大学英语四级（2013年12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷322

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay. You should start your essay with a brief description of the picture and then express your views on The Importance of Science and Technology. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. [*]

Eleven fishing boat crew who had been left since October in a remote area of Russia’ s Far East have been rescued after staying nearly three months at an abandoned military base. The eight men and three women sought shelter at the base after their small boats clashed on Oct. 10. Their attempts to repair one of the boats did not succeed and they had to remain at the abandoned base where there were only flour and cooking oil. Other supplies at the base, which was abandoned in 2003, included Christmas decorations, and the crew members put them up on a small tree inside their rooms. But supplies began running low and early this week, five people set off on foot across snowfields. On Friday, after four days of long walking, they reached a working military radio station. The center called rescuers, and helicopters were sent to take the 11 to the regional capital. 5. Why were the fishing crew left on Oct. 10th? 6. How did they survive during those three months? 7. How were the crew rescued eventually? They went to a remote area. Their fishing boats clashed. They tried to repair their boats. They decided to stay in the boats.

Police in India have arrested a Citibank employee accused of cheating clients out of millions of dollars. Shivraj Puri, 32, who will appear in court later, told an Indian newspaper he was innocent. The crime was discovered earlier this month in a branch of the global bank in Gurgaon, a wealthy district of Delhi. The bank has said investors were promised quick, high returns from a false financial scheme. It is claimed that Mr. Puri transferred the money into accounts controlled by three relatives. Mr. Puri reportedly handed himself in on Thursday, a day after police said he was wanted for questioning. The crime was revealed earlier this month when a client mentioned the scheme to a senior bank manager. 3. According to the news, who first discovered the crime? 4. When did Mr. Puri hand himself in? A client. A bank manager. The police. Bank headquarters.

French forces say they have entered Kidal in the north of Mali, the last major town they have yet to secure in their fight against Islamist militants. French forces now control Kidal airport after a number of aircraft, including helicopters, landed there last night. Islamist militants were reported to have already left the town and it was unclear who was in charge. France—the former colonial power in Mali—started a military operation this month after Islamist militants appeared to be threatening the south. French army spokesman confirms that “French troops were arranged overnight in Kidal“. One regional security source told the Press that French aircraft had landed at Kidal and that protection helicopters are in the sky. Kidal, 930 miles north-east of the capital Bamako, was until recently under the control of the Islamist militants. 1. What is the situation now in Kidal according to the news? 2. Why did the French start the military operation? Islamist militants are still in control of the town. French forces have entered the town. French are going to land at the airport. Islamist militants are attacking the airport.

M: Honey, the basketball game is about to start. Could you bring some chips and a bowl of ice cream? And ... Uh ... a slice of pizza from the fridge. W: Anything else? M: No, that’s all for now. Hey, honey, you know, they’re organizing a company basketball team, and I’m thinking about joining. What do you think? W: Humph. M: “Humph?“ What do you mean “Humph“? I was the star player in high school. W: Yeah, twenty-five years ago. Look, I just don’t want you to have a heart attack running up and down the court. M: So, what are you suggesting? Should I just abandon the idea? I’m not that out of shape. W: Well... you ought to at least have a physical checkup before you begin. M: Well, okay, but... W: And you need to watch your diet and cut back on the fatty foods, like ice cream. And you should try eating more fresh fruits and vegetables. M: Yeah, you ’re probably right. W: And you should take up a little weight training to strengthen your muscles. Oh, and you need to go to bed early instead of watching TV half the night. M: Hey, you ’re starting to sound like my personal fitness instructor! W: No, I just love you, and I want you to be around for a long, long time. Questions 8 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 8. What is the relationship between the man and the woman? 9. What does the man want to do? 10. What seems to be the woman’ s major concern? 11. What is the woman’ s first suggestion to her husband? Young couple. Middle-aged couple. Classmates. Teammates.

M: When I say I live in Sweden, people always want to know about the seasons. W: The seasons? M: Yeah, you know how cold it is in winter? What is it like when the days are so short? W: So what is it like? M: Well, it is cold , very cold in winter. Sometimes it is cold as 26 degrees below centigrade. And of course when you go out, you’ll wrap up warm. But inside in the houses it’s always very warm, much warmer than at home. Swedish people always complain that when they visit England, the houses are cold even in the good winter. W: And what about the darkness? M: Well, yeah, around Christmas time there’s only one hour of daylight, so you really looks forward to the spring. It is sometimes a bit depressing. But you see the summers are amazing, from May to July in the North of Sweden the sun never sets. It’s still light in the midnight. You can walk in the mountains and read a newspaper. W: Oh, yeah, the land of the midnight sun. M: Yeah, that’s right, but it’s wonderful. You won’t stay up all night. And the Swedes makes most of it often they started work earlier in summer and then leave at about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, so that they can really enjoy the long summer evenings. They’d like to work hard, but play hard, too. I think Londoners work longer hours, but I’m not sure this is a good thing. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12. What do we learn about the man from the conversation? 13. What do Swedish people complain about when they visit England in winter? 14. How does the man describe the short hour of daylight around Christmas in Sweden? 15. What does the man say about the Swedish people? He likes Sweden better than England. He prefers hot weather to cold weather. He is an Englishman living in Sweden. He visits London nearly every winter.

