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

华中科技大学

There is widespread belief that the emergence of giant industries has been accompanied by an equivalent surge in industrial research. A recent study of important inventions made since the turn of the century reveals that more than half were the product of individual inventors working alone, independent of organized industrial research. While industrial laboratories contributed such important products as nylon and transistors, independent inventors developed air conditioning, the automatic transmission, the jet engine, the helicopter, insulin, and streptomycin. Still other inventions, such as stainless steel, television, silicones, and Plexiglas were developed through the combined efforts of individuals and laboratory teams.Despite these finding, we are urged to support monopolistic power on the grounds that such power creates an environment supportive of innovation. We are told that the independent inventor, along with the small firm, cannot afford to undertake the important research needed to improve our standard of living while protecting our diminishing resources; that only the giant corporation or conglomerate, with its prodigious assets, can afford the kind of expenditures that produce the technological advances vital to economic progress. But when we examine expenditures for research, we find that of the more than $35 billion spent each year in this country, almost two-thirds is spent by the federal government. More than half of this government expenditure is funneled into military research and product development, accounting for the enormous increase in spending in such industries as nuclear energy, aircraft, missiles, and electronics. There are those who consider it questionable that these defense-linked research projects will either improve our standard of living or do much to protect our diminishing resources.Recent history has demonstrated that we may have to alter our longstanding conception of the process actuated by competition. The price variable, once perceived as the dominant aspect of the process, is now subordinate to the competition of the new product, the new business structure, and the new technology. While it can be assumed that in a highly competitive industry not dominated by a single corporation, investment in innovation — a risky and expensive budget item — might meet resistance from management and stockholders concerned about cost-cutting, efficient organization, and large advertising budgets, it would be an egregious error to equate the monopolistic producer with bountiful expenditures on research. Large-scale enterprises tend to operate more comfortably in stable and secure circumstances, and their managerial bureaucracies tend to promote the status quo and resist the threat implicit in change. Moreover, in some cases, industrial giants faced with little or no competition seek to avoid the capital loss resulting from obsolescence by deliberately obstructing technological progress. By contrast, small firms undeterred by large investments in plant and capital equipment often aggressively pursue new techniques and new products, investing in innovation in order to expand their market shares.The conglomerates are not, however, completely except from strong competitive pressures. There are instances in which they too must compete with another industrial Goliath, and then their weapons may include large expenditures for innovation.1.The primary purpose of the passage is to （）.2.According to the passage, important inventions of the twentieth century （）.3.Which of the following best describes the organization of the second paragraph of the passage?4.With which of the following statements would the author of the passage be most likely to agree?5.Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author’s main point?

Painter Frida Kahlo (1910―1954) often used harrowing images derived from her Mexican heritage to express suffering caused by a disabling accident and a stormy marriage. Suggesting much personal and emotional content, her works—many of them self-portraits—have been exhaustively psychoanalyzed, while their political content has been less studied. Yet Kahlo was an ardent political activist who in her art sought not only to explore her own roots, but also to champion Mexico’s struggle for an independent political and cultural identity.Kahlo was influenced by Marxism, which appealed to many intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, and by Mexican nationalism. Interest in Mexico’s culture and history had revived in the nineteenth century, and by the early 1900s, Mexican indigenista tendencies ranged from a violently anti-Spanish idealization of Aztec Mexico to an emphasis on contemporary Mexican Indians as the key to authentic Mexican culture. Mexican nationalism, reacting against contemporary United States political intervention in labor disputes as well as against past domination by Spain, identified the Aztecs as the last independent rulers of an indigenous political unit. Kahlo’s form of Mexicanidad, a romantic nationalism that focused upon traditional art uniting all indigenistas, revered the Aztecs as a powerful pre-Columbian society that had united a large area of the Middle Americas and that was thought to have been based on communal labor, the Marxist ideal.In her paintings, Kahlo repeatedly employed Aztec symbols, such as skeletons or bleeding hearts that were traditionally related to the emanation of life from death and light from darkness. These images of destruction coupled with creation speak not only to Kahlo’s personal battle for life, but also to the Mexican struggle to emerge as a nation—by implication, to emerge with the political and cultural strength admired in the Aztec civilization. Self-portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States (1932), for example, shows Kahlo wearing a bone necklace, holding a Mexican flag, and standing between a highly industrialized United States and an agricultural, pre-industrial Mexico. On the United States side are mechanistic and modern images such as smokestacks, light bulbs, and robots. In contrast, the organic and ancient symbols on the Mexican side—a blood-drenched Sun, lush vegetation, an Aztec sculpture, a pre-Columbian temple, and a skull alluding to those that lined the walls of Aztec temples—emphasize the interrelation of life, death, the earth, and the cosmos.Kahlo portrayed Aztec images in the folkloric style of traditional Mexican paintings, thereby heightening the clash between modern materialism and indigenous tradition; similarly, she favored planned economic development, but not at the expense of cultural identity. Her use of familiar symbols in a readily accessible style also served her goal of being popularly understood; in turn, Kahlo is viewed by some Mexicans as a mythic figure representative of nationalism itself.1.Which one of the following best expresses the main point of the passage?2.Which one of the following statements concerning psychoanalytic and political interpretations of Kahlo's work would the author be most likely to agree?3.Which one of the following stances toward the United States does the passage mention as characterizing Mexican nationalists in the early twentieth century?4.In the context of the passage, which one of the following phrases could best be substituted for the word "romantic"（Paragraph 2, Line 7） without substantially changing the author's meaning?5.The passage implies that Kahlo's attitude toward the economic development of Mexico was（）.

