编号

专八真题

命中题目

分数

1

（专八人文知识真题）

33.Which country is known as the Land of Maple Leaf?

A) Canada.                         

B) New Zealand.

C) Great Britain.                       

D) The United States of America.

（《英语专业八级考试人文知识满分突破》P78第1题）

1.       Which country is known as the Land of Maple Leaf?

A.     The United States of America.

B.     The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

C.     New Zealand.

D.     Canada.

100%

1分

2

34. Who wrote the famous pamphlet, The Common Sense, before the American Revolution?

A) Thomas Jefferson.                    

B) Thomas Paine.

C) John Adams.                        

D) Benjamin Franklin.

（《英语专业八级考试人文知识满分突破》P152第7题）

7. Jonathan Edwards’ works include the following EXCEPT

A. The Freedom of the Will.

B. The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended.

C. The Nature of True Virtue.

D. The Common Sense.

100%

1分

3

35. Virginia Woolf was an important female         in the 20th-century England.

A. poet

B. biographer

C. playwright

D. novelist

（《英语专业八级考试人文知识满分突破》P270第7题）

7.          is not a modernist novelist of Britain.

 A. James Joyce

 B. Virginia Woolf

 C. D. H. Lawrence

 D. Henry James

100%

1分

4

37. Which of the following best explores American myth in the 20th century?

A. The Great Gatsby.

B. The Sun Also Rises.

C. The Sound and the Fury.

D. Beyond the Horizon.

（《英语专业八级考试人文知识满分突破》P179第3题）

3. In 1925, Francis Scott Fitzgerald published his third novel ——           , a masterpiece related to irony and disillusionment of the American Dream.

A. The Great Gatsby

B. Tender Is the Night

C. The Old Man and the Sea

D. Desire under the Elms

100%

1分

5

2011专八人文知识真题：

38.        is defined as the study of the relationship between language and mind.

A. Semantics

B. Pragmatics

C. Cognitive linguistics

D. Sociolinguistics

《英语专业八级考试人文知识与改错》P199第123题）

22.       investigates the interrelation of language and mind.

A. Psycholinguistics

B. Sociolinguistics

C. Anthropological linguistics

D. Computational linguistics

100%

1分

6

39. A vowel is different from a consonant in English because of

A. absence of obstruction.

B. presence of obstruction.

C. manner of articulation.

D. place of articulation.

（《英语专业八级考试人文知识满分突破》P193第55题）

55. The distinction between vowels and consonants lies in      .

A. the place of articulation     

B. the obstruction of airstreams

C. the position of the tongue

D. the shape of the lips

100%

1分

（专八听力讲座部分）

Classifications of Cultures

Good morning, everyone. Today we’ll look at culture or rather classifications of cultures. Usually when we deal with different people, we deal with them as if we were all members of the same culture. However, it’s possible that people from different cultures have different assumptions about the world regarding such important and basic ideas as time, personal space. And this is the view of Edward Hall. And Edward Hall is an anthropologist who spent a large part of his life studying American Indians, their culture, their language. But he was different from a lot of other anthropologists who just study one culture. He was interested in the relations between cultures, how cultures interact. What Hall believes is that cultures can be classified by placing them on a continuum ranging from what he called high-context to low-context.

Ok, what is a high-context culture? A high-context culture is a culture in which the context of the message, or the action, or an event, carries a large part of its meaning and significance. What this means is that in a high-context culture more attention is paid to what’s happening in and around the message than to the message itself.

Now, let me give you examples. First, in terms of personal space, generally speaking, in a high-context culture, because there’s greater dependence on group thinking, people lean towards heavier sense of involvement or closeness to people. And they have less respect for privacy, for personal space. If you go into that culture, people might stand closer when they are talking to you. They might touch more and if they are jostled in a crowd, they won’t feel violated. And also people from a high-context culture pay attention to body language because, remember what I said, the definition of a high-context culture is that more attention is paid to the context of the message than to the message itself. And part of the context is body language.

Second, in terms of time. People in high-context cultures are considered to have what is called a polychronic attitude toward time. Here “poly” means multiple and “chronic” means time. What this means is that they believe people, things, events, have their own time. And there can’t be a standard system of time for everything. What this leads them to believe is that you can’t emphasize punctuality. Things happen when they are supposed to happen. So there’s a different attitude toward time. There’s no set standard of time. You can’t control time. Everything has its own sense of time. So it’s a culture that pays little attention to time, to clock time.

Now, let’s move on to low-context culture. A low-context culture is just the opposite. A low-context culture is one in which the message, the event, or the action, is a separate entity having meaning onto itself, regardless of the surroundings or the context. That the message, the event, the action, has meaning in itself. So what this means in a low-context culture is that people pay more attention to the event itself rather than to the context which surrounds the event or the message.

For example, in terms of personal space again, there’s more emphasis on individuality. So the concept of privacy is very, very important. Or as before as I said, in a high-context culture, they might not even be concerned with privacy or personal space. But in a low-context culture, there’s a feeling that we each have our own personal space. If you get too close, if you don’t knock on doors before entering, that’s an invasion of privacy. People feel violated. There’s a respect and desire for privacy. And you’ll also see that people might pay less attention to body language, because as I said, the message is everything. They are not going to worry about all the details around it. What you say is the important thing, or what you do is the important thing.

