2000年全国攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试英语试题

ly a boy baby）surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes one more agent of evolution has gone.

　　There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women has 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.

　　For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the pass 100, 000 years even the pass 100year our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension." No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

　　55.What used to be the danger in being a man according to the first paragraph?

　　[A]A lack of mates.

　　[B]A fierce competition.

　　[C]A lower survival rate.

　　[D]A defective gene.

　　56.What does the example of India illustrate?

　　[A]Wealthy people tend to have fewer children than poor people.

　　[B]Natural selection hardly works among the rich and the poor.

　　[C]The middle class population is 80% smaller than that of the tribes.

　　[D]India is one of the countries with a very high birth rate.

　　57.The author argues that our bodies have stopped evolving because____ .

　　[A]life has been improved by technological advance

　　[B]the number of female babies has been declining

　　[C]our species has reached the highest stage of evolution

　　[D]the difference between wealth and poverty is disappearing

　　58.Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

　　[A]Sex Ration Changes in Human Evolution

　　[B]Ways of Continuing Man's Evolution

　　[C]The Evolutionary Future of Nature

　　[D]Human Evolution Going Nowhere 转贴于：博学在线_考研

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　　Passage 3

　　When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for, however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today, it is possible that in years to come they may be regarded as normal. With regard to Futurist poetry, however, the case is rather difficult, for whatever Futurist poetry may be even admitting that the theory on which it is based may be right, it can hardly be classed as Literature.

　　This, in brief, is what the Futurist says; for a noise and violence and speed. Consequently, our feelings, thoughts and emotions have undergone a corresponding change. This speeding up of life, says the Futurist, requires a new form of expression. We must speed up our literature too, if we want to interpret modern stress. We must pour out a large stream of essential words, unhampered by stops, or qualifying adjectives, of finite verbs. Instead of describing sounds we must make up words that imitate them;we must use many sizes of type and different colored inks on the same page, and shorten or lengthen words at will.

　　Certainly their descriptions of battles are confused. But it is a little upsetting to read in the explanatory notes that a certain line describes a fight between a Turkish and a Bulgarian officer on a bridge off which they both fall into the river and then to find that the line consists of the noise of their falling and the weights of the officers: Pluff! Pluff! A hundred and eighty-five kilograms.

　　This, though it fulfills the laws and requirements of Futurist poetry, can hardly be classed as Literature. All the same, no thinking man can refuse to accept their first proposition: that a great change in our emotional life calls for a change of expression. The whole question is really this: have we essentially changed?

　　59.This passage is mainly____ .

　　[A]a survey of new approaches to art

　　[B]a review of Futurist poetry

　　[C]about merits of the Futurist movement

　　[D]about laws and requirements of literature

　　60.When a novel literary idea appers, people should try to_____ .

　　[A]dete