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北京外国语大学

2013年基础英语考试试题

Part Ⅰ GRAMMAR (30 Points)

A.Correct Errors

The passage contains ten errors. Each indicated line contains a maximum of one error. In each case, only ONE word is involved. You should proofread the passage and correct it in the following way:

For a wrong word, underline the wrong word and write the correct one in the blank provided at the end of the line.

For a missing word, mark the position of the missing word with a ∧and write the word which you believe is missing in the blank at the end of the line.

For an unnecessary word, cross the unnecessary word with a slash / and put the word in the blank at the end of the line.

Part Ⅱ READING COMPREHENSION (80 points)

A.Multiple Choice

Please read the following passages and choose A, B, C or D to best complete the statements or best answer the questions in front of them.

Passage 1

Germany has gold reserves of just under 3,400 tons, the second-largest reserves in the world after the United States. Much of that is in the safekeeping of central banks outside Germany, especially in the US. One would think that with such a valuable stash, worth around €133 billion ($170 billion), the German government would want to keep a close eye on its whereabouts. But now a bizarre dispute has broken out between different German institutions over how closely the reserves should be checked.

Germany’s federal audit office, the Bundesrechnungshof, which monitors the government’s financial management, is unhappy with how the central bank, the Bundesbank, keeps tabs on its gold.According to media reports, the auditors arc dissatisfied with the fact that gold reserves in Frankfurt are more closely monitored than those held abroad.

In Germany, spot checks are carried out to make sure that the gold bars are in the right place. But for the German gold that is stored on the Bundesbank’s behalf by the US Federal Reserve in New York,the Bank of England in London and the Banque de France in Paris, the German central bank relics on the assurances of its foreign counterparts that the gold is where it should be. The three foreign central banks give the Bundesbank annual statements confirming the size of the reserves, but the Germans do not usually carry out physical inspections of the bars.

According to German media reports, the Bundesrechnungshof has now recommended in its confidential annual audit of the Bundesbank for 2011 that Germany’s central bank check its foreign gold reserves with yearly spot checks. The Bundesbank has rejected the demand, arguing that central banks do not usually check each others’ reserves, and there are no doubt about the integrity and the reputation of these foreign depositories.

Germany moved some of its gold reserves abroad during the Cold War to protect them from a possible Soviet attack. Some of the gold was moved back to Frankfurt after the collapse of communism.But the Bundesbank argues that it still makes sense to store some gold in major financial centers so that it can be sold quickly if necessary. Although the Bundesbank does not provide exact details about the distribution, it has revealed that the largest share of Germany’s gold is held in New York, followed by Frankfurt, London and Paris.

In times of uncertainty about the future of Europe’s common currency, gold is a hot topic, and some Germans take a dim view of the fact that much of the country’s gold—which theoretically belongs to the people—is held abroad. Some members of parliament have even expressed doubts as to whether the foreign gold reserves really exist. Philipp Missfelder, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), wanted to see the gold for himself and traveled to New York in person to inspect the holdings, according to the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau .

Peter Gauweiler, a Bundestag member with the Christian Social Union (CSU), is also skeptical about the foreign gold reserves. In recent years he has attempted to gain more information about Germany’s gold through parliamentary questions. Last year, he had an economics professor prepare an expert report on the subject, which concluded that the Bundesbank was not fulfilling its inventory regulations by failing to physically inspect the gold. Gauweiler doubts that the Bundesbank would have immediate access to all its gold if necessary, suggesting that part of the gold may have even been lent out—a claim that the Bundesbank rejects.

Some Germans even want to bring the gold reserves back to Germany. An initiative called “Gold Action” is campaigning under the slogan: “Repatriate Our Gold!” Its petition has been signed by prominent industrialist Hans-Olaf Henkel and Frank Schäffler, a parliamentarian with the businessfriendly Free Democrats. The initiative alleges that there is an “acute” danger that the German gold could be expropriated as a result of the financial and debt crisis. They argue that the German government could soon be forced to sell gold to cover the costs of the crisis.

But the Bundesbank wants to leave the gold where it is. Observers point out that apart from the high cost of transporting the gold back to Frankfurt, the symbolic effect of Germany repatriating its gold reserves might unsettle the nervous financial markets, who could see it as a sign of an impending collapse of the euro.

