大学英语六级（2013年12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷321

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled China’s Internet Celebrity. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1.

W: Did you hear the news about David? He’ s living in Australia now and he loves it. He started a business and now he’ s practically a millionaire. It seems like it’ s so easy to make money over there. M: Oh, I hadn’ t heard the news, but I’ m not surprised. David was always a sharp guy, and he has a sharp eye for business. As for immigrating there, the old proverb says the grass is always greener on the other side. Remember that things always seem better when we are on the outside. W: Well, I know David’ s an astute businessman, but I know for a fact that the economy is better in Australia. They’ re experiencing an economic boom and so inflation is down. Everyone is prosperous and business is great. Right here where we are, we ’re in the middle of a recession, and everyone is trying to save money. It’s practically impossible to make any money here. M: That’s true. To tell you the truth, my business isn’t doing well at all. Customers aren’t coming like they used to, and the competition is fierce. Every day I’m losing more and more money. I’m actually considering selling the business and starting in another market. Maybe I’m too nervous about these things, though. W: I wouldn’ t say that. According to the federal government, this is the worst recession we’ve had in decades. They say that the best thing you can do is keep working and try to wait until the economy improves. It seems kind of risky, though. I think you’re just being sensible. Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 1. What are the man and woman discussing? 2. What is the man’ s opinion of David? 3. What do we know about the man? 4. What does the woman say about the economy in her country? News about a friend. Information they read in a newspaper. An article on the economy. A classroom lecture.

W: Hi, Gary! Is this seat taken? M: No, it isn’t. Please go right ahead. W: I was so surprised to see that you’re taking this class. I didn’ t know you have any interest in painting. M: I don’t know much about it at all, so I thought it would be a good idea to take this course. I also thought that it would be a relaxing way to spend a semester. W: Good thinking, Gary. By the way, what did you think of the exhibit last night? M: Unfortunately 1 couldn’t make it. They are open for one more day, so I’m going to see it tonight. I’ve heard from other people that it’ s just wonderful. What did you think? W: I love it. Desiree, the painter, primarily used black, white, and red images in all her paintings to convey her messages. It was very vivid and effective. M: How’s that? W: Well, just seeing black and white together with occasional splashes of red really shocks the viewer of the paintings. They catch your eye immediately, and then your eyes lock on the image. M: I can’ t wait to see this myself. And did you say the painter’ s name was Desiree? W: Yes, but that’ s just her pseudonym. She only uses that name when she paints. Her real name is Lisa Frank. Desiree definitely sounds more exciting, don’t you think? M: It sure does. Oh, it looks like Professor Brown is here. I’ll talk to you some more after class. Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 5. What can we infer about Gary? 6. What did the woman think about the exhibit? 7. Who is Lisa Frank? 8. When does this conversation probably take place? He already knows a lot about painting. He hopes to become a painter someday. He’ s not very familiar with painting. He hates the class.

Texas was the biggest state before Alaska became the forty-ninth state in 1959. Texas is smaller than Alaska, but it is much bigger than the other states. One good way to understand the size of Texas is to learn about its weather. Different parts of the state have very different kinds of weather. Laredo, Texas, is one of the hottest cities in the United States in summer. The best time to visit Laredo is in winter, when it is pleasantly warm. Amarillo gets very cold in winter. Sometimes there is more snow in Amarillo than in New York, which is a northern city. Summers are better, but sometimes it gets quite hot. The best time to visit Amarillo is in the autumn when it is cool. If anyone asks you about the weather in Texas, ask him, “What part of Texas do you mean?“ Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard. 9. Which of the following statements is correct in describing the size of Texas? 10. Which of the following statements is correct about the weather in Texas? 11. If you were going to travel in Texas, how would you plan your tour to enjoy nice weather everywhere you went? Texas is the largest state in the US. Texas is the second largest state in the US. Texas ranks the forty-ninth in terms of the size. Texas is smaller than Alaska, but it is a little bigger than many other states in the US.

