2007年6月23日大学英语六级(CET-6)真题试卷(A卷)
Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Seven Steps to a More Fulfilling Job
Many people today find themselves in unfulfilling work situations. In fact, one in four workers is dissatisfied with their current job, according to the recent “Plans for 2004” survey. Their career path may be financially rewarding, but it doesn’t meet their emotional, social or creative needs. They’re stuck, unhappy, and have no idea what to do about it, except move to another job.
Mary Lyn Miller, veteran career consultant and founder of the Life and Career Clinic, says that when most people are unhappy about their work, their first thought is to get a different job. Instead, Miller suggests looking at the possibility of a different life. Through her book, 8 Myths of Making a Living, as well as workshops, seminars and personal coaching and consulting, she has helped thousands of dissatisfied workers reassess life and work.
Like the way of Zen, which includes understanding of oneself as one really is, Miller encourages job seekers and those dissatisfied with work or life to examine their beliefs about work and recognize that “in many cases your beliefs are what brought you to where you are today.” You may have been raised to think that women were best at nurturing and caring and, therefore, should be teachers and nurses. So that’s what you did. Or, perhaps you were brought up to believe that you should do what your father did, so you have taken over the family business, or become a dentist “just like dad.” If this sounds familiar, it’s probably time to look at the new possibilities for your future.
Miller developed a 7-step process to help potential job seekers assess their current situation and beliefs, identify their real passion, and start on a journey that allows them to pursue their passion through work.
Step 1: Willingness to do something different.
Breaking the cycle of doing what you have always done is one of the most difficult tasks for job seekers. Many find it difficult to steer away from a career path or make a change, even if it doesn’t feel right. Miller urges job seekers to open their minds to other possibilities beyond what they are currently doing.
Step 2: Commitment to being who you are, not who or what someone wants you to be.
Look at the gifts and talents you have and make a commitment to pursue those things that you love most. If you love the social aspects of your job, but are stuck inside an office or “chained to your desk” most of the time, vow to follow your instinct and investigate alternative careers and work that allow you more time to interact with others. Dawn worked as a manager for a large retail clothing store for several years. Though she had advanced within the company, she felt frustrated and longed to be involved with nature and the outdoors. She decided to go to school nights and weekends to pursue her true passion by earning her master’s degree in forestry. She now works in the biotech forestry division of a major paper company.
Step 3: Self-definition
Miller suggests that once job seekers know who they are, they need to know how to sell themselves. “In the job market, you are a product. And just like a product, you most know the features and benefits that you have to offer a potential client, or employer.” Examine the skills and knowledge that you have identify how they can apply to your desired occupation. Your qualities will exhibit to employers why they should hire you over other candidates.
Step 4: Attain a level of self-honoring.
Self-honoring or self-love may seem like an odd step for job hunters, but being able to accept yourself, without judgment, helps eliminate insecurities and will make you more self-assured. By accepting who you are – all your emotions, hopes and dreams, your personality, and your unique way of being – you’ll project more confidence when networking and talking with potential employers. The power of self-honoring can help to break all the falsehoods you were programmed to believe – those that made you feel that you were not good enough, or strong enough, or intelligent enough to do what you truly desire.
Step 5: Vision.
Miller suggests that job seekers develop a vision that embraces the answer to “What do I really want to do?” one should create a solid statement in a dozen or so sentences that describe in detail how they see their life related to work. For instance, the secretary who longs to be an actress describes a life that allows her to express her love of Shakespeare on stage. A real estate agent, attracted to his current job because her loves fixing up old homes, describes buying properties that need a little tender loving care to make them more saleable.
Step 6: Appropriate risk.
Some philosophers believe that the way to enlightenment comes through facing obstacles and difficulties. Once people discover their passion, many are too scared to do anything about it. Instead, they do nothing. With this step, job seekers should assess what they are willing to give up, or risk, in pursuit of their dream. For one working mom, that meant taking night classes to learn new computer-aided design skills, while still earning a salary and keeping her day job. For someone else, it may mean quitting his or her job, taking out loan and going back to school full time. You’ll move one step closer to your ideal work life if you identify how much risk you are willing to take and the sacrifices you are willing to make.
Step 7: Action.
