1、大学英语六级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 247及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay based on the following drawing. In your essay, you should first describe the drawing and interpret its meanings, and then give your comment on it. You should write at le
2、ast 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1. 爸爸，妈妈，你们忘记给我请保姆了！ Section A （ A） Organisms far below the Earths surface. （ B） New drilling methods. （ C） A hidden underground world. （ D） Rare and infectious bacteria. （ A） Modem experiments. （ B） Advanced technology. （ C）
3、 Precise statistics. （ D） Keen observation. （ A） 3,000m. （ B） 3,000km. （ C） 6,000m. （ D） 6,000km. （ A） They would be killed by the human immune system. （ B） They would die once brought to the surface. （ C） Many precautions and remedies are available. （ D） Drilling operations are always closely monit
4、ored. （ A） Writing papers for his classes. （ B） Preparing for the coming exam in the library. （ C） Doing extra work in the chemistry lab. （ D） Working overtime at a library. （ A） Spend more time in the library. （ B） Write just one paper for all his classes. （ C） Drop one of his courses. （ D） Write h
5、is papers on closely related topics. （ A） She once wrote about it. （ B） She thinks the man should write about it. （ C） She has been studying it recently. （ D） She particularly likes Romantic poetry. （ A） She knows he is very busy. （ B） Hes already helped her enough. （ C） He is incompetent to help he
6、r. （ D） She doesnt need any help. Section B （ A） Bank savings. （ B） Spending habits. （ C） Monthly bills. （ D） Family debts. （ A） $500,000. （ B） $330,000. （ C） $1,000,000. （ D） $190,000. （ A） Quit his eating-out habit. （ B） Use only paper bills and save coins. （ C） Use the discount tickets. （ D） Inve
7、st into a mutual fund. （ A） Last week. （ B） Three weeks ago. （ C） Two months ago. （ D） Three years ago. （ A） By coach. （ B） By bus. （ C） By car. （ D） By train. （ A） Get information. （ B） Watch a film. （ C） Find a bank. （ D） Buy some shoes. （ A） Go sailing. （ B） See the lake by bus. （ C） Go swimming.
8、 （ D） Feed the ducks. Section C （ A） To discuss the different categories of films. （ B） To discuss the styles of an early filmmaker. （ C） To discuss the emergence of hybrid films. （ D） To discuss the standards of early films. （ A） They do not fit into the norms of the 1920s and 1930s. （ B） They are
9、considered a mixture styles of science and fiction. （ C） They are fictional and difficult to understand. （ D） They are all filmed about underwater animals. （ A） They could dance to the music like human beings. （ B） They had both human and animal characteristics. （ C） Their sounds and images in films
10、 were twisted. （ D） They had all the special features of human beings. （ A） It is about the jellyfish. （ B） It is about the seahorse. （ C） It is about unfamiliar sea plants. （ D） It is about unknown sea animals. （ A） It can be found in both plants and animals. （ B） It can be found only in human bein
11、gs. （ C） It cannot be found in one-cell creatures. （ D） It cannot be found in plants growing underwater. （ A） They stay awake all day long in summer. （ B） They work 24 hours every day in summer. （ C） They spend 12 hours sleeping every day in winter. （ D） They spend much time with families in winter.
