2009年12月大学
英语
关于好奇心的名言警句英语高中英语词汇下载高中英语词汇 下载英语衡水体下载小学英语关于形容词和副词的题
六级考试真
题
快递公司问题件快递公司问题件货款处理关于圆的周长面积重点题型关于解方程组的题及答案关于南海问题
及
答案
八年级地理上册填图题岩土工程勘察试题省略号的作用及举例应急救援安全知识车间5s试题及答案
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2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Part ? Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.
1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班
2. 对这种做法有人
表
关于同志近三年现实表现材料材料类招标技术评分表图表与交易pdf视力表打印pdf用图表说话 pdf
示支持，也有人并不赞成
3. 我认为……
Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes?
Part ?Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked
A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
Bosses Say “Yes” to Home Work
Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.
For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier,
enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can
also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries.
While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.
Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small-and-medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.
The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.
Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.
“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business
Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this.”
One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans
in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler,” Poulton says.
Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading (伪装) as business-friendly broadband.
“Broadband is available for as little as ,15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the
hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx
Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. “Providers offering
broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support.” Such services don’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of ,30 a month.
The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.
Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities
such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners.
By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to
provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.
Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from
maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified.”
For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this
strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.
O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see
any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day.”
Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating its systems anyway, the company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company
networks and access all their usual resources.
Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save fee-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.
That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops,” he adds.
The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon.
Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management
over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the company’s
consultants over broadband internet connections.
It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home
working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old,” says
Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ,16,000 a year on rent,
plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.”
1. What is the main topic of this passage?
A) How business managers view hi-tech.
B) Relations between employers and employees.
C) How to cut down the costs of small businesses.
D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking.
2. From the research conducted by the communications provider Inter-Tel, we learn that .
A) more employees work to full capacity at home
B) employees show a growing interest in small businesses
C) more businesses have adopted remote working solutions
D) attitudes toward IT technology have changed
3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to Andy Poulton?
A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.
B) Improved reliability of internet service.
C) Availability of the VoIP service.
D) Access to broadband everywhere.
4. What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services?
A) They look for reliable business-only providers.
B) They contact providers located nearest to them.
C) They carefully examine the contract.
D) They contract the cheapest provider.
5. Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote working by __________.
A) offering sophisticated voice services
B) giving access to emailing in real time
C) helping clients discuss business at home
D) providing calls completely free of charge
6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to __________.
A) present a positive image to prospective customers
B) support its employees with children to take care of
C) attract young people with IT expertise to work for it
D) reduce operational expenses of a second office
7. According to marketing director Jack O’Hern, teleworking enabled the company to
__________.
A) enhance its market image
B) reduce recruitment costs
C) keep highly qualified staff
D) minimise its office space
8. Wright Vigar’s practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only benefits the
company but helps improve employees’ .
With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be __________ while traveling. 9.
10. Single mother Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to __________.
Part ? Listening Comprehension (35 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A), B), C) and D), and decide which is the best answer. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
11. A) They would rather travel around than stay at home.
B) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad.
C) They usually carry many things around with them.
D) They don’t like to spend much money on traveling.
12. A) The selection process was a little unfair.
B) He had long dreamed of the dean’s position.
C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process.
D) Rod was in charge of the admissions office.
13. A) Applause encourages the singer.
B) She regrets paying for the concert.
C) Almost everyone loves pop music.
D) The concert is very impressive.
14. A) They have known each other since their schooldays.
B) They were both chairpersons of the Students’ Union.
C) They have been in close touch by email.
D) They are going to hold a reunion party.
15. A) Cook their dinner.
B) Rest for a while.
C) Get their car fixed.
D) Stop for the night.
16. A) Newly-launched products.
B) Consumer preferences.
C) Survey results.
D) Survey methods.
17. A) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse.
B) The woman needs blouses in the colors of a rainbow.
C) The information in the catalog is not always reliable.
D) He thinks the blue blouse is better than the red one.
18. A) The course is open to all next semester.
B) The notice may not be reliable.
C) The woman has not told the truth.
D) He will drop his course in marketing.
Questions 19 to 22 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
19. A) A director of a sales department.
B) A manager at a computer store.
C) A sales clerk at a shopping center.
D) An accountant of a computer firm.
20. A) Handling customer complaints.
B) Recruiting and training new staff.
C) Dispatching ordered goods on time.
D) Developing computer programs.
21. A) She likes something more challenging.
B) She likes to be nearer to her parents.
C) She wants to have a better-paid job.
D) She wants to be with her husband.
22. A) Right away.
B) In two months.
C) Early next month.
D) In a couple of days.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
23. A) It will face challenges unprecedented in its history.
B) It is a resolute advocate of the anti-global movement.
C) It is bound to regain its full glory of a hundred years ago.
D) It will be a major economic power by the mid-21st century.
24. A) The lack of overall urban planning.
B) The huge gap between the haves and have-nots.
C) The inadequate supply of water and electricity.
D) The shortage of hi-tech personnel.
25. A) They attach great importance to education.
B) They are able to grasp growth opportunities.
C) They are good at learning from other nations.
D) They have made use of advanced technologies.
Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will
hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear
a question,
you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark
the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
Passage One
Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. A) She taught chemistry and microbiology courses in a college.
B) She gave lectures on how to become a public speaker.
C) She helped families move away from industrial polluters.
D) She engaged in field research on environmental pollution.
27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings.
B) The job posed a potential threat to her health.
C) She found the working conditions frustrating.
D) She was offered a better job in a minority community.
28. A) Some giant industrial polluters have gone out of business.
B) More environmental organizations have appeared.
C) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up.
D) More branches of her company have been set up.
29. A) Her widespread influence among members of Congress.
B) Her ability to communicate through public speaking.
C) Her rigorous training in delivering eloquent speeches.
D) Her lifelong commitment to domestic and global issues.
Passage Two
Questions 30 to 32 are based on the passage you have just heard.
30. A) The fierce competition in the market.
B) The growing necessity of staff training.
C) The accelerated pace of globalisation.
D) The urgent need of a diverse workforce.
31. A) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture.
B) Take courses of foreign languages and cultures.
C) Share the experiences of people from other cultures.
D) Participate in international exchange programmes.
32. A) Reflective thinking is becoming critical.
B) Labor market is getting globalised.
C) Knowing a foreign language is essential.
D) Globalisation will eliminate many jobs.
Passage Three
Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
33. A) Red-haired women were regarded as more reliable.
B) Brown-haired women were rated as more capable.
C) Golden-haired women were considered attractive.
D) Black-haired women were judged to be intelligent.
34. A) They are smart and eloquent.
B) They are ambitious and arrogant.
C) They are shrewd and dishonest.
D) They are wealthy and industrious.
35. A) They force people to follow the cultural mainstream.
B) They exaggerate the roles of certain groups of people.
C) They emphasize diversity at the expense of uniformity.
D) They hinder our perception of individual differences.
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 numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.
The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called mnemonics. The name is 36 from their Goddess of memory “Mnemosyne”. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an 37 asset, particularly in public life. There were no 38 devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators(演说
家) delivered long speeches with great 39 because they learned the speeches using mnemonic systems.
The Greeks discovered that human memory is 40 an associative process—that it works by
linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The 41 your brain registers the word “apple”, it 42 the shape, color, taste, smell and 43 of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word “apple”.
44. An example could be when you think about a lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you’re talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory.
45. An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not. What about Italy, though? 46. You made an association with something already known, the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape could not be
forgotten once you had made the association.
Part? Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he
takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can
divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.
Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.
To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when
people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.
Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to
take calls.
47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered dangerous because it
seriously distracts .
48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of moving tasks
which were considered .
49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call
took to react than those who were not.
50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if they are required to
do .
51. The author believes persuasion, rather than , might be the only way to stop people from using
mobile phones while driving.
Section B
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 One
Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得
意的)green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public
high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium
and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子)and
various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health
and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to
keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly
threatening world. It raises the question of what, in
our time, “safe” could even mean.
“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a
nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also
means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the
dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid
my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still
haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.
52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal?
A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley.
B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings.
C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor.
D) Parents in Berkeley are over-sensitive to cancer risks their kids face.
53. What response did USA Today’s report draw?
A) A heated debate.
B) Popular support.
C) Widespread panic.
D) Strong criticism.
54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ studies?
A) They felt very much relieved.
