2011年南开大学考博英语部分试题
4阅读理解 共4篇40分： 比去年少一篇但是明显偏难了
第一题，有关公司内部职员股票； 经济
第二题，有关霍金的Big Bang，黑洞理论；物理
第三题，有关对黑人的歧视；政治
第四题，生物入侵；生物。此四篇据说涵盖了南开四大优势学科。
5改错题10空10分，原文：
Whenever you see an old film, even one made as little as ten years ago, you cannot help being struck by the appearance of the women taking part. Their hair-styles and make-up look dated; their skirts look either too long or too short; their general appearance is, in fact, slightly ludicrous. The men taking part in the film, on the other hand, are clearly recognizable. There is nothing about their appearance to suggest that they belong to an entirely different age. This illusion is created by changing fashions. Over the year, the great majority of men have successfully resisted all attempts to make them change their style of dress. The same cannot be said for women. Each year a few so- called top designers in Paris or London lay down the law and women the whole world over rush to obey. The decrees of the designers are unpredictable and dictatorial. This year, they decide in their arbitrary fashion, skirts will be short and waists will be high; zips are in and buttons are out. Next year the law is reversed and far from taking exception, no one is even mildly surprised.ýYó#S²QÝ)forum.liuxuehome.com½üQ¡
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If women are mercilessly exploited year after year, they have only themselves to blame. Because they shudder at the thought of being seen in public in clothes that are out of fashion, they are annually black-mailed by the designers and the big stores. Clothes, which have been worn, only a few times have to be discarded because of the dictates of fashion. When you come to think of it, only a women is capable of standing in front of a wardrobe packed full of clothes and announcing sadly that she has nothing to wear.ýYó#S²QÝ)forum.liuxuehome.com½üQ¡
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Changing fashions are nothing more than the deliberate creation of waste. Many women squander vast sums of money each year to replace clothes that have hardly been worn. Women, who cannot afford to discard clothing in this way, waste hours of their time altering the dresses they have. Hem-limes are taken up or let down; waist-lines are taken in or let out; neck-lines are lowered or raised, and so on.ýYó#S²QÝ)forum.liuxuehome.com½üQ¡
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No one can claim that the fashion industry contributes anything really important to society. Fashion designers are rarely concerned with vital things like warmth, comfort and durability. They are only interested in outward appearance and they take advantage of the fact that women will put up with any amount of discomfort, providing they look right. There can hardly be a man who hasn’t at some time in his life smiled at the sight of a woman shivering in a flimsy dress on a wintry day, or delicately picking her way through deep snow in dainty shoes.ýYó#S²QÝ)forum.liuxuehome.com½üQ¡
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When comparing men and women in the matter of fashion, the conclusions to be drawn are obvious. Do the constantly changing fashions of women’s clothes, one wonders, reflect basic qualities of fickleness and instability? Men are too sensible to let themselves be bullied by fashion designers. Do their unchanging styles of dress reflect basic qualities of stability and reliability? That is for you to decide.ýYó#S²QÝ)forum.liuxuehome.com½üQ¡
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阅读相对论原文：
Stephen William Hawking Biography
The theories of British physicist and mathematician Stephen William Hawking (born 1942) placed him in the great tradition of Newton and Einstein. Hawking made fundamental contributions to the science of cosmology--the study of the origins, structure, and space-time relationships of the universe.
Stephen W. Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. His father, a well-known researcher in tropical medicine, urged his son to seek a career in the sciences. Stephen found biology and medicine too descriptive and lacking in exactness. Therefore, he turned to the study of mathematics and physics.
Hawking was not an outstanding student at St. Alban's School, Hertfordshire, nor later at Oxford University, which he entered in 1959. He was a sociable young man who did little schoolwork because he was able to grasp the essentials of a mathematics or physics problem quickly and intuitively. While at Oxford he became increasingly interested in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, eventually graduating with a first class honors in physics (1962). He immediately began post-graduate studies at Cambridge University.
