851英語寫作2008年試題

1、浙江師范大學(xué)2008年碩士研究生入學(xué)考試試題科目代碼： 851 科目名稱： 英語寫作 提示：1、 本科目適用專業(yè)： 050201英語語言文學(xué)、050211外國(guó)語言學(xué)及應(yīng)用語言學(xué) ；2、 請(qǐng)將所有答案寫于答題紙上，寫在試題上的不給分；3、 請(qǐng)?zhí)顚憸?zhǔn)考證號(hào)后6位：_。I. Summary writing (40%)Read the following passage and write a summary of it in around 100 words.Despite all the current fuss and bother about the extraordinary number

2、of ordinary illiterates who overpopulate our schools, small attention has been given to another kind of illiterate, an illiterate whose plight is, in many ways, more important, because he is more influential. This illiterate may, as often as not, be a university president, but he is typically a Ph.D

3、., a successful professor and textbook author. The person to whom I refer is the straight-A illiterate, and the following is written in an attempt to give him equal time with his widely publicized counterpart.The scene is my office, and I am at work, doing what must be done if one is to assist in th

4、e cure of a disease that, over the years, I have come to call straight-A illiteracy. I am interrogating, I am cross-examining, I am prying and probing for the meaning of a students paper. The student is a college senior with a straight-A average, an extremely bright, highly articulate student who ha

5、s just been awarded a coveted fellowship to one of the nations outstanding graduate schools. He and I have been at this, have been going over his paper sentence by sentence, word by word, for an hour. “The choice of exogenous variables in relation to multi-colinearity,” I hear myself reading from hi

6、s paper, “is contingent upon the derivations of certain multiple correlation coefficients.” I pause to catch my breath. “Now that statement,” I address the student - whom I shall call, allegorically, Mr. Bright - “that statement, Mr. Bright, what on earth does it mean?” Mr. Bright, his brow furrowed

7、, tries mightily. Finally, with both of us combining our linguistic and imaginative resources, finally, after what seems another hour, we decode it. We decide exactly what it is that Mr. Bright is trying to say, what he really wants to say, which is: “Supply determines demand.”O(jiān)ver the past decade o

8、r so, I have known many students like him, many college seniors suffering from Brights disease. It attacks the best minds, and gradually destroys the critical faculties, making it impossible for the sufferer to detect gibberish in his own writing or in that of others. During the years of higher educ

9、ation it grows worse, reaching its terminal stage, typically, when its victim receives his Ph.D. Obviously, the victim of Brights disease is no ordinary illiterate. He would never turn in a paper with misspellings or errors in punctuation; he would never use a double negative or the word “irregardle

10、ss.” Nevertheless, he is illiterate, in the worst way: he is incapable of saying, in writing, simply and clearly, what he means. The ordinary illiterate - perhaps providentially protected from college and graduate school - might say: “Them people down at the shop better stock up on what our customer

11、s need, or we aint gonna be in business long.” Not our man. Taking his cue from years of higher education, years of reading the textbooks and professional journals that are the major sources of his affliction, he writes: “The focus of concentration must rest upon objectives centered around the knowl

12、edge of customer areas so that a sophisticated awareness of those areas can serve as an entrepreneurial filter to screen what is relevant from what is irrelevant to future commitments.” For writing such gibberish he is awarded straight As on his papers (both samples quoted above were taken from pape

13、rs that received As), and the opportunity to move, inexorably, toward his fellowship and eventual Ph.D.As I have suggested, the major cause of such illiteracy is the stuff - the textbooks and professional journals - the straight-A illiterate is forced to read during his years of higher education. He

14、 learns to write gibberish by reading it, and by being taught to admire it as profundity. If he is majoring in sociology, he must grapple with such journals as the American Sociological Review, journals bulging with barbarous jargon, such as “ego-integrative action orientation” and “orientation towa

15、rd improvement of the gratificational-deprivation balance of the actor” (the latter of which monstrous phrases represents, to quote Malcolm Cowley, the sociologists way of saying “the pleasure principle”). In such journals, Mr. Cowley reminds us, two things are never described as being “alike.” They

16、 are “homologous” or “isomorphic.” Nor are things simply “different.” They are “allotropic.” In such journals writers never “divide anything.” They “dichotomize” or “bifurcate” thins.II. Exposition writing (50%): Just imagine that you are going to attend an employee recruitment fair where you are ex

17、pected to deliver a job-application speech in front of the staff. Write a speech in around 300 words covering the following aspects: the reason why you want a specified job, your advantages for the post or possible benefits to the employer with your joining and your demand for the consideration of y

18、our application on the part of the employer.Marks will be awarded on the basis of your organization, diction, grammar and appropriateness.III. Argumentation writing (60%):Graduation theses are a prerequisite for a bachelors degree. However, thesis writing among university undergraduates does not see

19、m satisfactory: few original and high-quality theses are turned out by our students and most of their theses are commonplace enough to be rated valueless and some are even guilty of plagiarism. Therefore, some teachers argue that students can be given different tasks to test what they have learnt in

20、 four years time. Instead of requiring every student to write a graduation thesis prior to graduation, we can assign thesis-writing to the capable students and, as to the less capable ones, we can make them take graduation examinations rather than writing theses. In this way, the teachers can be relieved of the heavy burden of paper guidance and the less capable students can be relieved of the frustration as a result of wr