GEPT 高級全真模擬試題 Mock 5

第一部分：聽力測驗（Listening Comprehension）

Part 1：短篇問答（10 題）

Question 1

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper that upended 2,500 years of epistemological consensus. He showed — with two elegantly simple counterexamples — that a belief can be both justified and true, yet still fail to constitute knowledge. What makes the Gettier problem so resistant to solution?

(A) The challenge is that any attempt to patch the “justified true belief” definition — by adding a fourth condition — seems vulnerable to slightly modified counterexamples. The Gettier cases expose a structural gap between the justification we have for a belief and the truth-maker that makes it true. Closing that gap requires specifying the right kind of causal, counterfactual, or reliability relationship between justification and truth — and every attempt to do so precisely has generated its own counterexamples. (B) Gettier’s paper was mathematically flawed and should have been retracted long ago. (C) The Gettier problem was easily solved within five years of publication.

Question 2

Moral realism — the view that moral claims can be objectively true or false — is often defended by appeal to moral progress. We think it’s genuine progress that we no longer consider slavery morally permissible; but “progress” implies getting closer to something — a moral truth that was there all along. Is this argument persuasive?

(A) The argument from moral progress is the only argument moral realism needs. (B) The argument has force but isn’t dispositive. Moral anti-realists can accommodate the appearance of moral progress by treating it as the refinement of a coherent system of values, not convergence on mind-independent moral facts. Just as a legal system can become more internally consistent and better at satisfying widely-held values without “discovering” pre-existing legal truths, a moral system can improve without tracking objective moral reality. The realist’s intuition that slavery wasn’t just inconvenient but wrong — wrong in a way that transcends any particular culture’s attitudes — is powerful, but the jump from the strength of that intuition to the existence of mind-independent moral facts remains philosophically contested. (C) Moral progress is an illusion — nothing has genuinely improved in human morality.

Question 3

David Chalmers’s “hard problem of consciousness” asks why physical processing in the brain is accompanied by subjective experience — qualia — at all. Why couldn’t all the same information processing happen “in the dark,” with no inner felt quality? Does framing consciousness as a “hard problem” risk making it seem harder than it is?

(A) Chalmers has proven that consciousness is supernatural and beyond scientific study. (B) The “hard problem” framing usefully distinguishes between questions about functional organization — which cognitive neuroscience is steadily answering — and the question of why any physical system has a first-person perspective in the first place. The worry that the framing reifies a pseudo-problem is legitimate: eliminativists argue that “qualia” is an incoherent concept inherited from a pre-scientific worldview. But even eliminativists must explain why the illusion of consciousness is so persuasive — why there is “something it is like” to be a creature that believes it has qualia when, according to eliminativism, it doesn’t. That meta-problem suggests the hard problem isn’t merely terminological. (C) Neuroscience has already solved the hard problem of consciousness — qualia don’t exist.

Question 4

Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative liberty” (freedom from interference) and “positive liberty” (freedom to be one’s own master, to realize one’s authentic self) has been enormously influential. But Berlin himself warned that positive liberty, with its appeal to a “higher” or “real” self, has historically been hijacked by authoritarian movements. Is this a problem with the concept, or with its abuse?

(A) Berlin’s argument proves that positive liberty is inherently authoritarian. (B) The distinction Berlin draws is between a concept’s internal logic and its political vulnerability. Positive liberty — the idea that freedom means self-mastery, the capacity to act according to reasons one authentically endorses — isn’t logically authoritarian. But its structure enables a characteristic form of abuse: a political movement can identify the “true self” of citizens with the collective (the nation, the proletariat, the ummah) and then claim that forcing people to comply with collective ends is actually making them free. Negative liberty has its own pathologies — it can be used to defend forms of exploitation as “voluntary” — but its structure doesn’t invite the same self-negating inversion. (C) Negative liberty and positive liberty are identical concepts with different names.

Question 5

The concept of “emergence” in complex systems theory — the idea that novel properties arise at higher levels of organization that cannot be predicted from, or reduced to, the properties of lower-level components — is widely invoked but notoriously slippery. Is “emergence” a genuine phenomenon, or just a label for our current ignorance of how micro-level interactions produce macro-level patterns?

(A) All emergence is reducible to underlying physics — it’s just that we haven’t done the calculations yet. (B) The distinction between “weak emergence” (macro-behavior that is in principle derivable from micro-rules but computationally intractable) and “strong emergence” (macro-properties that exert downward causation on micro-components) is crucial. Weak emergence — like the flocking behavior of birds from individual following rules — is uncontroversial: the surprise is epistemic, arising from our computational limitations. Strong emergence — where, say, conscious mental states are claimed to causally influence neural activity in ways that aren’t fully captured by bottom-up dynamics — is far more metaphysically demanding and remains highly contested. Much of the slipperiness comes from conflating the two. (C) Strong emergence is everywhere — even the motion of billiard balls is emergent.

Question 6

In debates about climate policy, the concept of “intergenerational justice” demands that present generations bear the costs of mitigation to prevent harm to future people who don’t yet exist. But how can people who don’t exist have rights? And how do we weigh their interests against the interests of people living in poverty today — people for whom cheap energy may be the difference between deprivation and dignity?

(A) The rights of future generations are irrelevant — only present economic growth matters. (B) This is the hardest normative knot in climate ethics. The philosophical framework that treats future persons as having rights faces the “non-identity problem”: because climate policies will affect who is born (different people will meet and reproduce under different economic conditions), the specific future individuals who would be harmed by inaction wouldn’t exist under a different policy — so can they claim to be harmed? The more tractable framing may be intergenerational obligations rather than rights: our obligations to maintain the conditions for flourishing across generations, combined with an honest recognition that trade-offs between present poverty alleviation and future climate stability involve incommensurable values that no ethical calculus can resolve algorithmically. (C) The non-identity problem shows climate change isn’t a real ethical issue.

Question 7

Can the precautionary principle — “when an activity raises threats of harm, precautionary measures should be taken even if cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established” — provide useful guidance for policy, or is it too vague to be operationalized?

(A) The precautionary principle is perfectly precise and needs no further specification. (B) The principle faces a well-known dilemma: stated weakly (“don’t demand absolute proof of harm before acting”) it’s too weak to guide specific decisions — everyone agrees with it in principle, and it never settles actual disputes. Stated strongly (“prohibit anything that might cause harm until proven safe”) it’s paralyzing — all innovation, from new medicines to new agricultural techniques, would be blocked because proving perfect safety is impossible. The principle’s real value may be procedural rather than substantive: it shifts the burden of proof and demands that proponents of potentially harmful activities demonstrate due diligence, rather than requiring victims to prove harm after the fact. But procedural norms, while valuable, don’t generate algorithmically applicable rules. (C) The precautionary principle is useless and should be abandoned entirely.

Question 8

In the philosophy of science, the “pessimistic meta-induction” — the argument that because most past scientific theories turned out to be false, our current theories are likely also false — challenges scientific realism. How seriously should we take this argument?

