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最新职称英语学习资料(阅读理解讲义)4
PASSAGE 29Live with Computer
?After too long on the Net, even a phone call can be a shock. My boyfriend’s Liverpudlian accent suddenly becomes indecipherable after the clarity of his words on screen; a secretary’s tone seems more rejecting than I’d imagined it would be. Time itself becomes fluid - hours become minutes, and alternately seconds stretch into days. Weekends, once a highlight of my week, and now just two ordinary days.
For the last three years, since I stopped working as a producer for Charlie Rose, I have done much of my work as a telecommuter. I submit articles and edit them via E-mail and communicate with colleagues on Internet mailing lists. My boyfriend lives in England, so much of our relationship is computer-mediated.
If I desired, I could stay inside for weeks without wanting anything. I can order food, and manage my money, love and work. In fact, at times I have spent as long as three weeks alone at home, going out only to get mail and buy newspapers and groceries. I watched most of the blizzard of ’96 on TV.
But after a while, life itself begins to feel unreal. I start to feel as though I’ve merged with my machines, taking data in, spitting them back out, just another node on the Net. Others on line report the same symptoms. We start to strongly dislike the outside forms of socializing. It’s like attending an A. A. meeting in a bar with everyone holding a half-sipped drink. We have become the Net opponents; worst nightmare.
What first seemed like a luxury, crawling from bed to computer, not worrying about hair, and clothes and face, has become an avoidance, a lack of discipline. And once you start replacing real human contact with cyber-interaction, coming back out of the cave can be quite difficult.
At times, I turn on the television and just leave it to chatter in the background, something that I’d never done previously. The voices of the programs soothe me, but then I’m jarred by the commercials. I find myself sucked in by soap operas, or compulsively needing to keep up with the latest news and the weather. "Dateline," "Frontline," "Nightline," CNN, New York 1, every possible angle of every story over and over and over, even when they are of no possible use to me. Work moves from foreground to background.
练习：
1. Compared to the clear words of her boyfriend on screen, his accent becomes
A) unidentifiable.
B) unbearable.
C) unreal.
D) misleading.
2. The passage implies that the author and her boyfriend live in
A) different cities in England.
B) different countries.
C) the same city.
D) the same country.
3. What is the main idea of the last paragraph?
A) she is so absorbed in the TV programs that she often forgets her work.
B) In order to keep up with the latest news and the weather, she watches TV a lot.
C) In order to get some comfort from TV programs she, sometimes, turns on the television.
D) Having worked on the computer for too long, she became a bit odd.
4. What is the author’s attitude to the computer?
A) She dislikes it because TV is more attractive.
B) She dislikes it because it cuts off her relation with the outside world.
C) She has become bored with it.
D) She likes it because it is very convenient.
5. The phrase "coming back out of the cave" in the fifth paragraph means
A) coming back home.
B) going back home.
C) living a luxurious life.
D) restoring direct human contact.
Keys：ABCCD
PASSAGE 30
Knitting
?My mother knew how to knit, but she never taught me. She assumed, as did many women of her generation, that knitting was no longer a skill worth passing down from mother to daughter. A combination of feminism, consumerism and household gadgetry made many women feel that such homely accomplishments were no obsolete. My grandmother still knitted, though, and every Christmas she made a pair of socks for my brother and me, of red wool. They were the ones we wore under our ice skates, when it was really important to have warm feet.
Knitting is a nervous habit that happens to be productive. It helped me quit smoking by giving my hands
something else to do. It is wonderful for depression because no matter what else happens, you are creating something beautiful. Time spent in front of the television or just sitting is no longer time wasted.
I love breathing life into the patterns. It’s true magic, finding a neglected, dog-eared old book with the perfect snowflake design, buying the same Germantown knitting worsted my grandmother used, in the exact blue to match my daughter’s eyes, taking it on the train with me every day for two months, working feverishly to get it done by Christmas, staying up late after the stocking are filled to sew in the sleeves and weave in the ends.
Knitting has taught me patience. I know that if I just keep going, even if it takes months, there will be a reward. When I make a mistake, I know that a temper tantrum will not fix it, that I just have to go back and take out the stitches between and start over again.
People often ask if I would do it for money, and the answer is always a definite no. In the first place, you could not pay me though for the hours I put into a sweater. But more important, this is an activity I keep separate from such considerations. I knit to cover my children and other people I love in warmth and color. I knit to give them something earthly that money could never buy.
Knitting gives me life an alternative rhythm to the daily deadline. By day I can write about Northern Ireland or the New York City Police Department and get paid for it, but on the train home, surrounded by people with laptops, I stage my little rebellion. I take out my old knitting bag and join the centuries of women who have knitted for love.
1. Which of the following reasons does NOT explain the fact that "Knitting was no longer a skill worth passing down from mother to daughter"?
A) The struggle of women for equal rights.
B) The belief that it is good to buy and use a lot of goods.
C) The plain feature of Knitting.
D) The introduction of domestic devices.
2.At what time did the author wear the stocks her grandmother had knitted for her?
A) In winter.
B) When she went skiing.
C) During the Christmas holiday.
D) When she needed to keep her feet warm for skating.
3."Knitting is nervous habit" means
A) knitting involves the work of one’s nerves.
B) Knitting gets on one’s nerves.
C) Knitting makes one nervous.
D) Knitting may act as a trigger for a nervous breakdown.
4.Which of the following is false concerning knitting according the author?
A) It helps one give up one’s bad habit.
B) It helps one get rid of one’s bad mood.
C) It requires patience.
D) It is profit-making business.
