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电子科技大学
2016 年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试试题
考试科目: 621 英语水平测试
注：无机读卡，所有答案必须写在答题纸上，写在试卷或草稿纸上无效。
Part I Reading Comprehension (40 points)
Directions: In this part there are 5 passages, each with some questions or incomplete statements.
Read them carefully and then choose from the four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D to
answer the questions or complete the statements. Please write your answers on the Answer Sheet.
Passage 1
Historians of the American civil war find themselves in the same unenviable position as
Shakespeare scholars: so thoroughly have their fields of study been explored that finding a nearly
virgin comer is all but impossible. But Don Doyle has broken new ground in enlightening and
compellingly written book, The Cause of All Nations. More than any previous study, it tells the story
of how America’s civil war was perceived, debated and reacted to abroad, and how that reaction
shaped the course of the war at home.
At the war’s outset, however, things were not so simple. Southern diplomats framed their
struggle in accordance with liberal principles of self-determination. They judged the conflict, Mr.
Doyle notes, to be “one arising naturally between industrial and agricultural societies, not freedom
and slavery as the North believed.” The North’s response, meanwhile, was uncompromising,
legalistic and violent. America’s secretary of state threatened to “wrap the whole world in flames”,
promising total war on any state that dared aid the South.
Most histories of the civil war turn inward at the end and examine the war’s consequences and
legacy for America. Mr. Doyle turns outward to show how important America’s civil war was to the
rest of the wor1d: liberty and democracy defeated slavery and the landed gentry.
The Union’s victory had wider impacts. In Spain, Queen Isabella, fearing American naval
power, ended the attempted re-colonization of Santo Domingo. Ulysses Grant, a civil-war general,
turned his military attention to Mexico, where Napoleon III had installed an Austrian, Maximilian, as
emperor. When the threat of an alliance between France and the South was smashed, Napoleon
withdrew his support and in 1867 Maximilian was executed by Mexican troops. Across the ocean,
Britain’s republicans marched to victory that same year. Democracy had not just survived, but
flourished.
After Lincoln’s death, a French newspaper wrote that he “represented the cause of democracy
in the largest and the most universal understanding of the word. That cause is our cause, as much as
it is that of the United States.” In honor of the Union’s victory a French artist crafted a statue out of
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copper sheeting, a figure representing freedom, tall and proud, holding a torch high. The Statue of
Liberty stands today in New York harbor, the copper now green with age, her gaze fixed across the
Atlantic on Europe.
1. Shakespeare is mentioned in the first paragraph to illustrate that __________.
A. the civil war has been studied as extensively as possible
B. the civil war and Shakespeare’s works are known worldwide
C. new discoveries are easy concerning the cause of the civil war
D. historians of the civil war should learn from Shakespeare
2. The book entitled The Cause of All Nations is focused on __________.
A. the consequences of the civil war for America
B. the impact of the civil war on other countries
C. the political difference between the North and South
D. factors that caused the outbreak of the civil war
3. The North regarded the civil war as a war __________.
A. between the government and people B. between salves and slave-owners
C. between freedom and slavery D. between industrial and agricultural states
4. Paragraph Four is mainly concerned with __________.
A. the effect of incidents abroad on the civil war
B. numerous conflicts between European countries
C. contributions of Europeans to the Union’s victory
D. effects of the Union’s victory on other countries
Passage 2
Milankovitch proposed in the early twentieth century that the ice ages were caused by
variations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. For some time this theory was considered untestable,
largely because there was no sufficiently precise chronology of the ice ages with which the orbital
variations could be matched.
To establish such a chronology it is necessary to determine the relative amounts of land ice that
existed at various times in the Earth’s past. A recent discovery makes such a determination possible:
relative land-ice volume for a given period can be deduced from the ratio of two oxygen isotopes, 16
and 18, found in ocean sediments. Almost all the oxygen in water is oxygen 16, but a few molecules
out of every thousand incorporate the heavier isotope 18. When an ice age begins, the continental ice
sheets grow, steadily reducing the amount of water evaporated from the ocean that will eventually
return to it. Because heavier isotopes tend to be left behind when water evaporates from the ocean
surfaces, the remaining ocean water becomes progressively enriched in oxygen 18. The degree of
enrichment can be determined by analyzing ocean sediments of the period, because these sediments
are composed of calcium carbonate shells of marine organisms, shells that were constructed with
oxygen atoms drawn from the surrounding ocean. The higher the ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16 in
a sedimentary specimen, the more land ice there was when the sediment was laid down.
As an indicator of shifts in the Earth’s climate, the isotope record has two advantages. First, it is
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