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PART II READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)
In this section there are four reading passages followed be a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark the best answer to each question on ANSWER SHEER TWO.
TEXT A
My class at Harvard Business School helps students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. In each session, we look at one company through the lenses of different theories, using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what action will yield the needed results. On the last day of class, I asked my class to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves to find answers to two questions: First, How can I be sure I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure my relationships with my spouse and my family will become an enduring source of happiness? Here are some management tools that can be used to help you lead a purposeful life.
1. Use Your Resources Wisely. Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent shape your life’s strategy. I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources:I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, and contribute to my church. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time, energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to very different from what you intended.Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you have never planned for emerge. But if you don’t invest your resources wisely, the outcome can be bad. As I think about people who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles related right back to a short-term perspective.
When people with a high need for achievement have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. Our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward.You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationships with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer the same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse and on a daily basis it doesn’t seem as if thing are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers, even though intimate and loving family relationships are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens,you’ll see that same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
2. Create A Family Culture. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with a acuity and chart the course corrections a company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction.
When there is little agreement, you have to use “power tools” – coercion, threats, punishments and so on, to secure cooperation. But if employee’s ways of working together succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. Ultimately, people don ‘t even think about whether their way yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision, which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which member s of a group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.
I use this model to address the question, How can I be my family becomes an enduring source of happiness? My students quickly see that the simplest way parents can elicit cooperation from children is to wield power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point, parents start wishing they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and the confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture and you have think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
11. According to the author, the key to successful allocation of resources in your life depends on whether you ________.
A. can manage your time well
B. have long-term planning
C. are lucky enough to have new opportunities
D. can solve both company and family problems
12. What is the role of the statement “Our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward” with reference to the previous statement in the paragraph?
A. To offer further explanation
B. To provide a definition
C. To present a contrast
D. To illustrate career development
13. According to the author, a common cause of failure in business and family relationships is ________.
A. lack of planning
B. short-sightedness
C. shortage of resources
D. decision by instinct
14. According to the author, when does culture begin to emerge ________.
A. When people decide what and how to do by instinct
B. When people realize the importance of consensus
C. When people as a group decide how to succeed
D. When people use “power tools” to reach agreement
15. One of the similarities between company culture and family culture is that ________.
A. problem-solving ability is essential
B. cooperation is the foundation
C. respect and obedience are key elements
D. culture needs to be nurtured
Text B
It was nearly bedtime and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and, leaning over the rail, searched the heavens for the Southern Cross. After two years at the front and a wound that had taken longer to heal than it should, he was glad to settle down quietly at Apia (阿皮亚，西萨摩亚首都) for twelve months at least, and he felt already better for the journey. Since some of the passengers were leaving the ship next day they had had a little dance that evening and in his ears hammered still the harsh notes of the mechanical piano. But the deck was quiet at last. A little way off he saw his wife in a long chair talking with the Davidsons, and he strolled over to her. When he sat down under the light and took off his hat you saw that he had very red hair, with a bald patch on the crown, and the red, freckled skin which accompanies red hair; he was a man of forty, thin, with a pinched face, precise and rather pedantic; and he spoke with a Scots accent in a very low, quiet voice.
Between the Macphails and the Davidsons, who were missionaries, there had arisen the intimacy of shipboard, which is due to proximity rather than to any community of taste. Their chief tie was the disapproval they shared of the men who spent their days and nights in the smoking-room playing poker or bridge and drinking. Mrs. Macphail was not a little flattered to think that she and her husband were the only people on board with whom the Davidsons were willing to associate,and even the doctor, shy but no fool, half unconsciously acknowledged the compliment. It was because he was of an argumentative mind that in their cabin at night he permitted himself to carp (唠叨).
‘Mrs. Davidson was saying she didn’t know how they’d have got through the journey if it hadn’t been for us,’ said Mrs. Macphail, as she neatly brushed out her transformation (假发). ‘She said we were really the only people on the ship they cared to know.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought a missionary was such a big bug (要人、名士) that he could afford to put on frills (摆架子).’
‘It’s not frills. I quite understand what she means. It wouldn’t have been very nice for the Davidsons to have to mix with all that rough lot in the smoking-room.’
‘The founder of their religion wasn’t so exclusive,’ said Dr. Macphail with a chuckle.
‘I’ve asked you over and over again not to joke about religion,’ answered his wife. ‘I shouldn’t like to have a nature like yours, Alec. You never look for the best in people.’
He gave her a sidelong glance with his pale, blue eyes, but did not reply. After many years of married life he had learned that it was more conducive to peace to leave his wife with the last word.He was undressed before she was, and climbing into the upper bunk he settled down to read himself to sleep.
