历年考博英语试题

睿普教育 www.reapedu.com 内部资料，仅供学习参考 武汉大学2004年博士研究生入学考试试题 Part Ⅰ Reading Comprehension (30%)  Directions: There are 4 reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter in the brackets.  Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage:  All types of stress study, whether under laboratory or real-life situations, study mechanisms for increasing the arousal level of the brain.  The brain blood flow studies show that reciting the days of the week and months of the year increases blood flow in appropriate areas, whereas problem solving which demands intense concentration of a reasoning type produces much larger changes in the distribution of blood in the brain.  Between these basic studies of brain function and real life situations there is still a considerable gap, but reasonable deduction seems possible to try and understand what happens to the brain. Life consists of a series of events which may be related to work or to our so-called leisure time. Work may be relatively automatic—as with typing, for instance, it requires intense concentration and repetition during the learning phase to establish a pattern in the brain. Then the typist's fingers automatically move to hit the appropriate keys as she reads the words on the copy. ？ However, when she gets tired she makes mistakes much more frequently. To overcome this she has to raise her level of arousal and concentration but beyond a certain point the automatic is lost and thinking about hitting the keys leads to more mistakes.  Other jobs involve intense concentration such as holding bottles of wine up to a strong light and turning them upside down to look for particles of dirt falling down. This sounds quite easy but experience teaches that workers can do this for only about thirty minutes before they start making a mistake. This is partly because the number of occasions with dirt in the bottle is low and the arousal level, therefore, fails. Scientists have shown that devices to raise arousal level will increase the accuracy of looking for relatively rare events. A recent study of the effect of loss of sleep in young doctors showed that in tests involving a challenge to their medical judgment when short of sleep they raised their arousal level and became better at tests of grammatical reasoning as well.  1. According to the brain blood flow studies, problem solving ________.  A. increases blood flow in some areas of the brain  B. causes changes in the distribution of blood in the brain  C. demands intense concentration of blood in certain areas  D. is based on the ability to recite the time  2. The author believes that ________.  A. the results obtained in the laboratory exactly reflects the real-life situations  B. the gap between the laboratory studies and real-life situations is too large to fill up  C. the gap between the laboratory studies and real-life situations can be closed by proper reasoning  D. the difference between the laboratory studies and real-life situations will be reduced  3. When a typist gets tired, ________.  A. she has to try hard to raise her automatic  睿普教育 www.reapedu.com 内部资料，仅供学习参考 B. she can type only automatically  C. she cannot think about what she is doing.  D. she can seldom type automatically  4. Examining bottles of wine is hard work because ________.  A. the bottles must be held upside down  B. it is difficult to see the particles of dirt？  C. it requires high level of automatic  D. most bottles are all right  5. According to the author, a key factor in the ability to reason is ________. ？？？？？？ A. the subject's knowledge of grammar  B. the amount of sleep the subject has had  C. the level of arousal of the subject  D. the extent to which the subject has been taught to reason  Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage:  Auctions are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer. He asks the crowd assembled in the auction-room to make offers, or “bids”, for the various items on sale. He encourages buyers to bid higher figures, and finally names the highest bidder as the buyer of the goods. This is called “knocking down” the goods, for the bidding ends when the auctioneer bangs a small hammer on a table at which he stands. This is often set on a raised platform called a rostrum. ？ The ancient Romans probably invented sales by auction, and the English word comes from the Latin auctio, meaning “increase”. The Romans usually sold in this way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called sub basra, meaning “under the spear”, a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather. In England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries goods were often sold “by the candle”: a short candle was lit by the auctioneer, and bids could be made while it stayed alight.  Practically all goods whose qualities vary are sold by auction. Among these are coffee, hides, skins, wool, tea, cocoa, furs, spices, fruit and vegetables and wines. Auction sales are also usual for land and property, antique furniture, pictures, rare books, old china and similar works of art. The auction rooms at Christie's and Sotheby's in London and New York are world famous.  An auction is usually advertised beforehand with full particulars of the articles to be sold and where and when they can be viewed by prospective buyers. If the advertisement cannot give full details, catalogues are printed, and each group of goods to be sold？ together, called a “lot”, is usually given a number. The auctioneer need not begin with Lot 1 and continue in numerical order; he may wait until he registers the fact that certain dealers are in the room and then produce the lots they are likely to be interested in. The auctioneer's services are paid for in the form of a percentage of the price tha goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible.  The auctioneer must know fairly accurately the current market values of the goods he is selling, and he should be acquainted with regular buyers of such goods. He will not waste time by starting the bidding too low. He will also play on the rivalries among his buyers and succeed in getting a hight price by encouraging two business competitors to bid against each other. It is largely on his advice that a seller will fix a “reserve” price, that is ,a price below which the goods cannot be sold. Even the best auctioneers, however, find it difficult to stop a “knock out”, whereby dealers illegally arrange beforehand not to bid against each other, but nominate one of themselves as the