在六级考试之前,我们要做的一个重要的练习题即使真题了。真题是最好的练习题,这句话说的很有道理,我们在练习的时候,一般不要去做那些模拟题,还是以真题为主,在真题中能找到考试的技巧。而那些所谓的模拟题都没有真题那样的可行性。所以,做好每一年的真题才是最重要的。下面是一年的真题,我们大家对照答案做一做。

  Part II 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.

  Thirst grows for living unplugged

  More people are taking breaks from the connected life amid the stillness and quiet of retreats like the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania.

  About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began, was stillness and quiet.

  A few months later, I read an interview with the well-known cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck.

  What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps with a little exaggeration. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

  Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

  Has it really come to this?

  The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

  Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail) every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think.

  The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.

  Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

  The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

  When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots (奔跑), a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.”

  Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.”

  We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

  So what to do? More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思), or tai chi (太极);these aren’t New Age fads (时尚的事物) so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath (安息日)” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other friends take walks and “forget” their cellphones at home.

  A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy (同感,共鸣),as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.”

  I turn to eccentric measures to try to keep my mind sober and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time).I have yet to use a cellphone and I have never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot.

  None of this is a matter of asceticism (苦行主义);it is just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, or music. It is actually something deeper than mere happiness: it is joy, which the monk (僧侣) David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

  It is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world. But it is only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

  For more than 20 years, therefore, I have been going several times a year—often for no longer than three days—to a Benedictine hermitage (修道院),40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I am there, and I have never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it is only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I will have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to meet with a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old boy around his shoulders.

  “You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we had met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he had been living in the hermitage as an assistant to one of the monks.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked.

  We smiled. No words were necessary.

  “I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on. The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what is new, but what is essential.

  1. What is special about the Post Ranch Inn?

  A) Its rooms are well furnished but dimly lit.

  B) It makes guests feel like falling into a black hole.

  C) There is no access to television in its rooms.

  D) It provides all the luxuries its guests can think of.

  2. What does the author say the children of tomorrow will need most?

  A) Convenience and comfort in everyday life.

  B) Time away from all electronic gadgets.

  C) More activities to fill in their leisure time.

  D) Greater chances for individual development.

  3. What does the French philosopher Blaise Pascal say about distraction?

  A) It leads us to lots of mistakes.

  B) It renders us unable to concentrate.

  C) It helps release our excess energy.

  D) It is our greatest misery in life.

  4. According to Marshall McLuhan, what will happen if things come at us very fast?

  A) We will not know what to do with our own lives.

  B) We will be busy receiving and sending messages.

  C) We will find it difficult to meet our deadlines.

  D) We will not notice what is going on around us.

  5. What does the author say about yoga, meditation and tai chi?

  A) They help people understand ancient wisdom.

  B) They contribute to physical and mental health.

  C) They are ways to communicate with nature.

  D) They keep people from various distractions.

  6. What is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s finding?

  A) Quiet rural settings contribute a lot to long life.

  B) One’s brain becomes sharp when it is activated.

  C) Eccentric measures are needed to keep one’s mind sober.

  D) When people think deeply, their neural processes are slow.

  7. The author moved from Manhattan to rural Japan partly because he could _______.

  A) stay away from the noise of the big city.

  B) live without modern transportation.

  C) enjoy the beautiful view of the countryside.

  D) practice asceticism in a local hermitage

  8. In order to see the world whole, the author thinks it necessary to __________.

  9. The author takes walks and reads and loses himself in the stillness of the hermitage so that he can bring his wife and bosses and friends ___________.

  10. The youngish-looking man takes his little boy to the hermitage frequently so that when he grows up he will know __________.

  查看参考答案 参考答案

  1. There is no access to television in its rooms.

  2. Time away from all electronic gadgets

  3. It is our greatest misery in life

  4. We will not know what to do with our own lives

  5. They help people understand ancient wisdom

  6. When people think deeply, their neural processes are slow

  7. live without modern transportation

  8. have some distance from it / the world.

