美国政治经济与外交复习资料

美国政治经济与外交复习资料

选择题、填空题部分

Chapter 1 The Establishment of American Politics

1.Until the 1500s, most of what is now the United States was thinly populated forests and prairies.

2.The ancestors of the Hawaiians were Polynesians who sailed to what is now Hawaii from other Pacific islands about 2,000 years ago.

3.Some Spaniards settled in what is now the United States during the 1500's. European settlement increased sharply during the 1600's.

4.The history of the United States political system fashioned out of the wilderness within the past 400 years is packed with incident because America has had in that period to pass through those stages of political development that elsewhere have taken 1,000 or 2,000 years

5.The first known inhabitants of modern-day United States territory are believed to have arrived over a period of several thousand years beginning sometime prior to 15,000 years ago

6.Columbus was the first European to set foot on what would one day become U.S.

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territory when he came to Bahamas in October 12th of 1492.

7.In the 15th century, Europeans brought horses, cattle, and hogs to the Americas and, in turn, took back to Europe corn, potatoes, tobacco, beans, and squash.

8.some evidence suggests that John Cabot might have reached what is presently New England in 1498.

9.The strip of land along the eastern seacoast was settled primarily by English colonists in the 17th century

10 In 1607, about 100 British colonists reached the coast near Chesapeake Bay where they founded Jamestown

11.During the next 150 years, a steady stream of colonists came to America and settled near the coast. Most of the colonists were British, but they also included people from France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, and other countries.

12.The Plymouth Colony was established in 1620.

13.The area of New England was initially settled primarily by Puritans who created the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.

14.The first attempted English settlement south of Virginia was the Province of Carolina, with Georgia Colony the last of the thirteen colonies established in 1733.

15.Several colonies were used as places of punishment from the 1620s until the

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American Revolution.

16.The House of Burgesses first met at Jamestown, then the capital of Virginia, on July 30, 1619.

17.In 1621, the House gained the authority to make all legislation, but the governor and his council had the right of veto.

18.When it was temporarily broken up in 1774, its members met in the first revolutionary convention of Virginia.

19.The Thirteen Colonies were British colonies in North America founded between 1607 (Virginia), and 1733 (Georgia).

20.United States of America, which became a nation in 1781 with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.

21.The 1783 Treaty of Paris represented Great Britain’s formal acknowledgement of the United States as an independent nation.

22.The war began on April 19, 1775, when British soldiers and Americans clashed at Lexington, Massachusetts, and at nearby Concord.

23.On Sept. 3, 1783, Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, by which it recognized the independence of the United States.

24.Tension had been building between Great Britain and the American Colonies for

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more than 10 years before the Revolutionary War began.

25.By 1774, America no longer was a society in which the few ruled with the passive consent of the many.

26.In 1775, Britain’s Parliament declared Massachusetts—the site of much protest—to be in rebellion.

27.On July 4, 1776, the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, in which the colonies declared their freedom from British rule.

28.In 1777, the Americans won an important victory at Saratoga, N.Y., which convinced France that the Americans could win the war.

29.In October 1781, a large British force surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia.

30.Finally, on Sept. 3, 1783, the Americans and the British signed the Treaty of Paris of 1783, officially ending the Revolutionary War

31.When the Americans created their own nation in the violence of a revolution during the 1770s and 1780s, they took on a political identity

32.In 1781, the states set up a federal government under laws called the Articles of Confederation

33.The Articles of Confederation served as the new nation’s basic charter of

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government until the first government under the Constitution of the United States was formed in 17

34.Richard Henry Lee of Virginia first proposed the establishment of a confederation in the Congress on June 7, 1776.

35.Within a month, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania prepared a first draft. On Nov. 15, 1777, Congress adopted a final version.

36. By 1779, all the states except Maryland had approved it.

37.By 1786, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others were convinced that a general convention was needed to make changes in the Articles.

