2020年广东自考英语阅读（二）模考试题及答案

I. Vocabulary. ( 10 points, 1 point for each)

Scan the following passage and find the words which have roughly the same meanings as those given below. The number in the bracket after each word definition refers to the number of paragraph in which the target word is. Write the word you choose on the ANSWER SHEET.

About three hundred years ago, there were approximately half a billion people in the world. In the two centuries that followed the population doubled, and, by 1850, there were more than a billion people in the world. It took only 75 years for the figure to double once more, so that now the population figure stands at approximately six and one half billion. Each day the population of the world increases by about 150,000.

In former centuries the population grew slowly. Famines, wars, and epidemics, such as the plague and cholera, killed many people. Today, although the birth rate has not changed significantly, the death rate has been lowered considerably by various kinds of progress.

Machinery has made it possible to produce more and more food in vast areas, such as the plains of America and Russia. Crops have increased almost everywhere and people are growing more and more food. New forms of food preservation have also been developed so that food need not be eaten as soon as it has grown. Meat, fish, fruit and vegetables can be dried, tinned or frozen, then stored for later use.

Improvement in communications and transportation has made it possible to send more food from the place where it is produced to other places where it is needed. This has helped reduced the number of famines.

Generally speaking, people live in conditions of greater security. Practices such as the slave trade, which caused many useless deaths, have been stopped.

1. one hundred years (Para. 1)

2. symbol for a number (Para. 1)

3. an extreme scarcity of food (Para 2)

4. an outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely (Para.2)

5. importantly (Para.2)

6. much; a great deal (Para. 2)

7. preparation of food to resist decay (Para. 3)

8. to reserve or put away for future use (Para.3)

9. a means or system of carrying passengers or goods from one place to another (Para. 4)

10. the state of being safe (Para. 5) 

II. Reading Comprehension. (50 points, 2 points for each)

In this part of the test, there are five passages. Following each passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.

Passage One

Q. There’s a lot of talk about putting up manned orbital stations. What does this mean, concretely?

A. It is very important to have scientific stations in space. A space telescope with a mirror slightly over six and a half feet in diameter will be placed in orbit, and there will be more and more of these. A few years ago, our group at Saclay, in collaboration with a number of other European Laboratories, orbited a telescope that revolutionized our knowledge of gamma-ray emissions by celestial objects.

Life aboard manned space stations won’t be as exciting as we might suppose. It will probably be comparable to the life people lead aboard deep-sea oil rigs.

Q. What scientific interest will these stations offer?

A. Observation is much more precise beyond the atmosphere, because the sky is darker. You see many more stars and objects that are concealed by the earth’s luminescence.

Q. What objects?

A. We know pretty well how stars are born because we can observe them. Two or three new stars appear in our galaxy every year. But nearly all the galaxies were born at the same time, when the universe was constituted 15 billion (light) years ago. No new ones are thought to exist.

To observe the birth of a galaxy that happened so long ago, you have to see a very long way. At present we can go back 10 to 12 billion years. We have to go a bit farther back still, and maybe catch them in the act of birth. Distant objects are necessarily very dim, so ideal conditions are needed to observe them. Orbital stations provide such conditions.

Q. Would orbital stations be choice places from which to try to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences?

A. Not particularly through radio communication, except on certain wave lengths that are absorbed by the atmosphere. But as points of departure for exploration they’ll be very useful.

Q. How far would such exploration go?

A. In 1989 the satellite Voyager II will reach Neptune after a journey of three and a half years. In addition, five probes were sent to rendezvous with Halley’s comet. So exploration of the solar system is more or less under way. We’ve put people on the moon, sent probes to Mars and Venus, lofted satellites near the sun (within a few tens of millions of miles), and one satellite even left the solar system a few years ago.

But visiting the stars is something else again. Light takes four years to reach the nearest stars, so you can see that it would take a satellite hundreds of thousands of years.

Of course, if the earth were to become overpopulated, we can imagine sending families in space vessels to colonize the nearest stars. But it’s their great-great-great-grandchildren who would finally reach those stars. And they wouldn’t even know where to stop. 

Questions 11-15 are based on Passage One. 

11. A space station is a _____.

A. telescope in orbit

B. laboratory in space

C. celestial object

D. collaboration of labs

12. The writer compares the life on a space station to the one on a deep-sea oil rig in order to show____.

A. dull environment

B. excitement in the wild

C. hard living conditions

D. the sameness in operation

13. In Para.7 the sentence “No new ones are thought to exist” means ____.

A. nobody believes that any new galaxy exists now

B. nobody believes that there is any new galaxy to be found soon

C. people believe that the galaxies are very old now

D. people are wrong to believe that new galaxies will appear

14. Orbital stations provide an ideal condition to observe a galaxy because ____.

A. we are closer to it in space

B. we can go back 10 to 12 billion years

C. a galaxy appears dimmer in that environment than on earth

D. a galaxy appears brighter in that environment than on earth.

15. We may draw a conclusion from Para.14 that ____.

A. human habitation on other stars is a pure imagination

B. even later generations won’t know which star to land on

C. colonizing other stars is a solution to overpopulation

D. reaching other stars by present technology is still unrealistic 

Passage Two

In 1998 consumers could purchase virtually anything over the Internet. Books, compact discs, and even stocks were available from World Wide Websites that seemed to spring up almost daily. A few years earlier, some people had predicted that consumers accustomed to shopping in stores would be reluctant to buy things that they could not see or touch in person. For a growing number of time-starved consumers, however, shopping from their home computer was proving to be a convenient alternative to driving to the store.

