86至93 年考研英语真题阅读Reading Comprehension

86至93 年Reading Comprehension

93年Reading Comprehension

Text 1

Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick II in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.

All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.

Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.

Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.

Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern “toy-bear.” And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.

But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling (咿呀学语), grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

31. The purpose of Frederick II’s experiment was ________.

[A] to prove that children are born with the ability to speak

[B] to discover what language a child would speak without hearing any human speech

[C] to find out what role careful nursing would play in teaching a child to speak

[D] to prove that a child could be damaged without learning a language

32. The reason some children are backward in speaking is most probably that ________.

[A] they are incapable of learning language rapidly

[B] they are exposed to too much language at once

[C] their mothers respond inadequately to their attempts to speak

[D] their mothers are not intelligent enough to help them

33. What is exceptionally remarkable about a child is that ________.

[A] he is born with the capacity to speak

[B] he has a brain more complex than an animal’s

[C] he can produce his own sentences

[D] he owes his speech ability to good nursing

34. Which of the following can NOT be inferred from the passage?

[A] The faculty of speech is inborn in man.

[B] Encouragement is anything but essential to a child in language learning.

[C] The child’s brain is highly selective.

[D] Most children learn their language in definite stages.

35. If a child starts to speak later than others, he will in future ________.

[A] have a high IQ

[B] be less intelligent

[C] be insensitive to verbal signals

[D] not necessarily be backward

Text 2

In general, our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucratic (官僚主义的) management in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery. The oiling is done with higher wages, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and “human-relations” experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it. In fact, the blue- and the white-collar workers have become economic puppets who dance to the tune of automated machines and bureaucratic management.

The worker and employee are anxious, not only because they might find themselves out of a job; they are anxious also because they are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life. They live and die without ever having confronted the fundamental realities of human existence as emotionally and intellectually independent and productive human beings.

Those higher up on the social ladder are no less anxious. Their lives are no less empty than those of their subordinates. They are even more insecure in some respects. They are in a highly competitive race. To be promoted or to fall behind is not a matter of salary but even more a matter of self-respect. When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the tight mixture of submissiveness and independence. From that moment on they are tested again and again -- by the psychologists, for whom testing is a big business, and by their superiors, who judge their behavior, sociability, capacity to get along, etc. This constant need to prove that one is as good as or better than one’s fel …… 此处隐藏：38097字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……