2015年考研英语一真题及答案解析

Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following drawing. In your essay you should 

1) describe the drawing briefly

2) explain its intended meaning, and

3) give your comments

50_____________________

You are going to host a club reading session. Write an email of about 100 words recommending a book to the club members. You should state reasons for your recommendation. You should write neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use Li Ming instead. Do not write the address. 

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Within the span of a hundred years, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a tide of emigration—one of the great folk wanderings of history—swept from Europe to America. 46) This movement, driven by powerful and diverse motivations, built a nation out of a wilderness and, by its nature, shaped the character and destiny of an uncharted continent. 

47) The United States is the product of two principal forces-the immigration of European peoples with their varied ideas, customs, and national characteristics and the impact of a new country which modified these traits. Of necessity, colonial America was a projection of Europe. Across the Atlantic came successive groups of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Scots, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes, and many others who attempted to transplant their habits and traditions to the new world. 

48) But, the force of geographic conditions peculiar to America, the interplay of the varied national groups upon one another, and the sheer difficulty of maintaining old-world ways in a raw, new continent caused significant changes. These changes were gradual and at first scarcely visible. But the result was a new social pattern which, although it resembled European society in many ways, had a character that was distinctly American. 

49) The first shiploads of immigrants bound for the territory which is now the United States crossed the Atlantic more than a hundred years after the 15th- and 16th-century explorations of North America. In the meantime, thriving Spanish colonies had been established in Mexico, the West Indies, and South America. These travelers to North America came in small, unmercifully overcrowded craft. During their six- to twelve-week voyage, they subsisted on barely enough food allotted to them. Many of the ship were lost in storms, many passengers died of disease, and infants rarely survived the journey. Sometimes storms blew the vessels far off their course, and often calm brought unbearably long delay. 

“To the anxious travelers the sight of the American shore brought almost inexpressible relief.” said one recorder of events, “The air at twelve leagues’ distance smelt as sweet as a new-blown garden.” The colonists’ first glimpse of the new land was a sight of dense woods. 50) The virgin forest with its richness and variety of trees was a veritable real treasure-house which extended from Maine all the way down to Georgia. Here was abundant fuel and lumber. Here was the raw material of houses and furniture, ships and potash, dyes and naval stores. 

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How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your explicit knowledge of English grammar (41) ______you begin to infer a context for the text, for instance, by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved: who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where. 

The ways of reading indicated here are without doubt kinds of of comprehension. But they show comprehension to consist not just passive assimilation but of active engagement inference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer has invited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence and cues (42) _______ 

Conceived in this way, comprehension will not follow exactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not the retrieval of an absolute, fixed or “true” meaning that can be read off and clocked for accuracy, or some timeless relation of the text to the world. (43) _______ 

Such background material inevitably reflects who we are, (44) _______This doesn’t, however, make interpretation merely relative or even pointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, places and social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the same words on the page-including for texts that engage with fundamental human concerns-debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion of beliefs and values. How we read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest in reading it. 

(45)_______such dimensions of read suggest-as others introduced later in the book will also do-that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged) agenda to any act of reading. It doesn’t then necessarily follow that one kind of reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally, different kinds of reading inform. each other, and act as useful reference points for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the reading component of your overall literacy or relationship to your surrounding textual environment. 

A、 Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room. 

B、 Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretation but at the same time obscure or even close off others. 

C、If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the contest. On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities as well as possible links between them. 

[D]In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: These might be the ones the author intended. 

[E]You make further inferences, for instance, about how the test may be significant to you, or about its validity—inferences that form. the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible. 

[F]In plays，novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author’s own thoughts. 

[G]Rather, we ascribe meanings to test on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text. 

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Which of the following is suggested in the last paragraph?

The author holds that the current collective doctrine shows

The author believes the Rebekah Books’s deference

Two years ago, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter ,Elisabeth ,spoke of the “unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of our institutions” Integrity had collapsed, she argued, because of a collective acceptance that the only “sorting mechanism ”in society should be profit and the market .But “it’s us ,human beings ,we the people who create the society we want ,not profit ”. 

Driving her point home, she continued: “It’s increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose, of a moral language within government, media or business could become one of the most dangerous foals for capitalism and freedom.” This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies such as News International ,shield thought ,making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking . 

It can be inferred from Paragraph 3 that

David Vaux holds that what Science is doing now

Which of the following is the best title of the text?

Giovanni Parmigiani believes that the establishment of the SBoRE may

The phrase “flagged up” (Para. 2) is the closest in meaning to

The journal Science is adding an extra round of statistical checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced today. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are contributing to the irreproducibility of many published research findings. 

“Readers must have confidence in the conclusions published in our journal,” writes McNutt in an editorial. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has appointed seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors(SBoRE). Manuscript. will be flagged up for additional scrutiny by the journal’s internal editors, or by its existing Board of Reviewing Editors or by outside peer reviewers. The SBoRE panel will then find external statisticians to review these manuscripts. 

