大学英语六级（2013年12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷323

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the remark “Adversity Leads to Prosperity“. You can cite examples to illustrate your point and then explain what you will do to overcome adversity. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1.

W: May I help you? M: Yes. I would like to apply for one of these security guard positions you advertised in the local paper. W: Good. May I ask you a few questions first? Have you ever worked as a security guard before? M: Yes. At Chaffer’ s Plaza in San Francisco and at the Regency Hotel in town. W: How many years of experience have you had as a security guard? Have you had experience monitoring alarm systems? M: I have had over four years of experience as a security guard. And I monitored several types of alarm systems in my previous job. W: Very good. You seem to meet our minimum qualifications. Do you have any questions? M: Yes. What are the wages and the hours? W: The wages start at 8 dollars and 75 cents per hour. We have three shifts available, morning, evening and late night. M: Good. I was hoping to get an evening job since I go to school in the mornings. W: Well, you can write on your application that you prefer the evening shift. M: What do I need to do now? W: Complete this application form and bring it back to me. Then I will schedule you for another interview. Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 1. What does the woman want to know? 2. Why does the man want to work at night? 3. What do the wages start at? 4. What does the woman ask the man to do now before another interview? Which company the man has worked for. What the man’ s advantage and disadvantage are. Whether the man has any experience as a security guard. Whether the man has worked for any alarm system manufacturer.

M: So Janice, you were looking at identifying different talents in workers, do you think this is easy for managers to do? W: Well, currently teamwork is in fashion in the workplace and in my opinion the importance of the individual is generally neglected. What managers should be targeting is those employees who can take the lead in a situation and are not afraid to accept the idea of responsibility. M: That’ s true Janice but unfortunately many managers think the entire notion of encouraging individuality amongst their staff is far too hard. W: Yes, that maybe true but I think one of the most important tasks of managers is to consider the needs of the individual on one hand and group co-operation and conformity on the other. It requires creative thinking on the part of the management to avoid tension. M: So Janice, what kind of people do you think companies should be looking for? W: Well, it has to start at the very beginning when companies are looking for new employees. When the personnel department is choosing between applicants they need to look for someone who’s broken the mould and can think for themselves. Instead, people making these decisions often use a range of psychological tests to see if a person is a problem solver, or will do as they’re told. I’m not convinced that these qualities are actually the most important. M: So do you think being a good team player is overrated? W: No, it’ s not overrated. You do need to learn the rules and learn them fast. No individual can get around this if you’ re working in an organization. M: So how should managers deal with this? W: Rewards. When an individual demonstrates the behaviour the organization expects, some kind of incentive can be given. What’ s important here is that this happens right at the beginning so new recruits learn the rules of the system immediately. Also the incentive should be something the individual actually wants, and this isn’t always just money. Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 5. According to Janice, what kind of workers should be targeted by employers? 6. What is difficult for managers? 7. What kind of job applicants are needed by employers? 8. What is important for managers? Workers who are open to new ideas. Workers who are good at teamwork. Workers who are hard-working. Workers who are potential leaders.

There are several ways you can find out about the countries and places you wish to visit. You can talk to friends who have travelled to the places. Or you can go and see a colour film about them. Or you can read travel books. It would seem that there are three kinds of travel books. The first are those that give a personal, subjective ac count of travels which the author has actually made himself. If they are informative and have a good index then they can be useful to you when you are planning your travels. The second kind are those books whose purpose is to give a purely objective description of things to be done and seen. If a well-read, cultured person has written such a book then it is even more useful. It can be sorted as a selected guide book. The third kind are those books which are called “a guide“ to some place or other. If they are good, they will, in addition to their factual information, give an analysis or an explanation. Like the first kind they can be inspiring and interesting. But their basic purpose is to help the reader who wishes to plan in the most practical way. Whatever kind of travel book you choose you must make sure that it does not describe everything as “wonderful“, “excellent“ or “magical“. You must also note its date of publication because travel is a very practical affair and many things change quickly in the 21st century. Finally, you should make sure that the contents are well presented and easy to find. Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard. 9. Which is not one of the ways to get to know about the places we wish to visit? 10. What type of people a writer should be if he is to write a travel book in an objective description? 11. Why we need to pay attention to the book’ s date of publication? To consult friends who have travelled before. To search on the Internet. To watch a colour movie. To read travel books.

