大学英语六级（2013年12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷324

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a composition entitled The Gradual Loss of Traditional Culture. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. You should: 1) describe the meaning of cartoon briefly; 2) state its main idea; 3) give your comments. [*]

W: Hi, Bob. How is your oral presentation coming along? M: What oral presentation? I don’ t have to give mine until the end of the next week. W: You mean you haven’t even started working on it yet? M: No. I need the pressure of a deadline to get inspired. W: Gee. I’m just the opposite. I can’t concentrate unless I know I have plenty of time. Besides I have a big physics test next week so I want to get my presentation out of the way. M: What’ s your presentation on? W: William Carlos Williams. M: Wasn’ t he a poet? I thought we were supposed to focus on a short story. W: He wrote short stories, do you know? M: Really? I never knew that I guess I’ll learn more on Tuesday. Is that when you are supposed to talk? W: Uh-huh. But I was going to offer you sneak preview. I’ m looking for someone to tell me whether I’ m talking to fast and whether you can follow what I’ m saying. M: I guess I could do that. When were you thinking of? W: Will tonight be all right? I have a class to go to now but I’ll be around after dinner. M: That sounds good. I’ll stop by your room. It’ s probably quieter there than in my hall. Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 1. What is the main idea of the conversation? 2. Why does the man not start working on it? 3. What is the woman’ s presentation on? 4. What will they probably do tonight? Assignment. Entertainment. Summer vocation. Career plans.

W: Wu, do you have time to tell me more about the multimedia teaching system? M: Oh, yes, sure. The system is basically a computer system plus the projector, the slide and some other output equipment. They key point is the software. W: The software? M: Mm, only by using good software, can this system give us a good authentic English speaking environment. W: But how does it do that? M: The system and the software do more than offering English learners visual and audio exposure to the native language. They invite the learner to become part of the “oral class“ where the learner is immersed in the conversations of native speakers in everyday situations. W: So the learner’s participation is important? M: Of course. The participation can be in 2 major ways. First, learners can correct their pronunciations and intonations at the beginning stages of English learning. They can record their spoken English into the computer and then compare that with the built-in teacher’ s voice. W: Sounds interesting. M: Yes. And the communicative ability of the student is also heightened by role-playing in various situations and talking with different English speakers. W: I think in this way the benefit for the English learner does not stop at the improvement of their spoken English. M: Exactly. They will also sharpen their listening ability and enlarge their idiom vocabulary at the same time. W: If the system can really be spread on the campus, our English will be improved greatly. I’m looking forward to that. M: I think that’ s coming in the near future. Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 5. What can give learners a good authentic English speaking environment? 6. How does the teaching system give learners a good authentic English speaking environment? 7. What is NOT the benefit of this system? 8. What is the main idea of this conversation? Projector. Software. Output equipment. Slide.

Welcome, everybody, to the lovely house and gardens of Rosewood, once the home of the famous writer, Sebastian George. He bought the house in 1902 although he had first seen it two years earlier. At that time the owners let it out to a tenant because George was too slow making up his mind to buy it. When it came back on the market, there was no hesitation and he bought it immediately, for ￡9,300, even though the house had no bathroom, no running water upstairs, and no electricity. When he came here, he’d been married for ten years. During that time, he’d become one of the most famous writers in the English-Speaking world. His professional success was enormous, but his personal life wasn’ t as successful. He was no longer on speaking terms with his brother and had been devastated by the death at the age of seven of his elder daughter, Josephine. Moving to Rosewood allowed the family to start a new life. George regarded Rosewood as a pure example of a traditional country house of this part of England and did some of his most successful writing here. The house and its grounds became the family haven and their escape to privacy and quiet. The walls, and the mullioned windows were built of the local sandstone, the tiles on the roofs and the bricks of the chimney stack were baked from local clay, and the wooden structures inside came from oak trees which grow around here. Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard. 9. What was his reaction when the writer Sebastian George first saw Rosewood House? 10. What had George experienced before buying the house? 11. How did George view Rosewood House? He thought he might rent it. He decided he would buy it. He felt it was too expensive for him. He was unsure whether to buy it.