If we want to measure voice features very accurately, we can use a voice analyzer. A voice analyzer can show four characteristics of a speaker’s voice. No two speakers’ voices are alike. To get a voice sample, you have to speak into the voice analyzer. The voice analyzer is connected to a computer. From just a few sentences of normal speech, the computer can show four types of information about your voice. It will show nasalization, loudness, frequency and length of articulation. The first element, nasalization, refers to how much air normally goes through your nose when you talk. The second feature of voice difference is loudness. Loudness is measured in decibels. The number of decibels in speaking is determined by the force of air that comes from the lungs. The third feature of voice variation is frequency. By frequency we mean the highness or lowness of sounds. The frequency of sound waves is measured in cycles per second. Each sound of a language will produce a different frequency. The final point of voice analysis concerns the length of articulation for each sound. This time length is measured in small fractions for each second. From all four of these voice features—length of articulation, frequency, loudness and nasalization—the voice analyzer can give an exact picture of a person’ s voice. Questions 16 to 18 are based on the passage you have just heard. 16. What is the voice analyzer connected to? 17. What does the first element nasalization refer to? 18. How can the frequency of sound waves be measured? The mouth. The throat. The nose. A computer.

“Where is the university?“ is the question many visitors to Cambridge ask. But no one could point at any one direction because there is no campus. The university consists of 31 self-governing colleges. It has lecture halls, libraries, laboratories, museums and offices throughout the city. Individual colleges choose their own students who have to meet their minimum entrance requirements set by the university. And the graduates usually live and study in their colleges but they are taught in very full groups. Lectures and laboratories and practical work are organized by the university and held in university buildings. There are over ten thousand undergraduates and three thousand five hundred post-graduates. About 40% of them are women and some 8% from overseas. As well as teaching, research is of major importance. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, more than sixty university members have won Nobel prizes. The university has a huge number of buildings for teaching and research. It has more than 60 specialist subject libraries as well as the university library, which as the copy-right libraries, is entitled to a copy of every published in Britain. Examinations are held and degrees are awarded by the university. It allowed women to take the university exams in the 1881, but it was not until 1948 that they were awarded degrees. Questions 22 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard. 22. Why is it difficult to locate Cambridge University? 23. What does the passage tell us about the colleges of the university? 24. What can be learnt from the passage about the libraries in Cambridge University? 25. What does the passage tell us about the women students in Cambridge University? Because there are no signs to direct them. Because no tour guides are available. Because all the buildings in the city look alike. Because the university is everywhere in the city.

Men have traveled ever since they first appeared on the earth. In primitive times they did not travel for pleasure but to find new places where their herds could feed, or to escape from hostile neighbors, or to find more favorable climates. They traveled on foot. Their journeys were long, tiring, and often dangerous. They protected themselves with simple weapons, such as wooden sticks or stones, clubs, and by lighting fires at night and, above all, by keeping together. Being intelligent and creative, they soon discovered easier ways of traveling. They rode on the back of their domesticated animals: they hollowed out tree trunks and, by using bits of wood as paddles, were able to travel across water. Later they traveled, not for necessity, but for the joy and excitement of seeing and experiencing new things. This is still the main reason why we travel today. Traveling, of course, has now become a highly organized business. There are cars and splendid roads, express trains, huge ships and jet airliners, all of which provide us with comforts and security. This sounds wonderful. But there are difficulties. If you want to go abroad, you need a passport and a visa, tickets, luggage, and a hundred and one other things. If you lose any of them, your journey may be ruined. Questions 19 to 21 are based on the passage you have just heard. 19. How were the primitive men’s journeys? 20. What did they travel for later? 21. What modern means of transportation are mentioned in the passage? Short, tiring, and often dangerous. Long, tiring but not dangerous. Short but dangerous. Long, weary and often dangerous.

