2003年北京师范大学考博英语真题

2003年北京师范大学考博英语试题

English Entrance Examination for Non-English Major Doctoral Candidates

March 15, 2003

I. Listening Comprehension (20 point)

Section One

Directions: In this section, you will hear three short talks. At the end of each talk, you will hear some questions. Both the talks and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D. Then mark the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET with a single line through the centre.

1. A. a disease B. a potential cure for AIDS

C. immune system

D. a patient suffering from AIDS

2. A. High fever. B. Broken legs.

C. Cancer.

D. AIDS.

3. A. Doctors don?t know what causes AIDS.

B. Doctors don?t like to treat patients with AIDS.

C. AIDS attacks the immune system, turning good cells into bad ones.

D. AIDS patients refuse to receive any treatment offered by doctors.

4. A. perfect. B. inadequate C. desirable D. inefficient

5. A. They might find it hard to live with him.

B. They might love him so much as to spoil him.

C. They might expect too much from him.

D. They might love him more than average parents do.

6. A. The parents? dream is nothing but a false illusion.

B. The child will not look like their former child.

C. The child will be spoiled.

D. The child may fail to fulfill the parent s? dream.

7. A. The children?s interests are more important.

B. The parents? wishes should be respected.

C. The reasons for cloning children are justified.

D. There is a need to clone children.

8. A. They try them on first.

B. They put their right hand on them.

C. They just have a look.

D. They feel and touch them.

9. A. The things are used by people very often.

B. People do not pay attention to the feel of things.

C. People know how to use the things so they don?t need to feel them.

D. The things are easy to feel but difficult to see.

10. A. Touching by Feeling

B. To See or to Feel

C. To See Better—Feel

D. Ways of Feeling With Your Feet

Section B

Part 1

Directions: Look at the questions for this part. You will hear a presentation on Time Management. For questions 11-15, while you are listening, choose the correct word or phrase to complete each sentence by marking one letter A, B or C for the word or phrase you choose on the ANSWER SHEET with a single line through the centre.

11. The speaker wants to show you _______.

A. the harmful effects of stress

B. how you can be more effective at work

C. how to lead a balanced life

12. You can subject yourself to high levels of stress by ______.

A. meeting other people?s demands on your time

B. traveling a lot

C. regularly working very long hours

13. Typically, stress is related to ______.

A. jobs with high salaries

B. long working hours

C. high levels of responsibility

14. One thing the speaker suggests you do is _____ in order to reduce your working hours.

A. to delegate

B. to update facilities D. to take a holiday

15. To help you manage your time more effectively, the speaker suggests you start saying ______.

A. “no” to other people

B. “Yes” to other people

C. “Sorry” to yourself

Part 2

Directions: Look at the five statements (16-20) for this part. You will hear an interview between a sales manager and an applicant for the position of advertising manager. Decide if each statement is correct according to the interview. If you think it is correct, mark letter A on your ANSWER SHEET with a single line through the center. If you think it is not correct, mark letter B on the ANSWER SHEET with a single line through the centre.

16. The sales manager is satisfied with the present advertising firm.

17. Miss Edison will be responsible to Mr. Grant for all advertising.

18. The company has never advertised on TV.

19. The company produces chairs.

20. The sales manager shows great interest in Miss Edison?s idea about TV advertising and very

probably Miss Edison will get the job.

II. Reading Comprehension (25 points)

Directions: There are five passages in this part. Each of the passages is followed by five questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best one and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET with a single line through the center.

1

The great advance in rocket theory 40 years ago showed that liquid-fuel rockets were far superior in every respect to the skyrocket with its weak solid fuel, the only kind of rocket then known. However, during, the last decade, large solid-fuel rockets with solid fuels about as powerful as liquid fuels have made their appearance, and it is a favorite layman?s question to inquire which one is “better”. The question is meaningless; one might as well ask whether a gasoline or a diesel engine is “better”. It all depends on the purpose. A liquid-fuel rocket is complicated, but has the advantage tat it can be controlled beautifully. The burning of the rocket engine can be stopped completely it can be re-ignited when desired. In addition, the thrust can be made to vary by adjusting the speed of the fuel pumps. A solid-fuel rocket, on the other hand, is rather simple in construction, though hard to build when a really large size is desired. But once you have a solid-fuel rocket, it is ready for action at very short notice. A liquid-fuel rocket has to be fueled first and cannot be held in readiness for very long after it has been fueled. However, once a solid-fuel rocket has been ignited, it will keep burning. It cannot be stopped and re-ignited whenever desired (it could conceivably be stopped and re-ignited after a pre-calculated time of burning has elapsed) and its thrust cannot be varied. Because a solid-fuel rocket can be kept ready for a long time, most military missiles employ solid fuels, but manned space flight needs the fine adjustments that can only be provided by liquid fuels. It may be added that a liquid-fuel rocket is an expensive device; a large solid-fuel rocket is, by comparison, cheap. But the solid fuel, pound per pound, costs about 10 times as much as the liquid fuel. So you have on the one hand, an expensive rocket with a cheep fuel and on the other hand a comparatively cheap rocket with an expensive fuel.

