华南师范大学高等教育自学考试2016年1月委考课程
《高级英语(一)》模拟题A卷
(课程代码：07374 )
注意：1．本试卷共六大题，满分100分，考试时间150分钟；
2．所有答案必须写在答卷的规定位置上；
3. 必须用黑色墨水的钢笔或圆珠笔填写，不能使用涂改液； 4. 考试形式：闭卷。 题 号 得 分 I II III IV V VI 总 分
I. Reading Comprehension (20%)
(1) Reading the following passage carefully and then choose one from the given choices to answer each question.
1) \Since its introduction in 1959, the Barbie doll population of the world has grown to 12,000.000 --- more than the human population of Los Angeles or London or Paris. Little girls adore Barbie because she is highly realistic and eminently dress-upable. Mattel, Inc., maker of Barbie, also sells a complete wardrobe for her, including clothes for ordinary daytime wear, clothes for formal party wear, clothes for swimming and skiing.
2) Recently Mattel announced a new improved Barbie doll. The new version has a slimmer figure, \eyelashes, and a twist-and-turn waist that makes her more humanoid than ever. Moreover, Mattel announced that, for the first time, any young lady wishing to purchase a new Barbie would receive a trade-in allowance for her old one.
3) What Mattel did not announce was that by trading in her old doll for a technologically improved model, the little girl of today, citizen of tomorrow's super-industrial world, would learn a fundamental lesson about the new society: that man's relationships with things are increasingly temporary.
4) The ocean of man-made physical objects that surrounds us is set within a larger ocean of natural objects. But increasingly, it is the technologically produced environment that matters for the individual. The texture of plastic or concrete, the 3iridescent glisten of an automobile under a streetlight, the staggering vision of a cityscape seen from the window of a jet --- these are the intimate realities of his existence. Man-made things enter into and color his consciousness. Their number is expanding with explosive force, both absolutely and relative to the natural environment. This will be even more true in super-industrial society than it is today.
5) Anti-materialists tend to deride the importance of \Yet things are highly significant, not merely because of their functional utility, but also because of their psychological impact. We develop relationships with things. Things affect our sense of continuity or discontinuity. They play a role in the structure of situations and the foreshortening of our
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relationships with things accelerates the pace of life.
6) Moreover, our attitudes toward things reflect basic value judgments. Nothing could be more dramatic than the difference between the new breed of little girls who cheerfully turn in their Barbies for the new improved model and those who, like their mothers and grandmothers before them, clutch lingeringly and lovingly to the same doll until it disintegrates from sheer age. In this difference lies the contrast between past and future, between societies based on permanence, and the new, fast-forming society based on transience.
7) That man-thing relationships are growing more and more temporary may be i1lustrated by examining the culture surrounding the little girl who trades in her doll. This child soon learns that Barbie dolls are by no means the only physical objects that pass into and out of her young life at a rapid clip. Diapers, bibs, paper napkins, Kleenex, towels, non-returnable soda bottles --- all are used up quickly in her home and ruthlessly eliminated. Corn muffins come in baking tins that are thrown away after one use. Spinach is encased in plastic sacks that can be dropped into a pan of boiling water for heating, and then thrown away. TV dinners are cooked and often served on throw- away trays. Her home is a large processing machine through which objects flow, entering and leaving, at a faster and faster rate of speed. From birth on, she is inextricably embedded in a throwaway culture.
8) The idea of using a product once or for a brief period and then replacing it, runs counter to the grain of societies or individuals steeped in a heritage of poverty. Not long ago Uriel Rone, a market researcher for the French advertising agency Publicis, told me: \not used to disposable products. She likes to keep things, even old things, rather than throw them away. We represented one company that wanted to introduce a kind of plastic throw- away curtain. We did a marketing study for them and found the resistance too strong.\is dying all over the developed world.
