北大经济学复合人才项目英语真题

22. Hancock's research finding surprised those who believed that  .

A) people are less likely to lie in instant messages

B) people are unlikely to lie in face-to-face interactions

C) people are most likely to lie in e-mail communication

D) People are twice as likely to lie in phone conversations

23. According to the passage, why are people more likely to tell the truth through certain media of communication?

A) They are afraid of leaving behind traces of their lies.

B) They believe that honesty is the best policy.

C) They tend to be relaxed when using those media.

D) They are most practiced at those forms of communication.

24. According to Hancock, the telephone is a preferable medium for promoting sales because

A) salesmen can talk directly to their customers

B) salesmen may feel less restrained to exaggerate

C) salesmen can impress customers as being trustworthy

D) salesmen may pass on instant messages effectively

25. It can be inferred from the passage that  .

A) honesty should be encouraged in interpersonal communications

B) more employers will use e-mails to communicate with their employees

C) suitable media should be chosen for different communication purposes

D) email is now the dominant medium of communication within a company

Passage 2

Questions 26 to 30 are based on the following passage.

Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick II in the thirteenth century, it may be hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue: he told the nurses to keep silent.

All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.

Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to leam language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird leams to sing and to fly rapidly at right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.

Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.

Recent evidence suggests that an iniant is bom with the capacity to speak. What is special about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.

But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child   s babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child⁵s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

26. The purpose of Frederick IPs experiment was  .

A) to prove that children are bom with ability to speak

B) to discover what language a child would speak without hearing any human speech

C) to find out what role careful nursing would play in teaching a child to speak

D) to prove that a child could be starved and damaged without learning a language

28. What is particularly remarkable about a child is that  .

A) he is bom with the capacity to speak

B) he has a brain more complex than an animal⁵s

C) he can produce his own sentences

D) he knows how to play with a toy without being taught

29. Which of the following can NOT be inferred from the passage?

A) The faculty of speech is inborn in human beings.

B) The child's brain is highly selective.

C) Most children learn their language in definite stages.

D) A child owes his speech ability to good nursing.

30. If a child starts to speak later than others, he will  in future.

A) have a high IQ B) be less intelligent

C) be insensitive to verbal signals D) not necessarily be backward