21. The author feels that a comparison of liquid and solid-fuel rockets shows that ______.

A. neither type is very economical

B. the liquid-fuel rocket is best

C. each type has certain advantages

D. the solid-fuel rocket is best

22. The most important consideration for manned space flight is that the rocker be ________.

A. inexpensive to construct

B. capable of lifting heavy spacecraft into orbit

C. inexpensive to operate

D. inexpensive to operate

23. Solid fuel rockets are expensive to operate because of their _______.

A. size

B. fuel

C. construction

D. complicated engines

24. Which of the following statements is not characteristic of liquid-fuel rockets?

A. The fuel is cheap.

B. They are cheap to build.

C. They can be stopped and re-ignited.

D. They must be used soon after fueling.

25. The author tells us that ______.

A. whether a liquid-fuel or a solid-fuel rocket is better depends on the purpose

B. neither type is superior

C. forty years ago, large solid-fuel rockets with solid fuels as powerful as liquid fuels were

made

D. the thrust can be made to vary by adjusting the direction of the pump

2

Imagine an accident in which a nuclear power plant releases radioactive gas. The cloud starts moving with the wind. Clearly, the authorities will want to evacuate anyone in its path, but what is that path? Local wind information is meaningless without information about terrain; a mountain range or series of valleys can divert both wind and gas in unpredictable directions.

To make “downwind” a useful term, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have put the United States on a computer, the entire United States—every hill, every valley, every mile of seashore. Within minutes of a disaster, they can give meteorologists a context for weather data, and thus the ability to predict how toxic gases might spread.

The database for this computer map is a series of altitude measurements, made over many years by the Defense Department and the U.S. Geological Survey. They represent the height above sea level of over a billion separate points—a grid of points 200 feet apart, spanning the country. Armed with these data, plus a program that manipulates them, a Cray-1 computer can produce an image of any piece of terrain, seen from any angle, illuminated by an imaginary sun at any time of day placing the “observer” at any altitude from zero to 40,000 feet.

“We use a technique called ray tracing,”says Patrick Weidhaas, one of the Livermore computer scientists who wrote the program. The computer is told where the observer is. The program traces an imaginary ray from there outward until it “intersects” with one of the points of altitude recorded in the machine?s memory. The computer then puts a dot of color at the proper place on the screen, and the program traces another ray.

At its highest resolution of 2,000 horizontal and 1,700 vertical dots per picture, the computer has to trace several million rays, Even on the Cray, the most powerful computer in the world, this takes about a minute. Reducing the resolution to 400-800 (a TV screen has 800×700) speeds it up to about eight seconds. “We can?t produce a movie simulating flight on the screen in real time,” says Weidhaas. There is a way around the problem: Two movies have been made using still pictures generated by the computer as individual frames. “The results were impressive,” he says, “but it was cumbersome to do. At twenty-four frames per second, it takes fourteen hundred separate computer images to make a one-minute film.”Another limitation: The computer can access only enough memory to cove a 15-mile-square area. An “observer” high up will see blank spaces beyond those limits.

Weidhaas wants to add information about what overlies the terrain—cities, vegetation, roads, and so on. “Making the image as realistic as possible will make our advice more effective,” he says, “and might lead to uses we haven?t thought of yet.”

26. As used in the first paragraph, thrrain most clearly means _______.

A. available information about the weather

B. surrounding land area

C. blank spaces between the mountain ranges

D. amount of forest per square mile

27. Livermore?s computer map, in combination with weather reports, might be useful in predicting

_____.

A. the path of toxic gases from a nuclear power plant explosion

B. where incoming nuclear missiles might strike

C. the average annual rainfall for North Dakota

D. the amount of pollution in the air

28. The information used by the computer to make its detailed maps _______.

I. was gathered by the Defense Department and the U.S. Geological Survey

II. shows points roughly 200 feet apart

III. involves altitude measurements

A. I

B. I and II

C. I and III

D. I, II and III

29. Which of the following is the best description of ray tracing?

A. The computer simulates rays of the sun, filling in areas of light and shadow.

B. Lines radiate outward from the imagined observer and a dot of color is placed where the

line intersects with one of the points of altitude in the machine?s memory.