Some teachers of philosophy describe action in this way, “If one wants to get to the top of a mountain, just sitting at the foot thinking about it will not bring one there. It is by making the effort of climbing up the mountain, step by step, that eventually the summit is reached.” All too often, it is the lack of action that ultimately holds people back from attaining their ideals. Creating a plan and taking it one step at a time can lead to new and different job opportunities. Job-hunting tasks gain added meaning as you sense their importance in your quest for a more meaningful work life. The plan can include researching industries and occupations, talking to people who are in your desired area of work, taking classes, or accepting volunteer work in your targeted field.
Each of these steps will lead you on a journey to a happier and more rewarding work life. After all, it is the journey, not the destination, that is most important.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡1上作答。
1. According to the recent “Plans for 2004” survey, most people are unhappy with their current jobs.
2. Mary Lyn Miller’s job is to advise people on their life and career.
3. Mary Lyn Miller herself was once quite dissatisfied with her own work.
4. Many people find it difficult to make up their minds whether to change their career path.
5. According to Mary Lyn Miller, people considering changing their careers should commit themselves to the pursuit of ________.
6. In the job market, job seekers need to know how to sell themselves like ________.
7. During an interview with potential employers, self-honoring or self-love may help a job seeker to show ________.
8. Mary Lyn Miller suggests that a job seeker develop a vision that answers the question “________”
9. Many people are too scared to pursue their dreams because they are unwilling to ________.
10. What ultimately holds people back from attaining their ideals is ________.
Part IV Reading Comprehension (Reading in Depth) (25 minutes)
Section A
Google is a world-famous company, with its headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was set up in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998, and inflated (膨胀) with the Internet bubble. Even when everything around it collapsed the company kept on inflating. Google’s search engine is so widespread across the world that search became Google, and google became a verb. The world fell in love with the effective, fascinatingly fast technology.
Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of S. Brin and L. Page, but also to a series of fortunate events. It was Page who, at Stanford in 1996, initiated the academic project that eventually became Google’s search engine. Brin, who had met Page at a student orientation a year earlier, joined the project early on. They were both Ph.D. candidates when they devised the search engine which was better than the rest and, without any marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your grandmother.
Their breakthrough, simply put, was that when their search engine crawled the Web, it did more than just look for word matches, it also tallied (统计) and ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one another. That delivered far better results than anything else. Brin and Page meant to name their creation Googol (the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as Google. They raised money from prescient (有先见之明的) professors and venture capitalists, and moved off campus to turn Google into business. Perhaps their biggest stroke of luck came early on when they tried to sell their technology to other search engines, but no one met their price, and they built it up on their own.
The next breakthrough came in 2000, when Google figured out how to make money with its invention. It had lots of users, but almost no one was paying. The solution turned out to be advertising, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that Google is now essentially an advertising company, given that that’s the source of nearly all its revenue. Today it is a giant advertising company, worth $100 billion.
47. Apart from a series of fortunate events, what is it that has made Google so successful?
48. Google’s search engine originated from ________ started by L. Page.
49. How did Google’s search engine spread all over the world?
50. Brin and Page decided to set up their own business because no one would ________.
51. The revenue of the Google company is largely generated from ________.
Section B
Passage One
You hear the refrain all the time: the U.S. economy looks good statistically, but it doesn’t feel good. Why doesn’t ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness? It is a question that dates at least to the appearance in 1958 of The Affluent (富裕的) Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at 97.
The Affluent Society is a modern classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. For most of history, “hunger, sickness, and cold” threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. “Poverty was found everywhere in that world. Obviously it is not of ours.” After World War II, the dread of another Great Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18.2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4.5 percent.
To Galbraith, materialism had gone mad and would breed discontent. Through advertising, companies conditioned consumers to buy things they didn’t really want or need. Because so much spending was artificial, it would be unfulfilling. Meanwhile, government spending that would make everyone better off was being cut down because people instinctively—and wrongly—labeled government only as “a necessary evil.”
It’s often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. Well, there are many undeserving rich—overpaid chief executives, for instance. But over any meaningful period, most people’s incomes are increasing. From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted average family income rose 14.3 percent, to $43,200. people feel “squeezed” because their rising incomes often don’t satisfy their rising wants—for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections.
