2001年9月英语高级口译考试笔试真题+音频+答案
Directions: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.
Questions 1-3 //tr.hjenglish.com/
When Joe Marchese arrived at the Westtown School, a private Quaker day and boarding school in a suburb of Philadelphia, he found a one-strike policy in effect toward
drug and alcohol offenses: a kid caught with illegal substances was expelled. The effect, says Marchese, who runs the 385-student upper school, was to often drive the offenders underground. “Students would want to get help for themselves or their friends, but feared the possibility they’d be thrown out of school,” he says. That was nine years ago. Soon afterward Westtown, with advice from the drug-prevention nonprofit FCD Educational Services, moved toward a “two track” system of discipline and treatment. There's a mandatory two-week suspension for anyone caught with drugs on campus, but instead of just going home to watch game shows and smoke pot, the student receives counseling and support. When he returns to school, a support plan is in place that includes random drug testing and counseling. It's good to know that people have a second chance, says senior Nneka Nwosu, a student representative on the school’s discipline council. “It's: 'I made a mistake, but I'm not a bad kid. I get to come back and prove that I'm still a good kid.'”
Westtown is one of a relative handful of schools that have begun to rethink their “zero tolerance” policies toward substance abuse. The policies, which began coming into fashion around 1990, have sustained ridicule over the absurd outcomes they occasionally lead to, such as the suspension of a West Virginia seventh grader for sharing cough drops with a classmate. No one keeps statistics on how many schools have zero-tolerance polices, and there’s no uniform definition; and automatic expulsion for a first drug offense, which is what many people probably assume it means, appears to be fairly rare anyway. But even suspension is now being questioned, on the grounds of both fairness and efficacy. A policy meant to protect the school may not be in the best interests of the larger society, or the offender himself.“If a child leaves school, where does he go?”, “He goes somewhere and becomes someone else’s problem.” Even some teachers are beginning to feel uncomfortable with the one-strike policies, says kyle Pruett, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Yale University, who consults with many schools. “They begin to feel their hands are tied. It cuts out the ability to judge each circumstance on its own merits.”
The argument in favor of a tough, uniform code of drug penalties hasn't changed: it sends a strong, unambiguous message to students. That’s been the experience at Benedictine High School in Richmond, Va., a Roman Catholic military academy, which started random drug testing for all students (and faculty and staff) last year. Nick Cornwell, a junior, says he supports the policy because it makes it easier for students to turn down drugs, since they can plausibly claim to be a afraid of being caught. But even here, a student who flunks a drug test once is offered counseling and a second chance; expulsion is mandatory only after a second offense. Like many schools, Benedictine is drawing a distinction between the troubled kid, the drug abuser who may progress to dealing and a kid who may experiment once with a joint but isn’t going to let it ruin his life. “Most kids are going to experiment at some level,” says Harvard University child psychiatrist Timothy Wilens. “If experimentation is the norm, where do you draw the line? Who will be left?”
1. What is substance abuse? What is zero-tolerance policy?
2. Introduce briefly the two-track” system and its significance.
3. What can be learnt from the experience at Benedictine High School?
Questions 4-6 //tr.hjenglish.com/
When it comes to angering jurors, Exxon Mobil has few peers. In 1994 a panel of 11 Alaskans decided the company should pay ＄5 billion in punitive damages for the Exxon Valdez oil spill-the second-largest award in history. On Dec. 19, a jury in Alabama socked the company with ＄3.4 billion in punitives for cheating the state out of oil royalties-the third beggest verdict ever.
To Exxon, these decisions are symptoms of a sick legal system. Convinced the Valdez jury unfairly punished the company for its size, executives have exercised every possible appeal to get it overturned-even though that strategy has made them appear unrepentant. After the Alabama decision, the company once again came out fighting. Denouncing the jury’s decision as “meritless,” Exxon pledged to “take all legal steps to challenge the verdict.” Enough muscle? The company's outrage is, to a certain extent, understandable. Politicians, pundits, public interest groups, and plaintiffs' lawyers love to demonize Exxon. And the Alabama verdict is way out of proportion to Exxon's alleged misbehavior, given that jury only found the company had cheated the state out of ＄87.7 million. Ultimately, the punitive damages will probably get reduced.
So why was it awarded in the first place? Jurors were inflamed by internal corporate documents that indicated Exxon was aware it was cheating the state but thought it had enough muscle to get away with it. “They knew what they were doing wasn't right, but they did it anyway,” says jury foreman Shae Filingim.
The Alabama case raises a serious question: Does the world's biggest and richest company think it's above the law? That’s certainly the view of many attorneys who run into Exxon’s scorced-earth litigation tactics. They “don't have much respect for the civil justice sysem. They fight over everything. They don't concede the obvious,” says Eugene E. Stearns, a Miami commercial litigator who in February won a ＄1 billion judgment against the company on behalf of gas station dealers who claimed they had been overcharged.
The Alabama lawsuit revolved around a series of natural gas wells that Exxon drilled in state-owned waters. After signing several leases in 1979 obligating Exxon to share revenues with Alabama, the company decided it didn’t like the terms of the agreements. Among other things, Exxon wanted to deduct several different types of processing costs before paying the state any royalties.
Problem was, the lease clearly barred these deductions. In a 1993 memo, in-house attorney C. Charles Broome analyzed whether the company had any grounds take the deductions. He noted that Shell Oil, which had signed a similar lease interpreted it “in the same manner as the state.” He then laid out two arguments the company might use to claim the deductions. The odds of the first approach succeeding? “Less that 50%,” wrote Broome. As for the second argument, he said “I believe it has little chance of being upheld.” //tr.hjenglish.com/
Under these circumstances, most companies probably would have simply paid up. Not Exxon. Broome proceeded to subject the issue of whether the company should obey the law to cool cost-benefit analysis. “if we adopt anything beyond a 'safe'approach, we should anticipate a quick audit and subsequent litigation,” he wrote. “Our exposure is 12% interest on underpayments calculated from the due date, and the costs of litigation.”
