英语阅读(二)2011年1月真题试题及答案解析（00596）

Paragraph Ten

Some experts estimate that youngsters are bombarded with 10,000 food commercials each year during children's programming, and most of them aren’t promoting salads or fruit. All this marketing changes children’s taste preferences and causes them to crave - and beg for - unhealthy foods. 

Food commercials are largely r      for children's unhealthy eating habits.

Let’s take the orthodox definition of the word bargain. It is something offered at a low and advantageous price. It is an opportunity to buy something at a lower price than it is really worth. (46. A more recent definition is: a bargain is a dirty trick to extort money from the pockets of silly and innocent people.)

I have never attended a large company's board meeting in my life, but I feel certain that discussion often takes the following lines. The cost of producing a new - for example - toothpaste would make 80p the decent price for it, so we will market it at ￡1.20. (47. It is not a bad toothpaste (not specially good either, but not bad), and as people like to try new things it will sell well to start with; but the attraction of novelty soon fades, so sales will fall. When that starts to happen we will reduce the price to ￡1.15.) And we will rush to buy it even though it still costs forty-three percent more than its fair price.

Sometimes it is not 5p OFF but 1p OFF. What breathtaking impertinence to advertise 1p OFF your soap or washing powder or dog food or whatever. Even the poorest old-age pensioner ought to regard this as an insult, but he doesn’t. A bargain must not be missed. (48. To be offered a “gift” of one penny is like being invited to dinner and offered one single pea (tastily cooked), and nothing else.) Even if it represented a real reduction it would be an insult. Still, people say, one has to have washing powder (or whatever) and one might as well buy it a penny cheaper.

The real danger starts when utterly unnecessary things become “bargains”. There is a huge number who just cannot resist bargains and sales. Provided they think they are getting a bargain they will buy clothes they will never wear, furniture they have no space for. Old ladies will buy roller-skates and nonsmokers will buy pipe-cleaners.

(49. Quite a few people actually believe that they make money on such bargains. Some people buy in bulk because it is cheaper.) At certain moments New Zealand lamb chops may be 3p cheaper if you buy half a ton of them, so people rush to buy a freezer just to find out later that it is too small to hold half a tone of New Zealand lamb.

To offer bargains is a commercial trick to make the poor poorer. When greedy fools fall for this trick, it serves them right. (50. All the same, if bargains were prohibited by law our standard of living would immediately rise by 7.39 percent.)

Paragraph Nine

The benefits of quitting smoking - reduced risk of cancer and many other health problems - are known. But for millions of smokers, the calming effect of a cigarette can be reason enough to start up again. Studies have found, however, that in reality, lighting up has the opposite effect, causing long-term stress levels to rise, not fall.

Smoking may well cause rather than r      stress.

Paragraph Seven

Today roughly 17% of American kids and teens are obese, and parents cite obesity as a top concern for their children's health. Yet with so many other overweight kids in the class, it appears that parents can't recognize - or admit it to themselves - when their child is too heavy.

Parents may f      to realize it when their children are overweight.

Paragraph Eight

In the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency shut down thousands of leaky landfills, building larger ones with stricter environmental controls. Which means that if you do live near one, it's likely to be a whopper: There were 8,000 landfills in the United States in 1988, and there are fewer than 2,000 today.

The n      of landfills has decreased.

Paragraph Five

Well-intentioned parents have unwittingly left their kids defenseless against failure. The current generation of millennials (born between 1980 and 2001) grew up playing sports where scores and performance were downplayed because “everyone’s a winner”. And their report cards had more positive spin than an AIG press release.

Today's children have been poorly p      for failure.

Paragraph Six

The harp seal mom nurses her pup on 48% fat seal milk continuously for 12 days without eating. Her pup will gain an average of 2.3 kg per day during this 12-day nursing period, while mom herself will lose about 3.2 kg per day.

The harp seal mom's significant w      loss during nursing.

Paragraph Four

In the movie, the principal character, Leonard, can remember everything that happened before his head injury on the night his wife was attacked, but anyone he meets or anything he has done since that fateful night simply vanishes. He has lost the ability to convert short-term memory into long-term memory.

