2018年考研英语阅读理解模拟练习题
练习题一：
Proponents of different jazz styles have always argued that their predecessor’s musical style did not include essential characteristics that define jazz as jazz. Thus, 1940''s swing was belittled by beboppers of the 1950''s who were themselves attacked by free jazzes of the 1960''s. The neoboppers of the 1980''s and 1990''s attacked almost everybody else. The titanic figure of Black saxophonist John Coltrane has complicated the arguments made by proponents of styles from bebop through neobop because in his own musical journey he drew from all those styles. His influence on all types of jazz was immeasurable. At the height of his popularity, Coltrane largely abandoned playing bebop, the style that had brought him fame, to explore the outer reaches of jazz.
Coltrane himself probably believed that the only essential characteristic of jazz was improvisation, the one constant in his journey from bebop to open-ended improvisations on modal, Indian, and African melodies. On the other hand, this dogged student and prodigious technician? D who insisted on spending hours each day practicing scales from theory books? D was never able to jettison completely the influence of bebop, with its fast and elaborate chains of notes and ornaments on melody.
Two stylistic characteristics shaped the way Coltrane played the tenor saxophone: he favored playing fast runs of notes built on a melody and depended on heavy, regularly accented beats. The first led Coltrane to sheets of sound” where he raced faster and faster, pile-driving notes into each other to suggest stacked harmonies. The second meant that his sense of rhythm was almost as close to rock as to bebop.
Three recordings illustrate Coltrane’s energizing explorations. Recording Kind of Blue with Miles Davis, Coltrane found himself outside bop, exploring modal melodies. Here he played surging, lengthy solos built largely around repeated motifs; an organizing principle unlike that of free jazz saxophone player Ornette Coleman, who modulated or altered melodies in his solos. On Giant Steps, Coltrane debuted as leader, introducing his own compositions. Here the sheets of sound, downbeat accents, repetitions, and great speed are part of each solo, and the variety of the shapes of his phrases is unique. Coltrane’s searching explorations produced solid achievement. My Favorite Things was another kind of watershed. Here Coltrane played the soprano saxophone, an instrument seldom used by jazz musicians. Musically, the results were astounding. With the soprano’s piping sound, ideas that had sounded dark and brooding acquired a feeling of giddy fantasy.
When Coltrane began recording for the Impulse! Label, he was still searching. His music became raucous, physical. His influence on rockers was enormous, including Jimi Hendrix, the rock guitarist, who, following Coltrane, raised the extended guitar solo using repeated motifs to a kind of rock art form.
The primary purpose of the text is to
[A] Discuss the place of Coltrane in the world of jazz and describe his musical explorations.
[B] Examine the nature of bebop and contrast it with improvisational jazz.
[C] Analyze the musical sources of Coltrane’s style and their influence on his work.
[D] Acknowledge the influence of Coltrane’s music on rock music and rock musicians.
Which of the following best describes the organization of the fourth paragraph?
[A] A thesis referred to earlier in the text is mentioned and illustrated with three specific examples.
[B] A thesis is stated and three examples are given each suggesting that a correction needs to be made to a thesis referred to earlier in the text.
[C] A thesis referred to earlier in the text is mentioned, and three examples are presented and ranked in order of their support of the thesis.
[D] A thesis is stated, three seemingly opposing examples are presented, and their underlying correspondence is explained.
练习题二：
Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers ?D using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details of our material surroundings. Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should be valves be placed? Should it have a long or short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions such as wall thickness and pin diameter may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail hard thinking， nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
1.In the text, the author is primarily concerned with
[A] Identifying the kinds of thinking that is used by technologists.
[B] Stressing the importance of nonverbal thinking in engineering design.
[C] Proposing a new role for nonscientific thinking in the development of technology.
[D] Contrasting the goals of engineers with those of technologists.
2. It can be inferred that the author thinks engineering curricula are
[A] Strengthened when they include courses in design.
[B] Weakened by the substitution of physical science courses for courses designed to develop mathematical skills.
[C] Strong because nonverbal thinking is still emphasized by most of the courses.
[D] Strong despite the errors those graduates of such curricula have made in the development of automatic control systems.
3.Which of the following statements best illustrates the main point of the first two paragraphs of the text?
[A] When a machine like a rotary engine malfunctions, it is the technologist who is best equipped to repair it.
练习题三：
As Gilbert White，Darwin， and others observed long ago， all species appear to have the innate capacity to increase their numbers from generation to generation. The task for ecologists is to untangle the environmental and biological factors that hold this intrinsic capacity for population growth in check over the long run. The great variety of dynamic behaviors exhibited by different population makes this task more difficult： some populations remain roughly constant from year to year; others exhibit regular cycles of abundance and scarcity; still others vary wildly， with outbreaks and crashes that are in some cases plainly correlated with the weather， and in other cases not.
