Test 6
I. Vocabulary (30%)
Section 1: From the list of words at the top, select the correct word or phrase for
each blank space. Use each word or phrase only once (15%).
skin and bones
erectness
agonizing
marooned
sit out
hamlets
unabated
dogmatic
indulge in
sanctuary
doused
unfathomable
susceptible to
slashing
blasts
1. The children huddled in the ________ rain within the circle of adults.
2. They came to ________ the storm with the Koshaks.
3. With two walls in their bedroom _________ beginning to disintegrate, John
ordered everyone to leave.
4. The generator was _________, and the lights were out.
5. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old bodies reduced to ________.
6. The enlistment craze continued _________.
7. One wall began crumbling on the _________ group.
8. What they had wanted was an America more sensitive to art and less
_______________standardization.
9. Many other novelists, dramatists, poets, and critics directed sad and bitter
_______ at their native land.
10. She had an _________ of carriage, an ease of bearing.
11. However intricate they ways in which animals communicate with each other, they
do not ___________ anything that deserves the name of conversation.
12. I have whirled through the malarious tidewater ________ of Goergia.
13. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for
___________ theology.
14. What I allude to is the unbroken and __________ ugliness
15. They meet, in some _____________ ways, its obscure and unintelligible demands.
Section 2: From the list of words at the top, select the correct synonym for the
underlined words or phrase in each sentence (15%)
depression
condition
disappeared
troubled
systematically
criticized
unbearable
fiendish
begged
supported
according to narrow
decaying
set down
ignored
The plight of the human beings makes one’s blood boil.
The men methodically prepared for the hurricane.
Grandmother Koshak implored, “Children, let’s sing”.
Business was suffering a recession that prevented the opening up of new jobs.
We can prop up that mattress with our heads and shoulders.
The novelists flayed the Babbitts but loved their country.
It arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws.
So tremendous was the storming of recruitment centers that harassed sergeants
actually pleased with volunteers to go home.
9. The spirit of carnival and the enthusiasm for high military adventure were soon
dissipated.
10. We had reached an international stature that would forever prevent us from
retreating behind the artificial walls of a provincial morality.
11. The innumerable artists could never be written off as sterile.
12. They made the stadium perfect in their own sight by putting a completely
impossible penthouse, painted a starring yellow.
13. The same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and
three-quarters ago.
14. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert of Utah.
15. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
II. Paraphrase the following sentences. (20%)
1. We can batten down and ride it out.
2. Still, a white skin is always fully conspicuous.
3. Suddenly the alchemy of conversation took place.
4. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers.
5. In fact, the best conversationalists are those who are prepared to lose.
6. They have taken as their model a brick on end
7. Each town had its “fast” set which prided itself on its
unconventionality.
8. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow,
low-pitched roof.
9. Boy and man, I had been through it often before.
10.People with brown skins are next door to invisible.
III. Translate the following sentences (using the expressions given in the brackets.
(20%)
1. In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended
2.
3.
4.
5.
up inside.
The rebellion of the lower class against a cultural dominance of the ruling class is
still there.
Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those
problems that divide us.
The King’s English is no more than a class representation of reality.
Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination – and here were
human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley
cats.
6. 受到这样的待遇经过了好几个世纪后，他们已经不再为拥挤不堪而烦恼了。
(cease)
7. 那座楼房改成学校了。(convert)
8. 一想到他们所挥霍的钱，我就火冒三丈。(infuriate)
9. 学会自律是成功道路上的第一步。(discipline)
10. 不要一起挤进电梯。(squash)
IV. Name the figures of speech used in the following sentences. (one in each
sentence) (10%)
1. Several vacationers there held a hurricane party to watch the storm from their
spectacular vantage point.
2. The conversation was on wings.
3. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who
are rich.
4. It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect.
5. These abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some
gigantic and decaying cemetery.
6. The country itself is not uncomely.
7. Liquor talks mighty loud when it gets loose from the jug.
8. There is a limit to what flesh and blood can bear.
9. On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living
thinker ceased to think.
10. We can gain knowledge, by reading, by reflection, by observation or by practice.
V.
Proofreading and Error-Correcting (10%)
Directions: In the passage, there are altogether 10 mistakes, one in each
numbered line. You may have to add a word, cross out a word, or change a word.
