1、大学英语六级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 246及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 Directions： For this part， you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled How to Be Creative by commenting on this remark by a creativity expert， “If youre not prepared to be wrong， youll never come up with anything original ”You shou
2、ld write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1 Section A （ A） Neutral. （ B） Cautious. （ C） Favorable. （ D） Negative. （ A） It gives us sufficient information. （ B） It gives misleading information. （ C） It lets us know the best product. （ D） It fails to convi
3、nce people. （ A） Advertisers. （ B） Manufacturers. （ C） Customers. （ D） Sellers. （ A） Because they provide misleading information. （ B） Because they dont tell us whichs the best product. （ C） Because the cost of advertising is added to the price. （ D） Because they persuade people to do harmful things
4、. （ A） In a department store. （ B） At a travel agency. （ C） At an airport ticket counter. （ D） At a hotel. （ A） Its too expensive. （ B） It would take too long. （ C） Nothings worth seeing. （ D） Hes been there before. （ A） They dont arrange accommodations. （ B） Everybody speaks English there. （ C） The
5、y arrange everything for you. （ D） The meals they provide are tasty. （ A） Its crowed with tourists. （ B） No flight goes there. （ C） The weather is warm. （ D） It costs much to go there. Section B （ A） Pirates. （ B） Sailors. （ C） Manufactures. （ D） Merchants. （ A） The distance the merchandise had to b
6、e transported. （ B） The number of insurance companies available at the time. （ C） The risk involved in transporting the goods. （ D） The type of ships used to transport the goods. （ A） They are more expensive than earlier policies. （ B） They remain much similar to earlier policies. （ C） They are chea
7、per than earlier policies. （ D） They greatly differ from the earlier policies. （ A） It was full of energy. （ B） It gave out heat. （ C） It could cure illness. （ D） It could keep them healthy. （ A） Because of the development of industry. （ B） Because of the pasteurization process. （ C） Because of the
8、new discoveries. （ D） Because of the increasing number of cattle. （ A） A special milk bottle. （ B） A method to take water out of milk. （ C） A way to kill bacteria in milk. （ D） Machines to fill bottles automatically. （ A） It will become less popular than it has been. （ B） It will be reformed in the
9、near future. （ C） It will be more popular than before. （ D） It will always be important. Section C （ A） Americas colleges and universities. （ B） Important and successful national leaders. （ C） Technical and managerial work force. （ D） Excellent professional work force. （ A） The state government. （ B
10、） The federal government. （ C） The local government. （ D） The National Academy of Science. （ A） The Land Grant College Act. . （ B） The Act of 1914. （ C） The Federal Family Education Loan Program. （ D） The Servicemens Readjustment Act of 1944. （ A） Jones. （ B） Smith. （ C） Campbell. （ D） Webber. （ A）
11、Electoral register. （ B） Webber. （ C） Lerwick. （ D） Ex-pairing. （ A） For they are non-British names. （ B） For they only have 25,000 names on website. （ C） For most people get their names from their ancestors. （ D） For 25,000 names are difficult to generalize. （ A） Land formation. （ B） Geologic featu
12、re. （ C） Good dating. （ D） Fundamental technique. （ A） Geologists had a pretty good idea of the Grand Canyon. （ B） United States was formed 150 million years ago. （ C） United States was formed from sandstone. （ D） The sand had come from an ancient mountain range. . （ A） Uranium-Lead Dating. （ B） App
13、alachian Mountains. （ C） The sand from the Grand Canyon. （ D） Huge rivers carried the sand west. （ A） To prove earths continents were once joined together. （ B） To prove that the grain type within sandstone. （ C） To determine the actual particles in the sandstone. （ D） To determine where the actual
14、particles came from. Section A 26 The best time to view the Mona Lisa, according to a new book on the best times to do things, is around nine oclock on a Sunday morning: most tourists, it seems, dont realise that the Louvre is open then, while plenty of those who do will still be【 C1】_from the wine-
15、fuelled excesses of Saturday night. The best night to eat at a restaurant is a Tuesday: no crowds, but better than a Monday, since many restaurants dont get weekend deliveries, making Mondays food less【 C2】 _. Such is the【 C3】 _but strangely compelling life-advice collected within the covers of Buy
16、Ketchup In May And Fly At Noon, by Mark Di Vincenzo, a book that takes literally the cliche that timing is everything. But the【 C4】 _of his outlook are universal. If theres a perfect time to ask for a pay rise or a date, or a perfect moment in life to buy a house, have children or switch jobs, then
17、theres hope for us all, if only we can time things right. Of course, theres no such【 C5】 _art of timing that will make everything run smoothly. But one general principle that does【 C6】 _from Di Vincenzos book is this: it pays, in life, to learn when and how to deliberately【 C7】 _out of synchronise (
