大学英语六级（2013年12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷320

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the remark “Is machine translation more efficient?“ You can cite examples to illustrate your point. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1.

W: Can you tell me some of your strong points? M: With my qualifications and experience, I feel I am hardworking, responsible and diligent in any thing I do. W: Give me a brief introduction of your current job experience. M: I have been working as a computer programmer for five years. To be specific, I do system analysis, trouble shooting and provide software support. W: What have you done for your current organization? M: I have finished three new projects, and I am sure I can apply my experience to this position. W: What makes you think you would be a success in this position? M: My graduate school training along with my internship should qualify me for this job. I am sure I will be successful. W: Do you work well under stress or pressure? M: I can deal with it well since it is quite common in my current position. W: What leadership qualities did you have? M: I feel that learning how to motivate people and to work together as a team will be the major goal of my leadership. W: How do you deal with the trouble you have with your colleagues in your work? M: I will try to present my ideas in a clearer and open way in order to get my points across. Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 1. What can be inferred from the conversation? 2. Which one is not included in his job responsibility? 3. What makes him think he would be a success in this position? 4. What is the major goal of his leadership? They are talking about the current affairs. They are having a discussion. They are quarrelling with each other. They are having an interview.

W: Good morning and welcome to today’s program. Have you always wanted to invest, but didn’t know where to get started? Today’s show will help you with this problem. Very happily, we have Mr. Brown as our guest. Welcome to our program, Mr. Brown. M: It’ s a pleasure to be here. W: Now, Mr. Brown. Can you give us some suggestions on how to invest wisely? M: Well, I think there are three basic guidelines to smart investment. W: What are they? M: Number one is to have clear goals. Decide how many years you will invest for, and what your needs will be in the future. W: I see. First, we should have a clear goal. That’s definitely important. Then what is the second guideline? M: Number two is to understand the range of possibilities. You’ll want diversified investments: one with a mix of stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and cash. It’s a jungle out there. Each of these products has different risks associated with them and also different potential rewards. Understand them before you buy, so there won’t be any big surprises later. W: That sounds quite reasonable. Well, what about the third guideline? M: Finally, number three is to have realistic expectations. Keep this in mind: he who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year. You should invest for the long term since the stock market has both up and down years. W: That’s quite true. For example, over the past several years, New York stocks have averaged 30% annual returns, but this may not continue for long. Well, that’s today’s show. Thank you, Mr. Brown, for joining us. M: My pleasure. Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 5. What is the main topic of this conversation? 6. What is the first guideline according to Mr. Brown? 7. How many parts are there in diversified investments? 8. How to deal with the changeable stock market? How to invest smartly? What should we do to earn money? How to keep a balanced life? Why we need investment?

X was a secret agent. He had rented a furnished room in a provincial town not far from the public park and had been there two weeks. He was standing at the window looking out at the dull beds of geraniums, the park gates and the cold, uninviting statue of Queen Victoria that stood across the street from him. It was raining hard and the few people who passed by looked wet and miserable, too. How, he wondered, could anybody think there was anything interesting about the life of a secret agent? He knew it was because people had seen so many television plays about glamorous spies that they thought the life of a secret agent was exciting. They were convinced that every cigarette lighter concealed a secret tape recorder; that a fountain pen held in a certain way would open a locked door, that the touch of a gold ring against the hand of an enemy would make him reveal all his secrets. How wrong they were! He looked round his room. The wallpaper was in the worst possible taste, the pictures horrible, the carpet worn, dirty and faded; and he was cold. This was the third Monday he had come to the window to look out. He prayed it would be the last. As if in answer to his prayer, a certain meeting he had been sent to investigate was about to take place. He took out his camera. Just beneath the statue two women had stopped to speak. He knew one of them, and it was she who pointed in his direction. The other woman looked up towards him and in that brief moment he photographed her. Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard. 9. Where did the secret agent possibly live? 10. What could be found in his room? 11. Why did he stand at the window, looking outside? An unknown British town. Washington. New York. London.

