武大英语考博阅读部分.doc

武汉大学 阅读部分
Reading Comprehension
Text 1
Scientists have genetically engineered tomato and tobacco plants to produce a vaccine against the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, the disease that killed nearly 800 people in 2003.
Meanwhile, another team of researchers has developed a vaccine that protects monkeys against the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses, which have plagued central Africa. An ongoing Marburg outbreak in Angola has killed at least 357 people.
One reason it is difficult to develop vaccines for diseases like SARS and Ebola is because some viruses are believed to mutate constantly. If a virus changes quickly, a vaccine might be suitable for a while but not forever.
While both vaccines are far from ready for human use, the studies raise the possibility of producing economical vaccines for diseases for which there is no known cure.
"There was a need to prepare quickly a vaccine that is inexpensive and safe," said Hilary Koprowski, who is the director of the Center for Neurovirology at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Health officials alike have a strong need for vaccines that are both economical and easily administered. Plants have long been seen as an attractive source for vaccines, since plants can be grown inexpensively on a large scale.
The easiest plant to genetically modify is tobacco. For the SARS study, Koprowski and his colleagues engineered low-nicotine plants to produce a so-called spike protein of the SARS virus. The protein is used to trigger an immune response in the human body.
Once the researchers showed that tobacco could produce the SARS virus spike protein, they applied the same technique to tomatoes. Mice that were fed genetically modified tomatoes developed antibodies to the virus that causes SARS.
However, the scientists did not report whether they injected the mice with the SARS virus.
"It does not show that the antibody offers any protection," said Michael Lai, a virologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Don't expect to see "vaccine vegetables" anytime soon. Researchers say it would be impossible to standardize the amount of vaccine in a vegetable. In fact no vaccine produced in plants has ever been licensed for human use.
However, the scientists envision that the SARS vaccine could be ground into a powder, formed into capsules, and consumed as a dietary supplement.

1. Why is it hard to develop a vaccine for SARS?
[A] It’s a severe acute respiratory disease.
[B] There is no known cure for the disease.
[C] There is a constant change in the genetic structure of the virus.
[D] The SARS virus begins its life in an animal rather than a human.

2. What’s the significance of the studies?
[A] They produced vaccines ready for human use.
[B] They are the first to produce vaccine vegetables.
[C] They may lead to breakthroughs in vaccine research.
[D] They marked the beginning of a technical innovation.

3. Why do scientists turn to plants for vaccines?
[A] They prefer oral vaccines.
[B] Herbal medicine has a long history.
[C] Plants can produce a spike protein of the virus.
[D] They would like to produce affordable vaccines.

4. Why won’t there be "vaccine vegetables"?
[A] They haven’t been proved effective.
[B] They would be too expensive to grow.
[C] Quality control would be a big problem.
[D] They haven’t been licensed for human use.

5. How might the SARS vaccine be commercialized?
[A] Vaccine pills might be available.
[B] Vaccine injection might be available.
[C] Vaccine tobacco might go on sale.
[D] Vaccine tomatoes might go on sale.
Text 2
Maggie Dillon, a junior at Princeton, arrived on that Gothic patch of New Jersey in the fall of 2002 with a pretty good idea of what she wanted to study. "From Day 1," says Ms. Dillon, a native of Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., "I thought I was going to major in English."
It would certainly have been a well-worn path: this year, 128 Princeton students are concentrating in English literature, making it the university's fifth most popular major, after politics (250), history (245), economics (223) and public policy (164). In fact, in a pattern that is alarming administrators, 43 percent of all juniors and seniors at Princeton major in the "Big 5" departments. With the remaining 57 percent of students scattered across 29 other subjects, some departments are strained - by Princeton's comparatively luxurious standards - while others are underused. And some are essentially academic boutiques: Slavic languages, for instance, has six majors, German has eight, astrophysics nine.
"When you have that kind of imbalance, it is really hard to deliver the quality of the educational experience that we prize," says Nancy Weiss Malkiel, dean of the college. "The president" - Shirley M. Tilghman - "asked me about a year and a half ago what would be the one thing I could identify that we could do that would most improve the quality of education. " I said, without a moment's hesitation, 'Change the patterns of concentration.' "
So Ms. Malkiel has put the academic lemmings in her sights. Last fall, Princeton mailed a 71-page booklet promoting the advantages of the smaller majors to every freshman and sophomore and their parents. It featured essays by alumni who had majored in East Asian studies and gone into investment banking, or studied art history and gone to Hollywood, with quotes from law- and medical-school deans and employers reassuring students that all kinds of majors are welcome. This year, upperclassmen and professors are giving talks in residence and dining halls on the benefits of overlooked departments.
The dean's pitch piqued Ms. Dillon's interest. She had just started studying German but got on an accelerated track in the class and ended up signing with the German department. Last semester, as a major, she took three classes in the department, with 4, 6 and 10 people. This semester she is studying in Berlin - this reporter's phone call caught her touring Radio Brandenburg, part of her program - and she has a Princeton-financed job lined up at the Jewish Museum Vienna next summer. "Majoring in German," she says, "has opened up opportunities that I might not have had in English."
"They are great departments," she says of Princeton's underpopulated ones, "and they have a lot of resources."