Another example of a low-context culture is people’s attitude towards time. In terms of time, I said before, there was a polychronic sense of time in a high-context culture. What do you think there would be in a low-context culture? Monochronic. Right. A monochronic sense of time and by that we mean that there’s one time. And that concept means that people in a low-context culture believe that there’s one standard of time and that should be for everything and so are not willing to hear “Oh, the traffic was heavy. That’s why I’m late.” or “Oh, I slept late.” People in a low-context culture would be much more upset with lateness because they feel that everyone should follow the same time. There shouldn’t be all this flexibility with time and they expect punctuality. And they look at time as almost a commodity that they use expressions like “use time”, “to waste time”, “to spend time”, or “Time is money.” All of these expressions reinforce the concept that time is actually something you can hold on to.

So, what this is all about is that Hall stresses that people need to be aware of this different assumptions or concepts about reality. And he thinks that has all kinds of relevance, no matter what you are doing. If you are in business, negotiations, interpersonal relations, if you are dealing with people from different cultures in any way, it’s going to affect every part of your life. In any multicultural situation, these assumptions need to be taken into account for successful interactions.

Ok. Today, we’ve taken a brief look at Edward Hall’s view of culture, mainly his classification of high- or low-context culture with some examples. Next week, we’ll look at some more examples of cultures on the continuum between high-context and low-context cultures.

《专八听力题源精选500题》

Cultural Differences

    Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As we all know, culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another. As a result, different countries have different cultures. Today I will mention some differences between cultures of different nations and bring to light consequences of these dissimilarities.

For example, partings for the Chinese involve a certain amount of ritual and a great deal of courtesy. The Chinese feel they must see a guest off to the farthest feasible point—down flight of stairs to the street below or perhaps all the way to the nearest bus stop. Any protests are to no avail, though you have said “Don’t bother to see me off” ritual at every landing. If you try to go fast to discourage the hosts from following, they are simply put to the discomfort of having to flee after you. Better to accept the inevitable. On the contrary, for American people, they just say “goodbye” and go back to do other work. Another difference is what you say when you part from someone.

Besides, in American and Chinese cultures what a hostess needs to observe are at polar opposites. An American hostess, complimented for her cooking skills, is likely to say, “Oh, I’m so glad you liked it, I cooked it especially for you.” While a Chinese host or hostess will instead apologize profusely for giving you “nothing” or something slightly edible by providing proper dishes.

The same rules hold true with regard to children. American parents speak proudly of their children’s accomplishments, telling how Johnny made the school team or Jane made the honor well, while Chinese parents’ children, even if at the top of their class in school, are always so “naughty”, never studying, never listening to their elders, and so forth.

  Another distinctive difference between American culture and Chinese culture is that the Chinese take pride in “modesty”; the Americans in “straightforwardness”. That modesty has left many a Chinese hungry at an American table, for Chinese politeness calls for three refusals before one accepts an offer, and the American hosts take a “no” to mean “no”, whether it’s the first, second, or third time.

There had been four cultural dimensions that were defined in Hofstede’s research: Power distance, Uncertainty avoidance, Individualism vs. Collectivism, Masculinity vs. Femininity, and recently Hofstede added one more: Long-term vs. Short-term orientation.

What I think the most significant influence on cultural difference is the power distance. For instance, it would condition the extent to which employees accept that their boss has more power than they have and the extent to which they accept that their boss’s opinions and decisions are right because he or she is the boss. Among most oriental corporate cultures, there is hierarchism, greater centralization, sometimes called “power-oriented culture”, due to the historical reasons. Compared with western countries, the US for example, there is a higher power distance culture that managers make the decision and superiors are more likely to appeal to be entitled more privileges.

The clash of the cultures can be found among some returnees. After studying abroad for one year or two, a number of overseas college graduates return to Asia， in a hope to settle down if they find satisfactory jobs. However, before long, they find themselves in a predicament resulted from reverse or reentry culture shock; namely, the cultural differences between two different countries stand out and come to clash before their eyes and in their mind. To many of the returnees, culture shock found in cooperating context is more frustrating than that in a societal context. In companies abroad, it is very common that juniors may argue or discuss about their work with their seniors if they hold a different view, just for the good of the work. The boss would either take the argument or leave it, without feeling he is being humiliated or having his/her authority challenged. However, in an Asian workplace, which is characterized by a rigid hierarchy, staff at the bottom of the ladder are in no position to challenge their seniors whatsoever. Another often cited shock concerns working overtime and how it is perceived in an oriental work place. In some Asian societies, bosses tend to think their employees are their assets and hence working overtime is a matter of course. As it is, those who work overtime when it is time to go home usually do things unrelated to their work during office hours. Some of them deliberately work overtime to show to their boss that they are hard-working. But in a culture that values individuality, most people choose family over work.

All right, that is basically what I can tell you today: distinctions between different cultures and some supporting evidence. Next time we will learn how to fill in the cultural gaps, saving for ourselves a lot of perplexity and needless frustration in our life. See you next time.

50%相似度（说明：主题基本相似，且行文结构相仿，都是通过具体事例来说明文化的不同）

10*50%=

5分