新东方雅思全真模拟试题第一套 阅读

READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

THE CARE ECONOMY

– international migration of women from developing countries

A Every day, women from underdeveloped countries like India, Mexico and the Philippines pack their bags and leave their homes, families and communities in order to take up new positions as care workers in wealthier parts of the world. Whether these women find work in nurseries, day-care centres, homes or hospitals, looking after children, the elderly, the ill or disabled, they all have one thing in common – they are part of what many researchers now call the “care economy”.

B The care economy is not a new phenomenon but it has burgeoned on a global scale in the last twenty years. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of international migrants increased by 14 percent with a growing proportion of these women now travelling independently for their own employment and not as dependants of their husbands. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has called this growth in women's trans-national labour migration “one of the most striking economic and social phenomena of recent times”.

C This development can be seen as a result of two factors. The first is a multitude of demographic changes in wealthier countries since World War II. Middle-class women have entered the labour force en masse and workers have been logging more and more hours at the office every week. In addition, people in these countries are now living

longer and reproducing at a slower rate, meaning populations across the developed world are steadily aging. All of these changes have resulted in a larger demand for care services at a time when the working population is too besieged with other commitments to provide this care on a voluntary basis.

D In developing countries, the story is very different. Many societies have youthful populations in the prime of their working lives, but suffer from low wages and high unemployment, and women are often the last in line to get work. Even when good jobs are available, they often cannot compete with the salaries offered in developed countries. Afully trained and qualified nurse may earn less working at a hospital in the Philippines, for example, than she would as a domestic carer for a family in Los Angeles.

E It is easy to see why the care economy has developed at such a pace – it provides job opportunities for large numbers of unemployed women in developing countries, and affordable care for stressed, busy families in the developed world. But does everybody benefit from the globalisation of care?

F For women in developed countries, more are now free to pursue higher education and better careers, having found that passing care responsibilities on to a third party allows them to dedicate as much of their time and energy to their careers as men do, and in many cases break through the “glass ceiling” that held them back in the workplace.

G For the migrant workers and their families, there are also many benefits. Care workers can enjoy new levels of independence and earn better incomes than they could at home. Money sent home from abroad can account for 10-20 percent of some poorer countries' GDPs, and many studies demonstrate how migrant workers' payments have alleviated poverty. In Morocco, for example, it is estimated that 1.2 million people have been lifted out of poverty because of these payments, and much of this money is coming from the care economy.

H But there are many downsides to this process. Migrant domestic workers can experience guilt, isolation, and anxiety, and the long periods away from home can hurt the emotional welfare of their families. In the Philippines, one study found that children left behind when their mothers emigrate tend to have more behavioural problems,

and perform lower in class ranks and grades than their peers. Emigration can also drain developing countries' workforces of skilled labour and encourage young people to focus less on education and their local livelihoods in the hopes of finding better jobs abroad.

I The gain in care that developed countries experience often comes at a price that is not immediately visible when we look only at the affluent suburbs of cities like Hong Kong, London or New York where these women are employed. This price is the loss of social support that families and communities in the developing countries experience when women migrate in order to provide more support financially.Questions 1–5

Reading Passage 1 has nine paragraphs, A–I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–I, in boxes 1–5 on your answer sheet.

1evidence of how migrant care workers can improve living standards in their home countries

2an explanation of how living standards in developing countries encourage women to emigrate

3negative effects of migration on the lives of care workers and their families 4an explanation of how social changes in developed countries have created a need for immigrant care labour

5examples of wealthy environments where migrant women find work

Questions 6–11

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 6–11 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

6Many migratory women are being employed as carers in other countries.

7The majority of international labour migrants are women.

8In developed countries, people are having more children.

9There are often not enough jobs for women in underdeveloped countries.

10Only women without qualifications benefit from emigration.

11Hiring domestic carers has improved employment opportunities for many women in developed countries.Questions 12–13

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 12–13 on your answer sheet.

12In Morocco, payments from migrant workers have

A raised the living standards of 1.2 million poor people.

B lowered the living standards of 1.2 million poor people.

C raised the living standards of 1.2 million wealthy people.

D lowered the living standards of 1.2 million wealthy people.

13The children of women working abroad are more likely to

A feel lonely and worried.

B do badly at school.

C be hurt by their families.

D want to work locally.READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

BLOGGING

A phenomenon of the 21st century

A When, sometime in April 1999, computer programmer Peter Merholz posted a small note on his homepage: “I've decided to pronounce the word weblog as wee’blog. Or blog for short”, he had little idea about the phenomenon that was being set in motion. “I didn't think much of it”, he wrote in his own blog in 2002, “I was just being silly, shifting the syllabic break one letter to the left ... I enjoyed its crudeness, its dissonance.”

B Merholz did not actually invent the “blog”, only the epithet for this style of internet journaling that has quickly spread across the web-connected world. It is believed that the original web blog – still maintained to this day – was started by American university student, Justin Hall, in 1994. From there, blogging got off to a slow start; in early 1999, blogs still numbered only in their dozens – but later that year free blog-creation services such as Blogger and Edit This Page were introduced, and within a couple years the number of blogs had hit the tens of millions.

