2016年6月大学英语四级考试真题（三）Part IWriting(30 minutes)Directions:For this part,you are allowed 30 minutes to write a letter to express your thanks to your parentsor any other family member upon making a memorable achievement.You should write at least 120 wordsbut no more than 180 words.Part IListening Comprehension(25 minutes)说明：由于2016年6月四级考试全国共考了两套听力，本套真题听力与前两套内容相同，只是选项顺序不同，因此在本套真题中不再重复出现。PartⅢReadingComprehension(40 minutes)Section ADirections:In this section,there is a passage with ten blanks.You are required to select one word for eachblank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage.Read the passage through carefullybefore making your choices.Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter.Please mark the correspondingletter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.You may not use any of thewords in the bank more than once.Questions 26 to 35 are based on the following passage.Contrary to popular belief,older people generally do not want to live with their children.Moreover,most adult children 26 every bit as much care and support to their aging parents as was the case inthe "good old days",and most older people do not feel 27.About 80%of people 65 years and older have living children,and about 90%of them have 28contact with their children.About 75%of elderly parents who don't go to nursing homes live within30 minutes of at least one of their children.However,29 having contact with children does not guarantee happiness in old age.In fact,some research has found that people who are most involved with their families have the lowest spirits.Thisresearch may be30,however,as ill health often makes older people more 31 and therebyincreases contact with family members.So it is more likely that poor health,not just family involvement,32 spirits.Increasingly,researchers have begun to look at the quality of relationships,rather than at thefrequency of contact,between the elderly and their children.If parents and children share interests andvalues and agree on childrearing practices and religious 33,they are likely to enjoy each other'scompany.Disagreements on such matters can 34 cause problems.If parents are angered by theirdaughter's divorce,dislike her new husband,and disapprove of how she is raising their grandchildren,35are that they are not going to enjoy her visits.四级2016年6月49A)abandonedF)dampensK)grantB)advancedG)dependentL)merelyC)biasedH)distantM)provideD)chancesI frequentN)understandablyE)commitmentJ)fulfillmentO)unrealisticallySection BDirections:In this section,you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it.Eachstatement contains information given in one of the paragraphs.Identify the paragraph from which theinformation is derived.You may choose a paragraph more than once.Each paragraph is marked with aletter.Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?A)For many years I have studied global agricultural,population,environmental and economic trends andtheir interactions.The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate pointto the breakdown of governments and societies.Yet I,too,have resisted the idea that food shortagescould bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.B)I can no longer ignore that risk.Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that areundermining the world food economy forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.C)As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing,the resulting food-price inflation puts severestress on the governments of many countries.Unable to buy grain or grow their own,hungry peopletake to the streets.Indeed,even before the steep climb in grain prices in 2008,the number of failingstates was expanding.If the food situation continues to worsen,entire nations will break down at anever increasing rate.In the 20th century the main threat to international security was superpowerconflict;today it is failing states.D)States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security,food security and basicsocial services such as education and health care.When governments lose their control on power,lawand order begin to disintegrate.After a point,countries can become so dangerous that food reliefworkers are no longer safe and their programs are halted.Failing states are of international concernbecause they are a source of terrorists,drugs,weapons and refugees ()threatening politicalstability everywhere.E)The surge in world grain prices in 2007 and 2008-and the threat they pose to food security-has adifferent,more troubling quality than the increases of the past.During the second half of the 20thcentury,grain prices rose dramatically several times.In 1972,for instance,the Soviets,recognizingtheir poor harvest early,quietly cornered the world wheat market.As a result,wheat prices elsewheremore than doubled,pulling rice and corn prices up with them.But this and other price shocks wereevent-driven-drought in the Soviet Union,crop-shrinking heat in the U.S.Corn Belt.And the riseswere short-lived:prices typically returned to normal with the next harvest.F)In contrast,the recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven,making it unlikely to reverse withouta reversal in the trends themselves.On the demand side,those trends include the ongoing addition ofmore than 70 million people a year,a growing number of people wanting to move up the food chain toconsume highly grain-intensive meat products,and the massive diversion (of U.S.grain to theproduction of bio-fuel.四级2016年6月50G)As incomes rise among low-income consumers,the potential for further grain consumption is huge.Butthat potential pales beside the never-ending demand for crop-based fuels.A fourth of this year's U.S.grain harvest will go to fuel cars.H)What about supply?The three environmental trends-the shortage of fresh water,the loss of topsoiland the rising temperatures-are making it increasingly hard to expand the world's grain supply fastenough to keep up with demand.Of all those trends,however,the spread of water shortages poses themost immediate threat.The biggest challenge here is in irrigation,which consumes 70%of the world'sfresh water.Millions of irrigation wells in many countries are now pumping water out of undergroundsources faster than rainfall can refill them.The result is falling water tables (in countrieswith half the world's people,including the three big grain producers-China,India and the U.S.I)As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry,China's wheat crop,the world'slargest,has declined by 8%since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997.But water shortages are evenmore worrying in India.Millions of irrigation wells have significantly lowered water tables in almostevery state.J)As the world's food security falls to pieces,individual countries acting in their own self-interest areactually worsening the troubles of many.The trend began in 2007,when leading wheat-exportingcountries such as Russia and Argentina limited or banned their exports,in hopes of increasing localfood supplies and thereby bringing down domestic food prices.Vietnam banned its exports for severalmonths for the same reason.Such moves may eliminate the fears of those living in the exportingcountries,but they are creating panic in importing countries that must rely on what is then left forexport.K)In response to those restrictions,grain-importing countries are trying to nail down long-term tradeagreements that would lock up future grain supplies.Food-import anxiety is even leading to new effortsby food-importing countries to buy or lease farmland in other countries.In spite of such temporarymeasures,soaring food prices and spreading hunger in many other countries are beginning to breakdown the social order.L)Since the current world food shortage is trend-driven,the environmental trends that cause it must bereversed.We must cut carbon emissions by 80%from their 2006 levels by 2020,stabilize the world'spopulation at eight billion by 2040,completely remove poverty,and restore forests and soils.There isnothing new about the four objectives.Indeed,we have made substantial progress in some parts of theworld on at least one of these-the distribution of family-planning services and the associated shift tosmaller families.M)For many in the development community,the four objectives were seen as positive,promotingdevelopment as long as they did not cost too much.Others saw them as politically correct and morallyappropriate.Now a third and far more significant motivation presents itself:meeting these goals maybe necessary to prevent the collapse of our civilization.Yet the cost we project for saving civilizationwould amount to less than 200 billion a year,1/6 of current global military spending.In effect,ourplan is the new security budget.36.The more recent steep climb in grain prices partly results from the fact that more and more peoplewant to consume meat products.37.Social order is breaking down in many countries because of food shortages.38.Rather than superpower conflict,countries unable to cope with food shortages now constitute the mainthreat to world security.四级2016年6月51