2011年中科院考博英语真题（部分）
完型原文
Tomorrow Japan and South Korea will celebrate White Day, an annual event when men are expected to buy a gift for the adored women in their lives. It is a relatively new concept that was commercially created as payback for Valentine's Day. That's because in both countries, 14 February is all about the man.
On Valentine's Day, women are expected to buy all the important male figures in their lives a token gift: not just their partners, but their bosses or older relatives too. If the present is a romantic one, it is known as honmei-choco (chocolate of love). If it is a mark of respect, it is known as giri-choco (chocolate of obligation).
This seems fair enough. Surely it's reasonable for men to be indulged on one day of the year, given the number of times they're expected to produce bouquets of flowers on spec and surprise their woman with perfume or pearls? But the idea of a woman spoiling a man didn't sit easily with people. In 1978, the National Confectionery Industry Association came up with an idea to solve this anomaly. They started to market white chocolate that men could give to women on 14 March, as compensation for the male-oriented Valentine's Day.
It started with a handful of sweetmakers churning out candy as a simple gift idea. The day captured the public imagination, and is now a
fully-fledged, nationally recognized date in the diary - and one where men are obliged to whip out their credit cards. In fact, men are now expected to give gifts worth triple the value of those they received. What a complication: not only do men have to remember who bought them what, they have to estimate the value and multiply it by three. The temptation for women in Japan must be to buy every man they know some cheap chocolates on Valentine's Day as an investment. A month later, they could happily sit back as their 300% return of flowers, lingerie, jewellery came flooding in.
中科院英语试题——翻译全文
That puts him in the company of other great entrepreneurs of the past two centuries, men and women such as Josiah Wedgwood, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Estée Lauder.
Each of these people -- and especially Steve Jobs -- has been defined by the intense drive, unflagging curiosity, and keen commercial imagination that have allowed them to see products and industries and possibilities that might be. Each of these individuals has also been extremely hardworking, demanding of themselves and others. All have been compelled more by the significance of their own vision than by their doubts.
Jobs came of age in a moment of far-reaching economic, social, and technological change that we now call the Information Revolution. (Not so long ago -- in the early 1990s -- we used the term Computer Revolution, a shift in language that speaks to the breadth of change involved.) Wedgwood, the 18th-century British chinamaker who created the first real consumer brand, grew up in the Industrial Revolution, another period of profound change. And Rockefeller laid the foundations of the modern oil industry in the 1870s and 1880s, when the railroad and the coming of mass production were transforming the U.S. from an agrarian into an industrial society.
Like Wedgwood and Rockefeller, Jobs has had a sense -- analytic and intuitive -- that in a time of great transformation, a lot is up for grabs. Imbued with a perception of his own importance on a stage where everything from telephony to music distribution to consumers' relationships with technology is being disrupted, Jobs felt there was simply no time to lose.
This understanding has fueled the rapid-fire pace of his actions and his obsession with \next?\It may have also fed his often harsh, dictatorial, and somehow still-inspiring management style
2011中科院考博英语阅读五篇主题内容
第一篇，讲述关于英国教育的，开篇就说每年学生要面对好多好多的考试，说学生总体上分数高了，教育质量就如何如何，总体上分数低了，教育质量又如何如何，后面反正是围绕教育相关展开论述的了。
有一篇，讲述美国一些大学校园禁烟及相关情况，其中有一个桥段说到某大学1800英亩，很大啊，因此难以“追踪”那些吸烟的学生，因此因吸烟而受罚的人只有25人，好像很少的样子，当时看着就笑了。
另一篇，从布什政府之后（第一段提到布什.劳拉装修的白宫好像很差啊，文中提到的设计师居然说能在某房间能呆得下去一晚都是难以想象的）奥巴马夫妻（文中说到白宫的奥巴马时代）装修白宫论述起，反正是关于美国白宫装修设计的，自然少不了涉及到林肯堂，这是文章细节嘛。 还一篇，讲商业大亨洛克菲勒的，自然里面会提到他的一个哥哥一个弟弟走上了仕途，而他会挣钱，兄弟总是要拿出来相对比较下的嘛，文章中提到这位大亨有钱了帮助美国修建了一些些国家公园，原因自然跟他小时候的成长相关，最后说到他跟他爷爷挺像的，都是挣钱好手。
最后一篇，从1863年美国南北战争盖茨堡那场血腥战役讲述起，然后说到这样的战争自然成为后世人们各种文学艺术作品的题材，然后讲到其中一件作品近现代修复和保护的问题。
阅读理解最后一篇
[center]Painting’s Big Dig In the trenches restoring Gettysburg's cyclorama[/center]
The first three days of July 1863 saw the bloodiest hours of the Civil War, in a battle that spilled across the fields and hills surrounding Gettysburg, Pa. The fighting climaxed in the bright, hot afternoon of the third day, when more than 11,000 Confederate soldiers mounted a disastrous assault on the heart of the Union line. That assault—Pickett's Charge, named for the general who
led it—marked the farthest the South would penetrate into Union territory. In a much larger sense, it marked the turning point of the war. (Article continued below...)
No surprise, then, that the Battle of Gettysburg would become the subject of songs, poems, funeral monuments and, ultimately, some of the biggest paintings ever displayed on this continent. Paul Philippoteaux, famed for his massive 360-degree cyclorama paintings, painted four versions of the battle in the 1880s. Cycloramas were hugely popular in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century, before movies displaced them in the public's affection. Conceived on a mammoth scale, a cyclorama painting was longer than a football field and almost 50 feet tall. Little thought was given to preserving these enormous works of art. They were commercial ventures, and when they stopped earning they were tossed. Most were ultimately lost—victims of water damage or fire. One of Philippoteaux's Gettysburg renderings was cut up and hung in panels in a Newark, N.J., department store before finding its way back to Gettysburg, where it has been displayed off and on since 1913. Along the way, the painting lost most of its sky and a few feet off the bottom. Sections were cut and moved to patch holes in other sections. And some of the restorative efforts proved almost as crippling to the original as outright neglect. Since 2003, a team of conservators has labored in a $12 million effort to restore Philippoteaux's masterwork. They have cleaned it front and back, patched it, added canvas for a new sky and returned the painting to its original shape—a key part of a cyclorama's optical illusion was its hyperbolic shape: it bellies out at its central point, thrusting the image toward the viewer.
When restoration is completed later this year, the painting will be the centerpiece of the new Gettysburg battlefield visitors' center, which opens to the public on April 14. Much work remains to be done. But even partially restored, the painting seethes with life—and death. This is no mindless celebration of war but a balancing act of horror and heroism. Philippoteaux stared straight into the face of battle, and he didn't flinch.