北京师范大学2015年考博英语真题及详解
Part I Reading Comprehension(45%)
Directions:Read the following passages carefully and then select the best answer from the four choices marked A,B,C and D by marking the
corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET with a single line through
the center.
1
The Pacific Northwest coast of north America is temperate rain forest,where trees like the red cedar grow straight trunks more than two meters thick at the base and sixty meters high.Western red cedar is often called the canoe cedar because it supplied the native people of the region with the raw material for their seagoing dugout canoes.These extraordinary crafts,as much as twenty meters in length, were fashioned from a single tree trunk and carried as many as forty on fishing and whaling expeditions into the open ocean.
The Haida people from the Queen Charlottes Islands off British Columbia were noted for their skill in canoe building.After felling a giant tree with controlled burning,the canoe makers split the log into lengthwise sections with stone wedges. They burned away some of the heartwood,leaving a rough but strong cedar shell. They then carved away wood from the inside,keeping the sections below the waterline thickest and heaviest to help keep the canoe upright in stormy seas.To further enhance the canoe’s stability,they filled the hull with water and heated it to
boiling by dropping in hot stones.This rendered the wood temporarily flexible,so the sides of the hull could be forced apart and held with sturdy wooden thwarts, which served as both cross braces and seats.The canoes were often painted with elaborate designs of cultural significance to the tribe.
The Haida raised canoe building to a high art,designing boats of such beauty and utility that neighboring tribes were willing to exchange quantities of hides, meats,and oils for a Haida canoe.These graceful vessels became the tribe’s chief item of export.In their swift and staunch canoes,the first people of the Northwest were able to take full advantage of the riches provided by the sea.With harpoons of yew wood,baited hooks of red cedar,and lines of twisted and braided bark fibers,they fished for cod,sturgeon,and halibut,and hunted whales,seals,and sea otters.
1.Why did the canoe makers keep the sections of the canoe below the waterline thickest and heaviest?
A.To prevent the canoe from overturning in rough water.
B.To shorten the work of carving wood from the inside.
C.To avoid having to paint the bottom of the canoe.
D.To make the canoe strong enough to hold forty people.
2.Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph two?
A.Carving changed the texture and strength of the wood.
B.It took the canoe makers several months to build a canoe.
C.The wood was beaten with stone tools to make it flexible.
D.Canoes were important cultural artifacts of the Haida.
3.The word staunch in paragraph three is close in meaning to_____.
A.silent
B.strong
C.scented
D.severe
4.It can be inferred from paragraph three that_____.
A.canoes were the Haida’s only known art form
B.the Haida dominated trade among local tribes
C.the people used up all of the natural resources
D.trees provided essential tools for obtaining food
5.Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?
A.The western red cedar thrives in a variety of climates.
B.The skill of the Haida canoe makers has never been copied.
C.Haida canoes were of great value in the regional economy.
D.People no longer use cedar canoes for fishing and whaling.
【答案与解析】
1.A细节理解题。根据题干可定位至第二段。该段第四句提到“They then carved away
wood from the inside,keeping the sections below the waterline thickest and heaviest to help keep the canoe upright in stormy seas.”，由此可知，海达人将水平面以下的独木舟部分造得最厚最重，是为了让船只能够在波涛汹涌的海上平稳前行，不被海浪掀翻。A项表述与此相符。故选A项。
2.D推理判断题。第二段最后一句提到“The canoes were often painted with elaborate
designs of cultural significance to the tribe.”，由此可知，海达人在独木舟上面绘制对本部落具有文化意义的精巧图案，因此独木舟也是海达人重要的文化产品。故D项正确。雕刻并不会改变木头的纹理和受压情况，故A项错误；B项文中没有提及；
文中提到往船身灌水并通过丢热石头将水加热至沸腾，并不是用石头敲打，故C项错误。
3.B语义判断题。第三段第三句提到“In their swift and staunch canoes”，此处staunch
和swift都用于形容独木舟的特征，第二段介绍独木舟的制作方法时强调了独木舟的结实，浏览四个选项，B项strong（结实的）符合原文意思，故B项正确。其余三项均不符合文章意思。
4.D推理判断题。文章最后一句提到“With harpoons of yew wood,baited hooks of
red cedar,and lines of twisted and braided bark fibers,they fished for cod, sturgeon,and halibut,and hunted whales,seals,and sea otters.”，由此可知，木材为海达人提供了重要的捕食工具，故D项正确。A项过于绝对；B、C两项文中没有提及。
5.C推理判断题。文章最后一段第一句提到“...neighboring tribes were willing to
exchange quantities of hides,meats,and oils for a Haida canoe.”，由此可知，周围的部落都愿意用许多兽皮、肉和油来交换海达独木舟，因此海达人的独木舟对当地经济起着重要作用。故C项正确。
2
Nothing in the history of modern astronomy has excited as much speculation
as the object,or event,known as a black hole.Black holes have provided endless imaginative fodder for science fiction writers and endless theoretical fodder for astrophysicists.They are one of the more exotic manifestations of the theory of general relativity,and their fascinations lies in the way their tremendous gravity affects nearby space and time.
A black hole is very simple in structure:it has surface—the event horizon—and a center—the singularity.Everything else is gravity.The standard model for the formation of a black hole involves the collapse of a large star.The imaginary spherical surface surrounding the collapsed star is the event horizon—an artificial boundary in space that marks a point of no return.Outside the event horizon, gravity is strong but finite,and it is possible for objects to break free of its pull. However,once within the event horizon,an object would need to travel faster than light to escape.
For extremely massive stars,the exclusion principle—the resistance between the molecular particles within the star as they are compressed—will not be strong enough to offset the gravity generated by the star’s own mass.The star’s increasing density will overwhelm the exclusion principle.What follows is runaway gravitational collapse.With no internal force to stop it,the star will simply continue to collapse in on itself.Once a collapsing star has contracted through its event horizon,nothing can stop it from collapsing further until its entire mass is crushed down to a single point—a point of infinite density and zero volume—the singularity.
The star now disappears from the perceivable universe,like a cartoon character that jumps into a hole and pulls the hole in after him.What this process leaves behind is a different kind of hole—a profound disturbance in space-time,a region where gravity is so intense that nothing can escape from it.Any object falling within the boundary of a black hole has no choice but to move inward toward the singularity and disappear from our universe forever.Moreover,a black hole can never be plugged up or filled in with matter,the more matter that is poured into a black hole,the bigger it gets.
What would happen to objects,such as astronauts,as they vanished into a black hole?Physicists have been amusing themselves with this question for years, and most believe that the intense gravitational forces would rip apart the astronauts long before they were crushed at the singularity.Theoretically,any astronauts who managed to survive the passage would encounter some very strange things.For instance,they would experience acute time distortion,which would enable them to know,in a few brief seconds,the entire future of the universe.
Inside a black hole,space and time are so warped that the distance from the event horizon to the singularity is not a distance in time.The time it takes to reach the singularity from the event horizon—as measured by someone falling in—is proportional to the mass of the black hole.
The only way that astronauts would know whether they had crossed the event horizon would be if they tried to halt their fall and climb out again by firing their