gre 阅读错题整理2

Passage 149

Although, recent years have seen substantial reductions in noxious pollutants from individual motor vehicles, the number of such vehicles has been steadily increasing, consequently, more than 100 cities in the United States still have levels of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and ozone (generated by photochemical reactions with hydrocarbons from vehicle exhaust) that exceed legally established limits. There is a growing realization that the only effective way to achieve further reductions in vehicle emissions—short of a massive shift away from the private automobile—is to replace conventional diesel fuel and gasoline with cleaner-burning fuels such as compressed natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, ethanol, or methanol.

 

All of these alternatives are carbon-based fuels whose molecules are smaller and simpler than those of gasoline. These molecules burn more cleanly than gasoline, in part because they have fewer, if any, carbon-carbon bonds, and the hydrocarbons they do emit are less likely to generate ozone. The combustion of larger molecules, which have multiple carbon-carbon bonds, involves a more complex series of reactions. These reactions increase the probability of incomplete combustion and are more likely to release uncombusted and photochemically active hydrocarbon compounds into the atmosphere. (detail) On the other hand, alternative fuels do have drawbacks. Compressed natural gas would require that vehicles have a set of heavy fuel tanks—a serious liability in terms of performance and fuel efficiency—and liquefied petroleum gas faces fundamental limits on supply.

 

Ethanol and methanol, on the other hand, have important advantages over other carbon-based alternative fuels: they have a higher energy content per volume and would require minimal changes in the existing network for distributing motor fuel. Ethanol is commonly used as a gasoline supplement, but it is currently about twice as expensive as methanol, the low cost of which is one of its attractive features. Methanol’s most attractive feature, however, is that it can reduce by about 90 percent the vehicle emissions that form ozone, the most serious urban air pollutant.

 

Like any alternative fuel, methanol has its critics. Yet much of the criticism is based on the use of “gasoline clone” vehicles that do not incorporate even the simplest design improvements that are made possible with the use of methanol. It is true, for example, that a given volume of methanol provides only about one-half of the energy that gasoline and diesel fuel do; other things being equal, the fuel tank would have to be somewhat larger and heavier. However（this means what has discussed before is not the true thing）, since methanol-fueled vehicles could be designed to be much more efficient than “gasoline clone” vehicles fueled with methanol, they would need comparatively less fuel. Vehicles incorporating only the simplest of the engine improvements that methanol makes feasible would still contribute to an immediate lessening of urban air pollution.

3. It can be inferred from the passage that a vehicle specifically designed to use methanol for fuel would

A. be somewhat lighter in total body weight than a conventional vehicle fueled with gasoline

B. be more expensive to operate than a conventional vehicle fueled with gasoline

C. have a larger and more powerful engine than a conventional vehicle fueled with gasoline

D. have a larger and heavier fuel tank than a “gasoline clone” vehicle fueled with methanol (not fact)

E. average more miles per gallon than a “gasoline clone” vehicle fueled with methanol (after however)

Passage 71

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, prohibits state governments from denying citizens the “equal protection of the laws.” Although precisely what the framers of the amendment meant by this equal protection clause remains unclear, all interpreters agree that the framers’ immediate objective was to provide a constitutional warrant for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed the citizenship of all persons born in the United States and subject to United States jurisdiction. This declaration (the Civil Rights Act), which was echoed in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, was designed primarily to counter the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people in the United States could be denied citizenship. The act was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, who argued that the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, did not provide Congress with the authority to extend citizenship and equal protection to the freed slaves. Although Congress promptly overrode Johnson’s veto, supporters of the act sought to ensure its constitutional foundations with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.

 

The broad language of the amendment strongly suggests that its framers were proposing to write into the Constitution not a laundry list of specific civil rights but a principle of equal citizenship that forbids organized society from treating any individual as a member of an inferior class. Yet for the first eight decades of the amendment’s existence, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the amendment betrayed this ideal of equality. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, for example, the Court invented the “state action” limitation, which asserts that “private” decisions by owners of public accommodations and other commercial business to segregate their facilities are insulated from the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

 

After the Second World War, a judicial climate more hospitable to equal protection claims culminated in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two doctrines embraced by the Supreme Court during this period extended the amendment’s reach. First, the Court required especially strict scrutiny of legislation that employed a “suspect classification,” meaning discrimination against a group on grounds that could be construed as racial. This doctrine has broadened the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to other, nonracial forms of discrimination, for while some justices have refused to find any legislative classification other than race to be constitutionally disfavored, most have been receptive to arguments that at least some nonracial discriminations, sexual discrimination in particular, are “suspect” and deserve this heightened scrutiny by the courts. Second, the Court relaxed the state action limitation on the Fourteenth Amendment, bringing new forms of private conduct within the amendment’ s reach.

