Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A, B, C and D, and decide which is the best answer.
听力原文:M: Have you found an apartment yet?
W: No. We need such a large space that all the apartments we've seen are not big enough.
Q: Why is the woman having trouble finding an apartment?
(12)
A. She doesn't really need one.
B. She is difficult to please.
C. She doesn't want to pay a large sum of money.
D. She needs plenty of space.
听力原文:W: Can you give me a hand, Mike? I want to move a few heavy items into the car.
M: I'd like to, but I'm already five minutes late for my appointment with Mr. Johnson, and his office is on the other side of the campus.
Q: What will the man most probably do?
(15)
A. He will go to Mr. Johnson's office.
B. He will help the woman to move the items.
C. He will drive the woman's car to his own office.
D. He will call Mr. Johnson to move the items together.
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D . Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Children are a relatively modem invention. Until a few hundred years ago they did not exist. In Medieval and Renaissance painting you can see pint-sized men and women, wearing grown-up clothes and grown-up expressions, performing grown-up tasks. Children did not exist because the family as we know it had not evolved.
Children today not only exist; they have taken over, in no place more than in America, and at no time more than now. It is always Kids' Country here. Our civilization is child-centered, child-obsessed. A kid's body is our physical ideal. One way or another we are determined to "keep in shape", and invariably this means keeping a kid's shape. On Kids' Country we do not permit middle age. Thirty is promoted over 50, but 30 knows that soon his time to be overtaken will come. In our over-sixty population there are ten widows for every man. Like a child's room, Kids' Country is a mess. New York city seems about to disappear under its load of litter, graffiti and dog-droppings. How is it that China can eliminate the house-fly, and we can't even clean up Central Park?
We are the first society in which parents expect to learn from their children. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come about at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, ours is an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids. In the Old Country, hope was in the father, and how much wealth he could accumulate and pass along to his children. In the growth pattern of America and its ever-expanding frontier, the young man was ever advised to GO WEST; the father was ever inheriting from his son. Kids' Country may be the inevitable result.
Kids' Country is not all bad. America is the greatest country in the world to grow up in because it is Kids' Country. We not only wear kids' clothes and eat kids' food, but also dream kids' dreams and make them come true. It was after all, a boy's game to go to the moon.
But what we are experiencing now seems in many ways the exactly opposite of Medieval and Renaissance life. If in the old days children did not exist, it seems equally true today that adults, as a class have begun to disappear, condemning all of us to remain boys and girls forever, jogging and doing push-ups against eternity.
Why does the writer use the Medieval and Renaissance painting in Paragraph 1 ?
A. To show that men and women were smaller than now.
B. To show that there were no children at all at that time.
C. To show that children wore and acted like adults at that time.
D. To show that children were not permitted to appear in paintings.