2010英语专八真题及答案.doc

2010英语专八真题
2010英语专八真题
TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2010)
-GRADE EIGHT-
PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION (35 MIN)
SECTION A MINI-LECTURE
In this section you will hear a mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture is over, you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for note-taking.
Complete the gap-filling task. Some of the gaps below may require a maximum of THREE words. Make sure the word(s) you fill in is (are) both grammatically & semantically acceptable. You may refer to your notes.
Paralinguistic Features of Language
In face-to-face communication speakers often alter their tomes of voice or change their physical postures in order to convey messages. These means are called paralinguistic features of language, which fall into two categories.
First category: vocal paralinguistic features
A. (1)__________: to express attitude or intention (1)__________
B. Examples
1. whispering: need for secrecy
2. breathiness: deep emotion
3. (2)_________: unimportance (2)__________
4. nasality: anxiety
5. extra lip-rounding: greater intimacy
Second category: physical paralinguistic features
A. facial expressions\
1. (3)_______ (3)__________
----- smiling: signal of pleasure or welcome
2. less common expressions
----- eye brow raising: surprise or interest
----- lip biting: (4)________ (4)_________
B. gesture
gestures are related to culture.
1. British culture
----- shrugging shoulders: (5) ________ (5)__________
----- scratching head: puzzlement
2. other cultures
----- placing hand upon heart:(6)_______ (6)__________
----- pointing at nose: secret
C. proximity, posture and echoing
1. proximity: physical distance between speakers
----- closeness: intimacy or threat
----- (7)_______: formality or absence of interest (7)_________
Proximity is person-, culture- and (8)________ -specific. (8)_________
2. posture
----- hunched shoulders or a hanging head: to indicate(9)_____ (9)________
----- direct level eye contact: to express an open or challenging attitude
3. echoing
----- definition: imitation of similar posture
----- (10)______: aid in communication (10)___________
----- conscious imitation: mockery

SECTION B INTERVIEW
In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
1. According to Dr Johnson, diversity means
A. merging of different cultural identities.
B. more emphasis on homogeneity.
C. embracing of more ethnic differences.
D. acceptance of more branches of Christianity.
(You see, today, we use the word “diversity” to refer to more visible ethnic differences, ancient Americans, African American and Latino, for instance.)
2. According to the interview, which of the following statements in CORRECT?
A. Some places are more diverse than others.
B. Towns are less diverse than large cities.
C. Diversity can be seen everywhere.
D. American is a truly diverse country.
(Well, I think, in all these talks of diversity, there is a critical point that may be missed, that is, diversity is not occurring everywhere in the US.)
3. According to Dr Johnson, which place will witness a radical change in its racial makeup by 2025?
A. Maine
B. Selinsgrove
C. Philadelphia
D. California
(By 2025, being predicted, that figure will drop to just 34%, which indicates that the future change in a racial composition in California.)
4. During the interview Dr Johnson indicates that
A. greater racial diversity exists among younger populations.
B. both older and younger populations are racially diverse.
C. age diversity could lead to pension problems.
D. older populations are more racially diverse.
(For example, there is a large gap between the average age of the five stages of the youngest population and five stages of the oldest population.)
5. According to the interview, religious diversity
A. was most evident between 1990 and 2000.
B. exists among Muslim immigrants.
C. is restricted to certain places in the US.
D. is spreading to more parts of the country.
(They settled mainly in California and major north-eastern and mid-western cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Monosepalous)
SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST
In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your coloured answer sheet.
Question 6 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.
Now listen to the news.
6. What is the main idea of the news item?
A. Sony developed a computer chip for cell phones.
B. Japan will market its wallet phone abroad.
C. The wallet phone is one of the wireless innovations.
D. Reader devices are available at stores and stations.
Question 7 and 8 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions.
Now listen to the news.
7. Which of the following is mentioned as the government’s measure to control inflation?
A. Foreign investment.
B. Donor support.
C. Price control.
D. Bank prediction.
8. According to Kingdom Bank, what is the current inflation rate in Zimbabwe?
A. 20 million percent.
B. 2.2 million percent.
C. 11.2 million percent.
D. Over 11.2 million percent.
Question 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the question.
Now listen to the news.
9. Which of the following is CORRECT?
A. A big fire erupted on the Nile River.
B. Helicopters were used to evacuate people.
C. Five people were taken to hospital for burns.
D. A big fire took place on two floors.
10. The likely cause of the big fire is
A. electrical short-cut.
B. lack of fire-satefy measures.
C. terrorism.
D. not known.
PART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)
In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.
TEXT A

Still, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.

Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.

From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.

There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.

When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”

But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.

“Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

“When will it be decided?”

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

11. According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPT

A. taking foreign tourists around the city.

B. providing transport to school children.

C. carrying store supplies and purchases

D. carrying people over short distances.

12. Which of the following statements best describes the ric