B) They were frightened by the evidence.
C) They didn’t know who to believe.
D) They weren’t convinced of the results.
55. What is the view of the 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics?
A) It is important to quantify various concrete hazards.
B) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children.
C) Parents should be aware of children’s health hazards.
D) Attention should be paid to toxic chemical exposure.
56. Of the dangers in everyday life, the author thinks that people have most to fear from __________.
A) the uncertain
B) the quantifiable
C) an earthquake
D) unhealthy food
Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
Crippling health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.
Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician.
A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The
startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary
care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more
physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors.
How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans
heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to
indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.
Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.
Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.
How do we fix this problem?
It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳地)
managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.
We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.
Who will be there to treat them?
57. The author’s chief concern about the current U.S. health care system is __________.
A) the inadequate training of physicians
B) the declining number of doctors
C) the shrinking primary care resources
D) the ever-rising health care costs
58. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that __________.
A) the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure
B) seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors
C) visiting doctors on a regular basis ensures good health
D) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
59. Faced with the government threats to cut reimbursements indiscriminately, primary care
physicians have to __________ .
A) increase their income by working overtime
B) improve their expertise and service
C) make various deals with specialists
D) see more patients at the expense of quality
60. Why do many new medical graduates refuse to choose primary care as their career?
A) They find the need for primary care declining.
B) The current system works against primary care.
C) Primary care physicians command less respect.
D) They think working in emergency rooms tedious.
61. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care?
A) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians.
B) Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases.
C) Recruit more medical students by offering them loans.
D) Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major.
Part V Cloze (5 minutes)
Directions: There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices marked
A), B), C) and D) on the right side of the paper. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today
named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain Tidy called on fast-food companies to do more to tackle customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons (盒子)
in the streets.
Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy,
62 its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first 62. A) elevating
C) launching B) convening D) projecting
B) signs time it had investigated which 63 made up “littered 63. A) signals
C) commercials D) brands England” and the same names appeared again and again.
64. A) condemn “We 64 litterers for dropping this fast food litter C) uncover
65 the first place but also believe the results have 65. A) around
C) in B) refute D) disregard B) toward D) off
B) career
D) vocation
B) discourage
D) retreat pertinent (相关的) messages for the fast food 66. 66. A) industry C) profession Mc-Donald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway need to do more to 67. A) exclude 67 littering by their customers.” C) suppress
68. A) incorporating B) including He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 68 C)
comprising D) containing
placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols, but its litter 69. A) unreliable B) unrelated
C) unimportant D) unnecessary remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should
reduce 69 packaging, he added. Companies could 70. A) for
C) with
also reduce prices 70 those who stayed to eat food on 71. A) accessories
C) incentives their premises, offer money-off vouchers (代金券) or other
72. A) curious 71 for those who returned packaging and put more C) strange
bins at 72 points in local streets, not just outside their 73. A) narrator
C) mediator B) about D) to B) merits D) dividends B) mysterious D) strategic B) spokesman D)
broker
B) at risk premises. A 73 for McDonald’s said: “We do our 74. A) in season
C) off hand D) under way best. Obviously we ask all our customers to dispose of litter
responsibly.” Trials of more extensive, all-day litter patrols 75. A) responsibility B) liability
C) commission D) administration were 74 in Manchester and Birmingham. 76. A) around B) by
C) on D) above KFC said it took its 75 on litter management 77. A) divert B) minimize
“very seriously”, and would introduce a programme to C) degrade D) suspend reduce packaging
76 many products. Subway said 78. A) if
C) so
that it worked hard to 77 the impact of litter on 79. A) individual communities，78 it was “still
down to the 79 C) unique
80. A) except
customer to dispose of their litter responsibly”. Greggs said C) despite it recognised the “continuing challenge for us all”, 80 81. A) deal
C) cope
having already taken measures to help 81 the issue.
B) whether D) but B) concrete D) respective B) without D) via B) tackle D) dispose
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Part? Translation (5 minutes)
Directions: Complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in brackets. Please write your translation on Answer Sheet 2.
82. How long does a jacket like this last me? — (这要看你多长时间穿一次).
83. The theory he advanced has proved (对许多传统概念的一种挑战).
84. The manager (本可以亲自参加会议), but he was called away for some urgent
business abroad.
85. Both research and practical experience have shown that a (均衡的饮食对健康是
必不可少的).
86. Much (我感到遗憾), I was unable to finish the work on time.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Part ? Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.
1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班
2. 对这种做法有人表示支持，也有人并不赞成
3. 我认为……
Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes?
Part ?Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
Bosses Say “Yes” to Home Work
Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.
For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier,
enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can
also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
huge salaries.
While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.
Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small-and-medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that
28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.
The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.
Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.
“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business
Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this.”
One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler,” Poulton says.
Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading (伪装) as business-friendly broadband.
“Broadband is available for as little as ,15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the
hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx
Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. “Providers offering
broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support.” Such services don’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of ,30 a month.
The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.
Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners.
By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to
provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.
Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from
maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in
the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified.”
For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this
strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.
O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see
any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day.”
Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating its systems anyway, the company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company networks and access all their usual resources.
Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save fee-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.
That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops,” he adds.
The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon.
Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management
over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
accessible by all the company’s consultants over broadband internet connections.
It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home
working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old,” says
Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ,16,000 a year on rent,
plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.”
1. What is the main topic of this passage?
A) How business managers view hi-tech.
B) Relations between employers and employees.
C) How to cut down the costs of small businesses.
D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking.
2. From the research conducted by the communications provider Inter-Tel, we learn
that .
A) more employees work to full capacity at home
B) employees show a growing interest in small businesses
C) more businesses have adopted remote working solutions
D) attitudes toward IT technology have changed
3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to
Andy Poulton?
A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.
B) Improved reliability of internet service.
C) Availability of the VoIP service.
D) Access to broadband everywhere.
4. What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services?
A) They look for reliable business-only providers.
B) They contact providers located nearest to them.
C) They carefully examine the contract.
D) They contract the cheapest provider.
5. Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote working by __________.
A) offering sophisticated voice services
B) giving access to emailing in real time
C) helping clients discuss business at home
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
D) providing calls completely free of charge
6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to
__________.
A) present a positive image to prospective customers
B) support its employees with children to take care of
C) attract young people with IT expertise to work for it
D) reduce operational expenses of a second office
7. According to marketing director Jack O’Hern, teleworking enabled the company
to __________.
A) enhance its market image
B) reduce recruitment costs
C) keep highly qualified staff
D) minimise its office space
8. Wright Vigar’s practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only
benefits the company but helps improve employees’ .
9. With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be __________
while traveling.
10. Single mother Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to
__________.
Part ? Listening Comprehension (35 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the
end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the
conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause.
During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A), B), C) and D), and decide which is
the best answer. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through
the centre.
11. A) They would rather travel around than stay at home.
B) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad.
C) They usually carry many things around with them.
D) They don’t like to spend much money on traveling.
12. A) The selection process was a little unfair.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
B) He had long dreamed of the dean’s position.
C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process.
D) Rod was in charge of the admissions office.
13. A) Applause encourages the singer.
B) She regrets paying for the concert.
C) Almost everyone loves pop music.
D) The concert is very impressive.
14. A) They have known each other since their schooldays.
B) They were both chairpersons of the Students’ Union.
C) They have been in close touch by email.
D) They are going to hold a reunion party.
15. A) Cook their dinner.
B) Rest for a while.
C) Get their car fixed.
D) Stop for the night.
16. A) Newly-launched products.
B) Consumer preferences.
C) Survey results.
D) Survey methods.
17. A) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse.
B) The woman needs blouses in the colors of a rainbow.
C) The information in the catalog is not always reliable.
D) He thinks the blue blouse is better than the red one.
18. A) The course is open to all next semester.
B) The notice may not be reliable.
C) The woman has not told the truth.
D) He will drop his course in marketing.
Questions 19 to 22 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
19. A) A director of a sales department.
B) A manager at a computer store.
C) A sales clerk at a shopping center.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
D) An accountant of a computer firm.
20. A) Handling customer complaints.
B) Recruiting and training new staff.
C) Dispatching ordered goods on time.
D) Developing computer programs.
21. A) She likes something more challenging.
B) She likes to be nearer to her parents.
C) She wants to have a better-paid job.
D) She wants to be with her husband.
22. A) Right away.
B) In two months.
