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Part IV Reading Comprehension
Directions: In this part there are six passages, each of which is followed by five questions. For each question there are four possible answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer, and then mark the letter of your choice on the ANSWEK SHEET.
Passage One
There is plenty we don't know about criminal behavior. Most crime goes unreported so it I hard to pick out trends from the data, and even reliable sets of statistics can be difficult to compare. But here is one thing we do know: those with a biological predisposition to violent behavior who are brought up in abusive homes are very likely to become lifelong criminals.
Antisocial and criminal behavior tends to run in families, but no one was sure whether this was due mostly to social-environmental factors or biological ones.It turns out both are important, but the effect is most dramatic when they act together. This has been illustrated in several studies over the past six years which found that male victims of child abuse are several times as likely to become criminals and abusers themselves if they were born with a less-active version of a gene for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) , which breaks down neurotransmitters crucial to the regulation of aggression.
Researchers recently made another key observation: kids with this "double whammy" of predisposition and an unfortunate upbringing are likely to show signs of what's to come at a very early age. The risk factors for long-term criminality-attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, low IQ, language difficulties-can be spotted in kindergarten. So given what we now know, shouldn't we be doing everything to protect the children most at risk?
No one is suggesting testing all boys to see which variant of the MAO-A gene they have, but what the science is telling us is that we should redouble efforts to tackle abusive upbringing, and even simple neglect. This will help any child, but especially those whose biology makes them vulnerable. Thankfully there is already considerable enthusiasm in both the US and the UK for converting the latest in behavioral science into parenting and social skills: both governments have schemes in place to improve parenting in families where children are at risk of receiving poor care.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of early intervention because it implies our behavior becomes "set" as we grow up, compromising the idea of free will. That view is understandable, but it would be negligent to ignore what the studies are telling us. Indeed, the cost to society of failing to intervene-in terms of criminal damage, dealing with offenders and helping victims of crime-is bound to be greater than the cost of improving parenting. The value to the children is immeasurable.
61. It seems that researchers try to explain violent behavior ______.
A. in terms of physical environment
B. from a biological perspective
C. based on the empirical data
D. in a strictly statistical way
62. When we say that antisocial and criminal behavior tends to run in families, we mean that ______.
A. a particular gene may be passed on in families
B. child abuse will lead to domestic violence
C. the male victims of child abuse will pass on the tendency
D. the violent predisposition is closely related to child abuse
63. Based on the recent observation, what should be done to check the development of antisocial and criminal behavior?
A. Boys should be screened for the biological predisposition.
B. High-risk kids should be brought up in kindergarten.
C. Genes for the risk factors should be accurately determined.
D. Active measures ought to be taken at an early age.
64. What does the author emphasize in defending early intervention?
A. The immeasurable value of furthering the current research.
B. The consequences of compromising democracy.
C. The relatively easy solution to improving parenting skills.
D. The greater cost of failing to tackle the known issue.
65. Which of the following can be the best title for the passage?
A. Parenting Strategies for Kids.
B. The Making of a Criminal.
C. The Importance of Parental Education.
D. Abusive Parents and Criminal Children.
Passage Two
A looming doctor shortage threatens to create a national healthcare crisis by further limiting access to physicians, jeopardizing quality and accelerating cost increases.
"People are waiting weeks for appointments; emergency departments have lines out the door," said a spokesman for a national physician search firm." Doctors are working longer hours than they want. They are having a hard time taking vacations, a hard time getting their patients in to specialists."
Experts say these are symptoms of a wider problem: Demand for doctors is accelerating more rapidly than supply.
The number of medical school graduates has remained virtually flat for a quarter-century, because the schools limited enrollment out of concern that the nation was producing too many doctors.
But demand has exploded, driven by population gains, a healthy economy and a technology- driven boom in physicians' repertoires, which now include such procedures as joint replacement and liposuction.
Over the next 15 years, aging baby boomers will push urologists, geriatricians and other physicians into overdrive. Their cloudy eyes alone, one study found, could boost the demand for cataract surgery by 47%.
Yet much of the physician workforce also is graying, and headed for the door. A third of the nation's 750,000 active post-residency physicians are older than 55 and likely to retire as the boomer generation moves into its time of greatest medical need.
By 2025, physicians are expected to hang up their stethoscopes at a rate of 22,000 a year, up from 9,000 in 2005. That is only slightly less than the number of doctors who completed their training last year.
