试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-考博英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone(2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, Our Kids, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children.Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However the non-marital birth proportion among the high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer (with two professional incomes) and more stable: they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s, there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr. Putnam calls “Goodnight Moon” time (after a popular book for infants).Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time, in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organize their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase.Stunningly, Mr. Putnam finds that family background is a better predictor of whether or not a child will graduate from university than 8th grade test scores. Kids in the richest quarter with low test scores are as like to make it through college as kids in the poorest quarter with high scores.Mr. Putnam suggests a grab-bag of policies to help poor kids reach their potential such as raising subsidies for poor families, teaching them better parenting skills, improving nursery care and making after-school baseball clubs free. He urges all 50 states to experiment to find out what works. A problem this complex has no simple solution.1.Which of the following statements is TRUE according to Mr. Putnam’s new book?2.“Goodnight Moon” time (Line 5, Para. 4) refers to the time of（）.3.We can infer that working-class parents（）.4.What does Mr. Putnam’s finding about test scores suggest?5.In the passage, the author mainly discusses（）.

查看试题

In recent years there has been much talk of a “renaissance” in American manufacturing. A few things seemed to be on the side of the makers. For instance, until recently the dollar was weak, American wages were stagnant, but those in China were booming. Cheap shale oil and gas gave factories a boost. But as we argued recently, talking of a renaissance is overblown. And few figure, released today, add to the mounting pile of evidence saying that manufacturing growth is starting to slow.We argued before that although there has been a recovery in American manufacturing in recent years, it is not a sustainable one. Employment in the sector is still lower than before the crash. So is one important measure of output: real value added. In short, America has not got better at producing stuff.Also, much of the recovery in American manufacturing seems to be based on a cyclical boom in “durable” goods—things that you expect to last a long time, like cars and fridges. During the recession, orders for durable goods plunged. That’s because it is quite easy to put off such purchases. By contrast, it is more difficult to put off purchases of non-durable goods, like medicines, because people tend to consume them more frequently.After the recession, production of durable goods soared. Cheap credit, for instance, spurred demand for new motors and rapid growth in car-making. That sector accounted for over a third of the durable growth from 2009 to 2013. Yet a recovery based on a few durable industries is unsustainable. This is because when pent-up demand is satisfied, a few big industries will suffer. Overall output is likely to stall.New data confirm this prediction. Orders for durable goods fell by 1.4% in February. Motor-vehicle orders fell by 0.5%. It is possible that the recent bad weather has had an effect here. But it may be a sign of something more troubling. As economists at Capital Economics, a consultancy, argue, “the more general malaise started back in the autumn of last year. Indeed, core orders have now fallen in every month since last October.”In recent months, non-durable goods have also fallen quite rapidly. What explains all this? The obvious culprit is the strong dollar. Because it makes manufacturing exports (which account for roughly half of America’s total) more expensive. Alternatively, it may be because consumers are starting to pull back on spending. In January, consumer credit grew at the slowest pace in over a year, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve. In recent months consumer confidence has dropped a bit. And companies may not be so confident, either, and are thus not in the mood to add to capital stock, says Steven Ricchiuto of Mizuho Securities, an investment bank. This does not bode well for American manufacturing or, indeed, for economic growth overall.1.What does the author say about the recovery in American manufacturing?2.In what sense “durable” goods cannot boost sustainable economic growth?3.How can we understand the remarks of economists at Capital Economics?4.What can we infer from the last paragraph?5.What’s the author’s attitude towards the outlook of America manufacturing?