C A blog is little more than a webpage featuring chronological entries by one or more people, and usually linking to other sources of information or commentary in the process. Brigitte Eaton, who compiled a popular blog portal before they went mainstream, evaluated submissions by one simple criterion: “that the site consist of dated entries”.

D This simple medium has opened itself up to many diverse possibilities in practice, limited only by the human imagination. Firstly, many blogs are diaries in the personal sense – chronicles of feelings, events and changes in the author's life. These are often intended to be seen only by a close circle of friends, but sometimes personal bloggers build larger support networks by connecting with other bloggers in comparable situations. Bloggers who discuss the challenges of raising a disabled child, for example, may link to and visit each other’s pages for ideas, friendship and encouragement on a daily basis.

E Beyond that, there are blogs on almost every conceivable subject. Some of them canvas the usual dinner-table conversation fodder – politics, sports, celebrities, business

and travel, for example. Several of these blogs pull readership numbers in the millions every month, and some of their authors have become household names. Meanwhile, other blogs target those with very niche interests. Blogs on suit tailoring, etymology, knitting, home-schooling and silent Hollywood movies have found smaller but no less devoted audiences in the internet “blogosphere”.

F Writing a blog that captivates public interest is no easy task, however. It requires time, dedication, a unique perspective and imagination, and a knack for snappy, friendly prose that makes the reader feel engaged in a dialogue with the author. For every blog that succeeds at this, thousands do not. Derek Gordon, the vice president of Technorati, a search engine that has over 109 million blogs in its listings, found over 99 percent of blogs have only one reader – the blogger him- or herself. “The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near total obscurity”, he notes.

G For those who do make it, the opportunity exists to exert a real influence on public opinion, and sometimes even shape the agendas of mainstream news organisations. Under the pseudonym, Salam Pax, a 29-year-old architectural student published reports on life in Baghdad during the Iraq War and, in doing so, became one of the few sources of information to the West that was not filtered through a journalistic lens. In American politics, a scandal that cost Senator Trent Lott his career unfurled when bloggers latched onto and publicised minor news items about comments the senator had made during a recent speech. When the story re-entered the national media as a result of this attention, it was on the front page of major newspapers and the headlines of television news networks.

H Considering its simple basis, what is it about blogging that has turned it into a global phenomenon? The vital aspect that sets it apart from other media such as newspapers, radio, and television is its interactivity. Almost always, readers can debate with the blogger and other readers in a “comment” section under each entry, and the subject can be discussed freely for the most part. Even when bloggers do choose to censor offensive material and “trolls” (commenters who make controversial remarks intentionally designed to ignite long, fiery disputes), this is usually much less interfering than the type of editorial selectivity that goes into choosing letters to the editor in a newspaper, or screening calls on talk-back radio. Blogging turns its audience into participants, and they are no longer merely receiving a news medium, but playing an important role in creating and directing it.Questions 14–18

Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A–H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–H, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet.

14 a reference to people using blogs to share similar concerns

15 a definition of a blog

16 a summary of how the popularity of blogging grew

17examples of bloggers’ broader effects in society

18examples of less common blogging topics

Questions 19–24

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 19–23 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

19The term ‘blog’ was invented in 2002.

20Peter Merholz created the first blog.

21The distinguishing feature of a blog is its time-ordered postings

22Bloggers often meet in person.

23Some people have become very well-known as a result of their blogs.

24Salam Pax was a journalist in Iraq

Questions 25–26

Answer the questions below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

25What makes blogs different from traditional media?

26What do you call people who deliberately try to start arguments online?READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIPS

Who should get them?

Research findings continually demonstrate the benefits that accrue to university graduates compared to their compatriots who venture into the working world with only a high school qualification to their name. According to US Census Bureau statistics in 2003, workers with Bachelor's degrees earned nearly $23,300 a year more than high school graduates, making tertiary education a solid financial investment.

And yet it can also be expensive, with costs for a four-year degree programme reaching up to $100,000 depending on the school. In the US alone, over $168 billion in financial aid is made available to students to help them offset these costs. But how exactly these scholarships should be allocated is a major topic of debate. Should they be based on academic merit? Should they be race-based? Or class-based, that is, dependent on socioeconomic status?

Race-based affirmative action works on one simple principle – to treat unequals as equals is to perpetuate inequality. Scott Plous, author of Ten Myths about Affirmative Action, does not believe this programme is a form of fighting discrimination with more of the same (often called ‘reverse discrimination’). Discrimination, he argues, is based on kneejerk, unfounded prejudices and hatreds, while affirmative action is a response to social disparity that can be measured and observed through the use of peer-respected research methods. Affirmative action is, therefore, not an end, but the means to an end, a regrettable but necessary step towards smoothing out historical injustices in some societies.

