1、2017年 6月大学英语四级真题试卷（三）及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an advertisement on your campus website to sell some of the course books you used at college. Your advertisement may include a brief description of their content, their condition and price,
2、 and your contact information. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Section A （ A） Human drivers become easily distracted or tired while driving. （ B） Most drivers have test driven cars with automatic braking features. （ C） Most drivers feel uncertain about the safety of s
3、elf-driving cars. （ D） The majority of drivers prefer to drive and park themselves. （ A） Their increased comfort levels have boosted their sales. （ B） They are not actually as safe as automakers advertise. （ C） They would be unpopular with drivers who only trust their own skills. （ D） Their drivers
4、would feel safe after getting used to the automatic devices. （ A） Thefts of snowmobile dogs in Alaska. （ B） Attacks on some Iditarod Race competitors. （ C） A series of injuries to snowmobile drivers. （ D） A serious accident in the Alaska sports event. （ A） He stayed behind to look after his injured
5、dogs. （ B） He has quit the competition in Alaska for good. （ C） He received a minor injury in the Iditarod Race. （ D） He has won the Alaska Iditarod Race four times. （ A） It sank into the sea due to overloading. （ B） It ran into Nicaraguas Big Corn Island. （ C） It turned over because of strong winds
6、. （ D） It disappeared between two large islands. （ A） 32. （ B） 30. （ C） 25. （ D） 13 （ A） He has helped with the rescue effort. （ B） He is being investigated by the police. （ C） He was drowned with the passengers. （ D） He is among those people missing. Section B （ A） At a community college. （ B） At a
7、n accountancy firm. （ C） At a shopping centre. （ D） At an IT company. （ A） Making phone calls. （ B） Arranging interviews. （ C） Sorting application forms. （ D） Helping out with data input. （ A） He needs the money badly. （ B） He enjoys using computers. （ C） He wants to work in the city centre. （ D） He
8、 has relevant working experience. （ A） Learn some computer language. （ B） Review some accountancy terms. （ C） Improve his programming skills. （ D） Purchase some business suits. （ A） They are poor at technology skills. （ B） They are keen on high technology. （ C） They often listen to National Public R
9、adio. （ D） They feel superior in science and technology. （ A） Japanese. （ B） Poles. （ C） Americans. （ D） Germans. （ A） Emailing. （ B） Texting. （ C） Literacy. （ D） Science. （ A） It is undergoing a drastic reform. （ B） It has much room for improvement. （ C） It lays emphasis on creative thinking. （ D）
10、It prioritizes training of practical skills. Section C （ A） They taste like apples. （ B） They have small roots. （ C） They grow white flowers. （ D） They come from Central Africa. （ A） They turned from white to purple in color. （ B） They became an important food for humans. （ C） They began to look lik
11、e modern-day carrots. （ D） They became popular on the world market. （ A） Farm machines helped lower their prices. （ B） People discovered their medicinal value. （ C） There were serious food shortages. （ D） They were found quite nutritious. （ A） She could download as many pictures as she liked. （ B） S
12、he could call up her family whenever she liked. （ C） She could locate her friends wherever they were. （ D） She could update her family any time she liked. （ A） She felt she was a teenager again. （ B） She felt quite popular among them. （ C） She enjoyed reading her friends status updates. （ D） She lik
13、ed to inform her friends about her success. （ A） She didnt seem to be doing as well as her Facebook friends. （ B） She spent more time updating her friends than her family. （ C） She could barely respond to all her 500 Facebook friends. （ D） She could barely balance Facebook updates and her work. （ A）
14、 They have strong muscles. （ B） They eat much less in winter. （ C） They live a longer life than horses. （ D） They can work longer than donkeys. （ A） It was a pet of a Spanish king. （ B） It was brought over from Spain. （ C） It was bought by George Washington. （ D） It was donated by a U.S. ambassador.
