2014年12月大学英语六级考试真题（三）Directions:For this part,you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay based on the picture below.You should startyour essay with a brief description of the picture and then discuss what qualities an employer should look for in job200 words说明：2014年12月大学英语六级真题全国共考了两套听力。本套（即第三套）的听力材料与第一套完全一样，只是选项的顺序不同而己，故本套不再重复给出。Section CDirections:In this section,you will hear a passage three times.When the passage is read for the first time,you shouldlisten carefully for its general idea.When the passage is read for the second time,you are required to fill in theblanks with the exact words you have just heard.Finally,when the passage is read for the third time,you shouldcheck what you have written.If you're like most people,you've indulged in fake listening many times.You go to history class,sit in the thirdrow,and look squarely at the instructor as she speaks.But your mind is far away,26inthe clouds of pleasantdaydreams.Occasionally you come back to earth:The instructor writes an important term on the chalkboard,and you27copy it in your notebook.Every once in a while the instructor makes a 28remark,causing others in the class tolaugh.You smile politely,pretending that you've heard the remark and found it mildly humorous.You have a vaguesense of 29that you aren't paying close attention,but you tell yourself that any material you miss can 30from afriend's notes.Besides,the instructor's talking about road 3lin ancient Rome,and nothing could be more boring.So back you go into your private little world.Only later do you realize you've missed important information for a test.Fake listening may be easily exposed,since many speakers 32facial cues and can tell if you're merelypretending to listen.Your blank expression and the faraway look in your eyes are the cues that33your inattentiveness.Even if you're not exposed,there's another reason to avoid fakery:It's easy for this34tobecome a habit.For somepeople,the habit is so deeply rooted that they automatically start day dreaming when a speaker begins talking onsomething35or uninteresting.As a result,they miss lots of valuable information.Reading Comprehension(40 minutes)Section ADirections:In this section,there is a passage with ten blanks.You are required to select one word for each blankfrom a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage.Read the passage through carefully before makingyour choices.Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter.Please mark the corresponding letter for each item onAnswer Sheet 2 with a single line through the center You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage.It was 10 years ago,on a warm July night,that a newbom lamb took her first breath in a small shedin Scotland.From the outside,she looked no different from thousands of other sheep born on 36 farms.But Dolly,as the world soon came to realize,was no_37lamb.She was cloned from a single cell of an adult female sheep,38long-held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible.A decade later,scientists are starting to come to grips with just how different Dolly was.Dozens of animals havebeen cloned since that first lamb_mice,cats,cows and,most recently,a dog-and it's becoming39 clear that theyare all,in one way or another,defective.It's40 to think of clones as perfect carbon copies of the original.It tums out,though,that there are variousdegrees of genetic 41.That may come as a shock to people who have paid thousands of dollars to clone a pet cat onlyto discover that the baby cat looks and behaves 42liketheir beloved pet-with a different-color coat of fur,And these are just the obvious differences.Not only are clones 44 from the original template()by time,but they are also the product of an unnatural molecular mechanism that turns out not to be very good at making 45copies.In fact,the process can embed small flaws in the genes of clones that scientists are only now discovering注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。A.abstractF.identicalK.overturningB.completely.G.increasinglyL.separatedC.desertedH.miniatureM.surroundingD.duplicationI.NothingN.systematically.E.everythingJ.ordinaryO.temptingSection BDirections:In this section,you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it.Each statementcontains information given in one of the paragraphs.Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived.You may choose a paragraph more than once.Each paragraph is marked with a letter.Answer the questions bymarking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.Should Single-Sex Education Be Eliminated?A)Why is a neuroscientist here debating single-sex schooling?Honestly,I had no fixed ideas on the topic when Istarted researching it for my book,Pink Brain,Blue Brain.But any discussion of gender differences in childreninevitably leads to this debate,so I felt compelled to dive into the research data on single-sex schooling.I readevery study I could,weighed the existing evidence,and ultimately concluded that single-sex education is not theanswer to gender gaps in achievement--or the best way forward for todays young people.After my book waspublished,I met several developmental and cognitive psychologists whose work was addressing gender andeducation from different angles,and we published a peer-reviewed Education Forum piece in Science magazinewith the provocative title,"The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education."B)We showed that three lines of research used to justify single-sex schooling-educational,neuroscience,and socialpsychology--all fail to support its alleged benefits,and so the widely-held view that gender separation issomehow better for boys,girls,or both is nothing more than a myth.The Research on Academic Outcomes.C)First,we reviewed the extensive educational research that has compared academic outcomes in students attendingsingle-sex