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2025年军队文职人员招聘《英语语言文学》
临考Y题2
即刻题库 www.jike.vip
1 、 单选题
( ) refers to a construction where one clause is coordinated with another.
A ： Embedding
B ： Recursiveness
C ： onjoining
D ： Cohesion
2 、 单选题
Easter is a holiday usually connected to the following except( )
A ： the reunion of a large family
B ： coming of spring
C ： resurrection of Christ
D ： eating of Easter eggs
3 、 单选题
Which of the fllowing is not included in the design features of language？( )
A ： Cultural transmission
B ： Displacement
C ： Duality
D ： Inflection
4 、 单选题
The heart is( )intelligent than the stomach，for they are both controlled by the brain.
A ： not so
B ： not much
C ： much more
D ： no more5 、 单选题
The color in her shirt( )gently after it was washed by washing machine.
A ： faded
B ： vanished
C ： dissolved
D ： evaporated
6 、 单选题
The bomb destroyed a police station and damaged a church( )
A ： badly
B ： bad
C ： worse
D ： mostly
7 、 单选题
Which one is the national sport of Canada？( )
A ： Football
B ： Hockey
C ： Baseball
D ： Basketball
8 、 单选题
The Renaissance was a European phenomenon originated in ( )
A ： France
B ： ritain
C ： Italy
D ： Spain
9 、 单选题
A ( ) is not a sound， it is a collection of distinctive phonetic features.
A ： phoneme
B ： phone
C ： sound
D ： speech
10 、 单选题
According to the Official Language of Act of Canada，there are two official languages
in Canada，they are( )A ： English and Spanish
B ： English and Portuguese
C ： English and French
D ： English and Celtic
11 、 单选题
The Hundred Year’s War lasted from 1337 to 1453 between Britain and( )
A ： the US
B ： France
C ： anada
D ： Australia
12 、 单选题
( )，domesticated grapes grow in clusters，range in color from pale green to
black，and contain sugar in varying quantities.
A ： Their botanical classification as berries
B ： Although their botanical classification as berries
C ： Because berries being their botanical classification
D ： Classified botanically as berries
13 、 单选题
Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and ( )
A ： a speech community
B ： its diversity
C ： human mind
D ： human behavior
14 、 单选题
Which of the following is Thomas Hardy′sbest-known novel?
A ： Far From the Madding Crowd
B ： The Mayor of Castorbridge
C ： Tess of the D′Urbervilles
D ： The Return of the Native
15 、 单选题
( ) is the defining properties of units like number， gender， case.
A ： Parts of speech
B ： Word classes
C ： Grammatical categories
D ： Functions of words16 、 单选题
Among the following poets， who is NOT a lake poet？( )
A ： Samuel Taylor Coleridge
B ： Robert Southey
C ： William Wordsworth
D ： William Colins
17 、 单选题
The Catcher in the Rye is written by( )
A ： J.D.Salinger
B ： Jack London
C ： Flannery O′Connor
D ： Saul Bellow
18 、 单选题
( ) is commonly considered to be the beginning of English literature and is the oldest
surviving epic in English literature.
A ： Beowulf
B ： The Canterbury Tales
C ： Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
D ： The Fates of the Apostles
19 、 单选题
The captain and his crews depended on the( )of navigation- the compass for
orientation.
A ： instrument
B ： device
C ： appliance
D ： equipment
20 、 单选题
Henry Fielding′s ( )indicates the genre of novel has got to the mature period.
A ： Joseph Andrews
B ： Jonathan Wild
C ： The History of Tom Jones， a Foundling
D ： Amelia21 、 单选题
In an effort to( )culture shocks，I think it is necessary to know something about the
nature of culture.
A ： get off
B ： get by
C ： get through
D ： get over
22 、 单选题
( ) is often described as “father of modem linguistics”.
A ： Saussure
B ： Chomsky
C ： Bloomfield
D ： Halliday
23 、 单选题
He copied other people’s ideas in writing his new book，which is a kind of
copywrite( )
A ： offence
B ： violation
C ： crime
D ： sin
24 、 单选题
The UN put the( )forward so as to better cope with the tense situation in the Middle
East.
A ： conference
B ： summit
C ： rally
D ： seminar
25 、 单选题
Which of the following doesn′t belong to the Cooperative Principle？( )
A ： The generosity maxim
B ： The maxim of quality
C ： The maxim of relation
D ： The maxim of manner
26 、 单选题Industrialization of sofware trade leads to the production of software( ).
A ： elements
B ： sections
C ： components
D ： factors
27 、 单选题
My grandparents always enjoy the( )of their relatives.
A ： company
B ： companion
C ： accompaniment
D ： compassion
28 、 单选题
The“first Americans”are( )
A ： the Aborigines
B ： the Maori
C ： the Indians
D ： the Eskimos
29 、 单选题
The answers to the problem，the scientists say，is to build up the immune
system，which not only will give greater( )to disease but will boost cellular
regeneration and improve the skin.
A ： persistence
B ： insistence
C ： resistance
D ： instance
30 、 单选题
There is no reason they should limit how much vitamin you take，( )they can limit
how much water you drink.
A ： much more than
B ： no more than
C ： no less than
D ： any more than
31 、 单选题
Which of the following is NOT a “case” in English？
A ： NominativeB ： Accusative
C ： Genitive
D ： Vocative
32 、 单选题
The path in the park looked beautiful，( )with( )leaves.
A ： covered；falling
B ： covered；fallen
C ： covering；falling
D ： covering；fallen
33 、 单选题
When did the Australian Constitution take effect？( )
A ： 1 January，1900
B ： 1 January，1901
C ： 26 January，1801
D ： 26 January，1800
34 、 单选题
Price of the houses( )according to the positions and surrounding environment.
A ： converts
B ： alters
C ： varies
D ： transforms
35 、 单选题
My watch fell down on the ground and there was a hairline crack in the( )of dial plate.
A ： frontier
B ： boundary
C ： limit
D ： rim
36 、 单选题
We( )the radio signals for help from the ship.
A ： pick up
B ： pick at
C ： pick off
D ： pick out37 、 单选题
“Hen”is called“母鸡” in Chinese and“poule” in French.What design feature of
language is reflected ( ) in the example？
A ： Displacement
B ： Cultural transmission
C ： Duality
D ： Arbitrariness
38 、 单选题
Which of the following words is made up of bound morphemes only？( )
A ： Happiness
B ： Television
C ： Ecology
D ： Teacher
39 、 单选题
Of the fifty states，the smallest state in America is( )
A ： Rhode Island
B ： Virginia
C ： Texas
D ： Montana
40 、 单选题
The scents of the flowers were( )to us by the breeze.
A ： intercepted
B ： detested
C ： saturated
D ： wafted
41 、 单选题
The aim of President Roosevelt’s New Deal was to “save American ( )”
A ： economy
B ： democracy
C ： society
D ： politics
42 、 单选题
They gave each other a big hug with( )，since they haven’t seen each other for 15years.
A ： passion
B ： sensation
C ： sentiment
D ： emotion
43 、 单选题
( ) is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in
terms of certain categories.
A ： Concord
B ： Immediate constituent
C ： Syntagmatic relations
D ： Government
44 、 单选题
I just wonder( )that makes him so excited.
A ： why it does
B ： what he does
C ： how it is
D ： what it is
45 、 单选题
Don Juan was written by ( )
A ： Percy Bysshe Shelley
B ： John Keats
C ： George Gordon Byron
D ： William Wordsworth
46 、 单选题
( ) is NOT included in the modernist group
A ： Oscar Wilde
B ： Virginia Woolf
C ： William Butler Yeats
D ： T.S.Eliot
47 、 单选题
( ) is regarded as the “father of free verse” .
A ： Walt Whitman
B ： Emily Dickinson
C ： David ThoreauD ： Beecher Stowe
48 、 单选题
The social workers tried to( )the juvenile delinquents.
A ： quarantine
B ： muddle
C ： rehabilitate
D ： indent
49 、 单选题
With( )and fashionable elements，Beijing attracts a large number of young people
every year.
A ： original
B ： modem
C ： novel
D ： innovative
50 、 单选题
The Commonwealth of Nations is an association of independent countries ( )
A ： that speak English as their native language
B ： that have a large number of British immigrants
C ： that were once colonies of Britain
D ： that fought on the side of Britain in the two world wars
51 、 单选题
Which of the following is a blending word？
A ： lengthen
B ： nylon
C ： edit
D ： smog
52 、 单选题
Of the following writers，( )is NOT a Nobel Prize Winner.