To impose some order on this kaleidoscope of patterns， one school of thought proposes dividing populations into two groups. These ecologists posit that the relatively steady populations have density-dependent growth parameters; that is， rates of birth， death， and migration which depend strongly on population density. The highly varying populations have density-independent growth parameters， with vital rates buffeted by environmental events; these rates fluctuate in a way that is wholly independent of population density.
This dichotomy has its uses， but it can cause problems if taken too literally. For one thing， no population can be driven entirely by density-independent factors all the time. No matter how severely or unpredictably birth， death， and migration rates may be fluctuating around their long-term averages， if there were no density-dependent effects， the population would， in the long run， either increase or decrease without bound (barring a miracle by which gains and losses canceled exactly)。 Put another way， it may be that on average 99 percent of all deaths in a population arise from density-independent causes， and only one percent from factors varying with density. The factors making up the one percent may seem unimportant， and their cause may be correspondingly hard to determine. Yet， whether recognized or not， they will usually determine the long-term average population density.
In order to understand the nature of the ecologist''s investigation， we may think of the density-dependent effects on growth parameters as the signal ecologists are trying to isolate and interpret， one that tends to make the population increase from relatively low values or decrease from relatively high ones， while the density-independent effects act to produce noise in the population dynamics. For populations that remain relatively constant， or that oscillate around repeated cycles， the signal can be fairly easily characterized and its effects described， even though the causative biological mechanism may remain unknown. For irregularly fluctuating populations， we are likely to have too few observations to have any hope of extracting the signal from the overwhelming noise. But it now seems clear that all populations are regulated by a mixture of density-dependent and density-independent effects in varying proportions.
1.The author of the text is primarily concerned with
[A] Discussing two categories of factors that control population growth and assessing their relative importance.
[B] Describing how growth rates in natural populations fluctuate over time and explaining why these changes occur.
[C] Proposing a hypothesis concerning population size and suggesting ways to test it.
[D] Posing a fundamental question about environmental factors in population growth and presenting some currently accepted answer.
2. It can be inferred from the text that the author considers the dichotomy discussed to be
[A] Applicable only to erratically fluctuating populations.
[B] instrumental， but only if its limitations are recognized.
[C] Dangerously misleading in most circumstances.
[D] A complete and sufficient way to account for observed phenomena.
练习题四：
Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.
The first of these asserts that residents of early modern England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a natural spillover. Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English ?D they would rather have stayed home ?D by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in America history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably.
Bailyn's third proposition suggest two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730's, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans.
Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books? Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture.
Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.
Which of the following statements about migrants to colonial North America is supported by information in the text?
[A] A larger percentage of migrants to colonial North America came as indentured servants than as free agents interested in acquiring land.
[B] Migrants who came to the colonies as indentured servants were more successful at making a livelihood than were farmers and artisans.
[C] Migrants to colonial North America were more successful at acquiring their own land during the eighteenth century than during the seventeenth century.
[D] By the 1730's,migrants already skilled in a trade were in more demand by American employers than were unskilled laborers.
The author of the text states that Bailyn failed to
[A] Give sufficient emphasis to the cultural and political interdependence of the colonies and England.
[B] Describe carefully how migrants of different ethnic backgrounds preserved their culture in the United States.
练习题五：
Roger Rosenblatt’s book Black Fiction, in attempting to apply literary rather than sociopolitical criteria to its subject, successfully alters the approach taken by most previous studies. As Rosenblatt notes, criticism of Black writing has often served as a pretext for expounding on Black history. Addison Gayle’s recent work, for example, judges the value of Black fiction by overtly political standards, rating each work according to the notions of Black identity which it propounds.
Although fiction assuredly springs from political circumstances，its authors react to those circumstances in ways other than ideological, and talking about novels and stories primarily as instruments of ideology circumvents much of the fictional enterprise. Rosenblatt’s literary analysis discloses affinities and connections among works of Black fiction which solely political studies have overlooked or ignored.
Writing acceptable criticism of Black fiction, however, presupposes giving satisfactory answers to a number of questions. First of all, is there a sufficient reason, other than the facial identity of the authors, to group together works by Black authors?Second, how does Black fiction make itself distinct from other modern fiction with which it is largely contemporaneous? Rosenblatt shows that Black fiction constitutes a distinct body of writing that has an identifiable， coherent literary tradition. Looking at novels written by Black over the last eighty years, he discovers recurring concerns and designs independent of chronology. These structures are thematic, and they spring, not surprisingly, from the central fact that the Black characters in these novels exist in a predominantly white culture, whether they try to conform to that culture or rebel against it.