Human beings have lived on this earth for at least two million years. For most of that time people did not live in towns. Sometimes they used to camp in caves. Sometimes they used to build camps in the forest or on open ground. These camps were just groups of simple houses that were made of branches and leaves or grass. Only about thirty people lived in each camp. The men used to go hunting while the women and children collected food from the trees and other plants around the camp. All the food was shared between everyone in the group. After a few weeks they moved to another place in order to find more food there. It was a simple life, but people had to be clever. They had to make everything that they needed, and they had to know a lot about plants and animals. Man’ s body and brain were formed by his kind of life. Nowadays a lot of people live in big towns and cities, and they work in offices and factories. Life is a lot easier than it was in the old days. There are fewer dangers, but there is less excitement. Most people do not have to hunt for food, but they have to stay in one place for most of their lives. They get some excitement from sport and films, but many of them feel that modern civilization is too unnatural. A few of them go looking for adventure—sailing round the world, climbing mountains, or exploring caves. Most people look forward to the holidays, because then they can enjoy a change. A lot of them go camping in the country, or by the sea. They try to get back to nature. They try to live as people did thousands of years ago. But they also take a lot of modern luxuries with them. Camping today is very different from camping in the old days. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard. 12. Which of the followings is not a material of which camps were made? 13. Why did people often move from one place to another in the old days? 14. Which of the followings is NOT an advantage of modern life? 15. Why do people go camping today? Branches. Leaves. Grass. Flowers.

We only have a few minutes left so I’d like to go over a couple of points before we move on. Remember that, although there are both horizontal and vertical movements in air. The term wind applies only to horizontal movements. And more air is involved in horizontal movements than vertical movements. And what causes the horizontal movements? Alternately, it’s the solar radiation, because the unequal heating of the earth than the atmosphere produces horizontal differences in air pressure. These differences set winds in motion. Essentially, winds are the nature’ s way of balancing uneven distribution air pressure over the earth. Secondly, let me repeat my answer to the question we had before about wind direction. Many people get confused by what they hear in weather forecasts. We talk about wind direction in terms of where the wind’ s coming from, not where it’ s blowing to. There is a reason for this. To weather broadcasters, the origin of wind is more important than its destination. The winds origin helps them predict the weather. Logically, in the northern hemisphere, a north wind tends to bring cold weather, south wind warm weather. I haven’ t forgotten vertical movement of air, but we don’ t have time today to talk about them in depth. In our next class then, I’ll begin by discussing updraft and downdraft and how they affect the wealth. I suspect most of you can guess which of the two brings warm which weather, and which brings cold. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 16 to 18. 16. According to the speaker, how’ s the wind defined? 17. Why does the speaker mention solar radiation? 18. According to the speaker, which weather broadcast can be confusing? It’s defined as the result of the moisture in the Earth’ s atmosphere. It’ s defined as the result of the Earth’ s rotation. It’s defined as the horizontal movement of air. It’s defined as the vertical movement of air.

Some of the most practical lessons coming out of research in psychology are the area of memory. People ask, why can’t I remember that term from the physical chapter or the date my library books in due? Well for a lot of people, memory may be weak, because they don’t use it enough. It’s like a muscle, if you don’t exercise it, it won’t stay strong. That’s why it’s important to keep our mind active, to keep on learning throughout our life. We can do this by reading, playing memory games and seeking out new experiences. It’ s my guess though that the lack of mental stimulation isn’ t a problem for students like you. More likely, the life you are now leading is so busy and stimulating that it may sometime interfere with learning. Later on we will be discussing how information is recalled from memory. But, first, the information needs to be recorded, in other words, learned. And for busy people like you and me, that will be the real problem. If we are distracted, or we are trying to think what we are going to do next, the incoming message just might not be getting recorded effectively. And that leads to the first tip for students who want to improve their memories. Give your full attention to the information you hope to retain. Research clearly shows the advantages of this, and also of active learning, of consciously trying to visualize a new fact, perhaps to make a mental picture, even a wildly ridiculous one, so the new fact will stick in memory. Let me illustrate that for you here a little more concretely. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 19 to 21. 19. What does the speaker illustrate with the example of muscle? 20. What does the speaker suggest students do to learn new information more effectively? 21. What will the speaker probably do next? The need to exercise the memory. How the brain differs from other body tissues. The unconscious learning of a physical activity. How nerves control body movement.

