2013年考研英语二阅读理解试题及答案

英语二阅读原文及出处：

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In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines。”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers。

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra —their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over。

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs —about 6 million in total —disappeared。”

And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte” that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. ... You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. ... Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you’re through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. ... Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table —making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter。”

What the iPad won’t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from Sunday’s terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

And automation is not just coming to manufacturing, explains Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, a Silicon Valley idea lab that invented the Apple iPhone program known as Siri, the digital personal assistant. “Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services。”

There will always be change —new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 percent。

In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education。

亚当·戴维森(Adam Davidson)《在美国制造》一文中提到南部种棉地区的一个笑话，内容涉及现代纺织厂自动化的程度：如今的普通工厂只有两个雇员，“一个人外加一条狗。人是负责喂狗的，狗是让人不要靠近机器的。”

我们的失业率为何居高不下、中产阶级收入为何下降，其实大部分是由于大衰退造成的需求大幅下降。这其中也有全球化和信息科技革命巨大进步的推动：机器或者外国工人取代劳力的速度空前。最近有大量文章都在讨论这些，戴维森的文章只是其中一篇而已。

过去，只要有个一般的手艺，做份普通的工作，工人生活就过得还凑合。但如今，拥有一般水平不行了。不出众就没法像过去一样活着了。因为现在越来 越多的雇主有大把的机会接触到不错的外国廉价劳动力、便宜的机器人、廉价的软件、低廉的自动化设备和要价低的人才。因此，人人都需要有另外的价值：异于常 人的独特价值能够让他们在各自的雇佣市场上脱颖而出。靠平庸就能过日子的时代结束了。

是的，新技术一直就在吞噬我们的工作，将来还会继续吞噬。而且吞噬的速度在加快。俗话说，如果马会投票，那就永远不会有小轿车了。如戴维森所 言，“2009年之前的十年内，美国工厂裁撤工人速度之快，基本上等于过去70年新增的工人数量；大概每三个工作岗位就有一个岗位消失了，总共约有600 万之多。”

还有好戏呢。去年四月，Slate 杂志的安妮·洛瑞(Annie Lowrey)写了一篇初创公司E la Carte的文章，其目标是减少对服务生的需要：这家公司“已经生产出了一种增强版的iPad，它可以让您在桌边点菜和买单。也许很快在身边的餐馆里你就 会见到这个麻省理工工程师们的杰作、时髦的发明 Presto了。你可以选择你想吃的，把它放进小推车里。根据餐馆的选择，控制设备会显示营养信息、成分清单和图片等。你也可以有具体的需求，比如说‘调 料放在边上’或者‘五倍的熏肉’。你都决定好之后，订单立马会传到厨房，Presto会告诉你所点的东西花多长时间可以出来。... 与同伴等得不耐烦了？那就再iPad上玩玩游戏吧。吃完饭之后，你可以在控制设备上付款，如果你愿意，你可以一个菜一个菜地分割账单付款，你也可以选择付 款方式。你还可以要求将收据发邮件给你。... 使用每个控制设备每月需要100美金。如果一家餐馆每天营业8小时，每周营业7天，那么每张餐桌每小时的成本只有42美分：因此Presto比最廉价的服 务员都便宜。”

iPad不能以超常方式做的，中国工人都可以做。来看看查尔斯·杜赫(Charles Duhigg) 和基斯？布拉德舍(Keith Bradsher)在周日在本报(《纽约时报》)上的一篇美文吧，文中有一段讲述了苹果公司为什么将那么多的生产环节放在中国：“最后一刻，苹果公司重新 设计了iPhone 的屏幕，因此装配线需要全部调整。午夜时分左右，新屏幕开始到达中国工厂。根据这位执行官的叙述，一名领班立即叫醒了公司宿舍的8000名工人。每人领了 一份饼干和一杯茶后，就被带到一个车间，半小时内，他们就开始了12小时的轮班，将玻璃屏幕装到斜面框架中。96小时之后，这家工厂每天就能生产1万台 iPhone.‘这种速度和灵活性令人目瞪口呆。’这位执行官说，‘在美国找不到这样的工厂。’”

