2021年上半年大学英语四级阅读明白3篇
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【篇一】2021年上半年大学英语四级阅读明白
Forecasting of Statistics
Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus become part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected influx, few inns would have a manager to acco妹妹odate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay long enough to get a good sampling. Methods of gathering, recording, and evaluating information have presumably been improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages and seers to get a clue to future events. The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more i妹妹ediate concern, the reliability of present day economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about newfangled computers and high-falutin mathematical system in terms of excitement and endearment which we, at least in our younger years when these things mattered, would have associated more readily with the desc ription of a fair maiden. But others pointed to the deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets, and the President-elect of the Association cautioned that “high powered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of what crude and inadequate statisticians assume.” We left his birthday party somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired, that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical exactitude.
【篇二】2021年上半年大学英语四级阅读明白
The Present Is the Most Important
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men wouldsteadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it withsuch things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If werespected only what is inevitable and has a right to be , music and poetry would resoundalong the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthythings have any permanent and absolute existence, --that petty fears and petty pleasure arebut the shadow of reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes andslumbering, by consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life ofroutine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundation. Children, whoplay life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live worthily, butwho think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book,that “there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought upby a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to thebarbarous race with which be lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him,revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and heknew himself to be a prince. So soul, from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes itsown character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself tobe Brahme.” We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should give us an account ofthe realities he beheld, we should not recognize the place in his des cription. Look at ameeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop. Or a dwelling-house, and say what thatthing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Menesteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adamand after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all thesetimes and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the presentmoment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all ages. And we are enabled toapprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching ofthe reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to ourconceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives inconceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had as fair and noble a design but some of hisposterity at least could accomplish it.
【篇三】2021年上半年大学英语四级阅读明白
Europe’s Gypsies, Are They a Nation?
The striving of countries in Central Europe to enter the European Union may offer anunprecedented chance to the continent’s Gypsies (or Roman) to be recognized as a nation,albeit one without a defined territory. And if they were to achieve that they might even seeksome kind of formal place—at least a total population outnumbers that of many of the Union’spresent and future countries. Some experts put the figure at 4m-plus; some proponents ofGypsy rights go as high as 15m.
Unlike Jews, Gypsies have had no known ancestral land to hark back to. Though their languageis related to Hindi, their territorial origins are misty. Romanian peasants held them to be bornon the moon. Other Europeans (wrongly) thought them migrant Egyptians, hence thederivative Gypsy. Most probably they were itinerant metal workers and entertainers whodrifted west from India in the 7th century.
However, since co妹妹unism in Central Europe collapsed a decade ago, the notion ofRomanestan as a landless nation founded on Gypsy culture has gained ground. TheInternational Romany Union, which says it stands for 10m Gypsies in more than 30 countries, isfostering the idea of “self-rallying”. It is trying to promote a standard and written form of thelanguage; it waves a Gypsy flag (green with a wheel) when it lobbies in such places as theUnited Bations; and in July it held a congress in Prague, The Czech capital. Where PresidentVaclav Havel said that Gypsies in his own country and elsewhere should have a better deal.
At the congress a Slovak-born lawyer, Emil Scuka, was elected president of the InternationalTomany Union. Later this month a group of elected Gypsy politicians, including members ofparliament, mayors and local councilors from all over Europe (OSCE), to discuss how topersuade more Gypsies to get involved in politics.
The International Romany Union is probably the most representative of the outfits that speakfor Gypsies, but that is not saying a lot. Of the several hundred delegates who gathered at itscongress, few were democratically elected; oddly, none came from Hungary, whose Gypsiesare perhaps the world’s best organized, with some 450 Gypsy bodies advising local councilsthere. The union did, however, announce its ambition to set up a parliament, but how itwould actually be elected was left undecided.
So far, the European Co妹妹ission is wary of encouraging Gypsies to present themselves as anation. The might, it is feared, open a Pandora’s box already containing Basques, Corsicans andother awkward peoples. Besides, acknowledging Gypsies as a nation might backfire, just whenseveral countries, particularly Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, are beginning to treatthem better, in order to qualify for EU membership. “The EU’s whole premise is to overcomedifferences, not to highlight them,” says a nervous Eurocrat.
But the idea that the Gypsies should win some kind of special recognition as Europe’s largestcontinent wide minority, and one with a terrible history of persecution, is catching on . Gypsieshave suffered many pogroms over the centuries. In Romania, the country that still has thelargest number of them (more than 1m), in the 19th century they were actually enslaved. Hitlertried to wipe them out, along with the Jews.
“Gypsies deserve some space within European structures,” says Jan Marinus Wiersma, aDutchman in the European Parliament who suggests that one of the current co妹妹issionersshould be responsible for Gypsy affairs. Some prominent Gypsies say they should be moredirectly represented, perhaps with a quota in the European Parliament. That, they argue,might give them a boost. There are moves afoot to help them to get money for, among otherthings, a Gypsy university.
One big snag is that Europe’s Gypsies are, in fact, extremely heterogeneous. They belong tomany different, and often antagonistic, clans and tribes, with no co妹妹on language or religion,Their self-proclaimed leaders have often proved quarrelsome and corrupt. Still, says,Dimitrina Petrova, head of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, Gypsies’ sharedexperience of suffering entitles them to talk of one nation; their potential unity, she says,stems from “being regarded as sub-human by most majorities in Europe.”
And they have begun to be a bit more pragmatic. In Slovakia and Bulgaria, for instance, Gypsypolitical parties are trying to form electoral blocks that could win seats in parliament. InMacedonia, a Gypsy party already has some—and even runs a municipality. Nicholas Gheorge,an expert on Gypsy affairs at the OSCE, reckons that, spread over Central Europe, there arenow about 20 Gypsy MPS and mayors, 400-odd local councilors, and a growing number ofbusinessmen and intellectuals.
That is far from saying that they have the people or the cash to forge a nation. But, with theGypsy question on the EU’s agenda in Central Europe, they are making ground.