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词汇测试题(4)97—07真题阅读中旳多义词汇(第二部分)
词汇测试(4)97—07真题阅读中旳多义词汇(第二部分)
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Text 1
1.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.
2.Depending on whom you are addressing, the
problems will be different.
3.If you are talking to a group of managers, you may
refer to the disorganized methods of their secretaries;
alternatively if you are addressing secretaries, you
may want to comment on their disorganized bosses.
4.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.
5.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.
6.You will be on safer ground if you stick to scapegoats
like the Post Office or the telephone system.
7.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.
8.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.
9.Look at your talk and pick out a few words or sentences
which you can turn about and inject with humor.
10.It can be inferred from the text that public services
have often been the laughing stock.
11.To achieve the desired result, humorous stories
should be delivered in well-worded language.
Text 2
1.Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised
ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is
dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty.
2.And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical
version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.
3.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.
4.Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that
thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction.
5.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.
6.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.
7.“While we know how to tell a 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.”
8.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 , researchers lately
have begun to extend that forecast by decades if
not centuries.
9.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.
10.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.
11.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.
12.According to the text, what is beyond man’s ability
now is to design a robot that can have a little
common sense.
Text 3
1. 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.
2. 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.
3.Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation
and global economic decline.
4.So where are the headlines warning of gloom and
doom this time?
5.Strengthening economic growth, at the same time
as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push
the price higher still in the short term.
6.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.
7.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.
8.Rich economies are also less dependent on oil
than they were, and so less sensitive to swings
in the oil price.
9.For each dollar of GDP (inconstant prices) rich
economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973.
10.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.
11.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.
12.The estimates in Economic Outlook show that in
rich countries oil price changes have no significant
impact on GDP.
Text 4
1.The Supreme Court’s decisions on physician-assisted
suicide carry important implications for how medicine
seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.
2.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.
3.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.
4. 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 medication to control
their pain if that might hasten death.”
5. 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 hasten death.
6.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.
7.Just three weeks before the Court’s ruling on
physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of
Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, A
pproaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life.
8.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.
9.Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting
that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into
better care.
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Text 1
1.No clear-cut distinction can be drawn between professionals
and amateurs in science: exceptions can be found to any rule.
2.A comparison of British geological publications over the last
century and a half reveals not simply an increasing emphasis
on the primacy of research, but also a changing definition of
what constitutes an acceptable research paper.
3.Thus, in the nineteenth century, local geological studies
represented worthwhile research in their own right; but, in
the twentieth century, local studies have increasingly
become acceptable to professionals only if they incorporate,
and reflect on, the wider geological picture.
4.A rather similar process of differentiation has led to
professional geologists coming together nationally within
one or two specific societies, whereas the amateurs have
tended either to remain in local societies or to come together
nationally in a different way.
5.Although the process of professionalization and specialization
was already well under way in British geology during the
nineteenth century, its full consequences were thus delayed
until the twentieth century.
6.Theauthor writes of the development of geology to
demonstrate the process of specialization and
professionalization.
Text 2
1.A great deal of attention is being paid today to the
so-called digital divide — the division of the world into
the info (information) rich and the info poor.
2.There are technological reasons to hope the digital
divide will narrow.
3. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion
people on the planet will be netted together.
4.And that is very good news because the Internet
may well be the most powerful tool for combating
world poverty that we’ve ever had.
5.And the Internet is not the only tool we have.
6.To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished
countries will have to get over their outdated
anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment.
7. The more foreign capital you have helping you build your
Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic
infrastructure, the better off you’re going to be.
Text 3
1.The American Society of Newspaper Editors is trying to
answer this painful question.
2.Most journalists learn to see the world through a set of
standard templates (patterns) into which they plug each
day’s events. In other words, there is a conventional
story line in the newsroom culture that provides a
backbone and a ready-made narrative structure for
otherwise confusing news.
3. Replies show that compared with other Americans,
journalists are more likely to live in upscale neighborhoods,
have maids, own Mercedeses, and trade stocks, and
they’re less likely to go to church, do volunteer work,
or put down roots in a community.
4The astonishing distrust of the news media
isn’t rooted in inaccuracy or poor reportorial
skills but in the daily clash of world views between
reporters and their readers.
5.This is an explosive situation for any industry,
particularly a declining one.
6.The results of the journalism credibility
project turned out to be somewhat contradictory.
Text 4
1.The process sweeps from hyperactive America
to Europe and reaches the emerging countries
with unsurpassed might.
2.Multinational corporations accounted for less than
20% of international trade in 1982.
3.Today the figure is more than 25% and growing rapidly.
4.International affiliates account for a fast-growing
segment of production in economies that open up
and welcome foreign investment.
5.This phenomenon has created serious concerns over
the role of smaller economic firms, of national
businessmen and over the ultimate stability of the
world economy.
6.I believe that the most important forces behind the
massive M&A wave are the same that underlie the
globalization process: falling transportation and
communication costs, lower trade and investment
barriers and enlarged markets that require enlarged
operations capable of meeting customers’ demands.
7.Yet it is hard to imagine that the merger of a few oil
firms today could re-create the same threats to
competition that were feared nearly a century ago in
the U.S., when the Standard Oil trust was broken up.
8.Yet the fact remains that the merger movement
must be watched.
9.Won’t multinationals shift production from one place
to another when a nation gets too strict about
infringements to fair competition?
10. And should one country
take upon itself the role of
“defending competition”
on issues that affect many other
nations, as in the U.S. vs. Microsoft case?
Text 5
1. A lateral move that hurt my pride and blocked
my professional progress prompted me to abandon
my relatively high profile career although, in the
manner of a disgraced government minister,
I covered my exit by claiming “I wanted to spend
more time with my family”.
2. Curiously, some two-and-a-half years and two
novels later, my experiment in what the Americans
term “downshifting” has turned my tired excuse
into an absolute reality.
3. I have discovered, as perhaps Kelsey will after
her much-publicized resignation from the editorship
of She after a build-up of stress, that abandoning
the doctrine of “juggling your life”, and making
the alternative move into “downshifting” brings
with it far greater rewards than financial success
and social status.
4.Downshifting — also known in America as
“voluntary simplicity” — has, ironically, even
bred a new area of what might be termed
anti-consumerism.
5.There are a number of bestselling downshifting
self-help books for people who want to simplify
their lives; there are newsletters, such as The
Tightwad Gazette, that give hundreds of thousands
of Americans useful tips on anything from recycling
their cling-film to making their own soap; there are
even support groups for those who want to achieve
the mid- ’90s equivalent of dropping out.
6.While in America the trend started as a reaction to
the economic decline — after the mass redundancies
caused by downsizing in the late ’80s — and is still
linked to the politics of thrift, in Britain, at least among
the middle-class downshifters of my acquaintance,
we have different reasons for seeking to simplify our lives.
7. For the women of my generation who were urged
to keep juggling through the ’80s, down-shifting in
the mid- ’90s is not so much a search for the mythical
good life — growing your own organic vegetables, and
risking turning into one — as
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