Julian Bond, professor of history at the University of Virginia, points to the recent news “that black graduates of prestigious colleges and universities feel they must ‘whiten’ their résumés to hide their blackness” as a sign of how affirmative action has not gone far enough. “Bring on socioeconomic status”, he argues. “[But] while you're at it, bring back race-based policies – you cannot get beyond race without going to race”.

Some researchers feel that financial need is a fairer mechanism for distributing scholarship funding and insist that racial inequalities in education stem mostly from the fact that many ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented among the poor.Unfortunately, they argue, the benefits of race-based funding accrue to the wealthier members of these ethnic minorities at the expense of poor people from all races. Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of English at the University of Illinois notes that most successes from race-based affirmative action amount to little more than “fine tuning … enrolling more black students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Some people believe that ethnic minorities will receive the benefits of socioeconomic-based affirmative action anyway, without having to endure the social and political tensions that race-based policies can open up. However, other findings dispel the notion. In a review of affirmative action research, Mark C. Long found that alternative strategies pursued in U.S. states where race-based programmes were banned have been “ineffective in restoring minority enrolment in these states' flagship institutions”. His research also found that race-based affirmative action helped improve graduation rates and wages for racial minorities and that those beneficiaries became more involved in community services than their peers, producing an array of other social benefits.

Statistics, however, tend to corroborate the notion that it is the lower class, not ethnic groups, that are losing out from current policies. A 2004 study found that at the most selective 146 educational institutions in the USA, 74 percent of students come from the richest socioeconomic quarter of the population, and just 3 percent from the bottom quarter, a roughly 25:1 ratio.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity argues that “I would much prefer that preferences be based on socioeconomic status rather than race. The educational benefits that supposedly flow from a diverse student body are rooted in differences in perspectives and experiences—not in skin colour per se. Weighing socioeconomic status would provide such diversity to a similar degree as race, and without the ugliness, divisiveness, and myriad other costs of racial discrimination.”

Finally, there are those who argue that using both race and class as selection criteria results in messy, unfair and discriminatory funding practices and that the only way to fairly allocate scholarships is by one criterion: academic merit. According to George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, socioeconomic affirmative action is not the way forward from race-based selection. “Class-based affirmative action merely shuffles a small number of students from poorer families up into more-prestigious colleges, where they receive an education that isn't necessarily any better than they'd have received elsewhere. It also shuffles an equal number of studentsdown into ‘fall back’ schools just because those students aren't poor. This game of musical chairs accomplishes nothing.” The only fair way to manage this situation, he concludes, is to have the best schools enrolling the best students.

Though this argument is sound in theory, however, it is problematic in that it treats applicants as equals when they are not. Poor students often do not have university-educated parents to encourage them and help them with schoolwork from a young age, and they do not have the same access to expensive private tutoring that children from wealthier families do. Most importantly, their parents often cannot afford to pay for college tuition and living costs, meaning these students take on outside paid work and consequently drop out at a much higher rate than their peers. With the odds stacked against them, financial need-based scholarship funding can help reduce these inequalities. Merit-based funding often perpetuates them.Questions 27–32

Look at the following names (Questions 27–32) and the list of viewpoints below. Match each name with the correct viewpoint.

Write the correct letter, A–D, in boxes 27–32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

27George Leef

28Julian Bond

29Mark C. Long

30Roger Clegg

31Scott Plous

32Walter Benn Michaels

of

Viewpoints

List

A scholarships should be race-based

B scholarships should be class-based

C scholarships should be race-based and class-based

D scholarships should be merit-based

Questions 33–39

Complete the summary using the list of words, A–L, below.

Write the correct letter, A–L, in boxes 33–39 on your answer sheet.

Studies show that university graduates earn more than high school graduates. Although there is statistical evidence to justify the expense, 33 …………………. can be extremely costly. Financial assistance is offered in the form of scholarships to help some students pay their

34 …………………... . However, the basis on which these scholarships are awarded is the subject of 35 …………..……….. . One point of view is that high academic achievers should receive them. Another view is that the 36 …………….…….. should be given to candidates from certain 37 …………………... , while others say that these scholarships should go to the poor people in society. Affirmative action on the basis of ethnicity is an attempt to redress

38 ………..……….. and to rectify past wrongs. Even though it may seem to be an unequal or unfair way of doing it, it should not be regarded as a form of discrimination. Affirmative action is seen as an appropriate way to help the 39 ……….………….. in society because the results are measurable and can be documented using valued methods.

A academic merit

B affirmative action

C disadvantaged people

D ethnic groups

E financial investment

F grants

G much discussion H social inequality I socioeconomic argument

J tertiary education K tuition fees L working peopleQuestion 40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answer in box 40 on your answer sheet.

Which of the following statements best summarises the writer’s general conclusion?

A Scholarship allocation based on merit can help resolve social inequalities.

B Poor students do not need financial aid to do well at university.

C Merit-based funding wrongly assumes applicants have a similar background.

D Socioeconomic-based programmes are unfair but better for society.