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一、词汇
Saga orgy skirmish abject forgery banal edifice myxomatosis devastation bequeath electroencephalograph whimsical albatross crevasse palaeontological sediment bluebottle seismometer imperceptible interstellar aberrant pristine latitude recuperation satiation hierarchy dividend
二、阅读理解
Passage 1
Parents are often upset when their children praise the homes of theirs friends and regard it as a slur own cooking, or cleaning, or furniture, and often are foolish enough to let the adolescents see that they are annoyed. They may even accuse them of disloyalty, or make some spiteful remark about the friends’ parents. Such a loss of dignity and descent into childish behavior on the part of the adults deeply shocks the adolescents, and makes them resolve that in future they will not talk to their parents about the places or people they visit. Before very long the parents well be complaining that the child is so secretive and never tells them anything, but they seldom realize that they have brought this on themselves.
Disillusionment with the parents, however good and adequate they may be both as parents and individuals, is to some degree inevitable. Most children have such a high ideal of their parents, unless the parents themselves have been unsatisfactory, that it can hardly hope to stand up to a realistic evaluation. Parents would be greatly surprised and deeply touched if they realized how much belief their children usually have in their character and infallibility, and how much this faith means to a child. If parents were prepared for this adolescent reaction and realized that it was a sign that the child was growing up and developing valuable powers of observation and independent judgment, they would not be so hurt, and therefore would not drive the child into opposition by resenting and resisting it.
The adolescent, with his passion for sincerity, always respects a parent who admits that he is wrong, or ignorant, or even that he has been unfair or unjust. What the child cannot forgive is the parents’ refusal to admit these charges if the child knows them to be true.
Victorian parents believed that they kept their dignity by retreating behind an unreasoning authoritarian attitude; in fact they did nothing of the kind, but children were then too cowed to let them know how they really felt. Today we lend to go to the other extreme, but on the whole this is a healthier attitude both for the child and the parent. It is always wiser and safer to face up to reality, however painful it may beat the moment.
1 Adolescents often fail to communicate _____
(a) when parents feel their children are criticising their cooking
(b) because they don't want to talk about the places or people they visit
(c) because they don't want to annoy their parents
(d) in response to negative behavior from their parents
2 When adolescents feel disillusion with their parents ______ .
[a) they don't really mean it
(b) they want to hurt them
(c) it's often a sign they're developing into maturity
(d) they are expressing their dissatisfaction with them
3 Adolescents are likely to ______ .
(a) show more respect for parents who don't think they're always right
{b) resent and resist parents whatever the parents do
(c) respect their parents' infallibility
(d) treat their parents unfairly and unjustly
4 In Victorian times, adolescents ______ .
(al) had more respect for their parents than today
(b) always faced up to reality, however painful it might be
(c) were too afraid to show their true feelings
(d) admired the authoritarian attitude of their parents
Passage 2
A young man sees a sunset and, unable to understand or to express the emotion that it rouses in him, concludes that it must be the gateway to a world that lies beyond. It is difficult for any of us in moments of intense aesthetic experience to resist thee suggestion that we are catching a glimpse of alight that shines down to us from a different realm of existence, different and, because the experience is intensely moving in some way higher. And, though the gleams blind and dazzle, yet do they convey a hint of beauty and serenity greater than we have known or imagined. Greater too than we can describe; for language, which was invented to convey the meaning of this world, cannot readily be fitted to the uses of another.[!--empirenews.page--]
That all great art has this power of suggesting a world beyond is undeniable. In some moods Nature shares it. There is no sky in June so blue that it does not point forward to a bluer, no sunset so beautiful that it does not waken the vision of a greater beauty, a vision which passes before it is fully glimpsed, and in passing leaves an indefinable longing and regret. But, if this world is not merely a bad joke, life a vulgar flare amid the cool radiance of the stars, and existence an empty laugh braying across the mysteries; if these intimations of a something behind and beyond are not evil humour born of indigestion, or whimsies sent by the devil to mock and madden us, if, in a word, beauty means something , yet we must not seek to interpret the meaning . If we glimpse the unutterable, it is unwise to try to utter it, nor should we seek to invest with significance that which we cannot grasp. Beauty in terms of our human meanings is meaningless.
