-居士
Part I
2017
年
12
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
(25 minutes)
Writing
Directions
：
For
this part
，
you are allowed 30
minutes to write a short essay on how to best
handle
the relationship between parents
and children. You should write at least
120
words but no more
than
180
words.
Part II
Listening Comprehension
(25
minutes)
说明：由于
2017
年
12
月四级考试全国共考了
2
套听力，本套真题听力与前
2
套内容完全一
样，只是顺序不一样，因此在本套真题中不再重复出现。
(40 minutes)
Part III
Section A
Reading Comprehension
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 26 to 35 are based on the
following passage.
We all know there
exists a great void (
空白
)in
the public educational system when it comes to
26 to STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Mathematics) courses. One educator
named
Dori Roberts decided to do
something to change this system. Dori taught high
school engineering
for 11 years. She
noticed there was a real void in quality STEM
education at all 27 of the public
educational system. She said,
“
I started Engineering For
Kids (EFK) after noticing a real lack of
math, science and engineering programs
to 28 my own kids in.
”
She decided to start an afterschool
program where children 29 in STEM-based
competitions. The
club grew quickly and
when it reached 180 members and the kids in the
program won several state
30
, she decided to devote all her time to
cultivating and 31 it. The global business EFK was
born.
Dori began operating
EFK out of her Virginia home, which she then
expanded to 32
recreation
63
centers. Today, the EFK program 33
2017
年
12
<
/p>
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
over 144 branches in 32
states within the United States
and in
21 countries. Sales have doubled from $$5 million
in 2014 to $$10 million in 2015, with 25
new branches planned for 2016. The EFK
website
states, “Our nation is
not
34 enough engineers.
Our
philosophy is to inspire kids at a young age to
understand that engineering is a great
35.
”
A)
attracted
B)
career
C)
championships
D)
degrees
E)
developing
I)
feeding
J)
graduating
K)
interest
L)
levels
F)
enroll
G)
exposure
M)
local
N)
operates
O)
participated
H) feasible
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.
Why aren’t you curious about what
happened?
A) “You suspended
Ray Rice after our video, a reporter from TMZ
challenged National
Football
League Commissioner Roger Goodell the
other day. “Why didn’t you have the curiosity to
go to
the casino
(
赌场
)yourself?”
The implication of the question is that a more
curious commissioner
would
have found a way to get the tape.
B)
The accusation of incuriosity is one
that we hear often, carrying the suggestion that
there is
something wrong with not
wanting to search out the truth. I have been
bothered for a long time
about the
curious lack of curiosity said a Democratic member
of the New Jersey legislature back
in
July, referring to an insufficiently inquiring
attitude on the part of an assistant to New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie who chose not
to ask hard questions about the George Washington
Bridge
traffic scandal. “Isn’t the
mainstream media the least bit curious about what
happened?” wrote
conservative writer Jennifer Rubin
earlier this year, referring to the attack on
Americans in
Benghazi, Libya.
C)
The implication, in each
case, is that curiosity is a good thing, and a
lack of curiosity is a
64
2017
年
12
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
problem. Are such accusations simply
efforts to score
political points for
one’s party? Or is there
something of particular value about
curiosity in and of itself?
D) The
journalist Ian Leslie, in his new and enjoyable
book Curious
：
The Desire to
Know and
Why Your Future Depends on It,
insists that the answer
to that last
question is ‘Yes’. Leslie argues
that curiosity is a much-overlooked
human virtue, crucial to our
success
，
and that we are
losing it.
E)
We are
suffering
，
he
writes
，
from a “serendipity
deficit.” The word “serendipity” was
coined
by Horace Walpole in
an 1854 letter, from a tale of three princes who
“were always making
discoveries, by accident, of things
they were not in search of.” Leslie worries that
the rise of the
Internet,
among other social and technological changes, has
reduced our appetite for aimless
adventures. No longer have we the
inclination to let ourselves wander through fields
of knowledge,
ready to be surprised.
Instead, we seek only the information we want.
F)
Why is this a problem?
Because without curiosity we will lose the spirit
of innovation and
entrepreneurship. We
will see unimaginative governments and dying
corporations make disastrous
decisions.
We will lose a vital part of what has made
humanity as a whole so successful as a
species.
G) Leslie presents
considerable evidence for the proposition that the
society as a whole is
growing less
curious. In the U.S. and Europe, for example, the
rise of the Internet has led to a
declining consumption of news from
outside the reader’s borders. But not everything
is to be
blamed on
technology. The decline in interest in literary
fiction is also one of the causes identified
by Leslie. Reading literary fiction, he
says, makes us more curious.
