专业英语八级（阅读）模拟题2019年(21)
(总分100, 做题时间155分钟)
PART II READING COMPREHENSION
SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked [A] , [B], [C] and [D]. Choose the one that you think is the best answer.
(1)It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France, the headquarters of the global battle against American cultural hegemony. If French guys are giving in to English, something really big must be going on. And something big is going on.
(2)Partly, it's that American hegemony. Didier Benchimol, CEO of a French ecommerce **p
any, **pelled to speak English perfectly because the Internet software business is dominated by Americans. He and other French businessmen also have to speak English because they want to get their message out to American investors, possessors of the world's deepest pockets.
(3)The triumph of English in France and elsewhere in Europe, however, may rest on something more enduring. As they become entwined with each other politically and economically, Europeans need a way to talk to one another and to the rest of the world. And for a number of reasons, they've decided upon English as **mon tongue.
(4)So when German chemical and **pany Hoechst merged with **petitor Rhone-Poulenc last year, **panies chose the vaguely Latinate Aventis as the **pany name—-and settled on English as **pany's common language. When monetary policymakers from around Europe began meeting at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last year to set interest rates for the new Euroland, they held their deliberations in English. Even the European Commission, with 11 official languages and a traditionally French-speaking bureaucracy, effectively switched over to English as its working language last year.
(5)How did this happen? One school attributes English's great success to the sheer weight of its merit. It's a Germanic language, brought to Britain around the fifth century A.D. During the four centuries of French-speaking rule that followed Norman Conquest of 1066, the language morphed into something else entirely. French words were added wholesale, and most of **plications of Germanic grammar were shed while few of **plications of French were added. The result is a language with a huge vocabulary and a simple grammar that can express most things more efficiently than either of its parents. What's more, English has remained ungoverned and open to change—foreign words, coinages, and grammatical shifts—in a way that French, ruled by the purist Academie Francaise, has not.
(6)So it's a swell language, especially for business. But the rise of English over the past few centuries clearly owes at least as much to history and economics as to the language's ability to economically express the concept win-win. What happened is that **petition—first Latin, then French, then, briefly, German—faded with the waning of the political, economic, and military fortunes of, respectively, the Catholic Church, France, an
d Germany. All along, English was increasing in importance: Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and London the world's most important financial centre, which made English a key language for business. England's colonies around the world also made it the language with the most global reach. And as that former colony the U.S. rose to the status of the world's preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power, English became the obvious second language to learn.
(7)In the 1990s more and more Europeans found themselves forced to use English. The last generation of business and government leaders who hadn't studied English in school was leaving the stage. The European Community was adding new members and evolving from a paper-shuffling club into a serious regional government that would need a **mon language if it were ever to get anything done. Meanwhile, economic barriers between European nations have been disappearing, meaning that more and **panies are beginning to look at the whole continent as their domestic market. And then the Internet came along.
(8)The Net had two big impacts. One was that it was an exciting, potentially lucrative new
industry that had its roots in the U.S., so if you wanted to get in on it, you had to speak some English. The other was that by surfing the Web, Europeans who had previously encountered English only in school and in pop songs were **ing into contact with it daily.
(9)None of this means English has taken over European life. According to the European Union, 47% of Western Europeans(including the British and Irish)speak English well enough to carry on a conversation. That's a lot more than those who can speak German(32%)or French(28%), but it still means more Europeans don't speak the language. If you want to sell shampoo or cell phones, you have to do it in French or German or Spanish or Greek. Even me U.S. and British **panies that stand to benefit most from the spread of English have been hedging their bets—CNN broadcasts in Spanish; the Financial Times has recently launched a daily German-language edition.
(10)But just look at who speaks English: 77% of Western European college students, 69% of managers, and 65% of those aged 15 to 24. In the secondary schools of the European Union's non-English-speaking countries, 91% of students study English, all of which means that the transition to English as the language of European business hasn't been all that traumatic, and it's only going to get easier in the future.
1. 
Europeans began to favour English for all the following reasons EXCEPT its _____.
