1、大学英语六级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 196及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled On Self-improvement by commenting on the saying, “ There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man: true nobility is being superior to your former self. “ You s
2、hould write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Section A （ A） Its very good-looking. （ B） Its just so-so. （ C） Its too formal. （ D） Its too casual. （ A） At the garment centre. （ B） At the department store. （ C） At a small shop. （ D） At a fashion show. （ A） Because he spent much money on
3、tailor-made shirts. （ B） Because he spent much money on fashion shirts. （ C） Because he spent much money on tailor-made jeans. （ D） Because he spent much money on fashion jeans. （ A） Something more revealing. （ B） Something more formal. （ C） Something more laid-back. （ D） Something more classy. （ A）
4、 Show her passion for journalism. （ B） Choose journalism as her career. （ C） Hand in a writing sample. （ D） Write an essay on a given topic. （ A） Peoples reactions to it. （ B） The plot of it. （ C） The characters in it. （ D） The director of it. （ A） Part-time journalists. （ B） Full-time photographers
5、. （ C） Full-time journalists. （ D） Part-time photographers. （ A） An article about the latest news. （ B） A resume and some photograph works. （ C） An essay for a literature class. （ D） A self-introduction and a photo of himself. Section B （ A） The man who has a high opinion of himself. （ B） The man wh
6、o has risen to the top through his own efforts. （ C） The college professor who wins great respect from common workers. （ D） The leader in business who occupies a higher social position. （ A） Because servants in America are hard to get. （ B） Because she can hardly afford a servant. （ C） Because she t
7、akes pride in what she can do herself. （ D） Because it is easy to prepare a meal with canned food. （ A） Salaries are quite low in middle-class families. （ B） Manual labor is highly respected in the US. （ C） Exercise is very important for mental labor. （ D） People have various hobbies in the US. （ A）
8、 You are deceived. （ B） You are targeted. （ C） You are tracked. （ D） You are disappointed. （ A） By searching the network sites. （ B） By examining the cookies on user computers. （ C） By sending emails to the users. （ D） By consulting computer companies. （ A） Cell phones of poor quality. （ B） Annoying
9、 ads. （ C） Spring sandals of outdated style. （ D） Excessive morning news. （ A） It will be rooted out in a few years. （ B） It benefits net users in many ways. （ C） It invades the privacy of net users seriously. （ D） It exists in almost all the websites. Section C （ A） It is the major ingredient for h
10、uman evolution. （ B） It is a medium that binds all human beings. （ C） It is the most popular means for communication. （ D） It is only used for the purpose of enriching knowledge. （ A） By changing the speed of speaking. （ B） By using different dialects. （ C） By changing the tone at the proper time. （
11、 D） By making faces. （ A） It will make your speech concise. （ B） It will save your time. （ C） It will make the recitation of the speech easy. （ D） It will avoid grammatical mistakes. （ A） Make a joke about it and move on. （ B） Explain why and how it happens. （ C） Keep calm, apologize and continue. （
12、 D） Pretend not to notice it and go on. （ A） It will continue to decline gradually. （ B） It will expand at a somewhat faster pace. （ C） It will begin to move up toward two percent. （ D） It will intensify problems in developing countries. （ A） $85 billion. （ B） $45 billion. （ C） $40 billion. （ D） $50
13、 billion. （ A） The job growth was considered very slow. （ B） The jobs are not pushing up hourly wages. （ C） The job gains were worse than expected. （ D） The income gains were satisfying. （ A） Changing the obstacles into opportunities. （ B） Finding hope through parents. （ C） Spotting every opportunit
14、y. （ D） Overcoming all the difficulties. （ A） It is more important than money. （ B） People were born with it. （ C） People use it to get through difficulties. （ D） It can heal the soul. （ A） He gets a miracle. （ B） He is a superhero. （ C） He was born with hope. （ D） He tries to make his life a miracl
15、e for others. Section A 26 Attention to detail is something everyone can and should do especially in a tight job market. Bob Crossley, a human-resource expert notices this in the job application that comes across his desk every day. “Its【 C1】 _how many candidates cancel themselves,“ he says. “Resume
16、s arrive with stains. Some candidates dont【 C2】 _to spell the companys name correctly. Once I see a mistake, I【 C3】 _the candidate,“ Crossley concludes. “If they cannot take care of these details, why should we trust them with a job?“ Can we pay too much attention to details? Absolutely. Perfectioni
17、sts struggle over little things at the cost of something larger they work toward. “To keep from losing the forest for the trees,“ says Charles Garfield, professor at the University of California, San Francisco, “we must【 C4】 _ask ourselves how the details were working on fit into the large picture.
