考研英语阅读理解命题思路透析和真题揭秘(11)

1998年Passage 3

Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo's 17th century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century.

Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics - but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked "antiscience" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R.Gross, a biologist at the University of Verginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon Haunted World, by Car Sagan of Cornell University.

Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason," held in New York City in 1995, and "Science in the Age of (Mis)information," which assembled last June near Buffalo.

Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned science's objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.

A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.

Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, those manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.

The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.

Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. "The term ‘antiscience' can lump together too many, quite different things," notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti Science. "They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."

60. Paragraphs 2 and 3 are written to _____ .
[A] discuss the cause of the decline of science's power
[B] show the author's sympathy with scientists
[C] explain the way in which science develops
[D] exemplify the division of science and the humanities

[答案] D

[解题思路]

文章第一段的最后一句话指出"The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century"（在本世纪，（自然）科学与人文科学之间的裂痕更深了），而文章的下面两段就这一问题展开了详细的论述。因此显而易见D是正确选项，而其他三项都与两段的中心思想无关。

[题目译文]

第二、三段的写作目的在于 。
[A] 讨论科学势力衰落的原因
[B] 表达作者对科学家们的同情
[C] 解释科学发展的方式
[D] 举例说明自然科学与人文科学的分离

1998年Passage 5

Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world's volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.

That the plates are moving is not beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth's interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years.

The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate come to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops seed fissures(cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).

70. The passage is mainly about _____ .
[A] the features of volcanic activities
[B] the importance of the theory about drifting plates
[C] the significance of hot spots in geophysical studies
[D] the process of the formation of volcanoes

[答案] C

[解题思路]

这篇文章主要讨论的话题就是hot spots，第一段介绍了热区的分布，后面介绍了热区的作用等，因此答案显然为C。A、D关于火山的例子是用来支持关于热区的讨论的，因而是错误答案。而B显然也不是文章的主要论题。

[题目译文]

文章主要谈论的是 。
[A] 火山活动的特征
[B] 板块漂移理论的重要性
[C] 热区在地质研究中的重要性
[D] 火山形成的过程

1999年Passage l

It's a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers' misfortunes.

Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might-surprise! --fall off. The label on a child's Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly."

While warnings are often appropriate and necessary--the dangers of drug interactions, for example--and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn't clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.

Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn't have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We're really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren't designed to prevent those kinds of injuries, "says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete's injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight-issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities," says a law professor at Cornell law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.

52. Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to__
[A] satisfy customers by writing long warnings on products
[B] become honest in describing the inadequacies of their products
[C] make the best use of labels to avoid legal liability
[D] feel obliged to view customers' safety as their first concern

[答案] C

[解题思路] 本题对应于文章第二段的第一句话"Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident"（公司因此感到了威胁，便做出了反应，写出越来越长的警示标识语，力图预先标明种种可能发生的事故），可见商家极尽能事用商标来警告客户以免除自己的法律责任，因此C选项符合题意。A和B选项的satisfy customers和become honest都不是警告标签的主要原因，而D选项feel obliged to ...没有在原文中体现出来。

[题目译文]

文章中提到的生产者倾向于 。
[A] 通过在产品上标上很长的警示语来满足顾客
[B] 在描述产品缺点时变得更加诚实
[C] 充分利用警示牌以避免负法律责任
[D] 认为自己有责任把顾客的安全放在第一位

2000年Passage 2

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, by babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby)surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes one more agent of evolution has gone.

There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women has 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.

For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years -even the past 100 years-our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension." No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

58. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
[A] Sex Ration Changes in Human Evolution
[B] Ways of Continuing Man's Evolution
[C] The Evolutionary Future of Nature
[D] Human Evolution Going Nowhere

[答案] D

[解题思路]

纵观全文，主要讨论的是人类已经停止了进化的问题，由此可以对各个选项进行排除。A选项关于性别问题在第一段中有所提及但却不是文章的重点。B选项的话题正好与文章相反，也是错误选项。C选项的话题范围太大，文章针对的只是人类，而不是大自然的进化。而D则正好契合原文的主题。

[题目译文]

下面哪一项是本文的标题？
[A] 人类进化中的性别比例变化
[B] 人类进化继续的办法
[C] 自然的进化前景
[D] 人类进化毫无发展