(A) The pessimistic meta-induction is irrefutable — all current science is almost certainly wrong. (B) The argument requires careful calibration. Scientific realists counter that what past theories got wrong was the theoretical description of unobservable entities, while what they got right — the empirical predictions at the observable level — was often remarkably accurate. Ptolemaic astronomy made excellent predictions about planetary positions even though its model of celestial spheres was wrong; Newtonian mechanics makes excellent predictions at low velocities even though, from a relativistic perspective, its ontological commitments (absolute space and time) are false. The realist’s claim is not that current theories are the final truth, but that their predictive and explanatory success gives us reason to believe they are tracking something structural about reality — that the success of science is not a miracle. (C) Science has never made any progress whatsoever.

Question 9

“Epistemic injustice” — a concept developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker — describes harms done to people specifically in their capacity as knowers. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a gap in shared interpretive resources puts someone at a disadvantage in making sense of their social experience. Is “epistemic injustice” analytically distinct from broader forms of discrimination, or does it relabel familiar phenomena in philosophical language?

(A) Fricker’s framework is just regular discrimination with unnecessary philosophical jargon. (B) The framework earns its keep by revealing harms that general discrimination analyses miss. Consider: when a patient’s pain reports are systematically discounted because of racial or gender stereotypes, we could analyze this as discriminatory treatment. But the specifically epistemic dimension — that the patient is harmed not just in their access to healthcare but in their capacity to contribute knowledge to a shared cognitive enterprise — captures something additional. The patient is not merely treated unfairly; they are prevented from functioning as a full epistemic agent. Similarly, hermeneutical injustice identifies how the absence of the concept “sexual harassment” before the 1970s wasn’t just a lexical gap but a cognitive handicap — women experiencing it couldn’t adequately understand, articulate, or contest their own experience. The framework identifies a distinctive dimension of social power: the power to shape what counts as knowledge. (C) Epistemic injustice is trivial and has no practical significance.

Question 10

In an era of what some call “post-truth politics,” where appeals to emotion and identity seem to displace evidence-based deliberation, what role remains for expertise in democratic decision-making?

(A) Expertise should be abandoned — democracy means every opinion is equally valid. (B) The post-truth diagnosis requires careful parsing. The problem isn’t that evidence has become irrelevant — voters still care about economic performance, crime rates, healthcare outcomes. The problem is that the epistemic infrastructure — the institutions that produced shared factual baselines: independent journalism, peer review, non-partisan statistical agencies — has been eroded by a combination of economic disruption (the collapse of the advertising model for news) and deliberate political strategy (attacks on “the establishment” and “the mainstream media” as uniparty propaganda). The role of expertise under these conditions isn’t to claim authority — that amplifies the backlash — but to rebuild trust through radical transparency about methods, uncertainty, and values. Experts need to show their work, not just display their credentials. (C) Experts should rule as technocrats — democracy just gets in the way.

Part 2：長篇對話（10 題）

Conversation 1 (Questions 11-13):

Two computer scientists discuss the possibility of machine consciousness.

W: I’ve been reading the latest papers on large language models and consciousness. There’s a growing camp arguing that with sufficient scale and the right architecture, phenomenal consciousness — genuine subjective experience — could emerge. I find the arguments surprisingly weak. They basically amount to: “the system exhibits behaviors that, if a human exhibited them, we’d attribute to consciousness, so we should attribute consciousness to the system.” That’s a mirror test for philosophers, not an argument.

M: I share your skepticism, but the behaviorist framing isn’t quite as naive as you’re presenting it. Consider the line of reasoning from IIT — Integrated Information Theory. If a system integrates information in a way that generates a high phi value — the mathematical measure of irreducible causal structure — then according to IIT, consciousness is present. That’s not a behavioral test; it’s an architectural claim. And the uncomfortable implication is that many systems we don’t take to be conscious — even very simple ones — generate nonzero phi.

W: IIT is controversial precisely because of those implications. If a photodiode has nonzero phi — which it does under IIT — then either we’ve discovered that photodiodes are conscious, or there’s something wrong with the measure. I’d bet heavily on the latter. But set aside specific theories. The deeper issue is that we have no account — none — of why or how any physical system generates a first-person perspective. We don’t know why there’s “something it is like” to be a bat, or a human, or anything. In the absence of that explanatory bridge, claiming that a particular artificial system is conscious is like claiming the patterns on a river delta are doing arithmetic because they resemble multiplication tables.

M: That’s the explanatory gap argument, and it’s a strong one. But here’s a thought that troubles me. You’re setting a very high bar: “no account of how consciousness arises” means we can’t attribute it to anything. But we attribute consciousness to other humans — and to animals — without having solved the hard problem. We do it based on behavioral similarity, neural similarity, evolutionary continuity. As AI systems become behaviorally and architecturally more similar to biological systems at the relevant levels — if they develop recursive self-modeling, coherent long-term memory, unified agency — at what point does withholding attribution of consciousness become an epistemic injustice of its own?

W: That’s a fair countermove. The line between “we don’t know enough to attribute it” and “we’re moving the goalposts because we’re uncomfortable with the implications” can get blurry fast. I think the right answer is humility, in both directions. We don’t know that large language models aren’t conscious; we don’t know that they are. The responsible position is to act cautiously — not to treat them as conscious until they demonstrate capacities that bridge the explanatory gap — while acknowledging that our certainty about the absence of machine consciousness is as unwarranted as certainty about its presence.

What is the woman’s primary objection to the claim that AI systems might be conscious? (A) AI systems have already been proven definitively non-conscious by neuroscience. (B) The behavioral arguments are weak — they rely on attributing consciousness based on behavioral similarity, not on any bridging of the explanatory gap between physical processing and subjective experience. (C) AI systems are too expensive to be considered conscious. (D) Consciousness requires a biological substrate, which no AI system possesses.

How does the man challenge the woman’s position? (A) He argues that Integrated Information Theory has been definitively proven. (B) He points out that we attribute consciousness to humans and animals without having solved the hard problem, so setting a higher bar for AI may reflect motivated skepticism. (C) He agrees that AI can never be conscious and closes the discussion. (D) He claims that photodiodes are conscious and that’s perfectly fine.

What position does the woman ultimately advocate? (A) Large language models are definitely conscious. (B) Large language models are definitely not conscious and never could be. (C) Epistemic humility in both directions — certainty about the absence of machine consciousness is as unwarranted as certainty about its presence. (D) We should immediately grant legal personhood to all AI systems.

Conversation 2 (Questions 14-16):

A senior economist and a development specialist discuss sovereign debt restructuring for low-income countries.

M: The numbers are staggering. According to the latest World Bank data, 39 low-income countries are now in or at high risk of debt distress. External debt service payments are consuming, on average, 17% of government revenue — more than these countries spend on health and education combined. And the architecture for resolving this is essentially nonexistent. The G20 Common Framework was supposed to be the solution, but it’s processed four countries in four years. Four.