C. X-rays are used to trace the outline of the terrain through buildings and trees.

D. The exact movement of rays is used by private detectives to solve mysteries and locate

missing persons.

30. Information about cities, vegetation, and road overlying the terrain ______.

A. has to be eliminated before correct readings can be obtained

B. would be impossible to convert to data that a computer would accept.

C. might lead to new applications and improve effectiveness of present uses

D. would make ray tracing obsolete

3

Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patients—to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law, government, and other lines of work, the requirements of honesty often seem dwarfed by greater needs: The need to shelter from brutal news or to uphold a promise of secrecy.

What should doctors say, for example, to a 46-year-old man coming in for a routine physical checkup who, though he feels in perfect health, is found to have a form of cancer? If he asks, should the doctor deny that he is ill, or minimize the gravity of the illness Doctors confront such choices often and urgently. At times, they see important reasons to lie for the patient?s own sake. In their eyes, such lies differ sharply from self-serving ones.

Studies show that most doctors sincerely believe that the seriously ill do not want to know the truth about their condition, and that informing them risks destroying their hope, so that they may recover more slowly, or deteriorate faster, perhaps even commit suicide. As one physician wrote: “Ours is a profession which traditionally has been guided by a precept that transcends the virtue of uttering the truth for truth?s sake, and that is, as far as possible …do no harm?.” Armed with such a precept a number of doctors may slip into deceptive practices that they assume will “do no harm”and may well help their patients.

But the illusory nature of the benefits such deception is meant to produce is now coming to be documented. Studies show that, contrary to the belief of many physicians, an overwhelming majority of patients do want to be told the truth, even about grave illness, and feel betrayed when they learn that they have been misled. We are also learning that truthful information, humanely conveyed, helps patients cope with illness.

Not only do lies not provide the “help” hoped for by advocates of benevolent deception, they

invade the autonomy of patients and render them unable to make informed choices concerning their own health.

Lies also do harms to those who tell them: harm to their integrity and, in the long run, to their credibility. Lies hurt their colleagues as well. The suspicion of deceit undercuts the work of the many doctors who are scrupulously honest with their patients; it contributes to the spiral of lawsuits and of “defensive medicine”, and thus it injures, in turn, the entire medical profession.

31. Who are most likely to lie for serving purposes?

A. physicians

B. surgeons

C. psychiatrists

D. lawyers

32. Doctors think that lying to their patients is _______.

A. a medical tradition

B. to harm their own integrity

C. to defend medicine

D. uttering the truth for truth?s sake

33. Most patients think that being told the truth of their illness may ______.

A. slow down recovery

B. lead to suicide in some cases

C. be too hard for them to accept

D. help deal with illness

34. Which of the following statements is NOT true according to the author?

A. Doctors are often in a dilemma as to tell the patient his real condition of health.

B. Doctor s? reluctance to tell patient truth has no real support in reality.

C. Doctors? lies are different from that of lawyers and government officials.

D. Doctors and patients hold different views about telling truth.

35. What is the author?s attitude towards doctors?

A. sarcastic

B. praising

C. objective

D. appreciative

4

China today is home to 13 billion people—nearly one quarter of the world?s population. The growth of china?s population is largely the result of modernization, which has brought with it more food, better medical care, less disease, and fewer epidemics and famines. The death rate in China has decreased, and more children survive. The higher survival rate in China means that more people are entering childbearing age. This population growth was threatening to destroy China?s chances to become a richer country: just providing food and basic necessities for everyone would consume all of its economic gains.

To tame the explosive population growth, the Chinese government launched a drastic policy of allowing one child per family. To enforce this policy, the government has a variety of incentives for those who comply and punishment for those who do not. For example, couples who have only one child get a monthly pay until the child is fourteen, special consideration for scarce housing, free medical care, and extra pension benefits. The pressure to conform is powerful. Couples who ignore the state?s directive suffer social disgrace and economic penalties.

The family-planning policy, instituted in China in 1979, has been remarkably effective (though considerably more so in cities than in the countryside). Births to women of childbearing age have fallen dramatically—to about 2.5 children for every woman.

