1、2014 年年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题月大学英语六级考试真题(三三)Directions:For this part,you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay based on the picture below.You should startyour essay with a brief description of the picture and then discuss what qualities an employer should look for in jobapplicants.You should give sound
2、arguments to support your views and write at least 150 words but no more than200 words.说明：2014 年 12 月大学英语六级真题全国共考了两套听力。本套（即第三套）的听力材料与第一套完全一样，只是选项的顺序不同而已，故本套不再重复给出。Section CDirections:In this section,you will hear a passage three times.When the passage is read for the first time,you shouldlisten care
3、fully for its general idea.When the passage is read for the second time,you are required to fill in theblanks with the exact words you have just heard.Finally,when the passage is read for the third time,you shouldcheck what you have written.If youre like most people,youve indulged in fake listening
4、many times.You go to history class,sit in the thirdrow,and look squarely at the instructor as she speaks.But your mind is far away,26inthe clouds of pleasantdaydreams.Occasionally you come back to earth:The instructor writes an important term on the chalkboard,and you27copy it in your notebook.Every
5、 once in a while the instructor makes a28remark,causing others in the class tolaugh.You smile politely,pretending that youve heard the remark and found it mildly humorous.You have a vaguesense of29that you arent paying close attention,but you tell yourself that any material you miss can30from afrien
6、ds notes.Besides,the instructors talking about road31in ancient Rome,and nothing could be more boring.So back you go into your private little world.Only later do you realize youve missed important information for a test.Fake listening may be easily exposed,since many speakers32facial cues and can te
7、ll if youre merelypretending to listen.Your blank expression and the faraway look in your eyes are the cues that33your inattentiveness.Even if youre not exposed,theres another reason to avoid fakery:Its easy for this34tobecome a habit.For somepeople,the habit is so deeply rooted that they automatica
8、lly start day dreaming when a speaker begins talking onsomething35or uninteresting.As a result,they miss lots of valuable information.Part ReadingComprehension(40 minutes)Section ADirections:In this section,there is a passage with ten blanks.You are required to select one word for each blankfrom a l
9、ist of choices given in a word bank following the passage.Read the passage through carefully before makingyour choices.Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter.Please mark the corresponding letter for each item onAnswer Sheet 2 with a single line through the center.You may not use any of th
10、e words in the bank more than once.Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage.It was 10 years ago,on a warm July night,that a newborn lamb took her first breath in a small shedin Scotland.From the outside,she looked no different from thousands of other sheep born on36farms.But Dolly,as th
11、e world soon came to realize,was no 37 lamb.She was cloned from a single cell of an adult female sheep,38long-held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible.A decade later,scientists are starting to come to grips with just how different Dolly was.Dozens of animals haveb
12、een cloned since that first lamb_mice,cats,cows and,most recently,a dogand its becoming39clear that theyare all,in one way or another,defective.Its40 to think of clones as perfect carbon copies of the original.It turns out,though,that there are variousdegrees of genetic 41.That may come as a shock t
13、o people who have paid thousands of dollars to clone a pet cat onlyto discover that the baby cat looks and behaves42liketheir beloved petwith a different-color coat of fur,perhaps,or a43different attitude toward its human hosts.And these are just the obvious differences.Not only are clones44from the
14、 original template(模板)by time,but they are also the product of an unnatural molecular mechanism that turns out not to be very good at making45copies.In fact,the process can embed small flaws in the genes of clones that scientists are onlynow discovering注意：此部分试题请在答题卡 2 上作答。AabstractF.identicalKovertu
15、rningBcompletely.G.increasinglyL separatedCdesertedHminiatureM surroundingD.duplicationINothingN systematically.E.everythingJ.ordinaryO temptingSection BDirections:In this section,you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it.Each statementcontains information given in one of th
16、e 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 bymarking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.Should Single-Sex Education Be Eliminated?A）Why is a neuroscientist her
17、e debating single-sex schooling?Honestly,I had no fixed ideas on the topic when Istarted researching it for my book,Pink Brain,Blue Brain.But any discussion of gender differences in childreninevitably leads to this debate,so I felt compelled to dive into the research data on single-sex schooling.I r