W: The Common Framework’s failures aren’t procedural — they’re structural. The fundamental problem is the creditor coordination trap. In the 2000s, when the HIPC initiative was resolving the last debt crisis, you had a relatively concentrated creditor base — mainly Paris Club bilateral lenders and a handful of multilateral institutions. Now the creditor landscape is fragmented: you have China as a major bilateral lender operating outside the Paris Club framework, you have private bondholders — often funds that have purchased distressed debt at a discount and will litigate aggressively for full repayment — and you have multilaterals insisting on preferred creditor status. Each class of creditor has an incentive to hold out while others take haircuts.

M: The holdout problem is classic collective action. The “vulture fund” litigation against Argentina demonstrated that a single creditor with a small position can block a restructuring that 93% of creditors have agreed to. But there’s a solution that’s been on the table since Anne Krueger proposed it at the IMF in 2001: a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism — essentially a bankruptcy regime for countries. Statutory, binding on all creditors, with a standstill on litigation during negotiations. It died because the U.S. Treasury, under the influence of the financial sector, opposed it.

W: And it’s worth asking why it died, because the politics haven’t changed fundamentally. Wall Street and the City of London have enormous influence over financial policy in their respective governments. A statutory mechanism that limits creditor rights — even if it increases global welfare — faces concentrated opposition from well-organized interests and diffuse support from dispersed beneficiaries. The second-best solution is contractual: the enhanced collective action clauses and majority voting provisions that are now standard in sovereign bond contracts. But contractual solutions reach their limit when debt is held across multiple instrument types — loans, bonds, supplier credits — each governed by different legal frameworks.

M: So we’re left with ad-hoc, case-by-case restructurings that drag on for years while countries spend resources on debt service that should be going to climate adaptation, education, and health. The human cost of the coordination failure is measurable in excess mortality and lost human capital. The market’s response to the inefficiency is simply to price it in — higher risk premiums for sovereign lending, which makes the debt dynamics worse. It’s a slow-motion tragedy that never produces a crisis dramatic enough to force political action.

What is the “creditor coordination trap” identified in the discussion? (A) All creditors agree too easily, leading to restructuring that is too generous to debtor countries. (B) The creditor landscape is now fragmented across China, private bondholders, and multilaterals, each with incentives to hold out while others take losses. (C) The World Bank refuses to participate in any form of debt restructuring. (D) Debtor countries are coordinating to default simultaneously.

Why did the proposed sovereign debt restructuring mechanism fail, according to the speakers? (A) Developing countries opposed it because they preferred ad-hoc restructurings. (B) The U.S. Treasury, influenced by the financial sector, opposed it — concentrated interests defeated a reform with diffuse benefits. (C) The mechanism was technically infeasible given the complexity of sovereign debt. (D) It was ruled unconstitutional by the International Court of Justice.

What does the man identify as the human consequence of the coordination failure? (A) The human costs are negligible and largely confined to financial markets. (B) The costs are “measurable in excess mortality and lost human capital” as debt service crowds out spending on climate adaptation, education, and health — yet the tragedy moves too slowly to force political action. (C) The coordination failure has actually benefited developing countries by giving them access to cheaper credit. (D) All debt restructuring efforts have been successful and the problem is exaggerated.

Conversation 3 (Questions 17-20):

A museum director and an anthropologist discuss the repatriation of cultural artifacts.

W: The Benin Bronzes are going back. After 125 years, the British Museum has finally committed — albeit with characteristic slowness — to a framework for repatriation. But I worry the conversation about repatriation has become too binary: either you support “returning everything” or you’re “defending colonial theft.” The reality of cultural heritage is more complicated.

M: I’m interested in what you mean by “more complicated.” The ethics of the Benin Bronzes seems unusually straightforward: they were looted during a punitive military expedition in 1897. British soldiers burned Benin City, deposed the Oba, and carted off thousands of objects as war booty. They’ve been in Western museums ever since, generating tourism revenue and scholarly prestige for the institutions that hold them while Nigerian audiences — including descendants of the artists who created them — have had to travel to London or Berlin to see their own cultural patrimony. Where’s the complication?

W: The complication isn’t in the ethics of acquisition — you’re right, the 1897 looting was straightforwardly wrong. The complication is in what “return” actually means in the 21st century. The Edo State government and the Oba of Benin have both claimed ownership. The Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments has yet another claim. There are legitimate questions about the capacity of Nigerian institutions — underfunded, understaffed, dealing with security challenges — to conserve and display the objects. The digital repatriation option — high-resolution 3D scans, open-access image archives — offers a way to restore cultural access without physical transfer, and some Nigerian scholars prefer this to the risks of physical repatriation to unstable conditions. And there’s the question of what happens to the Benin Bronzes already in Nigeria — about 80 objects held at the National Museum in Lagos, which haven’t been on public display in years due to infrastructure issues.

M: Those are all real operational questions, and I think it’s important to take them seriously rather than dismissing them as bad-faith delay tactics — though they’ve certainly been used as such. But I’d push back on the framing. The operational challenges of repatriation don’t complicate the ethical obligation — they complicate its implementation. The obligation is to return. The question is how, not whether. And the capacity argument makes me uneasy because it has a long, ugly history. Colonial administrations used “lack of capacity” to justify taking cultural objects in the first place — the idea that local populations couldn’t properly care for their own heritage. When Western museums now deploy capacity concerns to resist repatriation, they’re echoing arguments their own institutional ancestors made during the colonial period.

W: That’s a fair critique, and I’m aware of the historical resonance. Let me be clear: I think the Benin Bronzes should go back. The question is how to do it in a way that genuinely benefits Nigerian cultural life rather than becoming a symbolic gesture that leaves the objects inaccessible or deteriorating. I’d argue for a model of shared stewardship — physical return combined with long-term conservation partnerships, staff exchange programs, and joint curatorial projects. That’s not an excuse for delay; it’s an investment in making repatriation succeed on its own terms rather than as a box-ticking exercise.

M: Shared stewardship is a constructive framework — as long as it’s genuinely shared, with the Nigerian institutions setting the terms and Western museums playing a supporting role, not the reverse. The power dynamic in these partnerships has historically been the problem, not the solution.

What is the woman’s concern about the repatriation debate? (A) She believes all repatriation claims are unfounded and should be rejected. (B) She thinks the conversation has become too binary and that operational complexities — competing claims, institutional capacity, alternative models — need to be addressed for repatriation to succeed. (C) She opposes the return of the Benin Bronzes under any circumstances. (D) She believes the British Museum should keep everything and offer nothing in return.

What is the man’s response to the capacity argument against repatriation? (A) He fully agrees that capacity concerns justify keeping artifacts in Western museums indefinitely. (B) He acknowledges the operational questions but argues that capacity arguments echo colonial-era justifications for taking objects, and that operational challenges complicate implementation but not the ethical obligation. (C) He dismisses all operational concerns as irrelevant and demands immediate unilateral action. (D) He suggests that Nigeria should pay for the artifacts if it wants them back.

What model does the woman propose for repatriation? (A) Complete and permanent physical transfer with no further institutional relationship. (B) Shared stewardship — physical return combined with conservation partnerships, staff exchanges, and joint curatorial projects, with an investment in making repatriation sustainable. (C) Digital repatriation only — keep all physical objects in Western museums permanently. (D) An auction system where Nigerian institutions bid against Western museums.