18、“ Garfield【 C5】 _this process to his work as a computer scientist at NASA. “ The Apollo II moon【 C6】 _was slightly off-course 90 percent of the time,“ says Garfield. “But a successful landing was still likely because we knew the【 C7】_coordinates of our goal. This allowed us to make【 C8】 _as necessar
19、y. “ Knowing where we want to go helps us judge the significance of the every task we【 C9】 _. Often we believe what accounts for others success is some special secret or a lucky break. But rarely is success so【 C10】 _. Again and again, we see that by doing little things within our grasp well, large
20、reward follow. A)abolish I)dominant B)adjustments J)eliminate C)administration K)launch D)amazing L)mysterious E)bother M)precise F)compares N)probably G)comprises O)undertake H)constantly 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 Rising
21、Inequality Is Holding Back the U. S. Economy AIn announcing his run for the presidency last month, Jeb Bush has set an ambitious goal of 4 percent real growth in gross domestic product(GDP). This goal has been greeted with substantial skepticism from parts of the economics establishment, while some
22、economists have praised it as a “worthy and viable aspiration“ that could be achieved with growth-oriented policies. Our recent research implies that a 4 percent growth goal for first term of the next President is not only possible, but is what we should strive to achieve. Like Hubbard and Warsh, ve
23、teran Republican economic policymakers, we agree that the U. S. needs policies that raise labor force participation, accelerate productivity growth and improve expectations. Where we part ways is the tactics. BTheir recommendations focus on supply-side policies, such as tax reform, regulatory reform
24、, reduced trade friction and education and training. Our research implies that a weak demand side explains the sluggish(萧条的 )recovery from the Great Recession, with the rise of income inequality as a central factor. Consequently, our policy prescriptions revolve around increasing the take-home pay o
25、f the majority of American households. The Great Recession, which began in December 2007, was the most severe American economic downturn in three-quarters of a century. Most economists did not anticipate ahead of time that this kind of thing could happen, although we warned that “it could get ugly o
26、ut there“ in October 2007. CBut as the severity of the recession became apparent in the dark days of late 2008 and early 2009, many economists predicted a swift bounce-back, reasoning from historical evidence that deep downturns are followed by rapid recoveries. Sadly, that prediction was also incor
27、rect. The growth path following the Great Recession has been historically sluggish. Our recent research, supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, helps explain why: The economic drag from decades of rising income inequality has held back consumer spending. DOur work studies the link bet
28、ween rising income inequality and U. S. household demand over the past several decades. From the middle 1980s until the middle 2000s, American consumers spent liberally despite the fact that income growth stagnated(停滞 )for most of the population. We show that the annual growth rate of household inco
29、me slowed markedly in 1980 for the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution, while income growth for the top 5 percent accelerated at the same time. The result was the widely discussed rise of income inequality. EIt is also well known that household debt grew rapidly during this period. Our work
30、 points out that the buildup of debt relative to income was concentrated in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution. Debt to income for the top 5 percent bounced around with little clear trend: When the financial crisis hit, our work shows that the bottom 95 percent of Americans could no lo
31、nger get the rising debt they needed to continue to spend along the trend they established in the years leading up to the crisis. The result was a sharp cutback in household demand relative to income that caused the collapse of the Great Recession. FWhat about the recovery? Household demand in 2013(
32、the most recent observation we have because our computations incorporate data that are released with a lag and are available at an annual frequency only)was a stunning 17. 5 percent below its pre-recession trend, with no sign of recovering back toward the trend. What happened? Our research implies t
33、hat the cutoff of credit for the group of households falling behind as income inequality rose prevented their spending from recovering to its pre-recession path. GWhile there is no reason to necessarily expect that consumer spending will follow a constant trend over long periods of time, the practic
34、al reality is that the U. S. economy needed the pre-recession trend of demand to maintain adequate growth and at least a rough approximation of full employment prior to 2007. In the middle 2000s, there was no sign of excess demand in the U. S. economy. Inflation was tame and interest rates were low.
