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Section II Reading Comprehension Part A
第一篇：
Rats and other animals need to be highly at tuned to social from others so that can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Loleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats.
They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat-one social and one asocial-for 5 our days. The robots rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels-to move around and colorful markings.
During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened caged doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.
Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave the rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a lever.
Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 percent more likely on average to set social robot free than the asocial one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being. They may have bonded more with the social robot because it displayed behavious like communal exploring and playing. This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped, says Quinn.
The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design. The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. “We’d assumed we’d have to give it a moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scene on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn’t necessary,” says Janet Wiles at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research.
The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals. “We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too,” says Wiles.
21.【题干】Quinn and her colleagues conducted a test to see if rats can _____.
【选项】
A.pickup social signals from non-living rats
B.distinguish a friendly rat from a hostile one
C.attain sociable traits through special training
D.send out warming messages to their fellow
【答案】A
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22.【题干】What did the social robot do during the experiment?
【选项】
A.It followed the social robot.
B.It played with some toys.
C.It set the trapped Tats free.
D.It moved around alone.
【答案】C
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23.【题干】According to Quinn, the rats released the social robot because they _____.
【选项】
A.tried to practice a means of escape
B.expected it to do the same in return
C.wanted to display their intelligence
D.considered that an interesting game
【答案】B
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24.【题干】James Wiles notes that rats _____.
【选项】
A.can remember other rat’s facial features
B.differentiate smells better than sizes
C.respond more to cations than to looks
D.can be scared by a plastic box on wheels
【答案】C
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25.【题干】It can be learned from the text that rats _____.
【选项】
A.appear to be adaptable to new surroundings
B.are more socially active than other animals
C.behave differently from children in socializing
D.are more sensitive to social cues than expected
【答案】D
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第二篇：
Why CEOs Actually Deserve Their Gazillion-Dollar Salaries
By Tyler Cowen
April 11, 2019
IDEAS
Cowen is Holbert L harris chair of economics at George Mason University and the author most recently of Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.
It is fashionable today to bash Big Business. And there is one issue on which the many critics agree: CEO pay. We hear that CEOs are paid too much (or too much relative to workers), or that they rig others' pay, or that their pay is insufficiently related to positive outcomes. But the more likely truth is CEO pay is largely caused by intense competition.
It is true that CEO pay has gone up-top ones may make 300 times the pay of typical workers on average, and since the mid-1970s, CEO pay for large publicly traded American corporations has, by varying estimates, gone up by about 500%. The typical CEO of a top American corporation-from the 350 largest such companies--now makes about $18.9 million a year.
While individual cases of overpayment definitely exist, in general, the determinants of CEO pay are not so mysterious and not so mired in corruption.
In fact, overall CEO compensation for the top companies rises pretty much in lockstep with the value of those companies on the stock market.
The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay, though, is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America s highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It's not popular to say, but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.
Today's CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many more skills than simply being able to run the company CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them. They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant. then there s the fact that large American companies are much more globalized than ever before, with supply chains spread across a larger number of countries. To lead in that system requires know ledge that is fairly mind-boggling.
There is yet another trend: virtually all major American companies are becoming tech companies, one way or another. An agribusiness company, for instance, may focus on R&D in highly IT-intensive areas such as genome sequencing. Similarly, it is hard to do a good job running the Walt Disney Company just by picking good movie scripts and courting stars; you also need to build a firm capable of creating significant CGi products for animated movies at the highest levels of technical sophistication and with many frontier innovations along the way.
On top of all of this, major CEOs still have to do the job they have always done--which includes motivating employees, serving as an internal role model, helping to define and extend a corporate culture, understanding the internal accounting and presenting budgets and business plans to the board. Good CEOs are some of the world's most potent creators and have some of the very deepest skills of understanding.
