2012年職稱英語理工類A級考試試題參考答案

四、閱讀理解

第一篇 Gross National Happiness

In the last century, new technology improved the lives of many people in many countries. However, one country resisted these changes. High in the Himalayan mountains of Asia, the kingdom of Bhutan remained separate. Its people and Buddhist(佛教) culture had not been affected for almost a thousand years. Bhutan, however, was a poor country. People died at a young age. Most of its people could not read, and they did not know much about the outside world. Then, in 1972, a new ruler named King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided to help Bhutan to become modern, but without losing its traditions.

King Wangchuck looked at other countries for ideas. He saw that most countries measured their progress by their Gross National Product (GNP). The GNP measures products and money. When the number of products sold increases, people say the country is making progress. King Wangchuck had a different idea for Bhutan. He wanted to measure his country’s progress by people’s happiness. If the people’s happiness increased, the king could say that Bhutan was making progress. To decide if people were happier, he created a measure called Gross National Happiness (GNH).

GNH is based on certain principles that create happiness. People are happier if they have health care, education, and jobs. They are happier when they live in a healthy, protected environment. They are happier when they can keep their traditional culture and customs. Finally, people are happier when they have a good, stable government.

Now there is some evidence of increased GNH in Bhutan. People are healthier and are living longer. More people are educated and employed. Teenty-five percent of the land has become national parks, and the country has almost no pollution. The Bhutanese continue to wear their traditional clothing and follow their ancient Buddhist customs. Bhutan has also become a democracy. In 2008, King Wangchuck gave his power to his son. Although the country still had a king, it held its first democratic elections that year. Bhutan had political parties and political candidates for the first time. Finally, Bhutan has connected to the rest of the world through television and internet.

Bhutan is a symbol for social progress. Many countries are now interested in Bhutan’s GNH. These countries are investigating their own ways to measure happiness. They want to create new policies that take care of their people, cultures, and land.

Brazil may be the nest country to use the principles of GNH. Brazilian leaders see the principles of GNH as a source of inspiration. Brazil is a large country with a diverse population. If happiness works as a measure of progress in Brazil, perhaps the rest of the world will follow.

31. Who was Jigme Singye Wangchuck?

A. A president.

B. A Buddhist priest.

C. A king.

D. A general.

32. Apart from modernizing Bhutan, what else did Wangchuck want to do for Bhutan?

A. To make its population grow.

B. To keep it separate from the world.

C. To keep its traditions and customs.

D. To encourage its people to get rich.

33. A country shows its progress with GNP by

A. selling more products.

B. spending more money.

C. spending less money.

D. providing more jobs.

34. According to GNH, people are happier if they

A. have new technology.

B. have a good, stable government.

C. can change their religion.

D. have more money.

35. Today many countries are

A. using the principles of GNH to measure their progress.

B. working together to develop a common scale to measure GNH.

C. taking both Bhutan and Brazil as symbols for social progress.

D. trying to find their own ways to measure happiness.

第二篇 Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain

For the first time, researchers have been able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using induced brain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as an instant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, but it’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching and rehabilitation techniques.

Future therapies could decode the brain activity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark for teaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.

Scientists from Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learning process. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptual learning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performance on a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people has been an ongoing debate in neuroscience.

Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate the visual cortex. First they showed participants circles at different orientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity. The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate this visual cortex activity.

The volunteers were again placed in MRI machines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants were asked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to make a solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paid bonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anything about what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brain activity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.

“Participants can be trained to control the overall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write, “or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”

This worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.

“The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,” Watanabe said in a statement.

Watanabe and colleagues said this method can be a powerful tool.

“It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.

36. what have researchers been able to do with the help of the study?

A. Discover a person’s learning process in the brain.

B. Make a person know how to do something without learning.

C. Set up different learning patterns for different people.

D. Enable people to learn kung fu instantly.

37. what helps a person to do a particular task better in visual perceptual learning?

A. Testing

B. Encouragement

C. Self- assessment

D. Repetition

38. which of the following statements is true of the experiment participants?

A. They learned how to control MRL machines in the experiment

B. They were not told what to be learned in the experiment

C. They were paid to take part in the experiment

D. They were not cooperative in the experiment

39. the finding of the study is most significant in that learning

A. is full of fun

B. is visualized

C. happens unconsciously

D. becomes unnecessary

40. who are most likely to benefit from the study?

A. Teenagers

B. Musicians

C. Senior people

D. Athletes

第三篇 Small But Wise

On December 14, NASA1 blasted a small but mighty telescope into space. The telescope is called WISE and is about as wide around as a trashcan. Don't let its small size fool you: WISE has a powerful digital camera, and it will be taking pictures of some the wildest objects2 in the known universe, including asteroids, faint stars, blazing galaxies3 and giant clouds of dust where planets and stars are born.

“I'm very excited because we're going to be seeing parts of the universe that we haven't seen before, ” said Ned Wright, a scientist who directs the WISE project.

Since arriving in space, the WISE telescope has been circling the Earth, held by gravity in a polar orbit4( this means it crosses close to the north and south poles with each lap5). Its camera is pointed outward, away from the Earth, and WISE will snap a picture of a different part of the sky every 11 minutes. After six months it will have taken pictures across the entire sky.

The pictures taken by WISE won't be like everyday digital photographs, however. WISE stands for “Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. ” As its name suggests, the WISE camera takes pictures of features that give off infrared radiation6.

Radiation is energy that travels as a wave. Visible light, including the familiar spectrum of light7 that becomes visible in a rainbow, is an example of radiation. When an ordinary digital camera takes a picture of a tree, for example, it receives the waves of visible light that are reflected off the tree. When these waves enter the camera through the lens, they're processed by the camera, which then puts the image together.

Waves of infrared radiation are longer than waves of visible light, so ordinary digital cameras don't see them, and neither do the eyes of human beings. Although invisible to the eye, longer infrared radiation can be detected as warmth by the skin.

That's a key idea to why WISE will be able to see things other telescopes can't. Not everything in the universe shows up in visible light. Asteroids, for example, are giant rocks that float through space — but they absorb most of the light that reaches them. They don't reflect light, so they're difficult to see. But they do give off infrared radiation, so an infrared telescope like WISE will be able to produce images of them. During its mission WISE will take pictures of hundreds of thousands of asteroids.

Brown dwarfs8 are another kind of deep-space object that will show up in WISE's pictures. These objects are “failed” stars — which means they are not massive enough to jump start9 the same kind of reactions that power stars such as the sun. Instead, brown dwarfs simply shrink and cool down. They're so dim that they're almost impossible to see with visible light, but in the infrared spectrum they glow.

41. What is so special about WISE?

A It is as small as a trashcan.

B It is small in size but carries a large camera.

C Its digital camera can help astronomers to see the unknown space.

D Never before has a telescope carried a digital camera in space.

42. The camera on WISE

A is equipped with expensive computers.

B produces images of objects giving off infrared radiation.

C reflects light visible to the human eyes.

D is similar to an ordinary digital camera.

43. It is true that infrared radiation.

A is not detectable to humans.

B looks brighter than visible light.

C is visible light reflected off an object.

D has longer waves than those of visible light.

44. Which of the following statements about asteroids is NOT ture?

A The WISE telescope can catch and take pictures of them.

B They do not reflect light that reaches them.

C They float through space giving off visible light.

D They are invisible to ordinary cameras.

45. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that brown dwarfs.

A give off infrared radiation.

B are power stars like the sun.

C become massive and active

D are invisible to the WISE telescope.

參考答案：

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