大学英语四级-132
(总分100,考试时间90分钟)
Reading Comprehension
Section A
Directions:In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.
Each artist knows in his heart that he is saying something to the public. He hopes the public will listen and understand—he wants to teach them, and he wants them to learn from him.
What visual artist like painters want to teach is easy to make out but difficult to  1  , because painters translate their experience into shapes and colors, not  2  . They seem to feel that a c
ertain selection of shapes and colors, out of the  3  billions possibles, is exceptionally interesting for them and worth showing to us. Without their works we should never have noticed these  4  shapes and colors, or have felt the  5  which they brought to the artist.
Most artists take their shapes and colors from the world of nature and from human bodies in  6  and at rest; their choices indicate that these aspects of the world are worth looking at, that they contain beautiful sights. Contemporary artists might say that they  7  choose subjects that provide an interesting pattern, that there is nothing more in it Yet even they do not choose entirely without  8  to the character of their subjects,
If one painter chooses to paint a decaying leg and another a lake in moonlight, each of them is  9  our attention to a certain aspect of the world. Each painter is telling us something, showing us something,  10  something—all of which means that, consciously or unconsciously, he is trying to teach us,
A. words B. directing C. countless D. crawl
E. reference F. merely G. erect H. motion
I. explain J. emphasizing K. sympathetic L. gloriously
M. delight N. crisis O. particular
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10. sort out the facts
Section B
Directions:In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it, Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs, Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once.
Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest?
A I"ve drawn up a list, And there"s one thing I know about this list: You won"t agree with it, Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever, Which is fine: A top-eight list is all about starting a good argument, But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine; I"m starting at the year zero, Otherwise, we"d never get out of prehistory, And I"m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don"t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B This is a list of end products. That is, I"m **ponents with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we"d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I"m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could **municate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D Unoriginal, I know, but still it"s true. Gutenberg"s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity"s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, if the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.

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