1、大学英语六级模拟试卷 255及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing (30 minutes) 1 Directions: For this part, you are allowed thirty minutes to write a short essay entitled My Iden of Pop music. You should write at least 150 words following the outline given bellow. 1. 有人认为流行音乐不能 登大雅之堂。 2. 有人认为音乐无高低贵贱之分，只有兴趣上的差别。 3. 我认为 My Idea
2、 of Pop music 二、 Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions attached to the passage. For questions 1-4, mark： Y (for YES) if the statement agrees with the information gi
3、ven in the passage; N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage; NG (for NOT GIVEN) if the information is not given in the passage. 1 Why Should We Worry About What We Shouldnt? It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there werent so many things trying to kill
4、 you every day. The problems start even before youre fully awake. Theres the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. Theres the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. Theres the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that
5、gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute. Other dangers stalk you all day long. Will a cabbies brakes fail when youre in the crosswalk? Will you have a violent reaction to bad food? And w
6、hat about the risks you carry with you all your life? The father and grandfather who died of coronaries in their 50s probably passed the same cardiac weakness on to you. The tendency to take chances on the highway that has twice landed you in traffic court could just as easily land you in the morgue
7、. Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think wed get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into ge
8、tting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isnt) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,00
9、0 of us annually. We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Musl
10、ims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fri
11、es and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. “We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million,“ says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. “Now its part
12、s per billion.“ At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers dont use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas and when theyre demo
13、lished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be tree that its something well never do exceptionally well, its almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
14、 Part of the problem we have with evaluating risk, scientists say, is that were moving through the modem world with what is, in many respects, a prehistoric brain. We may think weve grown accustomed to living in a predator-free environment in which most of the dangers of the wild have been driven aw
15、ay or fenced off, but our central nervous system-evolving at a glacial pace-hasnt got the message. To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory a
16、nimals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain-of mouse and man-is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger-a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a comer that could be a mugger-its the amy
17、gdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream. Its not until a fraction of a second later that the higher regions of the brain get the signal and begin to sort out whether the danger is real. But that f
18、raction of a second causes us to experience the fear far more vividly than we do the rational response an advantage that doesnt disappear with time. The brain is wired in such a way that nerve signals travel more readily from the amygdala to the upper regions than from the upper regions back down. S
19、etting off your internal alarm is quite easy, but shutting it down takes some doing. “There are two systems for analyzing risk: an automatic, intuitive system and a more thoughtful analysis,“ says Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. “Our perception of risk lives largely
20、 in our feelings, so most of the time were operating on system No. 1.“ Theres clearly an evolutionary advantage to this natural timorousness. If were mindful of real dangers and flee when they arise, were more likely to live long enough to pass on our genes. But evolutionary rewards also come to tho
21、se who stand and fight, those willing to take risks-and even suffer injury- in pursuit of prey or a mate. Our ancestors hunted mastodons and stampeded buffalo, risking getting trampled for the possible payoff of meat and pelt. Males advertised their reproductive fitness by fighting other males, will
22、ingly engaging in a contest that could mean death for one and offspring for the other. These two impulses-to engage danger or turn from it-are constantly at war and have left us with a well-tuned ability to evaluate the costs and payoffs of short-term risk, say Slovic and others. That, however, is n
23、ot the kind we tend to face in contemporary society, where threats dont necessarily spring from behind a bush. Theyre much more likely to come to us in the form of rumors or news broadcasts or an escalation of the federal terrorism-threat level from orange to red. Its when the risk and the consequen
24、ces of our response unfold more slowly, experts say that our analytic system kicks in. This gives us plenty of opportunity to overthink-or underthink- the problem, and this is where we start to bollix things up. Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of f
25、actors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether youre eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. Thats not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear i
26、t; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us; “We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash,“ says Slovic. “Thats the dread factor.“ In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we
27、get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening. “Its called probability neglect,“ says Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor of law specializing in risk regulation. The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compare
28、d with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year. We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, dis
29、tributed way. Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less. In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. 2
30、Avian flu killed more people than common flue in the U.S.A to date. （ A） Y （ B） N （ C） NG 3 Human being is the only species that understands the concept of risk, so we can avoid exposing ourselves to real dangers. （ A） Y （ B） N （ C） NG 4 Sensible calculation of real-world risks seems entirely beyond
31、 us and its something well never do exceptionally well. （ A） Y （ B） N （ C） NG 5 Our perception of risk lives largely in our feelings, so most of the time we are operating on an automatic system for analyzing risks. （ A） Y （ B） N （ C） NG 6 Amygdala is _. 7 _ is called probability neglect. 8 We dread
32、AIDS more than heart disease because _. 9 Unfamiliar threats are _. 10 We have problem with evaluating risk partly because _. 11 In contemporary society, threats are more likely to come to us in form _. Section A Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversatio
33、ns. At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A, B, C and D, and decide which is the be
34、st answer. （ A） She does it everyday. （ B） She does not do it herself. （ C） Her roommate is doing it. （ D） She is a researcher at the lab. （ A） He didnt know Bill was ill. （ B） He sent Bill to the hospital. （ C） He forgot to tell her Bill was ill. （ D） He didnt want to give her a call. （ A） Its goin
35、g to snow again tomorrow. （ B） Its not going to snow tomorrow. （ C） The forecast is always accurate. （ D） The man should put on coat and hat. （ A） The doctor will not work tomorrow. （ B） The doctor is completing a book. （ C） The man is very unfortunate. （ D） The man should make another appointment.
