2016考研英语二阅读理解解题
礼仪之邦送礼网-入团申请书1000字
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Text 1
The decision
of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert
as its next music
director has been the talk
of the classical-music world ever since the sudden
announcement of his appointment in 2009. For
the most part, the response has been
favorable, to say the least. “Hooray! At
last!” wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-
sided
classical-music critic.
One of the
reasons why the appointment came as such a
surprise, however, is
that Gilbert is
comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who
had advocated
Gilbert‘s appointment in
the
Times
, calls him “an unpretentious musician
with no air
of the formidable conductor about
him.” As a description of the next music director
of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by
musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre
Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at
least some
Times
readers as faint praise.
For my part, I have no idea whether
Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good
one. To be sure, he performs an impressive
variety of interesting compositions, but it
is
not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall,
or anywhere else, to hear
interesting
orchestral music. All I have to do is to go to my
CD shelf, or boot up my
computer and download
still more recorded music from iTunes.
Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are
no substitute for live
performance are missing
the point. For the time, attention, and money of
the art-
loving public, classical
instrumentalists must compete not only with opera
houses,
dance troupes, theater companies, and
museums, but also with the recorded
performances of the great classical musicians
of the 20th century. These recordings
are
cheap, available everywhere, and very often much
higher in artistic quality than
today’s live
performances; moreover, they can be “consumed” at
a time and place of
the listener’s choosing.
The widespread availability of such recordings has
thus
brought about a crisis in the institution
of the traditional classical concert.
One
possible response is for classical performers to
program attractive new
music that is not yet
available on record. Gilbert‘s own interest in new
music has
been widely noted: Alex Ross, a
classical-music critic, has described him as a man
who is capable of turning the Philharmonic
into “a markedly different, more vibrant
organization.” But what will be the nature of
that difference Merely expanding the
orchestra’s repertoire will not be enough. If
Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to
succeed,
they must first change the relationship between
America‘s oldest orchestra
and the new
audience it hopes to attract.
21. We learn
from Paragraph 1 that Gilbert’s appointment
has________.
[A]incurred criticism
[B]raised suspicion.
[C]received
acclaim
[D]aroused curiosity.
22. Tommasini regards Gilbert as an artist who is
_______.
[A]influential
[B]modest
[C]respectable
[D]talented
23.
The author believes that the devoted concertgoers
_________.
[A]ignore the expenses of live
performances
[B]reject most kinds of
recorded performances
[C]exaggerate the
variety of live performances
[D]overestimate the value of live performances
24. According to the text, which of the
following is true of recordings？
[A]They
are often inferior to live concerts in quality.
[B]They are easily accessible to the general
public.
[C]They help improve the quality of
music.
[D]They have only covered
masterpieces.
25. Regarding Gilbert‘s role
in revitalizing the Philharmonic, the author feels
______.
[A]doubtful
[B]enthusiastic
[C]confident
[D]puzzled
Text 2
When Liam McGee departed as president of
Bank of America in August, his
explanation was
surprisingly straight up. Rather than cloaking his
exit in the usual
vague excuses, he came right
out and said he was leaving “to pursue my goal of
running a company.” Broadcasting his ambition
was “very much my decision,” McGee
says.
Within two weeks, he was talking for the first
time with the board of Hartford
Financial
Services Group, which named him CEO and chairman
on September 29.
McGee says leaving
without a position lined up gave him time to
reflect on what
kind of company he wanted to
run. It also sent a clear message to the outside
world
about his aspirations. And McGee isn‘t
alone. In recent weeks the No.2 executives at
Avon and American Express quit with the
explanation that they were looking for a
CEO
post. As boards scrutinize succession plans in
response to shareholder pressure,
executives
who don’t get the nod also may wish to move on. A
turbulent business
environment also has senior
managers cautious of letting vague pronouncements
cloud their reputations.
As the
first signs of recovery begin to take hold, deputy
chiefs may be more willing
to make the jump
without a net. In the third quarter, CEO turnover
was down 23%
from a year ago as nervous boards
stuck with the leaders they had, according to
Liberum Research. As the economy picks up,
opportunities will abound for aspiring
leaders.
The decision to quit a senior
position to look for a better one is
unconventional.
For years executives and
headhunters have adhered to the rule that the most
attractive CEO candidates are the ones who
must be poached. Says KornFerry
senior partner
Dennis Carey: “I can‘t think of a single search
I’ve done where a
board has not instructed me
to look at sitting CEOs first.”
Those who
jumped without a job haven’t always landed in top
positions quickly.
Ellen Marram quit as chief
of Tropicana a decade ago, saying she wanted to be
a
CEO. It was a year before she became head of
a tiny Internet-based commodities
exchange.
