1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 236及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay on the following question. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Suppose you could change one important thing about your college, what would you chang
2、e? Give reasons and specific examples to support your answer. Section A （ A） She operated her aircraft single-handed. （ B） She followed Boeings commercial route. （ C） She drove an old aircraft sponsored by Boeing. （ D） She stopped occasionally to repair aircraft. （ A） She uploaded her pictures on tw
3、itter. （ B） She lost her temper several times. （ C） She argued heatedly with technicians. （ D） She left photographers behind halfway. （ A） It raised the food prices. （ B） It met huge rent rises. （ C） It attracted more diners. （ D） It gained more profit. （ A） It will cut down the rented space. （ B） I
4、t will turn to offering takeout instead. （ C） It will move to a place with cheaper rent. （ D） It will raise money from regular customers. （ A） It gained large amounts of money from oil. （ B） Its government raised the price of gasoline. （ C） Citizens got benefits from its government. （ D） It joined t
5、he International Monetary Fund. （ A） The international oil price crashed. （ B） The Saudi king was discontent with some citizens. （ C） Unemployment rate increased dramatically. （ D） Many Saudis had no concept of saving gas. （ A） Export more oil. （ B） Start taxing its people. （ C） Develop tourism indu
6、stry. （ D） Reduce the number of immigrants. Section B （ A） An apartment in the first floor. （ B） The nicest 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.
7、 （ D） He is the womans agent. （ A） The water fee is rather high. （ B） The electric is free of charge. （ C） 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. （
8、 D） The rent is too high for her to afford. （ A） He is curious. （ B） He is warm-hearted. （ C） He is impatient. （ 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 som
9、ething. （ D） It is the energy controlled by the temperature and the weather. （ A） Waters specific heat is 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 h
10、ot. （ A） The man slept on physics class. （ B） The man was on holiday in San Diego. （ C） The woman was extremely interested in physics. （ D） The woman figured out the question finally. Section C （ A） Many countries dislike it. （ B） All countries observe it. （ C） It began with the Americans. （ D） It b
11、egan with the Romans. （ A） To show how happy they were. （ B） To drive away the evil spirits. （ C） To warn the thieves and robbers. （ D） To sell their drums and sticks. （ A） Sing and dance in the square till midnight. （ B） Throw pieces of pottery against friends houses. （ C） Kiss each other when the
12、clock strikes midnight （ D） Go from house to house and make noises. （ A） It is the favorite food of young people. （ B） It is the last food of the past year. （ C） It brings good luck to people. （ D） It is good for peoples health. （ A） They are not allowed to drink coffee. （ B） They think coffee does
13、no good to them. （ C） They think coffee is too expensive. （ D） They should not drink coffee when working. （ A） Sleeping problems. （ B） Stomach problems. （ C） Bad emotions. （ D） High blood pressure. （ A） It improves ones brain function. （ B） It increases ones blood flow. （ C） It cleans the water of t
14、he bodys cells. （ D） It keeps one away from depression. （ A） It is comfortable. （ B） It is best made. （ C） It causes no pollution. （ D） It makes less noise. （ A） Its battery is not powerful enough. （ B） Its battery is of enormous size. （ C） It costs too much money. （ D） It breaks down easily. （ A） I
15、mprove the batteries of electric cars. （ B） Increase the number of electric cars. （ C） Design a new device for electric cars. （ D） Look for new ways to improve safety. Section A 26 Official health advice that said household chores help keep you active has been proved wrong by the research, which sho
16、ws that the people who do the most housework are also the most overweight. A study of the physical activity habits of 4,563 adults, carried out by Professor Marie Murphy at the University of Ulster found that women and older people were particularly likely to list “【 C1】 _physical activity as a sign
17、ificant proportion of their moderate to【 C2】 _physical activity“. Murphy said: “We found housework was reversely【 C3】 _to leanness, which suggests that either people are overestimating the amount of moderate-intensity physical activity they do through housework or are eating too much to【 C4】 _for th
18、e amount of activity undertaken.“ Kevin Fenton, director of health and wellbeing at Public Health England, suggested the study could【 C5】 _evidence that some people thought they were healthier than they actually were. “At an individual level there may be a【 C6】 _to overestimate the level of good beh
19、aviour were doing and this is reflected when people use food diaries, pedometers (计步器 ) or apps to measure more【 C7】 _what they have achieved.“ he said. But he defended everyday tasks as genuinely useful. He added: “From an individual【 C8】 _, physical activities such as housework, doing the shopping
20、 and walking to collect children from school, can have【 C9】 _impacts on physical and mental wellbeing. People who are even more active will often see greater benefits and it is important to recognise that healthy weight is just one of the potential【 C10】 _of physical activity.“ A) account E) domesti
21、c I) perspective M) related B) adjusted F) gentle J) positive N) tendency C) causes G) objectively K) practically O) vigorous D) compensate H) outcomes L) reinforce 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 Scientif
22、ic 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 century, modern s
23、cience 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 result of ch
24、eap 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“ studies in can
25、cer 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 based on resea
26、rch 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 riskand much of it is too far from the market to do soit blows money and the efforts of some of the worlds best minds. The opportunity costs of hindered
27、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 club of scie
28、ntists 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 jobs is cut-
29、throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012more 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 verification, uncert
30、ain 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 greatest
31、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 least one wil
32、l fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical noise. 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 fro
33、nt 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 what is
34、 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 the field
35、, 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 done to s
36、hore 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. Geneticists ha
37、ve 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 de
38、sign 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 ted
39、ious 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 need
40、 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 tightenedor perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked
41、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 enormousif sometimes perplexedrespect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to co
42、rrect 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. 37 The major journals reject more than 90% of the su
43、bmitted manuscripts to ensure their exclusiveness. 38 The flawed research wastes not only money but also the energy 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 c
44、linical trials from 2000 to 2010 were later abandoned by reason of mistakes or improperness. 42 Registered and 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. 4
45、4 Knowing what is false and knowing what is true are equally important to science. 45 Science can gain respect 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 As an opportunity to highlight wome
46、ns 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 in p
47、olitics 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 con
48、tribute at the highest levels of economic and financial leadership, while global policies and companies abandon the benefits. The disappointing numbers of women participating at the World Economic Forum in January was one highly visible and public demonstration of the challenge: While we are well in
49、to the 21st century, many participants and observers at Davos this year expressed astonishment, and even anger, at the extremely low representation of women. In this era, there are many outstanding examples of womens representation at the highest levels of political and corporate leadership, including Christine Lagarde, Sheryl Sandberg, and President Park Geun Hye. Yet even after the absence of women had been duly noted at the Forum last year, womens representation at D