Summer means internships for thousands of American college students. They work in the kinds of jobs they might want to have some day. Experts say at least one-third of all American college students complete an internship before they graduate. Most work at an internship during the summer when they do not attend classes. Some work at an internship during other times of the year. Others do an internship soon after completing college. Some students work for large companies. Some work for small organizations. Some work for the United States government. Many interns do not earn money at their summer jobs. Some college students get an internship to gain experience in the kind of job they want to get after graduation. Others do not yet know what kind of permanent job they want. So they may get internships in several different companies or organizations. In this way, they can find out what kind of job they like best. Why are internships so popular? Students can learn about different kinds of jobs. They can do interesting work. They can learn skills and gain valuable experience. And they can meet important people. Students often describe internships as a chance that happens once in a lifetime. George Washington University in Washington D.C., has internships at cultural, historical and technological centres in the nation’ s capital. It is the oldest American studies program in the United States. It was established in 1937. The university program offers young people a chance to test their interest in history or technology or art. It offers summer work at the National Museum of American History, and the National Air and Space Museum. It also provides experience a workplaces including the Library of Congress, the National Building Museum, and the National Park Service. These programs can satisfy students who are interested in many different subjects — subjects from airplanes to books to buildings. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard. 12. What is the meaning of “internship“? 13. Why do some students get internships in several different companies or organizations? 14. Which of the followings is not a reason for the popularity of internships? 15. When and where was the oldest American studies program established in the United States? It is the time when students are doing part-time jobs. It is the time before students graduate from college. It is the time when students just graduate from college. It is the time when students work in the kinds of jobs they might want to have some day.

Good evening, I am Steve Johnson and I represent the American Elm Society. Today I’d like to introduce you to some of the problems faced by elm trees. Many of you are familiar with this huge tree. It’s found in many areas of US and Canada in cities and small towns. Well, as you may know, the American elm has been threatened by a dangerous disease. The disease is caused by a fungus, when that fungus infects the tree, it blocks the circulation of water inside the tree. As a result, the tree cells don’t receive water and without water, of course they can’t survive. The tree’s leaves become dry, fall off, and eventually the tree dies. You may be interested in how the disease is transmitted, well, a very small insect called elm bug beetle brings the fungus with it. The beetle uses the tree to reproduce itself. The female builds channels in the wood for the eggs, at the same time, it infects the tree with fungus. The worst thing is that the process seems unstoppable, because once the beetle leaves the infected tree it carries the fungus on its body and poisons a healthy tree. Of course, we are trying to fight the disease, in the past, infected trees were simply cut down. That method reduces the number of the infected trees but it never stop the disease. Now experts are trying to get to the root of the problem, they are working on ways to control the beetle that spreads the disease. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 16 to 18. 16. What is causing the death of the infected elm trees? 17. According to the speaker, what causes the healthy elm tree to become weak? 18. According to the speaker, how do experts hope to limit the spread of the disease in the future? Their inability to circulate water. Their increased sensitivity to heat. Low reproductive rates. Heavy pollution in the atmosphere.

So, now we are in the room with naive art, produced in the United States during 18th and 19th centuries. At that time, people of many nations had come together to form a single nation. The future of these people was unknown and they didn’t share a history together. The absence of tradition created a need for inventing a new one. These were some of the factors allowed naive art to grow as an art form in the United States. Because everything was new and without past, there was no such thing as art education. That’s how these artists got to be called naive artists. Most of you probably already know the French word naive meaning not have much knowledge. So, unlike professional artists, naive artists didn’t have formal training in different academy and studios. Instead, since they were eliminated by tradition, they made their own rules, were generally self-taught and their paintings had a true feeling for color form and world around them. There’s very little known about early naive artists in the United States because many of them did not sign their works. However, we do know that they followed similar themes. Many naive artists started out as portrait painters. They travel from town to town and made portraits for different families, especially in the days before photography. People generally wanted portraits as evidence of their existence for future generations. Compared to French naive paintings that are less realistic, naive artists in United States painted images that were neat, positive, extremely accurate and almost photographic. Now, in the next room, let’s take a look at naive artists’ work in France. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 19 to 21. 19. How did naive artists differ from professional artists? 20. How did the speaker describe the paintings of the American naive artists? 21. According to the speaker, what factor makes learning about early naive artists difficult? They painted in their spare time. They lacked formal art training. They used a more traditional approach to color. They followed rules established by art schools.