The other great frustration is that it has not eliminated insecurity. People regard job stability as part of their standard of living. As corporate layoffs increased, that part has eroded. More workers fear they’ve become “the disposable American,” as Louis Uchitelle puts it in his book by the same name.
Because so much previous suffering and social conflict stemmed from poverty, the arrival of widespread affluence suggested utopian (乌托邦式的) possibilities. Up to a point, affluence succeeds. There is much les physical misery than before. People are better off. Unfortunately, affluence also creates new complaints and contradictions.
Advanced societies need economic growth to satisfy the multiplying wants of their citizens. But the quest for growth lets loose new anxieties and economic conflicts that disturb the social order. Affluence liberates the individual, promising that everyone can choose a unique way to self-fulfillment. But the promise is so extravagant that it predestines many disappointments and sometimes inspires choices that have anti-social consequences, including family breakdown and obesity (肥胖症). Statistical indicators of happiness have not risen with incomes.
Should we be surprised? Not really. We’ve simply reaffirmed an old truth: the pursuit of affluence does not always end with happiness.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
52. What question does John Kenneth Galbraith raise in his book The Affluent Society?
A) Why statistics don’t tell the truth about the economy.
B) Why affluence doesn’t guarantee happiness.
C) How happiness can be promoted today.
D) What lies behind an economic boom.
53. According to Galbraith, people feel discontented because ________.
A) public spending hasn’t been cut down as expected
B) the government has proved to be a necessary evil
C) they are in fear of another Great Depression
D) materialism has run wild in modern society
54. Why do people feel squeezed when their average income rises considerably?
A) Their material pursuits have gone far ahead of their earnings.
B) Their purchasing power has dropped markedly with inflation.
C) The distribution of wealth is uneven between the r5ich and the poor.
D) Health care and educational cost have somehow gone out of control.
55. What does Louis Uchitelle mean by “the disposable American” (Line 3, Para. 5)?
A) Those who see job stability as part of their living standard.
B) People full of utopian ideas resulting from affluence.
C) People who have little say in American politics.
D) Workers who no longer have secure jobs.
56. What has affluence brought to American society?
A) Renewed economic security.
B) A sense of self-fulfillment.
C) New conflicts and complaints.
D) Misery and anti-social behavior.
Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
The use of deferential (敬重的) language is symbolic of the Confucian ideal of the woman, which dominates conservative gender norms in Japan. This ideal presents a woman who withdraws quietly to the background, subordinating her life and needs to those of her family and its male head. She is a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, master of the domestic arts. The typical refined Japanese woman excels in modesty and delicacy; she “treads softly (谨言慎行)in the world,” elevating feminine beauty and grace to an art form.
Nowadays, it is commonly observed that young women are not conforming to the feminine linguistic (语言的) ideal. They are using fewer of the very deferential “women’s” forms, and even using the few strong forms that are know as “men’s.” This, of course, attracts considerable attention and has led to an outcry in the Japanese media against the defeminization of women’s language. Indeed, we didn’t hear about “men’s language” until people began to respond to girls’ appropriation of forms normally reserved for boys and men. There is considerable sentiment about the “corruption” of women’s language—which of course is viewed as part of the loss of feminine ideals and morality—and this sentiment is crystallized by nationwide opinion polls that are regularly carried out by the media.
Yoshiko Matsumoto has argued that young women probably never used as many of the highly deferential forms as older women. This highly polite style is no doubt something that young women have been expected to “grow into”—after all, it is assign not simply of femininity, but of maturity and refinement, and its use could be taken to indicate a change in the nature of one’s social relations as well. One might well imagine little girls using exceedingly polite forms when playing house or imitating older women—in a fashion analogous to little girls’ use of a high-pitched voice to do “teacher talk” or “mother talk” in role play.
The fact that young Japanese women are using less deferential language is a sure sign of change—of social change and of linguistic change. But it is most certainly not a sign of the “masculization” of girls. In some instances, it may be a sign that girls are making the same claim to authority as boys and men, but that is very different from saying that they are trying to be “masculine.” Katsue Reynolds has argued that girls nowadays are using more assertive language strategies in order to be able to compete with boys in schools and out. Social change also brings not simply different positions for women and girls, but different relations to life stages, and adolescent girls are participating in new subcultural forms. Thus what may, to an older speaker, seem like “masculine” speech may seem to an adolescent like “liberated” or “hip” speech.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
57. The first paragraph describes in detail ________.
A) the standards set for contemporary Japanese women
B) the Confucian influence on gender norms in Japan
C) the stereotyped role of women in Japanese families
D) the norms for traditional Japanese women to follow
58. What change has been observed in today’s young Japanese women?
A) They pay less attention to their linguistic behavior.