18、同步 ) with the rest of the world. Sometimes, this is a simple question of【 C8】 _the crowds: obviously, thats the reason for holidaying off season, and its why Di Vincenzo recommends calling customer-service lines the moment they open, when call volume is lowest. But theres more to the matter than【 C9
19、】 _avoiding peak times: with a little cunning (技巧 ), you can de-synchronise yourself from the crowd so as to make their【 C10】 _behaviour work to your advantage. A) numerous I) recovering B) avoiding J) emerge C) worldly K) merely D) implications L) herd E) implied M) superior F) secret N) conversely
20、 G) fresh O) fall H) engagements 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 Think or Swim: Can We Hold Back the Oceans? A As the world gets warmer, sea levels are rising. It has been happening at a snails pace so far, but as it speeds up m
21、ore and more low-lying coastal land will be lost. At risk are many of the worlds cities and huge areas of fertile farmland. The sea is set to rise a metre or more by the end of this century. And thats just the start. “Unless there is a rapid and dramatic about-face in emissionswhich no one expectsth
22、e next century will be far worse than this century,“ says glaciologist (冰川学家 ) Bob Bindshadler of NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. B Throwing trillions of dollars at the problem could probably save big cities such as New York and London, but the task of defending all low-lying coastal ar
23、eas and islands seems hopeless. Or is it? Could we find a way to slow the accelerating glaciers, drain seas into deserts or add more ice to the great ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica? C These ideas might sound crazy but we have got ourselves into such a bad situation that maybe we should start t
24、o consider them. If we carry on as we are, sea levels will rise for millennia, probably by well over 10 metres. Slashing greenhouse gas emissions would slow the rise, but the longer we hesitate, the bigger the rise we will be committed to. Even if “conventional“ geo-engineering schemes for cooling t
25、he planet were put in place and worked as planned, they would have little effect on sea level over the next century unless combined with drastic emissions cuts. D In short, if coastal dwellers dont want their children and grandchildren to have to abandon land to the sea, now is the time to start com
26、ing up with Plan C. So New Scientist set out in search of the handful of researchers who have begun to think about specific ways to hold back the waters. E One of the reasons why the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are already shrinking is that the ice is draining off the land faster. I
27、ce floating on the surrounding seas usually acts as a brake, holding back glaciers on land, so as this ice is lost the glaciers flow faster. The acceleration of the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland is thought to be the result of warm currents melting the floating tongue of the glacier. Other outlet g
28、laciers are being attacked in a similar way. F Mike MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington DC is one of those starting to think that we shouldnt just sit back and let warm currents melt ice shelves. “Is there some way of doing something to stop that flow, or cool the water?“ he asks. G La
29、st year, physicist Russel Seitz at Harvard University suggested that the planet could be cooled by using fleets of customised boats to generate large numbers of tiny bubbles. This would whiten the surface of the oceans and so reflect more sunlight. MacCracken says the bubbles might be better arrange
30、d in a more focused way, to cool the currents that are undermining the Jakobshavn glacier and others like it. A couple of degrees of chill would take this water down to freezing point, rendering it harmless. “At least that would slow the pace of change,“ MacCracken says. H What about a more direct a
31、pproach: building a physical barrier to halt a glaciers flow into the sea by brute force? Bindshadler thinks that is a non-starter. “The ice discharge has many sources, mostly remote and in environments where barriers are not likely to work,“ he says. “Taking just the one example I know best, the Pi
32、ne Island glacier in Antarctica drains into an ice shelf that at its front is 25 kilometres across and 500 metres thick, and moves at over 10 metres per day. The seabed there is 1000 metres down and is made of sediment (沉淀物 ) hundreds of metres thick and the consistency of toothpaste.“ Not your idea
33、l building site. I A slightly more subtle scheme to rein in the glaciers was proposed more than 20 years ago by Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago. His idea is to fight ice with ice. The big outlet glaciers feed into giant floating shelves of ice, which break off into icebergs at their ou
34、ter edges. MacAyeal suggested pumping water up from beneath the ice and depositing it on the upper surface, where it would freeze to form a thick ridge, weighing down the floating ice shelf. Add enough ice in this way, and the bottom of the ice shelf would eventually be forced down onto the seabed.