The onset of Hawking's graduate education at Cambridge marked a turning point in his life. It was then that he embarked upon the formal study of cosmology that focused his intellectual energies in a way that they had never been previously. And it was then that he was first stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), a debilitating neuromotor disease that eventually led to his total confinement to a wheelchair and to a virtual loss of his speech functions. At Cambridge his talents were recognized by his major professor, the cosmologist Dennis W. Sciama, and he was encouraged to carry on his studies despite his growing physical disabilities. His marriage in 1965 to Jane Wilde was an important step in his emotional life. Marriage gave him, he recalled, the determination to live and make professional progress in the world of science. Hawking received his doctorate degree in 1966 and began his life-long research and teaching association with Cambridge University.
Hawking made his first major contribution to science with his theorem of singularity, a work which grew out of his collaboration with theoretician Roger Penrose. A singularity is a place in either space or time at which some quantity becomes infinite. Such a place is found in a black hole, the final stage of a collapsed star, where the gravitational field has infinite strength. Penrose proved that a singularity was not a hypothetical construct; it could exist in the space-time of a real universe.
Drawing upon Penrose's work and on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, Hawking demonstrated that our universe had its origins in a singularity. In the beginning all of the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point, making a very small but tremendously dense body. Ten to twenty billion years ago that body exploded in a big bang which initiated time and the universe. Hawking was able to bring current astrophysical research to support the big bang theory of the origin of the universe and refute the rival steady-state theory.
Hawking's research into the cosmological implications of singularities led him to study the properties of the best-known singularity: the black hole. Although a black hole is a discontinuity in space-time, its boundary, called the event horizon, can be detected. Hawking proved that the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole could only increase, not decrease, and that when two black holes merged the surface area of the new hole was larger than the sum of the two original surface areas. Working in concert with B. Carter, W. Israel, and D. Robinson, Hawking was also able to prove the "No Hair Theorem" first proposed by physicist John Wheeler. According to this theorem, mass, angular momentum, and electric charge were the sole properties conserved when matter entered a black hole.
Hawking's continuing examination of the nature of black holes led to two important discoveries. The first of them, that black holes can emit thermal radiation, was contrary to the claim that nothing could escape from a black hole. The second concerned the size of black holes. As originally conceived, black holes were immense in size because they were the end result of the collapse of gigantic stars. Using quantum mechanics to study particle interaction at the subatomic level, Hawking postulated the existence of millions of mini-black holes. These were formed by the force of the original big bang explosion.
Hawking summarized his scientific interests as "gravity--on all scales," from the realm of galaxies at one extreme to the subatomic at the other extreme. In the 1980s Hawking worked on a theory that Einstein unsuccessfully searched for in his later years. This is the famous unified field theory that aims to bring together quantum mechanics and relativity in a quantum theory of gravity. A complete unified theory encompasses the four main interactions known to modern physics: the strong nuclear force, which operates at the subatomic level; electromagnetism; the weak nuclear force of radioactivity; and gravity. The unified theory would account for the conditions which prevailed at the origin of the universe as well as for the existing physical laws of nature. When humans develop the unified field theory, said Hawking, they will "know the mind of God."
As his physical condition grew worse Hawking's intellectual achievements increased. Not content with causing a revolution in cosmology, he presented a popular exposition of his ideas in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. First published in 1988, this book acquired great popularity in the United States. It sold over a million copies and was listed as the best-selling nonfiction book for over a year.
In 1993 Hawking wrote Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, which, in addition to a discussion of whether elementary particles that fall into black holes can form new, "baby" universes separate from our own, contains chapters about Hawking's personal life. He co-authored a book in 1996 with Sir Roger Penrose titled The Nature of Space and Time, which is based on a series of lectures and a final debate by the two authors. Issues discussed in this book include whether the universe has boundaries and if it will continue to expand forever. Hawking says yes to the first question and no to the second, while Penrose argues the opposite. Hawking joined Penrose again the following year, as well as Abner Shimony and Nancy Cartwright, in the creation of another book, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (1997). In this collection of talks given as Cambridge's 1995 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Hawking and the others respond to Penrose's thesis on general relativity, quantum physics, and artificial intelligence.