Today, we are going to continue our discussion of social insects, focusing on the Argentineant, which as you might guess is a species of ant that are natives to Argentina. We’ll consider what happened to this type of ant after some members of the species move to California from their original habitat. Ok, well, in Argentina, these Argentine ants behave like most ant species around the world. They fight other ants of the same species if those ants are from some other nests. But the Argentine ants living in California behave differently. Ants from different nests form a single large colony. Within this colony, there is little aggression among ants from different nests. And when they fight insects from outside their colony, the Argentine ants can quickly recruit a huge army from their network of nests. This of course gives them advantages over other ants’ species. So then, why do Argentine ants behave differently in California than they do in Argentina? Well, using genetic testing, researchers found that all the Argentine ants in California were very similar genetically. You see, when the first Argentine ants came to California, their population must have been very small, and all the later generations of Argentine ants there must be descended from the same few ancestors. So they are all closely related. This discovery is important, because for most social insects, membership in a colony is based on how closely related they are genetically. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 22 to 25. 22. What aspect of Argentine ant is mainly discussed? 23. What does the professor say about Argentine ants that live in Argentina? 24. What’s the characteristic of Argentine ants in California? 25. What did genetic testing indicate about the Argentine ants in California? How they behave toward ants from other nests. What they usually eat. Why they are becoming extinct. Why they were brought to California

Although interior design has existed since the beginning of architecture, its development into a【C1】______field is really quite recent. Interior designers have become important partly because of the many functions that might be【C2】______in a single large building. The importance of interior design becomes【C3】______when we realize how much time we spend surrounded by four walls. Whenever we need to be indoors, we want our surroundings to be as attractive and comfortable as possible. We also【C4】______each place to be appropriate to its use. You would be shocked if the inside of your bedroom were【C5】______changed to look like the inside of a restaurant. And you wouldn ’t feel right in a business office that has the appearance of a school. It soon becomes clear that the interior designer’ s most important basic【C6】______is the function of the particular space. For example, a theatre with poor sight lines, poor sound-shaping qualities, and too few entries and exits will not work for its purpose, no matter how beautifully it might be【C7】______. Nevertheless, for any kind of space, the designer has to make many of the same kind of【C8】______. He or she must【C9】______the shapes, lighting and decoration of everything from ceiling to floor. In addition, the designer must usually select furniture or design built-in furniture according to the functions that need to be【C10】______. A) obscure B) specialized C) attention D) expect E) concern F) specially G) evident H) contained I) decorated J) composed K) decisions L) suddenly M) served N) balance O) coordinate

