考研英语阅读理解练习题及答案
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考研英语阅读理解练习题及答案
要在考研英语考试之前，好好训练自己的阅读能力的话，非做题
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给大家整理的考研英语阅读理解练习题及答案，供
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2002年全国考研英语阅读真题1 Section III Reading
Comprehension
Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the
questions
below each text by choosing [A],
[B], [C] or [D]. Mark your
answers on ANSWER
SHEET 1. (40 points)
Text 1
If you
intend using humor in your talk to make people
smile, you must know how to identify shared
experiences and
problems. Your humor must be
relevant to the audience and
should help to
show them that you are one of them or that
you
understand their situation and are in sympathy
with their
point of view. Depending on whom
you are addressing, the
problems will be
different. If you are talking to a group of
managers, you may refer to the disorganized
methods of their
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secretaries; alternatively if you are
addressing secretaries, you
may want to
comment on their disorganized bosses.
Here is
an example, which I heard at a nurses convention,
of a story which works well because the
audience all shared
the same view of doctors.
A man arrives in heaven and is being
shown
around by St. Peter. He sees wonderful
accommodations, beautiful gardens, sunny
weather, and so on.
Everyone is very peaceful,
polite and friendly until, waiting in a
line
for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed
aside by a
man in a white coat, who rushes to
the head of the line, grabs
his food and
stomps over to a table by himself. Who is that?
the new arrival asked St. Peter. Oh, that s
God, came the reply,
but sometimes he thinks
he s a doctor.
If you are part of the group,
which you are addressing,
you will be in a
position to know the experiences and
problems
which are common to all of you and it ll be
appropriate for you to make a passing remark
about the
inedible canteen food or the
chairman s notorious bad taste in
ties. With
other audiences you mustn t attempt to cut in with
humor as they will resent an outsider making
disparaging
remarks about their canteen or
their chairman. You will be on
safer ground if
you stick to scapegoats like the Post Office or
2
the telephone system.
If you feel awkward being humorous, you must
practice
so that it becomes more natural.
Include a few casual and
apparently off-the-
cuff remarks which you can deliver in a
relaxed and unforced manner. Often it s the
delivery which
causes the audience to smile,
so speak slowly and remember
that a raised
eyebrow or an unbelieving look may help to show
that you are making a light-hearted remark.
Look for the humor. It often comes from the
unexpected.
A twist on a familiar quote If at
first you don t succeed, give up
or a play on
words or on a situation. Search for exaggeration
and understatements. Look at your talk and
pick out a few
words or sentences which you
can turn about and inject with
humor.
41.
To make your humor work, you should ________.
[A] take advantage of different kinds of audience
[B] make fun of the disorganized people
[C] address different problems to different people
[D] show sympathy for your listeners
42.
The joke about doctors implies that, in the eyes
of
nurses, they are ________.
[A]
impolite to new arrivals
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[B] very conscious of their godlike role
[C]
entitled to some privileges
[D] very busy
even during lunch hours
43. It can be
inferred from the text that public services
________.
[A] have benefited many people
[B] are the focus of public attention
[C] are an inappropriate subject for humor
[D] have often been the laughing stock
44. To
achieve the desired result, humorous stories
should be delivered ________.
[A] in
well-worded language
[B] as awkwardly as
possible
[C] in exaggerated statements
[D] as casually as possible
45. The best
title for the text may be ________.
[A] Use
Humor Effectively
[B] Various Kinds of Humor
[C] Add Humor to Speech
[D] Different
Humor Strategies
2002年全国考研英语阅读真题2 Text 2
Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have
devised
4
ever more cunning
tools to cope with work that is dangerous,
boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That
compulsion has
resulted in robotics -- the
science of conferring various human
capabilities on machines. And if scientists
have yet to create
the mechanical version of
science fiction, they have begun to
come
close.
As a result, the modern world is
increasingly populated
by intelligent gizmos
whose presence we barely notice but
whose
universal existence has removed much human labor.
Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot
assembly arms. Our
banking is done at
automated teller terminals that thank us
with
mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our
subway
trains are controlled by tireless
robot-drivers. And thanks to
the continual
miniaturization of electronics and
micro-
mechanics, there are already robot systems that
can
perform some kinds of brain and bone
surgery with
submillimeter accuracy -- far
greater precision than highly
skilled
physicians can achieve with their hands alone.
But if robots are to reach the next stage of
laborsaving
utility, they will have to operate
with less human supervision
and be able to
make at least a few decisions for themselves --
goals that pose a real challenge. While we
know how to tell a
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robot to
handle a specific error, says Dave Lavery, manager
of
a robotics program at NASA, we can t yet
give a robot enough
common sense to reliably
interact with a dynamic world.
