2003年英语专八阅读真题

　　TEXT G

　　First read the question.

　　33. The reviewer's comments on Henry Kissinger's new book are basically ____.

　　A. negative B. noncommittal C. unfounded D. positive

　　Now go through TEXT G quickly to answer question 33.

　　Whatever you think of Henry Kissinger, you have to admit: the man has staying power. With a new book-Does America Need a Foreign Policy?-on the shelves, Kissinger is once again helping to shape American thinking on foreign relations. This is the sixth decade in which that statement can be said to be true.

　　Kissinger's new book is terrific. Plainly intended as an extended tutorial on policy for the new American Administration, it is full of good sense and studded with occasional insights that will have readers nodding their heads in silent agreement. A particularly good chapter on Asia rebukes anyone who unthinkingly assigns China the role once played by the Soviet Union as the natural antagonist of the U. S.

　　Kissinger's book can also be read in another, and more illuminating, light. It is, in essence, an extended meditation on the end of a particular way of looking at the world: one where the principal actors in international relations are nation-states, pursuing their conception of their own national interest, and in which the basic rule of foreign policy is that one nation does not intervene in the internal affairs of another.

　　Students of international relations call this the "Westphalian system,"after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended Europe's Thirty Years War, a time of indescribable carnage waged in the name of competing religions. The treaties that ended the war put domestic arrangements-like religion-off limits to other states. In the war's aftermath a rough-and-ready commitment to a balance of power among neighbours took shape. Kissinger is a noted school of the balance of power. And he is suspicious of attempts to meddle in the internal business of others.

　　Yet Kissinger is far too sophisticated to attempt to recreate a world that is lost. "Today,"he writes,"the Westphalian order is in systematic crisis. "In particular, nation-states are no longer the sole drivers of the international system. In some cases, groups of states-like the European Union or Mercosur-have developed their own identities and agendas. Economic globalization has both blurred the boundaries between nations and given a substantial international role to those giant companies for whom such boundaries make little sense. In today's world, individuals can be as influential as nations; future historians may consider the support for public health of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be more noteworthy than last week's United Nations conference on AIDS. And a large number of institutions are premised on the assumption that intervention in the internal affairs of others is often desirable. Were that not the case, Slobodan Milosevic would not have been surrendered last week to the jurisdiction of the war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

　　The consequences of these changes are profound. Kissinger is right to note that globalization has undermined the role of the nation-state less in the case of the U. S. (Why? Because it's more powerful than anyone else. ) Elsewhere, the old ways of thinking about the "national interest"-that guiding light of the Westphalian system-have fewer adherents than they once did.

　　TEXT H

　　First read the question.

　　34. In the passage the author expresses his concern about ____.

　　A. the survival of small languages

　　B. globalization in the post-Cold War era

　　C. present-day technological progress

　　D. ecological imblance

　　Now go through TEXT H quickly to answer question 34.

　　During the past century, due to a variety of factors, more than 1 000 of the world's languages have disappeared, and it is possible to foresee a time, perhaps 100 years from now, when about half of today's 6 000 languages will either be dead or dying.

　　This startling rate of linguistic extinction is possible because 96 per cent of the world's languages are now spoken only by 4 per cent of the world's population.

　　Globalization in the post-Cold War era has witnessed the coming of the information age, which has played an important role in promoting economic co-operation but which has, at the same time, helped facilitate the assimilation of smaller cultural systems into a larger, mostly English-speaking whole.

　　Internet and other forms of mass media have succeeded in making English the worldwide standard.

　　In 1998, the Seminar on Technological Progress & Development of the Present-day World was held in China. At the seminar, many participants expressed concern over the potential risks associated with excessive dependency on information technology. These critics claimed a move from "information monopoly" to "information hegemony" could possibly become just another way for the strong to dominate the weak, culturally as well as economically.

　　In other words, life in a technology-and information-based global society may lead to a new social stratification, in which linguistic assimilation will lead to cultural assimilation and social injustice will abound.

　　In the 20th century, human society's over-development caused the deterioration of the environment and ecological imbalance. The extinction of myriad biological species aroused deep concern which led people to an understanding of the special importance of protecting rare animals and plants on the brink of extinction.

　　Now we face the question, is the maintenance of cultural and linguistic diversity as important as the preservation of pandas and Chinese white-flag dolphins?

　　Given the open society in which we live, or wish to live, this question becomes complicated. A balance must be struck between promoting international exchanges on the one hand, and taking measures to protect "small" languages on the other hand.

　　Most widely used languages, such as the six working languages-including English and Chiese-used in the United Nations, have little to fear and need no special protection.

　　But for other, more marginal languages some measures should be taken. Professionals should be trained to study and use them in order to keep them alive. Effective measures such as bilingual or multilingual education should also be implemented to protect them from extinction.

　　To some, 6 000 may seem like an inexhaustible number of languages. To those same people, it may seem irrelevant if one or two of those languages cease to be used.

　　But what many fail to realize is that language and culture are linked. Without one, the other dies, and so with the death of different languages we have the death of different cultures. The extinction of languages is equal to animal extinction in this respect. The fading away of a language, no matter how small, causes real damage to the "ecological balance" in the field of culture.

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