A new enemy is threatening Japanese traditions: leisure. As part of its attempt to increase imports, the government is trying to get people to work less and spend more. The workers are disgusted. The figures support the western prejudice that the Japanese are all work and no play. Trying to force workers away from their desks and machines, the government said last April that the country should cut down from its 2,100 hours average work year to 1,899 hours and a five-day week by 1992. Beginning in February, banks and stock markets will be closed on Saturdays; staff of civil service will be forced out of their offices two Saturdays a month. The government hopes that others will follow that practice. But some persuasion will be needed. Small companies are very angry about it and they fear competitors may not cut hours. The unions are no happier: they have even advertised in newspapers arguing their case against the foreign pressure that is forcing leisure upon them. They say that shorter hours are a disguised pay cut. The industrialists, who have no objection to the government’s plans, admit that shorter hours will help them cut costs. Younger Japanese who are supposed to be acting against their hard-working parents, show no sigh of wanting time off, either. But unlike older workers, they do spend money in their spare time. Not content with watching television, they dance, dress up, sit in cafes, go to pop concerts and generally drive the leisure-industry boom. Now that they know how to consume, maybe the West can teach them to relax and enjoy themselves, too. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard. 12. How many hours do Japanese need to work every year before 1992? 13. Who are not against the government’s plans? 14. What is the difference between younger Japanese and older Japanese? 15. What’ s the main idea of this passage? A five-day week. 1,899 hours. 2,100 hours. 1,992 hours.

I’d like to share with you today my experience with the new approach to building a house. It’s called Envelop Building. Essentially, what it means is that as you are building a house, you try to leave the landscape feature on the land, especially the vegetation in the original condition. So what you are not doing is the usual practice of land-scraping. By which I mean literally scraping or clearing land of any and all the original plants. Why is the approach called Envelop Building? Because instead of clearing everything away, you let your original landscape elements envelop or surround your house. Let the vegetation physical features such as hills and slopes or interesting rock formations, constituted a significant part of the character of the building sight. The design of the house should take these features of the property into account. Actually integrating your original wild landscape with a house is not that new. The famous American architect Wright was doing it about 65 years ago. So we are in good company. Envelop Building is not as easy as it sounds though. It’s not just that you build your house and leave the land alone. By building, you are already damaging the original landscape. But as architects, we should try to work with environment, not against it. A creative architect can find ways to incorporate natural landscape into the overall design. For example, why used the massive boulders on the side of one of the most famous houses has part of the house foundation? Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 16 to 18. 16. According to the professor, what does the term “land-scaping“ refer to? 17. In Envelop Building, what is done with the landscape features of a building sight? 18. Why does the professor mention the architect Frank Loid Wright? Eliminating the original vegetation from the building site. Making the houses in an area similar to one another. Deciding where on a site a house will be built. Surrounding a building with wildflowers and plants.

Today we are going to talk about copyright works of art. A copyright is a proof of authorship. It protects artists a-gainst someone else using their work without their permission. It’s important to remember that United States Copyright Law protects artistic expressions such as paintings, but does not protect any ideas, concept, procedure or technique. In all the United States Copyright Law, Artists needed to take several steps to obtain copyright protection. The law as changed in 1978 and again 1989. For artists the current law means everything they create is automatically and immediately copyrighted. They don’t have to file any documents and under the protection of the Copyright Law, any recreations of their original work such as prints are also covered by the artists copyright. Further more, any changes artists made to their original works are covered. The Law also makes it clear that when someone buys the work of art, they are not allowed to destroy or change that work of art. Artists keep the copyright even after selling the work of art. The purchaser may buy the physical work, but the right to make prints or copies is still the artists’ and buyers does not automatically have any right to make and sell prints or copies of work. Although works are automatically copyrighted, artists are encouraged to register their work with United States Copyright Office. Registering art provides additional legal protection and also gives the people around the world the ability to approach the honors about licensing and purchasing right. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 19 to 22. 19. What is the talk mainly about? 20. When does the Artist Copyright start? 21. What does the United States Copyright Law state about a work of art that is sold? 22. What does the professor say about the United States Copyright Law? Protecting buyers of paintings. Why copies of famous paintings are made. How paintings are sold in the United States. Protecting artists from illegal use of their work.