查看试题

Job hunting is never easy, but what if data could be used to make the process a little less stressful? Companies such as Linkedin and Monster.com hold vast amounts of information on people’s professional lives, but there is one organization that surpasses them all: the federal government. Although rich and comprehensive, government labor data can often be hard to access, bound by net tape and cloaked in jargon.“With today’s technologies, we can do a lot more to build open data sets for skills,” said Aneesh Chopra, the While House’s first chief technology officer and founder of Arlington-based start-up Hunch Analytics. During his tenure, Chopra’s role involved making government data more accessible. It’s a mission he has continued after his departure, assembling a band of public officials, tech entrepreneurs and think-tank analysts whose focus is firmly on the labor market.A robust economic recovery tempered by flat wages has reinforced the need to connect Americans with higher-paying technology jobs, according to the White House. That was the rationale behind the President’s new initiative, announced last week, to train and hire Americans for more than 500,000 unfilled information technology jobs through partnerships with local communities.“There’s not a standard, real-time, modern way to identify all the skills our economy needs in play today. Work force and talent planners have a daunting job in ensuring they have a ready-now workforce, so the more data they can get, the better informed they are.” said Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president of products at Workday, a human resources software company that was involved in the project.The closest thing to a standard national database is the Labor Department’s Occupational Information network Website, known as O* Net. Built in the 1990s, the site compiles data on more than 900 occupations, with details about job skills, average compensation and a search tool to find jobs by state. But although the site is continually updated, it has been slow to keep pace with the changing job market, according to Copra and Levensaler.A push to modernize O* Net is the group’s next big undertaking. The President’s 2016 budget proposal includes a $ 5 million request to study and test approaches modernize and potentially streamline data collection for O* Net. The measure seeks to “provide up-to-date coverage of occupations and skills, particularly for high-growth, changing industries.” Chopra convened a roundtable of government officials, academics and private-sector executives last month to discuss measures to improve O* Net. Workday and LinkedIn are among the companies interested in the effort—which is still at a conceptual stage, Chopra said.To open-data advocates such as Chopra, there’s no better time to harness the power of information for the economy. “No one company, no matter how amazing they are, has the capacity to get every employer in America to open up their skills data for every job posting,” he said, “The government has the capacity to convene stakeholders to open up the data.”1.In what respect is the company database inferior to that of federal government?2.The passage implies that Aneesh Chopra（）.3.Which of the following statements would Leighanne be most likely to agree with?4.We can infer from the passage that O* Net（）.5.In the last paragraph, Chopra emphasizes（）.

查看试题

What might driving on an automated highway be like? The answer depends on what kind of system is ultimately adopted. Two distinct types are on the drawing board. The first is a special-purpose lane system, in which certain lanes are reserved for automated vehicles. The second is a mixed traffic system; fully automated vehicles would share the road with partially automated or manually driven cars. A special-purpose lane system would require more extensive physical modifications to existing highways, but it promises the greatest gains in freeway capacity.Under either scheme, the driver would specify the desired destination, furnishing this information to a computer in the car at the beginning of the trip or perhaps just before reaching the automated highway. If a mixed traffic system was in place, automated driving could begin whenever the driver was on suitably equipped roads. If special-purpose lanes were available, the car could enter them and join existing traffic in two different ways. One method would use a special onramp（入口引道）. As the driver approached the point of entry for the highway, devices installed on the roadside would electronically check the vehicle to determine its destination and to ascertain that it had the proper automation equipment in good working order. Assuming it passed such tests, the driver would then be guided through a gate and toward an automated lane. In this case, the transition from manual to automated control would be shared by automated and regular vehicles. The driver would steer onto the highway and move in normal fashion to a “transition” lane. The vehicle would then shift under computer control onto a lane reserved for automated traffic. The limitation of these lanes to automated traffic would, presumably, be well respected because all trespassers could be swiftly identified by authorities.Either approach to joining, a lane of automated traffic would harmonize the movement of newly entering vehicles with those already traveling. Automatic control here should allow for smooth merging, without the usual uncertainties and potential for accidents. And once a vehicle had settled into automated travel, the driver would be free to release the wheel, open the morning paper or just relax.1.We learn from the first paragraph that two systems automated highways（）.2.A special-purpose lane system is probably advantageous in that（）.3.Which of the following is TRUE about driving on an automated highway?4.We know from the passage that a car can enter a special-purpose lane（）.5.When driving in an automated lane, the driver（）.