A ： Samuel Beckett
B ： James Joyce
C ： John Galsworthy
D ： William Butler Yeats53 、 单选题
Which of the following pairs is not a minimal pair？( )
A ： /sip//zip/
B ： /fi：l//li：f/
C ： /keit//feit/
D ： /sai//sei/
54 、 单选题
The Midwest is America′s most important ( ) area.
A ： agricultural
B ： industrial
C ： manufacturing
D ： mining industry
55 、 单选题
Sister Carrie is a masterpiece of ( )work.
A ： romantic
B ： classic
C ： neoclassic
D ： naturalistic
56 、 单选题
The capital city of Canada is( )
A ： Montreal
B ： Toronto
C ： Vancouver
D ： Ottawa
57 、 单选题
Among the following， ( ) is NOT one of the functions of adult′s language according
to Halliday.
A ： the Ideational Function
B ： the Syntactic Function
C ： the Interpersonal Function
D ： the Textual Function
58 、 单选题
The computer center，( )last year，is very popular among the students in this school.A ： open
B ： opening
C ： having opened
D ： opened
59 、 单选题
( ) was honored as“the Father of English Poetry
A ： William Langland
B ： Sir Thomas Marlory
C ： Geoffrey Chaucer
D ： Bede
60 、 单选题
I don’t think it advisable that Tim( )to the job since he has no experience.
A ： is assigned
B ： will be assigned
C ： be assigned
D ： has been assigned
61 、 不定项选择题
Modern technology and science have produced a wealth of new materials and new
ways of using old materials. For the artist this means wider opportunities. There is no
doubt that the limitations of materials and nature of tools both restrict and shape a
man’s work. Observe how the development of plastics and light metals along with
new methods of welding has changed the direction of sculpture. Transparent plastic
materials allow one to look through an object, to see its various sides superimposed
on each other (as in Cubism or in an X-ray). Today, welding is as prevalent as casting
was in the past. This new method encourages open designs, where surrounding and
intervening space becomes as important as form itself.
More ambiguous than other scientific inventions familiar to modern artists, but
no less influential, are the psychoanalytic studies of Freud and his followers,
discoveries that have infiltrated recent art, especially Surrealism. The Surrealists, in
their struggle to escape the monotony and frustrations of everyday life, claimed that
dreams were the only hope. Turning to the irrational world of their unconscious, they
banished all time barriers and moral judgements to combine disconnected dream
experiences from the past, present and intervening psychological states. The
Surrealists were concerned with overlapping emotions more than with overlapping
forms. Their paintings often become segmented capsules of associative experiences.
For them, obsessive and often unrelated images replaced the direct emotional
message of expressionism. They did not need to smash paint and canvas: they went
beyond this to smash the whole continuity of logical thought.
There is little doubt that contemporary art has taken much from contemporary
life. In a period when science has made revolutionary strides, artists in their studios
have not been unaware of scientists in their laboratories. But this has rarely been aone-way street. Painters and sculptors, through admittedly influenced by modern
science, have also molded and changed our world. If break-up has been a vital part of
their expression, it has not always been a symbol of destruction. Quite the contrary:
it has been used to examine more fully, to penetrate more deeply, to analyze more
thoroughly, to enlarge, isolate and make more familiar certain aspects of lire that
earlier we were apt to neglect. In addition, it sometimes provides rich multiple
experiences so organized as not merely to reflect our world, but in fact to interpret it.
Which of the following is tree about Surrealists?
A ： They diminished all time barriers and moral judgements to combine
disconnected dream experiences.
B ： They tried to express their subconscious world.
C ： They could transform real existence into incoherent dreams.
D ： They wanted to substitute direct expressions for fragmented images.
62 、 不定项选择题
Film has properties that set it apart from painting, sculpture, novels, and plays. It is
also, in its most popular and powerful form, a story telling medium that shares many
elements with the short story and the novel. And since film presents its stories in
dramatic form, it has even more in common with the stage play: Both plays and
movies act out or dramatize, show rather than tell, what happens.
Unlike the novel, short story, or play, however, film is not handy to study; it
cannot be effectively frozen on the printed page. The novel and short story are
relatively easy to study because they are written to be read. The stage play is slightly
more difficult to study because it is written to be performed. But plays are printed,
and because they rely heavily on the spoken word, imaginative readers can conjure
up at least a pale imitation of the experience they might have been watching a
performance on stage. This cannot be said of the screenplay, for a film depends
greatly on visual and other nonvisual elements that are not easily expressed in
writing. The screenplay requires so much “filling in” by our imagination that we
cannot really approximate the experience of a film by reading a screenplay, and
reading a screenplay is worthwhile only if we have already seen the film. Thus, most
screenplays are published not to read but rather to be remembered.
Still, film should not be ignored because studying it requires extra effort. And the
fact that we do not generally “read” films does not mean we should ignore the
principles of literary or dramatic analysis when we see a film. Literature and films do
share many elements and communicate many things in similar ways. Perceptive film
analysis rests on the principles used in literary analysis, and if we apply what we have
learned in the study of literature to our analysis of films, we will be far ahead of those
who do not. Therefore, before we turn to the unique elements of film, we need to
look into the elements that film shares with any good story.
Dividing film into its various elements for analysis is a somewhat artificial
process, for the elements of any art form never exist in isolation. It is impossible, for
example, to isolate plot from character: Events influence people, and people
influence events; the two are always closely interwoven in any fictional, dramatic, or
cinematic work. Nevertheless, the analytical method uses such a fragmenting
technique for ease and convenience. But it does so with the assumption that we canstudy these elements in isolation without losing sight of their interdependence or
their relationship to the whole.
What is mainly discussed in the text?
A ： The uniqueness of film.
B ： The importance of film analysis.
C ： How to identify the techniques a film uses.
D ： The relationship between film analysis and literary analysis.
63 、 不定项选择题
About a dozen years ago my wife and I planted a hedge of twenty-seven arborvitae
trees along the border of our backyard, which, although our house sits on nineteen
acres of fields and woods, is also the back border of our property. A sloping hayfield
with a realtor’s dream of panoramic views lies directly behind us. So the hedge was
our attempt to secure privacy for the future. The nurseryman who sold us the shrubs
assured us they were the best species for our purpose and climate. I measured and
marked the planting sites, called in “Chink” Norris (whose possibly racist nickname
I’ve not looked into any more than I have the nurseryman’s credentials) to come
with his small backhoe and dig the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the first year, with results that were everything I’d
been promised: dense, hardy, and luxuriant, a towering bulwark of green. Thus
began an episode of great vexation and buffoonery in my life, known and (I have no
doubt) merrily recounted in local circles as the tale of “Garret and his trees”, or as
my wife puts it, “Garret and the deer.” It so happens that we live next to one of the
county’s most extensive “deer yard”, those areas of canopied woods to which the
deer retire in winter, making networks of deeply furrowed tracks and foraging as best
they can until there’s a declared winner in the yearly race between spring and
starvation.
It also happens that deer find arborvitae a delicacy, related to the cedar that they
also love, but thicker and more succulent. By the second winter they’d found and
attacked my trees. I fought back, not with a vengeance—I stopped short of that—but
with something close to obsession. I erected fence structures that made our
backyard look like a scene from the Somme. I played recordings of wolves howling,
recordings of me howling. I fired pistol shots at random hours of the night. I hung or
sprinkled repellents of blood meal, urine, (mine), and deodorant soap. Hearing that
deer were repelled by the scent of human hair, I asked some hair dressers to set
aside their sweepings in a bag with, as the saying goes, my name on it.
As any warden will tell you, if deer are hungry enough they will get through
anything, which this year included an electric fence hooked to a charger supposedly
powerful enough to deter an elephant. So the farmer who’d helped me rig it up
assured me. What he did not tell me, because he did not know, was that the
insulating snowpack would prevent an animal from completing the circuit with the
ground. In came the deer like a school of piranhas. This was shortly after a man from
Connecticut purchased the hayfield behind our house for a price few of my neighbors
could afforded and none of them could believe and set about measuring the
foundations of a house.The author collects hair in bags to prevent the invasion of deer because he knows
that _____.
A ： deer like the smell of human hair
B ： deer can be repelled by the smell of human hair
C ： deer die when eating human hair
D ： deer flee at the sight of human hair
64 、 不定项选择题
The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a
generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx, once widely spoken
on the Isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning,
however, have helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public
documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to
learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe’s regional
languages, spoken by more than a half-million of the country’s three million people.
The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a
resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last
month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National
Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind
devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the
United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had
bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster,
implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the
club—Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal
forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union.
The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted
overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by
less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were
proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or
the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact
laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many
people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow
with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings
that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style
waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European
Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western
Europe—only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living.
Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and
women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard
Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and
Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue.
And Wales now boasts a national airline, Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means “land of
compatriots”, is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation’s symbol
since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere—on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell
phone covers.
“Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-
class citizens,” said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer
night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, anindustrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod,
Wales’s annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the
sounds of new Welsh bands.
“There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence,” Dyfan
continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-
speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his
generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago.
“We used to think. We can’t do anything, we’re only Welsh. Now I think that’s
changing.”
The word “centrifugal” in the second paragraph means _____.
A ： separatist
B ： conventional
C ： feudal
D ： political
65 、 不定项选择题
Film has properties that set it apart from painting, sculpture, novels, and plays. It is
also, in its most popular and powerful form, a story telling medium that shares many
elements with the short story and the novel. And since film presents its stories in
dramatic form, it has even more in common with the stage play: Both plays and
movies act out or dramatize, show rather than tell, what happens.
Unlike the novel, short story, or play, however, film is not handy to study; it
cannot be effectively frozen on the printed page. The novel and short story are
relatively easy to study because they are written to be read. The stage play is slightly
more difficult to study because it is written to be performed. But plays are printed,
and because they rely heavily on the spoken word, imaginative readers can conjure
up at least a pale imitation of the experience they might have been watching a
performance on stage. This cannot be said of the screenplay, for a film depends
greatly on visual and other nonvisual elements that are not easily expressed in
writing. The screenplay requires so much “filling in” by our imagination that we
cannot really approximate the experience of a film by reading a screenplay, and
reading a screenplay is worthwhile only if we have already seen the film. Thus, most
screenplays are published not to read but rather to be remembered.
Still, film should not be ignored because studying it requires extra effort. And the
fact that we do not generally “read” films does not mean we should ignore the
principles of literary or dramatic analysis when we see a film. Literature and films do
share many elements and communicate many things in similar ways. Perceptive film
analysis rests on the principles used in literary analysis, and if we apply what we have
learned in the study of literature to our analysis of films, we will be far ahead of those
who do not. Therefore, before we turn to the unique elements of film, we need to
look into the elements that film shares with any good story.
Dividing film into its various elements for analysis is a somewhat artificial
process, for the elements of any art form never exist in isolation. It is impossible, for
example, to isolate plot from character: Events influence people, and people
influence events; the two are always closely interwoven in any fictional, dramatic, or
cinematic work. Nevertheless, the analytical method uses such a fragmenting
technique for ease and convenience. But it does so with the assumption that we canstudy these elements in isolation without losing sight of their interdependence or
their relationship to the whole.
Why is it not handy to study film?
A ： Because screenplay is not as well written as literary works.
B ： ecause a film cannot be effectively represented by a printed screenplay
C ： Because a film is too complicated.
D ： Because publishers prefer to publish literary works.
66 、 不定项选择题
I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend’s house, and a bee stung
me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was
soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to
call my mother. As I told her what had happened, I felt myself blacking out, sinking to
the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver.
Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I’ve ever gotten, although
to this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an
eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his
Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the
phone cord.
Call me fanciful. Still, I’m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the
second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance.
This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eat
breakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already
served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp
bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in
his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his
palm. The blood was profuse.
Being a hematologist, my father didn’t panic: this was just business as usual.
But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by
the blood and my mother’s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar
rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a
roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled
around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already
attended to my mother.
Still think I’m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother
when her first fainting episode had occurred.
She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of
thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had
his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia,
the other person in the room was a nurse, who was busy changing the dressing on
the patient’s incision, which hadn’t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had
to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in
place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father,
gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-
old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor.The faint related to the bee sting led to the author’s fear later in her life of _____.
A ： snakes
B ： elephants
C ： insects
D ： dogs
67 、 不定项选择题
About a dozen years ago my wife and I planted a hedge of twenty-seven arborvitae
trees along the border of our backyard, which, although our house sits on nineteen
acres of fields and woods, is also the back border of our property. A sloping hayfield
with a realtor’s dream of panoramic views lies directly behind us. So the hedge was
our attempt to secure privacy for the future. The nurseryman who sold us the shrubs
assured us they were the best species for our purpose and climate. I measured and
marked the planting sites, called in “Chink” Norris (whose possibly racist nickname
I’ve not looked into any more than I have the nurseryman’s credentials) to come
with his small backhoe and dig the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the first year, with results that were everything I’d
been promised: dense, hardy, and luxuriant, a towering bulwark of green. Thus
began an episode of great vexation and buffoonery in my life, known and (I have no
doubt) merrily recounted in local circles as the tale of “Garret and his trees”, or as
my wife puts it, “Garret and the deer.” It so happens that we live next to one of the
county’s most extensive “deer yard”, those areas of canopied woods to which the
deer retire in winter, making networks of deeply furrowed tracks and foraging as best
they can until there’s a declared winner in the yearly race between spring and
starvation.
It also happens that deer find arborvitae a delicacy, related to the cedar that they
also love, but thicker and more succulent. By the second winter they’d found and
attacked my trees. I fought back, not with a vengeance—I stopped short of that—but
with something close to obsession. I erected fence structures that made our
backyard look like a scene from the Somme. I played recordings of wolves howling,
recordings of me howling. I fired pistol shots at random hours of the night. I hung or
sprinkled repellents of blood meal, urine, (mine), and deodorant soap. Hearing that
deer were repelled by the scent of human hair, I asked some hair dressers to set
aside their sweepings in a bag with, as the saying goes, my name on it.
As any warden will tell you, if deer are hungry enough they will get through
anything, which this year included an electric fence hooked to a charger supposedly
powerful enough to deter an elephant. So the farmer who’d helped me rig it up
assured me. What he did not tell me, because he did not know, was that the
insulating snowpack would prevent an animal from completing the circuit with the
ground. In came the deer like a school of piranhas. This was shortly after a man from
Connecticut purchased the hayfield behind our house for a price few of my neighbors
could afforded and none of them could believe and set about measuring the
foundations of a house.
Why did the electric fence fail? It is because of _____.
A ： The deer are smart
B ： The winter is coldC ： The fence is of low quality
D ： Snowpack serves as an insulator
68 、 不定项选择题
About a dozen years ago my wife and I planted a hedge of twenty-seven arborvitae
trees along the border of our backyard, which, although our house sits on nineteen
acres of fields and woods, is also the back border of our property. A sloping hayfield
with a realtor’s dream of panoramic views lies directly behind us. So the hedge was
our attempt to secure privacy for the future. The nurseryman who sold us the shrubs
assured us they were the best species for our purpose and climate. I measured and
marked the planting sites, called in “Chink” Norris (whose possibly racist nickname
I’ve not looked into any more than I have the nurseryman’s credentials) to come
with his small backhoe and dig the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the first year, with results that were everything I’d
been promised: dense, hardy, and luxuriant, a towering bulwark of green. Thus
began an episode of great vexation and buffoonery in my life, known and (I have no
doubt) merrily recounted in local circles as the tale of “Garret and his trees”, or as
my wife puts it, “Garret and the deer.” It so happens that we live next to one of the
county’s most extensive “deer yard”, those areas of canopied woods to which the
deer retire in winter, making networks of deeply furrowed tracks and foraging as best
they can until there’s a declared winner in the yearly race between spring and
starvation.
It also happens that deer find arborvitae a delicacy, related to the cedar that they
also love, but thicker and more succulent. By the second winter they’d found and
attacked my trees. I fought back, not with a vengeance—I stopped short of that—but
with something close to obsession. I erected fence structures that made our
backyard look like a scene from the Somme. I played recordings of wolves howling,
recordings of me howling. I fired pistol shots at random hours of the night. I hung or
sprinkled repellents of blood meal, urine, (mine), and deodorant soap. Hearing that
deer were repelled by the scent of human hair, I asked some hair dressers to set
aside their sweepings in a bag with, as the saying goes, my name on it.
As any warden will tell you, if deer are hungry enough they will get through
anything, which this year included an electric fence hooked to a charger supposedly
powerful enough to deter an elephant. So the farmer who’d helped me rig it up
assured me. What he did not tell me, because he did not know, was that the
insulating snowpack would prevent an animal from completing the circuit with the
ground. In came the deer like a school of piranhas. This was shortly after a man from
Connecticut purchased the hayfield behind our house for a price few of my neighbors
could afforded and none of them could believe and set about measuring the
foundations of a house.
