2009年上海外国语大学英语语言文学考研试题

2009年 英语语言文学 英语综合 改错

A fairly standard consensual definition is "a relatively permanent change in behavior (sic.; it\'s American of course) that results from practise." This is of course arguable, particularly the "practice" criterion. Others would accept changes in "capability" or even simple "knowledge" or "understanding", even if it is not manifest in behaviour. It is however an important criterion that "learned" behaviour is not pre-programmed or wholly instinctive (not a word used much nowadays), even if an instinctual drive underpins it. Behaviour can also change as a result of maturation-simple growing-up-without being totally learned. Think of the changing attitude of children and adolescents to opposite-sex peers. Whatever the case, there has to be interaction with the environment.
Even if psychologists ever agree about what learning is, in practice educationalists won\'t, because education introduces prescriptive notions about specifying what ought to be learnt, and there is considerable dispute about whether this ought only to be what the teacher wants the learner to learn (implicit in behavioural models), or what the learner wants to learn (as in humanistic models).

2009英语语言文学 完形填空 全文
Obtaining Linguistic Data

Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one\'s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.

In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data - an informant. Informants are(ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language(e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgements on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generative approach to linguistics. But a linguist\'s personal judgements are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgements of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants. The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on foreign languages, or child speech.

Many  factors must be considered when selecting informants - whether one is working with single speakers(a common situation when languages have not been described before), two people interacting, small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting(e.g. the level of formality) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants(e.g. their fluency and consistency). For larger studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.

Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist\'s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate(\'difficult\' pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimise the \'observer\'s paradox\'(how to observe the way people behave when they are not bening observed). Some recordings are made without the speaker being aware of the fact - a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style(e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality).

An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist\'s problems, however. Speech is often  unclear and ambiguous. Where possible , therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer\'s written comments on the non-verbal behaviour of the participants, and about the context in general. A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations(the camera connot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.

Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviour. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques(\'How do you say table in your language?\'). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often, the researcher wishes to obtain information about just a single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used: a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame(e.g I__see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus for correction(\'Is it possible to say I no can see?\').

A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text; others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a particular linguistic feature. The size of the porpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data: it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.

2009英语语言文学 英语综合 阅读理解Passage 1
BAKELITE

The birth of modern plastics

In 1907, Leo Hendrick Baekeland, a Belgian scientist working in New York, discovered and patented a revolutionary new synthetic material. His invention, which he named \'Bakelite\', was of enormous technological importance, and effectively launched the modern plastics industry.

The term \'plastic\' comes from the Greek plassein, meaning \'to mould\'. Some plastics are derived from natural sources, some are semi-synthetic (the result of chemical action on a natural substance), and some are entirely synthetic, that is, chemically engineered from the constituents of coal or oil. Some are \'thermoplastic\', which means that, like candlewax, they melt when heated and can then be reshaped. Others are \'thermosetting\': like eggs, they cannot revert to their original viscous state, and their shape is thus fixed for ever., Bakelite had the distinction of being the first totally synthetic thermosetting plastic.

The history of today\'s plastics begins with the discovery of a series of semi-synthetic thermoplastic materials in the mid-nineteenth century. The impetus behind the development of these early plastics was generated by a number of factors - immense technological progress in the domain of chemistry, coupled with wider cultural changes, and the pragmatic need to find acceptable substitutes for dwindling supplies of \'luxury\' materials such as tortoiseshell and ivory.

Baekeland\'s interest in plastics began in 1885 when, as a young chemistry student in Belgium, he embarked on research into phenolic resins, the group of sticky substances produced when phenol (carbolic acid) combines with an aldehyde (a volatile fluid similar to alcohol). He soon abandoned the subject, however, only returning to it some years later. By 1905 he was a wealthy New Yorker, having recently made his fortune with the invention of a new photographic paper. While Baekeland had been busily amassing dollars, some advances had been made in the development of plastics. The years 1899 and 1900 had seen the patenting of the first semi-synthetic thermosetting material that could be manufactured on an industrial scale. In purely scientific terms, Baekeland\'s major contribution to the field is not so much the actual discovery of the material to which he gave his name, but rather the method by which a reaction between phenol and formaldehyde could be controlled, thus making possible its preparation on a commercial basis. On 13 July 1907, Baekeland took out his famous patent describing this preparation, the essential features of which are still in use today.