At the same time, younger male physicians and women-who constitute half of all medical students-are less inclined to work the slavish hours that long typified the profession.
As a result, the next generation of physicians is expected to be 10% less productive, Edward Salsberg, the director of the Association of American Medical Colleges' Center for Workforce Studies, told a congressional committee in May.
66. The passage begins by saying that a doctor shortage ______.
A. is becoming a problem threatening the nation's health care
B. is a national problem that has been there for some time
C. is so serious that healthcare quality has suffered
D. has expressed itself gradually in several states
67. Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a cause of the problem?
A. There is now a bigger population than before.
B. The generally favorable economic situation has pushed the needs.
C. There has been a huge cut in the healthcare funding.
D. There are many new procedures that did not exist before.
68. Why haven't the medical schools trained more students?
A. There were already too many doctors just a few years ago.
B. The medical schools lack the capacity to do so.
C. Interest in the medical profession has declined.
D. The increased needs were not expected.
69. The imbalance between supply and demand will be worsened because ________.
A. residency training may take longer to complete
B. old-age medical problems will boost the needs dramatically
C. many doctors may find it hard to master the new technologies
D.many doctors who remain active have passed the retirement age
70. The passage implies that ________.
A. doctors of the older generation typically work harder
B. young doctors work more efficiently than the older doctors
C. female doctors can hardly do the same work as the male doctors
D. new doctors emphasize productivity rather than the hours they put in
Passage Three
Archaeology can tell us plenty about how humans looked and the way they lived tens of thousands of years ago. But what about the deeper questions? Could early humans speak, were they capable of self-conscious reflection, did they believe in anything?
Such questions might seem to be beyond the scope of science. Not so. Answering them is the focus of a burgeoning field that brings together archaeology and neuroscience. It aims to chart the development of human cognitive powers. This is not easy to do. A skull gives no indication of whether its owner was capable of speech, for example. The task then is to find proxies (替代物) for key traits and behaviors that have stayed intact over millennia.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this endeavor is teasing out the role of culture as a force in the evolution of our mental skills. For decades, development of the brain has been seen as exclusively biological. But increasingly, that is being challenged.
Take what the Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew calls "the sapient (智人的) paradox." Evidence suggests that the human genome, and hence the brain, has changed little in the past 60,000 years. Yet it wasn't until about 10,000 years ago that profound changes took place in human behavior: people settled in villages and built shrines. Renfrew's paradox is why, if the hardware was in place,did it take so long for humans to start changing the world?
His answer is that the software-the culture-took a long time to develop. In particular, the intervening time saw humans attach meaning to objects and symbols. Those meanings were developed by social interaction over successive generations, passed on through teaching, and in the neuronal connections of children.
Culture also changes biology by modifying natural selection, sometimes in surprising ways. How is it, for example, that a human gene for making essential vitamin C became blocked by junk DNA? One answer is that our ancestors started eating fruit, so the pressure to make vitamin C "relaxed" and the gene became unnecessary. By this reasoning, early humans then became addicted to fruit, and any gene that helped them to find it was selected for.
Our understanding of human cognitive development is still fragmented and confused. We have lots of proposed causes and effects, and hypotheses to explain them. Yet the potential pay-off makes answers worth searching for. If we know where the human mind came from and what changed it, perhaps we can gauge where it is going. Finding those answers will take all the ingenuity the modern human mind can muster.
71. The questions presented in the first paragraph ________.
A. are raised to explore the evolution of human appearance
B. have no possible scientific answers whatever
C. are not scientific enough to be answered here
D. are intended to dig for ancient human minds
72. According to the passage, where do some scientists try to find the force in the development of mental power?
A. The intriguing role of culture.
B. The conitinuous passage of time.
C. The fascinating structure of a skull.
D. The evolutionary force inherent in the brain.
73. According to Renfrew, the transition of the human mental skills from 60,000 to 10,000 years ago suggests that ________.
A. human civilization would come sooner or later
B. it took a long time for the culture to play its role
C. the human brain remained biologically static early on
D. the interaction between gene and environment was slow but sure
74. From the example illustrating the relation between culture and biology, we might conclude that ________.
A. the mental development has not been exclusively biological
B. natural selection is mostly independent of human behavior
C. the brain and culture have not developed at the same pace
D. vitamin C contributes to the development of the brain
75. Speaking of the human mind, the author would say that ________.
A. Its cognitive development is extremely slow
B. to know its past is to understand its future
C. its biological evolution is hard to predict
D. as the brain develops, so does the mind
Passage Four
Stephanie Smith, a children's dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches and cramping were tolerable that first day. Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed from the waist down.
Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday family party, In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.
Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as 0157: H7 since 1994. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.
Ms. Smith's reaction to the virulent strain of E. coli was extreme, but tracing the story of her burger shows that neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe.
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. This lowers the costs, but makes hamburger meat vulnerable to E. coli contamination. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
Those ingredients include cuts from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli. Yet most meat companies rely on their suppliers to check for the bacteria and do their own testing only after the ingredients are ground together.
Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli for fear of a recall of ingredients they sold to others.
"Ground beef is not a completely safe product," health officials say." While outbreaks had been on the decline, unfortunately it looks like we are going a bit in the opposite direction."
76. What does the description in the first paragraph tell us?
A. Her suffering originated from a stomach virus.
B. Her damaged nervous system made her unable to walk.
C. She lost the control of the left side of the body completely.
D. Her bloody diarrhea led to kidney failure and unconsciousness.
77. We can learn from the passage that _______.
A. food poisoning through eating contaminated hamburgers is uncommon
B. beef contamination is so serious that it has been found in 41 states
C. so far there have been 16 reports of E. coli contamination of beef
D. different individuals may react to 0157: H7 differently
78. The reason behind the ways ground beef is produced can be found in ________.
A. the protection of the customer's needs
B. the consideration for making more profits
C. the aim of checking E. coli contamination
D. the strict requirement of the federal government
79. We can infer that many big slaughterhouses ________.
A. do their own testing carefully to avoid possible recall of their products
B. actually know the possibility of their ground beef being contaminated
C. take special measures to ensure the safety of their beef products
D. are probably ignorant of the problem of E. coli contamination
80. Which of the following statements from the passage does NOT in one way or another imply a criticism of the governments' role in ensuring food safety?
A. In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.
B. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.
C. Neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe.
D. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
Passage Five
In the early 1970s, it became common practice for American blacks to undergo genetic screening tests for sickle-cell anemia. While this enabled physicians to detect and treat many previously overlooked cases of the blood disease, it also brought with it a subtle social cost. The tests revealed carriers (with no disease symptoms) as well as those with full-blown anemia. This gave patients new information for seeking treatment and making reproductive decisions, but on the basis of the test results, some employers and insurance companies denied people jobs and cheap premiums.
Consider, then, the recent revolution in genetic techniques and our new-found ability to map human genes, find markers for specific diseases, and screen unborn fetuses, children, and adults for various genetic conditions. There is great enthusiasm in many quarters over the potential these techniques present for studying the genetic roots of many diseases. Geneticists can already locate genetic markers for more than 400 diseases, and with the Human Genome Project that list will grow quickly. For some people, however, the social costs of "reading our genes" look high indeed.
Drawing parallels with sickle-cell anemia, some bioethicists fear that insurance companies and employers will require in-depth genetic screening for new Customers or job seekers and will turn away people if they have genes that merely raise the possibility of someday developing heart disease cancer, or other conditions. Some activists worry further that industrial firms will select for the ability to withstand occupational exposures rather than cleaning up their factories. And some social and religious groups are concerned that detailed fetal screening will result in more abortions since most genetic defects cannot presently be corrected or, in some cases, even treated effectively.
Some observers of the revolution in genetic screening have proposed the creation of new panel, laws, and rules. These, they say, should govern and probably restrict the speed and extent to which insurance companies, employers, and individuals could make use of detailed genetic information. Some geneticists, however, believe that existing bodies, such as the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health, are already sufficient to meet the ethical and legal concerns posed by the rapid expansion of genetic screening.
People on all sides of the issue seem to agree that widespread public awareness of the issues is essential.
81. Which of the following is NOT clearly stated in the first paragraph?
A. Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic disease affecting mainly American blacks.
