正在為2016年考研英語備考的考生,請在備考英語詞匯、閱讀、寫作部分的同時,不要忘了“新題型”的備考。下面是唯學(xué)網(wǎng)小編為考生們整理的考研英語“新題型”排序題精選,希望考生們都能下載下來,認真練習(xí),掌握排序題的答題技巧。
Passage 1
Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs A and D have been correctly placed.
[A] Subscription has proved by far the best way of paying for highquality television. Advertising veers up and down with the economic cycle, and can be skipped by using digital video recorders. And any outfit that depends on advertising is liable to worry more about offending advertisers than about pleasing viewers. Voluntary subscription is also preferable to the compulsory, universal variety that pays for the BBC and other European public broadcasters. A broadcaster supported by a tax on everyone must try to please everyone. And a government can starve public broadcasters of money, too—as the BBC is painfully learning.
[B] What began as an interesting experiment has become the standard way of supporting highquality programming. Most of the great television dramas that are watched in America and around the world appear first on payTV channels. Having shown others how to make gangster dramas with “The Sopranos”, HBO is laying down the standard for fantasy with “Game of Thrones”. Other payTV channels have delved into 1960s advertising (“Mad Men”), drug dealing (“Breaking Bad”) and Renaissance court society (“The Borgias”). PayTV firms outside America, like Britains BSkyB, are beginning to pour money into original series. Talent is drifting to paytelevision, in part because there are fewer appealing roles in film. Meanwhile, broadcast networks have retreated into a safe zone of sitcoms, police procedurals and singing competitions.
[C] But pay television is now under threat, especially in America. Prices have been driven so high at a time of economic malaise that many people simply cannot afford it. Disruptive, deeppocketed firms like Amazon and Netflix lurk, whispering promises of internetdelivered films and television shows for little or no money. Whether the lure of such alternatives or poverty is what is causing people to cancel their subscriptions is not clear. But the proportion of Americans who pay for TV is falling. Other countries may follow.
[D] Pay TV executives argue that people will always find ways of paying for their wares, perhaps by cutting back on cinema tickets or bottled water. That notion seems increasingly hopeful. Every month it appears more likely that the pay TV system will break down. The era of evergrowing channel choice is coming to an end; cable and satellite distributors will begin to prune the least popular ones. They may push “best of basic” packages, offering the most desirable channels—and perhaps leaving out sport. In the most disruptive scenario, no longer unimaginable, payTV would become a free for all, with channels hawking themselves directly to consumers, perhaps sending their content over the internet. How can media firms survive in such a world?
[E] Fifteen years ago nearly all the television shows that excited critics and won awards appeared on free broadcast channels. Paytelevision (or, as many Americans call it, “cable”) was the domain of repeats, music videos and televangelists. Then HBO, a subscription outfit mostly known for boxing and films, decided to try its hand at hour long dramas.
[F] But television as a whole should emerge stronger. If people buy individual channels rather than a huge bundle, they will have to think about what they really value—the more so because each channel will cost more than it does at present. Media firms will improve their game in response. The activity that diverts the average American for some four and a half hours each day should become more gripping, not less.
[G] It wont be easy. They will have to start marketing heavily: at present the payTV distributors do that for them. They must produce much more of their own programming. Repeats and old films lose their appeal in a world in which consumers can instantly call up vast archives. If they are to sell directly to the audience they will have to become technology firms, building apps and much slicker websites than they have now, which anticipate what customers might want to watch.
1→2→A→3→D→4→5
Passage 2
Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs D and E have been correctly placed.
[A] For publishers, though, it is a dangerous time. Book publishing resembles the newspaper business in the late 1990s, or music in the early 2000s. Although revenues are fairly stable, and the traditional route is still the only way to launch a blockbuster, the climate is changing. Some of the publishers functions—packaging books and promoting them to shops—are becoming obsolete. Algorithms and online recommendations threaten to replace them as arbiters of quality. The tide of selfpublished books threatens to swamp their products. As bookshops close, they lose a crucial showcase. And they face, as the record companies did, a nearmonopoly controlling digital distribution: Amazon’s grip over the ebook market is much like Apple’s control of music downloads.
