中共中央党校2019年博士研究生入学考试英语样题

英语试题模版

I.  Vocabulary and Structure (10 points)

  Directions: There are 10 incomplete sentences in this part. For each sentence there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. Choose the one that best completes the sentence. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Machine-scoring Answer Sheet.

    1.  The United States and Russia have reached an agreement that calls for Syria’s         _________ of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle            of 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday.

A. artillery                            B.    armor

C.     arsenal                            D.    army

II. Reading Comprehension (50 points)

Section A ( 20 points)

Directions: There are two passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on the Machine-scoring Answer Sheet.

Passage 1

From the earliest decades of colonization to the 20th century, Americans have celebrated and largely taken for granted the seemingly endless bounty of their land. Not until the early twentieth century did a significant conservation movement develop before the prodding of professional resource managers like the forester Gifford Pinchot, and politicians like Theodore Roosevelt. The movement was a response to an evident dwindling of known mineral resources, the decimation of virgin forests, and a decline in the fish and game available to sportsmen. It was also an integral expression of the political movement known as progressivism, which stressed, among other things, the use of government power, guided by scientific knowledge and democratic principles, to solve national, social, and economic problems. The progressive conservationists pushed into existence a substantial body of legislation at state and national levels that aimed at the rational management of resources. For the most part, however, these laws had more form than substance, and in practice the exploitation of nature continued largely unchecked.

By the 1920’s progressivism had faded away, but its enthusiasm for scientific management and research remained active in the business community. Both the commitment to resource management research by industry and the allocation of funds to seek out untapped resources grew rapidly. Science and technology linked up more closely than before to devise means for their exploitation.

The amalgam of science, technology, and business interests not only fostered the continued growth of older industries, but also spawned new industries that fostered economic expansion at great environmental cost. The development of electric power raised manufacturing productivity and the material standard of living, but also polluted the air through the combustion of fossil fuels in huge amounts. The spread of automotive transportation entailed mobility and productivity, but exacted the price of long-term environmental costs, voracious energy consumption, and expropriation of land for railways. The multifaceted petrochemical industry listed among its benefits better agricultural productivity from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but contributed heavily to air, water, and soil pollution. The aviation industry promoted mobility and cohesion within the nation and helped to end American isolation from the rest of the world, but promoted a new dimension of air and noise pollution, energy demands, and pressure on scarce land in urban areas for airports.

American urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate between World War I and the 1970’s, with only a temporary slump in the depression era. Demand for iron, steel, coal, oil, gas, water, and food rocked ahead during these years, stimulated particularly by the economic growth associated with World War II. By the 1970’s the industrial might of the United States was an overpowering national and global reality. With six percent of the world’s people, it consumes annually some thirty-five percent of the world’s available resources, while generating proportionate burdens of harmful wastes. While Americans have been proud of their technical and industrial preeminence, it was only in the 1950’s that persuasive environmental thinking began to remind them that being an economic superpower is a mixed blessing with profound ecological consequences.  

11.    The Americans have always believed that the United States __________.

%2. has the largest land area in the world

%2. enjoys inexhaustible resources

%2. is a democracy that is celebrated by other countries

%2. will develop a conservation movement before the prodding of professional resource managers and politicians

12. Progress in environmental protection in the United States would not have been     possible if it had not been for __________.

%2. the commitments of key professionals and politicians

%2. hard evidences of environmental degradation

%2. the prevalent political ideology

%2. all the above

13.    The author’s attitude towards environmental laws and regulations in the United     States is __________.

    A.     critical                             B.     misleading

   C.     positive                             D.     neutral

14.    In paragraph 3, the author tries to account for __________ in the United States.

    A.  the decline of progressivism

B.  continued technological and economic advances

C.  worsening ecological conditions

D.  the contributions of resources in industrial growth

15. The last sentence of the passage means that __________.

A.  economic progress has taken a serious toll on ecology in the United States

B.  the economic status of the United States is a blessing

C.  the Americans should be reminded of the need to protect nature

D.  the United States needs to conduct profound ecological research

Passage 2

16-20

Section B

In the following article some paragraphs/sentences have been removed. For Questions 21-25, choose the most suitable paragraph/sentence from the list A-E to fit into each of the numbered gaps. Write your answers on Answer Sheet.

