1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 84 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 The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For questions 1 5, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosi
2、ng from the list AH and filling them into the numbered boxes. There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.AFinally, they will suffer a drop in social capital. In times of recession, people spend more time at home. But this will be the first steep recession since the revolution in house
3、hold formation. Nesting amongst an extended family rich in social capital is very different from nesting in a one-person household that is isolated from family and community bonds. People in the lower middle class have much higher divorce rates and many fewer community ties. For them, self-isolation
4、 is more likely to be a dangerous psychological spiral.BThe phenomenon is noticeable in developing nations. Over the past decade, millions of people in these societies have climbed out of poverty. But the global recession is pushing them back down. Many seem furious with democracy and capitalism, wh
5、ich they believe led to their shattered dreams. Its possible that the Obama administration will spend much of its time battling a global protest movement that doesnt even exist yet.CIn this recession, maybe even more than other ones, the last ones to join the middle class will be the first ones out.
6、 And it wont only be material deprivations that bite. It will be the loss of a social identity, the loss of social networks, the loss of the little status symbols that suggest an elevated place in the social order. These reversals are bound to produce alienation and a political response. If you want
7、 to know where the next big social movements will come from, Id say the formerly middle class.DThe members of the formerly middle class will suffer housing reversals. The current mortgage crisis is having its most concentrated effect on people on the lowest ladder of middle-class life-people who liv
8、e in fast-growing suburbs in Florida and Nevada that are now flooded with housing reversals; people who just moved out of their urban neighborhoods and made it to modest, older suburbs in California and Michigan. Suddenly, the home of ones own is gone, and its back to the apartment complex.EThe leas
9、t well off are normally the hardest hit by recession, but the current downturn is very much a middle class phenomenon due to the financial and housing market crises. Having abused credit during the boom years as the value of their homes and stocks rose, many middle class households, particularly in
10、the USA and the UK, are now facing up to a heavy debt burden.FIn this country, there are also millions of people facing the psychological and social pressures of downward mobility. In the months ahead, the members of the formerly middle class will suffer career reversals. Paco Underhill, the retaili
11、ng expert, tells me that 20 percent of the mall storefronts could soon be empty. That fact alone means that thousands of service-economy workers will experience the self-doubt that goes with unemployment.GAt the beginning of every recession, there are people who see the downturn as an occasion for m
12、oral revival: Americans will learn to live without material extravagances. Theyll simplify their lives. Theyll rediscover what really matters; home, friends and family. But recessions are about more than material deprivatioa Theyre also about fear and diminished expectations. The cultural consequenc
13、es of recessions are rarely uplifting. The economic slowdown of the 1880s and 1890s produced a surge of agrarian populism and nativism. The recession of the 1970s produced a cynicism that has never really gone away.HRecessions breed pessimism. Thats why birthrates tend to drop and suicide rates tend
14、 to rise. This recession will probably have its own social profile. In particular, its likely to produce a new social group: the formerly middle class. These are people who achieved middleclass status at the tail end of the long boom, and then lost it. To them, the gap between where they are and whe
15、re they used to be will seem wide and discouraging.5 The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For questions 1 5, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G and filling them into the numbered boxes. The first and the last paragrap
16、hs have been correctly placed.AAnd already, there are signs that it will. New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some-like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with inte
17、ractive maps of the protagonists networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last monthenhance societys understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.BThe newspapers decline is both cause
18、 and effect of the worrying finding by the Pew Centre that the number of Americans aged 18 24 who got any news at all the previous day has dropped from 34% to 25% over the past ten years. But that figure may be less troubling than it looks. Because newspapers pack together all sorts of different con
19、tent, many of those who claimed in the past to have seen some news probably did so for a few seconds before turning the page to the sports scores. Acquaintance as shallow as that with the news is probably no great loss to society; Pew surveys of general knowledge suggest that young people are about
20、as well(or badly)informed as they used to be.CMost industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business. Things are worst in America, where many papers used to enjoy comfortable local monopolies, but in Britain around 70 local papers have shut down since the beginning
21、 of 2008. Among the survivors, advertising is decreasing, editorial is thinning and journalists are being laid off. The crisis is most advanced in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it is happening all over the rich world: the impact of the internet, aggravated by the advertising fall, is killing the da
22、ily newspaper.DAnd the newspaper companies troubles do not necessarily predict the death of the news business, for they stem in part from the messy and expensive transition from paper to electronic distribution. News organisations are currently bearing two sets of coststhose of printing and distribu
23、ting their product for the old world, and providing digital versions for the new- even though they have yet to find a business model that works online.EBetter mobile devices may encourage them to do so. Apples iPhone is the first reader-friendly mobile phone, and the latest update to its software, d
24、ue shortly, will enable news providers that currently give away content on the iPhone to start charging for it. Amazon has just unveiled a new, larger version of the Kindle, its e-book reader, better suited to displaying newspapers. Similar devices are available from other firms, with many more on t
25、he way. Better technology coupled with new payment systems will not solve the acute problems faced by newspapers today, but should eventually provide new models to enable news to flourish in the digital age.FA newspaper is a package of contentpolitics, sport, share prices, weather and so forth which
