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

哈尔滨工业大学

There were two widely divergent influences on the earl development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of governmental units and a gentlemanly gambling father who relied on mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. The influence of the mother on the offspring, statistics, is represented by counting, measuring, describing, tabulating, ordering, and the taking of censuses, all of which led to modern descriptive statistics. From the influence of the father came modern inferential statistics, which is based squarely on theories of probability.Descriptive statistics involves tabulating, depicting, and describing collections of data. These data may be either quantitative, such as measures of height, intelligence, or grade level-variables， that are characterized by the underlying continuum or the data may represent qualitative variables, such as sex, college major, or personality type. Large masses of data must generally undergo a process of summarization or reduction before they are comprehensible. Descriptive statistics is a tool for describing or summarizing, or reducing to comprehensible form the properties of an otherwise unwieldy mass of data.Inferential statistics is a formalized body of methods for solving another class of problems that present great difficulties for the unaided human mind. This general class of problems characteristically involves attempts to make predictions using a sample of observations. For example, a school superintendent wishes to determine the proportion of children in a large school system, who come to school without breakfast have been vaccinated for flu, or whatever. Having a little knowledge of statistics, the superintendent would know that it is unnecessary and inefficient to question each child; the proportion for the entire district could be estimated fairly accurately from a sample of as few as 100 children. Thus, the purpose of inferential statistics is to predict or estimate characteristics of a population from a knowledge of the characteristics of only a sample of the population.31. The passage is mainly concerned with ______.32. According to the first paragraph, counting and describing are associated with ______.33. Why does the author mention “mother” and “father” in the first paragraph?34. Which of the following statements about descriptive statistics is best supported by the passage?35. According to the passage, what is the purpose of examining a sample or a population?

The tragic impact of modern city on the human being has killed his sense of aesthetics. The material benefits of an affluent society have diverted his attention from his city and its cultural potential to the products of science and technology: washing machines, central heating, automatic cookers, television sets, computers and fitted carpets. He is, at the moment, drunk with democracy, well-to-do, and has never had it so good.He is reluctant to walk. Statistical data reveal that the distance he is prepared to walk from his parking place to his shopping center is very short. As there are no adequate off street parking facilities, the cities are littered with kerb-parked cars, and parking meters rear themselves everywhere. Congestion has become the predominant factor in his environment, and statistics suggest that two cars per household system may soon make matters worse.In the meantime, insult is added to injury by “land value”. The value of land results from its use: its income is derived from the service it provides. When its use is intensified, its income and its value increase. “Putting land to its highest and best use” becomes the principal economic standard in urban growth. This speculative approach and the pressure of increasing population leads to the “vertical” growth of cities with the result that people are forced to adjust themselves to congestion in order to maintain these relatively artificial land values. Paradoxically the remedy for removing congestion is to create more of it.Partial decentralization, or rather pseudo-decentralization, in the form of large development units away from the traditional town centers, only shifts the disease round the anatomy of the town: if it is not combined with the remodeling of the town’s transportation system, it does not cure it. Here the engineering solutions are strongly affected by the necessity for complicated intersections, which, in turn, are frustrated by the extravagant cost of land.It is within our power to build better cities and revive the civic pride of their citizens, but we shall have to stop operating on the fringe of the problem. We shall have radically to re-plan them to achieve a rational density of population. We shall have to provide in them what can be called minimum “psychological elbow room.” One of the ingredients of this will be proper transportation plans. These will have to be an integral part of the overall planning process which in itself is a scientific process. If we want to plan effectively, we must collect, in an organized manner, all and complete information about the city or the town. In this process, we must not forget that cities are built by people, and that their form and shape should be subject to the will of the people. Scientific methods of data collection and analysis will indicate trends, but they will not direct action. Scientific methods are only an instrument. Man will have to set the target, and, using the results obtained by science and his own engineering skill, take upon himself the final shaping of his environment.26. It can be inferred from the first paragraph that people in old times ______.27. The highly-developed technology has made man ______.28. The drastic increase of land value in the city ______.29. The expansion of big cities to the distant suburban areas may ______.30. The author suggests that the remodeling of cities must ______.

