2006年3月高级口译真题(3)

英语自学网

　　Questions 11-15
　　Concrete is probably used more widely than any other substance except water, yet it remains largely unappreciated. "Some people view the 20th century as the atomic age, the space age, the computer age--but an argument can be made that it was the concrete age," says cement specialist Hendrik Van Oss. "lt's a miracle material." Indeed, more than a ton of concrete is produced each year for every man, woman and child on Earth. Yet concrete is generally ignored outside the engineering world, a victim of its own ubiquity and the industry's conservative pace of development. Now, thanks to environmental pressures and entrepreneurial innovation, a new generation of concretes is emerging. This high-tech assortment of concrete confections  promises to  be  stronger,  lighter,  and  more environmentally friendly than ever before.
　　The concretes they will replace are, for the most part, strong and durable, but with limitations. Concrete is sound under compression but weak under tension. Steel rebars are used as reinforcement, but make recycling difficult when concrete breaks down-and break down it inevitably will. Cracks caused by stress grow larger over time, with water forcing them open and corroding the rebars within."When you put enough stress on it, concrete doesn't work like we want it to. We're asking too much of it now," says Mr. Van Oss. Concrete is also a climate-change villain. It is made by mixing water with an aggregate, such as sand or gravel, and cement. Cement is usually made by heating limestone and clay to over 2,500 degrees F. The resulting chemical reaction, along with fuel burned to heat the kiln, produces between 7% and 10% of global carbon-dioxide emissions.
　　"When we have to repeatedly regenerate these materials because they're not durable, we release more emissions," says Victor Li, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Michigan. Dr. Li has created a concrete suffused by synthetic fibers that make it stronger, more durable, and able to bend like a metal. Li's creation does not require reinforcement, a property shared by other concretes that use chemical additives called plasticizers to reduce the amount of water in their composition. Using less water makes concrete stronger, but until the development of plasticizers, it also made concrete sticky, dry, and hard to handle, says Christian Meyer, a civil engineering professor at Columbia University.
　　"The engineer would specify a certain strength, a certain amount of water--and as soon as a supervisor turned his back, it would go a bucket of water," says Dr. Meyer of the time before plasticizers. Making stronger concretes, says Li, allows less to be used, reducing waste and giving architects more freedom. "You can have such futuristic designs if you don't have to put rebar in there, or structural beams," says Van Oss. "You can have things shooting off into space at odd angles. Many possibilities are opened up."  A more directly "green" concrete has been developed by the Australian company TecEco. They add magnesium to their cement, forming a porous concrete that actually scrubs carbon dioxide from the air.
　　"The planet's been through several episodes of global warming before, and nature put carbon away as coal, petroleum, and carbonate sediments," says TecEco manager John Harrison. "Now we're in charge, and we need to do the same. We can literally 'put away' carbon in our own built environment." Another modification to the built environment is the carbon fiber-reinforced concrete of Deborah Chung, a materials scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. By running an electrical current through concrete, Dr. Chung says, tiny deformations caused by minute pressures can be detected. "You can monitor room occupancy in real-time, controlling lighting, ventilation, and cooling in relation to how many people are there," says Chung.
　　While experts agree that these new concrete will someday be widely used, the timetable is uncertain. Concrete companies are responsive to environmental concerns and are always looking to stretch the utility of their product, but the construction industry is slow to change. "When you start monkeying around with materials, the governing bodies, the building departments, are very cautious before they let you use an unproven material," Meyer says. In the next few decades, says Van Oss, building codes will change, opening the way for innovative materials. But while new concretes may be stronger and more durable, they are also more expensive--and whether the tendency of developers and the public to locus on short-term rather than long-term costs will also change is another matter.
　　11. When cement specialist Hendrik Van Oss argues that 20th century can be viewed as the "concrete age", he most probably means that _
　　(A) the traditional building material concrete is the only man-made miracle
　　(B) concrete is indispensable in the development of modem construction industry
　　(C) compared with other inventions, concrete is more practical and useful
　　(D) concrete, as a building material, can be mixed with any other materials
            
            

