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四、英语阅读理解题：每题 0.5 分，共 20 题，计 10 分。 阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个 选项（A、B、C 和 D）中，选出最佳选项。
Reading Comprehension
Directions：There are two passages in this part． Each passage is followed by several questions． For each of them there are four choices marked A， B， C and D． You should decide on the BEST CHOICE．
（一）
You’re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let’s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn’t it tempting to lie just a little， to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree？ Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University？
More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers， for personnel officers， like most Americans， value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway， but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well－known university. Registrars at most well－known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week.
Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms， then. If it turns out that an applicant’s lying， most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them impostors; another refers to them as special cases. One well－known West Coast school， in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all， says that these claims are made by no such people.
To avoid outright lies， some job－seekers claim that they attended or were associated with a college or university. After carefully checking， a personnel officer may discover that attending means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that being associated with a college means that the job －seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century—that’s when they began keeping records， anyhow.
If you don’t want to lie or even stretch the truth， there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma. One company， with offices in New York and on the West Coast， will put your name on a diploma from any number of non－existent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from Smoot State University. The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the University of Purdue. As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana properly called Purdue University， the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.
101. The main idea of this passage is that ________.
A. employers are checking more closely on applicants now
B. lying about college degrees has become a widespread problem
C. college degrees can now be purchased easily
D. employers are no longer interested in college degrees
102. According to the passage， special cases refer to cases where ________.
A. students attend a school only part－time
B. students never attended a school they listed on their application C. students purchase false degrees from commercial films
D. students attended a famous school
103. We can infer from the passage that ________.
A. performance is a better judge of ability that a college degree B. experience is the best teacher
C. past work histories influence personnel officers more than degrees do
D. a degree from a famous school enables an applicant to gain advantage over others in job petition
104. This passage implies that ________.
A. buying a false degree is not moral
B. personnel officers only consider applicants from famous schools
C. most people lie on applications because they were dismissed from school D. society should be greatly responsible for lying on applications
105. As used in the first line of the second paragraph， the word utter means ________.
A. address B.thorough
C. ultimate D. decisive
（二）
Artists routinely mock businesspeople as money -obsessed bores. Or worse, many business people, for their part, assume that artists are a bunch of pretentious wasters. Bosses may stick a few modernist paintings on their boardroom walls. But they seldom take the arts seriously as a source of inspiration.
The bias starts at business school, where “hard” things such as numbers and case studies rule.
It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly remind their underlings that if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Manager’s reading; habits often reflect this no nonsense attitude. Few read deeply about art. The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump does not count; nor does Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Some popular business books rejoice in their vulgarism: consider Wess Robert’s
Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
But lately there are welcome signs of a thaw on the business side of the great cultural divide.
Business presses are publishing a series of books such as The Fine Art of Success, by Jamie Anderson. Business schools such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto are trying to learn from the arts.
Mr. Anderson points out that many artists have also been superb entrepreneurs. Damien Hirst was even more enterprising. He not only realised that nouveau-riche collectors would pay extraor鄄
dinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from ￡75.5m on the day that Lehman Brothers
collapsed.
Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging” and “reaching out”, yet few are much good at it. Their prose is larded with cliches and garbled with gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell’s Why I
Write would work wonders.
Studying the arts can also help companies learn how to manage bright people. Rob Goffee of the London Business School points out that today’s most productive companies are dominated by what they call “clevers”, who are the devil to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, whom they regard as dullards. They refuse to submit to performance reviews. In short, they are prima donnas. The arts world has centuries of experience in managing such difficult people. Publishers coax books out of authors. Directors persuade actresses to cooperate with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing.
Studying the art world might even hold out the biggest prize of all-helping business become more innovative. Companies are scouring the world for new ideas. In their quest for creativity, they surely have something to learn from the creative industries. Look at how modern artists adapted to the arrival of photography, a technology that could have made them redundant, or how J. K. Rowling (the creator of Harry Potter) kept trying even when publishers rejected her novel.
106. Artists and businesspeople routinely ________.
A. despise each other.
B. compete fiercely against each other.
C. cooperate with each other.
D. steal ideas from each other.
107. Damien Hirst is mentioned as ________.
A. a businessman who benefits greatly from learning from the arts.
B. a businessman who is good at dealing with art works.
C. an artist who is good at doing business.
D. an artist whose works changed the art world.
108. Which book might be thought by the author as having the least value?
A. The Art of War.
B. Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
C. The Fine Art of Success.
D. Why I Write.
109. “prima donna”（Para. 6) is most likely to refer to a person who is ________.
A. bright. B. arrogant. C. hateful. D. dull.
110. By learning from the art world, businesses can ________.
A. endow their products with artistic characteristics.
B. master an efficient message-collecting method.
C. train the difficult people to be more obedient.
D. improve their adaptability and perseverance.
（三）
That Arctic sea ice is disappearing has been known for decades. The underlying cause is believed by all but a handful of climatologists to be global warming brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet the rate the ice is vanishing confuses these climatologists’ models. These predict that if the level of carbon ioxide, methane and so on in the atmosphere continues to rise, then the Arctic Ocean will be free of floating summer ice by the end of the century. At current rates of shrinkage, by contrast, this looks likely to happen sometime between 2020 and 2050.
The reason is that Arctic air is warming twice as fast as the atmosphere as a whole. Some of the causes of this are understood, but some are not. The darkness of land and water compared with the reflectiveness of snow and ice means that when the latter melt to reveal the former, the area exposed absorbs more heat from the sun and reflects less of it back into space. The result is a feedback loop that accelerates local warming. Such feedback, though, does not completely explain what
is happening. Hence the search for other things that might assist the ice’s rapid disappearance.
