2002年Text 1
If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems. Your humor must be relevant to the audience and should help to show them that you are one of them or that you understand their situation and are in sympathy with their point of view. Depending on whom you are addressing, the problems will be different. If you are talking to a group of managers, you may refer to the disorganized methods of their secretaries; alternatively if you are addressing secretaries, you may want to comment on their disorganized bosses.
Here is an example, which I heard at a nurses’ convention, of a story which works well because the audience all shared the same view of doctors. A man arrives in heaven and is being shown around by St. Peter. He sees wonderful accommodations, beautiful gardens, sunny weather, and so on. Everyone is very peaceful, polite and friendly until, waiting in a line for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed aside by a man in a white coat, who rushes to the head of the line, grabs his food and stomps over to a table by himself. Who is that? the new arrival asked St. Peter. On, that’s God, came the reply, but sometimes he thinks he’s a doctor.
If you are part of the group which you are addressing, you will be in a position to know the experiences and problems which are common to all of you and it’ll be appropriate for you to make a passing remark about the inedible canteen food or the chairman’s notorious bad taste in ties. With other audiences you mustn’t attempt to cut in with humor as they will resent an outsider making disparaging remarks about their canteen or their chairman. You will be on safer ground if you stick to scapegoats like the Post Office or the telephone system.examda.
If you feel awkward being humorous, you must practice so that it becomes more natural. Include a few casual and apparently off-the-cuff remarks which you can deliver in a relaxed and unforced manner. Often it’s the delivery which causes the audience to smile, so speak slowly and remember that a raised eyebrow or an unbelieving look may help to show that you are making a light-hearted remark.
Look for the humor. It often comes from the unexpected. A twist on a familiar quote If at first you don’t succeed, give up or a play on words or on a situation. Search for exaggeration and understatements. Look at your talk and pickout a few words or sentences which you can turn about and inject with humor.
45. The best title for the text may be .
[A] Use Humor Effectively.
[B] Various Kinds of Humor.
[C] Add Humor to Speech.
[D] Different Humor Strategies.
[答案] A
[解题思路]
文章的第一、二、三段主要谈论的是如何对不同的人用不同的话题表达幽默，第四段讨论了如何取得好的幽默效果，最后一段则介绍了一种表达幽默的方法，可见作者的目的是在于教会读者如何有效地利用幽默，与A选项相符合。其他三个选项都只概括了文章的一部分内容，而且也都是围绕着第一个选项的内容来表述的。因此正确答案为A。
[题目译文]
本文的最佳标题可能是 。
[A] 有效地使用幽默
[B] 幽默种种
[C] 为谈话增加幽默
[D] 不同的幽默策略
2003年Text 1
Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Internet. The American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in the World War II and later laid the roots for the CIA was fascinated with information. Donovan believed in using whatever tools came to hand in the great game of espionage-----spying as a profession. These days the Net, which has already re-made pastimes as buying books and sending mail, is reshaping Donovan’s vocation as well.
The last revolution isn’t simply a matter of gentlemen reading other gentlemen’s e-mail. That kind of electronic spying has been going on for decades. In the past three or four years, the world wide web has given birth to a whole industry of point-and-click spying. The spooks call it open source intelligence, and as the Net grows, it is becoming increasingly influential. in 1995 the CIA held a contest to see who could compile the most data about Burundi. The winner, by a large margin, was a tiny Virginia company called Open-Source Solutions，whose clear advantage was its mastery of the electronic world.
Among the firms making the biggest splash in the new world is Straitford, Inc.], a private intelligence-analysis firm based in Austin, Texas. Straitford makes money by selling the results of spying(covering nations from Chile to Russia. to corporations like energy-services firm McDermott International. Many of its predictions are available online at.
Straifford president George Friedman says he sees the online world as a kind of mutually reinforcing tool for both information collection and distribution, a spymaster’s dream. Last week his firm was busy vacuuming up data bits from the far corners of the world and predicting a crisis in Ukraine. As soon as that report runs, we’ll suddenly get 500 new internet sign-ups from Ukraine, says Friedman, a former political science professor. And we’ll hear back from some of them. Open-source spying does have its risks, of course, since it can be difficult to tell good information from bad. That’s where Straitford earns its keep.
