“外研社杯”全国英语阅读大赛样题资料讲解.doc

“外研社杯”全国英语阅读大赛样题

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2016“外研社杯”全国英语阅读大赛样题

Part I Read and Know
In Part I, you will read short texts of various kinds. Read the instructions carefully and answer the questions. (Time allowed: 22 minutes)
Questions 1-3 (Suggested completion time: 5 minutes)
Directions: Read the following quotes. Match the quotes on the left with the people on the right. Please note there are two extra options you do not need to use.
A. John Locke
B. Archimedes
C. Aristotle
D. Immanuel Kant
E. Steve Jobs

_____1. Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
_____2.Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
_____3.You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Questions 4 (Suggested completion time: 2 minutes)
Directions: Read the text, and answer the question according to the text.
To ensure the high standards of facilities we need to build new wards, laboratories and consulting rooms. In short, we need your help now. Complete the coupon today and rest assured that your donation is going to the best possible cause.
4. Where is the piece of text taken from?
A. an advertisement B. an instruction booklet
C. a story D. a newspaper
Questions 5 (Suggested completion time: 2 minutes)
Directions: Read the text, and answer the question according to the text.
Few corners of the world remain untainted by intrepid tourists, and their impact is often devastating. Too frequently they trample heedlessly on fragile environments, displacing wildlife and local populations in their insatiable quest for unexplored locations.
5. What is the best title for this text?
A. The future of tourism
B. The role of tourism
C. The price of tourism
D. The benefits of tourism
Questions 6 (Suggested completion time: 2 minutes)
Directions: Read the text, and answer the question according to the text.
Buying and selling anything is your forte now. If you visit a jumble or car-boot sale or the like, a romantic encounter is more than probable! News linked to the family is brilliant!
6. What type of text is this?
A. A personal advertisement.
B. A personal horoscope.
C. A friend’s letter of advice.
D. A written warning.
Questions 7 (Suggested completion time: 2 minutes)
Directions: Read the text, and answer the question according to the text.
With our travel agency, the holiday you book is the holiday you get. If you arrive and find we’ve failed to live up to our promises, let us know what the problem is within one day of your arrival. We’ll spend 24 hours doing everything possible to sort the problem out. In the unlikely event that we can’t resolve your problem and make you happy within 24 hours, we’ll fly you home and give your money back.
7. The text could best be described as __________.
A. a commitment
B. an appeal
C. a warning
D. a vow
Questions 8 (Suggested completion time: 2 minutes)
Directions: Read the text, and answer the question according to the text.
The new digital cameras are great fun and very easy to use. They let you review your pictures the moment you take them, so you can re-shoot right away if you’re not satisfied. But remember, a digital camera is just a computer XXXX. It’s not a replacement for your ordinary camera.
8. What is the meaning of the missing word (XXXX) in the text?
A. “something that is poor quality”
B. “an item that is not essential, something extra”
C. “something expensive but good value for money”
D. “a fashion which always remains popular”
Questions 9 (Suggested completion time: 2 minutes)
Directions: Read the text, and answer the question according to the text.
She had gone alone, but the children were to go to the station to meet her. And loving the station as they did, it was only natural that they should be there a good hour before there was any chance of Mother’s train arriving, even if the train were punctual, which was most unlikely.
9. What can you say about their mother’s train?
A. It would probably be early.
B. It would probably be on time.
C. It would probably be late.
D. It had been cancelled.

Question 10 (Suggested completion time: 5 minutes)
Directions: The bar chart shows the number and proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions, from 1990¬1992 to 2014¬2016. Answer the question according to the information in the chart.

Source: The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Report2015
10. Choose the INCORRECT description about the chart.
A. Current estimates suggest that nearly one in nine individuals do not have enough to eat between 2014 and 2016.
B. Projections indicate that the 2015 MDG target is nearly reached, with 12.9 per cent of undernourished population.
C. The situation noticeably improved during the years 1995-1999, but went down in the first five years of the new millennium.
D. The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half since 1990.

Part II Read and Reason
In Part II, you will read short texts on different subjects. Read the instructions carefully and answer the questions based on logical inference and reasoning. (Time allowed: 38 minutes)
Question 11-12 (Suggested completion time: 10 minutes)
Directions: Read the definitions of two types of logical fallacy. Answer the questions according to the definitions.
Poisoning the Well
Poisoning the well is a rhetorical technique and logical fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say. It uses the association of negative emotions to distract a subject from actual evidence in an argument.

11. Which of the following provides a typical example of poisoning the well?
A. That’s my stance on funding the education system, and anyone who disagrees with me hates children.
B. You are so weird. That means—we are pretty much sure—that your whole family is weird, too.
C. God exists because the Bible says so. The Bible is inspired. Therefore, we know that God exists.
D. I don’t care what you say. We don’t need any more bookshelves. As long as the carpet is clean, we are fine.
False Dilemma
A false dilemma arises when we allow ourselves to be convinced that we have to choose between two and only two mutually exclusive options, when that is untrue. Generally, when this rhetorical strategy is used, one of the options is unacceptable and repulsive, while the other is the one the manipulator wants us to choose. Whoever succumbs to this trap has thus made a choice that is forced, and as such, of little value.

12. Which of the following provides a typical example of a false dilemma?
A. Smoking is harmful to health, so you are supposed to quit smoking.
B. If the government doesn’t reduce public spending, our economy will collapse.
C. You may as well avoid overeating, or else you might be obese in no time.
D. You are the worst of the classmates; therefore, what you say is incredible.

