1、2015年 12月大学英语四级真题试卷（三）及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the saying “Never go out there to see what happens, go out there to make things happen. “ You can cite examples to illustrate the importance of being participants rather than me
2、re onlookers in life. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Section A （ A） Children should be taught to be more careful. （ B） Children shouldnt drink so much orange juice. （ C） There is no need for the man to make such a fuss. （ D） Timmy should learn to do things in the rig
3、ht way. （ A） Fitness training. （ B） The new job offer. （ C） Computer prograrnming. （ D） Directorship of the club. （ A） He needs to buy a new sweater. （ B） He has got to save on fuel bills. （ C） The fuel price has skyrocketed. （ D） The heating system doesnt work. （ A） Committing theft. （ B） Taking pi
4、ctures. （ C） Window shopping. （ D） Posing for the camera. （ A） She is taking some medicine. （ B） She has not seen a doctor yet. （ C） She does not trust the mans advice. （ D） She has almost recovered from the cough. （ A） Pamelas report is not finished as scheduled. （ B） Pamela has a habit of doing th
5、ings in a hurry. （ C） Pamela is not good at writing research papers. （ D） Pamelas mistakes could have been avoided. （ A） In the left-luggage office. （ B） At the hotel reception. （ C） In a hotel room. （ D） At an airport. （ A） She was an excellent student at college. （ B） She works in the entertainmen
6、t business. （ C） She is fond of telling stories in her speech. （ D） She is good at conveying her message. （ A） Arranging the womans appointment with Mr. Romero. （ B） Fixing the time for the designers latest fashion show. （ C） Talking about an important gathering on Tuesday. （ D） Preparing for the fi
7、lming on Monday morning. （ A） Her travel to Japan. （ B） The awards ceremony. （ C） The proper hairstyle for her new role. （ D） When to start the make-up session. （ A） He is Mr. Romeros agent. （ B） He is an entertainment journalist. （ C） He is the womans assistant. （ D） He is a famous movie star. （ A）
8、 Make an appointment for an interview. （ B） Send in an application letter. （ C） Fill in an application form. （ D） Make a brief self-introduction on the phone. （ A） Someone having a college degree in advertising. （ B） Someone experienced in business management. （ C） Someone ready to take on more resp
9、onsibilities. （ D） Someone willing to work beyond regular hours. （ A） Travel opportunities. （ B） Handsome pay. （ C） Prospects for promotion. （ D） Flexible working hours. （ A） It depends on the working hours. （ B） It is about 500 pounds a week. （ C） It will be set by the Human Resources. （ D） It is t
10、o be negotiated. Section B （ A） To give customers a wider range of choices. （ B） To make shoppers see as many items as possible. （ C） To supply as many varieties of goods as it can. （ D） To save space for more profitable products. （ A） On the top shelves. （ B） On the bottom shelves. （ C） On easily a
11、ccessible shelves. （ D） On clearly marked shelves. （ A） Many of them buy things on impulse. （ B） A few of them are fathers with babies. （ C） A majority of them are young couples. （ D） Over 60% of them make shopping lists. （ A） Sales assistants promoting high margin goods. （ B） Sales assistants follo
12、wing customers around. （ C） Customers competing for good bargains. （ D） Customers losing all sense of time. （ A） Teaching mathematics at a school. （ B） Doing research in an institute. （ C） Studying for a college degree. （ D） Working in a hi-tech company. （ A） He studied the designs of various clocks
13、. （ B） He did experiments on different materials. （ C） He bought an alarm clock with a pig face. （ D） He asked different people for their opinions. （ A） Its automatic mechanism. （ B） Its manufacturing process. （ C） Its way of waking people up. （ D） Its funny-looking pig face. （ A） It is often caused
14、 by a change of circumstances. （ B） It actually doesnt require any special treatment. （ C） It usually appears all of a sudden. （ D） It generally lasts for several years. （ A） They cannot mix well with others. （ B） They irrationally annoy their friends. （ C） They depend heavily on family members. （ D
15、） They blame others for ignoring their needs. （ A） They lack consistent support from peers. （ B） They doubt their own popularity. （ C） They were born psychologically weak. （ D） They focus too much on themselves. Section C 26 There was a time when any personal information that was gathered about us w
16、as typed on a piece of paper and【 B1】 _in a file cabinet. It could remain there for years and, often【 B2】 _, never reach the outside world. Things have done a complete about-face since then.【 B3】 _the change has been the astonishingly【 B4】 _development in recent years of the computer. Today, any dat
17、a that is【 B5】 _about us in one place or another and for one reason or another can be stored in a computer bank. It can then be easily passed to other computer banks. They are owned by individuals and by private businesses and corporations, lending【 B6】 _, direct mailing and telemarketing firms, cre
18、dit bureaus, credit card companies, and【 B7】 _at the local, state, and federal level. A growing number of Americans are seeing the accumulation and distribution of computerized data as a frightening【 B8】 _of their privacy. Surveys show that the number of worried Americans has been steadily growing o
19、ver the years as the computer becomes increasingly【 B9】 _, easier to operate, and less costly to purchase and maintain. In 1970, a national survey showed that 37 percent of the people【 B10】_felt their privacy was being invaded. Seven years later, 47 percent expressed the same worry. A recent survey
20、by a credit bureau revealed that the number of alarmed citizens had shot up to 76 percent. 27 【 B1】 28 【 B2】 29 【 B3】 30 【 B4】 31 【 B5】 32 【 B6】 33 【 B7】 34 【 B8】 35 【 B9】 36 【 B10】 Section A 36 Children do not think the way adults do. For most of the first year of life, if something is out of sight
21、, its out of mind. If you cover a babys【 C1】 _toy with a piece of cloth, the baby thinks the toy has disappeared and stops looking for it. A 4-year-old may【 C2】 _that a sister has more fruit juice when it is only the shapes of the glasses that differ, not the【 C3】 _of juice. Yet children are smart i
22、n their own way. Like good little scientists, children are always testing their child-sized【 C4】 _about how things work. When your child throws her spoon on the floor for the sixth time as you try to feed her, and you say, “Thats enough! I will not pick up your spoon again!“ the child will【 C5】 _tes
