1、2013年 12月大学英语六级真题试卷（二）及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay about the impact of the information explosion by referring to the saying “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. “ You can give examples to illustrate your point and then exp
2、lain what you can do to avoid being distracted by irrelevant information. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Section A （ A） Labor problems. （ B） Weather conditions. （ C） An error in the order. （ D） Misplacing of goods. （ A） What the woman says makes a lot of sense. （ B）
3、The rich are opposed to social welfare. （ C） He is sympathetic with poor people. （ D） He agrees with Mr. Johnsons views. （ A） He will be practicing soccer. （ B） He has work to finish in time. （ C） He will be attending a meeting. （ D） He has a tough problem to solve. （ A） Mary should get rid of her p
4、et as soon as possible. （ B） Mary will not be able to keep a dog in the building. （ C） Mary is not happy with the ban on pet animals. （ D） Mary might as well send her dog to her relative. （ A） The twins voices are quite different. （ B） Lisa and Gale are not very much alike. （ C） He does not believe
5、they are twin sisters. （ D） The woman seems a bit hard of hearing. （ A） The serious economic crisis in Britain. （ B） A package deal to be signed in November. （ C） A message from their business associates. （ D） Their ability to deal with financial problems. （ A） It is impossible to remove the stain c
6、ompletely. （ B） The man will be charged extra for the service. （ C） The man has to go to the main cleaning facility. （ D） Cleaning the pants will take longer than usual. （ A） European markets. （ B） A protest rally. （ C） Luxury goods. （ D） Imported products. （ A） He made a business trip. （ B） He had
7、a quarrel with Marsha. （ C） He talked to her on the phone. （ D） He resolved a budget problem. （ A） She may have to be fired for poor performance. （ B） She has developed some serious mental problem. （ C） She is in charge of the firms budget planning. （ D） She supervises a number of important projects
8、. （ A） She failed to arrive at the airport on time. （ B） David promised to go on the trip in her place. （ C） Something unexpected happened at her home. （ D） She was not feeling herself on that day. （ A） He frequently gets things mixed up. （ B） He is always finding fault with Marsha. （ C） He has been
9、 trying hard to cover for Marsha. （ D） He often fails to follow through on his projects. （ A） They are better sheltered from all the outside temptations. （ B） They are usually more motivated to compete with their peers. （ C） They have more opportunities to develop their leadership skills. （ D） They
10、take an active part in more extracurricular activities. （ A） Its chief positions are held by women. （ B） Its teaching staff consists of women only. （ C） Its students aim at managerial posts. （ D） Its students are role models of women. （ A） It is under adequate control. （ B） It is traditional but col
11、ourful. （ C） They are more or less isolated from the outside world. （ D） They have ample opportunities to meet the opposite sex. Section B （ A） By invading the personal space of listeners. （ B） By making gestures at strategic points. （ C） By speaking in a deep, loud voice. （ D） By speaking with the
12、local accent. （ A） To promote sportsmanship among business owners. （ B） To encourage people to support local sports groups. （ C） To raise money for a forthcoming local sports event. （ D） To show his familys contribution to the community. （ A） They are known to be the style of the sports world. （ B）
13、They would certainly appeal to his audience. （ C） They represent the latest fashion in the business circles. （ D） They are believed to communicate power and influence. （ A） To cover up his own nervousness. （ B） To create a warm personal atmosphere. （ C） To enhance the effect of background music. （ D
14、） To allow the audience to better enjoy his slides. （ A） She was the first educated slave of John Wheatleys. （ B） She was the greatest female poet in Colonial America. （ C） She was born about the time of the War of Independence. （ D） She was the first African-American slave to publish a book. （ A） R
15、evise in a number of times. （ B） Obtain consent from her owner. （ C） Go through a scholarly examination. （ D） Turn to the colonial governor for help. （ A） Literary works calling for the abolition of slavery. （ B） Religious scripts popular among slaves in America. （ C） A rich stock of manuscripts lef
16、t by historical figures. （ D） Lots of lost works written by African-American women. （ A） It is a trait of generous character. （ B） It is a reflection of self-esteem. （ C） It is an indicator of high intelligence. （ D） It is a sign of happiness and confidence. （ A） It was self-defeating. （ B） It was a
17、ggressive. （ C） It was the essence of comedy. （ D） It was something admirable. （ A） It is a double-edged sword. （ B） It is a feature of a given culture. （ C） It is a unique gift of human beings. （ D） It is a result of both nature and nurture. Section C 26 It is important that we be mindful of the ea
18、rth, the planet out of which we are born and by which we are nourished, guided, healedthe planet, however, which we have【 B1】 _to a considerable degree in these past two centuries of【 B2】_exploitation. This exploitation has reached such【 B3】 _that presently it appears that some hundreds of thousands
19、 of species will be【 B4】 _before the end of the century. In our times, human shrewdness has mastered the deep【 B5】 _of the earth at a level far beyond the capacities of earlier peoples. We can break the mountains apart)we can drain the rivers and flood the valleys. We can turn the most luxuriant for
20、ests into throwaway paper products. We can【 B6】 _ the great grass cover of the western plains and pour【 B7】 _ chemicals into the soil until the soil is dead and blows away in the wind. We can pollute the air with acids, the rivers with sewage(污水 )the seas with oil. We can invent computers【 B8】 _ pro
21、cessing ten million calculations per second. And why? To increase the volume and the speed with which we move natural resources through the consumer economy to the junk pile or the waste heap. Our managerial skills are measured by the competence【 B9】 _in accelerating this process. If in these activi
22、ties the physical features of the planet are damaged, if the environment is made inhospitable for【 B10】 _living species, then so be it. We are, supposedly, creating a technological wonderworld. 27 【 B1】 28 【 B2】 29 【 B3】 30 【 B4】 31 【 B5】 32 【 B6】 33 【 B7】 34 【 B8】 35 【 B9】 36 【 B10】 Section A 36 Qu
23、ite often, educators tell families of children who are learning English as a second language to speak only English, and not their native language, at home. Although these educators may have good【 C1】 _, their advice to families is misguided, and it【 C2】 _from misunderstandings about the process of l