H)
Moreover, in order to be curious, “you have to be
aware of a gap in your knowledge in the
first place.” Although Leslie perhaps
paints a bit broadly in contending that most of us
are
unaware of how much we
don’t know, he’s surely right to point
out that the problem is growing:
“Google can give us the powerful
illusion that all questions have definite
answers.”
I)
Indeed,
Google
，
for which Leslie
expresses admiration, is also his
frequent
whipping boy
(
替
罪羊）
. He quotes Google
co-
founder Larry Page to the effect
that the “ perfect search engine” will
“understand exactly what I mean and
give me back exactly what I want.” Elsewhere in
the book,
Leslie writes:
“Google aims to save you from the thirst of
curiosity altogether.”
J)
Somewhat
nostalgically
(
怀旧地），
he quotes John
Maynard Keynes’s justly famous words of
praise to the
bookstore
：
65
dictates, should be an afternoon’s
entertainment.” If only!
K)
Citing the work of psychologists and
cognitive
(
认
知
的
）
scientists
，
Leslie
criticizes the
received wisdom that
academic success is the result of a combination of
intellectual talent and
hard work.
Curiosity, he argues, is the third key
factor
—
and a difficult one
to preserve. If not
cultivated, it will
not survive
：
“Childhood curiosity is a collaboration
between child and adult.
The
surest way to kill it is to leave it alone.
”
L)
School
education, he warns, is often conducted in a way
that makes children incurious.
Children
of educated and upper-middle-class parents turn
out to be far more curious, even at early
ages, than children of working class
and lower class families. That lack of curiosity
produces a
relative lack of knowledge,
and the lack of knowledge is difficult if not
impossible to compensate
for later on.
M) Although Leslie’s book isn’t about
politics, he doesn’t entirely shy away from the
problem.
Political leaders,
like leaders of other organizations, should be
curious. They should ask questions
at
crucial moments. There are serious consequences,
he warns, in not wanting to know.
N) He
presents as an example the failure of the George
W. Bush administration to prepare
properly for the after-effects of the
invasion of Iraq. According to Leslie, those who
ridiculed
former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld for his 2002 remark that we have
to be wary of the
“unknown unknowns”
were mistaken. Rumsfeld’s idea, Leslie writes,
“wasn’t absurd —
it was
s
mart. ’’ He adds, “The
tragedy is that he didn’t follow his own advice.
”
O) All of which brings us
back to Goodell and the Christie case and
Benghazi. Each critic in those
examples
is charging, in a different way, that someone in
authority is intentionally being incurious.
I leave it to the reader’s political
preference to decide
which
，
if
any
，
charges should stick.
But let’s
be careful about
demanding curiosity about the other side’s
weaknesses and remaining
determinedly incurious about our own.
We should be delighted to pursue knowledge for its
own
sake
—even when what we
find out is something we didn’t particularly want
to know.
36. To be curious,
we need to realize first of all that there are
many things we don't know.
37.
According to
Leslie
，
curiosity is
essential to one’s success.
38. We should feel happy when we pursue
knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
39. Political leaders’ lack of
curiosity will result in bad
consequences.
2017
年
12
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
freely to attract and influence the
eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping
in as curiosity
66
truth.
41. The less curious
a child is, the less knowledge the child may turn
out to have.
42. It is widely accepted
that academic accomplishment lies in both
intelligence and diligence.
43.
Visiting a bookshop as curiosity leads us can be a
good way to entertain ourselves.
44.
Both the rise of the Internet and reduced appetite
for literary fiction contribute to
people’s
declining
curiosity.
45. Mankind wouldn’t be so
innovativ
e without curiosity.
Section C
Directions:
There are 2
passages in this section. Each passage is followed
by some questions or
unfinished
statements. For each of them there are four
choices marked A), B), C) and D). You
should decide on the best choice and
mark the corresponding letter on
Answer
Sheet 2
with a
single line
through the centre.
Passage One
Questions 46 to 50 are based on the
following passage.
Aging happens to all
of us, and is generally thought of as a natural
part of life. It would seem
silly to
call such a thing a “disease.”
On the other hand, scientists are
increasingly learning that aging and biological
age are two
different things, and that
the former is a key risk factor for conditions
such as heart disease, cancer
and many
more. In that light, aging itself might be seen as
something treatable, the way you would
treat high blood pressure or a vitamin
deficiency.
