1、2013 年 12 月大学英语四级考试真题答案解析(二)Part 1 writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay based on the picture below. You should start your essay with a brief account of the increasing use of the mobile phone in peoples life and then explain the consequence
2、s of overusing it.You should write at least IW words but no more than 180 words. People are crossing the street looking at their cell phones and using walking sticks in order to see. Part 2 Listening Comprehension (30 minutes) Section A Directions ： In this section, you will hear 8 short conversatio
3、ns 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
4、), and decide which the best answer is. Then mark the corresponding letter o“ Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre. 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡 1 上作答。 1. A) Go to a place he has visited. C) Consult a travel agent. B) Make her own arrangements. D) Join in a package tour. 2. A) They are on a long tr
5、ip by car. C) They are used to getting up early. B) They are stuck in a traffic jam. D) They are tired of eating out at night. 3. A) He is a person difficult to deal with. C) He is unwilling to speak in public. B) He dislikes any formal gathering. D) He often keeps a distance from others. 4. A) Work
6、 in another department. C) Recruit graduate students. B) Pursue further education. D) Take an administrative job. 5. A) He would not be available to start the job in time. B) He is not quite qualified for the art director position. C) He would like to leave some more time for himself. D) He will get
7、 his application letter ready before May 1. 6. A) Cleaner. B) Mechanic. C) Porter. D) Salesman. 7. A) Request one or two roommates to do the cleaning. B) Help Laura with her term paper due this weekend. C) Get Laura to clean the apartment herself this time. D) Ask Laura to put off the cleaning until
8、 another week. 8. A) A problem caused by the construction. C) The building project they are working on, B) An accident that occurred on the bridge. D) The public transportation conditions, heard. Questions 9 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just 9. A) To look for a job as a salesperson.
9、C) To place an order for some products. B) To have a talk with Miss Thompson. D) To complain about a faulty appliance. 10. A) The person in charge is not in the office. B) The supplies are out of stock for the moment. C) They failed to reach an agreement on the price. D) The company is re-cataloguin
10、g the items. 11. A) 0743, 12536 extension 15. B) 0734, 21653 extension 51. C) 0734, 38750 extension 15. D) 0743，62135 extension 51. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12. A) Since he found a girlfriend. C) Since he began to exercise regularly. B) Since he took to h
11、eavy smoking. D) Since he started to live on his own. 13. A) He is getting too fat. C) He doesnt eat vegetables. B) He smokes too much. D) He doesnt look well at all. 14. A) They are overweight for their age. C) They are still in their early twenties. B) They are respectful to their parents. D) They
12、 dislike doing physical exercise. 15. A) To quit smoking. C) To find a girlfriend. B) To reduce his weight. D) To follow her advice.Section BDirections ： In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a quest
13、ion, must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre. 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡 1 上作答。 Passage One Questions 16 to 19 are based on the passage you have just heard. 16. A) They have destroyed severa
14、l small towns. B) They will soon spread to San Francisco. C) They have injured many residents. D) They are burning out of control. 17. A) They have been hospitalized. B) They have got skin problems. C) They were choked by the thick smoke. D) They were poisoned by the burning chemicals. 18. A) It fai
15、led because of a sudden rocket explosion. B) It has been re-scheduled for a midday takeoff. C) It has been canceled due to technical problems, D) It was delayed for eleven hours and thirty minutes. 19. A) They made frequent long-distance calls to each other. B) They illegally used government compute
16、rs in New Jersey. C) They were found to be smarter than computer specialists. D) They were arrested for stealing government information. Passage Two Questions 20 to 22 are based on the passage you have just heard. 20. A) Peaceful, C) Generous. B) Considerate. D) Cooperative 21. A) someone dumped the
17、 clothes left in the washer and dryer. B) Someone broke the washer and dryer by overloading them. C) Mindy Lances laundry blocked the way to the laundry room. D) Mindy Lance threatened to take revenge on her neighbors. 22. A) Asking the neighborhood committee for help. B) Limiting the amount of laun
18、dry for each wash. C) Informing the building manager of the matter. D) Installing a few more washers and dryers. Passage Three Questions 23 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard. 23. A) She is both a popular and highly respected author, B) She is the most loved African novelist of all t
19、imes. C) She is the most influential author since the 1930，s. D) She is the first writer to focus on the fate of slaves. 24. A) The Book Critics Circle Award. C) The Pulitzer Prize for fiction. B) The Nobel Prize for literature. D) The National Book Award. 25. A) She is a relative of Morrisons. C) S
20、he is a skilled storyteller. B) She is a slave from Africa. D) She is a black woman. Section CDirections ： 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,
21、 you are required to fill in the blanks with the exact words you have just heard. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written. 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡 1 上作答。 Many college students today own personal computers that cost anywhere from $ 1 000 to perhaps $ 5 000 o
22、r more. 26 ,it is not uncommon for them to purchase 27 costing another several hundred dollars. Twenty years ago, computers were 28 ，but they were very large and extremely expensive. Few, if any, 29 purchased computers for home use. Over the years, the price of the “guts“ of a computer its memory 一
23、has declined to less than a thousandth of the price per unit of memory that prevailed twenty years ago. This is the main reason why computers cost so much less today than they used to. Moreover, 30 improvements have made it possible to 31 memory circuitry that is small enough to fit into the portabl
24、e personal computers that many of us own and use. 32 , as the price of computation has declined the average consumer and business have spent more on purchasing computers. 33 , improved agricultural technology, hybrid (杂交）seeds, 34 animal breeding, and so on have vastly increased the amount of output
25、 a typical farmer can produce. The prices of goods such as meats and grains have fallen sharply relative to the prices of most other goods and services. As agricultural prices have fallen, many households have decreased their total expenses on food. Even though the 35 of a product purchased generall
26、y increases when its price falls, total expenses on it may decline. Part3 Reading Comprehension (40 minutes)Section A Directions： In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage.