Robert Willumstad left Citigroup in 2005 with
ambitions to be a CEO. He
finally took that
post at a major financial institution three years
later.
Many recruiters say the old
disgrace is fading for top performers. The
financial
crisis has made it more acceptable
to be between jobs or to leave a bad one. “The
traditional rule was it’s safer to stay where
you are, but that’s been fundamentally
inverted,” says one headhunter. “The people
who’ve been hurt the worst are those
who’ve
stayed too long.”
26. When McGee announced
his departure, his manner can best be described as
being ________.
[A]arrogant
[B]frank
[C]self-centered
[D]impulsive
27. According to
Paragraph 2, senior executives’ quitting may be
spurred by
______.
[A]their expectation
of better financial status
[B]their need to
reflect on their private life
[C]their
strained relations with the boards
[D]their
pursuit of new career goals
28. The word
“poached”（Line 3, Paragraph 4）most probably means
_______.
[A]approved of
[B]attended
to
[C]hunted for
[D]guarded
against
29. It can be inferred from
the last paragraph that _______.
[A]top
performers used to cling to their posts
[B]loyalty of top performers is getting out-dated
[C]top performers care more about
reputations
[D]it’s safer to stick to the
traditional rules
30. Which of the
following is the best title for the text？
[A]CEOs: Where to Go
[B]CEOs: All the Way
Up
[C]Top Managers Jump without a Net
[D]The Only Way Out for Top Performers
Text 3
The rough guide to marketing success used
to be that you got what you paid for.
No
longer. While traditional “paid” media – such as
television commercials and print
advertisements – still play a major role,
companies today can exploit many
alternative
forms of media. Consumers passionate about a
product may create
“earned” media by willingly
promoting it to friends, and a company may
leverage
“owned” media by sending e-mail
alerts about products and sales to customers
registered with its Web site. The way
consumers now approach the process of
making
purchase decisions means that marketing’s impact
stems from a broad range
of factors beyond
conventional paid media.
Paid and owned
media are controlled by marketers promoting their
own products.
For earned media, such marketers
act as the initiator for users‘ responses. But in
some cases, one marketer’s owned media become
another marketer’s paid media –
for instance,
when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its
Web site. We define
such sold media as owned
media whose traffic is so strong that other
organizations
place their content or
e-commerce engines within that environment. This
trend,
which we believe is still in its
infancy, effectively began with retailers and
travel
providers such as airlines and hotels
and will no doubt go further. Johnson &
Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter,
a stand-alone media property that
promotes
complementary and even competitive products.
Besides generating income,
the presence of
other marketers makes the site seem objective,
gives companies
opportunities to learn
valuable information about the appeal of other
companies’
marketing, and may help expand user
traffic for all companies concerned.
The
same dramatic technological changes that have
provided marketers with
more（and more
diverse）communications choices have also increased
the risk that
passionate consumers will voice
their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much
more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are
the opposite of earned media: an
asset or
campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other
stakeholders, or activists
who make negative
allegations about a brand or product. Members of
social
networks, for instance, are learning
that they can hijack media to apply pressure on
the businesses that originally created them.
If that happens, passionate
consumers would try to persuade others to boycott
products, putting the reputation of the target
company at risk. In such a case, the
company‘s
response may not be sufficiently quick or
thoughtful, and the learning
curve has been
steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some
of the damage
from its recall crisis earlier
this year with a relatively quick and well-
orchestrated
social-media response campaign,
which included efforts to engage with consumers
directly on sites such as Twitter and the
social-news site Digg.
ers may create
“earned” media when they are_______.
[A]
obsessed with online shopping at certain Web sites
[B] inspired by product-promoting e-mails
sent to them
[C] eager to help their
friends promote quality products
[D]
enthusiastic about recommending their favorite
products
32. According to Paragraph 2, sold
media feature __________.
[A] a safe
business environment
[B] random
competition
[C] strong user traffic
[D] flexibility in organization
33. The
author indicates in Paragraph 3 that earned media
_________.
[A] invite constant conflicts
with passionate consumers
[B] can be used
to produce negative effects in marketing
[C] may be responsible for fiercer competition.
[D] deserve all the negative comments about
them.
34. Toyota Motor‘s experience is cited
as an example of __________.
[A] responding
effectively to hijacked media
[B]
persuading customers into boycotting products
[C] cooperating with supportive consumers
[D] taking advantage of hijacked media
35. Which of the following is the text mainly
about
[A] Alternatives to conventional paid
media.
[B] Conflict between hijacked and
earned media.
[C] Dominance of hijacked
media.
[D] Popularity of owned media.
Text 4
It‘s no surprise that
Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine
cover story.
