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浙江师范大学2008年硕士研究生入学考试试题
科目代码： 851 科目名称： 英语写作 提示： 1、 本科目适用专业： 050201英语语言文学、050211外国语言学及应用语言学 ； 2、 3、 请将所有答案写于答题纸上，写在试题上的不给分； 4、 请填写准考证号后6位：____________。 I. Summary writing (40%) Read the following passage and write a summary of it in around 100 words. Despite all the current fuss and bother about the extraordinary number of ordinary illiterates who overpopulate our schools, small attention has been given to another kind of illiterate, an illiterate whose plight is, in many ways, more important, because he is more influential. This illiterate may, as often as not, be a university president, but he is typically a Ph.D., a successful professor and textbook author. The person to whom I refer is the straight-A illiterate, and the following is written in an attempt to give him equal time with his widely publicized counterpart. The scene is my office, and I am at work, doing what must be done if one is to assist in the cure of a disease that, over the years, I have come to call straight-A illiteracy. I am interrogating, I am cross-examining, I am prying and probing for the meaning of a student’s paper. The student is a college senior with a straight-A average, an extremely bright, highly articulate student who has just been awarded a coveted fellowship to one of the nation’s outstanding graduate schools. He and I have been at this, have been going over his paper sentence by sentence, word by word, for an hour. “The choice of exogenous variables in relation to multi-colinearity,” I hear myself reading from his paper, “is contingent upon the derivations of certain multiple correlation coefficients.” I pause to catch my breath. “Now that statement,” I address the student --- whom I shall call, allegorically, Mr. Bright --- “that statement, Mr. Bright, what on earth does it mean?” Mr. Bright, his brow furrowed, tries mightily. 精品文档
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Finally, with both of us combining our linguistic and imaginative resources, finally, after what seems another hour, we decode it. We decide exactly what it is that Mr. Bright is trying to say, what he really wants to say, which is: “Supply determines demand.” Over the past decade or so, I have known many students like him, many college seniors suffering from Bright’s disease. It attacks the best minds, and gradually destroys the critical faculties, making it impossible for the sufferer to detect gibberish in his own writing or in that of others. During the years of higher education it grows worse, reaching its terminal stage, typically, when its victim receives his Ph.D. Obviously, the victim of Bright’s disease is no ordinary illiterate. He would never turn in a paper with misspellings or errors in punctuation; he would never use a double negative or the word “irregardless.” Nevertheless, he is illiterate, in the worst way: he is incapable of saying, in writing, simply and clearly, what he means. The ordinary illiterate --- perhaps providentially protected from college and graduate school --- might say: “Them people down at the shop better stock up on what our customers need, or we ain’t gonna be in business long.” Not our man. Taking his cue from years of higher education, years of reading the textbooks and professional journals that are the major sources of his affliction, he writes: “The focus of concentration must rest upon objectives centered around the knowledge of customer areas so that a sophisticated awareness of those areas can serve as an entrepreneurial filter to screen what is relevant from what is irrelevant to future commitments.” For writing such gibberish he is awarded straight As on his papers (both samples quoted above were taken from papers that received As), and the opportunity to move, inexorably, toward his fellowship and eventual Ph.D. As I have suggested, the major cause of such illiteracy is the stuff --- the textbooks and professional journals --- the straight-A illiterate is forced to read during his years of higher education. He learns to write gibberish by reading it, and by being taught to admire it as profundity. If he is majoring in sociology, he must grapple with such journals as the American Sociological Review, journals bulging with barbarous jargon, such as “ego-integrative action orientation” and “orientation toward improvement of the gratificational-deprivation balance of the actor” (the latter of which monstrous phrases represents, to quote Malcolm Cowley, the sociologist’s way of saying “the pleasure principle”). In such journals, Mr. Cowley reminds us, two things are never described as being “alike.” They are “homologous” or “isomorphic.” 精品文档
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Nor are things simply “different.” They are “allotropic.” In such journals writers never “divide anything.” They “dichotomize” or “bifurcate” thins. II. Exposition writing (50%): Just imagine that you are going to attend an employee recruitment fair where you are expected to deliver a job-application speech in front of the staff. Write a speech in around 300 words covering the following aspects: the reason why you want a specified job, your advantages for the post or possible benefits to the employer with your joining and your demand for the consideration of your application on the part of the employer. Marks will be awarded on the basis of your organization, diction, grammar and appropriateness. III. Argumentation writing (60%): Graduation theses are a prerequisite for a bachelor’s degree. However, thesis writing among university undergraduates does not seem satisfactory: few original and high-quality theses are turned out by our students and most of their theses are commonplace enough to be rated valueless and some are even guilty of plagiarism. Therefore, some teachers argue that students can be given different tasks to test what they have learnt in four years’ time. Instead of requiring every student to write a graduation thesis prior to graduation, we can assign thesis-writing to the capable students and, as to the less capable ones, we can make them take graduation examinations rather than writing theses. In this way, the teachers can be relieved of the heavy burden of paper guidance and the less capable students can be relieved of the frustration as a result of writing theses beyond their reach. Some other teachers hold a different view; they believe thesis writing is an ability every student should be encouraged to cultivate and no arbitrary division line should be drawn between capable and less capable students. What is your attitude toward this issue? Write a piece of argument in about 500 words. In the first part you should state your position clearly; in the second, you should supply relevant evidence to support your position and refute the opposing side’s view; and finally you should bring your essay to a logical conclusion. Marks will be awarded on the basis of your organization, diction, grammar and appropriateness. 精品文档
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