2018年可锐考研英语阅读专项练习

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2018

年可锐考研英语阅读专项练习（二）

Thanks to slumping markets, investment banks are shedding many of their highly-paid traders.

When markets recover, the banks might be tempted to replace them with rather cheaper talent.

One

alternative

has

been

around

for

a

while

but

has

yet

to

catch

on:

autonomous

trading

agents-computers

programmed

to

act

like

the

human

version

without

such

pesky

costs

as

holidays,

lunch

breaks

or

bonuses.

Program

trading

has,

of

course,

been

done

before;

some

blamed the 1987 stockmarket crash on computers instructed with simple decision-making rules.

But robots can be smarter than that.

Dave

Cliff,

a

researcher

at

Hewlett-Packard

Laboratories

in

Bristol,

England,

has

been

creating trading robots for seven years. In computer simulations he lets them evolve genetically ,

and so allows them to adapt and fit models of real-world financial markets. His experiments have

suggested that a redesign of some markets could lead to greater efficiency. Last year, a research

group at IBM showed that Mr Cliff

’

s artificial traders could consistently beat the human variety,

in various kinds of market. Nearly all take the shape of an auction. One well-known type is the

English auction, familiar to patrons of the salesrooms of Christie

’

s and Sotheby

’

s, where sellers

keep mum on their offer price, and buyers increase their bids by stages until only one remains.

At

the

other

extreme

is

the

Dutch

auction,

familiar

to

17th- century

tulip-traders

in

the

Netherlands as well as to bidders for American Treasury bonds. Here, buyers remain silent, and a

seller

reduces

his

price

until

it

is

accepted.

Most

markets

for

shares,

commodities,

foreign

exchange and derivatives are a hybrid of these two types: buyers and sellers can announce their

bid

or

offer

prices

at

any

time,

and

deals

are

constantly

being

closed,

a

so-called

continuous

double auction .

Mr

Cliff

’

s

novel

idea

was

to

apply

his

evolutionary

computer

programs

to

marketplaces

themselves. Why not, he thought, try and see what types of auction would let traders converge

most quickly towards an equilibrium price? The results were surprising. In his models, auctions

that let buyers and sellers bid at any time like most of today

’

s financial exchanges were less

efficient than ones that required relatively more bids from either buyers or sellers. These evolved

auctions

also

withstood

big

market

shocks,

such

as

crashes

and

panics,

better

than

today

’

s

real-world versions. Mr Cliff

’

s most recent results, which will be presented in Sydney, Australia,

on December 10th, show that the best type of auction for any market depends crucially on even

slight differences in the number of buyers and sellers.

Bank of America has been investigating these new auctions, along with robotic traders, for

possible

use

in

electronic

exchanges.

The

hope

is

that

today

’

s

financial

auctions

and

online

marketplaces might work better by becoming more like their English and Dutch forebears. But

what to call such multi- ethnic hybrids? Here

’

s introducing the Cliffhanger .

1. The passage is mainly__________.

可锐教育官网

?

A. a review of two kinds of auctions

B. an introduction of trading robots

C. a survey of the trading market

D. about trading alternatives

2. Which of the following is true according to the text?

A. David

’

s robot traders have now been used in real-world markets.

B. Robot traders can evolve like creatures.

C. There is room for improvement in efficiency in trading markets.

D. The English auction is the most popular trading form.

3. If you were trading American Treasury bonds, you would most likely take the trading form

of

___________.

A. the English auction

B. the continuous double auction

C. the Dutch auction

D. the evolved auction

4. We can infer from the text that______________.

A. existing auctions can not withstand market shocks

B. the Dutch auction is better than the continuous double auction

C. it

’

s hard for traders to reach an equilibrium price

D. the best type of auction takes place when the number of the buyers is equal to that of

sellers

5. Toward robot traders, the writer

’

s attitude can be said to be__________.

A. biased