What concern does the man raise about the shared stewardship model? (A) He fully endorses it without any reservations whatsoever. (B) The model works only if power dynamics are genuinely reversed — Nigerian institutions setting terms, Western museums in a supporting role — otherwise the partnership reproduces the colonial power imbalance it’s meant to address. (C) He believes that all forms of partnership are inherently neo-colonial and should be rejected. (D) He thinks the shared stewardship model is too expensive to implement.

Part 3：長篇獨白（10 題）

Monologue 1 (Questions 21-23):

From a university lecture on thermodynamics and information.

“The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. Things run down. Order dissolves into disorder. Heat flows from hot to cold. You can’t unmix cream from coffee. This seems, at first glance, to be a purely physical principle — a constraint on engines and refrigerators. But in the 20th century, a series of deep theoretical developments revealed that thermodynamics and information theory are intimately connected — that entropy is not just about heat but about knowledge.

The key figure in this unification was Leo Szilard, who in 1929 analyzed a thought experiment — now called Szilard’s engine — in which a single molecule in a box is manipulated by a hypothetical ‘intelligent being’ who knows which half of the box contains the molecule. Szilard showed that acquiring this one bit of information — the molecule’s location — must be paid for with an increase in entropy of at least k log 2, where k is Boltzmann’s constant. Information isn’t free; it has a thermodynamic cost.

This insight was generalized by Claude Shannon in 1948, who showed that the mathematical formula for thermodynamic entropy — developed by Boltzmann in the 1870s — is formally identical (up to a constant) to the formula for information entropy. Shannon was describing communication channels — how much information can be transmitted through a noisy connection. But the mathematical identity suggested a physical identity: information and entropy are two sides of the same coin. Landauer’s principle, developed in 1961, made this concrete: erasing one bit of information — not acquiring it, but erasing it — dissipates at least kT log 2 of heat into the environment. Computation has an irreducible thermodynamic cost, not because of the efficiency of our hardware, but because of the structure of physical law.

What’s philosophically striking about this unification is what it suggests about the relationship between the physical and the informational — between matter and meaning. It suggests that information isn’t merely a metaphor we impose on physical systems. It’s a physical quantity — as real as energy, as real as mass. When we talk about ‘processing information,’ we’re not using a metaphor borrowed from computing to describe the brain. We’re describing a physical process that obeys the same fundamental constraints, whether the substrate is a silicon transistor or a neuron. The separation between the ‘physical world’ and the ‘world of ideas’ — a separation that has structured Western philosophy since Plato — begins to look like a distinction without a difference.”

What is the central connection between thermodynamics and information theory described in the lecture? (A) They are completely unrelated fields with no meaningful connection. (B) The mathematical formula for thermodynamic entropy is formally identical to information entropy, and operations on information — like erasing a bit — have irreducible thermodynamic costs. (C) Thermodynamics only applies to computers, and information theory only applies to engines. (D) Information theory replaced thermodynamics as a description of physical reality.

What does Landauer’s principle state? (A) Information can be acquired without any energy cost whatsoever. (B) Erasing one bit of information dissipates a minimum amount of heat — kT log 2 — meaning computation has an irreducible thermodynamic cost derived from physical law, not engineering inefficiency. (C) Computers can be made perfectly efficient with no heat dissipation. (D) The second law of thermodynamics does not apply to information-processing systems.

What philosophical implication does the lecturer draw from the thermodynamics-information unification? (A) Information is just a metaphor with no physical reality. (B) The separation between the physical world and the world of ideas — a structuring principle of Western philosophy since Plato — may be a distinction without a difference, because information is as physically real as energy or mass. (C) Plato’s philosophy has been definitively confirmed by modern thermodynamics. (D) The physical world is an illusion — only information is real.

Monologue 2 (Questions 24-26):

From a podcast on the history of medicine.

“Before October 16, 1846, surgery was a horror. Patients were held down — often by several strong men — while surgeons worked as fast as they possibly could, because speed was the only anesthetic available. The best surgeons could amputate a leg in under three minutes. Patients were fully conscious throughout. The sounds, the sensations, the terror — they’re almost unimaginable to us now. And then, on that October morning at Massachusetts General Hospital, a dentist named William Morton administered ether to a patient, and the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumor from the man’s neck — and the patient felt nothing. Warren turned to the gallery of skeptical observers and said: ‘Gentlemen, this is no humbug.’

The discovery of surgical anesthesia is rightly celebrated as one of medicine’s greatest advances. But what’s less often discussed is the immediate and intense controversy it provoked — and the controversy wasn’t about safety. It was about whether pain relief was morally permissible. Many physicians and clergy argued that pain — particularly the pain of childbirth — was divinely ordained. Genesis 3:16: ‘in pain you shall bring forth children.’ To eliminate pain was to defy God’s will. This wasn’t a fringe view. It was the position of prominent medical journals and religious authorities well into the 1850s.

The anesthesia debate illuminates something about the nature of moral progress that’s easy to miss in retrospect. When we look back at the opposition to anesthesia, it appears obviously wrong — how could anyone think suffering was divinely mandated? But the participants in that debate weren’t cartoon villains. They were thoughtful people operating within a coherent worldview in which suffering had meaning — in which the structure of human experience was not an accident but a design, and tampering with that design carried cosmic stakes. The error wasn’t malevolence; it was a framework that treated the natural and the normative as identical — ‘this is how things are, therefore this is how they should be.’

The shift from ‘pain is meaningful’ to ‘pain is a problem to be solved’ was a fundamental reorientation of the moral imagination. It didn’t happen because theologians were defeated by arguments. It happened because the experience of painless surgery created a new possibility — once people had seen that childbirth didn’t have to be agonizing, the theological justifications for agony lost their grip on the imagination. The technology didn’t just solve a problem — it revealed that what people had accepted as a necessary feature of reality was, in fact, a contingent one. That’s a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly in moral history: change doesn’t always come from better arguments. Sometimes it comes from demonstrating that the world could be otherwise.”

What controversy immediately followed the discovery of surgical anesthesia? (A) A dispute about whether ether or chloroform was the safer anesthetic agent. (B) A moral and theological controversy about whether eliminating pain — especially childbirth pain, which was considered divinely ordained — was permissible. (C) A patent dispute between Morton and Warren over the commercial rights. (D) A controversy about whether surgery should be performed at all.

What does the speaker identify as the underlying error in the opposition to anesthesia? (A) The opponents were simply evil people who wanted others to suffer. (B) The opponents operated within a framework that treated the natural and the normative as identical — “this is how things are, therefore this is how they should be” — conflating description with prescription. (C) The opponents lacked the medical knowledge to understand how anesthesia worked. (D) The opponents were correct — pain is divinely ordained and should never be relieved.

