1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 183及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay. You should start your essay with a brief account of how our education system generally judge students, and then explain why academic achievement isnt an adequate way to judge
2、a student. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Section A （ A） Half of Malawians live under the poverty line. （ B） Mobile phone charge more than half of Malawians income. （ C） Most Malawians couldnt afford their mobile phone charge. （ D） Half of Malawians are unemployed wi
3、th no income. （ A） Because of the governments interference. （ B） Because of the high-level consumer-service. （ C） Because of lack of competition in the market. （ D） Because of the low income of consumers. （ A） They usually promote pre-Black Friday sales. （ B） They do nothing but just wait for the ba
4、ttle. （ C） They work hard to keep themselves happy. （ D） They open stores after Thanksgiving morning. （ A） Employ fewer staff. （ B） Keep customer wait longer. （ C） Pay attention to online sales. （ D） Charge more shipping fees. （ A） Parents are urged to get free sugar app to check products. （ B） Ther
5、e are too many advertisements on free apps. （ C） Children should lose weight by taking more exercise. （ D） More parents prefer to choose outdoor activities for children. （ A） They consume too much sugar every year. （ B） They tend to choose healthier alternatives. （ C） They have a lot of potentials.
6、（ D） They are influenced by advertisements. （ A） By blocking anonymous advertisements. （ B） By improving parents-children relationships. （ C） By reducing the purchases of food with sugar. （ D） By encouraging children to do more exercises. Section B （ A） An apartment in the first floor. （ B） The nice
7、st apartment downtown. （ C） A three-bedroom apartment. （ D） A two-bedroom apartment. （ A） He is the manager of the apartment. （ B） He is the womans husband. （ C） He is the owner of the apartment. （ D） He is the womans agent. （ A） The water fee is rather high. （ B） The electric is free of charge. （ C
8、） The stove must be renewed. （ D） Gas is included in the rent. （ A） She thinks the apartment is too small. （ B） It is the first apartment she has seen. （ C） She wants her husband to see it too. （ D） The rent is too high for her to afford. （ A） He is curious. （ B） He is warm-hearted. （ C） He is impat
9、ient. （ D） He is absent-minded. （ A） It is the energy needed to boil the water. （ B） It is the energy needed to cool down something. （ C） It is the energy required to raise the temperature of something. （ D） It is the energy controlled by the temperature and the weather. （ A） Waters specific heat is
10、 higher than that of the sand. （ B） Waters specific heat is lower than that of the sand （ C） Waters temperature changes faster than the sand. （ D） Water absorbs less energy than the sand to get hot. （ A） The man slept on physics class. （ B） The man was on holiday in San Diego. （ C） The woman was ext
11、remely interested in physics. （ D） The woman figured out the question finally. Section C （ A） From the 1850s. （ B） Prom the 1700s. （ C） From the 1800s. （ D） From 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 t
12、o measure their spare time. （ B） Everyone wanted to be punctual. （ C） Efficiency meant much more money. （ D） Efficiency was closely related to time. （ A） Drive 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
13、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） 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
14、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 large factories. （ A） Opera music. （ B） Drama. （ C） Country music. （ D） Politics. （ A） He had innate talent for music. （ B） He was the richest si
15、nger 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） They sharply criticize them. （ D） They follow his behavior. Section A 26 Dont let vacations or business travel sideline (使退出 ) your exercise rout
16、ine. Physical activity is a great way to【 C1】 _stress and adjust to a new time zone when youre traveling. Heres how to get the most out of it: Find fitness-friendly【 C2】 _. Call ahead to make sure your hotel or motel has a good fitness facility or at least a place where youll feel safe and【 C3】 _goi
17、ng for a walk. Take【 C4】 _of the local attractions. Many places offer their own【 C5】_exercise opportunities trails through beautiful parks or forests, beach walks, boat rides on the lake, bike rides out of town. Check the travel【 C6】 _of your bookstore or look on-line for information before you trav
18、el. Be sure to bring along what youll need. Walking shoes, gym shorts, a T-shirt, resistance bands make a checklist of all the things youll need while youre away and make sure to【 C7】 _it all. Use every opportunity. Too busy to set aside a block of time for【 C8】 _? Look for every opportunity you can
19、 to be active. Book a room on the third floor and take the stairs. Walk whenever you canbetween meetings, while youre waiting at the airport, on your way from here to there. Be【 C9】 _. If youre on a busy business trip, dont add to the stress by trying to do too much. Spending【 C10】 _15 minutes on re
20、freshing walking, along with climbing a few flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator, should hold you until you get home again and back to your regular routine. A) accommodations E) equipment I) pack M) section B) activity F) identically J) potential N) sketch C) advantage G) merely K) reali
21、stic O) unique D) enjoyable H) oppose L) relieve 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. A A simple idea underlies science: “trust, but ver