The Dodge Brothers A) It was 100 years ago this week that the Dodge brothers founded the powerful car brand that still bears their name. But few have heard the tale of how the two-fisted brothers started their business in Canada. John and Horace Dodge spent nearly eight years working in Windsor as machinists, founding their first company here, and learning how to massively produce manufactured goods. B) The Evans & Dodge Bicycle Company is nearly forgotten now. But it taught the brothers how to run a leading-edge technology business—which it was in those days, says Windsor automotive historian Mickey Moulder. After selling out to CCM in 1900, the brothers took $7,500 in capital out of the little Windsor Company back to Detroit and founded Dodge Brothers. So laid the foundation of the gigantic fortune they managed to produce before both dying in 1920. C) What a pair the quarrelling Dodge brothers were, with their red hair, their barrel chests and tendency for heavy boozing and bar fighting. Horace was the quieter mechanical brain, doggedly working out problems on his work bench with a micrometer until midnight. John was the play boy, the salesman, the spokesman for the both of them. Although born four years apart, John in 1864 Horace in 1868, they were inseparable. Which is what brought them to Windsor. They had moved to Detroit from rural Niles, Mich., in 1886 at ages 22 and 18, taking jobs in the same factory, Murphy’s Boiler Works. If they needed any toughening up, which is doubtful, they learned it there and the nearby waterfront taverns. D) But a fit of tuberculosis eventually made the heavy work impossible for John, so in 1892 he came to Windsor looking for lighter duties at the Dominion Typograph Company on Sandwich Street(now Riverside Drive). E) According to family legend, the owners of the company, located in the Medbury Block just west of Ouellette Avenue, wanted to hire only one machinist. But John announced both he and Horace would be hired as a team or neither of them would work in Canada. The two leading technologies of the day were typesetting machines and bicycles. And Dominion happened to make both. That especially suited Horace. F) Moulder, a car collector and former Ford of Canada executive, has been a lifelong student of automotive history. He’ s also co-chairman of the Canadian Transportation Museum in Essex, and he tells the Dodge story with enthusiasm. “Bicycles were the high-tech mechanical device of the 1880s and 1890s. Everybody and the two brothers(literally) were fascinated by them,“ Moulder says, “The Dodge brothers, the Leland brothers(Cadillac, Lincoln) and the Wright brothers all built bicycles before their gasoline machines“. G) John became foreman at Dominion Typograph, Horace a “skilled machinist,“ according to the Windsor City Directory of 1894. Within five years its owner, Fred Evans, had taken in the brothers as full partners and they devoted themselves to building bicycles exclusively. H) Their products were known for being extremely smooth, reliable and robust, just as their cars would be a few years later. By November, 1897, Evans & Dodge employed 100 people in Windsor. I) But the overpopulated bicycle industry began consolidating, and Evans and Dodge decided to sell. Although John had married a Canadian from Walkerton, Ont, and Horace was married on his lunch-break at a church in Walkerville, the Dodges had never lived in Windsor. So they took their little nest egg back to Detroit and rented a new shop. They started taking orders for difficult-to-machine parts. Business took off due to high quality work and respect for deadlines. J) Their first big customer: Ransom Olds, father of the first mass produced American automobile. They built engines and transmissions for him, quickly making big money. “The Dodge brothers got a reputation for being really, really good suppliers,“ Moulder says. K) Henry Ford came knocking next, and they were soon supplying him with nearly complete cars. Ford was broke, was a poor machinist and couldn’t make much himself. “The Dodge brothers essentially provided the heart and soul of the first Ford cars built in 1903 and 1904,“ Moulder says. “The running chassis(底盘) was made by Dodge Brothers. Ford just put on the fenders, the windshield, the headlights, the seats, dressed it up. Ford didn’t make its own first car. Dodge Brothers did. And that’ s why Ford became so well known, because the car was so well built“. L) “They were geniuses. They were tough bastards, too,“ says Moulder. “They were big guys, and you didn ’t cross either of them or badmouth them because they’d hear about it. And if they happened to see you in a bar at the wrong time—even if you were a lawyer—after they had a few drinks in them ... The Dodges would either drag the offending party out into the street for their punishment or break up the whole bar. Then next morning they’d come back and pay for all the damages. They were tough birds, which is why they took on Henry Ford. Everybody else was afraid of him, but they took him on and won.“ M) Ford’s defeat in a dispute over stocks the Dodges owned in his company came in the form of a lawsuit which netted the Dodges $25 million—more than enough to launch their own car brand in 1914. They started by incorporating all the ideas Henry Ford had rejected. Technologically, they were well ahead of the pack. N) “We’ve got a beautiful Dodge Brothers car, a 1920 four door sedan,“ Moulder says. It’s on permanent display at the Transportation Museum on the Arner Town Line. “It’s full of advances that you would never find on any other car at the time.“ For instance: the first metal weather stripping to keep rain out of the passenger compartment, the first one-piece roof stampings, the first silent starters, and the first 12-volt electrical systems. A Dodge always started in the cold due to those 12-volt systems, which is why the rest of the world eventually followed suit, Moulder says. O) The brothers got to enjoy quite a bit of their vast wealth, building castle-like mansions outside Detroit and commissioning giant yachts. But their premature deaths at ages 55 and 52 shocked the world at the time. John sat for days on end at Horace’ s bedside when his younger brother was stricken by the Spanish flu, leaving only when he himself collapsed from it, dying a few days later. Horace rallied and lived a few more months before following his beloved older brother into a crypt in the family’s huge tomb in Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery. John’s Canadian wife ran Dodge Brothers the company until 1925, selling out for $147 million to a Wall Street investment firm, which flipped it three years later to Walter P. Chrysler for $175 million.