15、 （ A） They met and exchanged ideas on animal breeding. （ B） They fed mules with the best food they could find. （ C） They participated in a mule-driving competition. （ D） They showed and traded animals in the market. （ A） A growing donkey population. （ B） The wider use of horses. （ C） A shrinking ani
16、mal trade. （ D） The arrival of tractors. Section A 26 Americas Internet is faster than ever before, but people still complain about their Internet being too slow. New York s Attorney Generals office【 C1】 _ an investigation in the fall into whether or not Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner are deli
17、vering broadband thats as fast as the providers【 C2】 _ it is. Earlier this month, the office asked for the publics help to measure their speed results, saying consumers【 C3】 _ to get the speeds they were promised. “Too many of us may be paying for one thing, and getting another,“ the Attorney Genera
18、l said. If the investigation uncovers anything, it wouldnt be the first time a telecom provider got into【 C4】 _ over the broadband speeds it promised and delivered customers. Back in June, the Federal Communications Commission fined AT even Jesus had 12 co-workers. But a new report by Deloitte, “Glo
19、bal Human Capital Trends“, based on a survey of more than 7,000 executives in over 130 countries, suggests that the fashion for teamwork has reached a new high. Almost half of those surveyed said their companies were either in the middle of restructuring or about to embark on (开始 ) it; and for the m
20、ost part, restructuring meant putting more emphasis on teams. B Companies are abandoning conventional functional departments and organising employees into cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or customers. These teams are gaining more power to run their own affairs. T
21、hey are also spending more time working with each other rather than reporting upwards. Deloitte argues that a new organisational form is on the rise: a network of teams is replacing the conventional hierarchy (等级体制 ). C The fashion for teams is driven by a sense that the old way of organising people
22、 is too rigid for both the modern marketplace and the expectations of employees. Technological innovation places greater value on agility (灵活性 ). John Chambers, chairman of Cisco Systems Inc., a worldwide leader in electronics products, says that “we compete against market transitions (过渡 ), not com
23、petitors. Product transitions used to take five or seven years; now they take one or two.“ Digital technology also makes it easier for people to co-ordinate their activities without resorting to hierarchy. The “millennials“ (千禧一代 ) who will soon make up half the workforce in rich countries were rais
24、ed from nursery school onwards to work in groups. D The fashion for teams is also spreading from the usual corporate suspects (such as GE and IBM) to some more unusual ones. The Cleveland Clinic, a hospital operator, has reorganised its medical staff into teams to focus on particular treatment areas
25、; consultants, nurses and others collaborate closely instead of being separated by speciality (专业 ) and rank. The US Army has gone the same way. In his book, Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal describes how the armys hierarchical structure hindered its operations during the early stages of th
26、e Iraq war. His solution was to learn something from the rebels it was fighting: decentralising authority to self-organising teams. E A good rule of thumb is that as soon as generals and hospital administrators jump on a management bandwagon (追随一种管理潮流 ), it is time to ask questions. Leigh Thompson o
27、f Kellogg School of Management in Illinois warns that, “Teams are not always the answer teams may provide insight, creativity and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot; but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay and poor decision-making.“ The late Richard Hackman of Harva
28、rd University once argued, “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary. But dont count on it.“ F Hackman (who died in 2013) noted that teams are hindered by problems of co-ordination and motivation that chip awa
29、y at the benefits of collaboration. High-flyers (能干的人 ) who are forced to work in teams may be undervalued and free-riders empowered. Group-think may be unavoidable. In a study of 120 teams of senior executives, he discovered that less than 10% of their supposed members agreed on who exactly was on
30、the team. If it is hard enough to define a teams membership, agreeing on its purpose is harder still. G Profound changes in the workforce are making teams trickier to manage. Teams work best if their members have a strong common culture. This is hard to achieve when, as is now the case in many big f
31、irms, a large proportion of staff are temporary contractors. Teamwork improves with time: Americas National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its civil-aviation database occurred on a crews first day of flying together. However, as Amy Edmondson of Harvard points out, or
32、ganisations increasingly use “team“ as a verb rather than a noun; they form teams for specific purposes and then quickly disband them. H The least that can be concluded from this research is that companies need to think harder about managing teams. They need to rid their minds of sentimentalism (感情用