  9 something useful

  10. what is essential

  2012年6月六级快速阅读真题及答案

  Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)(15minutes)

  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.

  The Three-Year Solution

  Hartwick College, a small liberal-arts school in upstate New York, makes New York, makes this offer to well prepared students: earn your undergraduate degree in three years instead of four, and save about 543,000—the amount of one year’s tuition and fees. A number of innovative colleges are making the same offer to students anxious about saving time and money. That’s both an opportunity and a warning for the best higher-education system in the world.

  TheUnited Stateshas almost all of the world’s best universities. A recent Chinese survey ranks 35 American universities among the top 50, eight among the top 10. Our research universities have been the key to developing the competitive advantages that help Americans produce 25% of all the world’s wealth. In 2007, 623,805 of the world’s brightest students were attracted to American universities.

  Yet, there are signs of peril (危险)within American higher es have to compete in the marketplace. Students may choose among 6,000 public, private, nonprofit, for profit, or religious institutions of higher learning. In addition, almost all of the 532 billion the federal government provides for university research is awarded competitively.

  But many colleges and universities are stuck in the past. For instance, the idea of the fall-to-spring“school year”hasn’t changed much since before the American Revolution, when we were a summer stretch no longer makes sense. Former George Washington University president Stephen Trachtenberg estimates that a typical college uses its facilities for academic purposes a little more than half the calendar year.“While college facilities sit idle, they continue to generate maintenance expenses that contribute to the high cost of running a college,” he has written.

  Within academic departments, tenure(终身职位),combined with age-discrimination laws, makes faculty turnover—critical for a university to remain current in changing times—difficult. Instead of protecting speech and encouraging diversity and innovative thinking, the tenure system often stifles(压制)them: younger professors must win the approval of established colleagues for tenure, encouraging like-mindedness and sometimes inhibiting the free flow of ideas.

  Meanwhile, tuition has soared, leaving graduating students with unprecedented loan debt. Strong campus presidents to manage these problems are becoming harder to find, and to keep. In fact, students now stay on campus almost as long as their presidents. The average amount of time students now take to complete an undergraduate degree has stretched to six years and seven months as students interrupted by work, inconvenienced by unavailable classes, or lured by one more football season find it hard to graduate.

  Congress has tried to help students with college costs through Pell Grants and other forms of tuition support. But some of their fixes have made the problem worse. The stack of congressional regulations governing federal student grants and loans now stands twice as tall as I do. Filling out these forms consumes 7% of every tuition dollar.

  For all of these reasons, some colleges like Hartwick are rethinking the old way of doing things and questioning decades-old assumptions about what a college degree means. For instance, why does it have to take four years to earn a diploma? This fall, 16 first-year students and four second-year students at Hartwick enrolled in the school’s new three year degree program. According to the college, the plan is designed for high-ability, highly motivated student who wish to save money or to move along more rapidly toward advanced degrees.

  By eliminating that extra year, there year degree students save 25% in costs. Instead of taking30credits a year, these students take 40. During January, Hartwick runs a four week course during which students may earn three to four credits on or off campus, including a number of international sites. Summer courses are not required, but a student may enroll in them—and pay extra. Three year students get first crack at course registration. There are no changes in the number of courses professors teach or in their pay.

  The three-year degree isn’t a new idea. Geniuses have always breezed through.JudsonCollege, a 350-student institution inAlabama, has offered students a three-year option for 40 years. Students attend “short terms” in May and June to earn the credits required for graduation.BatesCollegeinMaineandBallStateUniversityinIndianaare among other colleges offering three-year options.

  Changes at the high-school level are also helping to make it easier for many students to earn their undergraduate degrees in less time. One of five students arrives at college today with Advanced Placement (AP) credits amounting to a semester or more of college level work. Many universities, including large schools like theUniversityofTexas, make it easy for these AP students to graduate faster.