36、（ A） It will be warm enough. （ B） It is very cold at the beach. （ C） She is very interested in it. （ D） She isnt interested in it. （ A） Going to the concert tonight. （ B） Going to the concert later. （ C） Going to the concert after a while. （ D） Going to the concert in a long run. （ A） Go for some ex
37、pensive treatment. （ B） Do not listen to the doctors advice. （ C） Consult another doctor. （ D） Be sure of the treatment. （ A） She is going to put it off. （ B） She wont do anything. （ C） She will check it out by herself. （ D） She is going to follow the mans advice. （ A） 102 （ B） 103 （ C） 201 （ D） not
38、 sure （ A） $ 300 （ B） $ 345 （ C） $ 325 （ D） $ 100 （ A） Its a one-bedroom apartment. （ B） Its not expensive. （ C） Miss Smith will live there with her. （ D） Its very convenient to live and go to the university. （ A） He was unemployed. （ B） He hurt his feet. （ C） He went bankrupt. （ D） He failed in the
39、 business. （ A） His mother. （ B） His father. （ C） His teacher. （ D） His friend. （ A） He had no interest in it. （ B） His grades arent good enough. （ C） He missed the business course test. （ D） He cheated in the exam. （ A） To go abroad. （ B） To go over his business course. （ C） To find a part-time job
40、. （ D） To stay at home. Section B Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marke
41、d A, B, C and D. （ A） In our daily life. （ B） In business and universities. （ C） In government and industry. （ D） Both A and B. （ A） To allow students to take tests through computer. （ B） To store statistics about students. （ C） To help professors do research work. （ D） To aid in registration. （ A）
42、By computerized traffic control and personal computers at home. （ B） By computerized cash registers in the stores. （ C） By computerized billing of credit card companies. （ D） All of above. （ A） Its because there are many developing nations. （ B） Its because people use too many man-made materials. （
43、C） Its because we have more and more industry. （ D） Its because we are building more vehicles. （ A） Industry. （ B） Health. （ C） The future of our children. （ D） Clean air. （ A） Man knows where the society is going. （ B） People dont welcome the rapid development of modem society. （ C） The author is w
44、orried about the future of our modem society. （ D） Man can do nothing about the problem of pollution. （ A） To look at the history of movies in the United States. （ B） Arrangement for the movie course. （ C） Looking at The Gold Digger of 1933. （ D） Watching Frank Capras Why We Fight. （ A） To get us st
45、arted this semester. （ B） Giving background lectures about some basic cinematic concepts. （ C） Having background lectures about some basic cinematic concepts. （ D） Learning the history of movies in the United States. （ A） At Jennings Auditorium. （ B） At Janes Auditorium. （ C） At Johns Auditorium （ D
46、） At Juniors Auditorium （ A） Discussing the movie they saw the night before. （ B） Covering silent movies in this course. （ C） Watching more films. （ D） Choosing one of them as the subject for an extensive written critique. Section C Directions: In this section, you will hear a passage three times. W
47、hen the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea. When the passage is read for the second time, you are required to fill in the blanks numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fi
48、ll in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the 36 There are many arguments for and against the interview as a selection procedure. The main argument against it is that it results in a wholly【 B1】 _ decision. As often as not,
49、employers do not choose the best candidate, they choose the candidate who makes a good first impression on them. Some employers, of course,【 B2】 _ to this argument by saying that they have become so【 B3】 _ in interviewing staff that they are able to make a sound【 B4】 _ of each candidates likely performance. The main argument in favor of the interview is that an employer is concerned not only with a candidates ability, but with the【 B