9) Thus a writer, Edward Maze, has pointed out that many Americans visiting Sweden in the early 1950's were astounded by its cleanliness. \no beer and soft drink bottles by the roadsides, as, much to our shame, there were in America. But by the 1960's, lo and behold, bottles were suddenly blooming along Swedish highways --- What happened? Sweden had become a buy, use and throw-away society, following the American pattern.\as old fashioned, not to say unsanitary. In England for sixpence one may buy a \throw-away toothbrush\which comes already coated with toothpaste for its one-time use. And even in France, disposable cigarette lighters are commonplace. From cardboard milk containers to the rockets that power space vehicles, products created for short-term or one-time use are becoming more numerous and crucial to our way of life.
1. The function of the Barbie doll example at the beginning of the essay is _____.
A. to encourage people to buy these dolls B. to introduce the popularity of these dolls
C. to introduce and illustrate the thesis at the end of paragraph 3 D. to tell people how successful this doll company is
2. What is the meaning of “trade-in allowance” in paragraph 2?
A. Discounts given by a shop. B. A bargain sale.
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C. Profit of a shop.
D. Money a shop deducts from the price of a new thing which a customer buys when she turns in to the shop an old thing.
3. The topic sentence of paragraph 4 is _____.
A. sentence 1 B. sentence 2 C. sentence 3
D. the last sentence
4. The first sentence in paragraph 4 means that there are ____.
A. more natural objects than man-made physical objects. B. more man-made physical objects than natural objects
C. the same quantity of natural objects and man-made physical objects D. a small quantity of natural objects and man-made physical objects 5. The phrase “intimate realities of his existence” in paragraph 4 means ____.
A. the window of a jet B. an automobile of a person
C. things that are closest and most immediate to his life D. the texture of plastic or concrete
6. In paragraph 5, which two functions of things does Toffler specify?
A. Anti-materialism and functional utility B. Anti-materialism and physiological impact C. Functional utility and physiological impact D. Continuity and discontinuity
7. The subject of the first sentence of paragraph 7 is ____.
A. that
B. man-thing relationships C. that man-thing relationships
D. that man-thing relationships are growing more and more temporary 8. The main idea of paragraph 9 is ____.
A. the resistance of using disposable products is disappearing all over the developed world B. products created for short-term or one-time use are becoming more numerous C. Americans were astounded by the cleanliness in other countries D. many countries became a buy, use and throw-away society 9. We can infer from the text that _____.
A. old people like throw-away products more than young people B. our society needs more throw-away products
C. the throw-away products are convenient for people
D. the throw-away products affect the man-thing relationships 10. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?
A. The Barbie doll B. Anti-materialism
C. The Throw-away Products D. Things: The Throw-away Society
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(2) Read the following passage carefully and then judge whether the statements are true or false by writing T or F.
Accent on Accent
[1] Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is about a professor of phonetics who wagers that, within six months, he will train a young girl, Eliza, from a London slum, to acquire the manners and speech of a duchess. Early in the play the professor says: “This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with �80 a year, and end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths”.
[2]Geographical location is an important factor influencing the way we speak. A worker living in a busy capital city crowded with people will tend to have a quick, clipped, racy manner of speaking. The hustle and bustle of his daily life is reflected in his speech, whether he be a cockney, an inhabitant of “Toity-toid (thirty-third) Street” in New York, or a taxi driver using “le langage” of Paris. Likewise, the somewhat slower and steadier rhythm of the countryside with far less opportunity for social contact is revealed in the rolling accent of the farmer. The West Country dialect smacks as much of the farmyard as the patois of the French peasant, or the even more deliberate drawl of the Texan cattleman whose nearest neighbour may be 200 miles or more away. It is also worth noting that the languid, lazy, affected speech of some of the natives of Mayfair is just as much the product of a way of living as the harsh flat vowels of the Northern town dweller.
