晒晒英语专业考研10大院校真题之上外篇

III. READING COMPREHENSION (45 points)

In this section there are five reading passages followed by a total of 30 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then write your answers on your Answer Sheet.

Passage One

For most of the 20th century, the solution to the mystery of the original Americans-where did they come from, when, and how?--- seemed as clear as the geography of the Bering Strait, the climate of the last ice age, and the ubiquity of finely wrought stone hunting weapons known as Clovis points.

According to the ruling theory, bands of big-game hunters trekked out of Siberia sometime before 11,500 years ago. They crossed into Alaska when the floor of the Bering Strait, drained dry by the accumulation of water in a frozen world's massive glaciers, was a land bridge between continents, and found themselves in a trackless continent, the New World when it was truly new.

The hunters, so the story went, moved south through a corridor between glaciers and soon flourished on the Great Plains and in the Southwest of what is now the United States, their presence widely marked by distinctive stone projectile points first discovered near the town of Clovis, New Mexico. In less than 1,000 years, these Clovis people and their distinctive stone points made it all the way to the tip of South America. They were presumably the founding population of today's American Indians.

Now a growing body of intriguing evidence is telling a much different story. From Alaska to Brazil and southern Chile, artifacts and skeletons are forcing archaeologists to abandon Clovis orthodoxy and come to terms with a more complex picture of earliest American settlement. People may have arrived thousands to tens of thousands of years sooner, in many waves of migration and by a number of routes. Their ancestry may not have been only Asian. Some of the migrations may have originated in Australia or Europe.

1.Which of the following statements best describes (he main idea of this passage?

A.Hunters from Siberia crossed the Bering Strait 11,500 years ago.

B.The Clovis people may not have been the first to arrive.

C.Clovis points were first found in New Mexico.

D.During the last ice age, the Bering Strait was dry land.

2.The word trekked in Line 5 means

A.traveled.

B.swam.

C.sailed.

D.hunted.

3.According to this passage, the Clovis people may come to North America from

A.Australia.

B.Chile.

C.Siberia.

D.New Mexico.

4.The Clovis people are named after the place where

A.they first camped in North America.

B.their tents and burials were first found.

C.they crossed into North America.

D.their stone points were first found.

5.Scientist now believe that Native Americans originally came from

A.Siberia in a single migration about 11,500 years ago.

B.al! parts of North and South America.

C.Europe only.

D. many places, including Siberia, Europe, and Australia