1、大学英语四级（ 2013年 12月考试改革适用）模拟试卷 8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 description of the picture and then express your views on population aging. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 wor
2、ds. Section A （ A） To a barbershop. （ B） To the grocers. （ C） To a book store. （ D） To a restaurant. （ A） On Monday. （ B） On Tuesday. （ C） On Saturday. （ D） On Sunday. （ A） On October 2. （ B） On October 8. （ C） On October 20. （ D） On October 21. （ A） She will live a simple life. （ B） She will fully
3、focus on her job. （ C） She will quit her job to get married. （ D） She will stay with someone unmarried. （ A） Driving to work is really a headache. （ B） The woman will be able to buy an intelligent car. （ C） Cars that drive themselves may be very expensive. （ D） He is working with a car producer on i
4、ntelligent cars. （ A） Sandwich. （ B） Hot dogs. （ C） Ice cream. （ D） Potato chips. （ A） He would tear it down first. （ B） He would make some repairs. （ C） He would rebuild it by himself. （ D） He would scratch the paint off its surface. （ A） The hamburgers were delicious. （ B） Ted ate too many hamburg
5、ers. （ C） Pigs love hamburgers too. （ D） Ted looks overweight. （ A） There is too much noise. （ B） There arent enough cabinets. （ C） Office supplies are taking up space. （ D） Some teaching assistants dont have desks. （ A） To chat with Jack. （ B） To get help in the course. （ C） To hand in their assign
6、ments. （ D） To practise giving interviews. （ A） Give Jack a different office. （ B） Try to get a room for meetings. （ C） Complain to the department head. （ D） Move the supplies to the storage room. （ A） The other teachers should be consulted. （ B） Theyd have to get permission. （ C） She thinks it migh
7、t work. （ D） Jack wouldnt like it. （ A） He has a cold. （ B） He has a flu. （ C） He has a stomachache. （ D） He has a toothache. （ A） On Friday. （ B） On Saturday. （ C） On Sunday. （ D） On Monday. （ A） Take herbal medicine. （ B） See another doctor. （ C） Drink chicken soup. （ D） Stay in bed. Section B （ A
8、） Look at them sadly. （ B） Touch them gently. （ C） Keep them company. （ D） Play games with them. （ A） She disliked the speakers dad. （ B） She felt scary for her mistake. （ C） She loved playing hide-and-seek. （ D） She would eat anything when hungry. （ A） She was loved by everybody she met. （ B） She w
9、ent everywhere with the family. （ C） She played games with anyone she liked. （ D） She was treated as a member of the family. （ A） Mexico. （ B） The U.S. （ C） The U.K. （ D） Canada. （ A） Passing a test to write travel guides. （ B） Finishing her work as soon as possible. （ C） Checking all the facts to b
10、e written in the guides. （ D） Working in different places to collect information. （ A） She is successful in her job. （ B） She finds her life full of stresses. （ C） She spends half of her time traveling. （ D） She is especially interested in museums. （ A） He did not have any luggage with him. （ B） Tha
11、t made him easier to be recognized. （ C） They were the uniforms for air couriers. （ D） His backpack had no room for his clothes. （ A） He organizes international flights for tourists. （ B） He travels around the world with cheap tickets. （ C） He delivers papers and packages to foreign countries. （ D）
12、He manages a business company in foreign countries. （ A） It costs less. （ B） It is flexible. （ C） It saves time. （ D） It grows fast. （ A） He has to wear two pairs of jeans. （ B） He cannot take any luggage with him. （ C） He saves little money from the travel. （ D） He cannot decide when and where to t
13、ravel. Section C 26 In many countries seat belts are now compulsory for the driver and the front seat passenger at least. Doctors believe that seat belts save people from being seriously hurt in a【 B1】_. but there are some people who still think it is more【 B2】 _to wear a seat belt than not to wear
14、one. They think that seat belts may【 B3】 _people in a car that is burning, or that has fallen into the water, so that they are burnt to death or【 B4】_. But less than half of one percent of car accidents lead to fire or sinking, and in any case, a seat belt may easily save a person from being knocked
15、【 B5】 _in an accident, so that he or she is able to undo the seat belt immediately and【 B6】 _the automobile. Some people say that it is an【 B7】 _on their freedom to force them to wear a seat belt. But even in【 B8】 _countries there are many things people are denied the right to do though they want to
16、 do them. How does this affect seat belts? In what way does it【 B9】 _the rights of others if someone refuses to wear a seat belt? Well, common sense tells us that a driver without a seat belt has less control of a car, if there is an accident. In that case, the driver【 B10】 _be a danger to others, w
17、ho after all also have the right to be protected as much as possible from accidents. 27 【 B1】 28 【 B2】 29 【 B3】 30 【 B4】 31 【 B5】 32 【 B6】 33 【 B7】 34 【 B8】 35 【 B9】 36 【 B10】 Section A 36 American universities are rushing towards a wireless future. They are installing networks that let students and
