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Passage Four Handwriting analysis (graphology) circumvents the law by frying to determine an employee’s traits (e. g. stability) according to some handwriting group stereotype to which he or she belongs. (Indeed, some graphologists have m little respect for the law and m much confidence in their stereotyping that they have proposed using the technique in lieu of court proceedings to identify and prosecute criminals!) The analysis works by comparing the speed, size, slant, form, pressure, layout, and continuity of an individual’s handwriting with various patterns and typologies, and assimilating this person’s script into these types. As a result the individual judged ceases to be an individual and becomes little more than a composite of traits. This end result differs little from judgments based on race, sex, religion, etc. Granted, no individual is totally unique. Any evaluation of character, or for that matter skills, turns, in some measure, on employing generic ideas about virtue, vice, and technical competence. Still, there is a human individuality which manifests itself in our imagination and in the innovative arguments we choose to advance. Standardized handwriting analysis is far less respectful of individuality in this latter sense than other modes of screening. Individuals who are asked to write a personal essay describing their qualifications in their own terms; and who are given an opportunity in an interview to describe their motivations in seeking a particular job retain far more of what makes them distinctive. This more personalized format gives the individual an opportunity to express unusual or provocative opinions the employer may not have previously considered. Upon reflection, the employer may think these comments so pertinent that s/he awards the job to this candidate. Handwriting analysis, though, is ostensibly purely formal. It does not provide the candidate with any opportunity to distinguish himself or herself in this substantive fashion. At best, graphology will yield some vague assessment such as "the candidate is highly creative". It is worth remembering what the driving force is behind graphological testing. Handwriting analysis, like automated telephone screening, is increasingly being used early in the hiring process because it purports to deliver salient, accurate information cheaply. Yet precisely because these techniques are standardized, the data has reduced value. Judgments about the precise relevance of some perceived character traits to a job are rarely straightforward. Good interviewers learn through training and through interaction itself to qualify previous judgments. Perhaps the candidate who fails to make eye contact has a guilty conscience (as it is standardly assumed). On the other hand, perhaps the candidate is a recent immigrant from a country where eye contact is considered rude. Alternate interpretations sometimes suggest themselves in a face-to-face encounter with individuals who are fully present in their living, acting, and speaking personhood. Handwriting analysis, done at a distance by an expert who has never even met the candidate, will not stimulate the evaluator’s imagination in the way the in-person interview 6r personal essay might. On the contrary, the cheapness of the technique stems from its elimination of the important human activity of hypothesizing about the case at hand. The writer values ______.

A. people’s individuality.
B. good, experienced interviewers.
C. non-discriminatory practices.
D. all of the above.

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Passage 1Nuclear power is obtained from the energy which can be released from nucleus of an atom. Until the twentieth century man used water, wood and the fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) as sources of power. During the first quarter of the twentieth century physicists investigated the structure of the atom. In 1919 Rutherford split the atom artificially. Thirteen years later, the neutron was discovered. In 1939 Hahn and Strassman investigated the action of neutrons on uranium-235. They found that it was split into two equal pieces. This process is known as fission. It releases great amount of energy. The neutrons that are released in fission produce fissions in other atoms. This is known as a chain reaction. On 2nd December 1942 Enrico Fermi and his colleagues produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Since then atomic energy has been used in war and peace. In 1951 electricity was first produced by using the heat from a nuclear reactor. More and more countries are building nuclear power stations to produce electricity. Which of the following statements is true?()

A. Men only used water, wood and fossil fuels to produce power in the twentieth century.
B. Men only used water, wood and fossil fuels to produce power before the twentieth century.
C. Physicists investigated the structure of the atom in the 1890s.
D. Physicists discovered the neutron in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

On your answer sheet, circle and black out the letter that best answers the questions below.Passage One Obviously, the per capita income of a country depends on many things, and any statistical test that does not take account of all important determinants is misspecified, and thus must be used only for descriptive and heuristic purposes. It is nonetheless interesting--and for many people surprising--to find that there is a positive and even a statistically significant relationship between these two variables: the greater the number of people per square kilometer the higher the per capita income. The law of diminishing returns is not invariably true. It would be absurd to suppose that a larger endowment of land ipso facto makes a country poorer. This consideration by itself would, of course, call for a negative sign on population density. Thus, it is interesting to ask what might account for the "wrong" sign and think of what statistical tests should ultimately be done. Clearly there is a simultaneous two-way relationship between population density and per capita income; the level of per capita income affects population growth just as population, by increasing the labor force, affects per capita income. The argument offered here suggests that perhaps countries with better economic policies and institutions come to have higher per capita incomes than countries with inferior policies and institutions, and that these higher incomes bring about a higher population growth through more immigration and lower death raters. In this way, the effects of better institutions and policies in raising per capita income swamps the tendency of diminishing returns to labor to reduce it. This hypothesis may also explain why many empirical studies have not been able to show a negative association between the rate of population growth and increases in per capita income. One reason why the ratio of natural resources to population does not account for variations in per capita income is that most economic activity can now readily be separated from deposits of raw material and arable land. Over time, transportation technologies have certainly improved, and products that have a high value in relation to their weight, such as most services and manufactured goods like computers and airplanes, may have become more important. The Silicon Valley is not important for the manufacturing of computers because of the deposits of silicon, and London and Zurich are not great banking centers because of fertile land. Even casual observation suggests that most modem manufacturing and service exports are not closely related to natural resources. Western Europe does not now have a high ratio of natural resources to population, but it is very important in the export of manufactures and services. In a parallel way, the striking success of Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, with relatively few natural resources per capita, cannot be explained by reliance thereon. The population growth in countries with higher per capita income ______.

