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No company likes to be told it is contributing to the moral decline of a nation. "Is this what you intended to accomplish with your careers?" Senator Robert Dole asked Time Warner executives last week. "You have sold your souls, but must you corrupt our nation and threaten our children as well?" At Time Warner, however, such questions are simply the latest manifestation of the soul searching that has involved the company ever since the company was born in 1990. It's a self-examination that has, at various times, involved issues of responsibility, creative freedom and the corporate bottom line.
At the core of this debate is chairman Gerald Levin, 56, who took over for the late Steve Ross in 1992. On the financial front, Levin is under pressure to raise the stock price and reduce the company's mountainous debt, which will increase to 17.3 billion after two new cable deals close. He has promised to sell off some of the property and restructure the company, but investors are waiting impatiently.
The flap over rap is not making life any easier for him. Levin has consistently defended the company's rap music on the grounds of expression. In 1992, when Time Warner was under fire for releasing Ice T's violent rap song Cop Killer, Levin described rap as a lawful expression of street culture, which deserves an outlet. "The test of any democratic society," he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column, "lies not in how well it can control expression but in whether it gives freedom of thought and expression the widest possible latitude, however disputable or irritating the results may sometimes be. We won't retreat in the face of any threats."
Levin would not comment on the debate last week, but there were signs that the chairman was backing off his hard line stand, at least to some extent. During the discussion of rock singing verses at last month's stockholders' meeting, Levin asserted that "music is not the cause of society's ills" and even cited his son, a teacher in the Bronx, New York, who uses rap to communicate with students. But he talked as well about the "balanced struggle" between creative freedom and social responsibility, and he announced that the company would launch a drive to develop standards for distribution and labeling of potentially objectionable music.
The 15 member Time Warner board is generally supportive of Levin and his corporate strategy. But insiders say several of them have shown their concerns in this matter. "Some of us have known for many, many years that the freedoms under the First Amendment are not totally unlimited," says Luce. "I think it is perhaps the case that some people associated with the company have only recently come to realize this."
66. The best title for this passage could be _____.
[A] A Company under Fire
[B] A Debate on Moral Decline
[C] A Lawful Outlet of Street Culture
[D] A Form of Creative Freedom
[答案] A
[解题思路]
本文从头至尾主要讨论的就是时代华纳公司如何受到各方的攻击以及公司的反应，因此A选项很明显是正确答案。而B、C、D三个选项中提到的moral decline, street culture, creative freedom等都只是涉及原文的细节，不是中心思想。
[题目译文]
这篇文章的最佳标题可能是 。
[A] 一个受到攻击的公司
[B] 一场关于道德水平败坏的辩论
[C] 一种合法的街头文化表达方式
[D] 一种自由的创作形式
1998年Passage 1
Few creations of big technology capture the imagination like giant dams. Perhaps it is humankind's long suffering at the mercy of flood and drought that makes the ideal of forcing the waters to do our bidding so fascination. But to be fascinated is also, sometimes, to be blind. Several giant dam projects threaten to do more harm than good.
The lesson from dams is that big is not always beautiful. It doesn't help that building a big, powerful dam has become a symbol of achievement for nations and people striving to assert themselves. Egypt's leadership in the Arab world was cemented by the Aswan High Dam. Turkey's bid for First World status includes the giant Ataturk Dam.
But big dams tend not to work as intended. The Aswan Dam, for example stopped the Nile flooding but deprived Egypt of the fertile silt that floods left - all in return for a giant reservoir of disease which is now so full of silt that it barely generates electricity.
And yet, the myth of controlling the waters persists. This week, in the heart of civilized Europe, Slovaks and Hungarians stopped just short of sending in the troops in their contention over a dam on the Danube. The huge complex will probably have all the usual problems of big dams. But Slovakia is bidding for independence from the Czechs, and now needs a dam to prove itself.
Meanwhile, in India, the World Bank has given the go ahead to the even more wrong headed Narmada Dam. And the bank has done this even though its advisors say the dam will cause hardship for the powerless and environmental destruction. The benefits are for the powerful, but they are far from guaranteed.
Proper, scientific study of the impacts of dams and of the cost and benefits of controlling water can help to resolve these conflicts. Hydroelectric power and flood control and irrigation are possible without building monster dams. But when you are dealing with myths, it is hard to be either proper, or scientifid. It is time that the world learned the lessons of Aswan. You don't need a dam to be saved.
54. What the author tries to suggest may best be interpreted as _____ .
[A] "It's no use crying over spilt milk"
[B] "More haste, less speed"
[C] "Look before you leap"
[D] "He who laughs last laughs best"
[答案]
[解题思路]
本题的四个选项都是英语里面的谚语和警句，有的和中国的一些名言警句有异曲同工之妙。纵观本文的主要内容，主要讨论的是建设巨型大坝的行为弊大于利，人们应该从现有巨型水坝的失败中吸取教训，因此A、B、D三个选项都与文章的基调不符合。C为正确选项的原因正是在于作者希望通过教训提醒人们，以后如果要再建水坝，一定要三思而后行。
[题目译文]
作者的言下之意可以最好地理解为 。
[A] "无需为泼出去的牛奶而悲伤"
[B] "欲速则不达"
[C] "三思而后行"
[D] "笑到最后的人笑得最好"
1998年Passage 3
Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo's 17th century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century.
Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics - but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked "antiscience" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R.Gross, a biologist at the University of Verginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon Haunted World, by Car Sagan of Cornell University.
Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason," held in New York City in 1995, and "Science in the Age of (Mis)information," which assembled last June near Buffalo.
Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned science's objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.
A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.
Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, those manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.
The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.
Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. "The term ‘antiscience' can lump together too many, quite different things," notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti Science. "They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."
60. Paragraphs 2 and 3 are written to _____ .
[A] discuss the cause of the decline of science's power
[B] show the author's sympathy with scientists
[C] explain the way in which science develops
[D] exemplify the division of science and the humanities
[答案] D
[解题思路]
文章第一段的最后一句话指出"The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century"（在本世纪，（自然）科学与人文科学之间的裂痕更深了），而文章的下面两段就这一问题展开了详细的论述。因此显而易见D是正确选项，而其他三项都与两段的中心思想无关。
[题目译文]
第二、三段的写作目的在于 。
[A] 讨论科学势力衰落的原因
[B] 表达作者对科学家们的同情
[C] 解释科学发展的方式
[D] 举例说明自然科学与人文科学的分离
1998年Passage 5
Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world's volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.
That the plates are moving is not beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth's interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years.
The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate come to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops seed fissures(cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).
70. The passage is mainly about _____ .
[A] the features of volcanic activities
[B] the importance of the theory about drifting plates
[C] the significance of hot spots in geophysical studies
[D] the process of the formation of volcanoes
[答案] C
[解题思路]
这篇文章主要讨论的话题就是hot spots，第一段介绍了热区的分布，后面介绍了热区的作用等，因此答案显然为C。A、D关于火山的例子是用来支持关于热区的讨论的，因而是错误答案。而B显然也不是文章的主要论题。
[题目译文]
文章主要谈论的是 。
[A] 火山活动的特征
[B] 板块漂移理论的重要性
[C] 热区在地质研究中的重要性
[D] 火山形成的过程
