SAT阅读真题资料8

2022-06-04 03:36:50

  The passages below are followed by questions based on their content; questions following a pair of related passages may also

  be based on the relationship between the paired passages. Answer the questions on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passages and in any introductory material that may be provided.

  Questions 9-12 are based on the following passages.

  Passage 1

  What accounts for the inexorable advance of the giant sports utility vehicle (SUV) into our lives? Why do we want high-clearance trucks with 'four-wheel drive and front bumpers as big as battering rams? A large part of 5 the answer lies in the fake Western names so many of them carry. No one much cares about what those names denote (lakes, frontier towns, mountain ranges); what matters is their connotations of rugged individualism, mastery over the wilderness, cowboy endurance. The 10 names simply magnify the appeal of these vehicles ’ that are the Frankensteinian concoctions of our private anxieties and desires., `

  Passage 2 '

  When a major manufacturer launched an SUV named for an Alaskan mountain, an auto-trade publication dis-15 cussed the subtleties of its name. It proposed that even though most buyers will never venture into territory any less trampled than the parking lot of the local shopping mall, the important goal of the marketing hype is to plant the image in customers’ minds that they can conquer 20 rugged terrain. Perhaps we’re trying to tame a different kind of wilderness. Indeed, in an age when many who can afford to do so live in limited-access communities in houses guarded by sophisticated surveillance systems, the SUV is the perfect transportation shelter to protect us 25 from fears both real and imagined.

  9.Passage l and Passage 2 both support which of the`

  following generalizations about buyers of SUVs?

  (A) They intend to drive them on rough terrain.

  (B) They wish to live in mountainous regions.

  (C) They are wealthier than most other car buyers.

  (D) They are influenced by marketing strategies.

  (E) They are insecure about their social status.

  10 Which of the following aspects of SUVs is addressed

  in Passage l but Q in Passage 2 ?

  (A) Their imposing bulk

  (B) Their escalating cost

  (C) The psychology of their owners

  (D) Their environmental impact

  (E) The significance of their names

  11 Which of the following in Passage I exemplifies the

  “subtleties” mentioned in Passage 2, line 15 ?

  (A) “inexorable advance” (line 1)

  (B) “battering rams" (line 4)

  (C) “lakes, frontier towns, mountain ranges” (line 7)

  (D) “connotations” (line 8)

  (E) “Frankensteinian concoctions” (line l 1)

  12 Passage l and the article cited in Passage 2 both indicate that the imagery used to market SUVs is intended to

  (A)appeal to drivers’ primitive instincts

  (B)stir yearnings for a simpler way of life

  (C)engender feelings of power and control

  (D)evoke the beauty of unspoiled nature

  (E) create an aura of nonconformity ‘

  Questions 13-24 are based on the following passages.

  These two passages discuss different aspects of the impact of the First World War (1914-1918) on British people and society. Passage 1 is from a book that examines the depiction of the war in literature, letters, and newspapers; Passage 2 is from a book that examines the differences between men ’s and women 's experiences of war.

  Passage 1

  Even if the civilian population at home had wanted to know the realities of the war, they couldn’t have without experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its indus-trialized ghastliness too unprecedented. The war would ` 5 have been simply unbelievable. From the very beginning a fissure was opening between the amiy and the civilians. The causes of civilian incomprehension were numerous.Few soldiers wrote the truth in letters home for fear of causing needless uneasiness. If they did ever write the 10 truth, it was excised by company officers, who censoredall outgoing mail. The press was under rigid censorship throughout the war. Only correspondents willing to file wholesome, optimistic copy were permitted to visit France,and even they were seldom allowed near the battlefields of15 the front line. Typical of these reporters was George Adam,Paris correspondent of the Times. His Behind the ‘Scenes at the Front, published in 1915, exudes cheer, as well as warm condescension, toward the common British soldier, whom he depicts as well fed, warm, safe, and happy-better off, 20 indeed, than at home.Lord Northcliffe, the publisher of the Times, eventually assumed full charge of government propaganda. It is no surprise to find Northcliffe’s Times on July 3, 1916, reporting the first day’s attack during the battle of the Somme'*with 25 an airy confidence which could not help but deepen the fdivision between those on the spot and those at home. “Sir ‘Douglas Haig telephoned last night," says the Times, “that the general situation was favorable.” It soon ascends to the rhetoric of heroic romance: “There is a fair field ... and 30 we have elected to fight out our quarrel with the Germans and to give them as much battle as they want.” No wonder communication failed between the troopsand those who could credit prose like that as factual testimony. ~ ~

  * The British army had nearly 60.000 casualties, the largest number for any single day in the amiy’s history.

  Passage 2

  The First World War is a classic case of the dissonance 35 between official. male-centered history and unofficial female history. Not only did the apocalyptic events of this war have very different meanings for men and women, such events were in fact very different for men and women, a point understood almost at once by an involved contemporary 40 like Vera Brittain. She noted about her relationship with her soldier fiancé that the war put a “barrier of indescribable experience betweensmen and written whom they loved. Sometimes (I wrote at the time) I fear that even if he gets through, what he has experienced out there may change his 45 ideas and tastes utterly."The nature of the barrier thrust between Vera Brittain `and her fiancé, however, may have been even more complex than she herself realized, for the impediment preventing a marriage of their true minds was constituted not only by his 50 altered experience but by hers. Specifically, as young men became increasingly alienated from their pre-war selves,increasingly immured in the muck and blood of the battle-fields, increasingly abandoned by the civilization of which they had ostensibly been heirs, women seemed to become, 55 as if by some uncanny swing of history’s pendulum. ever more powerful. As nurses, as munitions workers, as bus drivers, as soldiers in the agricultural “land army,” even as wives and mothers, these formerly subservient creatures began to loom larger. A visitor to London observed in 60 1918 that; “England was a world of women-women in uniforms!"