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　　12. What does the author mean by saying that concrete is "a victim of its own ubiquity and the industry's conservative pace of development"(para.1)?
　　(A) Concrete suffers from its own unique features as well as the slow development of building industry.
　　(B) Concrete is not appreciated because of its dull color and other drawbacks, with little improvement as a building material.
　　(C) Slow progress of building industry does harm to the application and popularity of concrete.
　　(D) Concrete is ignored because it is conventional with little advance in its technology.
　　13. According to the passage, concrete is also a "climate-change villain" mainly because
　　(A) sand or gravel has to be used as an aggregate in the process of mixing
　　(B) the materials which are used to make concrete are not durable
　　(C) recycling of concrete is quite difficult when concrete breaks down
　　(D) chemical reaction in manufacturing cement emits carbon-dioxide (world-wide)
　　14. The new "green" concrete has all of the following advantages EXCEPT that ____
　　(A) it will greatly reduce the cost of production and construction
　　(B) it will become stronger, lighter and climate-friendly
　　(C) it will give architects and builders more freedom in designing and construction
　　(D) it will require little reinforcement in preparation
　　15. When Van Oss says that "Whether the tendency of developers and the public to focus on short-term rather than long-term costs will also change is another matter", it probably shows that_______.
　　(A) he has full confidence in the developers and the public in using new concrete
　　(B) he is quite pessimistic about the future development of greener concrete
　　(C) he is hostile to the attitudes of developers and the public
　　(D) he feels that people should be patient to wait for the change of the public attitude
　　Questions 16-20
　　We live in an age when everyone is a critic. "Criticism" is all over the internet, in blogs and chat rooms, for everyone to access and add his two cents' worth on any subject, high or low. But if everyone is a critic, is that still criticism? Or are we heading toward the end of criticism? If all opinions are equally valid, there is no need for experts. Democracy works in life, but art is undemocratic. The result of this ultimately meaningless barrage is that more and more we are living in a profoundly--or shallowly--uncritical age.
　　A critic, as T. S. Eliot famously observed, must be very intelligent. Now, can anybody assume that the invasion of cyberspace by opinion upon opinion is proof of great intelligence and constitutes informed criticism rather than uniformed artistic chaos. Of course, like any self-respecting critic, 1 have always encouraged my readers to think for themselves. They were to consider my positive or negative assessments, which I always tried to explain, a challenge to think along with me: here is my reasoning, follow it, then agree or disagree as you see fit. In an uncritical age, every pseudonymous chat-room chatterbox provides a snappy, self-confident judgment, without the process of arriving at it becoming clear to anyone, including the chatterer. Blogs, too, tend to be invitations to leap before a second look. Do the impassioned ramblings fed into a hungry blogosphere represent responses from anyone other than longheads?
　　How has it come to this? We have all been bitten by television sound bytes that transmute into Internet sound b~es, proving that brevity can also be the soul of witlessness. So thoughtlessness multiplies. D~ not, however, think 1 advocate censorship, an altogether unacceptable form of criticism. What we need in this age of rampant uncritical criticism is the simplest and hardest thing to come by: a critical attitude. How could it be fostered?
　　For starters, with the very thing discouraged by our print media: reading beyond the hectoring headlines and bold-type boxes embedded in reviews, providing a one-sentence summary that makes further reading unnecessary. With only slight exaggeration, we may say that words have been superseded by upward or downward pointing thumbs, self-destructively indulging a society used to instant self-gratification.
　　Criticism is inevitably constricted by our multinational culture and by political correctness. As society grows more diverse, there are fewer and fewer universal points of reference between a critic and his or her readers. As for freedom of expression, Arthur Miller long ago complained about protests and pressures making the only safe subjects for a dramatist babies and the unemployed.
　　My own experience is that over the years, print space for my reviews kept steadily shrinking, and the layouts themselves toadied to the whims of the graphic designer. In a jungle of oddball visuals, readers had difficulties finding my reviews. Simultaneously, our vocabulary went on a starvation diet. Where readers used to thank me for enlarging their vocabularies, more and more complaints were lodged about unwelcome trips to the dictionary, as if comparable to having to keep running to the toilet. Even my computer keeps questioning words 1 use, words that can be found in medium-size dictionaries. Can one give language lessons to a computer? What may be imperiled, more than criticism, is the word.
　　I keep encountering people who think "critical" means carping or fault-finding, and nothing more. So it would seem that the critic's pen, once mightier than the sword, has been supplanted by the ax. Yet I have always maintained that the critic has three duties: to write as well as a novelist or playwright; to be a teacher, taking off from where the classroom, always prematurely, has stopped, and to be a thinker, looking beyond his specific subject at society, history, philosophy. Reduce him to a consumer guide, run his reviews on a Web site mixed in with the next-door neighbor's pontifications, and you condemn criticism to obsolescence. Still, one would like to think that the blog is not the enemy, and that readers seeking enlightenment could find it on the right blog--just as in the past one went looking through diverse publications for the congenial critic. But it remains up to the readers to learn how to discriminate.
            
            

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　　16. Which of the following expresses the author's reasoning when the author says that the "criticism" over the lnternet, in blogs and chat rooms is "uncritical'"?
　　(A) If everyone is a critic, it is neither democracy nor criticism.
　　(B) When people only choose to express their opinions pseudonymously, what they were doing is to assault the others simply by waving the "ax".
　　(C) Real criticism should be expressed by giving the reasoning, the process of reasoning and letting the audience to reach their own conclusion.
　　(D) All the critics should be self-respecting and should be well-informed before they give their criticisms.
　　17. When the author concludes that "what may be imperiled, more than criticism, is the word"(para. 7), he possibly means that with the shrinking of print space, ____
　　(A) words will be less meaningful and criticism much more shallower
　　(B) language dictionaries will be much thinner and simpler
　　(C) people will not be interested in using dictionaries to learn the vocabulary
　　(D) human language will be greatly affected and even deteriorate
　　18. When the author thinks that the critic has three duties of "novelist or playwright", "teacher" and "thinker"(para. 8), he probably means that a critic should be equipped with all of the following qualities EXCEPT________.
　　(A) original thinking (B)enlightened instruction
　　(C) philosophical insight (D) matter-of-fact attitude
　　19. It can be concluded from the last paragraph that the author ____
　　(A) encourages the readers to make independent judgment
　　(B) fails to advise readers to seek enlightenment on any of the blogs
　　(C) never thinks that blogs will share the similar features with traditional publications
　　(D) probably agrees that the blog is the enemy
　　20. Which of the following shows the author's attitude towards the coming of the "uncritical age"?
　　(A) sympathetic and supportive. (B) critical and sarcastic.
　　(C) optimistic and welcoming. (D) neutral and indifferent.
实习编辑：褚萍湘