Section III Reading Comprehension

Part A

Directions:

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing [A], [B], [C] or [D]. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (40 points)

Text 1

If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems. Your humor must be relevant to the audience and should help to show them that you are one of them or that you understand their situation and are in sympathy with their point of view. Depending on whom you are addressing, the problems will be different. If you are talking to a group of managers, you may refer to the disorganized methods of their secretaries; alternatively if you are addressing secretaries, you may want to comment on their disorganized bosses.

Here is an example, which I heard at a nurses’ convention, of a story which works well because the audience all shared the same view of doctors. A man arrives in heaven and is being shown around by St. Peter. He sees wonderful accommodations, beautiful gardens, sunny weather, and so on. Everyone is very peaceful, polite and friendly until, waiting in a line for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed aside by a man in a white coat, who rushes to the head of the line, grabs his food and stomps over to a table by himself. “Who is that?” the new arrival asked St. Peter. “Oh, that’s God,” came the reply, “but sometimes he thinks he’s a doctor.”

If you are part of the group, which you are addressing, you will be in a position to know the experiences and problems which are common to all of you and it’ll be appropriate for you to make a passing remark about the inedible canteen food or the chairman’s notorious bad taste in ties. With other audiences you mustn’t attempt to cut in with humor as they will resent an outsider making disparaging remarks about their canteen or their chairman. You will be on safer ground if you stick to scapegoats like the Post Office or the telephone system.

If you feel awkward being humorous, you must practice so that it becomes more natural. Include a few casual and apparently off-the-cuff remarks which you can deliver in a relaxed and unforced manner. Often it’s the delivery which causes the audience to smile, so speak slowly and remember that a raised eyebrow or an unbelieving look may help to show that you are making a light-hearted remark.

Look for the humor. It often comes from the unexpected. A twist on a familiar quote “If at first you don’t succeed, give up” or a play on words or on a situation. Search for exaggeration and understatements. Look at your talk and pick out a few words or sentences which you can turn about and inject with humor.

41. To make your humor work, you should ________.

[A] take advantage of different kinds of audience

[B] make fun of the disorganized people

[C] address different problems to different people

[D] show sympathy for your listeners

42. The joke about doctors implies that, in the eyes of nurses, they are ________.

[A] impolite to new arrivals

[B] very conscious of their godlike role

[C] entitled to some privileges

[D] very busy even during lunch hours

43. It can be inferred from the text that public services ________.

[A] have benefited many people

[B] are the focus of public attention

[C] are an inappropriate subject for humor

[D] have often been the laughing stock

44. To achieve the desired result, humorous stories should be delivered ________.

[A] in well-worded language

[B] as awkwardly as possible

[C] in exaggerated statements

[D] as casually as possible

45. The best title for the text may be ________.

[A] Use Humor Effectively

[B] Various Kinds of Humor

[C] Add Humor to Speech

[D] Different Humor Strategies

Text 2

Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics -- the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.

As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy -- far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone.

But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves -- goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,” says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can’t yet give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world.”

Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries.

What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented -- and human perception far more complicated -- than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t know quite how we do it.

46. Human ingenuity was initially demonstrated in ________.

[A] the use of machines to produce science fiction

[B] the wide use of machines in manufacturing industry

[C] the invention of tools for difficult and dangerous work

[D] the elite’s cunning tackling of dangerous and boring work

47. The word “gizmos” (Line 1, Paragraph 2) most probably means ________.

[A] programs

[B] experts

[C] devices

[D] creatures

48. According to the text, what is beyond man’s ability now is to design a robot that can ________.

[A] fulfill delicate tasks like performing brain surgery

[B] interact with human beings verbally

[C] have a little common sense

[D] respond independently to a changing world

49. Besides reducing human labor, robots can also ________.

[A] make a few decisions for themselves

[B] deal with some errors with human intervention

[C] improve factory environments

[D] cultivate human creativity

50. The author uses the example of a monkey to argue that robots are ________.

[A] expected to copy human brain in internal structure

[B] able to perceive abnormalities immediately

[C] far less able than human brain in focusing on relevant information

[D] best used in a controlled environment

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