2018年新疆大学英语考博真题.docxVIP

2018年新疆大学英语考博真题 语法（15分） 阅读理解（40分） Text1 If books had never been discovered, man would have found some other way of recording his communication. But then, for our consideration, we should include as books everything that is a written record. This would include tablets, papyrus and anything else-including computer diskettes. In the case of music, it would be impossible to think that man can live without it. Looking at primitive cultures, it appears that music is actually a part of the human psyche. When two things are knocked together, music is produced. So for the sake of our discussion, it is intended to restrict the meaning of music to the popularly accepted concept. Music is the pleasing combination of sounds that we like to listen to.Though it is difficult to, we can pretend that these things never existed. In this case we would not miss them today. To compare with recent inventions, let us look at radio and television Though we cannot think of life without them today, this is so only from comparatively recent times. There are many of us living today who had seen a time when there was no television. They will tell us that life was not that much different. The same is probably true of radio. But books are a different thing because they, or something akin to them, began thousands of years ago. In the case of music, it goes back even further--perhaps to millions of years, we may be able to imagine a world which never saw books, because books are a human invention. However, in the case of music this does not seem possible. Pleasing sounds are all around us, like the singing of the birds and the whistling of the wind. Music just seems to be inborn in us and in the world around us.If books did not exist, the world will be a poorer place indeed. Great philosophies like Plato’s would become unknown and all the pleasures and lessons we could get from them will be lost forever. Then there is literature like the works of the great masters like Shakespeare, Dickens and Jan