1、大学英语六级改革适用（阅读）模拟试卷 24及答案与解析 Section B 0 Drone Problem and Chances A)In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone(无人驾驶飞机 )with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to
2、 a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,500 feet, FAA re
3、cords show. B)The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. “In many cases, radar data is not available and the ope
4、rators cannot be identified,“ the agency said in a statement. C)The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more dr
5、ones legal and illegal take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post. D)In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the
6、FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or r
7、emotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida. E)Civilian drones flown with the FAA s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have repo
8、rted 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records. F)The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the countrys already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congre
9、ss ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015 the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes. G)Congress imposed dual orders on
10、the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled. H)The FAA is fac
11、ing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for
12、 certifying drones and licensing pilots. I)The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. “I completely understand that there is significant potential, theres significant benefit, theres great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely,“ Michael P. Huer
13、ta, the FAA s administrator, said in an interview. “Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky,“ Huerta added. “But theyre not really worried a lot about whether its safe. Its their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flyi
14、ng around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them.“ J)Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep t
15、hem below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter a drone with four rotors crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis s Metropolitan Square building, the city s ta
16、llest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators. K)Even drone advocate
17、s worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. “We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage,“ Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. “If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of
18、 midair collision, it could set us back years.“ L)In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to “safely accelerate“ the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world. M)At the time, the military had been flyi
19、ng drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harms way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market wi
20、th $8 billion in annual revenue. N)Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of S
21、ept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones we
22、ighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances
23、. O)Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. “We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology,“ Michael
24、Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industrys trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington. 1 Even drone advocates worry that the sky is becoming accessible for all drones, especially illegal drone usage. 2 The new FAA Modernization and Reform Act require
25、s the federal government to safely speed up the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world. 3 Due to advances in technologies many small drones are relatively cheap and many people flying them as a hobby but some of them frequently violate the restrictions. 4 In many cases
26、 FAA cannot find any data about those unregistered drones and their operators are hard to be identified. 5 Civilian drones flown with the FAAs permission and under its scrutiny are also not free from air crashes. 6 Producers of drones become impatient and worry that if the FAA do not act quickly for
27、eign companies will steal the market. 7 Some contractors see the potential to sell drones to private business and other government agencies and they projected a very profitable market of drones. 8 Due to many drones flying in the sky, there are more and more dangerous occurrences in recent years. 9
28、In the many cases reported over the last two years, there are many drones flying very close to airports or passenger planes which is very dangerous. 10 The FAA has a difficult time to reconcile the order imposed by the Congress because it must draft the rules quickly and at the same time it has to e
29、nsure the safety standards. 10 Female Relationships A)Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream. B)Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowens 1932 novel To the North happ
30、ily share a house in London until Emmelines world is torn apart when Cecilia announces shes engaged to be married. “Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits,“ Emmeline thinks. C)Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weills 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standin
31、g on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach s Frances Ha(2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she
32、s deserted by her best friend. D)Although both are very much strong individuals the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends, and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha same to these womens identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. “Were the same person, with differe
33、nt hair,“ Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film. E)What Frances Ha and Lena Dunhams film Tiny Furniture(2010)and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friend
34、ships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbachs works, theres yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as suppor
35、tive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong. F)As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay “A Room of Ones Own“, capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are
36、 too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted.“ Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today. G)The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Goulds first novel, Friendship, the story of two 30-ye
37、ar-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growin
38、g apart. H)Friendship is Gould s first novel but she s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times, re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship, pointed out, “a case could b
39、e made that Ms. Goulds realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls“. I)These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British ne
40、wspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman, has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. “Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs?“ the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women wh
41、o claim not to be feminists. “Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house? Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights? Great, then youre a feminist.“ J)So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often
42、overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film? Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism? Carol Dyhouse, in her study “Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women“, says this feminism, and Morans book in particular, is characterised by “common
43、sense“; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship, “children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women s lives, the only legitimate goals women s lives can have“? K)In Friendship the relationship betw
44、een the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her? L)The
45、 fact that Girlfriends, despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see “the origi
46、nal Frances Ha / Girls“. Similarly, Rona Jaffes novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything, was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream. M)Look
47、between the cracks, and there s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna OBriens The Country Girls(1960); through Mary McCarthys The Group(1963); Shirley Conrans Lace(1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth s novel Animals(2014
48、). N)Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friends
49、hips play just as significant roles in women s lives today as they always have, it s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV. O)And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, “how small a part of a womans life is that“. 11 The hero in the Girlfriends feels life become unreliable again when her best friend told her that she is going to be mar
