I. Choose the rhetorical or figurative device from the list below that best describes the underlined words. All of the devices listed are used only once. Mark your answer with capital letters like A, B, C, …or J . (10%)
List of devices:
A) Repetition F) Personification B) Ridicule G) Antithesis C) Inversion H) Simile D) Alliteration I) Euphemism E) Oxymoron J) Transferred Epithet 1. …He commented with a crushing sense of despair on men’s final release from earthly struggles… 2. He called my conviction a “victorious defeat.” 3. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. 4. Bryan mopped his bald dome in silence. 5. Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. 6. A world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. 7. Gone was the fierce fervour of the days when Bryan had swept the political arena like a prairie fire.
8. The oratorial storm that Clarence Darrow and Dudley Field Malone blew up in the little court in Dayton swept like a fresh wind though the schools… 9. Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel experience. 10. Darrow had whispered throwing a reassuring arm around my shoulder as we were waiting for the court to open.
第 1 页 共 9 页
II. Determine whether the following statements are True or False. Mark them with T or F to indicate your answer. (15%)
1. In “Blackmail”, the Duke of Croydon has the most power because he is the English ambassador to the United States.
2. In the title of the text, “Hiroshima—the ‘Liveliest’ City in Japan”, the word Liveliest is placed in quotations to show sarcasm.
3. In “The Trial That Rocked the World,” Clarence Darrow argues that fundamentalist views deteriorate the progress of society and impede intellectual and cultural advancements.
4. In “But What’s a Dictionary For?” the author points out the contradictions in the publications that criticized the Third International Dictionary because the abusive publications are written in the language that the Third International describes.
5. In “The Middle Eastern Bazaar”, the author speaks to the audience in second-person, as if the reader is walking through the bazaar with him.
6. In “An Interactive Life” the author argues that technology will help society as a whole but disconnect and isolate individuals.
7. In “Mark Twain—Mirror of America”, the author argues that Twain’s days as a cub pilot enhance all of his writing and particularly his writing about the Mississippi River.
8. The author expresses that the real outcome of the trial in “The Trial that Rocked the World” was a victory for the fundamentalists, who proved that only creationism is reasonable to teach.
9. In “Speech on Hitler’s Invasion of the USSR”, we can tell that Winston Churchill changed from an anti-communist to a pro-communist.
10. In “Middle Eastern Bazaar” the author describes what he sees, hears
and smells in the bazaar.
III. Explain, in your own words, the meaning of the underlined part of each sentence. (10%)
1. Springing to her feet, her face wrathful, gray-green eyes blazing, she faced the grossness of the house detective squarely.
第 2 页 共 9 页
2. As my father growled, “That’s one hell of a jury!” 3. I was about to make my little bow of assent, when the meaning of these last words sank in, jolting me out of my sad reverie. 4. After the preliminary sparring over legalities, Darrow got up to make his opening statement. 5. The instant riches of a mining strike would not be his in the mining trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax.
IV. Choose from the list below the appropriate substitution for each of the italicized parts of the following sentences. (10%)
A. collect B. groups of thinking C. like D. sounding over and over E. bribe
1. As for the impacts of the future of the global economy, there are many schools of thought.
2. “If you want me to keep your boyfriend a secret, you’ll have to buy me off.”
3. Although Madison hated Sam in September, after two months of meetings with him at work, she was beginning to warm to his sense of humor.
4. “After you’re done working, will you round up everyone? I have a surprise to give to our boss. I want everyone there.”
5. After my girlfriend dumped me, all I heard was her voice ringing in my head for months.
V. Fifteen words are taken away at irregular intervals from the passage below. You are expected to fill in the blanks with
第 3 页 共 9 页
suitable words from below that best keep the meaning and structure of the sentences. (15%)
A. fed B. daring C. muscles D. padded E. ring F. off G. massacre H. consequences
Mark Twain 1 and experimented with his new writing 2 , but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing articles he wrote. Attacks 3 the city government, concerning such issues as 4 of Chinese, 5 angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-country settlers there 6 familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend setting on the West Coast. “It was a splendid population—for all the 7 , sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home… It was that population that gave to California a name for getting 8 astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and 9 and a recklessness of cost or 10 , which she bears unto this day—and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says, ‘Well, that is California all over.’ ……
Bitterness 11 on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well 12 with humor. Now the gloves came 13 with biting satire. He pretended to praise the U.S. military for the 14 of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic crater. In the Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious 15 and depend up on himself, not Providence, to make a better world.
I. on
J. honed K. up L. slow M. illusion N. mistreatment O. so
VI. Reading Comprehension (20%)
(A) (from a short story by Mishima Yukio)
第 4 页 共 9 页
(1) He was always busy, Toshiko’s husband. Even tonight he had to dash off to an appointment, leaving her to go home alone by taxi. But what else could a woman expect when she married an actor—an attractive one? No doubt she had been foolish to hope that he would spend the evening with her. And yet he must have known how she dreaded going back to their house, unhomely with its Western-style furniture and with the bloodstains still showing on the floor.
(2) Toshiko had been oversensitive since girlhood: that was her nature. As the result of constant worrying she never put on weight, and now, an adult woman, she looked more like a transparent picture than a creature of flesh and blood. Her delicacy of spirit was evident to her most casual acquaintance.
