Text 2

Carrying 20-foot containers is not as glamorous as making films, but shipping is doing more than Hollywood to boost southern California's economy these days. The adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, already the two biggest in the country, are growing quickly thanks to trade with China. They are a giant job-creating engine, stimulating industrial and warehouse employment on a scale not seen in the region since the rise of the aerospace industry after the Second World War. Sadly, like most engines, they are filthy.

The ports themselves reckon they are responsible for about 12% of all the diesel particle emissions and 45% of the sulphur oxides in southern California. Carried east by prevailing winds, such pollutants help to create some of America's worst air more than 50 miles inland. Those who live close to the freeways leading out of the ports suffer the most. Researchers have found that children living within a few hundred meters of such roads are not only more likely to suffer from asthma, a disease of the breathing system and characterized by coughing. They actually have smaller lungs.

The most ambitious effort to control pollution, and the one that may affect the local economy most drastically, involves truckers. Some 16,000 lorries currently haul containers between ships and warehouses, most of whom are owned by Hispanic immigrants. The drivers put in long hours: 13 a day is not unusual, according to a survey. They earn, on average, just under $35,000 a year. Such jobs, like many connected to the port, are an important stepping-stone on the path to the middle class.

The ports want to remove the oldest trucks and gradually upgrade the others so that, within five years, the fleet emits four-fifths less pollution than at present. To help pay for this, they intend to levy a fee of $34 to $54 on every “dirty” vehicle entering the port. Most important, they want to turn a large, unwieldy network of independent contractors into a more orderly group of companies operating concessions, as happens in an airport. “We need to have more control,” explains Geraldine Knatz, the head of Los Angeles' port.

The reforms do nonetheless pose a threat to the ports' competitiveness. At present, the truckers who work at the docks are price-takers, not price-setters. Because they are self-employed, they are almost impossible to unionise, and consequently have little bargaining power. All that could quite easily change if they were to become the employees of a few large firms. Indeed, the most enthusiastic welcome for the ports' plans has come not from environmental groups but from the Teamsters' union.

26. What is the passage mainly about?

A. the consequences of shipping industry in southern California

B. the causes of pollution along the coast of southern California

C. the pollution problem of the shipping industry in southern California

D. the role of shipping industry in southern California’s economy

27. The author mentions the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to justify that_________.

A. they are the largest in the US

B. they create new job opportunities

C. shipping industry is less glamorous than making movies.

D. shipping industry plays a significant role in southern California’s economy.

28. We can infer from the passage that___________.

A. Hollywood movies help little to southern California’s economy these days.

B. The shipping industry there is as dirty as other industries.

C. People living near these ports suffer the most.

D. The polluted air in the region may result in both asthma and smaller lungs.

29. According to the passage, the most ambitious effort to control pollution ______________.

A. has almost nothing to do with the truckers.

B. could have negative impacts upon the local economy.

C. may depend on independent contractors

D. will upgrade all the trucks to reduce pollution.

30. According to the author, the reforms bring about a threat to the port’s competitiveness in that_________.

A. the truckers’ unionization would raise the cost of the ports.

B. truckers working at the docks are price-takers.

C. the Teamsters’ union would have little bargaining power.

D. environmental groups are not enthusiastic about the plans.

Text 3

It could be all reasonable to blame traffic jams, the cost of petrol and the quick pace of modern life, but manners on the roads are becoming horrible. Everybody knows that the nicest men become monsters behind the wheel. It is adequate, again, to have a tiger in the tank, but to have one in the driver’s seat is another matter altogether. You might tolerate the rude and inconsiderate driver, but sadly nowadays the well-mannered motorist is just an exception. Perhaps the situation calls for a ‘Be Kind to Other Drivers’ campaign, otherwise it may get completely out of hand.

Road politeness is not just good manners, but good sense too. It takes the most cool-headed and good-tempered of drivers to resist the temptation to revenge when subjected to uncivilized behavior. On the other hand, a little politeness goes a long way towards relieving the tensions of motoring. A friendly nod or a wave of acknowledgement in response to an act of politeness helps to create an atmosphere of goodwill and tolerance so necessary in modern traffic conditions. But such acknowledgements of politeness are all too rare today. Many drivers nowadays don’t even seem able to recognize politeness when they see it.

However, misplaced politeness can also be dangerous. Typical examples are the driver who brakes violently to allow a car to emerge from a side street at some hazard to following traffic, when a few seconds later the road would be clear anyway; or the man who waves a child across a zebra crossing into the path of oncoming vehicles that may be unable to stop in time. The same goes for encouraging old ladies to cross the road wherever and whenever they care to. It always amazes me that the highways are not covered with the dead bodies of these grannies.

