Section II Reading Comprehension
Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (40 points)
Text 1
Come on –Everybody’s doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good-drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word.
Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of example of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers.
The idea seems promising，and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many pubic-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology.” Dare to be different, please don’t smoke!” pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers-teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure.
But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it’s presented here is that it doesn’t work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed.
There’s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits-as well as negative ones-spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day.
Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It’s like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that’s the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.
21. According to the first paragraph, peer pressure often emerges as
[A] a supplement to the social cure
[B] a stimulus to group dynamics
[C] an obstacle to school progress
[D] a cause of undesirable behaviors
22. Rosenberg holds that public advocates should
[A] recruit professional advertisers
[B] learn from advertisers’ experience
[C] stay away from commercial advertisers
[D] recognize the limitations of advertisements
23. In the author’s view, Rosenberg’s book fails to
[A] adequately probe social and biological factors
[B] effectively evade the flaws of the social cure
[C] illustrate the functions of state funding
[D]produce a long-lasting social effect
24. Paragraph 5shows that our imitation of behaviors
[A] is harmful to our networks of friends
[B] will mislead behavioral studies
[C] occurs without our realizing it
[D] can produce negative health habits
25. The author suggests in the last paragraph that the effect of peer pressure is
[A] harmful
[B] desirable
[C] profound
[D] questionable
21.【答案】D
【解析】文章首段包含了两方面的内容，作者先简单介绍Peer pressure，再引出Tina Rosenberg在她的新书Join the Club中对于peer pressure的看法，这篇文章是以一篇书评的形式出现。而题目“根据第一段，同伴压力的出现常常是…”问的仅仅是同伴压力，并无涉及到Tina Rosenberg或者她的新书，因此答案则应主要涉及文章对于peer pressure的介绍，而非Tina对于peer pressure的看法。首段第三句说“(同伴压力)通常引起不好的事情，如酗酒，嗑药，乱交”，故答案选D，说明同伴压力出现导致的结果，这里的答案使用了同义替换的方式。
22.【答案】B
【解析】根据题干关键词“public-health advocates”可以定位到第三段最后一句话“Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure”,即应该向广告商学习，这里主要是对于短语“take a page from”的理解，答案选B
23.【答案】A
【解析】根据题干“在作者看来，Rosenberg的书没能…”，所选答案是要找出作者看来这本书的缺点是什么。文章第四段第一句话说“但是，在…方面，Rosenberg不太有说服力”，紧接着说“Join the Club中太多无关的细节，而对于使同伴压力能产生如此大作用的社会和生物因素并未做足够的探究”，这句话充分说明了在作者心目中这本书的不足在哪儿，故答案选A
24.【答案】C
【解析】这是一道细节题。文章第五段首句告诉我们peer groups确实会对行为产生很大的影响，第二句具体说明影响的内容，即好的习惯和不好的习惯都会通过社会交际在朋友圈中传递，最后一句则对这种影响进行了总结，“这是同伴压力的细微表现，我们无意识地模仿日常所见到的行为”。而分析题干和选项，我们发现该题是对“imitation of behavior”进行归纳，回到原文，找到“我们无意识地模仿日常所见到的行为”，答案即刻清晰，这里是对unconsciously一词进行了释义，因此C选项正确。
25.【答案】D
【解析】这道题考查作者对于peer pressure所能带来的影响的态度，作者通过最后一段第一句话首先向我们表明他对“专家和其他官方人员是否能成功选择同伴来引导他们的行为朝好的方向发展”的不肯定，接下来以教师指导学生的例子为说明，得出结论“The tactic never really works.”(这个策略从来没有真正起作用)。通过作者的这样一番描述，可以看出，作者对于peer pressure是否能有效果是质疑的，故答案选D。