[B] They also need to become more efficient. Digital books can be distributed globally, but publishers persist in dividing the world into territories with separate editorial staffs. In the digital age it is daft to take months or even years to get a book to market. And if they are to distinguish their wares from selfpublished dross, they must get better at choosing books, honing ideas and polishing copy. If publishers are to hold readers’ attention they must tell a better story—and edit out all the spelling mistakes as well.
[C] For readers, this is splendid. Just as Amazon collapsed distance by bringing a huge range of books to outoftheway places, it is now collapsing time, by enabling readers to download books instantly. Moreover, anybody can now publish a book, through Amazon and a number of other services.
[D] During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the display tables at the front of bookshops in the runup to Christmas. It is an impressive display of competitive commercial activity. It is also increasingly pointless.
[E] Yet there are still two important jobs for publishers. They act as the venture capitalists of the words business, advancing money to authors of worthwhile books that might not be written otherwise. And they are editors, picking good books and improving them. So it would be good, not just for their shareholders but also for intellectual life, if they survived.
[F] More quickly than almost anyone predicted, ebooks are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest ebook retailer, has lowered the price of its Kindle ereaders to the point where people do not fear to take them to the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one fifth of the largest publishers sales are of e books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper ones. The proportion is growing quickly, not least because many bookshops are closing.
[G] They are doing some things right. Having watched the record companies impotence after Apple wrested control of music pricing from them, the publishers have managed to retain their ability to set prices. But they are missing some tricks. The music and film industries have started to bundle electronic with physical versions of their products—by, for instance, providing those who buy a DVD of a movie with a code to download it from the internet. Publishers, similarly, should bundle e books with paper books.
D→1→2→3→E→4→5
Passage 3
Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs C and F have been correctly placed.
[A] Fifteen years ago Vincent Bolloré, a French industrialist, decided to get into the business of electricity storage. He started a project to produce rechargeable batteries in two small rooms of his family mansion in Brittany. “I asked him, ‘what are you doing? and I told him to stop, that it wouldn t go anywhere,” says Alain Minc, a business consultant in Paris who has advised Mr Bolloré for many years. Fortunately, he says, Mr Bolloré continued.
[B] The real aim for Mr Bolloré, however, is to showcase his battery technology. His group has developed a type of rechargeable cell, called a lithiummetal polymer (LMP) battery. This is different from the lithiumion batteries used by most of the car industry. Mr Bolloré believes fervently that his batteries are superior, mainly because they are safer. Lithiumion batteries can explode if they overheat—which in the past happened in some laptops. Carmakers incorporate safety features to prevent the batterys cells from overheating.
[C] The city of Paris will cover most of the cost of the stations, but Mr Bolloré will pay an estimated 105m to supply his design of “Bluecar” vehicles and their batteries. He will bear a further 80m a year in running costs. The citys estimates for how popular the new service will be are highly optimistic, said a recent study by the government. Autolib could make 33ma year for Mr Bolloré, according to the study, but it could easily just breakeven or lose as much as 60mannually. Autolib will also be the first time the group has operated in a big consumerfacing business where it will be held directly responsible for problems such as vandalism or breakdowns.
[D] Going up against the rest of the car industry may seem quixotic. Before he won Autolib, Mr Bolloré says, people may well have thought he and his team were mad to venture into such a new area. But they underestimated his groups knowledge of electricity storage, he maintains. And if the growing number of electric cars on the road does lead to safety concerns over batteries, then Mr Bollorés LMP technology could move from the margin to the mainstream—provided, of course, they pass their test on the streets of Paris.
[E] “Being a family company means we can invest for the long term,” says Mr Bolloré, who has spent 1.5 billion on battery development since 1996. Most of his groups money comes from transport and logistics, with a strong position in Africa, and from petrol distribution in France. Mr Bolloré has also made billions from financial investments such as in Rue Imperiale, a holding company. Autolib will be keenly watched throughout the car industry. It is the first largescale city carsharing service to use only electric vehicles from the outset; a scheme in Ulm in Germany, by contrast, started with diesel vehicles. Running Autolib could mean shouldering substantial losses for the Bolloré Group. Mr Bolloré was not expected to win the contract, but did so mainly because he offered low rental charges for drivers.
