2013年北京大学考博英语真题-阅读理解
资料来源：《考博英语真题解析》育明教育出品，北外夏衍教授主编
更多考博资讯资料获取QQ：547063862 电话：153-1148-1034
针对北京地区院校的考博开设的辅导课程包括：专业课小班课程·一对一课程·视频班·定向保录班·复试保过班。欢迎你的加入，为自己的考博成功打下坚实的基础。
Part IV: Reading Comprehension (30%)
Directions: Each of the following four passages is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each question or unfinished statement, four answers are given. Read the passages and choose the best answer to each questions. Mark your choice on the ANSWER SHEET.
Passage 1
A considerable part of Facebook's appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or fusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that American's once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook's isolation is a grind. What's truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume — 750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend — but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users — and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user — log on every day. Among 18- to- 34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.
Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn't being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature — and this is not a minor revelation — is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left talking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.
41. Which of the following statements regarding the power of Facebook can be inferred from the passage?
A. It creates the isolation people want.
B. It delivers a more friendly world.
C. It produces intimacy people lack in the real world.
D. It enables us to be social while avoiding the mess of human interaction.
42. Which of the following statements about the underside of Facebook is supported by the information contained in this passage?
A. It imprisons people in the business of self-presentation.
B. It causes social disintegration.
C. It makes people vainer.
D. It makes people lonelier.
43. Which of the following best states "the new isolation" mentioned by the author?
A. It is full of the spirit of adventure
B. It is the extension of individualism.
C. It has a touch of narcissism.
D. It evolves from the appetite for independence.
44. Which of the following belongs to the category of "something that matters" according to the passage?
A. Constant connection
B. Instant communication
C. Smooth sociability
D. A human bond
45. Which of the following conclusions about Facebook does the author want us to draw?
A. It creates friendship.
B. It denies us the pleasure of socializing.
C. It opens a new world for us.
D. It draws us into a paradox.
Passage 2
Most scholars agree that Isaac Newton, while formulating the laws of force and gravity and inventing the calculus in the late 1600s, probably knew all the science there was to know at the time. In the ensuing 350 years an estimated 50 million research papers and innumerable books have been published in the natural sciences and mathematics. The modern high school student probably now possesses more scientific knowledge than Newton did, yet science to many people seems to be an impenetrable mountain of facts.
One way scientists have tried to cope with this mountain is by becoming more and more specialized. Another strategy for coping with the mountain of information is to largely ignore it. That shouldn't come as a surprise. Sure, you have to know a lot to be a scientist, but knowing a lot is not what makes a scientist. What makes a scientist is ignorance. This may sound ridiculous, but for scientists the fact are just a starting place. In science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions.
By this calculus, ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for all we have come to know, there is far more we don't know. More important, every day there is far more we know than we don't know. One crucial outcome of scientist knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being ignorant: not the kind of ignorance that associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a cultivated, high-quality ignorance. This gets to the essence of what scientists do: they make distinctions: between qualities of ignorance. They do it in grant proposals and over beers at meetings. As James Clerk Maxwell, probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, said “Thoroughly conscious ignorance ... is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge.”
This perspective on science — that it is about the questions more than the answers — should come as something of a relief. It makes science less threatening and far more friendly and, in fact, fun. Science becomes a series of elegant puzzles and puzzles within puzzles — and who doesn't like puzzles? Questions are also more accessible and often more interesting than answers; answers tend to be the end of the process, whereas questions have you in the thick of things.
Lately this side of science has taken a backseat in the public mind to what I call the accumulation view of science — that it is a pile of facts way too big for us to ever hope to conquer. But if scientists would talk about questions, and if the media reported not only on new discoveries but the questions they answered and the new puzzles they created, and if educators stopped trafficking in facts that already available on Wikipedia — then we might find a public once again engaged in this great adventure that has been going on for the past 15 generations.
