1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 261及答案与解析 一、 Part I Writing 1 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay. Suppose you have two ways to learn about other countries: one is to travel abroad and the other to obtain the information online. You are to make a choice. Write an ess
2、ay to explain the reasons for your choice. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Section A （ A） Two. （ B） Three. （ C） Four. （ D） Five. （ A） He called the police after the accident. （ B） He broke his arm in the accident. （ C） He was caught taking drugs. （ D） He was arrested
3、by the police. （ A） A cure to brain cancer. （ B） A new surgical instrument. （ C） A pen that can identify cancerous tissue. （ D） A new drug that can eliminate cancerous tissue. （ A） Finding the border between the cancerous and normal tissue. （ B） Identifying the accuracy rate of the new device. （ C）
4、Improving their speed of removing a tumour. （ D） Using the new device in brain surgery. （ A） To collect scientific data on it. （ B） To monitor the storm on it. （ C） To take photos of the storm on it. （ D） To investigate its environment. （ A） It has lasted for nearly 350 years. （ B） It has lasted for
5、 more than 350 months. （ C） It seems to be getting smaller. （ D） It seems to be getting larger. （ A） What initially caused the storm. （ B） What is underneath the storm. （ C） What is the impact of the storm. （ D） What makes the storm last for so long. Section B （ A） A single room. （ B） A double room.
6、 （ C） A family room. （ D） A suite. （ A） He is here on a research mission. （ B） He is here for meeting friends. （ C） He is here for sightseeing. （ D） He is here on a business travel. （ A） Free airport shuttle service. （ B） A full continental buffet every evening. （ C） Use of the mini-bar in the room.
7、 （ D） Room service provided by the hotel. （ A） In the morning. （ B） In the afternoon. （ C） At noon. （ D） Before midnight. （ A） A lighting cameraman. （ B） A movie maker. （ C） A film and video editor. （ D） A film director. （ A） Wonderful. （ B） Challenging. （ C） Frustrating. （ D） Difficult. （ A） There
8、are no office hour limits. （ B） Employees are reluctant to work overtime. （ C） Employees work more than 16 hours a day. （ D） Working overtime is very common. （ A） They are much more effective. （ B） They are socially great. （ C） They are sometimes annoying. （ D） They are not so common. Section C （ A）
9、 A new exhibition to explore the significance of seines as an art form. （ B） A new exhibition to explore the importance of self-portraits. （ C） A new exhibition of Vincent Van Goghs famous works. （ D） A new exhibition of recent celebrities selfies. （ A） A tool of becoming icons of the digital era. （
10、 B） A tool of artistic expression to which we all have access. （ C） A shift in society using technology as a means of self-expression. （ D） A shift in society using technology as a means of becoming popular. （ A） Modern technology. （ B） Social media. （ C） The smartphone. （ D） The iPhone. （ A） A puni
11、shing figure. （ B） A righteous figure. （ C） A funny figure. （ D） An almighty figure. （ A） They try to entertain the devil with gifts. （ B） They try to run away. （ C） They try to ask their parents to beat the devil （ D） They try to hide at a comer of their rooms. （ A） In German folklore. （ B） In Aust
12、rian folklore. （ C） In Australian folklore. （ D） In Croatian folklore. （ A） Misconceptions about learning English. （ B） The key to learning English vocabulary. （ C） The key to learning English speaking. （ D） The key to talking to native speakers. （ A） More speaking practice. （ B） A wide vocabulary.
13、（ C） Rich knowledge of grammar. （ D） More input. （ A） Because they tend to think in their native language. （ B） Because they are slower in the process of learning a language. （ C） Because they are ashamed of making mistakes. （ D） Because they lack speaking practice. （ A） It can be trained only by sp
14、eaking with native speakers. （ B） It is a skill and should be trained. （ C） It is a skill that develops automatically. （ D） It can be trained by reciting English essays. Section A 26 My co-teacher and I met in the parking lot before school and stared into my car trunk at the costumes and props we ha
15、d gathered over the weekend. We were giddy with excitement and nervous because neither of us had【 C1】 _ anything like this before. The co-teacher, Alice, had found a book called Teaching Content Outrageously by Stanley Pogrow, which explained how secondary classrooms can incorporate drama into any c
16、ontent to【 C2】 _ students in learning incorporating the element of surprise, for example, or developing role-play or simulation experiences to teach content and standards. The book inspired us to change how we taught our seventh-grade language-arts students in a high-poverty school that【 C3】 _ with
17、test scores, especially reading and math. The sense of urgency in the building was【 C4】 _ , and the pressure on teachers to increase student achievement was often【 C5】 _ . The district required us to teach a curriculum【 C6】 _ aligned with a 15-year-old reading textbook containing outdated articles a
18、bout Ricky Martin, ice fishing, and cartography in a(n)【 C7】 _ to provide relevant, entry-level reading for students. I refused to teach from this text on the grounds that it was both condescending and【 C8】 _. But district personnel insisted that teachers use the textbook, citing evidence that it br
19、ought up test scores. The【 C9】 _ curriculum, we decided, would never be enough to encourage our students to love reading and writing. Therefore, Alice and I decided to take the【 C10】_ and apply Pogrows advice. A) attempt I) persuade B) designated J) place C) engage K) rigidly D) extent L) risk E) in
20、novatively M) struggled F) nonexistent N) tried G) obvious O) uninteresting H) overwhelming 27 【 C1】 28 【 C2】 29 【 C3】 30 【 C4】 31 【 C5】 32 【 C6】 33 【 C7】 34 【 C8】 35 【 C9】 36 【 C10】 Section B 36 How to Fix the Internet A) We have to fix the internet. After 40 years, it has begun to corrode, both it
21、self and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement. B) I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants insulting the internet for rewiring our brains to give us the nervous attention span of
22、 Donald Trump on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the flowers. Those worries about new technologies have existed ever since Plato was concerned that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and oratory (演讲术 ). I love the internet and all of its digital off
23、shoots. What I feel sad for is its decline. C) There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: Its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their auth
