专四考前恶补阅读完型(3)(2)
文章出处： 发布时间：2006-07-09
A. A decrease in the cost of silver.
B. The invention of heatefficient furnaces.
C. The growing economic prosperity of colonial merchants.
D. The development of new tools used to shape silver.
21. In colonial America, where did silversmiths usually obtain the material to make silver articles?
A. From their own mines.
B. From importers.
C. From other silversmiths.
D. From customers.
22. The passage mentions all of the following as uses for copper in Colonial America
EXCEPT ______.
A. cooking pots
B. scientific instruments
C. musical instruments
D. maritime instruments
23. According to the passage, silversmiths and coppersmiths in colonial America were similar in which of the following ways?
A. The amount of social prestige they had.
B. The way they shaped the metal they worked with.
C. The cost of the goods they made.
D. The practicality of the goods they made.
TEXT C
When I was growing up, the whole world was Jewish. The heroes were Jewish and the villains were Jewish. The landlord, the doctor, the grocer, your best friend, the village idiot, and the neighborhood bully: all Jewish. We were working class and immigrants as well, but that just came with territory. Essentially we were Jews on the streets of New York. We learned to be kind, cruel, smart and feeling in a mixture of language and gesture that was part street slang, part grade school English, part kitchen Yiddish.
One Sunday evening when I was eight years old my parents and I were riding in the back seat of my rich uncle’s car. We had been out for a ride and now we were back in the Bronx, headed for home. Suddenly, another car sideswiped us. My mother and aunt shrieked. My uncle swore softly. My father, in whose lap I was sitting, said out the window at the speeding car, “That’s all right. Nothing but a few Jews in here.” In an instant I knew everything. I knew there was a world beyond our streets, and in that world my father was humiliated man, without power or standing.
When I was sixteen,a girl in the next building had her nose straightened; we all went together to see Selma Shapiro lying in state, wrapped in bandages from which would emerge a person fit for life beyond the block. Three buildings away
a boy went downtown for a job, and on his application he wrote “Arnold Brown” instead of “Arnold Braunowiitz”. The news swept through the neighborhood like a wild fire. A nose job? A name change? What was happening here? It was awful; it was wonderful. It was frightening; it was delicious. Whatever it was, it wasn’t standstill. Things felt lively and active. Selfconfidence was on the rise, passivity on the wane. We were going to experience challenges. That’s what it meant to be in the new world. For the first time we could imagine ourselves out there.
But who exactly do I mean when I say we? I mean Arnie, not Selma. I mean my brother, not me. I mean the boys, not the girls. My mother stood behind me, pushing me forward. “The girl goes to college, too,” she said. And I did. But my going to college would not mean the same thing as my mother’s going to college, and we all knew it. For my brother, college meant going from the Bronx to Manhattan. But for me? From the time I was fourteen I yearned to get out of the Bronx, but get out into what? I did not actually imagine myself a working person alone in
Manhattan and nobody else did either. What I did imagine was that I would marry
, and that the man I married would get me downtown. He would brave the perils of
class and race, and somehow I’d be there alongside him.
24. In the passage, we can find the author was ______.
A. quite satisfied with her life
B. a poor Jewish girl
C. born in a middleclass family
D. a resident in a rich area in New York
25. Selma Shapiro had her nose straightened because she wanted ______.
A. to look her best
B. to find a new job in the neighborhood
C. to live a new life in other places
D. to marry very soon
26. Arnold Brown changed his name because ______.
A. there was racial discrimination in employment
B. Brown was just the same as Braunowiitz
C. it was easy to write
D. Brown sounds better
27. From the passage we can infer that ______.
A. the Jews were satisfied with their life in the Bronx
B. the Jewish immigrants could not be rich
C. all the immigrants were very poor
D. the young Jews didn’t accept the stern reality
TEXT D
Nature’s Gigantic Snow Plough
On January 10, 1962, an enormous piece of glacier broke away and tumbled down the side of a mountain in Peru. A mere seven minutes later, when cascading ice finally came to a stop ten miles down the mountain, it had taken the lives of 4,000 people.
This disaster is one of the most ___devastating____ examples of a very common event: an avalanche of snow or ice. Because it is extremely cold at very high altitudes, snow rarely melts. It just keeps piling up higher and higher. Glaciers are eventually created when the weight of the snow is so great that the lower layers are pressed into solid ice. But most avalanches occur long before this happens. As snow accumulates on a steep slope, it reaches a critical point at which the slightest vibration will send it sliding into the valley below.
Even an avalanche of light power can be dangerous, but the Peruvian catastrophe was particularly terrible because it was caused by a heavy layer of ice. It is estimated that the ice that broke off weighed three million tons. As it crashed down the steep mountainside like a gigantic snow plough, it swept up trees, boulders and tons of topsoil, and completely crushed and destroyed the six villages that lay in its path.
At present there is no way to predict or avoid such enormous avalanches, but, luckily, they are very rare. Scientists are constantly studying the smaller, more common avalanches, to try to understand what causes them. In the future, perhaps dangerous masses of snow and ice can be found and removed before they take human lives.