C) Early next month.
D) In a couple of days.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
23. A) It will face challenges unprecedented in its history.
B) It is a resolute advocate of the anti-global movement.
C) It is bound to regain its full glory of a hundred years ago.
D) It will be a major economic power by the mid-21st century.
24. A) The lack of overall urban planning.
B) The huge gap between the haves and have-nots.
C) The inadequate supply of water and electricity.
D) The shortage of hi-tech personnel.
25. A) They attach great importance to education.
B) They are able to grasp growth opportunities.
C) They are good at learning from other nations.
D) They have made use of advanced technologies.
Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will
hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear
a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D).
Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Passage One
Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. A) She taught chemistry and microbiology courses in a college.
B) She gave lectures on how to become a public speaker.
C) She helped families move away from industrial polluters.
D) She engaged in field research on environmental pollution.
27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings.
B) The job posed a potential threat to her health.
C) She found the working conditions frustrating.
D) She was offered a better job in a minority community.
28. A) Some giant industrial polluters have gone out of business.
B) More environmental organizations have appeared.
C) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up.
D) More branches of her company have been set up.
29. A) Her widespread influence among members of Congress.
B) Her ability to communicate through public speaking.
C) Her rigorous training in delivering eloquent speeches.
D) Her lifelong commitment to domestic and global issues.
Passage Two
Questions 30 to 32 are based on the passage you have just heard.
30. A) The fierce competition in the market.
B) The growing necessity of staff training.
C) The accelerated pace of globalisation.
D) The urgent need of a diverse workforce.
31. A) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture.
B) Take courses of foreign languages and cultures.
C) Share the experiences of people from other cultures.
D) Participate in international exchange programmes.
32. A) Reflective thinking is becoming critical.
B) Labor market is getting globalised.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
C) Knowing a foreign language is essential.
D) Globalisation will eliminate many jobs.
Passage Three
Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
33. A) Red-haired women were regarded as more reliable.
B) Brown-haired women were rated as more capable.
C) Golden-haired women were considered attractive.
D) Black-haired women were judged to be intelligent.
34. A) They are smart and eloquent.
B) They are ambitious and arrogant.
C) They are shrewd and dishonest.
D) They are wealthy and industrious.
35. A) They force people to follow the cultural mainstream.
B) They exaggerate the roles of certain groups of people.
C) They emphasize diversity at the expense of uniformity.
D) They hinder our perception of individual differences.
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 numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.
The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called mnemonics. The name is 36 from their Goddess of memory “Mnemosyne”. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an 37 asset,
particularly in public life. There were no 38 devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators(演说
家) delivered long speeches with great 39 because they learned the speeches using mnemonic systems.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
The Greeks discovered that human memory is 40 an associative process—that it works by
linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The 41 your brain registers the word “apple”, it 42 the shape, color, taste, smell and 43 of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word “apple”.
44. An example could be when you think about a lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you’re talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory.
45. An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not. What about Italy, though? 46. You made an association with something already known, the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape could not be
forgotten once you had made the association.
Part? Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he
takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can
divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.
Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when
people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.
Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls.
47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered
dangerous because it seriously distracts .
48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of
moving tasks which were considered .
49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a
hands-free call took to react than those who were not.
50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if
they are required to do .
51. The author believes persuasion, rather than , might be the only way to stop
people from using mobile phones while driving.
Section B
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 One
Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得
意的)green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public
high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each
day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子)and
various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health
and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to
keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly
threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.
“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also
means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the
dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid
my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still
haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.
52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal?
A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley.
B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings.
C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor.
D) Parents in Berkeley are over-sensitive to cancer risks their kids face.
53. What response did USA Today’s report draw?
A) A heated debate.
B) Popular support.
C) Widespread panic.
D) Strong criticism.
54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ studies?
A) They felt very much relieved.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
B) They were frightened by the evidence.
C) They didn’t know who to believe.
D) They weren’t convinced of the results.
55. What is the view of the 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics?
A) It is important to quantify various concrete hazards.
B) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children.
C) Parents should be aware of children’s health hazards.
D) Attention should be paid to toxic chemical exposure.
56. Of the dangers in everyday life, the author thinks that people have most to fear
from __________.
A) the uncertain
B) the quantifiable
C) an earthquake
D) unhealthy food
Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
Crippling health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.
Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician.
A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The
startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary
care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more
physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors.
How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans
heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to
indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.
Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.
How do we fix this problem?
It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳地)
managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.
We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.
Who will be there to treat them?
57. The author’s chief concern about the current U.S. health care system is
__________.
A) the inadequate training of physicians
B) the declining number of doctors
C) the shrinking primary care resources
D) the ever-rising health care costs
58. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that __________.
A) the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure
B) seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors
C) visiting doctors on a regular basis ensures good health
D) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
59. Faced with the government threats to cut reimbursements indiscriminately,
primary care physicians have to __________ .
A) increase their income by working overtime
B) improve their expertise and service
C) make various deals with specialists
D) see more patients at the expense of quality
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
60. Why do many new medical graduates refuse to choose primary care as their
career?
A) They find the need for primary care declining.
B) The current system works against primary care.
C) Primary care physicians command less respect.
D) They think working in emergency rooms tedious.
61. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care?
A) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians.
B) Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases.
C) Recruit more medical students by offering them loans.
D) Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major.
Part V Cloze (5 minutes)
Directions: There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices
marked A), B), C) and D) on the right side of the paper. You should choose the ONE that best fits
into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through
the centre.
McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today
named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain
Tidy called on fast-food companies to do more to tackle
customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons (盒子)
in the streets.
Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy,
62 its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first
time it had investigated which 63 made up “littered
England” and the same names appeared again and again.
62. A) elevating
C) launching B) convening D) projecting
63. A) signals B) signs
C) commercials D) brands
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
64. A) condemn “We 64 litterers for dropping this fast food litter C) uncover
65 the first place but also believe the results have 65. A) around
C) in B) refute D) disregard B) toward D) off
B) career
D) vocation
B) discourage
D) retreat pertinent (相关的) messages for the fast food 66. 66. A) industry C) profession Mc-Donald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway need to do more to 67. A) exclude 67 littering by their customers.” C) suppress
68. A) incorporating B) including He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 68 C)
comprising D) containing
placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols, but its litter 69. A) unreliable B) unrelated
C) unimportant D) unnecessary remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should
reduce 69 packaging, he added. Companies could 70. A) for
C) with
also reduce prices 70 those who stayed to eat food on 71. A) accessories
C) incentives their premises, offer money-off vouchers (代金券) or other
72. A) curious 71 for those who returned packaging and put more C) strange
bins at 72 points in local streets, not just outside their 73. A) narrator
C) mediator B) about D) to B) merits D) dividends B) mysterious D) strategic B) spokesman D) broker
B) at risk premises. A 73 for McDonald’s said: “We do our 74. A) in season
C) off hand D) under way best. Obviously we ask all our customers to dispose of litter
responsibly.” Trials of more extensive, all-day litter patrols 75. A) responsibility B) liability
C) commission D) administration were 74 in Manchester and Birmingham. 76. A) around B) by
C) on D) above KFC said it took its 75 on litter management 77. A) divert B) minimize
“very seriously”, and would introduce a programme to C) degrade D) suspend reduce packaging 76 many products. Subway said 78. A) if
C) so
that it worked hard to 77 the impact of litter on 79. A) individual communities，78 it was “still
down to the 79 C) unique
80. A) except
customer to dispose of their litter responsibly”. Greggs said C) despite it recognised the “continuing challenge for us all”, 80 81. A) deal
C) cope
having already taken measures to help 81 the issue.
B) whether D) but B) concrete D) respective B) without D) via B) tackle D) dispose
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第31页，共88页
Part? Translation (5 minutes)
Directions: Complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in brackets.
Please write your translation on Answer Sheet 2.
82. How long does a jacket like this last me? — __________________(这要看你多
长时间穿一次).
83. The theory he advanced has proved__________________________ (对许多传统
概念的一种挑战).
84. The manager_______________ (本可以亲自参加会议), but he was called
away for some urgent business abroad.
85. Both research and practical experience have shown that a________ (均衡的饮食
对健康是必不可少的).
