2019年全国硕士研究生入学考试英语（二）阅读part A部分真题及答案

英语二阅读 part A部分真题及答案 
 

【真题】

Part A

Directions:

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

A few years ago, researchers in Germany set out to plumb the moral consciences of small children. They invited a series of 2- and 3-year-olds to play with a marble track in a lab. Close to the track—inauspiciously close—was a block tower that one of the adult experimenters claimed to have painstakingly constructed. Just before turning her back, she asked them not to damage it.

Needless to say, the game was rigged. After a few runs, a marble would knock over part of the tower, at which point the experimenter responded with what the resulting journal article described as a “mildly sad” tone. “Oh no,” she would say, then ask what had happened. In some versions of the experiment, the child seemed to be to blame; in others, an adult who was helping with the experiment toppled the tower. The kids’ reactions revealed a lot about how social-emotional development progresses during these key years. While many of the 2-year-olds seemed sympathetic to the researcher’s plight, the 3-year-olds went beyond sympathy. When they believed that they’d caused the accident, they were more likely than the 2-year-olds to express regret and try to fix the tower. In other words, the 3-year-olds’ behavior varied depending on whether they felt responsible.

Their actions, according to Amrisha Vaish, the University of Virginia psychology researcher who led the study, demonstrate “the beginnings of real guilt and real conscience.” Vaish is one of a number of scholars studying how, when, and why guilt emerges in children. Unlike so-called basic emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger, guilt emerges a little later, in conjunction with a child’s growing grasp of social and moral norms. Children aren’t born knowing how to say “I’m sorry”; rather, they learn over time that such statements appease parents and friends—and their own consciences. This is why researchers generally regard so-called moral guilt, in the right amount, to be a good thing: A child who claims responsibility for knocking over a tower and tries to rebuild it is engaging in behavior that’s not only reparative but also prosocial.

In the popular imagination, of course, guilt still gets a bad rap. It evokes Freud’s ideas and religious hang-ups. More important, guilt is deeply uncomfortable—it’s the emotional equivalent of wearing a jacket weighted with stones. Who would inflict it upon a child? Yet this understanding is outdated. “There has been a kind of revival or a rethinking about what guilt is and what role guilt can serve,” Vaish says, adding that this revival is part of a larger recognition that emotions aren’t binary—feelings that may be advantageous in one context may be harmful in another. Jealousy and anger, for example, may have evolved to alert us to important inequalities. Too much happiness (think mania) can be destructive.

And guilt, by prompting us to think more deeply about our goodness, can encourage humans to atone for errors and fix relationships. Guilt, in other words, can help hold a cooperative species together. It is a kind of social glue.

Viewed in this light, guilt is an opportunity. Work by Tina Malti, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, suggests that guilt may compensate for an emotional deficiency. In a number of studies, Malti and others have shown that guilt and sympathy (and its close cousin empathy) may represent different pathways to cooperation and sharing. Some kids who are low in sympathy may make up for that shortfall by experiencing more guilt, which can rein in their nastier impulses. And vice versa: High sympathy can substitute for low guilt.

In a 2014 study, for example, Malti and a colleague looked at 244 children, ages 4, 8, and 12. Using caregiver assessments and the children’s self-observations, they rated each child’s overall sympathy level and his or her tendency to feel negative emotions (like guilt and sadness) after moral transgressions. Then the kids were handed stickers and chocolate coins, and given a chance to share them with an anonymous child. For the low-sympathy kids, how much they shared appeared to turn on how inclined they were to feel guilty. The guilt-prone ones shared more, even though they hadn’t magically become more sympathetic to the other child’s deprivation.

“That’s good news,” Malti says. “We can be prosocial because of our empathetic proclivity, or because we caused harm and we feel regret.”