Navigation computers, now sold by most car-makers, cost $2,000 and up. No surprise, then, that they are most often found in luxury cars like Lexus, BMW and Audi. But it is a developing technology—meaning prices should eventually drop—and the market does seem to be growing.Even at current prices, a navigation computer is impressive. It can guide you from point to point in most major cities with precise turn-by-turn directions—spoken by a clear human sounding voice, and written on a screen in front of the driver.The computer works with an antenna that takes signals from no fewer than three of the 24 global positioning system (GPS) satellites. By measuring the time required for a signal to travel between the satellites and the antenna, the cars location can be pinned down within 100 meters.The satellite signals, along with inputs on speed from a wheel-speed sensor and direction from a meter, determine the cars position even as it moves. This information is combined with a map database. Streets, landmarks and points of interest are included.Most systems are basically identical. The differences come in hardware—the way the computer accepts the driver’s request for directions and the way it presents the driving instructions. On most systems, a driver enters a desired address, motorway junction or point of interest via a touch screen or disc. But the Lexus screen goes a step further: you can point to any spot on the map screen and get directions to it. BMWS system offers a set of cross hairs that can be moved across the map (you have several choices of map scale) to pick a point you’d like to get to. Audi’s screen can be switched to TV reception.Even the voices that recite the directions can differ, with better systems like BMWS and Lexus’s having a wider vocabulary. The instructions are available in French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian as well as English. The driver can also choose parameters for determining the route: fastest, shortest or no freeways, for example.21. We learn from the passage that navigation computers ______.22. With a navigation computer, a driver will easily find the best route to his destination ______.23. Despite their varied designs, navigation computers used in cars ______.24. The navigation computer functions ______.25. The navigation systems in Lexus, BMW and Audi are mentioned to show ______.

Britain’s richest people have experienced the biggest ever rise in their wealth, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. Driven by the new economy of the Internet and computer entrepreneurs, the wealth of those at the top of the financial tree has increased at an unprecedented rate. The 12th annual Rich List will show that the collective worth of the country’s richest 1, 000 people reached nearly 146 billion pounds by January, the cutoff point for the survey. They represented an increase of 31 billion, or 27%, in just 12 months. Since the survey was compiled, Britain’s richest have added billions more to their wealth, thanks to the continuing boom in technology shares on the stock market. This has pushed up the total value of the wealth of the richest 1,000 to a probable 160 billion according to Dr. Philip Beresford, Britain’s acknowledged expert on personal wealth who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List.The millennium boom exceeds anything in Britain’s economic history, including the railway boom of the 1840s and the South Sea bubble of 1720. It has made Margaret Thatcher’s boom seem as sluggish as Edward Heath’s “three-day week”, said Beresford. “We are seeing billions being added to the national wealth every week.” William Rubinstein, professor of modern history at the University of Wales; Abe Ystwyth, confirmed that the growth in wealth was unprecedented. Almost all of today’s wealth has been created since the industrial revolution, but even by those heady standards the current boom is extraordinary, he said. “There is no large scale cultural opposition or guilt about making money. In many ways British business attitudes can now challenge the United States.”Although the Britain’s richest are experiencing the sharpest surge in wealth, the rest of the population has also benefited from the stock market boom and rising house prices. Last year wealth rose by 16% to a record 4,267 billion, according to calculations by the investment bank Salomon Smith Barney. In real terms, wealth has increased by more than a third since the late 1980s. Much of the wealth of the richest is held in shares in start-up companies.Some of these paper fortunes, analysts agree, could easily be wiped out, although the wealth generating effects of the Internet revolution seem to be here to stay. A Sunday Times Young Rich List confirms that people are becoming wealthier younger. It includes the 60 richest millionaires aged 30 or under. At the top, on 600m, is the “old money” Earl of Inveigh, 30, head of the Guinness brewing family. In second place is Charles Nasser, also 30, who launched the Clara NET Internet provider four years ago and is worth 300m. The remaining eight in the top 10 young millionaires made their money from computing and the Internet.16. The “cutoff point for the survey” (in Paragraph 1) refers to ______.17. Which one is an example of the changed business attitude in Britain?18. The millennium economic boom in Britain ______.19. Why does the author call the wealth of the riches “paper fortunes”?20. A new tendency emerged in the current boom is that ______.

Banks are not ordinarily prepared to pay out all accounts; they rely on depositors not to demand payment all at the same time. If depositors should come to fear that a bank couldn’t pay off all its depositors, then that fear might cause all the depositors to appear on the same day. If they did, the bank could not pay all accounts. However, if they did not all appear at once, then there would always be funds to pay those who wanted their money when they wanted it. Mrs. Elsie Vaught has told us of a terrifying bank run (挤兑) that she experienced. One day, in December of 1925 several banks failed to open in a city where she lived. The other banks anticipated a run the next day, and so the officers of the bank in which Mrs. Vaught worked as a teller (出纳员) had enough funds on hand to pay off as many depositors as might apply. The officers simply instructed the tellers to pay on demand. Next morning a crowd gathered in the bank and on the sidewalk outside. The length of the line convinced many that the bank could not possibly pay off everyone. People began to push and then to fight for places near the teller’s windows. Clothing was torn and limbs broken, but the jam continued for hours. The power of the panic atmosphere is evident in the fact that two tellers, though they knew that the bank was sound and could pay out all depositors, nevertheless withdrew the funds in their own accounts. Mrs. Vaught says that she had difficulty restraining herself from doing the same.11. A bank run occurs when ______.12. What happened to some of the customers of the bank where Mrs. Vaught worked?13. The essential cause of a run on a bank is ______.14. The crowds gathered in Mrs. Vaught’s bank and on the sidewalk because of ______.15. According to the passage, the actions of the customers of Mrs. Vaught’s bank were influenced chiefly by ______.

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