Biophysicist Alex
Zhavoronkov believes that aging should be
considered a disease. He said
that
describing aging as a disease creates incentives
to develop treatments.
“It unties the
hands of the
pharmaceutical
(
制药的
)industry so
that they can begin treating
the
disease and not just the side effects,” he
said.
“Right now, people
think of aging as natural and something you can’t
c
ontrol
，
” he
said. “In
academic circles,
people take aging research as just an interest
area where they can try to develop
interventions. The medical community
also takes aging for granted, and can do nothing
about it
except keep people within a
certain hea
lth range. ”
But if aging were recognized as a
disease, he said, “It would attract funding and
change the
2017
年
12
<
/p>
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
40. There are often
accusations about politicians’ and the
media’s lack of curiosity to find out
the
67
2017
年
12
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
way
we do health care. What matters is understanding
that aging is curable.”
“It
was always known
that the body
accumulates damage
，
” he
added. “The only way to cure
aging is to find ways to repair that
damage. I think of it as preventive medicine for
age-related
conditions.”
Leonard Hayflick, a professor at the
University of California
，
San
Francisco
，
said the idea
that aging can be cured implies the
human lifespan can be increased, which some
researchers
suggest is possible.
Hayflick is not among them.
“There’re
many people who recover from cancer,
stroke
，
or heart disease. But
they continue
to
age
，
beca
use aging
is separate from their disease,” Hayflick said.
“Even if those causes of death
were eliminated, life expectancy would
still not go much beyond 92 years.”
46. What do people generally believe
about aging?
A) It should cause no
alarm whatsoever.
B) They just cannot
do anything about it.
C) It should be
regarded as a kind of disease.
D) They
can delay it with advances in science.
47. How do many scientists view aging
now?
A) It might be prevented and
treated.
C) It results from a vitamin
deficiency.
B) It can be as risky as
heart disease. D) It is an irreversible biological
process.
48. What does Alex Zhavoronkov
think of “describing aging as a
disease”?
A) It will prompt
people to take aging more seriously.
B)
It will greatly help reduce the side effects of
aging.
C) It will free pharmacists from
the conventional beliefs about aging.
D) It will motivate doctors and
pharmacists to find ways to treat aging.
49. What do we learn about the medical
community?
A) They now have a strong
interest in research on aging.
B) They
differ from the academic circles in their view on
aging.
C) They can contribute to
people’s health only to a limited
extent.
D) They have ways to
intervene in peopled aging process.
50.
What does Professor Leonard Hayflick believe?
A) The human lifespan cannot be
prolonged.
68
B) Aging is hardly
separable from disease.
C) Few people
can live up to the age of 92.
D) Heart
disease is the major cause of aging.
Passage Two
Questions 51 to
55 are based on the following passage.
Female applicants to postdoctoral
positions in geosciences were nearly half as
likely to
receive excellent letters of
recommendation, compared with their male
counterparts. Christopher
Intagliata
reports.
As in many other fields,
gender bias is widespread in the sciences. Men
score higher starting
salaries, have
more
mentoring
(
指导），
and have better odds of
being hired. Studies show they’re
also perceived as more competent than
women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,
and
Mathematics) fields. And new
research reveals that men are more likely to
receive excellent letters
of
recommendation, too.
“Say, you
know
，
this is the best
student I’ve e
ver
had
，
” says Kuheli
Dutt
，
a social scientist
and diversity officer at Columbia
University’s Lamont campus. “Compare those
excellent letters
with a
merely good
letter
：
‘
The
candidate was productive, or intelligent, or a
solid scientist or
something that’s
clearly solid
praise
，
’ but nothing that
singles out the candidate as exceptional
or
one of a kind.
”
Dutt and her colleagues
studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation
for postdoctoral
positions in
geoscience. They were all edited for gender and
other identifying information, so Dutt
and her team could assign them a score
without knowing the gender of the student. They
found
that female applicants were only
half as likely to get outstanding letters,
compared with their male
counterparts.
That includes letters of recommendation from all
over the world, and written by, yes,
men and women. The findings are in the
journal
Nature Geoscience
.
Dutt says they were not able to
evaluate the actual scientific qualifications of
the applicants
using the data in the
files. But she says the results still suggest
women in geoscience are at a
potential
disadvantage from the very beginning of their
careers starting with those less than
outstanding letters of recommendation.