26、 exists to attract eyeballs to advertisements. Unfortunately for newspapers, the internet is better at delivering some of that than paper is. It is easier to search through job and property listings on the web, so classified advertising and its associated revenue is migrating onto the internet. Some
27、 content, too, works better on the internet-news and share prices can be more frequently updated, weather can be more geographically specificso readers are migrating too. The package is thus being picked apart.GUp to now, most have been offering their content free online, but that is unsustainable,
28、because there isnt enough advertising revenue online to pay for it. So either the amount of news produced must shrink, or readers must pay more. Some publications, such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has more than lm online subscribers and has just promised to develop a ne
29、w system of micropayments for articles, already charge for content. Others will follow: Rupert Murdoch, the Journals owner, has said he expects his other titles to start charging too. With news available free on Google and Yahoo!, readers may, of course, not be prepared to pay even for deeper or mor
30、e specialised stuff)but since they do in the paper world, where free-sheets and paidfor publications coexist, there seems no reason why they wouldnt online.10 The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For questions 1 5, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent artic
31、le by choosing from the list AG and filling them into the numbered boxes. The first and the last paragraphs have been correctly placed for you.AThe researchers are not suggesting fraud, just that the way scientific publishing works makes it more likely that incorrect findings end up in print. They s
32、uggest that, as the marginal cost of publishing a lot more material is minimal on the internet, all research that meets a certain quality threshold should be published online. Preference might even be given to studies that show negative results.BIt seems likely that the danger of a winners curse doe
33、s exist in scientific publishing. Yet it may also be that editors and referees are aware of this risk, and succeed in reducing it. Even if they do not, with a world filled with new science the prestigious journals provide an informed filter.CThe groups more general argument is that scientific resear
34、ch is so difficult -the sample sizes must be big and the analysis rigorous-that most research may end up being wrong. And the “hotter“ the field, the greater the competition is and the more likely it is that published research in top journals could be wrong.DIn Public Library of Science(PloS)Medicin
35、e, an online journal, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, and his colleagues, suggest that most published scientific research is wrong. Now, along with Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland and O-mar Al-Ubaydli, an economist at George Mason
36、 University in Fairfax, Virginia, he suggests why.EThere also seems to be a bias towards publishing positive results. For instance, a study earlier this year found that among the studies submitted to Americas Food and Drug Administration about the effectiveness of antidepressants, almost all of thos
37、e with positive results were published, whereas very few of those with negative results were. But negative results are potentially just as informative as positive results, if not as exciting.FDr Ioannidis based his earlier argument about incorrect research partly on a study of 49 papers in leading j
38、ournals that had been cited by more than 1,000 other scientists. They were, in other words, well-regarded research. But he found that, within only a few years, almost a third of the papers had been refuted by other studies. For the idea of the winners curse to hold, papers published in less-well-kno
39、wn journals should be more reliable; but that has not yet been established.GIn Economic theory the winners curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to clus
40、ter around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much. The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most lik
41、ely to oversell themselves-to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false.15 The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For questions 1 5, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list AH and filling them into th
42、e numbered boxes. The first, the fifth and the last paragraphs have been correctly placed for you.AFirst, think of ways to make your speech mysterious or suspenseful. Radio commentator Paul Harvey has mastered the technique of telling a fascinating story about the accomplishments of an important ind
43、ividual but not revealing the identity of that person until the very end. Motorists who listen to these tales on their car radios are frequently unwilling to leave their vehicles until the mystery person is named. Such a technique could easily be applied in your first public speaking assignment.BAno
44、ther way to make a speech interesting is to use colorful, descriptive language that appeals to your audiences senses. If you were giving a speech about your messy roommate, for instance, go beyond the general statement that “My roommate never washes the dishes“. Describe the mountains of dirty plate
45、s in the sink; go into the details of dried-out sauce attached to the dishes.CIf you were telling the audience about your brush with greatness, for example, consider withholding the identity of your celebrity until the end. As your story unfolds, tease your classmates with clues about your celebrity
46、s gender, physical characteristics, special talents, and the like, but keep the name a secret until the last moment. The idea is to hold your classmates on the edges of their seats as they listen.DOr perhaps last summer you rode a bicycle across the full length of your state. The details of such an
47、adventure would make excellent material for a speech of self-introduction. If you think about it, every person has faced risk, done the unusual, or triumphed over hardships. Try to find ways to include such fascinating experiences in your speech.EIn addition to mystery and suspense, audiences are na
48、turally interested in dangerous situations, adventure, and drama. If your task is to introduce a fellow student, for instance, find out if he or she has ever been in danger. Suppose your classmate went on a white-water rafting expedition and fell overboard. The story of how this person was rescued w
49、ould be very dramatic.FStudents often ask about using humor to make their speeches more interesting. Audiences love witty remarks, jokes, and funny situations, but humor is only effective when done well. The best kind of humor pokes fun at ourselves or at universal human weaknesses. Everyone in the audience will be able to enjoy that kind of humor.GOr suppose you are speaking about a cherished objectsay your dog, Wolfgang. Make your speech come alive by vividly describing how Wolfgang m
