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根据以下资料,回答下列各题:

Early this week a bit of cheery news was reported by the Manhattan Institute,a conservative think tank:black segregation has hit its lowest point in more than a century—declining in all 85 0f the nation’S largest metropolitan areas.Nevertheless,the report is largely celebratory in tone,and it has been received in that fashion by much of the news media.Before we break out the champagne,however,it may be wise to pause and reflect for a moment on who was excluded from the analysis.

Our nation’s prison population has more than quintupled(soaring from 300,000 in the mid.1970s to more than 2 million today),due to a“get tough”movement and a war on drugs that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color. Studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites,but a fierce drug war has been waged nonetheless,and harsh mandatory minimum sentences passed,leading to a prison—building boom unprecedented in world history.Despite this sea change,prisoners continue to be treated as nonentities in much sociological and economic analysis.

In the Manhattan Institute study,prisoners are not even mentioned,despite the fact that millions of poor people--——0verwhelmingly people of color —are removed from their communities and held in prisons,often hundreds of miles from home.Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white,rural communities,and thus a new form. of segregation has emerged in recent years.Bars and walls keep hundreds of thousands away from mainstream society—a forE of apartheid unlike the world has even seen.If all of them suddenly returned,they would not be evenly throughout the nation’s population.Instead they would return to a relatively small number of communities defined by race and class,greatly intensifying the levels of segregation we see today.

Those who imagine that the failure to account for prisoners can’t possibly affect the analysis would be wise to consider the distortion of unemployment figures in recent years. According to Harvard professor Bruce Western, standard unemployment figures underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less educated black men.In fact.during the l990s——the economic—boom years——noncollege black men were the only group that experienced a sharp increase in unemployment,a development directly traceable to the sudden explosion of the prison population. At the same time that unemployment rates were sinking to record low levels for the general population,the true jobless rate among noncollege black men soared to a staggering 42%

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S.Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind,it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are.For now,let’s keep the cork in the bottle and pray that we will eventually awaken from our color—blind slumber to the persistent realities of race in America.

The news media’s response toward the research results announced by the Manhattan Institute is______.

  • A.negative
  • B.positive
  • C.neutral
  • D.suspicious
试题出自试卷《2014年考研《英语》(一)冲刺预测密卷(一)》
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  4. 根据以下资料,回答下列各题:Directions:

    Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.Your translation should be written clearly on the ANSWER SHEET.(10 points)

    Annual check—ups and company “wellness programmes”have become a familiar part of the corporate landscape.(46)Companies are now also starting to touch on a potentially troubling area:their employees mental health.Companies as diverse as BT.Rolls Royce and Grant Thornton have introduced mental health programmes ranging from training managers to spot problems to rehabilitating those suffering breakdowns

    The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health estimates that a sixth of the Bfitish workforce suffers from depression or stress.That mental ill health costs Bfitish employers almost$26 billion a year and American research suggests that“presenteeism”costs twice as much as absenteeism.Recently Grant Thornton sends its managers on a two day program put on by Positive Health Strategies,a London company.(47)Its program screens people forpsychological well being,and offers advice on“optimizing performance”and“staying positive under pressure”.Focusing on the upper ranks makes sense for companies.The stars not only represent huge profits.They are also most likely to live under stress while maintaining a stiff upper lip.But focusing on stars also makes sense for the mental wellness movement itself:the best way to insert yourself into a company’s DNA is to seduce its leadership.

    (48)What should one make of the corporate world’s new found interest in promoting mental health?For sure,depression and anxiety can take a serious toll on productivity,and companies bear their share of the blame for promoting stress in the first place.And catching psychological problems early can prevent them from escalating.This all sounds promising.

    But there are nevertheless several troubling aspects.

    The first worry is that promoting psychological wellness crosses an important line between the public and the private,raising awkward questions.Should companies pry into people’s emotional lives?Can they be trusted with the information they gather?And should psychologically frail workers put their faith in people who work primarily for their employers rather than in their personal doctors?Workers rightly worry that companies will use psychological information in their annual appraisals. (49)And that bosses will see the trend as an excuse for extending their power over staff-using the veiled threat of somehow being classified as mentally impaired to make them obey,and conform

    A second worry is about the scientific foundations of the mental wellness movement.A phrase like“mental fitness”is bound to attract chalants and salesmen.Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California has noted that the new“science”of neuroleadership is “filled with banalities”.0ther people are less complimentary.The biggest problem with the movement lies in the assumption that promoting psychological wellness is as good as encouraging the physical sort.(50)Few would doubt that good physical health makes for good productivity;but it is not self-evident that a positive mental attitude is good for a worker or his output:history shows that misfits have contributed far more to creativity than perky optimists.Besides,curmudgeonliness is arguably a rational way to cope with an imperfect world,rather than a sign of mental maladjustment.Companies that chase the elusive“positive attitudes”may end up damaging themselves as well as sticking their noses where they have no business.