查看试题

At the heart of the debate over illegal immigration lies one key question: “Are immigrants good or bad for the economy?” The American public overwhelmingly thinks they’re bad. Yet the consensus among most economists is that immigration, both legal and illegal, provides a small net boost to the economy. Immigrants provide cheap labor, lower the prices of everything from farm produce to new homes, and leave consumers with a little more money in their pockets. So why is there such a discrepancy between the perception of immigrants’ impact on the economy and the reality?There are a number of familiar theories. Some argue that people are anxious and feel threatened by an inflow of new workers. Others highlight the stress that undocumented immigrants place on public services, like schools, hospitals, and jails. Still others emphasize the role of race, arguing that foreigners add to the nation’s fears and insecurities. There’s some truth to all these explanations, but they aren’t quite sufficient.To get a better understanding of what’s going on, consider the way immigration’s impact is felt. Though its overall effect may be positive, its costs and benefits are distributed unevenly. David Card, an economist at UC Berkeley, notes that the ones who profit most directly from immigrants' low-cost labor are businesses and employers—meatpacking plants in Nebraska, for instance, or agricultural businesses in California. Granted, these producers’ savings probably translate into lower prices at the grocery store, but how many consumers make that mental connection at the checkout counter? As for the drawbacks of illegal immigration, these, too, are concentrated. Native low-skilled workers suffer most from the competition of foreign labor. According to a study by George Borjas, a Harvard economist, immigration reduced the wages of American high-school dropouts by 9% from 1980 to 2000.Among high-skilled, better-educated employees, however, opposition was strongest in states with both high numbers of immigrants and relatively generous social services. What worried them most, in other words, was the fiscal burden of immigration. That conclusion was reinforced by another finding: that their opposition appeared to soften when that fiscal burden decreased, as occurred with welfare reform in the 1990s, which curbed immigrants’ access to certain benefits.The irony is that for all the overexcited debate, the net effect of immigration is minimal. Even for those most acutely affected—say, low-skilled workers, or California residents—the impact isn’t all that dramatic. “The unpleasant voices have tended to dominate our perceptions, says Daniel Tichenor, a political science professor at the University of Oregon. “But when all those factors are put together and the economists calculate the numbers, it ends up being a net positive, but a small one.” Too bad most people don’t realize it.1. What can we learn from the first paragraph?2.In what way does the author think ordinary Americans benefit from immigration?3.Why do native low-skilled workers suffer most from illegal immigration?4.What is the chief concern of native high-skilled, better-educated employees about the inflow of immigrants?5.What is the irony about the debated over immigration?

查看试题

Directions: Write an essay of 180 to 200 words on the topic: “Private Cars Should Not Be Encouraged in China?” Your essay should include a beginning, a body and a conclusion. Please pay special attention to its structure, content and language. Write the essay on the answer sheet.

查看试题

1.In present-day technology man makes tremendous demands on the materials available to him. The demand is not only for huge quantities of materials such as timber, concrete, steel and plastics for constructional purposes. It is also for smaller but crucial amounts of materials which are less easily obtainable. Materials such as uranium and titanium do not exist in large quantities but they possess unusual properties which make them essential for certain highly specialized uses.2.Computers are electronic machines for processing data. Data are pieces or items of information that have been properly prepared so that the machine can work with them. Processing means handling or manipulating the material that has been presented to the machine in such ways as performing calculations, classifying information, or making comparisons. A computer is made of millions of electronic devices that can store the data or switch them through complex circuits with different functions at incredible speeds.3.在传统的中国家庭中，成年子女与年长父母生活在一个屋檐下。自1974年中国实行独生子女政策以来，中国家庭经历了许多变化，其中一个变化是核心家庭成为主导。当独生子女因为读大学或结婚而离开家里时，父母才四五十岁，他们比其他国家育有多个子女的父母更早经历空巢综合征。他们忽然感到孤独、悲伤、无用、消沉。

查看试题

Directions: Nowadays, traffic problem remains one of the most serious situations in urban areas. Write an essay of 180-200 words to discuss this topic. Your essay must include the instructions as follows:1. Present situations2. Possible reasons3. What should be done to solve this problem

查看试题

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking—and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking—don’t settle.