A veteran driver, whose manners are faultless, told me it would help if motorists learnt to filter correctly into traffic streams one at a time without causing the total blockages that give rise to bad temper. Unfortunately, modern motorists can’t even learn to drive, let alone master the subtler aspects of boatmanship. Years ago the experts warned us that the car-ownership explosion would demand a lot more give-and-take from all road users. It is high time for all of us to take this message to heart.

31. According to this passage, troubles on the road are primarily caused by ________.

A. traffic conditions

B. the rhythm of modern life

C. the behavior of the drivers（C）

D. people’s attitude towards rude drivers

32. The sentence “You might tolerate the rude and ... the rule.” (Para. 1) implies that ________.

A. our society is unjust towards well-mannered motorists

B. rude drivers can be met only occasionally

C. the well-mannered motorist cannot tolerate the inconsiderate drivers（D）

D. nowadays impolite drivers constitute the majority of motorists

33. By “good sense,” the writer means ________.

A. the driver’s ability to understand and react reasonably

B. the driver’s prompt response to difficult and severe conditions

C. the driver’s tolerance of rude or even savage behavior（A）

D. the driver’s acknowledgement of politeness and regulations

34. Experts have long pointed out that in the face of car-ownership explosion, ________.

A. road users should demand more sacrifice

B. drivers should be ready to yield to each other

C. drivers should have more communication among themselves（B）

D. drivers will suffer great loss if they pay no respect to others

35. What can be inferred from this passage?

A. Strict traffic regulations are badly needed

B. Drivers should apply road politeness properly

C. Rude drivers should be punished（B）

D. Drivers should avoid traffic jams

Text 4

With the prevalence of interactive electronic media, a man alone in his own home will never have been so well placed to fill the inexplicable mental space between birth and death. Computer games and surfing the web will make the existential problem a thing of the past. Isn't that great! In this promising scenario it seems only right that books should be pushed more and more into those moments, say, of travel, that people still don't quite know what to do with.

In spite of all this, given the perceived dumbing down of such a world, when people do read they'll no doubt want to feel they are reading something serious. For although the collapse of pretty well all collective illusions - religious and political - will have persuaded most people to turn their mental energies to problems exclusively technical and their emotions to the harmlessly superficial, still it's hard to forget that qualities like wisdom and insight once carried considerable prestige. It would be nice to think one had them. And of course those qualities tended to be associated with something called literature. Result? You're going to find fewer books presenting themselves as mass market stories and more taking up literary pretensions.

Translators can only benefit from this desire for the seemingly sophisticated. We can look forward to lots of fantastic foreign stories, which are enthusiastically sustained by the overall concept of 'the global village'. Much of this will be awful and some wonderful, but don't expect the press or the organizers of prizes to offer you much help in making the appropriate distinctions between superior and inferior stuff. They will be chiefly engaged in creating celebrity, the greatest enemy of discrimination, but a vital prop(支柱) for the confused consumer. However, the sharper readers will establish their own book list, something worth looking forward to.

Meanwhile, every ethnic grouping the world over will be seen to have a great writer of their own-a phenomenon that will lead to a new kind of provincialism, more historical than geographical, where only the strictly contemporary is admired. Universities will include novels written only last year, while the achievements of ten or only five years ago will quite reasonably be forgotten.

    In short, you can't go too far wrong when predicting more of the same things. But there is a positive side to this -- the inevitable reaction against it. What we would like to see happen in the world of literature-publishers seeking less to generate celebrity through advertising, newspapers and magazines giving space to reflective serious readings -- are rather unlikely. But dullness never quite darkens the whole planet. In their own fashion, a few writers will always be looking for new departures.

36. According to the author, people want to feel they are reading something serious because______.

A. they have turned their mental energies to technical problems.

B. wisdom and insight once carried substantial prestige.

C. they have not been persuaded into giving up certain qualities.

D. collective illusions have collapsed.

37. What does the author say about “celebrity” in the field of literature?

A. It is the greatest enemy of personal discriminations.

B. It is generated by publishers through advertising and by organizers of prizes.

C. It helps sharper readers establish their own reading lists.

D. It is a prop for all the consumers.

38. According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?

A. The prevalence of interactive electronic media helps a man alone at home to stop thinking about the meaning of life and death.

