2017年下半年高中英语学科知识与能力真题

请阅读 Passage1,完成第21~25小题。

Passage 1

With her magical first novel, Garcia joins a growing chorus of talented Latino writers whose voices are suddenly reaching a far wider, more diverse audience. Unlike Latin American writers such as Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquee of Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa-whose translated works became popular here in the 1970s-these authors are writing in English and drawing their themes from two cultures. Their stories, from Dreaming in Cuban to Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent and Victor Villasenor's Rain of Gold, offer insight into the mixture of economic opportunity and discrimination that Latinos encounter in the United States. Garcia Girls for example, is the story of four sisters weathering their transition from wealthy Dominicans to ragtag immigrants, "We didn’t feel we had the beat the United States had to offer,” one of the girls says, We had only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one redneck Catholic neighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and white TV afflicted with wavy lines. "Alvarez, a Middlebury College professor who emigrated from Santo Domingo when she was 10, says being an immigrant has given her a special vantage point: "We travel on that border between two worlds and we can see both points of view.”
With few exceptions, such as Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya, many Hispanic-Americans have been writing in virtual obscurity for years, nurtured only by small presses like Houston’s Arte Publico or the Bilingual Press in Tempe, Ariz. Only with the recent success of Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek and Oscar Hijuelos's prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, have mainstream publishers begun opening door to other Latinos. Julie Grau, Cisneros's editor at Turtle Bay, says, “Editors may now be looking more carefully at a book that before they would have deemed too exotic for the general readership.”
But if Villasenor's experience is any indication, some editors are still wary. In 1989, Putnam gave Villasenor a $75000 advance for the hardcover rights to Rain of Gold, the compelling saga of his family's migration from Mexico to California. But the editors, says Villasenor, wanted major changes: "They were going to destroy the book. It's nonfiction; they wanted to publish it as a novel. And they wanted to change the title to ‘Rio Grande’, which sounded like some old John Wayne movie.” After a year of strained relations, he mortgaged his house, borrowed his mother’s life savings and bought back the rights to the book that had taken 10 years to write.
In frustration, Villasenor turned to Arte Publico. In the eight months since its release, Rain of Gold has done extremely well, considering its limited distribution; 20000 copies have been sold. "If we were a mainstream publisher, this book would have been on The New York Times best-seller list for weeks," says Arte Pulico's Nicolas Kanelos. The author may still have a shot: he has sold the paperback rights to Dell. And he was just named a keynote speaker (with Molly Ivins and Norman Schwarzkopf) for the American Booksellers Association convention in May. Long before they gained this sort of attention, however, Villasenor, Cisneros and other Latino writers were quietly building devoted followings. Crossing the country, they read in local bookstores, libraries and schools. Their stories, they found, appeal not only to Latinos-who identify with them, but to a surprising number of Anglos, who find in them a refreshingly different perspective on American life. Still, there are unusual pressures on these writers. Cisneros vividly recalls the angst she went through in writing the final short stories for Woman Hollering: “I was traumatized that it was going to be one of the first Chicano books ‘out there’. I felt I had this responsibility to my community to represent us in all our diversity.”

请阅读 Passage2,完成第26-30小题。

Passage 2

Scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture-the language we speak, the values we absorb-shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we("we" being the Americans in the study)think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me” circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.
“Cultural neuroscience", as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the "me/mom" circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliché that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian-Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations-holistic context-while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects.
Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts found something similar when she and colleagues showed drawings of people in a submissive pose (head down, shoulders hunched)or a dominant one(arms crossed, face forward)to Japanese and Americans. The brain’s dopamine-fueled reward circuit became most active at the sight of the stance-dominant for Americans, submissive for Japanese-that each volunteer’s culture most values, they reported in 2009. This raises an obvious chicken-and-egg question, but the smart money is on culture shaping the brain, not vice versa. Cultural neuroscience wouldn't be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only for well-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 study found that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3+4)or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabic numerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use language circuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them with symbolic, spatial freight. (Insert cliché about Asian math geniuses. ) "One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal,” says Ambady, but they “seem to be culture-specific”.
Not to be the skunk at this party, but I think it's important to ask whether neuroscience reveals anything more than we already know from, say, anthropology. For instance, it's well known that East Asian cultures prize the collective over the individual, and that Americans do the opposite. Does identifying brain correlates of those values offer any extra insight? After all, it's not as if anyone thought those values are the result of something in the liver.
Ambady thinks cultural neuro-science does advance understanding. Take the me/mom finding, which, she argues, "attests to the strength of the overlap between self and people close to you in collectivistic cultures and the separation in individualistic cultures. It is important to push the analysis to the level of the brain.” Especially when it shows how fundamental cultural differences are-so fundamental, perhaps, that "universal” notions such as human rights, democracy, and the like may be no such thing.