大学生英语竞赛A类阅读理解专项强化真题试卷10

More than half the adult population claims to be suffering from it. It makes us tense, irritable and affects ours concentration. Worse, it damages our health, causing everything from heart attacks to asthma, from chronic fatigue to spots. Cynics are quick to dismiss the phenomenon as fashionable hype. And they have a point. After all, we are lives longer lives than any generation before us. Most of us have more cash, more holidays, more consumer durables, and more choices in our lives than ever before. [*] Faced with the historical evidence of human survival, trimuph and even happiness, against far greater odds than we experience today, talk of stress, the modern disease, just sounds like whingeing(诉苦、埋怨). Yet for many people stress is real enough. The effects of sudden and shocking events on physical and mental health have been well documented. But, crises are not the only things to damage our health. Professor Ben Fletcher, psychologist and Dean of the Business School at the University of Hertfordshire, argues that the work people do has a huge effect on their risk of physical disease. High demands, combined with low control, lack of support, and especially monotonous work, are stressful and increase our chance of an early death. But dose it make sense to sweep all these conditions under one title, “ stress“ ? According to Carry Cooper, Professor of Organizational Psychology at the University of Manchester, it’s an umbrella concept. While cause, context and response all vary, the underlying model is the same. Hans Selye, founder of modern research into stress, described it as “ the rate of wear and tear on the body“. The analogy emerges out of physics. Subject a bridge to repeated stress—perhaps the waves against the pillars, or steady vibrations from soldiers marching across it in step—and it will start to exhibit strain. But stress is not entirely malign. A certain amount of pressure—Professor Cooper distinguishes pressure from stress—and we thrive. We keep going, we keep interested in the world, we stay a-live. Too much and we get tense, troubled, breathless and run down. So stress is real. The answer to our cynics who point to historical evidence is that our ancestors suffered from stress too. Richard Napier, a sixteenth century physician, recorded that around a third of his patients were “trouble in the mind“. We are no more wimpish than our forebears, the stress they suffered probably contributing to their ill health and lower life expectancy. Of course the stresses we face today may genuinely be greater for many people than thirty years ago. Professor Cooper argues that we have less support today to help us deal with the inevitable stresses that arise. We no longer have the communities and extended families that acted as natural sources of moral support. So counseling networks and services have had to grow in their place. But the big test is whether our futures will be consistently more stressful than our past, how will human beings manage to adapt to change? No one knows, but the academics look forward to finding out. Questions 66 to 68 Mark each statement as either true(T)or false(F)according to the passage.

[*] David Cameron has pledged there will be “ no limit“ to the number of students from India who can study in the UK and then stay on to find work. Mr Cameron’s change of heart comes as he begins a campaign to win over voters of Indian origin. He was stung by evidence from Tory pollsters showing that being non-white is the single biggest reason why people don’t vote Tory— far outweighing income and social class—even though many Asians share Conservative values. He will reinforce his message with a trip to India next week billed as the biggest trade trip ever organised by Downing Street. In interviews with Asian television stations in the UK yesterday, Mr Cameron revealed his love of cricket and hot curries and sought to convince Asian voters that the Tories share their values of family and hard work. But he also went out of his way to encourage Indians to come to the UK—an offer that contrasts with years of Tory rhetoric about restricting immigration. He said: “There is no limit on the number of students who can come from India to study at British universities, no limit at all. All you need is a basic English qualification and a place at a British university. “ “ What’s more, after you’ve left a British university, if you can get a graduate-level job there is no limit to the amount of people who can stay and work, or the time that they can stay at work“ Existing Home Office rules mean that any student who obtains a graduate-level job, defined as a post with a salary of at least ￡ 20, 000, can stay in the UK. But some Tories criticized Business Secretary Vince Cable after a previous trip to India in 2010 when he complained that restrictions on Indian immigrants were too tight. Mr Cameron admitted last night that he had failed to “properly communicate“ the policy to Indians. He added: “Now we need to take that message out to talented young people in India and say if you want to make that choice, Britain will be incredibly welcoming. We have 40, 000 Indian students in Britain, I’m really proud of that. “ The Prime Minister is set to make a speech on race relation in the next two months in which he will seek to overturn the view that Tories are a racist party which has lingered since the days of E-noch Powell. Mr Cameron is also considering whether to make an apology for the worst aspects of the British Empire. On a trip to Pakistan in 2011, he conceded that Britain was “responsible“ for many of the world’s problems including the divisions over Kashmir. Yesterday he again referred to that “history“ but declined to intervene in talks between India and Pakistan. Others are encouraging him to visit Srebrenica, where 8, 000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in 1995, to help the Tories connect with Muslims in the UK. Questions 71 to 75 Complete the summary below with information from the passage, using no more than three words for each blank. After finding that【E1】______is the major obstacle to a Conservative victory in the vote, David Cameron announced that the restrictions on Indians to study or even stay in the UK would be changed. Before the pledge, David Cameron was seen to be implementing the policy of restricting 【E2】______. He said Indians with a【E3】______could stay and work in the UK without time limit. In the next two months Cameron will work on to change people’s impression of the Conservative as【E4】______. Based on his concession that Britain played a role in the divisions over Kashmir, he was encouraged to visit Srebrenica to build the connection between the Tories and【E5】______.

