2015年12月四级考试真题阅读及答案(1)

【阅读】

选词填空：

Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage.

Children do not think the way adults do. For most of the first year of life, if something is out of sight, it’s out of mind. if you cover a baby’s__36__toy with a piece of cloth, the baby thinks the toy has disappeared and stops looking for it. A 4-year-old man__37__, that a sister has more fruit juice when it is only the shapes of the glasses that differ, not the __38__ of the juice.

Yet children are smart in their own way. Like good little scientists,children are always testing their child-sized __39__ about how things work.When your child throws her spoon on the floor for the sixth time as you try to feed her, and you say, “That’s enough! I will not pick up your spoon again!”the child will__40__ test your claim. Are you serious? Are you angry? What will happen if she throws the spoon again? She is not doing this to drive you__41__;rather, she is learning
that her desires and yours can differ, and that sometimes those__42__ are important and sometimes they are not.

How and why does children’s thinking change? In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that children’s cognitive abilities unfold__43__,like the blooming of a flower, almost independent of what else is__44__ in their lives. Although many of his specific conclusions have been__45__ or modified over the years, his ideas inspired thousands of studies by investigators all over the world.

A) advocate B) amount C) confirmed

D) crazy E) definite F) differences

G) favorite H) happening I) immediately

J) naturally K) obtaining L) primarily

M) protest N) rejected O) theories

长篇阅读：

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 question by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.

The Perfect Essay

A) Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me,and my intellectual life, even when I didn’t. Her expectations were high impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.

B) When good students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page:”Flawless.” This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Of course, I had heard that genius could show itself at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I told was my mother.

C) My mother, who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset by my hubris(得意忘形) or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions(过渡), structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism.

D) Fist off, it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leaves an existential imprint(印记) on you as a person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we should never listen to these people.

E) Criticism, at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mental life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they are also the people who care enough to see you through this painful realization. For me it took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block—I was not able to produce anything for three years.

F) Franz Kafka once said:” Writing is utter solitude(独处), the

descent into the cold abyss(深渊) of oneself. “My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective (内省的) decent that writing requires you are out always pleased by what you find.” But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutoring suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “It is a thing of no great difficulty,” according to Plutarch, “to raise objections against another man’s speech, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I am sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recall them. What I remember, however, is how we took up the “extremely troublesome”work of ongoing criticism.

G) There are two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce “a better in its place.” In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques(评论). My mother was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to MarcusCicero’s claim that one should “criticize by creation, not by finding fault.”Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better on this own terms—a process that is often extremely painful, but also almost always meaningful.

H) My mother said she would help me with my writing, but fist I had myself. For each assignment, I was write the best essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any—the type I could have found on my own—I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was “flawless,” she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began.

I) She criticized me when I included little-known references and professional jargon(行话). She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures of speech. “Writers can’t bluff(虚张声势) their way through ignorance.” That was news to me—I would need to find another way to structure my daily existence.

J) She trimmed back my flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value of restraint in expression. “John,” she almost whispered. I learned in to hear her:”I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting and bluffing, and slowly my writing improved.

K) Somewhere along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I missed something important in my mother’s lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps the point of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willingly finish. Whitman repeatedly reworded “Song of Myself” between 1855 and 1891.Repeatedly. We do our absolute best wiry a piece of writing, and come as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique,however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we had achieved for the chance of being even a little bit better.

This is the lesson I took from my mother. If perfection were possible, it would not be motivating.

46. The author was advised against the improper use of figures of speech.

47. The author’s mother taught him a valuable lesson by pointing out lots of flaws in his seemingly perfect essay.

48. A writer should polish his writing repeatedly so as to get closer to perfection.

49. Writers may experience periods of time in their life when they just can’t produce anything.

50. The author was not much surprised when his school teacher marked his essay as “flawless”.

51. Criticizing someone’s speech is said to be easier than coming up
with a better one.

52. The author looks upon his mother as his most demanding and caring instructor.

53. The criticism the author received from his mother changed him as a
person.

54. The author gradually improved his writing by avoiding fact language.

55. Constructive criticism gives an author a good start to improve his
writing.

仔细阅读：

第一篇

Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?

It wouldn’t be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US either.

What does it take to make a Silicon Valley?

It’s the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.

You only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub (中心):rich people and nerds (痴迷科研的人).

