2021年度湖南大学英语考试考前冲刺卷（1）新整理版.doc

湖南大学英语考试考前冲刺卷（1） 本卷共分为1大题50小题，作答时间为180分钟，总分100分，60分及格。 严格遵守考试纪律，维护考试秩序！ 一、单项选择题（共50题，每题2分。每题的备选项中，只有一个最符合题意） 1.Imagine a chart that begins when man first appeared on the planet and tracks the economic growth of societies from then forward. It would be a long, flat line until the late 16th or early 17th century, when it would start trending upward. Before then the fruits of productive labor were limited to a few elites — princes, merchants and priests. For most of humankind life was as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described it in 1651 — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But as Hobbes was writing those words, the world around him was changing. Put simply, human beings were getting smarter. People have always sought knowledge, of course, but in Western Europe at that time, men like Galileo, Newton and Descartes began to search systematically for ways to understand and control their environment. The scientific revolution, followed by the Enlightenment, marked a fundamental shift. Humans were no longer searching for ways simply to fit into a natural or divine order, but they were seeking to change it. Once people found ways to harness energy — using steam engines — they were able to build machines that harnessed far more power than any human or horse could ever do. And people could work without ever getting tired. The rise of these machines drove the Industrial Revolution, and created a whole new system of life. Today the search for knowledge continues to produce an ongoing revolution in the health and wealth of humankind. If the rise of science marks the first great trend in this story, the second is its diffusion. What was happening in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was not an isolated phenomenon. A succession of visitors to Britain would go hack to report to their countries on the technological and commercial innovations they saw there. Sometimes societies were able to learn extremely fast, as in the United States. Others, like Ger