题目
题型：北京高考真题难度：来源：
Individuals (个人) should pay for their higher education.
A university education is of huge and direct benefit to the individual. Graduates earn more than non-
graduates. Meanwhile, social mobility is ever more dependent on having a degree. However, only some
people have it. So the individual, not the taxpayers, should pay for it. There are pressing calls on the
resources (资源) of the government. Using taxpayers" money to help a small number of people to earn
high incomes in the future is not one of them.
Full government funding (资助) is not very good for universities. Adam Smith worked in a Scottish
university whose teachers lived off student fees. He knew and looked down upon 18th-century Oxford,
where the academics lived comfortably off the income received from the government. Guaranteed salaries,
Smith argued, were the enemy of hard work; and when the academics were lazy and incompetent, the
students were similarly lazy.
If students have to pay for their education, they not only work harder, but also demand more from
their teachers. And their teachers have to keep them satisfied. If that means taking teaching seriously,
and giving less time to their own research interests, that is surely something to celebrate.
Many people believe that higher education should be free because it is good for the economy (经济).
Many graduates clearly do contribute to national wealth, but so do all the businesses that invest (投资)
and create jobs. If you believe that the government should pay for higher education because graduates
are economically productive, you should also believe that the government should pay part of business
costs. Anyone promising to create jobs should receive a gift of capital from the government to invest.
Therefore, it is the individual, not the government, who should pay for their university education.
B. pressing calls
C. college graduates
D. government resources
B. students are more demanding
C. students will become more competent
D. teachers will spend less time on teaching
B. call on them to finance students" studies
C. encourage graduates to go into business
D. show their contribution to higher education
答案
核心考点
举一反三
| 1. Why do airplanes take longer to fly west than east? It can take five hours to go west-east from New York (NY) to London but seven hours to travel east- west from London to NY. The reason for the difference is an atmospheric phenomenon known as the jet (喷射) stream. The jet stream is a very high altitude wind which always blows from the west to the east across the Atlantic. The planes moving at a constant air speed thus go faster in the west-east direction when they are moving with the wind than in the opposite direction. |
| 阅读理解。 |
| This brief book is aimed at high school students, but speaks to anyone learning at any stage of life. Its formal, serious style closely matches its content, a school-masterly book on schooling. The author, W. H. Armstrong, starts with the basics: reading and writing. In his opinion, reading doesn"t just mean recognizing each word on the page; it means taking in the information, digesting it and incorporating it into oneself just as one digests a sandwich and makes it a part of himself. The goal is to bring the information back to life, not just to treat it as dead facts on paper from dead trees. Reading and writing cannot be completely separated from each other; in fact, the aim of reading is to express the information you have got from the text. I"ve seen it again and again: someone who can"t express an idea after reading a text is just as ineffective as someone who hasn"t read it at all. Only a third of the book remains after that discussion, which Armstrong devotes to specific tips for studying languages, math, science and history. He generally handles these topics thoroughly (透彻地) and equally, except for some weakness in the science and math sections and a bit too much passion (激情) regarding history. Well, he was a history teacher -if conveyed only a tenth of his passion to his students, that was a hundred times more than my history teachers ever got across. To my disappointment, in this part of the book he ignores the arts. As a matter of fact, they demand all the concentration and study that math and science do, though the study differs slightly in kind. Although it"s commonly believed that the arts can only be naturally acquired, actually, learning the arts is no more natural than learning French or mathematics. My other comment is that the text aged. The first edition apparently dates to the 1960s-none of the references (参考文献) seem newer than the late 1950s. As a result, the discussion misses the entire computer age. These are small points, though, and don"t affect the main discussion. I recommend it to any student and any teacher, including the self-taught student. |
| 1. According to Armstrong, the goal of reading is to _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. gain knowledge and expand one"s view B. understand the meaning between the lines C. express ideas based on what one has read D. get information and keep it alive in memory |
| 2. The author of the passage insists that learning the arts _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. requires great efforts B. demands real passion C. is less natural than learning maths D. is as natural as learning a language |
| 3. What is a shortcoming of Armstrong"s work according to the author? |
| [ ] |
| A. Some ideas are slightly contradictory. B. There is too much discussion on studying science. C. The style is too serious. D. It lacks new information. |
| 4. This passage can be classified as _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. an advertisement B. a book review C. a feature story D. a news report |
| 阅读理解。 |
| Have you winterized your horse yet? Even though global warming may have made our climate more mild, many animals are still hibernating (冬眠). It"s too bad that humans can"t hibernate. In fact, as a species, we almost did. Apparently, at times in the past, peasants in France liked a semi-state of human hibernation. So writes Graham Robb, a British scholar who has studied the sleeping habits of the French peasants. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end. In line with this, Jeff Warren, a producer at CBC Radio"s The Current, tells us that the way we sleep has changed fundamentally since the invention of artificial (人造的) lighting and the electric bulb. When historians began studying texts of the Middle Ages, they noticed something referred to as "first sleep", which was not clarified, though. Now scientists are telling us our ancestors most likely slept in separate periods. The business of eight hours" uninterrupted sleep is a modem invention. In the past, without the artificial light of the city to bathe in, humans went to sleep when it became dark and then woke themselves around midnight. The late night period was known as "The Watch". It was when people actually kept watch against wild animals, although many of them simply moved around or visited family and neighhours. According to some sleep researchers, a short period of insomnia (失眠) at midnight is not a disorder. It is normal. Humans can experience another state of consciousness around their sleeping, which occurs in the brief period before we fall asleep or wake ourselves in the morning. This period can be an extraordinarily creative time for some people. The impressive inventor, Thomas Edison, used this state to hit upon many of his new ideas. Playing with your sleep rhythms can be adventurous, as anxiety may set in. Medical science doesn"t help much in this case. It offers us medicines for a full night"s continuous sleep, which sounds natural; however, according to Warren"s theory, it is really the opposite of what we need. |