Mark out the mistakes and put your corrections in the blanks provided. If you
cross out a word, put a slash (/) in the blank. Please note that you are not going
to look for any spelling errors.
Example
When  art museum wants a new exhibit, it buys
[1] an
things in the finished form. When a natural history
[2] the
museum wants an exhibition, it must often build it.
[3] exhibit
If you knew Casablanca 20 years ago and are to return today, you
1.
would be pleasantly surprised to find how a town can develop and
undergo
major changes and yet not lose its identity and the human dimension.
2.
Rapid growth has always been a feature of Casablanca, thus this 3.
has
never destroyed its balance. It is an industrial town and a major
financial center, but it is also a tourist town who has its own 4.
specialized charm.
If businessmen choose to locate his head offices there, it is because
5.
it has most of the advantages of a city with few of the disadvantages.
Its reputation as a conference and congress town has already been
constantly shown and business is growing all the time.
Hence Casablanca has become the economic capital of the
kingdom of Morocco. It fills a special position not just as the center
of its region but also within the life of nation: currently it is an area of 6.________
open demographic and economic concentration, thanks to a
hinterland which has yet to be developed.
But despite all this, Casablanca is not saturated, His Majesty King
7.
Hassan II wanted the town to develop and yet remain master of its 8.
own development.
This is why it has been given an administrative structure which is
originated but which has the lofty mission of making it a model town,
one that must jealously preserve its historical and cultural legacy. It is
from this oersoective that a major, totally intergrated developing plan 9.________
has been specially conceived for the city so that it may welcome the
21 century with quite confidence.
10.________
VI. Reading comprehension. Read the following passage and answer the
questions by choosing the most appropriate choice. Put your answers on the
ANSWER SHEET. (10%)
About Conformity
By Dr. Russell M. Church
In the past few years the American public has been chided, perhaps more than
usual, for being a collection of conformists. We have been accused of accepting our
attitudes ready-made from the mass media or our local “opinion leaders,” rather than
forming independent attitudes after critical consideration of the evidence.
It is charged that our wants as consumers are not our own but are dictated by
Madison Avenue, or by the Joneses. We have been accused of behaving in accordance
with the folkways of our organization rather than on the basis of international values.
Even the self-consciously non-conformist beatnik has been accused of conforming to
the standards of his group.
Some of those who make these charges of conformity may be under pressure to
speak strongly about something to which no one could take exception, but others are
sincerely concerned by the lack of independence among people in their attitudes,
desires, and their behavior.
The first investigations of conforming behavior in a standard laboratory situation
were those of Muzafer Sherif in 1935. These investigations made use of the
autokinetic phenomenon, the fact that a stationary pinpoint of light in a totally dark
room gives the appearance of moving. (Try it sometime-even though you know the
light to be stationary it seems to be moving erratically.) Sherif asked subjects to judge
the extent of this apparent movement. Alone a subject would become increasingly
stable in his judgements, but there were considerable individual differences among
subjects in the extent of movement that they reported. One subject might typically
report movement of 8 or 10 inches and another might typically report movement of
only 1 or 2 inches. When individuals with different norms were put together in a
group of two or three there was a marked convergence in their judgements. Gradually,
after 100 or more trials in a group, individuals who had established independent
standards for the extent of movement agreed rather closely with one another. (Many
subjects were influenced “unconsciously,” i.e., they were not aware that they were
being influenced.) After these group norms had been formed, individuals when again
judging the extent of movement alone, tended to keep the same group norms rather
than revert to the norms they had previously established as individuals. The degree of
conformity within a group was even greater for subjects who had not previously had
the opportunity to judge the stimuli alone. Sherif concluded that the judgements of the
others of the extent of movement had a marked effect on the judgements of the
subject. With this study he established the autokinetic phenomenon as a standard
laboratory task for the study of factors affecting the amount of conformity.
Quite naturally, the autokinetic phenomenon has been criticized as an unnatural
task to use in the study of conformity. The subject is in a totally dark room, an
unstructured situation with no frames of reference. He does not even know the size of
the room or the distance between himself and the source of light. With so few cues to
distance, the extent of movement is certainly ambiguous. Is it possible to demonstrate
conformity in an unambiguous situation?