The original patent outlined a three-stage process, in which phenol and formaldehyde (from wood or coal) were initially combined under vacuum inside a large egg-shaped kettle. The result was a resin known as Novalak, which became soluble and malleable when heated. The resin was allowed to cool in shallow trays until it hardened, and then broken up and ground into powder. Other substances were then introduced: including fillers, such as woodflour, asbestos or cotton, which increase strength and. moisture resistance, catalysts (substances to speed up the reaction between two chemicals without joining to either) and hexa, a compound of ammonia and formaldehyde which supplied the additional formaldehyde necessary to form a thermosetting resin. This resin was then left to cool and harden, and ground up a second time. The resulting granular powder was raw Bakelite, ready to be made into a vast range of manufactured objects. In the last stage, the heated Bakelite was poured into a hollow mould of the required shape and subjected to extreme heat and pressure; thereby \'setting\' its form for life.

The design of Bakelite objects, everything from earrings to television sets, was governed to a large extent by the technical requirements of the moulding process. The object could not be designed so that it was locked into the mould and therefore difficult to extract. A common general rule was that objects should taper towards the deepest part of the mould, and if necessary the product was moulded in separate pieces. Moulds had to be carefully designed so that the molten Bakelite would flow evenly and completely into the mould. Sharp corners proved impractical and were thus avoided, giving rise to the smooth, \'streamlined\' style popular in the 1930s. The thickness of the walls of the mould was also crucial: thick walls took longer to cool and harden, a factor which had to be considered by the designer in order to make the most efficient use of machines.

Baekeland\'s invention, although treated with disdain in its early years, went on to enjoy an unparalleled popularity which lasted throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It became the wonder product of the new world of industrial expansion -\'the material of a thousand uses\'. Being both non-porous and heat-resistant, Bakelite kitchen goods were promoted as being germ-free and sterilisable. Electrical manufacturers seized on its insulating: properties, and consumers everywhere relished its dazzling array of shades, delighted that they were now, at last, no longer restricted to the wood tones and drab browns of the prepfastic era. It then fell from favour again during the 1950s, and was despised and destroyed in vast quantities. Recently, however, it has been experiencing something of a renaissance, with renewed demand for original Bakelite objects in the collectors\' marketplace, and museums, societies and dedicated individuals once again appreciating the style and originality of this innovative material.

2009英语语言文学 英语综合 阅读理解 Passage 2
Nature or Nurture?

A few years ago, in one of the most fascinating and disturbing experiments in behavioural psychology, Stanley Milgram of Yale University tested 40 subjects from all walks of life for their willingness to obey instructions given by a \'leader\' in a situation in which the subjects might feel a personal distaste for the actions they were called upon to perform. Specifically, Milgram told each volunteer \'teacher-subject\' that the experiment was in the noble cause of education, and was designed to test whether or not punishing pupils for their mistakes would have a positive effect on the pupils\' ability to learn.

Milgram\'s experimental set-up involved placing the teacher-subject before a panel of thirty switches with labels ranging from \'15 vols of electricity (slight shock)\' to \'450 volts (danger - severe shock)\' in steps of 15 volts each. The teacher-subject was told that whenever the pupil gave the wrong answer to a question, a shock was to be administered, beginning at the lowest level and increasing in severity with each successive wrong answer. The supposed \'pupil\' was in reality an actor hired by Milgram to simulate receiving the shocks by emitting a spectrum of groans, screams and writhings together with an assortment of statements and expletives denouncing both the experiment and the experimenter. Milgram told the teacher-subject to ignore the reactions of the pupil, and to administer whatever level of shock was called for, as per the rule governing the experimental situation of the moment.

