GRE阅读高频机经原文及答案：十四修正案

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GRE阅读高频机经原文及答案：十四修正案

十四修正案 1994年10月 B 9104

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, prohibits state governments from denying citizens the “equal protection of the laws.” Although precisely what the framers of the amendment meant by this equal protection clause remains unclear, all interpreters agree that the framers’ immediate objective was to provide a constitutional warrant for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed the citizenship of all persons born in the United States and subject to United States jurisdiction. This declaration, which was echoed in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, was designed primarily to counter the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people in the United States could be denied citizenship. The act was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, who argued that the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, did not provide Congress with the authority to extend citizenship and equal protection to the freed slaves. Although Congress promptly overrode Johnson’s veto, supporters of the act sought to ensure its constitutional foundations with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The broad language of the amendment strongly suggests that its framers were proposing to write into the Constitution not a laundry list of specific civil rights but a principle of equal citizenship that forbids organized society from treating any individual as a member of an inferior class. Yet for the first eight decades of the amendment’s existence, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the amendment betrayed this ideal of equality. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, for example, the Court invented the “state action” limitation, which asserts that “private” decisions by owners of public accommodations and other commercial businesses to segregate their facilities are insulated from the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

After the Second World War, a judicial climate more hospitable to equal protection claims culminated in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two doctrines embraced by the Supreme Court during this period extended the amendment’s reach. First, the Court required especially strict scrutiny of legislation that employed a “suspect classification,” meaning discrimination against a group on grounds that could be construed as racial. This doctrine has broadened the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to other, nonracial forms of discrimination, for while some justices have refused to find any legislative classification other than race to be constitutionally disfavored, most have been receptive to arguments that at least some nonracial discriminations, sexual discrimination in particular, are “suspect” and deserve this heightened scrutiny by the courts. Second, the Court relaxed the state action limitation on the Fourteenth Amendment, bringing new forms of private conduct within the amendment’s reach.

7.1. Which of the following best describes the main idea of the passage?

(A) By presenting a list of specific rights, framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were attempting to provide a constitutional BAsis for broad judicial protection of the principle of equal citizenship.

(B) Only after the Supreme Court adopted the suspect classification approach to reviewing potentially discriminatory legislation was the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment extended to include sexual discrimination.

(C) Not until after the Second World War did the Supreme Court begin to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner consistent with the principle of equal citizenship that it expresses.

(D) Interpreters of the Fourteenth Amendment have yet to reach consensus with regard to what its framers meant by the equal protection clause.

(E) Although the reluctance of judges to extend the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment to nonracial discrimination has betrayed the principle of equal citizenship, the Supreme Court’s use of the state action limitation to insulate private activity from the amendment’s reach has been more harmful.

7.2. The passage suggests that the principal effect of the state action limitation was to

(A) allow some discriminatory practices to continue unimpeded by the Fourteenth Amendment

(B) influence the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v, Board of Education

(D) prohibit states from enacting laws that violated the intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1866

(E) shift to state governments the responsibility for enforcement of laws prohibiting discriminatory practices

7.3. The author’s position regarding the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment would be most seriously undermined if which of the following were true?

(A) The framers had anticipated state action limitations as they are described in the passage.

(B) The framers had merely sought to prevent discriminatory acts by federal officials.

(D) The framers were aware that the phrase “equal protection of the laws” had broad implications.

(E) The framers believed that racial as well as non-racial forms of discrimination were unacceptable.

7.4. According to the passage, the original proponents of the Fourteenth Amendment were primarily concerned with

(A) detailing the rights afforded by the principle of equal citizenship

(B) providing support in the Constitution for equal protection for all citizens of the United States

(D) asserting that the civil rights protected by the Constitution included nonracial discrimination as well as racial discrimination

(E) granting state governments broader discretion in interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1866

7.5. The author implies that the Fourteenth Amendment might not have been enacted if

(A) Congress’ authority with regard to legislating civil rights had not been challenged

(B) the framers had anticipated the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education

(D) most state governments had been willing to protect citizens’ civil rights

(E) its essential elements had not been implicit in the Thirteenth Amendment

7.6. According to the passage, which of the following most accurately indicates the sequence of the events listed below?

I. Civil Rights Act of 1866

II. Dred Scott v. Sandford

III. Fourteenth Amendment

IV. Veto by President Johnson

(A) I, II, III, IV

(B) I, IV, II, III

(D) II, I, IV, III

(E) III, II, I, IV

7.7. Which of the following can be inferred about the second of the two doctrines referred to in lines 39-41 of the passage?

