2015年下半年教师资格证《高中英语》试题（网友回忆版）

Passage 1
When asked by Conan if his daughters had smart phones, comedian Louis CK explained that he had successfully fended them off by simply replying, "No, you can' t have it. It is bad for you."
He instantly became my hero as I was mired in difficult negotiations with my ten-year-old daughter over one. And frankly, she was winning. Was it possible to say no to my daughter, as CK suggested？ I hadn't even known I was allowed to, if the guinea pigs, the dogs, and things for her doll Molly were any indication. CK rationalized, "I am not raising the children. I'm raising the grown-ups that they are going to be. So just because the other stupid kids have phones doesn't mean that my kid has to be stupid." Now I knew I didn't want my kid to grow up stupid like her friends. I needed to explain this to her. This is what CK told Conan and me.
Cell phones are "toxic, especially for kids," he said, because they don't help them learn em-pathy, one of the nicer human emotions. When we text, we don't see or hear a visceral reaction.
The response we get is cold and hard text-message. "Why are kids mean？" He asked. "Because they're trying it out. They look at another kid and say, 'You're fat.' Then they see the kid's face scrunch up and think that doesn't feel good." Texting "you're fat" allows you to bypass the pain.
CK went on to explain that smart phones rob us of our ability to be alone. Kids use smart phones to occupy their time： Must text! Must play game! Must look up more tiny socks online for Molly!!! CK asked, what happened to zoning out？ After all, one of the joys of being human is allowing our minds to wander, with cell phones, kids are always preoccupied. They never daydream, except in class. And here's something else we're missing： our right to be miserable. This was a right I hadn't realized I desired until CK pointed out that it's another essential human emotion.
CK gave the example of driving by yourself and suddenly realizing that you're alone. Not "Oh,guess I can't use the lane" alone. Dark, brooding sadness causes so many drivers to grab that smart phone and reach out to another living soul.
"Everybody's murdering each other with their cars" as they text because they dread being alone. Too bad--they're missing out on a life-affirming experience.
"I was in my car one time, and Bruce Springsteen's 'Jungle land' came on. He sounds so far away, making me really sad. And I think I've got to get the phone and write hi to 50 people. I was reaching for the phone, and I thought, don't! Just be sad."
So CK pulled over and allowed himself to sob like a little girl denied a nice thing for her American Girl doll. "It was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments," he said. Because he didn't fight it and allowed himself to be miserable, his body released endorphins.
"Happiness rushed in to meet the sadness. I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true profound happiness. The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with that little phone. So you never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kind of satis-fied. And then you die. That's why I don't want to get phones for my kids".
And I suppose I don't either.

Passage 2
Until a decade or two ago, the centers of many Western cities were emptying while their edges were spreading. This was not for the reasons normally cited. Neither the car nor the motorway caused suburban sprawl, although they sped it up： cities were spreading before either came along.
Nor was the flight to the suburbs caused by racism. Whites fled inner-city neighborhoods that were becoming black, but they also fled ones that were not. Planning and zoning rules encouraged sprawl, as did tax breaks for home ownership--but cities spread regardless of these. The real cause was mass affluence. As people grew richer, they demanded more privacy and space. Only a few could afford that in city centers; the rest moved out.
The same process is now occurring in the developing world, but much more quickly. The pop-ulation density of metropolitan Beijing has collapsed since 1970, falling from 425 people per hectare to 65. Indian cities are following; Brazil's are ahead. And suburbanization has a long way to run. Beijing is now about as crowded as metropolitan Chicago was at its most closely packed, in the 1920s. Since then Chicago's density has fallen by almost three-quarters.
This is welcome. Romantic notions of sociable, high-density living--notions pushed, for the most part, by people who themselves occupy rather spacious residences--ignore the squalor and lack of privacy to be found in Kinshasa, Mumbai or the other crowded cities of the poor world.
Many of them are far too dense for dignified living, and need to spread out.
The Western suburbs to which so many aspire are healthier than their detractors say. The modern Stepfords are no longer white monocultures, but that is progress. For every Ferguson there are many American suburbs that have quietly become black, Hispanic or Asian, or a blend of every-one. Picaresque accounts of decay overlook the fact that America's suburbs are half as criminal and a little more than half as poor as central cities. Even as urban centers revive, more Americans move from city centre to suburb than go the other way.
But the West has also made mistakes, from which the rest of the world can learn. The first lesson is that suburban sprawl imposes costs on everyone. Suburbanites tend to use more roads and consume more carbon than urbanites (though perhaps not as much as distant commuters forced out by green belts). But this damage can be alleviated by a carbon tax, by toll roads and by charging for parking. Many cities in the emerging world have followed the foolish American practice of re-quiring property developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces for every building--something that makes commuting by car much more attractive than it would be otherwise. Scrap-ping them would give public transport a chance.
The second is that it is foolish to try to stop the spread of suburbs. Green belts, the most ef-fective method for doing this, push up property prices and encourage long-distance commuting. The cost of housing in London, already astronomical, went up by 19% in the past year, reflecting not just the city's strong economy but also the impossibility of building on its edges. The insistence on big minimum lot sizes in some American suburbs and rural areas has much the same effect. Cities that try to prevent growth through green belts often end up weakening themselves, as Seoul has done.
A wiser policy would be to plan for huge expansion. Acquire strips of land for roads and rail-ways, and chunks for parks, before the city sprawls into them. New York's 19th-century governors decided where Central Park was going to go long before the city reached it. New York went on to develop in a way that they could not have imagined, but the park is still there. This is not the state control of the new-town planner--that confident soul who believes he knows where people will want to live and work, and how they will get from one to the other. It is the realism needed to manage the inevitable. A model of living that has broadly worked well in the West is spreading, adapting to local conditions as it goes. We should all look forward to the time when Chinese and Indian teenagers write sulky songs about the appalling dullness of suburbia.