1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 219及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled College Students Booklist based on the statistics provided in the table below. Please give a brief description of the table first and then make comments on it. You should w
2、rite at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1. College Students Booklist Section A （ A） A newly open casino nearby. （ B） A mobile phone with Internet access. （ C） A registered account on special sites. （ D） Knowledge of mobile Internet system. （ A） Europe. （
3、B） Asia. （ C） South Korea. （ D） Japan. （ A） The story of a survivor. （ B） The power of the tsunami. （ C） The rescue of a survivor. （ D） The struggle between man and nature. （ A） A month. （ B） Three weeks. （ C） Three days. （ D） Two days. （ A） Impose penalties to Iran. （ B） Stop the meeting of IAEA. （
4、 C） Call for a close-door meeting in London. （ D） Restart Irans nuclear program. （ A） Reaching agreement. （ B） Still being undecided. （ C） Breaking down. （ D） Being controversial. （ A） To convince Russia to give more pressure on Iran. （ B） To refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council. （ C） To impose t
5、ough sanctions on Iran. （ D） To adopt a diplomatic settlement with Iran. Section B （ A） He is late for classes too often. （ B） He has missed too many classes. （ C） He has failed in the exam again. （ D） He is a trouble-maker at school. （ A） He has a part-time job. （ B） He often oversleeps. （ C） He is
6、nt ready for class. （ D） He is busy preparing exams. （ A） Students are going to take the final exam today. （ B） Its the last day Steve can drop the class with a full refund. （ C） Students have to hand in their reports today. （ D） Its the final day Steve can apply for a loan. （ A） Drop the class. （ B
7、） Make up the missed lessons. （ C） Stop taking part-time job. （ D） Transfer to another school. （ A） The quality of goods and services has improved. （ B） Most people are reducing their consumption. （ C） Complaint channels are too limited. （ D） Many people dont bother to complain. （ A） Electrical appl
8、iances. （ B） Travel agencies. （ C） Photographic and sound equipment. （ D） Clothing. （ A） They account for the largest proportion. （ B） 90 per cent of them are reasonable. （ C） Most of them are for delayed air tickets. （ D） Few of them are for poor accommodation. （ A） Two weeks. （ B） Less than two we
9、eks. （ C） Two to three weeks. （ D） More than three weeks. Section C （ A） Babies begin to learn at 5 or 6 months old. （ B） Babies begin to learn when theyre born. （ C） Babies dont like to be taught by strangers. （ D） Babies always want to learn new things. （ A） To help all the weak children and women
10、. （ B） To study the genes of babies and mothers. （ C） To find out what affects healthy development in people. （ D） To study why babies are influenced by their environment. （ A） She will clap. （ B） She will blink. （ C） She will smile. （ D） She will imitate her mother. （ A） Unborn babies can remember
11、sounds. （ B） Unborn babies learn how to smile. （ C） Unborn babies can learn to connect with people. （ D） Unborn babies are active to learn things. （ A） They didnt like to do housework. （ B） Their efforts were unnoticed by the woman. （ C） They were very tired after a whole days work. （ D） They wanted
12、 to share the housework with women. （ A） Cleaning the washroom. （ B） Carrying shopping bags. （ C） Taking out the rubbish. （ D） Changing the bed sheets. （ A） 4.7 hours. （ B） 6.9 hours. （ C） 5.1 hours. （ D） 1.5 hours. （ A） They can be good if they happen in summer. （ B） They occur only in South China
13、sea. （ C） They can usually be seen around the Pacific Ocean. （ D） They happen in spring most often. （ A） When the warmer air meets with the cooler air. （ B） When the wind moves faster than 30 meters a second. （ C） When the seawater evaporates into the air. （ D） When the air gets warmer and warmer. （
14、 A） It is the most active part of a typhoon. （ B） It moves faster than 40 meters a second. （ C） It is right in the middle of a typhoon. （ D） It is the most dangerous part of a typhoon. Section A 26 A paper, Anatomy (剖析 ) of a Large Scale Social Search Engine, laying out a strategy for social search
15、has been getting a good deal of attention in tech circles. It was written by Damon Horowitz and Sepandar Kamvar of Aardvark, one of several companies【 C1】 _ on creating social search engines. Social search【 C2】 _ to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions. By contrast,
16、 regular Web searches take questions, break them into keywords, and then find Web sites that have the most【 C3】 _ to these keywords. The idea has been floating around tech circles for years. Yahoo, among others, has tried to develop social search as a way to【 C4】 _ Google. The idea has gained impuls
17、e with the increased use of Twitter and Facebook, where people【 C5】 _ on their networks for information, blasting questions to their social networks and, getting useful, personalized【 C6】 _ Aardvark and its competitors are trying to create better tools for people with questions to connect to people
18、with answers. Some people think social search has the potential to go beyond Google and【 C7】 _ change the way people use the Internet. From a technical standpoint, Aardvarks task is easier than Googles. But there are also some【 C8】 _ shortcomings to Aardvarks approach. Getting answers through social
19、 search requires someone else to do something, so it cannot produce the【 C9】_ satisfaction that comes from typing something into a Web search box and watching a page of results appear. For Aardvark to be successful, it needs to enlist the participation of【 C10】 _ answerers. A) working E) fundamental
20、ly I) competent M) relation B) researches F) specializing J) significant N) challenge C) aims G) constant K) relevance O) rely D) responses H) primarily L) instant 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 Having Kids Makes You Happy? A W
21、hen I was growing up, our former neighbors, whom well call the Sloans, were the only couple on the block without kids. It wasnt that they couldnt have children; according to Mr. Sloan, they just chose not to. All the other parents, including mine, thought it was odd even tragic. So any bad luck that
22、 happened to the Sloans the egging of their house one Halloween; the landslide (山崩 ) that sent their pool careering to the street below was somehow attributed to that fateful decision theyd made so many years before. “Well,“ the other adults would say, “you know they never did have kids.“ Each time
