2011年西北大学考博英语真题

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Part I: Structure and Vocabulary （20%）

Directions: Beneath each of the following sentences, there are four choices marked A, B，C and D. Choose the one that best completes the sentence. Mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter.

1. more than 65，000 described species of protozoa, of which more than half are fossils.

A. Being Chat there are B.There being C. Are there D. There are

2. Though in her personal life, Edna St. Vincent Millay was nonetheless about her work, usually producing several pages of complicated rhyme in a day.

A. jaded, feckless B. verbose, Ascetic

C. impulsive, disciplined D. self-assured, sanguine

3. Although Tom was aware that it would be to display annoyance publicly at the sales conference, he could not his irritation with the client’s unreasonable demands.

A. inadvisable, evince B. efficacious, suppress

C. captious, express D. impolitic, chide

4. Uncertainty differs from risk in that basis for estimating the probability of each potential condition occurring.

A. there is no B.although no C. there is not D. it is not

5. Noting that few employees showed any for complying with the corporation’s new safety regulations, Peterson was forced to conclude that acceptance of the regulations would be ，at best.

A. aptitude, unavoidable B.enthusiasm, grudging

C. respect, negotiable D. patience, imminent

6. The average level of United States prices grew very little from 1953 until the mid1960’s when .

A. did inflation begin B.inflation began

C. the beginning of inflation D. did the beginning of inflation

7. One theory about intelligence sees as the logical structure underlying

thinking and insists that since animals are mute, they must be _______ as well.

A. behavior, inactive B.heredity, thoughtful

C. adaptation, brutal D. language, mindless

8. Even though the folktales Perroult collected and retold were not solely French in origin, his versions of them were so decidedly French in style that later anthologizes of French

folktales have never them.

A. excluded B. admired C. collected D. promoted

9. Author Sraah Jewett established her literary reputation with Deep Haven, a collection of sketches .

A. with rural Maine life B.that life rural Maine

C. about life in Maine life D. life in rural Maine

10. In the late 1860’s，taxes were changed in the southern Us to require payment form plantation owners just from landless individuals.

A. despite B.whereas C. rather than D. other

11. School started on a cold day in February.

A. severe B. hitter C. such D. frozen

12. Because of the economic crisis, industrial output in the region remained .

A. motionless B. inactive C. stagnant D. immobile

13. The basic premise behind all agricultural production is available the riches of the soil for human consumption.

A. to be made B. the making C. making is D. to make

14. Nancy’s gone to work but her car’s still there. She by bus.

A. must have gone B.should have gone

C. ought to have gone D. could have gone

15. Unlike other creatures, who are shaped largely by their environment, human beings are products of a culture accumulated over centuries, yet one that is constantly being by massive infusions of new information from everywhere.

A. harsh, unconfirmed B.surrounding, upheld

C. immediate, transformed D. natural, mechanized

16. A mineral is any solid that has a definite chemical composition and a distinctive internal crystal structure.

A. natural occurrence of homogeneBusnaturally? occurring homogeneous

C. occurring naturally homogeneous), homogeneously naturally occurred

17. Paradoxically, England’s colonization of North America was by its success: the increasing prosperity of the colonies diminished their dependence upon, and hence their loyalty home country.

A. demonstrated B. determined C. undermined D. distinguish

18. All tropical storms develop over water that is warm enough to supply appreciable quantities of vapor to the air, the areas to watch for the development of tropical storms.

A. as it limited B. to limits 0. limiting D. was a limit to

19. The flowers from lack of water

A. withered B. flourished C. vanished D. stopped growing

20. The ability to communicate ideas and instructions was for the incredible development of the frontal brain lobe in human being.

A. necessary all that B. all that was necessary

C. all the necessities that D. such that all the necessities

Part II: Reading Comprehension (20%)

Directions: Each of the texts below is followed by some questions. For each question there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. Make the best choice for each question, and make you choice on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter.

Passage 1

Printmaking is the generic term for a number of processes, of which and engraving are two prime examples. Prints are made by pressing a sheet of paper (or other material) against an image bearing surface to which ink has been applied. When the paper is removed ,the image adds to it，but in reverse. The woodcut had been used in China from the fifth century A. D. for applying patterns to textiles. The process was not introduced into Europe until the fourteenth century, first for textiles, decoration and then for printing on paper. Woodcuts are created by a relief process. First, the artist take a block of wood, which has been sawed parallel to the grain, covers it with a white ground and then draws the image in ink. The background is carved away, leaving the design area slightly raised. The woodblock is inked, and the ink adheres to the raised image. It is then transferred to damp paper either by hand or with a printing press.