The author and his wife planted a hedge along their backyard for the purpose of
_____.
A ： prevent deer
B ： protect privacy
C ： beautify the surroundings
D ： eco-friendly69 、 不定项选择题
Modern technology and science have produced a wealth of new materials and new
ways of using old materials. For the artist this means wider opportunities. There is no
doubt that the limitations of materials and nature of tools both restrict and shape a
man’s work. Observe how the development of plastics and light metals along with
new methods of welding has changed the direction of sculpture. Transparent plastic
materials allow one to look through an object, to see its various sides superimposed
on each other (as in Cubism or in an X-ray). Today, welding is as prevalent as casting
was in the past. This new method encourages open designs, where surrounding and
intervening space becomes as important as form itself.
More ambiguous than other scientific inventions familiar to modern artists, but
no less influential, are the psychoanalytic studies of Freud and his followers,
discoveries that have infiltrated recent art, especially Surrealism. The Surrealists, in
their struggle to escape the monotony and frustrations of everyday life, claimed that
dreams were the only hope. Turning to the irrational world of their unconscious, they
banished all time barriers and moral judgements to combine disconnected dream
experiences from the past, present and intervening psychological states. The
Surrealists were concerned with overlapping emotions more than with overlapping
forms. Their paintings often become segmented capsules of associative experiences.
For them, obsessive and often unrelated images replaced the direct emotional
message of expressionism. They did not need to smash paint and canvas: they went
beyond this to smash the whole continuity of logical thought.
There is little doubt that contemporary art has taken much from contemporary
life. In a period when science has made revolutionary strides, artists in their studios
have not been unaware of scientists in their laboratories. But this has rarely been a
one-way street. Painters and sculptors, through admittedly influenced by modern
science, have also molded and changed our world. If break-up has been a vital part of
their expression, it has not always been a symbol of destruction. Quite the contrary:
it has been used to examine more fully, to penetrate more deeply, to analyze more
thoroughly, to enlarge, isolate and make more familiar certain aspects of lire that
earlier we were apt to neglect. In addition, it sometimes provides rich multiple
experiences so organized as not merely to reflect our world, but in fact to interpret it.
The sentence “But this has rarely been a one-way street.” in the last paragraph
means that _____.
A ： contemporary art has been nourished by modern science
B ： modern science has been nourished by art
C ： artists can become scientists and scientists can become artists
D ： the impacts of modern art and science are actually mutual
70 、 不定项选择题
Modern technology and science have produced a wealth of new materials and new
ways of using old materials. For the artist this means wider opportunities. There is no
doubt that the limitations of materials and nature of tools both restrict and shape a
man’s work. Observe how the development of plastics and light metals along with
new methods of welding has changed the direction of sculpture. Transparent plasticmaterials allow one to look through an object, to see its various sides superimposed
on each other (as in Cubism or in an X-ray). Today, welding is as prevalent as casting
was in the past. This new method encourages open designs, where surrounding and
intervening space becomes as important as form itself.
More ambiguous than other scientific inventions familiar to modern artists, but
no less influential, are the psychoanalytic studies of Freud and his followers,
discoveries that have infiltrated recent art, especially Surrealism. The Surrealists, in
their struggle to escape the monotony and frustrations of everyday life, claimed that
dreams were the only hope. Turning to the irrational world of their unconscious, they
banished all time barriers and moral judgements to combine disconnected dream
experiences from the past, present and intervening psychological states. The
Surrealists were concerned with overlapping emotions more than with overlapping
forms. Their paintings often become segmented capsules of associative experiences.
For them, obsessive and often unrelated images replaced the direct emotional
message of expressionism. They did not need to smash paint and canvas: they went
beyond this to smash the whole continuity of logical thought.
There is little doubt that contemporary art has taken much from contemporary
life. In a period when science has made revolutionary strides, artists in their studios
have not been unaware of scientists in their laboratories. But this has rarely been a
one-way street. Painters and sculptors, through admittedly influenced by modern
science, have also molded and changed our world. If break-up has been a vital part of
their expression, it has not always been a symbol of destruction. Quite the contrary:
it has been used to examine more fully, to penetrate more deeply, to analyze more
thoroughly, to enlarge, isolate and make more familiar certain aspects of lire that
earlier we were apt to neglect. In addition, it sometimes provides rich multiple
experiences so organized as not merely to reflect our world, but in fact to interpret it.
According to the passage, it is true that _____.
A ： artistic creations seem to be the reproductions of modern technology
B ： artistic creations have made great strides scientifically
C ： artistic creations appear to be incapable of ignoring material advances
D ： artistic creations are the reflection of the material world
71 、 不定项选择题
I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend’s house, and a bee stung
me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was
soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to
call my mother. As I told her what had happened, I felt myself blacking out, sinking to
the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver.
Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I’ve ever gotten, although
to this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an
eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his
Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the
phone cord.
Call me fanciful. Still, I’m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the
second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance.
This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eatbreakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already
served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp
bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in
his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his
palm. The blood was profuse.
Being a hematologist, my father didn’t panic: this was just business as usual.
But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by
the blood and my mother’s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar
rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a
roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled
around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already
attended to my mother.
Still think I’m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother
when her first fainting episode had occurred.
She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of
thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had
his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia,
the other person in the room was a nurse, who was busy changing the dressing on
the patient’s incision, which hadn’t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had
to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in
place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father,
gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-
old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor.
It can be gathered from this article that the tendency to faint most probably is _____.
A ： genetically determined
B ： independently developed
C ： virus infected
D ： emotionally affected
72 、 不定项选择题
Film has properties that set it apart from painting, sculpture, novels, and plays. It is
also, in its most popular and powerful form, a story telling medium that shares many
elements with the short story and the novel. And since film presents its stories in
dramatic form, it has even more in common with the stage play: Both plays and
movies act out or dramatize, show rather than tell, what happens.
Unlike the novel, short story, or play, however, film is not handy to study; it
cannot be effectively frozen on the printed page. The novel and short story are
relatively easy to study because they are written to be read. The stage play is slightly
more difficult to study because it is written to be performed. But plays are printed,
and because they rely heavily on the spoken word, imaginative readers can conjure
up at least a pale imitation of the experience they might have been watching a
performance on stage. This cannot be said of the screenplay, for a film depends
greatly on visual and other nonvisual elements that are not easily expressed in
writing. The screenplay requires so much “filling in” by our imagination that we
cannot really approximate the experience of a film by reading a screenplay, and
reading a screenplay is worthwhile only if we have already seen the film. Thus, most
screenplays are published not to read but rather to be remembered.Still, film should not be ignored because studying it requires extra effort. And the
fact that we do not generally “read” films does not mean we should ignore the
principles of literary or dramatic analysis when we see a film. Literature and films do
share many elements and communicate many things in similar ways. Perceptive film
analysis rests on the principles used in literary analysis, and if we apply what we have
learned in the study of literature to our analysis of films, we will be far ahead of those
who do not. Therefore, before we turn to the unique elements of film, we need to
look into the elements that film shares with any good story.
Dividing film into its various elements for analysis is a somewhat artificial
process, for the elements of any art form never exist in isolation. It is impossible, for
example, to isolate plot from character: Events influence people, and people
influence events; the two are always closely interwoven in any fictional, dramatic, or
cinematic work. Nevertheless, the analytical method uses such a fragmenting
technique for ease and convenience. But it does so with the assumption that we can
study these elements in isolation without losing sight of their interdependence or
their relationship to the whole.
From the third paragraph we learn that _____.
A ： the means by which we analyze a literary work cannot be applied to film analysis
B ： a good film and a good story have many elements in common
C ： we should not pay extra effort to study films
D ： using the principles of literary analysis makes no difference in film analysis
73 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today I
would not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losing
contact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is thebeginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to
know. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refers
to the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
The passage asserts which of the following about commercial art?
A ： There are many examples of commercial art whose artistic merit is equal to that
of great works of art of the past.
B ： Commercial art is heavily influenced by whatever doctrines are fashionable in
the serious art world of the time.
C ： The line between commercial art and great art lies primarily in how an image is
used, not in the motivation for its creation.
D ： The pervasiveness of contemporary commercial art has led art historians to
undervalue representational skills.
74 、 不定项选择题
I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend’s house, and a bee stung
me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was
soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to
call my mother. As I told her what had happened, I felt myself blacking out, sinking to
the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver.
Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I’ve ever gotten, although
to this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an
eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his
Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the
phone cord.
Call me fanciful. Still, I’m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the
second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance.
This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eat
breakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already
served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp
bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in
his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his
palm. The blood was profuse.
Being a hematologist, my father didn’t panic: this was just business as usual.
But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by
the blood and my mother’s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar
rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a
roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled
around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already
attended to my mother.
Still think I’m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother
when her first fainting episode had occurred.She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of
thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had
his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia,
the other person in the room was a nurse, who was busy changing the dressing on
the patient’s incision, which hadn’t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had
to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in
place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father,
gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-
old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor.