自动化也不仅仅发生在生产领域，硅谷科技公司孵化器斯坦福国际研究院(SRIInternational)的首席执行官柯蒂斯·卡尔森 (CurtisCarlson)说。该公司发明了苹果iPhone的个人数字助理服务Siri程序。“在改变我们与银行、保险公司、零售商店、医疗保健提 供商、信息检索服务公司和产品生产公司的关系方面，Siri只是这个巨大转变的开始。”

变化总是会存在的，新工作、新产品和新服务都会出现。但我们确信无疑的是，全球化和科学技术每前进一步，最好的工作都会要求工人接收过更多的更 优质的教育，这样他们才会超于常人。下面是美国劳工局对美国25岁以上人群的最新失业率统计：高中学历都没有的失业率为13.8%；有高中学历，但没大学 学历的为8.7%；有大学或大专学历的为7.7%；有学士甚至更高学位的只有4.1%。

在一个平庸者已经无法生存的时代，我们需要做的促进就业的事情有很多，但没有哪个比通过像《退伍军人权利法案》之类的法案来得重要。只有这样，才能保证21世纪的每个美国都能接受高中之后的教育。

Imagine a new immigration policy

A century ago, the immigrants from across the Atlantic included settlers and sojourners. Along with the many folks looking to make a permanent home in the United States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make some money and then go home. Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 million people arrived while about 2 million departed. About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, for example, eventually returned to Italy for good. They even had an affectionate nickname, "uccelli di passaggio," birds of passage。

Today, we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide newcomers into two categories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in the making, or brand them as aliens fit for deportation. That framework has contributed mightily to our broken immigration system and the long political paralysis over how to fix it。

We don’t need more categories, but we need to change the way we think about categories. We need to look beyond strict definitions of legal and illegal. To start, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving in the gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges。

Crop pickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, home health-care aides and particle physicists are among today’s birds of passage. They are energetic participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work, money and ideas. They prefer to come and go as opportunity calls them. They can manage to have a job in one place and a family in another。

With or without permission, they straddle laws, jurisdictions and identities with ease. We need them to imagine the United States as a place where they can be productive for a while without committing themselves to staying forever. We need them to feel that home can be both here and there and that they can belong to two nations honorably。

Imagine life with a radically different immigration policy: The Jamaican woman who came as a visitor and was looking after your aunt until she died could try living in Canada for a while. You could eventually ask her to come back to care for your mother。

The Indian software developer could take some of his Silicon Valley earnings home to join friends in a little start-up, knowing that he could always work in California again. Or the Mexican laborer who busts his back on a Wisconsin dairy farm for wages that keep milk cheap would come and go as needed because he could decide which dairy to work for, and a bi-national bank program was helping him save money to build a better life for his kids in Mexico。

Accommodating this new world of people in motion will require new attitudes on both sides of the immigration battle. Looking beyond the culture war logic of right or wrong means opening up the middle ground and understanding that managing immigration today requires multiple paths and multiple outcomes, including some that are not easy to accomplish legally in the existing system。

A new system that encourages both sojourners and settlers would not only help ensure that our society receives the human resources it will need in the future, it also could have an added benefit: Changing the rigid framework might help us resolve the status of the estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants who are our shared legacy of policy failures。

Currently, we do not do gray zones well. Hundreds of thousands of people slosh around in indeterminate status because they’re caught in bureaucratic limbo or because they have been granted temporary stays that are repeatedly extended. President Barack Obama created a paler shade of gray this summer by exercising prosecutorial discretion not to deport some young people who were brought to this country illegally as children. But these are exceptions, not rules。

The basic mechanism for legal immigration today, apart from the special category of refugee, is the legal permanent resident visa, or green card. Most recipients are people sponsored by close relatives who live in the United States. As the name implies, this mechanism is designed for immigrants who are settling down. The visa can be revoked if the holder does not show "intent to remain" by not maintaining a U.S. address, going abroad to work full time or just traveling indefinitely. Legal residents are assumed to be on their way to becoming Americans, physically, culturally and legally. After five years of living here, they become eligible for citizenship and a chance to gain voting rights and full access to the social safety net。

