公共英语四级阅读精选
无论是在学校还是在社会中，我们都经常看到试题的身影，借助试题可以检验考试者是否已经具备获得某种资格的基本能力。相信很多朋友都需要一份能切实有效地帮助到自己的试题吧？下面是小编精心整理的公共英语四级阅读精选，欢迎大家分享。
公共英语四级阅读 1
Teachers pay little attention to those school failures, assuming that academic failure means failure in everything. What do you think of this attitude? Write a short argumentative essay(about 300 words) explaining your view.
Since the 1980s, there has been heated discussion on the correlation between the academic failure and the sustainable development of a child. Some teachers emphasize that academic failure will deprive a student of any opportunity to further his college education, thus bringing about disastrous changes to his prospective career. However, through numerous practices and observations, it turns out that their statement has many restrictions.
Admittedly, the idea held by those arguers does contain an element of truth. For example, the repeated academic failure will definitely leave a man frustrated, hence often casting a shadow on his mood. But these arguers tend to ignore two other essential aspects. First, they fail to take into account the possibility that many people, though presenting a poor academic performance at school, turn out to be outstanding in realms other than their original academic research and study. Consider Charles Darwin who often flunked in his medical study. He later became the founder of the Natural Selection and Evolution. In this sense, the academic frustration is not always synonymous to the bankruptcy of one’s future professional career. Second, the teachers’ assertion doesn’t provide sufficient data to narrow down the exact correlation between the academic competence and the future achievement. Therefore, any further conclusion addressing the problem must be based on thorough investigation. As a matter of fact, when Albert Einstein was young, he couldn’t properly complete certain simple calculation. But he finally established himself as the founder of the Theory of Relativity. Given reasons above, the argument that the academic failure means failure in everything, under a careful scrutiny, turns out to be groundless in its hasty conclusion.
In conclusion, these teachers’ evidence lends little credible support to their claim. To persuade people that academic success is central in one’s career, those teachers would need to prove.
公共英语四级阅读 2
Sustainable development is applied to just about everything from energy to clean water and economic growth, and as a result it has become difficult to question either the basic assumptions behind it or the way the concept is put to use. This is especially true in agriculture, where sustainable development is often taken as the sole measure of progress without a proper appreciation of historical and cultural perspectives.
To start with, it is important to remember that the nature of agriculture has changed markedly throughout history, and will continue to do so .medieval agriculture in northern Europe fed, clothed and sheltered a predominantly rural society with a much lower population density than it is today. It had minimal effect on biodiversity, and any pollution it caused was typically localized. In terms of energy use and the nutrients captured in the product it was relatively inefficient.
Contrast this with farming since the start of the industrial revolution. Competition from overseas led farmers to specialize and increase yields. Throughout this period food became cheaper, safe and more reliable. However, these changes have also led to habitat(栖息地)loss and to diminishing biodiversity.
What’s more, demand for animal products in developing countries is growing so fast that meeting it will require an extra 300 million tons of grain a year by 2050.yet the growth of cities and industry is reducing the amount of water available for agriculture in many regions.
All this means that agriculture in the 21stcentury will have to be very different from how it was in the 20th.thiswill require radical thinking. For example, we need to move away from the idea that traditional practices are inevitably more sustainable than new ones. We also need to abandon the notion that agriculture can be “zero impact”. The key will be to abandon the rather simple and static measures of sustainability, which centre on the need to maintain production without increasing damage.
Instead we need a more dynamic interpretation, one that looks at the pros and cons(正反两方面)of all the various way land is used. There are many different ways to measure agricultural performance besides food yield: energy use, environmental costs, water purity, carbon footprint and biodiversity. It is clear, for example, that the carbon of transporting tomatoes from Spain to the UK is less than that of producing them in the UK with additional heating and lighting. But we do not know whether lower carbon footprints will always be better for biodiversity.
What is crucial is recognizing that sustainable agriculture is not just about sustainable food production.
公共英语四级阅读 3
Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ，an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, “Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate." Americans have responded to Lebows call, and much of the world has followed. Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the worlds two largest economics-Japan and the United States-show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent. Overconsumption by the worlds fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate. Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches. Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow, that misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things. Of course, the opposite of overconsumption, poverty, is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash, and burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert. If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough .What level of consumption can the earth support ?When dose having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction?
公共英语四级阅读 4
Accustomed though we are to speaking of the films made before 1927 as "silent", the film has never been, in the full sense of the word, silent. From the very beginning, music was regarded as an indispensable accompaniment; when the Lumiere films were shown at the first public film exhibition in the United States in February 1896, they were accompanied by piano improvisations on popular tunes. At first, the music played bore no special relationship to the films; an accompaniment of any kind was sufficient. Within a very short time, however, the incongruity of playing lively music to a solemn film became apparent, and film pianists began to take some care in matching their pieces to the mood of the film.
As movie theaters grew in number and importance, a violinist, and perhaps a cellist, would be added to the pianist in certain cases, and in the larger movie theaters small orchestras were formed. For a number of years the selection of music for each film program rested entirely in the hands of the conductor or leader of the orchestra, and very often the principal qualification for holding such a position was not skill or taste so much as the ownership of a large personal library of musical pieces. Since the conductor seldom saw the films until the night before they were to be shown (if indeed, the conductor was lucky enough to see them then), the musical arrangement was normally improvised in the greatest hurry.
To help meet this difficulty, film distributing companies started the practice of publishing suggestions for musical accompaniments. In 1909, for example, the Edison Company began issuing with their films such indications of mood as "pleasant", "sad", "lively". The suggestions became more explicit, and so emerged the musical cue sheet containing indications of mood, the titles of suitable pieces of music, and precise directions to show where one piece led into the next.
Certain films had music especially composed for them. The most famous of these early special scores was that composed and arranged for D. W. Griffiths film Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915.
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