2014年12月英语六级真题试卷+参考答案（第1套）.doc

2014年12月英语六级考试真题试卷（第1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 discuss what qualities an employer should look for in job applicants. You should give sound arguments to support your views and ivrite at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. 1. A) The man's tennis racket is good enough.  B) The man should get a pair of new shoes. C) She can wait for the man for a little while.  D) Physical exercise helps her stay in shape. 2. A) The woman will skip Dr. Smith's lecture to help the man. B) Kathy is very pleased to attend the lecture by Dr. Smith. C) The woman is good at doing lab demonstrations. D) The man will do all he can do assist the woman. 3. A) The woman asked the man to accompany her to the party. B) Steve became rich soon after graduation from college. C) Steve invited his classmates to visit his big cottage. D) The speakers and Steve used to be classmates. 4. A) In a bus. B) In a clinic. C) In a boat. D) In a plane. 5. A) 10:10. B) 9:50. C) 9:40. D) 9:10. 6. A) She does not like John at all. B) John has got many admirers. C) She does not think John is handsome. D) John has just got a bachelor's degree. 7. A) He has been bumping along for hours. B) He has got a sharp pain in the neck. C) He is involved in a serious accident. D) He is trapped in a terrible traffic jam. 8. A) She is good at repairing things. B) She is a professional mechanic. C) She should improve her physical condition. D) She cannot go without a washing machine. Questions 9 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 9. A) Some witnesses failed to appear in court. B) The case caused debate among the public. C) The accused was found guilty of stealing. D) The accused refused to plead guilty in court. 10. A) He was out of his mind. B) He was unemployed. C) His wife deserted him. D) His children were sick. 11. A) He had been in jail before. B) He was unworthy of sympathy. C) He was unlikely to get employed. D) He had committed the same sort of crime. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12. A) Irresponsible. B) Unsatisfactory. C) Aggressive. D) Conservative. 13. A) Internal communication. B) Distribution of brochures. C) Public relations. D) Product design. 14. A) Placing advertisements in the trade press. B) Drawing sketches for advertisements. C) Advertising in the national press. D) Making television commercials. 15. A) She has the motivation to do the job. B) She is not so easy to get along with. C) She knows the tricks of advertising. D) She is not suitable for the position. Passage One Questions 16 to 18 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 16. A) The cozy communal life.  B) Innovative academic programs. C) The cultural diversity.  D) Impressive school buildings. 17. A) It is very beneficial to their academic progress. B) It helps them soak up the surrounding culture. C) It is as important as their learning experience. D) It ensures their physical and mental health. 18. A) It offers the most challenging academic programs. B) It has the world's best-known military academies. C) It provides numerous options for students.  D) It draws faculty from all around the world. Passage Two Questions 19 to 21 are based on the passage you have just heard. 19. A) They try to give students opportunities for experimentation. B) They are responsible merely to their Ministry of Education. C) They strive to develop every student's academic potential. D) They ensure that all students get roughly equal attention. 20. A) It will arrive at Boulogne at half past two.  B) It crosses the English Channel twice a day. C) It is now about half way to the French coast.  D) It is leaving Folkestone in about five minutes 21. A) Opposite the ship's office.  B) At the rear of B deck. C) Next to the duty-free shop.  D) In the front of A deck. Passage Three Questions 22 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard. 22. A) It is the sole use of passengers travelling with cars. B) It is much more spacious than the lounge on C deck. C) It is for the use of passengers travelling with children. D) It is for senior passengers and people with VIP cards. 23. A) It was named after its location.  B) It was named after a cave art expert. C) It was named after its discoverer.  D) It was named after one of its painters. 24. A) Animal painting was part of the spiritual life of the time. B) Deer were worshiped by the ancient Cro-Magnon people. C) Cro-Magnon people painted animals they hunted and ate. D) They were believed to keep evils away from cave dwellers. 25. A) They know little about why the paintings were created. B) They have difficulty telling when the paintings were done. C) They are unable to draw such interesting and fine paintings. D) They have misinterpreted the meaning of the cave paints. If you are attending a local college, especially one without residence halls, you'll probably live at home and commute to classes. This arrangement has a lot of __26__. It's cheaper. It provides a comfortable and familiar setting, and it means you'll get the kind of home cooking you're used to instead of the monotony (单调) that __27__ even the best institutional food. However, commuting students need to __28__ to become involved in the life of their college and to take special steps to meet their fellow students. Often, this means a certain amount of initiative on your part in __29__ and talking to people in your classes whom you think you might like. One problem that commuting students sometimes face is their parents' unwillingness to recognize that they're adults. The __30__ from high school to college is a big one, and if you live at home you need to develop the same kind of independence you'd have if you were living away. Home rules that might have been __31__ when you were in high school don't apply. If your parents are __32__ to renegotiate, you can speed the process along by letting your behavior show that you have the responsibility that goes with maturity. Parents are more willing to __33__ their children as adults when they behave like adults. If, however, there's so much friction at home that it __34__ your academic work, you might want to consider sharing an apartment with one or more friends. Sometimes this is a happy solution when family __35__ make . Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage. Children are natural-born scientists. They have __36__ minds, and they aren't afraid to admit they don't know something. Most of them, __37__. lose this as they got older. They become self-conscious and don't want to appear stupid. Instead of finding things out for themselves they make __38__ that often turn to be wrong. So it's not a case of getting kids interested in science. You just have to avoid killing the __39__ for learning that they were born with. It's no coincidence that kids start deserting science once it becomes formalised. Children naturally have a blurred approach to __40__ knowledge. They see learning about science or biology or cooking as all part of the same act—it's all learning. It's only because of the practicalities of education that you have to start breaking down the curriculum into specialist subjects. You need to have specialist teachers who __41__ what they know. Thus once they enter school, children begin to define subjects and erect boundaries that needn't other-wise exist. Dividing subjects into science, maths, English, etc. is something we do for __42__. In the end it's all learning, but many children today __43__ themselves from a scientific education. They think science is for scientists, not for them. Of course we need to specialise __44__. Each of us has only so much time on Earth, so we can't study everything. At 5 years old, our field of knowledge and __45__ is broad, covering anything from learning to walk to learning to count. Gradually it narrows down so that by the time we are 45, it might be one tiny little comer within science. 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2 上作答。 A)accidentally  B)acquiring  C)assumptions  D)convenience  E)eventually F)exclude  G)exertion H)exploration  I)formu1as J)ignite K)impart L)inquiring M)passion N)provoking  O)unfortunately [A] For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone, over 1,000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including Happy Money, Happy-People-Pills tor All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners. [B] One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including - most promisingly - good health. Many studies have noted the connection between a happy mind and a healthy body - the happier you are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. In an overview of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: "Inductions of well-being lead to healthy functioning, and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health." [C] But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges the rosy picture. Happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. It might even be bad. [D] Of course, it's important to first define happiness. A few months ago, T wrote a piece called "There's More to Life Than Being Happy" about a psychology study that dug into what happiness really means to people It specifically explored the difference between a meaningful life and a happy life. [E] It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. But the researchers, who looked at a large sample of people over a month-long period, found that happiness is associated with selfish "taking" behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless "giving" behavior. [F] "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and complicated relationships are avoided," the authors of the study wrote. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need." While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, told me, "Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy." [G] The new PNAS study also sheds light on the difference between meaning and happiness, but on the biological level. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, and Steve Cole, a genetics and psychiatry (精神病学) researcher at UCLA, examined the self-reported levels of happiness and meaning in 80 research subjects. [H] Happiness was defined, as in the earlier study, by feeling good. The researchers measured happiness by asking subjects questions like "How often did you feel happy?", "How often did you feel interested in life?" and "How often did you feel satisfied?" The more strongly people endorsed these measures of "hedonic (享乐主义) well-being," or pleasure, the higher they scored on happiness. [I] Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self. They measured meaning by asking questions like "How often did you feel that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to it?", "How often did you feel that you had something to contribute to society?" The more people endorsed these measures of "eudaimonic (幸福论的) well-being" — or, simply put, virtue — the more meaning they felt in life. [J] After noting the sense of meaning and happiness that each subject had, Fredrickson and Cole, with their research colleagues, looked at the ways certain genes expressed themselves in each of the participants. Like neuroscientists who use fMRI (功能磁共振成像) scanning to determine how regions in the brain respond to different stimuli, Cole and Fredrickson are interested in how the body, at the genetic level, responds to feelings of happiness and meaning. [K] Cole's past work has linked various kinds of chronic adversity to a particular gene expression pattern. When people feel lonely, are grieving the loss of a loved one, or are struggling to make ends meet, their bodies go into threat mode. This triggers the activation of a stress-related gene pattern that has two features: an increase in the activity of pro-inflammatory (促炎症的) genes and a decrease in the activity of genes involved in anti-viral responses. [L] Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is, of course, associated with major illnesses like heart disease and various cancers. [M] "Empty positive emotions" - like the kind people experience during manic (狂喜的) episodes or artificially induced euphoria (欣快) from alcohol and drugs - " are about as good for you for as adversity," says Fredrickson. [N] It's important to understand that for many people, a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap; many people score jointly high (or jointly low) on the happiness and meaning measures in the study. But for many others, there is a dissonance (不一致) — they feel that they are low on happiness and high on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness, but low in meaning. This last group, which has the gene expression pattern associated with adversity, formed a 75 percent of study participants. Only one quarter of the study participants had what the researchers call "eudaimonic predominance" — that is, their sense of meaning outpaced their feelings of happiness. [O] This is too bad given the more beneficial gene expression pattern associated with meaningfulness. People whose levels of happiness and meaning line up, and people who have a strong sense of meaning hut are not necessarily happy, showed a dc-activation of the adversity stress response. Their bodies were not preparing them for the bacterial infections that we get when we are alone or in trouble, but for the viral infections we get when surrounded by a lot of other people. [P] Fredrickson's past research, described in her two books, Positivity and Love 2.0, has mapped the benefits of positive emotions in individuals. She has found that positive emotions broaden a person's perspective and help protect people against adversity. So it was surprising to her that hedonic well-being, which is associated with