1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 143及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay by commenting on the English proverb “East or west, home is best.“ You should write at least120 words but no more than 180 words. East or West, Home Is Best Section A （ A） She
2、contained her happiness. （ B） She pretended to be cheerful. （ C） She thought the exam was hard. （ D） She was awfully pleased with her grades. （ A） A carpenter. （ B） A painter. （ C） A gardener. （ D） A barber. （ A） Go for a later movie. （ B） Order his food quickly. （ C） Go to another restaurant. （ D）
3、Decide which movie to watch. （ A） She will deliver a speech at the convention. （ B） She is the only representative of her division. （ C） She helps to build a marketing system. （ D） She works in the marketing department. （ A） She forgot to make a call to the man. （ B） Her answering machine was broken
4、. （ C） She didnt get the mans messages. （ D） She couldnt remember the mans number. （ A） She hasnt heard from the teacher for three days. （ B） They have extra time to complete the assignment. （ C） She just found out the medical paper three days ago. （ D） They wont see the teacher until three days lat
5、er. （ A） Have a meal. （ B） Go shopping. （ C） Go to the movie. （ D） Play badminton. （ A） He works three nights every two weeks. （ B） He works four times as much as he did before. （ C） He has twice as much work as he used to have. （ D） He has three free days for every four days he works. （ A） Calm. （
6、B） Angry. （ C） Interested. （ D） Funny. （ A） Go to the library. （ B） Pay the money. （ C） Go through registration. （ D） Get a checklist-release card. （ A） Give up registration and leave. （ B） Talk to the admissions representative. （ C） Go to the library immediately. （ D） Wait until the woman processes
7、 his registration. （ A） Doctor. （ B） Government official. （ C） Teacher. （ D） Babysitter. （ A） He is always ill. （ B） He is too active. （ C） He speaks too little. （ D） He does a bad thing. （ A） His parents disagree with that. （ B） His parents cant be with him. （ C） His parents think it is unhealthy.
8、（ D） His parents order him to stay at home. （ A） It is signed by the state government. （ B） It could raise money from parents. （ C） It has been drawn up to protect children. （ D） It could help to fund afternoon programs. Section B （ A） From the 1850s. （ B） From the 1700s. （ C） From the 1800s. （ D） F
9、rom the 1900s. （ A） To know direction. （ B） To measure time. （ C） To show off ones wealth. （ D） To get to work on time. （ A） Everyone needed to measure their spare time. （ B） Everyone wanted to be punctual. （ C） Efficiency meant much more money. （ D） Efficiency was closely related to time. （ A） Driv
10、e cars. （ B） Fly planes. （ C） Pay wages. （ D） Repair machines. （ A） It can store many instructions. （ B） It can perform few tasks. （ C） It is a symbol of modernization. （ D） It is as clever as human brain. （ A） They are much cheaper than humans. （ B） They never complain about the difficulties. （ C）
11、They can handle all the problems of the job. （ D） They can work for long periods without rest. （ A） It will be long before robots can be used at home. （ B） It will be very expensive to use robots in the future. （ C） Robots will take over all the jobs in industry. （ D） Robots will be used only in lar
12、ge factories. （ A） Opera music. （ B） Drama. （ C） Country music. （ D） Politics. （ A） He had innate talent for music. （ B） He was the richest singer in America. （ C） He symbolizes the American dream. （ D） He stands for the new generation. （ A） They regret for them. （ B） They just ignore them. （ C） The
13、y sharply criticize them. （ D） They follow his behavior. Section C 26 If you wipe a finger across a household surface that hasnt been cleaned in the last few days, chances are youll【 B1】 _ with dust. Look around and youll find the stuff everywhere, from the particles【 B2】 _ in the sunlight to the fi
14、ne【 B3】_ of dirt coating TV screens, bookshelves, and car dashboards. Dust comes from everything and, like death and taxes, you cant avoid it. When things shoes, rocks, plants, socks, anything at all begin to【 B4】 _, they release tiny pieces of themselves into the air. These【 B5】 _ bits settle every
15、where, and because matter is always coming apart, dust production is a never-ending business. In a typical household, dust【 B6】 _ mainly of things such as dead insect parts, sheets of skin, food particles, and pieces of fabric. But not all dust is the product of natural【 B7】 _; we create amazing qua
16、ntities of dust everyday. For example, a single puff(吸 )of a cigarette contains an estimated four billion large dust particles. Industry of all sorts, from the【 B8】 _ of a piece of wood to large-scale steel manufacturing, creates particular kinds of dust. In short, dust is all around, ever, in the a
17、ir we breathe. Because its particles are so small, dust is highly【 B9】 _. Westward winds regularly blow dust from the Sahara desert across the Atlantic and into the【 B10】 _ above American coastal towns, where it contributes to some thrilling sunsets. 27 【 B1】 28 【 B2】 29 【 B3】 30 【 B4】 31 【 B5】 32 【
18、 B6】 33 【 B7】 34 【 B8】 35 【 B9】 36 【 B10】 Section A 36 Conrad Hilton really wanted to be a banker. Instead, he successfully changed the【 C1】 _purchase of a Texas low-end hotel into a multimillion-dollar hotel empire, that earned him the【 C2】 _“innkeeper to the world.“ Born in New Mexico in 1887, Hil
19、ton was 19 when his parents began renting out rooms in their home. The business didnt interest him, however, so he became a【 C3】_legislator(立法者 ), founded a bank and went off to war. In 1919, after Hiltons father died, a friend suggested he go to Texas to make his【 C4】 _. Hilton ended up in Cisco; w
20、hen his bank deal there【 C5】 _, he headed to a nearby hotel, the Mobley. It【 C6】 _to oil-field workers, so its 40 rooms turned over every eight hours. A week later, Hilton owned it. He soon acquired more hotels and started to build new ones. His first, the Dallas Hilton, opened in 1925. By the late
21、1940s, Hiltons list included the Town House in Beverly Hills and Chicagos Palmer House, as well as【 C7】_nightclubs featuring A-list stars. He also expanded【 C8】 _. And in 1949, he bought the “greatest of them all“: New York Citys magnificent Waldorf-Astoria. Typically American, Hiltons were creative
22、 too: the first to have rooms with air-conditioning, TVs, ironing boards and sewing kits. Even modern hotel-reservations systems【 C9】 _from one Hilton which was established in 1948. Today the Hilton Hotels Corp. owns some 3,300【 C10】 _in 78 countries. Last year more than a quarter-billion guests che