This is a fine way to deal with people who arrive with deep connections to the country and who resolve to stay. That can and should be most immigrants. But this mechanism has two problems: The nation is not prepared to offer citizenship to every migrant who is offered a job. And not everyone who comes here wants to stay forever。

It may have once made sense to think of immigrants as sodbusters who were coming to settle empty spaces. But that antique reasoning does not apply when the country is looking at a long, steep race to remain competitive in the world economy, particularly not when innovation and entrepreneurship are supposed to be our comparative advantage. To succeed, we need modern birds of passage。

The challenges differ depending on whether you are looking at the high end of the skills spectrum, the information workers or at low-skilled laborers。

A frequent proposal for highly skilled workers comes with the slogan, "Staple a green card to the diploma." That is supposed to ensure that a greater share of brainy international students remain in the United States after earning degrees in science and technology. But what if they are not ready for a long-term commitment? No one would suggest that investment capital or design processes need to reside permanently in one nation. Talent today yearns to be equally mobile. Rather than try to oblige smart young people from abroad to stay here, we should allow them to think of the United States as a place where they can always return, a place where they will spend part, not all, of their lives, one of several places where they can live and work and invest。

Temporary-worker programs are a conventional approach to meeting low-skilled labor needs without illegal immigration. That’s what President George W. Bush proposed in 2004, saying the government should "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers." An immigrant comes to do a particular job for a limited period of time and then goes home. But such programs risk replacing one kind of rigidity with another. The relatively small programs currently in place don’t manage the matchmaking very well。

Competing domestic workers need to be protected, as do the migrant workers, and the process must be nimble enough to meet labor market demand. Nobody really has pulled that off, and there is no reason to believe it can be done on a grand scale. Rather than trying to link specific migrants to specific jobs, different types of temporary work visas could be pegged to industries, to places or to time periods. You could get an engineering visa, not only a visa to work at Intel。

Both short-term visas and permanent residence need to be part of the mix, but they are not the whole answer. Another valuable tool is the provisional visa, which Australia uses as a kind of intermediary stage in which temporary immigrants spend several years before becoming eligible for permanent residency. The U.S. system practically obliges visitors to spend time here without authorization when they’ve married a citizen, gotten a job or done something else that qualifies them to stay legally。

We also could borrow from Europe and create long-term permission to reside for certain migrants that is contingent on simply being employed, not on having a specific job. And, legislation could loosen the definitions of permanent residency so that migrants could gain a lifetime right to live and work in the United States without having to be here (and pay taxes here) more or less continuously。

The idea that newcomers are either saints or sinners is not written indelibly either in our hearts or in our laws. As the size of the unauthorized population has grown over the past 20 years or so, the political response has dictated seeing immigration policy through the stark lens of law enforcement:

Whom do we lock up, kick out, fence off? Prominent politicians of both parties, including both presidential candidates, have engaged in macho one-upmanship when it comes to immigration. So, President Obama broke records for deportations. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, vows to break records for border security。

Breaking out of the either/or mentality opens up many avenues for managing future immigration. It could also help break the stalemate over the current population of unauthorized migrants. No election result will produce a Congress that offers a path to citizenship for everybody, but there is no support for total deportation, either。

If we accept that there are spaces between legal and illegal, then options multiply。

Citizenship could be an eventual outcome for most, not all, people here illegally, but everyone would get some kind of papers, and we can engineer a way for people to work their way from one status to another. The newly arrived and least attached could be granted status for a limited time and receive help with returning to their home countries. Others might be offered life-long privileges to live and work here, but not citizenship. We’d give the fullest welcome to those with homes, children or long time jobs。

By insisting that immigrants are either Americans or aliens, we make it harder for some good folks to come and we oblige others to stay for the wrong reasons. Worse, we ensure that there will always be people living among us who are outside the law, and that is not good for them or us.

