Part B
Directions:
In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41—45, choose the most suitable one from the list A—G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
The patriotic outpouring that followed the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks—80 percent of Americans displayed the flag on their car, house, or lapel—brought hopes of renewed voter interest. Yet turnout in this year’s congressional primaries was a mere 17 percent, no better than four years ago and only half that of three decades ago. Turnout in Tuesday’s election is expected to be less than 40 percent, significantly below what it once was.
41) _______________________________________________________. But it’s time to stop blaming the citizens. Candidates, public officials, and journalists are not giving Americans the type of campaign they deserve.
America’s politicians have also managed to invent the most unappetizing campaigns imaginable. If equivalent offerings were served at restaurants, Americans would never eat out. Attack ads have doubled in frequency since the 1770s and now account for a majority of the ads featured prominently in campaigns. Many of the attacks are so twisted that even a whiff of fresh air would topple them.
42) ____________________________________________________.
And where are the news media? They’re so enamored of infotainment and sensationalism that they can’t find time for the midterm elections. In the 1998 midterms, coverage was down by more than half over 1994. And it’s falling again—a comparison of news coverage in 10 states shows the midterm election is getting 13 percent less coverage this year than in 1998.
When Journalists deign to cover elections, they magnify the very things they rail against. Candidates are ignored or portrayed as boring if they run issue-based campaigns. Attack sound bites get airtime; positive statements land on the cutting-room floor. 43) ____________ _________________________________.
It’s not surprising voters are disenchanted with campaigns. During the 2000 election, as part of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, we interviewed 100,000 Americans to discover why they’re disengaging from elections. 44) _________________________________________________________.
Officials unfailingly urge citizens“to do your duty and vote.” Yet, these officials embrace policies that make it harder to do that. 45) ____________________________________.
So look for a small turnout Tuesday, but don’t ask citizens to look in the mirror. Some or them have cast their eye on what’s going on in candidate—land media—land and are asking why they should be bit players in that artifice.
[A] Electoral competition is key to democracy, and America’s voters aren’t getting the full benefit of that. Only a couple of dozen of this year’s 435 US House races are competitive. Two years ago, 98.5 percent of incumbents won, typically by margins of 70 percent or more.
[B] True leadership has become so rare that politicians may no longer even dream of stepping forward to say something other than what polls tell them is safe. Tuesday’s election will surely pass without much of a debate on the momentous foreign and domestic issues facing the nation.
[C] Amid the uproar over Florida’s ballot irregularities, no commentator has seen fit to ask why polls there close at 7 p.m. Florida is one of 26 states that close their polls before 8 p.m. Unsurprisingly, turnout in these states is several percentage points below that of states where polls are open until 8 p.m. or later.
[D] As for trivial issues, why did candidate Bush’s 1970s drunk—driving arrest get more time on the network newscasts in the final days of the 2000 election than Gore’s foreign policy statements got in the entire general election?
[E] No doubt, ordinarily Americans share responsibility for their lapse in participation; it is always easier to leave the work of democracy to others.
[F] Today, 87 percent of Americans reside in states that close registration two weeks or more before the election. The majority of unregistered Americans who otherwise would cast a vote are out of luck. Only six states allow election—day registration.
[G] Their responses tell the story: 81 percent believe “most political candidates will say almost anything to get themselves elected”; 75 percent feel “political candidates are more concerned with fighting each other than with solving the nation’s problems”。
Part C
Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2.
Why has global inequality increased? The answer is in four parts: (1) faster economic growth in developed OECD countries than developing countries as a group; (2) faster population growth in developing countries than in OECD countries; (3) slow growth of output in rural China, rural India, and Africa; and (4) rapidly widening output and income differences between urban China on the one hand, and rural China and rural India on the other.
These trends in turn have deeper causes. (46) Technological change and financial liberalization result in a disproportionately fast increase in the number of households at the extreme rich end, without shrinking the distribution at the poor end. Population growth, meanwhile, adds disproportionately to numbers at the poor end. (47) These deep causes yield an important intermediate cause that makes things worse: the prices of industrial goods and services exported from high-income countries are increasing faster than the prices of goods and services exported by low-income countries, and much faster than the prices of goods and services produced in low-income countries that do little international trade.
These price trends mean that the majority of the population of poor countries are able to buy fewer and fewer of the goods and services that enter into the consumption patterns of rich-country populations. The poorer countries and the poorer two-thirds of the world’s population therefore suffer a double marginalization: once through incomes, again through prices.
(48) The result is a lot of unemployed and angry young people, to whom new information technologies have given the means to threaten the stability of the societies they live in and even to threaten social stability in countries of the wealthy zone. Economic growth in these countries often depletes natural capital and therefore future potential. More and more people see migration to the wealthy zone as their only salvation.
It is striking that most of the organized opposition to more globalization comes from North America, Western Europe and Oceania. (49) Why have elites from developing countries for the most part subscribed to the globalization agenda that western states, businesses, and multilateral organizations have been promoting, if a case can be made that the gains of free markets for goods and capital tend to be concentrated in the top levels of the income distributions of their countries? Why are they doing so little to integrate their economies into the world economy in a strategic way, not open-endedly?
Part of the reason may be that elites in developing countries, like their counterparts in the rich world, are content to believe either that world inequality is falling, or that inequality is good because it is the source of incentives. They, like the multilateral economic organizations (and the reformers of Victorian England), worry about poverty. (50) But they see no link between widening world income distribution and poverty; and they think that poverty can be fixed by providing the poor with welfare and opportunities without changing larger structures like income and asset distributions. Academic analysts have a responsibility to counter the current neglect by analysing the relationship between trends in world income distribution and poverty as a way of getting distribution issues on to the world agenda.
Section III Writing
Part A
51. Directions:
You are supposed to invite Dr. King to make a speech about the future development of computer science at the annual conference of your department. Write a letter to Mr. King to
1) invite him on behalf of your department
2) tell him the time and place of the conference
3) promise to give him further details later.
You should write about 100 words on Answer Sheet 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use “Li Ming” instead. You do not need to write the address. ( 10 points )
Part B
52. Directions:
Look at the following picture and write an article on eager learners. Your article should meet the following two requirements:
1) interprete the message conveyed by the picture
2) make your comments on the phenomenon.
You should write about 160-200 words neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. ( 20 points )