  For students who don’t plan to stop with an undergraduate degree, the three-year plan may have an even greater appeal. Dr. John Sergent, head of VanderbiltUniversityMedicalSchool’s residency (住院医生) program, enrolled in Vanderbilt’s undergraduate college in 1959. He entered medical school after only three years as did four or five of his classmates.” My first year of medical school counted as my senior year, which meant I had to take three to four labs a week to get all my sciences in. I basically skipped my senior year,” says Sergent. He still had time to be a student senator and meet his wife.

  There are, however, drawbacks to moving through school at such a brisk pace. For one, it deprives students of the luxury of time to roam (遨游) intellectually. Compressing everything into three years also leaves less time for growing up, engaging in extracurricular activities, and studying abroad. On crowded campuses it could mean fewer opportunities to get into a prized professor’s class.Iowa’sWaldorfCollege has graduated several hundred students in its three-year degree program, but it now phasing out the option. Most Waldorf students wanted the full four-year experience—academically, socially, and athletically. And faculty members will be wary of any change that threatens the core curriculum in the name of moving students into the workforce.

  “Most high governmental officials seem to conceive of education in this light—as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth,” Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, told The Washington Post. “I strongly disagree with this approach.” Another risk: the new campus schedules might eventually produce less revenue for the institution and longer working hours for faculty members.

  Adopting a three-year option will not come easily to most school. Those that wish to tackle tradition and make American campus more cost-conscious may find it easier to take Trachtenberg’s advice: open campuses year-round.“You could run two complete colleges, with two complete faculties,”he says.“That’s without cutting the length of students’ vacations, increasing class sizes, or requiring faculty to teach more.”

  Whether they experiment with three-year degrees, offer year-round classes, challenge the tenure system—or all of the above—universities are slowly realizing that to stay competitive and relevant they must adapt to a rapidly changing world.

  Expanding the three-year option may be difficult, but it may be less difficult than asking Congress for additional financial help, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students. These sorts of innovations can help American universities avoid the perils of success.

  注意:此部分试题请在答题卡1上作答。

  Why didHartwickCollegestart three-year degree programs?

  A) To create chances for the poor. C) To enroll more students.

  B) To cut students’ expenses. D) To solve its financial problems.

  2. By quoting Stephen Trachtenberg the author wants to say that .

  A) American universities are resistant to change

  B) the summer vacation contributes to student growth

  C) college facilities could be put to more effective use

  D) the costs of running a university are soaring

  3. The author thinks the tenure system in American universities .

  A)suppresses creative thinking C) guarantees academic freedom

  B) creates conflicts among colleagues D) is a sign of age discrimination

  4. What is said about the new three-year degree program at Hartwick?

  A) Its students have to earn more credits each year.

  B) Non-credit courses are eliminated altogether.

  C) Its faculty members teach more hours a week.

  D) Some summer courses are offered free of charge.

  5. What do we learn aboutJudsonCollege’s three-year degree program?

  A) It has been running for several decades.

  B) It is open to the brightest students only.

  C) It is the most successful in the country.

  D) It has many practical courses on offer.

  6. What changes in high schools help students earn undergraduate degrees in three years?

  A) Curriculums have been adapted to students’ needs.

  B) More students have Advanced Placement credits.

  C) More elective courses are offered in high school.

  D) The overall quality of education bas improved.

  7. What is said to be a drawback of the three-year college program?

  A) Students have to cope with too heavy a workload.

  B) Students don’t have much time to roam intellectually.

  C) Students have little time to gain practical experience.

  D) Students don’t have prized professors to teach them.

  8. College faculty members are afraid that the pretext of moving students into the workforce might pose a threat to .

  9. Universities are increasingly aware that they must adapt to a rapidly changing world in order to .

  10. Convenient academic schedules with more-focused, less-expensive degrees will be more attractive to .

  查看参考答案 参考答案

  1. B) To cut students’ expenses

  2. C) college facilities could be put to more effective use

  3. A)suppresses creative thinking

  4. A) Its students have to earn more credits each year.

  5. A) It has been running for several decades.

  6. B) More students have Advanced Placement credits.

  7. B) Students don’t have much time to roam intellectually.

  8. the core curriculum

  9. stay competitive and relevant

  10. bright, motivated students

  2011年12月六级快速阅读真题及答案

  Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)

  Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer thequestions 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.