Thank you all for coming to my talk this evening. It’s nice to see so many people in the audience. For those of you who don’t know very much about PS Camping, let me start by giving you some background information about the company. The company started 25 years ago. It actually opened as a retail chain selling camping equipment, and then twenty years ago, it bought a small number of campsites in the UK, and began offering camping holidays. The company grew rapidly and has been providing holidays in continental Europe for the last fifteen years. If you book a camping holiday with us, you’ll have a choice of over three hundred sites. In Italy we now have some 64 sites that we either own, or have exclusive use of. France is where we have the majority of sites, and we currently have a project to expand into Switzerland. We also have a number of sites in Northern Spain, particularly in the mountainous region of Picos de Europa. We’ve upgraded all these Spanish sites, and improved them considerably from their original three-star rating. We believe our holidays offer superb facilities for the whole family. Parents who want their children to be fully occupied for all or part of the day can take advantage of our children’ s activities. These are organized by our well-qualified and enthusiastic staff. Each day kicks off with a sports match, perhaps football, or volleyball, followed by an hour of drama for everyone. This may include singing or dancing, mime or other activities. In the afternoon, there’ s a different art activity for each day of the week including a poster competition or model making. What’ s more, our sites are truly child-friendly, and, with this in mind, we operate a no-noise rule in the evenings. Children’ s evening activities usually finish at 9:30, or occasionally 10, and from 10:30 holiday-makers are expected to be quiet in the areas where there are tents. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard. 12. What was the company’ s business when it opened in the UK? 13. How many years has PS Camping been organizing holidays? 14. In which of the following countries does the company have the majority of camping sites? 15. Which organized activity can children do every day of the week? It opened as a retail chain selling camping equipment. It opened as a retail chain selling campsites. It opened as a retail chain offering camping holidays. It opened as a retail chain selling tents.

I’m going to pass this piece of amber around so you can see this spider trapped inside it. It’s a good example of amber-inclusion, one of the inclusions that scientists are interested in these days. This particular piece is estimated to be about 20 million years old. Please be extremely careful not to drop it. Amber shatters as easily as glass. One thing I really like about amber is its beautiful golden color. Now, how does the spider get in there? Amber is really fossilized tree resin. Lots of chunks of amber contain insects like this one or animal parts like feathers or even plants. Here is how it happens. The resin oozes out of the tree and the spider or leaf gets in cased in it. Over millions and millions of years, the resin hardens and fossilizes into the precious stone you see here. Ambers can be found in many different places around the world. But the oldest deposits are right here in the United States, in Appalachia. It’ s found in several other countries, too, though right now scientists are most interested in ambers coming from the Dominican Republic. Because it has a great many inclusions, something likes one insect inclusion for every one hundred pieces. One possible explanation for this it that the climate is tropical and a greater variety of number of insects thrive in tropics than in other places. What’s really interesting is the scientists are now able to recover DNA from these fossils and study the genetic material for important clues to revolution. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 16 to 19. 16. Why does the professor pass the amber around to the students? 17. What is amber derived from? 18. Why is the Dominican Republic an important source of amber? 19. What type of amber is probably the most valuable for genetic research? So they can feel its weight. So they can examine its contents. So they can guess its age. So they can admire its beautiful color.