Well in advance of Calvin’s entry into his vocation as a reformer of the church in Geneva and Strasbourg, the sixteenth century had already displayed a remarkable preoccupation with biblical interpretation and, as a consequence, an unprecedented eruption of exegetical publications. 21) ______

To begin with, the medium of intellectual exchange was forever altered by the dissemination of the printing press throughout Europe. As the costs of printing fell, books ceased to be a luxury item. Coupled to the growth of printing was a rising tide of scholarship that both consumed and produced those books. The humanists cry: Ad fontes — “back to the sources”— fueled scholars’ appetites for these same sources as they emerged from the presses. 22) ______ For example, if these burgeoning sources, editions, and tools reminded scholars and preachers that there were new discoveries to be made in their old Bibles, Erasmus’ early textual criticism of the New Testment Undermined the magisterium of the Latin Vulgate and warned his readers they could not take even the wording of the Bible for granted, much less its theological content.

  To these technological developments and philological discoveries, one should add other factors more unsettling still. Most notable of these was the climate of discontent within medieval Catholicism. Here was abundant tinder, for which Martin Luther was but a spark. The religious mood in Europe ranged between cynicism and anxiety, and ran not infrequently to the occult or the apocalyptic. 23) _______ All in All, it is easy to see why early reformers (and, in response, their Catholic opponents) found preaching and writing was not a diversion from the cares of the world, nor a mere antiquarianism. It instead served the defense of the gospel, the salvation of souls, and it was a matter of life and death. Virtually every aspect of daily life – not just preaching and sacraments, but also marriage and divorce, family life, commerce and consumption, as well as politics on every scale – was charged with theological and thus exegetical implications. 24) _______  

    Calvin entered this context not in the first wave but in the second, and even somewhat accidentally. His desire was not to be a reformer or even to be much in the public eye, but rather to live the quiet and secluded life of a humanist scholar – or so he tells us in the 1557 preface to his commentary on the Psalm. Calvin would have been exposed to humanist teachings and values throughout his years of academic preparation, beginning with his studies in the early 1520s at the College of de la Marche with Mathurin Cordier and continuing until he fled Paris in 1533, during which time he studied, by turns, theology and law in Paris, Orleans, and Bourges. 25) _______ Calvin’s self-published commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia (1532) is a case in point, showcasing his mastery of ancient writers; his interest in history, philology, and textual criticism; his careful scrutiny of the text for the author’s intended meaning; and his concern that eloquence be marshaled in the service of what could fairly be called an Erasmian moralism. These are many of the characteristics that what mark his later work as a biblical scholar.

A.    His varied course of study would in every case have driven him to a firsthand examination of the Bible as well as classical and patristic sources, and all his early writings display his instincts as a humanist scholar.

B.    For preachers and biblical scholars, and the sixteenth century was unquestionably invigorating. It was also dangerous.

C.    Factors contributing to this eruption are not difficult to identify, and Calvin’s career and character as a biblical interpreter would recapitulate most of them.

D.    Scholarship itself, along with scholarly standards, kept pace. A mastery of Latin alone was no longer enough to make one a respectable scholar: Greek and Hebrew were also required, and the growing competence of sixteenth-century scholars nourished, in turn, keener critical skills.

E.     Most European Christians would have claimed to take seriously the instructions of the Catholic Church regarding the way to salvation, but traditional Catholic teachings — along with the bulk of medieval exegesis and exegetical methods — were increasingly challenged by the rival views of Protestants and radicals, who typically appealed to Scripture as the only sufficient final authority.

Section C

Directions: In this section, there is a passage with 10 questions. After you have read the passage, answer the questions 26-35 in English on the Answer Sheet.

The answer lies somewhere in the realm of ideology, in European attitudes not just toward defense spending but toward power itself. Important as the power gap has been in shaping the respective strategic cultures of the United States and Europe, if the disparity of military capabilities were the only problem, the solution would be fairly straightforward. With a highly educated and productive population of almost 400 million people and a $9 trillion economy, Europe today has the wealth and technological capability to make itself more of a world power in military terms if Europeans wanted to become that kind of world power. They could easily spend twice as much as they are currently spending on defense if they believed it necessary to do so. And closing the power gap between the United States and Europe would probably go some way toward closing the gap in strategic perceptions.