The author’s mother fainting might be assumed to be related to _____.
A ： appendix
B ： abdomen
C ： nurse
D ： blood
75 、 不定项选择题
The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a
generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx, once widely spoken
on the Isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning,
however, have helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public
documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to
learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe’s regional
languages, spoken by more than a half-million of the country’s three million people.
The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a
resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last
month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National
Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind
devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the
United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had
bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster,
implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the
club—Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal
forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union.
The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted
overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by
less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were
proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or
the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact
laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many
people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow
with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings
that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style
waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European
Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western
Europe—only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living.
Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and
women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and RichardBurton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and
Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue.
And Wales now boasts a national airline, Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means “land of
compatriots”, is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation’s symbol
since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere—on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell
phone covers.
“Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-
class citizens,” said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer
night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an
industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod,
Wales’s annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the
sounds of new Welsh bands.
“There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence,” Dyfan
continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-
speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his
generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago.
“We used to think. We can’t do anything, we’re only Welsh. Now I think that’s
changing.”
Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of the resurgence of Welsh
national identity?
A ： Welsh has witnessed a revival as a national language.
B ： Poverty-relief funds have come from the European Union.
C ： A Welsh national airline is currently in operation.
D ： The national symbol has become a familiar sight.
76 、 不定项选择题
The miserable fate of Enron’s employees will be a landmark in business history, one
of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again.
This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their
retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens
again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron
workers represents something even larger than it seems. It’s the latest turn in the
unwinding of one of the most audacious promises of the 20th century.
The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially
everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the
19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to
dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food,
warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise
became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in
need and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour
unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant
corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the
promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect
was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal
of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the
average person’s stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I’m on
my own. Now it became, ultimately I’ll be taken care of.The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the
1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring
massively, with huge Layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of
corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended its no-layoff policy. AT&T fired thousands,
many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom
killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also
in decline. Labour-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in
decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans
realized that Social Security won’t provide social security for any of us.
A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs
easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, which
obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined
contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most
common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). the significance of the 401(k)
is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person’s economic fate back on the
employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each
year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it’s
worth when the employee retires.
Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement
savings went in employees’ 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how
much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron
matched a certain proportion of each employee’s 401(k) contribution with company
stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but
that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match
employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron
case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the
company’s problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold.
Second, Enron’s 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan
administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have
closed their accounts if they wanted to.
But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of
employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their
401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were
offered. Of course that wasn’t prudent, but it’s what some of them did.
The Enron employees’ retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from
guaranteed economic security. That’s why preventing such a thing from ever
happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I’ll-be-taken-care-
of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won’t be
complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a
20th-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like
most people in most times and places, they’re on their own.
Why does the author say at the beginning “The miserable fate of Enron’s
employees will be a landmark in business history…”?
A ： Because the company has gone bankrupt.
B ： ecause such events would never happen again.
C ： Because many Enron workers lost their retirement savings.
D ： Because it signifies a turning point in economic security.77 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today I
would not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losing
contact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is the
beginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to
know. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refers
to the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
It can be inferred from the passage that someone who wanted to analyze the
“grammar and semantics” of the language of art would most appropriately
comment on which of the following?
A ： The relationship between the drawing in a comic strip and the accompanying
text.
B ： The amount of detail that can be included in a tiny illustration on a postage
stamp.
C ： The sociological implications of the images chosen to advertise a particular
product.
D ： The particular juxtaposition of shapes in an illustration that makes one shape
look as though it were behind another.
78 、 不定项选择题Film has properties that set it apart from painting, sculpture, novels, and plays. It is
also, in its most popular and powerful form, a story telling medium that shares many
elements with the short story and the novel. And since film presents its stories in
dramatic form, it has even more in common with the stage play: Both plays and
movies act out or dramatize, show rather than tell, what happens.
Unlike the novel, short story, or play, however, film is not handy to study; it
cannot be effectively frozen on the printed page. The novel and short story are
relatively easy to study because they are written to be read. The stage play is slightly
more difficult to study because it is written to be performed. But plays are printed,
and because they rely heavily on the spoken word, imaginative readers can conjure
up at least a pale imitation of the experience they might have been watching a
performance on stage. This cannot be said of the screenplay, for a film depends
greatly on visual and other nonvisual elements that are not easily expressed in
writing. The screenplay requires so much “filling in” by our imagination that we
cannot really approximate the experience of a film by reading a screenplay, and
reading a screenplay is worthwhile only if we have already seen the film. Thus, most
screenplays are published not to read but rather to be remembered.
Still, film should not be ignored because studying it requires extra effort. And the
fact that we do not generally “read” films does not mean we should ignore the
principles of literary or dramatic analysis when we see a film. Literature and films do
share many elements and communicate many things in similar ways. Perceptive film
analysis rests on the principles used in literary analysis, and if we apply what we have
learned in the study of literature to our analysis of films, we will be far ahead of those
who do not. Therefore, before we turn to the unique elements of film, we need to
look into the elements that film shares with any good story.
Dividing film into its various elements for analysis is a somewhat artificial
process, for the elements of any art form never exist in isolation. It is impossible, for
example, to isolate plot from character: Events influence people, and people
influence events; the two are always closely interwoven in any fictional, dramatic, or
cinematic work. Nevertheless, the analytical method uses such a fragmenting
technique for ease and convenience. But it does so with the assumption that we can
study these elements in isolation without losing sight of their interdependence or
their relationship to the whole.
What does the word “it” refers to in the last sentence of the passage?
A ： The analytical method.
B ： The fragmenting technique.
C ： Ease.
D ： Convenience.
79 、 不定项选择题
I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend’s house, and a bee stung
me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was
soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to
call my mother. As I told her what had happened, I felt myself blacking out, sinking to
the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver.
Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I’ve ever gotten, althoughto this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an
eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his
Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the
phone cord.
Call me fanciful. Still, I’m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the
second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance.
This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eat
breakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already
served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp
bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in
his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his
palm. The blood was profuse.
Being a hematologist, my father didn’t panic: this was just business as usual.
But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by
the blood and my mother’s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar
rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a
roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled
around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already
attended to my mother.
Still think I’m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother
when her first fainting episode had occurred.
She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of
thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had
his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia,
the other person in the room was a nurse, who was busy changing the dressing on
the patient’s incision, which hadn’t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had
to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in
place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father,
gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-
old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor.
“At this point” in this article most probably means _____.
A ： at this moment
B ： At this part
C ： at this house
D ： at this corner
80 、 不定项选择题
Auctions are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer.
He asked the crowed 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 Autcio, meaning “increase.” The Romans usually sold in this
way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called subhasta, meaning “under the
spear,” a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather, InEnglish 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 as 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 I 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 the goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct
interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible.
The auctioneer may decide to sell the “lots” out of the order because _____.
A ： he sometimes wants to confuse the buyers
B ： he knows from experience that certain people will want to buy certain items
C ： he wants to keep certain people waiting
D ： he wants to reduce the number of buyers
81 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today I
would not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losing
contact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is the
beginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing toknow. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refers
to the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
The author of the passage explicitly,?disagrees?with which of the following
statements?
A ： In modern society even non-artists can master techniques that great artists of
the 14th?century did not employ.
B ： The ability to represent a three-dimensional object on a flat surface has nothing
to do with art.
C ： In modern society the victory of representational skills has created a problem
for art critics.
D ： The way that artists are able to represent the visible world is an area that needs
a great deal more study before it can be fully understood.
82 、 不定项选择题
The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a
generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx, once widely spoken
on the Isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning,
however, have helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public
documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to
learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe’s regional
languages, spoken by more than a half-million of the country’s three million people.
The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a
resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last
month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National
Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind
devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the
United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had
bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster,
implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the
club—Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal
forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union.
The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted
overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by
less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were
proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or
the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact
laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many
people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow
with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings
that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style
waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the EuropeanUnion will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western
Europe—only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living.
Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and
women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard
Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and
Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue.
And Wales now boasts a national airline, Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means “land of
compatriots”, is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation’s symbol
since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere—on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell
phone covers.
“Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-
class citizens,” said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer
night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an
industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod,
Wales’s annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the
sounds of new Welsh bands.
“There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence,” Dyfan
continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-
speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his
generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago.
“We used to think. We can’t do anything, we’re only Welsh. Now I think that’s
changing.”
Wales is different from Scotland in all the following aspects EXCEPT _____.