B. Books are supposed to be pushed more into moments people cannot handle.

C. Qualities like wisdom and insight tend to be forgotten.

D. Universities are inclined to include novels older than 5 years.

39. What does the author’s attitude towards the new kind of “provincialism” (Line2, paragraph 4)?

A. negative  B. positive  C. subjective   D. optimistic

40. According to the author, what is the prospect of the literary world?

A. The publishers will reduce the cost of advertising.

B. Newspapers and magazines will give space to serious literature.

C. Publishers will stop generating celebrity.

D. There are difficulties as well hopes with the future of literature.

Part B

Directions:

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G to fill in each numbered box. The first, the fourth and the last paragraphs have been placed for you in Boxes. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1 (10 points)

[A] And it’s not just servers in the back office that can benefit from virtualization. Modern desktop and even laptop computers have more than enough power these days to run virtualization software. Both the VMWare Server and Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 are ideal for installing virtual machines on an Intel- or AMD-based PC.

[B] Protection against spyware is no better. Until recently, however, the problem was more of an annoyance than a threat. But spyware is changing into something more horrible—with identity theft being the main objective. Meanwhile, protection against these attacks—cheating e-mails that try to get users to provide passwords and other crucial data—is even less effective. By one estimate, it costs Americans between $500m and $1 billion annually.

[C] A better idea is to adopt something called virtualization—a technique that’s been around for ages, but has only lately come back into fashion. Virtualization provides a way of hiding a computer’s resources—its central processor, operating system, network controller, and storage devices—behind a software curtain. The idea is to give users (not to mention nefarious strangers) the impression they have control of the machine, when really they are dealing with a fake machine created entirely in software.

[D] Security firms reckon some 2.3 million “bots” are currently online. While suppliers of anti-virus software have every reason to magnify the claim, the fact remains that only four out of five computers connected to the internet have such software installed. And less than half those have their software updated on time.

[E] Keep out! Either will allow you to run a “guest” operating system inside one of these virtual machines. The guest can be another copy of Windows, which can then be left exposed to attack by viruses and other malware circulating around the internet, while the actual computer remains hidden behind the curtain, free from infection. After you’ve finished surfing the web, the virtual machine and its copy of the operating system can be discarded and a fresh set re-established the next time you switch on the computer.

[F] Even among those that do, the software typically catches no more than 70% of the viruses, worms, Trojan horses and key-stroke loggers probing them continuously. Malware—Malicious software designed to take over computers—mutates faster than A-V software. Insiders reckon protection is generally one to two months behind.

[G] One answer, of course, is to disconnect your computer from the internet completely, and never to accept any form of portable media from anyone. That way, your computer will never get infected, nor will it be turned into a zombie ready to do the illicit bidding of some scam artist, identity thief, mail spammer or child pornographer. But it will also be next to useless.

[H] Hacking used to be done by kids for kicks or bragging rights. Nowadays, it’s big business for organised crime, often out of reach of the law, on the far side of the world. Connect an unprotected personal computer to the internet for more than 15 seconds and it will almost certainly be attacked by a virus or worse. That’s how ruthlessly effective the army of malicious robots, dispatched by criminals to scour the net for vulnerable computers, has become.

Part C

Directions:

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (10 points)

In modern universities, all disciplines strive to distinguish themselves from all others. (46) In doing so, they make at a lower level a primary distinction between the humanities and the sciences, with the former taking human beings and their thoughts, imaginings, capacities and works as its subject and the latter taking on the nonhuman world, of which the human can be seen as a mere by-product.

Within the humanities, each subfield claims its own territory. Philosophy, for example, examines the conditions of human life and thought, focusing in particular on the question of free will and choice that informs both ethics and aesthetics. Its mode can be described, very broadly, as analysis. (47)History focuses its efforts on the records of specifically human endeavor and achievement, which provides not only a subject, but a certain scale and style of analysis. As a discipline, history is primarily predisposed not to analysis but to chronology or narrative, which is capable of representing events in a causal series.

(48)Criticism of the arts defines itself more by its object—paintings, buildings, films or literary texts—than by its methodology（方法论）, which can incline either toward philosophy, or toward history, the production or reception of the work of art. Sometimes multiple approaches are comprehended in the same critical work. As its subject is creativity, criticism of the arts must itself be creative in determining its own orientation, its own projects, its own methodology.

(49)The discrimination of fields makes it possible not only to achieve precise specialized knowledge, but to mark the progress of knowledge as limited sets of problems are solved, one after another. (50)The classification also, however, creates a host of unintended consequences, and some of these have proved to be just as productive as the intended ones. By limiting the kinds of questions that can be posed, departmental thought intentionally screens out certain features of reality, and while this partial blindness can be counted as a necessary condition of modern knowledge, it creates the conditions for an interdisciplinary reaction that blends two or more approaches to achieve results unobtainable by either: hence sociobiology, genetic engineering, architectural ethics and countless other innovations that are virtually invited by the limitations of disciplinarity.

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