Exxon claims its interpretation of the lease is valid and is appealing the decision. “Alabama is notorious for excessive punitive damages, and unfortunately we are the latest in the saga,” says Kenneth P. Cohen, vice-president for public affairs. So the company is once again bashing the American legal system. But the oil giant seems to be missing the broader point: that it's own arrogance may be as much to blame for the big verdicts as irrational jurors.
4. What is Exxon Mobil? Why does the author say it has “few peers”,“when it comes to angering jurors”?
5. Why were the jurors “inflamed” when they found Exxon’s internal corporate documents (Para. 3)?
6. Give a brief summary of Exxon's response to thejury’s decisions.
Questions 7-10 //tr.hjenglish.com/
In the old days, it was all done with cakes. For marcel Proust, it was a visit to Mother’s for tea and madeleines that provided the access to “the vast structure of recollection” that was to become his masterpiece on memory and nostalgia, “Remembrance of Things Past.” These days, it's not necessary to evoke the past: you can't move without tripping over it.
In an age zooming forward technologically, why all the backward glances? The Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of nostalgia reads: “acute longing for familiar surroundings; sever homesickness.” With the speed of computers doubling every 18 months, and the net doubling in size in about half that, no wonder we’re aching for familiar surroundings. Since the cornerstone of the Information Age is change, anything enduring becomes precious. “People are looking for something authentic,” says McLaren. Trouble is, nostalgia has succumbed to trends in marketing, demographics and technology. “Nostalgia ain't what it used to be,” says Michal J. Wolf, senior partner at Booz-Allen Hamilton in New York. “These are the new good old days.”
Baby boomers form the core of the nostalgia market. The boomers, defined by American demographers as those born between 1946 and 1964, are living long and prosperous lives. In both Europe and America, they remain the holy grail for admen, and their past has become everyone's present. In a study on “entertainment imprinting,” two American marketing professors, Robert Schindler and Morris Holbrook, asked people ranging in age from 16 to 86 which popular music from the past they liked best. People’s favorite songs, they found, teded to be those that were popular when they were about 24, with their affection for pop songs diminishing on either side for pop songs diminishing on either side of that age. Doubtless Microsoft knows about entertainment imprinting, or at least nostalgia. The company hawks its latest Explorer to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” ,just as it launched Windows 98 to the tune of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Sones. Boomers remember both tunes form their 20s.
If boomers are one market that values memories, exiles are another. According to the International organization of Migration, more than 150 million people live today in a country other than one where they were born-double the number that did so in 1965. this mass movement has sources as dire as tyranny and as luxurious as the freedoms of an EU passport. But exiles and refugees share one thing: homes left behind. Type in “nostalgia” on the search engine Google, and one of the first sites that pop up is the nostalgia page of The Iranian, an onlince sit for Iran's exiles, most of whom fled after 1978's Islamic revolution. Perhaps the savvies of client’s rediscovering long-lost books on it. One John Mason Mings writes of the glories of finding a book with information on “Kickapoo Joy Juice,” a dreaded medicine of his youth. A Pennsylvanian waxes over alibris's recovery of his first—grade primer “Down Cherry Street”. The Net doesn't merely facilitate nostalgia-it promotes it. Web-based auction houses have helped jump-start markets for vintage items, form marbles to Apple Macintoshes. //tr.hjenglish.com/
Cutting-edge technology, designed to be transient, has even bred its own insta-nostalgia. Last year a ＄666 Apple I went for ＄18,000 to a British collector at a San Francisco a auction. “Historic! Microsoft Multiplan for Macintosh” crows one item on eBay’s vintage Apple secion. Surf to The Net Nostalgia Quiz to puzzle over questions like “In the old days, Altavista used to have which one of these URLs?”
Those who don't remember their history are condemned to repeat it. Or so entertainment moguls hope, as they market'70s TV hits like “Charlie's Angels” and “Scooby Doo,” out next year, to a generation that can't remember them the first time round. If you've missed a Puff Daddy track or a “Sopranos” episode, panic not. The megahits of today are destined to be the golden oldies of 202, syas Christopher Nurko of the branding consultant FutureBrand. “I guarantee you, Madonna's music will be used to sell everything, ” he says. “god help me, I hope it's not selling insurance.” It could be. When we traffic in the past, nothing's sacred.
7. Explain the beginning sentence “In the old days, it was all done with cakes.”
8. Who are the baby boomers? What does the author mean when he says that they become the “core of the nostalgia market” (Para. 3)? //tr.hjenglish.com/
9. What is the other big group which values memories? What do these people share?
10.What's is “nostalgia market?” What do they sell in the nostalgia market?
SECTION 6: LISTENING TEST (30 minutes)
Directions: Translate the following passage into English and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. //tr.hjenglish.com/
中国加入世界贸易组织的谈判已经进行了15 年。中国的立场始终如一。加入世界贸易组织后，中国将有步骤地扩大商品和服务贸易领域的对外开放，为国内外企业创 造公开、统一、平等竞争的条件，建立和健全符合国际经济通行规则、符合中国国情的对外经济贸易体制，为国外企业来华进行经贸合作提供更多、更稳定的市场准入机会。中国加入世界贸易组织，将为中国和亚洲以 世界各国各地区经济的发展注入新的活力，中国人民将从中受益，亚洲和世界各国人也将从中受益。