2010英语专业八级考试全真试题附答案

PART IIREADING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)

In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.

TEXT A

Still, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.

Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafes or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of live chickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.

From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.

There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.

When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”

But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “has difficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.

“Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

“When will it be decided?”

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

11.   According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following EXCEPT

A. taking foreign tourists around the city.

B. providing transport to school children.

C. carrying store supplies and purchases

D. carrying people over short distances.

12.   Which of the following statements best describes the rickshaw pullers from Bihar?

A. They come from a relatively poor area.

B. They are provided with decent accommodation.

C. Their living standards are very low in Kolkata.

D. They are often caught by policemen in the streets.

13.   That “For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar” (4 paragraph) means that even so,

A. the poor prefer to work and live in Bihar.

B. the poor from Bihar fare better than back home.

C. the poor never try to make a living in Bihar.

D. the poor never seem to resent their life in Kolkata.

14.   We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware people

A. hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws.

B. strongly support the ban on rickshaws.

C. call for humanitarian actions fro rickshaw pullers.

D. keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws.

15.   Which of the following statements conveys the author’s sense of humor?

A. “…not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor.” (2 paragraph)

B. “…,.which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.” (4 paragraph)

C. Kolkata, a resident told me, “ has difficulty letting go.” (7 paragraph).

D.“…or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas.” (6 paragraph)

16.   The dialogue between the author and the city official at the end of the passage seems to suggest

A. the uncertainty of the court’s decision.

B. the inefficiency of the municipal government.

C. the difficulty of finding a good solution.

D. the slowness in processing options.

TEXT B

Depending on whom you believe, the average American will, over a lifetime, wait in lines for two years (says National Public Radio) or five years (according to customer-loyalty experts).

The crucial word is average, as wealthy Americans routinely avoid lines altogether. Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers(people who still believe in and practice waiting in lines). Poor suckers, mostly.

Airports resemble France before the Revolution: first-class passengers enjoy "elite" security lines and priority boarding, and disembark before the unwashed in coach, held at bay by a flight attendant, are allowed to foul the Jetway.

At amusement parks, too, you can now buy your way out of line. This summer I haplessly watched kids use a $52 Gold Flash Pass to jump the lines at Six Flags New England, and similar systems are in use in most major American theme parks, from Universal Orlando to Walt Disney World, where the haves get to watch the have-mores breeze past on their way to their seats.

Flash Pass teaches children a valuable lesson in real-world economics: that the rich are more important than you, especially when it comes to waiting. An NBA player once said to me, with a bemused chuckle of disbelief, that when playing in Canada--get this--"we have to wait in the same customs line as everybody else."

Almost every line can be breached for a price. In several U.S. cities this summer, early arrivers among the early adopters waiting to buy iPhones offered to sell their spots in the lines. On Craigslist, prospective iPhone purchasers offered to pay "waiters" or "placeholders" to wait in line for them outside Apple stores.

Inevitably, some semi-populist politicians have seen the value of sort-of waiting in lines with the ordinary people. This summer Philadelphia mayor John Street waited outside an AT&T store from 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. before a stand-in from his office literally stood in for the mayor while he conducted official business. And billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg often waits for the subway with his fellow citizens, though he's first driven by motorcade past the stop nearest his house to a station 22 blocks away, where the wait, or at least the ride, is shorter.

As early as elementary school, we're told that jumping the line is an unethical act, which is why so many U.S. lawmakers have framed the immigration debate as a kind of fundamental sin of the school lunch line. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, to cite just one legislator, said amnesty would allow illegal immigrants "to cut in line ahead of millions of people."

Nothing annoys a national lawmaker more than a person who will not wait in line, unless that line is in front of an elevator at the U.S. Capitol, where Senators and Representatives use private elevators, lest they have to queue with their constituents.

But compromising the integrity of the line is not just antidemocratic, it's out-of-date. There was something about the orderly boarding of Noah's Ark, two by two, that seemed to restore not just civilization but civility during the Great Flood.

How civil was your last flight? Southwest Airlines has first-come, first-served festival seating. But for $5 per flight, an unaffiliated company called BoardFirst.com will secure you a coveted "A" boarding pass when that airline opens for online check-in 24 hours before departure. Thus, the savvy traveler doesn't even wait in line when he or she is online.

Some cultures are not renowned for lining up. Then again, some cultures are too adept at lining up: a citizen of the former Soviet Union would join a queue just so he could get to the head of that queue and see what everyone was queuing for.

And then there is the U.S., where society seems to be cleaving into two groups: Very Important Persons, who don't wait, and Very Impatient Persons, who do--unhappily.

For those of us in the latter group-- consigned to coach, bereft of Flash Pass, too poor or proper to pay a placeholder --what do we do? We do what Vladimir and Estragon did in Waiting for Godot: "We wait. We are bored."

17.   What does the following sentence mean? “Once the most democratic of institutions, lines are rapidly becoming the exclusive province of suckers…Poor suckers, mostly.” (2 paragraph)

A. Lines are symbolic of America’s democracy.

B. Lines still give Americans equal opportunities.

C. Lines are now for ordinary Americans only.

D. Lines are for people with democratic spirit only.

18.   Which of the following is NOT cited as an example of breaching the line?

A. Going through the customs at a Canadian airport.

B. Using Gold Flash Passes in amusement parks.

C. First-class passenger status at airports.

D. Purchase of a place in a line from a placeholder.

19.   We can infer from the passage that politicians (including mayors and Congressmen)

A. prefer to stand in lines with ordinary people.

B. advocate the value of waiting in lines.

C. believe in and practice waiting in lines.

D. exploit waiting in lines for their own good.

20.   What is the tone of the passage?

A. Instructive.

B. Humorous.

C. Serious.

D. Teasing.