Passage 1
During the arctic winter from October to March, the average temperature in the frozen north typically hovers around minus 20 degrees Celsius. But this year the Arctic is experiencing much higher temperatures. On February the 20th the temperature in Greenland climbed above freezing or zero degrees Celsius and it stayed there for over 24 hours. Then on February the 24th the temperature on Greenland’ s northern tip reached six degrees Celsius. Climate scientists describe the phenomenon as stunning. Weather conditions that drive this bizarre temperature surge have visited the Arctic before. They typically appear about once in a decade. However, the last such increase in temperature took place two years ago. This is troubling as climbing arctic temperatures combined with rapid sea ice loss are creating a new type of climate feedback loop which could accelerate Arctic warming. Indeed, sea ice cover in the Arctic is melting faster than expected. Without those masses of cooling sea ice, warm air brought to the Arctic can penetrate further inland than it ever did before. The air can stay warmer longer too. This drives additional melting. Overall earth is warming at a rapid pace. 2014 through 2017 rank as the hottest years on record and the Arctic is warming twice as fast as any place else on earth. This raises unique challenges for Arctic wildlife and indigenous people who depend on Arctic ecosystems to survive. Previously climate forecasts predicted that Arctic summer ice would disappear entirely by around 2060, but based on what scientists are seeing now the Arctic may be facing summers without ice within 20 years. Question 9. What did climate scientists describe as stunning?
A) The unprecedented high temperature in Greenland.
Question 10. What does the passage say about that temperature surge in the Arctic? C) It typiaclly appears about once every ten years.
Question 11. What may occur in 20 years according to scientists’ recent observations?
B) Iceless summers in the Arctic.
Passage2
A good dose of willpower is often necessary to see any task through whether it’s sticking to a spending plan or finishing a great novel. And if you want to increase that willpower, a new study suggests you just simply have to believe you have it. According to this study, what matters most is what we think about our willpower. If we believe it’s a finite resource, we act that way, we feel exhausted and need breaks between demanding mental tasks. However, people who view their willpower as a limitless resource get energized instead. The researchers used a psychological assessment tool to test the validity of the study. They asked 1100 Americans and 1600 Europeans to grade different statements such as after a challenging mental activity, my energy is depleted and I must rest to get it refueled again or I can focus on a mental task for long periods without feeling tired.
Although there was little difference between men and women overall. Americans were more likely to admit to needing breaks after completing mentally challenging tasks European participants on the other hand claimed they were able to keep going. Based on the findings, the researchers suggest that the key to boosting your willpower is to believe that you have an abundant supply of it. Your feelings about your willpower affect the way you behave. But these feelings are changeable, they said. Changing your beliefs about the nature of your self-control can have positive effects on character development. This leads to healthier behaviors and perceptions of other people. Question 12. What is often necessary for carrying through a task? C) A strong determination.
6
Question 13. What is the finding of the new study?
D) It is most important to have confidence in one`s willpower.
Question 14. What do we learn about European participants as compared with their American counterparts?
A) They could keep on working longer.
Question 15. What do the research say concerning people‘s feelings about willpower? B) They are subject to change.
Lecture 1
Here is my baby niece Sarah. Her mum is a doctor and her dad is a lawyer. By the time Sarah goes to college the jobs her parents do are going to look dramatically different. In 2013，researchers at Oxford University did a study on the future of work. They concluded that almost one in every two jobs has a high risk of being automated by machines. Machine learning is the technology that’s responsible for most of this disruption. It’s the most powerful branch of artificial intelligence. It allows machines to learn from data and copy some of the things that humans can do. My company, Kaggle, operates on the cutting edge of machine learning. We bring together hundreds of thousands of experts to solve important problems for industry and academia. This gives us an unique perspective on what machines can do, what they can‘t do and what jobs they might automate or threaten. Machine learning started making its way into industry in the early 90s. It started with relatively simple tasks. It started with things like assessing credit risk from loan applications, sorting the mail by reading handwritten zip codes. Over the past few years, we have made dramatic breakthroughs. Machine learning is now capable of far, far more complex tasks. In 2012, Kaggle challenged its community to build a program that could grade high school essays. The winning programs were able to match the grades given by human teachers. Now given the right data, machines are going to outperform humans at tasks like this. A teacher might read 10000 essays over a 40-year career. A machine can read millions of essays within minutes. We have no chance of competing against machines on frequent high-volume tasks, but there are things we can do that machines cannot. Where machines have made very little progress is in tackling novel situations. Machines can’t handle things they haven’t seen many times before. The fundamental limitation of machine learning is that it needs to learn from large volumes of past data. But humans don’t. We have the ability to connect seemingly different threads to solve problems we’ve never seen before.
