装备指挥技术学院2012年博士研究生招生考博英语真题

　　Passage 4

　　Auctions are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer. He asks the crowd assembled in the auction-room to make offers, or “bids”, for the various items on sale. He encourages buyers to bid higher figures, and finally names the highest bidder as the buyer of the goods. This is called “knocking down” the goods, for the bidding ends when the auctioneer bangs a small hammer on a table at which he stands. This is often set on a raised platform called a rostrum. ? The ancient Romans probably invented sales by auction, and the English word comes from the Latin auctio, meaning “increase”. The Romans usually sold in this way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called sub basra, meaning “under the spear”, a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather. In England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries goods were often sold “by the candle”: a short candle was lit by the auctioneer, and bids could be made while it stayed alight. 

　　Practically all goods whose qualities vary are sold by auction. Among these are coffee, hides, skins, wool, tea, cocoa, furs, spices, fruit and vegetables and wines. Auction sales are also usual for land and property, antique furniture, pictures, rare books, old china and similar works of art. The auction rooms at Christie's and Sotheby's in London and New York are world famous. 

　　An auction is usually advertised beforehand with full particulars of the articles to be sold and where and when they can be viewed by prospective buyers. If the advertisement cannot give full details, catalogues are printed, and each group of goods to be sold together, called a “lot”, is usually given a number. The auctioneer need not begin with Lot 1 and continue in numerical order; he may wait until he registers the fact that certain dealers are in the room and then produce the lots they are likely to be interested in. The auctioneer's services are paid for in the form of a percentage of the price the goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible. 

　　The auctioneer must know fairly accurately the current market values of the goods he is selling, and he should be acquainted with regular buyers of such goods. He will not waste time by starting the bidding too low. He will also play on the rivalries among his buyers and succeed in getting a high price by encouraging two business competitors to bid against each other. It is largely on his advice that a seller will fix a “reserve” price, that is ,a price below which the goods cannot be sold. Even the best auctioneers, however, find it difficult to stop a “knock out”, whereby dealers illegally arrange beforehand not to bid against each other, but nominate one of themselves as the only bidder, in the hope of buying goods at extremely low prices. If such a ‘knock-out’ comes off, the real auction sale takes place privately afterwards among the dealers. 

　　51. A candle used to burn at auction sales ________. 

　　A. because they took place at night 

　　B. as a signal for the crowd to gather 

　　C. to keep the auctioneer warm 

　　D. to limit the time when offers could be made 

　　52. An auction catalogue gives prospective buyers ________. 

　　A. the current market values of the goods 

　　B. details of the goods to be sold

　　C. the order in which goods must be sold 

　　D. free admission to the auction sale 

　　53. The auctioneer may decide to sell the “lots” out of order because ________. 

　　A. he sometimes wants to confuse the buyers 

　　B. he knows from experience that certain people will want to buy certain items 

　　C. he wants to keep certain people waiting 

　　D. he wants to reduce the number of buyers 

　　54. An auctioneer likes to get high prices for the goods he sells because ________. 

　　A. then he earns more himself 

　　B. the dealers are pleased 

　　C. the auction-rooms become world famous 

　　D. it keeps the customers interested 

　　55. A ‘knock-out’ is arranged ________. 

　　A. to increase the auctioneer's profit

　　B. to allow one dealer only to make a profit 

　　C. to keep the price in the auction room low

　　D. to help the auctioneer 

　　Section B (10 points, 2 points each)

　　Directions: In this section, there is a passage with five questions. After you have read the passage, answer each question in English with no more than 15 words. Write down your answer on the Answer Sheet.

　　1. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have some experience with turning a small Web site into Internet gold. In 2006 they sold their scrappy start-up YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion.

　　2. More recently they picked an unlikely candidate to be their next Web sensation: a Yahoo castoff (丢弃物).

　　3. The men are trying to inject new life into Delicious, a social bookmarking service that, in its time, was popular among the technorati, but failed to catch on with a broader audience.

　　4. “What we plan to do,” Mr. Hurley said in an interview here last week, “is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

　　5. Created in 2003, Delicious lets people save links from around the Web and organize them using a simple tagging system, assigning keywords like “neuroscience” or “recipes.” It was praised for the way it allowed easy sharing of those topical links. The site’s early popularity spurred Yahoo to snap it up in 2005 — but in the years after that Yahoo did little with it.

　　6. In December, leaked internal reports from Yahoo hinted that the company was planning to sell or shut down the service.

　　7. At the same time, Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, who had recently formed a new company called Avos and begun renting space a few blocks from the original YouTube offices in San Mateo, had been brainstorming ideas for their next venture. One problem they kept circling around was the struggle to keep from drowning in the flood of news, cool new sites and videos surging through their Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, a glut that makes it difficult to digest more than a sliver of that material in a given day.

　　8. “Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Mr. Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on.”

　　9. He added, “There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”

　　10. When the men heard about Yahoo’s plans to close Delicious, their ears perked up, and they placed a personal call to Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, and made him an offer. (They declined to disclose financial details of the transaction.)

　　11. At heart, they say, the revamped service will still resemble the original Delicious when it opens to the public, which Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said would happen later this year. But their blueprint involves an overhaul of the site’s design and the software and the systems used to tag and organize links.

　　12. The current home page of Delicious features a simple cascade of blue links, the most recent pages bookmarked by its users, and it tends to largely be dominated technology news. But the new Delicious aims to be more of a destination, a place where users can go to see the most recent links shared around topical events, like the Texas wildfires or the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the gadget reviews and tech tips.

　　13. The home page would feature browseable “stacks,” or collections of related images, videos and links shared around topical events. The site would also make personalized recommendations for users, based on their sharing habits. “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing,” Mr. Hurley said.

　　14. Mr. Chen gives the example of trying to find information about how to repair a vintage car radio or plan an exotic vacation.

　　15. “You’re Googling around and have eight to 10 browser tabs of results, links to forums and message boards, all related to your search,” he said. The new Delicious, he said, provides “a very easy way to save those links in a collection that someone else can browse.”

　　16. They say they decided to buy Delicious rather than build their own service for a number of reasons.

　　17. “We know how hard it would be to build a brand,” Mr. Hurley said. “Delicious lets us hit the ground running with its existing footprint.”

　　18. A number of sites already have Delicious buttons as an option for sharing content — right alongside Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, Mr. Hurley said.

　　19. But Mr. Chen said the team also “liked the idea of saving one of the original Web 2.0 companies that started the social sharing movement on the Web.” He added: “There was some sense of history. We were genuinely sad that it would be shut down.”

　　20. Both founders acknowledge that they were never diehard Delicious users. “I signed up in 2005 and I didn’t use it again until 2011,” Mr. Chen said with an embarrassed laugh.

　　56. What is likely to be Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s next web sensation according to the passage?

　　57. Why the author says in paragraph 2 that the sensation is an UNLIKELY candidate?

　　58. How do you understand the sentence said by Mr. Hurley “Delicious lets us hit the ground running with its existing footprint” in paragraph 17?

　　59. What does the word ‘diehard’ possibly mean in the first sentence of the last paragraph?

　　60. List no less than 10 words in the passage that are related with web or internet.

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