Leonard’s head injury has r      in his loss of long-term memory.

Paragraph One

Desertification, drought, and despair - that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. The Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.

Sahara desert turns g    thanks to more rain.

Paragraph Three

Daylight saving time began in the United States during World War I, primarily to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting. Although some states and communities observed daylight saving time between the wars, it was not observed nationally again until World War Ⅱ.

Daylight saving time in the U. S. reduced e      consumption.

Paragraph Two

Happiness research suggests that neither very good events nor very bad events seem to change people's happiness much in the long term. Most people, it seems, revert back to some kind of baseline happiness level within a couple of years of even the most devastating events, like the death of a spouse or loss of limbs.

For the majority, there seems to be a b      for happiness level.

The word “novel” in paragraph three is closest in meaning to ______.

The number of violent teens has grown in recent years, even as the population of teenagers has contracted. But the teen population has bottomed out and is now on the upswing. If current rates of offending remain unchanged, the number of teens who commit murder and other serious violent crimes shall increase, if only because of the demographic turnaround in the population at risk. However, given the worsening conditions in which children are being raised, given the breakdown of all our institutions as well as of our cultural norms, given our wholesale disinvestment in youth, our nation faces the grim prospect of a future wave of juvenile violence that may make the coming years look like “the good old days”.

The hopeful news is that there is still time to stem the tide - to prevent the next wave of youth crime. But we must act now - by reinvesting in schools, recreation, job training, support for families, and mentoring. We must act now while this baby-boomerang generation is still young and impressionable, and will be impressed with what a teacher, a preacher, or some other authority figures has to say. If we wait until these children reach their teenage years and the next crime wave is upon us, it may be too late to do much about it.

The challenge for the future, therefore, is how best to deal with youth violence. Unfortunately, we are obsessed with quick and easy solutions that will not work, such as the wholesale transfer of juveniles to the jurisdiction of the adult court, parental responsibility laws, midnight curfews, the V-chip, boot camps, three strikes, even caning and capital punishment, at the expense of long-term and difficult solutions that will work, such as providing young children with strong, positive role models, quality schools, and recreation programs.

26. reduced in size (Para.1)

27. increase (Para.1)

28. the failure of a system (Para.1)

29. unpleasant and depressing (Para.1)

30. prevent something from spreading or developing (Para.2)

31. easily influenced (Para.2)

32. act or operate effectively (Para.3)

33. regulation requiring a person to be home at a certain prescribed time (Para.3)

34. involving the loss of life (Para.3)

35. activity people do for pleasure (Para.3)

Which statement is true of GenBank according to the passage?

It can be learned from the passage that the significance of genetic modification is ______.

What was cited as a result of the green revolution?

Why did the author decide to give the couple two dollars?

Which of the following can best describe the author?

Passage Five

Modern humans emerged some 250,000 years ago, yet agriculture is a fairly recent invention, only about 10,000 years old. Many crop plants are rather new additions to our diet: broccoli (a flowering mutant of kale) is thought to be only 500 years old. Most innovation is far more recent still. Although Austrian monk Gregor Mendel's pea plant experiments quietly laid the basic foundations of genetics in the mid-19th century, his work was rediscovered and applied to crop breeding only at the beginning of the 20th century.

Further advances have steadily accumulated. The 1940s saw the identification of DNA as genetic material and the adoption, by commercial breeders, of genetic modification - typically by applying chemicals or radiation to DNA to try to make plants with advantageous characteristics. The modifications ultimately led to the green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, during which time global wheat yields tripled. The 1980s and 1990s saw the commercial adoption of agricultural biotechnology, which has allowed breeders to introduce specific genes into crops from the same or different species. In 2004 the first plant genome was fully sequenced, and since then the number of plant gene sequences in GenBank, the public repository for gene sequence information, has been doubling every two years. Our knowledge is increasing exponentially, as it has been in other fields such as semiconductors and cellular telephony.