24、entic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but thats not true with the packet-switched design of the internet. D) Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World W
25、ide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earths computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didnt exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your c
26、ontent. E) All of that protected the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someones servers or databases, you could do it anonymous
27、ly. F) For years, the benefits of anonymity on the net outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if they were holding different opinions or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet
28、, nobody knows youre a dog.“ G) Now the problem is nobody can tell if youre a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. Or a Macedonian (马其顿的 ) teenager publishing a story that the Pope has supported Trump. This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. H) Th
29、e lack of secure identification and authentication (身份认 证 ) inherent in the internets genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, obstructed financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators, unleashed the overflow of spam (垃圾邮件 ), and forced us to use passwords and two-f
30、actor authentication schemes that would have confused Houdini. The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being allocated to tackle security issues make it a drag, rather than a spur, to productivity in some sectors. I) In Platos Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of
31、 Gyges. Put it on, and youre invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The internet has proven him correct. The web is no longer a place of community, no longer a marketplace. Every day more sites are eliminatin
32、g comments sections. J) If we could start from scratch, heres what I think we would do: *Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators (整合者 ) and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio
33、 airings of its members works. *Embed (嵌入 ) a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale. *Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address. *Enforce critical properties and security
34、 at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write. *Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their pac
35、kets could be encoded or tagged with metadata (元数据 ) that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used. K) Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of c
36、ybersecurity at MIT. “We dont need to live in cyber hell,“ Shrobe has argued. Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will. Some people, understandably, will resist any reduction of anonymity, which they sometimes label privacy. L) So the best approach, I think, woul
37、d be to try to create a voluntary system, for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and authentication. People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to be anonymous and n
38、ot to deal with people who are anonymous should have that right as well. Thats the way it works in the real world. M) The benefits would be many. Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content rather than the current incent
39、ive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising. Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and spewing of anonymous hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse. 37 The one-way hyperlinks enable users to do many things online anonymously. 38 Although anonymity can make people conceal t
40、heir identity online, now it has poisoned their online life. 39 To adopt the voluntary system would be advantageous to our online life in a number of aspects. 40 There are several ways to reduce anonymity if we can rebuild the internet from the very beginning. 41 The author suggested inventing a sys
41、tem to let people go online anonymously or not as they wish. 42 The author thinks the internet should be fixed not because he is afraid of new technologies but because problems arise in it. 43 Public opposition could become one of the biggest obstacles to carrying out the reforms. 44 The hazard of a
42、nonymity mentioned by Plato has been shown on the internet. 45 People used to think that anonymity online did more good than harm. 46 It is the design of the internet that makes it impossible to find out where the information comes from. Section C 46 Every office worker hates meetings. But its a str
43、ange sort of hate, similar to the hatred of Londoners for the Northern Line, or New Yorkers for tourists who walk too slowly: the dislike is real, yet if the despised thing were to vanish, itd be like surrendering a piece of your soul. When researchers probed into why people put up with the strain t
44、hat meetings place on their time and sanity, they found something surprising those who resent and dread meetings the most also defend them as a “necessary evil“ , sometimes with great passion. True, research suggests that meetings take up vastly more of the average managers time than they used to. T
45、rue, done badly, theyre associated with lower levels of innovation and employee wellbeing (幸福 ). But thats just office life, right? Its not supposed to be fun. Thats why they call it work. Underlying (引起 ) this attitude is an assumption thats drummed into us not just as workers but as children, pare
46、nts and romantic partners: that more communication is always a good thing. So suggestions abound for (大量存在 ) communicating better in meetings for example, hold them standing up, so speakers will come to the point more quickly. But even when some companies consider abolishing meetings entirely, the p
47、rinciple that more communication is better isnt questioned. If anything, its reinforced when such firms introduce “flat“ management structures, with bosses always available to everyone, plus plenty of electronic distraction. In fact, constant connectivity is disastrous for both job satisfaction and
48、the bottom line. And anyway, once you give it three seconds thought, isnt it clear that more communication frequently isnt a good thing? Often, the difference between a successful marriage and a second-rate one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid. At work, its surely many mor
49、e than four, though for a different reason: office communication comes at the cost of precisely the kind of focus thats essential to good work. Yet were so accustomed to seeing talking as a source of solutions for resolving conflicts or finding new ideas that its hard to see when it is the problem. 47 What does the author say about meetings? （ A） Londoners hate them as well as the Northern Line. （ B） They can help to keep workers physical and spiritual health. （ C） Workers might be reluctant to gi
