2013年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案（第一套）

　　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.

　　It’s difficult to estimate the number of youngsters involved in home schooling, where children are not sent to school and receive their formal education from one or both parents. (26) _________ and court decisions have made it legally possible in most states for parents to educate their children at home, and each year more people take advantage of that opportunity. Some states require parents or a home tutor to meet teacher certification standards, and many require parents to complete legal forms to verify that their children are receiving (27)_________ in state-approved curricula.

　　Supporters of home education claim that it’s less expensive and far more (28)_________ than mass public education. Moreover, they cite several advantages: alleviation of school overcrowding, strengthened family relationships, lower (29)_________ rates, the fact that students are allowed to learn at their own rate, increased (30)_________, higher standardized test scores, and reduced (31)_________ problems.

　　Critics of the home schooling movement (32)_________ that it creates as many problems as it solves. They acknowledge that, in a few cases, home schooling offers educational opportunities superior to those found in most public schools, but few parents can provide such educational advantages. Some parents who withdraw their children from the schools (33)_________ home schooling have an inadequate educational background and insufficient formal training to provide a satisfactory education for their children. Typically, parents have fewer technological resources (34)_________ than do schools. However, the relatively inexpensive computer technology that is readily available today is causing some to challenge the notion that home schooling is in any way (35)_________ more highly structured classroom education.

　　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.

　　Quite often, educators tell families of children who are learning English as a second language to speak only English, and not their native language, at home. Although these educators may have good ___36___, their advice to families is misguided, and it ___37___ from misunderstandings about the process of language acquisition. Educators may fear that children hearing two languages will become ___38___ confused and thus their language development will be ___39___; this concern is not documented in the literature. Children are capable of learning more than one language, whether ___40___ or sequentially (依次地). In fact, most children outside of the United States are expected to become bilingual or even, in many cases, multilingual. Globally, knowing more than one language is viewed as an ___41___ and even a necessity in many areas.

　　It is also of concern that the misguided advice that students should speak only English is given primarily to poor families with limited educational opportunities, not to wealthier families who have many educational advantages. Since children from poor families often are___42___ as at-risk for academic failure, teachers believe that advising families to speak English only is appropriate. Teachers consider learning two languages to be too ___43___ for children from poor families, believing that the children are already burdened by their home situations.

　　If families do not know English or have limited English skills themselves, how can they communicate in English? Advising non-English-speaking families to speak only English is ___44___ to telling them not to communicate with or interact with their children. Moreover, the ___45___ message is that the family’s native language is not important or valued.

　　A) asset I) permanently

　　B) delayed J) prevalent

　　C) deviates K) simultaneously

　　D) equivalent L) stems

　　E) identified M) successively

　　F) intentions N) underlying

　　G) object O) visualizing

　　H) overwhelming

　　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 Uses of Difficulty

　　The brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.

　　A) Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist:“ease of use”. When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.

　　B) It’s an odd thought. Why would anyone made their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends. In 1966, soon after the Beatles had finished work on “Rubber Soul”, Paul McCartney looked into the possibility of going to America to record their next album. The equipment in American studios was more advanced than anything in Britain, which had led the Beatles’ great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album, “Aftermath”, in Los Angeles. McCartney found that EMI’s(百代唱片) contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow suit, and the Beatles had to make do with the primitive technology of Abbey Road.

　　C) Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their creativity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “A Day in the Life”featured revolutionary sound effects that dazzled and mystified Martin’s American counterparts.

　　D) Sometimes it’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition for British schoolchildren. During the 1980s he noticed an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also“strangely boring”. After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way into British homes.

　　E) You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage. But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review Hughes speculated that when a person puts pen to paper, “you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it, when you couldn’t write at all”. As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed, psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble (不着边际的长篇大论).

　　F) Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.

　　G) As a poet, Ted Hughes had an acute sensitivity to the way in which constraints on self-expression, like the disciplines of metre and rhyme (韵律), spur creative thought. What applies to poets and musicians also applies to our daily lives. We tend to equate (等同) happiness with freedom, but, as the psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips has observed, without obstacles to our desires it’s harder to know what we want, or where we’re heading. He tells the story of a patient, a first-time mother who complained that her young son was always clinging to her, wrapping himself around her legs wherever she went. She never had a moment to herself, she said, because her son was “always in the way”. When Phillips asked her where she would go if he wasn’t in the way, she replied cheerfully, “Oh, I wouldn’t know where I was!”

　　H) Take another common obstacle: lack of money. People often assume that more money will make them happier. But economists who study the relationship between money and happiness have consistently found that, above a certain income, the two do not reliably correlate. Despite the ease with which the rich can acquire almost anything they desire, they are just as likely to be unhappy as the middle classes. In this regard at least, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.

　　I) Indeed, ease of acquisition is the problem. The novelist Edward St Aubyn has a narrator remark of the very rich that, “not having to consider affordability, their desires rambled on like unstoppable bores, relentless (持续不断的) and whimsical (反覆无常的) at the same time.” When Boston College, a private research university, wanted a better feel for its potential donors, it asked the psychologist Robert Kenny to investigate the mindset of the super-rich. He surveyed 165 households, most of which had a net worth of $25m or more. He found that many of his subjects were confused by the infinite options their money presented them with. They found it hard to know what to want, creating a kind of existential bafflement. One of them put it like this: “You know, Bob, you can just buy so much stuff, and when you get to the point where you can just buy so much stuff, now what are you going to do?”

　　J) The internet makes information billionaires out of all of us, and the architects of our online experiences are catching on to the need to make things creatively difficult. Twitter’s huge success is rooted in the simple but profound insight that in a medium with infinite space for self-expression, the most interesting thing we can do is restrict ourselves to 140 characters. The music service This Is My Jam helps people navigate the tens of millions of tracks now available instantly via Spotify and iTunes. Users pick their favourite song of the week to share with others. They only get to choose one. The service was only launched this year, but by the end of September 650,000 jams had been chosen. Its co-founder Matt Ogle explains its raison d’être (存在的理由) like this: “In an age of endless choice, we were missing a way to say: ‘This. This is the one you should listen to’.”

　　K) Today’s world offers more opportunity than ever to follow the advice of the Walker Brothers and make it easy on ourselves. Compared with a hundred years ago, our lives are less tightly bound by social norms and physical constraints. Technology has cut out much of life’s donkeywork, and we have more freedoms than ever: we can wear what we like and communicate with hundreds of friends at once at the click of a mouse. Obstacles are everywhere disappearing. Few of us wish to turn the clock back, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves how useful the right obstacles can be. Sometimes, the best route to fulfillment is the path of more resistance.

　　46. The rigorous requirements placed on the writing of poetry stimulate the poet’s creativity.

　　47. With creativity, even old-fashioned instruments may produce spectacular sound effects.

　　48. More money does not necessarily bring greater happiness.

　　49. It is a false assumption that lessons should be made easier to learn.

　　50. Obstacles deliberately placed in the creation of music contribute to its success.

　　51. Those who enjoy total freedom may not find themselves happy.

　　52. Ted Hughes discovered many long poems submitted for poetry competition were composed on computers.

　　53. Maybe we need to bear in mind that the right obstacles help lead us to greater achievements.

　　54. An investigation found that many of the super-rich were baffled by the infinite choices their money made available.

　　55. One free social networking website turned out to be successful because it limited each posting to one hundred and forty characters.

　　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.