发布时间 : 星期一 文章2008年考研英语真题及答案更新完毕开始阅读
of their time. While Washington and Jefferson privately expressed distaste for slavery, they also understood that it was part of the political and economic bedrock of the country they helped to create.
For one thing, the South could not afford to part with its slaves. Owning slaves was “like having a large bank account,” says Wiencek, author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. The southern states would not have signed the Constitution without protections for the “peculiar institution,” including a clause that counted a slave as three fifths of a man for purposes of congressional representation.
And the statesmen’s political lives depended on slavery. The three-fifths formula handed Jefferson his narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 by inflating the votes of the southern states in the Electoral College. Once in office, Jefferson extended slavery with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; the new land was carved into 13 states, including three slave states.
Still, Jefferson freed Hemings’s children – though not Hemings herself or his approximately 150 other slaves. Washington, who had begun to believe that all men were created equal after observing the bravery of the black soldiers during the Revolutionary War, overcame the strong opposition of his relatives to grant his slaves their freedom in his will. Only a decade earlier, such an act would have required legislative approval in Virginia.
36. George Washington’s dental surgery is mentioned to [A] show the primitive medical practice in the past. [B] demonstrate the cruelty of slavery in his days. [C] stress the role of slaves in the U.S. history. [D] reveal some unknown aspect of his life. 37. We may infer from the second paragraph that
[A] DNA technology has been widely applied to history research.
[B] in its early days the U.S. was confronted with delicate situations. [C] historians deliberately made up some stories of Jefferson’s life. [D] political compromises are easily found throughout the U.S. history. 38. What do we learn about Thomas Jefferson?
[A] His political view changed his attitude towards slavery. [B] His status as a father made him free the child slaves. [C] His attitude towards slavery was complex. [D] His affair with a slave stained his prestige. 39. Which of the following is true according to the text? [A] Some Founding Fathers benefit politically from slavery. [B] Slaves in the old days did not have the right to vote. [C] Slave owners usually had large savings accounts. [D] Slavery was regarded as a peculiar institution.
40. Washington’s decision to free slaves originated from his [A] moral considerations. [B] military experience. [C] financial conditions. [D] political stand. Part B Directions:
In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41—45, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the 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)
The time for sharpening pencils, arranging your desk, and doing almost anything else instead of writing has ended. The first draft will appear on the page only if you stop avoiding the inevitable and sit, stand up, or lie down to write. (41) -------
Be flexible. Your outline should smoothly conduct you from one point to the next, but do not permit it to railroad you. If a relevant and important idea occurs to you now, work it into the draft. (42) ------- Grammar, punctuation, and spelling can wait until you revise. Concentrate on what you are saying. Good writing most often occurs when you are in hot pursuit of an idea rather than in a nervous search for errors.
(43) ------- Your pages will be easier to keep track of that way, and, if you have to clip a paragraph to place it elsewhere, you will not lose any writing on the other side.
If you are working on a word processor, you can take advantage of its capacity to make additions and deletions as well as move entire paragraphs by making just a few simple keyboard commands. Some software programs can also check spelling and certain grammatical elements in your writing. (44) ------- These printouts are also easier to read than the screen when you work on revisions.
Once you have a first draft on paper, you can delete material that is unrelated to your thesis and add material necessary to illustrate your points and make your paper convincing. The student who wrote “The A & P as a State of Mind” wisely dropped a paragraph that questioned whether Sammy displays chauvinistic attitudes toward women. (45) -------
Remember that your initial draft is only that. You should go through the paper many times – and then again – working to substantiate and clarify your ideas. You may even end up with several entire versions of the paper. Rewrite. The sentences within each paragraph should be related to a single topic. Transitions should connect one paragraph to the next so that there are no abrupt or confusing shifts. Awkward or wordy phrasing or unclear sentences and paragraphs should be mercilessly poked and prodded into shape.
[A] To make revising easier, leave wide margins and extra space between lines so that you can easily add words, sentences, and corrections. Write on only one side of the paper.
[B] After you have clearly and adequately developed the body of your paper, pay particular attention to the introductory and concluding paragraphs. It’s probably best to write the introduction last, after you know precisely what you are introducing. Concluding paragraphs demand equal attention because they leave the reader with a final impression.
[C] It’s worth remembering, however, that though a clean copy fresh off a printer may look terrific, it will read only as well as the thinking and writing that have gone into it. Many writers prudently store their data on disks and print their pages
each time they finish a draft to avoid losing any material because of power failures or other problems.
[D] It makes no difference how you write, just so you do. Now that you have developed a topic into a tentative thesis, you can assemble your notes and begin to flesh out whatever outline you have made.
[E] Although this is an interesting issue, it has nothing to do with the thesis, which explains how the setting influences Sammy’s decision to quit his job. Instead of including that paragraph, she added one that described Lengel’s crabbed response to the girls so that she could lead up to the A & P “policy” he enforces. [F] In the final paragraph about the significance of the setting in “A & P,” the student brings together the reasons Sammy quit his job by referring to his refusal to accept Lengel’s store policies.
[G] By using the first draft as a means of thinking about what you want to say, you will very likely discover more than your notes originally suggested. Plenty of good writers don’t use outlines at all but discover ordering principles as they write. Do not attempt to compose a perfectly correct draft the first time around. Part C Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (10 points) In his autobiography, Darwin himself speaks of his intellectual powers with extraordinary modesty. He points out that he always experienced much difficulty in expressing himself clearly and concisely, but (46) he believes that this very difficulty may have had the compensating advantage of forcing him to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus enabling him to detect errors in reasoning and in his own observations. He disclaimed the possession of any great quickness of apprehension or wit, such as distinguished Huxley. (47) He asserted, also, that his power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought was very limited, for which reason he felt certain that he never could have succeeded with mathematics. His memory, too, he described as extensive, but hazy. So poor in one sense was it that he never could remember for more than a few days a single date