| 1. The example of the French peasants shows the fact that _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. people might become lazy as a result of too much sleep. B. there were signs of hibernation in human sleeping habits. C. people tended to sleep more peacefully in cold weather. D. winter was a season for people to sleep for months on end. |
| 2. The late night was called "The Watch" because it was a time for people _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. to set traps to catch animals. B. to wake up their family and neighbours. C. to remind others of the time. D. to guard against possible dangers. |
| 3. What does the author advise people to do? |
| [ ] |
| A. Sleep in the way animals do. B. Consult a doctor if they can"t sleep. C. Follow their natural sleep rhythm. D. Keep to the eight-hour sleep pattern. |
| 4. What is the author"s purpose in writing the passage? |
| [ ] |
| A. To give a prescription for insomnia. B. To urge people to sleep less. C. To analyze the sleep pattern of modem people. D. To throw new light on human sleep. |
| 阅读理解。 |
| People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions-and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why. Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes. "We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," Jack said. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect (忽略) the mouth." According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations. The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of. expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies. It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than did Westerners. "The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions," Jack said. "Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less." In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation. |
| 1. The discovery shows that Westerners _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. pay equal attention to the eyes and the mouth B. consider facial expressions universally reliable C. observe the eyes and the mouth in different ways D. have more difficulty in recognizing facial expressions |
| 2. What were the people asked to do in the study? |
| [ ] |
| A. To make a face at each other. B. To get their faces impressive. C. To classify some face pictures. D. To observe the researchers" faces. |
| 3. What does the underlined word"they" in Paragraph 6 refer to? |
| [ ] |
| A. The participants in the study. B. The researchers of the study. C. The errors made during the study. D. The data collected from the study. |
| 4. In comparison with Westerners, Easterners are likely to _____. |
| [ ] |
| A. do translation more successfully B. study the mouth more frequently C. examine the eyes more attentively D. read facial expressions more correctly |
| 5. What can be the best title for the passage? |
| [ ] |
| A. The Eye as the Window to the Soul B. Cultural Differences in Reading Emotions C. Effective Methods to Develop Social Skills D. How to Increase Cross-cultural Understanding |
| 任务型阅读。请认真阅读下列短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意：请将答案写在相应题号的横线上。每个空格只填1个单词。 |
| For more than twenty years scientists have been seeking to understand the mystery of the "sixth sense" of direction. By trying out ideas and solving problems one by one, they are now getting closer to one answer. One funny idea is that animals might have a built-in compass (指南针). Our earth itself is a big magnet (磁体). So a little magnetic needle that swings freely lines itself with the big earth magnet to point north and south. When people discovered that idea about a thousand years ago and invented the compass,it allowed sailors to navigate (航海) on ocean voyages, even under cloudy skies. Actually the idea of the living compass came just from observing animals in nature. Many birds migrate twice a year between their summer homes and winter homes. Some of them fly for thousands of kilometers and mostly at night. Experiments have shown that some birds can recognize star patterns. But they can keep on course even under cloudy skies. How can they do that? A common bird that does not migrate but is great at finding its way home is the homing pigeon. Not all pigeons can find their way home. Those that can are very good at it, and they have been widely studied. One interesting experiment was to attach little magnets to the birds" heads to block their magnetic sense-just as a loud radio can keep you from hearing a call to dinner. On sunny days, that did not fool the pigeons. Evidently they can use the sun to tell which way they are going. But on cloudy days,the pigeons with magnets could not find their way. It was as if the magnets had blocked their magnetic sense. Similar experiments with the same kind of results were done with honeybees. These insects also seem to have a special sense of direction. In spite of the experiments,the idea of an animal compass seemed pretty extraordinary. How would an animal get the magnetic stuff for a compass. An answer came from an unexpected source. A scientist was studying bacteria that live in the mud of ponds and marshes. He found accidentally little rod-like bacteria that all swam together in one direction-north. Further study showed that each little bacterium had a chain of dense particles inside,which proved magnetic. The bacteria had made themselves into little magnets that could line up with the earth"s magnet. The big news was that a living thing,even a simple bacterium, can make magnetite. That led to a search to see whether animals might have it.. By using a special instrument called magnetometer, scientists were able to find magnetite in bees and birds, and even in fish. In each animal,except for the bee. The magnetic stuff was always in or closer to the brain. Thus the idea of a built-in animal compass began to seem reasonable. |