英语阅读(二) |
2006-2-17 21:23:30 点击数： 进入论坛 |
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D. plants are becoming less and less important to human beings
VI. Directions:
Passage 5 is taken from the TEXTBOOK. Read the passage carefully and choose the correct answer by blackening the letter of the answer on your ANSWER SHEET.(10 points,1 point for each)
Passage 5
1 Since the Republicans trounced the Democrats last November, I have been asked countless times, "Why didn't President Clinton get credit for the good economy?"
2 When I thought about it, I realized that everyone asking the question was under 30 ---too young to know what a truly good economy looked like. You have to have lived in the 1950s and 1960s to have experienced a good economy.
3 By g good economy I mean one that is not only expanding but also employing the nation's human and physical resources ata high degree of efficiency. In these terms the U.S. economy gas been contracting since the late'60s and is now nowhere near the levels reached earlier.
4 In the period between 1950 and 1970 it was the rule ---rather than the exception ---that an ordinary family, without higher education, could sustain itself decently on the income of a single breadwinner. In 1955, when I was 19 and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., my father, who had a sixth-grade education, maintained our family of five on a wage of $82 a week as a bookbinder. My mother taught us fairness and compassion; my father, discipline and enterprise.
5 With my younger brother and sister, we lived in a small apartment in a relatively new building. The monthly rent in 1954 was under $90, gas and electricity another $7 to $10. We had a 1949 Plymouth sedan that my father bought new for $1,200.
6 My first good suit, bought for my 1954 high-school graduation, was $30. In the summer of 1950, I worked as an office boy on wall Street for 75 cents an hour, the minimum wage. In the summers from 1951 to 1953, I labored in the bindery for $1 an hour, with time and a half for overtime.
7 College fees in 1955 at U. C. L. A. were $200 a semester for an out-of-stater like me, only $50 for a Californian. Tuition at a private school like U.S.C was reckoned at $20 per credit. Still, you could work your way through without help from parents or the government.
8 I worked summers as a common construction laborer in New York city for $85 a week, $83 after deductions for income tax and Social Security. A skilled union carpenter or electrician made $125 per week in New York City, $120 after payroll deductions. The scale was lower elsewhere in the country, but so were consumer prices.
9 Working as a newspaperman in 1963 in Las Vegas, Nev, four years out of college, I earned $125 per week. I saved $2,000 and bought an upscale, brand-new three-bedroom home, with a two-car garage, on a quarter-acre a half-mile from the center of town. It cost $20,000. The monthly payment was $120, including principal and interest, taxes and insurance. I bought a new Volkswagen Beetle for $1,600.
10 The U.S. economy in those years was good. But still, John F. Kennedy had won the Presidency in 1960 with the promise of "getting the country moving again" after the "sluggish" Eisenhower White House years, in which living standards were thought to be rising too slowly. The economy boomed in the wake of the Kennedy tax cuts, which brought the top marginal income-tax rate down from 91 percent to 70 percent. |
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| 2007年4月大考时间 |
| 2007年4月21日-4月22日 |
| 2007年7月加考时间 |
| 2007年7月7日-7月8日 |
| 2007年10月大考时间 |
| 2007年10月27日-10月28日 |
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