希賽網為考生們整理了2012年中共中央黨校考博英語閱讀題真題，供考生們備考復習。

Today in the techno-societies there is an almost ironclad consensus about the future of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture, and forced to adopt standardized styles of life.

Such predictions have spawned a generation of future haters and technophobes, as one might expect. One of the most extreme of there is a French religious mystic, Jacques Ellul, whose books are enjoying a campus vogue. According to Ellul, man was far freer in the past when “Choice was a real possibility for him.” By contrast, today, the human being is “no longer in any sense the agent of choice.” And, as for tomorrow, “In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device.” Robbed of choice, he will be acted upon, not active. He will live, Ellul warns, in a totalitarian state run by a velvet-gloved Gestapo.

This same theme---the loss of choice ---runs through much of the work of Arnold Toynbee. It is repeated by everyone from hippie gurus to Supreme Court justices, tabloid editorialists and existentialist philosophers. Put in its simplest form, the theory of Vanishing Choice rests on a crude syllogism: science and technology have fostered standardization. Science and technology will advance, making the future even more standardized than the present. Ergo, man will progressively lose his freedom of choice.

If instead of blindly accepting this syllogism, we stop to analyze it, however, we make an extraordinary discovery. For not only is the logic itself faulty, the entire idea is premised on sheer factual ignorance about the nature, the meaning and the direction of the super-industrial revolution.

Certainly, it would be difficult to deny that industrialism has had a leveling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly identical units it the growing achievement of the industrial age. Thus, when intellectuals bewail the sameness of our material goods, they accurately reflect the state of affairs of under-industrialism.

In the same breath, however, they reveal shocking ignorance about the character of super-industrialism. Focused on what society was, they are blinded to what it is fast becoming, for the society of the future will offer not a restricted, standardized flow of goods, but the greatest variety of unstandardized goods and services any society has ever seen. We are moving got towards a further extension of material standardization, but towards its dialectical negation.

The end of standardization is already in sight. However, the pace varies from industry to industry, and from country to country.

1.The predictions about the future made by many writers, in the author’s opinion, are ( ).

A、 pessimistic

B、 optimistic

C、 pleasing

D、 reasonable

2.The author gives the works of Jacques Ellul and Arnold Toynbee as examples to prove that ( ).

A、 a generation of future will become haters and technophobes

B、 science and technology will certainly advance

C、 man will gradually lose his freedom of choice

D、 science and technology will make the future more standardized

3.By saying “In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device” (Paragraph 2), Ellul implies that he (man) ( ).

A、 will record what other people say and then follow them

B、 will imitate other people when he takes actions

C、 can do whatever he wishes

D、 can do nothing but follow others

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