86. Much_____________ (我感到遗憾), I was unable to finish the work on time.
31
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第32页，共88页
2009年12月大学英语六级考试参考答案
快速阅读
1.B 2.C 3.C 4.B 5.A 6.D 7.B
8.home life 9.productive 10.improve productivity
听力答案:
短对话
11. A They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad.
12. C Rod was eliminated in the selection process.
13. A The concert is very impressive.
14. B They have known each other since their schooldays.
15. D Stop for the night.
16. A Survey results.
17. D He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse.
18. C The notice may not be reliable.
长对话
19. D A manager at a computer store.
32
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第33页，共88页
20. A Handling customer complaints.
21. C She wants to be with her husband.
22. D Early next month.
23. B It will be a major economic power by the mid-21st century.
24. D The huge gap between the haves and have-nots.
25. C They attach great importance to education.
短文
26. A She engaged in field research on environmental pollution.
27. A The job restricted her from revealing her findings.
28. B Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up.
29. D Her ability to communicate through public speaking.
32.D 31.B 32.C 33.B 34.A 35.C 复合式听写
36. derived 37. Immense 38. convenient 39. accuracy 40. Largely 41. Instant 42. Recalls
43. texture
44. This means that any thought about a certain subject will often bring up more memories that
are related to it.
33
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第34页，共88页
45. Associations do not have to be logical. They just have to make a good link.
46. If you remember the shape of Italy, it is because you have been told at some time that Italy is
shaped like a boot.
深度阅读
47. the driver’s attention 48. equivalent in difficulty to driving 49. more time
50. careful consideration of the information they hear 51. punishment
52-56 DCABD 57-61 BBABC
完型填空
62-71 BDBAC ADCDB 72-81 CADBB CACAD
翻译:
82. It depends on how often you wear it.
83. a challenge to many traditional concepts
84. could have attended the meeting in person
85. balance diet is essential to health
86. regretted as I felt
2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题
Part ? Writing (30 minutes)
34
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第35页，共88页 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes?
You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.
1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班
2. 对这种做法有人表示支持，也有人并不赞成
3. 我认为……
Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes?
Part ?Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
Bosses Say “Yes” to Home Work
Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.
For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier,
enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can
also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries.
While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.
Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small-and-medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.
The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.
Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.
“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business
Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have
enabled this.”
35
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第36页，共88页 One is the availability of broadband
everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler,” Poulton says.
Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading (伪装) as business-friendly broadband.
“Broadband is available for as little as ,15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the
hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. “Providers offering
broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support.”
Such services don’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of ,30 a month.
The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real
time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.
Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities
such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners.
By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to
provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.
Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from
maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified.”
For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this
strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.
O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see
any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day.”
Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was 36
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第37页，共88页 updating its systems anyway, the
company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company networks and access all their usual resources.
Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save fee-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.
That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops,” he adds.
The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon.
Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management
over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the company’s
consultants over broadband internet connections.
It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the
realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old,” says
Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at
off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ,16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.”
1. What is the main topic of this passage?
A) How business managers view hi-tech.
B) Relations between employers and employees.
C) How to cut down the costs of small businesses.
D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking.
2. From the research conducted by the communications provider Inter-Tel, we learn that .
A) more employees work to full capacity at home
B) employees show a growing interest in small businesses
C) more businesses have adopted remote working solutions
D) attitudes toward IT technology have changed
3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to Andy Poulton?
A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.
B) Improved reliability of internet service.
C) Availability of the VoIP service.
D) Access to broadband everywhere.
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2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第38页，共88页
4. What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services?
A) They look for reliable business-only providers.
B) They contact providers located nearest to them.
C) They carefully examine the contract.
D) They contract the cheapest provider.
5. Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote working by __________.
A) offering sophisticated voice services
B) giving access to emailing in real time
C) helping clients discuss business at home
D) providing calls completely free of charge
6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to __________.
A) present a positive image to prospective customers
B) support its employees with children to take care of
C) attract young people with IT expertise to work for it
D) reduce operational expenses of a second office
7. According to marketing director Jack O’Hern, teleworking enabled the company to
__________.
A) enhance its market image
B) reduce recruitment costs
C) keep highly qualified staff
D) minimise its office space
8. Wright Vigar’s practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only benefits the
company but helps improve employees’ .
9. With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be __________ while traveling.
10. Single mother Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to __________.
Part ? Listening Comprehension (35 minutes)
Part? Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.
38
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第39页，共88页 Questions 47 to 51 are based on the
following passage.
Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he
takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can
divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.
Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.
To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when
people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.
Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls.
47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered dangerous
because it seriously distracts .
48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of moving
tasks which were considered .
49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free
call took to react than those who were not.
50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if they are
required to do .
51. The author believes persuasion, rather than , might be the only way to stop people from using
mobile phones while driving.
Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or 39
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第40页，共88页 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 One
Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得
意的)green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public
high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium
and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子)and
various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health
and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to
keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly
threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.
“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a
nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also
means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the
dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid
my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance,
but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still
haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.
52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal?
A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley.
B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings.
C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor.
D) Parents in Berkeley are over-sensitive to cancer risks their kids face.
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2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第41页，共88页
53. What response did USA Today’s report draw?
A) A heated debate.
B) Popular support.
C) Widespread panic.
D) Strong criticism.
54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ studies?
A) They felt very much relieved.
B) They were frightened by the evidence.
C) They didn’t know who to believe.
D) They weren’t convinced of the results.
55. What is the view of the 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics?
A) It is important to quantify various concrete hazards.
B) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children.
C) Parents should be aware of children’s health hazards.
D) Attention should be paid to toxic chemical exposure.
56. Of the dangers in everyday life, the author thinks that people have most to fear from
__________.
A) the uncertain
B) the quantifiable
C) an earthquake
D) unhealthy food
Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
Crippling health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care
physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.
Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the
opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician.
A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The
startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary
care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors.
How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are
paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of 41
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第42页，共88页 quality or outcome, the better he’
s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.
Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.
Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.
How do we fix this problem?
It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳地)
managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.
We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.
Who will be there to treat them?
57. The author’s chief concern about the current U.S. health care system is __________.
A) the inadequate training of physicians
B) the declining number of doctors
C) the shrinking primary care resources
D) the ever-rising health care costs
58. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that __________.
A) the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure
B) seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors
C) visiting doctors on a regular basis ensures good health
D) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
59. Faced with the government threats to cut reimbursements indiscriminately, primary care
physicians have to __________ .
A) increase their income by working overtime
B) improve their expertise and service
42
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第43页，共88页
C) make various deals with specialists D) see more patients at the expense of quality
60. Why do many new medical graduates refuse to choose primary care as their career?
A) They find the need for primary care declining. B) The current system works against primary care. C) Primary care physicians command less respect. D) They think working in emergency rooms tedious.
61. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care?
A) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians. B) Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases. C) Recruit more medical students by offering them loans.
D) Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major. Part V Cloze (5 minutes)
Directions: There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D) on the right side of the paper. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain Tidy called on fast-food companies to do more to tackle customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons (盒子) in the streets.
Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, 62 its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first time it had investigated which 63 made up “littered England” and the same names appeared
again and again.
“We 64 litterers for dropping this fast food litter 65 the first place but also believe the results have pertinent (相关的) messages for the fast food
66. Mc-Donald’s, Greggs, KFC and
premises. A 73 for McDonald’s said: “We do our best. Obviously we ask all our customers to
dispose of litter responsibly.” Trials of more extensive, all-day litter patrols were Birmingham.
KFC said it took its
75 on litter
74 in Manchester and
Subway need to do more to 67 littering by their customers.”
He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 68 placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols,
but its litter remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should reduce 69 packaging, he added. Companies could also reduce prices 70 those who stayed to eat food on their premises, offer money-off vouchers (代金券) or other 71 for those who returned packaging and put more
bins at 72 points in local streets, not just outside their
management “very seriously”, and would introduce a
43
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第44页，共88页
programme to reduce packaging 76 many
products. Subway said that it worked hard to 77
the impact of litter on communities，78 it was
“still down to the 79 customer to dispose of
their litter responsibly”. Greggs said it recognised the
“continuing challenge for us all”, 80 having
already taken measures to help 81 the issue.