Now we’ ve been talking about the revolutionary period in the United States history when the colonies wanted to separate from England. I’d like to mention one point about the very famous episode from that period, a point I think is pretty relevant even today. I’m sure you remember, from when you are children, the story of Paul Revere’ s famous horseback ride to the Massachusetts countryside. In that version, he single-headily alerted the people that “the British were coming“. We have this image of us solitary rider running along of the dark from one farm house to another. And of course the story emphasized the courage of one man, made him a hero in our history books, right? But, that rather romantic version of the story is not what actually happened that night. In fact, that version misses the most important point entirely. Paul Revere was only one of the many riders helping deliver the messages that night. Just one part of a pre-arrange plan, that was thought out well in advance in preparation for just such an emergency. I don’t mean to diminish Revere’ s role though. He was actually an important organizer and promoter of this group effort for freedom. His mid-night rider didn’t just go knocking on farm house doors. They also awaken the institutions of New England. They went from town to town and engage the town leaders, the military commanders and volunteer groups, even church leaders, people who would then continue to spread the word. My point is that Paul Revere and his political party understood, probably more clearly than later generations ever have, that political institutions are theirs a kind of medium for the will of people and also to both build on and support the individual action. They knew the success requires careful planning and organization. The way they went about the work that night made a big difference in the history and this country. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 20 to 22. 20. What does the story of Paul Revere usually emphasize? 21. What new information does the speaker provide about Paul Revere? 22. What does the speaker imply is most significant about the rider of Paul Revere? The difficulties faced by the colonists. The skill of military heroes. The courage of one man. The cause of the Revolutionary War.

Let me warn you against a mistake that historians of science often make. They sometimes assume that people in the past use the same concepts we do. Here is a wonderful example that makes the use of history of mathematics some while ago. It concerns an ancient Mesopotamian tablet that has some calculations on it using square numbers. The calculations look an awful one like the calculations of the link of the sides of triangle. So that’s what many historians assume they were. But using square numbers to do this is a very sophisticated technique. If the Mesopotamians knew how to do it, as historians started thinking that they did. Well, they learn math with incredibly advanced. Well, it turns out the idea of Mesopotamians use square numbers to calculate the link of triangle’ s sides is probably wrong. Why? Because we discovered that Mesopotamians didn’t know how to measure angles, which is a crucial element in the whole process of triangle calculations. Apparently the Mesopotamians had a number of other uses for square numbers. These other uses were important but they were not used with triangles. And so these tablets in all likelihood were practice sheets, if you like, for doing simpler math exercises with square numbers. In all likelihood, it was the ancient Greeks who first calculate the link of triangle’s sides using square numbers. And this was hundreds of years after the Mesopotamians. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 23 to 25. 23. According to the professor, what did some historians mistakenly assumed about the Mesopotamians? 24. What was on the Mesopotamian tablet mentioned in the talk? 25. What does the professor imply about the ancient Greeks? They did not use square numbers. They used complex measuring instruments. They recorded math exercises on tablets. They calculated the link of triangle sides.

Our ape-men forefathers had no obvious natural weapons in the struggle for survival in the open. They had neither the powerful teeth nor the strong claws of the big cats. They could not【C1】______with the bear, whose strength, speed and claws provided an impressive ’ small fire’ weaponry. They could not even defend themselves by running swiftly like the horses, zebras or small animals. If the ape-men had attempted to compete on those terms in the open, they would have been【C2】______to failure and extinction. But they were【C3】______with enormous concealed advantages of a kind not possessed by any of their competitors. In the search of the picking of the forest, the ape-men had【C4】______efficient stereoscopic vision and a sense of colour that the animals of the grasslands did not possess. The ability to see clearly at close range permitted the ape-men to study practical problems in a way that lay far【C5】______the search of the original inhabitants of the grassland. Good long-distance sight was quite another matter. Lack of long-distance vision had not been a problem for forest-dwelling apes and monkeys because the higher the viewpoint, the greater the range of sight—so【C6】______they had had to do was climb a tree. Out in the open, however, this simple solution was not【C7】______. Climbing a hill would have helped, but in many places the ground was flat. The ape-men【C8】______the only possible solution. They reared up as high as possible on their hind limbs and began to walk upright. This vital change of physical position brought about considerable disadvantages. It was ex tremely unstable and it meant that the already slow ape-men became slower still. However, they persevered and their bone structure gradually became【C9】______to the new, unstable position that【C10】______them the name Homo erectus, upright man. A) compare B) driven C) match D) endowed E) doomed F) developed G) all H) adopted I) earned J) generated K) familiarized L) adapted M) available N) beyond O) bestowed

