2007年3月高级口译真题(6)

英语自学网

　　SECTION 5: READING TEST
　　Direction: Read the following passage and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.
　　Questions 1-3
　　America's population hit the 300 million mark yesterday—at 7:46 a.m. Eastern time, according to Census Bureau estimates. Nobody knows exactly who became America's 300 millionth citizen. But demographers are summing up the milestone as a turning point that signals several trends to watch as the US—in contrast with Europe and Japan—deals with a steadily growing population.
　　Politically and demographically, experts say, the shifts will begin to have an impact on regions of the country not yet used to the new diversity provided by the influx of Hispanics and Asians, which has already transformed California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, and New York.
　　In coming years, Midwesterners, those in the Great Plains, rural areas, and small towns everywhere will begin to deal with the challenges of new ethnic and racial residents, says William Frey, a population expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. And the country as a whole will begin to be more dominated by a young/old divide than the current liberal/conservative model that dominates political discourse.
　　"This means we are going to transform the current, red/blue political dichotomy to one where the nation is separated by age ... young vs. old," says Mr. Frey. "The issues of younger generations dealing with children and opportunities for minorities will clash with those of the aging baby boomers whose voters are concerned with issues of aging and Social Security and Medicare," he adds. "Both parties will have to adjust to this new dichotomy."
　　The new milestone hasn't generated much hoopla. That's in sharp contrast to 1967, when President Johnson hailed the 200 millionth American, and Life magazine dispatched a cadre of photographers to find a baby born at the exact moment. One reason is that population growth has become controversial, especially in an election year when immigration is a hot-button issue and politicians are wary.
　　Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez says the Bush administration is not playing down the milestone, though he had no plans for Tuesday. "I would hate to think that we are going to be low-key about this," he says, since growth helps the economy.
　　While it's hard to prove that population growth spurs economic growth, the two often go hand in hand, according to experts quoted in the Monitor's recently published series: "US population: 300 million." For example: a nation with a rising population can support its retirees far more easily than one with a declining population. That's an advantage for the US, which is virtually the only developed nation expected to grow this century.
　　But population growth has less rosy implications, the Monitor series points out. Some experts worry that the land can't sustain the extra 100 million people expected by 2043. Another challenge is sprawl, the dominant model of development, which gobbles up forest and prairie.
　　1. Why does the author say that the nation's reaction to the new milestone of 300 million is "in sharp contrast to 1967" (para.5)?
　　2. Introduce briefly population expert William Frey's comment on the challenges from the growth of America's population.
　　3. Why does the Monitor say that "population growth has less rosy implications" (para.8)?
            
            

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　　Questions 4-6
　　British police forces are reviewing more than 450 unsolved crimes in a push to capitalise on dramatic advances in DNA forensic science. The advent of new ways to collect DNA from items at crime scenes, coupled with powerful analytical tools, has made it possible to obtain DNA profiles of suspects from undetected crimes or cold cases committed nearly 20 years ago, according to a Home Office spokeswoman. The operation has already identified 42 suspects.
　　The reviews focus on serious, often sexual offences and encompass at least 451 crimes committed between 1989 and 1995. Forensic scientists are returning to items of evidence stored at the time, from scraps of clothing to microscope slides holding just a few cells obtained from victims.
　　This week, scientists at the Forensic Science Service, which manages the police national DNA database, used the pioneering technique of familial searching to help convict James Lloyd, a shoe fetishist who pleaded guilty to six sexual assaults at Sheffield crown court.
　　The conviction came after scientists recovered DNA from a 20-year-old sperm sample held on a micropscope slide. While the DNA did not match anyone on the DNA database, scientists searched again for similar DNA profiles and found a close match with his sister.
　　The high-profile success follows the first use of a new intelligence tool known as pendulum list searching (PLS) which led to the conviction last month of Duncan Turner for a sexual assault in Birmingham in August 2005. Scientists working on the case found a mixture of DNA from different people on a pair of sunglasses found at the crime scene. They used PLS to generate a list of theoretical DNA profiles that could make up the mix. Some 500 pairs of theoretical DNA fingerprints were entered into the database, and one matched Turner. The FSS ploughed a further ￡6m into research last year and more powerful and precise techniques are in the pipeline.
　　Part of the push to review cold cases of sexual assaults comes from the development of a technique called Fish, or Fluorescent In Situ Hybridisation, which allows forensic experts to identify and pluck just a few male cells from a swab of female cells taken from the victim. The technique identifies male cells by dyeing green only those carrying the male Y chromosome. Once they are stained, another new tool, laser microdissection, is used to cut them out and collect them, so a full profile can be obtained.
　　Jim Fraser, a forensic scientist who served as an expert witness in the case of Michael Stone, who was convicted of a double murder in Kent in 1996, said advances in DNA science had already led to suspects being identified beyond the grave and would continue to become more powerful. "The long arm of the law is getting considerably longer—there's really no hiding place now," he said.
　　According to Cathy Turner, a consultant forensic scientist at the FSS, the rapid advances in DNA technology have transformed the role of forensic scientists. "We've gone beyond corroborating allegations to using DNA and other techniques to provide fresh intelligence," she said. The swelling of the police national DNA database, which now holds profiles for 3.5m people, has in the last five years quadrupled the number of cases in which DNA is used. It provides police with some 3,000 matches to suspects every month.
　　The national DNA database has been criticised by privacy groups, who fear the privatised database could potentially be misused, but for police forces it is an invaluable resource, said Dr Fraser. "None of this evidence is infallible, irrefutable or unarguable. But it's pretty much the best evidence that'll ever be presented to the criminal justice system by some considerable way," he said.
　　4. What is the function of PLS? Illustrate the use of PLS by scientists.
　　5. Explain the sentence "The long arm of the law is getting considerably longer". (para.7)
　　6. What is the controversy over the use of the national DNA database?
　　Questions 7-10
　　The new SAT scores are out, and buried in them is a sign of hope for American education. True, the scores are actually a bit lower than last year's; the combined average for the SAT's math and reading sections fell 7 points, to 1021, the biggest decrease since 1975, when the score dropped 16 points, to 1010. But statistically speaking, a 7-point decline (out of a possible 1600 on those two sections) isn't much. It's less than the value of a single question, which is about 10 points. Also, the SAT was radically changed last year. The College Board made it longer and added Algebra II, more grammar and an essay. Fewer kids wanted to take the new 3-hr. 45-min. test more than once, so fewer had an opportunity to improve their performance. Scores were bound to slide.
　　But tucked into the reams of data the College Board included with the new scores was some wonderful news: 1 was wrong. In 2003 I spent six months tracking the development of the new SAT. I sat through hours of test-development sessions and even learned how to grade SAT essays. TIME ran my resulting story on its cover that October.
            