1. The German Bundesbank makes sure of its gold reserves stored in the U.S. by_____.

A. carrying out spot checks of the gold bars

B.requesting annual statements from foreign depositories

C.traveling to New York to inspect the holdings

D.conducting confidential annual audit of the depositorie

2. Germany stores a large share of its gold reserves abroad because_____.

A. the Bundesbank wants to safeguard the gold against the Soviets

B.the foreign banks have suspicious integrity and reputation

C.the gold can be traded instantly when there is a need to do so

D.the assurances of its foreign counterparts are so far reliable

3. The Bundestag member Gauweiler suggests that_____.

A. the gold may be just figures and non-existent in realit

B.the government could soon sell the gold to tackle debt crisis

C.the gold may have been already used for other purposes

D.to repatriate the gold is the central bank’s inventory regulation

4. What will be the biggest impact of transporting the gold back to Germany?

A. Prosperity of Frankfurt.

B.Burden of transport costs.

C.Chaos of federal audits.

D.Panic in financial markets

5. What is the central idea of this passage?

A. Germany does check on its gold reserves in foreign banks.

B.Germans worry about the safety of their gold reserves abroad.

C.Germany’s gold reserves stored in the US are not safe.

D.The Bundesbank tailed to fulfill its inventory duties on gold

Passage 2

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watchers to non-watchers, infecting children and their parents and lingering long enough to have an impact well after the children stopped watching the show. Cooney probably wouldn’t have used these concepts or described her goals in precisely this way. But what she wanted to do, in essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy. She called her idea Sesame Street .

By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. But it isn’t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street , says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find th kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile... Television has no potential, no power to do that.” Good teaching is interactive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. In experiments, children who are asked to read a passage and are then tested on it will invariably score higher than children asked to watch a video of the same subject matter. Educational experts describe television as “low involvement”. Television is like a strain of the common cold that can spread like lightning through a population, but only causes a few sniffles and is gone in a day.

But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner—Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York—set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from television commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or about their own emotions.

Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children’s show had, and the extraordinary thing was that it worked. Virtually every time the show’s educational value has been tested —and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history—it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. There are few educators and child psychologists who don’t believe that the show managed to spread its infectious message well beyond the homes of watched the show regularly. The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of a rule of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor. They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television’s weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

6. Why does the author use “virus” and “epidemic” to describe the Sesame Street ?

A. It is considered as a disease.

B.It has medical implications.

C.It hopes to spread like the flu

D.It infects educational health.

7. The term “educational Tipping Point” in Paragraph 1 probably means_____.

A. crucial point in mental growth

B.yardstick of literacy

C.stimulus to learning

D.point where change begins

8. What is the purpose the Sesame Street project hopes to achieve?

A. Change the life of underprivileged children.

B.Give poor children an equal start.

C.Eliminate poverty and illiteracy.

D.Help disadvantaged homes acquire education.

9. Gerald Lesser was skeptical about Sesame Street , because_____.

A. the show was more recreational than educational

B.television was not an interactive or engaging medium

C.there was no involvement among the audience

D.non-watchers scored higher in the tests than watchers

10. Which of the following did Cooney and her partners exclude from of the show?

A. Recruiting celebrities as guest stars.

B.Employing techniques of TV commercials.

C.Enlivening the teaching with cartoons.

D.Involving parents for interactive purposes.

B.True or False

Read the following passage carefully and then decide whether the statements which follow are true (T) or false (F).

Most serious scientists spend a good part of their waking hours amid papers and preprints,equations and equipment, conducting experiments, talking about graphs and data, arguing about ideas and theories, teaching, and writing grant proposals. But if they browse in bookstores or glance in the book review sections of journals, they cannot fail to find a fascinating phenomenon in the scientific landscape: books proclaiming the extra-rational implications of science are proliferating. Religion and mysticism are inching their way back into the arena of science whence (some thought) they had been gradually weeded out during the past two centuries.

Right from the days of Kepler and Galileo, scientists have generally had a religious side to them:after all, except when they encounter faiths of a different shade, religions normally have only civilizing effects on the human heart. Isaac Newton believed in a personal God, explicitly calling himself His servant. Leonard Euler was deeply religious, and so were Augustin Cauchy and Michael Faraday. One author has written a 100-page volume filled with quotations from eminent scientists expressing their religious convictions. No reflecting scientist can be immune to the awe and majesty of the physical world, nor insensitive to the deep mystery underlying life and consciousness, though some may not express it in traditional ways.

