全国2011年1月高等教育自学考试
英语阅读(二)试题
课程代码：00596
请将答案填在答题纸相应位置上，全部题目用英文作答(翻译题除外)
I. Reading Comprehension (50 points, 2 points for each)
Directions: 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 tile best answer and then write the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.
Passage One
Young girls and women need to be protected from inducements to smoke. Tobacco is a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. It is also an industry under threat; one quarter of its customers, in the long-term, have been killed by using its product and smoking is declining in many industrialized countries. To maintain profits, tobacco companies need to ensure that at least 2.7 million new smokers, usually young people, start smoking every year. Women have been clearly identified as a key target group for tobacco advertising in both the industrialized and developing worlds. Billions of US dollars each year are spent on promoting this lethal product specifically to women.
This strategy has been highlighted by several tobacco journals which have carried articles on "targeting the female smokers" and suggesting that retailers should “look to the ladies”. Among 20 US magazines that received the most cigarette advertising revenue in 1985, eight were women's magazines. In the same year, a study on the cigarette advertising policies of 53 British women's magazines showed that 64 percent of the magazines accepted cigarette advertising, which represented an average of seven percent of total advertising revenue.
Research in industrialized countries has shown the subtle method used to encourage girls to smoke. The impact of such method is likely to be even greater in developing countries, where young people are generally less knowledgeable about smoking hazards and may be more attracted by glamorous, affluent, desirable images of the female smoker. This is why World Health Organization (WHO), together with other national and international health agencies, has repeatedly called for national legislation banning all forms of tobacco promotion, and for an appropriate "high price" policy which would slow down the “enthusiasm” of young women for tobacco consumption.
Young girls and women have a right to be informed about the damage that smoking can do to their health. They also need to acquire skills to resist pressure to start smoking or to give it up. Several countries have developed integrated school health education programs which have successfully reduced girls' smoking rates, but this education should not be restricted to what happens in school. There are many other examples of effective cessation programs in the workplace and primary health centers. Unfortunately, many women do not have the opportunity to be involved in such programs, and programs have generally been less successful with women than with men.
In order for women to become, and remain, non-smokers they need support. Environments need to be created which enable them to break free of this health damaging behavior, to make the healthy choices the best choices.
Questions 1-5 are based on Passage One.
1. In paragraph one, why does the author say that the tobacco industry is under threat?
A. There are fewer smokers in the industrialized world.
B. The government is exerting stricter regulations.
C. Anti-smoking campaigns are on the rise.
D. It is constantly being sued.
2. According to the passage, in order to guarantee profit, the tobacco industry needs to ______.
A. use their advertising money more wisely
B. enrich its varieties to attract people of all ages
C. counteract the influence of anti-smoking campaigns
D. get millions more people to take up smoking every year
3. “This strategy” in paragraph two refers to ______.
A. producing cigarettes appealing to women
B. promoting tobacco specially to women
C. inviting celebrities to endorse cigarettes
D. advertising mainly in best-selling women's magazines
4. What can we learn about young people in developing countries?
A. They can hardly afford cigarettes.
B. They read many cigarette advertisements.
C. They seldom smoke imported cigarettes.
D. They are less informed of smoking hazards.
5. Which of the following is true of the cessation programs mentioned in paragraph four?
A. They have reached their goals sooner than planned.
B. They have operated more successfully on campus.
C. They have produced better results with male smokers.
D. They have gained greater popularity in developing countries.
Passage Two
Any discussion of English conversation, like any English conversation, must begin with The Weather. And in this spirit of observing traditional protocol, I shall quote Dr Johnson's famous comment that "When two English meet, their first talk is of the weather", and point out that this observation is as accurate now as it was over two hundred years ago.
This, however, is the point at which most commentators either stop, or try, and fail, to come up with a convincing explanation for the English “obsession” with the weather. They fail because their premise is mistaken: they assume that our conversations about the weather are conversations about the weather. In other words, they assume that we talk about the weather because we have a keen interest in the subject. Most of them then try to figure out what it is about the English weather that is so fascinating.
Bill Bryson, for example, concludes that the English weather is not at all fascinating, and presumably that our obsession with it is therefore inexplicable: “To an outsider, the most striking thing about the English weather is that there is not very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger - tornados, monsoons, hailstorms – are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles.”
Jeremy Paxman takes offence at Bryson's dismissive comments and argues that the English weather is intrinsically fascinating:
Bryson misses the point. The interest is less in the phenomena
themselves, but in uncertainty… one of the few things you can say about
England with absolute certainty is that it has a lot of weather. It may not
include tropical cyclones but life at the edge of an ocean and the edge of
a continent means you can never be entirely sure what you're going to get.
My research has convinced me that both Bryson and Paxman are missing the point, which is that our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all: English weather-speak is a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our natural reserve and actually talk to each other. Everyone knows, for example, that “Nice day, isn't it?”, “Ooh, isn't it cold?”; and other variations on the theme are not requests for meteorological data: they are ritual greetings or conversation-starters. In other words, English weather-speak is a form of “grooming talk” - the human equivalent of what is known as “social grooming” among our primate cousins, where they spend hours grooming each other's fur, even when they are perfectly clean, as a means of social bonding.
