2015年12月英语四级考试真题(第3套).docx

2015年12月英语四级考试真题试卷（第三套） Part I Writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the saying "Never go out there to see what happens, go out there to make things happen. " You can cite examples to illustrate the importance of being participants rather than mere onlookers in life. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. 注意：此部分试题在答题卡1上 _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ Part Ⅱ Listening Comprehension ( 30 minutes) Section A Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations.At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said.Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once.After each question there will be a pause.During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A, B, C,and D.and decide which is the best answer.Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer .Sheet I with a single line through the center. 1.A) They admire the courage of space explorers. B) They were going to watch a wonderful movie. C) They enjoyed the movie on space exploration. D) They like doing scientific exploration very much. 2.A) In a school library. B) At a gift shop. C) In the office of a travel agency. D) At a graduation ceremony. 3.A) He used to work in the art gallery. B) He does not have a good memory. C) He is not interested in any part-time jobs. D) He declined a job offer from the art gallery. 4.A) He will be unable to attend the birthday party. B) The woman should have informed him earlier. C) He will go to the birthday party after the lecture. D) Susan has been invited to give a lecture tomorrow. 5.A) Set a deadline for the staff to meet. B) Assign more workers to the project. C) Reward those having made good progress. D) Encourage the staff to work in small groups. 6.A) Where she can leave her car. B) The rate for parking in Lot C. C) How far away the parking lot is. D) The way to the visitor's parking. 7.A) He regrets missing the classes. B) He has benefited from exercise. C) He plans to take the fitness classes. D) He is looking forward to a better life. 8. A) How to select secretaries. B) How to raise work efficiency. C) The responsibilities of secretaries. D) The secretaries in the man's company. Questions 9 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 9.A) It is used by more people than English. B) It is more difficult to learn than English. C) It will be as commonly used as English. D) It will eventually become a world language. 10.A) Its popularity with the common people. B) The effect of the Industrial Revolution. C) The influence of the British Empire. D) Its loan words from many languages. 11.A) It has a growing number of newly coined words. B) It includes a lot of words from other languages. C) It is the largest among all languages in the world. D) It can be easily picked up by overseas travellers. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12.A) To place an order. B) To apply for a job. C) To return some goods. D) To make a complaint. 13.A) He works on a part-time basis for the company. B) He has not worked in the sales department for long. C) He is not familiar with the exact details of the goods. D) He has become somewhat impatient with the woman. 14.A) It is not his responsibility. B) It win be free for large orders. C) It depends on a number of factors. D) It costs ￡15 more for express delivery. 15.A) Make inquiries with some other companies. B) Report the information to her superior. C) Pay a visit to the saleswoman in charge. D) Ring back when she comes to a decision. Section B Directions：In this section, you will hear 3 short passages.At the end of each passage, you will hear some 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 center. Passage One Questions 16 to 18 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 16.A) No one knows for sure when they came into being. B) No one knows exactly where they were first made. C) No one knows for what purpose they were invented. D) No one knows what they will look like in the future. 17.A) Measure the speed of wind. B) Give warnings of danger. C) Pass on secret messages. D) Carry ropes across rivers. 18.A) To find out the strength of silk for kites. B) To test the effects of the lightning rod. C) To prove that lightning is electricity. D) To protect houses against lightning. Passage Two Questions 19 to 22 are based on the passage you have just heard. 19.A) She was born with a talent for languages. B) She was trained to be an interpreter. C) She can speak several languages. D) She enjoys teaching languages. 20.A) They want to learn as many foreign languages as possible. B) They have an intense interest in cross-cultural interactions. C) They acquire an immunity to culture shock. D) They would like to live abroad permanently. 21.A) She became an expert in horse racing. B) She learned to appreciate classical music. C) She was able to translate for a German sports judge. D) She got a chance to visit several European countries. 22.A) Take part in a cooking competition. B) Taste the beef and give her comment. C) Teach vocabulary for food in English. D) Give cooking lessons on Western food. Passage Three Questions 23 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard. 23.A) He had only a third-grade education. B) He once threatened to kill his teacher. C) He often helped his mother do housework. D) He grew up in a poor single-parent family. 24.A) Stupid. B) Active. C) Brave. D) Careless. 25.A) Watch educational TV programs only. B) Write two book reports a week. C) Help with housework. D) Keep a diary. Section C Directions: In this section, you will hear a passage three times.When the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea.When the passage is read for the second time, you are required to fill in the blanks with the exact words you have just heard.Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written. When you look up at the night sky, what do you see? There are other __26__ bodies out there besides the moon and stars. One of the most __27__ of these is a comet (彗星). Comets were formed around the same time the Earth was formed. They are __28__ ice and other frozen liquids and gases. __29__ these "dirty snowballs" begin to orbit the sun, just as the planets do. As a comet gets closer to the sun, some gases in it begin to unfreeze. They __30__ dust particles from the comet to form a huge cloud. As the comet gets even nearer to the sun, a solar wind blows the cloud behind the comet, thus forming its tail. The tail and the __31__ fuzzy (模糊的) atmosphere around a comet are __32__ that can help identify this __33__ in the night sky. In any given year, about a dozen known comets come close to the sun in their orbits. The average person can't see them all, of course. Usually there is only one or two a year bright enough to be seen with the __34__ eye. Comet Hale-Bopp, discovered in 1995, was an unusually bright comet. Its orbit brought it __35__ close to the Earth, within 122 million miles of it. But Hale-Bopp came a long way on its earthly visit. It won't be back for another four thousand years or so. 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 2with a single line through the center. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once. Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage. Children do not think the way adults do. For most of the first year of life, if something is out of sight, it's out of mind. If you cover a baby's __36__ toy with a piece of cloth, the baby thinks the toy has disappeared and stops looking for it. A 4-year-old may __37__ that a sister has more fruit juice when it is only the shapes of the glasses that differ, not the __38__ of juice. Yet children are smart in their own way. Like good little scientists, children are always testing their child-sized __39__ about how things work. When your child throws her spoon on the floor for the sixth time as you try to feed her, and you say, "That's enough! I will not pick up your spoon again!" the child will __40__ test your claim. Are you serious? Are you angiy? What will happen if she throws the spoon again? She is not doing this to drive you __41__ ; rather, she is learning that her desires and yours can differ, and that sometimes those __42__ are important and sometimes they are not. How and why does children's thinking change? In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that children's cognitive(认知的) abilities unfold __43__ , like the blooming of a flower, almost independent of what else is __44__ in their lives. Although many of his specific conclusions have been __45__ or modified over the years, his ideas inspired thousands of studies by investigators all over the world. A) advocate B) amount C) confirmed D) crazy E) definite F) differences G) favorite H) happening I) immediately J) naturally K) obtaining L) primarily M) protest N) rejected O) theories 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. The Perfect Essay A) Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual life, even when I didn't. Her expectations were high-impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother. B) When good students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page: " Flawless. " This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Of course, I had heard that genius could show itself at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn't get very far. The first person I told was my mother. C) My mother, who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset by my hubris(得意忘形) or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions (过渡), structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism. D) First off, it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leaves an existential imprint (印记) on you as a person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we should never listen to these people. E) Criticism, at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mental life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they are also the people who care enough to see you through this painful realization. For me it took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer's block-I was not able to produce anything for three years. F) Franz Kafka once said:" Writing is utter solitude (独处), the descent into the cold abyss (深渊) of oneself. " My mother's criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective (内省的) descent that writing requires you are not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutoring suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. "It is a thing of no great difficulty," according to Plutarch, "to raise objections against another man's speech, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome. " I am sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother's guidance, but I can't recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the "extremely troublesome" work of ongoing criticism. G) There are two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce " a better in its place. " In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques (评论). My mother was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to Marcus Cicero's claim that one should " criticize by creation, not by finding fault. " Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better on his own terms-a process that is often extremely painful, but also almost always meaningful. H) My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any-the type I could have found on my own-I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was " flawless," she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the t