2011年考研英语已经结束，英语二是改革以来的第二次考试，难度较之去年稍有提高。就各部分来说，第一部分完形填空难度较之去年有所降低，涉及的是一篇社会类的文章。阅读理解A部分对考生的词汇量要求有所提高，专业性也较强，相比于2010年来说，今年阅读理解的文章和题目在难度方面有所增加。B部分新题型是以多项对应的形式出现。第三部分翻译难度与去年持平，涉及的是环境方面的话题。最后一部分小作文是常见的书信形式，要求写一封祝贺加建议信；大作文也是考纲规定的图表作文，作文部分难度都不是很大。
第一部分：完形填空
文章是取自New York Times(《纽约时报》)2010年7月3日，原文标题为Taking the Mystery Out of Web Anonymity(揭开网络匿名的面纱)。文章探讨的是网络匿名这一现象给美国社会带来的一系列严重后果，政府决定采取一些措施来解决这个问题。词汇、固定搭配这是传统的两大考点，此外也侧重于对文章意思的理解。考生要学会分析句内和句际的逻辑关系以及篇章内容。
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Taking the Mystery Out of Web Anonymity
THE Obama Administration is trying to fix the Internet’s dog problem。
The problem, as depicted in Peter Steiner’s legendary 1993 New Yorker cartoon, is that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. And thus the enduring conundrum over who can be trusted in cyberspace。
The Internet affords anonymity to its users — a boon to privacy and freedom of speech. But that very anonymity is also behind the explosion of cybercrime that has swept across the Web。
Can privacy be preserved while bringing a semblance of safety and security to a world that seems increasingly lawless?
Last month, Howard Schmidt, the nation’s cyberczar, offered the Obama administration’s proposal to make the Web a safer place — a “voluntary trusted identity” system that would be the high-tech equivalent of a physical key, a fingerprint and a photo ID card, all rolled into one. The system might use a smart identity card, or a digital credential linked to a specific computer, and would authenticate users at a range of online services。
The idea is to create a federation of private online identity systems. Users could select which system to join, and only registered users whose identities have been authenticated could navigate those systems. The approach contrasts with one that would require a government-issued Internet driver’s license. (Civil liberties groups oppose a government system, fearful that it could lead to national identity cards。)
Google and Microsoft are among companies that already have these “single sign-on” systems that make it possible for users to log in just once but use many different services。
In effect, the approach would create a “walled garden” in cyberspace, with (virtually) safe neighborhoods and bright (cyber) streetlights to establish a sense of a trusted community。
Mr. Schmidt described it as a “voluntary ecosystem” in which “individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on。”
Still, the administration’s plan has divided privacy rights activists. Some applaud the approach; others are apprehensive. “It seems clear,” Lauren Weinstein, the editor of Privacy Journal, wrote “that such a scheme is a pre-emptive push toward what would eventually be a mandated Internet ‘driver’s license’ mentality。”
The plan has also been greeted with skepticism by some computer security experts, who worry that the “voluntary ecosystem” envisioned by Mr. Schmidt would still leave much of the Internet vulnerable. They argue that all Internet users should be forced to register and identify themselves, in the same way that drivers must be licensed to drive on public roads。
“The privacy standards the administration wants to adopt will make the system both unwieldy and less effective and not good for security,” said Stewart Baker, a former chief counsel of the National Security Agency who favors government-issued Internet driver’s licenses。
But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, said such criticism was unfair. He said the Obama administration had created a policy framework that will make it possible for private industry to improve privacy and security technologies。
Some members of the Internet’s technical community say that the Web-of-trust approach is too little, too late to solve the Internet’s security problems. The problem is no longer just about cyberspace stalkers, thieves and con artists, but about the trustworthiness of the very fabric of the network itself。
“We’re now seeing attacks on the Internet’s plumbing,” said Rodney Joffe, senior technologist at Neustar, an Internet infrastructure firm. “If you get control of the plumbing there are lots of things you can do because the plumbing was never designed for a world where there is a lack of trust。”
The essential plumbing components are the routers, which direct traffic on computer networks. Operators of these routers — mostly private companies — share instructions with each other on how to direct that traffic. They trust the information is accurate. But at least three times this year, a substantial fraction of the global network’s messages were mis-routed through China, potentially opening millions of users to spying or tampering. Chinese Internet engineers say the misroutings were mistakes; other engineers are not so sure。
“If our web of trust is corrupted or penetrated or broken, I don’t quite know what to do about that,” said Vinton Cerf, a Google vice president and one of the designers of the Internet. “That’s one of the nightmares that I worry about。”
He is pushing efforts to create standards that would secure the Internet’s plumbing, though those may take longer than a decade to be put in place globally. As for making the network more secure for users, he said he was optimistic and that he saw a relatively straightforward — though not exactly inexpensive — way to make the network more secure。
In the future, he envisions a card that each of us will carry, perhaps equipped with a fingerprint reader, that will in effect be a one-time password system. It will digitally hold all of our different personalities: who we are at work, while playing on-line games, banking and using our smart phones and make it possible for others to be sure we are who we say we are。
But Mr. Joffe said he worried that the time for such systems might already have run out。
“Imagine what would happen if people lost trust in using the Internet: what would that do to our economy?” Mr. Joffe asked. “You would have to go down to your local bank branch and you’d join 5,000 other people waiting to do their banking. That infrastructure has gone away and the banks can’t cope with it anymore。”
第二部分：阅读理解
A部分
Text 1文章取自The Economist(经济学家)2010年5月4日，原文标题为Outside directors and children first。文章分析的公司外部董事方面的内容。
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Outside directors and children first
RUTH SIMMONS joined Goldman Sachs's board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown University in Rhode Island. For the rest of the decade she apparently juggled both roles (as well as several other directorships) without attracting much criticism. But by the end of 2009 Ms Simmons was under fire from students and alumni for having sat on Goldman's compensation committee; how could she have let those enormous bonus payouts pass unremarked? By February Ms Simmons had left the board. The position was just taking up too much time, she said。
