download.csdn.net
download.csdn.netdownload.csdn.net
download.csdn.net
《
《《
《1994-2008 考研英语历年真题阅读理解短文
考研英语历年真题阅读理解短文考研英语历年真题阅读理解短文
考研英语历年真题阅读理解短文》
》》
》 研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列
研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列
研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列（
（（
（五
五五
五）
））
）
1
研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列
研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列
研究生考试公共课复习必备之英语系列（
（（
（五
五五
五）
））
）
1994-2008 考研英语历年
考研英语历年考研英语历年
考研英语历年真题
真题真题
真题阅读理解短文
阅读理解短文阅读理解短文
阅读理解短文
2008 Passage 1
While still catching-up to men in some spheres of modern life, women appear to be way ahead in at least one undesirable category. “Women
are particularly susceptible to developing depression and anxiety disorders in response to stress compared to men,” according to Dr. Yehuda, chief
psychiatrist at New York’s Veteran’s Administration Hospital.
Studies of both animals and humans have shown that sex hormones somehow affects the stress response, causing females under stress to
produce more of the trigger chemicals than do males under the same conditions. In several of the studies, when stressed-out female rats had their
ovaries (the female reproductive organs) removed, their chemical responses became equal to those of the males.
Adding to a woman’s increased dose of stress chemicals, are her increased “opportunities” for stress. “It’s not necessarily that women don’t
cope as well. It’s just that they have so much more to cope with,” says Dr. Yehuda. “Their capacity for tolerating stress may even be greater than
men’s,” she observes, “It’s just that they’re dealing with so many more things that they become worn out from it more visibly and sooner.”
Dr. Yehuda notes another difference between the sexes. “I think that the kinds of things that women are exposed to tend to be in more of a
chronic or repeated nature. Men go to war and are exposed to combat stress. Men are exposed to more acts of random physical violence. The kinds of
interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situations, by, unfortunately, parents or other family numbers, and they tend
not to be one-shot deals. The wear-and-tear that comes from these longer relationships can be quite devastating.”
Adeline Alvarez married at 18 and gave birth to a son, but wad determined to finish college. “I struggled a lot to get the college degree. I was
living in so much frustration that that was my escape, to go to school, and get ahead and do better.” Later her marriage ended and she became a
single mother. “It’s the hardest thing to take care of a teenager, have a job, pay the rent, pay the car payment, and pay the debt. I lived from paycheck
to paycheck.”
Not everyone experiences the kinds of severe chronic stresses Alvarez describes. But most women today are coping with a lot of obligations,
with few breaks, and feeling the strain. Alvarez’s experience demonstrates the importance of finding ways to diffuse stress before it threatens your
health and your ability to function.
2008 Passage 2
It used to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal.
A journal editor would then remove the authors’ names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Depending on the
comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers
seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal.
No longer. The Internet–and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from
government-funded research by restricting access to it- is making access to scientific results a reality. The Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) has just issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John Houghton of Victoria
University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. But it goes
further than that. It signals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavor.
The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It is big
business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International Association of
Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specializing in these subjects. They publish
more than 1.2 million articles each year in some 16,000 journals.
This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly journals are now online. Entirely new business models are
emerging; three main institutional subscribers pay for access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing agreements. There is
open-access publishing, typically supported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be published. Finally, there are open-access
archives, where organizations such as universities or international laboratories support institutional repositories. Other models exist that are hybrids
of these three, such as delayed open-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months, before making it freely
available to everyone who wishes to see it. All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process, at least for the publication of papers.
2008 Passage 3
In the early 1960s Wilt Chamberlain was one of only three players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) listed at over seven feet. If he
had played last season, however, he would have been one of 42. The bodies playing major professional sports have changed dramatically over the
years, and managers have been more than willing to adjust team uniforms to fit the growing numbers of bigger, longer frames.
The trend in sports, though, may be obscuring an unrecognized reality: Americans have generally stopped growing. Though typically about two
inches taller now than 140 years ago, today’s people- especially those born to families who have lived in the U.S. for many generations- apparently
reached their limit in the early 1960s. And they aren’t likely to get any taller. “In the general population today, at this genetic, environmental level,
we’ve pretty much gone as far as we can go,” says anthropologist William Cameron Chumlea of Wright State University. In the case of NBA players,
their increase in height appears to result from the increasingly common practice of recruiting players from all over the world.
Growth, which rarely continues beyond the age of 20, demands calories and nutrients – notably, protein – to feed expanding tissues. At the start
of the 20
th
century, under-nutrition and childhood infections got in the way. But as diet and health improved, children and adolescents have, on
average, increased in height by about an inch and a half every 20 years, a pattern known as the secular trend in height. Yet according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, average height- 5′9〞 for men, 5′4〞for women- hasn’t really changed since 1960.
Genetically speaking, there are advantages to avoiding substantial height. During childbirth, larger babies have more difficulty passing through
the birth canal. Moreover, even though humans have been upright for millions of years, our feet and back continue to struggle with bipedal posture
and cannot easily withstand repeated strain imposed by oversize limbs. “There are some real constraints that are set by the genetic architecture of the
剩余22页未读，继续阅读
评论0