Consider an individual asked to state which of three lines is equal to some
standard line in length under conditions that never (or almost never) would lead a
subject alone to make an error. Would an individual parrot the group judgement if all
the members of a group were to make the same erroneous judgement, even when that
judgement is obviously contrary to fact? This was the problem originally posed by
Solomon Asch. The first eight subjects to speak (paid stooges of the experimenter)
sometimes unanimously selected an erroneous line. What did the ninth subject do
when confronted by a unanimous, but erroneous, majority? In about one-third of the
cases the naive subject made an error in the direction of majority.
The conforming subjects were interviewed after the experiment, and some said
that they had made an error in action only, e.g., they knew that their response was an
error, but they went along with the majority anyway. Others said that they had made
an error in judgement, e.g., they believed that their perceptions were wrong after
hearing the response of the majority. Still others said that they had made an error in
perception, e.g., they actually saw the stimuli the way the majority had reported them
to be. Regardless of the cause of the errors, one must be impressed by the strength of
the pressures to conformity when they can make people agree to propositions which
are obviously contrary to fact.
With this study of the judgement of length of lines in groups, Asch had
established another standard laboratory task for the study of factors affecting the
amount of conformity. As in the case of the autokinetic situation, replications of this
study have been uniformly successful, there have been improvements in technique,
and there have been numerous studies of factors relevant to the amount of conformity.
Some of these are the size of the majority (which has an increasing effect only up to
about three individuals) and the unanimity of the majority (which is crucial).
The increase in understanding of conformity proceeds at a most gradual pace.
There was a time when it was only possible to describe conforming behavior. Now,
following the establishment of laboratory demonstrations of conformity, there are
extensive parametric investigations of the factors affecting the amount of conformity.
But this will not be the final stage. Almost certainly the body of knowledge regarding
conformity will be integrated with the general theories of behavior that are emerging
from radically different situations.
We may be as conforming now as we were a few years ago, although it certainly
seems we are being less often and less viciously attacked for it now. The accusations
have passed their peak, and may disappear for years, but they are certain to return.
When the charges of conformity return we may not know the values involved in
conformity any more surely than we do now, but we should know a little more about
the nature of conformity, its determinants and its control.
1. Some people criticize Americans for being conformists because
.
a. they feel that people need to think for themselves
b. they are afraid that the public tend to follow the self-consciously
non-conformist beatnik
c. they feel that it is unnecessary for consumers to follow the fashion as
displayed on Madison Avenue
d. they feel it is harmful to accept the attitudes from the mass media or our local
opinion leader
2. “Our wants are dictated by the Joneses.” The sentence means
.
a. big corporations like the Joneses have such domineering influence on us
consumers
3.
4.
5.
6.
b. consumers like the Joneses are especially inclined to follow the fashion
c. consumers are wanted by the Joneses
d. we buy more and better commodities in order to compete with our neighbors
in material possessions
“Autokinetic” in this context means
.
a. self-moving
b. deceptive illusion
c. fluid dynamics
d. conforming behavior
When a person sits in a totally dark room, and a stationary pinpoint of light is
turned on,
.
a. the person is unable to judge
b. the light seems to be immobile
c. the light appears to be moving irregularly
d. nobody except psychologists can correctly describe the condition of the light
“Subject” in this context means
.
a. substance
b. the person who receives an experiment
c. the problem that is being studied by scientists
d. an originating motive
When people were asked to judge singly the extent of movement of the
light,
.
a. they all reported eight or ten inches
b. they tended to make similar judgements
c. their answers varied considerably
d. the extent of movement reported averaged four or five inches
7. “Individuals with different norms” means
.
a. individuals who hold different attitudes toward the experiment
b. people whose judgements of the extent of movement of the light are different
c. people with different social backgrounds
d. people who are asked to take part in the experiments on different occasions
8. All experiments reported tend to show that
.
a. group judgements are more accurate than single judgements
b. a single individual’s judgements produce a more accurate
result than a majority or a group
c. a wrong majority will often cause a right individual to change his judgement
d. a right judgement of an individual tends to influence the wrong judgement of
a group
9. When a person has agreed with a majority judgement,
.
a. he tends to return to his own judgement when given the opportunity
b. he will again change his judgement easily if asked to decide
for a second time
c. he is seldom sure of himself in later judgement
d. he tends to stick to the group judgement
10. Muzafer Sherif’s experiment has been criticized because
.
a. people are asked to demonstrate conformity in an ambiguous situation
b. the room where the experiment is being made is too dark
c. the autokinetic phenomenon is unscientific
d. the source of light is undependable