By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behaviour, of thought and of attitude. It is in being thus susceptible to the environment that man differs from the animals, and the higher animals from the lower. The lower animals are influenced by the environment but not in the direction of changing their habits. Their instinctive responses are few and fixed by heredity. When transferred to an unnatural situation, such an animal is led astray by its instincts. Thus the “ant-lion“ whose instinct implies it to bore into loose sand by pushing backwards with abdomen, goes backwards on a plate of glass as soon as danger threatens, and endeavors, with the utmost exertions to bore into it. It knows no other mode of flight, “or if such a lonely animal is engaged upon a chain of actions and is interrupted, it either goes on vainly with the remaining actions(as useless as cultivating an unsown field) or dies in helpless inactivity“. Thus a net-making spider which digs a burrow and rims it with a bastion of gravel and bits of wood, when removed from a half finished home, will not begin again, though it will continue another burrow, even one made with a pencil. Advance in the scale of evolution along such lines as these could only be made by the emergence of creatures with more and more complicated instincts. Such beings we know in the ants and spiders. But another line of advance was destined to open out a much more far-reaching possibility of which we do not see the end perhaps even in man. Habits, instead of being born ready-made(when they are called instincts and not habits at all) were left more and more to the formative influence of the environment, of which the most important factor was the parent who now cared for the young animal during a period of infancy in which vaguer instincts than those of the insects were moulded to suit surroundings which might be considerably changed without harm. This means, one might at first imagine, that gradually heredity becomes less and environment more important. But this is hardly the truth and certainly not the whole truth. For although fixed automatic responses like those of the insect-like creatures are no longer inherited, although selection for purification of that sort is no longer going on, selection for educability is very definitely still of importance. The ability to acquire habits can be conceivably inherited just as much as can definite responses to narrow situations. Besides, since a mechanism—is now, for the first time, created by which the individual(in contradiction to the species) can be fitted to the environment, the latter becomes, in another sense, less not more important. And finally, less not the higher animals who possess the power of changing their environment by engineering feats and the like, a power possessed to some extent even by the beaver, and preeminently by man. Environment and heredity are in no case exclusive but always supplementary factors.

Last year at airports across the world, 18% of flights were delayed, leaving millions of passengers stuck with a lot of time on their hands. Most of us can kill time at airports with a bit of shopping or the distractions provided by our smartphones, but some instead choose to get creative. Richard Dunn is a case in point. Earlier this month, he found himself stuck overnight at Las Vegas’ McCar-ran International Airport, and decided to pass the time by shooting a music video of himself singing the Celine Dion cover of “All by Myself.“ Make a game of it Earlier this month, Daniel Wiersema, from Austin, Texas, was travelling with fellow members of the American Outlaws, a soccer fan club that travels to matches worldwide to show support for the US-A. He was one of 530 members who flew to Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. At George HW Bush International Airport, however, he and his fellow fans found they had time to kill before boarding. “Myself and about eight others began passing a ball around, and it broke into a full out game,“ he recalls. People-watching Sometimes, people-watching provides its own rewards. Training consultant Nick Holyoake found this to be true while waiting around at arrivals at London’ s Stansted Airport. He happened to notice a woman who, despite her bright yellow dress and smiley face balloon, looked “sad and soli tary“, he says. “She looked like she made such an effort for someone who was either late or never coming,“ Holyoake guesses. “The contrast between the bright yellow of her hopefulness and the reality that all was most likely not going smoothly impressed me.“ When he noticed her cover her face with the balloon, he couldn’ t help but snap a picture. Hit the lounge Some travelers, meanwhile, found themselves actually relishing their flight delays. Freddy Sherman, a luxury travel blogger, was so pleased with the facilities at Istanbul Ataturk Airport’ s CIP Lounge that he hated to board his flight. In addition to a spacious billiards area, the lounge also has a flight simulator(飞行模拟器). “I travel frequently and have experienced a lot of airport lounges, but this one constantly amazes me with all the things to see, do and eat,“ he says. “I actually wanted my plane to be delayed so I could spend more time there.“

长城是世界一大奇迹。现在，每年都有几百万人到长城游览。在旺季，几处最著名的景点总是让成群结队的游客挤得水泄不通。中国人修筑长城的历史久远，可以追溯到战国时期(Warring States period)。历史上，中国共修过大约20座长城。在所有这些长城中，明长城最长，达到6700公里。当时，中国的技术在世界上处于领先地位，因此明长城的结构也是最复杂的。明长城的修筑是为了抵御北方游牧民族的入侵。