【F1 】Then there are extraordinary geniuses whose insights are so astonishing and run so counter to received wisdom that it is hard to imagine anyone else devising them. Einsteinwas one such genius. Paul Dirac was another. He was quite probably the best British theore
40、tical physicist since Isaac Newton.Dirac became one of the fathers of quantum mechanics at the age of 23.【F2 】The theory, which was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, makes seemingly bizarre statements, including the fundamental truth that it is impossible to know everything about the world. But whil
41、e his colleagues struggled with the philosophical implications of their equations, Dirac thought words were unreliable and saw merit only in mathematics. For him, equations were beautiful.Dirac was notoriously reticent. He barely spoke and his silences were legendary. He was unwilling to collaborate
42、 with others.【F3】He was emotionally withdrawn and showed a lack of social sensitivity, and to many of his colleagues, he appeared uninterested in anything other than mathematics; therefore, they were astonished when he married. Yet he was far more than a calculating machine, as Graham Farmelos biogr
43、aphy shows. Dirac was a devotee of comic strips and he enjoyed Mickey Mouse films.Mr. Farmelos sympathetic portrait sketches Diracs unhappy family background. His parents appear to have loathed one another, and his elder brother committed suicide. Dirac blamed his father for the death. Certainly, so
44、me aspects of his fathers behavior warrant criticism. After Dirac won two scholarships to Cambridge, it appeared that he would lose his place for want of 5. Diracs father gave his son the money and made him understand that he had launched the boys career. Later Dirac learnt the truth.【F4】After his f
45、ather died in 1936, it emerged that he had not given Dirac the essential 5, although he could have done so, having saved more than 7,500, some 15 times his annual salary. The crucial fiver had come from the local education authority.Dirac went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933 for his dis
46、covery of antimatter.【F5】of the small group of young men who developed quantum mechanics and revolutionized physics almost a century ago, Paul Diraca strange man in a strange worldtruly stands out. 16 【F1】17 【F2】18 【F3】19 【F4】20 【F5】20 Free trade is supposed to be a win-win situation. You sell me yo
47、ur televisions, I sell you my software, and we both prosper. In practice, free-trade agreements are messier than that.【F1】Since all industries crave (热望) foreign markets to expand into but fear foreign competitors breaking into their home market, they lobby their governments to tilt the rules in the
48、ir favor. Usually,this involves manipulating tariffs and quotas. But, of late, a troubling twist in the game has become more common, as countries use free-trade agreements to rewrite the laws of their trading partners.Why does the U.S. insist on these rules?【F2】Quite simply, American drug, software,
49、 and media companies are furious about the pirating of their products, and are eager to extend the monopolies that their patents and copyrights confer. Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can prevent competition and can limit what economists call “increased innovation“innovations that build, in some way, on others