  Google's Plan for World's Biggest Online Library: Philanthropy Or Act of Piracy?

  In recent years, teams of workers dispatched by Google have been working hard to make digital copies of books. So far, Google has scanned more than 10 million titles from libraries in America and Europe - including half a million volumes held by the Bodleian in Oxford. The exact method it uses is unclear; the company does not allow outsiders to observe the process.

  Why is Google undertaking such a venture? Why is it even interested in all those out-of-printlibrary books, most of which have been gathering dust on forgotten shelves for decades? Thecompany claims its motives are essentially public-spirited. Its overall mission, after all, is to "organise the world's information", so it would be odd if that information did not include books.

  The company likes to present itself as having lofty aspirations. "This really isn't about making money. We are doing this for the good of society." As Santiago de la Mora, head of Google Books for Europe, puts it: "By making it possible to search the millions of books that exist today, we hope to expand the frontiers of human knowledge."

  Dan Clancy, the chief architect of Google Books, does seem genuine in his conviction that thisis primarily a philanthropic (慈善的) exercise. "Google's core business is search and find, soobviously what helps improve Google's search engine is good for Google," he says. "But we havenever built a spreadsheet (电子数据表) outlining the financial benefits of this, and I have neverhad to justify the amount I am spending to the company's founders."

  It is easy, talking to Clancy and his colleagues, to be swept along by their missionary passion. But Google's book-scanning project is proving controversial. Several opponents have recently emerged, ranging from rival tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon to small bodies representing authors and publishers across the world. In broad terms, these opponents have levelled two sets of criticisms at Google.

  First, they have questioned whether the primary responsibility for digitally archiving the world's books should be allowed to fall to a commercial company. In a recent essay in the New YorkReview of Books, Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard University's library, argued that because such books are a common resource – the possession of us all – only public, not-for-profit bodiesshould be given the power to control them.

  The second related criticism is that Google's scanning of books is actually illegal. This allegation has led to Google becoming mired in (陷入) a legal battle whose scope and complexity makes the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Charles Dickens' Bleak House look straightforward.

  At its centre, however, is one simple issue: that of copyright. The inconvenient fact about most books, to which Google has arguably paid insufficient attention, is that they are protected by copyright. Copyright laws differ from country to country, but in general protection extends for the duration of an author's life and for a substantial period afterwards, thus allowing the author's heirs to benefit. (In Britain and America, this post-death period is 70 years.) This means, of course, that almost all of the books published in the 20th century are still under copyright – and the last century saw more books published than in all previous centuries combined. Of the roughly 40 million books in US libraries, for example, an estimated 32 million are in copyright. Of these, some 27 million are out of print.

  Outside the US, Google has made sure only to scan books that are out of copyright and thus in the "public domain" (works such as the Bodleian's first edition of Middlemarch, which anyone canread for free on Google Books Search).

  But, within the US, the company has scanned both in-copyright and out-of-copyright works. Inits defence, Google points out that it displays only small segments of books that are in copyright– arguing that such displays are "fair use". But critics allege that by making electronic copies of these books without first seeking the permission of copyright holders, Google has committed piracy.

  "The key principle of copyright law has always been that works can be copied only once authors have expressly given their permission," says Piers Blofeld, of the Sheil Land literary agency in London. "Google has reversed this – it has simply copied all these works without bothering toask."

  In 2005, the Authors Guild of America, together with a group of US publishers, launched aclass action suit (集团诉讼) against Google that, after more than two years of negotiation, endedwith an announcement last October that Google and the claimants had reached an out-of-courtsettlement. The full details are complicated - the text alone runs to 385 pages– and trying tosummarise it is no easy task. "Part of the problem is that it is basically incomprehensible," saysBlofeld, one of the settlement's most vocal British critics.

