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

燕山大学

This is supposed to be an enlightened age, but you wouldn’t think if you could hear what the average man thinks of the average woman! Women won their independence years ago. After a long, bitter struggle, they now enjoy the same educational opportunities as men in most parts of the world. (1) They have proved repeatedly that they are equal and often superior to men in almost every field. It is men, not women who still carry on the sex war because their attitude remains basically hostile. Even in the most progressive societies, women continue to be regarded as second-rate citizens. To hear some men talk, you’d think that women belonged to a different species. (2) The hard-fought battle for recognition has been won, but it is by no means over.On the surface, the comments made by men about women’s abilities seem light-hearted. The same tired jokes about women drivers are repeated day in, day out. This apparent light-heartedness dose not conceal the real contempt that men feel for women. However much men sneer at women, their claims to superiority are not borne out by statistics. (3) We all know that women cause far fewer accidents than men. They are too conscientious and responsible to drive like maniacs (疯子). But this is a minor quibble. Women have succeeded in any job you care to name. As politicians, soldiers, doctors, factory-hands, university professors, farmers, company directors, lawyers, bus-conductors, scientists and presidents of countries they have often put men to shame. And we must remember that they frequently succeed brilliantly in all these fields in addition to bearing and rearing children.(4) Yet men go on maintaining the fiction that there are many jobs women can’t do. Top-level political negotiation between countries, business and banking are almost entirely controlled by men, who jealously guard their so-called “rights”. Even in otherwise enlightened places like Switzerland women haven’t even been given the cote.The truth is that men cling to their supremacy because of their basic inferiority complex. They shun real competition. They know in their hearts that women are superior and they are afraid of being beaten at their own game. One of the most important tasks in the world is to achieve peace between the nations. (5) You can be sure that if women were allowed to sit round the conference table, they would succeed brilliantly, as they always do, there men have failed for centuries.

Parents of wailing babies, take comfort: You are not alone. Chimpanzee babies fuss. Sea gull chicks squawk. Burying beetle larvae tap their parents’ legs. Throughout the animal kingdom, babies know how to get their parents’ attention. Exactly why evolution has produced all this fussing, squawking and tapping is a question many biologists are trying to answer.(1) Someday, that answer may shed some light on the mystery of crying in human babies. “It may point researchers in the right direction to find the causes of excessive crying,” said Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Soltis published an article on the evolution of crying in the current issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.Young animals vary in how much they cry, squawk or otherwise communicate with their parents, and studies with mice, beetles and monkeys show that this variation is partly based on genes.Some level of crying in humans, of course, is based on gas pains and messy diapers. (2) But as for the genetic contribution, you might expect that natural selection would favor genes for noisier children, since they would get more attention.Before long, however, this sort of deception may be ruinous. If the signals of offspring became totally unreliable, parents would no longer benefit from paying attention. (3) Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that natural selection should therefore favor so-called honest advertisements.Some biologists have speculated that these honest advertisements may not just tell a parent which offspring are hungry. They might also show their parent that they are healthy and vigorous and therefore worth some extra investment.The babies of rhesus macaque monkeys cry out to their mothers and tend to cry even more around the time their mothers wean (断奶) them. The mothers, in response, begin to ignore most of their babies’ distress calls, since most turn out to be false alarms.“Initially, mothers respond any time an infant cries,” said Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago, (4) “But as the cries increase, they respond less and less. They become more skeptical. So infants start crying less. So they go through these cycles, adjusting their responses.”Kim Bard, a primatologist at the University of Plymouth in England, has spent more than a decade observing chimpanzee babies. “Chimps can cry for a long time if something terrible is happening to them, but when you pick them up, they stop,” Bard said. “I’ve never seen any chimpanzees in the first three months of life be inconsolable.”Maestripieri and other researchers say these evolutionary forces may have also shaped the cries of human babies. “All primate infants cry,” Maestripieri said. (5) “It’s a very conserved behavior. It’s not something humans have evolved on their own.”

