專(zhuān)業(yè)八級(jí)分類(lèi)模擬196

1、專(zhuān)業(yè)八級(jí)分類(lèi)模擬196( 總分： 100.10 ，做題時(shí)間： 90 分鐘 )一、READING COMPREHENS(總題數(shù)：1分?jǐn)?shù)：100.00)Section A Multiple-Choice QuestionsIn this section there are several passagesby fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choicequtestion, there are four suggested answers marked A. B, C and D. Choose the one that

2、you think is the bestanswer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.PASSAGE ONEEvery political period has its characteristic form of scandal. During the Reagan defense buildup of the mid-1980s, thescandal of the day was waste, fraud and mismanagement at the Pentagon, symbolized by the infamous $64

3、0 toiletseat. Amid the general embarrassment and excuse-making, only one defense hawk was bold enough to declare thatwaste and fraud were actually good things. We need more of them, wrote Edward Luttwak in Commentary. If youregoing to build a stronger defense and build it fast, a bit of corruption i

4、s a necessary by-product.Todays characteristic form of scandal is financial abuse and excess. So where is the Luttwak of today who will cutthrough all the demagoguery and the whining, the outraged criticism and the mealymouthed apologies, and say, Look,you want a vigorous entrepreneurial economy? A

5、bit of excess is a necessary by-product. Weneed more financialabuse it is a sign that capitalismis working.Who has the courage to make this argument? I am not that man. But if 1 were that man, the case would run somethinglike this: the magic of capitalism, as explained by AdamSmith and his followers

6、, is that it channels individual greed intoactivities that benefit all of us. Greed is good, declared Michael Douglas, playing a corrupt financier in the movie WallStreet. More accurately, greed is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. And in moderation, economists argue andhistory demonstr

7、ates, greed is no bad thing. Free-market economies could not function if we were all Mother Teresa.But there is nothing inherent in the human condition that keeps greed in moderation. So there are laws, and there areappearances. Both these forces draw a rough line and attempt to placeit between gree

8、d that helps other people and greed that hurts other people. Inevitably, though, some will take greedtoo far. And thats a good thing (goes the argument I lack the courage to make). Why? Because you cant regulategreed with precision.Keynes used the term animal spirits to describe the motivation of bu

9、siness people. A successful economy needs aculture that encourages them, up to a point. Its a Goldilocks-type situation.You dont want too much greed, and you dont want too little you want an amount thats just right. But the dials are notall that sensitive. A culture that encourages enough greed in e

10、nough people will encourage too much in a few. If nobodyis taking greed too far, you can be certain that too few people are taking it far enough.For some reason, none of the lawyers who are defending the big greedheads have chosen to make this argument.Instead, they offer inconsistent theories to ex

11、plain the obvious. Lawyers for the Rigas family, which performed theremarkable feat of bankrupting a cable company, say their clients cant be guilty of a conspiracy to loot the companybecause they are too dimwitted: one is not the savviest guy, another is clueless. Martha Stewarts defense, bycontras

12、t, was in part that she is too clever to have done anything as dumb as conspiring to break the securities laws.Lawyers for Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco, take this line of reasoning further. The Wall Street Journal calledtheirs the brazenness defense. Kozlowski made no secret of the fact that

13、 he used Tyco money for a yacht, kept hismistresses on the payroll and (possibly therefore) also let Tyco finance a $5 million diamond ring for his wife. How couldhe have criminal intent if it was all out in the open? By contrast, Scott Sullivan, former CFO of WorldCom, engaged in amore traditional

14、form of gall in pleading guilty to $11 billion worth of accounting fraud. It was a misguided effort to savethe company, he said. Call this the Vietnam defense: it was necessary to destroy the company in order to save it.Will no one step forward tosay clearly thatthese seeming malefactorsare actually