“Moment of Reckoning“: U.S. Cities Burn Recyclables after China Bans Imports A) The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt containers and other items into recycling bins. But in the past three months, half of these recyclables have been loaded on to trucks, taken to a hulking incineration (焚烧) facility and burned, according to the city’s government. It’s a situation being replicated across the US as cities struggle to adapt to a recent ban by China on the import of items intended for reuse. B) The loss of this overseas dumping ground means that plastics, paper and glass set aside for recycling by Americans is being stuffed into domestic landfills or is simply burned in vast volumes. This new reality risks an increase of plumes of toxic pollution that threaten the largely black and Latino communities who live near heavy industry and dumping sites in the US. C) About 200 tons of recycling material is sent to the huge Covanta incinerator in Chester City,Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, every day since China’s import ban came into practice last year, the company says. Some experts worry that burning plastic recycling will create a new fog of dioxins that will worsen an already alarming health situation in Chester. Nearly four in 10 children in the city have asthma, while the rate of ovarian cancer is 64% higher than the rest of Pennsylvania and lung cancer rates are 24% higher, according to state health statistics. D) “People want to do the right thing by recycling but they have no idea where it goes and who it impacts,“ said Zulene Mayfield, who was born and raised in Chester and now spearheads(领导) a community group against the incinerator, called Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living. “People in Chester feel hopeless—all they want is for their kids to get out, escape. Why should we be expendable? Why should this place have to be burdened by people’ s trash and shit?“ E) The US generates more than 250m tons of waste a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with about a third of this recycled and composted. Until recently, China had been taking about 40% of US paper, plastics and other recyclables but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste. F) Since January 2018, China hasn’t accepted two dozen different recycling materials, such as plastic and mixed paper, unless they meet strict rules around contamination. The imported recycling has to be clean and unmixed—a standard too hard to meet for most American cities. It is “virtually impossible to meet the stringent contamination standards established in China“, said a spokeswoman for the city of Philadelphia, who added that the cost of recycling has become a “major impact on the city’s budget“, at around $78 a ton. Half of the city’s recycling is now going to the Covanta plant, the spokeswoman said. G) There isn’t much of a domestic market for US recyclables—materials such as steel or high-density plastics can be sold on but much of the rest holds little more value than rubbish—meaning that local authorities are hurling it into landfills or burning it in huge incinerators like the one in Chester, which already torches around 3,510 tons of trash, the weight equivalent of more than 17 blue whales, every day. H) “This is a real moment of reckoning for the US because of a lot of these incinerators are aging, on their last legs, without the latest pollution controls,“ said Claire Arkin, campaign associate at Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. “You may think burning plastic means ’poof, it’s gone’ but it puts some very nasty pollution into the air for communities that are already dealing with high rates of asthma and cancers.“ I) Hugging the western bank of the Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Chester City was once a humming industrial outpost, hosting Ford and General Motors plants. Since the war, however, Chester has been hollowed out, with an exodus (离开)of jobs ushering in an era where a third of people live in poverty. J) Covanta say that pollution controls, such as scrubbers in smokestacks, will negate toxins emitted by recyclables. After passing through the emissions control system, the plant’ s eventual output is comfortably below limits set by state and federal regulators, the company says, with emissions of dioxins far better than the expected standard. K) Covanta and its critics agree that the whole recycling system in the US will need to be overhauled to avoid further environmental damage. Just 9% of plastic is recycled in the US, with campaigns to push up recycling rates obscuring broader concerns about the environmental impact of mass consumption, whether derived from recycled materials or not. L) “The unfortunate thing in the United States is that when people recycle they think it’s taken care of, when it was largely taken care of by China,“ said Gilman. “When that stopped, it became clear we just aren’ t able to deal with it.“

