2005年英语专八阅读真题

　　TEXT C

　　提示：原文同2003年专八英译汉翻译试题相同

　　In his classic novel, "The Pioneers", James Fenimore Cooper has his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a teeming metropolis. But his cousin looks around bewildered. All she sees is a forest. "Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me?" she asks. He's astonished she can't see them. "Where! Everywhere," he replies. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his mind, and they as concrete to him as if they were already constructed and finished.

　　Cooper was illustrating a distinctly American trait, future-mindedness: the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally attached to things to come. As Albert Einstein once said, "Life for the American is always becoming, never being."... ...

　　20. The third paragraph examines America's future-mindedness from the _________ perspective.

　　A. future

　　B. realistic

　　C. historical

　　D. present

　　21. According to the passage, which of the following is NOT brought about by future-mindedness?

　　A. Economic stagnation

　　B. Environmental destruction

　　C. High divorce rates

　　D. Neglect of history

　　22. The word "pooh-pooh" in the sixth paragraph means

　　A. appreciate

　　B. praise

　　C. shun

　　D. ridicule

　　23. According to the passage, people at present can forecast ________ of a new round of future-mindedness.

　　A. the nature

　　B. the location

　　C. the variety

　　D. the features

　　24. The author predicts in the last paragraph that the study of future-mindedness will focus on

　　A. how it comes into being

　　B. how it functions

　　C. what it brings about

　　D. what it is related to.

　　TEXT D

　　"In every known human society the male's needs for achievement can be recognized... In a great number of human societies men's sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness in fact has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feat."

　　This is the conclusion of the anthropologist Margaret Mead about the way in which the roles of men and women in society should be distinguished.

　　If talk and print are considered it would seem that the formal emancipation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of women and about the complicated system of defences which men have thrown up around their hitherto accepted advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types of occupation and sociable groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubt of the seriousness of women's pretensions to the level of intellect and resolution that men, it is supposed, bring to the business of running the world.

　　There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men's status. In the first place, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the woman Prime Minister, in India, Sri Lanka and Israel.

　　Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. More diffusely there are the increasingly numerous convergences between male and female behaviour: the approximation to identical styles in dress and coiffure, the sharing of domestic tasks, and the admission of women to all sorts of hitherto exclusively male leisure-time activities.

　　Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive or natural conditions of human life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaelology, but that does not matter since it is not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardly felt expectations of people's sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiation between the roles of the two sexes. In this rudimentary natural society men go out to hunt and fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women keep the fire going. Amorous initiative is firmly reserved to the man, who sets about courtship with a club.

　　25. The phrase "men's sureness of their sex role" in the first paragraph suggests that they

　　A. are confident in their ability to charm women.

　　B. take the initiative in courtship.

　　C. have a clear idea of what is considered "manly".

　　D. tend to be more immoral than women are.

　　26. The third paragraph does NOT claim that men

　　A. prevent women from taking up certain professions.

　　B. secretly admire women's intellect and resolution.

　　C. doubt whether women really mean to succeed in business.

　　D. forbid women to join certain clubs and societies.

　　27. The third paragraph

　　A. generally agrees with the first paragraph

　　B. has no connection with the first paragraph

　　C. repeats the argument of the second paragraph

　　D. contradicts the last paragraph

　　28. At the end of the last paragraph the author uses humorous exaggeration in order to

　　A. show that men are stronger than women

　　B. carry further the ideas of the earliest paragraphs

　　C. support the first sentence of the same paragraph

　　D. disown the ideas he is expressing

　　29. The usual idea of the cave man in the last paragraph

　　A. is based on the study of archaeology

　　B. illustrates how people expect men to behave

　　C. is dismissed by the author as an irrelevant joke

　　D. proves that the man, not woman, should be the wooer

　　30. The opening quotation from Margaret Mead sums up a relationship between man and woman which the author

　　A. approves of

　　B. argues is natural

　　C. completely rejects

　　D. expects to go on changing

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