2005 The University as BusinessA number of colleges and universities have announced steeptuition increases for next year much steeper than the current,very low, rate of inflation. They say the increases are needed becauseof a loss in value of university endowments heavily investing in common 1 stock. I am skeptical. A business firm chooses the price that maximizesits net revenues, irrespective fluctuations in income; and increasingly the 2 outlookof universities in the United States is indistinguishable from those of 3 business firms.The rise in tuitions may reflect the fact economic uncertainty 4 increases the demand for education. The biggest cost of beingin the school is foregoing income from a job (this is primarily a factor in 5 graduate and professional-school tuition; the poor one's job prospects, 6 the more sense it makes to reallocate time from the job market to education,in order to make oneself more marketable.The ways which universities make themselves attractive to students 7 include soft majors, student evaluations of teachers, giving studentsa governance role, and eliminate required courses. 8 Sky-high tuitions have caused universities to regard their students as customers. Just as business firms sometimes collude to shorten the 9 rigors of competition, universities collude to minimize the cost to them of the athletes whom they recruit in order to stimulate alumni donations, so the best athletes now often bypass higher education in order to obtain salaries earlierfrom professional teams. And until they were stopped by the antitrust authorities, the Ivy League schools colluded to limit competition for the best students, by agreeing not to award scholarships on the basis of merit rather than purelyof need-just like business firms agreeing not to give discounts on their best 10 customer.2006 We use language primarily as a means of communication withother human beings. Each of us shares with the community in which welive a store of words and meanings as well as agreeing conventions as 1to the way in which words should be arranged to convey a particular 2message: the English speaker has in his disposal vocabulary and a 3set of grammatical rules which enables him to communicate his 4thoughts and feelings, in a variety of styles, to the other English 5 speakers. His vocabulary, in particular, both that which he uses activelyand that which he recognizes, increases in size as he growsold as a result of education and experience. 6But, whether the language store is relatively small or large, the systemremains no more, than a psychological reality for tike inpidual, unlesshe has a means of expressing it in terms able to be seen by another 7member of his linguistic community; he bas to give tile system aconcrete transmission form. We tak e it for granted rice? two most 8common forms of transmission-by means of sounds produced by ourvocal organs (speech or by visual signs (writing. And these are 9among most striking of human achievements. 102007 From what has been said, it must be clear that no one canmake very positive statements about how language originated.There is no material in any language today and in the earliest 1 __ _ records of ancient languages show us language in a new and 2 _ emerging state. It is often said, of course, that the language 3 _ ______ originated in cries of anger, fear, pain and pleasure, and the 4 _ necessary evidence is entirely lacking: there are no remotetribes, no ancient records, providing evidence ofa language with a large proportion of such cries 5 _than we find in English. It is true that the absenceof such evidence does not disprove the theory, but in6_other grounds too the theory is not very attractive.People of all races and languages make rather similarnoises in return to pain or pleasure. The fact that7such noises are similar on the lips of Frenchmenand Malaysians whose languages are utterly different,serves to emphasize on the fundamental difference8between these noises and language proper. We maysay that the cries of pain or chortles of amusementare largely reflex actions, instinctive to large extent, 9whereas language proper does not consist of signsbut of these that have to be learnt and that are10wholly conventional.08The desire to use language as a sign of national identity is avery natural one, and in result language has played a prominent ____1____ part in national moves. Men have often felt the need to cultivate ____2____ a given language to show that they are distinctive from another ____3____ race whose hegemony they resent. At the time the United States ____4____ split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals thatindependence should be linguistically accepted by the use of a ____5____ different language from those of Britain. There was even one ____6____ proposal that Americans should adopt Hebrew. Others favouredthe adoption of Greek, though, as one man put it, things wouldcertainly be simpler for Americans if they stuck on to English ____7____ and made the British learn Greek. At the end, as everyone ____8____ knows, the two countries adopted the practical and satisfactorysolution of carrying with the same language as before. ____9____Since nearly two hundred years now, they have shown the world ____10____ that political independence and national identity can be completewithout sacrificing the enormous mutual advantages of a commonlanguage.09专八改错原题Proofreading & Error Correction:The previous section has shown how quickly a rhyme passesfrom one school child to the next and illustrates the further difference(1___________ between shcool lore and nursery lore. In nursery lore a verse, learntin early childhood, is not usually passed on again when the little listener(2___________ has grown up, and has children of their own, or even grandchildren. (3____________ The period between learning a nursery rhyme and transmittingIt may be something from twenty to seventy years. With the playground(4_____________ lore, therefore, a rhyme may be excitedly passed on within the very hour (5___________it is learnt; and in the general, it passes between children ofthe (6________________same age, or nearly so, since it is uncommon for the difference in agebetween playmates to be more than five years. If therefore, a playgroundrhyme can be shown to have been currently for a hundred years, or (7__________ even just for fifty, it follows that it has been retransmitting overand over; very possibly it has passed along a chain of two or three (8___________ hundred young hearers and tellers, and the wonder is that it remains live(9_______________ after so much handling, to let alone that it bears resemblance to the (10____________2010年专八真题改错原文So far as we can tell, all human languages are equally complete and perfect as instruments of communication: that is, every language appears to be as well equipped as any other to say the things its speakers want to say. It may or may not be appropriate to talk about primitive peoples or cultures, but that is another matter. Certainly, not all groups of people are equally competent in nuclear physics or psychology or the cultivation of rice or the engraving of Benares brass. But this is not the fault of their language. The Eskimos can speak about snow with a great deal more precision and subtlety than we can in English, but this is not because the Eskimo language (one of those sometimes miscalled ?primitive? is inherently more precise and subtle t han English. This example does not bring to light a defect in English, a show of unexpected ?primitiveness?. The position is simply and obviously that the Eskimos and the English live in different environments. The English language would be just as rich in terms for different kinds of snow, presumably, if the environments in which English was habitually used made such distinction important.Similarly, we have no reason to doubt that the Eskimo language could be as precise and subtle on the subject of motor manufacture or cricket if these topics formed part ofthe Eskimos? life. For obvious historical reasons, Englishmen in the nineteenth cen tury could not talk about motorcars with the minute discrimination which is possible today:cars were not a part of their culture. But they had a host of terms for horse-drawn vehicleswhich send us, puzzled, to a historical dictionary when we are reading Scott or Dickens. How many of us could distinguish between a chaise, a landau, a victoria, a brougham, a coupe, a gig, a diligence, a whisky, a calash, a tilbury, a carriole, a phaeton, and a clarence ?2005 答案解析:1. investing应改为invested。