英语专业八级改错真题-2.doc

1

The hunter-gatherer tribes that today live as our prehistoric 1.______
human ancestors consume primarily a vegetable diet supplementing 2._____
with animal foods. An analysis of 58 societies of modem hunter-
gatherers, including the Kung of southern Africa, revealed that one
half emphasize gathering plant foods, one-third concentrate on fishing
and only one-sixth are primarily hunters. Overall, two-thirds
and more of the hunter-gatherer’s calories come from plants. Detailed 3.______
studies of the Kung by the food scientists at the University of
London, showed that gathering is a more productive source of food
than is hunting. An hour of hunting yields in average about 100 4.______
edible calories, as an hour of gathering produces 240. 5.______
Plant foods provide for 60 percent to 80 percent of the Kung 6._______
diet, and no one goes hungry when the hunt fails. Interestingly, if
they escape fatal infections or accidents, these contemporary
aborigines live to old ages despite of the absence of medical care. 7._______
They experience no obesity, no middle-aged spread, little dental
decay, no high blood pressure, on heart disease, and their blood
cholesterol levels are very low( about half of the average American 8._______
adult), if no one is suggesting what we return to an aboriginal life 9.________
style, we certainly could use their eating habits as a model for 10.________
healthier diet.
2
The grammatical words which play so large a part in English 
grammar are for the most part sharply and obviously different 1._______ 
from the lexical words. A rough and ready difference which may 
seem the most obvious is that grammatical words have“ less 
meaning”, but in fact some grammarians have called them 2._______ 
“empty” words as opposed in the “full” words of vocabulary. 3.________ 
But this is a rather misled way of expressing the distinction. 4._________ 
Although a word like the is not the name of something as man is, 
it is very far away from being meaningless; there is a sharp 5._________ 
difference in meaning between “man is vile and” “the man is 
vile”, yet the is the single vehicle of this difference in meaning. 6.________ 
Moreover, grammatical words differ considerably among 
themselves as the amount of meaning they have, even in the 7.________  
lexical sense. Another name for the grammatical words has been 
“little words”. But size is by no mean a good criterion for 8._________ 
distinguishing the grammatical words of English, when we 
consider that we have lexical words as go, man, say, car. Apart 9.________ 
from this, however, there is a good deal of truth in what some 
people say: we certainly do create a great number of obscurity 10.________ 
when we omit them. This is illustrated not only in the poetry of 
Robert Browning but in the prose of telegrams and newspaper headlines.

3
During the early years of this century, wheat was seen as the
very lifeblood of Western Canada. People on city streets watched
the yields and the price of wheat in almost as much feeling as if  1._______
they were growers. The marketing of wheat became an increasing  2._______
favorite topic of conversation.
     War set the stage for the most dramatic events in marketing
the western crop. For years, farmers mistrusted speculative grain
selling as carried on through the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.
Wheat prices were generally low in the autumn, so farmers could  3._______
not wait for markets to improve. It had happened too often that
they sold their wheat soon shortly after harvest when farm debts  4.________
were coming due, just to see prices rising and speculators getting rich.  5._______
On various occasions, producer groups, asked firmer control,  6._______
but the government had no wish to become involving, at  7.______
least not until wartime when wheat prices threatened to run
wild.
     Anxious to check inflation and rising life costs, the federal  8.______
government appointed a board of grain supervisors to deal with
deliveries from the crops of 1917 and 1918. Grain Exchange
trading was suspended, and farmers sold at prices fixed by the
board. To handle with the crop of 1919, the government appointed 9.______
the first Canadian Wheat Board, with total authority to 10.______
buy, sell, and set prices.
4
There are great impediments to the general use of a standard in pronunciation
comparable to that existing in spelling (orthography). One is the fact that
pronunciation is learnt “naturally” and unconsciously, and orthography is learnt 1__________
deliberately and consciously. Large numbers of us, in fact, remain throughout
our lives quite unconscious with what our speech 2._____________
sounds like when we speak out, and it often comes as a shock 3.__________
when we firstly hear a recording of ourselves. It is not a voice we 4._________
recognize at once, whereas our own handwriting is something which we almost
always know. We begin the natural learning 5.__________
of pronunciation long before we start learning to read or write, and in our early
years we went on unconsciously imitating and 6.____________
practicing the pronunciation of those around us for many more hours per every
day than we ever have to spend learning even our 7.______________
difficult English spelling. This is “natural”, therefore, that our 8.______________
speech-sounds should be those of our immediate circle; after all, as we have seen,
speech operates as a means of holding a community 9._______________
and giving a sense of 'belonging' We learn quite early to recognize a “stranger”,
someone who speaks with an accent of a different community-perhaps only a
few miles far. 10.________________
5
Demographic indicators show that Americans in the postwar 
period were more eager than ever to establish families. They quickly 