15、 heroes? Thatwe need more of them, not fewer? True, Martha has been found guilty (though she is appealing), and others may lose incourt as well. True, these people may have personally harmed the economy and ripped off many individual investors.Nevertheless, taken together, they are a sign of the eco

16、nomys robust health. Far better that a few greedheads getcarried away than that we are worried that we are not getting the benefit of all the good, healthy, productive sort of greedthat this county is capable of producing.In fact, think of these unpopular figures as the canaries of capitalism. They

17、precede us intothe coal mine of greed, going farther than the rest of us dare, showing us where far enough becomes too far andperishing in the effort. They are martyrs of capitalism, dying financially so that others may prosper. Does no one havethe simple guts to tell this truth?Well, I certainly do

18、nt. PASSAGE TWO At a chess tournament in Tunisia in 1967, Bobby Fischer, then 24, was pittedagainst another American grand master, Samuel Reshevsky. At game time, Fischer was nowhere to be found, soReshevsky sat down opposite Fischers empty chair, made his first move, punched the game clock and wait

19、ed. Andwaited. With five minutes left, Fischer suddenly strode onstage and, with a series of blindingly quick moves, hammeredReshevsky into defeat. Two days later, Fischer quit the tournament and abandoned competitive chess for two years.Which raises the question, Why is the gift of genius so often

20、given to people too stupid to know what to do with it?In Bobby Fischer Goes to War (Ecco; 342 pages), David Edmonds and John Eidinow tell the story of Fischers mostfamous match, the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik. Fischer faced Soviet grand master Boris Spassky in a chessgame that was not only

21、 an epic staring match between two intellectual gladiators but also the focus of all kinds of weird,free-floating cold war cultural-political energy. It was the Rumble in the Jungle and the Cuban missile crisis all rolled intoone.The drama was hopelessly miscast. Fischer, the champion of the America

22、n way, was an antisocial, anti-Semiticego-maniac who complained about the lighting, the auditorium, the prize money, even the marble the chessboard wasmade of. Spassky, the cog in the Soviet machine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He wasAll to Fischers Foreman. Of

23、course, Fischer ate him alive. Bobby Fischer Goes to War tells the story in fine, brisk style,interpreting the red-hot chess-fu action the Ruy Lopez opening! The Nimzo-Indian defense! for us nongeniusesand conveying the richness of the world beyond the chessboard through details plucked from FBI and

24、 KGB records. Wesee, for example, Soviet experts whisking Spasskys orange juice back to Moscow to test for suspicious capitalistcontaminants.It seems to be in the nature of genius to zero in on its purpose. In the 1790s a young French boy named Jean-FrancoisChampollion, the son of a bookseller, beca

25、me obsessed with ancient languages not only Latin and Greek hut alsoHebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by DanielMeyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed oft in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a2,000-pag

26、e dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soondiscovered the Rosetta stone, a chunk of gray and pink rock with the same text written on it in both Greek and Egyptianhieroglyphics, which no one had yet deciphered. Unlocking hieroglyphics was Champ

27、ollions great work, and Meyersontells the story as a passionate linguistic love affair. After finally solving the mystery, Champollion collapsed in a coma foreight days.Champollion and Fischer were lucky: they were heroes in their time. Deprived of the spotlight, genius can grow uptwisted and strang

28、e. David Hahn was the child of divorced, clueless parents living in a David Lynch perfectMichigan suburb in the mid-1990s. A loner and a compulsivetinkerer, Hahn somehowgot it into his head in high school to build a nuclear reactor in his moms potting shed, and damnif he didnt come close. In The Rad

29、ioactive Boy Scout (Random House;209 pages), Ken Silverstein describes how Hahn extracted radioactive elements from household objects americiumfrom smoke detectors, thorium from Coleman lanterns, deadly radium from the glow-in-the-dark paint used on the handsof vintage clocks. For sheer improvisatio

