浙江大学考博英语真题,考博英语试题

浙江大学二〇〇一年攻读博士学位研究生考试英语试题
考试科目：英语（B）

Part I Reading Comprehension (90 minutes, 45 marks, 1.5 mark each)
Directions: In this part of the test, there are five short passages for you to read. Read each passage carefully, and then do the questions that follow. Choose the best answer A, B, C or D, and mark the corresponding letter with a single bar on Answer Sheet I.
Passage One
Opinion polls are now beginning to show a reluctant consensus that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely.
But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should we not rather encourage many other ways for self-respecting people to work? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household and the neighborhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centers of production and work?
The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people's work has taken the form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a daunting thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future for work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom.
Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people commuted longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and the places in which they lived.
Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In pre-industrial times, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still assume this norm today, and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between the sexes.
It was not only women whose work status suffered. As employment became the dominant form of work, young people and old people were excluded — a problem now, as more teenagers become frustrated at school and more retired people want to live active lives.
All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch effort and resources away from the utopian goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full-time jobs.
1. Research carried out in recent opinion polls shows that ____.
A. available employment should be restricted to a small percentage of the population
B. new jobs must be created in order to rectify high unemployment figures
C. available employment must be more widely distributed among the unemployed
D. the present high unemployment figures are a fact of life

2. The article suggests that we should now re-examine our thinking about the future of work and ____.
A. be prepared to admit that being employed is not the only kind of work
B. create more factories in order to increase our productivity
C. set up small private enterprises so that we in turn can employ others
D. be prepared to fill in time at home by taking up hobbies and leisure activities

3. The arrival of the industrial age in our historical evolution meant that ____.
A. universal employment virtually guaranteed prosperity
B. economic freedom came within everyone's grasp
C. patterns of work were fundamentally changed
D. people's attitudes to work had to be reversed

4. The enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries mean that ____.
A. people were no longer legally entitled to own land
B. people were forced to look elsewhere for means of supporting themselves
C. people were not adequately compensated for the loss of their land
D. people were badly paid for the work they managed to find

5. The article concludes that ____.
A. the creation of jobs for all is an impossibility
B. our efforts and resources in terms of tackling unemployment are insufficient
C. people should start to support themselves by learning a practical skill
D. we should help those whose jobs are only part-time

Passage Two
Scientists assume that the creation of the island of Itua occurred several thousands of years ago as a result of a huge volcanic eruption in the nearby Polynesian Islands. They hypothesize that the volcanic ash blew several hundreds of miles and settled on a hitherto small atoll, building it to its current size of eight hundred square miles. Over the centuries that followed, plant spores were carried by the wind, landed on Itua, and burgeoned. Animal life followed. The scientists are uncertain, however, how non-swimming, non-flying animal life made it to the island.
Itua is uninhabited. There are traces that sociologists and scientists assume that at one time a very primitive culture survived on the island for a short while. It is assumed that sailors in boats stopped at the island and perhaps left captives there, who bred and began a small populace. Best estimates state that the society never had more than a hundred people and died out within two to three generations. Scientists are thoroughly baffled as to the cause of the extinction of the community. Skeletons that have been unearthed give no biological reasons; the plant and animal life should have been sufficient to support many more people than were ever on the island.
Currently, military experts are considering putting a small missile site on Itua. Its strategic location would be excellent for a compact nuclear power site with several small missiles and bombs. However, the island is so far from other military bases and supply lines that the sociologists worry that the people manning the base would become mentally distressed in the state of isolation they would necessarily be subjected to. It would be economically unfeasible to have all the comforts of society shipped to Itua to help support the morale of those forced to live on it.
The second possible use for Itua is as a nuclear waste dump site. A large corporation has asked for rights to the island to bury its nuclear waste there. The company is willing to pay the cost of transporting its nuclear waste to the island (such a cost would be deductible under a new federal law) and would provide yearly monitoring of the site to make certain that no radiation was escaping. Opponents of the corporation's request point out that the area around Itua is subject to frequent volcanic eruptions, one of which might spew any buried waste into the atmosphere or into the ocean, causing untold harm.
6. According to the passage, the major argument against putting a missile site on Itua is that ____.
A. missiles are too dangerous to put in a volcanic, eruption-prone area
B. nuclear disarmament should be practiced immediately
C. the small country that claims Itua would not permit the U.S. to do so
D. the cost to safeguard and operate the missiles on the island is unfeasible

