英语专八真题改错含答案.

2005 The University as Business

A number of colleges and universities have announced steep

tuition increases for next year much steeper than the current,

very low, rate of inflation. They say the increases are needed because

of a loss in value of university endowments heavily investing in common 1 stock. I

am skeptical. A business firm chooses the price that maximizes

its net revenues, irrespective fluctuations in income; and increasingly the 2 outlook

of universities in the United States is indistinguishable from those of 3 business firms.

The rise in tuitions may reflect the fact economic uncertainty 4 increases the demand for

education. The biggest cost of being

in the school is foregoing income from a job (this is primarily a factor in 5 graduate

and professional-school tuition; the poor one's job prospects, 6 the more sense it makes to

reallocate time from the job market to education,

in order to make oneself more marketable.

The ways which universities make themselves attractive to students 7 include soft

majors, student evaluations of teachers, giving students

a governance role, and eliminate required courses. 8 Sky-high tuitions have caused

universities to regard their students as customers. Just as business firms sometimes

collude to shorten the 9 rigors of competition, universities collude to minimize the cost to

them of the athletes whom they recruit in order to stimulate alumni donations, so the best

athletes now often bypass higher education in order to obtain salaries earlier

from professional teams. And until they were stopped by the antitrust authorities, the

Ivy League schools colluded to limit competition for the best students, by agreeing not to

award scholarships on the basis of merit rather than purely

of need-just like business firms agreeing not to give discounts on their best 10

customer.

2006 We use language primarily as a means of communication with

other human beings. Each of us shares with the community in which we

live a store of words and meanings as well as agreeing conventions as 1

to the way in which words should be arranged to convey a particular 2

message: the English speaker has in his disposal vocabulary and a 3

set of grammatical rules which enables him to communicate his 4

thoughts and feelings, in a variety of styles, to the other English 5 speakers. His

vocabulary, in particular, both that which he uses actively

and that which he recognizes, increases in size as he grows

old as a result of education and experience. 6

But, whether the language store is relatively small or large, the system

remains no more, than a psychological reality for tike inpidual, unless

he has a means of expressing it in terms able to be seen by another 7

member of his linguistic community; he bas to give tile system a

concrete transmission form. We tak

e it for granted rice? two most 8

common forms of transmission-by means of sounds produced by our

vocal organs (speech or by visual signs (writing. And these are 9

among most striking of human achievements. 10

2007 From what has been said, it must be clear that no one can

make very positive statements about how language originated.

There is no material in any language today and in the earliest 1 __ _ records of

ancient languages show us language in a new and 2 _ emerging state. It is often said, of

course, that the language 3 _ ______ originated in cries of anger, fear, pain and pleasure,

and the 4 _ necessary evidence is entirely lacking: there are no remote

tribes, no ancient records, providing evidence of

a language with a large proportion of such cries 5 _

than we find in English. It is true that the absence

of such evidence does not disprove the theory, but in6_

other grounds too the theory is not very attractive.

People of all races and languages make rather similar

noises in return to pain or pleasure. The fact that7

such noises are similar on the lips of Frenchmen

and Malaysians whose languages are utterly different,

serves to emphasize on the fundamental difference8

between these noises and language proper. We may

say that the cries of pain or chortles of amusement

are largely reflex actions, instinctive to large extent, 9

whereas language proper does not consist of signs

but of these that have to be learnt and that are10

wholly conventional.

08

The desire to use language as a sign of national identity is a

very natural one, and in result language has played a prominent ____1____

part in national moves. Men have often felt the need to cultivate ____2____

a given language to show that they are distinctive from another ____3____

race whose hegemony they resent. At the time the United States ____4____

split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals that

independence should be linguistically accepted by the use of a ____5____

different language from those of Britain. There was even one ____6____

proposal that Americans should adopt Hebrew. Others favoured

the adoption of Greek, though, as one man put it, things would

certainly be simpler for Americans if they stuck on to English ____7____

and made the British learn Greek. At the end, as everyone ____8____

knows, the two countries adopted the practical and satisfactory

solution of carrying with the same language as before. ____9____

Since nearly two hundred years now, they have shown the world ____10____

that political independence and national identity can be complete

without sacrificing the enormous mutual advantages of a common

language.

