2015 年全国硕士研究生招生考试

英语二

(科目代码: 204)

研考 英语二 试卷条形码

○考生注意事项○

1.答题前，考生须在试题册指定位置上填写考生编号和考生姓名;在答题卡指定位置上填写报考单位、考生姓名和考生编号，并涂写考生编号信息点。

2.考生须把试题册上的“试卷条形码”粘贴条取下，粘贴在答题卡的试卷条形码粘贴位置框中。不按规定粘贴条形码而影响评卷结果的，责任由考生自负。

3.选择题的答案必须涂写在答题卡相应题号的选项上，非选择题的答案必须书写在答题卡指定位置的边框区域内。超出答题区域书写的答案无效;在草稿纸、试题册上答题无效。

4.填(书)写部分必须使用黑色签字笔书写，字迹工整、笔迹清楚;涂写部分必须使用 2B 铅笔填涂。

5.考试结束，将答题卡按规定交回。

(以下信息考生必须认真填写)

考生编号

考生姓名

1Directions:

Section I Use of English

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B,

C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)

In our contemporary culture, the prospect of communicating with — or even looking

at — a stranger is virtually unbearable. Everyone around us seems to agree by the way

they cling to their phones, even without a 1

on a subway.

It’s a sad reality — our desire to avoid interacting with other human beings —

because there’s 2 to be gained from talking to the stranger standing by you. But you

wouldn’t know it,

3

into your phone. This universal protection sends the

4

:

“Please don’t approach me.”

What is it that makes us feel we need to hide 5 our screens?

One answer is fear, according to Jon Wortmann, an executive mental coach. We fear

rejection, or that our innocent social advances will be

6

as “weird.” We fear we’ll

be

7 . We fear we’ll be disruptive.

Strangers are inherently 8

to us, so we are more likely to feel 9

when

communicating with them compared with our friends and acquaintances. To avoid this

uneasiness, we 10 to our phones. “Phones become our security blanket,” Wortmann

says. “They are our happy glasses that protect us from what we perceive is going to be

more 11 .”

But once we rip off the band-aid, tuck our smartphones in our pockets and look up, it

doesn’t 12 so bad. In one 2011 experiment, behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and

Juliana Schroeder asked commuters to do the unthinkable: Start a 13 . They had

Chicago train commuters talk to their fellow 14 . “When Dr. Epley and Ms. Schroeder

asked other people in the same train station to

15

how they would feel after talking

to a stranger, the commuters thought their 16 would be more pleasant if they sat on

their own,” The New York Times summarizes. Though the participants didn’t expect a

positive experience, after they 17 with the experiment, “not a single person reported

having been embarrassed.”

18 , these commutes were reportedly more enjoyable compared with those

英语(二)真题 -1-(共 13 页)

without communication, which makes absolute sense, 19

human beings thrive off of

social connections. It’s that

20 : Talking to strangers can make you feel connected.

1. [A]. ticket

[B]. permit

[C]. signal

[D]. record

2. [A]. nothing

[B]. little

[C]. another

[D]. much

3. [A]. beaten

[B]. guided

[C]. plugged

[D]. brought

4. [A]. message

[B]. code

[C]. notice

[D]. sign

5. [A]. under

[B]. beyond

[C]. behind

[D]. from

6. [A]. misinterpreted

[B]. misapplied

[C]. misadjusted

[D]. mismatched

7. [A]. fired

[B]. judged

[C]. replaced

[D]. delayed

8. [A]. unreasonable

[B]. ungrateful

[C]. unconventional

[D]. unfamiliar

9. [A]. comfortable

[B]. anxious

[C]. confident

[D]. angry

10. [A]. attend

[B]. point

[C]. take

[D]. turn

11. [A]. dangerous

[B]. mysterious

[C]. violent

[D]. boring

12. [A]. hurt

[B]. resist

[C]. bend

[D]. decay

13. [A]. lecture

[B]. conversation

[C]. debate

[D]. negotiation

14. [A]. trainees

[B]. employees

[C]. researchers

[D]. passengers

15. [A]. reveal

[B]. choose

[C]. predict

[D]. design

16. [A]. voyage

[B]. flight

[C]. walk

[D]. ride

17. [A]. went through

[B]. did away

[C]. caught up

[D]. put up

18. [A]. In turn

[B]. In particular [C]. In fact

[D]. In consequence

19. [A]. unless

[B]. since

[C]. if

[D]. whereas

20. [A]. funny

[B]. simple

[C]. logical

[D]. rare

Part A

Directions:

Section II Reading Comprehension

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing A, B, Cor

D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

英语(二)真题 -2-(共 13 页)

A new study suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more

stressed at home than at work. Researchers measured people’s cortisol, which is a stress

marker, while they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what

is supposed to be a place of refuge.

“Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men

have lower levels of stress at work than at home,” writes one of the researchers, Sarah

Damske. In fact women even say they feel better at work, she notes. “It is men, not

women, who report being happier at home than at work.” Another surprise is that the

findings hold true for both those with children and without, but more so for nonparents.

This is why people who work outside the home have better health.

What the study doesn’t measure is whether people are still doing work when they’re

at home, whether it is household work or work brought home from the office. For many

men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. For women who stay home, they

never get to leave the office. And for women who work outside the home, they often are

playing catch-up-with-household tasks. With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the

home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women,

it’s not surprising that women are more stressed at home.

But it’s not just a gender thing. At work, people pretty much know what they’re

supposed to be doing: working, making money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to

draw an income. The bargain is very pure: Employee puts in hours of physical or mental

labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola.

On the home front, however, people have no such clarity. Rare is the household in

which the division of labor is so clinically and methodically laid out. There are a lot of

tasks to be done, there are inadequate rewards for most of them. Your home colleagues —

your family — have no clear rewards for their labor; they need to be talked into it, or if

they’re teenagers, threatened with complete removal of all electronic devices. Plus,

they’re your family. You cannot fire your family. You never really get to go home from

home.

So it’s not surprising that people are more stressed at home. Not only are the tasks

apparently infinite, the co-workers are much harder to motivate.

21. According to Paragraph 1, most previous surveys found that home

.

英语(二)真题 -3-(共 13 页)

A. was an unrealistic place for relaxation

B. generated more stress than the workplace

C. was an ideal place for stress measurement

D. offered greater relaxation than the workplace

22. According to Damaske, who are likely to be the happiest at home?

A. Working mothers.

B. Childless husbands.

C. Childless wives.

D. Working fathers.

23. The blurring of working women’s roles refers to the factthat

.

A. they are both bread winners and housewives

B. their home is also a place for kicking back

C. there is often much housework left behind

D. it is difficult for them to leave their office

24. The word “moola” (Line 4, Para. 4) most probably means

.

A. energy

B. skills

C. earnings

D. nutrition

25. The home front differs from the workplace in that

.

A. home is hardly a cozier working environment

B. division of labor at home is seldom clear-cut

C. household tasks are generally more motivating

D. family labor is often adequately rewarded

Text 2

For years, studies have found that first-generation college students—those who do

not have a parent with a college degree—lag other students on a range of education

achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since

such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education,

colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has

英语(二)真题 -4-(共 13 页)

created “a paradox” in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of

them fail, means that higher education has “continued to reproduce and widen, rather than

close” an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of

a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.

But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this

problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost

program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as

grades) between first-generation and otherstudents.

The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based

on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private

university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college

degree. Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants,

a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6

percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.

Their thesis — that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact — was

based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but

in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students.

They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be

narrowed to close the achievement gap.

Many first-generation students “struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of

higher education, learn the ‘rules of the game’, and take advantage of college resources,”

they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don’t talk about the class

advantages and disadvantages of different groups of students. “Because US colleges and

universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students’ educational

experience, many first-generation students lack insight about why they are struggling and

do not understand how students ‘like them’ can improve.”

26. Recruiting more first-generation students has

.

A. reduced their dropout rates

B. narrowed the achievement gap

C. missed its original purpose

D. depressed college students

英语(二)真题 -5-(共 13 页)

27. The authors of the research article are optimistic because

.

A. the problem is solvable

B. their approach is costless

C. the recruiting rate has increased

D. their findings appeal to students

28. The study suggests that most first-generation students

.

A. study at private universities

B. are from single-parent families

C. are in need of financial support

D. have failed their college

29. The author of the paper believe that first-generation students

.

A. are actually indifferent to the achievement gap

B. can have a potential influence on other students

C. may lack opportunities to apply for research projects

D. are inexperienced in handling their issues at college

30. We may infer from the last paragraph that

.

A. universities often reject the culture of the middle-class

B. students are usually to blame for their lack of resources

C. social class greatly helps enrich educational experiences

D. colleges are partly responsible for the problem in question

Text 3

Even in traditional offices, “the lingua franca of corporate America has gotten much

more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20 years ago,” said Harvard

Business School professor Nancy Koehn. She started spinning off examples. “If you and I

parachuted back to Fortune 500 companies in 1990, we would see much less frequent use

of terms like journey, mission, passion. There were goals, there were strategies, there

were objectives, but we didn’t talk about energy; we didn’t talk about passion.”

Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabulary is very “team”-

oriented— and not by coincidence. “Let’s not forget sports — in male-dominated

corporate America, it’s still a big deal. It’s not explicitly conscious; it’s the idea that I’m a

英语(二)真题 -6-(共 13 页)

coach, and you’re my team, and we’re in this together. There are lots and lots of CEOs in

very different companies, but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team

and they want to win.”

These terms are also intended to infuse work with meaning — and, as Rakesh

Khurana, another professor, points out, increase allegiance to the firm. “You have the

importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with non-profit

organizations and religious organizations: Terms like vision,values, passion, and purpose,”

said Khurana.

This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated amid

increasingly loud debates over work-life balance. The “mommy wars” of the 1990s are

still going on today, prompting arguments about why women still can’t have it all and

books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, whose title has become a buzzword in its own right.

Terms like unplug, offline, life-hack, bandwidth, and capacity are all about setting

boundaries between the office and the home. But if your work is your “passion”, you’ll be

more likely to devote yourself to it, even if that means going home for dinner and then

working long after the kids are in bed.

But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but

managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. As a

linguist once said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you

buy into it.” In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning,

office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work — and how your work

defines who you are.

31. According to Nancy Koehn, office language has become

.

A. more emotional

B. more objective

C. less energetic

D. less strategic

32. “Team”-oriented corporate vocabulary is closely related to

.

A. historical incidents

B. gender difference

C. sports culture

D. athletic executives

英语(二)真题 -7-(共 13 页)

33. Khurana believes that the importation of terminology aimsto

.

A. revive historical terms

B. promote company image

C. foster corporate cooperation

D. strengthen employee loyalty

34. It can be inferred that Lean In

.

A. voices for working women

B. appeals to passionate workaholics

C. triggers debates among mommies

D. praises motivated employees

35. Which of the following statements is true about office speak?

A. Managers admire it but avoid it.

B. Linguists believe it to be nonsense.

C. Companies find it to be fundamental.

D. Regular people mock it but accept it.

Text 4

Many people talked of the 288,000 new jobs the Labor Department reported for June,

along with the drop in the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, as good news. And they

were right. For now it appears the economy is creating jobs at a decent pace. We still have

a long way to go to get back to full employment, but at least we are now finally moving

forward at a faster pace.

However, there is another important part of the jobs picture that was largely

overlooked. There was a big jump in the number of people who report voluntarily

working part-time. This figure is now 830,000 (4.4 percent) above its year ago level.

Before explaining the connection to the Obamacare, it is worth making an important

distinction. Many people who work part-time jobs actually want full-time jobs. They take

part-time work because this is all they can get. An increase in involuntary part-time work

is evidence of weakness in the labor market and it means that many people will be having

a very hard time making ends meet.

英语(二)真题 -8-(共 13 页)

There was an increase in involuntary part-time in June, but the general direction has

been down. Involuntary part-time employment is still far higher than before the recession,

but it is down by 640,000 (7.9 percent) from its year ago level.

We know the difference between voluntary and involuntary part-time employment

because people tell us. The survey used by the Labor Department asks people if they

worked less than 35 hours in the reference week. If the answer is “yes”, they are classified

as working part-time. The survey then asks whether they worked less than 35 hours in

that week because they wanted to work less than full time or because they had no choice.

They are only classified as voluntary part-time workers if they tell the survey taker they

chose to work less than 35 hours a week.

The issue of voluntary part-time relates to Obamacare because one of the main

purposes was to allow people to get insurance outside of employment. For many people,

especially those with serious health conditions or family members with serious health

conditions, before Obamacare the only way to get insurance was through a job that

provided health insurance.

However, Obamacare has allowed more than 12 million people to either get

insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges. These are people who may previously have

felt the need to get a full-time job that provided insurance in order to cover themselves

and their families. With Obamacare there is no longer a link between employment and

insurance.

36. Which part of the jobs picture was neglected?

A. The prospect of a thriving job market.

B. The increase of voluntary part-time jobs.

C. The possibility of full employment.

D. The acceleration of job creation.

37. Many people work part-time because they

.

A. prefer part-time jobs to full-time jobs

B. feel that is enough to make ends meet

C. cannot get their hands on full-time jobs

D. haven’t seen the weakness of the market

38. Involuntary part-time employment in the US

.

