2008年中级职称外语考试试卷

2008年中级职称英语考试试卷（120分钟内完成）一、阅读理解（阅读下列短文并用英语回答问题，共30分）短文一(15分)In one year the world uses as much energy as that contained in 21 billion barrels of oil. And the amount of fuel needed is growing rapidly. The supplies of fossil fuels---coal, oil, and gas---are limited. They may not last a century. Then what will take their place?For the answer, let’s look to the sky. Each day the sun showers the world with several thousand times as much energy as man uses. Here, in a sense, energy is unlimited. The sun’s energy is free for the taking. If man could capture even a small part of the sun’s energy at low cost, no one would worry about running out of nonrenewable fuels.If scientists succeed in making use of the power of the sun, this new energy will have many different uses. The sun’s energy can be used in your own house for heating and cooking.Then the sun can also be used as a source of fuel for power plants. Solar energy can be used in telephone communication, in space travel, and in farming.One of the practical problems in controlling solar energy is making it continuous. What can be done when the sun is not shining on the heating system? If you were using a solar pump for irrigation, the interruption would not matter, since plants do not need a continuous supply of water in the night time. But suppose you were heating your house by solar energy. A number of experimental houses that are heated in this way use storage tanks to hold the heat for night time and rainy spells, or they must have supplementary heating supplied by ordinary fuels.Once the sun’s energy is captured, the supply of energy will be endless. No wonder those who look to the sky see there will be great changes in our future way of life.Questions:1.What is this passage mainly about?2.What will replace fossil fuels in the future?3.What problem may arise when solar energy is used to heat the house?4.How can solar energy be stored for continuous use5. What can be expected of our life in the future if the sun’s energy is widely used?短文二(15分)In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment are fundamental. One is acid rain, which is created by the millions of tons of sulphur dioxide(二氧化硫) and nitrogen oxides(氧化氮) spewed out of smokestacks and automobile exhaust pipes. The oxides mix with water vapor in the air to form weak sulphuric and nitric acid, which later falls as acid rain. The result is increased acidity(酸性) in lakes, which has curtailed the ability of many fish to reproduce, and in the soil, which has slowed the growth of trees.With every news report, the externality (外延性) of environmental problems seems to become clearer. For example, it was recently reported that Lapp villagers in northern Sweden and Norway were forbidden to eat local deer meat after their deer became polluted by fallout from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl (切尔诺贝利).But some pollution problems involve such great externalities that the whole world is affected. One example is the greenhouse effect. The steadily rising of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere causes it to trap increasing amounts of the heat radiated by the planet. The general warming trend is expected to have disastrous effects, including mass starvation in some less developed countries, flooding of entire coastalareas, and severe droughts on the Canadian Prairies, perhaps within the next fifty years.Improperly disposed wastes such as those from nuclear plants, industrial manufacturing, laboratories, and medical institution becomes another critical environmental problem; they can threaten all forms of organic life. Unfortunately, little has been done so far to solve this problem. Indeed there are many examples in which industrialized countries have literally just shipped the problem off to the poorest of the less developed countries – countries unequipped with the necessary storage and treatment facilities, and certainly too poor to deal with the serious environmental problems that will follow. For example, in 1988 the government of Guinea signed a contract with two British firms to receive fifteen million tons of pharmaceutical wastes over a five-year period. While this arrangement was very inexpensive from the firms’point of view, the payments to Guinea totaled more than four times that country’s national product. It makes it difficult to solve the problem when parts of the world are so poor that they are forced to regard such transactions as “good deals”.The users of the world’s resources simply must be made to take the external costs of their actions into consideration when making their decisions. The people who are hacking down the world’s rain forests at the rate of 1200 hectares an hour are literally cutting away the lungs of the earth, since rain forests contribute a large percentage of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. But these individuals are not necessarily evil: in many cases, they are forced to overuse the environment for their own or their country’s immediate survival. For example, some developing countries’ needs for foreign exchange to pay for imports compel them to cut wood faster than it can be regenerated. They simply can’t afford to worry about the future.Questions:1. What causes acid rain?2. Why can’t deer meat be eaten in northern Sweden and Norway?3. What disastrous effects is the greenhouse effect expected to result in?4. What can improperly disposed wastes threaten?5. Why does hacking down the world’s rain forests mean cutting away the lungs of the earth ?二、英译汉（将下列短文译成汉语，每题10分，共50分）1. A look ahead gives petroleum an exciting role in the world of tomorrow. Two generations ago petroleum became a revolutionary energy source used to transport man from place to place. Next, it was used to heat homes. More recently, people have begun using it to make clothing, wash dishes and so on. Tomorrow this versatile substance may be called in to help feed man.2. Genetics technology as well as energy and environment technologies could hold this potential. But looking ahead towards the next ten years or so, the main driving force for economic and social change will be information technology. A decade from now, information technology will have penetrated every aspect of human activity. Once again, the interaction between the evolution of technology and the development of economy and society will have led to profound changes.3. Many reports on China by the media of the West are not accurate, and sometimes very unobjective and very unfair. Reports on China’s development are rarely seen in Western newspapers. They show little concern for China’s rapid progress, but care only about the difficulties and problems. If one relied only on those reports and ignored the reality of China, the picture of China in one’s mind would be a society soon to collapse. But quite on the contrary, China in fact is a politically very stable society and economically rapid growing country.4. Advertising is a way of bringing information to the public for the purpose of selling a product, providing a service, giving an idea. The information is transmitted by means of the printed words or over the air. It may by presented as a simple statement of fact, as is more frequently the case, it may be offered in colorful or even emotional language. All advertising is intended to stimulate people to do some specific things, such as buy a product, order a service, join an organization, attend a meeting or think sympathetically about a situation.5. Innovation is not just about technology; it is about how you use technology. It is not about the “new”economy; it is about how you apply knowledge. Often it is about asking the right questions, thinking clearly about the answers, and applying common senses. When you begin to stimulate innovation in one area, it has an enabling effect elsewhere. The effects of innovation are accumulative. When you begin to innovate in one area, it stimulates innovation elsewhere.三、汉译英（将下列句子译成英语，每题4分，共20分）1.要是没有你的帮助，我们就不能按时完成任务。