Black Fiction does leave some aesthetic questions open. Rosenblatt’s thematic analysis permits considerable objectivity; he even explicitly states that it is not his intention to judge the merit of the various works ?D yet his reluctance seems misplaced, especially since an attempt to appraise might have led to interesting results. For instance, some of the novels appear to be structurally diffuse. Is this a defect, or are the authors working out of, or trying to forge, a different kind of aesthetic? In addition, the style of some Black novels, like Jean Toomey’s Cane, verges on expressionism or surrealism; does this technique provide a counterpoint to the prevalent theme that portrays the fate against which Black heroes are pitted, a theme usually conveyed by more naturalistic modes of expression?
In spite of such omissions, what Rosenblatt does include in his discussion makes for an astute and worthwhile study. Black Fiction surveys a wide variety of novels, bringing to our attention in the process some fascinating and little-known works like James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Its argument is tightly constructed, and its forthright, lucid style exemplifies levelheaded and penetrating criticism.
1. The author of the text is primarily concerned with __________.
[A] Evaluating the soundness of a work of criticism.
[B] Comparing various critical approaches to a subject.
[C] Discussing the limitations of a particular kind of criticism.
[D] Summarizing the major points made in a work of criticism.
2. The author of the text believes that Black Fiction would have been improved had Rosenblatt __________.
[A] Evaluated more carefully the ideological and historical aspects of Black fiction.
[B] Attempted to be more objective in his approach to novels and stories by Black authors.
[C] Explored in greater detail the recurrent thematic concerns of Black fiction throughout its history.
[D] Assessed the relative literary merit of the novels he analyzes thematically.
3.The author’s discussion of Black Fiction can be best described as __________.
[A] Pedantic and contentious.
练习题六：
The majority of successful senior managers do not closely follow the classical rational model of first clarifying goals, assessing the problem, formulating options, estimating likelihoods of success, making a decision, and only then taking action to implement the decision. Rather, in their day-by-day tactical maneuvers, these senior executives rely on what is vaguely termed intuition to manage a network of interrelated problems that require them to deal with ambiguity, inconsistency, novelty, and surprise; and to integrate action into the process of thinking.
Generations of writers on management have recognized that some practicing managers rely heavily on intuition. In general, however, such writers display a poor grasp of what intuition is. Some see it as the opposite of rationality; others view it as an excuse for capriciousness.
Isenberg's recent research on the cognitive processes of senior managers reveals that managers' intuition is neither of these. Rather, senior managers use intuition in at least five distinct ways. First, they intuitively sense when a problem exists. Second, managers rely on intuition to perform well-learned behavior patterns rapidly. This intuition is not arbitrary or irrational, but is based on years of painstaking practice and hands-on experience that build skills. A third function of intuition is to synthesize isolated bits of data and practice into an integrated picture, often in an Aha! experience. Fourth, some managers use intuition as a check on the results of more rational analysis. Most senior executives are familiar with the formal decision analysis models and tools, and those who use such systematic methods for reaching decisions are occasionally leery of solutions suggested by these methods which run counter to their sense of the correct course of action. Finally, managers can use intuition to bypass in-depth analysis and move rapidly to engender a plausible solution. Used in this way, intuition is an almost instantaneous cognitive process in which a manager recognizes familiar patterns.
One of the implications of the intuitive style of executive management is that thinking is inseparable from acting. Since managers often know what is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first and explain later. Analysis is inextricably tied to action in thinking/acting cycles, in which managers develop thoughts about their companies and organizations not by analyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by acting and analyzing in close concert.
Given the great uncertainty of many of the management issues that they face, senior managers often instigate a course of action simply to learn more about an issue. They then use the results of the action to develop a more complete understanding of the issue. One implication of thinking/acting cycles is that action is often part of defining the problem, not just of implementing the solution.
1. According to the text, senior managers use intuition in all of the following ways EXCEPT to
[A] Speed up of the creation of a solution to a problem.
[B] Identify a problem.
[C] Bring together disparate facts.
[D] Stipulate clear goals.
2. The text suggests which of the following about the writers on management mentioned in line 1, paragraph 2?
[A] They have criticized managers for not following the classical rational model of decision analysis.
[B] They have not based their analyses on a sufficiently large sample of actual managers.
[C] They have relied in drawing their conclusions on what managers say rather than on what managers do.
[D] They have misunderstood how managers use intuition in making business decisions.
3. It can be inferred from the text that which of the following would most probably be one major difference in behavior between Manager X, who uses intuition to reach decisions, and Manager Y, who uses only formal decision analysis?
[A] Manager X analyzes first and then acts; Manager Y does not.
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