查看试题

The sun is not growing weaker, yet its light appears to be dimming. Between 1960 and 1990, some scientists believe, the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface may have declined as much as 10%—and in some places, Hong Kong, for example, more than 35%.What was going on? Well, it appears that increased air pollution during those 30 years—over Asia, in particular—with the help, perhaps, of some increased cloudiness, may have exerted a cooling influence on the surface of the planet even as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were encouraging the atmosphere to warm. The impacts of that tug-of-war on the climate system could be devilishly difficult to untangle. At the same time, no task could be more urgent. For if global pollution has helped keep global warming in check, says Veerabhadran Ramanthan, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at San Diego, then the full impact of the buildup of greenhouse gases has yet to be felt. This week, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Montreal, Ramanathan and others will be presenting the latest data on the solar-dimming problem and pondering its implications for the climate system as a whole.Many scenarios for global warming, for example, invoke a speedup in the hydrological cycle by which water evaporates and then comes down as rain. The cooling produced by solar dimming, however, may slow the rate of evaporation, while higher up in the atmosphere the pollutants responsible for absorbing and reflecting sunlight are likely to interfere with the process that produces rain.Why? These pollutants, which take the form of tiny, airborne particles called aerosols, act as nuclei around which cloud droplets form. The problem is, there are too many aerosols in the atmosphere competing for water molecules, so the cloud droplets that form are too small and never become weighty enough to fall to the ground. As a result, says Beate Liepert, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the atmosphere could be filled with moisture while Earth’s surface thirsts for rain.Many questions remain, including the true extent of the dimming. One analysis pegs the average worldwide darkening to be about 4% over three decades, while another computes it to be more than twice that much. There are also questions about the reliability of the devices that measure the sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. Known as radiometers, these instruments are nothing more than flat, black solar collectors capped with glass. They are sometimes finicky: a smudge of dirt or a speck of dust can cause bogus readings and change the calculated results.Solar dimming, in other words, is a problem still in the process of being defined, and as its dimensions become clearer, so will the nature of the challenge the world faces. Although scientists have done a lot of thinking about global warming, they are just beginning to grapple with the problem of how global warming and solar dimming interact. As Ramanthan puts it, “It’s like we have a new gorilla sitting down at the table”—and it could turn out to be a very big gorilla indeed.1.By tug-of-war, (line 4, Paragraph 2), the author means（）.2.How do the scientists feel about the current climate situation?3.When mentioning “it’s like we have a new gorilla sitting down at the table” (Line 4, Paragraph 6), the author implies that（）.4.Which of the following cannot serve as factor of causing the cooling surface of the planet?5.Which of the following is TURE according to the text?

查看试题

On campuses, cheerful undergraduates are pressing leaflets into fresher’s hands. At Heathrow airport, where many foreign students enter Britain, the welcome has been less warm. Officials herded recent arrivals into a separate queue that at times took six hours to get through—and those were lucky ones. Many potential students are languishing at home, and will miss out on university places this autumn unless they receive visas in the next few days.Universities had seen trouble looming since March, when a new student-visa system was introduced. By insisting that potential students prove their academic credentials and show that they have enough money to support themselves, the Home Office intended to deter those who were actually coming to Britain to work. It has hoped the reforms would keep out potential terrorists. But the advice it issued to applicants was poor (it has since been revised) and staff at many visa-processing centres were not properly trained.The result has been a backlog at many centers—in Los Angles, for example, students waited up to 40 days for a visa. But the problem has been particularly acute in the Indian subcontinent. In Pakistan, 5,000 aspiring students have yet to have their applications processed and 9,000 more are appealing against outright refusals.The logjam affects mostly wealthy, well-educated folk in strategically important countries. The elite universities, some of which have long had a cosmopolitan clientele, are concerned. “We are extremely worried about the damage that this could do to the reputation of British higher education overseas, particularly in the Indian subcontinent. It comes at a time when universities’ finances are under enormous pressure, ” says Simeon Underwood, head of admissions policy at the London School of Economics.International students are vital to British universities. Although British and European students pay tuition fees of up to €3, 225 a year, the cost of educating them is far higher. The state partially plugs the gap and, for that reason, it also caps the number of these students. Fees from overseas students, who pay around €12,000 a year, contribute more than €1.5 billion annually, 8% of universities total income.To attract these crucial customers, universities offer to meet them at airports, run events to settle them in and arrange for police to visit campuses to expedite visa controls. But if students cannot make it into Britain, such canny marketing is in vain. This year, even though a weak pound makes British universities a cheap option, some have seen the number of new students from outside the European Union fall by a fifth because of difficulties in getting visas.On a visit to Islamabad on October 5th Alan Johnson, the home secretary, promised to cut the time it takes to process a visa from 60 days to 15 by hiring more staff, and to help Pakistan establish a national anti-terrorism agency, which would relieve the pressure on the visa system. But his intervention will not help this year’s blocked students. And if problems persist, more foreign students may plump for universities in America or Australia in future.1.We can learn from the first paragraph that（）.2.According to the new student-visa system, an international student should prove all of the following EXCEPT（）.3.According to the text, the student-visa system may lead to（）.4.It can be inferred from the last paragraph that（）.5.The author’s attitude towards the new student-visa system seems to be（）.

