内容发布更新时间 : 2024/4/27 3:26:40星期一 下面是文章的全部内容请认真阅读。

2014年12月英语六级考试真题试卷（第3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 whether technology is indispensable in education. You should give sound arguments to support your views and write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

Part II Listening Comprehension (30 minutes)

说明：2014年12月六级真题全国共考了两套听力。本套（即第三套）的听力内容与第二套的完全一样，只是选项的顺序不一样而已，故在本套中不再重复给出。

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 Sheet2 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.

It was 10 years ago, on a warm July night, that a newborn lamb took her first breath in a small shed in Scotland. From the outside, she looked no different from thousands of other sheep born on 36 farms. But Dolly, as the world soon came to realize, was no 37 lamb. She was cloned from a single cell of an adult female sheep, 38 long-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 have been cloned since that first lamb—mice, cats, cows and, most recently, a dog—and it’s becoming 39 clear that they are all, in one way or another, defective.

It’s 40 to think of clones as perfect carbon copies of the original. It turns out, though, that there are various degrees of genetic 41 . That may come as a shock to people who have paid thousands of dollars to clone a pet cat only to discover that the baby cat looks and behaves 42 like their beloved pet—with a different- color coat of fur, perhaps, or a 43 different attitude toward its human hosts.

And these are just the obvious differences. Not only are clones 44 from the 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 making 45 copies. In fact, the process can embed small flaws in the genes of clones that scientists are only now discovering.

注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2 上作答。 A) abstract I) nothing B) completely J) ordinary C) deserted K) overturning D) duplication L) separated E) everything M) surrounding F) identical N) systematically G) increasingly O) tempting H) miniature 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.

High School Sports Aren’t Killing Academics

A) In this month’s Atlantic cover article, “The Case Against High-School Sports,” Amanda Ripley argues that school-sponsored sports programs should be seriously cut. She writes that, unlike most countries that outperform the United States on international assessments, American schools put too much of an emphasis on athletics. “Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else,” she writes. “Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic

debates about America’s international mediocrity (平庸) in education.”

B) American student-athletes reap many benefits from participating in sports, but the costs to the schools could outweigh their benefits, she argues. In particular, Ripley contends that sports crowd out the academic missions of schools: America should learn from South Korea and Finland and every other country at the top level of international test scores, all of whom emphasize athletics far less in school. “Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports,” she writes, citing a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics.

C) It might well be true that sports are far more rooted in American high schools than in other countries. But our reading of international test scores finds no support for the argument against school athletics. Indeed, our own research and that of others lead us to make the opposite case. School-sponsored sports appear to provide benefits that seem to increase, not detract (减少) from, academic success.

D) Ripley indulges a popular obsession (痴迷) with international test score comparisons, which show wide and frightening gaps between the United States and other countries. She ignores, however, the fact that states vary at least as much in test scores as do developed countries. A 2011 report from Harvard University shows that Massachusetts produces math scores comparable to South Korea and Finland, while Mississippi scores are closer to Trinidad and Tobago. Ripley’s thesis about sports falls apart in light of this fact. Schools in Massachusetts provide sports programs while schools in Finland do not. Schools in Mississippi may love football while in Tobago interscholastic sports are nowhere near as prominent. Sports cannot explain these similarities in performance. They can’t explain international differences either.

E) If it is true that sports undermine the academic mission of American schools, we would expect to see a negative relationship between the commitment to athletics and academic achievement. However, the University of Arkansas’s Daniel Bowen and Jay Greene actually find the opposite. They examine this relationship by analyzing schools’ sports winning percentages as well as student-athletic participation rates compared to graduation rates and standardized test score achievement over a five-year period for all public high schools in Ohio. Controlling for student poverty levels, demographics (人口统计状况), and district financial resources, both measures of a school’s commitment to athletics are significantly, positively related to lower dropout rates as well as higher test scores.

F) On-the-field success and high participation in sports is not random—it requires focus and dedication to athletics. One might think this would lead schools obsessed with winning to deemphasize academics. Bowen and Greene’s results contradict that argument. A likely explanation for this seemingly counterintuitive