            

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　　The story did make some predictions that turned out to be right. For instance, the new test favors girls more than the old one did. It is a long-standing tenet of testmaking that girls outperform boys on writing exams. For reasons I am not foolish enough to speculate about in print, girls are better than boys at fixing grammar and constructing essays, so the addition of a third SAT section, on writing, was almost certain to shrink the male-female score gap. It did. Girls trounced boys on the new writing section, 502 to 491. Boys still outscored girls overall, thanks largely to boys' 536 average on the math section, compared with girls' 502. But boys now lead on the reading section by just 3 points, 505 to 502; the gap was 8 points last year. What changed? The new test has no analogies ("bird is to nest" as "dog is to doghouse"), and boys usually clobbered girls on analogies.
　　My story also predicted that the addition of the writing section would damage the SAT'S reliability. Reliability is a measure of how similar a test's results are from one sitting to the next. The pre-2005 SAT had a standard error of measurement of about 30 points per section. In other words, if you got a 500 on the math section, your "true" score was anywhere between 470 and 530. But the new writing section, which includes not only a multiple-choice grammar segment but also the subjective essay, has a standard error of measurement of 40 points. That means a kid who gets a 760 in writing may actually be a perfect 800—or a clever-but-no-genius 720. In short, the College Board sacrificed some reliability in order to include writing.
　　Finally, I was right about one other thing: that the graders would reward formulaic, colorless writing over sharp young voices. The average essay score for kids who wrote in the first person was 6.9, compared with 7.2 for those who didn't. (A 1 -to-12 scale is used to grade essays. That score is then combined with the score on the grammar questions and translated into the familiar 200 to 800 points.) As my editors know well, first-person writing can flop. But the College Board is now distributing a guide called "20 Outstanding SAT Essays"—all of them perfect scores—and many are unbearably mechanical and cliched.
　　Still, there's good news. The central contention of my 2003 story was that the SAT'S shift from an abstract-reasoning test to a test of classroom material like Algebra 11 would hurt kids from failing schools. I was worried that the most vulnerable students would struggle on the new version. Instead, the very poorest children—those from families earning less than $20,000 a year—improved their SAT performance this year. It was a modest improvement (just 3 points) but significant, given the overall slump in scores. And noncitizen residents and refugees saw their scores rise an impressive 13 points. It was middleclass and rich kids who account for the much reported decline.
　　What explains those wonderfully unpredictable findings? The College Board has no firm answers, but its top researcher, Wayne Camara, suggests a (somewhat self-serving) theory: the new SAT is less coachable. When designing the new test, the board banned analogies and "quantitative comparisons". "1 think those items disadvantaged students who did not have the resources, the motivation, the awareness to figure out how to approach them," says Camara. "By eliminating those, the test becomes much less about strategy." Because it focuses more on what high schools teach and less on tricky reasoning questions, the SAT is now more, not less, egalitarian.
　　Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.
　　7. What are some of the "right" predictions the author made about the new SAT a few years ago?
　　8. Why does the author say that the addition of the writing section would "damage the SAT's reliability" (para.4)?
　　9. What is the "good news" (para.6) about the SAT according to the passage?
　　10. What does Wayne Camara mean by saying that "the new SAT is less coachable" (para. 7)?
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