7. The corporation would be willing to use Itua as a dump site for its nuclear waste possibly because ____.
A. it is far enough from humans not to endanger them
B. it is on a convenient freighter route
C. the transportation of the waste would be tax deductible
D. the corporation already owns land on Itua

8. According to scientists, why didn't the human life on Itua survive?
A. Disease decimated the population.
B. Attacks by warriors killed the males.
C. There was not sufficient food for the humans.
D. No theory is given in the passage for the question.

9. This passage would most probably be found in ____.
A. a history book
B. a geography book
C. a children's book
D. a news magazine

10. Which of the following theories do scientists give as a possible reason for the creation of Itua?
A. Earthquake upheavals of the ocean bottom.
B. Volcanic eruptions with blowing ash.
C. Breaking apart and drifting away from a larger land mass.
D. Gradual accumulation of soil and dust particles.

Passage Three
In 1985 few of the industrialized market economies were without massive, or at least high, unemployment. While modest economic growth was achieved generally, in most of those countries somewhat austere economic policies continued to be judged necessary.
The feeling grew, in Europe particularly, that lack of competitiveness owed much to rigidities in both industrial structure and the labor market. Comparison between economic and employment performance in the U.S. and Japan and in Europe reinforced the feeling that in Europe payroll taxes and restrictions relating to employment, working conditions and working practices had made many industries uncompetitive. Hence, interest grew in ways to increase labor market flexibility without sacrificing social benefits.
One of the most interesting developments in the move toward greater flexibility was a change in attitudes toward working time. From the Industrial Revolution onward, standard industrial practice had been based on fairly rigid notions of the workweek. The idea of individual flexibility of working hours (within controlled limits) gained ground in the 1970s, but there was no radical change in practice. Later, reductions in weekly working time were undertaken in some countries with a view to creating jobs, but the results were disappointing. In 1985 the emphasis — notably in West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France — was on accompanying reductions with an easing of law-enforced and collectively bargained restrictions on the arrangement of hours. The objective was to increase plant operating time in order to pay for shorter time for workers, thereby achieving higher efficiency as well as increasing the number of jobs available.
11. The main idea of the first paragraph is about a growing interest in ____.
A. the economic and employment performance in developed countries
B. the massive unemployment in Europe
C. the labor market flexibility of the industrialized market economies
D. the competitiveness in those developed countries

12. The word "austere" in the second sentence means ____.
A. stern
B. simple
C. plain
D. compromising

13. The author was disappointed to see ____.
A. the change in attitudes toward working time
B. the individual flexibility of working hours
C. the fairly rigid notions of the workweek unchanged
D. no satisfactory increase in the job number

14. The passage might probably be titled ____.
A. Market Economies
B. Labor Market Flexibility
C. Labor-Management Relations
D. Achieving Higher Efficiency

Passage Four
That experiences influence subsequent behavior is evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering. Learning could not occur without the function popularly named memory leading to skillful performance on the piano, to recitation of a poem, and even to reading and understanding these words. So-called intelligent behavior demands memory, remembering being prerequisite to reasoning. The ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory. Typically, the decision to cross a street is based on remembering many earlier experiences.
Practice (or review) tends to build and maintain memory for a task or for any learned material. Over a period of no practice what has been learned tends to be forgotten; and the adaptive consequences may not seem obvious. Yet, dramatic instances of sudden forgetting can be seen to be adaptive. In this sense, the ability to forget can be interpreted to have survived through a process of natural selection in animals. Indeed, when one's memory of an emotionally painful experience leads to serious anxiety, forgetting may produce relief. Nevertheless, an evolutionary interpretation might make it difficult to understand how the commonly gradual process of forgetting survived natural selection.
In thinking about the evolution of memory together with all its possible aspects, it is helpful to consider what would have happened if memories failed to fade. Forgetting clearly aids orientation in time: since old memories weaken and the new ones tend to be vivid, clues are provided for inferring duration. Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behavior that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species.
15. In the first paragraph, "remembering being prerequisite to reasoning" may be rewritten into ____.
A. "because remembering is a foremost requirement for thinking"
B. "and remembering is all too important to reasoning"
C. "so that remembering has a steadily increasing effect on reasoning"
D. "for thinking while remembering is necessary for reasoning"

