2016年12月英语四级考前冲刺试题第四套_第2页

　　Passage Two

　　Questions 26 to 30 are based on the following passage.

　　Americans have always been ambivalent in their attitudes toward education. On the one hand, free and universal public education was seen as necessary in a democracy, for how else would citizens learn how to govern themselves in a responsible way? On the other hand, America was always a country that offered financial opportunities for which education was not needed: on the road from rags to riches, schooling-beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic-was an unnecessary detour.

　　Even today, it is still possible for people to achieve financial success without much education, but the number of situations in which this is possible is decreasing. In today's more complex world, the opportunities for financial success is closely related to the need for education, especially higher education.

　　Our society is rapidly becoming one whose chief product is information, and dealing with this information requires more and more specialized education. In other words, we grow up learning more and more about fewer and fewer subjects.

　　In the future, this trend is likely to continue. Tomorrow's world will be even more complex than today's world, and, to manage this complexity, even more specialized education will be needed.

　　26. The topic treated in this passage is _____.

　　A) education in general

　　B) Americans' attitudes

　　C) higher education

　　D) American education

　　27. Americans' attitudes toward education have always been _____.

　　A) certain B) contradictory

　　C) ambitious D) unclear

　　28. Today, financial success is closely related to the need for _____.

　　A) higher education B) public education

　　C) responsible citizens D) learning the basics

　　29. It can be inferred from the third paragraph that _____.

　　A) information is our only product

　　B) education in the future will be specialized

　　C) we are entering an age of information

　　D) we are living in an age of information

　　30. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

　　A) The History of American Education.

　　B) The Need for Specialized Education.

　　C) The Future of the American Educational System.

　　D) Attitudes toward American Education.

　　Passage Three

　　Questions 31 to 35 are based on the following passage.

　　A growing world population and the discoveries of science may alter this pattern of distribution in the future. As men slowly learn to master diseases, control floods, prevent famines, and stop wars, fewer people die every year; and in consequence the population of the world is steadily increasing. In 1925 there were about 2,000 million people in the world; by the end of the century there may well be over 4,000 million.

　　When numbers rise the extra mouths must be fed. New lands must be brought under cultivation, or land already farmed made to yield larger crops. In some areas the accessible land is so intensively cultivated that it will be difficult to make it provide more food. In some areas the population is so dense that the land is parceled out in units too tiny to allow for much improvement in farming methods. Were a large part of this farming population drawn off into industrial occupations, the land might be farmed much more productively by modern methods.

　　There is now a race for science, technology, and industry to keep the output of food rising faster than the number of people to be fed. New strains of crops are being developed which will thrive in unfavorable climates: there are now farms beyond the Arctic Circle in Siberia and North America; irrigation and dry-farming methods bring arid lands under the plough, dams hold back the waters of great rivers to ensure water for the fields in all seasons and to provide electric power for new industries; industrial chemistry provides fertilizers to suit particular soils; aeroplanes spray crops to destroy locusts and many plant diseases. Every year some new means is devised to increase or to protect the food of the world.