试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-考博英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

河北师范大学

Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behavior. Viewed biologically, the modern footballer is in reality a member of a hunting group. His killing weapon has turned into a harmless football and his prey into a goal-mouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, he enjoys the hunter’s triumph of killing his prey.To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our forefathers. They spent over a million years evolving as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in the hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies became greatly changed. They became chasers, runners, jumpers, aimers, throwers and prey-killers. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers.Then about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their improved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use—that of controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunt became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, awaiting their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunt were no longer essential for survival.The skills and thirst for hunting remained, however, and demanded new outlets. Hunting for sport replaced hunting for necessity. This new activity involved all the original hunting sequences, but the aim of the operation, was no longer to avoid starvation. Instead the sportsmen set off to test their skill against prey that were no longer essential to their survival. To be sure, the kill may have been eaten, but there were other, much simpler ways of obtaining a meaty meal.1. The author believes that sporting activities ____.2. In a football game, what is equal to the prey in hunting is ____.3. For over a million years, our forefathers were basically ____.4. The word “operation” (Para.4) refers to ____.5. Which of the following can best summarize the main idea of the passage?

When the first white men arrived in Samoa, they found blind men, who could see well enough to describe things in detail just by holding their hands over objects. In France, Jules Romaine tested hundreds of blind people and found a few who could tell the difference between light and dark. He narrowed their photosensitivity（感觉灵敏度）down to areas on the nose or in the finger tips. In 1960 a medical board examined a girl in Virginia and found that, even with thick bandages over her eyes, she was able to distinguish different colors and read short sections of large print.Rosa Kuleshova, a young woman in the Urals, can see with her fingers. She is not blind, but because she grew up in a family of blind people, she learned to read Braille（盲文）to help them and then went on to teach herself to do other things with her hands. She was examined by the Soviet Academy of Science, and proved to be genuine. A scientist made an intensive study with her and found that, securely blindfolded with only her arms stuck through a screen, she could tell the difference between three primary colors. To test the possibility that the cards reflected heat differently, he heated some and cooled others without affecting her response to them. He also found that she could read newsprint under glass, so texture was giving her no clues. She was able to identify the colors and shape of patches of light projected on to her palm or on to a screen. In rigidly controlled tests, with a blindfold and a screen and a piece of card around her neck so wide that she could not see round it, Rosa read the small print in a newspaper with her elbow. And, in the most convincing demonstration of all, she repeated these things with someone standing behind her pressing hard on her eyeballs. Nobody can cheat under this pressure.1. The first white men to visit Samoa found people who ____.2. From the first paragraph we can learn that ____.3. Why did the scientist put the paper under glass?4. Which of the following makes the demonstration most persuasive?5. Which of the following statements is true?

In the future your automobile will run on water instead of gas! You might even drive a flying car! These predictions are some of today’s guesses about what technology might bring tomorrow. However, many past technology predictions show that the future isn’t always easy to guess. Many of the high-tech things our parents thought we’d be using by now simply never appeared.Ok, not all past predictions have been proven wrong. A few of them have been surprisingly accurate. Some great thinkers predicted the arrival of the credit card, the fax machine and even the internet years before they happened. But for each prediction that has come true today, several others have missed by a mile. Many of these predictions didn’t consider how people would want to use the technology or if people really needed it in their lives or not. Let’s look at some predictions from the not-too-distant past.Robot HelpersWhere’s the robot in my kitchen? Nowhere of course. And he’s probably not coming anytime soon. Robots do exist today, but mostly in factories and other manufacturing environments. Back in the 1950s however people said that by now personal robots would be in most people’s homes.So why hasn’t happened? Maybe because robots are still too expensive and clumsy. And probably the idea of robots cooking our dinners and washing our clothes is just too weird. At home we seem to be doing fine without them.Telephones of tomorrow?In 1964 an American company introduced the video telephone. They said by the year 2000 most people would have a video phone in their homes. But of course the idea hasn’t caught on yet. Why? The technology worked fine, but it overlooked something obvious: people desire for privacy. Would you want to have a video phone conversation with someone after you just stepped out of the shower? Probably not—it could be uncomfortable! Just because a technology is available doesn’t always mean people will want to use it.And finally, how about that crazy prediction of the flying car? It remains one of the most fascinating technology ideas to capture our imagination. Keep watching the news or perhaps the sky outside your window to see what the future will bring.1. According to the passage, which of the following is an example of an accurate prediction?2. It can be inferred from the passage that ____.3. What is said of robot helpers at home?4. Which of the following sentences is closest in meaning to “the idea hasn’t caught on” in paragraph 7?5. The author seems to suggest that the flying car is ____.

