2011年考研英语真题总体分析：难度略下降

B部分

文章取自Economist（经济学人）2010年2月25日。选的是大纲中第二种备选题型：排序题，这种题型是第一次在考试中出现。总体来看，难度与以前持平。

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Professionalising the professor

-The difficulties of an American doctoral student

THIS subtle and intelligent little book should be read by every student thinking of applying to take a doctorate. They may then decide to go elsewhere. For something curious has been happening in American universities, and Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard University, captures it deftly.

His concern is mainly with the humanities: literature, languages, philosophy and so on. These are disciplines that are going out of style: 22% of American college graduates now major in business compared with only 2% in history and 4% in English. However, many leading American universities want their undergraduates to have a grounding in the basic canon of ideas that every educated person should possess. But most find it difficult to agree on what a “general education” should look like. At Harvard, Mr Menand notes, “The great books are read because they have been read”-they form a sort of social glue.

One reason why it is hard to design and teach such courses is that they cut across the insistence by top American universities that liberal-arts education and professional education should be kept separate, taught in different schools. Many students experience both varieties. Although more than half of Harvard undergraduates end up in law, medicine or business, future doctors and lawyers must study a non-specialist liberal-arts degree before embarking on a professional qualification.

Besides professionalising the professions by this separation, top American universities have professionalised the professor. The growth in public money for academic research has speeded the process: federal research grants rose fourfold between 1960 and 1990, but faculty teaching hours fell by half as research took its toll. Professionalism has turned the acquisition of a doctorate into a prerequisite for a successful academic career: as late as 1969 a third of American professors did not possess one. But the key idea behind professionalisation, argues Mr Menand, is that “the knowledge and skills needed for a particular specialisation are transmissible but not transferable.” So disciplines acquire a monopoly not just over the production of knowledge, but also over the production of the producers of knowledge.

No disciplines have seized on professionalism with as much enthusiasm as the humanities. You can, Mr Menand points out, become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four. But the median time-median!-to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. (Advertising note to American students: you can get a perfectly good PhD at a top British university in under four years.) Not surprisingly, up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees.

Equally unsurprisingly, only about half end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get: tenured professorships. There are simply too few posts. This is partly because universities continue to churn out ever more PhDs. But fewer students want to study humanities subjects: English departments awarded more bachelor’s degrees in 1970-71 than they did 20 years later. Fewer students require fewer teachers. So, at the end of a decade of thesis-writing, many humanities students leave the profession to do something for which they have not been trained.

The key to reforming higher education, concludes Mr Menand, is to alter the way in which “the producers of knowledge are produced”. Otherwise, academics will continue to think dangerously alike, increasingly detached from the societies which they study, investigate and criticise. “Academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic.” Yet quite how that happens, Mr Menand does not say. In reality, baby and bathwater may go out together. Public exasperation with academic introversion may lead to a loss of some independence, the most precious right of academics in a free society.

C部分

文章取自Fifty self-help classics一书的CHAPTER 1 James Allen，出题者在原文基础上稍作了改写。翻译中会涉及一些富有哲理性的话语，还有一些单词的翻译则是要根据上下文的语境来进行意译。这都是需要考生加以注意的。

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CHAPTER 1 James Allen

With its theme that “mind is the master weaver,” creating our inner character and outer circumstances, As a Man Thinketh is an in-depth exploration of the central idea of self-help writing.

James Allen’s contribution was to take an assumption we all share-that because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughts-and reveal its fallacy. Because most of us believe that mind is separate from matter, we think that thoughts can be hidden and made powerless; this allows us to think one way and act another. However, Allen believed that the unconscious mind generates as much action as the conscious mind, and while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a question: “Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that?”

In noting that desire and will are sabotaged by the presence of thoughts that do not accord with desire, Allen was led to the startling conclusion:

“We do not attract what we want, but what we are.” Achievement happens because you as a person embody the external achievement; you don’t “get” success but become it. There is no gap between mind and matter.

We are the sum of our thoughts

The logic of the book is unassailable: Noble thoughts make a noble person, negative thoughts hammer out a miserable one. To a person mired in negativity, the world looks as if it is made of confusion and fear. On the other hand, Allen noted, when we curtail our negative and destructive thoughts, “All the world softens towards us, and is ready to help us.”

We attract not only what we love, but also what we fear. His explanation for why this happens is simple: Those thoughts that receive our attention, good or bad, go into the unconscious to become the fuel for later events in the real world. As Emerson commented, “A person is what he thinks about all day long.”

Our circumstances are us

Part of the fame of Allen’s book is its contention that “Circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him.” This seems an exceedingly heartless comment, a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation and abuse, of the superiority of those at the top of the pile and the inferiority of those at the bottom.

This, however, would be a knee-jerk reaction to a subtle argument. Each set of circumstances, however bad, offers a unique opportunity for growth. If circumstances always determined the life and prospects of people, then humanity would never have progressed. In fact, circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us, and if we make the decision that we have been “wronged” then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation. Nevertheless, as any biographer knows, a person’s early life and its conditions are often the greatest gift to an individual.

The sobering aspect of Allen’s book is that we have no one else to blame for our present condition except ourselves. The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array and fearsomeness of limitations, now we become connoisseurs of what is possible.