16. From the evolutionary point of view, ____.
A. forgetting for lack of practice tends to be obviously adaptive
B. if a person gets very forgetful all of a sudden he cannot be very adaptive
C. sudden forgetting may lead one to be adaptive, especially in dramatic instances
D. the survival of natural selection can easily be explained

17. According to the passage, if a person never forgot ____.
A. he would survive best
B. he would frequently get into trouble
C. his ability to adapt would be greatly enhanced
D. the evolution of memory would stop

18. The word "that" in the first sentence of this passage refers to ____.
A. a proof
B. a fact
C. a memory
D. a capacity

Passage Five
An ideal college should be a community, a place of close, natural, intimate association, not only of the young men who are its pupils and beginners in various lines of study, but also of young men with older men, with maturer men, with veterans and professionals in the great undertaking of learning, of teachers with pupils, outside the classroom as well as inside it. No one is successfully educated within the walls of any particular classroom or laboratory or museum, and no amount of association, however close and familiar and delightful, between mere beginners can ever produce the sort of enlightenment which the young lad gets when he first begins to catch the infection of learning. The trouble with most of our colleges nowadays is that the faculty of the college live one life and the undergraduates quite a different one. They constitute two communities. The life of the undergraduates is not touched with the personal influence of the teachers; life among the teachers is not touched by the personal impressions which should come from frequent and intimate contact with undergraduates. This separation need not exist, and, in the college of the ideal university, would not exist.
It is perfectly possible to organize the life of our colleges in such a way that students and teachers alike will take part in it; in such a way that a perfectly natural daily intercourse will be established between them; and it is only by such an organization that they can be given real vitality as places of serious training, be made communities in which youngsters will come fully to realize how interesting intellectual work is, how vital, how important, how closely associated with all modern achievement. Only by such an organization that study can be made to seem part of life itself. Lectures often seem very formal and empty things; recitations generally prove very dull and unrewarding. It is in conversation and natural intercourse with scholars chiefly that you find how lively knowledge is, how it ties into everything that is interesting and important, how intimate a part it is of everything that is "practical" and connected with the world. Men are not always made thoughtful by books; but they are generally made thoughtful by association with men who think.
The present and most pressing problem of our university authorities is to bring about this vital association for the benefit of the beginners of the university world, the undergraduates. Classroom methods are thorough enough; competent scholars already lecture and set tasks and direct their performance; but the life of the average undergraduate outside the classroom and other stated appointments with his instructors is not very much affected by his studies; it is almost entirely dissociated from intellectual interests.
19. An ideal college should ____.
A. cultivate experienced and professional men
B. be managed by experienced scholars
C. make men thoughtful only by books
D. see tight, harmonious connection between the experienced and the inexperienced

20. Successful education is the acquiring of knowledge from ____.
A. classrooms, laboratories and museums
B. intimate association between beginners
C. experienced scholars
D. all sources

21. Beginners are not likely to get the sort of enlightenment mentioned in the passage from ____.
A. themselves
B. books
C. scholars
D. experience

22. The teacher and the student do not understand each other well because ____.
A. they do not live together
B. they do not often try to exchange ideas, emotions and experiences
C. they do not respect each other
D. they have different standards of education

23. According to the author, the gap between the teacher and the undergraduate ____.
A. will not exist in future
B. would never disappear
C. may practically be avoided
D. should be ignored

24. According to the author, the effective solution to the problem he mentions in the passage is to ____.
A. dissociate the life of the students from intellectual interest
B. bridge the gap between teacher and student
C. think about creative classroom methods
D. employ more competent scholars

