2020年12月大学英语四级考试真题第1套.docx

2020年12月大学英语四级考试真题(一) Part I Writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write on the topic Changes in the Way of Education. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Part Ⅱ Listening Comprehension (25 minutes) Section A Directions: In this section, you will hear three news reports. At the end of each news report, you will hear two or three questions. Both the news report and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre. Questions 1 and 2 are based on the news report you have just heard. 1. A) Many people have been attacked by Devil Firefish. B) The Mediterranean is a natural habitat of Devil Firefish. C) Invasive species are driving away certain native species. D) A deadly fish has been spotted in the Mediterranean waters. 2. A) It could badly pollute the surrounding waters. B) It could pose a threat to other marine species. C) It could disrupt the food chains there. D) It could add to greenhouse emissions. Questions 3 and 4 are based on the news report you have just heard. 3. A) Cars will not be allowed to enter the city. B) Pedestrians will have free access to the city. C) About half of its city center will be closed to cars. D) Buses will be the only vehicles allowed on its streets. 4. A) The unbearable traffic noise. C) The ever-growing cost of petrol. B) The worsening global warming. D) The rising air pollution in Paris. Questions 5 to 7 are based on the news report you have just heard. 5. A) His house was burnt down in a fire. C) His good luck charm sank into the sea. B) Many of his possessions were stolen. D) His fishing boat got wrecked on a rock. 6. A) Change his fishing locations. C) Sell the pearl he had kept for years. B) Find a job in a travel agency. D) Spend a few nights on a small island. 7. A) His pearl could be displayed in a museum. B) His monstrous pearl was extremely valuable. C) The largest pearl in the world weighs 14 pounds. D) A New York museum has the world's biggest pearl. Section B Directions： In this section, you will hear two long conversations. At the end of each conversation, you will hear four questions. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre. Questions8 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 8. A) It boasts a fairly long history. C) It has 75 offices around the world. B) It has over 50 business partners.D) It produces construction materials. 9. A) It was started by his father. C) It is over 100 years old. B) It has about 50 employees. D) It is a family business. 10. A) Outdated product design. C) Shortage of raw material supply. B) Loss of competitive edge. D) Legal disputes in many countries. 11. A) Introducing innovative marketing strategies. B) Seeking new ways ,to increase its exports. C) Providing training for its staff members. D) Conducting a financial analysis for it. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard, 12. A) She is a real expert at house decorations. B) She is really impressed by the man's house. C) She is well informed about the design business. D) She is attracted by the color of the sitting room. 13. A) From a construction businessman. C) From home design magazines. B) From his younger brother Greg. D) From a professional interior designer. 14. A) The cost was affordable. C) The effort was worthwhile. B) The style was fashionable. D) The effect was unexpected. 15. A) She'd like him to talk with Jonathan about a new project. B) She'd like to show him around her newly-renovated house. C) She wants to discuss the house decoration budget with him. D) She wants him to share his renovation experience with her. Section C Directions: In this section, you will hear three passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear three or four questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question , you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre. Questions 16 to 18 are based on the passage you have just heard. 16. A) Paying hospital bills for emergency cases. B) Doing research on ear, nose and throat diseases. C) Removing objects from patients' noses and ears. D) Providing routine care for small children. 17. A) Children aged one to four are often more curious than older children. B) Five- to nine-year-olds are the most likely to put things in their ears. C) Many children like to put foreign objects in their mouths. D) Many children like to smell things they find or play with. 18. A) They want to attract attention. C) They are unaware of the potential risks. B) They tend to act out of impulse. D) They are curious about these body parts. Questions 19 to 21 are based on the passage you have just heard. 19. A) It gave her a used bicycle. C) It delivered her daily necessities. B) It paid for her English lessons. D) It provided her with physical therapy. 20. A) Expanding bike-riding lessons. C) Offering walking tours to visitors. B) Providing free public transport. D) Asking local people for donations. 21. A) It is a sports chub. C) It is a counseling center. B) It is a language school. D) It is a charity organization. Questions 22 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard 22. A) How animals deal with lack of gravity. B) How mice interact in a new environment. C) How low gravity affects the human body. D) How mice imitate human behavior in space. 23. A) They found the space in the cage too small to stay in. B) They found it difficult to figure out where they were. C) They were not used to the low-gravity environment. D) They were not sensitive to the changed environment. 24. A) They continued to behave as they did in the beginning. B) They already felt at home in the new environment. C) They had found a lot more activities to engage in. D) They tried everything possible to escape from the cage. 25. A) They changed their routines in space.C) They behaved as if they were on Earth. B) They began to eat less after some time. D) They repeated their activities every day. Part皿 Reading Comprehension (40 minutes) Section A Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage . Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once. Trust is fundamental to life. If you can't trust anything, life becomes intolerable. You can't have relationships without trust, let alone good ones. In the workplace, too, trust is 26 An organization without trust will be full of fear and 27. If you work for a boss who doesn't trust their employees to do things right, you'll have a 28 time. They'll be checking up on you all the time, correcting “mistakes”and 29 reminding you to do this or that. Colleagues who don't trust one another will need to spend more time 30 their backs than doing any useful work. Organizations are always trying to cut costs. Think of all the additional tasks caused by lack of trust. Audit (审计) departments only exist because of it. Companies keep large volumes of 31 because they don't trust their suppliers, their contractors or their customers. Probably more than half of all administrative work is only there because of an ever-existing sense that “you can't trust anyone these days.”If even a small part of such valueless work could be 32 , the savings would run into millions of dollars. All this is extra work we 33 onto ourselves because we don't trust people- -the checking,following through, doing things ourselves because we don't believe others will do them 34 or at all. If we took all that away, how much extra time would we suddenly find in our life? How much of our work35 would disappear? A) constantly F) load K) removed B) credible G) miserable L) stacks C) essential H) pressure M) suspicion D) exploring I) properly N) tracked E) gather J) records 0) watching Section B Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet2. The Place Where the Poor Once Thrived A) This is the land of opportunity. If that weren't already implied by the landscape- -rolling green hills,palm trees, sun-kissed flowers- then it's evident in the many stories of people who grew up poor in these sleepy neighborhoods and rose to enormous success. People like Tri Tran, who fled Vietnam on a boat in 1986, showed up in San Jose with nothing, made it to MIT, and then founded the food-delivery start-up Munchery, which is valued at $ 300 million. B) Indeed, data suggests that this is one of the best places to grow up poor in America. A child born in the early 1980s into a low-income family in San Jose had a 12. 9 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult, according to a landmark study released in 2014 by the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues from Harvard and Berkeley. That number- 12. 9 percent- -may not seem remarkable, but it was: Kids in San Jose whose families fell in the bottom quintile (五分位数) of income nationally had the best shot in the country at reaching the top quintile. C) By contrast, just 4.4 percent of poor kids in Charlotte moved up to the top; in Detroit the figure was 5.5 percent. San Jose had social mobility comparable to Denmark's and Canada's and higher than other progressive cities such as Boston and Minneapolis. D) The reasons kids in San, Jose performed so well might seem obvious. Some of the world's most innovative companies are located here, providing opportunities such as the one seized by a 12-year-old Mountain View resident named Steve Jobs when he called William Hewlett to ask: for spare parts and subsequently received a summer job. This is a city of immigrants- 38 percent of the city's population today is foreign-born- -and immigrants and their children have historically experienced significant upward mobility in America. The city has long had a large foreign-born population (26. 5 percent in 1990) , leading to broader diversity, which, the Harvard and Berkeley economists say, is a good predictor of mobility. E) Indeed, the streets of San Jose seem, in some ways, to embody the best of America. It's possible to drive in a matter of minutes from sleek (光亮的) office towers near the airport where people pitch ideas to investors, to single-family homes with orange trees in their yards, or to a Vietnamese mall. The libraries here offer programs in 17 languages, and there are areas filled with small businesses owned by Vietnamese immigrants, Mexican immigrants， Korean immigrants, and Filipino immigrants, to name a few. F) But researchers aren't sure exactly why poor kids in San Jose did so well. The city has a low prevalence of children growing up in single-parent families, and a low level of concentrated poverty, both factors that usually mean a city allows for good intergenerational mobility. But San Jose also performs poorly on some of the measures correlated with good mobility. It is one of the most unequal places out of the 741 that the researchers measured, and it has high degrees of racial and economic segregation (隔离). Its schools underperform based on how much money there is in the area, said Ben Scuderi, a predoctoral fellow at the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard, which uses big data to study how to improve economic opportunities for low-income children.“There's a lot going on here which we don't totally understand," he said.“It's interesting, because it kind of defies our expectations.” G) The Chetty data shows that neighborhoods and places mattered for children born in the San Jose area of the 1980s. Whether the city still allows for upward mobility of poor kids today, though, is up for debate. Some of the indicators such as income inequality; measured by the Equality of Opportunity Project for the year 2000, have only worsened in the past 16 years. H) Some San Jose residents say that as inequality has grown in recent years, upward mobility has become much more difficult to achieve. As Silicon Valley has become home to more successful companies, the flood of people to the area has caused housing prices to skyrocket. By most measures, San Jose is no longer a place where low-income, or even middle-income families, can afford to live. Rents in San Jose grew 42. 6 percent between 2006 and 2014, which was the largest increase in the country during that time period. The city has a growing homelessness problem, which it tried to address by shutting down“The Jungle," one of the largest homeless encampments (临时住地) in the nation, in 2014. Inequality is extreme. The Human Development Index- -a measure of life expectancy, education and per capita (人均的) income -gives East San Jose a score of 4. 85 out of 10，while nearby Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters sits, receives a 9.26. San Jose used to have ,a happy mix of factors- cheap housing, closeness to a rapidly developing industry, tightly-knit immigrant communities- -that together opened up the possibility of prosperity for even its poorest residents. But in recent years, housing prices have skyrocketed, the region's rich and poor have segregated, and middle-class jobs have disappeared. Given this, the future for the region's poor doesn't look nearly as bright as it once did. I) Leaders in San Jose are determined to make sure that the city regains its status as a place where even poor kids can access the resources to succeed. With Silicon Valley in its backyard, it certainly has the chance to do so.“I think there is a broad consciousness in the Valley that we can do better than to leave thousands of our neighbors behind through a period of extraordinary success," San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said.