1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 481 及答案与解析Part B (10 points) 0 AHowever, the culture of Atlantis began to decay. Plato recounts that the people changed their law-respecting way of life. They began to disregard their religion, gradually living with less restraint and piety. They began to value luxuries, wealth, and idl
2、eness. Then in one day and one night the continent was completely destroyed. Plato concludes that a decadent society deserved such punishment. But two questions remain unanswered. Where was Atlantis, and where did it go? BThis story intrigues people so much that many have been searching for the expl
3、anation of the “lost continent“ for 23 centuries. There are three probable locations for Atlantis: the Azores, in the Atlantic Ocean:the Bimini Islands, in the Caribbean Sea:and Santorini, or Kalliste, in the Aegean Sea. Several facts make the Azores a possible location. In the Azores and near Icela
4、nd there have been many volcanic islands that have risen from the sea and then disappeared later. Also, Plato was sure that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, as the name implies. The theory that Atlantis was in the Azores has only recently been refuted. CThe Greek philosopher Plato(approximately 427 to
5、347 B.C.)is the primary source for the legend of Atlantis. His description of the “lost continent“ still excites the modern mind. Plato s Atlantis was a kind of paradisea vast island “larger than Libya and Asia put together“with magnificent mountain ranges, green plains that were full of every varie
6、ty of animal, and luxuriant gardens where the fruit was “fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance.“ The earth was rich with precious metals, especially the one prized most highly by the ancients, orichalc, an alloy of copper, perhaps brass. DThe second credible possibility for Atlantis is in the
7、Bahamas, in the Biminis. In 1958 some strange structures were noticed on the seabed under the water. Curious geometric structuresregular polygons, circles, triangles, rectangles , and completely straight linesextend over several miles. A giant “wall“ several hundred yards long was found submerged in
8、 the waters off the small island of North Bimini. The wall has two branches, running at right angles, in perfectly straight lines. The construction, which is precisely perpendicular, is made of massive stone blocks over 16 feet square. Part of the structure even resembles a harbor with a dock for bo
9、ats. The geology of the Bahamas shows, however, that the submersion of the plateau had been caused by the melting of the polar glaciers that raised the level of the worlds oceans. This diminishes the possibility that Atlantis was in the Caribbean Sea. There were no violent eruptions, merely the slow
10、ly rising ocean from approximately 8, 000 to 7, 000 B.C EThe capital of Atlantis was beautifully constructed in white, black, and red stone. The city was carefully planned in five zones built in perfect concentric circles. Each circular zone was built inside a larger one. Plato says that the capital
11、 s canals and its nearby port were “full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who kept up din and clatter night and day.“ The city was full of life, activity and culture. FThe last reasonable possibility to date is that Atlantis was located in the Aegean, not far from Crete. However, mis
12、assumption cannot be proved beyond doubt, and the disappearance of Atlantis remains a lasting mystery. GThirty-five hundred years ago, a tremendous explosion blew apart an island and completely destroyed a civilization called Atlantis. Where was Atlantis? What kind of people lived there? Why and how
13、 was it destroyed? No one knows the answers to these questions , but there have been hundreds of guesses and theories. Order: 5 AMost of us know what its like to stay in a job after its stopped being satisfying, or to take on a project thats too big and be reluctant to admit it. CEOs have been known
14、 to allocate manpower and money to projects long after it becomes clear that they are failing. The costs to a person who does not know when to quit can be enormous. In economics its known as sunk cost fallacy. While we recognize the fallacy almost immediately in others, it s harder to see in ourselv
15、es. Why? BIn one of their studies, they put participants into either a promotion or prevention focus. Next, each participant was told to imagine that he or she was CEO of an aviation company that had committed $ 10 million to developing a plane that can t be detected by radar. With the project near
16、completion and $ 9 million already spent, a rival company announces the availability of their own radar-blank plane, which is both superior in performance and lower in cost. The question put to CEOs was simple: do you invest the remaining $ 1 million and finish your company s plane, or cut your loss