12、 （ A） Sleeping from 8:00 p.m. until sunrise. （ B） Sleeping from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. （ C） Sleeping twice with meditation at the end. （ D） Sleeping twice with in-between meditation. （ A） Drinking addiction. （ B） Gambling addiction. （ C） Internet addiction. （ D） Drug addiction. （ A） Moving fingers d
13、uring dreams. （ B） Feeling better on the Internet. （ C） Checking emails online. （ D） Preferring social activities. （ A） IAD can be cured with a new drug. （ B） IAD is helpful to get information online. （ C） Getting information online takes much time. （ D） Internet is an effective way for communicatio
14、n. Section A 26 Crying is hardly an activity encouraged by society. Tears, be they of sorrow, anger, or joy, typically make Americans feel uncomfortable and【 C1】 _. The shedder of tears is likely to apologize, even when a devastating (毁灭性的 ) tragedy was the provocation. The observer of tears is like
15、ly to do everything possible to put an end to the【 C2】 _outpouring. But judging from recent studies of crying behavior, links between illness and crying and the chemical composition of tears, both those responses to tears are often【 C3】 _and may even be counterproductive (使达不到预期目标的 ). Humans are the
16、 only animals【 C4】 _known to shed emotional tears. Since evolution has given【 C5】 _to few, if any, purposeless physiological responses, it is logical to assume that crying has one or more functions that【 C6】 _survival. Although some observers have suggested that crying is a way to elicit assistance
17、from others (as a crying baby might from its mother), the shedding of tears is hardly necessary to get help. Vocal cries would have been quite enough, more likely than tears to gain【 C7】 _. So, it appears, there must be something special about tears themselves. Indeed, the new studies suggest that e
18、motional tears may play a direct role in alleviating stress. University of Minnesota researchers who are studying the chemical composition of tears have recently【 C8】 _two important chemicals from emotional tears. Both chemicals are found only in tears that are shed in response to emotion. Tears she
19、d because of exposure to cut onion would contain no such【 C9】 _. Researchers at several other institutions are investigating the usefulness of tears as a means of 【 C10】 _human ills and monitoring drugs. A) attention I) definitely B) overwhelming J) enhance C) inappropriate K) aspiration D) embarras
20、sed L) emotional E) diagnosing M) repelled F) indispensable N) substance G) rise O) increasingly H) isolated 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 Theres Gold in Them there Landfills A In the movie WALL E, humankind has left Earth in
21、a bit of a mess. The planet is choked with garbage and all the people have shipped out, leaving robot WALLE to clean the place up and make it habitable again. Things may not be quite that bad yet, but theres no doubt that we produce a huge amount of waste. Even with increased recycling, landfill sit
22、es are filling up by the day andin the absence of a brave robotthe waste experts of planet Earth are working on the next best thing: landfill mining. B The idea is simple. Instead of disappearing under mountains of our own waste, while paying through the nose for diminishing commodities, why not dig
23、 up and recycle what we have already thrown away? C Next week, industry experts will gather in London for the first global landfill mining conference. Bringing together environmental scientists, economists and landfill operators, the one-day meeting promises to show delegates how to turn waste into
24、“garbage gold“. D Landfill mining has been tried before. The first scheme began in 1953 at Hiriya garbage dump outside Tel Aviv, Israel, and aimed to reclaim fine-particle waste rich in minerals to improve soil quality at local fruit farms. The landfill closed in 1998, but the recycling plant that r
25、emains on the site still produces soil improver from green waste. Then during the 1960s and 1970s, a handful of sites in the US began separating waste to recycle the steel and to compost food scraps. In the late 1980s, a pilot programme was set up to extract recyclables from a small, community landf
26、ill in the town of Edinburg, New York, and burn the solid leavings to generate energy. This pilot proved uneconomical but during the oil price rising of the 1990s interest in the economic value of waste soared. Investors claimed to snap up scrap metal companies, only for the price of commodities to
27、drop through the floor in the mid-1990s. E Yet now that commodities prices are rising once more, environmental issues are high on everyones list of priorities and land prices are increasing, every square kilometre is worth too much to use for landfill. Raiding the dump seems like a good idea again.
28、This time the prospects are more promising. Thanks to a decade of innovation by the recycling industry, the technology to process landfill waste is more readily available. F So whats in a landfill worth recycling? For a start, the average landfill is filled with valuableand sometimes even preciousme
29、tals. Aluminium, from drinks cans, is just one example. According to Patrick Atkins, environmental consultant for private equity fund Pegasus Capital Advisors, and until recently director of energy innovation at US aluminium producer Alcoa, Americans throw away 317 aluminium cans every second of eve
30、ry day. Around half of these, totalling 680,000 tonnes of aluminium each year, dodge the recycling basket and end up in landfill. Given that the cost of aluminium peaked at $2,700 per tonne in July this means America is burying up to $1.83 billion worth of metal per year. Atkins estimates that there
31、 is now more aluminium in US landfills than can be produced from ores globally in one year. And its not only aluminium that is hiding down there with the used diapers (尿布 ) and grocery bags. One tonne of scrap from discarded PCs contains more gold than can be produced from 16 tonnes of ore, he says.
