新东方：2014年12月英语六级考试真题答案
2014年12月大学英语六级考试真题
Part I Writing(30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay on the following question. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.
【题目一】应聘者为硕士文凭，招聘者说：“简历不错，但是别人都是博士文凭”。
【范文一】
As is vividly illustrated in the picture above, in the middle of the picture stands an employer, saying sorry to an applicant because his master’s degree can not compare with other applicants’ Doctorate degree.
Unfortunately, it is a fact that a majority of companies over-focus on study, ignoring employees’ practical skills of solving issues, which has negative influence on graduate students. For one thing, the job market will be worse than ever and an increasing number of graduate students will wait for employment. For another, students may turn their blind eyes to practice, losing the basic ability to cope with problems.
In order to address this social problem, two effective measures should be taken. First, a series of policies as to fair employment should be drawn up to guarantee every graduate student has equal opportunity. Second, it would be more beneficial if students keep a balance between study and practical skills, which will improve their competitiveness in job-hunting.
【题目二】
【范文二】
As is vividly shown in the picture above, in the front of the class stand a boy and his teacher. When the teacher asks the boy a question written on the blackboard, the boy wants to seek tech support rather than working it out by himself. Simple as the drawing is, the meaning is as deep as an ocean.
Unfortunately, it is a fact that a majority of students over depend on technology. There is no denying that technology is one of the most efficient media for students to gain information that they cannot learn form books, which expands students’ horizons and enriches their thoughts. However, overuse of technology has negative influences. First, with the advent of information age and the upgrade of functions, an increasing number of children are obsessed with those entertainments, which can easily attract their attention and deprive their ability to think by themselves.
As one of youngsters, I think as long as we can take advantages of hi-tech reasonably, our learning process will be highly beneficial. In addition, students themselves should keep it in mind that independent thinking comes first while tech support just offers assistance.
Part II Listening Comprehension(30 minutes)
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.
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 get 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 out 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 formalized. 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 otherwise exist.
Dividing subjects into science, maths, English ,etc. is something we do for 42. In the end it’s all learning, but many children today43 themselves from a scientific education. They think science is for scientists, not for them.
Of course we need to specialize44. Each of us has only so much time on Earth, so we can’t study everything. At 5 years old, our field of knowledge and45 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 corner within science.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
A)A)accidentally
B)acquiring
C)assumptions
D)convenience
E)eventually
F)exclude
G)exertion
H)exploration
I)formulas
J)ignite
K)impart
L)inquiring
M)passion
N)provoking
O)unfortunately
【答案】
36. L37. O 38. C 39. M 40. B 41. K42. D 43. F 44. E 45. H
Section B
?Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statementsattached 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.
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 For All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners.
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 a meta-analysis (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.”
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.
Of course, it’s important to first define happiness. A few months ago, I 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.
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.
"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 difficult or taxing entanglements 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.”
The new PNAS study also sheds light on the difference between meaning and happiness, but on the biological level. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher who specializes in positive emotions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Steve Cole, a genetics and psychiatric researcher at UCLA, examined the self-reported levels of happiness and meaning in 80 research subjects.
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 well-being,” or pleasure, the higher they scored on happiness.
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?”, and “How often did you feel that you belonged to a community/social group?” The more people endorsed these measures of “eudaimonic well-being” - or, simply put, virtue - the more meaning they felt in life.
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 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.
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 proinflammatory genes and a decrease in the activity of genes involved in anti-viral responses.
Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives - proverbially, simply here for the party - 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.
“Empty positive emotions” - like the kind people experience during manic episodes or artificially induced euphoria from alcohol and drugs - ”are about as good for you for as adversity,” says Fredrickson.
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 - 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 whopping 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.
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 but are not necessarily happy, showed a deactivation 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.
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 buffers people against adversity. So it was surprising to her that hedonistic well-being, which is associated with positive emotions and pleasure, did so badly in this study compared with eudaimonic well-being.
“It’s not the amount of hedonic happiness that’s a problem,” Fredrickson tells me, “It’s that it’s not matched by eudaimonic well-being. It’s great when both are in step. But if you have more hedonic well-being than would be expected, that’s when this pattern that’s akin to adversity emerged.”
The terms hedonism and eudemonism bring to mind the great philosophical debate, which has shaped Western civilization for over 2,000 years, about the nature of the good life. Does happiness lie in feeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the virtue ethicists, think? From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Jung’s wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.