Indeed the
quest for true artificial intelligence has
produced very mixed results. Despite a spell
of initial optimism
in the 1960s and 1970s
when it appeared that transistor
circuits and
microprocessors might be able to copy the action
of the human brain by the year 2010,
researchers lately have
begun to extend that
forecast by decades if not centuries.
What
they found, in attempting to model thought, is
that
the human brain s roughly one hundred
billion nerve cells are
much more talented --
and human perception far more
complicated --
than previously imagined. They have built
robots that can recognize the error of a
machine panel by a
fraction of a millimeter in
a controlled factory environment.
But the
human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene
and immediately disregard the 98 percent that
is irrelevant,
instantaneously focusing on the
monkey at the side of a
winding forest road or
the single suspicious face in a big
crowd. The
most advanced computer systems on Earth can t
approach that kind of ability, and
neuroscientists still don t
know quite how we
do it.
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46. Human ingenuity
was initially demonstrated in
________.
[A] the use of machines to produce science fiction
[B] the wide use of machines in manufacturing
industry
[C] the invention of tools for
difficult and dangerous
work
[D] the
elite s cunning tackling of dangerous and boring
work
47. The word gizmos (Line 1,
Paragraph 2) most probably
means ________.
[A] programs
[B] experts
[C]
devices
[D] creatures
48. According to
the text, what is beyond man s ability
now is
to design a robot that can ________.
[A]
fulfill delicate tasks like performing brain
surgery
[B] interact with human beings
verbally
[C] have a little common sense
[D] respond independently to a changing world
49. Besides reducing human labor, robots can also
________.
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[A] make a
few decisions for themselves
[B] deal with
some errors with human intervention
[C]
improve factory environments
[D] cultivate
human creativity
50. The author uses the
example of a monkey to argue
that robots are
________.
[A] expected to copy human brain in
internal structure
[B] able to perceive
abnormalities immediately
[C] far less able
than human brain in focusing on relevant
information
[D] best used in a controlled
environment
2002年全国考研英语阅读真题3 Text 3
Could the bad old days of economic decline be
about to
return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-
cuts in March, the price
of crude oil has
jumped to almost $$26 a barrel, up from less
than $$10 last December. This near-tripling of
oil prices calls up
scary memories of the 1973
oil shock, when prices quadrupled,
and
1979-80, when they also almost tripled. Both
previous
shocks resulted in double-digit
inflation and global economic
decline. So
where are the headlines warning of gloom and
doom this time?
The oil price was given
another push up this week when
8
Iraq suspended oil exports.
Strengthening economic growth,
at the same
time as winter grips the northern hemisphere,
could push the price higher still in the short
term.
Yet there are good reasons to expect
the economic
consequences now to be less
severe than in the 1970s. In most
countries
the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller
share of the price of petrol than it did in
the 1970s. In Europe,
taxes account for up to
four-fifths of the retail price, so even
quite
big changes in the price of crude have a more
muted
effect on pump prices than in the past.
Rich economies are also less dependent on oil
than they
were, and so less sensitive to
swings in the oil price. Energy
conservation,
a shift to other fuels and a decline in the
importance of heavy, energy-intensive
industries have
reduced oil consumption.
Software, consultancy and mobile
telephones
use far less oil than steel or car production. For
each dollar of GDP (in constant prices) rich
economies now
use nearly 50% less oil than in
1973. The OECD estimates in its
latest
Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $$22
a
barrel for a full year, compared with $$13 in
1998, this would
increase the oil import bill
in rich economies by only 0.25-0.5%
of GDP.
That is less than one-quarter of the income loss
in
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1974 or 1980. On the
other hand, oil-importing emerging
economies
-- to which heavy industry has shifted -- have
become more energy-intensive, and so could be
more
seriously squeezed.
One more reason
not to lose sleep over the rise in oil
prices
is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not
occurred
against the background of general
commodity-price inflation
and global excess
demand. A sizable portion of the world is
only
just emerging from economic decline. The Economist
s
commodity price index is broadly unchanging
from a year ago.
In 1973 commodity prices
jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by
almost 30%.
51. The main reason for the latest rise of oil
price is
________.
[A] global inflation
[B] reduction in supply
[C] fast growth
in economy
[D] Iraq s suspension of exports
52. It can be inferred from the text that the
retail price of
petrol will go up dramatically
if ________.
[A] price of crude rises
[B] commodity prices rise
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[C] consumption rises
[D] oil taxes rise
53. The estimates in Economic Outlook show that in
rich
countries ________.