Today let’ s talk about synesthesia, that’ s a brain condition in which a person’ s senses are combined in a unusual ways. For example, a person with synesthesia may taste sounds. To them, a musical note may taste like black tea. Many people who have synesthesia experience intense colors when they hear specific words. For example, they might see a flash of pink every time they hear the word “jump“. For a long time, many scientists were unconvinced that synesthesia really exists. So in the 1990s an experiment was done to find out for sure. Two groups were studied. One was a group of people who claim to experience colors when they heard certain words. The other was a controlled group, people who experience nothing out of the ordinary when hearing words. Each group was asked to describe the colors they thought of when they heard a list of spoken words. When the test was repeated, the difference between the two groups was startling. After just a week, the controlled group gave the same answers only a third of the time. But even a year of a half later, the synesthetic group gave the same answers 92% of the time. Clearly, this is not just a matter of memory. Scientists are still not sure just why synesthesia happens. But certain drugs are reportedly able to produce it artificially. So we all probably have brains with connections that could synesthesia. It’ s just the connections normally are used in that way. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 23 to 25. 23. What’ s the one example of synesthesia that the professor mentions? 24. What was the purpose of the experiment the professor mentioned? 25. What were some of people in the study able to do? Remembering word definitions. Recognizing repeated numbers. Distinguishing between similar colors. Tasting sounds.

It was music to my ears to hear that the Government’ s chief adviser on【C1】______, Susan Jebb, wants parents to【C2】______fruit juices at the table and return to the old days when children drank water or milk. There is no doubt that fruit juices, as well as fizzy colas and other soft drinks, are a major contributor to the emerging crisis of【C3】______weight in our children and teenagers. Most fruit juice drinks are【C4】______with sugar syrup, often derived not from fruit, but corn. The true【C5】______here, though, is not sugar but human greed. Sugar is not a poison, as some sug gest, and is not even【C6】______: we just enjoy it. Eating too much sugar is a cause of tooth decay. It also【C7】______to the development of a fatty liver—which can lead to irreparable liver diseases. The main【C8】______here is the weight gain, but sugar is not the only culprit; excess fat in your diet can make you fat. My point is that taking too much in, whether it’s sugar or fat, is going to leave you with more body fat. However, a【C9】______of the energy intake for most growing youngsters is refined sugar in one shape or form. If we are to educate the public how best to【C10】______obesity, then a cut in fruit juices and sugar-containing drinks is a good way to start. It may cut calorie intake near enough in half. Think twice before you pour that glass of juice. A) embrace B) proportion C) sensible D) attachment E) amount F) contributes G) obesity H) issue I) vast J) tackle K) addictive L) excess M) loaded N) ban O) villain

