发布时间 : 星期二 文章川大2012年硕士研究生入学考试试题（翻译硕士英语）更新完毕开始阅读8d420dc16137ee06eff91851
8. According to the passage, Eskimos depend most heavily on______. [A] evil spirits [B] charms and magic [C] a helpful god [D] nature
9. The word “revolting” in paragraph 12 means______. [A] shocking [B] rebellious [C] nauseating [D] wicked
10. The Eskimo believed that sitting quietly near their buried ancestors_______.
[A] was the best way to express faith in God [B] helped the hunters to find food
[C] gave them the wisdom of their ancestors
[D] was the best way to pay tribute to the dead.
Section 2 Answering questions (20’)
Directions: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only
information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your answer sheet.
Questions 1～3
What do we mean by leisure, and why should we assume that it
represents a problem to be solved by the arts? The great ages of art were not conspicuous for their leisure-at least, art was not an activity associated with leisure. It was a craft like any other, concerned with the making of necessary things. Leisure, in the present meaning of the word, did not exist. Leisure, before the
Industrial Revolution meant no more than “time” or “opportunity”; “If your leisure serv'd, I would speak with you”, says one of Shakespeare's characters. Phrases which we still use, such as “at your leisure”, preserve this original meaning.
But when we speak of leisure nowadays, we are not thinking of
securing time or opportunity to do something; time is heavy on our hands, and the problem is how to fill it. Leisure no longer signifies a space with some difficulty secured against the pressure of events: rather it is a pervasive emptiness for which we must invent
occupations-Leisure is a vacuum, a desperate state of vacancy--a
vacancy of mind and body. It has been commandeered by the sociologists and the psychologists: it is a problem.
Our diurnal existence is divided into two phases, as distinct as day and night. We call them work and play. We work so many hours a day, and, when we have allowed the necessary minimum for such activities as eating and shopping, the rest we spend in various activities which are known as recreations, an elegant word which disguises the fact that we usually do not even play in our hours of leisure, but spend them in various forms of passive entertainment or entertainment--not football but watching football matches; not acting, but theatre-going; not walking, but riding in a motor coach.
We need to make, therefore, a hard-and-fast distinction not only between work and play but, equally, between active play and passive entertainment. It is, I suppose, the decline of active play—of amateur sport—and the enormous growth of purely receptive
entertainment which has given rise to a sociological interest in the problem. If the greater part of the popu1ation, instead of indulging in sport, spend their hours of leisure ‘viewing' television
programmes, there will inevitably be a decline in health and physique. And, in addition, there will be a psychological problem, for we have yet to trace the mental and moral consequences of a prolonged diet of sentimental or sensational spectacles on the screen. There is, if we are optimistic, the possibility that the diet is too thin and
unnourishing to have much permanent effect on anybody. Nine films out of ten seem to leave absolutely no impression on the mind or
imagination of those who see them: few people can give a coherent account of the film they saw the week before last, and at longer intervals they must rely on the management to see that they do not sit through the same film twice.
We have to live art if we would be affected by art. We have to paint rather than look at paintings, to play instruments rather than go to concerts, to dance and sing and act ourselves, engaging all our senses in the ritual and discipline of the arts. Then something may begin to happen to us: to work upon our bodies and our souls.
It is only when entertainment is active, participated in, practiced, that it can properly be called play, and as such it is a natural use of leisure. In that sense play stands in contrast to work, and is usually regarded as an activity that alternates with work. It is
there that the most fundamental error enters conception of daily life.
Work itself is not a single concept. We say quite generally that we work in order to make a living: to earn, that is to say, sufficient tokens which we can exchange for food and shelter and all the other needs of our existence. But some of us work physically, tilling the land, minding the machines, digging the coal; others work mentally, keeping accounts, inventing machines, teaching and preaching,
managing and governing. There does not seem to be any factor common to all these diverse occupations, except that they consume our time, and leave us little leisure.
We may next observe that one man's profession or work is often another man’s recreation or play. The merchant at the week-end
becomes a hunter (he has not yet taken to mining); the clerk becomes a gardener; the machine-tender becomes a breeder of bull—terriers. There is, of course, a sound instinct behind such transformations. The body and mind are unconsciously seeking compensation--muscular coordination, mental integration. But in many cases a dissociation is set up and the individual leads a double life--one half Jekyll, the other half Hyde. There is a profound moral behind that story of Stevenson's for the compensation which a disintegrated personality may seek will often be of an anti-social nature. The Nazi party, for example, in its early days was largely recruited from the bored--not much from the unemployed as from the street-corner society of listless hooligans
Scientific studies have been made of street-corner society, out of which crime, gangsterdom, and fascism inevitably develop. It is a society with leisure--that is to say, spare time--and without
compensatory occupation. It does not need a Satan to find mischief for such idle hands to do. They will spontaneously itch to do
something: muscles have a life of their own unless they are trained to purposeful actions. Actions, or rather activities, are the obvious reflex to leisure; they consume it, and leave the problem solved. But work is also activity, and if we reach the conclusion that all our time must be filled with one activity or another, the distinction between work and play becomes rather meaningless, and what we mean by play is merely a change of occupation. We pass from one form of
activity to another; one we call work, and for that we receive pay; the other we call play, and for that we receive no pay--on the contrary, we probably pay a subscription.
1. The author points out two kinds of danger that may arise from the misuse of leisure. One of them is the result of purely passive
entertainment; the other results when work and play are not properly coordinated What are the two dangers? Which of them is particularly
harmful to society?
2. The author says that most films are not good enough to leave a permanent impression on our minds. Is this, in his opinion, a good thing or a bad thing? In what way?
3. What, in the author’s opinion, is the real difference between work and play? Or is there no difference at all between them? . Questions 4～5
History tells us that in ancient Babylon, the cradle of our
civilization, the people tried to build a tower that would reach to heaven. But the tower became the tower of Babel, according to the Old Testament, when the people were suddenly caused to speak different languages. In modern New York City, a new tower, that of the United Nations Building, thrusts its shining mass skyward. But the
realization of the UN’s aspirations—and with it the hopes of the peoples of the world—is threatened by our contemporary Babel: about three thousand different languages are spoken throughout the world today, without counting the various dialects that confound communication between peoples of the same land.
In China, for example, hundreds of different dialects are spoken;
people of some villages have trouble passing the time of day with the inhabitants of the next town. In the new African state of Ghana, five million people speak fifty different dialects. In India more than one hundred languages are spoken, of which only fourteen are recognized as official. To add to the confusion, as the old established empires are broken up and new states are formed, new official tongues spring up at an increasing rate.
In a world made smaller by jet travel, man is still isolated from many of his neighbors by the Babel barrier of multiplying languages. Communication is blocked daily in scores of ways. Travelers find it difficult to know the peoples of other nations. Scientists are often unable to read and benefit from the work being carried on by men of science in other countries. The aims of international trade, of world accord, of meetings between nations, are blocked at every turn; the work of scholars, technologists, and humanists is handicapped. Even in the shining new tower of the United Nations in New York, speeches and discussions have to be translated and printed in the five
official UN languages—English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. Confusion, delay, suspicion, and hard feelings are the products of the diplomatic Babel.
The chances for world unity are lessened if in the literal sense of the phrase, we do not speak the same language. We stand in dire need