Passage Six
Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among the causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful question. There is certainly much work which is exceedingly weary and an excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness. There are in work all grades, from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights, according to the nature of the work and the abilities of the worker. Most of the work that most people have to do is not pleasant in itself, but even such work has certain great advantages. To begin with, it fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level. Moreover the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from toil. At times they may find relief by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round the world, but the number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past. Accordingly the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they were poor, while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy with innumerable trifles of whose earth-shaking importance they are firmly persuaded.
Work therefore is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to work so hard as to impair his vigor he is likely to find far more zest in his free time than an idle person could possibly find.
The second advantage of most paid work and some unpaid work is that it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In most work success is measured by income, and while our capitalistic society continues, this is inevitable. It is only where the best work is concerned that this measure ceases to be the natural one to apply. The desire that men feel to increase their income is quite as much a desire for success as for the extra comforts that a higher income can acquire. However dull work may be, it becomes bearable if it is a means of building up a reputation, whether in the world at large or only in one's own circle.
25. What is the author's opinion about work?
A. Work is very tiresome, especially when too excessive.
B. Work is a cause of the greatest delight of life.
C. Work can at least give relief from boredom.
D. Work can keep people busy as if they were poor.

26. Who is the happiest person according to the author?
A. A man who works moderately.
B. A man who works to the extreme.
C. A man who has nothing to do.
D. A man who has many choices.

27. In the author's opinion, what is the last product of civilization?
A. To work to some extent.
B. To be free from hard work.
C. To make wise use of leisure.
D. To keep oneself busy with trifles.

28. According to the passage, to be told to do something is generally ____.
A. acceptable
B. respectable
C. insulting
D. admiring

29. According to the passage, success can mostly be measured in terms of ____.
A. enjoyment
B. income
C. initiative
D. intelligence

30. As put by the author, most of the work that most people have to do is ____.
A. not interesting but very rewarding
B. exceedingly dull and always painful
C. delightful but time consuming
D. not worth doing and bearable at all

Part II Cloze Test (20 minutes, 20 marks, 1 mark each)
Directions: Choose the best word(s) from those suggested to fill each blank in the text below. Mark your choices on Answer Sheet I.
（说明：本题完形填空正文在原扫描件中缺失，仅有上述答题指令。）
Part III Translation (70 minutes, 33 marks)
Directions: Translate the following passage into Chinese. Write your version on Answer Sheet II.
It is hard to exaggerate the effect music can have on the human brain. A song from the past can trigger memories as vivid as anything. A tune can induce emotions ranging from unabashed joy to deep sorrow and can drive listeners into states of patriotic fervor or religious frenzy — to say nothing of its legendary ability to soothe the savage beast.
Yet in spite of music's remarkable influence on the human psyche, scientists have spent little time attempting to understand why it possesses such potency. What seems clear is that the ability to experience and react to music is deeply embedded in the biology of the nervous system. While music tends to be processed mostly in the right hemisphere of the brain, no single set of cells is devoted to the task. Different networks of neurons are activated, depending on whether a person is listening to music or playing an instrument, and whether or not the music involves lyrics.
Specific brain disorders can affect the perception of music in very specific ways. Experiments done decades ago showed that stimulating certain areas on both sides of the brain awakened "musical memories" — vivid re-creations of melodies that the patients had heard years earlier and resulted in some mental disorders, such as autism (孤独症). People with this condition are mentally deficient, yet most are proficient musicians; some are "musical savants" possessed of extraordinary talent.
The opposite is true of the less than 1% of the population who suffer from true tone deafness. They literally cannot recognize a melody, let alone tell two of them apart, and they are incapable of repeating a song (although they think they are doing it correctly).
As for music's emotional impact, there is some indication that music can affect levels of various hormones. It has been shown that the parts of the brain involved in processing emotion seem to light up with activity when a subject hears music.
As tantalizing as these bits of research are, they barely begin to address the mysteries of music and the brain. Given music's central role in most of our lives, it's time that scientists found the answers.