17、es and move on? CSunk costs are the investments that youve put into something that you cant get back out. They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate. They are the thousands of dollars you spent on redecorating your living room, only to find that you hate living in it. Once youve
18、 realized that you probably won t succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn t matter how much time and effort you ve already put into something. DRecent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui demonstrates an effective way to be sure you
19、are making the best decisions when things go awry: Focus on what you have to gain by moving on, rather than what you have to lose. When people think about goals in terms of potential gain, thats a “promotion focus“, which makes them more comfortable making mistakes and accepting losses. When people
20、adopt a “prevention focus“ , they think about goals in terms of what they could lose if they dont succeed, so they become more sensitive to sunk costs. This is the focus people usually adopt, if unconsciously, when deciding whether or not to walk away. It usually tells us not to walk away, even when
21、 we should. EThere are several powerful, largely unconscious psychological forces at work. We may throw good money after bad or waste time in a dead-end relationship because we haven t come up with an alternative: or because we dont want to admit to our friends and family, or to ourselves, that we w
22、ere wrong. But the most likely cause is this innate, overwhelming aversion to sunk costs. FThe two researchers found that participants with a prevention focus stayed the course and invested the remaining $ 1 million roughly 80 percent of the time. The odds of making that mistake were significantly r
23、educed by adopting a promotion focus: those people invested the remaining $ 1 million less than 60 percent of the time. When we see our goals in terms of what we can gain, rather than what we might lose, we are more likely to see a doomed endeavor for what it is. GAs studies by behavioral economists
24、 like Daniel Kahnemen and Dan Ariely show, people are gene-rally loss-averse. Putting in a lot, only to end up with nothing to show for it, is just too awful for most of us to seriously consider. The problem is one of focus. We worry far too much about what we 11 lose if we just move on, instead of
25、focusing on the costs of not moving on: more wasted time and effort, more unhap-piness, and more missed opportunities. Order: 10 A“I just don t know how to motivate them to do a better job. We re in a budget crunch and I have absolutely no financial rewards at my disposal. In fact, we11 probably hav
26、e to lay some people off in the near future. It s hard for me to make the job interesting and challenging because it isn t it s boring, routine paperwork, and there isn t much you can do about it.“ B“Finally, I cant say to them that their promotions will hinge on the excellence of their paperwork. F
27、irst of all, they know its not true. If their performance is adequate, most are more likely to get promoted just by staying on the force a certain number of years than for some specific outstanding act. Second, they were trained to do the job they do out in the streets, not to fill out forms. All th
28、rough their career it is the arrests and interventions that get noticed.“ C“Ive got a real problem with my officers. They come on the force as young, inexperienced men, and we send them out on the street, either in cars or on a walk. They seem to like the contact they have with the public, the actio
29、n involved in crime prevention, and the apprehension of criminals. They also like helping people out at fires, accidents, and other emergencies.“ D“Some people have suggested a number of things like using conviction records as a performance criterion. However, we know thats not fairtoo many other th
30、ings are involved. Bad paperwork increases the chance that you lose in court, but good paperwork doesn t necessarily mean you 11 win. We tried setting up team competitions based on the excellence of the reports, but the guys caught on to that pretty quickly. No one was getting any type of reward for
31、 winning the competition, and they figured why should they labor when there was no payoff.“ E“The problem occurs when they get back to the station. They hate to do the paperwork, and because they dislike it, the job is frequently put off or done inadequately. This lack of attention hurts us later on
32、 when we get to court. We need clear, factual reports. They must be highly detailed and unambiguous. As soon as one part of a report is shown to be inadequate or incorrect, the rest of the report is suspect. Poor reporting probably causes us to lose more cases than any other factor.“ F“So I just don
33、t know what to do. Ive been groping in the dark in a number of years. And I hope that this seminar will shed some light on this problem of mine and help me out in my future work.“ GA large metropolitan city government was putting on a number of seminars for administrators, managers and executives of