But the scientific world view arrived at by collective and extensive inquiries, fortified by countles instruments and carefully-erected conceptual tools, has been in awkward contradiction to explanations of how the world began and behaves, or how life emerged, as reported in the holy books of human history. As a result, ever since the Copernican revolution, there have been confrontations between scientific theories and religious worldviews. In 1896, A. D. White published his erudite work, which was an embarrassingly candid exposure, instance after instance, of the dogged obstinacy of the religious establishment in upholding ancient doctrines in the face of mounting scientific evidence to the contrar.

After a full century, however, the situation seems to have changed drastically. A plethora of extrapolations of science are cropping up whose goal is to reestablish prescience. Many popular books,TV specials, magazine articles, and conference papers are joyously declaring that the ancients were not as much in the dark as Bacon and company had imagined; that, if anything, they had, through intuition and revelation, pretty much summed up the essence of twentieth-century physics and cosmology: from the strange physics of vacuums to the big bang.

In the view of quite a few writers (including some practicing scientists of repute), physics has shown that Hindu mystics were right in picturing the cosmos as the Dancing Divine; that Chinese philosophers were on target when they spoke of yin and yang, for these referred implicitly to the conservation of matter and energy; and that the Book of Genesis formulates the principle of evolution in metaphorical meters. It has been claimed that receding galaxies provide experimental confirmation of what cabalists had already recognized in medieval times, and inklings of the esoteric formulations of quantum physics (the so-called S-matrix theory) have been detected in Buddhist sutras.

Whether or not mainstream professional scientists take note of it, whether or not they attach weight to such claims, a significant fact in the closing decade of our century is that mysticism and old-time religion are back in full vigor in public consciousness, not just as enriching dimensions of the human spirit, nor even as competing modes of knowing or perceiving, but as profound intuitive visions that have at long last been “scientifically proven”. A good deal of academic discussion is dedicated either to showing how limited and misleading the intellect is or to proving that non-rationally-derived insights have been confirmed by the most recent scientific theorie.

11. Scientists in the west have cherished a tradition of keeping their religious beliefs since the time of Kepler and Galileo.

12. According to A. D. White, religious authorities simply turned a deaf ear to the growing amount of scientific evidence contrary to their worldviews

13. The last decade of the 20th century saw a change of view in the science field regarding ancient wisdom: after all, profound intuitions are valuable as they successfully predicted contemporary scientific finding

14. As science writers suggest, hints of the modern “S-matrix theory” of quantum physics can be found in Buddhist teachings.

15. The coming back of old-time religion and mysticism in the arena of science is not surprising, as insightful ancient intuitions and recent scientific theories have arrived at similar worldviews

C.Gap Filling

Choose from the list A to F after the passage the best sentences to fill in the gaps in the text. There are more sentences than gaps.

Brevity

Those of us who are small in physical stature are often reassured by kindly friends who say: ‘The best things come in small packages... A little person is a beautiful thing... It’s the size of the brain that counts...’ and so on.

For the man who craves those extra inches in order to dominate an audience, for the woman who regularly has to speak in public while resting her chin on the table, these thoughts provide little consolation. But they do contain a germ of truth. 16_____. Tall people cannot stretch out in the bath or extend their legs in a sleeper or couchette. They can peer over the top of the crowd but seldom slide through it. As with people, so with letters.

There are times when a letter must be long to achieve its purpose. But generally, the shorter the words, the sentences and the letter, the more effective the results will be. Even the longest epistle should be broken up into brief sections. There is no excuse for the sentence that stretches into a paragraph, nor the paragraph that becomes a page.

17_____.

The bore, the windbag, the person whom we would all go the longest distance to avoid, is also the writer whose letters we least like to read. “Oh, him again,” you say, recognizing the prolix prose. “I’ll read it later... if I have time.” So the writer joins the rank of the great unread.

In the world of journalism there are newspapers that pay by the word or column inch. This puts a premium on padding. 18_____. “We only want 500 words” writes the editor. “We pay &x per thousand.” “I shall be delighted to write your piece!” the journalist replies. But it will be harder for me to condense the material you want into 500 words than to produce a piece of 1,000. I suggest that it would be fairer to pay the rate of £ x + £ y for the 500-word piece. It will take me longer to write and will cost more in care”. With luck, the editor will agree—as a professional, he will know that length and value are seldom the same. Quality counts. Brevity matters.

19_____.

