SECTIONⅢ Reading Comprehension
　　(40 minutes)
　　Par A
　　Directions
　　Read the following three texts. Answer the questions on each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
　　Text1
　　People seldom feel neutral about poetry. Those who love it sometimes give the impression that it is an adequate substitution for food, shelter, and love. It isn’t. Words, no matter how satisfying, are never an equivalent for life itself and its human experiences. Those who dislike poetry on principle sometimes claim, on the other hand, that poetry is only words and good for nothing. That’s not true either. It is easy to become frustrated by words------- in poetry or in life----but when words represent and recreate and genuine human feelings, as they often do in poetry, they can be very important. Poetry is, in fact, more than just words. It is an experience of words, and those who know how to read poetry can easily extend their experience of life, their sense of what other people are like, their awareness of themselves, and their range of human feelings.
　　One reason poetry can be so important is that it is so closely concerned with feelings. Poetry is often full of ideas, too, and sometimes poems can be powerful experiences of the mind, but most poems are primarily about how people feel rather than how people think. Poems provide, in fact, a language for feeling, and one of poetry’s most insistent merits involves its attempt to express the inexpressible. How can anyone, for example, put into words what it means to be in love or what it feels like to lose someone one cares about? Poetry tries, and it often captures exactly the shade of emotion that feels just right to a reader. No single poem can be said to express all the things that love or death feels like, or means, but one of the joys of experiencing poetry occurs when we read a poem and want to say, “Yes, that is just what it is like; I know exactly what that line means but I’ve never been able to express it so well.” Poetry can be the voice of our feelings even when our minds are speechless with grief or joy.
　　46. “People seldom feel neutral about poetry” in the first paragraph means that _____________.
　　A. few people think that poetry is neutral
　　B. people always differ in their views about poetry
　　C. people rarely take a partial opinion about poetry
　　D. people generally think of poetry as extremely important or totally useless
　　47. The author suggests that ____________________.
　　A. poetry tends to make the reader disappointed
　　B. poetry makes its readers sentimental
　　C. poetry is more important than words
　　D. poetry often captures real human feelings
　　48. According to the author, poetry ________________.
　　A. is more than just words
　　B. is the poet’s feelings about words
　　C. is anything but patterns of lines
　　D. is an experiment on the use of words
　　49. Poetry tries, persistently, to express _______________.
　　A. what love and death mean
　　B. what people think about themselves
　　C. what people feel but find it hard to describe
　　D. how people go through life
　　50. This passage is mainly about _____________________.
　　A. the structure of poetry
　　B. the component of poetry
　　C. the nature and importance of poetry
　　D. the appreciation of poetry

　　Text 2
　　Contemporary Western American art has been a very popular and lucrative part of the art marketplace. But unlike some artists who have begun to paint Western subjects precisely because there is a ready market for them, the members who makes up the Women Artists of the American West (WAOAW) paint the West because it has always been the primary subject matter for them. For the most part, these women have lived in the American West since birth, and their art is natural outgrowth of the habitat and habits of their daily lives.
　　The WAOAW was launched in 1971 by artists Gloria Bilotta and Mollie Graham. This organization brought Western artists together in the hope of making more of an impact of the art community than any of them could individually and to promote Western art by women.
　　In the more than 10 years of the organization’s existence, the work of WAOAW has become recognized as preeminent by collectors and critics of Western American art. Just what type of subject matter does this art genre include? The scenic landscapes and sprawling vistas of the West are, of course, popular subjects but the most recognizable are those landscapes and portraits featuring mountain men, cowboys, and various American Indian tribes. However, WAOAW artists believe that the subjects matter for Western art should not be confined to these narrow limitations. It should contain all aspects of ranch and pioneer life, including the large role played by women Western art should also depict Western wildlife and authentic Western artifacts as portrayed by Lisa Danielle Lorimer, Esther Maric Vetsch, Mary Thomson, and other members.
　　The artists who make up WAOAW, currently about thirty-five members have another character in common apart from their painting genre and that is the high quality of their art. When the group was originally formed, requirements for membership were not strict and involved willingness to participate and a membership fee. But as the group grew in prestige, it became necessary to tighten membership requirements considerably in order to justify the many hours and thousands of dollars spent by the group to promote the work of its members.
　　51. The best title for the passage is _______________.
　　A. Women Artists of the American West
　　B. Western Landscape Paintings
　　C. Famous Artists in the West
　　D. The Popularity of Western Art
　　52. All the following subjects are mentioned by the author as typical of WAOAW portraits EXCEPT __________________.
　　A. powerful American landowners
　　B. cowboys
　　C. mountain men
　　D. authentic western artifacts
　　53. An example of typical WAOAW painting would be __________________.
　　A. men attending an Eastern horse race
　　B. a woman participating in a Western horse show
　　C. a view of a portrait painter at work
　　D. collectors at an art auction
　　54. It can be concluded from the passage about WAOOW that ________________.
　　A. men are eligible for membership
　　B. the dues are reasonable
　　C. acceptance for membership is difficult to obtain today
　　D. it sets the standards for Western art
　　55. The word “l(fā)ucrative” in line 1 is closest in meaning to __________________.
　　A. expanding
　　B. promising
　　C. influential
　　D. profitable