A 
inherent linguistic properties
B 
association with the business world
C 
links with the United States
D 
disassociation from political changes
    该问题分值: 2.9
答案:D
第2段第1句说，部分原因与美国霸权有关，故C是原因之一。第5段谈英语语言自身的优点，故A“内在的语言特点”是原因之一。第6段开头即说英语是商界的时髦语言，B也提及。排除C、A、B，故答案是D。
vaguely2. 
French lost its dominant status as an international language for _____.
A 
religious reasons
B 
political reasons
C 
economic reasons
D 
military reasons
    该问题分值: 2.9
答案:C
文章第6段提到，随着天主教堂、法国和德国分别在政治、经济和军事力量上的衰弱，语言间的竞争——先是拉丁语，然后是法语，再随后是短期内的德语——慢慢消退了。也就是说，拉丁语的衰落是政治原因引起的，法语的衰落是经济原因引起的，德语在短暂强势后，随德国军事力量的衰弱而衰落了。故答案是C。
3. 
Which of the following statements forecasts the continuous rise of English in the future?
A 
About half of Western Europeans are now proficient in English.
B 
**. and British **panies are operating in Western Europe.
C 
Most secondary school students in Europe study English.
D 
Most Europeans continue to use their own language.
    该问题分值: 2.9
答案:C
文中最后一段中提到“在欧盟非英语国家的中学生中，91％的学生学习英语。这意味着欧洲商业界把工作语言转为英语的过程并不难．而且将来会变得更加容易”。九成多中学生学习英语，意味着未来绝大多数人会说英语。所以C符合题意。
4. 
The passage mainly examines the factors related to _____.
A 
the rising status of English in Europe
B 
English learning in non-English-speaking E.U. nations
C 
the preference for English by European businessmen
D 
the switch from French to English in the European Commission
    该问题分值: 2.9
答案:A
由文章首句即可知，本文讨论英语地位的不断上升。文章主体探讨了这一现象的原因，结尾又用数字进一步说明。在欧洲，英语将得到进一步普及。故A“英语在欧洲的地位上升”正确。
(1)Hostility to Gypsies has existed almost from the time they first appeared in Europe in the 14th century. The origins of the Gypsies, with little written history, were shrouded in mystery. What is known now from clues in the various dialects of their language, Romany, is that they came from northern India to the Middle East a thousand years ago, working as minstrels and mercenaries, metal-smims and servants.
Europeans misnamed them Egyptians, soon shortened to Gypsies. A clan system, based
mostly on their traditional crafts and geography, has made them a deeply fragmented and fractious people, only really unifying in the face of enmity from non-Gypsies, whom they call gadje. Today many Gypsy activists prefer to be called Roma, **es from the Romany word for "man". But on my travels among them most still referred to themselves as Gypsies.
(2)In Europe their persecution by the gadje began quickly, with the church seeing heresy in their fortune-telling and the state seeing anti-social behaviour in their nomadism. At various times they have been forbidden to wear their distinctive bright clothes, to speak their own language, to travel, to marry one another, or to ply their traditional crafts. In some countries they were reduced to slavery—it wasn't until the mid-1800s that Gypsy slaves were freed in Romania. In more recent times the Gypsies were caught up in Nazi ethnic hysteria, and perhaps half a million perished in the Holocaust. Their horses have been shot and the wheels removed from their wagons, their names have been changed, their women have been sterilized, and their children have been forcibly given for adoption to non-Gypsy families.
(3)But the Gypsies have confounded predictions of their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group, and their numbers have burgeoned. Today there are an estimated 8 to 12 million Gypsies scattered across Europe, making them the continent's largest minority. The exact number is hard to pin down. Gypsies have regularly been undercounted, both by regimes anxious to downplay their profile and by Gypsies themselves, seeking to avoid bureaucracies. Attempting to remedy past inequities, activist groups may overcount. Hundreds of thousands more have emigrated to the Americas and elsewhere. With very few exceptions Gypsies have expressed no great desire for a country to call their own—unlike the Jews, to whom the Gypsy experience is **pared. "Romanestan," said Ronald Lee, the Canadian Gypsy writer, "is where my two feet stand."

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