查看试题

Charles Reznikoof (1894-1976) worked relentlessly, never leaving New York but for a brief stay in Hollywood, of all places. He was admired by Pound and Kenneth Burke, and often published his own works; in the Depression era, he managed a treadle printing press in his basement. He wrote three sorts of poems: exceptionally short imagistic lyrics; longer pieces crafted and cobbled from other sources, often from the Judaic tradition; and book-length poems wrought from the testimony both of Holocaust trials and from the courtrooms of tum-of-the-century America. Two of these full-length volumes were indeed titles “Testimony”, as was an earlier prose work; it was a word that kept him close company. When asked late in life to define his poetry, it was not the word he chose.“Objectivist”, he wrote, naming his long standing group, and mimicking poetic style with a single prose sentence: “images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse; words pithy and plain; without the artifice of regular meters; themes, chiefly Jewish, American, urban.” If the sentence sounds hard-won, this is perhaps because it was. Four decades earlier, he wrote in a letter to friends, “There is a learned article about my verse in Poetry this month, from which I learn that I am an objectivist.” The learned fellow was Louis Zukofsky, brilliant eminence of the objectivists, “with whom I disagree as to both form and content of verse, but to whom I am obliged for placing some of my things here and there.” So read Reznikoof’s conclusion in 1931, with its fillip of polite resentment.Movements and schools are arbitrary and immaterial things by which poetic history is told. This must have rankled Reznikoof, who spent his writing life tracing the material and the necessary.Born a child of immigrants in Brooklyn in 1894, he was in journalism school at 16, took a law degree at 21. Though he was little interested in legal practice, the ideas would be near the heart of his writing. Ideal poetic language, he wrote, “is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law.” If this suggests a congenital optimism about the law, it made for astonishingly care-filled poetry. Reznikoof is unsurpassed in conveying the sense that world is worth getting right. Not the glorious or the damaged world, but the world that is everything that is the case. Reznikoof’s faith in the facts of the case takes on an intensity no less social than spiritual, no greater when surveying the Old Testament than New York. This collection gathers all his poems (but for those already book-length) by the technique of compressing onto single pages as many as five or six at a time. This can lessen the force; each is a sort of American haiku, though no more impressionistic than a hand-operated printing press. One such, numbered 69 in the volume “Jerusalem the Golden” runs in its length: “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still itself among the rubbish.” This exemplary couplet is sometimes taken to represent Reznikoof’s poetry itself, immutable and certain amid the transitory.1.By saying “it was a word that kept him close company” (Line 8, Paragraph 1) the author implies（）.2.Reznikoff's attitude to the fact that he was grouped as objectivist is（）.3.The word “rankled” (Line 2, Paragraph 3) probably means（）.4.We can learn from the 4th paragraph that（）.5.By citing the poem in the last paragraph, the author intends to（b）.

查看试题

In the collected body of writing we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate groupings capable of blending, but also fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately to the higher understanding or reason, but always through the affections of pleasure and sympathy. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the works as connected with absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests, although it may not be absolutely novel even to the meanest of minds.What do we learn from “Paradise Lost”? Nothing at all. What do we learn from a cook book? Something new, something we did not know before, in every paragraph. But would we therefore put the wretched cookbook on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What we owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million advancing steps on the same earthly level. What we owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion of your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step ascending as upon Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry us farther on the same plane, but could never raise us one foot above your ancient level on earth, whereas, the very first step of power is flight—an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten.1.The passage is written to（）.2.According to the passage, the literature of knowledge are（）.3.The sentence “The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding” means（）.4.The true implication concerning the comparison between “Paradise Lost” and a cookbook is（）.5.Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?

查看试题

暂未登录

成为学员

学员用户尊享特权

老师批改作业做题助教答疑学员专用题库高频考点梳理

This book is divided into five sections. Each section（）a different aspect of the problem.

If you keep on overworking yourself, your health will（）.

He seems to think the plan will work, but I am（）about its success.

The professor knows his subject, but he has trouble（）his ideas across to the students.

An airplane（）in the mountain.

He failed to（）himself to the new environment.

He was afraid he would have to（）her invitation to the party.

Directions: Write an essay of 180 to 200 words on the topic: “Private Cars Should Not Be Encouraged in China?” Your essay should include a beginning, a body and a conclusion. Please pay special attention to its structure, content and language. Write the essay on the answer sheet.

Directions: Nowadays, traffic problem remains one of the most serious situations in urban areas. Write an essay of 180-200 words to discuss this topic. Your essay must include the instructions as follows:1. Present situations2. Possible reasons3. What should be done to solve this problem