[3]But not all people of particular town or country district speak in the same way. Education also counts. An educated person through his reading will have absorbed some of the more complex sentence constructions and his vocabulary will be wide. A knowledge of foreign languages brings a greater awareness of one’s own tongue. Learning also helps one to think clearly, a necessary condition for being able to speak clearly.
[4]Individual personalities differ considerably, too. Cheerful or miserable, energetic or lazy, happy-go-lucky or careworn, dignified or subservient, whatever the person’s character, attitude or frame of mind it shows itself in the tone, pace and pitch of the voice. That is why we find some people pleasant and others boring to listen to.
[5]The main point of the quotation from Shaw, however, is that the difference between a Kentish Town and a Park Lane accent is not so much a geographical one as a social one, or as some would say, a class difference. Though these class divisions are not as well-defined and all-important as they were in 1914, when Pygmalion was written, a considerable amount of snobbery is attached to the way we speak. Many people from a lower social class are apt to feel inferior because of their dialect; they feel over-awed and ill-at-ease in the presence of those who speak, as Dylan Thomas put it, “as if they had the Elgin marbles in their mouths.” It is this that compels some people to cultivate a highly exaggerated “refined” manner of pronunciation. They, too, give themselves away every time they open their mouths.
[6]That anyone should be made to feel less worthy of respect because of his dialect is deplorable in a country which professes to be democratic. It is also absurd, when one considers that the social stigma is not applied to Scotch, Welsh or Irish accents, forms of speech which have evolved in a similar way to provincial dialects. Human beings should be judged, if at all, by the sincerity and truth of what they have to say rather than by the way they pronounce it.
[7]It would be reassuring to be able to say that it matters only in so far as you think it does, but this would be only partly true. There are some occupations which demand a more standardized
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form of English. We are also social beings engaged in the interchange of ideas with speech as the most important means of communication. I remember how during the last war I shared a billet with a “Geordie”, a most amiable and generous individual, but for all I understood of what he had to say he might as well have been talking Hungarian. There we have the criterion; the responsibility for making himself understood is on the shoulders of the speaker. In so far as dialect is a hindrance in this respect, it must be modified to suit the needs of the listener.
[8]There is a particular satisfaction in doing whatever we have to do well, and the way we speak is no exception. Clarity of meaning and grace of delivery are vitally necessary for this purpose, but this need not mean the entire discarding of whatever local speech forms we have. The delightfully lazy, gentle slur of John Arlott, the cricket commentator, and the forthright bluntness of J. B. Priestley’s Yordshire vowels help us to realize that dialect may be just as much an asset as a liability.
11. According to the text, we should all try to speak standard language and try to hide our
personal accent. F
12. Personality plays an important role in deciding one’s accent. T
13. “Park Lane” in para. 1 stands for an area where the rich choose to live.T 14. In order to improve our accent, we need to acquire more education.T
15. According to the text, it is quite fashionable to assume Scotch, Welsh or Irish accents. F 16. The author seems to be a socialist since he pay much attention to the class problem F
17. The problem “I” have in understanding arises from the fact “Geordie” speaks Hungarian
rather than English. T
18. According to the text, our different accents are the result of geographical location, personality
and some other social factors like class.T
19. For Shaw, difference between accents is more social than geographical.T
20. Although we don’t necessarily speak standard language, we need to do well in these two
aspects in communication: clarity of meaning and grace of delivery. T
II. Multiple Choice (10%)
Choose the word or phrase which best completes each of the following sentences.
21. He was driving the car at such a tremendous _____ that I could not even say hello to him.
A) acceleration B) speed C) quickness D) mileage
22. This text examines how American’s attachment to objects is increasingly ____.
A) permanent B) perishable
D) momentary C) temporary
23. Tourists are ____ to beware of pickpockets in the bus.
A) commanded B) notified C) informed D) advised
24. These mountaineers will have to ____ severe cold and terrible winds.
A) survive B) endure C) attain D) go through 25. We were asked to ____ from smoking until the plane was airborne.
A) resist B) restrain C) restrict D) refrain
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