As the experiment unfolded, the pupil would deliberately give the wrong answers to questions posed by the teacher, thereby bringing on various electrical punishments, even up to the danger level of 300 volts and beyond. Many of the teacher-subjects balked at administering the higher levels of punishment, and turned to Milgram with questioning looks and/or complaints about continuing the experiment. In these situations, Milgram calmly explained that the teacher-subject was to ignore the pupil\'s cries for mercy and carry on with the experiment. If the subject was still reluctant to proceed, Milgram said that it was important for the sake of the experiment that the procedure be followed through to the end. His final argument was, \'You have no other choice. You must go on.\' What Milgram was trying to discover was the number of teacher-subjects who would be willing to administer the highest levels of shock, even in the face of strong personal and moral revulsion against the rules and conditions of the experiment.

Prior to carrying out the experiment, Milgram explained his idea to a group of 39 psychiatrists and asked them to predict the average percentage of people in an ordinary population who would be willing to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts. The overwhelming consensus was that virtually all the teacher-subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. They psychiatrists felt that \'most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts\' and they further anticipated that only four per cent would go up to 300 volts. Furthermore, they thought that only a lunatic fringe of about one in 1,000 would give the highest shock of 450 volts.

What were the actuatl results? Well, over 60 per cent of the teacher-subjects continued to obey Milgram up to the 450-volt limit! In repetitions of the experiment in other countries, the percentage of obedient teacher-subjects was even higher, reaching 85 per cent in one country. How can we possible account for this vast discrepancey between what calm, rational, knowledgeable people predict in the comfort of their study and what pressured, flustered, but cooperative \'teachers\' actually do in the laboratory of real life?

One\'s first inclination might be to argue that there must be some sort of built-in animal aggression instinct that was activated by the experimental, and the Milgram\'s teacher-subjects were just following a genetic need to discharge this pent-up primal urge onto the pupil by administering the electrical shosck. A modern hard-core sociobiologist might even go so far as to claim that this aggressive instinct evolved as an advantageous trait, having been of survival value to our ancestors in their struggle against the hardships of life on the plains and in the caves, ultimately finding its way into our genetic make-up as a remnant of our ancient animal ways.

An alternative to this notion of genetic programming is to see the teacher-subjects\' actions as a result of the social environment under which the experiment was carried out. As Milgram himself pointed out, \'Most subjects in the experiment see their behaviour in a larger context that is benevolent and useful to society - the pursuit of scientific truth. The psychological laboratory has a strong claim to legitimacy and evokes trust and confidence in those who perform there. An action such as shocking a victim, which in isolation apears evil, acquires a completely different meaning when placed in this setting\'.

Thus, in this explanation the subject merges his unique personality and personal and moral code with that of larger institutional structures, surrendering individual properties like loyalty, self-sacrifice and discipline to the service of malevolent systems of authority.

Here we have two radically different explanations for why so many teacher-subjects were willing to forgot their sense of personal responsibility for the sake of an institutional authority figure. The problem for biologists, psychologists and anthropologists is to sort out which of these two polar explanations is more plausible. This, in essence, is the problem of modern sociobiology - to discover the degree to which hard-wired genetic programming dictates, or at least strongly biases, the interaction of animals and humans with their environment, that is, their behaviour. Put another way, sociobiology is concerned with elucidating the biological basis of all behaviour.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

1  a biological explanation of the teacher-subjects\' behaviour
2  the explanation Milgram gave the teacher-subjects for the experiment
3  the identity of the pupils
4  the expected statistical outcome
5  the general aim of sociobiologial study
6  the way Milgram persuaded the teacher-subjects to continue
 

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

7 The teacher-subjects were told that they were testing whether
(A) a 450-volt shock was dangerous
(B) punishment helps learning
(C) the pupils were honest
(D) they were stuited to teaching

8 The teacher-subjects were instructed to
(A) stop when a pupil asked them to
(B) denounce pupils who made mistakes
(C) reduce the shock level after a correct answer
(D) give punishment according to a rule

