最新2021年上半年大學(xué)英語四級閱讀理解三篇(精選)

1、【篇一】2021年上半年大學(xué)英語四級閱讀理解Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus become part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexp

2、ected influx, few inns would have a manager to accommodate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay long enough to get a good sampling. Methods of gathering, recording, and evaluating information have presumably b

3、een improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages

4、and seers to get a clue to future events. The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present day economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of the 125th an

5、niversary of the American Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about newfangled computers and high-falutin mathematical system in terms of excitement and endearment which we, at least in o

6、ur younger years when these things mattered, would have associated more readily with the des cription of a fair maiden. But others pointed to the deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets, and the President-elect of the Association c

7、autioned that “high powered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of what crude and inadequate statisticians assume. " We left his birthday party somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired

8、, that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical exactitude.【篇二】2021年上半年大學(xué)英語四級閱讀理解S

9、ocial circumstances in Early Modern England mostly served to repress women * s voices. Patriarchal culture and institutions constructed them as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate. At the beginning of the 17th century, the ideology of patriarchy, political absolutism, and gender hierarchy were

10、 reaffirmed powerfully by King James in The Trew Law of Free Monarchic and the Basilikon Doron; by that ideology the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch was seen to be imaged in the absolute monarch of the state and in the husband and father of a family. Accordingly, a woman * s subjection,

11、first to her father and then to her husband, imaged the subjection of English people to their monarch, and of all Christians to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist sermons, tracts, and plays, detailing women' s physical and mental defects, spiritual evils,

12、 rebelliousness, shrewish ness, and natural inferiority to men.Yet some social and cultural conditions served to empower women. During the Elizabethan era (15581603) the culture was dominated by a powerful Queen, who provided an impressive female example though she left scant cultural space for othe

13、r women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the 17th century, however, various circumstances enabled women to write original texts in some numbers. For one thing, some counterweight to patriarchy was provided by female communities

14、一mothers and daughters, extended kinship networks, close female friends, the separate court of Queen Anne (King James' consort) and her often oppositional masques and political activities. For another, most of these women had a reasonably good education (modern languages, history, literature, re

15、ligion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women * s lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious female characters in literature and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any monolithic social co

16、nstruct of women1 s mature and role.Most important, perhaps, was the radical potential inherent in the Protestant insistence on every Christian' s immediate relationship with God and primary responsibility to follow his or her individual conscience. There is plenty of support in St Paul * s epis

17、tles and elsewhere in the Bible for patriarchy and a wife, s subjection to her husband, but some texts (notably Galatians 3:28) ins cribe a very different politics, promoting women1 s spiritual equality: uThere is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor femal

18、e: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ. ” Such texts encouraged some women to claim the support of God the supreme patriarch against the various earthly patriarchs who claimed to stand toward them in his stead.There is also the gap or slippage between ideology and common experience. English women thr

19、oughout the 17th century exercised a good deal of accrual power: as managers of estates in their husbands' absences at court or on military and diplomatic missions; as members of guilds; as wives and mothers who apex during the English Civil War and Interregnum(1640-60) as the execution of the K

20、ing and the attendant disruption of social hierarchies led many women to seize new rolesas preachers, as prophetesses, as deputies for exiled royalist husbands, as writers of religious and political tracts.【篇三】2021年上半年大學(xué)英語四級閱讀理解Moreover, insofar as any interpretation of its author can be made from t

21、he five or six plays attributed to him, the Wake field Master is uniformly considered to be a man of sharp contemporary observation. He was, formally, perhaps clerically educated, as his Latin and music, his Biblical and patristic lore indicate. He is, still, celebrated mainly for his quick sympathy

22、 for the oppressed and forgotten man, his sharp eye for character, a ready ear for colloquial vernacular turns of speech and a humor alternately rude and boisterous, coarse and happy. Hence despite his conscious artistry as manifest in his feeling for intricate metrical and stanza forms, he is looke

23、d upon as a kind of medieval Steinbeck, indignantly angry at, uncompromisingly and even brutally realistic in presenting the plight of the agricultural poor.Thus taking the play and the author together, it is mow fairly conventional to regard the former as a kind of ultimate point in the secularizat

24、ion of the medieval drama. Hence much emphasis on it as depicting realistically humble manners and pastoral life in the bleak hills of the West Riding of Yorkshire on a typically cold bight of December 24th. After what are often regarded as almost u documentaries n given in the three successive mono

25、logues of the three shepherds, critics go on to affirm that the realism is then intensified into a burlesque mock-treatment of the Nativity. Finally as a sort of epilogue or after-thought in deference to the Biblical origins of the materials, the play slides back into an atavistic mood of early inno

26、cent reverence. Actually, as we shall see, the final scene is not only the culminating scene but perhaps the raison d' etre of introductory ureal ism.''There is much on the surface of the present play to support the conventional view of its mood of secular realism. All the same, the “realism" of the Wak