(3) Earlier that evening, when she had joined her husband at a night club, she had been shocked to find him entertaining friends with an account of “the incident.” Sitting there in his American-style suit, puffing at a cigarette, he had seemed to her almost a stranger.
(4) “It’s a fantastic story,” he was saying, gesturing flamboyantly as if in an attempt to outweigh the attractions of the dance band. “Here this new nurse for our baby arrives from the employment agency, and the very first thing I notice about her is her stomach. It’s enormous—as if she had a pillow stuck under her kimono! No wonder, I thought, for I
soon saw that she could eat more than the rest of us put together. She polished off the contents of our rice bin like that …” He snapped his fingers. “‘Gastric dilation’—that’s how she explained her girth and her appetite. Well, the day before yesterday we heard groans and moans coming from the nursery. We rushed in and found her squatting on the floor, holding her stomach in her two hands, and moaning like a cow. Next to her our baby lay in his cot, scared out of his wits and crying at the top of his lungs. A pretty scene, I can tell you!”
(5) “So the cat was out of the bag?” suggested one of their friends, a film actor like Toshiko’s husband.
1. Based on the passage, what kind of attitude do you think Toshiko holds toward America and the West?
(A) She envies the culture of the West.
(B) She married her husband because he is often like an American.
第 5 页 共 9 页
(C) The idea of the West makes her uncomfortable.
(D) Toshiko finds American and Western things mysterious.
2. In paragraph 4, “gesturing flamboyantly” means that Toshiko’s husband _____
(A) Smiles broadly.
(B) Explains his story with large hand movements.
(C) Is calling a waiter to his table to order food and drink. (D) Looks drunk and silly.
3. In paragraph 4, “She polished off the contents of our rice bin like that” means_____
(A) The nurse did not like the rice and left it alone. (B) The nurse cleaned the rice bin very well. (C) The nurse cooked all of the rice in one day.
(D) The nurse ate quickly and finished everything.
4. In the last paragraph, “So the cat was out of the bag?” refers to_____ (A) The nurse losing all of her weight. (B) The baby screaming in the cot.
(C) The moaning and groaning sounds coming from the nurse. (D) The nurse’s secret was discovered.
5. Which of the following represents an appropriate title for this passage? (A) An Unhappy Marriage (B) The Nurse’s Secret (C) Toshiko’s Husband (D) A Very Fat Nurse
Reading Comprehension (B)
“WHAT are Papa and I doing here?”
These words, instant-messaged by my mother in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean cables and came to me in the village where I’m now living, in the country that she left.
It was five years ago that I left America to come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring motherland opportunities. As economies convulse in the West and jobs dry up, the idea is spreading virally in émigré homes.
第 6 页 共 9 页
Which raises a heart-stirring question: If our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?
If we are here, what are they doing there?
They came of age in the 1970s, when the “there” seemed paved with possibility and the “here” seemed paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.
My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of Washington’s best schools.
It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.
My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.
Perhaps it was the survivalism born of scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.
My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.
India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: It liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.
第 7 页 共 9 页
America, meanwhile, floundered. In a blink of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, rising economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate change, dwindling oil, a financial crisis.
Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a “Post-American World.” Even in the wake of a historic presidential election, culminating in a dramatic change in direction, it remained unclear whether the United States could be delivered from its woes any time soon.
“In the U.S., there’s a crisis of confidence,” said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant. “In India,” he added, “for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children’s futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough.”
My love for the country of my birth has never flickered. But these new times piqued interest in my ancestral land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.
6. The author tells his parents’ story as a way to______
(A) demonstrate that they had lived a typical American-immigrant life. (B) demonstrate their love of America and why they will not return to India.
(C) demonstrate the difference between his own and his parents’ American experiences.
(D) demonstrate the changes of the American economy over 50 years. 7. In paragraph 3, “dry up,” means_______ (A) the quality of jobs is decreasing. (B) the demand for jobs is decreasing.
(C) jobs in the West are decreasing their salaries.
(D) jobs in the West are not as exciting as those elsewhere. 8. As a child, the author found India alienating because______
(A) the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin revealed and criticized the corruption of India’s society.
(B) although he looked Indian, his background was American and he didn’t speak the local language.
第 8 页 共 9 页
(C) the choice between doctors and lawyers as a way to be higher in society was foreign to him.
(D) the lack of choice in the established system completely opposed what he knew in America.
9. The author’s main feeling toward America is_______
(A) hopelessness. The US has become weak and the author says people should move back to their original countries.
(B) resent. The author doesn’t like how America changed his family’s traditions.
(C) appreciation. Even though the author is in India, he still loves the US for the opportunities it gave his parents.
(D) loneliness. The author found himself alone as an Indian growing up. 10. The main change in the Indian economy came from_______ (A) the dwindling power of the US because of many disasters. (B) changing religious views on fate in small Indian villages. (C) the evolution from a command economy to a market economy. (D) success in economic education in traditional villages.
VII. Write out a short essay on the following subject in about 200 words. (20%)
The Happiest Moment in My Life
第 9 页 共 9 页
因篇幅问题不能全部显示，请点此查看更多更全内容