　　Text 3
　　It is, everyone agrees, a huge task that the child performs when he learns to speak, and the fact that he does so in so short a period of time challenges explanation.
　　Language learning begins with listening. Individual children vary greatly in the amount of listening they do before they start speaking, and late starters are often long listeners. Most children will “obey” spoken instructions some time before they can speak, though they word obey is hardly accurate as a description of the eager and delighted cooperation usually shown by the child. Before they can speak, many children will ask questions by gesture and by making questioning noises.
　　Any attempt to trace the development from the noises babies make to their first spoken words leads to considerable difficulties. It is agreed that they enjoy making noises, and that during the first few months one or two noises sort themselves out as particularly indicative of delight, distress, sociability, and so on. But since these cannot be said to show the baby’s intention to communicate, they can hardly be regarded as early forms of language. It is agreed, too, that from about three months they play with sounds for enjoyment, and that by six months they are able to add new sounds to their voices. This self imitation leads on to deliberate imitation of sounds made or words spoken to them by other people. The problem then arises as to the point at which one can say that these imitations can be considered as speech.
　　56. By “……challenges explanation”, the author means that _________________.
　　A. no explanation is necessary for such an obvious phenomenon.
　　B. no explanation has been made up to now.
　　C. it’s no easy job to provide an adequate explanation
　　D. it’s high time that an explanation was provided
　　57. The third paragraph is mainly about ___________________.
　　A. the development of babies’ early forms of language
　　B. the difficulties of babies in learning to speak
　　C. babies’ strong desire to communicate
　　D. babies’ intention to communicate
　　58. The author’s purpose in writing the second paragraph is to show that children _________.
　　A. usually obey without asking questions
　　B. are passive in the process of learning to speak
　　C. are born cooperative
　　D. learn to speak by listening
　　59. From the passage we learn that __________________.
　　A. early starters can learn to speak within only six months
　　B. children show a strong desire to communicate by making noises
　　C. imitation plays an important role in learning to speak
　　D. children have various difficulties in learning to speak
　　60. The best title for this passage would be _________________.
　　A. How babies learn to speak
　　B. Early forms of language
　　C. A huge task for children
　　D. Noise making and language learning

　　Part B
　　Directions
　　Read the following text from a discussion in which five business leaders talked about their predictions on high-tech developments in the 21st century. For questions 61 to 65, match each person (61 to 65 ) to one of the statements ( A to G) given below. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
　　Maguel de Icaza:
　　Free software benefits people, countries and companies by giving them complete controls of the software on which they depend. This is helping close the digital divide between developed countries. People who previously might never have had access to this sort for technology are already leading the efforts to bring it to the developing world. Free software is the foundation on which a fairer future and a more efficient economy is being built.
　　Austin Hill:
　　Welcome to the future. Your mobile phone tracks your location, your interactive TV records your viewing habits. Privacy is to the information age what environmentalism was to the industrial age. Businesses will protect themselves, and their customers, by introducing privacy-promoting technologies and building better data controls into every aspect of their operation. A leading class of privacy protectors will emerge in every industry, and both they and their customers will reap the rewards of the ethical privacy brand.
　　Ng Ede Phang:
　　This will be the year that plain old text email sits up and starts talking-------and talking a lot.
　　The human voice is a powerful weapon. An email doesn’t tell me whether you’re happy, sad or excited, whereas Internet voice services provide all these key emotional characteristics. The human voice adds a very powerful element to business relationships that email just cannot match.
　　Murray Goldman:
　　For those of us who live on airplanes, a key decision is which electronic devices to carry on a trip. The future is in the appropriate combination of communications and computing devices. Many business travelers will require the full computing power of a personal computer, with a screen large enough to do intensive work. As a result, lightweight notebooks have been introduced to the market with innovative options such as built-in DVDs, cameras and wireless capabilities.
　　Christine Karman:
　　We’ll see against on portals and community websites helping people trade goods and information. Venture capitalists are shifting from dotcoms to software and hardware companies. In Europe, that shift is hard to make because we don’t have a Silicon Valley from which lots of companies are conquering the world. As a consequence, the slowly emerging Internet and software industry in Europe may not survive. If I were starting a new software company now, I’d go to California or Boston.
　　Statements