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

宁波大学

Democritus was fascinated by the question of what principle underlay the material universe and developed a solution that revealed the brilliance of his thought. Every material thing, Democritus believed, is made up of a finite number of discrete particles, or atoms, as he called them, whose joining together and subsequent separation account for the coming to be of things and for their passing away. The atoms themselves, he said, are infinite in number and eternal. They move, according to a necessary motion, in the void, which we would call space.Most of the main tenets of the atomism of Democritus were astonishingly modern. First, the atoms were invisibly small. They were all of the same stuff, or nature, but they came in a multitude of different shapes and sizes. Though impermeable (Democritus did not know that atoms could be split), they acted upon one another, aggregating and clinging to one another so as to produce the great variety of bodies that we see. The space outside the atoms was empty, a concept that most of Democritus’ contemporaries could not accept.Second, the atoms were in perpetual motion, in every direction, throughout empty space. There is no above or below, before or behind, in empty space, said Democritus. In modern terms, empty space did not vary according to direction. This was an extremely sophisticated notion.Third, the continual motion of the atoms was inherent. They possessed what would call inertial mass. The notion that the atoms kept on moving without being pushed, besides being another remarkable intellectual concept, was not acceptable to Aristotle and others. Only the celestial bodies, Aristotle thought, kept on moving of any by themselves, because they were divine. The general refusal by Aristotle and his influential followers to accept the law of inertia stood as an obstacle to the development of physics for two thousand years.Fourth, weight or gravity was not a property of atoms or indeed of aggregates thereof. Here Democritus was as wrong as wrong could be. Whether Democritus was right or wrong about a fifth point is not definitely decided to this day. He held that the soul is breath and because breath is material, and therefore made up of atoms, so must the soul be. He maintained that, because the soul is a physical thing, it must be determined by physical laws; it cannot be free. Even the hardy thinkers who claim to accept this theory do not act as if they do. They may deny the innate freedom of others, but they act as if they believe in their own.The tension built up by this antinomy has proved to be fruitful over the centuries. However, the notion that the soul was material proved so unacceptable to both the Aristotelians and the Christians that for nearly two millennia the atomic hypothesis languished.26. According to Democritus, empty space ______.27. The author discusses the beliefs of Aristotle and his followers (in Paragraph 4) in order to ______.28. It can be inferred from Democritus’ inclusion of the soul in his theories of the material universe (in Paragraph 6) that ______.29. Democritus would most likely believe that which of the following would explain the life cycle of a flower?30. Which is most analogous to a “hardy thinkers” (in Paragraph 6) view of the soul?

When musing on cities over time and in our time, from the first (whenever it was) to today, we must always remember that cities are artifacts. Forests, jungles, deserts, plains, oceans — the organic environment is born and dies and is reborn endlessly, beautifully, and completely without moral constraint or ethical control. But cities — despite the metaphors that we apply to them from biology or nature (“The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism”), despite the sentimental or anthropomorphic devices we used to describe cities — are artificial. Nature has never made a city, and what Nature makes that may seem like a city — an anthill, for instance — only seems like one. It is not a city.Human beings made and make cities, and only human beings kill cities, or let them die. And human beings do both — make cities and unmake them — by the same means: by acts of choice. We enjoy deluding ourselves in this as in other things. We enjoy believing that there are forces out there completely determining our fate, natural forces — or forces so strong and overwhelming as to be like natural forces — that send cities through organic or biological phases of birth, growth, and decay. We avoid the knowledge that cities are at best works of art, and at worst ungainly artifacts — but never flowers or even weeds — and that we, not some mysterious force or cosmic biological system, control the creation and life of a city.We control the creation and life of a city by the choices and agreements we make — the basic choice being, for instance, not to live alone, the basic agreement being to live together. When people choose to settle, like the starts, not wander like the moon, they create cities as sites and symbols of their choice to stop and their agreement not to separate. Now stasis and proximity, not movement distance, define human relationships. Mutual defense, control of a river or harbor, shelter from natural forces — all these and other reasons may lead people to aggregate, but once congregated, they then live differently and become different.A city is not an extended family. That is a tribe or clan. A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to function: They agree to live as if they were as close in blood or ties of kinship as they are in physical proximity. Choosing life in an artifact, people agree to live in a state of similitude. A city is a place where ties of considerable pact, a city. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.21. The author’s purpose is primarily to ______.22. The author cites the sentence “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism” (Paragraph 1) as ______.23. The author’s attitude toward the statements quoted in “The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism” in Paragraph 1 is ______.24. According to this passage, why is an anthill by definition unlike a city?25. Mutual defense, control of waterways, and shelter from the forces of nature are presented primarily an example of motives for people to ______.

A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide — the division of the world into the info (information) rich and the info poor. And that (1) does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less (2) then, however, were the new, positive (3) that work against the digital divide. (4), there are reasons to be (5).There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more (6), it is in the interest of business to universalize access — after all, the more people online, the more potential (7) there are. More and more (8), afraid their countries will be left (9), want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be (10) together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will (11) rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for (12) world poverty that we’ve ever had. Of course, the use of the Internet isn’t the only way to (13) poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has (14) potential.To (15) advantage of this tool, some poor countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices (16) respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is a/an (17) of their sovereignty might well study the history of (18) (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is (19) America’s Second Wave infrastructure — (20) roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on — were built with foreign investment.

Directions: Carefully read the following passage and write a short composition of about 250 to 300 words. You should write the composition on the ANSWER SHEET. Note that your score will be awarded mainly on the base of content, logic, style and language. (30 points)Some people think that the increasing use of computers and mobile phones for communication has had a negative effect on young people’s reading and wring skills. Does the advantage outweigh the disadvantage?An argumentative is expected to support your viewpoint.

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)(46) The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. (47) Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species- man- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.(48) During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. (49) In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world — the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or com or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. (50) As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”

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