44
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第45页，共88页
62. A) elevating
B) convening C) launching D) projecting 63. A) signals
B) signs C) commercials D) brands 64. A) condemn
B) refute C) uncover D) disregard 65. A) around
B) toward C) in D) off 66. A) industry
B) career C) profession D) vocation 67. A) exclude
B) discourage C) suppress D) retreat 68. A) incorporating
B) including C) comprising D) containing 69. A) unreliable
B) unrelated C) unimportant D) unnecessary 70. A) for
B) about C) with D) to 71. A) accessories
B) merits C) incentives
D) dividends
Part? Translation (5 minutes)
Directions: Complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in brackets.
Please write your translation on Answer Sheet 2.
82. How long does a jacket like this last me? — (这要
看你多长时间穿一次). 83. The theory he advanced has proved (对许多传统概
念的一种挑战). 84. The manager (本可以亲自参加会议), but he was
called away for some urgent business abroad. 85. Both research and practical experience have
shown
that a (均衡的饮食对健康是必不可少的).
86. Much (我感到遗憾), I was unable to finish
the work on time.
72. A) curious
C) strange 73. A) narrator
C) mediator 74. A) in season
C) off hand
75. A) responsibility C) commission 76. A) around C) on 77. A) divert
C) degrade 78. A) if
C) so 79. A) individual
C) unique 80. A) except
C) despite 81. A) deal
C) cope
B) mysterious D) strategic B) spokesman D) broker B) at risk D) under way
B) liability
D) administration B) by D) above B) minimize D) suspend B) whether D) but B) concrete D)
respective B) without D) via B) tackle D) dispose
45
2009年12月大学英语6级真题 第46页，共88页
2009年12月大学英语六级考试答案(B卷)(注意
试题
中考模拟试题doc幼小衔接 数学试题 下载云南高中历年会考数学试题下载N4真题下载党史题库下载
是A卷，此答案为B卷答案) Part
II Reading
Comprehension(Skimming and scanning) (15 minutes)
51. punishing
52. D) the shrinking primary care
resources 53. C) the more doctors taking
care of a patient, the better 54. A) see more patients at the
69 C) unnecessary 70 C) to 71 B) incentives 72 C) strategic 73 A) spokesman 1.
B) Benefits of the practice of
teleworking。 2. C) more businesses have
adopted remote working solution 3. C) Access to broadband every
where。 4. B) They look for reliable
business-only providers。 5. A) offering sophisticated voice
services 6. D) support its employees with
children to take care of 7. B) keep highly qualified staff
8. home life
9. productive
10. increase her own productivity
47. a driver’s attention
48. equivalent in difficulty to
driving 49. more time
50. carful thinking/consideration
expense of quality 55. B) The current system works
against primary care 56. D) Bridge the salary gap
between specialists and primary care physicians 57. B) The air quality around
Berkeley’s school campuses is poor。 58. C) A heated debate。
59. D) They didn’t know who to
believe。 60. D) Daily accidents pose a
more serious threat to children。 61. A) the unceertain
62 B) launching
63 D) brands
64 B) condemn
65 A) in
66 C) industry 67 B) exclude 68 D) including
74 D)underway 75 B) responsibility 76 B) on 77 C) minimize 78 C) so 79 C)
individual 80 A) despite 81 D) tackle
82. It depends on how often you
wear it 83. to be a challenge to many
traditional concepts 84. could have attended the
meeting in person (by himself) 85. balanced diet is essential to
health 86. regretful did I feel
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2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Part ? Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.
1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班
2. 对这种做法有人表示支持，也有人并不赞成
3. 我认为……
Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes?
Part ?Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
Bosses Say “Yes” to Home Work
Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.
For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier,
enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can
also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries.
While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.
Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small-and-medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.
The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and 47
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claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.
Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.
“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business
Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have
enabled this.”
One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler,” Poulton says.
Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading (伪装) as business-friendly broadband.
“Broadband is available for as little as ,15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the
hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. “Providers offering
broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support.” Such services don’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of ,30 a month.
The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.
Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities
such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners.
By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to
provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.
Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of 48
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our tax managers returned from maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week from home, and a day in
the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified.”
For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this
strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.
O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see
any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day.”
Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating
its systems anyway, the company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company networks and access all their usual resources.
Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save fee-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.
That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops,” he adds.
The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon.
Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management
over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the company’s
consultants over broadband internet connections.
It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home
working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old,” says
Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ,16,000 a year on rent,
plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.”
1. What is the main topic of this passage?
A) How business managers view hi-tech.
B) Relations between employers and employees.
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C) How to cut down the costs of small businesses.
D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking.
2. From the research conducted by the communications provider Inter-Tel, we learn
that .
A) more employees work to full capacity at home
B) employees show a growing interest in small businesses
C) more businesses have adopted remote working solutions
D) attitudes toward IT technology have changed
3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to
Andy Poulton?
A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.
B) Improved reliability of internet service.
C) Availability of the VoIP service.
D) Access to broadband everywhere.
4. What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services?
A) They look for reliable business-only providers.
B) They contact providers located nearest to them.
C) They carefully examine the contract.
D) They contract the cheapest provider.
5. Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote working by __________.
A) offering sophisticated voice services
B) giving access to emailing in real time
C) helping clients discuss business at home
D) providing calls completely free of charge
6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to
__________.
A) present a positive image to prospective customers
B) support its employees with children to take care of
C) attract young people with IT expertise to work for it
D) reduce operational expenses of a second office
7. According to marketing director Jack O’Hern, teleworking enabled the company
to __________.
A) enhance its market image
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B) reduce recruitment costs
C) keep highly qualified staff
D) minimise its office space
8. Wright Vigar’s practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only
benefits the company but helps improve employees’ .
9. With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be __________
while traveling.
10. Single mother Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to
__________.
Part ? Listening Comprehension (35 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the
end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the
conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause.
During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A), B), C) and D), and decide which is
the best answer. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through
the centre.
11. A) They would rather travel around than stay at home.
B) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad.
C) They usually carry many things around with them.
D) They don’t like to spend much money on traveling.
12. A) The selection process was a little unfair.
B) He had long dreamed of the dean’s position.
C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process.
D) Rod was in charge of the admissions office.
13. A) Applause encourages the singer.
B) She regrets paying for the concert.
C) Almost everyone loves pop music.
D) The concert is very impressive.
14. A) They have known each other since their schooldays.
B) They were both chairpersons of the Students’ Union.
C) They have been in close touch by email.
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D) They are going to hold a reunion party.
15. A) Cook their dinner.
B) Rest for a while.
C) Get their car fixed.
D) Stop for the night.
16. A) Newly-launched products.
B) Consumer preferences.
C) Survey results.
D) Survey methods.
17. A) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse.
B) The woman needs blouses in the colors of a rainbow.
C) The information in the catalog is not always reliable.
D) He thinks the blue blouse is better than the red one.
18. A) The course is open to all next semester.
B) The notice may not be reliable.
C) The woman has not told the truth.
D) He will drop his course in marketing.
Questions 19 to 22 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
19. A) A director of a sales department.
B) A manager at a computer store.
C) A sales clerk at a shopping center.
D) An accountant of a computer firm.
20. A) Handling customer complaints.
B) Recruiting and training new staff.
C) Dispatching ordered goods on time.
D) Developing computer programs.
21. A) She likes something more challenging.
B) She likes to be nearer to her parents.
C) She wants to have a better-paid job.
D) She wants to be with her husband.
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22. A) Right away.
B) In two months.
C) Early next month.
D) In a couple of days.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
23. A) It will face challenges unprecedented in its history.
B) It is a resolute advocate of the anti-global movement.
C) It is bound to regain its full glory of a hundred years ago.
D) It will be a major economic power by the mid-21st century.
24. A) The lack of overall urban planning.
B) The huge gap between the haves and have-nots.
C) The inadequate supply of water and electricity.
D) The shortage of hi-tech personnel.
25. A) They attach great importance to education.
B) They are able to grasp growth opportunities.
C) They are good at learning from other nations.
D) They have made use of advanced technologies.
Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will
hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear
a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D).
Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
Passage One
Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. A) She taught chemistry and microbiology courses in a college.
B) She gave lectures on how to become a public speaker.
C) She helped families move away from industrial polluters.
D) She engaged in field research on environmental pollution.
27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings.
B) The job posed a potential threat to her health.
C) She found the working conditions frustrating.
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D) She was offered a better job in a minority community.
28. A) Some giant industrial polluters have gone out of business.
B) More environmental organizations have appeared.
C) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up.
D) More branches of her company have been set up.