According to the speaker, how did the moral shift from “pain is meaningful” to “pain is a problem” ultimately occur? (A) Theologians were defeated in formal public debates by superior philosophical arguments. (B) The experience of painless surgery created a new possibility — once people saw that childbirth didn’t have to be agonizing, the theological justifications lost their grip, demonstrating that moral change sometimes comes from showing that the world could be otherwise. (C) The Pope issued a decree reversing the Church’s position on pain relief. (D) Surgeons simply ignored the controversy and continued using anesthesia secretly.

Monologue 3 (Questions 27-30):

From a public lecture on decolonial theory and epistemology.

“The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu begins his essay ‘How Not to Compare African Traditional Thought with Western Thought’ with a deceptively simple observation: when Western anthropologists describe African belief systems, they almost invariably use the vocabulary of the ‘supernatural,’ the ‘mystical,’ the ‘magical.’ These terms frame traditional African thought as a departure from a natural, rational baseline — which is, implicitly, Western scientific rationality. But Wiredu argues this framing is a category mistake. The distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ is itself a product of a specific intellectual tradition — post-Enlightenment European thought. It’s not a universal framework within which all systems of thought can be neutrally located.

What makes Wiredu’s argument philosophically powerful is that he doesn’t simply claim that African thought has been unfairly judged by Western standards. He argues that the very standards — the categories, the conceptual distinctions, the criteria for what counts as knowledge — are not culturally neutral. They’re the sedimented products of specific historical trajectories. When an anthropologist asks an Akan elder whether a disease was caused by ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’ forces, they’re imposing a distinction that may not map onto the elder’s conceptual scheme at all. The question itself is a form of epistemic violence — it demands that the other culture translate itself into the colonizer’s categories, and in the act of translation, something essential is lost.

This is the core insight of what’s come to be called ‘decolonial epistemology’: the recognition that the infrastructure of knowledge — what questions are asked, what counts as an answer, who is authorized to know — was built under conditions of colonial domination and bears those conditions in its structure. The university disciplines, the research methodologies, the peer-review systems, the very language in which ‘international’ scholarship is conducted — these are not neutral instruments. They’re the institutional expression of a particular civilizational project, and they systematically disadvantage ways of knowing that don’t conform to their implicit norms.

The practical upshot isn’t a rejection of Western knowledge systems — Wiredu is a careful analytical philosopher who writes in English and engages deeply with the Western philosophical canon. It’s a demand for genuine pluralism: not the tolerance of ‘alternative’ knowledge systems within a framework that remains Western, but the reconstruction of the frameworks themselves so that multiple traditions can engage as equals, each transforming the other in the encounter.

This is, needless to say, easier to articulate than to operationalize. How do you design a university curriculum that is genuinely plural rather than Western-plus-a-few-electives? How do you peer-review a paper that doesn’t share your methodological assumptions? How do you translate concepts across conceptual schemes without one scheme serving as the unmarked ‘normal’ case? These questions are hard, and the decolonial project doesn’t pretend they’re easy. It insists, though, that the difficulty of the questions is not a reason to stop asking them.”

What is Wiredu’s central argument about the comparison of African and Western thought? (A) African thought is fundamentally inferior to Western thought and the comparisons are too generous. (B) The categories used for comparison — “natural,” “supernatural,” “rational” — are themselves products of a specific Western intellectual tradition, not neutral frameworks, and imposing them constitutes a category mistake. (C) There are no differences between African and Western thought — all cultures think identically. (D) Western anthropologists should stop studying African cultures entirely.

What is “decolonial epistemology” as described in the lecture? (A) A movement to completely abolish all forms of knowledge and return to pre-modern ignorance. (B) The recognition that the infrastructure of knowledge — disciplines, methodologies, languages of scholarship — was built under colonial conditions and systematically disadvantages ways of knowing that don’t conform to Western norms. (C) A new academic discipline that replaces all existing fields of study. (D) An argument that Western knowledge is objectively superior and should be exported globally.

What does the lecturer identify as the practical goal of decolonial epistemology, according to Wiredu’s approach? (A) The complete replacement of all Western institutions with non-Western alternatives. (B) Genuine pluralism — not just tolerating “alternative” knowledge systems within a Western framework, but reconstructing frameworks so multiple traditions can engage as equals. (C) The forced adoption of Akan conceptual schemes by all universities worldwide. (D) The abandonment of all attempts at cross-cultural comparison.

What hard questions does the lecturer identify at the end? (A) How to design genuinely plural curricula, peer-review across methodological assumptions, and translate concepts without one scheme serving as the “normal” baseline — questions whose difficulty isn’t a reason to stop asking them. (B) All questions about decolonial epistemology have been definitively answered — nothing remains to be discussed. (C) How to most efficiently impose Western categories on the entire world. (D) Whether African philosophy should be entirely conducted in European languages.

第二部分：閱讀測驗（Reading Comprehension）

Part 1：高階字彙（15 題）

The philosopher’s ________ critique of utilitarianism did not merely challenge its conclusions but attacked its foundational premise — that all values can be reduced to a single metric of utility. (A) superficial (B) perfunctory (C) coruscating (D) laudatory

The ambassador’s statement was deliberately ________ — it condemned the military action without naming any country, leaving every party uncertain whether it was the target. (A) unequivocal (B) anodyne (C) trenchant (D) pellucid

The historian argued that the empire’s collapse was not the result of external pressure but of an internal ________ — the ruling elite had become so estranged from the population that it could no longer mobilize collective resources. (A) invigoration (B) enervation (C) consolidation (D) rejuvenation

The novelist’s prose style is ________ — every sentence seems to have been weighed, pared, and polished until nothing superfluous remains. (A) prolix (B) verbose (C) lapidary (D) discursive

The company’s apology was widely regarded as ________ — it expressed regret for “any offense that may have been caused” without acknowledging any specific wrongdoing. (A) contrite (B) penitent (C) disingenuous (D) heartfelt

The speech’s central argument was ________ on a single, unexamined assumption — that economic growth necessarily improves human welfare. (A) predicated (B) contravened (C) obviated (D) gainsaid

The documentary ________ between two timelines — the rise of the corporation in the 1950s and its collapse in the 2000s — creating a narrative tension that sustained the four-hour running time. (A) stagnated (B) oscillated (C) terminated (D) fixated

The professor’s lecture was ________ — it ranged from quantum mechanics to medieval theology to contemporary cinema, yet somehow cohered into a unified argument. (A) myopic (B) centrifugal (C) monolithic (D) monolithic

In his later years, the statesman’s thinking underwent a ________ transformation — positions he had defended ferociously for decades were quietly abandoned in favor of their near-opposites. (A) negligible (B) imperceptible (C) tectonic (D) cosmetic

The prosecutor’s cross-examination was ________ — she exposed contradictions in the witness’s testimony that the defense had spent months trying to paper over. (A) inept (B) forensic (C) desultory (D) haphazard

The report’s recommendations were ________ — they gestured toward ambitious reform but specified no mechanisms, timelines, or accountability measures. (A) granular (B) hortatory (C) prescriptive (D) operational

The government’s argument that mass surveillance was necessary for public safety was ________ by the revelation that the surveillance program had not foiled a single terrorist plot in five years of operation. (A) corroborated (B) buttressed (C) vitiated (D) bolstered