18、eadevery study I could,weighed the existing evidence,and ultimately concluded that single-sex education is not theanswer to gender gaps in achievement-or the best way forward for todays young people.After my book waspublished,I met several developmental and cognitive psychologists whose work was add
19、ressing gender andeducation from different angles,and we published a peer-reviewed Education Forum piece in Science magazinewith the provocative title,The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education.B）We showed that three lines of research used to justify single-sex schooling-educational,neuroscience,and
20、socialpsychology-all fail to support its alleged benefits,and so the widely-held view that gender separation issomehow better for boys,girls,or both is nothing more than a myth.The Research on Academic Outcomes.C）First,we reviewed the extensive educational research that has compared academic outcome
21、s in students attendingsingle-sex versus coeducational schools.The overwhelming conclusion when you put this enormous literaturetogether is that there is no clear academic advantage of sitting in all-female or all-male classes,in spite of muchpopular belief to the contrary.I base this conclusion not
22、 on any individual study,but on large-scale andsystematic reviews of thousands of studies conducted in every major English-speaking country.D）Of course,therere many excellent single-sex schools out there,but as these careful research reviews havedemonstrated,its not their single-sex composition that
23、 makes them excellent.Its all the other advantages thatare typically packed into such schools,such as financial resources,quality of the faculty,and pro-academicculture,along with the family background and pre-selected ability of the students themselves that determinetheir outcomes.E）A case in point
24、 is the study by Linda Sax at UCLA,who used data from a large national survey of collegefreshmen to evaluate the effect of single-sex versus coeducational high schools.Commissioned by the NationalCoalition of Girls Schools,the raw findings look pretty good for the funders-higher SAT scores and a str
25、ongeracademic orientation among women who had attended all girls high schools(men werent studied).However,once the researchers controlled for both student and school attributes-measures such as family income,parentseducation,and school resources-most of these effects were erased or diminished.F）When
26、 it comes to boys in particular,the data show that single-sex education is distinctly unhelpful for them.Among the minority of studies that have reported advantages of single-sex schooling,virtually all of them werestudies of girls.Therere no rigorous studies in the United States that find single-se
27、xschooling is better for boys,and in fact,a separate line of research by economists has shown both boys and girls exhibit greater cognitivegrowth over the school year based on the dose of girls in a classroom.In fact,boys benefit even more thangirls from having larger numbers of female classmates.So
28、 single-sex schooling is really not the answer to thecurrent boy crisis in education.Brain and Cognitive DevelopmentG）The second line of research often used to justify single-sex education falls squarely within my area of expertise:brain and cognitive development.Its been more than a decade now sinc
29、e the brain sex movement beganinfiltrating(渗入)our schools,and there are literally hundreds of schools caught up in the fad(新潮).Publicschools in Wisconsin,Indiana,Florida and many other states now proudly declare on their websites that theyseparate boys and girls because research solidly indicates th
30、at boys and girls learn differently,due tohard-wired differences in their brains,eyes,ears,autonomic nervous systems,and more.H）All of these statements can be traced to just a few would-be neuroscientists,especially physician Leonard Sax andtherapist Michael Gurian.Each gives lectures,runs conferenc
31、es,and does a lot of professional development onso-called gender-specific learning.analyzed their various claims about sex difference sin hearing,vision,language,math,stress responses,and learning styles in my book and a long peer-reviewed paper.Otherneuroscientists and psychologists have similarly
32、exposed their work.In short,the mechanisms by which ourbrains learn language,math,physics,and every other subject dont differ between boys and girls.Of course,learning does vary a lot between individual students,but research reliably shows that this variance is far greaterwithin populations of boys
33、or girls than between the two sexes.I）The equal protection clause of the US Constitution prohibits separation of students by sex in public education thatsbased on precisely this kind of over broad generalizations about the different talents,capacities,or preferencesof males and females.And the reaso