24、anguage acquisition. Educators may fear that children hearing two languages will become【 C3】_confused and thus their language development will be【 C4】 _; this concern is not documented in the literature. Children arc capable of learning more than one language, whether【 C5】 _or sequentially(依次地 ). In
25、 fact, most children outside of the United States are expected to become bilingual or even, in many cases, multilingual. Globally, knowing more than one language is viewed as an【 C6】_and even a necessity in many areas. It is also of concern that the misguided advice that students should speak only E
26、nglish is given primarily to poor families with limited educational opportunities, not to wealthier families who have many educational advantages. Since children from poor families often are【 C7】 _as at-risk for academic failure, teachers believe that advising families to speak English only is appro
27、priate. Teachers consider learning two languages to be too【 C8】 _for children from poor families, believing that the children are already burdened by their home situations. If families do not know English or have limited English skills themselves, how can they communicate in English? Advising non-En
28、glish-speaking families to speak only English is【 C9】 _to telling them not to communicate with or interact with their children. Moreover, the【 C10】 _message is that the familys native language is not important or valued. A)asset F)intentions K)simultaneously B)delayed G)object L)stems C)deviates H)o
29、verwhelming M)successively D)equivalent I)permanently N)underlying E)identified J)prevalent O)visualizing 37 【 C1】 38 【 C2】 39 【 C3】 40 【 C4】 41 【 C5】 42 【 C6】 43 【 C7】 44 【 C8】 45 【 C9】 46 【 C10】 Section B 46 The Uses of Difficulty The brain likes a challenge and pulling a few obstacles in its way
30、may well boost its creativity. A)Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that wont stay in shape or in tunc. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is
31、 deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because hes on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: “ease of use“. When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.
32、 B)Its an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends. In 1966, soon after the Beatles had finished work on “Rubber Soul“. Paul McCartney looked into the possibility of going to America to record their next
33、 album. The equipment in American studios was more advanced than anything in Britain, which had led the Beatles great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album. “Aftermath“, in Los Angeles. McCartney found that EMIs(百代唱片 )contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow sui
34、t, and the Beatles had to make do with the primitive technology of Abbey Road. C)Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George
35、Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their creativity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows“, “Strawberry Fields Forever“, and “A Day in the Life“ featured revolutionary sound effects that dazzled and mystified M
36、artins American counterparts. D)Sometimes its only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition for British schoolchildren. During the 1980s he not
37、iced an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also “strangely boring“. After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way into Briti
38、sh homes. E)You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage. But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review Hughes speculated that when a person puts pen to paper, “you meet the terrible resistance of what happ
39、ened your first year at it, when you couldnt write at all“. As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed, psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble(不着边际
40、的长篇大论 ). F)Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils reta
41、in more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level. G)As a poet, Ted Hughes had an acute sensitivity to the way in which constraints on self-expression, like the disciplines of metre and rhyme(韵律 ), spur creative thought. What applies to poets and musicians also applies to our dai
42、ly lives. We tend to equate(等同 )happiness with freedom, but, as the psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips has observed, without obstacles to our desires its harder to know what we want, or where were heading. He tells the story of a patient, a first-time mother who complained that her young son w
43、as always clinging to her, wrapping himself around her legs wherever she went. She never had a moment to herself, she said, because her son was “always in the way“. When Phillips asked her where she would go if he wasnt in the way. she replied cheerfully, “Oh, I wouldnt know where I was!“ H)Take ano
44、ther common obstacle: lack of money. People often assume that more money will make them happier. But economists who study the relationship between money and happiness have consistently found that, above a certain income, the two do not reliably correlate. Despite the ease with which the rich can acq
45、uire almost anything they desire, they are just as likely to be unhappy as the middle classes. In this regard at least, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. I)Indeed, ease of acquisition is the problem. The novelist Edward St Aubyn has a narrator remark of the very rich that, “not having to consider affor
46、dability. their desires rambled on like unstoppable bores, relentless(持续不断的 )and whimsical(反复无常的 )at the same time. “ When Boston College, a private research university, wanted a better feel for its potential donors, it asked the psychologist Robert Kenny to investigate the mindset of the super-rich
47、. He surveyed 165 households, most of which had a net worth of $ 25m or more. He found that many of his subjects were confused by the infinite options their money presented them with. They found it hard to know what to want, creating a kind of existential bafflement. One of them put it like this: “Y
48、ou know. Bob, you can just buy so much stuff, and when you get to the point where you can just buy so much stuff, now what are you going to do?“ J)The internet makes information billionaires out of all of us, and the architects of our online experiences are catching on to the need to make things cre
49、atively difficult. Twitters huge success is rooted in the simple but profound insight that in a medium with infinite space for self-expression, the most interesting thing we can do is restrict ourselves to 140 characters. The music service This Is My Jam helps people navigate the tens of millions of tracks now available instantly via Spot if y and iTunes. Users pick their favourite song of the week to share with others. They only get to choose one. The
