1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 78 及答案与解析Part ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)0 In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For questions 1 5, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the num
2、bered blank. There are two extra choices which you do not need to use.Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, recently argued that we ought not to claim that literature improves us as people, because there is no “compelling evidence that suggests that people are mo
3、rally or socially better for reading Tolstoy“ or other great books.Actually, there is such evidence. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and the other professor reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to un
4、derstand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective. 【R1】_. .“Deep reading“ as opposed to the often superficial reading we do on the Web is an endangered practice. Its disappearance would threaten the intellectual and emotional development of generations growing up o
5、nline, as well as the perpetuation of a critical part of our culture: the novels, poems and other kinds of literature that can be appreciated only by readers whose brains, quite literally, have been trained to apprehend them.Recent research has demonstrated that deep reading slow, immersive, rich in
6、 sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity is a distinctive experience, different in kind from the mere decoding of words. 【R2】_. A books lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions Should I click on this link or not? allowing her to remain fully immersed in the n
7、arrative.That immersion is supported by the way the brain handles language rich in detail, allusion and metaphor; by creating a mental representation that draws on the same brain regions that would be active if the scene were unfolding in real life. 【R3】_.None of this is likely to happen when were s
8、urfing TMZ. Although we call the activity by the same name, the deep reading of books and the information-driven reading we do on the Web are very different, both in the experience they produce and in the capacities they develop. 【R4】_.To understand why we should be concerned about how young people
9、read, and not just whether theyre reading at all, it helps to know something about the way the ability to read evolved. “Human beings were never born to read,“ notes Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and LanguageResearch at Tufts University. 【R5】_. The “reading circuits“ we construct
10、 are recruited from structures in the brain that evolved for other purposes and these circuits can be feeble or they can be robust, depending on how often and how vigorously we use them.AThe combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers tim
11、e to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions.BThe emotional situations and moral dilemmas that are the stuff of literature are also vigorous exercise for the brain, propelling us inside the heads of fictional characters and even, studies suggest, increasin
12、g our real-life capacity for empathy.CUnlike the ability to understand and produce spoken language, which under normal circumstances will unfold according to a program dictated by our genes, the ability to read must be painstakingly acquired by each individual.DThis link persisted even after the res
13、earchers factored in the possibility that more empathetic individuals might choose to read more novels.EThe study also found that young people who read daily only onscreen were nearly two times less likely to be above-average readers than those who read daily in print or both in print and onscreen.F
14、A growing body of evidence suggests that online reading may be less engaging and less satisfying, even for the “digital natives“ for whom it is so familiar.GAlthough deep reading does not, strictly speaking, require a conventional book, the built-in limits of the printed page are uniquely beneficial
15、 to the deep reading experience.1 【R1 】2 【R2 】3 【R3 】4 【R4 】5 【R5 】5 In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For questions 1 5, choose the most suitable one from the list AG to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices which you do not need to use.With the
16、pace of technological change making heads spin, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. We have smartphones and supercomputers, big data and nanotechnologies, gene therapy and stem-cell transplants. Yet nobody recently has come up with an invention half as useful as those sprang fro
17、m late-19th and early-20th-century brains such as cars, planes, the telephone, radio and antibiotics.Modern science has failed to make anything like the same impact, and this is why a growing band of thinkers claim that the pace of innovation has slowed. 【R1】_.Yet that pattern is not as conclusively
18、 gloomy as the doomsayers claim. It is too early to write off the innovative impact of the present age.This generations contribution to technological progress lies mostly in information technology(IT).【R2 】_. But as with electricity, companies will take time to learn how to use them, so it will prob
19、ably be many decades before their full impact is felt.On the other hand, globalisation should make our period a fruitful one for innovation. 【R3】 _So there are good reasons for thinking that the 21st centurys innovative juices will flow fast. But there are also reasons to watch out for impediments.