When we think of green buildings, we tend to think of new ones—the kind of high-tech, solar-paneled masterpieces that make the covers of architecture magazines. But the U.S. has more than 100 million existing homes, and it would be【C1】______wasteful to tear them all down and【C2】______them with greener versions. An enormous amount of energy and resources went into the construction of those houses. And it would take an average of 65 years for the【C3】______carbon emissions from a new energy-efficient home to make up for the resources lost by destroying an old one. So in the broadest【C4】______, the greenest home is the one that has already been built. But at the same time, nearly half of U. S. carbon emissions come from heating, cooling and【C5】______our homes, offices and other buildings. “You can’t deal with climate change without dealing with existing buildings,“ says Richard Moe, the president of the National Trust. With some【C6】______, the oldest homes tend to be the least energy-efficient. Houses built before 1939 use about 50% more energy per square foot than those built after 2000, mainly due to the tiny cracks and gaps that【C7】______over time and let in more outside air. Fortunately, there are a【C8】______number of relatively simple changes that can green older homes, from【C9】______ones like Lincoln’s Cottage to your own postwar home. And efficiency upgrades (升级) can save more than just the earth; they can help【C10】______properly owners from rising power costs. A) accommodations B) clumsy C) doubtfully D) exceptions E) expand F) historic G) incredibly H) powering I) protect J) reduced K) replace L) sense M) shifted N) supplying O) vast

Endangered Peoples A) Today, it is not distance, but culture that separates the peoples of the world. The central question of our time may be how to deal with cultural differences. So begins the book, Endangered Peoples, by Art Davidson. It is an attempt to provide understanding of the issues affecting the world’s native peoples. This book tells the stories of 21 tribes, cultures, and cultural areas that are struggling to survive. It tells each story through the voice of a member of the tribe. Mr. Davidson recorded their words. Art Wolfe and John Isaac took pictures of them. The organization called the Sierra Club published the book. B) The native groups live far apart in North America or South America, Africa or Asia. Yet their situations are similar. They are fighting the march of progress in an effort to keep themselves and their cultures alive. Some of them follow ancient ways most of the time. Some follow modern ways most of the time. They have one foot in ancient world and one foot in modern world. They hope to continue to balance between these two worlds. Yet the pressures to forget their traditions and join the modern world may be too great. C) Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1992, offers her thoughts in the beginning of the book Endangered Peoples. She notes that many people claim that native people are like stories from the past. They are ruins that have died. She disagrees strongly. She says native communities are not remains of the past. They have a future, and they have much wisdom and richness to offer the rest of the world. D) Art Davidson traveled thousands of miles around the world while working on the book. He talked to many people to gather their thoughts and feelings. Mr. Davidson notes that their desires are the same. People want to remain themselves, he says. They want to raise their children the way they were raised. They want their children to speak their mother tongue, their own language. They want them to have their parents’ values and customs. Mr. Davidson says the people’ s cries are the same: “Does our culture have to die? Do we have to disappear as a people?“ E) Art Davidson lived for more than 25 years among native people in the American state of Alaska. He says his interest in native peoples began his boyhood when he found an ancient stone arrowhead. The arrowhead was used as a weapon to hunt food. The hunter was an American Indian, long dead. Mr. Davidson realized then that Indians had lived in the state of Colorado, right where he was standing. And it was then, he says, that he first wondered: “Where are they? Where did they go?“ He found answers to his early question. Many of the native peoples had disappeared. They were forced off their lands. Or they were killed in battle. Or they died from diseases brought by new settlers. Other native peoples remained, but they had to fight to survive the pressures of the modern world. F) The Gwich’in are an example of the survivors. They have lived in what is now Alaska and Canada for 10,000 years. Now about 5,000 Gwich’in remain. They are mainly hunters. They hunt the caribou, a large deer with big horns that travels across the huge spaces of the far north. For centuries, they have used all parts of the caribou: the meat for food, the skins for clothes, the bones for tools. Hunting caribou is the way of life of the Gwich’ in. G) One Gwich’in told Art Davidson of memories from his childhood. It was a time when the tribe lived quietly in its own corner of the world. He spoke to Mr. Davidson in these words: “As long as I can remember, someone would sit by a fire on the hilltop every spring and autumn. His job was to look for caribou. If he saw a caribou, he would wave his arms or he would make his fire to give off more smoke. Then the village would come to life! People ran up to the hilltop. The tribes seemed to be at its best at these gatherings. We were all filled with happiness and sharing!“ H) About ten years ago, the modern world invaded the quiet world of the Gwich’in. Oil companies wanted to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. This area was the place where the caribou gave birth to their young. The Gwich’in feared the caribou would disappear. One Gwich’in woman describes the situation in these words: “Oil development threatens the caribou. If the caribou are threatened, then the people are threatened. Oil company official and American lawmakers do not seem to understand. They do not come into our homes and share our food. They have never tried to understand the feeling expressed in our songs and our prayers. They have not seen the old people cry. Our elders have seen parts of our culture destroyed. They worry that our people may disappear forever.“ I) A scientist with a British oil company dismisses (驳回，打消) the fears of the Gwich’ in. He also says they have no choice. They will have to change. The Gwich’ in, however, are resisting. They took legal action to stop the oil companies. But they won only a temporary ban on oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. Pressures continue on other native people, as Art Davidson describes in his book. The pressures come from expanding populations, dam projects that flood tribal lands, and political and economic conflicts threaten the culture, lands, and lives of such groups as the Quechua of Peru, the Malagasy of Madagascar and the Ainu of Japan. J) The organization called Cultural Survival has been in existence for 22 years. It tries to protect the rights and cultures of peoples throughout the world. It has about 12,000 members. And it receives help from a large number of students who work without pay. Theodore MacDonald is director of the Cultural Survival Research Center. He says the organization has three main jobs. It does research and publishes information. It works with native people directly. And it creates markets for goods produced by native communities. K) Late last year, Cultural Survival published a book called State of the Peoples: a Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger. The book contains reports from researchers who work for Cultural Survival, from experts on native peoples, and from native peoples themselves. The book describes the conditions of different native and minority groups. It includes longer reports about several threatened societies, including the Penan of Malaysia and the Anishinabe of North American. And it provides the names of organizations similar to Cultural Survival for activists, researchers and the press. L) David May bury-Lewis started the Cultural Survival organization. Mr. May bury-Lewis believes powerful groups rob native peoples of their lives, lands, or resources. About 6,000 groups are left in the world. A native group is one that has its own langue. It has a long-term link to a homeland. And it has governed itself. Theodore MacDonald says Cultural Survival works to protect the rights of groups, not just individual people. He says the organization would like to develop a system of early warnings when these rights are threatened. Mr. MacDonald notes that conflicts between different groups within a country have been going on forever and will continue. Such conflicts, he says, cannot be prevented. But they do not have to become violent. What Cultural Survival wants is to help set up methods that lead to peaceful negotiations of traditional differences. These methods, he says, are a lot less costly than war.

Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick II in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected. Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed. Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel—like sounds: at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands: at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1, 000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar. Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’ s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a teddybear with the sound pattern “teddybear“. And even more incredible is the young brain’ s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways. But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

Bill Gates was 20 years old. Steve Jobs was 21. Warren Buffett was 26. Ralph Lauren was 28. These now iconic(偶像的)names were all 20-somethings when they started their companies that would throw them, and their enterprises, into some of the biggest successes ever known. Consider this: many of the truly remarkable innovations of the latest generation—a list that includes Google, Facebook and Twitter—were all founded by people under 30. So what is it about that youthful decade after those awkward teenage years that inspires such shoot-for-the-moon success? Does age really have something to do with it? It does. Young people bring fresh eyes to confronting problems and challenges that others have given up on. 20-something entrepreneurs see no boundaries and see no limits. And they can make change happen. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, has another, colder theory that may explain it: Ultimately, it’s about money. In other words, it’s the young people who have nothing to lose, with no mortgage and, frankly, with nothing to do on a Friday night except work, who are the ones often willing to take the biggest risks. Sure, they are talented. But it’ s their persistence and zeal(激情), the desire to stay up until 6 a. m. chugging Red Bull, that is the difference between being a salaried employee and an entrepreneur. That’s not to say that most 20-somethings are finding success. They’re not. The latest crop of ueber-successful young entrepreneurs, designers and authors are far, far from the norm In truth, unemployment for workers age 16 to 24 is double the national average. One of the biggest challenges facing this next generation—and one that may prevent more visionary entrepreneurs from succeeding—is the staggering rise in the level of debt college students have been left with. If Peter Thiel’ s theory is right, it is going to be harder and harder for young people to take big risks because they will be crushed with obligations before they even begin. If you’re over 29 years old and still haven’t made your world-changing mark, don’t despair. Some older people have had big breakthroughs, too. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the phonograph(留声机)until he was 30.

在不久的将来，教授们将会使用一种能够收集每位学生的学习进度数据的数字平台来授课。最初开发这些平台是为了服务于海量的在线公开课程。然而，由于这些平台能够更加便捷地分享教学内容、开展课程讨论并同步学生学业进度，现如今各大高校都将其应用到传统课堂中。随着更多的课程被部分或全部搬到网上，学校不再需要统一的课程起止时间。