Question 16. What did the researchers at Oxford University conclude? A) About half of current jobs might be automated.
Question 17. What do we learn about Kaggle companies winning programs? D) They could grade high-school essays just like human teachers. Question 18. What is the fundamental limitation on machine learning? C) It has to rely on huge amounts of previous data.
Lecture 2
We’ve talked recently about the importance of sustainable energy. We’ve also talked about the different theories on how that can be done. So far, our discussions have all been theoretical. Now I have a practical question for you all. Can you run a 140,000 kilogram train on just the steam generated by solar power? Well, one engineer, Tim Casselman, believes it‘s possible. And his home city of Sacramento, California should see the technology’s first test as part of the upgrading of its rail yard. Casselman, who is an inventor and self-proclaimed steam visionary, is campaigning for a new steam train that runs without any fire and could run on an existing 10 kilometer line drawing
7
tourists and perhaps offering city commuters a green alternative to their cars. Casselman wants to build an array of solar magnifying mirrors at one end of the line to collect and focus heat onto water filled tubes. This would generate steam that could be used to fill tanks on a small steam train without the use of fire. Supplying power to trains in this way would offer the shortest distance from well to wheels he says with the least amount of energy lost. According to Harry Valentijn, a Canadian engineer who is researching modern steam technology, a special tank measuring 2 by 10 metres could store over 750 kilowatt hours of energy as high pressure steam enough to pull a two car train for an hour or so. Energy to drive a steam locomotive can be stored in other materials besides water for example a team at Tohoku University in Japan has studied materials that can store large amounts of heat when heated. These materials turn from a solid into a liquid absorbing energy as they change phase. The liquid is maintained above its melting point until steam is required at which point the liquid is allowed to turn back into a solid releasing its stored energy another team at Nagoya University in Japan has tested calcium compound as an energy storage material. Heating this chemical compound drives off carbon dioxide gas leaving calcium oxide the gas can be stored under pressure and attain to recover the energy the gas is fed back over the calcium oxide. In theory says Valentijn this can create a high enough temperature to generate superheated steam. Question 19. What has the speaker previously talked about? D) The theoretical aspects of sustainable energy. Question 20. What is Tim Casselman trying to do in Sacramento? A) Drive trains with solar energy.
Question 21. What has a Japanese research team tried to do?
B) Find a new material for storing energy.
Lecture 3
Today’s crisis in care for older people in England has two main causes.
First，people are living longer with a lot more complex needs. Second, they rely on a system that has long been marked by a poor relation between national health and social-care services.
Current services originate in two key measures. They are the National Health Service and the 1948 National Assistance Act. This required local government to provide residential accommodation for older people and supervise care homes run by independent organizations.
They also provided home and community services including meals, day centers and home helpers and other subsidized services. The National Health Service was free and wholly publicly provided. It delivered the best health-care for all. No such vision guided residential and community care though. The care was substantially provided by voluntary services which worked together with local authorities as they long had with eligibility based on income. Today, life expectancy has risen from 66 for a male at birth in 1948 to around 80 now. In addition, there is better overall health and improved medical knowledge and care. This means an unprecedented number of people are surviving longer in conditions requiring expert support. Families provide at least as much care as they ever did. Even so, they can rarely without subsidised support address serious personal needs. Care for older people faced persistent criticism as these trends became apparent. From the early 1960s, local authorities were required to plan health and welfare services. The aim was to enable older people to remain in their own homes for as long as possible, but this increased concern about the lack of coordination between free health and paid-for social care. Through the 1970s, a number of measures sought to improve matter. However at a time of financial crisis, funding diminished and little changed. In the 1980s, the government cut spending. Meanwhile, preference for private over public services made management even more difficult. Simultaneously, the number of sick older
8
people grew. Governments emphasized the need to improve services. They did so though while doing little to stop the erosion of available aid. Services were irregular across authorities. Unless you were prepared to pay, they were increasingly difficult to obtain for any but the most severely disabled. Why has 60 years of criticism produced so little change. Discrimination against older people has a long history. Additionally, those affected by inadequate health and social care are too vulnerable to launch the protests that have addressed other forms of discrimination.
Question 22. What is one cause of the current crisis in care for the elderly in England? D) The poor relation between national health and social care services. Question 23. What does the speaker say about residential and community care? A) It was mainly provided by voluntary services.
Question 24. What made management of care for the elderly more difficult in the 1980s? C) Their preference for private services.
Question 25. What does the speaker say about older people in England? B) They have long been discriminated against.
9
完整word版，2018年12月英语六级听力试题答案原文
