北京大学博士考试英语试题

　　Direction: Read the following passage carefully and then explain in your own English the exact meaning of the numbered an d underlined parts . (15%)
　　 Medical consumerism--like all sorts of consumerism, only more menacingly--is designed to be unsatisfying. (31) The prolongation of life and the search

for perfect health (beauty. youth, happiness) are inherently self-defeating, The law of diminishing returns necessarily applies. You can make higher

percentages of people survive into their eighties and nineties. But, as any geriatric ward shows, that is not the same as to confer enduring mobility,

awareness and autonomy. (32)grows medically feasible, but it is often a life deprived of everything and one exposed to　degrading neglect as resources grow

over-stretched and polities turn　mean.   
　　 What an ignominious destiny for medicine if its future tamed into one of bestowing meager increments of unenjoyed life! It would mirror the fate of

athletics, in which disproportionate energies and resources--not least medical ones, like illegal steroids--are now invested to shave records by

milliseconds. And, it goes without saying, the logical extension of longevism--the "abolition" of death--would net be a solution but only an exacerbation.

(33) To air these predicaments is not anti-medical spleen--a churlish reprisal against medicine for its victories--but simply to face the growing reality of

medical power not exactly without responsibility but with   
dissolving goals,
　　 (34) Hence medicine's finest hour becomes the dawn of its dilemmas For centuries, medicine was impotent and hence unproblematic, From the Greeks to the

Great War, its job was simple to struggle with lethal diseases and gross disabilities, to ensure live births, and to mintage pain. It performed these

uncontroversial tasks by and large with meager success. Today, with mission accomplished, medicine's triumphs are dissolving m disorientation, (35) Medicine

has led to vastly inflated expectations, which the public has eagerly swallowed. Yet as these expectations grow unlimited, they become unfulfillable. The

task facing medicine in the twenty-first century will be to redefine its limits even as it extends its capacities.   
Part Three: Cloze Test
Direction: Fill in each numbered blank in the following passage with ONE suitable word to complete the passage Put your answers in the ANSWER
SHEET. (10%)
　　For______(36) the bloodshed and tragedy of D-Day, the beaches of Normandy will always evoke a certain ______(37): a yearning for a time when nations in

the civilized world buried their differences and combined to oppose absolute evil, when values seemed clearer and the retable consequences of war stopped

______ (38) of the annihilation of humanity. But over half a century after the Allies hit those wave-battered sand flats and towering cliffs, the Normandy

invasion stands as a feat _______ (39) to be repeated.   
　　There will never be ____ (40) D-Day. Technology has changed the conditions of warfare in ways that none of the D-Day participants could have __(41), Ali

-out war in the beginnings of this century would surely spell all-out _____ (42) for the belligerents, and possibly for the entire human race. No credible

scenario for a future world war would allow time for the massive buildup' of conventional forces that occurred in the 1940s. The moral equivalent of the

Normandy invasion in the nuclear age would involve a presidential decision to put tens of millions of American lives at _____ (43). And the possible benefits

for the allies would be uncertain at best   
European defense experts often ask whether the U.S. would be willing to "trade Pittsburgh for　'Dusseldorf.” In practice, the question may well be whether

it is worth ____ (44) American cities to avenge a Europe already _____ (45) to rubble.
Part Four: Proofreading
Directions: This part consists of a short passage. In this passage, there are altogether l0 mistakes, one in each underlined sentence or part. of a sentence.

You may have to change a word, add a word or just delete a word. lf you change a word, cross it out with a slash() and write the correct word. lf you add a

word, write the missing word between the words (in bracket3) immediately before and after it. If you delete a word, cross it out with a slash (), Put your

,answers in the