1、大学英语六级改革适用（阅读）模拟试卷 17及答案与解析 Section B 0 Friends A)On my recent travels, I came to realize still more fully the significance of the word “friend“. B)Seven or eight days ago, I said to a friend whom I had just come to know, “I cant help feeling embarrassed before my friends. Youre all so nice to me. I
2、 simply dont know how to repay your kindness.“ I did not make this remark out of mere modesty and courtesy. I truly meant what I said. The next day, I said goodbye to this friend, not knowing if I could ever see him again. But the little warmth that he gave me has been keeping my heart throbbing wit
3、h gratitude. C)The length of my days will not be unlimited. However, whenever I look back on my brief past life, I find a beacon illuminating my soul and thereby lending a little brightness to my being. That beacon is friendship. I should be grateful to it because it has helped me keep alive up to n
4、ow and cleared away the shadow left on me by my old family. D)Many people forsake their friends in favour of their own families, or at least draw a line of demarcation between families and friends, considering the former to be many times more important than the latter. That seems to be a matter of c
5、ourse. I have also seen with my own eyes how some people abandon their friends as well as their own careers soon after they get married. E)Friends are transient whereas family are lasting that is the tenet, as I know, guiding the behaviour of many people. To me, that is utterly inconceivable. Withou
6、t friends, I would have been reduced to I don t know what a miserable creature. F)Friends are my saviours. They give me things which it is beyond my family to give me. Thanks to their fraternal love, assistance and encouragement, I have time and again been saved from falling into an abyss while on i
7、ts verge. They have been enormously generous towards me. G)There was a time when my life was miserable and gloomy. My friends then gave me in large quantities sympathy, love, joy and tears things essential for existence. It is due to their bountiful free gifts that I also have my share of warmth and
8、 happiness in my life. I accepted their kindnesses quietly without ever saying a word of thanks and without ever doing anything in return. In spite of that, my friends never used the epithet “self-cantered“ when referred to me. They are only too generous towards me. H)I visited many new places and m
9、et new friends on my recent trip. My time was mostly taken up by looking around, listening, talking and walking. But I never ran into any trouble because my friends had done their utmost to make sure that I would be short of nothing. Whatever new places I called at, I always felt at home as if I wer
10、e back in my old residence in Shanghai which had been already been raged to the ground by Japanese troops. I)No matter how hard up and frugal my friends themselves were, they would unstintingly share with me whatever they had, although they knew I would not be able to repay them for their kindness.
11、Some, whom I did not even know by name, showed concern over my health and went about inquiring after me. It was not until they saw my suntanned face and arms that they began to smile a smile of relief. All that was enough to move one to tears. J)Some people believe that, without writing, I would los
12、e my livelihood. One of my sympathizers, in an article published two months ago in the Guangzhou Republic Daily Supplement, gives a full account of the conditions of my life. He also says that I would have nothing to live on once I should lay down my pen. That is not true at all. It has already been
13、 proved by recent travels that my friends would never let me suffer from cold and hunger even if I should go without writing a single word. There are a great many kind-hearted people in the world who never attach undue importance to themselves and their own families and who never place themselves an
14、d their families above anything else. It is owing to them that I still survive and shall continue to survive for a long time to come. K)I owe my friends many, many kindnesses. How can I repay them? But, I understand, they dont need me to do that. L)Recently I came across the following words in a boo
15、k by a French philosopher: M)One condition of life is consumption. Survival in this world is inseparable from generosity, without which we would perish and become dried-up from within. We must put forth flowers. Moral integrity and unselfishness are the flowers of life. N)Now so many flowers of life
16、 are in full bloom before my eyes. When can my life put forth flowers? Am I already dried-up from within? O)A friend of mine says, “If I were a lamp, I would illuminate darkness with my light.“ P)I, however, dont qualify for a bright lamp. Let me be a piece of firewood instead. Ill radiate the heat
17、that I have absorbed from the sun. Ill burn myself to ashes to provide this human world with a little warmth. 1 My friends generously gave me sympathy, love and joy but expected nothing for return. 2 It is friendship which helped me to live till now and led me get out of the shadow of my old family.
