For all the possibilities of our new culture machines, most people are still stuck in download mode. Even after the advent of widespread social media, a pyramid of production remains, with a small number of people uploading material, a slightly larger group commenting on or modifying that content, and a huge percentage remaining content to just consume. (44)
Television is a one-way tap flowing into our homes. The hardest task that television asks of anyone is to turn the power off after he has turned it on. (45)
What counts as meaningful uploading? My definition revolves around the concept of \- creations and experiences to which others adhere.
[A] Of course, it is precisely these superfluous things that define human culture and ultimately what it is to be human. Downloading and consuming culture requires great skills, but failing to move beyond downloading is to strip oneself of a defining constituent of humanity.
[B] Applications like tumblr.com, which allow users to combine pictures, words and other media in creative ways and then share them, have the potential to add stickiness by amusing, entertaining and enlightening others.
[C] Not only did they develop such a device but by the turn of the millennium they had also managed to embed it in a worldwide system accessed by billions of people every day.
[D] This is because the networked computer has sparked a secret war between downloading and uploading - between passive consumption and active creation - whose outcome will shape our collective future in ways we can only begin to imagine.
[E] The challenge the computer mounts to television thus bears little similarity to one format being replaced by another in the manner of record players being replaced by CD players.
[F] One reason for the persistence of this pyramid of production is that for the past half-century, much of the world's media culture has been defined by a single medium - television - and television is defined by downloading.
[G]The networked computer offers the first chance in 50 years to reverse the flow, to encourage thoughtful downloading and, even more importantly, meaningful uploading.
Part C Directions:
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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)
Since the days of Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the scientific enterprise. In some ways, this quest for commonalities defines science. Newton’s laws of motion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of different phenomena into a single explicatory frame work. (46)In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything—a single generative equation for all we see.It is becoming less clear, however, that such a theory would be a simplification, given the dimensions and universes that it might entail, nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal.
This tendency in the natural sciences has long been evident in the social sciences too. (47)Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification for it all humans share common origins it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings. Just as the bewildering variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered forms of sexual selection, perhaps the world’s languages, music, social and religious customs and even history are governed by universal features. (48)To filter out what is unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behavior arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms. That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland and his colleagues consider the evolution of grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in language.
The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that humans are born with an innate language—acquisition capacity that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly.
(49)The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many language which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints
Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000 languages.(50)Chomsky’s grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it. Whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations. Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lire age-specific and not governed by universals
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Section III Writing
Part A
51. Directions:
Some internationals students are coming to your university. Write them an email in the name of the Students’ Union to
1) extend your welcome and
2) provide some suggestions for their campus life here.
You should write about 100 words on ANSWER SHEET2.Do not sign your name at the end of the letter. Use “Li Ming” instead.
Do not write the address(10 points)
Part B
52. Directions:
write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following drawing. In your essay you should
1) describe the drawing briefly 2) explain its intended meaning, and 3) give your comments
You should write neatly on ANSWER SHEET2.(20 points)
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49
2012考研英语（一）答案
Section I
1.B 2.A 3.B 4.D 5.C 6.B 7.D 8.B 9.A 10.B 11.A 12.C 13.C 14.D 15.A 16.C 17.A 18.C 19.D 20.D 21.D 22.D 23.A 24.C 25.D 26.C 27.A 28.A 29.B 30.B 31.A 32.D 33.B 34.D 35.D 36.C 37.D 38.B 39.A 40.A
41.C 42.D 43.A 44.F 45.G
1.【答案】B
【解析】从空后信息可以看出，这句表达的是“___ ___法官表现得像政治家”的情况下，法庭就不能保持其作为法律法规的合法卫士的形象，所以应该选C, maintain“维持，保持”，其他显然语义不通。
2.【答案】A
【解析】从第三段可以看出，文章认为法院和政治之间应该是有界限的。所以这里应该是当法官像政治家一样行事，模糊了二者之间的区别时，就失去了其作为法律卫士的合法性。只有B，when表示这个意思。
3.【答案】B
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2000-2013年考研英语历年真题和答案（英语一） - 图文
