1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 178及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the saying “ If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. “ You can cite examples to illustrate the importance of living with a goal. Y
2、ou should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Section A （ A） Over 900,000. （ B） More than 886,000. （ C） About 450,000. （ D） Nearly 120,000. （ A） Up to 8 percent. （ B） About 5 percent. （ C） Over 4 percent. （ D） Nearly 1.5 percent. （ A） 64 percent. （ B） 60 percent. （ C） 46 percent. （
3、D） 44 percent. （ A） They are in declining at a high rate. （ B） They offer many resources to humans. （ C） They help to store carbon dioxide. （ D） They increase natural disaster risks. （ A） 9. （ B） 25. （ C） 30. （ D） 36. （ A） Promoting business strategies. （ B） Commanding other people. （ C） Greater res
4、pect. （ D） Higher salary. （ A） Female leaders put more emphasis on assigning tasks. （ B） Female leaders attach greater importance on positive attitude. （ C） Male leaders focus on the sense of belonging of employees. （ D） Male leaders pay more attention to cooperation and teamwork. Section B （ A） To
5、spend her summer there. （ B） To attend a wedding of her friend. （ C） To enjoy the climate and food there. （ D） To visit some beautiful scenic spots. （ A） For a week. （ B） For five days. （ C） For one day only. （ D） For all her journey. （ A） She doesnt like French. （ B） She cannot speak French at all.
6、 （ C） She cannot communicate in French very well. （ D） She can speak French fluently. （ A） Quebec is a famous modem city. （ B） Quebec has many traditional buildings. （ C） He has a friend from college in Quebec. （ D） He will go to visit his friend in Quebec. （ A） This spring. （ B） This summer. （ C） T
7、his autumn. （ D） This winter. （ A） Information technology. （ B） Computer programming. （ C） Computer processing. （ D） Data processing. （ A） Three hours. （ B） More than three hours. （ C） Forty-five minutes. （ D） Two hours and forty-five minutes. （ A） His checkbook only. （ B） 300 dollars and his checkb
8、ook. （ C） 300 dollars and his computer. （ D） His checkbook and his computer. Section C （ A） She moved to America instantly alter born. （ B） She moved to America when she was three. （ C） She moved to America in 1946. （ D） She moved to America at 16. （ A） She was swimming in Lake Michigan. （ B） She wa
9、s drying her hair with the wind. （ C） She was gazing at the horizon. （ D） She was miming towards the horizon. （ A） He married his wife at the age of 17. （ B） He had barely received any formal education. （ C） He could speak only a little English. （ D） He didnt like to live in the city. （ A） It lasts
10、for one, two or three months. （ B） It is the largest festival in America. （ C） Its one of the oldest state fairs in America. （ D） It is held every other summer. （ A） I hey could get into the fair for ten cents per person. （ B） They could get into the fair with a single ticket. （ C） Indiana people we
11、re allowed in for free. （ D） Officials of the fair were allowed in for free. （ A） Making shoes. （ B） Cows giving birth. （ C） Pricing cows. （ D） Selling pigs. （ A） They are afraid of getting diseases. （ B） They dont want to be too strong. （ C） They want to have a perfect figure. （ D） They dont want t
12、o be laughed at. （ A） She will go out looking for something to eat. （ B） She will go to see the doctor to solve her problems. （ C） She will try to find out the reasons. （ D） She will exercise more to cheer herself up. （ A） She doesnt enjoy eating at all. （ B） She has got some kind of mental disease.