The artist’s work occupies a deliberately ________ space — neither purely figurative nor entirely abstract, it forces the viewer to oscillate between recognition and estrangement. (A) liminal (B) conventional (C) orthodox (D) pedestrian

The CEO’s retirement was presented as voluntary, but journalists uncovered evidence that it was a ________ departure — she had been given an ultimatum by the board after the quarterly earnings disaster. (A) celebrated (B) decorous (C) involuntary (D) triumphant

The diplomat’s memoirs are notable for their ________ — she names the officials who sabotaged her negotiations, describes the backroom deals that never made the official record, and acknowledges her own strategic misjudgments without self-exculpation. (A) discretion (B) circumspection (C) unsparingness (D) evasiveness

Part 2：克漏字（10 題）

Passage 1 (Questions 46-50):

The “trolley problem” — first formulated by Philippa Foot in 1967 — has become philosophy’s most famous thought experiment. In the standard version, a runaway trolley is heading toward five people tied to the track. You can pull a lever to divert the trolley onto a side track, __46__ it will kill one person instead of five. Most people say they would pull the lever. But in the “footbridge” variant — pushing a large man off a bridge to stop the trolley — most people say they would not, __47__ the mathematical calculus is identical: one death versus five.

For decades, this asymmetry was treated as a puzzle about moral reasoning — what principle distinguishes the two cases? But more recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have __48__ the trolley problem as a window into the cognitive architecture of moral judgment. Neuroimaging studies suggest that the lever case activates brain regions associated with deliberate cost-benefit calculation, while the footbridge case __49__ regions associated with emotional processing — particularly the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The “yuck factor” of physically pushing someone overrides the abstract utilitarian calculus.

The neuroscientific turn raises questions that Foot could not have __50__. If moral judgment is driven, at least in part, by domain-general cognitive and emotional processes that evolved for other purposes, what does that imply for the authority of our moral intuitions? Are we discovering the structure of moral truth, or merely mapping the quirks of primate cognition?

(A) so (B) but (C) where (D) although

(A) even though (B) because (C) as if (D) provided that

(A) dismissed (B) repurposed (C) abandoned (D) ignored

(A) suppresses (B) engages (C) bypasses (D) atrophies

(A) solved (B) imagined (C) resolved (D) concluded

Passage 2 (Questions 51-55):

The “extended mind” thesis, proposed by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998, argues that cognitive processes are not confined to the brain or even to the body. They can __51__ into the environment. The canonical example is the Alzheimer’s patient who relies on a notebook as his memory. Clark and Chalmers argue that the notebook isn’t merely a memory aid — it’s part of the patient’s memory system. When the patient accesses information from the notebook, the process is functionally __52__ to a biological memory retrieval: it’s reliably available, automatically consulted, and the retrieved information is automatically endorsed.

The thesis has radical implications. If your smartphone is part of your cognitive system — not metaphorically, but __53__ — then what we call “the self” extends beyond the biological boundaries of skin and skull. Conversely, damage to or removal of the external components of your cognitive system constitutes a kind of cognitive harm — a point with significant implications for disability law, education policy, and the design of digital environments.

Critics of the extended mind thesis have __54__ that the argument conflates causal coupling with constitution. Just because an external object is causally coupled to a cognitive process doesn’t make it part of the cognitive system — the heart is causally essential to cognition (it supplies oxygen to the brain), but nobody claims the heart is a cognitive organ. Defenders reply that the heart-brain coupling is entirely unlike the notebook-brain coupling: the heart doesn’t store representational content that is poised for __55__ control of action in the way that the notebook entries are.

(A) contract (B) extend (C) retreat (D) evaporate

(A) inferior (B) equivalent (C) supplementary (D) detrimental

(A) figuratively (B) approximately (C) literally (D) hypothetically

(A) conceded (B) endorsed (C) amplified (D) objected

(A) conscious (B) random (C) incidental (D) automatic

Part 3：閱讀理解（15 題）

Passage A (Questions 56-58):

The Fermi Paradox — named for physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” — is the contradiction between the high probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and the complete absence of evidence for it. Given the vast number of stars in the Milky Way (roughly 100-400 billion), a significant fraction of which are billions of years older than our Sun, even a modest estimate of the probability of intelligent life evolving suggests the galaxy should be teeming with civilizations — some of which should have had time to colonize the entire galaxy many times over.

Proposed resolutions to the paradox fall into roughly three categories. “Rare Earth” hypotheses suggest that the conditions for complex, intelligent life are far more specific than we assume — that a series of contingent evolutionary transitions, each highly improbable, is required. “Great Filter” hypotheses suggest that there is some barrier ahead of us (nuclear self-destruction, climate collapse, unfriendly AI) or behind us (the emergence of life itself, the evolution of multicellularity) that almost all civilizations fail to cross. “Zoo Hypothesis” or “transcension” theories suggest that advanced civilizations are out there but choose not to reveal themselves, whether for ethical reasons (non-interference), observational reasons (we’re in a “galactic zoo”), or because they have migrated into simulated or interior dimensions that we cannot detect.

A less discussed but philosophically significant category concerns the limits of our detection capabilities and interpretive frameworks. We have been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence for less than a century, using technologies — radio telescopes, primarily — that an advanced civilization might regard as laughably primitive. The assumption that alien civilizations would communicate via radio waves — or that they would communicate at all, or that their signals would be recognizable as signals — may reflect a failure of imagination. A civilization a billion years older than ours may operate on timescales or in modalities that we lack the sensory and conceptual apparatus to register. The “absence of evidence” may not be evidence of absence; it may be evidence of our epistemic limitations — that we are looking for the wrong thing, in the wrong way, at the wrong scale.

What is the Fermi Paradox? (A) The proven fact that Earth hosts the only intelligent life in the universe. (B) The contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial intelligence and the complete absence of evidence for it. (C) Fermi’s discovery that radio signals cannot travel through interstellar space. (D) A mathematical proof that interstellar travel is physically impossible.

What concern does the passage raise about our search methods? (A) Our detection technologies are exhaustively complete — nothing could evade them. (B) We may lack the sensory and conceptual apparatus to detect civilizations a billion years older than ours that operate on different timescales or in unrecognizable modalities. (C) Radio telescopes are the only possible detection technology and they have fully surveyed the galaxy. (D) All extraterrestrial civilizations have been definitively located but governments are suppressing the information.

The phrase “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” in this context suggests that: (A) The failure to detect signals does not logically imply that no civilizations exist; it may indicate the inadequacy of our search methods and conceptual frameworks. (B) We have definitively proven that no extraterrestrial civilizations exist. (C) There is no meaningful difference between “absence of evidence” and “evidence of absence.” (D) All forms of evidence are equally unreliable.

Passage B (Questions 59-62):

In his 1962 book “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered a historical account of the rise and fall of a distinctive social space: the bourgeois public sphere of 18th-century Europe. In coffee houses, salons, and reading societies, Habermas argued, private citizens came together to engage in rational-critical debate about matters of public concern, mediating between the private realm of civil society and the state. The public sphere was characterized by bracketing of social status — arguments were to be evaluated on their merits, not on the rank of their speakers — and by an orientation toward consensus through reasoned deliberation.

