全國2013年7月高等教育自學考試

英語科技文選試題

課程代碼：00836

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I. Directions: Read through the following passages. Choose the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. (20%)

(A)

The world’s largest social network will shift its corporate headquarters starting this summer to a 57-acre campus with 1 million square f.eet of office space in Menlo Park, California, making its second move in less than two years. The move, which will see Facebook swap its Palo Alto address for a home base in a largely undeveloped area near the entrance to a busy Bay Area bridge, will give the company much-needed room to grow, even if the new location lacks some of the glamour of other corporate real estate deals. Google Inc, which is increasingly vying with Facebook for engineering talent, announced on Tuesday that it had leased an iconic building for its staff in Santa Monica. Google's headquarters is in Mountain View, California. Facebook executives said the company, which turned seven on Friday, is seeking the space beyond its nearby Palo Alto base to contain its explosive expansion. The company has seen its payroll swell by about 50 percent annually in past years to about 2,000 now, a pace it expects to sustain in coming years. Its new Menlo Park location can house about 3,600 people, executives said. Facebook leased the campus -- the former headquarters of Sun Microsystems which Oracle Corp took over in 2010 -- and will begin moving in June or July. The site, a cluster of nine blockish buildings and wide, open spaces wedged between the freeway and the San Francisco Bay, is known locally as “Sun Quentin” for what insiders say is a passing, resemblance to the state prison 50 miles north. John Tenanes, Facebook’s director of global real estate, offered a more metropolitan analogy for the company’s new home at a briefing with reporters at Menlo Park City Hall on Tuesday, noting that the various parts of the campus were connected by a courtyard. “That’s how we plan to look at this, like an urban street, or an urban setting.  We think this is going to be kind of the glue that holds the buildings and people together,” he said. Speaking to reporters after the briefing, Tenanes said the new campus will provide plenty of important amenities, including a fitness center, a basketball court, an auditorium and two cafes. Facebook’s move was announced the same day that Web arch-foe Google said it had leased a Frank Gehry-designed office building a stone’s throw from the sun-speckled beaches of Santa Monica, near Los Angeles. Google leased the iconic former headquarters of the Chiat/Day advertising agency -- whose giant binoculars-shaped facade is a fixture of travel guide books -- in Venice, California, to house part of its own envisioned expansion, with 6,000 people set to join the company’s payroll this year.

1. According to the passage, one main reason for the move of Facebook is ______.

A. due to its rapid growth

B. in response to Google’s act

C. that it could provide more amenities for its employees

D. that it needs an urban setting

2. The word “swap” in line 3 is closest in meaning to ______.

A. move

B. give up

C. replace

D. use

3. According to the passage, all of the following are true EXCEPT ______.

A. Facebook was established seven years ago

B. Google probably has a higher employment level than Facebook

C. both Facebook and Google are badly in need of talented engineers

D. Facebook’s new home is located in a metropolitan district

4. According to the passage, Sun Quentin is probably the name of ______.

A. a park

B. a prison

C. a bay

D. a company

5. Which of the following is true according to the passage?

A. Facebook is a larger social network than Google.

B. Both Facebook and Google are the largest networks in the world.

C. Facebook’s staff can work out in its new home base.

D. Facebook’s staff get a raise every other year.

(B)

Some fish in New York’s Hudson River have become resistant to several of the waterway’s more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a new study finds. But what’s good for this bottom-dwelling species could be bad for those feeding on it, says Isaac Wirgin of the New York University School of Medicine’s Institute of Environmental Medicine in Tuxedo. Each bite of tomcod that a predator takes, he explains, will move a potent dose of toxic chemicals up the food chain — eventually into species that could end up on home dinner tables. From 1947 to 1976, two General Electric manufacturing plants along the Hudson River produced PCBs for a range of uses, including as insulating fluids in electrical transformers. Over the years, PCB and dioxin levels in the livers of the Hudson’s tomcod rose to become “among the highest known in nature,” Wirgin and his colleagues note online February 17 in Science. Because these fish don’t detoxify PCBs, Wirgin explains, it was a surprise that they could accumulate such hefty contamination without becoming poisoned. His team now reports that the tomcod’s protection traces to a single mutation in one gene. The gene is responsible for producing a protein needed to unleash the pollutants’ toxicity. All vertebrates contain molecules in their cells that will bind to dioxins and related compounds. Indeed, these proteins — aryl hydrocarbon receptors, or AHRs — are often referred to as dioxin receptors. Once these poisons diffuse into an exposed cell, each molecule can mate with a receptor and together they eventually pick up a third molecule. This trio can then dock with select segments of DNA in the cell’s nucleus to inappropriately turn on genes that can poison the host animal. The tomcod actually has two types of AHRs, with AHR-2 offering the most effective binding to