发布时间 : 星期二 文章对外经济贸易大学MTI2014年211翻译硕士英语真题更新完毕开始阅读f6c2b7e9680203d8ce2f2480
a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one ofthem must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr. Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around \
Cituzens tend to think about voting in one of two ways, First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today’s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the scepticism Mr. Apkon speaks of, certain institutions \with\cefttain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything \about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism's rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culnunation of the culture of the written word. Mr. Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, \
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn't democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the ending?
1. Which of the following is INCORRECT according to the author?
A. Images do not always matterin public arguments more than we admit B. Videos on political issues are the most popular among all.
C. Videos carrying messages with a great emotional wallop can attract attention. D. Activists must use street language to appeal to the audience.
2. What does the author mean by saying \Renaissance - the language of a scholarly establishment?\
A. Mdeos are like Italian that served as the street language. B. A video is worth more than a thousand words\ C. Writing would face extinction, just as Latin.
D. Writing would be less popular among common people. 3 What is the author's attitude towards \ A positive B. dangerous C. negative D. useful
4.According to the author, what may \
A. People might vote on their identities.
B. People might vote on their \C. People might vote on arguments,independent of identity.
D. People might vote on political advertisers who have better stories.
5.Which of the following constitutes the best title for this passage?
A. In the unthinking age, seeing is believing. B. Images matter less today than in the past. C. Democracy has lost its appeal nowadays. D.Images in the Information Age.
Passage Two
One November evening in 1989 I was loafing in my room at university when a friend began thumping on the door. \is it? \I shouted irritably. \Berlin Wall just fell, \he shouted back. For months afterwards I walked around in a daze of wonder, as crowds ransacked secret-police headquarters and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Two lines from Wordsworth about the French Revolution, which I'd read in some article about the 1989 revolutions, kept goirtg through my mind:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
It was the most optimistic political moment I've lived through, my generation's version of 1945 or 1968 6
Now we're at the peak of political pessimism. The political year is opening with almost nobody on either right or left expecting anything good. The great questions seem to be: how will an intervention in Syria go wrong? And will the US House of Representatives vote to repeal \for the 41st time? 7 The utopian urge persists; it has just migrated from politics to technology. Instead of developing a political policy to solve a problem, people now develop an app.
In politics, you can hardly count all the lights that have failed since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Faith in unregulated capitalism died with Lehman Brothers. Then Barack Obama, the Occupy movements and the Tea Party all rapidly disappointed their followers. In 2009 in Copenhagen, it became clear the world wouldn't agree to combat climate change. Now the Arab spring is eating its own children, the Russian demonstrators have gone home, and hardly anyone believes in the European project any more. 8 , even before its intellectual underpinning was revealed as an academic paper whose authors had accidentally left important bits of data off their spreadsheet.
The western liberating impulse - previously directed at Iraq, Iran and Cuba - has died too. Myanmar finally opened up, and ethnic conflict promptly began. Even people who believed in al-Qaeda are now presumably disillusioned.
It’s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chávez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba's revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. 9 Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of lt portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates lots of western voters is rage at immigrants - an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK's Labour party, says: \in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don't have the answers. \
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: Technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. 10 . The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains:“Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, 'OK, what are we going to do?'”Now they are busy remaking the world: Google's Eric Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world's poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. “They have something of the white knight about them,”muses Adonis. “There is a profound tech-optinusm.”
In this budding tech-utopia, govemment scarcely features. Great technological achievements of the past - the atomic bomb, the moon landing and even the internet - began within the US government. Today, whether people like government or loathe it, they mostly ignore it.
Choose the following sentences marked A to E to complete the above artticle.
6_____________7____________8_____________9_____________10_____________ A. Austerity became the latest light to fail
B. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies C. Strangely, it actually turned out pretty well D. But hope springs eternal
E. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today’s lot
Passage Three
Where do pesticides fit into the picture of environmental disease? We have seen that they now pollute soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world?
We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can cause extremely severe poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, farm workers, and others exposed to sufficient quantities of pesticides are very sad and should not occur. For the population as a whole,
we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly pollute our world.
Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the danger to the indnadual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasorts the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shake off what may seem to us a threat of future disaster. \are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious signs,\says a wise physician, Dr. Rene Dubos, \some of their worst enemies slowly approach them unnoticed.\
11. Wluch of the following is closest in meaning to the sentence \part of nature.\(Para.1)?
A. Man appears indifferent to what happens in nature. B. Man acts as if he does not belong to nature.
C. Man can avoid the effects of environmental pollution.
D. Man can escape his responsibilities for environmental protection.
12. What is the author's attitude towards the environmental effects ofpesticides?
A. Pessimistic B. Indifferent. C. Defensive. D. Concerned.
13. In the author's view, the sudden death caused by exposure to large amounts of Pesticides_________.
A. is not the worst of the negative consequences resulting from the use of pesticides B. now occurs most frequently among all accidental deaths
C. has sharply increased so as to become the center of public attention D. is unavoidable because people can't do without pesticides in farming
14. People tend to ignore the delayed effects of exposure to chemicals because_______.
A.limited exposure to them does little harm to people's health B. the present is more important for them than the future C. the danger does not become apparent immediately
D. humans are capable of withstanding small amounts of poisoning
15. It can be concluded from Dr Dubos' remarks that
A. people find invisible diseases difficult to deal with B. attacks by hidden enemies tend to be fatal C. diseases with obvious signs are easy to cure
D. people tend to overlook hidden dangers caused by pesticides