2015年考研英语二真题及答案解析

Think about driving a route that's very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it's easy tolose concentration on the driving and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that the trip has taken less time than it actually has. 

This is the well-travelled road effect: people tend to underestimate the time it takes to travel a familiar route. The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. 

When we travel down a well-known route, because we don't have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can't remember the journey well because we didn't pay much attention to it. So we assume it wasshorter. 

Suppose your university is going to host a summer camp for high school students. Write a notice to 

1)briefly introduce the camp activities, and 2)call for volunteers.

You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your name or the name of your university. Do not write your address.

Write an essay based on the following chart. In your writing, your should

1)interpret the chart, and

2)give your comment.

You should write about 150 words on the ANSWER SHEET. 

45__________

44__________

42__________

43__________

Some Old Truths to Help You Overcorne Toucgh Times 

Uefortunately, life is not a bed of roses, We are going through life facing sad experiences. Moreover, we are grieving various kinds of loss: a friendship, a rontantic relatlonshlp of a house. Hard times may hold you down at what usually seems like the most inopportune time,but you should remember that they won't last forever. When our time of mourning is over, we press forward, stronger with a greater understanding and respect for life. Furthermore, these losses make us mature and eventally move as toward future opportunities for growth and happiness. I want to share these old truths I've learned along the way. 

41.________________

Fear is both useful and harmful. This normal human reaction is used to protect us by signaling danger and preparing us to deal with it. Unfortunately, people create inner barriers with a help of exaggerating fears. My favorite actor will smith once said, "Fear is not real. It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real. But fear is a choice." I do completely agree that fears are just the product of our luxuriant imagination. 

42________________ 

If you are by and 43________________ Sometimes it is casy to feel bad because you are going through tough times. You can be easily caught up by life problems that you forget to pause and appreciate the things you have. Only strong people prefer to smile and value their life instead of crying and complaining about something. 

44________________ 

No matter how isolated you might feel and how serious the situation is, you should always remember that you are not alone. Try to keep in mind that almost everyone respects and wants to help you if you are trying to make a good change in your life, especially your dearest and nearest people, You may have a circle of friends who provide constant good humor, help and companionship. If you have no friends or relatives. Try to participate in several online communities, full of people who are always willing to share advice and cncouragement. 

45________________ 

Today many people find it difficult to trust their own opinion and seek balance by gaining objectivity from external sources. This way you devalue your opinion and show that you are incapable of managing your of own life. When you are struggling to achieve something important you should believe in yourself and be sure that your decision is the best. You live in your skin, think your own thoughts, have your own values and make your own choices.

41题____________

The text mainly discusses___________________.

Many people work part-time because they___________________

It can be learned that with Obamacare,___________________ .

Involuntary part-time employment in the US___________________

Which of the following statements is true about office speak?

Many people talked of the 288,000 new jobs the Labor Department reporled for Jure, along with the drop in the unemployment take to 6 J percent. at good news. And they were right. For now it appears the economy is creating jobs at a decent pace. We still have a long way to go to get back to full employment, but at least we are now finally moving forward at a faster pace. 

However there is another important part of the jobs picture that was targely ovedookcd. There was a big jump in the number of people who report voluntarily working part-time. This figure is now 830,000（4,4 percent）above its year ago level. 

Before explaining the connection to the Obamacare, it is worth making an important distinction. Many people who work part-time jobs actually want full-time jobs. They take part-time work because this is all they can get. An increase in involuntary part-time work is evidence of weakness in the labor market and it means that many people will be having a very hard time making ends meet. There was an increase in involuntary part-time in June, but the general direction has been down. Involuntary part-time employment is still far higher than before the recession, but it is down by 640,000(9 percent)from its year ago level. 

We know the difference between voluntary and involuntary part-time employment because people tell us. The survey used by the Labor Department asks people if they worked less than 35 hours in the reference week. If the answer is "yes."they are classified as working part-time. The survey then asks whether they worked less than 35 hours in that week because they wanted to work less than full time or because they had no choice. They are only elassified as voluntary part-time workers if they tell the survey taker they chose to work less than 35 hours a week. 

The issue of voluntary part-time relates to Obamacare becanse one of the main purposes was to allow people to get insurance outside of employment. For many people, especially those with serious health conditions or family members with serious health conditions, before Obamacare the only way to get insurance was through a job that provided health insurance. 

However, Obamacare has allowed more than 12 million people to either get insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges. These are people who may previously have felt the need to get a full-time job that provided insurance in order to cover themselves and their families. With Obamacare there is no longer a link between employment and insurance. 

 36. Which part of the jobs picture was neglected?

It can be inferred that Lean In_________

"team"-oriented corporate vocabulary is closely related to________

Khurana believes that the importation of terminology aims to________

We mayinfer from the last paragraph that--

Even in traditional offices，"the lingua franca of corporate America has gottenmuch more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20 years ago，" said Ha rva rd Business School professor Nancy Koehn She sta rted spinning off examples."If you and I pa rachuted back to Fortune 500 companies in 1990，we would see much less frequent use of terms like Journey, mission,passion. There were goals，there were strategies，there were objectives，but we didn't talk about energy；we didn't talk about passion." 

Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabula ry is very "team"-oriented-and not by coincidence."Let's not forget sDorts-in male-dominated corporate America，it's still a big deal. It's not explicitly conscious；it's the idea that I'm a coach，and you're my team，and we're in this togethec. There are lots and lots of CEOs in very different companies，but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team and they want to win". 