One is physical change in the ice itself. Formerly a solid mass that melted and refroze at its edges, it is now thinner, more fractured, and so more liable to melt. But that is (literally and figuratively) a marginal effect. Filling the gap between model and reality may need something besides this. The latest candidates are “short-term climate forcings”. These are pollutants, particularly ozone and soot (also called “black carbon”) that do not hang around in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide does, but have to be renewed continually if they are to have a lasting effect. If they are so renewed, though, their impact may be as big as CO2’s.
Reducing soot would not stop the summer sea ice disappearing, but it might delay the process by a decade or two. According to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Program, reducing soot and ozone in the lower part of the atmosphere, especially in the Arctic countries of America, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia, could cut warming in the Arctic by two-thirds over the next three decades. Indeed, the report suggests, if such measures—preventing crop burning and forest fires, cleaning up diesel engines and wood stoves, and so on—were adopted everywhere they could halve the wider rate of wanning by 2050.
The rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice, then, illuminates the difficulty of modeling the climate—but not in a way that brings much comfort to those who hope that fears about the future climate might prove exaggerated. When reality is changing faster than theory suggests it should, a certain amount of nervousness is a reasonable response.
111. Which of the following is true of global warming according to Paragraph 1?
A. It is caused mainly by carbon dioxide emissions.
B. Most climatologists attribute Arctic sea ice melting to it.
C. It doesn’t develop as climatologists’ models have predicted.
D. Arctic sea ice will soon disappear under its impact.
112. According to Paragraph 2, the feedback loop ________.
A. makes the warming process in Arctic area much faster than elsewhere.
B. results from the dark land and water in Arctic area.
C. causes the Arctic sea to absorb more heat from the sun.
D. speeds up the rate of global warming all over the world.
113. Which of the following is true of the reasons mentioned in Paragraph 3?
A. The physical change happened to ice makes it easier to melt.
B. The physical change of ice is the leading cause of Arctic ice melting.
C. The pollutants like ozone and soot are not as influential as CO2.
D. Ozone and soot can exert an effect as long-lasting as CO2 does.
114. The report by the United Nations Environment Program suggests that ________.
A. cutting soot emission can prevent summer sea ice from melting.
B. every country can contribute to the alleviation of global warming.
C. Arctic countries should not develop heavy industry.
D. we can stop global warming by taking effective measures.
115. Which of the following is the text mainly about?
A. The difficulty of modeling Arctic sea ice melting.
B. Control of soot emission throughout the world.
C. Human’s responsibility for global warming.
D. Reasons and feasible solutions for Arctic sea ice melting.
（四）
What are the roads not taken because students must take out loans for college? For one thing, it appears that people with student loans are less likely to start businesses of their own. A new study has found that areas with higher relative growth in student debt show lower growth in the formation of small businesses.
The correlation makes sense. People normally have only a certain amount of “debt capacity”. When students use up their “debt capacity” on student loans, they can’t commit it elsewhere. Given the importance of an entrepreneur’s personal debt capacity in financing a start -up business,
student loan debt, which cannot be discharged via bankruptcy, can have lasting effects later in life and may impact the ability of future small-business owners to raise capital. Considering that 60 percent of jobs are created by small business, “if you shut down the ability to create new businesses, you’re going to harm the economy,” said Brent Ambrose, a professor of risk management at
Pennsylvania State University.
Student loan debt also appears to be affecting homeownership trends. According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fewer 30 -year-olds in general have bought homes since the recession, but the decline has been steeper for people with a history of student loan debt and has continued even as the housing market has recovered.
Student loan debt may also affect career choices. Having a college loan appears to reduce the likelihood that people will choose a low-paying public-interest job, according to a 2011 study by Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Cecilia Elena Rouse of Princeton.
They arrived at their conclusion by studying a well-off university that began meeting students’ financial needs through a combination of work-study money and grants, and dispensing with loans altogether. Before the new policy started in the early 2000s, students were more likely to choose well -paid professions like investment banking and consulting. After the policy took effect, more students chose jobs in areas like teaching and the nonprofit sector.
In many cases, the choices that student borrowers make are just common sense, based on the financial realities they face. If society wants to change the skewing effect of student loans, some tough decisions about allocating educational resources may well lie ahead.
116. Which of the following is NOT true about “debt capacity”?
A. People with student loans, generally speaking, have almost used up their “debt capacity”.
B. All the people have a certain amount of “debt capacity” no matter they have loans or not.
C. For those people who took student loans, their “debt capacity” are weaker than others.
D. Entrepreneur’s “debt capacity” should be stronger since it is crucial in financing situation.
117. The quotation in Para. 2 implies that ________.
A. job opportunities are disappearing in high speed
B. economic development can be held back by student loans
C. small business survival is insignificant and meaningless
D. more and more commercial opportunities have been created
118. We can infer from Rothstein and Elena’s research that ________.
A. with lots of student loans, people will repress their desires of homeownership
B. without student loans, college graduates prefer to choose high-reward jobs
C. without the burden of paying back loans, people will get more freedom of job choice
D. although many colleges have financial capacity to support students, they refuse to do so
119. Be a person with student loans, one would like to ________.
A. run his / her own business
B. invest in real estate
C. dedicate to public welfare
D. become a high-paid employee
120. What’s the focus of the passage?
A. A recent research about student debt.
B. The ripple effects of student debt.
C. Rules of applying loans in colleges.
D. Career choice of contemporary youth.
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发表于 2017-7-14 12:01:45
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