Orin Kerr’s comparison is quoted to indicate that

The author’s attitude toward California’s argument is one of

The author believes that exploring one’s phone contents is comparable to

The author believes that exploring one’s phone contents is comparable to

Just how much does the Constitution protect your digital data? The Supreme Court will now consider whether police can search the contents of a mobile phone without a warrant if the phone is on or around a person during an arrest. 

California has asked the justices to refrain from a sweeping ruling particularly one that upsets the old assumption that authorities may search through the possessions of suspects at the time of their arrest. It is hard, the state argues, for judges to assess the implications of new and rapidly changing technologies. The court would be recklessly modest if it followed California’s advice. Enough of the implications are discernable, even obvious, so that the justices can and should provide updated guidelines to police, lawyers and defendants. 

They should start by discarding California’s lame argument that exploring the contents of a smart phone — a vast storehouse of digital information — is similar to, say, rifling through a suspect’s purse. The court has ruled that police don’t violate the Fourth Amendment when they sift through the wallet or pocketbook of an arrestee without a warrant. But exploring one’s smart phone is more like entering his or her home. A smart phone may contain an arrestee’s reading history, financial history, medical history and comprehensive records of recent correspondence. The development of “cloud computing,” meanwhile, has made that exploration so much the easier. 

Which of the following is the best title of the text?

The British royals “have most to fear” because Charles

Which of the following is shown to be odd, according to Paragraph 4?

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King Juan Carlos of Spain once insisted “kings don’t abdicate, they dare in their sleep.” But embarrassing scandals and the popularity of the republican left in the recent Euro-elections have forced him to eat his words and stand down. So, does the Spanish crisis suggest that monarchy is seeing its last days? Does that mean the writing is on the wall for all European royals, with their magnificent uniforms and majestic lifestyle? 

The Spanish case provides arguments both for and against monarchy. When public opinion is particularly polarised, as it was following the end of the Franco regime, monarchs can rise above “mere” politics and “embody” a spirit of national unity. 

It is this apparent transcendence of politics that explains monarchs’ continuing popularity polarized. And also, the Middle East excepted, Europe is the most monarch-infested region in the world, with 10 kingdoms (not counting Vatican City and Andorra). But unlike their absolutist counterparts in the Gulf and Asia, most royal families have survived because they allow voters to avoid the difficult search for a non-controversial but respected public figure. 

Even so, kings and queens undoubtedly have a downside. Symbolic of national unity as they claim to be, their very history—and sometimes the way they behave today – embodies outdated and indefensible privileges and inequalities. At a time when Thomas Piketty and other economists are warning of rising inequality and the increasing power of inherited wealth, it is bizarre that wealthy aristocratic families should still be the symbolic heart of modern democratic states. 

The most successful monarchies strive to abandon or hide their old aristocratic ways. Princes and princesses have day-jobs and ride bicycles, not horses (or helicopters). Even so, these are wealthy families who party with the international 1%, and media intrusiveness makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the right image. 

While Europe’s monarchies will no doubt be smart enough to survive for some time to come, it is the British royals who have most to fear from the Spanish example. 

It is only the Queen who has preserved the monarchy’s reputation with her rather ordinary (if well-heeled) granny style. The danger will come with Charles, who has both an expensive taste of lifestyle. and a pretty hierarchical view of the world. He has failed to understand that monarchies have largely survived because they provide a service – as non-controversial and non-political heads of state. Charles ought to know that as English history shows, it is kings, not republicans, who are the monarchy’s worst enemies. 

 21. According to the first two Paragraphs, King Juan Carlos of Spain

Monarchs are kept as heads of state in Europe mostly

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Though not biologically related, friends are as “related” as fourth cousins, sharing about 1% of genes. That is _(1)_a study, published from the University of California and Yale University in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has__(2)_. The study is a genome-wide analysis conducted _(3)__1,932 unique subjects which __(4)__pairs of unrelated friends and unrelated strangers. The same people were used in both_(5)_. While 1% may seem_(6)_,it is not so to a geneticist. As James Fowler, professor of medical genetics at UC San Diego, says, “Most people do not even _(7)_their fourth cousins but somehow manage to select as friends the people who_(8)_our kin.” The study_(9)_found that the genes for smell were something shared in friends but not genes for immunity .Why this similarity exists in smell genes is difficult to explain, for now,_(10)_,as the team suggests, it draws us to similar environments but there is more_(11)_it. 

There could be many mechanisms working together that _(12)_us in choosing genetically similar friends_(13)_”functional Kinship” of being friends with_(14)_! One of the remarkable findings of the study was the similar genes seem to be evolution_(15)_than other genes Studying this could help_(16)_why human evolution picked pace in the last 30,000 years, with social environment being a major_(17)_factor. The findings do not simply explain people’s_(18)_to befriend those of similar_(19)_backgrounds, say the researchers. Though all the subjects were drawn from a population of European extraction, care was taken to_(20)_that all subjects, friends and strangers, were taken from the same population. 

1__________