34、n it is prohibited is because it leads far too easily to stereotyping and sexdiscrimination.Social Developmental PsychologyJ）That brings me to the third area of research which fails to support single-sex schooling and indeedsuggests the practice is actually harmful:social developmental psychology.K）
35、Its a well-proven finding in social psychology that segregation promotes stereotyping and prejudice,whereas intergroup contact reduces them-and the results are the same whether you divide groups by race,age,gender,bodymass index,sexual orientation,or any other category.Whats more,children are especi
36、ally vulnerable to thiskind of bias,because they are dependent on adults for learning which social categories are important and whywe divide people into different groups.L）You dont have to look far to find evidence of stereotyping and sex discrimination in single-sex schools.There wasthe failed sing
37、le-sex experiment in California,where six school districts used generous state grants to set upseparate boys and girls academics in the late 1990s.Once boys and girls were segregated,teachers resorted totraditional gender stereotypes to run their classes,and within just three years,five of the six d
38、istricts had goneback to coeducation.M）At the same time,researchers are increasingly discovering benefits of gender interaction in youth.A large Britishstudy found that children with other-sex older siblings(兄弟姐妹)exhibit less stereotypical play than childrenwith same-sex older siblings,such as girls
39、 who like sports and building toys and boys who like art and dramaticplay.Another study of high school social networks found less bullying and aggression the higher the density ofmixed-sex friendships within a given adolescent network.Then there is the finding we cited in our Science paperof higher
40、divorce and depression rates among a large group of British men who attended single-sex schools asteenagers,which might be explained by the lack of opportunity to learn about relationships during theirformative years.N）Whether in nursery school,high school,or the business world,gender segregation na
41、rrows our perceptions of eachother,facilitating stereotyping and sexist attitudes.Its very simple:the more we structure children andadolescents environment around gender distinctions and separation,the more they will use these categories asthe primary basis for understanding themselves and others.O）
42、Gender is an important issue in education.There are gaps in reading,writing,and science achievement that shouldbe narrower.There are gaps in career choice that should be narrower-if we really want to maximize humanpotential and American economic growth.But stereotyping boys and girls them in the nam
43、e of fictitious(虚拟的)brain differences is never going to close these gaps.注意：此部分试题请在答题卡 2 上作答。46.Hundreds of schools separate boys from girls in class on the alleged brain and cognitive differences.47.Areview of extensive educational research shows no obvious academic advantage of single-sex schoolin
44、g.48.The author did not have any fixed ideas on single-sex education when she began her research on the subject.49.Research found men who attended single-sex schools in their teens were more likely to suffer from depression.50.Studies in social psychology have shown segregation in school education h
45、as a negative impact on children.51.Reviews of research indicate there are more differences in brain and cognitive development within thesame sexthan between different sexes.52.The findings of the national survey of college freshmen about the impact of single-sex schooling fail to take intoaccount s
46、tudent and school attributes.53.It wasnt long before most of the school districts that experimented with single-sex education abandoned thepractice.54.Boys from coeducational classes demonstrate greater cognitive abilities according to the economists research.55.As careful research reviews show,acad
47、emic excellence in some single-sex schools is attributed to other factorsthan single-sex education.Section CDirections:There are 2 passages in this section.Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinishedstatements.For each of them there are four choices marked A,B,C,and D.You should decide
48、on the best choice andmark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the center.Passage OneQuestions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.International governments inaction concerning sustainable development is clearly worrying but the proactive(主动出击的)approaches of
49、 some leading-edge companies are encouraging.Toyota,Wal-Mart,DuPont,M&S andGeneral Electric have made tackling environmental wastes a key economic driver.DuPont committed itself to a 65%reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the 10 years prior to 2010.By 2007,DuPont was saving$2.2 billion a year t
50、hrough energy efficiency,the same as its total declared profits that year.General Electric aims to reduce the energy intensity of its operations by 50%by 2015.They have invested heavily inprojects designed to change the way of using and conserving energy.Companies like Toyota and Wal-Mart are not co
