新题型模拟练习

Directions:

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of numbered blanks. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the blanks. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Researchers have found that genes play a large role in shaping a child’s emotional makeup, but a child’s personality traits are also profoundly affected by his or her environment. Genetic and environmental factors combine in complex ways to shape a child’s psychological development.

The wizards of genetics keep closing in on the biological roots of personality. It’s not your imagination that one baby seems born cheerful and another morose. But that’s not the complete picture. (41) ___________________________.

In the last few years scientists have identified genes that appear to predict all sorts of emotional behavior, from happiness to aggressiveness to risk-taking. (42) __________________. But the answer may not be so simple after all. Scientists are beginning to discover that genetics and environment work together to determine personality as intricately as Astaire and Rogers danced. Nature affects nurture affects nature and back and forth. Each step influences the next.

(43) ___________________________. An aggressive toddler, under the tight circumstances, can essentially be rewired to channel his energy more constructively. A child can overcome her shyness—forever. No child need be held captive to her genetic blueprint. The implications for child rearing—and social policy—are profound.

While Gregor Mendel’s pea plants did wonders to explain how humans inherit blue eyes or a bald spot, they turn out to be an inferior model for analyzing something as complex as the brain. (44) ___________________________. Genes control the brain’s neurotransmitters and receptors, which deliver and accept mental messages like so many cars headed for their assigned parking spaces. But there are billions of roads to each parking lot, and those paths are highly susceptible to environmental factors.

(45) ___________________________.

Children conceived during a three-month famine in the Netherlands during a Nazi blockade in 1945 were later found to have twice the rate of schizophrenia as did Dutch children born to parents who were spared the trauma of famine. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t get your research funded if you were looking for a genetic basis for schizophrenia, because everyone knew it was what your mother did to you in the first few years of life, as Freud said,” says Robert Plomin, a geneticist at London’s Institute of Psychiatry. “Now you can’t get funded unless you’re looking for a genetic basis. Neither extreme is right, and the data show why. There’s only a 50 percent concordance between genetics and the development of schizophrenia.”

［A］ Many scientists now believe that some experiences can actually alter the structure of the brain.

［B］ Meanwhile, genetic claims are being made for a host of ordinary and abnormal behaviors, from addiction to shyness and even to political views and divorce. If who we are is determined from conception, then our efforts to change or to influence our children may be futile. There may also be no basis for insisting that people behave themselves and conform to laws. Thus, the revolution in thinking about genes has monumental consequences for how we view ourselves as human beings.

［C］ DNA is not destiny; experience plays a powerful role, too.

［D］ A gene is only a probability for a given trait, not a guarantee. For that trait to be expressed, a gene often must be “turned on” by an outside force before it does its job. High levels of stress apparently activate a variety of genes, including those suspected of being involved in fear, shyness and some mental illnesses.

［E］ The human body contains about 100,000 genes, of which 50,000 to 70,000 are involved in brain function.

［F］ The inextricable interplay between genes and environment is evident in disorders like alcoholism, anorexia, or overeating that are characterized by abnormal behaviors. Scientists spiritedly debate whether such syndromes are more or less biologically driven. If they are mainly biological—rather than psychological, social, and cultural—then there may be a genetic basis for them.

［G］ The age-old question of whether nature or nurture determines temperament seems finally to have been decided in favor of Mother Nature and her ever-deepening gene pool.

参考答案：41 C 42 G 43 A 44 E 45 D

英译汉模拟练习

Directions:

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (10 points)

Judging goodness is not an exact science. Received opinion has, over the ages, recommended various pursuits for the benefits they purportedly bestow, from wearing hair shirts and reading the Bible to cleaning one’s plate at dinner time and listening to Mozart. (46) Self-improvement, be it of body or of mind, is the key, we are told, to individual happiness and collective well-being; striving to find what is good for us will lead us to the good life and the good society.

But does science help or hinder? Historians have often identified the scientific revolution of the late 17th and 18th centuries as the watershed that separated the moderns from the ancients in ways of knowing the world. (47) As a result, superstition, tradition and custom no longer stood as the primary authorities that could explain, legitimate and preserve the status quo. (48) The emerging spirit of inquiry and discovery released humanity from pre-modern unenlightenment; out of the darkness came the gas lamp, the electric light bulb and the ultraviolet beam, shedding light on man’s formerly slavish, subordinated state of being.

In this Whiggish narrative of progress, science plays its benevolent part in bringing mankind to a higher stage of evolution. (49) Elemental forces are mastered and managed: killer diseases no longer kill, long distances cease to be prohibitive, mass media and communications transform our knowledge of societies outside our own. The length and quality of life increase in tandem with the onward procession of scientists, physicians, inventors and techno-entrepreneurs.

Anxieties about where technology might lead us are therefore part of the broader malaise of our impoverished democracy. (50) If we are to feel confident about the power of science to build a brighter future, then we must create structures for the development of moral consensus, through debate and dialogue, across communities and societies at all levels. A socially integrated, politically connected, virtuous science cannot be successfully locked into an inclusive, democratic system when that system itself is weak and failing.

参考答案：

46. 我们得知，自我改进，不管是身体上的还是心灵上的，是获得个人幸福和集体安康的关键，努力寻找对我们有用的东西将引导我们走向幸福的生活和美好的社会。

47. 因此，迷信、传统和习俗不再是能够解释、证明和维持现状的绝对权威。

48. 正在兴起的探索和发现精神把人类从前现代未启蒙状态解救出来，黑暗中出现了煤气灯、电灯泡和紫外线，使我们清楚地看到人类过去被奴役、受控制的生存状态。

49. 自然的力量得到了征服和控制：致命的疾病不再致命，遥远的距离不再使人望而却步，大众媒体和各种通信手段把我们的社会知识传播到了我们自己的社会以外。

50. 如果我们想对科学的力量创造更加美好的未来充满信心，我们就必须建立起一些机制，通过在不同层次的社区和社会展开辩论和对话使道德观念变得一致。