At the age of 37, Jared, a would-be professor in New York State, should already have a permanent position at a university and perhaps be publishing his second or third book. Instead, he’s working on a paper in sociology that he’d planned to complete a decade ago. He’s blown two “ drop-dead“ deadlines and is worried about missing a third. No one can understand why a guy they consider brilliant doesn’t “just do it. “ Nor, for that matter, can Jared. [*] Jared is among the one in five people who chronically procrastinate, endangering careers and throwing away peace of mind, all the while repeating, “I should be doing something else right now. “ Procrastination is not just an issue of time management or laziness. It’s about feeling paralyzed and guilty as yon channel surf, knowing you should be studying or rethinking your investment strategy. Why the gap between incentive and action? Psychologists now believe it is a combination of several factors, some of which are anxiety and false beliefs shout productivity. Tim Pychyl, Ph. D. , associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, tracked students with procrastination problems in the final week before a project was due. Students first reported anxiety and guilt because they had not started their projects. “They were telling themselves, ’I work better under pressure’ or ’This isn’t important,’ “ says Phchyl. But as soon as they began to work, they reported more positive emotions: they no longer lamented wasted time, nor claimed that pressure helped. Psychologists have focused on procrastination among students because the problem is rampant in academic settings: some seventy percent of college students report problems with overdue papers and delayed studying, according to Joseph Ferrari, associate professor of psychology at Chicago’s DePaul University. Many procrastinators are convinced that they work better under pressure. But tomorrow never comes and last-minute work is often low quality. In spite of what they may believe, “Procrastinators generally don’t do well under pressure,“ says Ferrari. The idea is perhaps the most common myth among procrastinators. “The main reason people procrastinate is fear,“ says Neil Fiore, Ph. D. , the author of The Now Habit. Procrastinators fear they’ll fall short because they don’t have the requisite talent or skills. “They’re afraid they’ll look stupid. “ According to Ferrari, “Procrastinators would rather be seen as lacking in effort than lacking in ability. “ Impulsivity may seem diametrically opposed to procrastination, but both can be part of a larger problem: self-control. People who are impulsive may not be able to prioritize intentions, says Phchyl. So, while writing a term paper you break for a snack and see some dirt in the refrigerator, which leads to cleaning the entire kitchen. Children of authoritarian parents are more likely to procrastinate. Pychyl speculates that children with such parents postpone choices because their decisions are so frequently criticized—or made for them. Alternatively, the child may procrastinate as a form of rebellion. Refusing to study can be an angry—if self-defeating—message to Mom and Dad. Ambiguous directions and vague priorities increase procrastination. The boss who asserts that everything is high priority and due yesterday is more likely to be kept waiting. Supervisors who insist on “prioritizing the Jones project and using the Smith plan as a model“ see greater productivity. It might be comforting for procrastinators to realize that there is a reason for why they procrastinate. But for the situation to change, they have to do something about it. And for a procrastinator, that is not easy to do. Questions 56 to 60 Mark each statement as either true(T)or false(F)according to the passage.