A research estimated that in 1998 US consumers would purchase $7.3 billion of goods over the Internet, double the 1997 total. Finding a bargain was getting easier, owing to the rise of online auctions and Websites that did comparison shopping on the Internet for the best deal.

For all the consumers’ interest, retailing in cyberspace was still a largely unprofitable business, however, Internet pioneer Amazon. com, which began selling books in 1995 and later branched into recorded music and videos, posted revenue of $153.7 million in the third quarter, up from $37.9 million in the same period of 1997. Overall, however, the company’s loss widened to $45.2 million from $9.6 million, and analysts did not expect the company to turn a profit until 2001. Despite the great loss, Amazon. Com had a stock market value of many billions, reflecting investors’ optimism about the future of the industry.

Internet retailing appealed to investors because it provided an efficient means for reaching millions of consumers without having the cost of operating conventional stores with their armies of salespeople. Selling online carried its own risks, however. With so many companies competing for consumers’ attention, price competition was intense and profit margins were thin or nonexistent. One video retailer sold the hit movie Titanic for $9.99, undercutting the $19.99 suggested retail price and losing about $6 on each copy sold. With Internet retailing still in its initial stage, companies seemed willing to absorb such losses in an attempt to establish a dominant market position. 

Questions 16-20 are based on Passage Two 

16. According to the writer, which of the following is true?

A. Consumers are reluctant to buy things on the Internet.

B. Consumers are too busy to buy things on the Internet.

C. More and more consumers prefer Internet shopping.

D. Internet retailing is a profitable business.

17. Finding a bargain on the Internet was getting easier partly because _____.

A. there were more and more online auctions.

B. there were more and more Internet users.

C. the consumers had more money to spend.

D. there were more goods available on the Internet

18. “For all the consumer interest” (Para. 3) means _____.

A. to the interest of all the consumers

B. for the interest of all the consumers

C. all the consumers are much interested

D. though consumers are very much interested

19. It can be inferred from the passage that Amazon. com ______.

A. is making a profit now

B. will probably make a profit in 2001

C. is a company that sells books only

D. suffers a great loss on the stock market

20. Investors are interested in Internet retailing because _____.

A. selling online involves little risk

B. Internet retailing is in its initial stage

C. they can make huge profits from it

D. it can easily reach millions of consumers 

Passage Three

The ear is indeed a remarkable mechanism; it is so complicated that its operation is not well-understood. Certainly it is extremely sensitive. At the threshold of audibility, the power requirement is inconceivably tiny. If all the people in the United States were listening simultaneously to a whisper (20 decibels (分贝)), the power received by all their collective eardrums would total only a few millionths of a watt (瓦特) — far less than the power generated by a single flying mosquito.

This aural organ is also remarkable for its ability to distinguish various pitches and other qualities of sound. In the range of frequencies where the ear is most sensitive (between 500 and 4,000 vibrations per second), changes in pitch of only 0.3 percent can be detected. Thus, if a singer trying to reach the octave above middle C (512 vibrations per second) is off-key by only 1.5 vibrations per second, the fault can be detected.

The normal ear can respond to frequencies ranging from 20 to 20,000 vibrations per second. In this range, it is estimated that the ear can distinguish more than half a million separate pure tones; that is, 500,000 differences in frequency or loudness. The range varies somewhat from ear to ear and becomes somewhat shorter for low-intensity sounds. Above the audible range, air vibrations similar to sound are called supersonic vibrations. These may be generated and detected by electrical devices and are useful particularly for depth sounding at sea. The time for the waves to travel from the generator to the bottom of the ocean and back again is measure of the depth of that particular spot. Supersonic vibrations apparently can be heard by some animals — notably bats. It is believed that bats are guided during flight by supersonic sounds (supersonic only to humans) which they emit and which are reflected back to their ears in a kind of natural radar. Humans can tell approximately where a sound comes from because we have two ears, not one. The sound arriving at one ear gives the brain information, which the latter organ interprets to note the direction from which the sound originally came. 

Questions 21-25 are based on Passage Three. 

21. The amount of wattage received by the normal eardrum ____.

A. indicates the amount of electrical energy

B. is extremely sensitive

C. is remarkably long

D. is extraordinarily small

22. A Sound coming from a person’s left side would ____.

A. hit the left ear first

B. hit both ears at the same time

C. pass on to the right side

D. generate electrical devices to the brain

23. All of the following is true EXCEPT that ____.

A. the ear is so complicated that its operation is not fully understood yet

B. the ear is so sensitive that it can distinguish full range of frequencies

C. the ear is remarkable for its ability to tell the differences of various pitches

D. the ear can distinguish more than 500,000 separate pure tones when the frequencies range from 20 to 20,000 vibrations per second

24. The direction of sound can be detected ____.

A. because sound arrives in each ear at different time intervals

B. by the frequency and duration of the sound

C. by the inner ear only

D. by combining kinesthetic and tactile data

25. The best title for this passage is _____.

A. How Ears Tell Directions

B. How Sounds Come to Ears

C. The Ear — An Amazing Part of the Body

D. How Ears Distinguish Pitches