New Discoveries of Public Transport A) A new study conducted for the World Bank by Murdoch University’s Institute for Science and Technology Policy(ISTP) has demonstrated that public transport is more efficient than cars. The study compared the proportion of wealth poured into transport by thirty-seven cities around the world. This included both the public and private costs of building, maintaining and using a transport system. B) The study found that the Western Australian city of Perth is a good example of a city with minimal public transport. As a result, 17% of its wealth went into transport costs. Some European and Asian cities, on the other hand, spent as little as 5%. Professor Peter Newman, ISTP Director, pointed out that these more efficient cities were able to put the difference into attracting industry and jobs or creating a better place to live. C) According to Professor Newman, the larger Australian city of Melbourne is a rather unusual city in this sort of comparison. He describes it as two cities: “A European city surrounded by a car-dependent one“. Melbourne’s large tram network has made car use in the inner city much lower, but the outer suburbs have the same car-based structure as most other Australian cities. The explosion in demand for accommodation in the inner suburbs of Melbourne suggests a recent change in many people’ s preferences as to where they live. D) Newman says this is a new, broader way of considering public transport issues. In the past, the case for public transport has been made on the basis of environmental and social justice considerations rather than economics. Newman, however, believes the study demonstrates that “the auto-dependent city model is inefficient and grossly inadequate in economic as well as environmental terms“. E) Bicycle use was not included in the study but Newman noted that the two most “bicycle friendly“ cities considered—Amsterdam and Copenhagen—were very efficient, even though their public transport systems were—“reasonable but not special“. F) It is common for supporters of road networks to reject the models of cities with good public transport by arguing that such systems would not work in their particular city. One objection is climate. Some people say their city could not make more use of public transport because it is either too hot or too cold. Newman rejects this, pointing out that public transport has been successful in both Toronto and Singapore and, in fact, he has checked the use of cars against climate and found “zero correlation“. G) When it comes to other physical features, road lobbies are on stronger ground. For example, Newman accepts it would be hard for a city as hilly as Auckland to develop a really good rail network. However, he points out that both Hong Kong and Zurich have managed to make a success of their rail systems, heavy and light respectively, though there are few cities in the world as hilly. H) In fact, Newman believes the main reason for adopting one sort of transport over another is politics: “The more democratic the process, the more public transport is favoured.“ He considers Portland, Oregon, a perfect example of this. Some years ago, federal money was granted to build a new road. However, local pressure groups forced a referendum over whether to spend the money on light rail instead. The rail proposal won and the railway worked spectacularly well. In the years that have followed, more and more rail systems have been put in, dramatically changing the nature of the city. Newman notes that Portland has about the same population as Perth and had a similar population density at the time. I) In the UK, travel times to work had been stable for at least six centuries, with people avoiding situations that required them to spend more than half an hour travelling to work. Trains and cars initially allowed people to live at greater distances without taking longer to reach their destination. However, public infrastructure did not keep pace with urban sprawl, causing massive congestion problems which now make commuting times far higher. J) There is a widespread belief that increasing wealth encourages people to live farther out where cars are the only viable transport. The example of European cities refutes that. They are often wealthier than their American counterparts but have not generated the same level of car use. In Stockholm, car use has actually fallen in recent years as the city has become larger and wealthier. A new study makes this point even more starkly. Developing cities in Asia, such as Jakarta and Bangkok, make more use of the car than wealthy Asian cities such as Tokyo and Singapore. In cities that developed later, the World Bank and Asian Development Bank discouraged the building of public transport and people have been forced to rely on cars— creating the massive traffic jams that characterize those cities. K) Newman believes one of the best studies on how cities built for cars might be converted to rail use is The Urban Village report, which used Melbourne as an example. It found that pushing everyone into the city centre was not the best approach. Instead, the proposal advocated the creation of urban villages at hundreds of sites, mostly around railway stations. L) It was once assumed that improvements in telecommunications would lead to more dispersal in the population as people were no longer forced into cities. However, the ISTP team’ s research demonstrates that the population and job density of cities rose or remained constant in the 1980s after decades of decline. The explanation for this seems to be that it is valuable to place people working in related fields together. “The new world will largely depend on human creativity, and creativity flourishes where people come together face-to-face.“