B. Sickle-cell anemia is a disease that is often overlooked until it is full-blown.
C. Genetic tests for sickle-cell anemia have both positive and negative impacts.
D. Sickle-cell anemia may become an obstacle to some people getting employed.
82. According to the passage, why is it that some people are not enthusiastic about genetic tests?
A. The new genetic techniques are slow in coming.
B. Genetic markers are hard to locate and differentiate.
C. Genetic problems may be easy to detect but hard to tackle.
D. Developments in genetic technology may cause social problems.
83. When drawing parallels with sickle-cell anemia, people are ________.
A. making a comparison
B. underlining a concern
C. presenting an example
D. looking for connections
84. What seems to be the real concern in terms of genetic technology?
A. A tendency in overemphasizing its positive side
B. A pattern in the inappropriate use of genetic technology
C. The huge benefit that can be reaped by some special social groups.
D. Unbearable costs involved in providing genetic tests with uncertain results.
85. What is the purpose the author intends to achieve in writing this passage?
A. Raising awareness of a potential problem among the public.
B. Publicizing the rapid development of new genetic technology.
C. Introducing legal consideration in the discussion of a bioethical issue.
D. Summing up various views in a public debate from deferent perspectives.
Passage Six
There's nothing new about TV and fashion magazines giving girls unhealthy ideas about how thin they need to be in order to be considered beautiful. What is surprising is the method some psychologists have come up with to keep girls from developing eating disorders. Their main weapon against super-skinny models: a brand of civil disobedience dubbed "body activism."
Recently, more than 1,000 high school and college students in the U.S.have participated in the Body Project, which works by getting girls to understand how they have been buying into the notion that you have to be thin to be happy or successful. After critiquing the so-called thin ideal by writing essays and role-playing with their peers, participants are directed to come up with and execute small, nonviolent acts. They include slipping notes saying "Love your body the way it is" into dieting books and writing letters to makers of the impossibly proportioned Barbie doll.
According to a study in the latest issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, the risk of developing eating disorders was reduced 61% among Body Project participants. And they continued to exhibit positive body-image attitudes as long as three years after completing the program, which consists of four one-hour sessions. Such lasting effects may be due to girls' realizing not only how they were being influenced but also who was benefiting from the societal pressure to be thin. "These people who promote the perfect body really don't care about you at all," says Kelsey Hertel, a high school junior and Body Project veteran. "They purposefully make you feel like less of a person so you'll buy their stuff and they'll make money."
As part of the program, Hertel and a friend posted signs in a school bathroom saying YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. DON'T BE SOMEONE THAT YOU'RE NOT. BE YOURSELF. The girls then watched their classmates react. "They'd see the.signs and say things like ‘That's encouraging because I always feel so fat and gross and ugly,’ " Hertel says.
"This is a good start," says Dr. Walter Kaye,a board member of the National Eating Disorders Association. But Kaye cautions that eating disorders are much more complicated than researchers first thought. For starters, the disorders can't be blamed solely on environmental factors. Brain-scan studies show that the neural circuitry that normally responds to the pleasurable, rewarding aspects of eating doesn't seem to work in anorexics.
86. According to the passage, which of the following expresses the essence of “body activism”?
A. "I know best what is good for my body."
B. "I should actively keep my body beautiful."
C. "I will decide how to exercise for my health."
D. "I should take a positive approach toward my body."
87. What do psychologists who support the Body Project believe?
A. The ideal body of a girl can only result from healthy eating habits.
B. Eating disorder affecting the body weight of a girl should be treated.
C. The stereotypical body image on TV and media may lead to eating disorder.
D. TV and other media are not active enough in promoting healthy eating habits.
88. Which of the following is an example of nonviolent acts used by the Body Project participants?
A. They call on people to reject the selling of Barbie doll.
B. They dissuade other girls from becoming extremely thin.
C. They debate openly with peers who have unhealthy notions.
D. They adopt some unconventional methods to express their belief.
89. Which of the following is NOT true of the Body Project participants?
A. They are now more confident about their self-image.
B. They are more immune to publicity after completing the program.
C.They now seek longer-term effects in improving their body images.
D. They now realize the commercial motive behind the current notion of beauty.
90. Which of the following agrees with Dr. Kaye's view as expressed in the last paragraph?
A. Body Project is only a good start and should go on advocating its ideals.
B. Many people still fail to realize the real effect of environmental factors.
C. Body Project needs to have more scientific evidence to back its claims.
D. Environmental factors do not explain all that are involved in the issue.
答 案：
61. C 62. A 63. D 64. D 65. B
66. A 67. C 68. D 69. B 70. A
71. D 72. A 73. B 74. A 75. B
76. B 77. D 78. B 79. B 80. B
81. B 82. D 83. A 84. B 85. A
86. A 87. C 88. D 89. C 90. D
