2015年06月四级真题第3套.docx

大学英语四级考试 2015 年 6 月真题(第三套) Part I Writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay based on the picture below. You should start your essay with a brief description of the picture and then comment on parents’ role in their children’s growth. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. Part I Listening (30 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) The three researchers shared evenly the Nobel prize. B) The three winners studied the same subject. C) This year's first Nobel prize was awarded for medicine. D) All of the Nobel prizes have been made public. 2. A) Youyou Tu's treatment is more hi-tech. B) Youyou Tu's treatment is more traditional. C) Youyou Tu focuses on roundworm-caused infections. D) Youyou Tu invented a completely new therapy. 11 Questions 3 and 4 are based on the news report you have just heard. 3. A) NASA sent a new Mars lander. C) Scientists revealed a new space theory. B) Different soil samples were studied. D) Liquid water has been found on Mars. 4. A )Mars is not as dry as what we used to think. B) Mars could support life at the moment. C) They have found living things on Mars. D) Soil samples from Mars are the same as those of the Earth. Questions 5 to 7 are based on the news report you have just heard. 5. A) A kidnapper. C) Her 4-year-old son. B) Her rival. D) Her drunken husband. 6. A) She is brutal in nature. C) She loves shooting and killing. B ) She is a die-hard racist. D) She is a firm gun-rights supporter. 7. A) It is against the law to own a gun. B) Women are not allowed to possess a gun. C) Improper storing of guns constitutes a crime. D) All the citizens have the right to carry a gun. 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. Questions 8 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 8. A) He likes Sweden better than England. B) He prefers hot weather to cold weather. C) He is an Englishman living in Sweden. D) He visits London nearly every winter. 9. A) The bad weather. C) The cold houses. B) The gloomy winter. D) The long night. 10. A) Delightful. C) Depressing. B) Painful. D) Refreshing. 11. A)They often stay up late reading. B)They work hard and play hard. C) They like to go camping in summer. D) They try to earn more and spend more. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12. A) English literature. C) French. B) Management. D) Public Administration. 13. A) English teaching. C) Careers guidance. B) Staff training. D) Psychological counselling. 14. A) They went to the same university. B) They all love to engage in management. C) The jobs they choose are not related to their major. D) They received the same job training. 15. A) Its generous scholarships. C) its well-designed courses. B) Its worldwide fame. D) Its pleasant environment. Section C Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short 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) Characteristics of Japanese artists. C) The art of Japanese brush painting. B) Some features of Japanese culture. D) The uniqueness of Japanese art. 17. A) To calm themselves down. C) To show their impatience. B) To enhance concentration. D) To signal lack of interest. 18. A)How listeners in different cultures show respect. B)How speakers can win approval from the audience. C) How speakers can misunderstand the audience. D) How different Western and Eastern art forms are. Questions 19 to 22 are based on the passage you have just heard. 19. A) Directing personnel evaluation. B) Buying and maintaining equipment. C) Drawing up plans for in-service training. D) Interviewing and recruiting employees. 20. A) Some of his equipment was damaged in a fire. C) Two of his workers were injured at work. B) The training program he ran was a failure. D) Two of his employees committed theft. 21. A) A better relationship with his boss. C) A better-paying job in another company. B) Advancement to a higher position. D) Improvement in the company's management. 22. A) She has more self-confidence than Chris. B) She works with Chris in the same division. C) She has more management experience than Chris. D) She is competing with Chris for the new job. Questions 23 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard. 23. A) They help us see the important values of a culture. B) They guide us in handling human relationships. D) They help us express ourselves more effectively. D) They are an infinite source of human knowledge. 24. A) Their wording may become different. B) The values they reflect may change. C) Their origins can no longer be traced. D) They may be misinterpreted occasionally. 25. A) Certain values are shared by a large number of cultures. B) Some proverbs are assuming more and more importance. C) Old proverbs are constantly replaced by new ones. D) Certain values have always been central to a culture. Part III 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. Question 26 to 35 are based on the following passage. The U. S. Department of Education is making efforts to ensure that all students have equal access to a quality education. Today it is 26 the launch of the Excellent Educators for All Initiative. The initiative will help states and school districts support great educators for the students who need them most. “All children are 27 to a high-quality education regardless of their race, zip code or family income. It is 28 important that we provide teachers and principals the support they need to help students reach their full 29 ” U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “Despite the excellent work and deep 30 of our nation’s teachers and principals, students in high-poverty, high-minority schools are unfairly treated across our country. We have to do better. Local leaders and educators will 31 their own creative solutions, but we must work together to 32 our focus on how to better recruit, support and 33 effective teachers and principals for all students, especially the kids who need them most.” Today’s announcement is another important step forward in improving access to a quality education, a 34 of President Obama’s year of action. Later today, Secretary Duncan will lead a round table discussion with principals and school teachers from across the country about the 35 of working in high-need schools and how to adopt promising practices for supporting great educators in these schools. A) announcing I) distributing B) beneficial J) enhance C) challenges K) entitled D) commitment L) potential E) component M) properly F) contests N) qualified G) critically O) retain H) develop 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 Sheet 2. Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break A) Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade. B) EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated ( 自动的） software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks. C) The new service will bring the educational consortium (联盟) into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread acceptance by educators and has many critics. D) Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful teaching tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades. “There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.” E) But skeptics ( 怀疑者) the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtime critic , Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies claiming that the software compares well to human graders. F) He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition (呼吁) opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from famous people like Noam Chomsky. G) “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read’. They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical (伦理的) position, convincing argument, meaningful organization, and clarity, among others. H) But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. It offers free online classes from Harvard, MIT and the University of California-Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools. I) The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantly. The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical（数字的）rank. J) EdX is not the first to use the automated assessment technology, which dates to early computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers, and four states—Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia—are using some form of the technology in secondary schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader,” to check the reliability of the human graders. K) But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is likely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that it would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that will make use of the automated assessment technology. L) Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that lean turns into a game, with students naturally ( 吸引) toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Roller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera. M) Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 prizes aimed at improving software that grades essays and short answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner of one of the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to help design its assessment software. N) “One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.” O) Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology—though imperfect—has a place in educational settings. P) With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of tea