The focus of today’s class is on an important element in the development of United States cities, something the modern cities need to survive: efficient transportation. The rapid growth of cities in 19th century created a serious problem. Growth obviously meant greater distances between people’s home and their work places. People could no longer rely on walking. By the mid 19th century, some United States cities had used railways drawn by horses, but they were very slow. City planners understood that without improved transportation cities could not grow any larger and they welcome the invention of system of trolley cars on cables, powered by steam engines. These cables were able to pull cars up to the steep hills of San Francisco and so other large cities installed similar systems in 1880s. But although faster than horses, these cable cars still weren’t fast enough to solve the transportation problems of United States cities. Our real breakthrough came thanks to electricity. Electric trolley move twice as fast as the old horse drawn railways and they were clean. They designers of electric trolley came up with the new control system that allowed each part to be powered independently and have its own breaks, what’s safer and more efficient than cable cars. Electricity also helped the next great advance in urban transportation, the subway. It solved one problem that the early English subways suffered from, unbearable smoke of steam engines that made breathing in the subway tunnels almost impossible. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 22 to 25. 22. What is the talk mainly about? 23. According to the professor, what problem did many people face as cities grew larger? 24. Other than their speed, in what way were electric trolley car better than cable cars? 25. According to the professor, what major advantage for the subway did electricity offer? Why American industries grew rapidly in the nineteenth century. How advances in transportation helped American cities develop. Transportation between the cities of the United States. Great American inventors of the nineteenth century.

Using a computer or smartphone at night can cause us to pile on the pounds, new research has revealed. The study found a link between blue light exposure—blue light is【C1】______by smartphones and tablets—and increased hunger. It found that exposure to the light increases hunger levels for several hours and even increases hunger levels after eating a meal. Results of the US study show that blue-enriched light exposure, compared with【C2】______light exposure, was【C3】______with an increase in hunger that began 15 minutes after light onset and was still present almost two hours after the meal. Blue light exposure has also already been shown to decreased【C4】______in the evening increasing the risk of insomnia. Study co-author Ivy Cheung, of Northwestern University, in Chicago, said: “A single three-hour exposure to blue-enriched light in the evening【C5】______impacted hunger and glucose metabolism. “ “These results are important because they suggest that manipulating environmental light exposure for humans may represent a novel【C6】______of influencing food intake patterns and metabolism.“ The study group【C7】______10 healthy adults with regular sleep and eating schedules who received【C8】______carbohydrate-rich meals. They completed a four-day trial under dim light conditions, which involved exposure to less than 20 lux during 16 hours【C9】______and less than three lux during eight hours of sleep. On day three they were exposed to three hours of 260 lux, blue-enriched light starting 10.5 hours after waking up, and the effects were compared with dim light exposure on day two. Ms Cheung said more research is needed to determine the【C10】______of action involved in the relationship between light exposure, hunger and metabolism. A) exposure B) awake C) associated D) emitted E) related F) acutely G) comprised H) sleepiness I) agencies J) significant K) approach L) identical M) dim N) mechanisms O) slightly