Engraving, which grew out of the goldsmith’s art, originated in Germany and northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. It is an intaglio process (from Italian intagliare,

“to carve”). The image is incised into a highly polished metal plate, usually copper, with a cutting instrument, or burin. The artist inks the plate and wipes it clean so that some ink

remains in the incised grooves. An impression is made on damp paper in a printing press, with sufficient pressure being applied so that the paper picks up the ink. Both woodcut and engraving have distinctive characteristics. Engraving lends itself to subtle modeling and shading through the use of fine lines. Hatching and cross-hatching determine the degree of light and shade in a print. Woodcuts tend to be more linear, with sharper contrasts between light and dark. Printmaking is well suited to the production of multiple images, a set of multiples is called an edition. Both methods can yield several hundred good-quality prints before the original block or plate begins to show signs of wear. Mass production of prints in the sixteenth century made images available, at a lower cost, to a much broader public than before.

21. What does the text mainly discuss?

A. The origins of textile decoration.

B.The characteristics of good-quality prints.

C. Two types of printmaking.

D. Types of paper used in printmaking.

22. The author’s purposes in Paragraph 2 is to describe .

A. the woodcuts found in China in the fifth century

B. the use of woodcuts in the textile industry

C. the process involved in creating a woodcut

D. the introduction of woodcuts to Europe

23. According to the text, all of the following are true about engraving EXCEPT that it .

A. developed from the art of the goldsmiths

B.requires that the paper be cut with a burin

C. originated in the fifteenth century

D. involves carving into a metal plate

24. According to the text，what do woodcut and engraving have in common?

A. Their designs arc slightly raised.

B.They achieve contrast through hatching and cross-hatching.

C. They were first used in Europe.

D. They allow multiple copies to be produced from one original.

25. According to the author, what made it possible for members of the general public to own prints in the sixteenth century?

A. Prints could be made at low cost.

B. The quality of paper and ink had improved.

C. Many people became involved in the printmaking industry

D. Decreased demand for prints kept prices affordable.

26. According to the text, all of the following are true about prints EXCEPT that they .

A. can be reproduced on materials other than paper

B. arc created from a reversed image

C. show variations between light and dark shades

D. require a printing press

Passage 2

Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as Western Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one carft do anything about. But the truth is once you’re off the beaten paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural

wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhabitants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, ex-

ploited the mind-set, being one of land as commodity rather than land as well, and priceless art on the scale of the Mona Lisa.

When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40- year contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for

a new smelter, those who had been dreaming of something like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries ,with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the project’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of want, hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark which officially had ended only in 1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting that destroying all vegetation and livestock, all spirit 一a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.

Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions-the remote and sparsely populated east —where the way of life had steadily declined to a point

of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many individual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing

rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermen were virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing everything they had worked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum

projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance, “Smelter or Death. ”

The contract with Alcoa would infuse the region with foreign capital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that

potentially could be sold to the rest of the world ； diversify an economy historically dependent on fish； and, in an appealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all of Iceland, once and for all, form the unpredictability of life itself. “We have to live，’’ Halldor & Acute Sgrimssion said in his sad, sonorous voice. Halldor, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving force behind the project. “We have a right to live. ”

27. According to the text, most Icelanders view land as something of .

A. environmental value B.commercial value

C. potential value for tourism D. great value for livelihood

28. What is Iceland’s old-aged advocates5 feeling toward the Alcoa project?

A. Iceland is wealthy enough to reject the project.

B. The project would lower life expectancy.

C. The project would cause environmental problems.

D. The project symbolizes an end to the colonial legacies.

29. The disappearance of the old way of life was due to all the following EXCEPT .

A. fewer fishing companies B. fewer jobs available

C. migration of young people D. imposition of fishing quotas

30. The 4th paragraph in the text .

A. sums up the main points of the passage

B. starts to discuss an entirely new point

C. elaborates on the last part of the 3rd paragraph

D. continues to depict the bleak economic situation

Passage 3

Museum is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated to the Muses: a hill, a shrine, a garden, a festival or even a textbook. Both Plato’s Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum had a mouseion, a Muses’ shrine. Although the Greeks already collected detached works of art, many temples —notably that of Hera at Olympia (before which the Olympic flame is still lit) —had collections of objects, some of which were works of art by well-known masters, while paintings and sculptures in the Alexandrian Museum were incidental to its main purpose.