Malti describes guilt as a self-directed emotion, elicited when you act in a way that’s out of keeping with your conscience. Sympathy and empathy are other-directed. A child who isn’t inclined to feel bad for a classmate whose toy car she stole might nevertheless feel uncomfortable with the idea of herself as a thief—and return the toy. Guilt can include sympathy, Malti says, but it doesn’t have to. She’s agnostic about which of the two paths children take, so long as they treat one another well.

This is a provocative idea at a moment when parents and educators have come to almost fetishize empathy—when a child’s ability to put herself in another’s shoes seems like the apex of goodness. Parents encourage children to consider how their peers feel when they don’t share their toys. Preschool teachers instruct students to consider one another “friends,” implying that good behavior is predicated on affection. Elementary schools base anti-bullying curricula around altruistic concepts like love and kindness.

When it comes to helping kids manage relationships and tamp down aggression, “schools and programs have almost exclusively focused on empathy promotion,” Malti says. “I think it’s incredibly important to nurture empathy, but I think it’s equally important to promote guilt.”

If you still find the idea of guilting your child unpalatable, keep in mind that we’re talking about a very specific kind of guilt. This is not telling your child that her disobedience proves she’s unworthy, or describing how painful it was to give birth to her. This is not pressuring your grown son or daughter to hurry up and have babies before you die. In short, this is not your grandmother’s guilt-trip.

You don’t want a child to feel bad about who she is (that’s called shaming) or responsible for things outside her control (which can give rise to maladaptive or neurotic guilt; see the child who feels guilty for her parents’ divorce). Malti points out that a child’s age and disposition are also important considerations; some may be temperamentally guilt-prone and require a lighter touch. The point is to encourage both goodness and resilience. We all make mistakes, and ideally we use them to propel ourselves toward better behavior.

Proper guilting connects the dots between your child’s actions and an outcome—without suggesting anything is wrong or bad about her—and focuses on how best to repair the harm she’s caused. In one fell swoop it inspires both guilt and empathy, or what Martin Hoffman, an emeritus professor at NYU known for his extensive work on empathy, has termed “empathy-based guilt.” Indeed, you may already be guilting your child (in a healthy way!) without realizing it. As in: “Look, your brother is crying because you just threw his Beanie Boo in the toilet.” Hopefully, the kid is moved to atone for her behavior, and a parent might help her think through how to do that.

Work by Renee Patrick, a psychology professor at the University of Tampa, shows that it’s important for parents to express themselves in a warm and loving way: A parent who seems chastising or rejecting can induce anxiety in a child, and do nothing to encourage healthy behavior. Patrick’s work also shows that kids whose parents used a strategy intended to elicit “empathy-based guilt” during their adolescence tended to see moral concepts like fairness and honesty as more central to their sense of themselves. (A related technique that’s been found effective in adolescents involves what Patrick calls “parental expression of disappointed expectations”—which is as harrowing as it sounds.)

Joan Grusec, a psychologist and researcher in parenting and children’s development, and a colleague of Malti’s at the University of Toronto, says it’s important to make the what-you-can-do-about-it part a discussion between parent and child, instead of a sermon. Forcing a child to behave morally may prevent her from internalizing the lesson you’re trying to impart. And, she says, such a conversation may work better “once everybody has simmered down,” rather than in the heat of a dispute. She points to research on what academics call reminiscence, which suggests that discussing a transgression after the fact may better help children understand what they did wrong.

Of course, knowing when to feel bad and what to do about it are things we could all benefit from. Malti’s research may focus on kids, but guilt is a core human emotion—an inevitability for people of every age. And she believes that it has the potential to be especially helpful now, in a world that is growing more divided and atomized.

She argues that guilt may have the ability to bring us together, not despite but because of its focus on the self. The proposition is radical. What if the secret to treating one another better is thinking about ourselves not less, but more?