Parents’ Homework: Find Perfect Teachers for Kids A) Tomi Hall did what she could to lobby for the best teachers for her two children, making her case this spring in letters to the principal. Then all she could do was waiting for news of their classroom assignments—and it’s been torturing. The Aurora mom knows her efforts carry no guarantees. One year her son didn’t get the teacher Hall had hoped for, and he struggled for months with one whose relaxed style came across to him as uncaring. “Granted, I know it’ s just kindergarten,“ said Hall, 39. “But... a teacher can make or break you.“ B) In the next few weeks, many families will rip open notification letters or go to school to see class lists posted on the front door. For parents accustomed to directing nearly every aspect of their child’ s early learning it can be difficult to have little voice in teacher selection—a decision they view as critical. Some spend hours crafting the perfect letter or meet with the principal to make an argument. For their child’s early learning, parents regard that teacher is critical. C) Principals, meanwhile, struggle to create balanced classrooms while juggling(同时应付) individual requests. They say they want input but find it increasingly necessary to discourage parents from asking for a specific teacher. Administrators don’t want the selection process to be a popularity contest—in part because what makes a teacher popular may have nothing to do with a particular child’ s educational needs. D) “I’m bright enough to realize parents talk at soccer fields and baseball fields, but you have to realize your experience with Teacher A may be very different than someone else’s Teacher A,“ said Scott Meek, the new principal at Northbrook Junior High School who is making classroom assignments this summer for 600 students with the help of an office display board. He asks parents to focus their input on the student and his or her learning style and trust the school to make the right match. E) Some students also recognize that certain teachers bring out the best in them. “I need one of those strict kinds of teachers,“ said Hall’ s daughter Tori, 12, who is entering 7th grade. “When I get a not-so-strict teacher, I think they don’t really care about me. I really don’t want a bad teacher. I’ll get lower grades.“ F) When Chaya Fish, 30, of West Rogers Park taught at a private school in New York, she said, it was obvious who the “in“ teachers were. She said she automatically joined them after the principal’ s son landed in her classroom. “It was ridiculous,“ said Fish. “The other teacher was probably better than me. It was how you dressed, how you talked“ that often determined parental favor. G) Teachers said the most vocal parents often get their way so that all parties involved can avoid a difficult school year. But educators warn that parents who get what they wish for may be sorry afterward. “A lot of times when people orchestrate(精心安排) who they think their child is best suited for, they find they made a mistake,“ said Mark Friedman, superintendent(督学) for Libertyville Elementary School District 70. “I have many parents say later, ’I don’t know why I did this. It isn’t working out this year.’“ Friedman said he assures parents their comments will be considered but never guarantees a specific teacher. In fact, he tells them that if they do request a teacher and later regret that choice, “you have no one to blame but yourself.“ H) Some parents said they’ve learned their lesson about trying to guess which teacher would be best. Jamie Thompson said she was initially concerned when her daughter was assigned to a strict lst-grade teacher. She was aware other parents had lobbied for a different person, who had a more casual style. “At the end, it turned out that the other class was asking, ’Why isn’t my child learning that?’“ said Thompson, 36, of Arlington Heights. “That’ s why I don’ t want to interfere too much.“ I) Yet parents have different reasons for requesting classes, and some have nothing to do with the teacher, said Michelle Van Every, 36, of Deerfield. She and other mothers once requested that their children not be placed in a classroom with a specific boy—not because of him, but to avoid his mother, who had created problems in the past, she said. “We didn’ t want to cross paths with her,“ said Van Every, who added that the school complied with their request. “We didn’t want to have to volunteer with her at a class party.“ J) Each district follows its own procedure for teacher selection. Some begin as early as April or May, officials said. Many ask parents to complete a form about their child’s strengths and weaknesses. Typically, teachers have some say in the process by deciding early on which students should be separated or kept together, on the basis of academics, personalities and learning styles. The principal draws up the final class lists, often after meeting with parents or reviewing special requests, officials said. K) Many school districts wait until the last minute to announce class assignments, usually about two weeks before the start-up of school. That’ s because they have come to expect a flood of phone calls within hours from parents who beg or demand to switch teachers. L) Other schools handle it differently. At Sawyer Elementary School on Chicago’s Southwest Side, the fall class assignments are handed out with the last report card the previous spring, said teacher Maureen “Moe“ Forte. Forte said she is aware of colleagues and members of the Local School Council who have asked that their children be moved from one class into another. “It’s not fair,“ Forte said. “I was very upset that one of the LSC parents moved her daughter to my classroom.The parent just felt my personality fit better with her child. And it’ s not a personality contest.“ M) Denita Ricci of Lake Villa said she knows parents who request certain classes but tries to stay out of the process. Her son, Mason Wubs, 12, hopes to be placed in the same class as his best friend, easing the transition to 7th grade at a new school. “I trust the school’s judgment,“ she said, though she secretly hopes Mason will share a class with his friend. “I think they need to learn to deal with people who are different from them, just like an employer.“

Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject and studied the brain say that they are. Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathematician or scientist, and four fifths had a close relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subjects and to music. Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns. However, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering. If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians. It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music. Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modem. A long string of names comes to mind—Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker... and so on. None of this indicates any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.