13、 （ C） She doesnt want to be unhealthy. （ D） She always believes in doctors. （ A） She needs to chew gums when she feels like eating. （ B） She should exercise more often to keep herself healthy. （ C） Just forgetting all the unhappy things and having a good sleep. （ D） Trying to find something interest
14、ing to engage herself in. Section A 26 New research shows that children born after unplanned pregnancies develop more slowly than children whose parents bad planned their pregnancy. However, once the results are adjusted to take into【 C1】 _socioeconomic【 C2】 _these differences disappear. A team from
15、 the University of Oxford used data from the Millennium Cohort Study to【 C3】 _the effect of pregnancy planning on childhood development. The Millennium Cohort Study collected【 C4】 _from parents of children born between 2000 and 2001 in the U. K. when the children were 9 months old, and then revisite
16、d them at age 3, 5 and 7. The researchers, led by Claire Carson of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at the university, found that children whose parents had not planned to have a baby had worse verbal and non-verbal skills, and spatial【 C5】 _, than their planned counterparts,【 C6】 _behind by
17、 around five months at age 5. The team also looked at the development of children born as a result of IVF treatment and found that they were three to four months ahead in terms of their development than children who had been planned. These differences didnt【 C7】 _disappear when the results were adju
18、sted for the familys【 C8】 _but it follows that more privileged families are more likely to be able to afford expensive IVF treatment. Other advantages associated with a(n) 【 C9】 _socioeconomic position include more highly educated parents and more parental involvement. “At the other end of the spect
19、rum,“ the authors write, “children born after mistimed or unplanned pregnancies might have【 C10】 _to fewer educational resources, such as books, puzzles, trips to library. “ A)access B)account C)awareness D)beneficial E)benevolent F)circumstances G)data H)distinguish I)factors J)investigate K)involv
20、ing L)lagging M)surveyed N)totally O)unexpectedly 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 Are books and the Internet about to merge? A)The difference between e-books and the Internet is minimal, and we should be glad the two are growing
21、 closer and closer. B)Its easy to forget that the World Wide Web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the Internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged what would become the World Wide Web, it was with the idea of making academic papers and other documents widely available. T
22、o this end he devised(设计 )a simple way of laying out text and images on a page, inventing what we now call Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. C)Early HTML could define pages and paragraphs, bold and italicise text, embed images and layout tables. A little more than 20 years later, HTML 5 includes me
23、dia playback and animation, and the web has now become so ubiquitous that for most users it is indistinguishable from the underlying framework of the Internet itself, but at its core the technology of the web remains little changed. Every web page. however sophisticated it may seem, is basically a d
24、igital book that we read on our computer through our web browser. D)So when Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks and LibriVox, stated today that the book and the Internet will merge, he was in one sense simply reiterating what is already the case. But from the perspective of people without the techni
25、cal knowledge to see how closely entwined the book and the Internet already are, it has the whiff of yet another doom-monger proclaiming the death of the book as we know it. E)McGuires argument hinges on the recent emergence of e-books as a serious contender to the print book as the dominant artefac
26、t of the publishing industry, with some suggesting that e-books will make up 50% of the book market by 2015 thanks to the Kindle, iPad and smartphones. E-books are deliberately packaged and marketed to appear as much like traditional print books as possible, so many readers will be surprised to disc
27、over that e-books are built around much the same HTML structure that powers the web. Every e-book, no matter how much like a print book it may seem, is a web page that we read on the simplified browser embedded in our e-reader of choice. F)The distinction between e-book and webpage is not a material
28、 one. In technological terms they are exactly the same thing. But when McGuire first mooted(提出 )his argument on Twitter in April last year my response likely mirrors the response of many book readers, “Books are researched, written, edited, published, marketed. and hence paid for. The Internet is eg
29、o noise, hence free. “ The distinction many of us draw between a book and a webpage is one of quality and hence of value. The real question raised by McGuires argument is whether we continue to value e-books as books, or as webpages. Books are something we pay for. Webpages are things we read for fr
30、ee. Which model will win out? G)Unless you are one of the very small number of people whose fortunes rest upon the outdated business model of publishing, you should hope that the latter wins. Because this is about a much bigger issue than how writers and editors get paid for the valuable work they d
31、o. For hundreds of years we“ve been slowly expanding the reach of human knowledge, both in terms of what we know and how many of us know it. Today we take a resource like Wikipedia for granted but compare it with the situation of only a few decades ago, when the majority of the population had lacked