B) The use fewer of the deferential linguistic forms.
C) They confuse male and female forms of language.
D) They employ very strong linguistic expressions.
59. How do some people react to women’s appropriation of men’s language forms as reported in the Japanese media?
A) They call for a campaign to stop the defeminization.
B) The see it as an expression of women’s sentiment.
C) They accept it as a modern trend.
D) They express strong disapproval.
60. According to Yoshiko Matsumoto, the linguistic behavior observed in today’s young women ________.
A) may lead to changes in social relations
B) has been true of all past generations
C) is viewed as a sign of their maturity
D) is a result of rapid social progress
61. The author believes that the use of assertive language by young Japanese women is ________.
A) a sure sign of their defeminization and maturation
B) an indication of their defiance against social change
C) one of their strategies to compete in a male-dominated society
D) an inevitable trend of linguistic development in Japan today
Part V Cloze (15 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.
Part V CLOZE
Historically, humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just struck them. __62__ that logic, 2006 should have been a breakthrough year for rational behavior. With the memory of 9/11 still __63__ in their minds, Americans watched hurricane Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history, on __64__ TV. Anyone who didn’t know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made __65__ worse by our willful blindness to risk as much as our __66__ to work together before everything goes to hell.
Granted, some amount of delusion (错觉) is probably part of the __67__ condition. In A.D. 63, Pompeii was seriously damaged by an earthquake, and the locals immediately went to work __68__, in the same spot—until they were buried altogether by a volcano eruption 16 years later. But a __69__ of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly bad at __70__ themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we __71__ did about the dangers we face. But it turns __72__ that in times of crisis, our greatest enemy is __73__ the storm, the quake or the __74__ itself. More often, it is ourselves.
So what has happened in the year that __75__ the disaster on the Gulf Coast? In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night to rebuild the flood walls. They have got the walls to __76__ they were before Katrina, more or less. That’s not __77__, we can now say with confidence. But it may be all __78__ can be expected from one year of hustle (忙碌).
Meanwhile, New Orleans officials have crafted a plan to use buses and trains to __79__ the sick and the disabled. The city estimates that 15,000 people will need a __80__ out. However, state officials have not yet determined where these people will be taken. The __81__ with neighboring communities are ongoing and difficult.
62. A) To B) By C) On D) For
63. A) fresh B) obvious C) apparent D) evident
64. A) visual B) vivid C) live D) lively
65. A) little B) less C) more D) much
66. A) reluctance B) rejection C) denial D) decline
67. A) natural B) world C) social D) human
68. A) revising B) refining C) rebuilding D) retrieving
69. A) review B) reminder C) concept D) prospect
70. A) preparing B) protesting C) protecting D) prevailing
71. A) never B) ever C) then D) before
72. A) up B) down C) over D) out
73. A) merely B) rarely C) incidentally D) accidentally
74. A) surge B) spur C) surf D) splash
75. A) ensued B) traced C) followed D) occurred
76. A) which B) where C) what D) when
77. A) enough B) certain C) conclusive D) final
78. A) but B) as C) that D) those
79. A) exile B) evacuate C) dismiss D) displace
80. A) ride B) trail C) path D) track
81. A) conventions B) notifications C) communications D) negotiations
Part VI Translation (5 minutes)
Directions: Complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in brackets. Please write your translation on Answer Sheet 2.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答，只需写出译文部分。
82. The auto manufacturers found themselves ________________________ (正在同外国公司竞争市场的份额).
83. Only in the small town ________________________ (他才感到安全和放松).
84. It is absolutely unfair that these children ________________________ (被剥夺了受教育的权利).
85. Our years of hard work are all in vain, ________________________ (更别提我们花费的大量金钱了).
86. The problems of blacks and women ________________________ (最近几十年受到公众相当大的关注).
