最新2009考研英语真题英语一阅读部分资料

Text 1

①Habits are a funny thing.②We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. ③“Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,”William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. ④In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word“habit”carries a negative implication.

①So it seems paradoxical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. ②But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

①Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits.②In fact, the more new things we try—the more we step outside our comfort zone—the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

①But don't bother trying to kill off old habits；once those ruts of procedure are worn into the brain, they're there to stay. ②Instead, the new habits we deliberately press into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

①“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,”says Dawna Markova, author of The Open Mind. ②“But we are taught instead to‘decide', just as our president calls himself‘the Decider.'”

③She adds, however, that“to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. ④A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”

①All of us work through problems in ways of which we're unaware, she says.②Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively.③At the end of adolescence, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

①The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. ②“This breaks the major rule in the American belief system—that anyone can do anything,”explains M.J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book This Year I Will...and Ms. Markova's business partner. ③“That's a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters commonness. ④Knowing what you're good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”⑤This is where developing new habits comes in.

21.In Wordsworth's view,“habits”is characterized by being__________.

[A] casual

[B] familiar

[C] mechanical

[D] changeable

22.Brain researchers have discovered that the formation of new habits can be__________.

[A] predicted

[B] regulated

[C] traced

[D] guided

23.The word“ruts”(Para. 4) is closest in meaning to__________.

[A] tracks

[B] series

[C] characteristics

[D] connections

24.Dawna Markova would most probably agree that__________.

[A] ideas are born of a relaxing mind

[B] innovativeness could be taught

[C] decisiveness derives from fantastic ideas

[D] curiosity activates creative minds

25.Ryan's comments suggest that the practice of standardized testing__________.

[A] prevents new habits form being formed

[B] no longer emphasizes commonness

[C] maintains the inherent American thinking mode

[D] complies with the American belief system

Text 2

①It is a wise father that knows his own child, but today a man can boost his paternal (fatherly) wisdom —or at least confirm that he's the kid's dad. ②All he needs to do is shell out $30 for a paternity testing kit (PTK) at his local drugstore—and another $120 to get the results.

①More than 60,000 people have purchased the PTKs since they first became available without prescriptions last year, according to Doug Fogg, chief operating officer of Identigene, which makes the over-the-counter kits. ②More than two dozen companies sell DNA tests directly to the public, ranging in price from a few hundred dollars to more than $2,500.

①Among the most popular: paternity and kinship testing, which adopted children can use to find their biological relatives and families can use to track down kids put up for adoption. ②DNA testing is also the latest rage among passionate genealogists—and supports businesses that offer to search for a family's geographic roots.

①Most tests require collecting cells by swabbing saliva in the mouth and sending it to the company for testing. ②All tests require a potential candidate with whom to compare DNA.

①But some observers are skeptical. ②“There's a kind of false precision being hawked by people claiming they are doing ancestry testing,”says Troy Duster, a New York University sociologist. ③He notes that each individual has many ancestors—numbering in the hundreds just a few centuries back. ④Yet most ancestry testing only considers a single lineage, either the Y chromosome inherited through men in a father's line or mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down only from mothers. ⑤This DNA can reveal genetic information about only one or two ancestors, even though, for example, just three generations back people also have six other great-grandparents or, four generations back, 14 other great-great-grandparents.

①Critics also argue that commercial genetic testing is only as good as the reference collections to which

a sample is compared. ②Databases used by some companies don't rely on data collected systematically but rather lump together information from different research projects. ③This means that a DNA database may have a lot of data from some regions and not others, so a person's test results may differ depending on the company that processes the results. ④In addition, the computer programs a company uses to estimate relationships may be patented and not subject to peer review or outside evaluation.

26.In Paragraphs 1 and 2, the text shows PTK's___________.

[A] easy availability

[B] flexibility in pricing

[C] successful promotion

[D] popularity with households

27.PTK is used to___________.

[A] locate one's birth place

[B] promote genetic research

[C] identify parent-child kinship

[D] choose children for adoption

28.Skeptical observers believe that ancestry testing fails to___________.

[A] trace distant ancestors

[B] rebuild reliable bloodlines

[C] fully use genetic information

[D] achieve the claimed accuracy

29.In the last paragraph, a problem commercial genetic testing faces is___________.

[A] disorganized data collection

[B] overlapping database building

[C] excessive sample comparison

[D] lack of patent evaluation

30.An appropriate title for the text is most likely to be___________.

[A] Fors and Againsts of DNA Testing

[B] DNA Testing and Its Problems

[C] DNA Testing Outside the Lab

[D] Lies Behind DNA Testing

Text 3

①The relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. ②Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political and intellectual development of these and all other societies；however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. ③We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations.④The findings of a research institution have consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radically higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living.

①Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. ②Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its pre-bubble peak, the U.S. workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of the primary causes of the poor U.S. economic performance. ③Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly productivity.④Yet the research revealed that the U.S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts—a result of the training that U.S. workers received on the job.

①More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry's work.

①What is the real relationship between education and economic development? ②We have to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don't force it. ③After all, that's how education got started. ④When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, they didn't have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. ⑤Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things.

①As education improved, humanity's productivity potential increased as well. ②When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. ③This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance.④Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education.

⑤A lack of formal education, however, doesn't constrain the ability of the developing world's workforce to substantially improve productivity for the foreseeable future.⑥On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn't developing more quickly there than it is.