    ________

  5. ________

  6. Directions:

    Write an essay of l60—200 words based Oil the following drawin9.In your essay,you should

    1)describe the drawing briefly.

    2)explain its intended meanin9,and then

    3)give your comments.

    You should write neatly on the ANSWER SHEET.(20 points)

  7. ___________

    • 正确
    • 错误
  8. Directions:

    You live in a room in college which you share with another student.You find it very difficult to work there because your roommate always has friends visitin9.He/She has parties in the room and sometimes borrows your things without asking you.

    Write a letter to the Accommodation Officer at the college and:

    1)ask for a new room next term.

    2)you would prefer a single room,

    3)explain your reasons.

    Write your letter in no less than l00 words.Write it neatly on the ANSWER SHEET.

    Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter.Use“Zhang Wei”instead.

    Don’t write the address.

  9. ___________

    • 正确
    • 错误
  10. 根据以下资料回答下列各 :

    In the following text.some sentences have been removed.For Questions 41—45, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blanks.There are two extra choices,which do not fit in any of the blanks.Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET.(10 points)

    Even if we could make it impossible for people to commit crimes,should we?Or would doing so improperly deprive people of their freedom?

    This may sound like a fanciful concern,but it is an increasingly real one.The new federal transportation bill,for example,authorized funding for a program that seeks to prevent the crime of drunken driving not by raising public consciousness or issuing stiffer punishments—but by making the crime practically impossible to commit.(41)______ The Dadss program is part of a trend toward what I call the“perfect prevention”of crime:depriving people of the choice to commit an offense in the first place.The federal government’s Intelligent Transportation Systems program,which is creating technology to share data among vehicles and road infrastructure like traffic lights,could make it impossible for a driver to speed or run a red light.(42)______

    Such technologies force US to reconcile two important interests.On one hand is society’s desire for safety and security.On the other hand is the individual’S right to act freely. Conventional crime prevention balances these interests by allowing individuals the freedom to commit crime,but punishing them if they do.

    The perfect prevention of crime asks US to consider exactly how far individual freedom extends.Does freedom include a“right”to drive drunk.for instance?It is hard to imagine that it does.(43)______ 

    For most familiar crimes(murder,robbery,rape,arson),the law requires that the actor have some guilty state of mind,whether it is intent,recklessness or negligence.

    (44)______ 

    In such cases,using technology to prevent the crime entirely would not unduly burden individual freedom;it would simply be effective enforcement of the statute.Because there is no mental state required to be guilty of the offense,the government could require,for instance.that drug manufacturers apply a special tamper-proof coating to all pills,thus making the sale of tainted drugs practically impossible,without intruding on the thoughts of any future seller.

    But because the government must not intrude on people’s thoughts,perfect prevention is a bad fit for most offenses.(45) ______ Even if this could be known,perhaps with the help of some sort of neurological scan,collecting such knowledge would violate an individual’s freedom of thought.

    Perfect prevention is a politically attractive approach to crime prevention,and for strict— liability crimes it is permissible and may be good policy if implemented properly.But for most offenses,the threat to individual freedom is too great to justify this approach.This is not because people have a right to commit crimes;they do not.Rather,perfect prevention threatens our right to be free in our thoughts,even when those thoughts turn to crime.

    • A.But there is a category of crimes that are forbidden regardless of the actor’s state of mind:so.called strict—liability offenses.One example is the sale of tainted drugs. Another is drunken driving.
    • B.The Dadss program,despite its effectiveness in preventing drunk driving,is criticized as a violation of human rights because it monitors drivers’behavior. and controls individual’s free will.
    • C.And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of l998 has already criminalized the development of technologies that can be used to avoid copyright restrictions,making it effectively impossible for most people to illegally share certain copyrighted ma
    • D.If the actor doesn’t have the guilty state of mind,and he commits crime involuntarily,in this case,the actor will be convicted as innocent.
    • E.Perfect prevention of a crime like murder would require the ability to know what a person was thinking in order to determine whether he possessed the relevant culpable mental state.
    • F.The program,the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety(Dadss),is developing in vehicle technology that automatically checks a driver’s blood—alcohol level and,if that level is above the legal limit,prevents the car from starting.
    • G.But what if the government were to add a drug to the water supply that suppressed antisocial urges and thereby reduced the murder rate? This would seem like an obvious  violation of our freedom.We need a clear method of distinguishing