23、cked in. A)soured B)motivated C)nickname D)catered E)previously F)luxurious G)properties H)features I)fortune J)evolved K)casual L)severe M)inherited N)internationally O)state 37 【 C1】 38 【 C2】 39 【 C3】 40 【 C4】 41 【 C5】 42 【 C6】 43 【 C7】 44 【 C8】 45 【 C9】 46 【 C10】 Section B 46 How science goes wro
24、ng Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. A)A simple idea underlies science: “trust, but verify“. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th centur
25、y, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed extreme self-satisfaction. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying, damaging the whole of science, and of humanity. B)Too many of the findings are the r
26、esult of cheap experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated(复制 ). Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “milestone“ stud
27、ies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist worries that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are nonsense. In 2000-10, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials base
28、d on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness. What a load of rubbish C)Even when flawed research does not put peoples lives at risk and much of it is too far from the market to do so it blows money and the efforts of some of the worlds best minds. The opportunity costs
29、of hindered progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising. D)One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the Second World War, it was still a rarefied(小众的 )pastime. The entire cl
30、ub of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled to 6m -7m active researchers on the latest account, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish(消亡 )“ has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jo
31、bs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012 more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs strive for every academic post. Nowadays verification(the replication of other peoples results)does little to advance a researchers career. And without verificatio
32、n, uncertain findings live on to mislead. E)Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the choose-the-most-profitable of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the
33、greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has polished a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results based on his instinct, And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, it is more likely that at leas
34、t one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical noise. Such lake correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, or letting children play video games, they may well comman
35、d the front pages of newspapers, too. F)Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis(假设 )are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results“ now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing
36、what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists. G)The holy process of peer review is not all it is praised to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in th
37、e field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested. If its broke, fix it H)All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to discovering the truth about the world. What might be do
38、ne to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that screen through untold crowds of data looking for patterns. Genetic
39、ists have done this, and turned an early stream of deceptive results from genome sequencing(基因组测序 )into a flow of truly significant ones. I)Ideally, research protocols(草案 )should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to manipulate the experiments
40、 design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.(It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test. J)The most enlightened journals are already showing less dislike of t
41、edious papers. Some government funding agencies, including Americas National Institutes of Health, which give out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends ne
42、ed to go much further. Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting“ work, and grant-givers should set- aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightened or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has wor
43、ked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules. K)Science still commands enormous if sometimes perplexed respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and
44、 to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by cheap research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding. 47 The major journals reject more than 90% of
45、the submitted manuscripts to ensure their exclusiveness. 48 The flawed research wastes not only money but also the energy of other talents. 49 Modern science began in the 17th century. 50 Some government funding agencies have already granted money to figure out how best to encourage replication. 51
46、Some clinical trials from 2000 to 2010 were later abandoned by reason of mistakes or impropemess. 52 Registered and monitored research protocols would help to resist the temptation to manipulate the experiments design. 53 The most enlightened journals are more willing to accept dull papers than befo
47、re. 54 Knowing what is false and knowing what is true are equally important to science. 55 Science can gain respect only when it is basically right and is able to correct mistakes. 56 “Publish or perish“ has become the dominant rule over academic life now. Section C 56 As an opportunity to highlight
48、 womens contributions, International Womens Day has always served to commemorate(纪念 )the cutting edge of the global womens movement, from demanding better working conditions in US sweatshop factories of the early 1900s, to voting rights, pay equality and, more recently, promoting womens leadership i
49、n politics and business. Recent years have featured womens economic contributions, ranging from women producing nearly 90% of the food in Africa, to 7.8 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. with $1.2 trillion in total receipts. Yet qualified women are continually held back in their efforts to contribute at the highest levels of economic and financial leadership, while global policies and companies abandon the benefits. The disappointing number