35、 Wage growth was stagnant. Although some gradual slowing in long-term U. S. growth might have been predicted as the large baby-boom generation ages, the overall labor force participation rate was actually rising prior to the recession, so there was no reason to expect any significant decline in labo
36、r resources in the years immediately following 2007. HYes, the way many Americans were financing their demand was unsustainable, but there is no indication that businesses could not sustainably continue to produce along the pre-recession trend if they had been able to sell the output. Our interpreta
37、tion of the evidence is that the demand drag that could be expected as the result of rising inequality is, after a delay of a-quarter century, finally constraining the U. S. economy. Intuition, theory and evidence predict that high-income people spend, on average, a smaller share of their income tha
38、n everyone else does. So as a higher share of income goes into the pockets of the well-to-do, the household sector as a whole is likely to recycle less of its income back into spending, which slows the path of demand growth. IA possible problem with this prediction for the U. S. in recent years is t
39、hat income inequality began to rise in the early 1980s, but household demand remained strong through 2006. Our argument is that the demand drag from rising inequality was postponed by the buildup of debt-. The bottom 95 percent borrowed rather than cut back their spending when their income growth sl
40、owed. But as the crisis hit, lending to households collapsed, and the trend of rising debt could not continue. JThe effect of rising inequality has hit the economy hard. As a result, todays economy is underperforming. No one can know precisely how much of the stagnation in household demand is due to
41、 the rise of inequality, but our estimates imply that the current path of total demand in the economy is at least 10 percent below where it would have been with the income distribution of the early 1980s. Where demand goes, so follows output and employment. This analysis links to the call for 4 perc
42、ent growth. Considering conventional estimates of the long-term trend growth of the economy, a 4 percent growth rate through the next U. S. Presidents first term would go a long way toward closing the gap in output that opened with the collapse of household spending in the Great Recession and has ye
43、t to be filled. KHow can we move toward this goal? Our research strongly implies that the main problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. The U. S. needs to find a way to boost demand growth by arresting, and hopefully reversing, the dramatic rise of inequality. The basic argument is exceed
44、ingly simple: The economy continues to be held back by insufficient household spending, and if the income share of Americans outside of the top sliver rises, household spending will increase. Policies that raise the minimum wage and reduce the tax burden of low- and middle-income households would he
45、lp. LIn our view, however, the best method to achieve this objective would be to restore wage growth across the income distribution as occurred in the decades after World War II. Meeting this objective is challenging for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there remains no clear consensus
46、about what has caused the rise of American economic inequality. But the need to address inequality is not just a matter of social justice: it also is important to get the economy back on the right track after more than seven years of stagnation. We can do better. 37 Americans were free with their mo
47、ney though their income growth mostly remained still from the late 20th century to the early 21st century. 38 Contrary to many economists claims, the U. S. economy didnt experience rapid recoveries after the Great Recession. 39 Labor resources were not expected to suffer from a sharp fall in the yea
48、rs after 2007. 40 Reducing the income inequality is of significance in terms of social justice and economic recovery. 41 The author differs from some economic policymakers on the strategies the U. S. should take to boost the economy. 42 The author estimates that the current demand should have been t
49、en percent higher if the income distribution remained the same as the early 1980s. 43 The majority of the low-income earners continued to take on more loans rather than cut expenses when their income growth has been weakening. 44 To achieve the goal of 4% growth in GDP, the demand growth should be boosted by raising the income share of the bottom 95%. 45 Its predicted that high-income earners generally spend less relative to their income than others. 46 Except a little warning two months before