35、Friction with the seabed would slow down the shelfs movement, which in turn would hold back the glaciers feeding into it. It would be like tightening an immense valve. J “I think its quite an inspired idea,“ says Bindshadler. But nobody has followed it up to work out how practical the scheme would b
36、e. “On the back of an envelope it has promisebut these ice shelves are big. You would need a lot of drilling equipment all over the ice shelf, and my intuition is that if you look at the energetics of it, it wont work,“ Bindshadler says. K Even if we could apply brakes to glaciers, this would only s
37、low down sea level rise. Could we do better than that and reverse itactually make the sea retreat? If you think of the sea as a giant bathtub, then the most obvious way to lower its level is to take out the plug. L “One of the oldest notions is filling depressions on the land,“ says MacCracken. Amon
38、g the largest of these is the Qattara depression in northern Egypt, which at its lowest point is more than 130 metres below sea level. Various schemes have been proposed to channel water from the Mediterranean into the depression to generate hydroelectric (水力的 ) power, and as a by-product a few thou
39、sand cubic kilometres of the sea would be drained away. Unfortunately, thats only enough to shave about 3 millimetres off sea level: a drop in the ocean. And there would be grave consequences for the local environment. “The leakage of salt water through fracture systems would add salt to aquifers (含
40、水层 ) for good,“ says Farouk El-Baz, a geologist at Boston University who has studied the region. M Refilling the Dead Sea is no better. Because of surrounding hills, this depression could be filled to 60 metres above sea level, but even that would only offset the rise by 5 millimetresand drown sever
41、al towns into the bargain. N The notion of engineering lower sea levels remains a highly abstract topic. “If the world doesnt control emissions, Im pretty sure that no geo-engineering solution will workand it would potentially create other side effects and false promises,“ says MacCracken. “But if w
42、e do get on a path to curbing emissions dramaticallydown 50 per cent by 2050, saythen the question becomes, can geo-engineering help with the hump were going to go through over the next few centuries?“ 37 Sea levels are rising very slowly at present. 38 Building physical barriers to keep glaciers ma
43、y not be practical. 39 Filling depressions can only offset very little rise of sea levels. 40 One of the oldest ways to retreat the sea is to fill depressions on the land. 41 The ice floating on the surrounding seas can stops the glaciers move away. 42 Spending trillions of dollars at sea-level rise
44、 problem could probably save only a few cities. 43 Someone advised to pump water up from beneath the ice to weigh down the floating ice shelf. 44 A physicists suggestion to cool the planet is to generating tiny bubbles with fleets of customised boats. 45 The idea of pumping water up from beneath the
45、 ice may not work because it consumes too much energy. 46 People once believed that channeling water from the sea into some depression could both generate electricity and drain away some sea water. Section C 46 Is that Folgers coffee in your cup or Maxwell House? Now you no longer have to rely on yo
46、ur nose to tell. Researchers have developed an analyzer that can distinguish between 10 commercial brands of coffee and can even tell apart coffee beans roasted at various temperatures for different times. The advance could help growers determine within minutes whether a particular batch of coffee i
47、s just as good as the previous one or whether its undrinkable. Researchers have been trying for years to come up with a simple way to analyze coffee. But its no easy task. The challenge is that the pleasant smell of roasted coffee beans consists of more than 1,000 compounds that change with roasting
48、 temperatures and time. Traditional methods of chemical analysis generally have difficulty distinguishing between compounds that are very similar to one another. And “electronic noses,“ an array of dyes, and other devices that change color or chemical properties when they react with certain molecule
49、s suffer from the same drawback. Over the past decade, chemist Kenneth Suslick and colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have refined the electronic nose approach. In the new study, they used dyes that interact strongly with other chemicals, making them more specific. They then put drops of 36 dyes on a polymer (聚合物 ) film the size of a nickel. The colors in the dyes belonged to a range of chemical classes, including pH indicators and molec
