上海大学2005年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试 综合英语1.docVIP

上海大学2005年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试 综合英语试题 SECTION 1: READING COMPREHENSION (36 points) Directions: In this section, you will find two passages, each of which is followed by some questions. Read the passages carefully and then answer the questions in your own words on the Answer Sheet. Make sure that each response is limited to less than ten words in order to be valid. Questions 1 ~ 9 On balance, are euphemisms bad for us? One school of thought holds that a truly healthy, stable, psychologically mature society would have no need for euphemisms. Those who subscribe to this school would hold further, with George Orwell, that political euphemism “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” They might add that the emergence of the new genre of faux euphemism is particularly insidious, in that it implies a kind of equivalence among the concepts of terminology represented by letters of the alphabet—as if “the L word” and “the T word” really did belong to the same category as “the N word.” There is something to be said for all these points, the last one in particular. I’m surely not alone in observing that the phrase “the N word” has lately come into the mainstream, as the N word itself never could again. A second school of thought about euphemisms might be called the white-blood-cell school; it holds that yes, an elevated count could well be a sign of mild or serious pathology—but it’s also a sign that a natural defense mechanism has kicked in. By and large my sympathies lie with the white-blood-cell school. Although euphemism sets some to spluttering about its deceitfulness, I suspect that few people are really deceived—that, indeed, the transparent motives and awkward semantics only undermine the euphemist’s intention. When a nuclear warhead is referred to as “the physics package,” when genocide is referred to as “ethnic cleansing,” when wife-beating is referred to as “getting physical”—in all these cases th