[F] Mr Bollorés LMP batteries are said to be more stable when being charged and discharged, which is when batteries come under most strain. Just two European carmakers have seen the batteries, which are made only by the Bolloré Group. One carindustry executive says that though the LMP technology is attractive from a safety point of view, the batteries have to be heated up to function—which takes power and makes them less convenient to use.
[G] Mr Bollorés technology is about to hit the road. In 2010 his group won a contract to run Autolib, a carsharing scheme designed by Bertrand Delane, the mayor of Paris, which will put 3,000 electric vehicles on the city s streets along with 1,120 stations for parking and recharging. Construction of the stations started in the summer, and Mr Bolloré will begin testing the service on October 1st before opening it to the public in December. Rechargeable batteries are now an important technology for the global car industry as it starts to make ever more electric and hybrid vehicles. Renault, a French manufacturer, is alone investing 4 billion ($5.6 billion) in a range of electric models which it will start selling this autumn. Many producers will unveil new electric vehicles next week when the Frankfurt Motor Show opens.
1→2→3→C→4→F→5
Passage 4
Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs A and D have been correctly placed.
[A] The contest has been held in anticipation of a new era of pylon building. By 2020, a quarter of the countrys current generating capacity will need replacing; the government hopes the new supply will come from renewable sources such as onshore and offshore wind farms. Todays offshore capacity is just 7% of ministers targets for the end of the decade—and all of the new generation out to sea will need to land transmission cables ashore. The existing electricity grid is in the wrong place for many of these new sources of power. That creates a paradox: trying to save the world by cutting carbon emissions means scarring particular bits of it by dragging new power lines through scenic countryside.
[B] This is an old problem. The launch of Britains national electricity grid in 1933 was decried for desecrating the landscape. More recently, the location of wind farms has prompted similar debates. The difficulty with pylons is that they go everywhere. Scotland has had nearly five years of disputes over the planned 600pylon upgrade of a transmission line running from Beauly in the Highlands to the central belt where more electricity is used. The same clashes will now play out in England and Wales. A new planning commission was set up in 2009 to speed up the glacial pace of infrastructure decisionmaking. But weighing economic demands against beauty remains a thorny and potentially time-consuming job.
[C] Opponents of towering pylons say the answer is to bury power lines: at present only 950km of Britains 13,000km of highvoltage cable runs underground, most of it in urban areas. But sinking wires, which means clearing a corridor 17m to 40m wide and cannot be done in all terrains, carries an environmental toll too. “You are effectively sterilising land use in the area,” says Richard Smith of National Grid; no planting, digging or building is allowed. That makes installing subsurface cables 12 to 17 times as pricey as overhead lines, according to National Grid (they also need replacing sooner). Since consumers pay for this through their electricity bills, everyone would have to fork out to protect the views and house prices of a few people.
[D] So finding a new shape for pylons may be only one aspect of the coming power rows. But it will be a tricky one. Typically the best designs combine elegance with utility. Yet rather than being a feature in itself, the optimal pylon blends in with nature. Thats a tough task for 20 tons of steel, however impressively shaped.
[E] The skeletal, lattice design of Britains electricity pylons has changed little since the first one was raised in 1928. Many countries have copied these “striding steel sentries”, as the poet Stephen Spender called them; more than 88,000 now march across the countrys intermittently green and pleasant land.
[F] Now six new models are vying to replace these familiar steel towers. The finalists in a governmentsponsored competition to design a new pylon include a single shard spiking into the sky and an arced, open bow. After a winner is picked in October, National Grid, which runs the electricitytransmission network, will decide whether to construct it.
[G] But the price of despoiling pretty scenery is hard to calculate. The risk is that the cost of damaging the landscape is ignored because it is not ascribed a monetary value, says Steve Albon, coauthor of a governmentcommissioned report on how much the natural environment contributes to Britains economy. As yet, though, no one has found an easy or accepted measure of this worth to help make decisions.
1→2→A→3→4→5→D