30、nal ingenuity, Hahn makes MacGyver look like Jessica Simpson. Whenpublic-health officials finally caught on to what Hahn was up to, the potting shed was so hot that it had to be classified asa Superfund site.Stories about geniuses rarely end well. Hahn wound up in the Navy, assigned to the nuclear-p

31、owered aircraft carrier theU.S. Enterprise, but his officers wouldnt even let him tour the engine room. Champollion died at 40. Fischer neverdefended his world title. He declined into irascibility and then obscurity.What happened to him? A chess masteronce said, Chess is not something thatdrives peo

32、ple mad. Chess is something that keeps mad people sane. Which is to say that genius may lie not only inhaving a gift but in lacking something crucial as well. Reading these books, one feels grateful for being just a little stupid.PASSAGE THREEWas the Red Planet once a wet planet? A plucky Martian ro

33、ver finally delivers some hard evidence. GiovanniSchiaparelli could have told you there had been water on Mars. It was Schiaparelli who peered through his telescopeone evening in 1877 and discovered what he took to be the Red Planets famous canals. As it turned out, the canalswere an optical illusio

34、n, but as more powerful telescopes and, later, spacecraft zoomed in for closer looks, there was noshortage of clues suggesting that Mars was once awash in water. Photographs shot from orbit show vast plains thatresemble ancient sea floors, steep gorges that would dwarf the Grand Canyon and sinuous s

35、urface scars that look anawful lot like dry riverbeds.Given all that, why were NASA scientists so excited last week to announce that one of their Mars rovers, having crawledacross the planet for five weeks, finally determined that Mars, at some point in its deep past, was indeed drenched to use NASA

36、s term with liquid water?Part of their excitement probably stems from sheer failure fatigue. NASA has had its share of setbacks in recent years including a few disastrous missions to Mars. So it was with some relief that leading investigator Steve Squyresannounced that the rover Opportunity had acco

37、mplished its primary mission. The puzzle pieces have been falling intoplace, he told a crowded press conference, and the last piece fell into place a few days ago.But there was also, for the NASAteam, the pleasure that comes from making a genuine contribution to space science.For despite all the sig

38、ns pointing to Mars watery past, until Opportunity poked its instruments into the Martian rocks,nobody was really sure how real that water was. At least some of the surface formations that look water carved couldhave been formed by volcanism and wind. Just two years ago, University of Colorado resea

39、rchers published apersuasive paper suggesting that any wateron Mars was carried in by crashing comets and then quickly evaporated.The experiments that put that theory to rest and nailed down the presence of water for good were largely conductedon one 10-in.-high, 65-ft.-wide rock outcropping in the

40、Meridiani Planum that mission scientists dubbed E1 Capitan. Thesurface of the formation is made up of fine layers called parallel laminations that are often laid down by mineralssettling out of water. The rock is also randomly pitted with cavities called vugs that created when salt crystals form inb

41、riny water and then fall out or dissolve away.Chemical analyses of E1 Capitan, performed with two different spectrometers, support the visual evidence. They showthat it is rich in sulfates known to form in the presence of water as well as a mineral called jarosite, which not only formsin water but a

42、lso actually contains a bit of water trapped in its matrix.The most intriguing evidence comes in the form of the BB-size spherules or blueberries, asNASA calls them scattered throughout the rock. Spheres like these can be formed either by volcanism or by mineralsaccreting under water, but the way th

43、e blueberries are mixed randomly through the rock not layered on top, as theywould have been after a volcanic eruption strongly suggests the latter.None of these findings are dispositive, but their combined weight persuaded NASA scientists to summarize theirfindings in unusually explicit language. W

44、e have concluded that the rocks here were soaked with liquid water, saidSquyres flatly. The ground would have been suitable for life.Does that mean that there was or still is life on Mars? The fossil record on Earth suggests that given enough timeand H2O, life will eventually emerge, but theres noth

45、ing in the current findings to prove that this happened on Mars.Without more knowledge of such variables as temperature, atmosphere and the length of time Martian water existed, wecant simply assume that what happened on our planet would necessarily occur on another.Opportunity and its twin robot Sp

