托福习题练习

Why did William Faulkner write about the southern states ofAmericaA．They were the place where he grew up and his family took an important role in the history of that region.
B．His work became a touchstone.
C．He cared about the troubled issues of southernAmericA、
D．He felt sympathy for the poor in southernAmericA、
【单选题】： A     B     C     D  

第3题：Reading 5 "Speech and Writing" It is a widely held misconception that writing is more perfect than speech. To many people, writing somehow seems more correct and more stable, whereas speech can be careless, corrupted, and susceptible to change. Some people even go so far as to identify language with writing and to regard speech as a secondary form of language used imperfectly to approximate the ideals of the written language. → One of the basic assumptions of modern linguistics, however, is that speech is primary and writing is secondary. The most immediate manifestation of language is speech and not writing. Writing is simply the representation of speech in another physical medium. Spoken language encodes thought into a physically transmittable form, while writing, in turn, encodes spoken language into a physically preservable form. Writing is a two-stage process.All units of writing, whether letters or characters, are based on units of speech, i.e., words, sounds, or syllables. When linguists study language, they take the spoken language as their best source of data and their object of description (except in instances of languages like Latin for which there are no longer any speakers). There are several reasons for maintaining that speech is primary and writing is secondary. First, writing is a later historical development than spoken language. Current archeological evidence indicates that writing was first utilized in Sumer, that is, modern-day Iraq, about 6,000 years ago. As far as physical and cultural anthropologists can tell, spoken language has probably been used by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. → Second, writing does not exist everywhere that spoken language exists. This seems hard to imagine in our highly literate society, but the fact is that there are still many communities in the world where a written form of language is not used, and even in those cultures using a writing system, there are individuals who fail to learn the written form of their language. In fact, the majority of theEarth’s inhabitants are illiterate, though quite capable of spoken communication. However, no society uses only a written language with no spoken form. Third, writing must be taught, whereas spoken language is acquired automatically.All children, except children with serious learning disabilities, naturally learn to speak the language of the community in which they are brought up. They acquire the basics of their native language before they enter school, and even if they never attend school, they become fully competent speakers. Writing systems vary in complexity, but regardless of their level of sophistication, they must all be taught. Finally, neurolinguistic evidence (studies of the brain in action during language use) demonstrates that the processing and production of written language is overlaid on the spoken language centers in the brain. Spoken language involves several distinct areas of the brain; writing uses these areas and others as well. → So what gives rise to the misconception that writing is more perfect than speech There are several reasons. For one thing, the product of writing is usually more aptly worded and better organized, containing fewer errors, hesitations, and incomplete sentences than are found in speech. This perfection of writing can be explained by the fact that writing is the result of deliberation, correction, and revision, while speech is the spontaneous and simultaneous formulation of ideas; writing is therefore less subject to the constraint of time than speech is. In addition, writing is ultimately associated with education and edu

【单选题】： A     B     C     D

第4题： A、Messenger from the Past His people said good-bye and watched him walk off toward the mountains. They had little reason to fear for his safety: the man was well dressed in insulated clothing and equipped with tools needed to survive theAlpine climate. However, as weeks passed without his return, they must have grown worried, then anxious, and finally resigneD、After many years everyone who knew him had died, and a note even a memory of the man remaineD、 Then, on an improbably distant day, he came down from the mountain. Things had changed a bit: it wasn’t theBronzeAge anymore, and he was a celebrity. When a melting glacier released its hold on a 4,000-year-old corpse in September, it was quite rightly called one of the most important archeological finds of the century.Discovered by a German couple hiking at 10,500 feet in the Italian Tyrol near theAustrian border, the partially freeze-dried body still wore remnants of leather garments and boots that had been stuffed with straw for insulation. The hikers alerted scientists from the University of Innsbruck inAustria, whose more complete examination revealed that the man was tattooed on his back and behind his knee.At his side was a bronze ax of a type typical in southern centralEurope around 2000BC、On his expedition perhaps to hunt or to search for metal ore--he had also carried an all-purpose stone knife, a wooden backpack, a bow and a quiver, a small bag containing a flint lighter and kindling, and an arrow repair kit in a leather pouch. Such everyday gear gives an unprecedented perspective on life in earlyBronzeAgeEurope. "The most exciting thing is that we genuinely appear to be looking at a man who had some kind of accident in the course of a perfectly ordinary trip," says archeologist Ian Kinnes of theBritish Museum. "These are not artifacts placed in a grave, but the fellow’s own possessions. " Unlike theEgyptians and Mesopotamians of the time, who had more advanced civilizations with cities and central authority, the Ice Man and his countrymen lived in a society built around small, stable villages. He probably spoke in a tongue ancestral to currentEuropean languages. Furthermore, though he was a member of a farming culture, he may well have been hunting when he died, to add meat to his family’s diet. X-rays of the quiver showed that it contained 14 arrows. While his backpack was empty, careful exploration of the trench where he died revealed remnants of animal skin and bones at the same spot where the pack lay. There was also the remainder of a pile of berries.Clearly the man didn’t starve to death. The trench provided him so with shelter from the elements, and he also had a braided mat of grass to keep him warm. If injury or illness caused the Ice Man’s death, an autopsy on the 4,000-year-old victim could turn up some clues. The circumstances of his death may have preserved such evidence, as well as other details of his life. Freeze-dried by the frigid climate, his inner organs and other soft tissues are much better preserved than those of dried-upEgyptian mummies or the waterlogged Scandinavian "Bog Men" found in recent years. One concern, voiced by archeologistColin Renfrew ofCambridge University, is that the hot TV lights that greeted the hunter’s return to civilization may have damaged these fragile tissues, jeopardizing a chance to recover additional precious genetic information from his chromosomes. If not, Renfrew says, "it may be possible to get very longDNA、sequences out of this material. This is far and away the most exciting aspec