The Romans also collected and exhibited art from disbanded temples, as well as mineral specimens, exotic plants, animals； and they plundered sculptures and paintings (mostly Greek) for exhibition. Meanwhile, the Greek word had slipped into Latin by transliteration (though not to signify picture galleries, which were called pinacothecae) and

museum still more or less meant “Muses’shrine. ” The inspirational collections of precious and semi-precious objects were kept in larger churches and monasteries —which focused on the gold-enshrined, bejeweled relics of saints and martyrs. Princes, and later merchants, had similar collections, which became the deposits of natural curiosities: large lumps of amber or coral, irregular pearls, unicorn horns, ostrich eggs, fissile bones and so on. They also included coins and game —often antique engraved ones —as well as, increasingly, paintings and sculptures. As they multiplied and expanded, to supplement them, the skill of the fakers grew increasingly refined.

At the same time, visitors could admire the very grandest paintings and sculptures in the churches, palaces and castles: they were not “collected” either, but “site-specific”， and were considered an integral part both of the fabric of the buildings and of the way of life which went on inside them and most of the buildings were public ones. However, dur-

ing the revival of antiquity in the fifteenth century, fragments of antique sculpture were given higher status than the work of any contemporary, so that displays of antiquities would inspire artists to imitation, or even better, to emulation； and so could be considered Muses’shrines in the former sense. The Medici garden near San Marco in Florence, the

Belvedere and the Capitol in Rome were the most famous of such earls “inspirational” collections. Soon they multiplied, and gradually, exemplary “modem” works were also added to such galleries.

In the seventeenth century, scientific and prestige collecting became so widespread that three or four collectors independently published directories to museums all over the known world. But it was the institution was perceived, the fury against royal and church monuments prompted antiquarians to shelter them in asylum-galleries, of which the Musee des Monuments Francais was the most famous. Then, in the first hall of the nineteenth century, museum funding took off, allied to the rise of new wealth, London acquired the National Gallery and the British Museum, the Louvre was organized, the Museum-lnsel was begun in Berlin, and the Munich galleries were built In Vienna, the huge Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums took over much of the imperial treasure. Meanwhile, the decline of craftsmanship (and of public taste with it) inspired the creation of “improving”

collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was the most famous, as well as perhaps the largest of them.

31. The sentence “Museum is a slippery word” in the first paragraph means that .

A. the meaning of the word didn’t change until after 15th century

B. the meaning of the word had changed over the years

C. the Greeks held different concepts from the Romans

D. princes and merchants added paintings to their collections

32. The idea that museum could mean a mountain or an object originates from .

A. the Romans B.Florence C. Olympia D. Greek

33. . the skill of the fakers grew increasingly refined?n in Paragraph three means that .

A. there was a great demand for fakers 巳.fakers grew rapidly in number

C. fakers became more skillful D. fakers became more polite

34. Paintings and sculptures on display in churches in the 15th century were

A. collected from elsewhere B. made part of the buildings

C. donated by people D. bought by churches

35. Modern museum came into existence in order to ,

A. protect royal and church treasures

B. improve existing collections

C. stimulate public interest

D. raise more funds

Passage 4

Cultural rules determine every aspect of food consumption. Who eats together defines social units. For example, in some societies, the nuclear family is the unit that regularly

eats together, The anthropologist Mary Douglas has pointed out that, for the English, the kind of meal and the kind of food that is served relate to the kinds of social links between

people who are eating together. She distinguishes between regular meals, Sunday meals when relatives may come, and cocktail parties for acquaintances. The food served symbol-

izes the occasion and reflects who is present. For example，only snacks are served at a cocktail party. It would be inappropriate to serve a steak or hamburgers. The distinctions

among cocktails, regular meals, and special dinners mark the social boundaries between those guests who are invited for drinks, those who are invited to dinner, and those who

come to a family meal. In this example, the type of food symbolizes the category of guest and with whom it is eaten.

In some New Guinea societies, the nuclear family is not the unit that eats together, the men take their meals in a men’s house, separately from their wives and children. Women

prepare and eat their food in their own houses and take the husband’s portion to the men’s house. The women eat with their children in their own houses. This pattern is also wide- spread among Near Eastern societies.