34、 various departments throughout the city. At one of these sessions the topic to be discussed was motivationhow we can get public servants motivated to do a good job. The difficulty of a police captain became the central focus of the discussion. Order: 15 AAll in all, the numbers suggest that aging i
35、s simply different in the active. BAs it turned out, the cyclists did not show their age. On almost all measures, their physical functioning remained fairly stable across the decades and was much closer to that of young adults than of people their age. As a group, even the oldest cyclists had younge
36、r peoples levels of balance, reflexes, metabolic health and memory ability. CActive older people resemble much younger people physiologically, according to a new study of the effects of exercise on aging. The findings suggest that many of our expectations about the inevitability of physical decline
37、with advancing years may be incorrect and that how we age is, to a large degree, up to us. Aging remains a surprisingly mysterious process. A wealth of past scientific research has shown that many bodily and cellular processes change in undesirable ways as we grow older. But science has not been abl
38、e to establish definitively whether such changes result primarily from the passage of time or result at least in part from lifestyle. DThis conundrum is particularly true in terms of inactivity. Older people tend to be quite sedentary nowadays, and being sedentary affects health, making it difficult
39、 to separate the effects of not moving from those of getting older. In the new study, which was published this week in The Journal of Physiology, scientists at Kings College London and the University of Birmingham in England decided to use a different approach. They removed inactivity as a factor in
40、 their study of aging by looking at the health of older people who move quite a bit. EThe scientists then ran each volunteer through a large array of physical and cognitive tests. The scientists determined each cyclists endurance capacity, muscular mass and strength, pedaling power, metabolic health
41、, balance, memory function, bone density and reflexes. The researchers compared the results of cyclists in the study against each other and also against standard benchmarks of supposedly normal aging. If a particular tests numbers were similar among the cyclists of all ages, the researchers consider
42、ed, then that measure would seem to be more dependent on activity than on age. FTo accomplish that goal, the scientists recruited 85 men and 41 women aged between 55 and 79 who bicycle regularly. The volunteers were all serious recreational riders but not competitive athletes. The men had to be able
43、 to ride at least 62 miles in six and a half hours and the women 37 miles in five and a half hours, benchmarks typical of a high degree of fitness in older people. GSome aspects of aging did, however, prove to be ineluctable. The oldest cyclists had less muscular power and mass than those in their 5
44、0s and early 60s and considerably lower overall aerobic capacities. Age does seem to reduce our endurance and strength to some extent, Dr. Harridge said, even if we exercise. But even so, both of those measures were higher among the oldest cyclists than would be considered average among people aged
45、70 or above. Order: 考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 481 答案与解析Part B (10 points) 【知识模块】 阅读理解1 【正确答案】 C【试题解析】 文章第一段 G 项开宗明义提出主题：人们对 3 500 年前一声巨大的爆炸摧毁一个叫亚特兰蒂斯的岛屿充满猜想，故为“起”。C 项段落讲到希腊哲学家柏拉图对亚特兰蒂斯传说的描述(magnificent mountain ranges，green plains that were full of every variety of animal，and luxuriant gardens)，起“承”的语篇功能，符合题意。【知
46、识模块】 阅读理解2 【正确答案】 E【试题解析】 E 项具体介绍了亚特兰蒂斯首府的繁华境况(The capital of Atlantis was beautifully constructed in white，black，and red stoneThe city was)，仍然对上一段起“承”的语篇功能，为正确答案。由此可见，本文前三段逻辑层次很清晰：第一段 G 项提出主题，又提出了三个问题，为下文做铺垫。第二段， C 项和第三段 E 项分别讲述柏拉图对亚特兰蒂斯的种种描述，符合逻辑.【知识模块】 阅读理解3 【正确答案】 A【试题解析】 第四段 A 项 However，the cul
47、ture of Atlantis began to decay 话锋一转，讲述亚特兰蒂斯的文明是如何衰退的。从语篇结构上看，与上文构成转折关系。本段结尾 Plato concludes that a decadent society deserved such punishmentBut two questions remain unansweredWhere was Atlantis ，and where did it go?提出两个问题：亚特兰蒂斯曾在何处 ?它到哪里去了?这两个问题对下文做了铺垫。【知识模块】 阅读理解4 【正确答案】 B【试题解析】 B 项指出上述两个问题激起了人们的好
48、奇心(This story intrigues people so much that)，因此 B 项很好地承接了第四段的内容。随后本段介绍柏拉图和许多其他人提出了他们对亚特兰蒂斯原始位置的大胆猜测(Also ，Plato was sure that Atlantis was in the Atlantic)，上下文逻辑关系紧密，故 B 项符合题意。【知识模块】 阅读理解5 【正确答案】 D【试题解析】 第六段 D 项提出了关于亚特兰蒂斯原始位置的第二种可信的看法(The second credible possibility for Atlantis is in the Bahamas，in
49、 the Biminis)，与第七段 F 项“迄今，最后一种符合逻辑的可能性是，亚特兰蒂斯曾位于爱琴海，离克利特岛不远。”前后照应。可见，第五、六、七段以先后顺序回答了第四段末尾提出的两个问题。从整篇文章看，逻辑层次清晰，连贯性很强。【知识模块】 阅读理解【知识模块】 阅读理解6 【正确答案】 E【试题解析】 试题中首段已给出，研读后我们得知首段末句提出问题：我们一眼便能看出别人犯了“沉没成本谬误”，却很难发现自己身上这种毛病，这是为什么呢?这就要求下文必须对首段中提出的这个问题进行解答。E 项首先指出，(这是因为)有几种强大的心理因素在起作用，然后进行具体分析：在项目失败后我们仍往里面砸钱，感情破灭后仍然浪费时间，这是因为我们尚未找到可以替代的东西；也可能是因为我们不愿承认自己做错了。最后又指出造成这一结果的最主要原因可能是我们对于沉没成本与生俱来的极大反感。可以看出，E 项与首段末句构成了因果逻辑关系，衔接顺畅。其中，E 项中 because；or becausethe most likely cause is，是对首段末句 why 的针对性回答。【