21. Researchers think that guilt can be a good thing because it may help__________.

A. regulate a child’s basic emotions

B. improve a child’s intellectual ability

C. intensify a child’s positive feelings

D. foster a child’s moral development

22. According to Paragraph 2, many people still guilt to be _________.

A. deceptive B. addictive C. burdensome D. inexcusable

23. Vaish holds that the rethinking about guilt comes from an awareness that________.

A. an emotion can play opposing roles

B. emotions are socially constructive

C. emotional stability can benefit health

D. emotions are context -independent

24. Malti and others have shown that cooperation and sharing_______.

A. may help correct emotional deficiencies

B. can bring about emotional satisfaction

C. can result from either sympathy or guilt

D. may be the outcome of impulsive acts

25. The word “transgressions” (line4 para5) is closest in meaning to________.

A. wrongdoings

B. discussions

C. restrictions

D. teachings

Text 2

Forests give us shade, quiet and one of the harder challenges in the fight against climate change. Even as we humans count on forests to soak up a good share of the carbon dioxide we produce, we are threatening their ability to do so. The climate change we are hastening could one day leave us with forests that emit more carbon than they absorb.

Thankfully, there is a way out of this trap—but it involves striking a subtle balance. Helping forests flourish as valuable "carbon sinks" long into the future may require reducing their capacity to sequester carbon now. California is leading the way, as it does on so many climate efforts, in figuring out the details.

The state's proposed Forest Carbon Plan aims to double efforts to thin out young trees and clear brush in parts of the forest, including by controlled burning. This temporarily lowers carbon-carrying capacity. But the remaining trees draw a greater share of the available moisture, so they grow and thrive, restoring the forest's capacity to pull carbon from the air. Healthy trees are also better able to fend off bark beetles. The landscape is rendered less combustible. Even in the event of a fire, fewer trees are consumed.

The need for such planning is increasingly urgent. Already, since 2010, drought and beetles have killed more than 100 million trees in California, most of them in 2016 alone, and wildfires have scorched hundreds of thousands of acres.

California's plan envisions treating 35,000 acres of forest a year by 2020, and 60,000 by 2030 —financed from the proceeds of the state's emissions-permit auctions. That's only a small share of the total acreage that could benefit, an estimated half a million acres in all, so it will be important to prioritize areas at greatest risk of fire or drought.

The strategy also aims to ensure that carbon in woody material removed from the forests is locked away in the form of solid lumber, burned as biofuel in vehicles that would otherwise run on fossil fuels, or used in compost or animal feed. New research on transportation biofuels is under way, and the state plans to encourage lumber production close to forest lands. In future the state proposes to take an inventory of its forests' carbon-storing capacity every five years.

State governments are well accustomed to managing forests, including those owned by the U.S. Forest Service, but traditionally they've focused on wildlife, watersheds and opportunities for recreation. Only recently have they come to see the vital part forests will have to play in storing carbon. California's plan, which is expected to be finalized by the governor early next year, should serve as a model.

26. “One of the harder challenges” implies ___

A. global climate change may get out of control

B. forests may become a potential threat

C. people may misunderstand global warming

D. extreme weather conditions may arise

27. To maintain forests as valuable "carbon sinks", we may need to _

A.preserve diversity of species

B. lower their present carbon-absorbing capacity

C. accelerate the growth of young trees

D. strike a balance among different plants

28.California's Forest Carbon Plan endeavors to ___

A. restore its forests quickly after wildfires.

B. cultivate more drought resistant trees.

C. find more effective ways to kill insects

D. reduce the density of some of its forests

29. What is essential to California's plan according to para. 5?

A. To obtain enough financial support

B. To carry it out before 2020

C. To handle the areas in the serious danger first

D. To perfect the emission-permit auctions

30.the author's attitude toward California's plan can be best described as ____

A. supportive

B. ambiguous

C. tolerant

D. cautious

Text 3

American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years now. Given a multi-year decline in illegal immigration, and a similarly sustained pickup in the U.S. job market, the complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for farm workers.

