2013年12月大学英语六级考试真题（第3套）
Part I Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay about the
impact of the information explosion by referring to the saying “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” You can give examples to illustrate your point and then explain what you can do to avoid being distracted by irrelevant information. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Part II Listening Comprehension (30 minutes)
说明：2013年12月六级真题全国共考了两套听力。本套（即第三套）的听力内容与第二套的完全一样，只是选项的顺序不一样而已，故在本套中不再重复给出。
Part III 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. Read the passage through carefully before making 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 45 are based on the following passage.
Some performance evaluations require supervisors to take action. Employees who receive a very favorable evaluation may deserve some type of recognition or even a promotion. If supervisors do not acknowledge such outstanding performance, employees may either lose their 36 and reduce their effort or search for a new job at a firm that will 37 them for high performance. Supervisors should acknowledge high performance so that the employee will continue to perform well in the future.
Employees who receive unfavorable evaluations must also be given attention. Supervisors must 38 the reasons for poor performance. Some reasons, such as a family illness, may have a temporary adverse 39 on performance and can be corrected. Other reasons, such as a bad attitude, may not be temporary. When supervisors give employees an unfavorable evaluation, they must decide whether to take any 40 actions. If the employees were unaware of their own deficiencies, the unfavorable evaluation can pinpoint (指出) the deficiencies that employees must correct. In this case, the supervisor may simply need to monitor the employees 41 and ensure that the deficiencies are corrected.
If the employees were already aware of their deficiencies before the evaluation period, however, they may be unable or unwilling to correct them. This situation is
more serious, and the supervisor may need to take action. The action should be 42 with the firm’s guidelines and may include reassigning the employees to new jobs, 43 them temporarily, or firing them. A supervisor’s action toward a poorly performing worker can 44 the attitudes of other employees. If no 45 is imposed on an employee for poor performance, other employees may react by reducing their productivity as well.
注意：此部分题请在答题卡2上作答。 A) additional I) identify B) affect J) impact C) aptly K) penalty D) assimilate L) reward E) circulation M) simplifying F) closely N) suspending G) consistent O) vulnerable H) enthusiasm Section B
Directions: 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 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.
The College Essay: Why Those 500 Words Drive Us Crazy
A) Meg is a lawyer-mom in suburban Washington, D.C., where lawyer-moms are thick on the ground. Her son Doug is one of several hundred thousand high-school seniors who had a painful fall. The deadline for applying to his favorite college was Nov. 1, and by early October he had yet to fill out the application. More to the point, he had yet to settle on a subject for the personal essay accompanying the application. According to college folklore, a well-turned essay has the power to seduce (诱惑) an admissions committee. “He wanted to do one thing at a time,” Meg says, explaining her son’s delay. “But really, my son is a huge procrastinator (拖延者). The essay is the hardest thing to do, so he’s put it off the longest.” Friends and other veterans of the process have warned Meg that the back and forth between editing parent and writing student can be traumatic (痛苦的).
B) Back in the good old days—say, two years ago, when the last of my children suffered the ordeal (折磨)—a high-school student applying to college could procrastinate all the way to New Year’s Day of their senior year, assuming they could withstand the parental pestering (烦扰).But things change fast in the nail-biting world of college admissions. The recent trend toward early decision and early action among selective colleges and universities has pushed the traditional deadline of January up to Nov. 1 or early December for many students. C) If the time for heel-dragging has been shortened, the true source of the anxiety and panic remains what it has always been. And it’s not the application itself. A
college application is a relatively straightforward questionnaire asking for the basics: name, address, family history employment history. It would all be innocent enough—20 minutes of busy work—except it comes attached to a personal essay. D) “There are good reasons it causes such anxiety,” says Lisa Sohmer, director of college counseling at the Garden School in Jackson Heights, N.Y. “It’s not just the actual writing. By now everything else is already set. Your course load is set, your grades are set, your test scores are set. But the essay is something you can still control, and it’s open-ended. So the temptation is to write and rewrite and rewrite.” Or stall and stall and stall.
E) The application essay, along with its mythical importance, is a recent invention. In the 1930s, when only one in 10 Americans had a degree from a four-year college, an admissions committee was content to ask for a sample of applicants’ school papers to assess their writing ability. By the 1950s, most schools required a brief personal statement of why the student had chosen to apply to one school over another.
F) Today nearly 70 percent of graduating seniors go off to college, including two-year and four-year institutions. Even apart from the increased competition, the kids enter a process that has been utterly transformed from the one baby boomers knew. Nearly all application materials are submitted online, and the Common Application provides a one-size-fits form accepted by more than 400 schools, including the nation’s most selective.
G) Those schools usually require essays of their own, but the longest essay, 500 words maximum, is generally attached to the Common Application. Students choose one of six questions. Applicants are asked to describe an ethical dilemma they’ve faced and its impact on them, or discuss a public issue of special concern to them, or tell of a fictional character or creative work that has profoundly influenced them. Another question invites them to write about the importance (to them, again) of diversity―a word that has assumed magic power in American higher education. The most popular option: write on a topic of your choice.
H) “Boys in particular look at the other questions and say, ‘Oh, that’s too much work,’” says John Boshoven, a counselor in the Ann Arbor, Mich., public schools. “They think if they do a topic of their choice, “I’ll just go get that history paper I did last year on the Roman Empire and turn it into a first-person application essay!’ And they end up producing something utterly ridiculous.”
I) Talking to admissions professionals like Boshoven, you realize that the list of “don’ts” in essay writing is much longer than the “dos.” “No book reports, no history papers, no character studies,” says Sohmer. J) “It drives you crazy, how easily kids slip into clichés (老生常谈),”says Boshoven. “They don’t realize how typical their experiences arc. ‘I scored the winning goal in soccer against our arch-rival.’ ‘My grandfather served in World War II, and I hope to be just like him someday.’ That may mean a lot to that particular kid. But in the world of the application essay, it’s nothing. You’ll lose the reader in the first paragraph.”
2013年12月六级真题第3套
