2024年5月16日发(作者：oppor8007)

2021年考研《英语二》阅读真题及答案

Text 1

It is curious that Stephen Koziatek feels almost as though he has to justify his

efforts to give his students a better future.

Mr. Koziatek is part of something pioneering. He is a teacher at a New

Hampshire high school where learning is not something of books and tests and

mechanical memorization, but practical. When did it become accepted wisdom

that students should be able to name the 13th president of the United States but

be utterly overwhelmed by a broken bike Chain?

As Koziatek know, there is learning in just about everything. Nothing is

necessarily gained by forcing students to learn geometry at a graffitied desk stuck

with generations of discarded chewing gum. They can also learn geometry by

assembling a bicycle.

But he's also found a kind of insidious prejudice. Working with your hands is

seen as almost a mark of inferiority. School in the family of vocational education

"have hat it's for kids who can't make it academically," he says.

On one hand, that viewpoint is a logical product of America's evolution.

Manufacturing is not the economic engine that it once was. The job security that

the US economy once offered to high school graduates has largely evaporated.

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More education is the new principle. We want more for our kids, and rightfully so.

But the headlong push into bachelor's degrees for all—and the subtle

devaluing of anything less—misses an important point: That's not the only thing

the American economy ,a bachelor's degree opens moredoors. Buteven

now,54 percent of the jobs in the country are middle-skill jobs, such as

construction and high-skill manufacturing. But only 44 percent of workers are

adequately trained.

In other words, at a time when the working class has turned the country on its

political head, frustrated that the opportunity that once defined America is

vanishing,one obvious solution is staring us in the face. There is a gap in

working-class jobs, but the workers who need those jobs most aren't equipped to

do them. Koziatek's Manchester School of Technology High School is trying to fill

that gap.

Koziatek's school is a wake-up call. When education becomes one-size-fits-all,

it risks overlooking a nation's diversity of gifts.

21.【题干】A broken bike chain is mentioned to show students' lack of_____.

【选项】

ical memorization

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ic training

cal ability

ring spirit

【答案】C

【解析】这是一道细节题，根据题干关键词可定位至第二段最后一句话,意思是”什么

时候这种观点变得可接受了呢?学生应该能够说出美国第十三任总统的名字，但是却完全对

坏了的自行车链束手无策”。从作者使用问句的形式就可判断出作者并不接受这种观点，

即学生只学会书本上的知识而不具备实际能力。再结合上一句话即本段第二句话，Mr

Koziatek是New Hampshire高中的一名老师，在这所学校，学习不只是书本上的知识，

或者是为了考试，也不是为了机械化的记忆，而是为了实际的技能。能看出，作者认为学

生们缺少的是实际技能，所以答案是C practical ability. Text 2

While fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – still generate roughly 85 percent of the

world’s energy supply, it’s clearer than ever that the future belongs to renewable

sources such as wind and solar. The move to renewables is picking up momentum

around the world. They now account for more than half of new power sources

going on line.

Some growth stems from a commitment by governments and farsighted

businesses to fund cleaner energy sources. But increasingly the story is about the

plummeting prices of renewables, especially wind and solar. The cost of solar

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panels has dropped by 80 percent and the cost of wind turbines by close to

one-third in the past eight years.

In many parts of the world renewable energy is already a principal energy

source. In Scotland, for example, wind turbines provide enough electricity to

power 95 percent of homes. While the rest of the world takes the lead, notably

China and Europe, the United States is also seeing a remarkable shift. In March, for

the first time, wind and solar power accounted for more than 10 percent of the

power generated in the US, reported the US Energy Information Administration.

President Trump has underlined fossil fuels – especially coal – as the path to

economic growth. In a recent speech in Iowa, he dismissed wind power as an

unreliable energy source. But that message did not play well with many in Iowa,

where wind turbines dot the fields and provide 36 percent of the state’s electricity

generation – and where tech giants like Microsoft are being attracted by the

availability of clean energy to power their data centers.

The question "what happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’

t shine?" has provided a quick put-down for skeptics. But a boost in the storage

capacity of batteries is making their ability to keep power flowing around the clock

more likely.

The advance is driven in part by vehicle manufacturers, who are placing big

bets on battery-powered electric vehicles. Although electric cars are still a rarity on

roads now, this massive investment could change the picture rapidly in coming

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years.

While there’s a long way to go, the trend lines for renewables are spiking. The

pace of change in energy sources appears to be speeding up – perhaps just in

time to have a meaningful effect in slowing climate change. What Washington

does – or doesn’t do – to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at

a time of a global shift in thought.

26.【题干】The word "plummeting" (Line 3, Para 2) is closest in meaning to_____.

【选项】

izing

ng

g

【答案】C

【解析】这是一道词义句意题，要想知道plummeting 的意思，首先要回到原文找线

索，即plummeting所在的句子以及上下句，由原文可知，plummeting所在句子是在说

现在例如风能和太阳能这样的可再生资源的价格的问题，plummeting是修饰可再生资源

的价格的，接着二段最后一句就在用具体数字来证明可再生资源的成本在下降，如太阳能

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成本下降了百分之八十，风能也降到三分之一，由此可知，可再生资源的成本在下降，

plummeting的含义是下降的意思。所以选择C falling. Text 3

The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is

astonishing-Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery

chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than

that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn't have any physical

product at all. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely

detailed web of its users' friendships and social lives.

Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link

phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as

soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages,

the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still

could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the

makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May's enemies are currently

plotting? It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the

460 shops it owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of

power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of

change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and

remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses

of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as

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presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is

not obvious when the users of these services don't pay for them. The users of their

services are no their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising

from them-and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital

advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.

The product they're selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data

for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids

for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data

that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their

aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn't feel like

a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

31.【题干】According to Paragraph 1, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for its_____.

【选项】

l products

information

al assets

y service

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