23、I visited the Sloans, Id search for signs of insanity, misery or even regret in their super clean home, yet I never seemed to find any. From what I could tell, the Sloans were happy, maybe even happier than my parents, despite the fact that they were childless. B My impressions may have been swayed
24、by the fact that their candy dish was always full, but several studies now show that the Sloans could well have been more satisfied than most of the traditional families around them. In Daniel Gilberts 2006 book Stumbling on Happiness, the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and
25、 concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child and increases only when the last child has left home. He also finds out that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008s Gross Natio
26、nal Happiness author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless. C The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy“ may not be the most accurate way to de
27、scribe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,“ says Florida State Universitys Robin Simon. “In fact, no group of parents married, single, step or even empty nest reported
28、 significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. Its such an unexpected finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and theyre not.“ D Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research, which is
29、nt surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what weve been raised to believe is true. In a recent Newsweek Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negat
30、ive effect on the parents happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable? E Parents may openly complain their lack of sleep, busy schedules and difficulty in dealing with their bad-tempered teens, but rarely wi
31、ll they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. “If you admit that kids and parenthood arent making you happy, its basically blasphemy (亵渎 ),“ says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaS. “From baby-cream comm
32、ercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where youre supposed to feel like a kid because youre there with your kids, weve made parenthood out to be one extremely happy moment after another, and its disappointing when you find out its not.“ F Is it poss
33、ible that American parents have always been this disillusioned? Anecdotal (轶事的 ) evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kid
34、s more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madisons Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantl
35、y more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a worsening education and health-care system, so raising
36、children has not only become more complicated it has become more expensive. Today the U. S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17 and thats not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feelin
37、g a little blue. G Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Projects 2006 “State of Our Unions“ report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents because they experienced more single and child-free
38、years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both sexes are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parents past, like career wins or a carefree social life. Send
39、ing bad-tempered kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesnt turn out to be romantic. H For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming (弥补的 ). As for those of us with kids, well, the news isnt all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sens
40、e of purpose and meaning in their lives than those whove never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son. As for the Sloans, its hard to say whether they had a less
41、 meaningful existence than my parents, or if my parents were 7 percent less happy than the Sloans. Perhaps it just comes down to how you see the candy dish half empty or half full. Or at least as a parent, thats what Ill keep telling myself. 37 Now highs in a parents past are being fought by the exp
42、erience of raising kids. 38 Because of insufficient sleep, busy schedules and difficulty in rearing their bad-tempered teens, parents may complain publicly. 39 Besides societal ills that lower parents satisfaction, the promise of parenting is also too much expected. 40 Our cultural beliefs are that
43、having kids makes parents happy. 41 The Sloans were childless because they decided not to have a child. 42 A professor believes that after the last child has left home, parents tend to be happier. 43 Despite the low happiness level, compared with the childless, parents feel a greater sense of purpos
44、e and meaning in their lives. 44 Parenthood became more stressful in the 1970s partly due to changes in employment patterns. 45 The author expects to find signs showing the Sloans were miserable in their home. 46 According to the Newsweek Poll, half Americans agreed adding a child has a positive eff
45、ect on happiness levels. Section C 46 We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users over three months has conclusively proved that the truth is otherwise. “We are all in one way or another boring,“ says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at the Cent
46、er for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who co-wrote the study. “Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population.“ Barabasi and colleagues used three months worth of data from a cellphone network to track the cellphone towers each persons phone connected
47、to each hour of the day, revealing their approximate location. They conclude that regardless of whether a person typically remains close to home or roams far and wide, their movements are theoretically predictable as much as 93 per cent of the time. Surprisingly, the cellphone data showed that indiv
48、iduals movements were more or less as predictable at weekends as on weekdays, suggesting that routine is rooted in human nature rather than being an effect of work patterns. The cellphone records were processed to identify the most visited locations for each user. Then the probability of finding a g
49、iven user at his or her most visited locations at each hour through the day was calculated. People were to be found in their most visited location for any given hour 70 per cent of the time. Not surprisingly, the figure increased at night, and decreased at lunchtime and in the early evening, when most people were returning home from work. The team analysed the randomness (随意性 ) of peoples traces to show it was theoretically possible to predict the aver