18、 teachers surf the Internet from laptop computers(笔记本电脑 ). But professors say the technology poses a growing【 C1】 _: Retaining their students attention. In a classroom at American University in Washington D.C., the benefits and【 C2】_of the new wireless work were on display. From the back row of a le
19、cture hall, more than a dozen laptop screens were【 C3】 _. As Professor Jay Mallek lectured on the finer points of an office budget, many students went online to surf the Internet. Students write quick emails and send instant messages. A young man shows an amusing email to the women next to him, and
20、then switches over to read the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. Distraction is nothing【 C4】 _. As long as there have been schools, students have whispered, passed notes and even gazed out the window and daydreamed. But the【 C5】 _of the laptop has introduced new opportunities for distractio
21、n, and wireless introduces an even【 C6】 _range of distraction. This is【 C7】 _annoying for law professors, many of whom still live in the world of paper. “This is something that hurts the students themselves,“ said Ian Ayres, professor at Yale Law School, who【 C8】 _the Internets entry into the classr
22、oom. However, Professor Mallek sees it【 C9】 _. He said the benefits of the technology outweigh(胜过 )the problems. He suggested that it might even be making him a better teacher. He takes the【 C10】 _of losing his students to email and online newspapers as a challenge to keep lectures lively and intere
23、sting. A)visible I)new B)threat J)demonstrates C)possible K)larger D)opposes L)differently E)obstacle M)challenge F)especially N)arrival G)broader O)advantages H)drawbacks 37 【 C1】 38 【 C2】 39 【 C3】 40 【 C4】 41 【 C5】 42 【 C6】 43 【 C7】 44 【 C8】 45 【 C9】 46 【 C10】 Section B 46 Wired for Distraction: K
24、ids and Social Media? A)Most parents who worry about their kids online activity focus on the people or content their children might encounter: Are they being cyberbullied? Do they have access to age-inappropriate material? Can sexual predators(色狼 )reach them? What I worry about, as a sociobiologist,
25、 is not what my kids are doing on the Internet but what all this connectivity is doing to their brains. Scientific evidence increasingly suggests that, amid all the texting, poking and surfing, our childrens digital lives are turning them into much different creatures from us and not necessarily for
26、 the better. B)For starters, there is the problem of what some researchers refer to as continuous partial attention, a term coined by former Microsoft executive Linda Stone. We know the dangers of texting or talking on the phone while operating a motor vehicle but what about when forming a brain? A
27、Kaiser Family Foundation report released last year found that on average, children ages 8 to 18 spend 7 hours and 38 min. a day using entertainment media. And if you count each content stream separately a lot of kids, for example, text while watching TV they are logging almost 11 hours of media usag
28、e a day. C)You(or your children)might think the people who have had the most practice dealing with distractions would be the most adept at multitasking. But a 2009 study found that when extraneous(与正题无关的 )information was presented, participants who(on the basis of their answers to a study questionna
29、ire)did a lot of media multitasking performed worse on a test than those who dont do much media multitasking. In the test, a trio of Stanford University researchers showed college students an image of a bunch of rectangles(矩形 )in various orientations and asked them to focus on a couple of red ones i
30、n particular. Then the students were shown a second, very similar image and asked if the red rectangles had been rotated. The heavy media multitaskers were wrong more often because, the study concluded, they are more sensitive to distracting stimuli than light media multitaskers are. D)We have separ
31、ate circuits, it turns out, for top-down focus i.e., when we set our mind to concentrate on something and reactive attention, when our brain reflexively tunes in to novel stimuli. We obviously need both for survival, whether in the wilds of prehistory or while crossing a street today, but our satura
32、ted(饱和的 )media universe has perhaps privileged the latter form and is wiring our kids brains differently. “Each time we get a message or text,“ Anthony Wagner, one of the Stanford studys coauthors, speculates, “our dopamine(多巴胺 )reward circuits probably get activated, since the desire for social con
33、nection is so wired into us.“ The result, he suggests, could be a forward-feeding cycle in which we pay more and more attention to environmental stimuli Hey, another text! at the expense of focus. E)Constant distraction affects not only how well kids learn but also how their brains absorb the new in