Habermas’s account was both historical and normative. Historically, he traced the emergence of this space to specific conditions: the rise of commercial capitalism, the development of a critical press, the spread of literacy. Normatively, he held up the ideals of the public sphere — inclusivity, rational deliberation, the suspension of status hierarchies — as standards against which actually existing democracies could be measured. And measured they were: Habermas himself argued that the public sphere had undergone a “refeudalization” in the 20th century, as mass media transformed citizens from active participants in public discourse into passive consumers of spectacle manufactured by political and corporate elites.

The book has attracted enormous commentary and criticism over six decades. Feminist critics, most prominently Nancy Fraser, have argued that Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere was idealized and exclusionary in ways he failed to acknowledge: the “bracketing of status” was a fiction, since women, workers, and racial minorities were systematically excluded. Fraser proposed that we should think not of a single public sphere, but of “counterpublics” — alternative discursive spaces where subordinated groups articulate their needs and identities. Post-structuralist critics have questioned the very ideal of consensus through rational deliberation, arguing that “reason” is never neutral — that the norms of “rational” discourse are themselves products of power relations and serve to delegitimize forms of expression (emotional, embodied, narrative) that don’t conform to them.

What’s striking, in 2026, is how the structural conditions Habermas analyzed have been transformed by the digital revolution while his core question — what are the conditions for a healthy democratic public discourse? — has become more urgent, not less. The platformized public sphere — structured by algorithmic amplification, engagement-optimized feeds, and a political economy of attention extraction — bears little resemblance to Habermas’s coffee houses. But his insistence that democratic legitimacy requires communicative spaces where citizens can encounter, contest, and refine each other’s views remains the starting point for any serious thinking about digital democracy.

What, according to Habermas, characterized the bourgeois public sphere? (A) A space where the king and nobility issued decrees to passive subjects. (B) Private citizens engaging in rational-critical debate about public matters, with social status bracketed and arguments evaluated on their merits. (C) A purely commercial space for buying and selling goods. (D) A religious institution for theological debate.

What did Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas argue? (A) Habermas’s account was fully inclusive and needed no revision. (B) The bourgeois public sphere was idealized and exclusionary — women, workers, and minorities were systematically excluded — and we should think of “counterpublics” where subordinated groups articulate their needs. (C) The concept of a public sphere should be abandoned entirely. (D) Only women should be allowed to participate in public discourse.

What is meant by Habermas’s concept of “refeudalization”? (A) The return of actual feudal monarchies in the 20th century. (B) The transformation, via mass media, of citizens from active participants in public discourse into passive consumers of spectacle manufactured by political and corporate elites. (C) The improvement of the public sphere through technological innovation. (D) The relocation of political debate from urban centers to rural areas.

How does the passage characterize the contemporary relevance of Habermas’s work? (A) Habermas is completely irrelevant — digital technology has made his questions obsolete. (B) The structural conditions have been transformed by the platformized digital public sphere, but his core question — what are the conditions for healthy democratic discourse? — is more urgent than ever. (C) Habermas’s ideal has been fully realized through social media. (D) The digital public sphere perfectly replicates the conditions of 18th-century coffee houses.

Passage C (Questions 63-66):

For most of the 20th century, the inheritance of acquired characteristics — the idea that an organism can pass on traits it acquired during its lifetime — was considered a discredited heresy. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who proposed this mechanism in the early 19th century, had been decisively refuted by August Weismann’s germ plasm theory and the subsequent neo-Darwinian synthesis, which established that genetic information flows only from DNA to phenotype (via RNA and proteins), never the reverse. Weismann’s famous experiment — cutting off the tails of 901 mice over 19 generations and observing that all offspring were born with normal-length tails — was taught to generations of biology students as the definitive refutation of Lamarckism.

The emergence of epigenetics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has complicated this narrative considerably. Epigenetics studies heritable changes in gene expression that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. The primary mechanisms — DNA methylation, histone modification, non-coding RNA — can be influenced by environmental factors including diet, stress, toxins, and social experience. Crucially, some epigenetic marks can be transmitted across generations. The Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-1945, for example, produced measurable epigenetic effects in the children and grandchildren of women who were pregnant during the famine — effects linked to increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders.

Does this mean Lamarck was right after all? The answer is nuanced, and the nuance matters. What epigenetics demonstrates is not that the central dogma of molecular biology (information flows from DNA to RNA to protein but not backwards) has been overturned. It’s that there are additional layers of information — above the genetic code — that can be environmentally responsive and transgenerationally transmitted. This is not Lamarckism in the classical sense (the giraffe’s neck lengthens from stretching and this lengthening is passed on), but it represents a genuine departure from the strict neo-Darwinian view that the only route to heritable change is random genetic mutation filtered through natural selection. The environment, it turns out, can leave marks on the genome that persist across generations — and those marks can affect phenotype in ways that have adaptive significance.

The philosophical lesson is about the relationship between scientific refutation and scientific progress. Weismann was not wrong to reject Lamarckism as Lamarck understood it: acquired characteristics in the sense Lamarck intended (use and disuse directly modifying heritable traits) is not the mechanism that operates. But the clean, simple story taught to undergraduates — Lamarck was wrong, Darwin was right, end of story — turned out to obscure a more complex reality in which organisms and environments are engaged in a bidirectional relationship that leaves traces across generations. The history of Lamarckism is a case study in how scientific orthodoxies can be simultaneously correct (in rejecting a specific mechanism) and incorrect (in foreclosing an entire domain of inquiry that turns out to be real).

What was Weismann’s experiment, and what was it taken to prove? (A) Cutting off the tails of mice for 19 generations produced tailless offspring, proving Lamarck right. (B) Cutting off mouse tails for 19 generations produced only normal-tailed offspring, which was taken as definitive refutation of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. (C) Injecting mice with epigenetic markers produced inherited changes in behavior. (D) A dietary experiment that showed nutrition can alter DNA sequence across generations.

What does epigenetics demonstrate, according to the passage? (A) That the central dogma of molecular biology has been completely overturned. (B) That there are additional layers of heritable information — above the genetic code — that can be environmentally responsive and transgenerationally transmitted, representing a departure from the strict neo-Darwinian view without being classical Lamarckism. (C) That all acquired characteristics are inherited exactly as Lamarck proposed. (D) That genes have no role in inheritance.

What epigenetic effect did the Dutch Hunger Winter produce? (A) No measurable effects on subsequent generations — the famine had no lasting biological legacy. (B) Measurable epigenetic effects linked to metabolic disorders in the children and grandchildren of women pregnant during the famine. (C) Immediate genetic mutations in the DNA sequence of all exposed individuals. (D) The complete elimination of all metabolic diseases in the Dutch population.

