2010年英语专业八级考试真题.docVIP

2012年英语专业八级考试真题 一、阅读理解(共4题，合计100分) 第1题: Still, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws on a modern city’s traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006. “Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief minister—the equivalent of a state governor—went on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata. Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are pe