When he came on deck next morning they were close to land. He looked at it with greedy eyes.There was a thin strip of silver beach rising quickly to hills covered to the top with luxuriant vegetation. The coconut trees, thick and green, came nearly to the water’s edge, and among them you saw the grass houses of the Samoaris (萨摩亚人); and here and there, gleaming white, a little church. Mrs. Davidson came and stood beside him. She was dressed in black, and wore round her neck a gold chain, from which dangled a cross. She was a little woman, with brown, dull hair very elaborately arranged, and she had prominent blue eyes behind invisible pince-nez (夹鼻眼镜). Her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness; she had the quick movements of a bird. The most remarkable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic, and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating to the nerves like the pitiless clamor of the pneumatic drill.
‘This must seem like home to you,’ said Dr. Macphail, with his thin, difficult smile.
‘Ours are low islands, you know, not like these. Coral. These are volcanic. We’ve got another ten days' journey to reach them.’
‘In these parts that’s almost like being in the next street at home,’ said Dr. Macphail facetiously.
‘Well, that’s rather an exaggerated way of putting it, but one does look at distances differently in the J South Seas. So far you’re right.’
Dr. Macphail sighed faintly.
16. It can be inferred from the first paragraph that Dr. Macphail ________.
A. preferred quietness to noise
B. enjoyed the sound of the mechanical piano
C. was going back to his hometown
D. wanted to befriend the Davidsons
17. The Macphails and the Davidsons were in each other’e company because they ________.
A. had similar experience
B. liked each other
C. shared dislike for some passengers
D. had similar religious belief
18. Which of the following statements BEST describes Mrs. Macphail?
A. She was good at making friends
B. She was prone to quarrelling with her husband
C. She was skillful in dealing with strangers
D. She was easy to get along with.
19. All the following adjectives can be used to depict Mrs. Davidson EXCEPT ________.
A. arrogant
B. unapproachable
C. unpleasant
D. irritable
20. Which of the following statements about Dr. Macphail is INCORRECT?
A. He was sociable.
B. He was intelligent.
C. He was afraid of his wife.
D. He was fun of the Davidsons.
Text C
Today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We're told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts — which means that we've lost sight of who we really are. One-third to one-half of Americans are introverts — in the other words, one out of every two or three people you know. If you're not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising,managing, married to, or coupled with one.
If these statistics surprise you, that's probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts.Closet introverts pass undetected on playgrounds, in high school locker rooms, and in the corridors of corporate America. Some fool even themselves, until some life event — a layoff, an empty nest, an inheritance that frees them to spend time as they like — jolts them into taking stock of their true natures. You have only to raise this subject with your friends and acquaintances to find that the most unlikely people consider themselves introverts.
It makes sense that so many introverts hide even from themselves. We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal— the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual — the kind who's comfortable "putting himself out there." Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.
Introversion — along with its cousin’s sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness — is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.
The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking,more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. Even the word introvert is stigmatized — one informal study, by psychologist Laurie Helgoe, found that introverts described their own physical appearance in vivid language, but when asked to describe generic introverts they drew a bland and distasteful picture.
But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions — from the theory of evolution to van Gogh's sunflowers to the personal computer — came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there.
21. According to the author, there exists, as far as personality styles are concerned, a discrepancy between ________.
A. what people say they can do and what they actually can
B. what society values and what people pretend to be
C. what people profess and what statistics show
D. what people profess and what they hide from others
22. The ideal extrovert is described as being all the following EXCEPT ________.
A. doubtful
B. sociable
C. determined
D. bold
23. According to the author, our society only permits ________ to have whatever personality they like.
A. the young
B. the ordinary
C. the artistic
D. the rich
24. According to the passage, which of the following statements BEST reflects the author’s opinion?
A. Introversion is seen as an inferior trait because of its association with sensitivity.
B. Extroversion is arbitrary forced by society as a norm upon people.
C. Introverts are generally regarded as either unsuccessful or as deficient.
D. Extroversion and introversion have similar personality trait profiles.
25. The author winds up the passage with a ________ note.
A. cautious
B. warning
C. positive
D. humorous
Text D
Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people.Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain,improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia （痴呆） in old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict,giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind ? like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often? You may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age, and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life.
26. According to the passage, the more recent and old views of bilingualism differ mainly in ________.
A. its practical advantages
B. its role in cognition
C. perceived language fluency
D. its role in medicine
27. The fact that interference is now seen as a blessing in disguise means that ________.
A. it has led to unexpectedly favorable results
B. its potential benefits have remained undiscovered
C. its effects on cognitive development have been minimal
D. only a few researchers have realized its advantages
28. What is the role of Paragraph Four in relation to Paragraph Three?
A. It provides counter evidence to Paragraph Three.
B. It offers another example of the role of interference.
C. It serves as a transitional paragraph in the passage.
D. It further illustrates the point in Paragraph Three.
29. Which of the following can account for better performance of bilinguals in doing non-inhibition tasks?
A. An ability to monitor surroundings.
B. An ability to ignore distractions.
C. An ability to perform with less effort.
D. An ability to exercise suppression.
30. What is the main theme of the passage?
A. Features of bilinguals and monolinguals.
B. Interference and suppression.
C. Bilinguals and monitoring tasks.
D. Reasons why bilinguals are smarter.