A ： people’s desire for devolution
B ： locals’ turnout for the voting
C ： powers of the legislative body
D ： status of the national language
83 、 不定项选择题
About a dozen years ago my wife and I planted a hedge of twenty-seven arborvitae
trees along the border of our backyard, which, although our house sits on nineteen
acres of fields and woods, is also the back border of our property. A sloping hayfield
with a realtor’s dream of panoramic views lies directly behind us. So the hedge was
our attempt to secure privacy for the future. The nurseryman who sold us the shrubs
assured us they were the best species for our purpose and climate. I measured and
marked the planting sites, called in “Chink” Norris (whose possibly racist nickname
I’ve not looked into any more than I have the nurseryman’s credentials) to come
with his small backhoe and dig the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the first year, with results that were everything I’d
been promised: dense, hardy, and luxuriant, a towering bulwark of green. Thus
began an episode of great vexation and buffoonery in my life, known and (I have no
doubt) merrily recounted in local circles as the tale of “Garret and his trees”, or as
my wife puts it, “Garret and the deer.” It so happens that we live next to one of the
county’s most extensive “deer yard”, those areas of canopied woods to which the
deer retire in winter, making networks of deeply furrowed tracks and foraging as best
they can until there’s a declared winner in the yearly race between spring andstarvation.
It also happens that deer find arborvitae a delicacy, related to the cedar that they
also love, but thicker and more succulent. By the second winter they’d found and
attacked my trees. I fought back, not with a vengeance—I stopped short of that—but
with something close to obsession. I erected fence structures that made our
backyard look like a scene from the Somme. I played recordings of wolves howling,
recordings of me howling. I fired pistol shots at random hours of the night. I hung or
sprinkled repellents of blood meal, urine, (mine), and deodorant soap. Hearing that
deer were repelled by the scent of human hair, I asked some hair dressers to set
aside their sweepings in a bag with, as the saying goes, my name on it.
As any warden will tell you, if deer are hungry enough they will get through
anything, which this year included an electric fence hooked to a charger supposedly
powerful enough to deter an elephant. So the farmer who’d helped me rig it up
assured me. What he did not tell me, because he did not know, was that the
insulating snowpack would prevent an animal from completing the circuit with the
ground. In came the deer like a school of piranhas. This was shortly after a man from
Connecticut purchased the hayfield behind our house for a price few of my neighbors
could afforded and none of them could believe and set about measuring the
foundations of a house.
Why the author sets up an electric fence?
A ： as a safety precaution
B ： to prevent the harassment by deer
C ： as part of house decoration plan
D ： to halt potential thieves and robbers
84 、 不定项选择题
Auctions are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer.
He asked the crowed 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 Autcio, meaning “increase.” The Romans usually sold in this
way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called subhasta, meaning “under the
spear,” a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather, In
English 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 as 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 ofgoods to be sold together, called a “lot,” is usually given a number. The auctioneer
need not begin with Lot I 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 the goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct
interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible.
A candle used to burn at auction sales _____.
A ： because they took place at night
B ： as a signal for the crowd to gather
C ： to keep the auctioneer warm
D ： to limit the time when offers could be made
85 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today I
would not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losing
contact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is the
beginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to
know. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refers
to the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage, about the adherents of
“certain theories of nonrepresentational art”?A ： They consider the use of illusion to be inappropriate in contemporary art.
B ： They do not agree the marks on a flat surface can ever satisfactorily convey the
illusion of three-dimensional space.
C ： They do not discuss important works of art created in the past.
D ： They do not think that the representation of nature was ever the primary goal of
past painters.
86 、 不定项选择题
I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend’s house, and a bee stung
me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was
soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to
call my mother. As I told her what had happened, I felt myself blacking out, sinking to
the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver.
Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I’ve ever gotten, although
to this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an
eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his
Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the
phone cord.
Call me fanciful. Still, I’m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the
second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance.
This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eat
breakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already
served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp
bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in
his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his
palm. The blood was profuse.
Being a hematologist, my father didn’t panic: this was just business as usual.
But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by
the blood and my mother’s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar
rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a
roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled
around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already
attended to my mother.
Still think I’m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother
when her first fainting episode had occurred.
She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of
thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had
his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia,
the other person in the room was a nurse, who was busy changing the dressing on
the patient’s incision, which hadn’t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had
to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in
place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father,
gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-
old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor.
One most plausible reason that the author’s father did not panic when he cut
himself is _____.
A ： He had served in the armyB ： He was the head of the family
C ： He tried to maintain his authority
D ： He was an expert on blood
87 、 不定项选择题
Modern technology and science have produced a wealth of new materials and new
ways of using old materials. For the artist this means wider opportunities. There is no
doubt that the limitations of materials and nature of tools both restrict and shape a
man’s work. Observe how the development of plastics and light metals along with
new methods of welding has changed the direction of sculpture. Transparent plastic
materials allow one to look through an object, to see its various sides superimposed
on each other (as in Cubism or in an X-ray). Today, welding is as prevalent as casting
was in the past. This new method encourages open designs, where surrounding and
intervening space becomes as important as form itself.
More ambiguous than other scientific inventions familiar to modern artists, but
no less influential, are the psychoanalytic studies of Freud and his followers,
discoveries that have infiltrated recent art, especially Surrealism. The Surrealists, in
their struggle to escape the monotony and frustrations of everyday life, claimed that
dreams were the only hope. Turning to the irrational world of their unconscious, they
banished all time barriers and moral judgements to combine disconnected dream
experiences from the past, present and intervening psychological states. The
Surrealists were concerned with overlapping emotions more than with overlapping
forms. Their paintings often become segmented capsules of associative experiences.
For them, obsessive and often unrelated images replaced the direct emotional
message of expressionism. They did not need to smash paint and canvas: they went
beyond this to smash the whole continuity of logical thought.
There is little doubt that contemporary art has taken much from contemporary
life. In a period when science has made revolutionary strides, artists in their studios
have not been unaware of scientists in their laboratories. But this has rarely been a
one-way street. Painters and sculptors, through admittedly influenced by modern
science, have also molded and changed our world. If break-up has been a vital part of
their expression, it has not always been a symbol of destruction. Quite the contrary:
it has been used to examine more fully, to penetrate more deeply, to analyze more
thoroughly, to enlarge, isolate and make more familiar certain aspects of lire that
earlier we were apt to neglect. In addition, it sometimes provides rich multiple
experiences so organized as not merely to reflect our world, but in fact to interpret it.
The welding techniques _____.
A ： can cause a lot of changes in sculpture arts
B ： permit details of an object to be seen clearly
C ： can superimpose multiple sides of sculptor’s designs
D ： can make artists adaptable to surroundings
88 、 不定项选择题
The miserable fate of Enron’s employees will be a landmark in business history, oneof those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again.
This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their
retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens
again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron
workers represents something even larger than it seems. It’s the latest turn in the
unwinding of one of the most audacious promises of the 20th century.
The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially
everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the
19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to
dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food,
warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise
became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in
need and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour
unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant
corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the
promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect
was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal
of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the
average person’s stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I’m on
my own. Now it became, ultimately I’ll be taken care of.
The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the
1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring
massively, with huge Layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of
corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended its no-layoff policy. AT&T fired thousands,
many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom
killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also
in decline. Labour-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in
decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans
realized that Social Security won’t provide social security for any of us.
A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs
easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, which
obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined
contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most
common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). the significance of the 401(k)
is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person’s economic fate back on the
employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each
year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it’s
worth when the employee retires.
Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement
savings went in employees’ 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how
much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron
matched a certain proportion of each employee’s 401(k) contribution with company
stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but
that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match
employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron
case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the
company’s problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold.
Second, Enron’s 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan
administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have
closed their accounts if they wanted to.
But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands ofemployees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their
401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were
offered. Of course that wasn’t prudent, but it’s what some of them did.
The Enron employees’ retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from
guaranteed economic security. That’s why preventing such a thing from ever
happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I’ll-be-taken-care-
of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won’t be
complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a
20th-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like
most people in most times and places, they’re on their own.
Which is NOT seen as a lesson drawn from the Enron disaster?
A ： The 401(k) assets should be placed in more than one investment option.
B ： Employees have to take up responsibilities for themselves.
C ： Such events could happen again as it is not easy to change people’s mind.
D ： Economic security won’t be taken for granted by future young workers.
89 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today I
would not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losing
contact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is the
beginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to
know. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refersto the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
The author suggests which of the following about art historians?
A ： They do not believe that illusionist tricks have become trivial.
B ： They generally spend little time studying contemporary artists.