5.What is NOT her purpose for knitting according to this passage?
A) It saves money.
B) It activate one’s life.
C) It enriches one’s life.
D) It is a pleasant pastime.
Keys: CDADA
PASSAGE 31
Powers of Self-suggestion
?Most systems of medicine are based on theater. With leeches, acupuncture needles, vitamin pills or whatever stage prop is appropriate for the time and culture, the healer artfully evokes the patient’s powers of self-suggestion, which are responsible for whatever healing may occur.
Western medicine operates on a different plane. For one thing, it has the most impressive props - expensive medicines, elaborate rituals and mysterious high-tech machines with a white-gowned cast to operate them. For another, it evokes the patient’s auto suggestive powers all the more forcefully by pretending to ignore them. This mysterious gift of self-healing is cloaked with an anodyne label, the "placebo effect", and recognized only as a nuisance likely to confound clinical trials. But the placebo (Latin for "I will please") and its shadowy twin the nocebo ("I will harm") are much more than methodological problems: they lie at the heart of every interaction between doctor and patient.
How they work no one knows. But the brain rules the body in many subconscious ways, including its control of the body’s major hormones and its subtle influence over the immune system. So it’s possible that, in ways yet unknown, expectations about health or disease are sometimes translated into a bodily reaction that fulfills them.
The power of these effects is hard to overstate. A rule of thumb is that 30 percent of patients in the placebo half of a drug trial (i.e. those who unknowingly receive a dummy pill instead of the real thing) will experience an improvement in symptoms. But the proportion may be much higher. Just like real drugs, placebo pills can produce stronger effects in larger doses. Patients will report greater relief when given a larger pill, or two dummy capsules instead of one.
Doctors’ expectations also contribute to the awesome power of the placebo effect. In a study of tooth extractions, patients were given either a painkiller or sham drugs. Some dentists were assigned to give either drug, without knowing which, but other dentists knew they would be giving only sham drugs. The patients whose dentists thought they had at least a 50-50 chance of giving a painkiller suffered significantly less pain.
Presumably, doctors transmit their expectations to the patient through subtle cues, often without knowing they are doing so. For this reason, all properly designed drug trials are double blind. But given that both groups can often guess from the side effects, even this precaution may not always crush the generation of expectancies.
1. Which of the following is NOT a feature of Western medicine?
A) It reduces the patients; self-healing powers.
B) It has the full support of high-tech machines.
C) It is very expensive.
D) It has complicated rituals.
2. What dose the term "the placebo effect" mean?
A) It means the mind-troubling effect.
B) It means the psychological effect.
C) It means the harmful effect.
D) It means the theatrical effect.
3. What does "them" (the last word in paragraph 3) refer to?
A) Clinical trials.
B) The body’s major hormones.
C) Expectations about health or disease.
D) Many subconscious ways.
4. Why did the patients whose dentists thought they had at least a 50-50 chance of being given a painkiller suffer significantly less pain?
A) Because of doctors’ expectations.
B) Because of the placebo effect.
C) Because of the healing power of the medicine taken.
D) Because of the excellent medical skills of the doctors.
5. What does the author mean by saying that for this reason, all properly designed drug trials are double blind (in the last paragraph)?
A) The physician and the patient are both ignorant of the healing power of the medicine.
B) The physician doesn’t know whether the given pill is real or fake.
C) The patient doesn’t know whether the given pill is real or fake.
D) Neither the physician nor the patient knows whether the given pill is real or fake.
Key: ABCAD
PASSAGE 32
Ford’s Assembly Line
?When it comes to singling out those who have made a difference in all our lives, you cannot overlook Henry Ford. A historian a century from now might well conclude that it was Ford who most influenced all manufacturing, everywhere, even to this day, by introducing a new way to make cars-one, strange to say, that originated in slaughterhouses.
Back in the early 1900’s, slaughterhouses used what could have been called a "disassembly line." Ford reversed this process to see if it would speed up production of a part of an automobile engine called a magneto. Rather than have each worker completely assemble a magneto, one of its elements was placed on a conveyer, and each worker, as it passed, added another component to it, the same one each time. Professor David Hounshell of the University of Delaware, an expert on industrial development, tells what happened:
"The previous day, workers carrying out the entire process had averaged one assembly every 20 minutes. But on that day, on the line, the assembly team averaged one every 13 minutes and 10 seconds per person."
Within a year, the time had been reduced to five minutes. In 1913, Ford went all the way. Hooked together by ropes, partially assembled vehicles were towed past workers who completed them one piece at a time. It wasn’t long before Ford was turning out several hundred thousand cars a year, a remarkable achievement then. And so efficient and economical was this new system that he cut the price of his cars in half, to $260, putting them within reach of all those who, up until that time, could not afford them. Soon, auto makers the world over copied him. In fact, he encouraged them to do so by writing a book about all of his innovations, entitled Today and Tomorrow. The Age of the Automobile has arrived. Today, aided by robots and other forms of automation, everything from toasters to perfumes are made on assembly lines.
1. Which of the nbsp;
D) Using genetic forecasting to cure diseases.
4. According to the passage, Hitler attempted to
A) change the pilots biologically to win the war.
B) develop genetic farming for food supply.
C) kill the people he thought of as inferior.
D) encourage the development of genetic weapons for the war.
5. What does Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard’s statement imply?
A) the commercial applications of genetic engineering are inevitable.
B) America will depend on other countries for biological progress.
C) Americans are proud of their computers, automobiles and genetic technologies.
D) The potential application of each new genetic advance should be controlled.
KEYS: BDDCA
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