英语(二)真题 -9-(共 13 页)

A. is harder to acquire than one year ago

B. shows a general tendency of decline

C. satisfies the real need of the jobless

D. is lower than before the recession

39. It can be learned that with Obamacare,

.

A. it is no longer easy for part-timers to get insurance

B. employment is no longer a precondition to get insurance

C. it is still challenging to get insurance for family members

D. full-time employment is still essential for insurance

40. The text mainly discusses

.

A. employment in the US

B. part-timer classification

C. insurance through Medicaid

D. Obamacare’s trouble

Part B

Directions:

Read the following text and answer the questions by choosing the most suitable

subheading from the list A— G for each numbered paragraph (41 — 45). There are two

extra subheadings which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER

SHEET. (10 points)

[A]. You are not alone

[B]. Don’t fear responsibility for your life

[C]. Pave your own unique path

[D]. Most of your fears are unreal

[E]. Think about the present moment

[F]. Experience helps you grow

[G]. There are many things to be grateful for

Some Old Truths to Help You Overcome ToughTimes

英语(二)真题 -10-(共 13 页)

Unfortunately, life is not a bed of roses. We are going through life facing sad

experiences. Moreover, we are grieving various kinds of loss: a friendship, a romantic

relationship or a house. Hard times may hold you down at what usually seems like the

most inopportune time, but you should remember that they won’t lastforever.

When our time of mourning is over, we press forward, stronger with a greater

understanding and respect for life. Furthermore, these losses make us mature and

eventually move us toward future opportunities for growth and happiness. I want to share

these old truths I’ve learned along the way.

41.

Fear is both useful and harmful. This normal human reaction is used to protect us

by signaling danger and preparing us to deal with it. Unfortunately, people create inner

barriers with a help of exaggerating fears. My favorite actor Will Smith once said, “Fear

is not real. It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is

very real. But fear is a choice.” I do completely agree that fears are just the product of our

luxuriant imagination.

42.

If you are surrounded by problems and cannot stop thinking about the past, try to

focus on the present moment. Many of us are weighed down by the past or anxious about

the future. You may feel guilt over your past, but you are poisoning the present with the

things and circumstances you cannot change. Value the present moment and remember

how fortunate you are to be alive. Enjoy the beauty of the world around and keep the eyes

open to see the possibilities before you. Happiness is not a point of future and not a

moment from the past, but a mindset that can be designed into the present.

43.

Sometimes it is easy to feel bad because you are going through tough times. You can

be easily caught up by life problems that you forget to pause and appreciate the things

you have. Only strong people prefer to smile and value their life instead of crying and

complaining about something.

44.

No matter how isolated you might feel and how serious the situation is, you should

always remember that you are not alone. Try to keep in mind that almost everyone

英语(二)真题 -11-(共 13 页)

respects and wants to help you if you are trying to make a good change in your life,

especially your dearest and nearest people. You may have a circle of friends who provide

constant good humor, help and companionship. If you have no friends or relatives, try to

participate in several online communities, full of people who are always willing to share

advice and encouragement.

45.

Today many people find it difficult to trust their own opinion and seek balance by

gaining objectivity from external sources. This way you devalue your opinion and show

that you are incapable of managing your own life. When you are struggling to achieve

something important you should believe in yourself and be sure that your decision is the

best. You live in your skin, think your own thoughts, have your own values and make

your own choices.

Section III Translation

46. Directions:

Translate the following text into Chinese. Your translation should be written on the

ANSWER SHEET. (15 points)

Think about driving a route that’s very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a

trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the

back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it’s easy to lose concentration on the driving

and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that

the trip has taken less time than it actually has.

This is the well-travelled road effect: people tend to underestimate the time it takes

to travel a familiar route.

The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. When we travel down a

well-known route, because we don’t have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more

quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can’t remember the

journey well because we didn’t pay much attention to it. So we assume it wasshorter.

Section Ⅳ Writing

Part A

英语(二)真题 -12-(共 13 页)

47. Directions:

Suppose your university is going to host a summer camp for high school students. Write a

notice to

1) briefly introduce the camp activities, and

2) call for volunteers.

You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET.

Do not sign your own name or the name of your university.

Do not write your address. (10 points)

Part B

48. Directions:

Write an essay based on the following chart. In your writing, you should

1) interpret the chart, and

2) give your comments.

You should write about 150 words on the ANSWER SHEET. (15 points)

英语(二)真题 -13-(共 13 页）