09

专八改错原题

Proofreading & Error Correction:

The previous section has shown how quickly a rhyme passes

from one school child to the next and illustrates the further difference

(1___________ between shcool lore and nursery lore. In nursery lore a verse, learnt

in early childhood, is not usually passed on again when the little listener

(2___________ has grown up, and has children of their own, or even grandchildren.

(3____________ The period between learning a nursery rhyme and transmitting

It may be something from twenty to seventy years. With the playground

(4_____________ lore, therefore, a rhyme may be excitedly passed on within the very

hour (5___________

it is learnt; and in the general, it passes between children of

the (6________________

same age, or nearly so, since it is uncommon for the difference in age

between playmates to be more than five years. If therefore, a playground

rhyme can be shown to have been currently for a hundred years, or (7__________

even just for fifty, it follows that it has been retransmitting over

and over; very possibly it has passed along a chain of two or three (8___________

hundred young hearers and tellers, and the wonder is that it remains live

(9_______________ after so much handling, to let alone that it bears resemblance to the

(10____________

2010

年专八真题改错原文

So far as we can tell, all human languages are equally complete and perfect as

instruments of communication: that is, every language appears to be as well equipped as

any other to say the things its speakers want to say. It may or may not be appropriate to

talk about primitive peoples or cultures, but that is another matter. Certainly, not all

groups of people are equally competent in nuclear physics or psychology or the

cultivation of rice or the engraving of Benares brass. But this is not the fault of their

language. The Eskimos can speak about snow with a great deal more precision and

subtlety than we can in English, but this is not because the Eskimo language (one of those

sometimes miscalled ?primitive? is inherently more precise and subtle t han English. This

example does not bring to light a defect in English, a show of unexpected ?primitiveness?.

The position is simply and obviously that the Eskimos and the English live in different

environments. The English language would be just as rich in terms for different kinds of

snow, presumably, if the environments in which English was habitually used made such

distinction important.

Similarly, we have no reason to doubt that the Eskimo language could be as precise

and subtle on the subject of motor manufacture or cricket if these topics formed part of

the Eskimos? life. For obvious historical reasons, Englishmen in the nineteenth cen

tury

could not talk about motorcars with the minute discrimination which is possible today:

cars were not a part of their culture. But they had a host of terms for horse-drawn vehicles

which send us, puzzled, to a historical dictionary when we are reading Scott or Dickens.

How many of us could distinguish between a chaise, a landau, a victoria, a brougham, a

coupe, a gig, a diligence, a whisky, a calash, a tilbury, a carriole, a phaeton, and a

clarence ?

2005

答案解析

:

1. investing

应改为

in vested

。这里说

“

投资于

”

普通股中的捐赠金价值损失惨重

,

既然是投资

,

就是指人去投资

< br>,

即

endowments (that wereheavily invested in.

括号内的部

分是被省略的部分

,

本句形式上是主动

,

实际意义上为被动

,

因此应该把< /p>

investing

改为

investe d,

否则逻辑上和语法上都是说不通的。

2.

在

irrespective< /p>

和

fluctuations

之间加上介 词

of

。

irrespectiveO f

是一固定用法

,

意指

“

不论

,

不管

,

不顾

,”

等

,

如

:irrespective Of the cost

不惜工本

,irrespective of the

consequences

不顾后果

, irrespective of duty status

不论职位高低。此处指公司 不顾收

入的波动变化。

3.

把

those

改为

t hat

。本句的后半部分主要强调的是大学里的

“

看法或观

点

”(outlo ok

< br>与企业公司的看法或观点不一样

,

即着眼点在于对两种不 同团体看法的

对比。既然前面用的是单数形式

,

后面也应用单数形式

,

基本语法规则是前后应一致

,

本句为代词

those

< br>的误用

,

所以应把

those< /p>

改为

that

。

4.

在

fact

和

economic

之间力口上关系代词

that

。这是一个同位语从语

,that

在同

位语从句中是不能省略的

,

否则就很可能出现意思所指不清的麻烦

,

所以此处必须加

上关系代词

that

。

5.

把定冠词

the