2024年英语专业八级考试真题及答案解析

(1)If the properties of human language make it such a unique communication system, quite different from the communication systems of other creatures, then it would seem extremely unlikely that other creatures would be able to understand it. Some humans, however, do not behave as if this is the case. There is, after all, a lot of spoken language directed by humans to animals, apparently under the impression that the animal follows what is being said. Riders can say Whoa to horses and they stop. Should we treat these examples as evidence that non-humans can understand human language?Probably not. The standard explanation is that the animal produces a particular behavior in response to a particular sound-stimulus or noise, but does not actually“understand”what the words in the noise mean. (2)In an early attempt to teach a chimpanzee to use human language, in the 1930s, two scientists(Luella and Winthrop Kellogg)raised an infant chimpanzee together with their baby son. The chimpanzee, called Gua, was reported to be able to understand about a hundred words, but did not“say”any of them. In the 1940s, a chimpanzee named Viki was reared by another scientist couple(Catherine and Keith Hayes)in their own home, exactly as if she was a human child. These foster parents spent five years attempting to get Viki to“say”English words by trying to shape her mouth as she produced sounds. Viki eventually managed to produce some words, rather poorly articulated versions of“mama”,“papa”and“cup”.In retrospect, this was a remarkable achievement since it has become clear that non-human primates do not actually have a physically structured vocal tract which is suitable for articulating the sounds used in speech. (3)Recognizing that a chimpanzee was a poor candidate for spoken language learning, another scientist couple(Beatrix and Allen Gardner)set out to teach a female chimpanzee called Washoe to use a version of American Sign Language. This sign language has all the essential properties of human language and is learned by many congenitally deaf children as their natural first language. From the beginning, the Gardner's and their research assistants raised Washoe like a human child in a comfortable domestic environment. Sign language was always used when Washoe was around and she was encouraged to use signs. In a period of three and a half years, Washoe came to use signs for more than a hundred words. Even more impressive was Washoe's ability to take these forms and combine them to produce“sentences”of the type gimme tickle, more fruit and open food drink. Some of the forms appear to have been inventions by Washoe, as in her novel sign for“bib”and in the combination“water bird”(referring to a swan), which would seem to indicate that her communication system had the potential for productivity. (4)At the same time as Washoe was learning sign language, another chimpanzee named Sarah was being taught(by Ann and David Premack)to use a set of plastic shapes for the purpose of communicating with humans. These plastic shapes represented“words"that could be arranged in sequence to build“sentences”.The basic approach was quite different from that of the Gardner's. Sarah was systematically trained to associate these shapes with objects or actions 、She remained an animal in a cage, being trained with food rewards to manipulate a set of symbols. Once she had learned to use a large number of these plastic shapes, Sarah was capable of getting an apple by selecting the correct plastic shape(a blue triangle)from a large array. Sarah was also capable of producing“sentences”such as“Mary give chocolate Sarah”and had the impressive capacity to understand complex structures such as"If Sarah put red on green, Mary give Sarah chocolate". (5)A psychologist Herbert Terrace argued that chimpanzees simply produce signs in response to the demands of people and tend to repeat signs those people use, yet they are treated as if they are taking part in a “conversation”.As in many critical studies of animal learning, the chimpanzees'behavior is viewed as a type of conditioned response to cues provided by human trainers. (6)Important lessons have been learned from attempts to teach chimpanzees how to use forms of language. We have answered some questions. Were Washoe and Sarah capable of taking part in interaction with humans by using a symbol system chosen by humans and not chimpanzees?The answer is clearly“Yes.”Could Washoe and Sarah go on to perform linguistically on a level comparable to a two-year-old child?The answer is just as clearly“No.”In arriving at these answers, we have also had to face the fact that, even with our list of key properties, we still don't seem to have a non-controversial definition of what counts as“using language".It has to be fair to say that, in both cases, we observe the participants“using language”.However, there is a difference. Underlying the two-year-old's communicative activity is the capacity to develop a highly complex system of sounds and structures, plus a set of computational procedures, which will allow the child to produce extended discourse containing a potentially infinite number of novel utterances. No other creature has been observed"using language"in this ense. It is in this more fundamental or abstract sense that we say that language is uniquely human.