C ： They have not given enough consideration to how the representation of nature
has become commonplace.
D ： They generally tend to argue about theories rather than address substantive
issues.
90 、 不定项选择题
The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a
generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx, once widely spoken
on the Isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning,
however, have helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public
documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to
learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe’s regional
languages, spoken by more than a half-million of the country’s three million people.
The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a
resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last
month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National
Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind
devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the
United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had
bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster,
implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the
club—Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal
forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union.
The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted
overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by
less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were
proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or
the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact
laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many
people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow
with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings
that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style
waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European
Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western
Europe—only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living.
Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and
women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard
Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and
Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue.
And Wales now boasts a national airline, Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means “land of
compatriots”, is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation’s symbol
since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere—on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cellphone covers.
“Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-
class citizens,” said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer
night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an
industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod,
Wales’s annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the
sounds of new Welsh bands.
“There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence,” Dyfan
continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-
speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his
generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago.
“We used to think. We can’t do anything, we’re only Welsh. Now I think that’s
changing.”
According to Dyfan Jones what has changed is _____.
A ： people’s mentality
B ： pop culture
C ： town’s appearance
D ： possibilities for the people
91 、 不定项选择题
Auctions are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer.
He asked the crowed 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 Autcio, meaning “increase.” The Romans usually sold in this
way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called subhasta, meaning “under the
spear,” a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather, In
English 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 as 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 I 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 the goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct
interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible.The Romans used to sell _____ by auction.
A ： spoilt goods
B ： old-worn weapons
C ： property taken from the enemy
D ： spears
92 、 不定项选择题
The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a
generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx, once widely spoken
on the Isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning,
however, have helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public
documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to
learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe’s regional
languages, spoken by more than a half-million of the country’s three million people.
The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a
resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last
month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National
Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind
devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the
United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had
bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster,
implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the
club—Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal
forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union.
The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted
overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by
less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were
proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or
the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact
laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many
people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow
with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings
that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style
waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European
Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western
Europe—only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living.
Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and
women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard
Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and
Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue.
And Wales now boasts a national airline, Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means “land of
compatriots”, is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation’s symbol
since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere—on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell
phone covers.
“Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-
class citizens,” said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer
night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an
industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod,Wales’s annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the
sounds of new Welsh bands.
“There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence,” Dyfan
continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-
speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his
generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago.
“We used to think. We can’t do anything, we’re only Welsh. Now I think that’s
changing.”
According to the passage, devolution was mainly meant to _____.
A ： maintain the present status among the nations.
B ： reduce legislative powers of England.
C ： create a better state of equality among the nations.
D ： grant more say to all the nations in the union.
93 、 不定项选择题
The miserable fate of Enron’s employees will be a landmark in business history, one
of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again.
This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their
retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens
again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron
workers represents something even larger than it seems. It’s the latest turn in the
unwinding of one of the most audacious promises of the 20th century.
The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially
everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the
19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to
dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food,
warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise
became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in
need and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour
unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant
corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the
promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect
was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal
of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the
average person’s stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I’m on
my own. Now it became, ultimately I’ll be taken care of.
The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the
1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring
massively, with huge Layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of
corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended its no-layoff policy. AT&T fired thousands,
many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom
killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also
in decline. Labour-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in
decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans
realized that Social Security won’t provide social security for any of us.
A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs
easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, whichobligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined
contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most
common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). the significance of the 401(k)
is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person’s economic fate back on the
employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each
year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it’s
worth when the employee retires.
Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement
savings went in employees’ 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how
much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron
matched a certain proportion of each employee’s 401(k) contribution with company
stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but
that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match
employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron
case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the
company’s problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold.
Second, Enron’s 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan
administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have
closed their accounts if they wanted to.
But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of
employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their
401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were
offered. Of course that wasn’t prudent, but it’s what some of them did.
The Enron employees’ retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from
guaranteed economic security. That’s why preventing such a thing from ever
happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I’ll-be-taken-care-
of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won’t be
complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a
20th-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like
most people in most times and places, they’re on their own.
According to the passage, the combined efforts by governments, layout unions and
big corporations to guarantee economic comfort have led to a significant change in
_____.
A ： people’s outlook on life
B ： people’s life styles
C ： people’s living standard
D ： people’s social values
94 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today Iwould not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losing
contact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is the
beginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to
know. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refers
to the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
Which of the following best states that author’s attitude toward comics, as
expressed in the passage?
A ： They constitute an innovative art from.
B ： They can be a worthwhile subject for study.
C ： They are critically important to an understanding of modern art.
D ： Their visual structure is more complex than that of medieval art.
95 、 不定项选择题
Film has properties that set it apart from painting, sculpture, novels, and plays. It is
also, in its most popular and powerful form, a story telling medium that shares many
elements with the short story and the novel. And since film presents its stories in
dramatic form, it has even more in common with the stage play: Both plays and
movies act out or dramatize, show rather than tell, what happens.
Unlike the novel, short story, or play, however, film is not handy to study; it
cannot be effectively frozen on the printed page. The novel and short story are
relatively easy to study because they are written to be read. The stage play is slightly
more difficult to study because it is written to be performed. But plays are printed,
and because they rely heavily on the spoken word, imaginative readers can conjure
up at least a pale imitation of the experience they might have been watching a
performance on stage. This cannot be said of the screenplay, for a film depends
greatly on visual and other nonvisual elements that are not easily expressed in
writing. The screenplay requires so much “filling in” by our imagination that we
cannot really approximate the experience of a film by reading a screenplay, andreading a screenplay is worthwhile only if we have already seen the film. Thus, most
screenplays are published not to read but rather to be remembered.
Still, film should not be ignored because studying it requires extra effort. And the
fact that we do not generally “read” films does not mean we should ignore the
principles of literary or dramatic analysis when we see a film. Literature and films do
share many elements and communicate many things in similar ways. Perceptive film
analysis rests on the principles used in literary analysis, and if we apply what we have
learned in the study of literature to our analysis of films, we will be far ahead of those
who do not. Therefore, before we turn to the unique elements of film, we need to
look into the elements that film shares with any good story.
Dividing film into its various elements for analysis is a somewhat artificial
process, for the elements of any art form never exist in isolation. It is impossible, for
example, to isolate plot from character: Events influence people, and people
influence events; the two are always closely interwoven in any fictional, dramatic, or
cinematic work. Nevertheless, the analytical method uses such a fragmenting
technique for ease and convenience. But it does so with the assumption that we can
study these elements in isolation without losing sight of their interdependence or
their relationship to the whole.
Why can’t we divide film into various elements for analysis?
A ： Because these elements are interwoven with each other and cannot be
separated without failing to appreciate a film as a whole.
B ： ecause films cannot be written down and it is inconvenient to analyze them
C ： Because films elements are too complicated.
D ： Because films need not to be analyzed in detail.
96 、 不定项选择题
The miserable fate of Enron’s employees will be a landmark in business history, one
of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again.
This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their
retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens
again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron
workers represents something even larger than it seems. It’s the latest turn in the
unwinding of one of the most audacious promises of the 20th century.
The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially
everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the
19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to
dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food,
warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise
became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in
need and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour
unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant
corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the
promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect
was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal
of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the
average person’s stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I’m onmy own. Now it became, ultimately I’ll be taken care of.
The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the
1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring
massively, with huge Layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of
corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended its no-layoff policy. AT&T fired thousands,
many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom
killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also
in decline. Labour-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in
decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans
realized that Social Security won’t provide social security for any of us.
A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs
easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, which
obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined
contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most
common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). the significance of the 401(k)
is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person’s economic fate back on the
employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each
year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it’s
worth when the employee retires.
Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement
savings went in employees’ 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how
much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron
matched a certain proportion of each employee’s 401(k) contribution with company
stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but
that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match
employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron
case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the
company’s problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold.
Second, Enron’s 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan
administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have
closed their accounts if they wanted to.
But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of
employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their
401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were
offered. Of course that wasn’t prudent, but it’s what some of them did.
The Enron employees’ retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from
guaranteed economic security. That’s why preventing such a thing from ever
happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I’ll-be-taken-care-
of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won’t be
complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a
20th-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like
most people in most times and places, they’re on their own.
Changes in pension schemes were also part of _____.