27、 Read the passage through carefully before asking your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once. Questions 36 to
28、45 are based on the following passage. To get a sense of how women have progressed in science, take a quick tour of the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. This is a storied place, the 36 of some of the most important discoveries in modern science- starting with Ernest Lawr
29、ences invention of the cyclotron (回旋 加速器）in 1931. A generation ago, female faces were 37 and, even today, visitors walking through the first floor of LeConte Hall will see a full corridor of exhibits 38 the many distinguished physicists who made history here, 39 all of them white males. But climb up
30、 to the third floor and youll see a 40 display. There, among the photos of current faculty members and students, are portraits of the 41 head of the department, Marjorie Shapiro, and four other women whose research 42 everything from the mechanics of the universe to the smallest particles of matter.
31、 A sixth woman was hired just two weeks ago. Although theyre still only about 10 percent of the physics faculty, women are clearly a presence here. And the real 43 may be in the smaller photos to the right: graduate and undergraduate students, about 20 percent of them female. Every year Berkeley sen
32、ds its fresh female physics PhDs to the countrys top universities. That makes Shapiro optimistic, but also 44 “I believe things are getting better，“ she says, “but theyre not getting better as 45 as I would like.“ 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡 2 上作答。 A) circumstance F) different K) presently B) confidence G) exposi
33、ng L) rare C) covers H) fast M) realistic D) current I) honoring N) site E) deals J) hope O) virtually Section BDirections： In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph
34、from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2. Is College a Worthy Investment? A) Why are we spending so much money on college? And why are we so unh
35、appy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe its time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious (大不敬的）：is all this investment in college education really wo
36、rth it? B) The answer, I fear, is no. For an increasing number of kids the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus. C) For my entire adult life, a good education has been the most important thing for middle-class h
37、ouseholds. My parents spent more educating my sister and me than they spent on their house, and theyre not the only ones. and, of course, for an increasing number of families, most of the cost of their house is actually the cost of living in a good school district. Questioning the value of a college
38、 education seems a bit like questioning the value of happiness, or fun. D) The average price of all goods and services has risen about 50 percent. But the price of a college education has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that todays students are getting twice as good? Are new workers tw
39、ice as smart? Have they become somehow massively more expensive to educate? E) Perhaps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor, says, .I look at the data, and I see college costs rising faster than inflation up to the mid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3 to 4
40、percent a year over inflation. What has happened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes.“ Aid has increased, subsidized （补贴的）loans have become available, and “the universities have gotten the money.“ Economist Bryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees：
41、“Its a giant waste of resources that will continue as long as the subsidies continue.“ F) Promotional literature for colleges and student loans often speaks of debt as an “investment in yourself.“ But an investment is supposed to generate income to pay off the loans. More than half of all recent gra
42、duates are unemployed or in jobs that do not require a degree, and the amount of student- loan debt carried by households has increased more than five times since 1999. These graduates were told that a diploma was all they needed to succeed, but it wont even get them out of the spare bedroom at Mom
43、and Dads. For many, the most visible result of their four years is the loan payments, which now average hundreds of dollars a month on loan balances in the tens of thousands. G) Its true about the moneysort of. College graduates now make 80 percent more than people who have only a high-school diplom
44、a, and though there are no precise estimates, the wage premium (高出的部分）for an outstanding school seems to be even higher. But thats not true of every student. Its very easy to spend four years majoring in English literature and come out no more employable than you were before you went in. Conversely,
45、 chemical engineers straight out of school can easily make almost four times the wages of an entry-level high-school graduate. H) James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has examined how the returns on education break down for individuals with different backgrounds and levels of ability. “
46、Even with these high prices, youre still finding a high return for individuals who are bright and motivated,“ he says. On the other hand, “if youre not college ready, then the answer is no, its not worth it.“ Experts tend to agree that for the average student, college is still worth it today, but th
47、ey also agree that the rapid increase in price is eating up more and more of the potential return. For borderline students, tuition (学费）rise can push those returns into negative territory. I) Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how we invest in higher educa
48、tionand that employers need to rethink the increasing use of college degrees as crude screening tools for jobs that dont really require college skills. “Employers seeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just adding that requirement,“ says Vedder. “In fact, a college degree
49、 becomes a job requirement for becoming a bar-tender.“ J) We have started to see some change on the finance side. A law passed in 2007 allows many students to cap their loan payment at 10 percent of their income and forgives any balance after 25 years. But of course, that doesnt control the cost of education; it just shifts it to taxpayers. It also encourages graduates to choose lower-paying careers, which reduces the financial return to education still further. “Youre subsidizing people to become priests and poets and