1 When we have an intense experience of beauty we ————— .
(a) are tempted to believe it has some kind of meaning
(b) want to express the emotion it arouses in us
(c) know that it comes from a different realm of existence
(d) are open to suggestions
2 According to the writer, language ————— .
(a) is not powerful enough to describe other-worldly experiences
(b) always conveys meaning
(c) can convey beauty and serenity
(d) has only got one use
3 _____ can suggest a world beyond-
(a) All forms of art and Nature
(b) Only Nature
(c) Not only Nature
(d) Only great art
4 The writer implies that we would all like to ————— .
(a) explain the meaning of life
(b) explain the meaning of beauty
(c) have an explanation of the meaning of life
(d) express the inexpressible
Passage 3
Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to from in three dimensions. That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most difficult of all arts; certainly it is more than the arts which involve appreciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. Many more people are ‘form-blind’ than colour- blind. The child learning to see, fir5st distinguishes only two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances, depths. Later, for its personal safety and practical needs, it has to develop (partly by means of touch) the ability to judge roughly three-dimensional distances. But having satisfied the requirements of practical necessity, most people go no further. Though they may attain considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form, they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence.
This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head – he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like: he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air .
And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence. He must, for example, perceive an egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as food, or form the literary idea that it will become a bird. And so with solids such as a shell, a nut, a plum, appear, p tadpole, a mushroom , a mountain peak , a kidney , a carrot , a tree- trunk , a bird , a bud , a lark , a ladybird , a bulrush , a bone. From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms or combinations of several forms.
1 Sculpture has been described as the. most difficult of the arts because _____ .
(a) it is not two-dimensional (b) most people are 'form blind'
(c) of the difficulty of working in stone (d} it depends on special abilities
2 We all learn about three dimensions _____ .
(a) as a matter of practical necessity and no more
(b) to appreciate sculptural forms
(c) through intellectual and emotional effort
(d) with considerable accuracy
3 A scuptor must be able to _____ .
(a) hold his sculpture in the hollow of his hand
(b) think of his sculpture viewed from every angle
(c) identify himself with his sculpture
(d) carry his sculpture inside his head
4 The important thing for a sculptor is the appreciation of the ______ of objects.
(o) form (b) ideas behind (c) meaning (d) description[!--empirenews.page--]
Passage 4
Custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment .The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any on e person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probing, he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his won baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities. Its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities, Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study6 of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions, In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people’s minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbor’s superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
1 Our view of life and the world is largely the product of______
(a) the society we are born into
(b) the inner workings of our own brains
(c) individual development and preference
(d) a mass of detail
2 According to the writer, the thoughts and ideas of an individual ______ .
(a) are minimal compared with the power of tradition
{b) will often dominate the patterns and standards handed down in the community
(c) shape his own beliefs and behaviour
(d) are often completely unintelligible
3 According to the writer, it is unlikely that a child born into one culture _____ .
(a) will acquire the customs and traditions of another
(b) will ever learn anything about a different culture
(c) will be intelligible to a child of another culture
(d) will ever travel to the opposite side of the globe
4 Anthropologists can only study human societies objectively if they -
(a) regard all cultures as having equal value
(b) distinguish between themselves and barbarians
(c) believe in the supernatural
(d) have a good understanding of Western civilization
三、翻译
1． Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route, which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded.[!--empirenews.page--]
2． On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise; but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.
3． An individual human existence should be like a river-small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
4． If one group of people were disturbed from their eye-movement sleep for several nights on end, and another group were disturbed for an equal period of time but when they were not exhibiting eye-movement, the first group began to show some personality disorders while the others seemed more or less unaffected.
5． It was Hart who created the basic formula of the Western film, and devised the protagonist he played in every film he made, the good-bad man, the accidental, noble outlaw, or the honest but frame cowboy, or the sheriff made suspect by vicious gossip; in short, the individual in conflict with himself and his frontier environment.
6． There is no sky in June so blue that it does not point forward to a bluer, no sunset so beautiful that it does not waken the vision of a greater beauty, a vision which passes before it is fully glimpsed, and in passing leaves an indefinable longing and regret.
7． The adolescent, with his passion for sincerity, always respects a parent who admits that he is wrong, or ignorant, or even that he has been unfair or unjust. What the child cannot forgive is the parents’ refusal to admit these charges if the child knows them to be true.
8． But if no one can be trusted to act in a loyal and responsible manner towards his job, then the business will require armies of administrators, checkers, and foremen, and administrative overhead will rise correspondingly.
9． A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart; he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of, and when he firsts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself, from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.
10．The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.
11．We cannot think outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or, to be more accurate, we can think only a very little way outside, and the only if we are very original.
12． The long hours in the office or the factory bring with them as their reward, not only the means of sustenance, but a keen appetite for pleasure even in its simplest and most modest forms.
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发表于 2016-8-10 18:03:56