18、 3 If I am a piece of firewood, I will give out the little flame to illuminate the world. 4 Life blossoms moral integrity and unselfishness, without which human life would come to an end. 5 The love, assistance and encouragement from my friends saved me from falling down the abyssal deep. 6 My frien
19、ds would help me to live a decent life even if I could not make a living with writing. 7 Some people, whose names remained even unknown, extended their concern to me and cared for my health condition. 8 When I expressed gratitude to a friend whom I just met, I really meant it. 9 My recent trip was t
20、rouble-free because my friends prepared everything for me. 10 Many people make a distinction between families and friends, giving the former priority. 10 Trying too Hard Can Slow New Language Development A)Neuroscientists have long observed that learning a language presents a different set of opport
21、unities and challenges for adults and children. B)Adults easily grasp the vocabulary needed to navigate a grocery store or order food in a restaurant, but children have an innate ability to pick up on subtle nuances of language that often elude adults. For example, within months of living in a forei
22、gn country, a young child may speak a second language like a native speaker. C)Experts believe that brain structure plays an important role in this “sensitive period“ for learning language, which is believed to end around adolescence. The young brain is equipped with neural circuits that can analyze
23、 sounds and build a coherent set of rules for constructing words and sentences out of those sounds. Once these language structures are established, it s difficult to build another one for a new language. D)In a new study, a team of neuroscientists and psychologists from Massachusetts Institute of Te
24、chnology(MIT)discovered another factor that contributes to adults language difficulties: When learning certain elements of language, adults more highly developed cognitive skills actually get in the way. E)The researchers discovered that the harder adults tried to learn an artificial language, the w
25、orse they were at deciphering the language s morphology the structure and deployment of linguistic units such as root words, suffixes, and prefixes. F)“We found that effort helps you in most situations, for things like figuring out what the units of language that you need to know are, and basic orde
26、ring of elements. But when trying to learn morphology, at least in this artificial language we created, it s actually worse when you try,“ said Amy Flynn a postdoc at MITs McGovern Institute for Brain Research. G)Finn and colleagues from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford Univer
27、sity, and the University of British Columbia describe their findings in journal PLOS ONE. H)Linguists have known for decades that children are skilled at absorbing certain tricky elements of language, such as irregular past participles(examples of which, in English, include “gone“ and “been“)or comp
28、licated verb tenses like the subjunctive. “Children will ultimately perform better than adults in terms of their command of the grammar and the structural components of language some of the more idiosyncratic, difficult-to-articulate aspects of language that even most native speakers don t have cons
29、cious awareness of,“ Finn says. I)In 1990, linguist Elissa Newport hypothesized that adults have trouble learning those nuances because they try to analyze too much information at once. Adults have a much more highly developed prefrontal cortex than children, and they tend to throw all of that brain
30、power at learning a second language. J)This high-powered processing may actually interfere with certain elements of learning language. “It s an idea that s been around for a long time, but there hasn t been any data that experimentally show that its true,“ Finn says. Finn and her colleagues designed
31、 an experiment to test whether exerting more effort would help or hinder success. The study K)First, they created nine nonsense words, each with two syllables. Each word fell into one of three categories(A, B, and C), defined by the order of consonant and vowel sounds. Study subjects listened to the
32、 artificial language for about 10 minutes. One group of subjects was told not to overanalyze what they heard, but not to tune it out either. L)To help them not overthink the language, they were given the option of completing a puzzle or colouring while they listened. The other group was told to try
33、to identify the words they were hearing. Each group heard the same recording, which was a series of three-word sequences first a word from category A, then one from category B, then category C with no pauses between words. M)Previous studies have shown that adults, babies, and even monkeys can parse
