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

湘潭大学

Directions: For this part, you are required to write a composition of 200 words on the following topic and write your composition on the ANSWER SHEET.My Views on Chinese Culture Going abroad

Directions: For this part you are required to summarize the main idea of the following passage in no more than 60 words. Write your summary on the ANSPVER SHEET .As researchers in psychology, economics and organizational behavior have been gradually discovering, the experience of being happy at work looks very similar across professions. People, who love their jobs, feel challenged by their work but in control of it. They have bosses who make them feel appreciated and co-workers they like. They can find meaning in whatever they do. And they aren’t just lucky. It takes real effort to reach that Sublime State.An even bigger obstacle, though, may be our low expectations on the job. Love, family, community—hose are supposed to be the true sources of happiness, while work simply gives us the means to enjoy them. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow, which adherents of positive psychology would use to describe the job-induced highs, says that distinction is a false one.“Anything can be enjoyable if the elements of now are present,” he writes in his book Good Business.” Within that framework, doing a seemingly boring job can be a source of greater fulfillment than one ever thought possible.”Csikszentmihalyi encourages us to reach a state in which work is an extension of what we naturally want to do. Immersed in the pleasure of work, we don’t worry about its ultimate reward. If that sounds out of reach, take heart. You may soon get some encouragement from the head office. A growing body of research is demonstrating that happy workers not only are happier in life but are also crucial to the health of a company.Thirty-five years ago, the Gallup Organization started researching why people in certain work groups, even within the same company, were so much more effective than others. Donald Clifton, the Gallup researcher who pioneered that work, conducted a series of extensive interviews with highly productive teams of workers. From those interviews, Gallup developed a set of 12 statements designed to measure employees’ overall level of happiness with their work, which Gallup calls ’’engagement". Some of the criteria reflect the obvious requirements of any worker (Do you have what you need to do your job? Do you know what's expected of you at work?), while others reveal more subtle variables (Do you have a best friend at work? Does your supervisor or someone else at work care about you as a person?). Gallup started the survey in 1998, and it now includes 5.4 million employees at 474 organizations; Gallup also does periodic random polls of workers in different countries.The polls paint a picture of a rather disaffected U-S. work force. In the most recent poll, from September 2004, only 29% of workers said they were engaged with their work. More than half, 55%, were not engaged, and 16% were actively disengaged. Still, those numbers are better than those in many other countries. The percentage of engaged workers in the U. S. is more than twice as large as Germany's and three times as great as Singapore's. But neither the late 1990s boom nor the subsequent bust had much impact in either direction, indicating that the state of worker happiness goes much deeper than the swings of the economy.James Harter, a psychologist directing that research at Gallup, says many companies are simply misreading what makes people happy at work. Beyond a certain minimum level, it isn’t pay or benefits; it’s strong relationships with co-workers and a supportive boss. ’’These are basic human needs in the workplace, but they're not the ones thought by managers to be very important." Harter says. Gallup has found that a strong positive response to the statement” I have a best friend at work”, for example, is a powerful predictor for engagement at work and is correlated with profitability and connection with customers. "It indicates a high level of belonging," Hatter says.Without it, a job that looks good on paper can make a worker miserable. Martina Radix, 41, traded a high-pressure job as an executive assistant at a company where she liked her colleagues for a less taxing position as a clerical worker in a law firm six years ago. She has more time and flexibility but feels stifled by her co-workers and unappreciated by her boss. nI am a misfit in that department,” she says. "No matter how good your personal life is, if you go in to a bad atmosphere at work, it takes away from it.”In fact, engagement at work is less a function of your personality than is happiness in general. Harter estimates that individual disposition accounts for only about 30% of the difference between employees who are highly engaged and those who are not. The rest of it is shaped by the hundreds of interactions that employees have every day with co-workers, supervisors and customers.The most direct fix, then, is to seek out a supportive workplace. Finding a job that fits a life calling unlocks the door to happiness. Lissette Mendez, 33, says her job coordinating the annual book fair at Miami Dade College is the one she was born to do. "Books are an inextricable part of my life," she says.Even if your passion does not easily translate into a profession, you can still find happiness on the job. Numerous studies have shown correlations between meaningful work and happiness, job satisfaction and even physical health. That sense of meaning, however, can take many different forms. Some people find it in the work itself; others take pride in their company's mission rather than in their specific job. People can find meaning in anything.The desire for meaning is so strong that sometimes people simply create it, especially to make sense of difficult or unpleasant work. In a recently completed six-year study of physicians during their surgical residency, for example, it was found that the surgeons were extremely dissatisfied in the first year, when the menial work they were assigned, like filling out endless copies of patient records, seemed pointless. Once they started to think of the training as part of the larger process of joining an elite group of doctors, their attitude changed. They're able to reconstruct and make sense of their work and what they do. By the end of year one, they've started to create some meanings.While positive psychology has mostly focused on the individual pursuit of happiness, a new field -positive organizational scholarship -has begun to examine the connection between happy employees and happy businesses. Instead of focusing on profitability and competition to explain success, researchers in this field are studying meaningfulness, authentic leadership and emotional competence. Not the typical B-school buzzwords, but they may soon become part of the language spoken by every M. B. A.Until recently, business people would dismiss employee well-being as "outside their domain and kind of fringe-ish, says Thomas Wright, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Nevada, Reno. Early hints of the importance of worker happiness were slow to be accepted. A 1920s study on the topic at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Co. in Cicero. It looked at whether increased lighting, shorter workdays and other worker-friendly fixes would improve productivity. While the workplace changes boosted performance, the experimenters eventually discovered that the differences workers were responding to not in the physical environment but in the social one. In other words, the attention they were getting was what made them happier and more effective. This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect. "The researchers came to realize that it was people’s happiness that made the difference," Wright says. But later studies that looked at job-satisfaction ratings were inconsistent. Broader measures of happiness, it turns out, are better predictors of productivity.Making any of those changes depends on the boss, although not necessarily, the CEO. So a handful of business schools are trying to create a new kind of frontline manager, based on the idea of "authentic leadership’'. Instead of imposing faddish management techniques on each supervisor, authentic leadership begins with self-awareness. Introverted bosses have to know their own style and then find strategies to manage people that feel natural. In other words, by figuring out theirstrengths, they learn to recognize those of employees.