In the world of public speaking there is a trite saying: “Stand up, speak up and then shut up.”But at least the spoken work is transitory. Unless you are on radio or television, or you are a politician who produces some glorious gaffe—or, of course, you slander someone—your words will probably go unrecorded and unremembered. Commercial correspondence, though, have their words preserved in files, to be used in evidence if necessary. So keep those words short, accurate and to the point.

If you find your letter is too long, take out your equivalent of the sub-editor’s blue pencil. Peel away the extra words with which your thoughts are clothed and leave them to stand on their own naked merits. If you are ashamed of them when they stand stripped, then think again. Redraft, rewrite, rethink... 20_____.

A magazine once asked millionaire Paul Getty for a short article explaining his success. The editor enclosed his cheque for £ 200. The multi-millionaire wrote: “Some people find oil. Others don’t.”

Be brief, then. Or in the famous words of another oil man, “If you don’t strike oil soon, stop boring!”

A. Churchill was once asked how long it took him to prepare a speech. “If it’s a two-hour speech,” he replied “ten minutes. If it’s a ten-minute speech, two hours.”

B. Many professional writers do their best to avoid this sort of yardstick

C. Excess verbiage not only offends, bores and muddles the reader. It also fools the writer

D. Length is fine in its way, but it may be a nuisanc

E. When General Eisenhower appointed Arthur Bums as Chairman of his Economic Advisors, Burns suggested sending the President a memo outlining plans to organize the flow of economic advice. He said, “Keep it short. I can’t read.” Burns replied, “That’s fine, Mr. President. I can’t write” So they had a one-hour weekly conference instead

F. Brevity is the soul of a good letter. Short, snappy, concise, clear and pungent paragraphs. Thoughts neatly packed into words with punch. Neat, lively expressions, shorn of padding and pomposity.These are the keys to successful correspondence

Part Ⅲ TRANSLATION (40 points)

A. Please read the following passage and translate it into Chinese.

Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you, but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other check, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other check. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral: “Don’t relinquish power; don’t give away your lands.” But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it: “Give away your lands if you want to, but don’t expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won’t gain happiness.If you live for others, you must live for other, and not as a roundabout way of getting advantage for yourself.”

B. Please read the following passage and translate it into English.

我是欧洲人,这一点我从未怀疑过。我的父母双方都有欧洲祖先,年代久远,但至今联系牢固。生于苏格兰的人比如我和我父亲,从来都认为苏格兰和欧洲是连接在一起的。

现在欧洲人身份已经不仅仅是一种努力目标,也不单单是拿破仑当年的梦想,而是一个事实。不列颠失去了帝国,只是欧洲海岸外的若干岛屿而已。至于欧洲的将来,我个人的希望是:英国可以继续把它最好的东西献给欧洲,即它的语言。英语是了不起的语言,是极好的材料,既可用来完成实际任务,又可用来表达各式各样的观念。没有一种语言能与之媲美。它已经代替了法语成为国际标准语。希望能兴旺下去。

参考答案

Part Ⅰ GRAMMAR (30 Points)

A.Correct Errors

1. to→with。compare to“把……比作……”;compared with“与……相比”。

2.  those ^ →who。number作动词,句子主干完整,不能出现两个谓语动词,所以此处加关系代词who改成定语从句。

3. 第一个of→at。look at sth.表示“观察”。

4. rather ^ →than。rather than“而不是”;the other way round“相反”。

5. 第一个was→were。中心词the language revelations是复数形式。

6. eventually→eventual。修饰名词separation用形容词。

7. with→from。separation from sth.“与……脱离”。

8. expecting→expected。with复合结构中,expect与new legislation是动宾关系,所以用过去分词形式。

9. law→laws。the existing law与上文的language laws形成对应。

10.  would→should。表示“建议,命令,要求”接宾语从句或者跟同位语从句时,形式:(should)+动词原形。

Part Ⅱ READING COMPREHENSION (80 points)

