2013 年考研英语（一）真题

People are, on the whole, poor at considering background information when making individual decisions. At first glance this might seem like a strength that ___1___ the ability to make judgments which are unbiased by ___2___ factors. But Dr Uri Simonsohn speculated that an inability to consider the big ___3___ was leading decision-makers to be biased by the daily samples of information they were working with. ___4___, he theorised that a judge ___5___ of appearing too soft ___6___ crime might be more likely to send someone to prison ___7___ he had already sentenced five or six other defendants only to forced community service on that day.

To ___8___ this idea, he turned to the university-admissions process. In theory, the ___9___ of an applicant should not depend on the few others ___10___ randomly for interview during the same day, but Dr Simonsohn suspected the truth was ___11___.

He studied the results of 9,323 MBA interviews ___12___ by 31 admissions officers. The interviewers had ___13___ applicants on a scale of one to five. This scale ___14___ numerous factors into consideration. The scores were ___15___ used in conjunction with an applicant's score on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, a standardised exam which is ___16___ out of 800 points, to make a decision on whether to accept him or her.

Dr Simonsohn found if the score of the previous candidate in a daily series of interviewees was 0.75 points or more higher than that of the one ___17___ that, then the score for the next applicant would ___18___ by an average of 0.075 points. This might sound small, but to ___19___ the effects of such a decrease a candidate would need 30 more GMAT points than would otherwise have been ___20___.

In the 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, scolds her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashion doesn't affect her. Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistant's sweater descended over the years from fashion shows to department stores and to the bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment.

This top-down conception of the fashion business couldn't be more out of date or at odds with the feverish world described in Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline's three-year indictment of "fast fashion". In the last decade or so, advances in technology have allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo to react to trends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely. Quicker turnarounds mean less wasted inventory, more frequent releases, and more profit. These labels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposable - meant to last only a wash or two, although they don't advertise that - and to renew their wardrobe every few weeks. By offering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands have hijacked fashion cycles, shaking an industry long accustomed to a seasonal pace.

The victims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers. For H&M to offer a $5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2,300-plus stores around the world, it must rely on low-wage overseas labor, order in volumes that strain natural resources, and use massive amounts of harmful chemicals.

Overdressed is the fashion world's answer to consumer-activist bestsellers like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fills a hunger and need, yet is non-durable and wasteful," Cline argues. Americans, she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a year - about 64 items per person - and no matter how much they give away, this excess leads to waste.

Towards the end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named Sarah Kate Beaumont, who since 2008 has made all of her own clothes - and beautifully. But as Cline is the first to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft; her example can't be knocked off.

Though several fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on labor and the environment - including H&M, with its green Conscious Collection line - Cline believes lasting change can only be effected by the customer. She exhibits the idealism common to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy. Vanity is a constant; people will only start shopping more sustainably when they can't afford not to.

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An old saying has it that half of all advertising budgets are wasted - the trouble is, no one knows which half. In the internet age, at least in theory, this fraction can be much reduced. By watching what people search for, click on and say online, companies can aim "behavioural" ads at those most likely to buy.

In the past couple of weeks a quarrel has illustrated the value to advertisers of such fine-grained information: Should advertisers assume that people are happy to be tracked and sent behavioural ads? Or should they have explicit permission?

In December 2010 America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed adding a "do not track" (DNT) option to internet browsers, so that users could tell advertisers that they did not want to be followed. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari both offer DNT; Google's Chrome is due to do so this year. In February the FTC and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) agreed that the industry would get cracking on responding to DNT requests.

On May 31st Microsoft set off the row. It said that Internet Explorer 10, the version due to appear with Windows 8, would have DNT as a default.

Advertisers are horrified. Human nature being what it is, most people stick with default settings. Few switch DNT on now, but if tracking is off it will stay off. Bob Liodice, the chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, says consumers will be worse off if the industry cannot collect information about their preferences. People will not get fewer ads, he says. "They'll get less meaningful, less targeted ads."

It is not yet clear how advertisers will respond. Getting a DNT signal does not oblige anyone to stop tracking, although some companies have promised to do so. Unable to tell whether someone really objects to behavioural ads or whether they are sticking with Microsoft's default, some may ignore a DNT signal and press on anyway.

Also unclear is why Microsoft has gone it alone. After all, it has an ad business too, which it says will comply with DNT requests, though it is still working out how. If it is trying to upset Google, which relies almost wholly on advertising, it has chosen an indirect method: there is no guarantee that DNT by default will become the norm. DNT does not seem an obviously huge selling point for windows 8 - though the firm has compared some of its other products favourably with Google's on that count before. Brendon Lynch, Microsoft's chief privacy officer, blogged: "We believe consumers should have more control." Could it really be that simple?

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Up until a few decades ago, our visions of the future were largely - though by no means uniformly - glowingly positive. Science and technology would cure all the ills of humanity, leading to lives of fulfilment and opportunity for all.

Now utopia has grown unfashionable, as we have gained a deeper appreciation of the range of threats facing us, from asteroid strike to epidemic flu and to climate change. You might even be tempted to assume that humanity has little future to look forward to.

But such gloominess is misplaced. The fossil record shows that many species have endured for millions of years - so why shouldn't we? Take a broader look at our species' place in the universe, and it becomes clear that we have an excellent chance of surviving for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Look up Homo sapiens in the "Red List" of threatened species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and you will read: "Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline."

So what does our deep future hold? A growing number of researchers and organisations are now thinking seriously about that question. For example, the Long Now Foundation has as its flagship project a mechanical clock that is designed to still be marking time thousands of years hence.