Medievalists usually distinguish medieval public law from private law: the former was concerned with government and military affairs and the latter with the family, social status, and land transactions. Examination on medieval women’s lives shows this distinction to be overly simplistic. Although medieval women were legally excluded from roles that categorized as public, such as soldier, justice, jury member, or professional administrative official, women’s control of land—usually considered a private or domestic phenomenon—had important political implications in the feudal system of thirteenth-century England. Since land equaled wealth and wealth equaled power, certain women exercised influence by controlling land. Unlike unmarried women who were legally subject to their guardians or married women who had no legal identity separate from their husbands, women who were widows had autonomy with respect to acquiring or disposing of certain property, suing in court, incurring liability for their own debts, and making wills.Although feudal lands were normally transferred through primogeniture (the eldest son inheriting all), when no sons survived, the surviving daughters inherited equal shares under what was known as partible inheritance. In addition to controlling any such land inherited from her parents and any bridal dowry—property a woman brought to the marriage from her own family—a widow was entitled to use of one-third of her late husband’s lands. Called “dower” in England, this grant had greater legal importance under common law than did the bridal dowry; no marriage was legal unless the groom endowed the bride with this property at the wedding ceremony. In 1215 Magna Carta (The charter of English political and civil liberties granted by King John at Runnymede in June 1215) guaranteed a widow’s right to claim her dower without paying a fine; this document also strengthened widow’s ability to control land by prohibiting forced remarriage. After 1272 women could also benefit from jointure: the groom could agree to hold part or all of his lands jointly with the bride, so that if one spouse died, the other received these lands.Since many widows had inheritances as well as dowers, widows were frequently the financial heads of the family; even though legal theory assumed the maintenance of the principle of primogeniture, the amount of land the widow controlled could exceed that of her son or of other male heirs. Anyone who held feudal land exercised authority over the people attached to the land—knights, rental tenants, and peasants—and had to hire estate administrators, oversee accounts, receive rents, protect tenants from outside encroachment, punish tenants for not paying rents, appoint priests to local parishes, and act as guardians of tenants, children and executors of their wills. Many married women fulfilled these duties as deputies for husbands away at court or at war, but widows could act on their own behalf. Widow’s legal independence is suggested by their frequent appearance in thirteenth-century English legal records. Moreover, the scope of their sway (a: a controlling influence b: sovereign power: DOMINION c: the ability to exercise influence or authority: DOMINANCE; synonyms see POWER.) is indicated by the fact that some controlled not merely single estates, but multiple counties.1.Which one of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?2.Which one of the following most accurately expresses the meaning of the word “sway” as it is used in Line 33 of the passage?3.Which one of the following most accurately describes the function of the second paragraph of the passage?4.According to information in the passage, a widow in early thirteenth-century England could control more land than did her eldest son if （）.5.The primary purpose of the passage is to （）.