Hawking's work in modern cosmology and in theoretical astronomy and physics was widely recognized. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1974 and five years later was named to a professorial chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton: Lucasian professor of mathematics, Cambridge University. Beyond these honors he earned a host of honorary degrees, awards, prizes, and lectureships from the major universities and scientific societies of Europe and America. These included the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1975; the Pius XI Gold Medal, in 1975; the Maxwell Medal of the Institute of Physics, in 1976; the Albert Einstein Award of the Lewis and Rose Strauss Memorial Fund (the most prestigious award in theoretical physics), in 1978; the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, in 1981; the Gold Medal of the Royal Society, in 1985; the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize, in 1987; and the Britannica Award, in 1989. By the last decade of the 20th century Stephen Hawking had become one of the best-known scientists in the world.
Hawking's endeavors include endorsing a wireless connection to the internet produced by U.S. Robotics Inc., beginning in March 1997, and speaking to wheelchair-bound youth. In addition, Hawking made an appearance on the television series Star Trek that his fans will not soon forget.
Hawking does not readily discuss his personal life, but it is generally know that he was divorced from his first wife in 1991 and they have two sons and a daughter.
When asked about his objectives, Hawking told Robert Deltete of Zygon in a 1995 interview, "My goal is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
阅读生物入侵原文：
WHAT makes for a successful invasion? Often, the answer is to have better weapons than the enemy. And, as it is with people, so it is with plants—at least, that is the conclusion of a paper published in ★Biology Letters[1] by Naomi Cappuccino, of Carleton University, and Thor Arnason, of the University of Ottawa, both in Canada.
怎样才能成功入侵？答案常常是：拥有比敌人更好的武器。人是这样，植物也是如此——至少，《生物书简》上发表的一篇论文是这么认为的，作者是来自加拿大加里敦大学的纳奥米•卡普奇诺和渥太华大学的索尔•阿纳森。
The phenomenon of alien species ★popping up[2] in unexpected parts of the world has grown over the past few decades as people and goods become more mobile and （1）►plant seeds and animal larvae have ★hitched[3] along for the ride◄. Most such aliens blend into the ecosystem in which they arrive without too much fuss. (Indeed, many probably fail to establish themselves at all—but those failures, of course, are never noticed.) Occasionally, though, something ★goes bananas[4] and starts trying to take the place over, and an invasive species is born. Dr Cappuccino and Dr Arnason asked themselves why.
过去的几十年，随着人和货物的流动日益频繁，植物种子和动物幼体也乘机“搭便车”四处播散，世界各地无意间出现了越来越多的外来物种。这些外来物种大多数都轻而易举地融入了所到之处的生态系统。（事实上，许多物种可能还没有站稳脚跟——当然，人们从未注意到这一点。）不过，偶尔也有某些物种疯狂繁殖，开始企图占领原有物种的生长空间，一种入侵物种就这样形成了。卡普奇诺和阿纳森对此感到百思不得其解。
One hypothesis is that aliens leave their predators behind. Since the predators in their new homelands are not adapted to exploit them, they are able to reproduce unchecked. That is a nice idea, but it does not explain why only certain aliens become invasive. Dr Cappuccino and Dr Arnason suspected this might be because native predators are （2）►sometimes “pre-adapted” to the aliens' defences◄, but in other cases they are not.
有一种假说认为，外来物种摆脱了原先的掠食者，而在新的“家园”，现有的掠食者又没有发现它们也合口味，因此这些物种得以肆无忌惮地繁衍。这种观点好是好，不过没有解释为什么只有特定的外来物种才具有入侵性。卡普奇诺和阿纳森猜测，这可能是因为土生土长的掠食者对外来物种所具有的防御机制有时产生“预适应”，有时又不产生。
To test this, they had first to establish a reliable list of invaders. That is not as easy as it sounds. As they observe, “although there are many lists of invasive species published by governmental agencies, inclusion of a given species in the lists （3）►may not be entirely free of political motivation◄”. Instead, they polled established researchers in the field of alien species, asking each to list ten invasive species and, for comparison, ten aliens that just ★rubbed along quietly with[5] their neighbours. The result was a list of 21 species widely agreed to be invasive and, for comparison, 18 non-invasive aliens.