Using Facebook makes people sadder, at least according to some research. But just what is it about the social network that takes a hit on our mood? A study of the different ways of interacting with the site now offers an answer: Grazing on the content of other people’ s idealized lives may make reality painful. Scientists have long debated Facebook’ s impact on users’ in-the-moment mood as well as their deeper satisfaction with life. Some studies have found that the site makes us happier; others, sadder. One of the problems is that most studies were cross-sectional, taking a snapshot of people at one point of time. But that makes it difficult to separate our use of Facebook from the many other factors known to affect well-being, from overwork to romantic meltdowns. A 2013 study led by Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, sidestepped this problem by studying people’ s use of Facebook over time, surveying them about their well-being five times per day for 2 weeks. The conclusion was that the more you use Facebook, the sadder you get. That study generated an enormous amount of attention. But the results offered no clue to what it is about the social network, or how people are using it, that might have this negative effect. Since then, a collaboration of labs including Kross’ s has tried to tease apart the mechanisms. The researchers performed an “intervention,“ using subjects’ personal Facebook accounts in specific ways. After all, interaction with Facebook consists of a whole set of activities, from browsing photos and “liking“ websites to directly interacting with others through messages and comments. Last week, Kross shared a sneak preview of his team’ s results. Their findings suggest that there is no effect on well-being if one “actively“ uses Facebook. When subjects directly interacted with the social network by posting status updates, sharing content, and messaging others, their mood stayed the same over the course of a day. But the negative impact on well-being that Kross discovered in his 2013 study reappeared for individuals who were made to “passively“ use the site—just browsing through photographs of other people’ s happy moments, reading people’ s conversations, and not contributing anything. “Using Facebook is not bad for well-being per se,“ Kross concluded, but “grazing“ its content is. Possible reasons for this were bounced around by the audience of psychologists. For example, one theory holds that people post idealized versions of themselves on Facebook, and comparing those to your own real-world life is toxic if you don’ t take part in the online theater.

Latino youths need better education for Arizona to take full advantage of the possibilities their exploding population offers. Arizona’ s fast-growing Latino population offers the state tremendous promise and a challenge. Even more than the aging of the baby boomers, the Latino boom is fundamentally reorienting the state’ s economic and social structure. Immigration and natural increase have added 600,000 young Latino residents to the state’s population in the past decade. Half of the population younger than 18 in both Phoenix and Tucson is now Latino. Within 20 years, Latinos will make up half of the homegrown entry-level labour pool in the state’ s two largest labour markets. What is more, Hispanics are becoming key economic players. Most people don’t notice it, but Latinos born in Arizona make up much of their immigrant parents’ economic and educational deficits. For example, second-generation Mexican-Americans secure an average of 12 grades of schooling where their parents obtained less than nine. That means they erase 70 percent of their parents’ lag behind third-generation non-Hispanic Whites in a single generation. All of this hands the state a golden opportunity. At a time when many states will struggle with labour shortages because of modest population growth, Arizona has a priceless chance to build a populous, hardworking and skilled workforce on which to base future prosperity. The problem is that Arizona and its Latino residents may not be able to seize this opportunity. Far too many of Ari zona’ s Latinos drop out of high school or fail to obtain the basic education needed for more advanced study. As a result, educational deficits are holding back many Latinos—and the state as well. To be sure, construction and low-end service jobs continue to absorb tens of thousands of Latino immigrants with little formal education. But over the long term, most of Arizona’s Latino citizens remain ill-prepared to prosper in an increasingly demanding knowledge economy. For the reason, the educational uplift of Arizona’s huge Latino population must move to the centre of the state’ s agenda. After all, the education deficits of Arizona’ s Latino population will severely cramp the fortunes of hardworking people if they go unaddressed and could well undercut the state’ s ability to compete in the new economy. At the entry level, slower growth rates may create more competition for low-skill jobs, displacing Latinos from a significant means of support. At the higher end, shortages of Latinos educationally ready to move up will make it that much harder for knowledge-based companies staff high-skill positions.

目前，中国很多城市纷纷建立共享书吧。人们可在共享书吧的书架中自行挑选任意一本感兴趣的纸质图书或刊物回家阅读，阅毕可将此书送回。有些书吧还引进数字阅读机，每台机器内存有大量高清畅销书，每月定时更新，使用二维码扫一扫即可阅读。接下来，共享书吧将面向更广泛的地方推广，以期更好地发挥图书馆馆藏资源利用率，进一步在全国范围内推广“全民阅读”，加快构建公益性、均等性、便利性的公共文化服务体系，真正让共享书吧成为提升公共文化服务水平和市民文化素养的载体平台。