For years scholars have contrasted slavery in the United States and in Brazil, stimulated by the fact that racial patterns assumed such different aspects in the two countries after emancipation. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation of the sort that replaced slavery in the United States, and its racial system was fluid (a situation that is fluid is likely to change) because its definition of race was based as much on characteristics such as economic status as on skin color. Until recently, the most persuasive explanation for these differences was that Portuguese institutions especially the Roman Catholic church and Roman civil law, promoted recognition of the slave’s humanity. The English colonists, on the other hand, constructed their system of slavery out of whole cloth (whole cloth: pure fabrication usually used in the phrase out of whole cloth). There were simply no precedents in English common law, and separation of church and state barred Protestant clergy from the role that priests assumed in Brazil.But the assumption that institutions alone could so powerfully affect the history of two raw and malleable frontier (a new field for exploitative or developmental activity) countries seems, on reexamination, untenable. Recent studies focus instead on a particular set of contrasting economic circumstances and demographic profiles at significant periods in the histories of the two countries. Persons of mixed race quickly appeared in both countries. In the United States they were considered to be Black, a social definition that was feasible because they were in the minority. In Brazil, it was not feasible. Though intermarriage was illegal in both countries, the laws were unenforceable in Brazil since Whites formed a small minority in an overwhelmingly Black population. Manumission for persons of mixed race was also easier in Brazil, particularly in the nineteenth century when in the United States it was hedged about with difficulties. Furthermore, a shortage of skilled workers in Brazil provided persons of mixed race with the opportunity to learn crafts and trades, even before general emancipation, whereas in the United States entry into these occupations was blocked by Whites sufficiently numerous to fill the posts. The consequence was the development in Brazil of a large class of persons of mixed race, proficient in skilled trades and crafts, who stood waiting as a community for freed slaves to join.There should be no illusion that Brazilian society after emancipation was color-blind. Rather, the large population of persons of mixed race produced a racial system that included a third status, a bridge between the Black caste and the White, which could be traversed by means of economic or intellectual achievement, marriage, or racial heritage. The strict and sharp line between the races so characteristic of the United States in the years immediately after emancipation was simply absent. With the possible exception of New Orleans, no special “place” developed in the United States for persons of mixed race.Sad to say, every pressure of society worked to prevent their attaining anything approximating the economic and social position available to their counterparts in Brazil.1.In the passage, the author is primarily concerned with （）.2.According to the passage, early scholars explained the differences between the racial systems that developed in the United States and in Brazil as the result of which of the following factors?3.In the context in which it is found, the phrase “constructed their system of slavery out of whole cloth” (Paragraph 1, Line 8) implies that the system of slavery established by theEnglish settlers was（）.4.The author implies that the explanation proposed by early scholars for the differences between the systems of slavery in the United States and in Brazils （） .5.The author mentions intermarriage, manumission, and the shortage of skilled workers in Brazil primarily in order to establish which of the following?

Who won the World Cup 1994 football game? What happened at the United Nations? How did the critics like the new play?（1） an event takes place, newspapers are on the street （2） the details.（3） anything happens in the world, reporters are on the spot to gather the news.Newspapers have one basic （4） to get the news as quickly as possible from its source, from those who make it to those who want to （5） it.Radio, telegraph, television, and （6） inventions brought competition for newspapers. So did the development of magazines and other means of communication. （7）, this competition merely spurred the newspapers on. They quickly made use of the newer and faster means of communication to improve the（8） and thus the efficiency of their own operations. Today more newspapers are（9） and read than ever before. Competition also led newspapers to （10） out into many other fields. Besides keeping readers informed of the latest news, today’s newspapers entertain and influence readers about politics and other important and serious （11） .Newspapers influence readers, economic choices （12） advertising. Most newspapers depend on advertising for their very （13） . Newspapers are sold at a price that （14） even a small fraction of the cost of production. The main （15） of income for most newspapers is commercial advertising. The （16） in selling advertising depends newspaper’s value to advertisers. This （17） in terms of circulation. How many people read the newspaper?Circulation depends （18） on the work of the circulation department and on the services or entertainment （19） in a newspaper’s pages. But for the most part, circulation depends on a newspaper’s value to readers as a source of information （20） the community, city, county, state, nation and world — and even outer space.

3 / 10