28. The first paragraph catches the reader’s attention with a _____
A. firsthand report
B. dramatic description
C. tall tale
D. vivid world picture
29. In this passage ___devastating____ means ______.
A. violently ruinous
B. spectacularly interesting
C. stunning
D. unpleasant
30. The passage is mostly about ______.
A. avalanches
B. glaciers
C. Peru
D. mountains
SECTION B SKIMMING AND SCANNING ［5 MIN.］
In this section there are five passages followed by ten questions or unfinished statements. Skim or scan them as required and then mark your answers on your ANSWER SHEET.
TEXT E
First read the following questions.
31. Bush fires are most likely to occur in Australia in ______.
A. December and January
B. April
C. July, August and September
D. May and June
32. Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a factor that contributes to great fire danger?
A. Sultry weather.
B. Cigarettes thrown out of car windows.
C. Pine forests.
D. Windstorm.
Now read Text E quickly and mark your answers on your ANSWER SHEET.
Every summer in Australia there is the danger of bush fires. Long periods of hot dry weather cause the grass and trees to become highly inflammable. As well as the dryness and high temperature, an important factor is the great amount of oil in the leaves of such trees as eucalyptus, and gum trees.
Fires start very easily, often spontaneously, but usually because of a carelessly thrown cigarette or match. If there is a high wind, the ample supply of air fans the flames into an inferno. The radiant heat vaporizes the oil in the leaves, and the fire travels very quickly, sometimes overtakes fleeing cars and burns passengers to death.
Great fires often occur around Christmas, in areas near big cities, causing great loss of life and property.
TEXT F
First read the following questions.
33. According to the passage, how many people on earth spoke English twenty years ago?
A. About 300 million.
B. Roughly 500 million.
C. More than 600 million.
D. One seventh of the whole population.
34. What Burchfield says roughly means ______.
A. an educated person will be deprived of civil rights if he doesn’t learn English
B. an educated person will be looked down upon if he knows not English
C. an educated person is hindered in his life if he does not know the language
D. knowledge of English helps him get rich in many ways
Now read Text F quickly and mark your answers on your ANSWER SHEET.
The sun sets regularly on the Union Jack these days, but never on the English language. It was spread by British colonialists. It got a boost from American GI’s, and it was cemented by the multinational corporation. Today, like it or curse it, English is the closest thing to a lingua franca around the globe. Roughly 700 million people speak it——an increase of 40 percent in the last twenty years and a total that represents more than oneseventh of the world’s population.
It has replaced French in the world of diplomacy and German in the field of science. It is the dominant language of medicine, electronics and space technology, of international business and advertising, of radio, television and film. Says Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary: “Any literate, educated person is deprived if he does not know English.”
TEXT G
First read the following questions.
35. What is the main topic of the passage?
A. The mechanics of rain.
B. The weather patterns of North America.
C. How Earth’s gravity affects agriculture.
D. Types of clouds.
36. Ice crystals do not immediately fall to Earth because ______.
A. they are kept aloft by air currents
B. they combine with other chemicals in the atmosphere
C. most of them evaporate
D. their electrical charges draw them away from the earth
Now read Text G quickly and mark your answers on your ANSWER SHEET.
What makes it rain? Rain falls from clouds for the same reason anything falls to Earth. The Earth’s gravity pulls it. But every cloud is made of water droplets or ice crystals. Why doesn’t rain or snow fall constantly from all clouds? The droplets or ice crystals in clouds are exceedingly small. The effect of gravity on them is minute. Air currents move and lift droplets so that the net downward displacement is zero, even though the droplets are in constant motion.
Droplets and ice crystals behave somewhat like dust in the air made visible in a shaft of sunlight. To the casual observer, dust seems to act in a totally random fashion, moving about chaotically without fixed direction. But in fact dust particles are much larger than water droplets and they finally fall. The average size of a cloud droplet is only 0.0004 inch in diameter. It is so small that it would take sixteen hours to fall half a mile in perfectly still air, and it does not fall out of moving air at all. Only when the droplet grows to a diameter of 0.0008 inch or larger can it fall from the cloud. The average raindrop contains a million times as much water as a tiny cloud droplet. The growth of a cloud droplet to a size large enough to fall out is the cause of rain and other forms of precipitation. This important growth process is called “coalescence”.
TEXT H
First read the following questions.
37. The 1030 bus leaving Miami at 5:45 p.m. arrives at Jacksonville at 2:35 a.m. after
a stop at ______.
A. Naples B. Sarasota C. Orlando D. Daytona Beach
38. Judging from the bus time schedule, the cities which are most
likely closest to one
another geographically are ______.
A. Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale
B. Orlando and Jacksonville
C. Miami and Hollywood
D. Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach
Now read Text H quickly and mark your answers on your ANSWER SHEET.
Bus Schedule
GREYHOUND
MIAMI TO JACKSONVILLE
10301010
MIAMIA
JAXBOS
MIAMILv5:4511:45
HOLLYWOOD6:30
FT. LAUDERDALE6:55
WEST PALM BEACHLv8:10
Ft. Pierc
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