Observation bears this out. Within the US, towns have become start up hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few start ups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like.

Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT,

Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley. But what did Carnegie-Mellon yield in Pittsburgh? And what happened in Ithaca, home of Cornell University,

which is also high on the list.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can answer for both. The weather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there’s
no interesting old city to make up for it, as there is in Boston. Rich
people don’t want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. So while there are
plenty of hackers (电脑迷)who could start start ups, there’s no one to invest in them.

Do you really need the rich people? Wouldn’t it work to have the government invest the nerds?No, it would not. Start up investors are a distinct type of rich people. They tend to have a lot of experience
themselves in the technology business. This helps them pick the right start ups, and means they can supply advice and connections as well as
money. And the fact that they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.

56. What do we learn about Silicon Valley from the passage?

A) Its success is hard to copy any where else.

B) It is the biggest technology hub in the US.

C) Its fame in high technology is incomparable.

D) It leads the world in information technology.

57. What makes Miami unfit to produce a Silicon Valley?

A) Lack of incentive for investments.

B) Lack of the right kind of talents.

C) Lack of government support.

D) Lack of famous universities.

58. In that way is Carnegie-Mellon different from Stanford, Berkeley and

MIT?

A) Its location is not as attractive to rich people

B) Its science department are not nearly as good

C) It does not produce computer hackers and nerds

D) It does not pay much attention to business start ups

59. What does the author imply about Boston?

A) It has pleasant weather all year round.

B) It produces wealth as well as high-tech

C) It is not likely to attract lots of investor and nerds.

D) It is an old city with many sites of historical interest.

60. What does the author say about start up investors?

A) They are especially wise in making investments.

B) They have good connections in the government.

C) They can do more than providing money.

D) They are enough to invest in nerds.

第二篇
It’s nice to have people of like mind around. Agreeable people boost
your confidence and allow you to relax and feel comfortable.
Unfortunately, that comfort can hinder the very learning that can expand your company and your career.

It’s nice to have people agree, but you need conflicting perspectives to dig out the truth. If everyone around you has similar views, your work will suffer from confirmation bias. (偏颇)

Take a look at your own network. Do you contacts share your point of view on most subjects? It yes, it’s time to shake things up. As a leader, it can be challenging to create an environment in which people will freely disagree and argue, but as the saying goes: From confrontation comes brilliance.

It’s not easy for most people to actively seek conflict. Many spend their lives trying to avoid arguments. There’s no need to go out and find people you hate, but you need to do some self-assessment to determine where you have become stale in your thinking. You may need to start by encouraging your current network to help you identify your blind spots.

Passionate, energetic debate does not require anger and hard feelings to be effective. But it does require moral strength. Once you have worthing opponents, set some ground rules so everyone understands responsibilities and boundaries. The objective of this debating game is not to win but to get to the truth that will allow you to move faster,and better.

Fierce debating can hurt feelings,particularly when strong personalities are involved. Make sure your check in with your opponents so that they are not carrying the emotion of the battles beyond the battlefield. Break the tension with smiles and humor to reinforce the idea that this is friendly discourse and that all are working toward a common goal.Reword all those involved in the debate sufficiently when the goals are reached. Let your sparring partners (拳击陪练) know how much you appreciate their contribution. The more they feel appreciated, the more they’ll be willing to get into the ring next time.

61.What happens when you have like-minded people around you all the while?

A) It will help your company expand more rapidly.

B) It will be create a harmonious working atmosphere.

C) It may prevent your business and career from advancing.

D) It may make you fell uncertain about your own decision.

62.What does the author suggest leaders do?

A) Avoid arguments with business partners.

B) Encourage people to disagree and argue.

C) Build a wide and strong business network.

D) Seek advice from their worthy competitors.

63.What is the purpose of holding a debate?

A) To find out the truth about an issue.

B) To build up people’s moral strength.

C) To remove misunderstandings.

D) To look for worthy opponents.

64.What advice does the author give to people engaged in a fierce debate?

A) They listen carefully to their opponents' views.

B) They slow due respect for each other's beliefs.

C) They present their views clearly and explicitly.

D) They take care not to hurt each other's feelings.

65.How should we treat our rivals after a successful debate?

A) Try to make peace with them.

B) Try to make up the differences.

C) Invite them to the ring next time.

D) Acknowledge their contribution.