[A] heavy
industry becomes more energy-intensive
[B]
income loss mainly results from fluctuating crude
oil
prices
[C] manufacturing industry has
been seriously squeezed
[D] oil price changes
have no significant impact on GDP
54. We can
draw a conclusion from the text that ________.
[A] oil-price shocks are less shocking now
[B] inflation seems irrelevant to oil-price
shocks
[C] energy conservation can keep down
the oil prices
[D] the price rise of crude
leads to the shrinking of heavy
industry
55. From the text we can see that the writer seems
________.
[A] optimistic
[B]
sensitive
[C] gloomy
[D] scared
2002年全国考研英语阅读真题4 Text 4
11
The Supreme Court s decisions on physician-
assisted
suicide carry important implications
for how medicine seeks
to relieve dying
patients of pain and suffering.
Although it
ruled that there is no constitutional right to
physician-assisted suicide, the Court in
effect supported the
medical principle of
double effect, a centuries-old moral
principle
holding that an action having two effects -- a
good
one that is intended and a harmful one
that is foreseen -- is
permissible if the
actor intends only the good effect.
Doctors
have used that principle in recent years to
justify
using high doses of morphine to
control terminally ill patients
pain, even
though increasing dosages will eventually kill the
patient.
Nancy Dubler, director of
Montefiore Medical Center,
contends that the
principle will shield doctors who until now
have very, very strongly insisted that they
could not give
patients sufficient mediation
to control their pain if that might
hasten
death.
George Annas, chair of the health law
department at
Boston University, maintains
that, as long as a doctor
prescribes a drug
for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor
has done nothing illegal even if the patient
uses the drug to
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hasten
death. It s like surgery, he says. We don t call
those
deaths homicides because the doctors
didn t intend to kill
their patients, although
they risked their death. If you re a
physician, you can risk your patient s suicide
as long as you
don t intend their suicide.
On another level, many in the medical
community
acknowledge that the assisted-
suicide debate has been fueled
in part by the
despair of patients for whom modern medicine
has prolonged the physical agony of dying.
Just three weeks before the Court s ruling on
physician-assisted suicide, the National
Academy of Science
(NAS) released a two-volume
report, Approaching Death:
Improving Care at
the End of Life. It identifies the
undertreatment of pain and the aggressive use
of ineffectual
and forced medical procedures
that may prolong and even
dishonor the period
of dying as the twin problems of
end-of-life
care.
The profession is taking steps to
require young doctors
to train in hospices, to
test knowledge of aggressive pain
management
therapies, to develop a Medicare billing code for
hospital-based care, and to develop new
standards for
assessing and treating pain at
the end of life.
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Annas
says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that
these well-meaning medical initiatives
translate into better
care. Large numbers of
physicians seem unconcerned with the
pain
their patients are needlessly and predictably
suffering, to
the extent that it constitutes
systematic patient abuse. He says
medical
licensing boards must make it clear that painful
deaths are presumptively ones that are
incompetently
managed and should result in
license suspension.
56. From the first three
paragraphs, we learn that ________.
[A]
doctors used to increase drug dosages to control
their patients pain
[B] it is still
illegal for doctors to help the dying end their
lives
[C] the Supreme Court strongly
opposes
physician-assisted suicide
[D]
patients have no constitutional right to commit
suicide
57. Which of the following
statements is true according
to the text?
[A] Doctors will be held guilty if they risk their
patients
death.
[B] Modern medicine has
assisted terminally ill patients in
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painless recovery.
[C] The Court
ruled that high-dosage pain-relieving
medication can be prescribed.
[D] A
doctor s medication is no longer justified by his
intentions.
58. According to the NAS s
report, one of the problems in
end-of-life
care is ________.
[A] prolonged medical
procedures
[B] inadequate treatment of pain
[C] systematic drug abuse
[D]
insufficient hospital care
59. Which of the
following best defines the word
aggressive
(Line 3, Paragraph 7)?
[A] Bold
[B]
Harmful
[C] Careless
[D] Desperate
60. George Annas would probably agree that doctors
should be punished if they ________.
[A]
manage their patients incompetently
[B] give
patients more medicine than needed
[C] reduce
drug dosages for their patients
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[D] prolong the needless suffering of
the patients
2002年全国考研英语阅读真题答案解析 Section III:
Reading
Comprehension (50 points)
Part A
(40 points)
41.[C]42.[B]43.[D]44.[D]45.[A]
46.[C]47.[C]48.[D]49.[B]50.[C]
51.[B]52.[D]53.[D]54.[A]55.[A]
56.[B]57.[C]58.[B]59.[A]60.[D]
16