(A) It caused some justices to rule that all types of discrimination are prohibited by the Constitution.

(B) It shifted the focus of the Supreme Court from racial to nonracial discrimination.

(D) It caused legislators who were writing new legislation to reject language that could be construed as permitting racial discrimination.

(E) It made it more difficult for commercial businesses to practice racial discrimination.

答案：CABBADE

　　GRE阅读高频机经原文：Maya 旱灾

8. Maya 旱灾

To understand the ancient Mayan people who lived in the area that is today southern Mexico and Central America and the ecological difficulties they faced, one must first consider their environment, which we think of as “jungle" or 'tropical rainforest." This view is inaccurate, and the reason proves to be important. Properly speaking, tropical rainforests grow in high-rainfall equatorial areas that remain wet or humid all year round. But the Maya homeland lies more than sixteen hundred kilometers from the equator, at latitudes 17 to 22 degrees north, in a habitat termed a “seasonal tropical forest." That is, while there does tend to be a rainy season from May to October, there is also a dry season from January through April. If one focuses on the wet months, one calls the Maya homeland a "seasonal tropical forest"; if one focuses on the dry months, one could instead describe it as a "seasonal desert.”

From north to south in the Yucatan Peninsula, where the Maya lived, rainfall ranges from 18 to 100 inches (457 to 2,540 millimeters) per year, and the soils become thicker, so that the southern peninsula was agriculturally more productive and supported denser populations. But rainfall in the Maya homeland is unpredictably variable between years; some recent years have had three or four times more rain than other years. As a result, modern farmers attempting to grow corn in the ancient Maya homelands have faced frequent crop failures, especially in the north. The ancient Maya were presumably more experienced and did better, but nevertheless they too must have faced risks of crop failures from droughts and hurricanes.

Although southem Maya areas received more rainfall than northern areas, problems of water were paradoxically more severe in the wet south. While that made things hard for ancient Maya living in the south, it has also made things hard for modem archaeologists who have difficulty understanding why ancient droughts caused bigger problems in the wet south than in the dry north. The likely explanation is that an area of underground freshwater underlies the Yucatan Peninsula, but surface elevation increases from north to south, so that as one moves south the land surface lies increasingly higher above the water table. In the northern peninsula the elevation is sufficiently low that the ancient Maya were able to reach the water table at deep sinkholes called cenotes, or at deep caves. In low-elevation north coastal areas without sinkholes, the Maya would have been able to get down to the water table by digging wells up to 75 feet (22 meters) deep. But much of the south lies too high above the water table for cenotes or wells to reach down to it. Making matters worse, most of the Yucatan Peninsula consists of karst, a porous sponge-like limestone terrain where rain runs straight into the ground and where little or no surface water remains available.

How did those dense southern Maya populations deal with the resulting water problem? It initially surprises us that many of their cities were not built next to the rivers but instead on high terrain in rolling uplands. The explanation is that the Maya excavated depressions, or modified natural depressions, and then plugged up leaks in the karst by plastering the bottoms of the depressions in order to create reservoirs, which collected rain from large plastered catchment basins and stored it for use in the dry example, reservoirs at the Maya city of Tikal held enough water to meet the drinking water needs of about 10,000 people for a period of 18 months. At the city of Coba the Maya built dikes around a lake in order to raise its level and make their water supply more reliable. But the inhabitants of Tikal and other cities dependent on reservoirs for drinking water would still have been in deep trouble if 18 months passed without rain in a prolonged drought. A shorter drought in which they exhausted their stored food supplies might already have gotten them in deep trouble, because growing crops required rain rather than reservoirs.

　　GRE阅读高频机经原文及题目：鹿背上的hamp

9. 鹿背上的hamp

Which of following most logically completes the argument?

The last members of a now-extinct species of a European wild deer called the giant dear lived in Ireland about 16,000 years ago. Prehistoric cave paintings in France depict this animal as having a large hump on its back. Fossils of this animal, however, do not show any hump. Nevertheless, there is no reason to conclude that the cave paintings are therefore inaccurate in this regard, since ______.

