高等教育自学考试《英语（二）》模拟试卷三

Marriage Advertisements in India    Every Sunday morning millions of Indians settle down with a cup of tea and special weekend issues of their newspapers just as Americans do.But here,with the marriage season approaching, many of them quickly to a Sunday feature that is particularly Indian-the-col-umns of marriage advertisements in which young people look for husbands and wives.This is relatively modern change in the age-old custom of the arranged marriage.The thousands of advertisements published each week increasingly reflect social changes that coming to this traditional society.For example, although women are still described in terms of appearance or skill in "the wifely arts", information about her earning power is entering more and more of the advertisements.This reflects the arrival in India of the working wife.   Divorce which used to be almost unheard of in India， is sometimes now mentioned in the advertisements as in the case of a woman whose advertisement in New Delhi newspaper explained that had been "the innocent party" when her marriage broke up.   Because the custom of the dowry(marriage payment)is now illegal some advertisements say "no dowry" or "simple marriage" ,which means the same thing.However,the fathers of many bridegrooms still require it.In a land where light skin is often regarded as socially preferable many also require that a woman have a "wheatcolor" complexion or that a man be "tall, fair and handsome".Advertisements are placed and eagerly read by a wide range of people in the upper classes,mostly in cities.Many of them receive dozens of answers."There's nothing embarrassing about it,explained a Calcutta businessman advertising a son-in-law."It's just another way of broadening the contacts and increasing the possibility of doing the contacts and increasing the possibilities of doing the best one for one's daughter."    Because of high unemployment and a generally poor standard of living here,one of the best attractions a marriage advertisement can offer is a permit to live abroad，especially in Canada or the United States.A person who has one can get what he wants.One recent Sunday in Madras, for example,a Punjabi engineer living in San Francisco advertised for a "beautiful slim bride with lovely features knowing music and dance".And a man whose advertisement said that he held an American immigration permit was able to say,only girls from rich well-connected families need apply.

Sleeping is very ancient.In the electroencephalographic（脑电图仪的）sense we share it with all the primates（灵长类动物）and almost all the other mammals and birds: it may extend back as far as the reptiles（爬行动物）.
There is some evidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and dreamless, depend on the life-style of the animal, and that predators（食肉动物）are statistically much more likely to dream than prey, which are in turn much more likely to experience dreamless sleep.In dream sleep, the animal is powerfully immobilized（使固定不动）and remarkably unresponsive to external stimuli.Dreamless sleep is much shallower, and we have all witnessed cats or dogs cocking their ear to a sound when apparently fast asleep.The fact that deep dream sleep is rare among prey today seems clearly to be a product of natural selection, and it makes sense that today, when sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animals are less frequently immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones.
Why should they sleep deeply at all? Why should a state of such deep immobilization ever have evolved? Perhaps one useful hint about the original function of sleep is to be found in the fact that dolphins and whales and aquatic mammals in general seem to sleep very little.There is, by and large, no place to hide in the ocean.Could it be that, rather than increasing an animal's vulnerability, the function of sleep is to decrease it? Wilse Webb of the University of Florida and Ray Meddis of London University have suggested this to be the case.It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.The point seems particularly clear for the young of predatory animals.This is an interesting notion and probably at least partly true.

Income    Income may be national income and personal income.Whereas national income is defined as the total earned income of all the factors of production--namely,profits, interest,rent，wages,and other corn pensation for labor, personal income may be defned as total money income received byindividuals before personal taxes are paid.National income does not equal GNP(Gross National Product)because the actors of production do not receive payment for either capital consumption allowances or indirect business taxes,both of which are included in GNP.The money put aside for capital consumption is for replacement and thus is not counted as income.Indirect taxes include sales taxes property taxes and excise taxes that are paid by businesses directly to the government and so reduce the income left to pay for the factors of production.Three-fourths of national income goes for wages,salaries, and other forms of compensation to employees.   Whereas national income shows the income that the factors of production earn personal income measures the income that individuals or households receive.Corporation profits are included in national income because they are earned.Out of these profits,however,corporation profit taxes must be paid to the government,and some money must be put into the business for expansion.Only that part of profits distributed as dividends goes to the individual there fore out of corporation profits only dividends count as personal income.The factors of production earn money for social security and unemployment insurance contributions,but this money goes togovernment(which is not a factor of production), not to individuals.It is therefore part of national income but not part of personal income.   On the other hand money received by individuals when they collect social security or unemployment compensation is not money earned but money received.Interest received on government bonds is also in this category, because much of the money received from the sale ofbonds went to pay for war production and that production no longer furnishes a service to the economy.   The money people receive as personal income may be either spent or saved.However not all spending is completely voluntary.A significant portion of our income goes to pay personal taxes.Most workers never receive the money they pay in persona] taxes,because it is withheld from their paychecks.The money that individuals are left with after they have met their tax obligations is disposable personal income.Disposable income can be divided between personal consumption expenditures and personal savings.It is important to remember that personal saving is what is left after spending.

Now comes the first hurdle.__1__ We all make it overthis hurdle with ease.This symbolizesThose obstacles in life that we struggle to get over, butwe always manage to do so.You can look at that hurdle in two ways: "Ican’t make it over, I’m too tired" or "I am one more hurdle closer tofinishing this race".This is an example of taking a negative situationand seeing something positive in it.The next part of the race is every hurdle between thefirst and last one.__2__ This happens a lot in life too.There may be asituation that arises where you feel as though you can’t make it and all youcan think about is giving up.You may fall over that "hurdle" orstruggle getting over it, but somehow you find it in yourself to jump over itand move on with the race.Next is that last 100m of the race.You feel as thoughyou just want to say, "No I can't do this." __3__Now lastly is the last hurdle.This hurdle is thetoughest out of all of them.In life we find ourselves falling and falling, andmaybe getting too lost in our problems that we fell like have been thoughenough and there’s no hope.__4__ It's one step close to the end of the race.Once you finish, you look back on it and you realize thatyou made it not by leaping, but step by step."Yard by yard, life is veryhard.But inch by inch, life can be a cinch."___5___

We all have plans and dreams for a better, more ___1___ life.Yet only a small percentage of people actually achieve their ___2___ .A good question is: why?    Recently, I was working with a young man who was ___3___ get on his feet.He had written out his goals, and he had powerful reasons why he wanted to achieve these goals.But after weeks of trying, he was still not much further along.   So we took some time to try to understand what was holding him ___4___ .As we examined his average day, it became apparent to me that he was much too ___5__ .He was spending lots of time doing lots of different things.I ___6___ that most of what he was doing was not very important in the greater scheme of things.   We did some exercises to ___7___ which activities were important, which ones were urgent and which ones was filling (or killing) time.As it turned out, most of the things he was doing throughout the day were filling time.He wasn't comfortable ___8___ he was very busy, so he created things that needed to be done.He was always working on something—yet at the end of the day, he had rarely accomplished any tasks to move him closer to the life he wanted.   This behavior is fairly easy for an outside observer to spot but extremely difficult to self-diagnose.The ___9___ is to slow down and get comfortable with being still, with contemplating what we really want and whether our actions are suitable for our goals.Many of our activities are avoidance activities: we do things to fill up the time and thus avoid having to do more difficult tasks.It wasn't easy, but once the young man finally accepted that he needed to do less overall but more of the important things, his life took a dramatic ___10___ for the better.