Translate the following passage into English. 研究表明，与20年前相比，尽管社交媒体越来越受人们欢迎，但是青少年的朋友却日益减少。一份历时12年、涵盖20万高中生的研究发现，虽然年轻人的朋友越来越少，但是他们更多交友的意向并无增多。该研究认为，经济变化在促使个人主义增长的同时，可能导致人们交友兴趣减弱，使人们更多转向自立、增强自尊、减少孤独感。

Translate the following passage into Chinese. The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind: it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanations. The difference between the operations and methods of a baker weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist by means of his balance is not that the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working, but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement that the former.Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion of a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.

Whenever two or more unusual traits or situations are found in the same place, it is tempting to look for more than a coincidental relationship between them. The high Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau certainly have extraordinary physical characteristics and the cultures which are found there are also unusual, though not unique. However there is no intention of adopting Montesquieu's view of climate and soil as cultural determinants. The ecology of a region merely poses some of the problems faced by the inhabitants of the region, and while the problems facing a culture are important to its development, they do not determine it.The appearance of the Himalayas during the late Tertiary Period and the accompanying further raising of the previously established rages had a marked effect on the climate of the region. Primarily, of course, it blocked the Indian monsoon from reaching Central Asia at all. Secondarily, air and moisture from other directions were also reduced.Prior to the raising of the Himalayas, the land now forming the Tibetan uplands had a dry, continental climate with vegetation and animal life similar to that of much of the rest of the region on the same parallel, but somewhat different than that of the areas farther north, which were already drier. With the coming of the Himalayas and the relatively sudden drying out of the region, there was a severe thinning out of the animal and plant population. The ensuing incomplete Pleistocene glaciations had a further thinning effect, but significantly did not wipe out life in the area. Thus after the end of the glaciations there were only a few varieties of life extant from the original continental species. Isolated by the Kunlun range from the Tarim basin and Turfan depression, species which had already adapted to the dry steppe climate, and would otherwise have been expected to flourish in Tibetan, the remaining native fauna and flora multiplied. Armand describes the Tibetan fauna as not having great variety, but being "striking*' in the abundance of the particular species that are present. The plant life is similarly limited in variety, with some observers finding no more than seventy varieties of plants in even the relatively fertile Eastern Tibetan valleys, with fewer than ten food crops. Tibetan "tea" is a major staple, perhaps replacing the unavailable vegetables.The difficulties of living in an environment at once dry and cold, and populated with species more usually found in more hospitable climates, are great. These difficulties may well have influenced the unusual polyandrous (一妻多夫制) societies typical of the region. Lattimore sees the maintenance of multiple-husband households as being preserved from earlier forms by the harsh conditions of the Tibetan uplands, which permitted no experimentation and "froze" the cultures which came there. Kawakita, on the other hand, sees the polyandry as a way of easily permitting the best householder to become the head husband regardless of age. His detailed studies of the Bhotea village of Tsumje do seem to support this idea of polyandry as a method of talent mobility is a situation where even the best talent is barely enough for survival.In sum, though arguments can be made that a pre-existing polyandrous system was strengthened and preserved (insofar as it has been) by the rigors of the land, it would certainly be an overstatement to lay causative factors of any stronger nature to the ecological influences in this case.1.What are the “unusual traits or situations” referred to in the first sentence?2.The purpose of the passage is to（）.3.The author’s knowledge of Tibet is probably （）. 4.According to the passage, which of the following would probably be the most agreeable to Montesquieu?5.The species of fauna and flora remaining in Tibet after the Pleistocene glaciations can properly be called continental because they（）.

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