brought down the age at marriage for both men and women and brought 
the birth rate to a twentieth century height after more than a hundred (1)______
years of a steady decline, producing the “baby boom.” These young (2)_______
adults established a trend of early marriage and relatively large 
families that Went for more than two decades and caused a major (3)_______
but temporary reversal of long-term demographic patterns. From 
the 1940S through the early 1960s, Americans married at a high rate (4)________
and at a younger age than their Europe counterparts.(5)________
Less noted but equally more significant, the men and women on who (6)________
formed families between 1940 and 1960 nevertheless reduced the (7)________
divorce rate after a postwar peak; their marriages remained intact to 
a greater extent than did that of couples who married in earlier as well (8)
as later decades. Since the United States maintained its dubious (9)___________
distinction of having the highest divorce rate in the world, the 
temporary decline in divorce did not occur in the same extent in (10)___________ 
Europe. Contrary to fears of the experts, the role of breadwinner and 
homemaker was not abandoned.
6
One of the most important non-legislative functions of the U.S Congress
is the power to investigate. This power is usually delegated to committees - either
standing committees, special committees set for a specific (1)________
purpose, or joint committees consisted of members of both houses. (2)________
Investigations are held to gather information on the need for
future legislation, to test the effectiveness of laws already passed,
to inquire into the qualifications and performance of members and
officials of the other branches, and in rare occasions, to lay the (3)________
groundwork for impeachment proceedings. Frequently, committees
rely outside experts to assist in conducting investigative hearings (4)_________
and to make out detailed studies of issues. (5)_________
There are important corollaries to the investigative power. One
is the power to publicize investigations and its results. Most (6)_________
committee hearings are open to public and are reported (7)__________
widely in the mass media. Congressional investigations
nevertheless represent one important tool available to lawmakers (8)____
to inform the citizenry and to arouse public interests in national issues.(9)________
Congressional committees also have the power to compel
testimony from unwilling witnesses, and to cite for contempt
of Congress witnesses who refuse to testify and for perjury
these who give false testimony. (10)_________

7
The University as Business
A number of colleges and universities have announced steep
tuition increases for next year much steeper than the current,
very low, rate of inflation. They say the increases are needed because
of a loss in value of university endowments heavily investing in common 1
stock. I am skeptical. A business firm chooses the price that maximizes
its net revenues, irrespective fluctuations in income; and increasingly the 2
outlook of universities in the United States is indistinguishable from those of 3
business firms. The rise in tuitions may reflect the fact economic uncertainty 4
increases the demand for education. The biggest cost of being
in the school is foregoing income from a job (this is primarily a factor in 5
graduate and professional-school tuition); the poor one's job prospects, 6
the more sense it makes to reallocate time from the job market to education,
in order to make oneself more marketable.
The ways which universities make themselves attractive to students 7
include soft majors, student evaluations of teachers giving students
a governance role, and eliminate required courses. 8
Sky-high tuitions have caused universities to regard their students as
customers. Just as business firms sometimes collude to shorten the 9
rigors of competition, universities collude to minimize the cost to them of the
athletes whom they recruit in order to stimulate alumni donations, so the best
athletes now often bypass higher education in order to obtain salaries earlier
from professional teams. And until they were stopped by the antitrust authorities,
the Ivy League schools colluded to limit competition for the best students, by
agreeing not to award scholarships on the basis of merit rather than purely
of need-just like business firms agreeing not to give discounts on their best 10
customer.

8
We use language primarily as a means of communication with
other human beings. Each of us shares with the community in which we
live a store of words and meanings as well as agreeing conventions as  1_______
to the way in which words should be arranged to convey a particular 2______
message: the English speaker has in his disposal vocabulary and a 3_______
set of grammatical rules which enables him to communicate his 4______
thoughts and feelings, in a variety of styles, to the other English 5_______
speakers. His vocabulary, in particular, both that which he uses actively
and that which he recognizes, increases in size as he grows
old as a result of education and experience.                   6______
But, whether the language store is relatively small or large, the system
remains no more, than a psychological reality for tike inpidual, unless
he has a means of expressing it in terms able to be seen by another 7_______
member of his linguistic community; he bas to give tile system a
concrete transmission form. We take it for granted rice’ two most 8_______
common forms of transmission-by means of sounds produced by our
vocal organs (speech) or by visual signs (writing). And these are 9______
among most striking of human achievements.                10_______

9
From what has been said, it must be clear that no one can
make very positive statements about how language originated.
There is no material in any language today and in the earliest 1 __ _
records of ancient languages show us language in a new and 2 _
emerging state. It is often said, of course, that the language 3 _ ______
originated in cries of anger, fear, pain and pleasure, and the 4 _
necessary evidence is entirely lacking: there are no remote　　
tribes, no ancient records, providing evidence of
a language with a large proportion of such cries　　　　　　 5 _
than we find in English. It is true that the absence　　　　
of such evidence does not disprove the theory, but in　　 6_
other grounds too the theory is not very attractive.
People of all races and languages make rather similar
noises in return to pain or pleasure. The fact that　　 7
such noises are similar on the lips of Frenchmen
and Malaysians whose languages are utterly different,
serves to emphasize on the fundamental difference　　　　 8________
between these noises and language proper. We may
say that the cries of pain or chortles of amusement
are largely reflex actions, instinctive to large extent, 9
whereas language proper does not consist of signs
but of these that have to be learnt and that are　　　　　　 10________
wholly conventional.

10
The desire to use language as a sign of national identity is a very natural one，and in result language has played a 1__________
prominent part in national moves．Men have often felt the need 2__________
to cultivate a given language to show that they are distinctive 3____________
from another race．whose hegemony they resent．At the time the 4.___________
United States split off from Britain，for example，there were proposals that independence should be linguistically accepted by 5.__
the use of a different language from those of Britain．6.____________
There was even one proposal that Americans should adopt Hebrew．Others favoured the adoption of Greek，though，as one man put it，things would certainly be simpler for Americans if they stuck on to 7.____________
English and made the British learn Greek．At the end，as everyone 8.___________ knows，the two countries adopted the practical and satisfactory solution of carrying with the same language as before．Since nearly two hundred years now，they have shown the 9.______________
world that political independence and national identity can be 10.___________ complete without sacrificing the enormous mutual advantages of a common language．

11
The previous section has shown how quickly a rhyme passes
from one school child to the next and illustrates the further difference (1)_____
between school lore and