Efforts to create a more straightforward agricultural-workers visa that would enable foreign workers to stay longer in the U.S. and change jobs within the industry have so far failed in Congress. If this doesn’t change, American businesses, communities and consumers will be the losers.

Perhaps half of U.S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants. As fewer such workers enter the U.S., the characteristics of the agricultural workforce are changing. Today’s farm laborers, while still predominantly born in Mexico, are more likely to be settled, rather than migrating, and more likely to be married than single. They are also aging. At the start of this century, about one-third of crop workers were over the age of 35. Now, more than half are. And crop picking is hard on older bodies.

One oft-debated cure for this labor shortage remains as implausible as it has been all along: Native U.S. workers won’t be returning to the farm.

In a study published in 2013, economist Michael Clemens analyzed 15 years of data on North Carolina’s farm-labor market and concluded, “There is virtually no supply of native manual farm laborers” in the state. This was true even in the depths of a severe recession.

Mechanization is not the answer either—not yet at least. Production of corn, cotton, rice, soybeans and wheat have been largely mechanized, but many high-value, labor-intensive crops, such as strawberries, need labor. Even dairy farms, where robots currently do only a small share of milking, have a long way to go before they are automated.

As a result, farms have grown increasingly reliant on temporary guest workers using the H-2A visa to fill the gaps in the agricultural workforce. Starting around 2012, requests for the visas rose sharply; from 2011 to 2016 the number of visas issued more than doubled.

The H-2A visa has no numerical cap, unlike the H-2B visa for nonagricultural work, which is limited to 66,000 annually. Even so, employers frequently complain that they aren’t allotted all the workers they need. The process is cumbersome, expensive and unreliable. One survey found that bureaucratic delays led H-2A workers to arrive on the job an average of 22 days late. And the shortage is compounded by federal immigration raids, which remove some workers and drive others underground.

Petitioning each year for laborers—and hoping the government provides enough, and that they arrive on time—is no way to run a business. In a 2012 survey by the California Farm Bureau, 71 percent of tree-fruit growers and nearly 80 percent of raisin and berry growers said they were short of labor. Some western growers have responded by movingoperations to Mexico. Without reliable access to a reliable workforce, more growers will be tempted to move south.

According to a report by the Partnership for a New American Economy, Americans are consuming more fresh produce, which is good. But a rising share of it is grown elsewhere. In 1998-2000, 14.5 percent of the fruit Americans consumed was imported. Little more than a decade later, the share of imported fruit had increased to 25.8 percent. Rural U.S. communities that might have benefited didn’t.

In effect, the U.S. can import food or it can import the workers who pick it. The U.S. needs a simpler, streamlined, multi-year visa for agricultural workers, accompanied by measures to guard against exploitation and a viable path to U.S. residency for workers who meet the requirements. Otherwise growers will continue to struggle with shortages and uncertainty, and the country as a whole will lose out.

缺题目

Text 4

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dia Mirza and Adrian Grenier have a message for you: It’s easy to beat plastic. They’re part of a bunch of celebrities staring in a new video for World Environment Day-encouraging you, the consumer, to swap out your single-use Plastic staples to combat the plastic crisis.

If only I’d realized that we can buy our way out of the problem except we can’t.

The key messages that have been put together for World Environment Day do include a call for governments to enact legislation to curb single-us plastics. But the overarching message is directed at individuals: Lead with your wallets.

The problem of perpetuating this individualistic narrative is that it's not going to get us very far and the plastics crisis we face is immense. Our oceans are blighted by the stuff. It's in our drinking water (including bottled water), and we could even be breathing it in.

I'm not dismissing individual actions like ordering straw-free drinks at bars, or opting for a reusable water bottle over a cup that's going in the trash as soon as you've used it. I can't imagine not at least trying to minimize my own plastics footprint, whether it's lugging home my newly-refilled gallon bottle of washing-up liquid every few months, or buying packaging-free food, clothing and toiletries where possible.

