大学英语四级阅读理解配套练习题

　　One morning, I picked up a magazine from the table and attempted to while away the time with it, while my companion munched silently at his toast. One of the articles had a pencil mark at the heading, and I naturally began to run my eye through it.

　　Its somewhat ambitious title was “The Book of Life, ” and it attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deduction appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thought. Deceit, according to him, was impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at them they might well consider him as a necromancer.

　　“From a drop of water, ”said the writer, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. ”

　　This smartly written piece of theory I could not accept until a succession of evidences justified it.

　　配套练习：

　　1. What is the author’s attitude toward Holmes?

　　[A]Praising.

　　[B]Critical.

　　[C]Ironical.

　　[D]Distaste.

　　2. What way did the author take to stick out Holmes’ uniqueness?

　　[A]By deduction.

　　[B]By explanation.

　　[C]By contrast.

　　[D]By analysis.

　　3. What was the Holmes’ idea about knowledge-learning?

　　[A]Learning what every body learned.

　　[B]Learning what was useful to you.

　　[C]Learning whatever you came across.

　　[D]Learning what was different to you.

　　4. What did the article mentioned in the passage talk about?

　　[A]One may master the way of reasoning through observation.

　　[B]One may become rather critical through observation and analysis.

　　[C]One may become rather sharp through observation and analysis.

　　[D]One may become practical through observation and analysis.

　　Mass transportation revised the social and economic fabric of the American city in three fundamental ways. It catalyzed physical expansion, it sorted out people and land uses, and it accelerated the inherent instability of urban life. By opening vast areas of unoccupied land for residential expansion, the omnibuses, horse railways, commuter trains, and electric trolleys pulled settled regions outward two to four times more distant form city centers than they were in the premodern era. In 1850, for example, the borders of Boston lay scarcely two miles from the old business district; by the turn of the century the radius extended ten miles. Now those who could afford it could live far removed from the old city center and still commute there for work, shopping, and entertainment. The new accessibility of land around the periphery of almost every major city sparked an explosion of real estate development and fueled what we now know as urban sprawl. Between 1890 and 1920, for example, some 250,000 new residential lots were recorded within the borders of Chicago, most of them located in outlying areas. Over the same period, another 550,000 were plotted outside the city limits but within the metropolitan area. Anxious to take advantage of the possibilities of commuting, real estate developers added 800,000 potential building sites to the Chicago region in just thirty years – lots that could have housed five to six million people.

　　Of course, many were never occupied; there was always a huge surplus of subdivided, but vacant, land around Chicago and other cities. These excesses underscore a feature of residential expansion related to the growth of mass transportation: urban sprawl was essentially unplanned. It was carried out by thousands of small investors who paid little heed to coordinated land use or to future land users. Those who purchased and prepared land for residential purposes, particularly land near or outside city borders where transit lines and middle-class inhabitants were anticipated, did so to create demand as much as to respond to it. Chicago is a prime example of this process. Real estate subdivision there proceeded much faster than population growth.

　　1. With which of the following subjects is the passage mainly concerned?

　　[A] Types of mass transportation.

　　[B] Instability of urban life.

　　[C] How supply and demand determine land use.

　　[D] The effect of mass transportation on urban expansion.

　　2. Why does the author mention both Boston and Chicago?

　　[A] To demonstrate positive and negative effects of growth.

　　[B] To exemplify cities with and without mass transportation.

　　[C] To show mass transportation changed many cities.

　　[D] To contrast their rate of growth.

　　3. According to the passage, what was one disadvantage of residential expansion?

　　[A] It was expensive.

　　[B] It happened too slowly.

　　[C] It was unplanned.

　　[D] It created a demand for public transportation.

　　4. The author mentions Chicago in the second paragraph as an example of a city,

　　[A] that is large.

　　[B] that is used as a model for land development.

　　[C] where the development of land exceeded population growth.

　　[D] with an excellent mass transportation system.