29. A) Her widespread influence among members of Congress.
B) Her ability to communicate through public speaking.
C) Her rigorous training in delivering eloquent speeches.
D) Her lifelong commitment to domestic and global issues.
Passage Two
Questions 30 to 32 are based on the passage you have just heard.
30. A) The fierce competition in the market.
B) The growing necessity of staff training.
C) The accelerated pace of globalisation.
D) The urgent need of a diverse workforce.
31. A) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture.
B) Take courses of foreign languages and cultures.
C) Share the experiences of people from other cultures.
D) Participate in international exchange programmes.
32. A) Reflective thinking is becoming critical.
B) Labor market is getting globalised.
C) Knowing a foreign language is essential.
D) Globalisation will eliminate many jobs.
Passage Three
Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
33. A) Red-haired women were regarded as more reliable.
B) Brown-haired women were rated as more capable.
C) Golden-haired women were considered attractive.
D) Black-haired women were judged to be intelligent.
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34. A) They are smart and eloquent.
B) They are ambitious and arrogant.
C) They are shrewd and dishonest.
D) They are wealthy and industrious.
35. A) They force people to follow the cultural mainstream.
B) They exaggerate the roles of certain groups of people.
C) They emphasize diversity at the expense of uniformity.
D) They hinder our perception of individual differences.
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 numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.
The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called mnemonics. The name is 36 from their Goddess of memory “Mnemosyne”. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an 37 asset, particularly in public life. There were no 38 devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators(演说
家) delivered long speeches with great 39 because they learned the speeches using mnemonic systems.
The Greeks discovered that human memory is 40 an associative process—that it works by
linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The 41 your brain registers the word “apple”, it 42 the shape, color, taste, smell and 43 of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word “apple”.
44. An example could be when you think about a lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you’re talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory.
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45. An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not. What about Italy, though? 46. You made an association with something already known, the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape could not be
forgotten once you had made the association.
Part? Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he
takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can
divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.
Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.
To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when
people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.
Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls.
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47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered
dangerous because it seriously distracts .
48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of
moving tasks which were considered .
49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a
hands-free call took to react than those who were not.
50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if
they are required to do .
51. The author believes persuasion, rather than , might be the only way to stop
people from using mobile phones while driving.
Section B
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 One
Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得
意的)green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public
high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium
and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子)and
various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health
and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents 57
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perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in
what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.
“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also
means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that
nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the
dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid
my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still
haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.
52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal?
A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley.
B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings.
C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor.
D) Parents in Berkeley are over-sensitive to cancer risks their kids face.
53. What response did USA Today’s report draw?
A) A heated debate.
B) Popular support.
C) Widespread panic.
D) Strong criticism.
54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ studies?
A) They felt very much relieved.
B) They were frightened by the evidence.
C) They didn’t know who to believe.
D) They weren’t convinced of the results.
55. What is the view of the 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics?
A) It is important to quantify various concrete hazards.
B) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children.
C) Parents should be aware of children’s health hazards.
D) Attention should be paid to toxic chemical exposure.
56. Of the dangers in everyday life, the author thinks that people have most to fear
from __________.
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A) the uncertain
B) the quantifiable
C) an earthquake
D) unhealthy food
Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
Crippling health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.
Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the
opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician.
A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The
startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary
care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more
physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors.
How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans
heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.
Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.
Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.
How do we fix this problem?
It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳地)
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loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.
We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.
Who will be there to treat them?
57. The author’s chief concern about the current U.S. health care system is
__________.
A) the inadequate training of physicians
B) the declining number of doctors
C) the shrinking primary care resources
D) the ever-rising health care costs
58. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that __________.
A) the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure
B) seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors
C) visiting doctors on a regular basis ensures good health
D) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
59. Faced with the government threats to cut reimbursements indiscriminately,
primary care physicians have to __________ .
A) increase their income by working overtime
B) improve their expertise and service
C) make various deals with specialists
D) see more patients at the expense of quality
60. Why do many new medical graduates refuse to choose primary care as their
career?
A) They find the need for primary care declining.
B) The current system works against primary care.
C) Primary care physicians command less respect.
D) They think working in emergency rooms tedious.
61. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care?
A) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians.
B) Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases.
C) Recruit more medical students by offering them loans.
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D) Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major.
Part V Cloze (5 minutes)
Directions: There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices
marked A), B), C) and D) on the right side of the paper. You should choose the ONE that best fits
into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through
the centre.
McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today
named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain
Tidy called on fast-food companies to do more to tackle
customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons (盒子)
in the streets.
Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy,
62 its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first
time it had investigated which 63 made up “littered
England” and the same names appeared again and again.
62. A) elevating B) convening
C) launching D) projecting
63. A) signals B) signs
C) commercials D) brands
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“We 64 litterers for dropping this fast food litter 64. A) condemn
C) uncover 65 the first place but also believe the results have
65. A) around
C) in pertinent (相关的) messages for the fast food 66. B) refute D) disregard B) toward D) off
B) career Mc-Donald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway need to do more to 66. A) industry
C) profession D) vocation
67 littering by their customers.” 67. A) exclude B) discourage
C) suppress D) retreat He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 68 68. A) incorporating B)
including
C) comprising D) containing placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols, but its litter
remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should 69. A) unreliable B) unrelated reduce 69 packaging, he added. Companies could C) unimportant D) unnecessary
B) about
D) to
B) merits
D) dividends
B) mysterious
D) strategic
B) spokesman
D) broker 70. A) for also reduce prices 70 those who stayed to eat food on C) with their premises, offer money-off vouchers (代金券) or other 71. A) accessories C) incentives 71 for
those who returned packaging and put more 72. A) curious C) strange bins at 72 points in local streets, not just outside their 73. A) narrator C) mediator premises. A 73 for McDonald’s said:
“We do our
B) at risk best. Obviously we ask all our customers to dispose of litter 74. A) in season
C) off hand D) under way responsibly.” Trials of more extensive, all-day litter patrols
75. A) responsibility B) liability were 74 in Manchester and Birmingham. C) commission D) administration
KFC said it took its 75 on litter management 76. A) around
C) on
“very seriously”, and would introduce a programme to 77. A) divert
C) degrade reduce packaging 76 many products. Subway said
78. A) if that it worked hard to 77 the impact of litter on C) so
communities，78 it was “still down to the 79 79. A) individual
C) unique B) by D) above B) minimize D) suspend B) whether D) but B) concrete D) respective
B) without
D) via
B) tackle
D) disposecustomer to dispose of their litter responsibly”. Greggs said 80. A) except C) despite
it recognised the “continuing challenge for us all”, 80 81. A) deal having already taken measures to help 81 the issue. C) cope
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Part? Translation (5 minutes)
Directions: Complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in
brackets. Please write your translation on Answer Sheet 2.
82. How long does a jacket like this last me? — (这要看你多长时间穿一次).
83. The theory he advanced has proved (对许多传统概念的一种挑战).
84. The manager (本可以亲自参加会议), but he was called away for some urgent
business abroad.
85. Both research and practical experience have shown that a (均衡的饮食对健康是
必不可少的).