On their own, however, none of these things is enough.

Part of my worry about leaving it up to the individual is that we're all just guessing at what's going on out there-and that's if we haven't been scared off from doing anything to start with in the face of such a huge challenge. As consumers, we have little idea about how much plastic has been used and discarded along the supply chain, for example. It's also hard to compare, say, going to a bulk store that sells plastic-free products but requires you to drive some distance versus a more Iccal shop where you may end up taking home some packaged items.

There’s also a time and cost issue. Realistically, I'm not going to start making my own laundry detergents so I can avoid the plastic bottles they come in, and there can be extra costs associated with environmentally friendly products.

My biggest concern with leaving it up to the individual, however, is our limited sense of what needs to be achieved On their own, taking our own bags to the grocery store or quitting plastic straws, for example, will accomplish little and require very little of us. They could even be detrimental, satisfying a need to have "done our bit" without ever progressing onto bigger, bolder, more effective actions---a kind of "moral licensing" that allays our concerns and stops us doing more and asking more of those in charge.

While the conversation around our environment and our responsibility toward it remains centered on shopping bags and straws, we're ignoring the balance of power that implies that as "consumers" we must shop sustainably, rather than as "citizens" hold our governments and industries to account to push for real systemic change. Nowhere in World Environment Day 2018's key messages is there anything about voting for environmentally progressive politicians, for example. Why not?

It’s important to acknowledge that the environment isn’t everyone’s priority-or even most people’s. We shouldn’t expect it to be .In her latest book, Why Could People Do Bad Environmental Things, Wellesley College professor Elizabeth R. De Sombre argue that the best way to collectively change the behavior of large numbers of people is for the change to be structural.

This might mean implementing policy such as a plastic tax that adds a cost to environmentally problematic action, or banning single-use plastics altogether. India has just announced it will” eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022.” There are also incentive-based ways of making better environmental choices easier, such as ensuring recycling is at least as easy as trash disposal.

De Sombre isn’t saying people should stop caring about the environment. It’s just that individual actions are too slow, she says, for that to be only, or even primary, approach to changing widespread behavior.

None of this is about writing off the individual. It’s just about putting things into perspective. We don’t have time to wait. We need progressive policies that shape collective action (and rein in polluting business), alongside engaged citizens pushing for change. That’s not something we can buy.

36. Some celebrities star in a new video to

A. demand new laws on the use of plastics

B. urge consumers to cut the use of plastics

C. invite public opinion on the plastics crisis

D. disclose the causes of the plastics crisis

37. The author is concerned that “moral licensing” may

A. mislead us into doing worthless things

B. prevent us from making further efforts

C. weaken our sense of accomplishment

D. suppress our desire for success

38. By pointing out our identity as “citizens,” the author indicates that

A. our focus should be shifted to community welfare

B. our relationship with local industries is improving

C. we have been actively exercising our civil rights

D. We should press our governments to lead the combat

39. De Sombre argues that the best way for a collective change should be

A. a win-win arrangement

B. a self-driven mechanism

C. a cost- effective approach

D. a top down process

40. The author concludes that individual efforts

A. can be too aggressive

B. are far from sufficient

C. can be too inconsistent

D. are far from rational

【参考答案】

part A

21. D foster a child’s moral development

22. C burdensome

23. A an emotion can play opposing roles

24. C can result from either sympathy or guilt

25. A wrongdoings

26. B forests may become a potential threat

27. B lower their present carbon-absorbing capacity

28. D reduce the density of some of its forest

29. C to handle the areas in the serious danger first

30. A supportive

31. D flaws in US immigration rules

32. D the aging of immigrant farm workers

33. B To get native U.S. workers back farming

34. A slow granting procedures

35. B Import Food or Labor?

36. B urge consumers to cut the use of plastics

37. B prevent us from making further efforts

38. D We should press our governments to lead the combat

39. D a top down press

40. B are far from sufficient