These terms a re also intended to infuse work with meaning-and，as Khu rana points out，increase allegiance to the firm."You have the importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with non-profit organizations and religious organizations：Terms like vision，values，passion，and purpose，"said Khurana 

This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated amid increasingly loud debates over work-life balance The "mommy wars" of the 1990s a re still going on today, prompting arguments about whywomen still can'thave it all and books like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In，whose title has become abuzzword in its own right. Terms like unplug，offline，life-hack，bandwidth，andcapacity are all about setting boundaries between the office and the home But ifyour work is your "passion," you'II be more likely to devote yourself to it，even ifthat means going home for dinner and then working long after the kids are in bed.

But this seems to be the irony of office speak：Everyone makes fun of it，butmanage rs love it，companies depend on it，and regular people willingly absorb itAs Nunberg said，"You can get people to think it's nonsense at the same timethat you buy into it." In a workplace that's fundamentally indiffe rent to your lifeand its meaning office speak can help you figu re out how you relate to yourwork-and how your work defines who you are. 

The author of the paper believe that first-generation students__________________

The study suggests that most first-gene ration students__________________

For years, studies have found that first-generation college students-those who do not have a parent with a college degree-lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created "a paradox" in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has "continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close" achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Sciense. 

But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach(which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap(measured by such factors as grades)between first-generation and other students. 

The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findins are based on a study involving 147 students(who completed the project)at an unnamed private unive rsity．First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree Most of the first-generation students(1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants，a federal g rant for undergraduates with financial need，while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students wit at least one parent with a four-year degree Their thesis-that a relatively modest inte rvention could have a big impact-was based on the view that first-gene ration students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students They cite past resea rch by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be na rrowed to close the achievement gap. 

Many first-gene ration students"struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education，learn the'rules of the game，'and take advantage of college resou rces," they write And this becomes more of a problem when collages don't talk about the class advantage and disadvantages of different groups of students Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students' educational expe rience，many first-gene ration students lack sight about why they a re struggling and do not unde rstand how students' like them can improve .

26. Recruiting more first-generation students has__________________

The author of the research article are optimistic because__________________

The word"moola"(Line 4，Para 4)most probably means___________

The blurring of working women's roles refers to the fact thay___________

The home front differs from the workplace in that_____________

According to Damaske， who are likely to be the happiest at home?

A new study suggests that contrary to most surveys. People art actually more stressed at home than at work. Researchers measured people's cortntlol. Which is it at stress marker. While they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what is supposed to be a place of refuge. 

"Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home," writes one of the researchers. Sarah Damaske, In fact women say they feel better at work. She notes. "it is men not women. Who report being bappicr at home than at work," Another surprise is that the findings hold true for both those with childrcn and without, but more so for nonparents. This is why pcoplc who work outside the home have better health. 

What the study doesn't measure is whether people are still doing work when they' re at home, whether it is household work or work brought home from the office. For many men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. For women who stay home, they never get to leave the office. And for women who work outside the home, they often are playing catch-up-with-household tasks. With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women, it' s not surprising that women are more stressed at home. 

But it's not just a gender thing. At work, people pretty much know what they're supposed to be doing: working, making money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to draw an income. The bargain is very pure: Employee puts in hours of physical or mental labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola. 

On the home front, however, people have no such clarity. Rare is the household in which the division of labor is so clinically and methodically laid out. There are a lot of tasks to be done, there are inadequate rewards for most of them. Your home colleagues-your family-have no clear rewards for their labor; they need to be talked into it, or if they' re teenagers, threatened with complete removal of all electronic devices. Plus, they' re your family. You cannot fire your family. You never really get to go home from home. 

So it's not surprising that people are more stressed at home. Not only are the tasks apparently infinite, the co-workers are much harder to motivate. 

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In our contemporary culture，the prospect of communicating with-or even looking at-a stranger is virtually unbearable Everyone around us seems to agree by the way they fiddle with their phones，even without a ___1___ underground It's a sad reality-our desire to avoid interacting with other human beings-because there's ___2___ to be gained from talking to the strange r standing by you. 

But you wouldn't know it， ___3___ into your phone. This universal armor sends the ___4___ ："Please don't approach me." What is it that makes us feel we need to hide ___5___ our screens? One answer is fear, according to Jon Wortmann, executive mental coach We fear rejection，or that our innocent social advances will be ___6___ as"creep,"We fear we'II be ___7___ We fear we'II be disruptive Strangers are inherently ___8___ to us，so we are more likely to feel ___9___ when communicating with them compared with our friends and acquaintances To avoid this anxiety, we ___10___ to our phones."Phones become our security blanket，"Wortmann says."They are our happy glasses that protect us from what we perceive is going to be more ___11___ ." But once we rip off the bandaid，tuck our smartphones in our pockets and look up，it doesn't ___12___ so bad. 

In one 2011 experiment，behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters to do the unthinkable: Start a ___13___ . They had Chicago train commuters talk to their fellow ___14___ . "When Dr.Epley and Ms. Schroeder asked other people in the same train station to ___15___ how they would feel after talking to a stranger, the commuters thought their ___16___ would be more pleasant if they sat on their own," the New York Times summarizes. Though the participants didn't expect a positive experience, after they ___17___ with the experiment, "not a single person reported having been snubbed." ___18___ , these commutes were reportedly more enjoyable compared with those sans communication, which makes absolute sense, ___19 ___human beings thrive off of social connections. It's that ___20___ : Talking to strangers can make you feel connected.

1_____