38.In September 1786, delegates from five states met at Annapolis, Maryland, and proposed that such a convention meet in Philadelphia in May 1787.

39.The delegates finally reached agreement on a new Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787.

40.The delegates also drew on political theories set forth by philosophers of the 1600s and 1700s.

41.The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by [the Constitutional Convention] of 1787, not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.

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42.In 17, the Electoral College chose George Washington to serve as the first president, who was reelected in 1792.

43.The government went into operation in 17, with its temporary capital in New York City, and then the capital was moved to Philadelphia in 1790, and to Washington, D.C., in 1800.

Chapter 2 The Government of the United States

1.The United States Constitution, adopted in 1788, contained few personal guarantees.

2.There have been twenty-seven amendments to the Constitution.

3.The Pilgrims, who settled in Massachusetts in 1620, joined in signing the Mayflower Compact to obey “just and equal laws.”

4.The American Revolution began more than a hundred and fifty years later, in 1775.

5.The Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress in 1776, is a classic document of democracy

6.The Senate has 100 members, 2 from each state, who serve six-year terms. About a third of the seats come up for election every two years.

7.The House of Representatives, usually called simply the House, has 435

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members.

8.House members, or representatives, serve two-year terms.

9.According to the Constitution, each member of the House must represent at least 30,000 persons, but every state must have at least one representative.

10.The Constitution also requires a census of the nation every 10 years to determine how many representatives each state should have.

11.The Constitution requires a representative to be at least 25 years old and to have been a United States citizen for at least seven years.

12.Representatives serve two-year terms and are elected in the even-numbered years, and there is no limit on the number of times a representative may be re-elected.

13.In January after a congressional election, House members meet to choose their party leaders for the next two years.

14.If the president fails to act on a bill for 10 days—not including Sundays—while Congress is in session, it becomes law.

15.A bill that reaches the president fewer than 10 days—not including Sundays—before Congress adjourns must be signed to become law.

16.Fourteen executive departments and about 80 agencies handle the daily work of

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administering federal laws and programs.

17.The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1951, provides that no one can be elected to the presidency more than twice.

18.The 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1961, gave the District of Columbia three electoral votes.

19.The manner of electing the President was a major problem at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

20.From 17 to 1801, each elector voted for two persons on the same ballot.

21.In 17, all 69 electors voted for George Washington, and 34 voted for John Adams.

22.After 1800, more and more states began choosing electors in popular elections.

23.The Peace Corps was established in 1961. In 1971, it became part of ACTION, a new government agency that combined several volunteer programs.

24. In 1981, the Peace Corps became an independent agency.

25. Since then, the court has overturned all or parts of more than 125 federal laws and over 1,000 state laws.

26. In 17, Congress passed the Judiciary Act, which established the federal court

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system.

27.There are ninety-four district courts in the United States and its possessions. Each state has at least one.

28. The United States is divided into 12 judicial areas called circuits, each of which has one court of appeals.

29. A 13th court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, has nationwide jurisdiction.

30. At least six justices hear the cases chosen and decide each case by a majority vote.

31. For example, the court ruled in the 19 case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that public school segregation was unconstitutional.

32. Therefore, segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which requires that all citizens be treated equally.

33. However, the lawmaking role of legislatures in the country has increased greatly since 1900.

34. Relations between Congress and the president shifted wildly throughout the 1800s.

35. During the early and middle 1800s, however, several strong presidents sought

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to deal with Congress as an equal.

36. The speaker became so strong that House members revolted in 1910 to limit the office’s power.

37. During the early to middle 1900s, voters elected several strong-willed individuals who established the president as a leader in the legislative process.

38. Relations between Congress and the presidency changed markedly in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

39. In 1973, a Senate select committee began hearings on the Watergate scandal which involved illegal campaign activities during the 1972 presidential race.