26.【题干】which of the following has contributed to CEO pay rise? _____
【选项】
A.The growth in the number of cooperations
B.The general pay rise with a better economy
C.Increased business opportunities for top firms
D.Close cooperation among leading economics
【答案】C
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27.【题干】Compared with their predecessors, today's CEOs are required to _____.
【选项】
A.foster a stronger sense of teamwork
B.finance more reaserach and development
C.establish closer ties with tech companies
D.operate more globalized companies
【答案】D
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28.【题干】CEO pay has been rising since the 1970s despite _____.
【选项】
A.continual internal opposition
B.strict corporate governance
C.conservative business strategies
D.repeated governance warnings
【答案】A
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29.【题干】High CEO pay can be justified by the fact that it helps _____.
【选项】
A.confirm the status of CEOs
B.motive inside candidates
C.boost the efficiency of CEOs
D.increase corporate value
【答案】B
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30.【题干】The most suitable title for this text would be _____.
【选项】
A.CEOs Are Not Overpaid
B.CEO Pay: Past and Present
C.CEOs Challenges of Today
D.CEO Traits: Not Easy to Define
【答案】A
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第三篇：
Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon last November when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone, a first step toward its possible demise.
Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida made opposition to the zone a centrepiece of his election campaign, despite its success in improving air quality. A judge has now overruled the city's decision to stop levying fines, ordering them reinstated. But with legal battles ahead, the zone's future looks uncertain at best.
Among other weaknesses, the measures cities must employ when left to tackle dirty air on their own are politically contentious, and therefore vulnerable. That's because they inevitably put the costs of cleaning the air on to individual drivers-who must pay fees or buy better vehicles-rather than on to the car manufacturers whose cheating is the real cause of our toxic pollution.
It's not hard to imagine a similar reversal happening in London. The new ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is likely to be a big issue in next year's mayoral election. And if Sadiq Khan wins and extends it to the North and South Circular roads in 2021 as he intends , it is sure to spark intense opposition from the far larger number of motorists who will then be affected.
It's not that measures such as London's Ulez are useless. Far from it. Local officials are using the levers that are available to them to safeguard residents' health in the face of a serious threat. The zones do deliver some improvements to air quality, and the science tells us that means real health benefits-fewer heart attacks, stokes and premature births, less cancer, dementia and asthma. Fewer untimely deaths.
But mayors and councilors can only do so much about a problem that is far bigger than any one city or town. They are acting because national governments-Britain's and others across Europe-have failed to do so.
Restrictions that keep highly polluting cars out of certain areas-city centres, "school streets", even individual roads-are a response to the absence of a larger effort to properly enforce existing regulations and require auto companies to bring their vehicles into compliance. Wales has introduced special low speed limits to minimise pollution. We're doing everything but insist that manufacturers clean up their cars.
31.【题干】Which of the following is true about Madrid's clean air zone?
【选项】
A.Its effects are questionable.
B.It has been opposed by a judge.
C.Its fate is yet to be decided.
D.It needs tougher enforcement.
【答案】C
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32.【题干】Which is considered a weakness of the city-level measures to tackle dirty air?
【选项】
A.They are biased against car manufacturers.
B.They prove impractical for city councils.
C.They are deemed too mild for politicians.
D.They put too much burden on individual motorists.
【答案】D
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33.【题干】The author believes that the extension of London's Ulez will_____.
【选项】
A.arouse strong resistance.
B.ensure Khan’s electoral success.
C.improve the city’s traffic.
D.discourage car manufacturing.
【答案】A
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34.【题干】Who does the author think should have addressed the problem?
【选项】
A.Local residents
B.Mayors.
C.Councilors.
D.National governments.
【答案】D
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35.【题干】It can be inferred from the last paragraph that auto companies_____.
【选项】
A.will raise low-emission car production.
B.should be forced to follow regulations.
C.will upgrade the design of their vehicles.
D.should be put under public supervision.
【答案】B
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第四篇：
Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring-the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year-the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. GenZs are about to hit the streets looking for work in labor market that's tighter than its been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U.S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them.
