2007年12月四级考试真题

Part Ⅰ               Writing              (30 minutes)

注意：此部分试题在答题卡1上。

 Part Ⅱ Rading comprehension (Skimming and scanning) (15minutes)

Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passsage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B),C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.

Univeraities Branch Out

     As never before in their long story, universities have become instruments of national

competition as well as instruments of peace. They are the place of the scientific discoveries that

move economies forward, and the primary means of educating the talent required to obtain and

maintain competitive advantages. But at the same time, the opening of national borders to the flow

of goods, services, information and especially people has made universities a powerful force for

global integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical stability.

   In response to the same forces that have driven the world economy, universities have become

More self-consciousy global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire

range of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers,

offering courses of study that address the challenges of an interconnected world and collaborative

（合作的）research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity.

Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than the movement across borders. Over the past three decades the number of students leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at an annual rate of 3.0 percent, from 8000,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in 2994. Most travel from one developed nation to another, but the flow from developing to developed countries id growing rapidly. The reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is on the rise, too. Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those in the United Kingdom. And the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is growing as well, to 8 percent of the undergraduates at America’s best institutions and 10 percent of all undergraduates in the U.K. In the United States, 20 percent of the newly hired professors in science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China many newly hired faculty hired faculty members at the top research universities received their graduate education abroad.

       Universities are also encouraging students to spend some of their undergraduate years in another country. In Europe, more than 140,000 students participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking courses for credit in one of 2, 2000 participating institutions across the continent. And in the United States, institutions are helping place students in summer internships（实习）abroad to prepare them for global careers. Yale and Harvard have led the way, offering every undergraduate at least one international study or internship opportunity and providing the financial resources to make it possible.

Globalization is also reshaping the way research is done. One new trend involves sourcing portions of a research program to another country. Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Shanghai’s Fudan University, in collaboration with faculty colleagues from both schools. The Shanghai center has 95 employees and graduate students working in a 4,300-square-meter laboratory seminars with scientists from both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries;

Xu’s Yale lab is more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducing from a word-class scientist and his U.S. team.

As a result of its strength in science, the United States has consistently led of the world in the world in the commercialization of major new technologies, from the mainframe computer and integrated circuit of the 1960s to the internet infrastructure(基础设施)and applications software of

the 1990s.The link between university-based science and industrial application is often indirect but sometimes highly visible: Silicon Valley was intentionally created by Stanford University, and

Route 128 outside Boston has long housed companies spun off from MIT and Harvard. Around the world ,governments have encouraged copying of his model, perhaps most successfully in Cambridge, England, where Microsoft and scores of other leading software and biotechnology companies have set up shop around the university.

For all its success, the United States remains deeply hesitant about sustaining the research university model. Most politician recognize the link between investment in science and national

Economic strength, but support for research funding has been unsteady. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled between 1998 and 2003,but has risen more slowly than inflations since then. Support for the physical sciences and engineering barely kept pace with inflation during that same period. The attempt to make up lost ground is welcome, but the nation would be better served by steady, predictable increases in science funding at the rate of long-term GDP growth, which is on the order of inflation plus 3 percent per year.

American politicians have great difficulty recognizing that admitting more foreign students can greatly promote the national interest by increasing international understanding. Adjusted for inflation, public funding for international exchanges and foreign-language study is well below the levels of 40 years ago. In the wake of Sep