Beyond the Blink

When the Supreme Court announced its decision on the Affordable Care Act last month, the media went wild. The rush to judgment took seconds. CNN and Fox News initially described the decision incorrectly, saying five justices had struck down the law. Even after corrections, the snap analysis that followed wasn’t very helpful. The multipart decision is complex, and its ramifications will take months or even years to understand。

The blink response to this case is only the latest example of a troubling increase in the speed of our reactions. E-mail, social media and the 24-hour news cycle are informational amphetamines, a cocktail of pills that we pop at an increasingly fast pace —and that lead us to make mistaken split-second decisions. Economists label the problem “present bias”： we are vulnerable to fast, salient stimulation。

Fortunately, there is an antidote: the conscious pause. Scientists have found that although we are prone to snap overreactions, if we take a moment and think about how we are likely to react, we can reduce or even eliminate the negative effects of our quick, hard-wired responses。

For example, countless studies have shown that physicians’ immediate, unconscious reactions to racial minorities lead them to undertreat black patients. In one study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2007, researchers asked several hundred doctors about a hypothetical 50-year-old male patient who showed up with chest pain. The researchers gave the doctors a photograph of the man, randomly varying his race. Half saw him as white; half saw him as black。

Sure enough, although the doctors insisted they were not racially biased, they were more likely to prescribe thrombolysis, an anti-blood-clotting procedure, for the white patient, while giving the black patient a less-aggressive prescription. The doctors didn’t appear racist, yet their unconscious snap reactions led them to treat blacks differently —the very definition of racism。

However, about one in four of the doctors guessed that the study was designed to test racial bias. They stopped for a moment and considered how they might react differently depending on race. The researchers found that this “aware” subgroup did not treat patients differently. Once they paused to consider whether race was an issue, race was no longer an issue。

Snap decisions can be important defense mechanisms; if we are judging whether someone is dangerous, our brains and bodies are hard-wired to react very quickly, within milliseconds. But we need more time to assess other factors. To accurately tell whether someone is sociable, studies show, we need at least a minute, preferably five. It takes a while to judge complex aspects of personality, like neuroticism or open-mindedness. If we need to understand how nine justices resolved a difficult legal issue, we need even more time。

But snap decisions in reaction to rapid, even subliminal stimuli aren’t exclusive to the interpersonal realm. Sanford DeVoe and Chen-Bo Zhong, psychologists at the University of Toronto, found that viewing a fast-food logo for just a few milliseconds primes us to read 20 percent faster, even though reading has little to do with eating. We unconsciously associate fast food with speed and impatience and carry those impulses into whatever else we’re doing. Subjects exposed to fast-food flashes also tend to think a musical piece lasts too long。

Yet we can reverse such influences. If we know we will overreact to consumer products or housing options when we see a happy face (one reason good sales representatives and real estate agents are always smiling)， we can take a moment before buying. If we know female job screeners are more likely to reject attractive female applicants, as a study by the economists Bradley Ruffle and Ze’ev Shtudiner shows, we can help screeners understand their biases —or hire outside screeners。

John Gottman, the marriage guru made famous in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book “Blink,” explains that we quickly “thin slice” information reliably only after we ground such snap reactions in “thick sliced” long-term study. When Dr. Gottman really wants to assess whether a couple will stay together, he invites them to his island retreat for a much longer evaluation: two days, not two seconds。

Our ability to mute our hard-wired reactions by pausing is what differentiates us from animals: primates and dogs can think about the future only intermittently or for a few minutes. But historically we have spent about 12 percent of our days contemplating the longer term。

The beginning of summer is supposed to be the time for us to slow down and take a breath. Go to the beach with a few books. Spend downtime with family. Tune out. But instead of jumping into the swimming pool, we have leapt into a whirlpool of news。

Still, although technology might change the way we react, it hasn’t changed our nature. We still have the imaginative capacity to rise above temptation and reverse the high-speed trend. There are a couple of summer months left, and no time to waste。

Frank Partnoy is a law professor at the University of San Diego and the author of “Wait: The Art and Science of Delay。”