A ： the corporate lay-offs
B ： the government cuts in welfare spending
C ： the economic restructuring
D ： the warning power of labors unions97 、 不定项选择题
Modern technology and science have produced a wealth of new materials and new
ways of using old materials. For the artist this means wider opportunities. There is no
doubt that the limitations of materials and nature of tools both restrict and shape a
man’s work. Observe how the development of plastics and light metals along with
new methods of welding has changed the direction of sculpture. Transparent plastic
materials allow one to look through an object, to see its various sides superimposed
on each other (as in Cubism or in an X-ray). Today, welding is as prevalent as casting
was in the past. This new method encourages open designs, where surrounding and
intervening space becomes as important as form itself.
More ambiguous than other scientific inventions familiar to modern artists, but
no less influential, are the psychoanalytic studies of Freud and his followers,
discoveries that have infiltrated recent art, especially Surrealism. The Surrealists, in
their struggle to escape the monotony and frustrations of everyday life, claimed that
dreams were the only hope. Turning to the irrational world of their unconscious, they
banished all time barriers and moral judgements to combine disconnected dream
experiences from the past, present and intervening psychological states. The
Surrealists were concerned with overlapping emotions more than with overlapping
forms. Their paintings often become segmented capsules of associative experiences.
For them, obsessive and often unrelated images replaced the direct emotional
message of expressionism. They did not need to smash paint and canvas: they went
beyond this to smash the whole continuity of logical thought.
There is little doubt that contemporary art has taken much from contemporary
life. In a period when science has made revolutionary strides, artists in their studios
have not been unaware of scientists in their laboratories. But this has rarely been a
one-way street. Painters and sculptors, through admittedly influenced by modern
science, have also molded and changed our world. If break-up has been a vital part of
their expression, it has not always been a symbol of destruction. Quite the contrary:
it has been used to examine more fully, to penetrate more deeply, to analyze more
thoroughly, to enlarge, isolate and make more familiar certain aspects of lire that
earlier we were apt to neglect. In addition, it sometimes provides rich multiple
experiences so organized as not merely to reflect our world, but in fact to interpret it.
We can learn from the text mat Freud’s studies _____.
A ： are more ambiguous than any other scientific invention
B ： have influenced other scientific inventions
C ： cause Surrealism
D ： have infiltrated Surrealism
98 、 不定项选择题
About a dozen years ago my wife and I planted a hedge of twenty-seven arborvitae
trees along the border of our backyard, which, although our house sits on nineteen
acres of fields and woods, is also the back border of our property. A sloping hayfield
with a realtor’s dream of panoramic views lies directly behind us. So the hedge was
our attempt to secure privacy for the future. The nurseryman who sold us the shrubs
assured us they were the best species for our purpose and climate. I measured andmarked the planting sites, called in “Chink” Norris (whose possibly racist nickname
I’ve not looked into any more than I have the nurseryman’s credentials) to come
with his small backhoe and dig the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the holes. As advised, I faithfully watered and
fertilized each tree throughout the first year, with results that were everything I’d
been promised: dense, hardy, and luxuriant, a towering bulwark of green. Thus
began an episode of great vexation and buffoonery in my life, known and (I have no
doubt) merrily recounted in local circles as the tale of “Garret and his trees”, or as
my wife puts it, “Garret and the deer.” It so happens that we live next to one of the
county’s most extensive “deer yard”, those areas of canopied woods to which the
deer retire in winter, making networks of deeply furrowed tracks and foraging as best
they can until there’s a declared winner in the yearly race between spring and
starvation.
It also happens that deer find arborvitae a delicacy, related to the cedar that they
also love, but thicker and more succulent. By the second winter they’d found and
attacked my trees. I fought back, not with a vengeance—I stopped short of that—but
with something close to obsession. I erected fence structures that made our
backyard look like a scene from the Somme. I played recordings of wolves howling,
recordings of me howling. I fired pistol shots at random hours of the night. I hung or
sprinkled repellents of blood meal, urine, (mine), and deodorant soap. Hearing that
deer were repelled by the scent of human hair, I asked some hair dressers to set
aside their sweepings in a bag with, as the saying goes, my name on it.
As any warden will tell you, if deer are hungry enough they will get through
anything, which this year included an electric fence hooked to a charger supposedly
powerful enough to deter an elephant. So the farmer who’d helped me rig it up
assured me. What he did not tell me, because he did not know, was that the
insulating snowpack would prevent an animal from completing the circuit with the
ground. In came the deer like a school of piranhas. This was shortly after a man from
Connecticut purchased the hayfield behind our house for a price few of my neighbors
could afforded and none of them could believe and set about measuring the
foundations of a house.
What measure was NOT taken by the author to deter the deer?
A ： urine
B ： gun shots
C ： watchdog
D ： deodorant soup
99 、 不定项选择题
When we consider great painters of the past, the study of art and the study of illusion
cannot always be separated. By illusion I mean those contrivances of color, line,
shape, and forth that lead us to see marks on a flat surface as depicting three-
dimensional objects in space. I must emphasize that I am not making a plea,
disguised or otherwise, for the exercise of illusionist tricks in painting today, although
I am, in fact rather critical of certain theories of non-representational art. But to
argue over these theories would be to miss the point. That the discoveries and effects
of representation that were the pride of earlier artists have become trivial today I
would not deny for a moment. Yet I believe that we are in real danger of losingcontact with past masters if we accept the fashionable doctrine that such matters
never had anything to do with art. The very reason why the representation of nature
can now be considered something commonplace should be of the greatest interest to
art historians. Never before has there been an age when the visual image was so
cheap in every sense of the word. We are surrounded and assailed by posters and
advertisements, comics and magazine illustrations. We see aspects of reality
represented on television, postage stamps, and food packages. Painting is taught in
school and practiced as a pastime, and many modest amateurs have mastered tricks
that would have looked like sheer magic to the 14th?century painter Giotto. Even the
crude colored renderings on a cereal box might have made Giotto’s contemporaries
gasp. Perhaps there are people who concluded from this that the cereal box is
superior to a Giotto; I do not. But I think that the victory and vulgarization of
representational skills create a problem for both art historians and critics. In this
connection it is instructive to remember the Greek saying that to marvel is the
beginning of knowledge and if we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to
know. I believe we must restore our sense of wonder at the capacity to conjure up by
forms, lines, shades, or colors those mysterious phantoms of visual reality we call
“pictures.” Even comics and advertisements, rightly viewed, provide food for
thought. Just as the study of poetry remains incomplete without an awareness of the
language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be increasingly supplemented by
inquiry into the “linguistics” of the visual image. The way the language of art refers
to the visible world is both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely
unknown except to artists who use it as we use all language—without needing to
know its grammar and semantics.
The author’s statement regarding how artists use the languages of art implies that
_____.
A ： artists are better equipped than art historians to provide detailed evaluations of
other artist’s work
B ： many artists have an unusually quick, intuitive understanding of language
C ： artists can produce works of art even if they cannot analyze their methods of
doing so
D ： artists of the past, such as Giotto, were better educated about artistic issues
than were artists of the author’s time
100 、 不定项选择题
The miserable fate of Enron’s employees will be a landmark in business history, one
of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again.
This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their
retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens
again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron
workers represents something even larger than it seems. It’s the latest turn in the
unwinding of one of the most audacious promises of the 20th century.
The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially
everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the
19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to
dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food,
warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise
became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone inneed and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour
unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant
corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the
promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect
was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal
of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the
average person’s stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I’m on
my own. Now it became, ultimately I’ll be taken care of.
The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the
1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring
massively, with huge Layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of
corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended its no-layoff policy. AT&T fired thousands,
many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom
killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also
in decline. Labour-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in
decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans
realized that Social Security won’t provide social security for any of us.
A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs
easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, which
obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined
contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most
common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). the significance of the 401(k)
is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person’s economic fate back on the
employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each
year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it’s
worth when the employee retires.
Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement
savings went in employees’ 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how
much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron
matched a certain proportion of each employee’s 401(k) contribution with company
stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but
that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match
employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron
case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the
company’s problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold.
Second, Enron’s 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan
administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have
closed their accounts if they wanted to.
But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of
employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their
401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were
offered. Of course that wasn’t prudent, but it’s what some of them did.
The Enron employees’ retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from
guaranteed economic security. That’s why preventing such a thing from ever
happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I’ll-be-taken-care-
of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won’t be
complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a
20th-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like
most people in most times and places, they’re on their own.
Thousands of employees chose Enron as their sole investment option mainly because_____.
A ： the 401(k) made them responsible for their own future
B ： Enron offered to add company stock to their investment
C ： their employers intended to cut back on pension spending
D ： Enron’s offer was similar to a defined-benefit plan