Keeping it in the Family For expat parents, passing on their native languages can be a struggle. “You understand grandmother when she talks to you, don’t you, darling?“ The girl nods. Johnson met her—and her Danish mother and English father—at the airport, en route to Denmark. The parents were eager to discuss their experience of bringing up their daughter bilingually in London. It isn’ t easy: the husband does not speak Danish, so the child hears the language only from her mother, who has come to accept that she will reply in English. This can be painful. Not sharing your first language with loved ones is hard. Not passing it on to your own child can be especially tough. Many expat and immigrant parents feel a sense of failure; they wring their hands and share stories on parenting forums and social media, hoping to find the secret to nurturing bilingual children successfully. Children are linguistic sponges, but this doesn’ t mean that cursory exposure is enough. They must hear a language quite a bit to understand it—and use it often to be able to speak it comfortably. This is mental work, and a child who doesn’ t have a motive to speak a language—either a need or a strong desire—will often avoid it. Children’ s brains are already busy enough. So languages often wither and die when parents move abroad. Consider America. The foreign-born share of the population is 13.7%, and has never been lower than 4.7% (in 1970). And yet foreign-language speakers don’t accumulate: today just 25% of the population speaks another language. That’s because, typically, the first generation born in America is bilingual, and the second is monolingual— in English, the children often struggling to speak easily with their immigrant grandparents. In the past, governments discouraged immigrant families from keeping their languages. Teddy Roosevelt worried that America would become a “polyglot boarding-house“. These days, officials tend to be less interventionist; some even see a valuable resource in immigrants’ language abilities. Yet many factors conspire to ensure that children still lose their parents’ languages, or never learn them. A big one is institutional pressure. A child’s time spent with a second language is time not spent on their first. So teachers often discourage parents from speaking their languages to their children. (This is especially true if the second language lacks prestige.) Parents often reluctantly comply, worried about their offspring’s education. This is a shame; children really can master two languages or even more. Research does indeed suggest their vocabulary in each language may be somewhat smaller for a while. But other studies hint at cognitive advantages among bilinguals. They may be more adept at complex tasks, better at maintaining attention, and (at the other end of life) suffer the onset of dementia later. Even without those side-effects, though, a bilingual child’ s connection to relatives and another culture is a good thing in itself. How to bring it about? When both parents share the heritage language, the strategy is often to speak that at home, and the national language outside. But when they have different languages, perhaps the most common approach is “one parent, one language“. Francois Grosjean, a linguist at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, emphasises necessity. He recommends reserving occasions on which the only language that may be spoken is the one that needs support. Sabine Little, a German linguist at the University of Sheffield, puts the emphasis elsewhere. Making the heritage language yet another task imposed by parents can lead to rejection, she argues. She recommends letting the child forge their own emotional connection to the language. Her son gave up on German for several years before returning to it. She let him determine when they would speak it together. (He decided on the pair’ s trips in her car to after-school activities, during which his father, who doesn’t speak German, would not be excluded.) They joke about his Anglo-German mash-ups and incorporate them into their lexicon. Like many youngsters, his time on YouTube is restricted—but he is allowed more if he watches in German. Ms Little suggests learning through apps and entertainment made for native speakers; the educational type smack of homework, she thinks. Languages are an intimate part of identity; it is wrenching to try and fail to pass them on to a child. Success may be a question of remembering that they are not just another thing to be drilled into a young mind, but a matter of the heart.

目前，京津冀三地人力资源服务业从业人员资质实现一体化。高层次人才户籍将可在京津冀地区自由流动。对许多毕业生而言，未来在天津、河北工作，不仅机会更多，而且生活成本、落户难度比北京小。京津冀协同发展国家战略实施以来，各类优惠政策不断出台，破解三地人才流通过程中的束缚与障碍，为区域经济社会发展增添动力和活力，打造三地人才“朋友圈”。