“I love My Children, I Hate My
Life,” is arousing much chatter – nothing gets
people
talking like the suggestion that child
rearing is anything less than a completely
fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather
than concluding that children make
parents
either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need
to redefine happiness:
instead of thinking of
it as something that can be measured by moment-to-
moment
joy, we should consider being happy as
a past-tense condition. Even though the
day-
to-day experience of raising kids can be
soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that “the
very things that in the moment dampen our
moods can later be sources of intense
gratification and delight.”
The
magazine cover showing an attractive mother
holding a cute baby is hardly
the only
Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week.
There are also stories
about newly adoptive –
and newly single – mom Sandra Bullock, as well as
the usual
“Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news.
Practically every week features at least one
celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the
newsstands.
In a society that so
persistently celebrates procreation, is it any
wonder that
admitting you regret having
children is equivalent to admitting you support
kitten-
killing It doesn‘t seem quite fair,
then, to compare the regrets of parents to the
regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents
rarely are provoked to wonder if they
shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless
folks are bothered with the message
that
children are the single most important thing in
the world: obviously their misery
must be a
direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in
their lives.
Of course, the image of
parenthood that celebrity magazines like
US
Weekly
and People
present is hugely
unrealistic, especially when the parents are
single
mothers like Bullock. According to
several studies concluding that parents are less
happy than childless couples, single parents
are the least happy of all. No shock
there,
considering how much work it is to raise a kid
without a partner to lean on;
yet to hear
Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their
“own”（read: with round-
the-clock help）is a
piece of cake.
It’s hard to imagine
that many people are dumb enough to want children
just
because Reese and Angelina make it look
so glamorous: most adults understand that
a
baby is not a haircut. But it’s interesting to
wonder if the images we see every
week of
stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren’t
in some small,
subconscious way contributing
to our own dissatisfactions with the actual
experience,
in the same way that a small part
of us hoped getting “ the Rachel” might make us
look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
er Senior suggests in her article that raising
a child can bring______.
[A]temporary
delight
[B]enjoyment in progress
[C]happiness in retrospect
[D]lasting reward
learn from Paragraph 2 that ________.
[A]celebrity moms are a permanent source for
gossip
[B]single mothers with babies
deserve greater attention
[C]news about
pregnant celebrities is entertaining
[D]having children is highly valued by the public
is suggested in Paragraph 3 that childless
folks ________.
[A]are constantly exposed to
criticism
[B]are largely ignored by the
media
[C]fail to fulfill their social
responsibilities
[D]are less likely to be
satisfied with their life
ing to Paragraph
4, the message conveyed by celebrity magazines is
______.
[A]soothing
[B]ambiguous
[C]compensatory
[D]misleading
of the following can be
inferred from the last paragraph？
[A]Having
children contributes little to the glamour of
celebrity moms.
[B]Celebrity moms have
influenced our attitude towards child rearing.
[C]Having children intensifies our
dissatisfaction with life.
[D]We sometimes
neglect the happiness from child rearing.
Text 5
Text 3
The US$$3-million
Fundamental Physics Prize is indeed an interesting
experiment, as
Alexander Polyakov said when he
accepted this year’s award in March. And it is far
from the only
one of its type. As a News
Feature article in Nature discusses, a string of
lucrative awards for
researchers have joined
the Nobel Prizes in recent years. Many, like the
Fundamental Physics
Prize, are funded from the
telephone-number-sized bank accounts of Internet
entrepreneurs. These
benefactors have
succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and
they want to use their wealth to
draw
attention to those who have succeeded in science.
What’s not to like Quite a lot, according to a
handful of scientists quoted in the News Feature.
You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes,
and these upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their
prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The
new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for
those
behind them, say scientists. They could
distort the achievement-based system of peer-
review-led
research. They could cement the
status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not
fund peer-
reviewed research. They perpetuate
the myth of the lone genius.
The goals of the
prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism.
Some want to shock, others to
draw people into
science, or to better reward those who have made
their careers in research.
As Nature has
pointed out before, there are some legitimate
concerns about how science
prizes – both new
and old – are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize
in Life Sciences, launched
this year, takes an
unrepresentative view of what the life sciences
include. But the Nobel
Foundation’s limit of
three recipients per prize, each of whom must
still be living, has long been
outgrown by the
collaborative nature of modern research – as will
be demonstrated by the
inevitable row over who
is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the
discovery of the Higgs
boson. The Nobels were,
of course, themselves set up by a very rich
individual who had decided
what he wanted to
do with his own money. Time, rather than
intention, has given them legitimacy.
As much
as some scientists may complain about the new
awards, two things seem clear. First,
most
researchers would accept such a prize if they were
offered one. Second, it is surely a good
thing
that the money and attention come to science
rather than go elsewhere. It is fair to criticize
and question the mechanism – that is the
culture of research, after all – but it is the
prize-givers’
money to do with as they please.