40. In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend three articles of impeachment against Nixon

41. In 1996, Congress took the unusual step of trying to increase presidential power.

42. In 1998, however, the Supreme Court ruled the line-item veto unconstitutional.

Chapter 3 The Political Culture

1. Since the 1790s the United States has been run by one of the two major parties.

2. From 1828 through 1996, Democrats won twenty-one of the forty-four

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presidential elections.

3. But the Democratic candidate won ten of the seventeen presidential elections held from 1932 through 1996.

4. Origin of the Democratic Party is uncertain. Some historians trace its beginnings to the Democratic-Republican Party created by Thomas Jefferson during the 1790s.

5.Most historians, however, regard Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign organization, formed in 1828, as the beginning of the Democratic Party as it is known today.

6.Jefferson served as president from 1801 to 1809, and other

Democratic-Republicans held the presidency from 1809 to 1825.

7. After 1816, the Democratic-Republican Party split into several groups and fell apart as a national organization.

8. By about 1830, Jackson and his followers were called Democrats.

9. By the late 1830s, top Jacksonian Democrats had turned Jackson’s loose organization into an effective national political party—the Democratic Party.

10. The Republican Party is often called the G.O.P., which stands for Grand Old Party, a nickname Republicans gave their party in the 1880s.

11. By the late 1800s, the Republican Party represented a firm alliance of the

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agricultural West and the industrial East.

12. Origin of the Republican Party dates back to the strong anti-slavery opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 18

13. Whig is a short form of the word whiggamore, a Scotch word once used to describe people from western Scotland who opposed King Charles I of England in 18.

14. In the late 1600s, Scottish and English opponents of the growing power of royalty were called Whigs.

15. The Whigs maintained a strong position in English politics until the 1850s, when the Whig progressives adopted the term Liberal.

16.On July 6, 18, at a party meeting in Jackson, Michigan, the delegates formally adopted the name Republican.

17. By the 1790s, different views of the new country’s proper course had already developed, and those who held these opposing views tried to win support for their cause by banding together.

18. By 1828, the Federalists had disappeared as an organization, replaced by the Whigs

19.In the 1850s, the issue of slavery took center stage, with disagreement in particular over the question of whether or not slavery should be permitted in the

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country’s new territories in the West.

20.By the 1920s, however, this strong folksiness had diminished.

21. From the 1860s to the 1950s the Republican Party was considered to be the more classically liberal of the two major parties and the Democratic Party—the more classically conservative/populist of the two.

22. During the 1950s and the early 1960s both parties essentially expressed a more centrist approach to politics on the national level and had their liberal, moderate, and conservative wings equally influential within both parties.

23. From the early 1960s, the conservative wing became more dominant in the Republican Party,

24. The 19 presidential election heralded the rise of the conservative wing among Republicans.

25. The liberal and conservative wings within the Democratic Party were competitive until 1972.

26. By the 1980 election, each major party had largely become identified by its dominant political orientation.

27. In 1931, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Near v. Minnesota used the 14th Amendment to apply the freedom of the press to the States.

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28.The United States has about 1,800 daily and 9,700 weekly and semiweekly newspapers.

29. The total circulation of daily papers in the United States is about 60 million copies.

31. In 1980, The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch became the first electronic newspaper in the United States.

32. The first television interview program, “Meet the Press,” began in 1947.

33. In the 1950s, TV began to increase its coverage of public affairs.

34. In 19, television reporters covered the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin accused the U.S. Army of “coddling Communists.”

35. Television played a major role in the 1960 presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. A nationwide audience watched as the men faced each other in the first televised debates between presidential candidates.

36. In 1965, the launching of Early Bird, the first commercial communications satellite, made possible live broadcasts of news events between North America and Europe.

Chapter 4 The Development of American Economy

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1. The American colonies developed from slightly successful colonial economies to a small, independent farming economy, which became the United States of America in 1776.

2. By 1770, the North American colonies were ready, both economically and politically, to become part of the emerging self-government movement.

