英语阅读(二)2015年10月真题试题及答案解析（00596）

Paragraph Ten

Safar's work began to change our perceptions of death —blurring the point that is meant to mark the end of our lives.“We've all been brought up to think death is an absolute moment — when you die you can't come back. It used to be correct, but now we've come to understand that even after you've become a cadaver, you're still retrievable."

The boundary between life and death is less and less c_____.

(46.Camps are either temporary. that is changed from day to day, or they are permanent and may be visited year after year. or they may be used for a few weeks at a time.) Temporary camps are the ones we are considering, and these can be elaborate or very, very simple. I prefer the latter, and I am sure the boys will agree with me.

(47. During the autumn and when the weather is dry and the nights not too cool, the best way to camp is in the open. sleeping on beds of boughs, about a roaring fire. and with one blanket under and another over.)

Small dog tents, like the ones our soldiers carried in the Civil War, are cheap and very convenient. Each man carried a section, and two made a tent, into which two men crawled when it rained, but in dry weather they preferred to sleep in the open, even when it was freezing.

(48.Shelters of boughs. arranged in an A-framed fashion from a ridge pole make good temporary shelters and are first rate as windbreaks at night.)

A shack built of crossed logs requires some time to build and some skill to make, but it is not beyond the reach of any boy who has seen - and who has not - an old-fashioned log shanty.But all boys, even trained foresters, are apt to get lost in strange woods. Every one, however, should know what to do in such a circumstance. As a rule the denser growth of moss on trees is on the north side. This knowledge may help find the direction, but it is better to carry a small pocket compass.

(49.When the sky is clear. the sun and the stars help to guide the course and if they are followed one is saved from traveling in a circle, as the lost are pretty sure to do in a dense forest .)

(50. If twigs are broken from bushes they will serve to show the course to nose out searching, A good plan is to follow down the course of a stream which always flows into a larger body of water and will lead to some abode.) If a hill is accessible, the lay of the land may be had from its summit. 

In any event, should you be lost, do not get ratted. You will be missed in camp and a search will be made by your friends. If you have to stay in the woods all night, make the best of it. Others have made the best of it by sleeping near the foot of a tree or beside a log. It will be more cheery if you can make a fire without anger to the woods.

Paragraph Seven

If you remember learning about the senses in elementary school, you know humans possess five: sense of sight, sense of smell, sense of bearing, sense of touch, and sense of taste. Most scientists agree, however, that you have more like ten to twenty senses, including pain, hunger, thirst, temperature, and more.

More senses than commonly k_____.

Paragraph Eight

Regular poor sleep can raise the risk of serious medical conditions like obesity, heart attack and diabetes - and can even shorten life expectancy. Adequate exposure to natural daylight is known to be crucial for governing the body's circadian rhythm — the built-in clock which dictates our sleeping and waking patterns.

A key factor to improve one's sleep and h_____.

Paragraph Nine

In a new study, a team of neuroscientists and psychologists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) discovered that the harder adults tried to learn an artificial language, the worse they were at deciphering the language's morphology - the structure and deployment of linguistic units such as root words, suffixes, and prefixes.

A scientific discovery on language l_______.

Paragraph Four

It may seem odd to chow down on a garden salad topped with lentils or salmon at 8 am, but who says breakfast meals have to look different than lunch or supper? Give it a try - you may just find that warmed up stir fry, veggie“pasta”, or a crisp entree salad is your new favorite way to start the day.

Suggestion on the f______ meal of the day.

Paragraph Five

Malta is a beautiful southern European country in the Mediterranean Sea, which has a rich history and culture. There are amazing sky-high cliffs to climb, fabulous temples to explore, and lots of wonderful places to go scuba diving. The historic part of Malta has incredible architecture, great walled cities, and many underground tunnels to explore.

An attractive seaside r_____ for tourists.

Paragraph Six

Brushing already acidic teeth can further the erosion of one's enamel. People need to give their teeth time to remineralize after being bathed in an acidic beverage. It's advisable to wait an hour after drinking before lifting a toothbrush.

T______ your time brushing your teeth after drinking.

Paragraph Three

Shorter workdays have made headlines lately in Sweden. On I July, the city began a year-long experiment with six-hour days, enlisting a segment of government employees to work less than their eight-hour-a-day counterparts, for the same pay. The hope is that staffers working shorter days will accomplish just as much, only with more efficiency and less calling in sick.

An experiment on shorter workdays but h_____ productivity.

Paragraph two

The State Council of China issued a guideline to further accelerate household registration reform. A“points system” - mainly based on legal permanent employment and accommodation, seniority in social security and continuous residence - is to be established in cities with over 5m residents. Those who have accumulated certain points are qualified to apply for the cities' permanent household residence for themselves, their spouses, minor children and parents.

A p_____ of household registration reform is underway.