China may eventually succeed in balancing its population growth, but in doing so, it is creating a new problem. The irony is that because of the very success of China?s population policy, the Chinese population is aging rapidly. In 1982, 5% of the population was over age 64. In 2010, about 9% will be over 64, and in 2050, 25% will be. At the family level, children without brothers

or sisters will each have to care for two aging parents. At the national level, the great numbers of aging people will tax the society?s resources. China shares this problem—a rapidly aging population without a large enough following generation to support it—with many of the developed nations of the world.

36. The primary purpose of this passage is to _______.

A. predict the population problem in China.

B. explain why the family-planning policy is adopted in China

C. illustrate the result of family-planning policy

D. demonstrate the cause and effect of the family-planning policy

37. According to the passage, all of the following are the causes for the population explosion in

China except ______.

A. better life

B. decreased death rate

C. better education

D. better health

38. According to the passage, China is in a population dilemma in the sense that ______.

A. it is difficult to carry out the family-planning policy

B. Chinese population will continue to increase rapidly in the near future

C. birth-rate decreases but the percentage of old people increases

D. more old people survive in the society

39. To punish those who violate the family-planning policy, the Chinese government does which

of the following?

A. Put them into prison.

B. Fine those couples.

C. Reduce their wages.

D. Advise them to observe the rule.

40. All of the following can be inferred form the passage except that ______.

A. many developed nations suffer from the problem of a rapidly aging population

B. the family-planning policy meets more difficulty in the countryside than in cities

C. the increasing number of aged people is a result of the reduced birth-rate

D. in the year of 2010 each child will have to look after one parent

5

Americans had always been preoccupied with reforming their society; with “making it over,”and between the 1890s and the end of the First World War, the reform spirit intensified. More and more people tried to address the problem of their time directly, to impose order on a confusing world, and, especially, to create a conflict-free society. Their efforts, inspired by a complicated mixture of calculated self-interest and unselfish benevolence, helped what can be called the Progressive era. The urge for reform had many sources. Industrialization had brought unprecedented productivity, awesome technology, and plenty of consumer goods. But it had also included labor struggle, waste of natural resources, and abuse of corporate power. Rapidly growing cities facilitated the accumulation and distribution of goods, services, and cultural amenities but also magnified problems of poverty, disease, crime, and political corruption. Massive inflows of immigrants and the rise of a new class of managers and professionals shook the foundations of old social classes. And the depression that crippled the nation in the 1890s made many leading citizens realize what working people had known for some time: the central promise of American life was not being kept; equality of opportunity—whether economic, political, or social—was a myth.

Progressives tried to resolve these problems by organizing ideas and actions around three basic themes. First, they sought to end abuses of power. Second, progressives aimed to replace corrupt power with the power of reformed institutions such as schools, charities, medical clinics, and the family. Third progressives wanted to apply principles of science and efficiency on a nationwide scale to all economic, social, and political institutions, to minimize social and economic disorder and to establish cooperation, especially between business and government, that would end wasteful competition and labor conflict.

Befitting their name, progressives had strong faith in the ability of humankind to create a better world. More than ever before, Americans looked to government as an agent of the people that could and should intervene in social and economic relations to protect the common good and substitute public interest for self-interest.

41. The passage is primarily concerned with .

A. the reasons for the Progressive Movement

B. the problems that American society faced between the 1890s and the end of World war I

C. the causes and contents of the Progressive reform

D. the belief that Americans possessed in their society

42. All of the following can be inferred from the passage about the American society before the 1890s except that .

A. there was little equal opportunity for general Americans

B. industry developed very rapidly

C. thousands of people immigrated to the United States

D. economic depression did great harm to its development

43. The author believed that the remedy for the social problems is .

A. to stop the use of power

B. to establish more schools and medical clinics

C. to depend on government to make reforms

D. to minimize the conflict between the labor and capital

44. It can be inferred from the passage that Progressives believed that .

A. the rate of industrial development should be reduced

B. rapid growth of cities resulted mainly from the massive immigration

C. human beings are able to do anything well

D. government tended to protect the businesses rather than the masses

45. It can be concluded from the passage that the spirit of the progressive movement is the spirit

.

A.to end political corruption

B.to minimize social and economic disorder

C.to promote free competition

D.to reform all the social evils and problems

Ⅲ. Translation and Writing (55 points)

Part A Translation

Translate the following into Chinese (30 points):

1.Culture is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour. Culture thus

defined consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools,

techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies, and other related components; and the development of culture depends upon man?s capacity to learn and to transmit knowledge to succeeding generations.