46、irit are not equipped to search for life. Their mission is limited to looking for signs ofwater. But theres still a lot for them to do. Just knowing that rocks were wet doesnt tell you if the water was flowing orstationary, if it melted down from ice caps or seeped up through the ground. And if wate

47、r was once there in suchabundance, where did it go?Opportunity, which is very likely to exceed its planned 90-day mission, is already looking for those answers, toddling offto investigate other rocks farther and farther from its landing site. Spirit is conducting its own studies in Gusev Crater, ont

48、he opposite side of the planet.The next step the search for life will have to wait until 2013 or so. Thats when NASA has tentatively scheduled thefirst round trip to Mars a mission that will pluck selected rocks off the Red Planet and bring them back home for closerstudy. Whether humans will ever fo

49、llow those machines President Bushs January announcement notwithstandingis impossible to say.PASSAGE FOUREven if prices shoot back toward $50 a barrel, that wont wean the world from oil. Only government can do that.Is the internal-combustion engine dead? Listening to all the voices calling hybrid ve

50、hicles the future of transportation,you might think so. Alternative energy is back in style among the chattering classes. But oil prices would have to go a lothigher to make so-called renewables such as solar and wind energy commercially viable. That meanstheir futurewont be decided by changing cons

51、umer tastes or market conditions, but by government policy.These are facts. Any oil company will use whatever energysource makes economic sense, since itsbasic mission is not to pump oil. Its to create value from energy. We figure the cost of one kilowatt of solar power at aminimum of five times the

52、 cost of oil power, even when oil is hovering near $50 a barrel the recent record high, whichwe never expected to hold up for long. Solar power is even less competitive against cheaper fossil fuels like coal andnatural gas, and relies on mature technology. A radically new technology perhaps replacin

53、g the silicon inphotovoltaiccells with polymerswill be needed to make solar cost-effective. That day is at least 20 yearsoff. Wind is closer than solar to becoming competitive with fossil fuels, but its capacity to supply large amounts of energyis limited. And even the most modemwindmills have inspi

54、red a popular backlash on esthetic grounds.Many energy industrialists think nuclear is the answer, but they rely on a misleading analysis of its cost competitiveness.Even if you ignore the political concerns surrounding nuclear waste, producers often fail to correctly calculate the realprice of elec

55、tricity produced from nuclearenergy. It costs about as much to close a nuclear plant as it does to build a new one, which is why nuclear powercompanies are now lobbying worldwide to delay planned plant closings. Moreover, it seems the height of folly to thinkthat highly sensitive industrialized coun

56、tries, where not-in-my-backyard outrage flourishes, will make it possible to site asingle new plant, let alone create an entire energy-development plan.Theres also a lot of fuzzy talk about things like hybrid homes and cars. Many analysts note that while consumers stillpay a lot more for hybrid cars

57、 than they can make back in gas savings, this gap is closing. What this line of reasoningignores is that no technology competes only against itself, and combustion engines are rapidly evolving, too. The rush toinnovate is led by the makers of diesel engines, which nearly match the gas efficiency of

58、hybrids, but at much lower costto consumers. Diesel also cuts greenhouse emissions by 30 to 40 percent compared with gas.The conclusion is that even with real oil prices at their highest levels in 20 years, no alternative can competehead-to-head with fossil fuels on a scale broad enough to challenge

59、 their market dominance. Given this outlook, marketforces wont wean society away from oil, gas and coal. Only government can do this. And since the late 1970s and early1980s, public funding for R&D in the energy sector has been halved in the United States and Europe. Incentives andsubsidies to p

60、roduce alternative energy sources have fallen throughout the developed world with only a few exceptions Japan, Germany, Denmark and a few others. This is why, for example, the bulk of U.S. solar hardware is exported toGermany and Japan.In the United States, public policy continues to support Americas lo