2008年1月全国自考00603英语写作真题试卷

全国2008年1月高等教育自学考试

英语写作试题

课程代码：00603

I. Supply the missing paragraph .(20 points)

The following passage is incomplete with the introduction missing. Study the passage carefully and write the paragraph in no more than 100 words. Make sure your tone and the vocabulary you use are in unity with the passage provided.

Learning to Swim

Before going into water, some warm-up exercise on the bank is necessary. You can start from learning to regulate your balance of breath. Draw a deep breath, then breathe it out as slowly as you can. This exercise helps you stay under water longer and prevents drowning. Keep doing this for a few minutes and then combine it with practicing the upper limbs. Take breaststroke for example. Put the palms together in front of your chest and push forward. Part the palms and swing them sideways with your fingers close to each other. That’ll bring your palms back to the chest. Repeat the cycle.

Now you are ready to practice the movements in water. You must be brave. Fear of water is the main barrier in learning swimming. To overcome the fear, you can wear a life jacket which can make floating easier. Simply put into practice what you learned with your arms. Breathe in with every pushing forward; breathe out during the course of circling your arms. In the meanwhile, lift your body horizontally and move your legs in the same way as frogs do in water. You may find with a pleasant surprise that you can swim.

Repeat the series of actions until you are confident in throwing away the life jacket. Once you have learned this basic movement, it is easy to try floating on water, a must for a swimmer.

Like other skills, swimming requires courage, persistence and practice. “Practice makes perfect.” Usually it takes two weeks to a month to learn swimming. When you can swim freely, you’ll enjoy the voluptuous touch of water on your body. But don’t forget the tips. Before you become a skilled swimmer, stay in the shallow water. Second, whenever and wherever you swim, be sure to be in the sight of people. After all, safety comes first.

Ⅱ.Write an outline .(20 points)

Read the following passage carefully and compose a “sentence outline” for it.

Midnight

It was eight o’clock, and like millions of other Americans, I was staring at the television set wondering what kind of a lesson Mr. Huxtable was going to teach his children next on The Bill Cosby Show. I was glued to the set like an average eleven-year-old couch potato while leisurely eating a can of cold Chef Boyardee spaghetti in my empty living room. As I watched the show, I gradually fell asleep on the floor fully clothed in a pair of blue jeans and a Tshirt, wondering when my parents would come home. Around midnight I suddenly woke up to a rustling noise when my parents finally arrived from a long day at work. I could see in their tired faces the grief and the hardship of working at a dry cleaner.

They worked in modern times, but in conditions similar to those of eighteen-century factory workers. Because they were immigrants with little formal education and spoke broken English, only hard, physically demanding jobs were available to them. Therefore, they worked at a dry cleaner that was as big as a factory, a place where smaller cleaners sent their clothes to be cleaned.

My parents had to fulfill certain quotas: Several hundred garments——shirts, pants, and other clothing——had to be cleaned and pressed per day. By themselves, every day, they did an amount of work that should have taken four laborers to complete. The muscles of my mother’s shoulders and arms became as firm as iron from working with the press, which is considered a difficult job even for man. In addition to pressing, my father washed the clothes in the machines, which was the reason a strong odor of oil was permanently embedded in his working clothes.

Not only were my parents’ jobs physically demanding, but they also had to work long hours. They went to work at five o’clock in the morning and came home anytime between nine o’clock at night and midnight. They worked over twelve hours daily at the dry cleaner, where the eight-hour workday did not exist. Their only rest was two ten-to-twenty-minute breaks——one for lunch and one for dinner. They did not stop even when they were burned by the hot press or by the steam rising from it. It was obvious that they worked at a dry cleaner because of the scars on their arms. Their burned skin would blister and later peel off, showing their raw flesh. In time they would heal, but other burns would soon follow.

Along with having to work overtime without compensation and suffering injuries without treatment, my parents were paid below the minimum wage. These two people who did the work of four laborers together received a paycheck equivalent to that of a single worker. This money was then spent to feed and house a household of five people.

As my parents silently entered our home around midnight, they did not have to complain about their jobs. I could see their anguish in the wrinkles on their foreheads and their fatigue in the languid movements of their bodies. Their eyes looked toward me saying, “We hate our jobs, but we have to work in order to survive.”

Ⅲ.Compose an essay. (60 points)

Choose one of the following transportation vehicles and write an essay (about 300 words) to explain why you think it has changed people’s lives.

(Automobiles Bicycles Airplanes)