B.Multiple Choice

Passage 1

1. B. 文章第三段提到德国中央银行主要依赖英美法三国的相应机构的担保,即提供黄金储备数量的年度报告,德国不再对此进行实地考察。

2. C. 由题目信息定位到第五段。冷战期间,德国将一些黄金移至国外,当共产主义解体后,又将黄金移回,但依然有必要将黄金储备于国外大型金融中心,这样可以在必要时快速出售。

3. C. 由题目信息定位到第七段结尾。高威勒指出,他对德国央行是否能在必要时直接使用这些黄金表示怀疑,并暗示有些黄金储备是否真正存在。

4. D. 观察者指出黄金储备的召回除了消耗高额的运输成本外,还造成金融市场的动荡。

5. B. 全文主要围绕德国人对国外黄金储备安全性的担忧。

Passage 2

6. C. 作者将芝麻街比作流行病。因为流行病会传播,极有传染性,芝麻街也是如此。

7. C. 由题目信息定位到首段第三句。可见作者认为芝麻街这个“教育引爆点”是可以促进孩子们开始学习并持续下去的刺激物。

8. C. 首段结尾以转折方式引出节目制作人启动该项目的真正目的:创造学习风潮并以此来对抗贫困和文盲。

9. B. 由题目信息定位到第二段。杰拉尔德给出的怀疑芝麻街项目的理由是:良好的教学是互动的,必须有孩子们亲自参与体验,要调动所有感官,对孩子们作出反馈,而电视没有这种才能。10. D. 由题目信息定位到第三段。几种芝麻街节目制作过程中所采用的技术和手段,ABC三项都是该节目中使用的方法。

B.True or False

11. T. 由题目信息定位到第二段首句。西方科学家有宗教信仰的传统。

12. F. 由题目信息定位到第三段结尾。与宗教权威的观点相对的科学证据日益增多,宗教权威并没有充耳不闻。

13. T. 20世纪,人们对古老智慧的态度有所改变,因为有些深奥的直觉和发现确实成功地预测了当代的科学发现。

14. T. 由题目信息定位到第五段。列举了一些古老智慧与科学发现相吻合,在结尾作者指出,量子物理神秘形成的一些迹象早就在佛教经典中被察觉出来。

15. F. 由题目信息定位到首段结尾。古宗教和神秘主义的重现并不惊奇,但并不是因为它们最终与近代科学理论达成类似的世界观,而是这些深刻的古代智慧可以在科学理论下得以验证。

C.Gap Filling

16. D. 作者的观点是高或者长亦有不好之处,这样才可以论证前面那句“浓缩才是精华”,并且引出空格后的例子。

17. C. 可见文章冗长不仅让读者感到无聊,也会愚弄作家。

18. B. 通过编辑和记者的对话说明,字数少所需支付的钱反而应该多,因为专业人士应该明白精简材料更费力,文章长度不等于价值,可见空白处应该表达专业人士对新闻界这一标准的不认同。

19. A. 从文章长度和质量的关系论证文章的长度和价值不等同。

20. F. 商务信件的写作要简短,精准,删除一切多余的话语。作者强调书信简洁性的重要性。

Part Ⅲ TRANSLATION (40 points)

A.Please read the following passage and translate it into Chinese.

莎士比亚从一开始就认为把自己搞得无权无势会招来攻击,这倒不是说每个人都会背叛你,但是非常可能有人会。如果你扔掉你的武器,某些无所顾忌的人就会捡起它们。別人打你一耳光,如果你把你的另一半脸伸出去,那么你挨的打可能比第一次更重,这种事情并不总是发生,但却在所难免。如果真的发生了,你也没什么可抱怨的。可以说,第二个耳光是你把另一边脸伸给对方的结果。于是,首先就有了这样一个略显粗浅而又颇富常识性的认识:“不要放弃权力;不要把土地赠人。”但它还有另外一个寓意。莎士比亚没有用这么长的篇幅来表述,甚至他是否完全明了也无关紧要:“如果你愿意,你可以把你的土地赠人,但是别指望借此得到幸福。很可能你不会得到幸福,如果你为别人而活,那你就必须为了别人而活,而不是把为别人而活当作是自己得益的迂回路线。”

B.Please read the following passage and translate it into English.

I’m an European, about which I have never doubted. Both my parents have European stock—ages ago yet still closely connected. People born in Scotland, just like my father and I, have always realized that Scotland is related to the Europe. Now the European identity is not only a target to fight for, nor a dream of Napoleon’s, but an actual fact. The Great Britain has lost its empire, being no more than several islands outside the European coast. As for the future of the Europe, my personal hope is that Britain can continue offering its best part—its language—to the Europe. English is an outstanding language and a fantastic material to complete practical tasks and to express diversified ideas. No other language is like it. English has taken the place of French and become one of the international standard languages. I hope it can remain prosperous. MxM7iCsbTW3VLVnvaaPiexlxdxkwHfVyYmxCrT2nFZgy2qbL6EL5M01LuhGfj7wK

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