Our challenge is to increase agricultural yields while decreasing the use of fertilizer, water, fossil fuels and other negative environmental inputs. Embracing human ingenuity and innovation seems the most likely path. Plants did not evolve to serve humans, and their sets of genes are incomplete for our purposes. The integral role of modifying genes is obvious to all breeders, though sometimes painfully absent from the public's understanding of how modern agriculture succeeds. All breeding techniques, from before Mendel's time until today, exploit modifications to plant DNA. These modifications can take the form of mistakes or mutations that occur during natural cell division in the wild; the natural but random movement of DNA sequences from one part of a plant's genome to another; or the more precise insertion of known gene sequences using biotechnology. In all these cases, plant genes are moved within or across species, creating [novel] combinations. Hybrid genetics - the combination of different versions of the same gene – has resulted in spectacular yield increases. Largely as the consequence of using hybrid seed varieties, corn yields in the U.S. have increased more than 500 percent in the past 70 years.

Questions 21-25 are based on Passage Five.

Which statement is correct according to paragraph one?

Why did the young man stand under the burning sun at noon?

The “one-armed doll” in paragraph four is most probably meant to indicate that ______.

Passage Four

On a hot summer's day many years ago, I was on my way to pick up two items at the supermarket. I was then a frequent visitor to it because there never seemed to be enough money for a whole week's food-shopping at once.

My wife, after a tragic battle with cancer, had died just a few months earlier. There was no insurance -just many expenses and a mountain of bills. I held a part-time job, which barely generated enough money to feed my two young children. Things were really bad.

The word “haze” in paragraph three is closest in meaning to ______.

”Positive feedback” in paragraph three refers to ______.

The lessening of low-level cloud cover over the Pacific Ocean may be caused by ______.

What is true of low-level cloud cover according to the passage?

Passage Three

In Bill Bryson's opinion, the English obsession with their weather is ______.

According to the author, English weather-speak is similar to primates' social grooming in that they are both ______.

Disapproving of Bill Bryson's opinion, Jeremy Paxman argues that ______.

Passage Two

Which of the following is true of the cessation programs mentioned in paragraph four?

As is stated in the passage, most commentators try to find out ______.

”This strategy” in paragraph two refers to ______.

What can we learn about young people in developing countries?

According to the passage, in order to guarantee profit, the tobacco industry needs to ______.

Passage One

Young girls and women need to be protected from inducements to smoke. Tobacco is a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. It is also an industry under threat; one quarter of its customers, in the long-term, have been killed by using its product and smoking is declining in many industrialized countries. To maintain profits, tobacco companies need to ensure that at least 2.7 million new smokers, usually young people, start smoking every year. Women have been clearly identified as a key target group for tobacco advertising in both the industrialized and developing worlds. Billions of US dollars each year are spent on promoting this lethal product specifically to women.

[This strategy] has been highlighted by several tobacco journals which have carried articles on "targeting the female smokers" and suggesting that retailers should “look to the ladies”. Among 20 US magazines that received the most cigarette advertising revenue in 1985, eight were women's magazines. In the same year, a study on the cigarette advertising policies of 53 British women's magazines showed that 64 percent of the magazines accepted cigarette advertising, which represented an average of seven percent of total advertising revenue.

Research in industrialized countries has shown the subtle method used to encourage girls to smoke. The impact of such method is likely to be even greater in developing countries, where young people are generally less knowledgeable about smoking hazards and may be more attracted by glamorous, affluent, desirable images of the female smoker. This is why World Health Organization (WHO), together with other national and international health agencies, has repeatedly called for national legislation banning all forms of tobacco promotion, and for an appropriate "high price" policy which would slow down the “enthusiasm” of young women for tobacco consumption.

Young girls and women have a right to be informed about the damage that smoking can do to their health. They also need to acquire skills to resist pressure to start smoking or to give it up. Several countries have developed integrated school health education programs which have successfully reduced girls' smoking rates, but this education should not be restricted to what happens in school. There are many other examples of effective cessation programs in the workplace and primary health centers. Unfortunately, many women do not have the opportunity to be involved in such programs, and programs have generally been less successful with women than with men.

In order for women to become, and remain, non-smokers they need support. Environments need to be created which enable them to break free of this health damaging behavior, to make the healthy choices the best choices.

Questions 1-5 are based on Passage One.

In paragraph one, why does the author say that the tobacco industry is under threat?