2015年中科院考博英语真题4

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Part B Reading Comprehension

Section A (60 minutes, 30 points)

Directions: Below each of the following passages you will find some questions or incomplete statements. Each question or statement is followed by four choices marked A, B，C，and D. Read each passage carefully, and then select the choice that best answers the question or completes the statement. Mark the letter of your choice with a single bar across the square brackets on your machine-scoring ANSWER SHEET.

Passage Two

Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia， without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change—pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England—and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem, imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw； to pump more oil，drill more wells； to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants.

That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity—from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich—whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-century England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old: make the last ten thousand years equal to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2 for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and everything from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy of survival than economic growth. The latter has changed so much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.

Although food scarcity, when it occurs, is a localized problem, other kinds of scarcity are already here. Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum.

42. Economists are prone to .

A. emphasize the differences between economic growth and scarcity

B. see economy from an ecological perspective

C. ignore the environmental impact of economic growth

D. use different approaches to economics and ecology

43. What does the author think of ecosystems?

A. They may deteriorate. B. They may benefit from the economy.

C. They are associated with productivity. D. They are closely related to technology.

44. What does the passage say about the predictions made by Thomas Robert Malthus and Paul Ehrlich?

A. They proved to be useful. B. They have not come true.

C. They proved to be accurate. D. They have not drawn enough attention.

45. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s?