 

1. Which of the following best describes the main idea of the passage?

A. By presenting a list of specific rights, framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were attempting to provide a constitutional basis for broad judicial protection of the principle of equal citizenship (not …)

B. Only after the Supreme Court adopted the suspect classification approach to reviewing potentially discrimination legislation was the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment extended to include sexual discrimination (detail)

C. Not until after the Second World War did the Supreme Court begin to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner consistent with the principle of equal citizenship that it express.

D. Interpreters of the Fourteenth Amendment have yet to reach consensus with regard to what its framers meant by the equal protection clause

E. Although the reluctance of judges to extend the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment to nonracial discrimination has betrayed the principle of equal citizenship, the Supreme Court’s use of the state action limitation to insulate private activity from the amendment’s reach has been more harmful.

3. The author’s position regarding the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment would be most seriously undermined if which of the following were true?

(according to the content)

A. The framers had anticipated state action limitations as they are described in the passage. B. The framers had merely sought to prevent discriminatory acts by federal officials. C. The framers were concerned that the civil rights act of 1866 would be overturned by the Supreme Court. D. The framers were aware that the phrase “equal protection of the laws”had broad implications. E. The framers believed that racial as well as non-racial forms of discrimination were unacceptable.

5. The author implies that the Fourteenth Amendment might not have been enacted if

Change what

5. The author implies that the Fourteenth Amendment might not have been enacted if

A. congress’ authority with regard to legislating civil rights had not been challenged

B. the framers has anticipated the Supreme Courts ruling in Brown v. Board of Education

C. the framers had believed that it would be used in deciding cases of discrimination involving non-racial groups

D. most state governments had been willing to protect citizens’ civil rights

E. its essential elements had not been implicit in the Thirteenth Amendment

7. Which of the following can be inferred about the second of the two doctrines (highlighted sentence) of the passage?

A. It caused some justice to rule that all types of discrimination are prohibited by the Constitution.

B. It shifted the focus of the Supreme Court from racial to nonracial discrimination.

C. It narrowed the concern of the Supreme Court to legislation that employed a suspect classification.

D. It caused legislators who were writing new legislation to reject language that could be construed as permitting racial discrimination.

This choice concerns things with legislators

E. It made it more difficult for commercial business to practice racial discrimination.

Passage 35

Architectural morphology is the study of how shifting cultural and environmental conditions produce changes in an architectural form. When applied to the mission churches of New Mexico exemplifying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish colonial architecture in what is now the southwestern United States, architectural morphology reveals much about how Native American culture transformed the traditional European church architecture of the Spanish missionaries who hoped to convert Native Americans to Christianity. (example)

 

Many studies of these mission churches have carefully documented the history and design of their unique architectural form, most attribute (reference point) the churches’ radical departure from their sixteenth-century European predecessors to local climate and a less-mechanized building technology. Certainly, the limitations imposed by manual labor and the locally available materials of mud-brick and timber necessitated a divergence from the original European church model. However, (author’s point) the emergence of a church form suited to life in the Southwest was rooted in something more fundamental than material and technique. The new architecture resulted from cultural forces in both the Spanish colonial and indigenous Native American societies, each with competing ideas about form and space and different ways of conveying these ideas symbolically.

 

For example, the mission churches share certain spatial qualities with the indigenous kiva, a round, partly subterranean room used by many Southwest Native American communities for important rituals. Like the kiva it was intended to replace, the typical mission church had thick walls of adobe (sun-dried earth and straw), a beaten-earth floor, and one or two small windows. In deference to European custom, the ceilings of these churches were higher than those of the traditional kiva. However (return to main point), with the limited lighting afforded by their few small windows, these churches still suggest the kiva's characteristically low, boxlike, earth-hugging interior. Thus, although pragmatic factors of construction may have contributed to the shape of the mission churches, as earlier studies suggest, the provision of a sacred space consistent with indigenous traditions may also have been an important consideration in their design.

 

The continued viability of the kiva itself in Spanish mission settlements has also been underestimated by historians. Freestanding kivas discovered in the ruins of European-style missionary communities have been explained by some historians as examples of “superposition”. Under this theory, Christian domination over indigenous faiths is dramatized by surrounding the kiva with Christian buildings. However, as James Ivey points out, such superposition was unlikely, since historical records indicate that most Spanish missionaries, arriving in the Southwest with little or no military support, wisely adopted a somewhat conciliatory attitude toward the use of the kiva at least initially. This fact, and the careful, solitary placement of the kiva in the center of the mission-complex courtyards, suggests an intention to highlight the importance of the kiva rather than to diminish it.

 

4. According to the passage, the building techniques prevailing in the Southwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played a role in which of the following?

A. preventing missionaries in the Southwest from duplicating traditional European churches (certainly)

B. influencing missionaries in the Southwest to incorporate a freestanding kiva into certain mission settlements (this is the information in the fourth paragraph, irrelevant to the building techniques)

C. causing missionaries in the Southwest to limit the building of churches to New Mexico only

D. jeopardizing the viability of Spanish religious settlements throughout the Southwest

E. encouraging many missionaries in the Southwest to reexamine the continued viability of a highly ceremonial European religious tradition