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北京外国语大学
2007 年硕士研究生入学考试基础英语试题
Please write all the answers on the answer sheets.
Time Limit：3 hours
The total points for this exam are 150 points
I. Reading Comprehension (50 points)
A Multiple Choice (24 points)
Please read the passages and choose A、B、C or D to best complete the statements about
them.
The Quiet Crisis
Close games for the Americans were rare in previous Olympics, but now it appears to be
something the Americans should get used to.
You could find no better metaphor for the way the rest of the world can now compete
head-to-head more effectively than ever with America than the struggles of the U.S. Olympic
basketball team in 2004. The American team, made up of NBA stars, limped home to a bronze
medal after losing to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina. Previously, the United States Olympic
basketball team had lost only one game in the history of the modern Olympics. Remember when
America sent only NCAA stars to the Olympic basketball events? For a long time these teams
totally dominated all corners. Then they started getting challenged. So we sent our pros. And they
started getting challenged. Because the world keeps learning, the diffusion of knowledge happens
faster; coaches in other countries now download American coaching methods off the Internet and
watch NBA games in their own living rooms on satellite TV. Many of them can even get ESPN
and watch the highlight reels. And thanks to the triple convergence, there is a lot of new raw talent
walking onto the NBA courts from all over the world—including many new stars from China,
Latin America, and Eastern Europe. They go back and play for their national teams in the
Olympics, using the skills they honed in America. So the automatic American superiority of
twenty years ago is now gone in Olympic basketball. The NBA standard is increasingly becoming
a global commodity—pure vanilla. If the United States wants to continue to dominate in Olympic
basketball, we must, in that great sports cliché, step it up a notch. The old standard won’t do
anymore. As Joel Cawley of IBM remarked to me, “Star for star, the basketball teams from places
like Lithuania or Puerto Rico still don't rank well versus the Americans, but when they play as a
team—when they collaborate better than we do, they are extremely competitive.”
There is something about post-world War Ⅱ America that reminds me of the classic wealthy
family that by the third generation starts to squander its wealth. The members of the first
generation are nose-to-the-grindstone innovators, the second generation holds it all together then
their kids come along and get fat, dumb, and lazy and slowly squander it all. I know that is both
overly harsh and a gross generalization, but there is, nevertheless, some truth in it. American
society started to coast in the 1990s, when our third postwar generation came of age. The dot-com
boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard
work. All it took was an MBA and a quick IPO, or one NBA contract, and you were set for life.
But while we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China, and
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