2018专八阅读理解练习题：经济复兴需要“业余精神”

2017-08-11 17:36:18来源：网络

2018专八阅读理解练习题：经济复兴需要“业余精神”

　　The financial crisis came about because we got self-satisfied, depending on all-knowing financial experts—mortgage lenders, Wall Street cheaters, the Federal Reserve—to run our system expertly. But then the experts did the same thing, imagining that they had laid off all their risks on other experts. Until finally the last expert down the line turned out to be just another greater fool, and the system crashed.

　　We still need experts. But we can no longer abandon judgment to them or to the system they’ve roughly produced. This country, after all, was created by passionately engaged amateurs. The American spirit really is the amateur spirit.

　　Amateurs do the things they want to do in the ways they want to do them. They don’t worry too much about breaking rules and aren’t paralyzed by a fear of imperfection or even failure. Active citizenship is all about tapping into one’s amateur spirit. “But hold on,” you say. “I will never understand credit-default swaps or know how to determine the correct leverage ratio for banks.” Me neither. But we can trust our reality-based intuitions about fishy-looking procedures and unsustainable projects and demand that the supposed experts explain their supposed expertise in ways we do understand.

　　The American character is two-sided to an extreme and paradoxical degree. On the one hand, we are sober and practical and commonsensical, but on the other hand, we are wild and crazy speculators. The full-blown amateur spirit derives from this same paradox. Even as we indulge our native nerve—Live the dream! To hell with the naysayers!—as a practical matter, it also requires a profound humility, since the amateur must throw himself into situations where he’s uncertain and even ignorant, and therefore obliged to figure out new ways of seeing problems and fresh ways of solving them.

　　At this particular American inflection point, after the crash and before the rebuild, frankly admitting that we aren’t absolutely certain how to proceed is liberating, and crucial. The 20th century Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki famously wrote that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few,” which sounds to me very much like the core of Boorstin’s amateur spirit. “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance,” Boorstin wrote, “but the illusion of knowledge.”

　　This isn’t just airy-fairy philosophy: it’s real, and it works. A decade after Steve Jobs co-founded Apple, he was dismissed by his own board, but after the sense of betrayal passed, and he went on to build Pixar and oversee Apple’s glorious renewal, he realized his personal reset had been a blessing in disguise. “The heaviness of being successful,” Jobs has said of his firing, “was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” May America and Americans have such good luck figuring out how to climb out of the holes we find ourselves in now. [497 words]

　　16. The author thinks that the economic crisis appeared due to .

　　[A] the defects of the financial system

　　[B] people’s blind trust in expert judgement

　　[C] people’s self-satisfaction about their financial knowledge

　　[D] experts’ overconfidence in their risk monitoring ability

　　17. It is suggested in the text that amateurs .

　　[A] make up the majority of the U.S. population

　　[B] stand to their own opinions

　　[C] take perfection as nonsense

　　[D] prefer instinct to judgment

　　18. The author uses paragraph 4 to .

　　[A] justify that the American spirit is the amateur spirit