(1)It was well past midnight this past July and the round-the-clock Arctic sun was shining on Mercy Bay. Exhausted Parks Canada archaeologist Ryan Harris was experiencing a rare moment of rest on the rocky beach, looking out over the bay's dark, ice-studded water. Around him; a dozen red-and-yellow tents.lined the shoreline—the only signs of life. Every day for the previous two weeks, work had started by mid-morning and continued nonstop for 16 hours. Night and day had litle relevance in the murky, near-freezing waters. Along with Parks Canada's chief of underwater archaeology, Marc-Andre Bernier, Harris has overseen more than 100 dives at this remote inlet of Banks Island in Aulavik National Park, exploring the wreck of HMS Investigator, a British vessel that has sat on the bottom of the bay for more than 160 years. (2)Harris and a small team of archaeologists had discovered Investigator in 2010 and returned in 2011 with a larger team to dive, study, and document the wreck, which holds a critical place in the history of Arctic exploration. Twenty-five feet below the surface, Investigator sits upright, intact, and.remarkably well preserved. Silt covers everything below the main deck, entombing the officers'cabins, the ship's galey, and a full library. The archaeologists had intended to leave the wreck and its artifacts where they had lain since the polar ship was abandoned, trapped in ice, on June 3,1853.Artifact recovery was not part of their original plan, but that plan changed after their first few dives. (3)The team was instantly surprised by the number of artifacts they saw—muskets ( 火 枪 ) , shoes, and hunks of copper sheathing rested on Investigator's upper deck, dangled off the hull, or lay haphazardly on the sediment. Leaving these artifacts behind in Mercy Bay would have made them vulnerable to the icebergs that regularly scour the bay's floor, including the ones the six-man dive team had been dodging since their arrival. (4)Each piece fished from the water was a clue to life at sea aboard a ship during a period of British fervor for Arctic exploration. The captain of Investigator, Robert McClure, was originally sent to find and rescue two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, that Sir John Franklin had led into the Arctic in 1845 to discover the long- sought Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Investigator's voyage ended, without sight or word of Franklin's ships or crew, when it was set upon by ice in Mercy Bay. After 39 months at sea, the listing ship sat, slowly being crushed on all sides, for three frigid years—with no Inuit encounters, no British search parties, and no relief. For much of that time, McClure and his crew of 60 were desperate and under constant threat of starvation, until a surprising rescue in the spring of 1853.Fifty-five men survived the ordeal. (5)In July 2010, after months of study to pinpoint Investigator's resting place, the actual discovery of the wreck took just a few minutes. Harris was in the bay in an inflatable boat testing sonar equipment when the ·wreck came into range. The four hours of video gathered on that trip.showed that the ship was, in essence, frozen in time, protected by the cold water and opaque, light-blocking ice cover. It would be a year before they could return with cold-water diving equipment to have a closer, more detailed look. Over that year, the Parks Canada team pored over photographs and examined glowing gold ultrasound images that showed timber from the wreck scattered across the upper deck like matchsticks. They sought and received the blessing for a more intensive exploration of the wreck site from the 136 residents of Sachs Harbour, an Inuvialuit(Inuit from the western Arctic)community on the southwestern tip of Banks Island, the closest permanent community, some 125 miles away. In addition to the underwater work to document the wreck, archaeologist Henry Cary led a land-based survey and excavation team of Inuvialuit archaeologists, conservation officers, and park staff. It fell upon Cary to shuttle the 8,820 pounds of equipment up to the 74th parallel, including tents, a three-week supply of food, two boats, diving gear, compressors, recording equipment, surveying tools, and 20 barrels for collecting fresh drinking water. (6)The archaeologists came prepared for delays, nasty weather, and polar bears—but they weren't prepared for the number of artifacts that needed recovery. Harris, Bernier, Cary, and their crews had packed cameras, lasers, and measuring tapes to document the sites but fewer items to help them retrieve, excavate, or transfer artifacts. Recovering the wreck's finds quickly used up their small toolkit for stabilizing artifacts: foam padding, tongue depressors, and gauze bandages. (7)“We had not really envisioned the number of artifacts that were visible and exposed on the deck. So, basically, we had to improvise,"says Bernier. (8)Someone ripped the lid of a large black storage case off its hinges to use as a cradle to lift a bent and corroded musket from the frigid waters. A large food cooler was loaded with a shredded, twisted, oxidized sample of the copper sheathing used by the British navy to reinforce their Arctic fleet for contact with icebergs. To protect a fragile rectangle of encrusted felt—a novel addition to Investigator that was intended to keep the ship watertight—Harris fashioned a cover out of absorbent chamois( 鹿 皮 ) , ripped up an old black T-shirt to place underneath it, and sandwiched the artifact between floorboards taken from the boat that had shuttled them between land and the wreck. The artifacts then made a more than 4,000-mile journey, by helicopter and commercial airliner, to the Parks Canada conservation lab in Ottawa, where they are being conserved and studied today.

(1)My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farmhand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell. He had then a horse of his own.and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farmhands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head's saloon—crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farmhands. Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o'clock father drove home along a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for the night and himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life. He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world. (2)It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, then a country school teacher, and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happened to the two people. They became ambitious. The passion for getting up in the world took possession of them. (3)It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a school teacher she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of how some people rose from poverty to fame and greatness and as I lay beside her—in the days of her lying-in—she may have dreamed that I would someday rule men and cities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place as a farmhand, sell his horse and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled grey eyes. For herself she wanted nothing. For father and myself she was incurably ambitious, (4)The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly. They rented ten acres of poor stony land on Griggs's Road, eight miles from Bidwell, and launched into chicken raising. I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impressions of life there. From the beginning they were impressions of disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life, I atribute it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm. (5)One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.f disease does not kill them they wait until your.expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon—to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders. (6)For ten years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another. They decided to move into the town of Bidwell, and embarked in the restaurant business. After ten years of worry with incubators that did not hatch, and with tiny—and in their own way lovely—balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullerhood and from that into dead henhood, we threw all aside, packed our belongings on a wagon and drove down Griggs's Road toward Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life. (7)We must have been a sad looking lot, not, I fancy, unlike refugees fleeing from a battlefield. Mother and I walked in the road. The wagon that contained our goods.had been borrowed for the day from Mr. Albert Griggs, a neighbor. Out of its sides stuck the legs of cheap chairs and at the back of the pile of beds, tables, and boxes filled with kitchen utensils was a crate of live chickens, and on top of that the baby carriage in which I had been wheeled about in my infancy. Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don't know. It was unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken. People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging. (8)Father rode on top of the wagon. He was then a bald-headed man of forty-five, a little fat and from long association with mother and the chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged. All during our ten years on the chicken farm he had worked as a laborer on neighboring farms and most of the money he had earned had been spent for remedies to cure chicken diseases. There were two little patches of hair on father's head just above his ears. I remember that as a child I used to sit looking at him when he had gone to sleep in a chair before the stove on Sunday afternoons in the winter. I had at that time already begun to read books and have notions of my own and the bald path that led over the top of his head was, I fancied, something like a broad road, such a road as Caesar might have made on which to lead his legions out of Rome and into the wonders of an unknown world. (9)One might write a book concerning our flight from the chicken farm into town. Mother and I walked the entire eight miles—she to be sure that nothing fell from the wagon and I to see the wonders of the world.