  Broadly, the deal provides a mechanism for Google to compensate authors and publishers whose rights it has breached (including giving them a share of any future revenue it generates fromtheir works). In exchange for this, the rights holders agree not to sue Google in future.

  This settlement hands Google the power - but only with the agreement of individual rights holders – to exploit its database of out-of-print books. It can include them in subscription deals sold to libraries or sell them individually under a consumer licence. It is these commercial provisions that are proving the settlement's most controversial aspect.

  Critics point out that, by giving Google the right to commercially exploit its database, thesettlement paves the way for a subtle shift in the company's role from provider of information to seller. "Google's business model has always been to provide information for free, and sell advertising on the basis of the traffic this generates," points out James Grimmelmann, associate professor at New York Law School. Now, he says, because of the settlement's provisions, Google could become a significant force in bookselling.

  Interest in this aspect of the settlement has focused on "orphan" works, where there is noknown copyright holder – these make up an estimated 5-10% of the books Google has scanned. Under the settlement, when no rights holders come forward and register their interest in a work, commercial control automatically reverts to Google. Google will be able to display up to 20% oforphan works for free, include them in its subscription deals to libraries and sell them to individual buyers under the consumer licence.

  It is by no means certain that the settlement will be enacted (执行) – it is the subject of afairness hearing in the US courts. But if it is enacted, Google will in effect be off the hook as far as copyright violations in the US are concerned. Many people are seriously concerned by this - and the company is likely to face challenges in other courts around the world.

  No one knows the precise use Google will make of the intellectual property it has gained byscanning the world's library books, and the truth, as Gleick, an American science writer and member of the Authors Guild, points out, is that the company probably doesn't even know itself. But what is certain is that, in some way or other, Google's entrance into digital bookselling will have a significant impact on the book world in the years to come.

  注意:此部分试题请在答题卡1上作答。

  1. Google claims its plan for the world's biggest online library is _____.

  A) to serve the interest of the general public

  B) to encourage reading around the world

  C) to save out-of-print books in libraries

  D) to promote its core business of searching

  2. According to Santiago de la Mora, Google's book-scanning project will _____.

  A) broaden humanity's intellectual horizons

  B) help the broad masses of readers

  C) revolutionise the entire book industry

  D) make full use of the power of its search engine

  3. Opponents of Google Books believe that digitally archiving the world's books should be controlled by _____.

  A) non-profit organisations C) multinational companies

  B) the world's leading libraries D) the world's tech giants

  4. Google has involved itself in a legal battle as it ignored _____.

  A) the copyright of authors of out-of-print books

  B) the copyright of the books it scanned

  C) the interest of traditional booksellers

  D) the differences of in-print and out-of-print books

  5. Google defends its scanning in-copyright books by saying that _____.

  A) it displays only a small part of their content

  B) it is willing to compensate the copyright holders

  C) making electronic copies of books is not a violation of copyright

  D) the online display of in-copyright books is not for commercial use

  6. What do we learn about the class action suit against Google?

  A) It ended in a victory for the Authors Guild of America.

  B) It was settled after more than two years of negotiation.

  C) It failed to protect the interests of American publishers.

  D) It could lead to more out-of-court settlements of such disputes.

  7. What remained controversial after the class action suit ended?

  A) The compensation for copyright holders.

  B) The change in Google's business model.

  C) Google's further exploitation of its database.

  D) The commercial provisions of the settlement.

  8. While _____, Google makes money by selling advertising.

  9. Books whose copyright holders are not known are called _____.

  10. Google's entrance into digital bookselling will tremendously _____ in the future.

  查看参考答案 参考答案

   serve the interest of the general public

  2.A. broaden humanity's intellectual horizons

  3. -profit organisations

  4.B. the copyright of the books it scanned

  5. D. the online display of in-copyright books is not for commercial use

  6. B. It was settle after more than two years of negotiation.

  7. D. The commercial provision of the settlement

  8. Providing information for free

  9. orphan works

  10. change the world’s book market