South Africa has 11 official languages. If you want to say hello, it’s “sawubona“ in Zulu, and “hallo“ in Afrikaans. Now, South Africa’s school children may start using “ni hao“ to say hello. The country’s education minister says, the nation is adding the Mandarin language teaching in some schools. Mandarin is the official spoken language of China. That country is a major trading power for South Africa. A recent agreement between the two nations centres on five areas of cooperation. They include development in basic education, school books and lessons, mathematics and science, teacher training and career education and research. South Africa officials have not said how much they teaching Mandarin will cost. Troy Martens is an official with South Africa’s Ministry of Basic Education. She says the new partnership is ex tremely valuable. “So it is very exciting and both countries have indicated that for them education is a high priority, and that is why education is high on the agenda of collaboration between the two countries,“ said Martens. The part of the plan that has garnered the most attention is the inclusion of the Mandarin language in schools. A public opinion study last year found that South Africans have mixed feelings about China. The survey showed 46 percent of South Africans do not like the spread of Chinese ideas and customs in their country, the results also showed that 60 percent dislike Chinese music, movies and television. But Ms Martens said Chinese trade is more important than those feelings. She said it is extremely helpful to learners in South Africa to study Mandarin as well as Chinese culture. And she said not every school will offer Mandarin. “Now this will not be compulsory, it will not be for every school, and it will not be for every child. But for schools that feel they have the capacity to offer Mandarin as a subject, we think it is a great opportunity for South African learners to be exposed to this international type of language,“ said Martens. South Africa’s population studies do not say how many native Chinese speakers are among its nearly 51 million people. Lisette Noonan heads the 80-year-old Pretoria Chinese School in South Africa’ s capital. The school serves about 500 students from kindergarten to grade 12. Every student studies Mandarin. Ms Noonan says the school welcomes the new cooperation between South Africa and China. She said it is in the best interests of children to study Mandarin. She said that especially true with China becoming what she called “a huge economic power in the world“.

Why has crime in the U.S. declined so dramatically since the 1990s? Economists and sociologists have offered a bounty of reasons, including more police, more security technology, more economic growth, more immigration, more imprisonment, and so on. The “real“ answer is almost certainly a combination of these factors, rather than one of them to the exclusion of the rest. But a new paper adds a surprising variable to the mix. What if the decline of crime in America started with the decline of cash? Cash is critical to the health of an underground economy, because it’ s anonymous, nearly untraceable, and easily stolen. This makes it the lifeblood of the black market. But Americans are rapidly abandoning cash thanks to credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments. Half a century ago, cash was used in 80 percent of U.S. payments. Now that figure is about 50 percent, according to researchers. In the 1980s, the federal government switched from paper money to electronic benefit transfers. They didn’t switch all at once. They switched one county at a time within states. This created a kind of randomly controlled environment for the researchers, who studied Missouri’ s counties to establish whether the areas that switched from welfare cash to electronic transfers saw a concurrent decline in crime. The results were striking: The shift away from cash was associated with “a significant decrease in the overall crime rate and the specific offenses of burglary and assault in Missouri and a decline in arrests.“ In other words, the counties saw a decline in specific crimes when they switched away from cash welfare. Perhaps most interestingly, they found that the switch to electronic transfers reduced robbery but not rape, suggesting that the move away from cash only had an impact on crime related to getting and spending cash. The move toward cashlessness in the U.S. continues quickly. Google now lets you attach mon ey to emails to send to friends, which means that for some shoppers, pulling out your credit card could become as rare as finding exact change in your coin purse. It might seem absurd to imagine Visa, Square, and Google Wallet as crime-fighting technologies. But with a better understanding of how cash’ s availability affects crime, perhaps the government should consider killing more than just the penny.

宋朝的创始人建立了有效的中央集权制(centralized bureaucracy)，广泛任用学术文人，地方的军事(military)官员及其党羽都被中央任命的官员所替代。这种官员体系使得宋朝的权力比以往任何朝代都更集中在皇帝和官僚机构手中。宋朝的城市有了显著的发展，这不单指其在管理上的职能，而且还包括其作为贸易、工业和海上贸易的中心职能。在文化方面，宋朝在过去几百年的基础上又发展了，这些发展不仅包括唐朝的思想，还包括历史文献、绘画、书法(calligraphy)等。