86. Much (我感到遗憾), I was unable to finish the work on time.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试答案(B卷)
Part II Reading Comprehension(Skimming and scanning) (15 minutes)
1. B) Benefits of the practice of teleworking。
2. C) more businesses have adopted remote working solution
3. C) Access to broadband every where。
4. B) They look for reliable business-only providers。
5. A) offering sophisticated voice services
6. D) support its employees with children to take care of
7. B) keep highly qualified staff
8. home life
9. productive
10. increase her own productivity
Part III Listening Comprehension 63
(35minutes)
Section A
11. A) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad。
12. C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process。
13. A) The concert is very impressive。
14. B) They have known each other since their schooldays。
15. D) Stop for the night。
16. A) Survey results。
17. D) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse。
18. C) The notice may not be reliable。
19. D) A manager at a computer store。
20. A) Handling customer complaints。
21. C) She wants to be with her husband。
22. D) Early next month。
23. B) It will be a najor economic power by the mid-21st century。
24. D) The huge gap between the haves and have-nots。
25. C) they attach great importance to education。
Section B
26. A) She engaged in field research on enviromental pollution。
27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings。
28. B) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up。
29. D) Her ability to communicate through public speaking。 64
30. D) The accelerated pace of globlalisation。
31. B) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture。
32. C) The labour market is getting globalised。
33. B) Brown-haired women are rated as ore capabe。
34. A) They are shrewd dishonest。
35. C) They hinder our perception of individual differences。
Section C
36. derived
37. immense
38. convenient
39. accuracy
40. largely
41. instinct
42. recalls
43. texture
44. This means that any thought about a certain subject will often bring up more
memories that are related to it。
45. The associations do not have to be logical. They just have to make a good link。
46. If you remember the shape of Italy, it is because you have been told sometime
that Italy is shaped like a boot。
Part IV Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth) (25minutes)
47. a driver’s attention
48. equivalent in difficulty to driving
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49. more time
50. carful thinking/consideration
51. punishing
52. D) the shrinking primary care resources
53. C) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
54. A) see more patients at the expense of quality
55. B) The current system works against primary care
56. D) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians
57. B) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor。
58. C) A heated debate。
59. D) They didn’t know who to believe。
60. D) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children。
61. A) the unceertain
Part V Cloze (15minutes) 62 B)
launching
63 D) brands
64 B) condemn
65 A) in
66 C) industry
67 B) exclude
68 D) including
69 C) unnecessary
66
70 C) to
71 B) incentives
72 C) strategic
73 A) spokesman
74 D)underway
75 B) responsibility
76 B) on
77 C) minimize
78 C) so
79 C) individual
80 A) despite
81 D) tackle
Part VI Translation
(5 minutes)
82. It depends on how often you wear it
83. to be a challenge to many traditional concepts
84. could have attended the meeting in person (by himself)
85. balanced diet is essential to health
86. regretful did I feel
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2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题及答案
Part ? Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should
Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? You should write at least 150 words following the outline
given below.
1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班
2. 对这种做法有人表示支持，也有人并不赞成
3. 我认为……
Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes?
Part ?Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
Bosses Say “Yes” to Home Work
Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.
For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier,
enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can
also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries.
While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.
Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small-and-medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.
The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.
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Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.
“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business
Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have
enabled this.”
One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler,” Poulton says.
Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading (伪装) as business-friendly broadband.
“Broadband is available for as little as ,15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the
hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. “Providers offering
broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and
heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support.”
Such services don’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of ,30 a month.
The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.
Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities
such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners.
By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to
provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.
Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from
maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her 69
the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week
from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified.”
For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this
strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.
O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see
any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day.”
Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating its systems anyway, the company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company networks and access all their usual resources.
Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save fee-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.
That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to
kill time at the shops,” he adds.
The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon.
Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management
over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the company’s
consultants over broadband internet connections.
It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old,” says
Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at
off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ,16,000 a year on rent,
plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.”
1. What is the main topic of this passage?
A) How business managers view hi-tech.
B) Relations between employers and employees.
C) How to cut down the costs of small businesses.
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D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking.
2. From the research conducted by the communications provider Inter-Tel, we learn
that .
A) more employees work to full capacity at home
B) employees show a growing interest in small businesses
C) more businesses have adopted remote working solutions
D) attitudes toward IT technology have changed
3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to
Andy Poulton?
A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.
B) Improved reliability of internet service.
C) Availability of the VoIP service.
D) Access to broadband everywhere.
4. What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services?
A) They look for reliable business-only providers.
B) They contact providers located nearest to them.
C) They carefully examine the contract.
D) They contract the cheapest provider.
5. Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote working by __________.
A) offering sophisticated voice services
B) giving access to emailing in real time
C) helping clients discuss business at home
D) providing calls completely free of charge
6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to
__________.
A) present a positive image to prospective customers
B) support its employees with children to take care of
C) attract young people with IT expertise to work for it
D) reduce operational expenses of a second office
7. According to marketing director Jack O’Hern, teleworking enabled the company
to __________.
A) enhance its market image
B) reduce recruitment costs
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C) keep highly qualified staff
D) minimise its office space
8. Wright Vigar’s practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only
benefits the company but helps improve employees’ .
9. With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be __________
while traveling.
10. Single mother Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to
__________.
Part ? Listening Comprehension (35 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the
end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the
conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause.
During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A), B), C) and D), and decide which is
the best answer. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through
the centre.
11. A) They would rather travel around than stay at home.
B) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad.
C) They usually carry many things around with them.
D) They don’t like to spend much money on traveling.
12. A) The selection process was a little unfair.
B) He had long dreamed of the dean’s position.
C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process.
D) Rod was in charge of the admissions office.
13. A) Applause encourages the singer.
B) She regrets paying for the concert.
C) Almost everyone loves pop music.
D) The concert is very impressive.
14. A) They have known each other since their schooldays.
B) They were both chairpersons of the Students’ Union.
C) They have been in close touch by email.
D) They are going to hold a reunion party.
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15. A) Cook their dinner.
B) Rest for a while.
C) Get their car fixed.
D) Stop for the night.
16. A) Newly-launched products.
B) Consumer preferences.
C) Survey results.
D) Survey methods.
17. A) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse.
B) The woman needs blouses in the colors of a rainbow.
C) The information in the catalog is not always reliable.
D) He thinks the blue blouse is better than the red one.
18. A) The course is open to all next semester.
B) The notice may not be reliable.
C) The woman has not told the truth.
D) He will drop his course in marketing.
Questions 19 to 22 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
19. A) A director of a sales department.
B) A manager at a computer store.
C) A sales clerk at a shopping center.
D) An accountant of a computer firm.
20. A) Handling customer complaints.
B) Recruiting and training new staff.
C) Dispatching ordered goods on time.
D) Developing computer programs.
21. A) She likes something more challenging.
B) She likes to be nearer to her parents.
C) She wants to have a better-paid job.
D) She wants to be with her husband.
22. A) Right away.
B) In two months.
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C) Early next month.
D) In a couple of days.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
23. A) It will face challenges unprecedented in its history.
B) It is a resolute advocate of the anti-global movement.
C) It is bound to regain its full glory of a hundred years ago.
D) It will be a major economic power by the mid-21st century.
24. A) The lack of overall urban planning.
B) The huge gap between the haves and have-nots.
C) The inadequate supply of water and electricity.
D) The shortage of hi-tech personnel.
25. A) They attach great importance to education.
B) They are able to grasp growth opportunities.
C) They are good at learning from other nations.
D) They have made use of advanced technologies.
Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will
hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear
a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D).
Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
Passage One
Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. A) She taught chemistry and microbiology courses in a college.
B) She gave lectures on how to become a public speaker.
C) She helped families move away from industrial polluters.
D) She engaged in field research on environmental pollution.
27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings.
B) The job posed a potential threat to her health.
C) She found the working conditions frustrating.
D) She was offered a better job in a minority community.
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28. A) Some giant industrial polluters have gone out of business.
B) More environmental organizations have appeared.
C) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up.
D) More branches of her company have been set up.
29. A) Her widespread influence among members of Congress.
B) Her ability to communicate through public speaking.
C) Her rigorous training in delivering eloquent speeches.
D) Her lifelong commitment to domestic and global issues.
Passage Two
Questions 30 to 32 are based on the passage you have just heard.
30. A) The fierce competition in the market.
B) The growing necessity of staff training.
C) The accelerated pace of globalisation.
D) The urgent need of a diverse workforce.
31. A) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture.
B) Take courses of foreign languages and cultures.
C) Share the experiences of people from other cultures.
D) Participate in international exchange programmes.
32. A) Reflective thinking is becoming critical.
B) Labor market is getting globalised.
C) Knowing a foreign language is essential.
D) Globalisation will eliminate many jobs.
Passage Three
Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
33. A) Red-haired women were regarded as more reliable.
B) Brown-haired women were rated as more capable.
C) Golden-haired women were considered attractive.
D) Black-haired women were judged to be intelligent.
34. A) They are smart and eloquent.
B) They are ambitious and arrogant.
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C) They are shrewd and dishonest.
D) They are wealthy and industrious.
35. A) They force people to follow the cultural mainstream.
B) They exaggerate the roles of certain groups of people.
C) They emphasize diversity at the expense of uniformity.
D) They hinder our perception of individual differences.
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 numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.
The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called mnemonics. The name is 36 from their Goddess of memory “Mnemosyne”. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an 37 asset, particularly in public life. There were no 38 devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators(演说
家) delivered long speeches with great 39 because they learned the speeches using mnemonic systems.