6. Why would a lot of Princeton students major in the "Big 5" departments?
[A] They may well become successful.
[B] They have no interest in other majors.
[C] These departments have a lot more resources.
[D] They would like to pursue graduate studies in medicine or law later.

7. What is alarming to the Princeton administrators?
[A] The employment rate of graduates.
[B] The imbalance of student distribution.
[C] The survival of the underused departments.
[D] The heavy strain on the popular departments.

8. What does the author imply by "Princeton's comparatively luxurious standards" (Line 6, paragraph 2)?
[A] Princeton has always been a university for the rich.
[B] Princeton has stricter standards for the "Big 5" departments.
[C] You have to pay a large sum of tuition fees to attend Princeton.
[D] The teacher-student ratio in other universities would usually be bigger.

9. What have the administrators been trying to achieve according to the passage?
[A] To ensure employment for the graduates.
[B] To strengthen the overlooked departments.
[C] To provide quality education to every student.
[D] To promote the advantages of the popular majors.

10. Why did Ms. Dillon transfer to the German department?
[A] She acted on the dean’s advice.
[B] She found it a mistake to major in English.
[C] She cherishes the dream of working in Europe.
[D] She came to realize the advantages of the German department.
Text 3
Commuter trains are often stuffy and crowded, and they frequently fail to run on time. As if that were not bad enough, Tsuyoshi Hondou, a physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, published a paper in 2002 that gave commuters yet another reason to feel uncomfortable. Dr Hondou examined mobile-phone usage in enclosed spaces such as railway carriages, buses and lifts, all of which are, in essence, metal boxes. His model predicted that a large number of passengers crowded together, all blathering, sending text messages, or browsing the web on their phones, could produce levels of electromagnetic radiation that exceed international safety standards. That is because the radio waves produced by each phone are reflected off the metal walls of the carriage, bus or lift. Enough radiation escapes to allow the phone to communicate with the network, but the rest bathes the inside of the carriage with bouncing microwaves.
This sounds worrying. But maybe it isn't after all. In a paper published recently in Applied Physics Letters, Jaime Ferrer and Lucas Fernández-Seivane from the University of Oviedo in Spain—along with colleagues from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and Telefónica Móviles, a Spanish mobile operator—dispute Dr Hondou's findings. They conclude that the level of radiation is safe after all.
The key addition to the new research is the effect of the passengers themselves. While each phone produces radiation that bounces around the car, the passengers absorb some of it, which has the effect of reducing the overall intensity, just as the presence of an audience changes the acoustics of a concert hall, making it less reverberant. Dr Hondou's model, in short, was valid only in the case of a single passenger sitting in an empty carriage with an active mobile phone on every seat.
While Dr Hondou acknowledged this in his original paper, he did not specifically calculate the effect that leaving out the other passengers would have on the radiation level. As a result, say the authors of the new paper, he significantly overestimated the level of electromagnetic radiation. When one is sitting on a train, Dr Ferrer and his colleagues found, the most important sources of radiation are one's own phone, and those of one's immediate neighbours. The radiation from these sources far exceeds that from other phones or from waves bouncing around the carriage. And all these sources together produce a level of radiation within the bounds defined by the ICNIRP, the international body that regulates such matters.
People concerned about the effects of mobile-phone radiation are unlikely to take much comfort from Dr Ferrer's results. They worry that even small amounts of microwave radiation—within the ICNIRP's limits—may have adverse health effects. The evidence so far is ambiguous, inconsistent and sparse. Indeed, Dr Ferrer says he was surprised at how little research has been done in this area.

11. According to Dr Hondou, what’s wrong with public means of transport?
[A] They are not punctual in most cases.
[B] They are as unhealthy as microwaves.
[C] They emit excessive electromagnetic radiation.
[D] They allow too much radiation to affect passengers.

12. What’s the difference between Dr Hondou’s and Dr. Ferrer’s research?
[A] They take different factors into account.
[B] They research into different means of transport.
[C] They have different criteria of safe radiation level.
[D] They use different ways to estimate the level of electromagnetic radiation.

13. What did Dr. Ferrer think of electromagnetic radiation in public transport?
[A] It may have adverse health effects.
[B] It far exceeds microwaves radiation.
[C] It is overestimated by some of the researchers.
[D] It bathes the inside of the carriage with bouncing microwaves.

14. What is ICNIRP?
[A] The maximum level of radiation set by WHO.
[B] A research institute for electromagnetic radiation.
[C] A set of international safety standards governing mobile phone business.
[D] An organization that disseminates information and advice on potential health hazards.

15. What might be a possible flaw in Dr. Hondou’s and Dr. Ferrer’s research?
[A] Neither of them can comfort the passengers.
[B] Both of them had done little research into the area.
[C] Both are valid only in the case of a single passenger in an empty carriage.
[D] Both results are based on mathematical models, not physical measurements.

Text 4
It never rains but it pours. Just as bosses and boards had finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and beefed up their feeble corporate governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss's agenda in businesses of every variety.
Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organisations as diverse as Polo Ralph Lauren, Time Warner, MCI, the large American defence contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.
“Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset,” says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University's business school. “The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders”. Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices, suggests Eli Noam of New York's Columbia Business School. “Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue, not a techie one,” he says.
The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.
Such a situation may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast: lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, DC. America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) already made a hugely important decision this June to put corporate America on notice that reg