34、 this kind of information into word units, a task known as word segmentation. Subjects from both groups were successful at word segmentation, although the group that tried harder performed a little better. Both groups also performed well in a task called word ordering, which required subjects to cho
35、ose between a correct word sequence(ABC)and an incorrect sequence(such as ACB)of words they had previously heard. N)The final test measured skill in identifying the languages morphology. The researchers played a three-word sequence that included a word the subjects had not heard before, but which fi
36、t into one of the three categories. O)When asked to judge whether this new word was in the correct location, the subjects who had been asked to pay closer attention to the original word stream performed much worse than those who had listened more passively. The findings support a theory of language
37、acquisition that suggests that some parts of language are learned through procedural memory, while others are learned through declarative memory. P)Under this theory, declarative memory, which stores knowledge and facts, would be more useful for learning vocabulary and certain rules of grammar. Proc
38、edural memory, which guides tasks we perform without conscious awareness of how we learned them, would be more useful for learning subtle rules related to language morphology. Q)“Its likely to be the procedural memory system thats really important for learning these difficult morphological aspects o
39、f language. In fact, when you use the declarative memory system, it doesnt help you, it harms you,“ Finn says. Still unresolved is the question of whether adults can overcome this language-learning obstacle. Finn says she does not have a good answer yet but she is now testing the effects of “turning
40、 off“ the adult prefrontal cortex using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. R)Other interventions she plans to study include distracting the prefrontal cortex by forcing it to perform other tasks while language is heard, and treating subjects with drugs that impair activity in that
41、 brain region. 11 It has been well established that children are good at acquiring some difficult grammar of language, e.g. irregular past participles. 12 The study showed that declarative memory system hinders the learning process of difficult morphological aspects of language. 13 The words in the
42、first test were artificial and nonsense. 14 The chances to set up a new language structure are slim once the old one is well formed. 15 Both groups successfully completed word segmentation as well as word ordering. 16 Their efforts paid off when adults tried very hard to understand units of language
43、 and basic sequence of elements. 17 One theory of language acquisition suggests that language are learned through both procedural and declarative memory. 18 The opportunities and challenges adults and children face in learning a language are different. 19 The test which aimed to evaluate skill in id
44、entifying the language s morphology included a word the subjects had not heard before. 20 Finn and her colleagues tried to test the hypothesis that exerting more effort would interfere with language learning. 20 Survival Skills for a Job You Detest A)We all have heard or at least seen in the movies
45、great stories about people who are working in soul-destroying jobs, then quit in some spectacular fashion and move on to fabulous second careers. B)This isn t a column about that. Rather, more realistically, it s about what to do if you re in a job you dislike or actively hate but can t move on. May
46、be you need to pay the rent or the mortgage and you ve sent out endless resumes and haven t gotten a bite. Whatever the reason, youre stuck. Are there ways to make going into work every day more palatable? C)Dawn Rosenberg McKay, who writes the career planning guide on A(which is owned by The New Yo
47、rk Times), suggests first making a list of all the things you dislike about your job. Try to do it when you have a little distance, like during a vacation or on a weekend. Dont cheat and write, “everything.“ It may feel that way, but that s not helpful. D)“If you hate your boss, write down the thing
48、s you hate about her,“ Ms. Rosenberg said. Do you like what you do, but dislike your colleagues or boss, or do you despise the actual tasks? Try to separate it out. E)Then write down all the things you like about your job, and again, “nothing“ is not a satisfactory answer. “ Try to find something po
49、sitive, even if it s just the neighbourhood you work in or the view from your window,“ she said. F)If you want to switch careers, not just get out of that particular job, Cathy Goodwin, a career consultant who specializes in career transitions, suggested focusing on “developing skills rather than serving time.“ What can you learn that you can put on your resume? Computer skills? Public speaking? “If your company offers education benefits, use them to make yourself marketable,“ she said. Even if your company