Every human society has its own particular culture, or sociocultural system, which overlaps to some extent with other systems. Variation among sociocultural systems is attributable to physical habitats and resources; to the range of possibilities inherent in various areas of activity, such as language, rituals and customs, and the manufacture and use of tools; and to the degree of social development. Adaptation and change take place within and among cultures by means of ecological and environmental changes.

2.Data base (or database): any collection of data that is specially organized for rapid search and

retrieval, usually by a computer. Databases are organized and integrated in such a way as to facilitate the accessing, manipulation, and deletion of data in conjunction with various data-processing operations.

The information in many databases consists of natural-language texts of documents.

Information is retrieved from these computerized records based on the presence in them of words or short phrases that are identical to those posed in the user?s query. In a typical query, the user provides a sequence of characters, such as the title of a journal or the name of a subject area, and the computer searches in the database for a corresponding sequence of characters and provides the source materials in which those characters appear. Queries are the principal means by which users retrieve database information.

Translate the following into English (10 points):

3.摩天大楼、高速公路、小轿车和市场上品种繁多的家用电器，这一切都说明中国自1978

年实行改革开放以来经历了深刻的变化—这是人们能够亲眼看见的变化。然而，在人们物质生活变化的背后，还有其他一些可能是具有更重要意义的变化。社会学家们发现，随着人们生活水平提高，传统的生活方式和观念也慢慢地发生了变化。社会学家们一直在关注这些变化，从家庭结构的演变到妇女社会地位的变化，从人们对婚姻的态度到消费观念的转变，还有收入水平的两极分化等，这些都成为社会学家们研究的课题。

Part B Summary Writing (15 points)

Read the following passage carefully and then write a summary of it in English in about 120 words.

Europe was the first of the major world regions to develop a modern economy based on commercial agriculture and industrial development. Its successful modernization can be traced to the continent?s rich endowment of economic resources, its history of innovations, the evolution of a skilled and educated labour force, and the interconnectedness of all its parts-both naturally existing and man-made—which facilitated the easy movement of massive quantities of raw materials and finished goods and the communication of ideas.

Europe?s economic modernization began with a marked improvement in agriculture output in the 17th century, particularly in England. The traditional method of cultivation involved periodically allowing land to remain fallow; this gave way to continuous cropping on fields that were fertilized with nature from animals raised as food for rapidly expanding urban markets. Greater wealth was accumulated by landowners at the same time that fewer farmhands were needed to work the land. The accumulated capital and abundant cheap labour created by this revolution in agriculture fueled the development of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.

The revolution vegan in northern England in the 1730s with the development of water-driven machinery to spin and weave wool and cotton. By mid-century James Watt had developed a practical steam engine that emancipated machinery from sites adjacent to waterfalls and rapids. Britain had been practically deforested by this time, and the incessant demand for more fuel to run the engines led to the exploitation of coal as a major industry. Industries were built on the coalfields to minimize the cost of transporting coal over long distances. The increasingly surplus rural population flocked to the new manufacturing areas. Canals and other improvements in the transportation infrastructure were made in these regions, which made them attractive to other industries that were not necessarily dependent on coal and thus prompted development in adjacent regions.

Industrialization outside of England began in the mid-19th century in Belgium and northeastern France and spread to Germany, the Netherlands, southern Scandinavia, and other areas in conjunction with the construction of railways. By the 1870s the governments of the European nations had recognized the vital importance of factory production and had taken steps to encourage local development through subsidies and tariff protection against foreign competition. Large areas, however, remained virtually untouched by modern industrial development, including most of the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy, and a broad belt of eastern Europe extending from the Balkans on the south to Finland and northern Scandinavia.

During the 20the century Europe has experienced periods of considerable economic growth and prosperity, and industrial development has proliferated much more widely throughout the continent; but continued economic development in Europe has been handicapped to a large degree by its multinational character—which has spawned economic rivalries among states and two devastating world wars-as well as by the exhaustion of many of its resources and by increased economic competition from overseas. Governmental protectionism, which has tended to restrict the potential market for a product to a single country, has deprived many industrial concerns of the efficiencies of large-scale production serving a mass market (such as is found in the United States). In addition, enterprise efficiency has suffered from government support and from a lack of competition within a national market area. Within individual countries there have been growing tensions between regions that have prospered and those that have not. This “core-periphery”problem has been particularly acute in situations where the contrasting regions are inhabited by different ethnic groups.