34、formation. In 2006, UCLA scientists showed that multitaskers and focused learners deploy(调动 )different parts of the brain when they learn the same thing. Multitaskers fire up their striatum(终脑的皮层 ), which encodes the learning more like habit, or whats known as procedural memory. Meanwhile, those who
35、 were allowed to focus on the task without distraction relied on the hippocampus(海马体 ), which is at the heart of the declarative memory circuit that comes into play, say, in math class when you need to apply abstract rules to novel problems. The upshot of the study was that the focusers could apply
36、the new skill more broadly but the multitaskers could not. Multitaskers reliance on rote habit would be all well and good if we want our offspring to work on assembly lines, but to do the kind of high-level thinking that experts agree will be key to getting well-paying jobs, wed better exercise our
37、collective hippocampus. F)Some technology observers, like Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvards Berkman Center for Internet and Society, claim that social media are getting a bum rap(不公正的对待 )and that the real problem lies in the hyperprotective way we parent today. “Over and over, kids tell me that theyd
38、 rather get together in person, but then they list off all of the things that make doing so impossible“ like their overscheduled after-school lives or parents fears of kids navigating the streets alone, she says. G)Stone has observed something similar in technology use among adolescents: “When theyr
39、e with friends, they wont answer their cell phone. And if they get an SMS, they will just answer, BZ, L8R. “ Perhaps this is a sign that our kids will be better than we are at learning how to prioritize tasks something that will come in handy when they become workers and spouses and parents. H)But I
40、 am still concerned about the effect that 24/7 connectivity has on my kids and on my 11-year-old son in particular. School-lunchroom behavior gossipy whispers, competition for attention, etc. now goes on around the clock. Theres no downtime, no alone time for him to develop his sense of self. I)So w
41、hats a good dad to do? Ive set some rules that are designed to aid his social and cognitive development: no Facebook during school, and no electronic devices after 9:30 p.m. The latter prohibition is designed to help him get more sleep, which, according to some studies, is when our brains prune conn
42、ections among neurons, preserving and speeding up the ones that matter and flushing out the ones that dont. “Unfortunately, the new modes of communication and hours spent using them are preventing already sleep-deprived teens from getting any, which affects memory consolidation and behavioral regula
43、tion,“ says B.J. Casey, director of Cornells Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. Even if kids get nine to 10 hours of sleep but sustain multiple interruptions from, say, a buzzing iPhone next to the pillow they will suffer cognitively and feel tired the next day. Hence my 9:30 rule, w
44、hich falls into that age-old parenting category: Do as I say, not as I do. 47 According to a 2009 study, people who did a lot of media multitasking made more fault on the test. 48 In order to help his son get more sleep, the author forbids his son to use electronic devices after 9:30 p.m. 49 The sat
45、urated media universe may have weakened our top-down focus. 50 8 to 18 years old children spend about 11 hours using media per day if each content stream is counted separately. 51 According to Stone, adolescents may do better than their parent generation on learning how to prioritize tasks. 52 Focus
46、ed learners can do high-level thinking and may get well-paying jobs more probably. 53 Multiple interruptions during kids sleep time may lead to trouble on their cognition and body the next day. 54 What the author worries about is that his kids online activity may have bad effect on their brains. 55
47、According to UCLA scientists, the focusers and the multitaskers rely on different parts of their brain in learning. 56 According to Danah Boyd, the hyperprotective way parents behave is the real reason for kids continuous partial attention. Section C 56 A very important world problem is the increasi
48、ng number of people who actually inhabit this planet. The limited amount of land and land resources will soon be unable to support the huge population if it continues to grow at its present rate. So why is this huge increase in population taking place? It is really due to the spread of the knowledge
49、 and practice of what is becoming known as “Death Control“. You have no doubt heard of the term “Birth Control“. “Death Control“ is something rather different. It recognizes the work of the doctors and scientists who now keep alive people who, not very long ago, would have died of a variety of then incurable diseases. Through a wide variety of technological innovations that include farming methods and the control of de
