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

山西大学

Cardinal MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a secular saint who was said to speak 72 languages. Or 50. No one was certain of the true figure, but it was a lot. Visitors flocked from all comers of Europe to test him and came away stunned. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their sins the next morning and saved them from hell.Or so the legend goes. In “Babel No More”, Michael Erard has written the first serious book about the people who master vast numbers of languages—or claim to. A journalist with some linguistics training, Mr. Erard is not a hyperpolyglot himself (he speaks some Spanish and Chinese), but he approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of scepticism.To find out whether anyone could really learn so many languages, Mr. Erard set out to find Modern Mezzofantis. The people he meets are certainly interesting. One man with a mental age of nine has a vast memory for foreign words and the use of grammatical endings, but he cannot seem to break free of English word order. Ken Hals, who was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and died in 2001, was said to have learned 50 languages. Professional linguists sill swear by his talent. But he insisted he spoke only three (English, Spanish and Warlpiri—from Australia’s Northern Territory) and could merely “talk” in others. Mr. Erard says that true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few.At the end of his story, however, Erard finds a surprise in Mezzofanti’s archive: flashcards. Stacks of them, in Georgian, Hungarian, Arabic, Algonquin and nine other tongues. The world’s most celebrated hyperpolyglot relied on the same tools given to first-year language learners today. The conclusion? Hyperpolyglots may begin with talent but they aren’t geniuses. They simply enjoy tasks that are drudgery to normal people. The talent and enjoyment drive a virtuous cycle that pushes them to feats others simply shake their heads at.1.The word “hyperpolyglot” (para. 2) refers to the one who（）.2.By “a healthy dash of skepticism”, the author demonstrates Mr. Erard’s（）.3.Mr. Erard’s efforts to find the Modern Mezzofantis（）.4.What is the emphasis in the last paragraph?5.The passage is most likely a part of（）.

A new website from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows that 10% of the country is now a “food desert”. The Food Desert Locator is an online map highlighting thousands of areas where, the USDA says, low-income families have little or no access to healthy fresh food. First identified in Scotland in the 1990s, food deserts have come to symbolize urban decay. They suggest images of endless fast-food restaurants and convenience stores serving fatty, sugary junk food to overweight customers who have never tasted organic vegetables.Accordingly, Michelle Obama announced a $400m Healthy Food Financing Initiative last year with the aim of eliminating food deserts nationwide by 2017. Official figures for the number of people living in food deserts already show a decline, from 23.5m in 2009 to 13.5m at the launch of the website. Although this might on the face of it suggest that the initiative is off to a superb start, sadly it does not in fact represent a single additional banana bought or soda shunned. This is because in America, the definition of a food desert is any census area where at least 20% of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33% live more than a mile from a supermarket. By simply extending the cut-off in rural areas to ten miles, the USDA managed to rescue 10m people from desert life.Some academics would go further, calling the appearance of many food deserts nothing but a mirage. Research by the Centre for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington found that only 15% of people shopped for food within their own census area. Critics also note that focusing on supermarkets means that the USDA ignores tens of thousands of larger and smaller retailers, farmers’ markets and roadside greengrocers, many of which are excellent sources of fresh food. Together, they account for more than half of the country’s trillion-dollar retail food market.A visit to Renton, a depressed suburb of Seattle, demonstrates the problem. The town sits in the middle of a USDA food desert stretching miles in every direction. Yet it is home to a roadside stand serving organic fruit and vegetables, a health-food shop packed with nutritious grains and a superstore that researchers found attracts flocks of shoppers from well outside the desert.1.According to the USDA, food deserts（）.2.Healthy Food Financing Initiative is intended to（）.3.The author seems to think that the drop from 23.5 million to 13.5 million（）.4.The scholars in paragraph 3 believe that the USDA definition of a food desert is（）.5.Renton is mentioned in the passage to（）.

Some of the world’s most important museums are confirming what we’ve suspected all along but didn’t dare say: selfie sticks (自拍杆) are stupid.The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has banned the sticks from their exhibition halls to prevent damage to the artwork. If you’ve ever set foot in MoMA you’ll know what a difficult experience it can be. Not because it isn’t an exceptional art institution that’s given the mind-expanding exhibitions, but because of other people. The MoMA is one of the world’s busiest museums—add selfie sticks among the crowds and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.The same situation can be found at many famous tourist landmarks. Like seat belts, the selfie stick problem doesn’t hit home until someone gets hurt. An increasing number of sites have seen the potential hazard and put a stop to things before a “tragedy” occurs. The Australian Open has banned selfie sticks. Sports and music stadiums around London have banned the stick, as well.Yet the real issue behind the selfie stick is the selfie itself. It’s somehow become socially acceptable for us to take the narcissism (自恋) of adolescence and extend it through adulthood, manifested in selfies. I admit that I do enjoy the occasional guilty pleasure of a selfie, so I can’t and won’t be a hypocrite about it.When it comes to traveling, though, when it comes to once-in-a-lifetime visits to sacred landmarks and world-class museums, I’d hope that we could all turn the lens away from ourselves.Or simply put the camera away. Travel writer Paul Theroux once told his readers: “I never bring a camera—because taking pictures, I’ve found, makes me less observant and interferes with my memory.” How much do we rely on photo graphs to remember our vacations? Does it really matter that we have a permanent documentation of every moment of our travels?What if we entirely let go of documenting and just simply experience? I tried it for a day. It is what I imagine skydiving would be like: terrifying at first, then exciting and finally, when I got my mind to stop subconsciously framing every street scene, I became more present than I’ve ever been on a trip.1.What do we learn about MoMA?2.As mentioned in the passage, selfie sticks have been banned in the following events EXCEPT （）.3.According to Paragraph 4, the author considers selfies as（）.4.Travel writer Paul Theroux is quoted to（）.5.In “I became more present than I’ve ever been on a trip” (last paragraph), the author’ feeling can be summarized as（）.

Many countries have made it illegal to talk into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research provides further confirmation that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can impair a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation about their hobbies using a speakerphone. As Dr. Kunar and Dr. Horowitz report in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 meters to the braking distance of a car traveling at 100kph. They found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83 percent more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.Dr. Kunar and Dr. Horowitz also explored the effect of simply listening to something—such as a radio programme. For this they played a recording of the first chapter of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Even though the test subjects were told to pay attention because they would be asked questions about the story afterwards, it had little effect on their reaction time. The research led by Frank Drews of the University of Utah suggests the same thing is true of the idle chatter of a passenger. Dr. Kunar reckons that having to think about responses during a phone conversation competes for the brain’s resources in a way that listening to a monologue does not.Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Stopping people making hands-free calls would probably be impossible—especially because more and more vehicles are now being fitted with the necessary equipment as standard. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls. And they’ll be more likely to arrive in one piece.1.In Kunar and Horowitz’s experiments, the subjects who performed tasks while talking（）.2.According to Frank Drews, listening to a passenger talking（）.3.According to the last paragraph, the law forbidding the use of hand-held phones when driving （）.4.The best hope of stopping people from using hands-free phones lies with（）.5.The purpose of the passage is to（）.

With a wide variety of fresh fruit（）available, canned fruit is no longer so popular as before.

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