22、ify“. 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 century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed extreme se
23、lf-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 result of cheap experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published
24、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“ studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important
25、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 based on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness. What a load of rubbish C Even when flawed research
26、 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 of hindered progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising. D One reason is the compe
27、titiveness 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 club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest acco
28、unt, 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 jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012 more than judges did. Every year six freshly
29、 minted PhDs strive for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other peoples results) does little to advance a researchers career. And without verification, uncertain findings live on to mislead. E Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the choose-the-most-profitable of r
30、esults. 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 greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has polis
31、hed 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 least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical n
32、oise. Such fake 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 command the front pages of newspapers, too. F Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis (假设 ) are rarely even offered for publi
33、cation, 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 what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys alread
34、y 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 the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even afte
35、r 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 done to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tigh
36、ten 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. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early stream of deceptive results from genome sequencing (基因组测序 ) into a flow of trul
37、y 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 design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are. (It is already meant to happen in c
38、linical 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 tedious papers. Some government funding agencies, including Americas National Institutes of Health, which give out $
39、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 need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting“ work, and grant-givers should set aside m
40、oney 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 worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using publ
41、ic 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 to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries t
42、o keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by cheap research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding. 37 The major journals reject more than 90% of the submitted manuscripts to ensure their exclusiveness. 38 The flawed research wastes not only money but also the e
43、nergy of other talents. 39 Modern science began in the 17th century. 40 Some government funding agencies have already granted money to figure out how best to encourage replication. 41 Some clinical trials from 2000 to 2010 were later abandoned by reason of mistakes or improperness. 42 Registered and
44、 monitored research protocols would help to resist the temptation to manipulate the experiments design. 43 The most enlightened journals are more willing to accept dull papers than before. 44 Knowing what is false and knowing what is true are equally important to science. 45 Science can gain respect
45、 only when it is basically right and is able to correct mistakes. 46 “Publish or perish“ has become the dominant rule over academic life now. Section C 46 Girls think they are cleverer, more successful and harder working than boys from as young as four, a study has found. Boys come round to this vie
46、w by the age of seven or eight and assume that girls will outperform them at school and behave better in lessons, research from the University of Kent shows. The study Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat argues that teachers have lower expectations of boys than of girls and this belief fulfils
47、 itself throughout primary and secondary school. Girls performance at school may be boosted by what they perceive to be their teachers belief that they will achieve higher results and be more conscientious (勤奋的 ) than boys, the academics claim. Boys may underachieve because they pick up on teachers
48、assumptions that they will obtain lower results than girls and have less drive. “By seven or eight years old, children of both genders believe that boys are less focused, able and successful than girls and think that adults endorse (认可 ) this stereotype,“ the academic Bonny Hartley said. “There are
49、signs that these expectations have the potential to become self-fulfilling in influencing childrens actual conduct and achievement.“ Hartley said that while it was unacceptable to divide classes by the race of their pupils, this was not the case for gender. “In this way, it is widely acceptable to pitch the boys against the girls or harmlessly divide the class in this way for practical ease.“ Jenny Parkes, senior lecturer at the Institute of Education, Univers