A. comes not from the birth rate of the citizens but rather from the influx of others.
B. is a natural result because the citizens have more money for children.
C. is only an artifact based on a declining birth rate.
D. does not invalidate the population growth of poorer countries.

Passage Two The procedures followed by scholars studying literature are often unsatisfactory: the control over a cognitive project as a whole is often lost. The literary scholar seems to be collecting data, which is a preliminary operation, without making use of them. Like a diligent ant gathering food it will never eat, the contemporary literary scholar seems intent upon writing footnotes of a book s/he will never try to read. I propose that at the outset of a research project it is necessary to render explicitly the questions the scholar will try to answer, what methods will be used and the reason why s/he thinks that it may be worthwhile answering such questions. More over, the work of the people concerned with the study of literature seems casual. For instance, much research is devoted to one author, often on the occasion of an anniversary. Now there is no reason to think that our observations will be more valid, urgent, appropriate, useful, or interesting if the author of the texts we are concerned with was born or died or the texts were written fifty, one hundred, or two hundred years ago. This seems to be celebration and not research producing knowledge. It does not seem to make any sense to determine one’s research program by looking at the calendar. The widespread habit of limiting the scope of a research project to a single author often leads to a confined understanding of the author and the texts, which, in turn, offers marginal results. The average literary scholar considers these results satisfactory. But for what purpose are they satisfactory Often the research strategies and methods of the literary scholar are repetitive. A new operation that is anologous to previous ones is often considered worthwhile. It is on these premises that many texts concerning literature are produced and accepted. I propose instead that in a concrete project that tries to produce knowledge, any statement needs verification. But there is a point where it is unnecessary to repeat the same operation on new data, because the result has already been established: rather than additional confirmation of what is already known, it is the exploration of what is still unknown that deserves priority. Contemporary literary research seems to be based on habits that originated in the past and that bear little resemblance to research projects as they are intended now in other fields. If our main aim were the proposal of some objects as cultural models, then it would be useful to our purpose to try to attract our society’s attention toward these objects and the persons who produced them. It would be reasonable to perform our actions on the occasion of anniversaries, because we would not be doing research, but celebration and propaganda. Celebration aims at confirming certitudes and strengthening bonds of solidarity among the participants. It does not produce knowledge, but it confirms what is already known. Legitimating by means of the power of words has been for many centuries the main job of the man of letters. According to the writer, writing about an author on their anniversary ______.

A. is useful because it creates stronger ties with the author.
B. is useful because it strengthens the cultural information.
C. is useful because it is celebration and celebration confirms certitudes.
D. is not useful since it does not add much to the pool of established information.

Passage Three After a run of several thousand years, it is entirely fitting that 2000 will be marked as the year the tide turned against taxation. Clay tablets recall the taxes of Hammurabi in the Babylon of 2000BC, but the practice is certainly older. People in power have always tried to divert some of the proceeds of economic activity in their own direction. Lords took feudal dues from their vassals; landowners took tolls from merchants; gangsters took protection money from small businesses; governments took taxes from their citizens. Despite the different names, the principle has remained constant: those who do not produce take resources from those who do, and spend it on altogether different things. The tide is turning because of the convergence of several factors, in the first place, taxes are becoming harder to collect. Capital is more mobile than ever, and inclined to fly from places that tax to places that do not. Governments do not move their boundaries and jurisdictions as rapidly as companies can change locations. Attempts to establish trans-national tax powers are almost certainly, ably doomed by international competition to attract economic activity. Many businesses will choose to stay out of reach. The global economy and the Internet mean that purchases can now cross frontiers. People buy books, clothes, and cars from abroad, and any finance minister who likes to tax these items find his tax base diminishing. It is not only capital and goods which are harder to pin down. Even wages are crossing frontiers. The rise of the service sector means that many income-generating activities can take place across frontiers, causing yet more headaches for overstretched public treasuries. Furthermore, the pace of electronic, hard-to-trace activity is accelerating. No less important has been the rise of political resistance. The past quarter-century has been marked by a movement led in Britain and America itself in California’s famous tax-cutting referendum Proposition 13, but saw its fullest expression in the Thatcher and Reagan tax cuts of the 1980’s. Britain’s Tories entered office in 1979 with the top rate of income tax at 98%, and left office 18 years later with a top rate of 40%. Indeed, their Labour opponents became electable only after a firm promise not to raise it again. The plain fact is that electorates these days will not stand for it. They recognize, correctly, that governments spend their money less carefully and less efficiently than they can spend it themselves. One of the greatest uses of tax money is to provide pensions. And here a revolution--as important and pervasive as privatization--is sweeping the world. Fully-funded personal pension plans, based on individual savings, are sweeping away the poorly funded public pensions promised by governments. The latter take taxes from the young to support the old. The former invest savings from the young to support themselves when old. From this article it is evident that ______.

A. small business will continue to be heavily taxed.
B. in England, personal income tax will rise to a top rate of 40%.
C. many large companies can still avoid paying high taxes.
D. globalization is making tax-collection easier.

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