2012年10月英语阅读（二）自考试题

全国2012年10月英语阅读（二）自考试题

请考生按规定用笔将所有试题的答案涂、写在答题纸上。全部题目用英文作答（翻译题除外）。
选择题部分
注意事项：
1. 答题前，考生务必将自己的考试课程名称、姓名、准考证号用黑色字迹的签字笔或钢笔填写在答题纸规定的位置上。
2. 每小题选出答案后，用2B铅笔把答题纸上对应题目的答案标号涂黑。如需改动，用橡皮擦干净后，再选涂其他答案标号。不能答在试题卷上。

I. Reading Comprehension (50 points, 2 points for each)
Directions: In this part of the test, there are five passages. Following each passage, there are
five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then
blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.
Passage One
    From time to time, we need an expert. In such situations, the Internet has been like a gift from the gods. In the old days, authorities were near at hand for expert advice: the village seamstress on how to make a buttonhole, the blacksmith on how to take care of a horse’s hooves, or the apothecary on what to do about warts. On the Internet, advice and answer sites are popping up all over the place, with self-proclaimed experts at the ready.
    Exp.com claims to have “tens of thousands of experts who can help you,”while the more restrained Abuzz.com, owned by The New York Times, limits its pitch to “Ask Anything! Real People. Real Answers.” It’s said that expert sites or knowledge networks represent the latest stage in the Internet’s evolution, a “democratization of expertise.” However, if your question is about something other than “Who invented the light bulb?”, the answers are likely to be a wild potpourri
of personal opinions.
    Top colleges and universities are rushing into online education, but the big news is the proliferation of a new breed of for-profit online institutions bringing Internet education to the masses.“The Internet will probably be the single most democratizing force in education,” says Columbia Business School Dean Meyer Feldberg, who envisions educational programs being routed through the net to hundreds of millions of people.
     The largest online institution is the University of Phoenix, with some 6,000 students today and hopes of reaching 200,000 students in 10 years. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in business management, technology, education, and nursing. The university notes that its degree programs cost far less and may take some students far less time to complete.
    On the other hand, a Business Week survey of 247 companies found that only a handful would consider hiring applicants who earned their MBA degrees online.Whether that will change as for-profit online universities improve their offerings and graduates prove their worth-is anyone’s guess.
     The rest of the world is moving into cyberspace more slowly than the United States, and, in the developing world, the Internet has hardly penetrated at all. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is determined to change this through the United Nations Information Technology Service, which will train large numbers of people to tap into the income enhancing power of the Internet. Annan is also proposing an Internet health network that will provide state-of-the-art medical knowledge to 10,000 clinics and hospitals in poor countries.
Questions l-5 are based on Passage One.
1. From the passage we may assume that the author______.
  A. trusts old days experts more than online ones
  B. believes that most of the online experts are qualified
  C. trusts the intelligence of large amounts of experts online
  D. believes that online experts can answer people’s questions better
2. From paragraph 2 we can infer that the author’s attitude towards experts online is_________.
  A. excited                    B. neutral
  C. doubtful                     D. indifferent
3. Which of the following best describes the author’s opinion towards the future of online education?
  A. People have to wait and see.
  B. It is predictable in future development.
  C. It cannot thrive without good management.
  D. People believe that it is doomed from the start.
4. The underlined phrase“state-of-the-art” in paragraph 6 means______.
  A. advanced and in large quantity        B. very creative and artistic
  C. skillful and attractive          D. very modern
5. Kofi Annan’s United Nations Information Technology Service aims at ______.
  A. improving UN staff’s computer skill
  B. promoting the use of the Internet over the world
  C. providing medical knowledge to poor hospitals
  D. promoting the use of the Internet in the United States

Passage Two
   Nowadays there is a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math — the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing – is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise: utterly necessary but insufficient. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here’s what they are:
    Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are“global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages” — not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.
    Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy — the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated – “put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that’s been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary combinations — design and technology, mathematics and art – “that produce YouTube and Google,” says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.
Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t. “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,” says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.
Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s work place.‘‘Most innovations today involve large teams of people,” says former L