46. Which of the following would most scholars agree to about Newton and science?
A. Newton was the only person who knew all the science in the 1600s
B. Newton's laws of force and gravity dominated science for 350 years.
C. Since Newton's time, science has developed into a mountain of facts
D. A high school student probably knows more science than Newton did.
47. Which of the following is best support in this passage?
A. A scientist is a master of knowledge.
B. Knowledge generates better ignorance.
C. Ignorance is a sign of lack of education.
D. Good scientists are thoroughly ignorant
48. Why is it a relief that science is about the questions more than the answers?
A. Because people like solving puzzles.
B. Because questions make science accessible.
C. Because there are more questions than answers,
D. Because questions point the way to deep answers.
49. The expression “take a backseat” (Paragraph 5) probably means ________.
A. take a back place
B. have a different role
C. be of greater priority
D. become less important
50. What is the author's greatest concern in the passage?
A. The involvement of the public in science.
B. Scientists' enjoyment of ignorance.
C. The accumulation of scientific knowledge.
D. Newton's standing in the history of science.
Passage 3
Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it—processing up to 60 million pages of text per second, even when that text is in the form of plain old prose, or what scientists call “natural language”.
That's no small thing, because something like 80 percent of all information is “unstructured”. In medicine, it consists of physician notes dictated into medical records, long-winded sentences published in academic journals, and raw numbers stored online by public-health departments. At least in theory, Watson can make sense of it all. It can sit in on patient examinations, silently listening. And over time, it can learn and get better at figuring out medical problems and ways of treating them the more it interacts with real cases. Watson even has the ability to convey doubt. When it makes diagnoses and recommends treatments, it usually issues a series of possibilities, each with its own level of confidence attached.
Medicine has never before had a tool quite like this. And at an unofficial coming-out party in Las Vegas last year, during the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, more than 1,000 professionals packed a large hotel conference hall, and overflow room nearby, to hear a presentation by Marty Kohn, an emergency-room physician and a clinical leader do the IBM team training Watson for health care. Standing before a video screen that dwarfed his large frame, Kohn described in his husky voice how Watson could be a game changer — not just in highly specialized fields like oncology but also in primary care, given that all doctors can make mistakes that lead to costly, sometimes dangerous, treatment errors.
Drawing on his own clinical experience and on academic studies, Kohn explained that about one-third of these errors appear to be products of misdiagnosis, one cause of which is "anchoring bias": human beings' tendency to rely too heavily on a single piece of information. This happens all the time in doctors' offices, clinics, and emergency rooms. A physician hears about two or three symptoms, seizes on a diagnosis consistent with those, and subconsciously discounts evidence that points to something else. Or a physician hits upon the right diagnosis, but fails to realize that it's incomplete, and ends up treating just one condition when the patient is, in fact, suffering from several. Tools like Watson are less prone to those failings. As such, Kohn believes, they may eventually become as ubiquitous in doctors' offices as the stethoscope.
"Watson fills in for some human limitations." Kohn told me in an interview. "Studies show that human are good at taking a relatively limited list of possibilities and using that list, but a far less adept at using huge volumes of information. That's where Watson shines: taking a huge list of information and winnowing it down."
51. What is Watson?
A. It is a person who aids doctors in processing medical records.
B. it is an online tool that connects doctors over different places.
C. It is an intelligent computer that helps doctors make decisions.
D. It is a beast that greets millions of visitors to a medical institution.
52. Which of the following is beyond Watson's ability?
A. Talk with the patient
B. Calculate probability
C. Recommend treatment
D. Process sophisticated data
53. Marty Kohn ________.
A. gave a presentation at an academic conference
B. works for the IBM Training Division
C. is a short person with a husky voice
D. expressed optimism for Watson
54. "Anchoring bias" ________.
A. is a device ubiquitous in doctors' offices
B. is less likely to be committed by Watson
C. happens in one third of medical treatments
D. is a wrong diagnosis with incomplete information
55. Which of the following may be the best title of the passage?
A. Watson as a Shining Star
B. The Risks of Misdiagnosis
C. The Robot Will See You Now
D. IBM's IT Solution to Medicine