1993年英语专业四级阅读试题

1993 Passage A California is a land of variety and contrast. Almost every type of physical land feature, short of arctic ice fields and tropical jungles can be found within its borders. Sharply contrasting types of land often lie very close to one another. People living in Bakersfield, for instance, can visit the Pacific Ocean and the coastal plain, the fertile San Joaquin Valley, the arid Mojave Desert, and the high Sierra Nevada, all within a radius of about 100 miles. In other areas it is possible to go snow skiing in the morning and surfing in the evening of the same day, without having to travel long distances. Contrast abounds in California. The highest point in the United States (outside Alaska)is in California, and so is the lowest point (including Alaska).Mount Whitney, 14 494 feet above sea level, is separated from Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level, by a distance of only 100 miles. The two areas have a difference in altitude of almost three miles. California has deep, clear mountain lakes like Lake Tahoe, the deepest in the country, but it also has shallow, salty desert lakes. It has Lake Tulainyo, 12 020 feet above sea level, and the lowest lake in the country, the Salton Sea, 236 feet below sea level. Some of its lakes, like Owens Lake in Death Valley, are not lakes at all; they are dried-up lakebeds. In addition to mountains, lakes, valleys, deserts, and plateaus, California has its Pacific coastline, stretching longer than the coastlines of Oregon and Washington combined. Passage B By far the most common snake in Britain is the adder. In Scotland, in fact, there are no other snakes at all. The adder is also the only British snake with a poisonous bite. It can be found almost anywhere, but prefers sunny hillsides and rough open country, including high ground. In Ireland there are no snakes at all. Most people regard snakebites as a fatal misfortune, but not all bites are serious, and very few are fatal. Sometimes attempts at emergency treatment turn out to be more dangerous than the bite itself, with amateurs heroically, but mistakenly, trying do-it-yourself surgery and other unnecessary measures. All snakes have small teeth, so it follows that all snakes can bite, but only the bite of the adder presents any danger. British snakes are shy animals and are far more frightened of you than you could possibly be of them. The adder will attack only if it feels threatened, as can happen if you take it by surprise and step on it accidentally or if you try to catch it or pick it up, which it dislikes intensely. If it hears you coming, it will normally get out of the way as quickly as it can, but adders cannot move very rapidly and may attack before moving if you are very close. The effect of a bite varies considerably. It depends upon several things, one of which is the body-weight of the person bitten. The bigger the person, the less harmful the bite is likely to be, which is why children suffer far more seriously from snake bites than adults. A healthy person will also have better resistance against the poison. Very few people actually die from snakebites in Britain, and though these bites can make some people very ill, there are probably just as many cases of bites having little or no effect, as there are of serious illness. Passage C Concern with money, and then more money, in order to buy the conveniences and luxuries of modern life, has brought great changes to the lives of most Frenchmen. More people are working than ever before in France. In the cities the traditional leisurely midday meal is disappearing. Offices, shops, and factories are discovering the greater efficiency of a short lunch hour in company lunchrooms. In almost all lines of work emphasis now falls on ever-increasing output. Thus the “typical” Frenchman produces more, earns more, and buys more consumer goods than his counterpart of only a generation ago. He gains in creature comforts and ease of life. What he loses to some extent is his sense of personal uniqueness, or individuality. Some say that France has been Americanized. This is because the United States is a world symbol of the technological society and its consumer products. The so-called Americanization of France has its critics. They fear that “assembly-line life”will lead to the disappearance of the pleasures of the more graceful and leisurely (but less productive) old French style. What will happen, they ask, to taste, elegance, and the cultivation of the good things in lif e—to joy in the smell of a freshly picked apple, a stroll by the river, or just happy hours of conversation in a local cafe? Since the late 1950’s life in France has indeed taken on qualities of rush, tension, and the pursuit of material gain. Some of the strongest critics of the new way of life are the young, especially university students. They are concerned with the future, and they fear that France is threatened by the triumph of this competitive, goods-oriented culture. Occasionally, they have reacted against the trend with considerable violence. In spite of the critics, however, countless Frenchmen are committed to keeping France in the forefront of the modern economic world. They find that the present life brings more rewards, conveniences, and pleasures than that of the past. They believe that a modern, industrial France is preferable to the old. Passage D Ultralight (超轻型的) airplanes are a recent development in aviation that provide what aviation enthusiasts have long been seeking: an inexpensive airplane that is easy to fly. The ultralight plane was born of the marriage of the hang glider and the go-kart(微型单座竞赛车) engine around 1974, when John Moody mounted a 12 -horsepower go-kart engine on his Icarus II hang glider. Today’s ultralights are not just hang gliders with engines; they are “air recreation vehicles”. Modern ultralight planes use snowmobile(雪地机动车) engines that let them cruise at about 50 miles per hour , climb at about 500 feet per minute, and carry combined payloads of pilot and fuel up to about 200 pounds, which is about equal to an ultralight plane’s weight when empty. More than ten thousand ultralight planes were sold last year at prices ranging from $ 2 800 to $ 7000. But the main reason for the increasing popularity of these aircraft is not that they are inexpensive, but that they are fun to fly. The modern ultralight plane would look very familiar to the earliest pioneers of aviation. Otto Lilienthal made more than 2000 flights in Germany in the 1890’s in what were actually hang gliders. Octave Chanute designed and built many early hang gliders. Augustus Herring, Chanute’s assistant, used these gliders as models for a glider that he built for himself. On this glider, Herring installed a compressed-air motor and flew 267 feet in 1898. The Wright brothers’ Flyer was the grandfather of today’s ultralight planes. The pilot sat right out in the open, just as in modern ultralights, and used controls that were much the same as those used in today’s machines. Though most ultralight planes are used for pleasure flying, some are also used for crop dusting, aerial photography, and even military observation service. The likelihood is that further uses will be found for ultralight planes, but their greatest use will continue to be as air recreational vehicles.