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

沈阳工业大学

About the time that schools and others quite reasonably became interested in seeing to it that all children, whatever their background, were fairly treated, intelligence testing became unpopular. Some thought it was unfair to minority children. Through the past few decades such testing has gone out of fashion and many communities have indeed forbidden it.However, paradoxically, just recently a group of black parents filed lawsuit (诉讼) in California claiming that the state’s ban on IQ testing discriminates against their children by denying them the opportunity to take the test. (They believed, correctly, that IQ tests are a valid method of evaluating children for special education classes.) The judge, therefore, reversed, at least partially, his original decision.And so the argument goes on and on. Does it benefit or harm children from minority groups to have their intelligence tested? We have always been on the side of permitting, even facilitating, such testing. If a child of any color or group is doing poorly in school it seems to us very important to know whether it is because he or she is of low intelligence, or whether some other factor is the cause.What school and family can do to improve poor performance is influenced by its cause. It is not discriminative to evaluate either a child’s physical condition or his intellectual level. Unfortunately, intellectual level seems to be a sensitive subject, and what the law allows us to do varies from time to time. The same fluctuation back and forth occurs in areas other than intelligence. Thirty years or so ago, for instance, white families were encouraged to adopt black children. It was considered discriminative not to do so.And then the style changed and this cross-racial adopting became generally unpopular, and social agencies felt that black children should go to black families only. It is hard to say what are the best procedures. But surely good will on the part of all of us is needed. As to intelligence, in our opinion, the more we know about any child’s intellectual level, the better for the child in question.1. Why did the intelligence test become unpopular in the past few decades?2. The recent legal action taken by some black parents in California aimed to ________.3. The author believes that intelligence testing ________.4. The author’s opinion of child adoption seems to be that ________.5. Child adoption is mentioned in the passage to show that ________.

It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidence of the depressing state of literacy. These figures from the Department of Education are sufficient: 27 million Americans cannot read at all, and a further 35 million read at a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society.But my own worry today is less that of the overwhelming problem of elemental literacy than it is of the slightly more luxurious problem of the decline in the skill even of the middle-class reader, of his unwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time and concentration, that surround the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested that almost 80 percent of America’s literate, educated teenagers can no longer read without an accompanying noise (music) in the background or a television screen flickering (闪烁) at the corner of their field of perception. We know very little about the brain and how it deals with simultaneous conflicting input, but every common-sense intuition suggests we should be profoundly alarmed. This violation of concentration, silence, solitude (独处的状态) goes to the very heart of our notion of literacy; this new form of part-reading, of part-perception against background distraction renders impossible certain essential acts of apprehension and concentration, let alone that most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.Under these circumstances, the question of what future there is for the arts of reading is a real one. Ahead of us lie technical, Psychic (心理的), and social transformations probably much more dramatic than those brought about by Gutenberg, the German inventor in printing. The Gutenberg revolution, as we now know it, took a long time: its effects are still being debated. The information revolution will touch every fact of composition, publication, distribution, and reading. No one in the book industry can say with any confidence what will happen to the book as we’ve known it.1. The picture of the reading ability of the American people, drawn by the author, is ________.2. The author’s biggest concern is ________.3. A major problem with most adolescents who can read is ________.4. The author claims that the best way a reader can show admiration for a piece of poetry or prose is ________.5. About the future of the arts of reading the author feels ________.

What makes Americans spend nearly half their food dollars on meals away from home? The answers lie in the way Americans live today. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, canned and other convenience foods freed the family cook from full-time duty at the kitchen range. Then, in the 1940s, work in the wartime defense plants took more women out of the home ever before, setting the pattern of the working wife and mother.Today about half of the country’s married women are employed outside the home. But, unless family members pitch in with food preparation, women are not fully liberated from that chore. It’s easier to pick up a bucket of fried chicken on the way home from work or take the family out for pizzas or burgers than to start opening cans or heating up frozen dinners after a long, hard day.Also, the rising divorce rate means that there are more single working parents with children to feed. And many young adults and elderly people, as well as unmarried and divorced mature people, live alone rather than as a part of a family unit and don’t want to bother cooking for one.Fast food is appealing because it is fast, it doesn’t require any dressing up, it offers a “fun” break in the daily routine, and the outlay of money seems small. It can be eaten in the car—sometimes picked up at a drive-in window without even getting out—or on the run. Even if it is brought home to eat, there will never be any dirty dishes to wash because of the handy disposable wrappings. Children, especially, love fast food because it’s finger food, no struggling with knives and forks, no annoying instructions from adults about table manners.1. Americans enjoy fast food mainly because ________.2. It can be inferred that children ________.3. Many Americans are eating out and not cooking at home nowadays because ________.4. According to the text, a drive-in window is a(an) ________.5. The expression “pitch in with” (Para. 2) probably means ________.

For many people today, reading is no longer relaxation. To keep up with their work they must read letters, reports, trade publications, interoffice communications, not to mention newspapers and magazines: a never-ending flood of words. In ___1___ a job or advancing in one, the ability to read and comprehend ___2___ can mean the difference between success and failure. Yet the unfortunate fact is that most of us are ___3___ readers. Most of us develop poor reading ___4___ at an early age, and never get over them. The main deficiency ___5___ in the actual stuff of language itself—words. Taken individually, words have ___6___ until they are strung together into phrases, sentences and paragraphs. ___7___, however, the untrained reader does not read groups of words. He laboriously reads one word at a time, often regressing to ___8___ words or passages. Regression, the tendency to look back over ___9___ you have just read, is a common bad habit in reading. Another habit which ___10___ down the speed of reading is vocalization-sounding each word either orally or mentally as ___11___ reads.To overcome these bad habits, some reading clinics use a device called an ___12___, which moves a bar down the page at a predetermined speed. The bar is set at a slightly faster rate ___13___ the reader finds comfortable, in order to “stretch” him. The accelerator forces the reader to read fast, ___14___ word-by-word reading, regression and sub-vocalization practically impossible. At first ___15___ is sacrificed for speed. But when you learn to read ideas and concepts, you will not only read faster, ___16___ your comprehension will improve. Many people have found their reading skill drastically improved after some ___17___. ___18___ Charlce Au, a business manager, for instance, his reading rate was a reasonably good 172 words a minute ___19___ the training, now it is an excellent 1,378 words a minute. He is delighted that how he can ___20___ a lot more reading material in a short period of time.

The international situation has been growing _______ difficult for the last few years.

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