A some prehistoric cave paintings in France also depict other animals as having a hump

B fossils of the giant deer are much more common in Ireland than in France

C animal humps are composed of fatty tissue, which dose not fossilize

D the cave paintings of the giant deer were painted well before 16,000 years ago

E only one currently existing species of deer has any anatomical feature that even remotely resembles a hump

　　GRE阅读高频机经原文：Mystery of the Anasazi

10. Mystery of the Anasazi

As the tourists prepare to depart Spruce Tree House, one asks Qumawunu the question that's on everyone's mind: Why, after having invested so much work in this place, did the ancestral Pueblo people leave it all behind?

The park ranger's answer sounds well-rehearsed: "We can come up with so many thoughts about why they moved in and why they moved out. But no one really knows for sure."

But it's a mystery that is finally beginning to unravel.

But while Crow Canyon has brought professional archaeology to the masses, it has yet to dismantle the biggest misconception about Mesa Verde's prehistory: that the ancestral Pueblo people simply vanished.

"I don't think we really ever thought that they just vanished into thin air," says Kuckelman. "I think the real enigma of the ancestral Pueblo people in the Mesa Verde region is, ?Why did they leave?'"

The ancestral Pueblo people didn't have a written language; no one left behind a detailed account of their last days in the Mesa Verde region. But Kuckelman believes that if she looks hard enough at places like Goodman Point Pueblo, she can find this story written on the walls -- and on the floors and in the trash heaps.

There's a partially excavated kiva, a subterranean dwelling near the northwest corner, that could hold part of the story. Standing over it, Kuckelman lifts the plywood covering that will protect the underground chamber over the winter and peers into the darkness. When this kiva was first excavated last summer, workers discovered prehistoric ash in the hearth and a rabbit skeleton nearby. Kuckelman thinks those findings may be the remains of one of the last meals ever eaten in the village.

She believes that when researchers dissolve the ash in liquid and analyze what remains, they'll find markedly little evidence of maize, compared to the amount of maize refuse in rubbish pits around the village. This isn't a wild guess. Kuckelman and her co-workers noticed the pattern when they ran similar tests at a nearby contemporary ruin, Sand Canyon Pueblo. These findings helped Kuckelman piece together a new theory about the ancestral Pueblo's departure, a theory she hopes to bolster with evidence from Goodman Point Pueblo and other excavations.

Kuckelman believes that as more and more people settled in the Mesa Verde region in the thirteenth century, they overwhelmed wild food sources in the area, such as deer and wild plants. As a result, they became increasingly dependent on maize crops -- not just for food, but for feed for domesticated turkeys -- as evidenced by the ubiquity of maize in refuse pits, essentially time capsules of the villagers' eating habits and customs. But then something wiped out their ability to cultivate their crops, as indicated by the limited maize remains in hearths. The rabbit skeleton may also be a clue, suggesting that turkey populations may have died out and forced these people to fall back on small wild game. This could mean that Kuckelman has found more than just evidence of the last meals ever eaten by the ancestral Pueblo people in the Mesa Verde region; she's found a possible impetus for their leaving: to search out new means of sustenance.

"The folks in this area had become very, very dependent on crops, like maize, and wild turkeys. Ultimately, I think that system backfired and collapsed on them," she says.

But why did the system backfire? Why did the entire population collapse? For a while, archaeologists thought they had the single answer: a great drought.

This idea was born from ancient wooden beams found in Mesa Verde ruins, beams whose tree rings captured the exact date and climate conditions of the prehistoric time period. Andrew E. Douglass, the father of tree-ring dating, studied these beams and, in a 1929 National Geographic article evocatively titled "The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree-rings," announced that he'd cleared up the mystery of the prehistoric migration. The beams, he wrote, showed evidence of a massive drought in the region from 1276 to 1299. Drought can be apocalyptic in the Mesa Verde region -- soil turns to powder, trees hold less moisture than kiln-dried wood -- and this one, it seemed, had led to a mass exodus.

Scholars are skeptical of single-factor explanations. Could one drought, no matter how devastating, be enough to depopulate an entire region? But for decades, no one had the hard evidence to challenge the drought theory. "Interpretations were kind of all over the board," says Kuckelman. That changed seventeen years ago, thanks to the work of a Ph.D. student named Carla Van West.

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