Perhaps willfully, it may be easier to think about such lengthy timescales than about the more immediate future. The potential evolution of today's technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated, and it's perhaps best left to science fiction writers and futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can envisage. That's one reason why we have launched Arc, a new publication dedicated to the near future.

But take a longer view and there is a surprising amount that we can say with considerable assurance. As so often, the past holds the key to the future: we have now identified enough of the long-term patterns shaping the history of the planet, and our species, to make evidence-based forecasts about the situations in which our descendants will find themselves.

This long perspective makes the pessimistic view of our prospects seem more likely to be a passing fad. To be sure, the future is not all rosy. But we are now knowledgeable enough to reduce many of the risks that threatened the existence of earlier humans, and to improve the lot of those to come.

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On a five to three vote, the Supreme Court knocked out much of Arizona's immigration law Monday - a modest policy victory for the Obama Administration. But on the more important matter of the Constitution, the decision was an 8-0 defeat for the Administration's effort to upset the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

In Arizona v. United States, the majority overturned three of the four contested provisions of Arizona's controversial plan to have state and local police enforce federal immigration law. The Constitutional principles that Washington alone has the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization" and that federal laws precede state laws are noncontroversial. Arizona had attempted to fashion state policies that ran parallel to the existing federal ones.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to the federal sun. On the overturned provisions the majority held Congress had deliberately "occupied the field" and Arizona had thus intruded on the federal's privileged powers.

However, the Justices said that Arizona police would be allowed to verify the legal status of people who come in contact with law enforcement. That's because Congress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement and explicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate with federal colleagues.

Two of the three objecting Justices - Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas - agreed with this Constitutional logic but disagreed about which Arizona rules conflicted with the federal statute. The only major objection came from Justice Antonin Scalia, who offered an even more robust defense of state privileges going back to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The 8-0 objection to President Obama turns on what Justice Samuel Alito describes in his objection as "a shocking assertion of federal executive power". The White House argued that Arizona's laws conflicted with its enforcement priorities, even if state laws complied with federal statutes to the letter. In effect, the White House claimed that it could invalidate any otherwise legitimate state law that it disagrees with.

Some powers do belong exclusively to the federal government, and control of citizenship and the borders is among them. But if Congress wanted to prevent states from using their own resources to check immigration status, it could. It never did so. The Administration was in essence asserting that because it didn't want to carry out Congress's immigration wishes, no state should be allowed to do so either. Every Justice rightly rejected this remarkable claim.

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The social sciences are flourishing. As of 2005, there were almost half a million professional social scientists from all fields in the world, working both inside and outside academia. According to the World Social Science Report 2010, the number of social-science students worldwide has swollen by about 11% every year since 2000.

Yet this enormous resource is not contributing enough to today's global challenges, including climate change, security, sustainable development and health. (41)______________.Humanity has the necessary agro-technological tools to eradicate hunger, from genetically engineered crops to artificial fertilizers. Here, too, the problems are social: the organization and distribution of food, wealth and prosperity.

(42)______________This is a shame - the community should be grasping the opportunity to raise its influence in the real world. To paraphrase the great social scientist Joseph Schumpeter: there is no radical innovation without creative destruction.

Today, the social sciences are largely focused on disciplinary problems and internal scholarly debates, rather than on topics with external impact. Analyses reveal that the number of papers including the keywords "environmental change" or "climate change" have increased rapidly since 2004. (43) ______________

When social scientists do tackle practical issues, their scope is often local: Belgium is interested mainly in the effects of poverty on Belgium, for example. And whether the community's work contributes much to an overall accumulation of knowledge is doubtful.

The problem is not necessarily the amount of available funding. (44)______

This is an adequate amount so long as it is aimed in the right direction. Social scientists who complain about a lack of funding should not expect more in today's economic climate.

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The trick is to direct these funds better. The European Union Framework funding programs have long had a category specifically targeted at social scientists. This year, it was proposed that the system be changed: Horizon 2020, a new program to be enacted in 2014, would not have such a category. This has resulted in protests from social scientists. But the intention is not to neglect social science; rather, the complete opposite. (45) ______________That should create more collaborative endeavors and help to develop projects aimed directly at solving global problems.

[A] The idea is to force social scientists to integrate their work with other categories,

including health and demographic change; food security; marine research and the

bio-economy; clean, efficient energy; and inclusive, innovative and secure

societies. [B] The solution is to change the mindset of the academic community, and what it

considers to be its main goal. Global challenges and social innovation ought to

receive much more attention from scientists, especially the young ones. [C] It could be that we are evolving two communities of social scientists: one that 1s

discipline-oriented and publishing in highly specialized journals, and one that is

problem-oriented and publishing elsewhere, such as policy briefs. [D] However, the numbers are still small: in 2010, about 1,600 of the 100,000 social

sciences papers published globally included one of these keywords. [E] These issues all have root causes in human behavior: all require behavioral

change and social innovations, as well as technological development. Stemming

climate change, for example, is as much about changing consumption patterns

and promoting tax acceptance as it is about developing clean energy. [F] Despite these factors, many social scientists seem reluctant to tackle such

problems. And in Europe, some are up in arms over a proposal to drop a specific

funding category for social-science research and to integrate it within cross

cutting topics of sustainable development. [G] During the late 1990s, national spending on social sciences and the humanities

as a percentage of all research and development funds - including government,

higher education, non-profit and corporate - varied from around 4% to 25%;

in most European nations, it is about 15%.

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