32、 easy access to such knowledge. The benefits of expanding access to knowledge, both social and economic, are incalculable. H)Now we stand at the threshold of possibly the most revolutionary advances in human history. The combined technologies of the Internet HTML webpages, ebooks, search technology,
33、 social media and many more are very close to making all human knowledge accessible to all people for free. Even the short-term consequences of this advance are hard to envisage, and in the long term it has the potential to improve our future as much as the invention of the printing press improved o
34、ur past and present. I)Every time society advances, it faces challenges from those people economically and emotionally invested in the past. Undoubtedly stone age flint knappers were less than happy about bronze-age technology disturbing their business model. The medieval church was none too pleased
35、 about printing technology breaking their hegemony over knowledge, but wed never have had the Enlightenment without it. Today the media-conglomerates, governments and educational institutions that profit from gatekeeping knowledge of all kinds are pushing the Slop Online Piracy Act, and even more se
36、rious legislation to try and hold back the flood of free knowledge that threatens their power. Unless we want to stay in the knowledge equivalent of the stone age, and miss the next enlightenment the knowledge revolution promises to bring with it, we should all redouble our efforts to make sure they
37、 lose. J)For centuries the book has been the highest symbol of knowledge. The object that has enshrined and preserved knowledge through history. The book is so inextricably(逃不掉地 )linked with our concept of knowledge that for many people it is hard to separate one from the other. But for human knowle
38、dge to reach its full potential, we may have to let go of the book -as-object first, or open our thinking to a radically different definition of what a book is. 37 Many book readers hold the opinion that paper books should be paid for while webpages should be free. 38 Thanks to internet technologies
39、, every person on the planet enjoys free access to the sum of all human knowledge. 39 People who made economical and emotional investment in the past would object social advances. 40 The World Wide Web was envisaged to make academic papers and other documents available widely. 41 All of us should ma
40、ke more efforts to beat those who are against social advances to expand access to knowledge. 42 It is possible that e-books will occupy half of the book market by 2015 according to some people. 43 Basically speaking, each web page is a digital book which can be read on computer no matter how sophist
41、icated it seems. 44 We need to separate the concept of knowledge from that of a book to make the best use of human knowledge. 45 People who have no technical knowledge to see the close relation between the book and the Internet wont believe the two will merge. 46 It has innumerable social and econom
42、ic benefits of enabling the majority of people to access to knowledge. Section C 46 Older Americans are heading into and through retirement with a boatload(船的载货量 )of debt. Theyre carrying everything from mortgages and home-equity loans to big credit-card balances, and many are finding the burdens ha
43、rder and harder to bear. In the last eight years, the over-55 crowd has become the age group most likely to declare bankruptcy, according to the AARP. The statistics are unsettling. More than half of people 50 and older who carry debt spend most of their monthly income paying it down. An AARP study
44、released before the worst of the current recession hit found that a quarter of those folks spend more than 75 percent of their income on their debts. Americans 65 and older who carry credit-card balances saw their average balance rise to $ 10,235 , up 26 percent from 2005 , according to Demos, a pub
45、lic-policy research group. “We are seeing an across-the-board increase in seniors coming to us for help,“ says Gail Cunningham, of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. “ They are in financial distress for a variety of reasons: because a spouse has died, they are helping their children and
46、grandchildren, they have credit-card debts, and their home values have declined. “ Retirees have a harder time paying down those debts, too, because they dont have salaries to devote to the effort. Most have seen their nest eggs decline. Even those who want to return to work to pay down their debts
47、may not be able to find a job, says Cunningham. In different economic times, retirees might have downsized and cashed in their homes to pay off their debts or at least have gotten reverse mortgages against those homes to carry them for a while. But with declines in housing markets, they may not have
48、 enough equity in their homes to do that. Some, like their younger neighbors, likely owe more on their homes than they are worth. Not all retirement debt is cause for concern, though it can be hard to separate good debt from bad debt. Someone retiring with sufficient assets to cover what he or she o
49、wes may choose to keep their existing long-term low-interest mortgage, because it can help them keep their assets invested, offering them emergency funds and the promise of greater returns on that money. But even that can be problematic for 401(k)and IRA savers who face income taxes on the withdrawals they make to pay their bills. A couple in a 30 percent tax bracket(纳税等级 ), for example, would have to take $ 1 ,300 out of their IRA to pay their $ 1 ,000 mortgage check. 47 People over 50 in America who carry de