3. In 1791, Congress chartered a national bank for 20 years.

4. Cotton boomed following Eli Whitney’s invention in 1793 of the cotton gin, a machine that separated raw cotton from seeds and other waste.

5. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain during the 1700s and started spreading to other parts of Europe and to North America in the early 1800s.

6. By 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, sixteen percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas, and a third of the nation’s income came from manufacturing.

7.In the late 1840s and early 1850s, between 200,000 and 400,000 immigrants landed in the city every year。

8. By 1855, when the census recorded only 11,840 African Americans in New York, fifty-one percent of the city’s population of 630,000 was foreign-born. Most were poor and remained in eastern cities, often at ports of arrival.

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9.The Republican Party, organized in 1856, represented the industrialized North.

10.In 1860, Republicans and their presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, were speaking hesitantly on slavery, but they were much clearer on economic policy.

11. In 1861, they successfully pushed adoption of a protective tariff.

12. In 1862, the first Pacific railroad was chartered.

13. In 1863 a national banking system was established to finance the American Civil War, and in every city a “First National Bank” was established.

14. In 1859, a retired railroad conductor named Edwin L. Drake drilled a well near Titusville, Pa. Drake used an old steam engine to power the drill.

15. By the early 1860s, the oil boom had transformed western Pennsylvania, which made thousands of people crowd into the new boom towns.

16. In 1865, the first successful oil pipeline was built from an oil field near Titusville to a railroad station eight kilometers away.

17. During the 1700s and 1800s, many inventors in Europe and the United States tried to develop a practical typewriter which had to be accurate, easy to use, fast, and inexpensive.

18. In 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes, an inventor from Milwaukee, designed the

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first one with the help of Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule.

19.The restless era of the 1920s brought the United States spectacular economic growth, which helped the nation with prosperity, and far-reaching social change.

20. From 1922 to 1929, the national income increased more than forty per cent, from $60.7 billion annually to $87.2 billion.

21. Even many low-income families could now afford to buy an inexpensive automobile called the Model T, which Henry Ford had developed in 1908.

22. The number of passenger cars in the United States jumped from fewer than 7 million in 1919 to about 23 million in 1929.

23. The value of radio sales in the United States jumped from $60 million in 1922 to almost $850 million in 1929.

24. Throughout the 1920s, most Americans regarded big business as the foundation of society.

25. Stock prices had risen gradually since the early 1920s, but they rose rapidly in 1927 and 1928.

26. The average price of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange nearly tripled from 1925 to 1929.

27. By 1929, the U.S. economy was in serious trouble despite the soaring profits in

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the stock market.

28. Since the end of World War I in 1918, farm prices had dropped about 40 percent below their pre-war level.

29. Partly as a result, about 550 banks went out of business between July 1928 and June 1929.

30. A panic developed, and on October 29, stockholders sold a record 16,410,030 shares.

31. New Deal was a term that Franklin Roosevelt first used when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932.

32. Roosevelt called Congress into special session on March 5, 1933.

33. But about eight million Americans still had no jobs in 1940.

35. The government borrowed much of the money it needed by selling bonds, and the federal debt grew from $22.5 billion in 1933 to about $40.5 billion in 1939.

36. The end of World War II to the late 1960s was a golden era of American capitalism.

37. Shopping centers multiplied, rising from eight at the end of World War II to 3,840 in 1960.

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38. The nation’s gross national product rose from about $200,000 million in 1940 to $300,000 million in 1950 and to more than $500,000 million in 1960.

39. In 1949 a dispute broke out between Chairman Edwin Nourse and member Leon Keyserling.

40. In 1949 Keyserling gained support from powerful Truman advisors Dean Acheson and Clark Clifford.

41. President Kennedy passed the largest tax cut in history upon entering office in 1961.

42. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 spurred Congress to enact much of his legislative agenda.