33、事 ) : the most successful teams have leaders who are able to set an overall direction and take immediate action. They need to keep teams small and focused: giving in to pressure to be more “inclusive“ is a guarantee of dysfunction. Jeff Bezos, Amazons boss, says that “If I see more than two pizzas f
34、or lunch, the team is too big.“ They need to immunise teams against group-think: Hackman argued that the best ones contain “deviants“ (离经叛逆者 ) who are willing to do something that may be upsetting to others. I A new study of 12,000 workers in 17 countries by Steelcase, a furniture-maker which also d
35、oes consulting, finds that the best way to ensure employees are “engaged“ is to give them more control over where and how they do their work which may mean liberating them from having to do everything in collaboration with others. J However, organisations need to learn something bigger than how to m
36、anage teams better: they need to be in the habit of asking themselves whether teams are the best tools for the job. Team-building skills are in short supply: Deloitte reports that only 12% of the executives they contacted feel they understand the way people work together in networks and only 21% fee
37、l confident in their ability to build cross-functional teams. Loosely managed teams can become hotbeds of distraction employees routinely complain that they cant get their work done because they are forced to spend too much time in meetings or compelled to work in noisy offices. Even in the age of o
38、pen-plan offices and social networks some work is best left to the individual. 37 Successful team leaders know exactly where the team should go and are able to take prompt action. 38 Decentralisation of authority was also found to be more effective in military operations. 39 In many companies, the c
39、onventional form of organisation is giving way to a network of teams. 40 Members of poorly managed teams are easily distracted from their work. 41 Teamwork is most effective when team members share the same culture. 42 According to a report by Deloitte, teamwork is becoming increasingly popular amon
40、g companies. 43 Some team members find it hard to agree on questions like membership and the teams purpose. 44 Some scholars think teamwork may not always be reliable, despite its potential to work wonders. 45 To ensure employees commitment, it is advisable to give them more flexibility as to where
41、and how they work. 46 Product transitions take much less time now than in the past. Section C 46 The phrase almost completes itself; midlife crisis. Its the stage in the middle of the journey when people feel youth vanishing, their prospects narrowing and death approaching. Theres only one problem w
42、ith the cliche (套话 ). It isnt true. “In fact, there is almost no hard evidence for midlife crisis other than a few small pilot studies conducted decades ago,“ Barbara Hagerty writes in her new book, Life Reimagined. The bulk of the research shows that there may be a pause, or a shifting of gears in
43、the 40 s or 50 s, but this shift “can be exciting, rather than terrifying“. Barbara Hagerty looks at some of the features of people who turn midlife into a rebirth. They break routines, because “autopilot is death“. They choose purpose over happinesshaving a clear sense of purpose even reduces the r
44、isk of Alzheimers disease. They give priority to relationships, as careers often recede (逐渐淡化 ). Life Reimagined paints a picture of middle age that is far from gloomy. Midlife seems like the second big phase of decision-making. Your identity has been formed; youve built up your resources; and now y
45、ou have the chance to take the big risks precisely because your foundation is already secure. Karl Barth described midlife precisely this way. At middle age, he wrote, “the sowing is behind; now is the time to reap. The run has been taken; now is the time to leap. Preparation has been made; now is t
46、he time for the venture of the work itself.“ The middle-aged person, Barth continued, can see death in the distance, but moves with a “measured haste“ to get big new things done while there is still time. What Barth wrote decades ago is even truer today. People are healthy and energetic longer. We h
47、ave presidential candidates running for their first term in office at age 68, 69 and 74. A longer lifespan is changing the narrative structure of life itself. What could have been considered the beginning of a descent is now a potential turning point the turning point you are most equipped to take f
48、ull advantage of. 47 What does the author think of the phrase “midlife crisis“? （ A） It has led to a lot of debate. （ B） It is widely acknowledged. （ C） It is no longer fashionable. （ D） It misrepresents real life. 48 How does Barbara Hagerty view midlife? （ A） It may be the beginning of a crisis. （
49、 B） It can be a new phase of ones life. （ C） It can be terrifying for the unprepared. （ D） It may see old-age diseases approaching. 49 How is midlife pictured in the book Life Reimagined？ （ A） It can be quite rosy. （ B） It can be burdensome. （ C） It undergoes radical transformation. （ D） It makes for the best part of ones life. 50 According to Karl Barth, midlife is the time_. （ A） to relax （ B） to mature （ C） to harvest （ D） to reflect 51 What does the author say about midlife today? （ A） It is more meaningfu