Eating is a metaphor that is sometimes used to signify marriage. In many New Guinea societies, like that of the Lesu on the island of New Ireland in the Pacific and that of the

Trobriand Islanders, marriage is symbolized by the couple’s eating together for the first time. Eating symbolizes their new status as a married couple. In U. S. society, it is just

the reverse, a couple may go out to dinner on a first date. Other cultural rules have to do with taboos against eating certain things. In some societies, members of a clan, a type of kin (family) group, are not allowed to eat the animal or bird that is their totemic ancestor. Since they believe themselves to be descended from that ancestor, it would be like eating that ancestor or eating themselves. There is also an association between food prohibitions and rank, which is found in us most extreme form in the caste system a caste system consists of ranked groups, each with a different economic specialization. In India, there is an association between caste and the idea of pollution. Members of highly ranked groups can be polluted by coming into contact with the bodily secretions, particularly saliva, of individuals of lower-ranked castes. Because of the fear of pollution, Brahmans and other high-ranked individuals will not share food with, not eat from the same plate as, not even accept food from an individual from a low-ranking caste.

36. According to the passage, the English make clear distinctions between .

A. people who eat together B.the kinds of food served

C. snacks and hamburgers D. family members and guests

37. According to the passage, who will NOT eat together?

A. The English.

B. Americans on their first date.

C. Men and women in Near Eastern societies.

D. Newly-weds on the island of New Ireland.

38. According to the passage, eating together indicates all the following EXCEPT .

A. the type of food B. social relations C. marital status D. family ties

39. The last paragraph suggests that in India decides how people eat.

A. pollution B. food C. culture D. social status

40. Which of the following can best serve as the topic of the passage?

A. Different Kinds of Food in the World

B.Relations between Food and Social Units

C. Symbolic Meanings of Food Consumption

D. Culture and Manners of Eating

Part III: Text Management (10%)

[1 ] Read the text, which describes the experience of a company that has made big changes in its office procedures.

[2] Choose the best sentence following the text to fill each of the gaps.

[3] For each gap 41 -46, write one letter (A-H) on your ANSWEr SHEET.

[4] Do not use any letter more than once.

[5] There is an example at the beginning.

Beyond Paperwork

The Danish electronics manufacturer, Oticon, is a leader in the move towards the paperless office. In their cafeteria a huge glass pipe runs from ceiling to floor. When the mail

comes in, it is immediately scanned into the computer, shredded, and thrown down the tube to the general cheers of the employees [40]. Having all mail and memos available only as computer tiles to be read on the screen makes it easy to dispense with large physical storage spaces for people who work at desks. [41 ]

Changing over to the paperless office required a rapid increase in computer literacy, but rather than set up a corporate training programme they turned the problem over to employees. Eight months before the system was installed, they offered each employee a powerful personal computer for use at home in exchange for training themselves to use it. [42] The big change was not the move from paper memos to computer messages. Oticon realized that the more radical transformation is from written to verbal communication. [43]

Thai adds up a large number of face-to-face exchanges, a big improvement over memos and the occasional multi-hour sit-down consultation typical of the old culture. People do not send each other memos, they talk, As the CEO puts it, “We have jumped through the memo wall and gone right to action. ” On the eighth of August 1991, the company left their old wood-paneled offices, [44] since then they have cut in half the “time to market” on new products. The following year, sales and profits grew more than ever before. [45] In fact, despite a downsizing of 15 percent employee satisfaction is hitting record highs. Oticon has created an organizational pattern that supports great freedom of action for individuals and terms. They have tied it together with a minimum hierarchy. The first clear results to show up were in the greater efficiencies generated by the fact that less time nee-

ded to be spent on management activities. [46] They also have some investment in the success of the project they choose, Oticon has succeeded in breaking the mould and tak-

ing a lead in non-bureaucratic organizational design.

A. This saving was possible because when people have real choice in the nature of their jobs, they commit themselves to being responsible for their areas of choice.

B.They were headed for a new building and a new era in communication.

C. Instead, they have large private areas on their hard disks for their correspondence

D. In spite of this, the physical office layout at Oticon is one of its most charming features.

E. Over 90 percent accepted, and they organized a club to help one another learn.

F. To facilitate this, the on-site coffee bars have now become the venue for about twenty meetings a day, averaging ten^minutes and 2..7- participants each.

G. So, are people happy with the change?

H. Only about ten documents a day, items like legal contracts, escape this treatment. The answer of [40] is D.

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