46. The author’s recent article examined how a meaningful life is different from a happy life.
47. It should be noted that many people feel their life is both happy and meaningful.
48. According to one survey, there is a close relationship between hedonic well-being measures and high scores on happy.
49.According to one of the authors of a new study, what makes life meaningful may not make people happy.
50.Experiments were carried out to determine our body’s genetic expression of feelings of happiness and meaning.
51. A new study claims happiness may not contribute to health.
52. According to researchers, taking makes for happiness while giving adds meaning to life.
53. Evidence from research shows that it takes meaning for people to thrive.
54. With regard to gene expression patterns, happy people with little or no sense of meaning in life are found to be similar to those suffering from chronic adversity.
55. Most books on happiness today assert that happiness is beneficial to health.
【答案】
46.D47.N48.H49.F50.J51.C52.E53.R54.L55.B
Section C
?Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some
questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
Passage 1
Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with “In Search of Excellence”. It has been kept going ever since by a succession of gurus and would-be gurus who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three (or five or seven) simple rules.
“The Three Rules” is a self-conscious contribution to this type; it even includes a bibliography of “success studies”. Messrs Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success genre. They insist that their conclusions are “measurable and actionable”-guide to behavior rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional business-people stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on “calculating the elements of advantage” and “detailed analysis”.
The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 “exceptional companies”, only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉) led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.
Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and ever-changing. But exceptional companies approach these trade-offs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.
Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is “the halo (光环) effect”, whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche (缝隙市场) and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.
What kind of business books are most likely to sell well?
Books on excellence.C) Books on business rules.
Guides to management. D) Analyses of market trends.
What does the author imply about books on success so far?
They help businessmen on way or another.
They are written by well-recognised experts.
They more or less fall into the same stereotype.
They are based on analyses of corporate leaders.
How does The Three Rules different from other success books according to the passage?
It focuses on the behavior of exceptional businessmen.
It bases its detailed analysis on large amount of data.
It offers practicable advice to businessmen.
It draws conclusion from vivid examples.
What does the passage say contributes to the success of exceptional companies?
Focus on quality and revenue.
Management and sales promotion.
Lower production costs and competitive prices.
Emphasis on after-sale service and maintenance.
What is the author’s comment on The Three Rules?
It can help to locate profitable niches.
B) It has little to offer to businesspeople.
C) It is noted for its detailed data analysis.
D) It fails to identify the keys to success.
【答案】
56. A57. C58. D59. A60. B
Passage 2
Until recently, the University of Kent prided itself on its friendly image. Not any more. Over the past few months it has been working hard, with the help of media consultants, to downplay its cosy reputation in favour of something more academic and serious.
Kent is not alone in considering an image revamp. Changes to next year's funding regime are both forcing universities to justify charging students up to ?9,000 in fees.
Nowadays, universities putting much more of a focus on their brands and what their value propositions are. While in the past universities have often focused on student social life and attractions of the university town in recruitment campaigns, they are now concentrating on more tangible attractions, such as employment prospects, engagement with industry, and lecturer contact hours, making clear exactly what students are going to get for their money.
The problem for universities is that if those benefits fail to materialise, students notice. That worries Rob Behrens, chief executive of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), which deals with student complaints. "Universities need to be extremely careful that … they describe the reality of what's going to happen to students," he says. "Because competition is going to get greater for attracting students, there is a danger that universities will go the extra mile."
One university told prospective engineering students they would be able to design a car and race it at Brands Hatch, which never happened, he says. "If universities spent as much money on handling complaints and appeals appropriately as they spend on marketing, they would do better at keeping students, and in the National Student Survey returns," he says.
Ongoing research by Heist tracking prospective 2012 students suggests that they are not only becoming more sophisticated in thinking about what they want from a university, but are also spending more time researching evidence to back up institutional claims.
Hence the growing importance of the student survey and league tables. From next September, all institutions will also be expected to publish on their websites key information sets, allowing easier comparison between institutions - and between promises and reality - of student satisfaction levels, course information, and the types of jobs and salaries graduates go on to.
As a result, it is hardly surprising that universities are beginning to change the way they market themselves. While the best form of marketing for institutions is to be good at what they do, they also need to be clear about how they are different from others.
And it is vital that once an institution claims to be particularly good at something, it must live up to it. The moment you position yourself, you become exposed because you have played your joker, and if you fail in that you are in trouble.
