1、大学英语六级分类模拟题 357及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：0，分数：0.00)Play Is a Serious BusinessA. Playing is a serious business. Children engrossed in a make-believe world, fox cubs play-fighting or kittens teaming a ball of string aren“t just having fun. Play may look like a carefree and
2、exuberant way to pass the time before the hard work of adulthood comes along, but there“s much more to it than that. B. For a start, play can even cost animals their lives. Eighty percent of deaths among juvenile fur seals occur because playing pups fail to sport predators approaching. It is also ex
3、tremely expensive in terms of energy. Playful young animals use around two or three per cent of energy cavorting, and in children that figure can be closer to fifteen per cent. “Even two or three per cent is huge,“ says John Byers of Idaho University. “You just don“t find animals wasting energy like
4、 that,“ he adds. There must be a reason. C. But if play is not simply a developmental hiccup, as biologists once thought, why did it evolve? The latest idea suggests that play has evolved to build big brains. In other words, playing makes you intelligent. Playfulness, it seems, is common only among
5、mammals, although a few of the larger-brained birds also indulge. Animals at play often use unique signstail-wagging in dogs, for exampleto indicate that activity superficially resembling adult behaviour is not really in earnest. D. A popular explanation of play has been that it helps juveniles deve
6、lop the skills they will need to hunt, mate and socialise as adults. Another has been that it allows young animals to get in shape for adult life by improving their respiratory endurance. Both these ideas have been questioned in recent years. E. Take the exercise theory. If play evolved to build mus
7、cle or as a kind of endurance training, then you would expect to see permanent benefits. But Byers points out that the benefits of increased exercise disappear rapidly after training stops, so many improvement in endurance resulting from juvenile play would be lost by adulthood. F. “If the function
8、of play was to get into shape,“ says Byers, “the optimum time for playing would depend on when it was most advantageous for the young of a particular species to do so. But it doesn“t work like that.“ Across species, play tends to peak about halfway through the suckling stage and then decline. G. The
9、n there“s the skills-training hypothesis. At first glance, playing animals do appear to be practising the complex manoeuvres they will need in adulthood. But a closer inspection reveals this interpretation as too simplistic. In one study, behavioural ecologist Tim Caro, from the University of Califo
10、rnia, looked at the predatory play of kittens and their predatory behaviour when they reached adulthood. He found that the way the cats played had no significant effect on their hunting prowess in later life. H. Earlier this year, Sergio Pellis of Lethbridge University, Canada, reported that there i
11、s a strong positive link between brain size and playfulness among mammals in general. Comparing measurements for fifteen orders of mammals, he and his team found large brains (for a given body size) are linked to greater playfulness. The converse was also found to be true. I. Robert Barton of Durham
12、 University believes that, because large brains are more sensitive to developmental stimuli than smaller brains, they require more play to help mould them for adulthood. “I concluded it“s to do with learning and with the importance of environmental data to the brain during development,“ he says. J.
13、According to Byers, the timing of the playful stage in young animals provides an important clue to what“s going on. If you plot the amount of time juvenile devotes to play each day over the course of its development, you discover a pattern typically associated with a “sensitive period“a brief develo
14、pment window during which the brain can actually be modified in ways that are not possible earlier or later in life. K. Think of the relative ease with which young childrenbut not infants or adultsabsorb language. Other researchers have found that play in cats, rats and mice is at its most intense j
15、ust as this “window of opportunity“ reaches its peak. L. “People have not paid enough attention to the amount of the brain activated by plays,“ says Marc Bekoff from Colorado University. Bekoff studied coyote pups at play and found that the kind of behaviour involved was markedly more variable and u
16、npredictable than that of adults. Such behaviour activates many different parts of the brain, he reasons. Bekoff likens it to a behavioural kaleidoscope, with animals at play jumping rapidly between activities. “They use behaviour from a lot of different contextspredation, aggression, reproduction,“
17、 he says. “Their developing brain is getting all sorts of stimulation.“ M. Not only is more of the brain involved in play that was suspected, but it also seems to activate higher cognitive processes. “There“s enormous cognitive involvement in play,“ says Bekoff. He points out that play often involve
18、s complex assessments of playmates, ideas of reciprocity and the use of specialised signals and rules. He believes that play creates a brain that has greater behavioural flexibility and improved potential for learning later in life. N. The idea is backed up by the work of Stephen Siviy of Gettysburg
19、 College. Siviy studied how bouts of play affected the brain“s levels of particular chemical associated with the stimulation and growth of nerve cells. He was surprised by the extent of the activation. “Play just lights everything up,“ he says. By allowing link-ups between brain areas that might not
20、 normally communicate with each other, play may enhance creativity. O. What might further experimentation suggest about the way children are raised in many societies today? We already know that rat pups denied the chance to play grow smaller brain components and fail to develop the ability to apply
21、social rules when they interact with their peers. With schooling beginning earlier and becoming increasingly exam-orientated, play is likely to get even less of a look-in. Who knows what the result of that will be?（分数：20.00）(1).A wide range of activities are combined during play.（分数：2.00）(2).Play is
22、 related to learning, and provides input concerning physical surroundings.（分数：2.00）(3).There is a link between a specific substance in the brain and playing.（分数：2.00）(4).Byers thinks that play is not a form of fitness training for the future.（分数：2.00）(5).If you record how much time young animals spe
23、nd playing each day over the course of its development, you“ll discover a sensitive period.（分数：2.00）(6).A reduction in play opportunities might possibly affect children.（分数：2.00）(7).Play is functional because the brain needs it for development.（分数：2.00）(8).Play consumes about fifteen percent of chil