  The wartime poems, stories, and memoirs by women.sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly explore the political and economic revolution by which the First World War 65 at least temporarily dispossessed male citizens of the primacy that had always been their birthright, while perma-nently granting women access to both the votes and the professions that they had never before possessed. Similarly, a number of these women writers covertly or overtly cele-70 brated the release of female desires and powers which that revolution made possible, as well as the reunion (or even reunification) of women which was a consequence of such liberated energies.Their enthusiasm, which might otherwise seem like 75 morbid gloating, was explained by Virginia‘Woolf, a writer otherwise known for her pacifist sympathies:How. _ _ can we explain that amazing outburst in August 1914, when the daughters of educated men _ _ _rushed into hospitals. _ _ drove lorries, worked in fields 80 and munitions factories, and used all their immense stores of charm _ _ _ to persuade young men that to fight was heroic. _ _ ? So profound was ( woman 's) unconsciousloathing for the education of the private house that she would undertake any task, however menial, exercise any 85 fascination, however fatal, that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously s e desired “our splendid Empire”,'unconsciously she sired our splendid war.

  13 Passage 2 is unlike Passage l in that Passage 2

  (A) describes war as dehumanizing

  (B) endorses the official view of the war

  (C). discusses war in terms of how it affects women

  (D) tries to identify the root causes of the conflict

  (E) criticizes the censorship of information about the war

  14 The “fissure” (line 6) was primarily caused by the

  (A) civilians’ ignorance about the soldiers’ experience

  (B) discrepancy between the experiences of men and of women

  (C) behavior of the officers who led the battles

  (D) guilt that civilians felt about sending young men off to war

  (E) special privileges granted to war correspondents

  15 The footnote about the battle of the Somme adds

  information that

  (A) shows how history has been rewritten to glorify the war`

  (B) trivializes the dangers faced by most of the soldiers

  (C) emphasizes the inaccuracy of the published reports

  (D) suggests that the -costs of war outweighed its l benefits

  (E) offers a journalist’s personal reflection on the war

  16 ln Passage l, the author suggests that the attitudes of

  “those at home” (line 26) were strongly influenced by .

  (A) the government’s inadequate control over propaganda

  (B) the lack of opportunities for soldiers to write home

  (C) the disparity between men’s and women’s views of war .

  (D) efforts of pacifists to end the war

  (E) censored reports from the press

  17 ln line 33, “credit” most nearly means

  (A) award

  (B) believe

  (C) enter

  (D) Supply

  (E) enrich

  18. ln Passage 2, the author mentions Vera Brittain (line 40) primarily to

  (A) support an argument by quoting material written at the time of the war

  (B) present an example of the kind of powers women gained during the war ' 4 .

  (C) describe how a writer manipulated the facts about the war

  (D) discuss the wartime literature produced by women

  (E) dispute recent historians’ views of the war

  19 In line 58, the reference to “wives and mothers” most

  directly implies the author’s assumption that

  (A) families prospered more when women became head of the household

  (B) soldiers were unaware of the fundamental change taking place in society

  (C) women embraced their chance to work outside the home

  (D) women were anxious about fulfilling family responsibilities

  (E) women in domestic roles had previously exercised little authority

  20 In line 64, the “revolution” refers to

  (A)women’s literary output during the war

  (B) women’s pursuit of rights previously unavailable to them

  (C) the change that men underwent after experiencing war

  (D) the redistribution of power from the upper to the middle class`

  (E) the growing equalization of men’s and women’s wages

  21 The author of Passage 2 implies that women’s enthusiasm “might . . _seem like morbid gloating” (lines 74-75) because

  (A) women`s progress caused the deterioration of men’s status '

  (B) women achieved recognition as the real peace- makers in the war

  (C) women boasted that the war would be lost without them

  (D) women celebrated the fact that they did not have to fight in the war 2

  (E) women were enjoying power while men were in battle

  22 In lines 84-85, the discussion of women’s involvement 24;

  with “menial” tasks and “fatal”fascinations primarily serves to emphasize the

  (A)far-reaching consequences of women’s roles during wartime

  (B)extent to which women felt stifled in their traditional roles

  (C)contrast between how women idealized war and what it was really like

  (D)desire by women to escape the horrors of war

  (E)risks that women took to fight in the war

  23 What do Behind the Scenes at the Front (lines 16-17) and "wartime poems, stories and memoirs” (line 62) have in common?

  (A)Both caused needless uneasiness among civilians.

  (B)Both deliberately reflected the views of the government

  (C)Both changed the status quo for women in wartime Britain.

  (D)Both encouraged writers to take their craft more seriously.

  (E)Neither focused on the realities of the battlefield.

  24 Which of the following statements about the effect of the First World War is supported by both passages?

  (A) Officers resented the government’s complacency.

  (B)Women gained independence in postwar Britain.

  (C)Soldiers felt isolated from parts of civilian society

  (D)Writers failed in their attempts to describe the atrocities of war.

  (E) War proved an undesirable way to resolve the European conflict.

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