“We’re not trying to assign blame or
criticize
anyone or call anyone
consciously sexist.
Rather, the point
is to use the results of this study to open up
meaningful dialogues on implicit
2017
年
12
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
69
2017
年
12
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
gender bias, be it at a departmental
level or an institutional
level or even
a discipline level.” Which
may lead to some recommendations for
the letter writers themselves.
51. What
do we learn about applicants to postdoctoral
positions in geosciences?
A) There are
many more men applying than women.
B)
Chances for women to get the positions are scarce.
C) More males than females are likely
to get outstanding letters of recommendation.
D) Male applicants have more interest
in these positions than their female counterparts.
52. What do studies find about men and
women in scientific research show?
A)
Women engaged in postdoctoral work are quickly
catching up.
B) Fewer women are
applying for postdoctoral positions due to gender
bias.
C) Men are believed to be better
able to excel in STEM disciplines.
D)
Women who are keenly interested in STEM fields are
often exceptional.
53. What do the
studies find about the recommendation letters for
women applicants?
A) They are hardly
ever supported by concrete examples.
B)
They contain nothing that distinguishes the
applicants.
C) They provide objective
information without exaggeration.
D)
They are often filled with praise for exceptional
applicants.
54. What did Dutt and her
colleagues do with the more than 1,200 letters of
recommendation?
A) They asked unbiased
scholars to evaluate them.
B) They
invited women professionals to edit them.
C) They assigned them randomly to
reviewers.
D) They deleted all
information about gender.
55. What does
Dutt aim to do with her study?
A) Raise
recommendation writers’ awareness of gender bias
in th
eir letters.
B) Open up
fresh avenues for women post-doctors to join in
research work.
C) Alert women
researchers to all types of gender bias in the
STEM disciplines.
D) Start a public
discussion on how to raise women’s status in
academic circles.
70
Part IV
Translation
2017
年
12
<
/p>
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
(30
minutes)
Directions:
For
this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate
a passage from Chinese into
English.
You should write your answer on
Answer
Sheet 2
.
黄山位于安徽省南部。它风景独特，尤以其日出和云海著称。
要欣赏大山的宏伟壮丽，
通常得向上看。但要欣赏黄山美景，
就得向下看。黄山的湿润气候有利于茶树生长，是中国
主要产
茶地之一。这里还有许多温泉，其泉水有助于防治皮肤病。黄山是中国主要旅游目的
地之一，也是摄影和传统国画最受欢迎的主题。
71
Part I
参考范文：
The Relationship between Parents and
Children
The relationship between
parents and children is an eternal and universal
topic for the mankind.
Our relationship
with parents might be different at different ages.
And for young people at their
20s, I
think it will more depend on what children do.
The reason why I say so is that as we
grow up, our parents who were our idols before
gradually get old and even out-dated.
However hard efforts they make, they could not
catch up
with our steps, leading to the
so-called invisible generation gap between us.
Thus, if we cannot
slow down our pace,
there will definitely be an awkward silence
between parents and us, which is
not
rare now. As a result, we young people should talk
more with parents to share our feelings and
to know each other better.
Everyone wants loving parents who are
open and supportive. Only through frequent
communication with each other can we
establish such a harmonious relationship with our
parents.
2017
年
12
<
/p>
月大学英语四级考试真题
(
第三套）
参考答案及解析
(25 minutes)
Writing
【写作技巧】
审题：父母与子女的关
系可以说是老生常谈，作为经常被拿来谈论的话题，相信学生们
本人也是非常有感触的。因此，关键是如何组织语言。要把重点放在
how to handle
上面。
写作时可以重点论述子女应该怎样做，同时要注意分析原因，做到言之有物，有理有据。
范文第一段引出话题：父母与子女的关系。指出对当今的年轻
人而言，亲子关系更多地
取决于孩子自己的做法；第二段分析
年轻人应多与父母交流的原因；第三段重申观点，总结
全文，
指出只有经常与父母交流才能建立和谐的家庭关系，使文章结构严谨。
(40 minutes)
Part III
Section A
Reading Comprehension
【篇章译文】
众所周知，当提到（<
/p>
26
）接触
S
TEM
（科学、技术、工程学和数学）课程时，公共教育
体系存在巨大的空白。一位名为多丽
罗伯茨的教育者决定做一些事来改变这个体系。多丽
在高中教了
11
< br>年的工程学。她注意到，所有（
27
）级别的公共教育体
系都存在着优质
STEM
72