Questions 13 (Suggested completion time: 4 minutes)
Directions: Read the passage about syllogism. Decide whether the reasonings are Valid or Invalid based on the principles of syllogism.
Syllogism is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true. It is perhaps today’s most commonly accepted form of logical reasoning in aptitude tests. The most commonly used type of syllogisms is elucidated in a frequently used example:
Premise 1: All men are mortal.
Premise 2: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
Now practice syllogisms for IQ tests. Please note that the conclusion is based on logical reasoning and doesn’t necessarily represent the “truth” always.
13. Valid ( ); Invalid ( )
Premise 1: All human action is conditioned by circumstances.
Premise 2: All human action involves morality.
Conclusion: All that involves morality is conditioned by circumstances.
Questions 14 (Suggested completion time: 4 minutes)
Directions: Read the passage about contraposition. Decide whether the reasonings are Valid or Invalid based on the principles of contraposition.
In logic, contraposition is a law that says that a conditional statement is logically equivalent to its contrapositive. The contrapositive of the statement has its antecedent and consequent inverted and flipped. The most commonly used type of contraposition is elucidated in the following example:
Premise 1: If it is raining, then there are clouds in the sky.
Premise 2: There are no clouds in the sky.
Conclusion: It is not raining.
Now practice contraposition for IQ tests. Please note that the conclusion is based on logical reasoning and doesn’t necessarily represent the “truth” always.
14. Valid ( ); Invalid ( )
Premise 1: If he is not an American, he is not from Texas.
Premise 2: He is from Texas.
Conclusion: He is an American.
Questions 15-17 (Suggested completion time: 6 minutes)
Directions: Read the text about a science discovery. Answer the questions according to the text.
Manipulating Memory
Memory is notoriously malleable. Our recollections fade and take on new meanings; sometimes we remember things that never even happened. But 15 .
Recently, however, scientists have started to grasp and tinker with memory’s physical basis. Last year, in work evocative of films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception, researchers discovered ways to manipulate specific memories in mice using optogenetics, a powerful technique that can trigger nerve cells in animals’ brains by zapping them with beams of laser light. In a series of experiments, they showed that they could delete existing memories and “incept” false ones.
This year, researchers went even further: switching the emotional content of a memory in mice from bad to good and vice versa. Under the laser, for example, male mice that had once associated a certain room with being shocked were tricked into acting as though they had once met friendly female mice there instead.
Whether the mice in these experiments actually experienced vivid false memories or just a fuzzy sense of pleasure or fear is unclear. Nor is it clear whether the findings apply to the tricks of memory so familiar to people. Long-sought therapeutic advances, such as treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, could remain far off. One thing is certain, however: Once considered beyond scientific dissection, memory is finally starting to yield its secrets.
15. Which of the following best fits the numbered space in the passage?
A. what is really happening in our brain as memories are remodeled remains mysterious
B. scientists are curious about why people are oblivious to what have happened to them
C. advanced technology has helped scientists discover the workings of our brain
D. some scientists argue that what we observe about human memory is not what it really is
16. The word “incept” is closest in meaning to ________.
A. operate
B. start
C. detect
D. occupy
17. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
A. People’s false memories result from the impact of different emotion provoked by later experience on the same spot.
B. The success in research indicates that it won’t be long that a therapy is worked out for people disturbed by painful memory.
C. By zapping the brain cells of mice with light, researchers are able to create, erase, or alter their memories, good or bad.
D. Many fancy ideas in science fictions or movies that are based on them actually draw greatly upon scientific achievement.

Questions 18-19 (Suggested completion time: 4 minutes)
Directions: Read the following passage about cholera. Decide whether the statements are True or False according to the passage.

A child receives the oral cholera vaccine Shanchol
Cholera is caused by a bacterial infection of the intestine. Approximately one in 20 people infected with cholera has a serious case, with symptoms including severe diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps. These symptoms quickly cause dehydration and shock, and can result in death within hours if the infected person doesn’t receive treatment. Cholera is typically transmitted by contaminated food or water. In areas with poor treatment of sewage and drinking water, the feces of people with cholera can enter the water supply and spread quickly, resulting in an epidemic. The cholera bacterium may also live in the environment in some coastal waters, so shellfish eaten raw can be a source of cholera in affected areas.
18. Cholera is known to be a life-threatening disease which easily causes death of most of the patients.
True ( ) False ( )
19. Cholera typically occurs in areas near the sea or the river where contaminated food is a major source of the disease.
True ( ) False ( )
Questions 20-21 (Suggested completion time: 5 minutes)
Directions: Read the abstract of a research paper from the DeepMind website. Decide whether the statements are True or False according to the abstract.

Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend
Authors: K. M. Hermann, T. Kočiský, E. Grefenstette, L. Espeholt, W. Kay, M. Suleyman, P. Blunsom
Published: NIPS 2015
Abstract: Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now large scale training and test datasets have been missing for this type of evaluation. In this work we define a new methodology that resolves this bottleneck and provides large scale supervised reading comprehension data. This allows us to develop a class of attention based deep neural networks that learn to read real documents and answer complex questions with minimal prior knowledge of language structure.
20. Previous studies didn’t take constant effort to evaluate the reading ability of artificial intelligence machines, which was why the present research was conducted.
True ( ) False ( )
21. One implication of the research is that a methodology that helps gather and handle big data is indispensible to artificial intelligence related studies.
True ( ) False ( )
Questions 22-23 (Suggested completion time: 5 minutes)
Directions: Read the passage about the “Think small” advertising campaign. Answer the questions according to the passage.
Think Small
If you’re interested in marketing and advertising, Volkswagen’s “Think small” campaign for the Beetle when it was first introduced to North America in 1959 looms large as one of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time. It wasn’t just a rev