Passage Five Auctions (拍卖) are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer. He asks the crowd assembled in the auction room to make offers, or "bids", for the various items on sale. He encourages buyers to bid higher figures, and finally names the highest bidder as the buyer of goods. This is called "knocking down the goods, for the bidding ends when the auctioneer bangs a small hammer on a table at which he stands, This is often set on a raised platform called a rostrum. The ancient Romans probably invented sales by auction, and the English word comes from the Latin auction, meaning "increase". The Romans usually sold in this way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called "subusta", meaning "under the spear", a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries goods were often sold by the candle’, a short candle was lit by the auctioneer; and bids could be made while it stayed alight. An auction is usually advertised beforehand with full particulars of the articles to be sold and where and when they can be viewed by possible buyers. If the advertisement cannot give full details, catalogues are printed, and each group of goods to be sold together, called a "lot", is usually given a number. The auctioneer need not begin with lot 1 and continue in numerical order; be may wait until he registers the fact that certain dealers arc in the room and then pro- duce the lots they are likely to be interested in. The auctioneer’s services are paid for in the form of a percentage of the price the goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible. Practicaly all goods whose qualities vary are sold by auction. Among these are coffee, hider, skins, wool, tea, cocoa, furs, spices, fruit and vegetables and wines. Auction sales are also usual for land and property, antique, furniture, pictures, rare books, old china, and similar works of art. The auction-rooms at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London and New York are world famous. A candle used to bum at auction sales ()
A. because they took place at night
B. as a signal for the crowd together
C. to limit the time when offers could be made
D. to keep the auctioneer warm
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Passage Two In only two decades Asian Americans have become the fastestgrowing the U. S. minority. As their children began moving up through the nation’s schools, it became clear that a new class of academic achievers was emerging. Their achievements are reflected in the nation’s best universities, where mathematics, science and engineering departments have taken on a decidedly Asian character. This special liking for mathematics and science is partly explained by the fact’ that Asian-American students who began their educations abroad arrived in the U.S. with a solid grounding in mathematics but little or no knowledge of English. They are also influenced by the promise of a good job after college. Asians feel they will be judged more objectively. And the return on the investment in education is more immediate in something like engineering than with an arts degree. Most Asian-American students owe their success to the influence of parents who are deter- mined that their children take full advantage of what the American educational system has to offer. An effective measure of parental attention is homework. Asian parents spend more time with their children than American parents do, and it helps. Many researchers also believe there is something in Asian culture that breeds success, such as ideals that stress family values and emphasize education. Both explanations for academic success worry Asian Americans because of fears that they feed a typical racial image. Many can remember when Chinese, Japanese and Filipino immigrants were the Victims of social isolation. Indeed, it was not until 1952 that laws were laid down giving all Asian immigrants the right to citizenship. Few Asian-American students major in human sciences mainly because ()
A. their English is not good enough
B. they are afraid they might meet with unfair judgment in these areas
C. there is a wide difference between Asian and Western cultures
D. they know little about American culture and society
When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money. He may (1) the repayment of the money at any time, either (2) cash or by drawing a check in favor of another person. (3) , the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor who is (4) depending on whether the customer’s account is (5) credit or is overdrawn. But, in (6) to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer (7) a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give (8) to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is (9) against him.The bank must (10) its customer’s instructions, and not those of anyone else. (11) , for example, a customer opens an account, he instructs the bank to debit his account only in (12) of checks drawn by himself. He gives the bank (13) of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or (14) to pay out a customer’s money (15) a check on which its customer’s signature has been (16) It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very (17) one: the bank must recognize its customer’s signature. For this reason there is no (18) to the customer in the practice, (19) by banks, of printing the customer’s name on his checks. If this (20) Forgery, it is the bank that will lose, not the customer. (254 words) 2()
A. for
B. through
C. as
D. in
Karl Von Linne (or Linnaeus, as he is widely known) was a Swedish biologist who devised the system of Latinised scientific names for living things that biologists use to this day. When he came to (1) people into his system, he put them into a group called Homo- and Linne ’ s hairless fellow humans are still known biologically as Homo sapiens. (2) the group originally had a second member, Homo troglodytes. It lived in Africa, and the pictures show it to be covered (3) hair.Modern (4) are not as generous as Linne in welcoming other species into Man’s lofty (5) ,and the chimpanzee is now referred to (6) Pan troglodytes. But Pan or Homo, there is no (7) that chimps are humans’ nearest living relatives, and that if the secrets of what makes humanity special are ever to be (8) , understanding why chimps are not people, nor people chimps, is a crucial part of the process. That, in turn, means looking at the DNA of the two species, (9) it is here that the (10) must originate.One half of the puzzle has been (11) for several years: the human genome was published in 2001. The second has now been added, with the announcement in this week’s Nature (12) the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced as well. For those expecting (13) answers to age-old questions (14) , the publication of the chimp genome may be something of an (15) . There are no immediately obvious genes-present in one, but not the other-that account for such characteristic human (16) as intelligence or even hairlessness. And (17) there is a gene connected with language, known as FOXP2, it had already been discovered. But although the preliminary comparison of the two genomes (18) by the members of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analyssis Consortium, the multinational team that generated the sequence, did not (19) any obvious nuggets of genetic gold, it does at least show where to look for (20) . Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.19()
A. show up
B. turn up
C. resort to
D. turn to
Passage Four When I began reading Catch-22, I thought it was a farcical satire on life in the’ United States Army Air Force. Later I believed that Mr. Heller’s target was modern war and all those who axe responsible for waging it. Still later it seemed that he was attacking social organization and anyone who derives power from it. But by the end of the book it had become plain to me that it is no other phrase will do the human condition itself which is the object of Mr. Heller’ an outraged fury and disgust. A reviewer must always keep an anxious eye on the state of his currency. If he announces too many masterpieces he risks inflation (though it is sometimes forgotten by some of us that the cowardice of perpetual crabbing (挑剔) receives its own kind of punishment). It does not seem many weeks since I was proclaiming that Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is one of the great English novels of the century; and not long before that I was urging that attention should be paid to the magnificent and neglected talent of William Gerhardi. But at the risk of inflation I cannot help writing that Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon. For the fact is that all my successive interpretations of this book now seem to have been accurate, even if the earlier ones were also incomplete. The book has an immense and devastating (讽刺的) theme, but this theme is illustrated, as it should be, by means of an observed reality. I am not suggesting that Catch - 22 is a realistic account of life in the war——time Air Force of America or any other country. The method of satire is to inflate (放大) reality so that all its partially concealed blemishes (缺点) turn into monstrous and apparent deformations. The effect of good satire is to make us laugh with horror. And this means that social and person- al evils which are being satirized must have been there, and must be felt by the reader to be there even while he is laughing at the results of the satirist’s inflating imagination. The writer suggests that Catch - 22 is ()
A. a very great English novel
B. an accurate portrayal of life in wartime
C. an excellent piece of satire
D. the work of a neglected author