If "entitled" is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and 1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren't interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U.S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.
One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment(followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good.
36.【题干】Generation Zs graduating college this spring_____.
【选项】
A.are recognized for their abilities.
B.are optimistic about the labor market.
C.are in favor of office job offers.
D.are drawing growing public attention.
【答案】D
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37.【题干】Generation Zs are keenly aware_____.
【选项】
A.What their parents expect of them
B.How valuable a counselor's advice is
C.What a tough economic situation is like
D.How they differ from past generation
【答案】C
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38.【题干】assuage (line 9 paragraph 2) _____.
【选项】
A.deepen
B.define
C.maintain
D.relieve
【答案】D
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39.【题干】It can be learned from Para.3 that Generation 2s _____.
【选项】
A.give top priority to professional training
B.have a clear idea about their future jobs
C.care little about their job performance
D.think it hard to achieve work-life balance
【答案】B
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40. 【题干】Michelsen thinks that compared with millennials, Generation Zs are _____.
【选项】
A.less realistic
B.less adventurous
C.more diligent
D.more generous
【答案】B
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Section II Reading Comprehension Part B
Directions:
Read the following text and answer the questions by choosing the most suitable subheading from the list A-G for each numbered paragraphs (41-45). There are two extra subheadings which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)
Five Ways to Win Over Everyone in the Office
Is it possible to like everyone in your office? Think about how tough it is to get together 15 people, much less 50, who all get along perfectly. But unlike in friendships, you need coworkers. You work with them every day and you depend on them just as they depend on you. Here are some ways that you can get the whole office on your side.
41._____
If you have a bone to pick with someone in your workplace, you may try stay tight-lipped around them. But you won't be helping either one of you. A Harvard Business School study found that observers consistently rated those who were frank about themselves more highly, while those who hid lost trustworthiness. The lesson is not that you should make your personal life an open book, but rather, when given the option to offer up details about yourself or painstakingly conceal them, you should just be honest.
42._____
Just as important as being honest about yourself is being receptive to others. We often feel the need to tell others how we feel, whether it's a concern about a project, a stray thought, or a compliment. Those are all valid, but you to take time to hear out your coworkers, too. In fact, rushing to get your own ideas out there can cause colleagues to feel you don't value their opinions. Do your best to engage coworkers in a genuine, back-and-forth conversation, rather than prioritizing your own thoughts.
43._____
It's common to have a "cubicle mate" or special confidant in a work setting. But in addition to those trusted coworkers, you should expand your horizons and find out about all the people around you. Use your lunch and coffee breaks to meet up with colleagues you don't always see. Find out about their lives and interests beyond the job. It requires minimal effort and goes a long way. This will help to grow your internal network, in addition to being a nice break in the work day.
44._____
Positive feedback is important for anyone to hear. And you don't have to be someone's boss to tell them they did an exceptional job on a particular project. This will help engender good will in others. But don't overdo it or be fake about it. One study found that people responded best to comments that shifted from negative to possibly because it suggested they had won somebody over.
45._____
This one may be a bit more difficult to pull off but it can go a long way to achieving results. Remember in dealing with any coworker what they appreciate from an interaction. Watch out for how they verbalize with others. Some people like small talk in a meeting before digging into important matters, while other are more straightforward. Jokes that work one person won't necessarily land with another. So, adapt your style accordingly to type. Consider the person that you're dealing with in advance and what will get you to your desired outcome.
A.Give compliments, just not too many.
B.Put on a good face, always.
C.Tailor your interactions.
D.Spend time with everyone.
E.Reveal, don't hide information.
F.Slow down and listen.
G.Put yourselves in others' shoes.
41.【题干】41._____.
【答案】E
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42.【题干】42._____.
【答案】F
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43.【题干】43._____.
【答案】D
【解析】
【考点】
44.【题干】44._____.
【答案】A
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45.【题干】45._____.
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