2010年6月英语四级全真预测试卷及答案详解(4)

　　Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week. Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them "impostors(骗子)"; another refers to them as "special cases". One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by "no such people". To avoid outright(彻底的)lies, some job-seekers claim that they "attending" means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that "being associated with" a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century—that's when they began keeping records, anyhow. If you don't want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma.

　　One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of nonexistent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from "Smoot State University". The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the "University of Purdue". As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.

　　57. The main idea of this passage is that ________ .

　　[A] employers are checking more closely on applicants now

　　[B] lying about college degrees has become a widespread problem

　　[C] college degrees can now be purchased easily

　　[D] employers are no longer interested in college degrees

　　58. According to the passage, "special cases" refers to cases that ________.

　　[A] students attend a school only part-time

　　[B] students never attended a school they listed on their application

　　[C] students purchase false degrees from commercial firms

　　[D] students attended a famous school

　　59. We can infer from the passage that ________ .

　　[A] performance is a better judge of ability than a college degree

　　[B] experience is the best teacher

　　[C] past work histories influence personnel officers more than degrees do

　　[D] a degree from a famous school enables an applicant to gain advantage over others in job competition

　　60. This passage implies that ________ .

　　[A] buying a false degree is not moral

　　[B] personnel officers only consider applicants from famous schools

　　[C] most people lie on applications because they were dismissed from school

　　[D] society should be greatly responsible for lying on applications

　　61. The word "phony" (Line 13, Para. 2) means ________ .

　　[A] thorough [C] false

　　[B] ultimate [D] decisive

　　Passage Two

　　Questions 62 to 66 are based on the following passage.

　　Material culture refers to what can be seen, held, felt, used—what a culture produces. Examining a culture's tools and technology can tell us about the group's history and way of life. Similarly, research into the material culture of music can help us to understand the music culture. The most vivid body of material culture in it, of course, is musical instruments. We cannot hear for ourselves the actual sound of any musical performance before the 1870s when the phonograph was invented, so we rely on instruments for important information about music cultures in the remote past and their development. Here we have two kinds of evidence: instruments well preserved and instruments pictured in art. Through the study of instruments, as well as paintings, written documents, and so on, we can explore the movement of music from the Near East to China over a thousand years ago, or we can outline the spread of Near Eastern influence to Europe that resulted in the development of most of the instruments in the symphony orchestra.

　　Sheet music or printed music, too, is material culture. Scholars once defined folk music cultures as those in which people learn and sing music by ear rather than from print, but research shows mutual influence among oral and written sources during the past few centuries in Europe, Britain, and America. Printed versions limit variety because they tend to standardize any song, yet they stimulate people to create new and different songs. Besides, the ability to read music notation has a far-reaching effect on music and, when it becomes widespread, on the music culture as a whole.

　　One more important part of music's material culture should be singled out: the influence of the electronic media—radio, record player, tape recorder, television, and videocassette, with the future promising talking and singing computers and other developments. This is all part of the "information revolution", a twentieth-century phenomenon as important as the industrial revolution was in the nineteenth. These electronic media are not just limited to modern nations; they have affected music cultures all over the globe.