24、dren“s energy.（分数：2.00）(9).Some cognitive activities are exercised and developed during play.（分数：2.00）(10).There is a tendency for mammals with smaller brains to play less.（分数：2.00）VolcanoesEarth-shattering NewsA. Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top
25、 few kilometres off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurt rock fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away. B. But the classic eruptioncone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of molten lavais only a tiny part of a global story
26、. Volcanism, the name given to volcanic processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt. C. Volcanoes have not only made the continen
27、ts, they are also thought to have made the world“s first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. D. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometres of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes s
28、moking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust. E. What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of th
29、e gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world“s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need. F. Geologists c
30、onsider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets
31、like a tiny mountain chain over the cracklike an archipelago of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much halter. G. Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly “flow“ like thick treacle
32、. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the “eggshell“ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimetres a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur,
33、 are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes. H. These zones are lines it is working with living Inuit in the snows of Alaska. It is diving down to Spanish wrecks off the coast of Florida, and it is investigating the sewers of Roman York. But it is also the painstaking task of interpret
34、ation so that we come to understand what these things mean for the human story. And it is the conservation of the world“s cultural heritage against looting and against careless destruction. B. Archaeology, then, is both a physical activity out in the field, and an intellectual pursuit in the study o
35、r laboratory. That is part of its great attraction. The rich mixture of danger and detective work has also made it the perfect vehicle for fiction writers and film-makers, from Agatha Christie with Murder in Mesopotamia to Steven Spielberg with Indiana Jones. However far from reality such portrayals
36、 may be, they capture the essential truth that archaeology is an exciting questthe quest for knowledge about ourselves and our past. C. But how does archaeology relate to disciplines such as anthropology and history that are also concerned with the human story? Is archaeology itself a science? And w
37、hat are the responsibilities of the archaeologist in today“s world, where the past is manipulated for political ends and “ethnic cleansing“ is accompanied by the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage? Archaeology as anthropology D. Anthropology at its broadest is the study of humanityour p
38、hysical characteristics as animals, and our unique non-biological characteristics that we call culture. Culture in this sense includes what the anthropologist Edward Tylor usefully summarized in 1871 as “knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by ma
39、n as a member of society.“ Anthropologists also use the term culture in a more restricted sense when they refer to the culture of a particular society, meaning the non-biological characteristics unique to that society which distinguish it from other societies. Anthropology is thus a broad discipline
40、so broad that it is generally broken down into three smaller disciplines: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. E. Biological anthropology, or physical anthropology as it used to be called, concerns the study of human biological or physical characteristics and how they evo
41、lved. Cultural anthropologyor social anthropologyanalyzes human culture and society. Two of its branches are ethnography (the study at first hand of individual living cultures) and ethnology (which sets out to compare cultures using ethnographic evidence to derive general principles about human soci
42、ety). F. Archaeology is the “past tense of cultural anthropology“. Whereas cultural anthropologists will often base their conclusions on the experience of actually living within contemporary communities, archaeologists study past humans and societies primarily through their material remainsthe build
43、ings, tools, and other artifacts that constitute what is known as the material culture left over from former societies. G. Nevertheless, one of the most challenging tasks for the archaeologist today is to know how to interpret material culture in human terms. How were those pots used? Why are some d
44、wellings round and others square? Here the methods of archaeology and ethnography overlap. Archaeologists in recent decades have developed “ethnoarchaeology“, where like ethnographers they live among contemporary communities, but with the specific purpose of understanding how such societies use mate
45、rial culturehow they make their tools and weapons, why they build their settlements where they do, and so on. H. Moreover, archaeology has an active role to play in the field of conservation. Heritage studies constitute a developing field, where it is realized that the world“s cultural heritage is a
46、 diminishing resource, and one which holds different meanings for different people. I. The presentation of the findings of archaeology to the public cannot avoid difficult political issues, and the museum curator and the popularizer today have responsibilities which some can be seen to have failed.
47、Archaeology as history J. If, then, archaeology deals with the past, in what way does it differ from history? In the broadest sense, just as archaeology is an aspect of anthropology, so too is it apart of historywhere we mean the whole history of humankind from its beginnings over 3 million years ag
48、o. Indeed for more than 99 percent of that huge span of time archaeologythe study of past material cultureis the only significant source of information, if one sets aside physical anthropology, which focuses on our biological rather than cultural progress. Conventional historical sources begin only
49、with the introduction of written records around 3000 BC in western Asia, and much later in most other parts of the world (not until AD1788 in Australia, for example). K. A commonly drawn distinction is between prehistorythe period before written recordsand history in the narrow sense, meaning the study of the past using written evidence. In some countries, “prehistory“ is now considered a patronizing and derogatory term which implies that written texts are more valuable than oral histories, and which classifies their cultures as inferior until the arrival of Western ways