There is a cynical view current in American strategic circles that the Europeans simply enjoy the “free ride” they have gotten under the American security umbrella over the past six decades. Given America’s willingness to spend so much money protecting them, Europeans would rather spend their own money on social welfare programs, long vacations, and shorter workweeks. But there is more to the transatlantic gulf than a gap in military capabilities, and while Europe may be enjoying a free ride in terms of global security, there is more to Europe’s unwillingness to build up its military power than comfort with the present American guarantee. After all, the United States in the 19th century was the beneficiary of the British navy’s dominance of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. But that did not stop the United States from engaging in its own peacetime naval buildup in the 1880s and 1890s, a buildup that equipped it to launch and win the Spanish-American war, acquire the Philippines, and become a world power. Late-nineteenth-century Americans did not take comfort from their security; they were ambitious for more power.

Europeans today are not ambitious for power, and certainly not for military power. Europeans over the past half century have developed a genuinely different perspective on the role of power in international relations, a perspective that springs directly from their unique historical experience since the end of World War II. They have rejected the power politics that brought them such misery over the past century and more. This is a perspective on power that Americans do not and cannot share, inasmuch as the formative historical experiences on their side of the Atlantic have not been the same. Consider again the qualities that make up the European strategic culture: the emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism. It is true that these are not traditionally European approaches to international relations when viewed from a long historical perspective. But they are a product of more recent European history. The modern European strategic culture represents a conscious rejection of the European past, a rejection of the evils of European Machtpolitik.

Answer the following questions briefly according to what you have just read.

26. What might be the question raised prior to the first paragraph of the passage?

……

30.

III. Translation (20 points)

Directions: Put the underlined sentences into Chinese and write your translation on the Answer Sheet.

  The freedom of art is more than an ideal. If, despite the small chance of success, the profession of artist is so popular, it is because it offers the prospect of a labor that is apparently free of narrow specialization, allowing artists, like heroes in the movies, to endow work and life with their own meanings. Equally for the viewers of art, there is a corresponding freedom in appreciating the purposeless play of ideas and forms, not in slavishly attempting to divine artists’ intentions, but in allowing the work to elicit thoughts and sensations that connect with their own experiences. The wealthy buy themselves participation in this free zone through ownership and patronage, and they are buying something genuinely valuable; the state ensures that a wider public has at least the opportunity to breathe for a while the scent of freedom that works of art emit.

Yet there are reasons to wonder whether free trade and free art are as antithetical as they seem. Firstly, the economy of art closely reflects the economy of finance capital. In a recent analysis of the meaning of cultural dominance, Donald Sassoon explored patterns of import and export of novels, opera, and films in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Culturally dominant states have abundant local production that meets the demands of their home markets, importing little and successfully exporting much. In the nineteenth century, France and Britain were the dominant literary powers. The US is now by far the most dominant cultural state, exporting its products globally while importing very little. As Sassoon points out, this does not mean that everyone consumes American culture, just that most of the culture that circulates across national boundaries is American.

Sassoon rules fine art out of his account on the sensible grounds that it has no mass market. It is hard to read trade figures for signs of cultural dominance in a system that is thoroughly cosmopolitan, so that you may have a German collector buying through a British dealer the work of a Chinese artist resident in the US. We can, however, get an idea of the volume of trade in each nation, and, given the high proportion of international trade in the art market, this does give an indication of global hegemony. Here there are striking parallels with the distribution of financial power. It is hardly surprising that the US is dominant, accounting for a little less than a half of all global art sales; Europe accounts for much of the rest, with the UK taking as its share around a half of that.

IV. Composition (20points)

Directions: Write a composition of 250 words in about 40 minutes on the following topic. Remember to write in readable handwriting on the Answer Sheet.

As those of the post-1980 generation become the main breadwinners in China, China is facing the challenge of a rapidly aging population.

How will we be able to support our old people? Who should be responsible for our old people?

Give reasons for your answer.