32、 And the world throws away 18 million tonnes of electronic waste each year. G Nowadays it is relatively easy to separate the metal you want from the junk you dont using recycling technologies. Eddy current (漩涡流 ) magnets, for example, can avert aluminium and other metals from a flowing stream of was
33、te. Plastic, too, is becoming easier to pick out. Rather than the more expensive process of doing it by hand, some plastic sorting plants are now using some scanners, which sort different types based on the spectrum of light they absorb. And since rising prices are making oil seem like an expensive
34、raw material to produce plastics, recycling existing plastic from landfill seems sensible. H Metals and plastics are only part of it, says William Hogland, an environmental engineer at the University of Kalmar in Sweden. All that smelly food and other organic waste rots down sooner or later. And as
35、the TelAviv project discovered back in the 1950s, even this can be worth digging up. I “The earth fraction of landfill can be one of the most profitable as coverage material, compost (堆肥 ) and for lawn improvement,“ Hogland says. Theres also plenty of flammable material in landfills. One kilogram of
36、 the coarse earth fractioncontaining particles greater than 50 millimetres acrossyields between 6 and 10 megajoules (兆焦 ) of energy, Hogland says, and the average Swedish landfill has 40 million tonnes of the stuff. Burning that waste is a controversial idea because of toxins (霉素 ) that may be relea
37、sed in the process. But, Hogland says, thanks to new technology for cleaning flue gases, Sweden is building new incinerators (焚烧炉 ) to provide heat and light for local communities. J So if landfill sites are, sometimes literally, gold mines, why arent companies tearing into them already? For its par
38、t, Alcoa has invested heavily in stopping as many cans as it can from reaching a landfill, but has stopped short of digging them up again. “Its not something we are doing at this point,“ said Alcoa spokesman Kevin Lowery. “If we thought it was the most efficient thing, wed do it.“ K Part of the reas
39、on for this is that while aluminium can be recycled at a fraction of the cost of producing it from ore, and using 94 per cent less energy, thats only the case once you have collected the cans. Getting them out of landfill is more expensive than buying aluminium directly from a recycling plant. Plus
40、no two landfill sites are the same. Each has a different blend of useful materials, mixed with all kinds of less useful or dangerous materials. And when you consider that companies would likely want to mine more than one site, covered perhaps by different state or national regulations, it starts to
41、look like too much trouble. L Reid Lifset, an industrial ecologist at Yale University who has investigated the prospect of extracting copper from landfills, has come to a similar conclusion. “With current technology and prices, landfill mining is generally not economically feasible,“ he says. “The b
42、enefits such as revenue from sale of recovered metals, and reduction in regulatory costs, generally did not outweigh the costs.“ In other words, there may be a lot of copper buried in landfills, but if copper is your thing, a huge mine with gigantic equipment makes more sense than picking your way t
43、hrough several different landfill sites. M Advocates of landfill mining argue that with more imagination and a sober assessment of the true cost of burying rubbish, there is a reasonable economic case for landfill mining. He and his colleagues have calculated that reclaiming sites in the Baltic regi
44、on alone could generate billions of euros from various revenue streams. Rather than approaching landfill mining with one outcome in mind, Hogland says, you have to look at the overall advantages, including environmental services like protecting water quality. 37 Eddy current magnets are used to sepa
45、rate metals from the waste. 38 The pilot programme in the 1980s was found to be inefficient 39 The controversy over waste burning is that it may release poisonous substances. 40 The purpose of the garbage dump in Israel was to recover the mineral fine-particle. 41 As the landfill sites are filling u
46、p, the waste experts are trying to put effort into landfill mining. 42 It is estimated that the aluminum American throw into landfill every year totally is worth 1.83 billion. 43 The benefits from landfill mining may not outweigh the costs. 44 Digging metals up from the dump is not the most efficien
47、t thing. 45 The prospects of digging up the dump are now more promising because the waste recycling technology has been improved. 46 Advocates of landfill mining believe that if planned with more imagination and sober assessments, landfill mining can be reasonable economic. Section C 46 Several year
48、s ago I was teaching a course on the philosophical assumptions and cultural impact of massive multi-user online games at Williams College. The students in the course were very intelligent and obviously interested in the topic. But as the semester progressed, I began to detect a problem with the clas
49、s. The students were working hard and performing well but there was no energy in our discussions and no passion in the students. They were hesitant to express their ideas and often seemed to be going through the motions. I tried to encourage them to be more venturesome with tactics I had used successfully in the past but nothing worked. One day I asked them what was or, perhaps better, was not going on. Why were they so cautious and where was their enthusiasm for learning? They seem