23、t your claim. Are you serious? Are you angry? What will happen if she throws the spoon again? She is not doing this to drive you【 C6】 _: rather, she is learning that her desires and yours can differ, and that sometimes those【 C7】 _are important and sometimes they are not. How and why does childrens
24、thinking change? In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that childrens cognitive(认知的 )abilities unfold【 C8】 _, like the blooming of a flower, almost independent of what else is【 C9】 _in their lives. Although many of his specific conclusions have been【 C10】 _or modified over the years,
25、 his ideas inspired thousands of studies by investigators all over the world. A)advocate I)immediately B)amount J)naturally C)confirmed K)obtaining D)crazy L)primarily E)definite M)protest F)differences N)rejected G)favorite O)theories H)happening 37 【 C1】 38 【 C2】 39 【 C3】 40 【 C4】 41 【 C5】 42 【 C6
26、】 43 【 C7】 44 【 C8】 45 【 C9】 46 【 C10】 Section B 46 The Perfect Essay A)Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual life, even when I didnt. Her expectations were high impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She
27、 was also my mother. B)When good students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page: “Flawless. “ This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Of course, I had hea
28、rd that genius could show itself at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do: I hurried off to spread the good news. I didnt get very far. The first person I told was my mother. C)M
29、y mother, who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset by my hubris(得意忘形 )or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother a
30、nd her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions(过渡 ), structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson abou
31、t the nature of creative criticism. D)First off, it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leaves an existential imprint(印记 )on you as a person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we should never li
32、sten to these people. E)Criticism, at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mental life is getting in t
33、he way of good writing. Conveniently, they are also the people who care enough to see you through this painful realization. For me it took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writers block I was not able to produce anything for three years. F)Franz Kafka once said:“ Writing is utte
34、r solitude(独处 ), the descent into the cold abyss(深渊 )of oneself. “ My mothers criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective(内省的 )descent that writing requires you are not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sust
35、ained tutoring suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “It is a thing of no great difficulty,“ according to Plutarch, “to raise objections against another mans speech, it is a very
36、 easy matter: but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome. “ I am sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mothers guidance, but I cant recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the “extremely troublesome“ work of ongoing criticism. G)
37、There are two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce “ a better in its place. “ In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques(评论 ). My mother was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarc
38、h is suggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to Marcus Ciceros claim that one should “ criticize by creation, not by rinding fault. “ Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better on his own terms a process that is often extremely painful, but al
39、so almost always meaningful. H)My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any the type I could have found on my own I had to start
40、from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was “ flawless,“ she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began. I)She criticized me when I included little-known references and professional jargon(行话 ). She had no patience
41、 for brilliant but irrelevant figures of speech. “Writers cant bluff(虚张声势 )their way through ignorance. “ That was news to me I would need to find another way to structure my daily existence. J)She trimmed back my flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value of
42、restraint in expression. “ John,“ she almost whispered. I leaned in to hear her: “I cant hear you when you shout at me. “ So I stopped shouting and bluffing, and slowly my writing improved. K)Somewhere along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I missed something
43、important in my mothers lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps the point of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willingly finish. Whitman repeatedly reworked “Song of Myself between 1855 and 1891. Repeatedly. We do our absolute best with a piece of writing, and come
44、 as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique, however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we had achieved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson I took from my mother: If perfection were possible, it would
45、not be motivating. 47 The author was advised against the improper use of figures of speech. 48 The authors mother taught him a valuable lesson by pointing out lots of flaws in his seemingly perfect essay. 49 A writer should polish his writing repeatedly so as to get closer to perfection. 50 Writers
46、may experience periods of time in their life when they just cant produce anything. 51 The author was not much surprised when his school teacher marked his essay as “flawless“. 52 Criticizing someones speech is said to be easier than coming up with a better one. 53 The author looks upon his mother as
47、 his most demanding and caring instructor. 54 The criticism the author received from his mother changed him as a person. 55 The author gradually improved his writing by avoiding fancy language. 56 Constructive criticism gives an author a good start to improve his writing. Section C 56 Could you repr
48、oduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it? It wouldnt be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldnt reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a Silicon Valley? Its the right people. If you could get the right ten
49、 thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley. You only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub(中心 ): rich people and nerds(痴迷科研的人 ). Observation bears this out. Within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although its full of rich people, it has few nerds. Its not the ki