What philosophical lesson does the passage draw from the history of Lamarckism? (A) Scientific refutations are always final and the history of ideas is irrelevant to current research. (B) Scientific orthodoxies can be simultaneously correct in rejecting a specific mechanism yet incorrect in foreclosing an entire domain of inquiry that later turns out to be real — the clean “Lamarck wrong, Darwin right” story obscured a more complex bidirectional reality. (C) Lamarck was entirely correct and Darwin was wrong about everything. (D) The history of science has no philosophical significance.

Passage D (Questions 67-70):

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon — a circular prison designed so that a single guard in a central tower could observe all inmates without them knowing whether they were being watched at any given moment — was conceived in 1785 as a humane reform. Its architectural innovation was to replace corporal punishment with the internalization of surveillance: inmates, never certain whether the guard’s eye was upon them, would regulate their own behavior. The guard didn’t need to watch everyone all the time; it was enough that the inmates believed he might be.

Michel Foucault, in “Discipline and Punish” (1975), transformed the Panopticon from an architectural curiosity into one of the most powerful metaphors in 20th-century social theory. Foucault argued that the Panopticon was not merely a prison design but a diagram of modern power itself — a power that operates not through spectacular public punishment (the scaffold, the execution) but through continuous, dispersed, internalized surveillance. Schools, factories, hospitals, barracks — all could be understood as panoptic institutions that produce disciplined, productive subjects who monitor themselves.

The digital age has given Foucault’s metaphor a second life — and, some argue, a literalization that even Foucault could not have anticipated. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his short 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” anticipated this transition: we were moving, Deleuze argued, from Foucault’s disciplinary societies (enclosures: the school, the factory, the prison) to societies of control (continuous modulation: the corporation replaces the factory, lifelong learning replaces the school exam, electronic tagging replaces the prison). In control societies, surveillance is no longer confined to specific institutions at specific times; it’s continuous, ambient, and woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Shoshana Zuboff, in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” (2019), provided the economic analysis that Foucault’s and Deleuze’s more abstract frameworks lacked. The panoptic dynamic of the digital age, Zuboff argued, is not primarily driven by a political desire for social control but by an economic logic: the extraction and commodification of behavioral data. The platforms that mediate our social interactions, our information consumption, our commerce, and increasingly our physical movement through smart devices don’t watch us because the state demands it; they watch us because our behavioral surplus — the data exhaust of daily life — is the raw material of a new mode of production. The guard in the tower is not a prison warden but an algorithm optimizing for engagement, and the inmates are not prisoners who can’t leave — they’re users who can’t afford to, because participation in digital life has become a practical necessity for economic, social, and civic functioning.

The question the Panopticon’s 240-year trajectory poses is whether Bentham’s architectural diagram describes something essential about modernity that keeps finding new technological expressions — or whether each era’s invocation of the Panopticon is a loose analogy that obscures more than it reveals.

What was Bentham’s original conception of the Panopticon? (A) A system of brutal corporal punishment administered by multiple guards. (B) A circular prison where a single guard could observe all inmates, designed to replace physical punishment with the internalization of surveillance — inmates would self-regulate because they never knew when they were being watched. (C) A school designed to maximize student collaboration and creativity. (D) A hospital ward designed to isolate infectious patients from the general population.

How did Foucault reinterpret the Panopticon? (A) He dismissed it as an architecturally insignificant footnote in prison history. (B) He transformed it into a diagram of modern power — a power that operates through continuous, dispersed, internalized surveillance rather than spectacular public punishment, applicable across schools, factories, and hospitals. (C) He argued it was the ideal architectural model for democratic governance. (D) He proved that the Panopticon never actually functioned as Bentham intended.

What transition did Deleuze describe in “Postscript on the Societies of Control”? (A) A return to medieval forms of spectacular public punishment. (B) A shift from disciplinary societies (enclosures and institutions) to societies of control (continuous modulation, ambient surveillance woven into everyday life). (C) The complete disappearance of all forms of surveillance from modern society. (D) The replacement of all human guards with artificial intelligence — exactly as Bentham predicted.

How does Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism differ from Foucault’s panoptic framework, according to the passage? (A) Zuboff proves Foucault was entirely wrong about surveillance. (B) Zuboff argues that the driving force behind digital surveillance is not a political desire for control but an economic logic — the extraction and commodification of behavioral data as the raw material of a new mode of production. (C) Zuboff’s analysis is identical to Foucault’s with no significant differences. (D) Zuboff argues that surveillance is exclusively conducted by governments with no corporate involvement.

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## 答案與解析 Answer Key

Listening Answer Key

Reading Answer Key

分數級距

聽力正確	閱讀正確	評估
27-30	36-40	高級實力穩固，複試有望
24-26	32-35	邊緣，聽力與閱讀需針對弱項加強
20-23	28-31	距離通過還有一段差距，加強單字深度理解
Below 20	Below 28	建議回到中高級鞏固基礎，再挑戰本回

本回重點單字 (15 Key Vocabulary Words)

英文	中文	出現位置
epistemological	知識論的	Part 1 Q1
qualia	感質/主觀感受	Part 1 Q3
intergenerational	跨世代的	Part 1 Q6
hermeneutical	詮釋學的	Part 1 Q9
repatriation	歸還/遣返	Part 2 Conv 3
coruscating	鋒芒畢露的/犀利的	Part 1 Vocab Q31
anodyne	溫和不得罪人的	Part 1 Vocab Q32
enervation	衰弱/無力	Part 1 Vocab Q33
lapidary	精簡精確的	Part 1 Vocab Q34
hortatory	勸誡的/說教式的	Part 1 Vocab Q41
vitiated	削弱/使失效	Part 1 Vocab Q42
unsparingness	不留情面/坦率	Part 1 Vocab Q45
counterpublics	對抗性公共領域	Part 3 Pass B
epigenetics	表觀遺傳學	Part 3 Pass C
refeudalization	再封建化	Part 3 Pass B

解鎖內容

GEPT-高級-Mock-5

GEPT 高級全真模擬試題 Mock 5

第一部分：聽力測驗（Listening Comprehension）

Part 1：短篇問答（10 題）

Part 2：長篇對話（10 題）

Part 3：長篇獨白（10 題）

第二部分：閱讀測驗（Reading Comprehension）

Part 1：高階字彙（15 題）

Part 2：克漏字（10 題）

Part 3：閱讀理解（15 題）

Listening Answer Key

Reading Answer Key

分數級距

本回重點單字 (15 Key Vocabulary Words)

關係圖譜

目錄

GEPT-高級-Mock-5

GEPT 高級 全真模擬試題 Mock 5

第一部分：聽力測驗（Listening Comprehension）

Part 1：短篇問答（10 題）

Part 2：長篇對話（10 題）

Part 3：長篇獨白（10 題）

第二部分：閱讀測驗（Reading Comprehension）

Part 1：高階字彙（15 題）

Part 2：克漏字（10 題）

Part 3：閱讀理解（15 題）

Listening Answer Key

Reading Answer Key

分數級距

本回重點單字 (15 Key Vocabulary Words)

威威學習信

關係圖譜

目錄

GEPT 高級全真模擬試題 Mock 5