What’s that on your pizza? You can bet it’s not just the extra cheese and onions you ordered. As matter of fact, you can count on at least a dozen other extra additives that you never asked for. [*] 【R1】______However, additives are nothing new, and neither is the controversy surrounding them. London in the 18th century could have been called the “adulterated food capital of the world. “ though it’s likely that other cities in other countries were just as guilty of the practice of food adulteration. One might think that food in the “old days“ was pure and simple, but in many cases, what people paid for was not what they were getting. When black Indian tea became popular, it was common for manufacturers to buy up used tea leaves, which they stiffened with a gum solution and then tinted with lead, another dangerous substance. Practices like that eventually came to the public’s attention, and in 1860 the first British Food and Drug Act was passed. 【R2】______Salt has been used as a preservative for thousands of years, and, thanks to some basic and other quite complicated substances, we have “fresh“ vegetables in January, and meat that doesn’t turn green on the way home from the grocery store. But as they say, there’s a price to pay for everything. The federal government recognizes about 35 different categories of additives, which are used for various purposes. Antioxidants are added to oil-containing foods to prevent the oil from spoiling. Chelating agents stop food from discoloring. Emulsifiers keep oil and water mixed together. Flavor enhancers improve the natural flavor of food. Thickening agents absorb some of the water present in food and make food thicker. About 800 million pounds of additives are added to our food every year. 【R3】______The average American ingests about five pounds of food additives per year. The good news is that the majority of the hundreds of chemicals that are added to food are safe. In some cases, they’re even good for us, such as when vitamins are added. The bad news is that some of them are not safe, and these are the ones with which we need to concern ourselves. 【R4】______The sugar substitute aspartame is used in many diet beverages. However, some scientists believe that aspartame can cause problems with brain function and behavior changes in people who consume it. Aspartame is still widely added, although many lawsuits have been filed to block its use. The additives sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate are two closely related chemicals to preserve meat. These additives keep meat’s red color, enhance its flavor, and stop the growth of dangerous bacteria. Nitrate by itself is harmless, but it is quickly changed into nitrite by a chemical reaction that occurs at high temperatures. During this chemical reaction, nitrite confines with other chemicals to form some very powerful cancer-causing agents. 【R5】______But several additives, such as those we have mentioned, do pose some risks to the general public and should be avoided as much as possible. There is intense pressure on the federal government to ban unsafe substances. But it is also our responsibility as consumers to read labels and be aware of what we’re putting into our bodies, and to learn how to eat safe and healthy food for long and healthy lives. Questions 61 to 65 Choose from the sentences A - G the one which best fits each gap of 61 -65. There are two extra sentences which you do not need to use. A. What happens when we consume this conglomeration of chemicals? B. It’s good to know that no signal food additive poses a severe danger to the entire population. C. Despite the regulations on food purity that currently exist in almost every country, there are still problems. D. Believe it or not, food adulteration is not all bad. E. Today’s additives read like a chemistry book, so many people believe they’re a modern invention. F. The first of the unsafe additives is artificial sweeteners. G. Food additives make food more flavorful and easier to prepare: they make it last longer, look more appetizing, and feel better in our mouths.

There was a time when only governments could create money, and as Mike Rowbotham explains in his excellent book, The Grip of Death, they have long since delegated 97 percent of that responsibility to the banks—which create it in the form of mortgages or interest bearing loans. [*] They are helped by the credit card companies, which give the power to customers to create their own debts—and create their own money at the same time—every time their card is swiped through a till. But now there are also supermarkets and airlines issuing their own money. Tesco, Safeway, and other businesses all issue their own, points to encourage regular customers. A whole range of businesses deal in frequent-flier miles, which you can spend on an ever-increasing variety of goods and services, and which then disappear when you’ve spent them. In the Unite States, there are now a range of off-the-shelf “incentive cards“ along the same lines or companies to offer their customers. There is even one card that acts as a combined loyalty and credit card. You can use it to buy things with “loyalty points“ you haven’t earned yet, but which then have to be repaid with increased customer loyalty. None of these innovations help us to improve either the shortage of the collapse of local communities , or the damage done by worldwide human greed. But they do open up new possibilities for experiments with new kinds of money which are kinder to the planet—and maybe even turning the base metal of human poverty into something closer to gold. As we know, with Local Exchange and Trading Systems(LETS)in the United Kingdom, people have been experimenting with this technology to invent their own new kinds of money. LETS money is available to anyone with time and skills, is less dependent on the increasingly bizarre fluctuations of the market and does less damage to the planet by not charging ruinous interest. Similar ideas are suddenly popping up all over the world. But in America, as befits the great money innovators, the field is even broader, with a range of local currencies all launched to achieve a different aspect of local sustainability. Time dollars, for example, is a non-market kind of money that recognizes the contribution people make to the places they live. Time dollars record, store, and find new ways of rewarding human transactions where neighbors help neighbors, such as giving lifts to older people. One hour is worth an hour, whether you are a rich lawyer or an elderly widow. All of the work is voluntary, yet none of it is volunteer work. Research shows that the Time dollar idea also helps us to see work differently, recognizing that caring work is productive work. Governments may not define it as such, and economists may balk at the whole idea, but it is. Then there are Hours, the innovative printed currency, which has revolutionized the local e-conomy of Ithaca in upstate New York. Now Ithaca is home to what is probably the biggest local currency in the world. Like so many other small cities, Ithaca local business was threatened by large nationwide chains that took money away from local business and sent profits out of the area. The result was that local incomes were falling, economic self-determination was crumbling, and the city was increasingly dependent on expensive, packaged imports to the area, usually brought in from great distances by multinational traders. These experiments may be difficult to sustain, but they could potentially give people the means to provide themselves with the money they need—when it normally seeps away to the big cities and massive world capital flows. Taken together, they could mean an economic breakthrough for tackling poverty and social collapse and, given the implications of economic collapse in Russia or the Far East, an urgent one for the whole of humanity. Questions 66 to 70 Answer the following questions with the information given in the passage.