Paragraph One

A study says men can have just as strong a bond with their child as mothers. In the study, the brains of parents were scanned while they watched videos of their interactions with children. Fathers who were raising a child by themselves were found to have a similar emotional response. This meant they were performing both roles mother and father.

Fathers can also establish an intimate t______ with their child.

Today, there's scarcely an aspect of our life that isn't being upended by the torrent of information available on the hundreds of millions of sites crowding the Internet, not to mention its ability to keep us in constant touch with each other via electronic mail.“If the automobile and aerospace technology had exploded at the same pace as computer and information technology," says Microsoft, “a new car would cost about $2 and go 600 miles on a thimbleful of gas. And you could buy a Boeing 747 for the cost of a pizza."

Probably the biggest payoff, however, is the billions of dollars the Internet is saving companies in producing goods and serving for the needs of their customers. Nothing like it has been seen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when power-driven machines began producing more in a day than men could turn out in nearly a year.“We view the growth of the Internet and e-commerce as a global megatrend,” says Merrill Lynch, “along the lines of printing press, the telephone, the computer, and electricity."

You would be hard pressed to name something that isn't available on the Internet. Consider. books, health care, movie tickets, construction materials, baby clothes，stocks, cattle feed, music, electronics, antiques, tools, real estate, toys, autographs of famous people, wine and airline tickets. And even after you've moved on to your final resting place, there's no reason those you love can't keep it touch. A company called FinalThoughts.com offers a place for you to store “afterlife e-mails" you can send to Heaven with the help of a "guardian angel".

Kids today are so computer savvy that it virtually ensures the United States will remain the unchallenged leader in cyberspace for the foreseeable future. Nearly all children in families with incomes of more than $75,000 a year have home computers, according to a study by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Youngsters from ages 2 to 17 at all income levels have computers, with 52% of those connected to the Internet.

26. overthrown (Para. 1)

27. turbulent, swift-flowing stream (Para. 1)

28. by means of (Para. 1)

29. benefit or advantage (Para. 2)

30. worldwide (Para. 2)

31. mention (Para. 3)

32. put away for future use (Para. 3)

33. well informed and perceptive (Para. 4)

34. practically or nearly (Para. 4)

35. capable of being anticipated (Para. 4)

What is the author's attitude toward the future of passwords?

The strength of a password is NOT determined by______.

The main reason why passwords are stolen and broken is_____.

The problem with complex passwords is that____.

Passage Five

The theft by a Russian syndicate of 1.2 billion username and password combinations from 420,000 websites around the world means that the personal details of almost half of all users of the internet must now be considered severely compromised. It can be only a matter of time before the victims find nasty surprises in their bank statements and credit-card accounts. To be on the safe side, anyone who uses financial and shopping websites should change their passwords forthwith —preferably to something longer, more jumbled, and including no word found in any dictionary. The more nonsensical the better.

Heads may nod in agreement, but the advice is then promptly ignored. Human nature, being what it is, has a habit of making people the weakest link in and security chain. For instance, passwords that are easy to remember — the ones most people choose — tend to be the easiest for cybercrooks to guess. By contrast, passwords comprising long, random strings of uppercase and lowercase letters plus numbers and other keyboard characters arc far more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, they are also difficult to remember. As a result, users write them down on scraps of paper that get left lying around for prying eyes to see.

Basically, two factors determine a password's strength. The first is the number of guesses an attacker must try to find the correct one. This depends on the password's length, complexity and randomness. The second factor concerns how easy it is to check the validity of each guess. This depends on how the password is stored on a website's server.

What can individuals do to protect themselves? Apart from choosing passwords that are strong enough (ie, long, complex and random mixtures of ASCII characters) to make cracking their hashes too time consuming for thieves to bother with, there is actually not all that much more. Passwords get stolen and broken mainly because of poor choices made by those responsible for a website's security — especially the way it stores customers' validation details.

Given the pace of innovation in graphics processors, coupled with the increasing power of cracking software (mostly available for free on the internet), even the best password defences are destined to be overwhelmed in due course. After two thousand years of development, the password's days would finally seem numbered. Time to start investing in spoof-proof biometric factors that characterise each person uniquely as an individual.

Questions 21-25 are based on Passage Five.

Once their username and password combinations are stolen, it is advisable for online shoppers____.

Increased price competition and new technology make many readers _______.

This passage mainly discusses the relationship between______.

According to the passage, some publishers refuse to do business with Costco partly because______.

Mass retailers sell some books at a loss in order to

It can be inferred from the last paragraph that_____.

Passage Four

Snazzy technology is a twist in a narrative already several chapters long. Mass-market retailing has changed the publishing industry: these days books are as likely to be found beside steaks and saucepans as they are to be bought in specialist stores. The story tums on whether broader changes in bookselling will stifle literature. Dan Brown will survive. Would Dante?For most of the past century, governments across Europe protected book prices; many still do. Even in America, apart from dime-store romances, few titles were sold outside bookshops. But in the 1970s stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble applied a supermarket maxim to print: pile therm high and watch them fly. Waterstones did the same thing in Britain and top titles started selling in the hundreds of thousands, even millions.