9 Before the experiment took place the psychiatrists
(A) believed that a shock of 150 volts was too dangerous
(B) failed to agree on how the teacher-subjects would respond to instructions
(C) underestimated the teacher-subjects\' willingness to comply with experimental procedure
(D) thought that many of the teacher-subjects would administer a shock of 450 volts

2009英语语言文学 英语综合 阅读理解 Passage 3
The Truth about the Environment

For many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting worse. They have developed a hit-list of our main fears: that natural resources are running out; that the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat; that species are becoming extinct in vast numbers, and that the planet\'s air and water are becoming ever more polluted.

But a quick look at the facts shows a different picture. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so, since the book \'The Limits to Growth\' was published in 1972 by a group of scientists. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world\'s population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exggerated, or are transient - associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution - the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming - does appear to be a phenomenon that is going to extend well into our future, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.

Yet opinion polls suggest that many people nurture the belief that environmental standards are declining and four factors seem to cause this disjunction between perception and reality.

One is the lopsidedness built into scientific research. Scientific funcing goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.

Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes overstate their arguments. In 1997, for example, the World Wide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled: \'Two thirds of the world\'s forests lost forever\'. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.

Though these groups are run overwhelmingly by selfless folk, they nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby groups. That would matter less if people applied the same degree of scepticism to environmental lobbying as tehy do to lobby groups in other fields. A trade organisation arguing for, say, weaker pollution controls is instantly seen as self-interested. Yet a green organisation opposing such a weakening is seen as altruistic, even if an impartial view of the controls in question might suggest they are doing more harm than good.

A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are clearly more cuirous about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants. That, however, can lead to significant distortions of perception. An example was America\'s encounter El Nino in 1997 and 1998. This climatic phenomenon was accused of wrecking tourism, causing allergies, melting the ski-slopes and causing 22 deaths. However, according to an artical in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the damage it did was estimated at US$4 billing but the benefits amounted to some US$19 billion. These came fromhigher winter temperatures (which saved an estimated 850 lives, reduced heating costs and diminished spring floods caused by meltwaters).

The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America\'s trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st centurey will still take up only on 12,000th of the area of the entire United States.

So what of global warming? As we know, carbon dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. The best estimates are that the temperatures will rise by 2-3°C in this century, causing considerable problems, at a total cost of US$5,000 billion.

Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show it will be far more expensive to cut carbon dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation ot the increased temperatures. A model by one of the main authors of the United Nations Climate Change Panel shows how an expected temperature increase of 2.1 degrees in 2100 would only be diminished to an increase of 1.9 degrees. Or to put it another way, the temperature increase that the planet would have experienced in 2094 would be postponed to 2100.

So this does not prevent global warming, but merely buys the world six years. Yet the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the wolrd\'s single, most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2 million deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill.

It is crucial that we look at the facts if we want to make the best possible decisions for the future. It may be costly to be overly optimistic - but more costly still to be too pessimistic.

33 What aspect of scientific research does the writer express concern about in paragraph 4?
(A) the need to produce results
(B) the lack of financial support
(C) the selection of areas to research
(D) the desire to solve every research problem

34 The writer quotes from the Worldwide Fund for Nature to illustrate how
(A) influential the mass media can be
(B) effective environmental groups can be
(C) the mass media can help groups raise funds
(D) environmental groups can exaggerate their claims

35 What is the writer\'s main point about lobby groups in paragraph 6? 
(A) some are more active than others
(B) some are better organised than others
(C) some receive more criticism than others
(D) some support more important issues than others

36 The writer suggests that newspapers print items that are intended to
(A) educate readers
(B) meet their readers\' expectations
(C) encourage feedback from readers
(D) mislead readers

37 What does the writer say about America\'s waste problem? 
(A) it will increase in line with population growth
(B) it is not as important as we have been led to believe
(C) it has been reduced through public awareness of the issues
(D) it is only significant in certain areas of the country

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