61. What was the University of Kent famous for?
A. Its comfortable campus life.
B. Its up-to-date course offerings.
C. Its distinguished teaching staff.
D. Its diverse academic programs.
62. What are universities trying to do to attract students?
A. Improve their learning environment.
B. Upgrade their campus facilities.
C. Offer more scholarships to the gifted.
D. Present a better academic image.
63. What does Rob Behrens suggest universities do in marketing themselves?
A. Publicise the achievements of their graduates.
B. Go to extra lengths to cater to students’ needs.
C. Refrain from making promises they cannot honour.
D. Survey the expectations of their prospective students.
64. What is students’ chief consideration in choosing a university?
A. Whether it promises the best job prospects.
B. Whether it is able to deliver what they want.
C. Whether is ranks high among similar institutions.
D. Whether is offers opportunities for practical training.
65. What must universities show to win recruitment campaigns?
A. They are positioned to meet the future needs of society.
B. They are responsible to students for their growth.
C. They are ever ready to improve themselves.
D. They are unique one way or another.
【答案】61. A.62. D63. C64. B 65. D
Part IV Translation (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English.
翻译一：
自从1978年启动改革以来，中国已从计划经济转为以市场为基础的经济，经历了经济和社会的快速发展。平均10%的GDP增长已使五亿多人脱贫。联合国的“千年（millennium）发展目标”在中国均已达到或即将达到。目前，中国的第十二个五年规划强调发展服务业和解决环境及社会不平衡的问题。政府已设定目标减少污染，提高能源效率，改善得到教育和医保的机会，并扩大社会保障。中国现在7%的经济年增长目标表明政府是在重视生活质量而不是增长速度。
【参考答案】
China has been through an economic transformation from planned economy to market-oriented economy since the beginning of the reform in 1978, experiencing rapid developments in both economy and society. The average increasing rate of GDP is about 10%, which helps more than 5000 million people to get rid of poverty. And the “millennium developing targets” brought up by the UK have been reached or will be fulfilled quickly in China. For now, to develop the service industry and to solve the imbalance between environment and society have become the main issues of the twelfth five-year-plan in China. The government has set goals to reduce pollution, increased the efficiency in using energy, and offered more opportunities for people to get access to education and health care and improve the social insurance. The targeted average economic growing rate is at about 7% annually, which indicates that China has paid main attention to the quality of people’s life, rather than merely the increasing rate of the economy.
翻译二:
反应在艺术和文学中的乡村生活理想是中国文明的重要特征。这在很大程度上归功于道家对自然的感情。传统中国画有两个最受青睐的主题，一是家庭生活的各种幸福场景，画中往往有老人在下棋饮茶，男人在耕耘收割，妇女在织布缝衣，小孩在户外玩耍。另一个则是乡村生活的种种乐趣，画有渔夫在湖上打渔，农夫在山上砍柴采药，或是书生坐在松树下吟诗作画。这两个主题可以分别代表儒家和道家的生活理想。
【参考答案】
The ideal rural life illustrated in art and literature is a significant feature of Chinese civilization, which can be mainly attributed to the emotions for nature conveyed by Taoism. There are two popular themes for traditional Chinese paintings. One is about the happy scenes of family life, with the elder playing chess and drinking tea, men working hard on the farm, women weaving, making clothes and children playing outdoors. The other one is about various pleasures in country life, which involves scenes like fishers fishing on the lake, farmers cutting woods and collecting herbs on the mountains and scholars writing poems and painting under the pine trees. And the two themes above respectively represent the ideal of life of Confucianism and Taoism.
翻译三：
中国将努力确保到2015年就业者接受过平均13.3年的教育。如果这一目标得以实现，今后大部分进入劳动力市场的人都需获得大学文凭。在未来几年，中国将着力增加职业学院的招生人数：除了关注高等教育外，还将寻找新的突破以确保教育制度更加公平。中国正在努力最佳地利用教育资源，这样农村和欠发达地区将获得更多的支持。
【参考答案】
China will endeavor to ensure every employee to have average 13.3 years of education. If the goal is achieved, a majority of people entering the labor market will be having Bachelor’s degree. In the next few years, China will increase the number of people in vocational college. Except focusing on the higher education, the government will find a breakthrough point to ensure the justice of education. China is trying to optimize education resources and, accordingly, the countryside as well as the less developed areas will receive more support. In addition, the education ministry decides to improve the nutrition of students in less developed areas and provides equal opportunities for the children of workers from out of town to receive education in the city.
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