Just as book superstores forced out many independents, so supermarkets and other mass retailers have since crowded the book chains. In Britain, when price regulation was disbanded in 1997, supermarkets rushed in and now sell a quarter of all books, according to the way that Nielsen, a market-research outfit, calculates it. Belgium and Finland mimicked this trend.

This has been good for readers: in Britain the average price of a book hat fallen by 15% since 2003, reckons BML. Bowker, a book-marketing consultancy. And demand has grown: consumers spend the same amount on books, so they must be buying more. Those independent bookshops that survived the chain war in America and Britain have held sales and prices steady. Meanwhile, mass retailers find books such a draw that they lure in customers by selling some titles at a loss. Higher turnover should also be positive for publishers. But mass retailers demand discounts of up to 60% for bulk orders, shrinking margins. All sides prosper when books sell quickly. But, unlike groceries, if books don't sell, retailers return them to the publisher - and do not pay. So, when a book with a large print run flops, publishers end up with an expensive pile of recycling. That is why some publishers have stopped doing new deals with the likes of Costco, an American warchouse retailer, which likes to order very large print runs.

Few people will mourn publishers' losses from increased price competition and new technology like e-readers. The question is whether these trends undermine the quality of books which arc being published, by breaking a business model that has let firms focus on variety and range. Publishers have good reason to shiver at the decline of traditional bookshops. To fund the discovery and promotion of new authors, they have relied on books that sell steadily over a number of years. Yet mass retailers stock a few hundred new blockbusters.

Questions 16-20 are based on Passage Four.

The supermarket maxim adopted by Borders and Barnes & Noble in the 1970smeans that_____.

According to the passage, cord cutting became a reality because of_____.

When do people have the largest amount of smartphone viewing?

According to Experian's study, _____ of U.S. young adults watch streaming or downloaded videos during a typical week.

Passage Three

Cord cutting is growing in popularity, with more and more people deciding to ditch cable or satellite television in favor of other options. According to Experian Marketing Services, cord-cutters grew by 44 percent in the past four years. Instead of using cable or satellite television, 7.6 million households are using high-speed Internet for videos. SNL Kagan predicts that 12 million households will cut the cord by 2015.

According to the passage, in American society, women____.

According to the passage, women tend to make requests____.

The payoff of women's way of making demands is_______.

Passage Two

There are many different kinds of evidence that women and men are judged differently even if they talk the same way. This tendency makes mischief in discussions of women, men and power. If a linguistic strategy is used by a woman, it is seen as powerless; if it is used by a man, it is seen as powerful. Often, the labeling of “women’s language” as “powerless language" reflects the view of women’s behavior through the lens of men's.

Because they are not struggling to be one-up, women often find themselves framed as one- down. Any situation is ripe for misinterpretation because status and connections are displayed by the same moves. This ambiguity accounts for much misinterpretation by experts as well as nonexperts, by which women's ways of talking, uttered in a spirit of rapport, are branded powerless. Nowhere is this inherent ambiguity clearer than in a brief comment in a newspaper article in which a couple, both psychologists, were jointly interviewed. The journalist asked them he meaning of "being very polite". The two experts responded simultaneously, giving different answers. The man said, "Subservience." The woman said,Sensitivity." Both experts were right. but each was describing the view of different gender.

Experts and nonexperts alike tend to see anything women do as evidence of powerlessness. The same newspaper article quotes another psychologist as saying, “A man might ask a woman, ‘Will you please go to the store?’ where a woman might say, 'Gee, I really need a few things from the store, but I'm so tired." The woman's style is called "covert", a term suggesting negative qualities like being. ?sneaky" and "underhanded". The reasons offered for this is power: The woman I doesn't feel she has a right to ask directly.Granted, women have lower status than men in our American society. But this is not necessarily why they prefer not to make outright demands. The explanation for a woman's indirectness could just as well be her seeking connection. If you get your way as a result of having demanded it, the payoff is. satisfying in terms of status: You're one-up because others are doing as you told them. But if you get your way because others happened to want the same thing, or because they offered freely, the payoff is rapport. You're neither one-up nor one-down but happily connected to others whose wants are the same as yours. Furthermore, if directness is understood by both parties, then there is nothing covert about it: That a request is being made is clear. Calling an indirect communication covert reflects the view of someone for whom the direct style. seems "natural" and “logical"- a view more common among men.

Questions 6-10 are based on Passage Two.

The association of women's language with "powerlessness" shows .

The interview of the couple of psychologists is mentioned to show_______.

The audience was important for the transformation of baseball because of_____.

According to the passage, baseball_______.

The passage is intended for_____.

Passage One

Americans regarded sports as evil things______.