It is wise to take such gifts with gratitude and
grace.
31. The Fundamental Physics Prize is
seen as ______
[A] a symbol of the
entrepreneurs’ wealth.
[B] a possible
replacement of the Nobel Prizes.
[C] an
example of bankers’ investments.
[D] a
handsome reward for researchers.
32. The
critics think that the new awards will most
benefit ________
[A]the profit-oriented
scientists.
[B]the founders of the new awards.
[C]the achievement-based system.
[D]peer-
review-led research.
33. The discovery of the
Higgs boson is a typical case which involves
_______
[A]controversies over the recipients’
status.
[B]the joint effort of modern
researchers.
[C]legitimate concerns over the
new prizes.
[D]the demonstration of research
findings.
34. According to Paragraph 4, which
of the following is true of the Nobels
[A]Their endurance has done justice to them.
[B]Their legitimacy has long been in dispute.
[C]They are the most representative honor.
[D]History has never cast doubt on
them.
35. The author believes that the new
awards are ______
[A]acceptable despite
the criticism.
[B]harmful to the culture of
research.
[C]subject to undesirable changes.
[D]unworthy of public attention.
Text 6
“The Heart of the Matter,” the just-released
report by the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (AAAS)，deserves praise for affirming
the importance of the humanities and social
sciences to the prosperity and security of
liberal democracy in America. Regrettably,
however, the
report’s failure to address the
true nature of the crisis facing liberal education
may cause more
harm than good.
In 2010,
leading congressional Democrats and Republicans
sent letters to the AAAS asking
that it
identify actions that could be taken by “federal,
state and local governments, universities,
foundations, educators, individual benefactors
and others” to “maintain national excellence in
humanities and social scientific scholarship
and education.” In response, the American Academy
formed the Commission on the Humanities and
Social Sciences. Among the commission’s 51
members are top-tier-university presidents,
scholars, lawyers, judges, and business
executives, as
well as prominent figures from
diplomacy, filmmaking, music and journalism.
The goals identified in the report are
generally admirable. Because representative
government
presupposes an informed citizenry,
the report supports full literacy, stresses the
study of history
and government, particularly
American history and American government; and
encourages the use
of new digital
technologies. To encourage innovation and
competition, the report calls for
increased
investment in research, the crafting of coherent
curricula that improve students’ ability
to
solve problems and communicate effectively in the
21st century, increased funding for teachers
and the encouragement of scholars to bring
their learning to bear on the great challenges of
the
day. The report also advocates greater
study of foreign languages, international affairs
and the
expansion of study abroad programs.
Unfortunately, despite 2? years in the making,
“The Heart of the Matter” never gets to the
heart of the matter: the illiberal nature of
liberal education at our leading colleges and
universities.
The commission ignores that for
several decades America’s colleges and
universities have
produced graduates who don’t
know the content and character of liberal
education and are thus
deprived of its
benefits. Sadly, the spirit of inquiry once at
home on campus has been replaced by
the use of
humanities and social sciences as vehicles for
publicizing “progressive, ”or left-liberal
propaganda.
Today, professors routinely
treat the progressive interpretation of history
and progressive
public policy as the proper
subject of study while portraying conservative or
classical liberal ideas
—such as free
markets and self-reliance—as falling outside the
boundaries of routine, and
sometimes
legitimate, intellectual investigation.
The
AAAS displays great enthusiasm for liberal
education. Yet its report may well set back
reform by obscuring the depth and breadth of
the challenge that Congress asked it to
illuminate.
36. According to Paragraph 1, what
is the author’s attitude toward the AAAS’s report
[A] Critical
[B] Appreciative.
[C] Contemptuous.
[D] Tolerant.
37.
Influential figures in the Congress required that
the AAAS report on how to ______
[A]
retain people’s interest in liberal education.
[B] define the government’s role in education.
[C] keep a leading position in liberal
education.
[D] safeguard individuals’ rights
to education.
38. According to Paragraph 3,
the report suggests _______
[A] an
exclusive study of American history.
[B] a
greater emphasis on theoretical subjects.
[C]
the application of emerging technologies.
[D]
funding for the study of foreign languages.
39. The author implies in Paragraph 5 that
professors are ________
[A] supportive of free
markets.
[B] cautious about intellectual
investigation.
[C] conservative about public
policy.
[D] biased against classical liberal
ideas.
40. Which of the following would be the
best title for the text
[A] Ways to
Grasp “The Heart of the Matter”
[B] Illiberal
Education and “The Heart of the Matter”
[C]
The AAAS’s Contribution to Liberal Education
[D] Progressive Policy vs. Liberal Education