versus coeducational schools.The overwhelming conclusion when you put this enormous literaturetogether is that there is no clear academic advantage of sitting in all-female or all-male classes,in spite of muchpopular belief to the contrary.I base this conclusion not on any individual study,but on large-scale andsystematic reviews of thousands of studies conducted in every major English-speaking country.D)Of course,there're many excellent single-sex schools out there,but as these careful research reviews havedemonstrated,it's not their single-sex composition that makes them excellent.It's all the other advantages thatare typically packed into such schools,such as financial resources,quality of the faculty,and pro-academicculture,along with the family background and pre-selected ability of the students themselves that determinetheir outcomes.E)A case in point is the study by Linda Sax at UCLA,who used data from a large national survey of collegefreshmen to evaluate the effect of single-sex versus coeducational high schools.Commissioned by the NationalCoalition of Girls'Schools,the raw findings look pretty good for the funders--higher SAT scores and a strongeracademic orientation among women who had attended all girls'high schools (men weren't studied).However,once the researchers controlled for both student and school attributes--measures such as family income,parents'education,and school resources--most of these effects were erased or diminished.F)When it comes to boys in particular,the data show that single-sex education is distinctly unhelpful for them.Among the minority of studies that have reported advantages of single-sex schooling,virtually all of them werestudies of girls.There're no rigorous studies in the United States that find single-sexschooling is better for boys,and in fact,a separate line of research by economists has shown both boys and girls exhibit greater cognitivegrowth over the school year based on the "dose"of girls in a classroom.In fact,boys benefit even more thangirls from having larger numbers of female classmates.So single-sex schooling is really not the answer to thecurrent"boy crisis"in education.Brain and Cognitive DevelopmentG)The second line of research often used to justify single-sex education falls squarely within my area of expertise:brain and cognitive development.It's been more than a decade now since the "brain sex movement"beganinfiltrating(渗入)our schools,,and there are literally hundreds of schools caught up in the fad(新謿)，Publicschools in Wisconsin,Indiana,Florida and many other states now proudly declare on their websites that theyseparate boys and girls because "research solidly indicates that boys and girls learn differently,"due to"hard-wired"differences in their brains,eyes,ears,autonomic nervous systems,and more.H)All of these statements can be traced to just a few would-be neuroscientists,especially physician Leonard Sax andtherapist Michael Gurian.Each gives lectures,runs conferences,and does a lot of professional development onso-called "gender-specific leaming."[analyzed their various claims about sex difference sin hearing,vision,language,math,stress responses,and "learning styles"in my book and a long peer-reviewed paper.Otherneuroscientists and psychologists have similarly exposed their work.In short,the mechanisms by which ourbrains learn language,math,physics,and every other subject don't differ between boys and girls.Of course,learning does vary a lot between individual students,but research reliably shows that this variance is far greaterwithin populations of boys or girls than between the two sexes.I)The equal protection clause of the US Constitution prohibits separation of students by sex in public education that'sbased on precisely this kind of "over broad generalizations about the different talents,capacities,or preferencesof males and females."And the reason it is prohibited is because it leads far too easily to stereotyping and sexdiscrimination.Social Developmental PsychologyJ)That brings me to the third area of research which fails to support single-sex schooling and indeedsuggests the practice is actually harmful:social developmental psychology.K)It's a well-proven finding in social psychology that segregation promotes stereotyping and prejudice,whereas intergroup contact reduces them--and the results are the same whether you divide groups by race,age,gender,bodymass index,sexual orientation,or any other category.What's more,children are especially vulnerable to thiskind of bias,because they are dependent on adults for learning which social categories are important and whywe divide people into different groups.L)You don't have to look far to find evidence of stereotyping and sex discrimination in single-sex schools.There wasthe failed single-sex experiment in Califomia,where six school districts used generous state grants to set upseparate boys'and girls'academics in the late 1990s.Once boys and girls were segregated,teachers resorted totraditional gender stereotypes to run their classes,and within just three years,five of the six districts had goneback to coeducation.M)At the same time,researchers are increasingly discovering benefits of gender interaction in youth.A large Britishstudy found that children with other-sex older siblings (exhibit less stereotypical play than childrenwith same-sex older siblings,such as girls who like sports and building toys and boys who like art and dramaticplay.Another study of high school social networks found less bullying and aggression the higher the density ofmixed-sex friendships within a given adolescent network.Then there is the finding we cited in our Science paperof higher divorce and depression rates among a large group of British men who attended single-sex schools asteenagers,which might be explained by the lack of opportunity to learn about relationships during their