Until the 1980s, the American homeless population comprised mainly older males. Today, homelessness strikes much younger part of society. In fact, a 25-city survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1987 found that families with children make up the fastest growing part of the homeless population. Many homeless children gather in inner cities; this transient (变化无常的) and frequently frightened student population creates additional problems—both legal and educational—for already overburdened urban school administrators and teachers.Estimates of the number of homeless Americans range from 350,000 to three million. Likewise, estimates of the number of homeless school children vary radically. A U.S. Department of Education report, based on state estimates, states that there are 220,000 homeless school-age children, about a third of whom do not attend school on a regular basis. But the National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there are at least two times as many homeless children, and that less than half of them attend school regularly.One part of the homeless population that is particularly difficult to count consists of the “throwaway” youths who have been cast of their homes. The Elementary School Center in New York City estimates that there are 1.5 million of them, many of whom are not counted as children because they do not stay in family shelters and tend to live by themselves on the streets.Federal law, the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, includes a section that addresses the educational needs of homeless children. The educational provisions of the McKinney Act are based on the belief that all homeless children have the right to a free, appropriate education.1. It is implied in the first paragraph that ________.2. The National Coalition for the Homeless believes that the number of homeless children is ________.3. One part of the homeless population is difficult to estimate. The reason might well be ________.4. The McKinney Act is mentioned in this passage in order to show that ________.5. The passage mainly deals with ________.

The greatest contribution to civilization in the century may well be the air-conditioning—and American leads just as amazing is the speed with which this situation came to be. Air-conditioning began to spread in industries as a production aid during World War Ⅱ. Today most Americans need to take air-conditioning for granted to homes, offices, factories, theatres, shops, studios, schools, hotels, and restaurants.But not everybody is aware that high cost and easy comfort are merely two of the effects of the vast cooling of American. In fact, air conditioning has substantially altered the country’s character and customs.Many of the byproducts are so conspicuous that they are scarcely noticed. To begin with, air-conditioning transformed the face of America by making possible those glassy, boxy, sealed-in skyscrapers. It has been indispensable, no less, to the functioning of sensitive advanced computers, whose high operating temperatures require that they be constantly cooled.It has, at will, forced families into retreating into families with closed doors and shut windows, reducing the interactions of neighborhood life. It is really surprising that the public’s often noted withdrawal into self-pursuit and privacy has coincided with the historic spread of air-conditioning. Though science has little studied how habitual air-conditioning affects mind and body, some medical experts suggest that, like other technical avoidance of natural variations in climate, air-conditioning may damage the human capacity to adapt to stress. If so, air-conditioning is only like many other greatly useful technical developments that liberate man from nature by increasing his productivity and power in some way—while indirectly weakening him in others.1. According to this selection, which of the following constitutes the unique character of U.S.?2. According to the author, the chief consequence brought about by the wide application of air-conditioning is ________.3. The tone of this selection reveals that air-conditioning ________.4. Who benefits the least from air-conditioning according to the author?5. What is the author’s overall attitude towards air-conditioning?

Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it’s the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can’t take it too seriously, because “ever” really means “as long as the records go hack”, which is only as far as the late 1800s. Scientists have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though—not for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of a given year by such proxy measurements as growth marks in corals, deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as there were hundreds of years ago compared with today.And in the most comprehensive compilation of such data to date, says a new report from the National Research Council, it looks pretty certain that the last few decades have been hotter than any comparable period in the last 400 years. That’s a blow to those who claim the current warm spell is just part of the natural up and down of average temperatures—a frequent assertion of the global-warming-doubters crowd.The report was triggered by doubts about past-climate claims made last year by climatologist Michael Mann, of the University of Virginia (he’s the creator of the “hockey stick” graph A1 Gore used in “An Inconvenient Truth” to dramatize the rise in carbon dioxide in recent years). Mann claimed that the recent warming was unprecedented in the past thousand years—that led Congress to order up an assessment by the prestigious Research Council. Their conclusion was that a thousand years was reasonable, but not overwhelmingly supported by the data. But the past 400 was—so resoundingly that it fully supports the claim that today’s temperatures are unnaturally warm, just as global warming theory has been predicting for a hundred years. And if there’s any doubt about whether these proxy measurements are really legitimate, the NRC scientists compared them with actual temperature data from the most recent century, when real thermometers were in widespread use. The match was more or less right on.In the past nearly two decades since TIME first put global warming on the cover, then, the argument against it has gone from “it isn’t happening” to “it’s happening, but it’s natural”, to “it’s mostly natural”—and now, it seems, that assertion too is going to have to drop away. Indeed, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee and who asked for the report declared that it did nothing to support the notion of a controversy over global warming science—a controversy that opponents keep insisting is alive.1. What does this passage mainly deal with?2. What is “proxy measurement” in Paragraph 1 likely to refer to?3. What does the report from NRC indicate?4. Which of the statement is NOT true concerning the controversy about global warming?5. What is the author’s attitude towards global warming theory?

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