43. But by the end of the 1960s, the government’s failure to raise taxes to pay for these efforts led to accelerating inflation, which eroded this prosperity.

英译汉部分

1. Although short by European or Asian standards, the history of the United States political system fashioned out of the wilderness within the past 400 years is packed with incident because America has had in that period to pass through those stages of political development that elsewhere have taken 1,000 or 2,000 years.

虽然按欧洲或亚洲的时间标准美国政治制度的历史短暂，但是，在过去400年中，美国在

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这片荒凉的土地上所开创的政治制度有着自己的特征，那就是，美国用了400年的时间完成了在世界上任何地方都需要1000年或2000年的时间才能完成的历史。

2.American came to believe that all dimensions （size or extent; scope） of the lives of Americans were encased enclosed within the same boundaries that defined their political life.

美国人逐渐懂得，就政治生活而言，他们生活中的一切标准都是相同的。

3.The influence of skilled economists has been brought to bear right at the apex of the American administrative machine.

业务精通的经济学家一直对美国最高管理机器施加影响。

4. PB + D > C.，P is the probability that an individual’s vote will affect the outcome of an election, and B is the perceived benefit of that person’s favored political party or candidate being elected. D originally stood for democracy or civic duty, but today represents any social or personal gratification an individual gets from voting. C is the time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting. Since P is virtually zero in most elections, PB is also near zero, and D is thus the most important element in motivating people to vote.

PB+D>C，其中，P是手中选票影响选举结果的机会率，B是某人认为所支持的政党胜出后可带来的益处，D原本指民主或公民责任，但现已理解为个人从投票中所获得的正面感觉，而C则是投票所需的时间、费用等成本。由于P在大部分选举中是零，故PB接近零，于D成为最重

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要的驱动力。

简答部分

1、The features of American Government

The first principle is constitutional authority。

The second principle is separation of powers。

The third principle is federalism， which is the division of powers between a national or central government and local authorities。

The fourth principle is representative democracy。

2、The features of the Executive Branch

The first feature of the branch is the presidency。

The second feature of the branch is its independent agencies。

The third feature of the branch is the control of departments and agencies。

3、The features of the Judicial Branch

The first feature of the branch is the authority of the courts。

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The second feature of the branch is its lower court system。

The third feature of the branch is its special courts。

4、Today， the president has seven basic roles：

（1）chief executive

（2）commander in chief

（3）foreign policy director

（4）legislative leader

（5）party head

（6）popular leader

（7）chief of state

5、In the United States， the law comes from four sources：

Constitutional law、administrative law、statutes、the common law（which includes case law）

6、There are two main methods of choosing which delegate candidates will

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attend the convention as delegates。

（1）the primary election system

（2）the caucus-convention system

7、In the first seven years the CEA(the Council of Economic Advisors) made five technical advances in policy making：

（1）the replacement of a “cyclical madel” of the economy by a “growth model”

（2）the setting of quantitative targets for the economy

（3）use of the theories of fiscal drag and full-employment budget

（4）recognition of the need for greater flexibility in taxation

（5）replacement of the notion of unemployment as a structural problem by a realization of a low aggregate demand

• judicial review

The courts’ most important power is judicial review—their authority to overturn laws they judge unconstitutional. Any court in the United States can declare laws or the actions of public officials illegal if they conflict with the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court, however, is the final authority on such matters. Judicial review provides an important check on the executive and legislative branches, as well as on state and

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local governments. The Supreme Court first established the power of judicial review in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), which struck down part of an act of Congress. Since then, the court has overturned all or parts of more than 125 federal laws and over 1,000 state laws.

first-past-the-post

Most officials in America are elected from single-member districts and win office by beating out their opponents in a system for determining winners called first-past-the-post—the one who gets the plurality wins, which is not the same thing as actually getting a majority of votes, which is thought to punish small parties both in the aggregation of votes into seats and by providing incentives to vote tactically. This encourages the two-party system.

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