南京大学2008年基础英语考研真题.doc

11．南京大学基础英语考研真题及参考答案（2007-2008） 南京大学2008年基础英语考研真题 PART ONE READING COMPREHENSION AND VOCABULARY (30 POINTS) Read the passage below and then answer the questions that follow. The Ethics of Foreign Policy By Felix Morley 1 The architects of foreign policy throughout the ages have frequently asserted that morality plays an important part in their official planning and conduct. 2 This dubious claim has received much partisan support, but relatively little objective examination. The failure to exercise the critical faculty toward the acts of one’s own government, while readily believing the worst in respect to the acts of other governments, is a tribute to the virtue of patriotism rather than to the quality of scientific analysis. The law of averages alone would indicate, without reference to cases, that in countless number of disputes between sovereignties, no single government is likely to have demonstrated superior morality consistently, except in the opinion of its own adherents. 3 The logical assumption would be that the foreign policy of any government is seldom completely “good,” in the sense of being a perfect exponent of the moral code of its time and place, and equally seldom is it absolutely “evil,” in the sense of being wholly oblivious to current moral standards. 4 From the ethical viewpoint the complexion of foreign policy would seem to be a habitual, though not uniform, gray. It is therefore the more desirable to indicate precisely why moral considerations, while seldom altogether ignored, are nevertheless of wholly secondary importance in determining the relations of governments. 5 Men are endowed by their Creator with a moral sense. They possess an intangible organ, to which we give the name “conscience,” that distinguishes between the more and the less admirable choices in all the countless occasions of decision that occur in an individual lifetime. 6 Conscience may be strong to the extreme of obduracy or weak to the point of impotence, but