20、The biggest danger is government.When government was smaller, innovation was easier. Industrialists could introduce new processes or change a products design without a man from the ministry claiming some regulation had been brokea It is a good thing that these days pharmaceuticals are stringently te
21、sted and factory emissions controlled. 【R4】_.The state has also notably failed to open itself up to innovation. 【R5】_. There is vast scope for IT to boost productivity in health care and education, if only those sectors were more open to change.The rapid growth in the rich world before the 1970s was
22、 encouraged by public spending on infrastructure(including in sewage systems)and basic research: the computer, the internet and the green revolution in food technology all sprang out of science, where there was no immediate commercial aim. Even in those straitened war times, money should still be fo
23、und for basic research into areas such as carbon capture and storage.For governments that do these things well, the rewards could be huge. The risk that innovation may slow is a real one, but can be avoided. Whether it happens or not is, like most aspects of mankinds fate, up to him.AMany more brain
24、s are at work now than were 100 years ago: Western inventors have been joined in the race to produce cool new stuff by inventors from other countries.BProductivity is mostly stagnant in the public sector. Unions have often managed to prevent governments even publishing the performance indicators whi
25、ch, elsewhere, have encouraged managers to innovate.CAccording to Robert Gordon, productivity supports the pessimists case: it took off in the mid-19th century, accelerated in the early 20th century and held up pretty well until the early 1970s. It then dipped sharply, ticked up in late 1990s with c
26、omputerisation and dipped again in the mid-2000s.DBut officialdom tends to write far more rules than are necessary for the public good, which is strangling innovation. Even many regulations designed to help innovation are not working well. The Wests intellectual-property system, for instance, is a m
27、ess, because it grants too many patents of dubious merit.EBut the pollution control mechanisms adopted in the United States have tended toward detailed regulation of technology, leaving polluters little choice in how to achieve the environmental goals. This “command-and-control“ strategy needlessly
28、increases the cost of pollution controls and may even slow our progress toward a cleaner environment.FRather as electrification changed everything by allowing energy to be used far from where it was generated, computing and communications technologies transform lives and businesses by allowing peopl
29、e to make calculations and connections far beyond their unaided capacity.GThe specific example we discussed was that there is increasing evidence that when a professor or company gets a patent in the field of genetics research, other researchers simply stop doing work in that specific area.6 【R1 】7
30、【R2 】8 【R3 】9 【R4 】10 【R5 】10 In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For questions 1 5, choose the most suitable one from the list AG to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices which you do not need to use.Many animal species are “cultural“ in the sense
31、that individuals acquire important behaviors and skills from groupmates via social learning. Thus, whales socially learn some hunting techniques from others, capuchin monkeys socially learn some grooming-type behaviors from others, and chimpanzees acquire the use of some tools by observing the tool-
32、use activities of others in their social group.But human culture is clearly different. Nonhuman primate(and other animal)culture is essentially individualistic, or maybe even exploitative. 【R1】_.In contrast, human culture and cultural transmission are fundamentally cooperative. Synchronically, human
33、s engage in much more cooperative behavior in terms of such things as collaborative problem solving and cooperative communication. Moreover, human individuals live in a world in which the group expects them to conform to its particular conventions and social norms or else! 【R2】_.Diachronically, this
34、 cooperative way of living translates into established members of the group teaching things to youngsters, who not only learn but actively conform. 【R3】 _. The result is human handicrafts and symbol systems with “histories,“ so-called cumulative cultural evolution.Underlying humans uniquely cooperat
35、ive lifeways and modes of cultural transmission are a set of species-unique social-cognitive processes, which we may refer to collectively as skills and motivations for shared intentionality. 【R4】_. Skills and motivations of shared intentionality arose as part of a coevolutionary process in which hu
36、mans evolved species-unique ways of operating, indeed cooperating, within their own self-built cultural worlds.It must be emphasized that the evolutionary dimension of culture highlighted here is clearly only one aspect of the process. 【R5】_. Human cognitive and motivational adaptations for culture
37、are simply psychological enabling conditions for the generation and maintenance of the specific cultural handicrafts and practices created by specific cultural groups which, by all appearances, are endlessly creative.ATeaching and conformity are main contributors to the stability of cultural practic
38、es in a group and precisely because of this stability to the unique ways in which human cultural practices develop in complexity over historical time.BThat is to say, when a chimpanzee individual observes another using a tool and then learns something that facilitates her own use, she is simply gath
39、ering information that is useful to her - much as she might gather information from the inanimate world. The one being observed may not even know that the observer is gathering information from her actions.CMoreover, in experimental studies using, for example, the ultimatum game, humans in all cultu
40、res show some kinds of social norms in distributing resources, whereas chimpanzees in an ultimatum game behave in an almost totally self-centered manner.DThe result is a society structured by cooperatively created and enforced conventions and norms for how to behave as one of “us“, resulting ultimat
41、ely in rule-governed social institutions.EThe specific cultural practices and products generated by individuals interacting with one another in cultural groups - everything from specific linguistic constructions to techniques for building kayaks or skyscrapers can in no way be reduced to biology.FTh
42、e ultimate outcome of social norms in human groups is the creation of social institutions, whose existence is constituted by the collective agreement of all group members that things should be done in a particular way.GThese involve such things as the ability and motivation to form shared goals and
43、intentions with others in collaborative activities, and the ability and motivation to share experience with others via joint attention, cooperative communication, and teaching.11 【R1 】12 【R2 】13 【R3 】14 【R4 】15 【R5 】15 In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 15, choose
44、 the most suitable one from the list AG to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps.It is always a little disconcerting to realise a generation has grown up never knowing what it was like to manage without something that is taken for grant
45、ed today. A case in point: the World Wide Web, which celebrated the 20th anniversary of its introduction last Saturday. It is no exaggeration to say that not since the invention of the printing press has a new media technology altered the way people think, work and play quite so extensively. With th
46、e web having been so thoroughly embraced socially, politically and economically, the world has become an entirely different place from what it was just two decades ago.【R1 】_. On balance, the world is grateful for what the web has brought. Despite their arrogant attitudes to privacy, websites like F
47、acebook, Twitter have changed the way a whole generation of people communicatescreating new ways to make friends, find old acquaintances, socialise online and pursue common interests. Business sites like Linkedln help them further their careers. From Amazon to Zappos, online retailing sites have tak
48、en the drudgery out of shopping, allowing goods to be bought with the click of a mouse at home. Music-streaming sites like Spotify have opened millions of ears to melodies they might never otherwise have heard.At a keystroke, it has become possible to find all sorts of obscure information, thanks to
49、 Google, Bing, Ask and other search engines. 【R2】_. Compared with printed encyclopaedias and public libraries, the web has democratised the collected wisdom of ages, and redistributed it in a way unimaginable a few decades ago.Few would deny that such services have made the world a smarter, livelier, more interesting place. But while the news travels faster than ever courtesy of the web, so do lies, hyperboles and distortions. A