Ms Simmons's decision to leave makes perfect sense, according to research conducted by Rüdiger Fahlenbrach at the École Polytechnique Féderale in Lausanne, Angie Low of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and René Stulz of The Ohio State University. The three are co-authors of a new working paper suggesting that when trouble looms for a firm, outside directors have more incentives to quit than to stay。
Outside directors are supposed to serve as helpful, yet less biased, advisers on a firm's board. Having made their wealth and their reputations elsewhere, they presumably have enough independence to disagree with the chief executive's proposals. Leaders from other fields are frequently in demand: former presidents or Cabinet members, retired CEOs, and yes, university presidents. If the sky, and the share price, is falling, outside directors should be able to give advice based on having weathered their own crises。
The researchers used a database that covered more than 10,000 firms and more than 64,000 different directors between 1989 and 2004. Then they simply checked which directors stayed from one proxy statement to the next. The most likely reason for departing a board was age, so the researchers concentrated on those "surprise" disappearances by directors under the age of 70. They found that after a surprise departure, the probability that the company will subsequently have to restate earnings increases by nearly 20%. The likelihood of being named in a federal class-action lawsuit also increases, and the stock is likely to perform worse. The effect tended to be larger for larger firms, reported Dr Fahlenbrach。
Bail out before the bail-out
The obvious conclusion might be that outside directors, with inside knowledge of tricky times ahead, prefer to save their own reputations, rather than those of the company they are serving. But although a correlation between them leaving and subsequent bad performance at the firm is suggestive, it does not mean that such directors are always jumping off a sinking ship. Often they "trade up", leaving riskier, smaller firms for larger and more stable firms。
But the researchers believe that outside directors have an easier time of avoiding a blow to their reputations if they leave a firm before bad news breaks, even if a review of history shows they were on the board at the time any wrongdoing occurred. Firms who want to keep their outside directors through tough times may have to create incentives, such as increasing pay, says Dr Fahlenbrach. Otherwise outside directors will follow the example of Ms Simmons, once again very popular on campus。
Text 2文章取自The Economist(经济学家)2010年6月10日，原文标题为Newspapers not dead yet。文章讲述的是报纸业的衰落，并分析了其衰落的原因。
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Newspapers not dead yet
Newspapers have cut their way out of crisis. More radical surgery will be needed。
WHATEVER happened to the death of newspapers? A year ago the end seemed near. The recession threatened to remove the advertising and readers that had not already fled to the internet. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle were chronicling their own doom. America’s Federal Trade Commission launched a round of talks about how to save newspapers. Should they become charitable corporations? Should the state subsidise them? It will hold another meeting on June 15th. But the discussions now seem out of date。
In much of the world there is little sign of crisis. German and Brazilian papers shrugged off the recession (see article). Even American newspapers, which inhabit the most troubled corner of the global industry, have not only survived but often returned to profit. Not the 20% profit margins that were routine a few years ago, but profit all the same。
It has not been much fun. Many papers stayed afloat by pushing journalists overboard. The American Society of News Editors reckons that 13,500 newsroom jobs have gone since 2007. Readers are paying more for slimmer products. Some papers even had the nerve to refuse delivery to distant suburbs. Yet these desperate measures have proved the right ones and, sadly for many journalists, they can be pushed further。
Demolishing the house that Otis built
Newspapers are becoming more balanced businesses, with a healthier mix of revenues from readers and advertisers. American papers have long been highly unusual in their reliance on ads. Fully 87% of their revenues came from advertising in 2008, according to the OECD. In Japan the proportion is 35%. Not surprisingly, Japanese newspapers are much more stable。
The whirlwind that swept through newsrooms harmed everybody, but much of the damage has been concentrated in areas where newspapers are least distinctive. Car and film reviewers have gone. So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely pruned. Newspapers are less complete as a result. But completeness is no longer a virtue in the newspaper business. Just look at the fate of Otis Chandler’s creation。
Thanks to family connections, Chandler ended up in control of the Los Angeles Times in 1960. The paper he inherited was parochial and conservative, reflecting the city it served. Chandler jettisoned the anti-union dogma and set about building a west-coast rival to the New York Times. His paper was heavy on foreign news and serious, objective reporting. The result was hugely impressive—but not, as it turned out, suited to the internet era. In the past few years the paper has suffered repeated staff cuts. In 2007 it was acquired by a property magnate and in 2008 filed for bankruptcy protection。
The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it. The Los Angeles Times’s foreign reporting is extremely good. But it is hard to argue that it is better than the stuff supplied by the New York Times or foreign papers—sources to which the residents of Los Angeles now have unfettered, largely free access via their laptops and iPhones. Similarly, it has never been clear why each major newspaper needs its own car reviewer: a Corolla is a Corolla, whether it is driven in Albuquerque or Atlanta. And by extension, it is not clear why presidential candidates or sport teams require huge journalistic entourages. Papers should concentrate on what they do best, which means, in many cases, local news and sport. If the rest is bought in from wire services or national outfits, readers are unlikely to complain—as long as there is enough competition between those larger providers to keep up standards (and thanks to the internet there probably is now). Specialisation generally means higher quality。
It is grim to forecast still more writers losing their jobs. But whether newspapers are thrown onto doorsteps or distributed digitally, they need to deliver something that is distinctive. New technologies like Apple’s iPad only make this more true. The mere acquisition of a smooth block of metal and glass does not magically persuade people that they should start paying for news. They will pay for news if they think it has value. Newspapers need to focus relentlessly on that。