The Greeks discovered that human memory is 40 an associative process—that it works by
linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The 41 your brain registers the word “apple”, it 42 the shape, color, taste, smell and 43 of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word “apple”.
44. An example could be when you think about a lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you’re talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory.
45. An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not. What 76
about Italy, though? 46. You made an association with something already known, the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape could not be forgotten once you had made the association.
Part? Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he
takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can
divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.
Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.
To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when
people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.
Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls.
47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered
dangerous because it seriously distracts .
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48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of
moving tasks which were considered .
49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a
hands-free call took to react than those who were not.
50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if
they are required to do .
51. The author believes persuasion, rather than , might be the only way to stop
people from using mobile phones while driving.
Section B
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 One
Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得
意的)green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public
high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium
and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子)and
various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health
and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to
keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly
threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.
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“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also
means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the
dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid
my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still
haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.
52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal?
A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley.
B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings.
C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor.
D) Parents in Berkeley are over-sensitive to cancer risks their kids face.
53. What response did USA Today’s report draw?
A) A heated debate.
B) Popular support.
C) Widespread panic.
D) Strong criticism.
54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ studies?
A) They felt very much relieved.
B) They were frightened by the evidence.
C) They didn’t know who to believe.
D) They weren’t convinced of the results.
55. What is the view of the 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics?
A) It is important to quantify various concrete hazards.
B) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children.
C) Parents should be aware of children’s health hazards.
D) Attention should be paid to toxic chemical exposure.
56. Of the dangers in everyday life, the author thinks that people have most to fear
from __________.
A) the uncertain
B) the quantifiable
C) an earthquake
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D) unhealthy food
Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
Crippling health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.
Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician.
A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The
startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary
care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more
physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors.
How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans
heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to
indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.
Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.
Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.
How do we fix this problem?
It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳地)
managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.
We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few 80
years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.
Who will be there to treat them?
57. The author’s chief concern about the current U.S. health care system is
__________.
A) the inadequate training of physicians
B) the declining number of doctors
C) the shrinking primary care resources
D) the ever-rising health care costs
58. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that __________.
A) the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure
B) seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors
C) visiting doctors on a regular basis ensures good health
D) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
59. Faced with the government threats to cut reimbursements indiscriminately,
primary care physicians have to __________ .
A) increase their income by working overtime
B) improve their expertise and service
C) make various deals with specialists
D) see more patients at the expense of quality
60. Why do many new medical graduates refuse to choose primary care as their
career?
A) They find the need for primary care declining.
B) The current system works against primary care.
C) Primary care physicians command less respect.
D) They think working in emergency rooms tedious.
61. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care?
A) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians.
B) Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases.
C) Recruit more medical students by offering them loans.
D) Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major.
Part V Cloze (5 minutes)
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Directions: There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D) on the right side of the paper. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today
named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain
Tidy called on fast-food companies to do more to tackle
customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons (盒子)
in the streets.
Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy,
62 its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first
time it had investigated which 63 made up “littered
England” and the same names appeared again and again.
62. A) elevating B) convening
C) launching D) projecting
63. A) signals B) signs
C) commercials D) brands
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“We 64 litterers for dropping this fast food litter 64. A) condemn
C) uncover 65 the first place but also believe the results have
65. A) around
C) in pertinent (相关的) messages for the fast food 66. B) refute D) disregard B) toward D) off
B) career Mc-Donald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway need to do more to 66. A) industry
C) profession D) vocation
67 littering by their customers.” 67. A) exclude B) discourage
C) suppress D) retreat He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 68 68. A) incorporating B)
including
C) comprising D) containing placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols, but its litter
remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should 69. A) unreliable B) unrelated reduce 69 packaging, he added. Companies could C) unimportant D) unnecessary
B) about
D) to
B) merits
D) dividends
B) mysterious
D) strategic
B) spokesman
D) broker 70. A) for also reduce prices 70 those who stayed to eat food on C) with their premises, offer money-off vouchers (代金券) or other 71. A) accessories C) incentives 71 for those who returned packaging and put more 72. A) curious C) strange bins at 72 points in local streets, not just outside their 73. A) narrator C) mediator premises. A 73 for McDonald’s said:
“We do our
B) at risk best. Obviously we ask all our customers to dispose of litter 74. A) in season
C) off hand D) under way responsibly.” Trials of more extensive, all-day litter patrols
75. A) responsibility B) liability were 74 in Manchester and Birmingham. C) commission D) administration
KFC said it took its 75 on litter management “very seriously”, and would introduce a programme to 76. A) around C) on B) by D) above B) minimize
D) suspend
B) whether
D) but
B) concrete
D) respective
B) without
D) via
B) tackle
D) dispose77. A) divert C) degrade reduce packaging 76 many products. Subway said 78. A) if that it worked hard to 77 the impact of litter on C) so communities，78 it was “still down to the 79
79. A) individual C) unique customer to dispose of their litter responsibly”. Greggs said 80. A)
except C) despite it recognised the “continuing challenge for us all”, 80 81. A) deal having already taken measures to help 81 the issue. C) cope
83
Part? Translation (5 minutes)
Directions: Complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in
brackets. Please write your translation on Answer Sheet 2.
82. How long does a jacket like this last me? — (这要看你多长时间穿一次).
83. The theory he advanced has proved (对许多传统概念的一种挑战).
84. The manager (本可以亲自参加会议), but he was called away for some urgent
business abroad.
85. Both research and practical experience have shown that a (均衡的饮食对健康是
必不可少的).
86. Much (我感到遗憾), I was unable to finish the work on time.
2009年12月大学英语六级考试答案(B卷)
Part II Reading Comprehension(Skimming and scanning) (15 minutes)
1. B) Benefits of the practice of teleworking。
2. C) more businesses have adopted remote working solution
3. C) Access to broadband every where。
4. B) They look for reliable business-only providers。
5. A) offering sophisticated voice services
6. D) support its employees with children to take care of
7. B) keep highly qualified staff
8. home life
9. productive
10. increase her own productivity
Part III Listening Comprehension 84
(35minutes)
Section A
11. A) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad。
12. C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process。
13. A) The concert is very impressive。
14. B) They have known each other since their schooldays。
15. D) Stop for the night。
16. A) Survey results。
17. D) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse。
18. C) The notice may not be reliable。
19. D) A manager at a computer store。
20. A) Handling customer complaints。
21. C) She wants to be with her husband。
22. D) Early next month。
23. B) It will be a najor economic power by the mid-21st century。
24. D) The huge gap between the haves and have-nots。
25. C) they attach great importance to education。
Section B
26. A) She engaged in field research on enviromental pollution。
27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings。
28. B) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up。
29. D) Her ability to communicate through public speaking。 85
30. D) The accelerated pace of globlalisation。
31. B) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture。
32. C) The labour market is getting globalised。
33. B) Brown-haired women are rated as ore capabe。
34. A) They are shrewd dishonest。
35. C) They hinder our perception of individual differences。
Section C
36. derived
37. immense
38. convenient
39. accuracy
40. largely
41. instinct
42. recalls
43. texture
44. This means that any thought about a certain subject will often bring up more
memories that are related to it。
45. The associations do not have to be logical. They just have to make a good link。
46. If you remember the shape of Italy, it is because you have been told sometime
that Italy is shaped like a boot。
Part IV Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth) (25minutes)
47. a driver’s attention
48. equivalent in difficulty to driving
86
49. more time
50. carful thinking/consideration
51. punishing
52. D) the shrinking primary care resources
53. C) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better
54. A) see more patients at the expense of quality
55. B) The current system works against primary care
56. D) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians
57. B) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor。
58. C) A heated debate。
59. D) They didn’t know who to believe。
60. D) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children。
61. A) the unceertain
Part V Cloze (15minutes) 62 B)
launching
63 D) brands
64 B) condemn
65 A) in
66 C) industry
67 B) exclude
68 D) including
69 C) unnecessary
87
70 C) to
71 B) incentives
72 C) strategic
73 A) spokesman
74 D)underway
75 B) responsibility
76 B) on
77 C) minimize
78 C) so
79 C) individual
80 A) despite
81 D) tackle
Part VI Translation
(5 minutes)
82. It depends on how often you wear it
83. to be a challenge to many traditional concepts
84. could have attended the meeting in person (by himself)
85. balanced diet is essential to health
86. regretful did I feel
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