【单选题】： A     B     C     D

{{B}}President Hoover’s PoliticsDuring the GreatDepression{{/B}}
At first everything seemed fine and dandy.America was enjoying one of the biggest economic surges in the nation’s history. However, even thoughAmerica benefited from the economic boom of the so called "Roaring Twenties", the imbalance between the rich and the poor combined with the production of more and more goods and rising personal debt caused one of the biggest recessions in history. OnBlack Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, triggering the GreatDepression, which was the worst economic collapse in the history of the modem, industrial worlD、It spread from the United States and rippled out to the rest of the world, with banks failing and businesses going bust for over a span of a decade, leaving more than a quarter of the working force inAmerica without jobs.
President Herbert Hoover, underestimating the seriousness of the crisis, called it "a passing incident in our national lives," and assuredAmericans that it would be over within two months. Hoover did not think that the federal government should offer relief to the poverty-stricken population because he firmly believed in individualism. Focusing on economic programs to help finance businesses and banks, Hoover met with resistance from business executives who preferred to lay off workers.Blamed by many for the GreatDepression, Hoover was widely ridiculeD、
Hoover’s economy was put to the test with the onset of the GreatDepression in 1929. It was his vocal stance on non-intervention that led toDemocratic criticism that Hoover was a "sitting duck" president; on the other hand, his more pro-free market opponents also denied he was a laissez-faire president and condemned him for being an interventionist. Hoover tried to restore confidence with a series of speeches but his weak speaking style hampered these efforts. The biggest problem was that his predictions of an upturn just around the comer never materializeD、His promises were not delivered and he lost a lot of the public’s confidence.
Together, the government and businesses actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than the previous year; yet frightened consumers cut back their expenditures by ten percent.A、severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland beginning in the summer of 1930, while foreign banks declared bankruptcy, draining U.S. wealth and destroying world trade. The combination of these factors caused a downward spiral: as earning fell, domestic banks collapsed, and mortgages were called in. Hoover’s hold-the- line policy in wages lasted little more than a year. Unemployment soared from five million in 1930 to over eleven million in 1931, causing this sharp recession to become the GreatDepression.
In 1930, Hoover reluctantly signed the Smoot-Hawley TariffAct, which raised tariffs on over 20,000 dutiable items. The Tariff, combined with the 1932 RevenueAct, which hiked taxes and fees across the board, is often blamed for deepening the economic depression, and is considered by some to be Hoover’s biggest political mistakes. Moreover, the Federal Reserve System’s tightening of the money supply is also regarded by most modem economists as a mistaken tactic, under the circumstances.
In order to cover the expenses of these government programs, Hoover agreed to one of the largest tax increases inAmerican history.
The RevenueAct of 1932 raised taxes on the highest incomes from 25% to 63%, while the estate tax was doubled, and corporate taxes were raised by almost 15%.
Also, a "check tax" was inclu

第5题：{{B}}Set 5{{/B}}

【单选题】： A     B     C     D