All the teachers who teach reading agree with the following statement: Not everything in print is equally important and depending on your purpose, some material is not worth reading at all. That is, in many situations reading material is important only if it contains information you need to learn or that you are interested in learning. Of course at times you may read for entertainment or enjoyment, in which case you are not concerned with importance. An efficient reader should be able to locate portions of material that fulfill his or her purpose and skip those portions which do not. For example, you may decide to read a newspaper movie review to get a general impression of the film. In that case, it would not be necessary to read detailed descriptions of particular scenes or of actors’ performances. Or, you may read a magazine article to find out a specific piece of information. In that case, most of the article would be unimportant and reading it would be an inefficient use of your time.Some very useful techniques that will allow you to read selectively—reading what is important and skipping what does not suit your immediate purpose will be introduced in this chapter, such as skimming—locating only the most important ideas in any type of material and scanning—the technique of rapidly locating particular types of information.1. According to the author, to save time, a reader should read material that ____.2. It can be inferred from the passage that if you are interested in the photography of a film, you will ____.3. When you read an article to find out a specific piece of information, ____.4. According to the author, what is skimming?5. Based on the content you have read, the passage is probably selected from ____.

Recently, a possible alternative way of producing paper has been suggested by agriculturalists and environmentalists: a plant called hemp.Hemp has been cultivated by many cultures for thousands of years. It produces fiber, which can be made into paper, fuel, oils, textiles, food, and rope. For centuries, it was essential to the economies of many countries because it was used to make the ropes and cables used on sailing ships; colonial expansion and the establishment of a worldwide trading network would not have been feasible without hemp. Nowadays, ships’ cables are usually made from wire or synthetic fibers, but scientists are now suggesting that the cultivation of hemp should be revived for the production of paper and pulp. According to its proponents, four times as much paper can be produced from land using hemp rather than trees, and many environmentalists believe that the large-scale cultivation of hemp could reduce the pressure on world’s forests.However, there is a problem: hemp is illegal in many countries of the world. This plant, so useful for fiber, rope, oil, fuel and textiles, is a species of cannabis（大麻）, related to the plant from which marijuana is produced. In the late 1930s, a movement to ban the drug marijuana began to gather force, resulting in the eventual banning of the cultivation not only of the plant used to produce the drug, but also of the commercial producing—producing hemp plant. Although both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp in large quantities on their own land, any American growing the plant today would soon find himself in prison—despite the fact that marijuana cannot be produced from the hemp plant, since it contains almost no THC (the active ingredient in the drug).In recent years, two major movements for legalization have been gathering strength. One group of activists believes that ALL cannabis should be legal—both the hemp plant and the marijuana plant—and that the use of the drug marijuana should not be an offense. They argue that marijuana is not dangerous or addictive, and that it is used by large numbers of people who are not criminals but productive members of society. They also point out that marijuana is less toxic than alcohol or tobacco. The other legalization movement is concerned only with the hemp plant used to produce producing; this group wants to make it legal to cultivate the plant and sell the fiber for paper and pulp production. This second group has had a major triumph recently: in 1997, Canada legalized the farming of hemp for fiber. For the first time since 1938, hundreds of farmers are planting this crop, and soon we can expect to see pulp and paper produced from this new source.1. What equipment on a ship was made from hemp?2. What drug can be obtained from a relative of hemp?3. Why was the plant hemp essential to worldwide trade in the past?4. Why do agriculturalists think that hemp would be better for paper production than trees?5. Why was hemp banned?

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