为了证实这一猜测，他们必须首先列出一些已经确认的入侵物种。这可不是件轻松的事。正如他们所说，“虽然政府部门公布了许多入侵物种名单，但是把指定物种归入此名单也许多少有些出于政治上的考虑。”为此，他们调查了外来物种领域一些有名望的研究人员，请每人举出10种入侵物种，以及10种与本地物种能和睦共生的外来物种用于对照。最后得到的名单中包括21种被广泛认可的入侵物种和18种用于对照的非入侵性外来物种。
Having established these lists, they went to the library to find out what was known about the plants' chemistry. Their aim was to find the most prominent chemical weapon in each plant, whether that weapon was directed against insects that might want to eat the plant, bacteria and fungi that might want to infect it, or other plants that might compete for space, water, nutrients and light. Botanists know a lot about which sorts of compounds have what roles, so classifying constituent chemicals in this way was not too hard.
名单确定之后，他们就到图书馆查询这些植物的化学性质，旨在找出每种植物所拥有的作用最为突出的“化学武器”。这种“化学武器”的攻击对象包括可能吃掉该植物的昆虫，使其感染的细菌和真菌以及与其竞争生长空间、水、养料和阳光的其它植物。植物学家对哪些化合物有哪些作用都了如指掌，因此这样对化学物质进行分类并不太难。
The researchers then compared the chemical arsenals of their aliens with those of native North American plants, （4）►to see if superior (or, at least, unusual) weaponry was the explanation for the invaders' success.◄ Their hypothesis was that highly invasive species would have chemical weapons not found in native plants, and which pests, parasites and other plants would therefore not have evolved any resistance to. The more benign aliens, by contrast, were predicted to have arsenals also found in at least some native species.
然后，为了弄清外来物种的成功入侵是否得益于“超级武器“（或者至少是超常武器），这两位研究人员将已知外来物种的“化学武器库”同北美土生土长的植物“化学武器库”进行了比较。他们推断，具有高度入侵性的物种拥有土产植物所缺少的“化学武器”，对这种化学武器，害虫、寄生虫及其它植物都不能产生任何抵抗力。相比之下，入侵性较弱的外来物种所具有的“武器库”可能至少同样存在于某些土产物种。
And so it proved. More than 40% of the invasive species had a chemical unknown to native plants; just over 10% of the non-invasive aliens had such a chemical. Moreover, when they looked at past studies on alien plants that had examined how much such plants suffer from the ★depredations[6] of herbivorous insects, they found that the extent of the damage reported was significantly correlated with the number of native species with which that alien shared its principal chemical weapon.
猜测因而得到了证实。40%以上的入侵物种含有一种土产植物所没有的化学物质，仅10%多一点的非入侵外来物种含此物质。而且，他们在看了以前一些关于外来物种的研究（已经查实这类植物受食草昆虫的损害程度）之后，发现损害程度与土产植物的数量密切相关，而外来物种所含的主要“化学武器” 与这些土产植物相同。
For alien plants, then, the real secret of success—also as in human warfare—is surprise. （5）►It is not that the chemicals concerned are more toxic in any general sense◄ (indeed, successful invaders are often rare in their own native habitats). Rather, it is that the locals just don't see them coming.
那么，对于外来植物而言，其成功的真正秘诀——人的竞争也是如此——令人感到惊奇，它不在于一般意义上所认为的那样具有毒性更强的化学物质（的确，入侵成功的外来物种在其原有生长区域内往往很罕见），而是因为本地掠食者根本没有察觉它们的到来。
育明教育考博分校祎丹老师分析：大家在复习的时候需要认真研究历年真题，分析出题方向和特点，这不但是专业课备考的关键，更是公共课备考的精髓。这里主要强调两点：一是分析试题这项工作要提早，因为这对于大家看各种考博书籍和资料有重要的指导意义；另外不仅要思考还要动笔，要认认真真把每一道考博题落实到字面上，你会发现很多原来没有想到过的东西。同时，这种训练可以避免真正考试时因时间仓促和心理压力带来的表达上的不成熟。