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四川大学2012考博英语真题及答案详解
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1）Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed languages are unique—a speech of the hand. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy: whether language, complete with grammar, is something that we are born With, or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C., the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people.
When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd: among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.
Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English (混杂英语). But Stokoe believed the “hand talk” his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually: have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as “substandard”. Stokoe’s idea was academic heresy (异端邪说).
It is 37 years later. Stokoe—now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture—is having lunch at a cafe near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation (调节) of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. “What I said,” Stokoe explains, “is that language is not mouth stuff—it’s brain stuff.”
21. The study of sign language is thought to be _____C___. A) a new way to look at the learning of language
B) a challenge to traditional, views on the nature of language C) an approach: to simplifying the grammatical structure of a language D) an attempt to clarify misunderstanding about the origin of language（C） 22. The, present growing interest in sign language was stimulated by ___C_____. A) a famous scholar in the study of the human brain B) a leading specialist in the study of liberal arts C) an English teacher in a university for the deaf D) some senior experts in American Sign Language（C） 23. According to Stokoe, sign language is _____B___. A) a Substandard language B) a genuine language C) an artificial language
D) an international language（B）
24. Most educators objected to Stokoe’s idea because they thought _____D___. A) sign language was not extensively used even by deaf people
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B) sign language was too artificial to be widely accepted C) a language should be easy to use and understand
D) a language could only exist in the form of speech sounds（D） 25. Stokoe’s argument is based on his belief that ____D____. A) sign language is as efficient as any other language B) sign language is derived from natural language C) language is a system of meaningful codes D) language is a product of the brain（D）
2）It was the worst tragedy in maritime history, six times more deadly than the Titanic. When the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by torpedoes fired from a Russian submarine in the final winter of World War II, more than 10,000 people-mostly women, children and old people fleeing the final Red Army push into Nazi Germany-were packed aboard. An ice storm had turned the decks into frozen sheets that sent hundreds of families sliding into the sea as the ship tilted and began to go down. Others desperately tried to put lifeboats down. Some who succeeded fought off those in the water who had the strength to try to claw their way aboard. Most people froze immediately. I’ll never forget the screams,” says Christa Ntitzmann, 87, one of the 1,200 survivors. She recalls watching the ship, brightly lit, slipping into its dark grave-and into seeming nothingness, rarely mentioned for more than half a century.
Now Germany’s Nobel Prize-winning author Gtinter Grass has revived the memory of the 9,000 dead, including more than 4,000 children-with his latest novel Crab Walk, published last month. The book, which will be out in English next year, doesn’t dwell on the sinking; its heroine is a pregnant young woman who survives the catastrophe only to say later: “Nobody wanted to hear about it, not here in the West (of Germany) and not at all in the East.” The reason was obvious. As Grass put it in a recent interview with the weekly Die Woche: “Because the crimes we Germans are responsible for were and are so dominant, we didn’t have the energy left to tell of our own sufferings.”
The long silence about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was probably unavoidable-and necessary. By unreservedly owning up to their country’s monstrous crimes in the Second World War, Germans have managed to win acceptance abroad, marginalize the neo-Nazis at home and make peace with their neighbors. Today’s unified Germany is more prosperous and stable than at any time in its long, troubled history. For that, a half century of willful forgetting about painful memories like the German Titanic was perhaps a reasonable price to pay. But even the most politically correct Germans believe that they’ ye now earned the right to discuss the full historical record. Not to equate German suffering with that of its victims, but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy.
31. Why does the author say the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was the worst tragedy in maritime history? （B） A) It was attacked by Russian torpedoes. B) It caused the largest number of casualties. C) Most of its passengers were frozen to death. D) Its victims were mostly women and children.
32. Hundreds of families dropped into the sea when ___（A）_____. A) the badly damaged ship leaned toward one side B) a strong ice storm tilted the ship C) the cruise ship sank all of a sudden
D) the frightened passengers fought desperately for lifeboats
33. The Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy was little talked about for more than half a century because Germans _____（D）___. A) were eager to win international acceptance B) had been pressured to keep silent about it
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C) were afraid of offending their neighbors D) felt guilty for their crimes in World War II
34. How does Gunter Grass revive the memory of the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy? （D） A) By describing the ship’s sinking in great detail. B) By giving an interview to the weekly Die Woche. C) By presenting the horrible scene of the torpedo attack. D) By depicting the survival of a young pregnant woman.
35. It can be learned from the passage that Germans no longer think that ____（C）____. A) the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy is a reasonable price to pay for the nation’s past misdeeds B) Germany is responsible for the horrible crimes it committed in World War II C) they will be misunderstood if they talk about the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy D) it-is wrong to equate their sufferings with those of other countries
）There are people in Italy who can’t stand soccer. Not all Canadians love hockey. A similar situation exists in America, where there are those individuals you may be one of them who yawn or even frown when somebody mentions baseball. 『Baseball to them means boring hours watching grown men in funny tight outfits standing around in a field staring away while very little of anything happens.』① They tell you it’s a game better suited to the 19th century, slow, quiet, gentlemanly. These are the same people you may be one of them who love football because there’s the sport that glorifies “the hit”.
By contrast, baseball seems abstract, cool, silent, still.
On TV the game is fractured into a dozen perspectives, replays, close
ups. The geometry of the game, however,
is essential to understanding it. You will contemplate the game from one point as a painter does his subject; you may, of course, project yourself into the game. It is in this projection that the game affords so much space and time for involvement. The TV won’t do it for you.
Take, for example, the third baseman. You sit behind the third base dugout and you watch him watching home plate. His legs are apart, knees flexed. His arms hang loose. He does a lot of this. The skeptic still cannot think of any other sports so still, so passive. 『But watch what happens every time the pitcher throws: the third baseman goes up on his toes, flexes his arms or bring the glove to a point in front of him, takes a step right or left, backward or forward, perhaps he glances across the field to check his first baseman’s position.』② Suppose the pitch is a ball. “Nothing happened,” you say. “I could have had my eyes closed.”
The skeptic and the innocent must play the game. And this involvement in the stands is no more intellectual than listening to music is. Watch the third baseman. Smooth the dirt in front of you with one foot; smooth the pocket in your glove; watch the eyes of the batter, the speed of the bat, the sound of horsehide on wood. If football is a symphony of movement and theatre, baseball is chamber music, a spacious interlocking of notes, chores and responses.
1. The passage is mainly concerned with . A. the different tastes of people for sports B. the different characteristics of sports C. the attraction of football D. the attraction of baseball
2012四川大学考博英语真题及答案详解
