-
2018
年
12
月大学
英语六级考试真题（第
2
套）
Part I
Writing
(30 minutes)
Directions:
For
this
part,
you
are
allowed
30
minutes
to
write
an
essay
on
how
to
balance
job
responsibilities
and
personal
interests.
You should write at least
150 words but no more than 200 words.
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 26 to 35 are based on the
following passage.
Surfing the Internet
during class doesn't just steal focus from the
educator; it also hurts students who're already
struggling to
26
the material. A new study
from Michigan State University, though, argues
that all
students
—
including high
achievers
—
see a decline in
performance when they browse the Internet during
class for
non-academic purposes.
To measure the effects of Internet-
based distractions during class, researchers
27
500
students taking an
introductory
psychology class at Michigan State University.
Researchers used ACT scores as a measure of
intellectual
28
.
Because previous research has shown that people
with high intellectual abilities are better at
29
out
distractions, researchers believed
students with high ACT scores would not show a
30
decrease in performance due
to their use of digital devices. But
students who surfed the web during class did worse
on their exams regardless of their
ACT
scores, suggesting that even the academically
smartest students are harmed when they're
distracted in class.
College professors
are increasingly
31
alarm bells about the
effects smartphones, laptops, and tablets have on
academic performance. One 2013 study of
college students found that 80% of students use
their phones or laptops during
class,
with the average student checking their digital
device 11 times in a
32
class. A quarter of
students report that
their use of
digital devices during class causes their grades
to
33
.
Professors sometimes implement policies
designed to
34
students' use of digital devices, and
some instructors
even confiscate
(
没收
) tablets and phones. In
a world where people are increasingly dependent on
their phones, though,
such strategies
often fail. One international study found that 84%
of people say they couldn't go a day without their
smartphones. Until students are able to
35
the
pull of social networking, texting, and endlessly
surfing the web,
they may continue to
struggle in their classes.
A)aptitude
I
）
obscure
B)eradication
J)obsess
C) evaluated
K)
raising
D)evaporated
L
）
resist
E)filtering
M
）
significant
F)grasp
N)
suffer
G)legacy
O
）
typical
H) minimize
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
.
A Pioneering
Woman of Science Re-Emerges after 300 Years
[A] Maria Sibylla Merian, like many
European women of the 17th century, stayed busy
managing a household and
rearing
children. But on top of that, Merian, a German-
born woman who lived in the Netherlands, also
managed a
successful career as an
artist, botanist, naturalist and entomologist
（昆虫学家）
.
[B]
“
She was a scientist on the
level with a lot of people we spend a lot of time
talking about,
”
said Kay Etheridge, a
biologist at Gettysburg College in
Pennsylvania who has been studying the scientific
history of Merian
’
s work.
“
She didn't
do as
much to change biology as Charles Darwin, but she
was significant.
”
[C] At a time when natural history was
a valuable tool for discovery, Merian discovered
facts about plants and insects
that
were not previously known. Her observations helped
dismiss the popular belief that insects
spontaneously emerged
from mud. The
knowledge she collected over decades didn't just
satisfy those curious about nature, but also
provided
valuable insights into
medicine and science. She was the first to bring
together insects and their habitats, including
food
they ate, into a single ecological
composition.
[D] After years of
pleasing a fascinated audience across Europe with
books of detailed descriptions and life-size
paintings of familiar insects, in 1699
she sailed with her daughter nearly 5,000 miles
from the Netherlands to South America
to study insects in the jungles of what
is now known as Suriname. She was 52 years old.
The result was her masterpiece,
Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.
[E] In her work, she revealed a side of
nature so exotic, dramatic and valuable to
Europeans of the time that she
received
much acclaim. But a century later, her findings
came under scientific criticism. Shoddy
（粗糙的）
reproductions of
her work along with setbacks to women's
roles in 18th- and 19th-century Europe resulted in
her efforts being largely
forgotten.
“
It was kind of stunning
when she sort of dropped off into oblivion
（遗忘）
,
”
said Dr. Etheridge.
“
Victorians
started putting women in a box, and
they're still trying to crawl out of
it.
”
[F] Today,
the pioneering woman of the sciences has re-
emerged. In recent years, feminists, historians
and artists have
all praised Merian's
tenacity
（坚韧）
, talent and
inspirational artistic compositions. And now
biologists like Dr. Etheridge
are
digging into the scientific texts that accompanied
her art. Three hundred years after her death,
Merian will be celebrated
at an
international symposium in Amsterdam this June.
[G] And last month, Metamorphosis
Insectorum Surinamensium was republished. It
contains 60 plates
（插图）
and
original descriptions,
along with stories about Merian's life and updated
scientific descriptions. Before writing
Metamorphosis, Merian spent decades
documenting European plants and insects that she
published in a series of books. She
began in her 20s, making textless,
decorative paintings of flowers with insects.
“
Then she got really
serious,
”
Dr.
Etheridge said. Merian started raising
insects at home, mostly butterflies and
caterpillars.
“
She would sit
up all night until
they came out of the
pupa
（蛹）
so she
could draw them,
”
she said.
[H] The results of
her decades' worth of careful observations were
detailed paintings and descriptions of European
insects, followed by unconventional
visuals and stories of insects and animals from a
land that most at the time could only
imagine. It's possible Merian used a
magnifying glass to capture the detail of the
split tongues of
sphinx
moths
（斯芬克
斯飞蛾）
depicted in the painting. She wrote
that the two tongues combine to form one tube for
drinking nectar
（花蜜）
.
Some criticized this detail later,
saying there was just one tongue, but Merian
wasn't wrong. She may have observed the
adult moth just as it emerged from its
pupa.
For a brief moment
during that stage of its life cycle, the tongue
consists of
two tiny half-tubes before
merging into one.
[I] It may not have
been ladylike to depict a giant spider devouring a
hummingbird, but when Merian did it at the turn
of the 18th century, surprisingly,
nobody objected. Dr. Etheridge called it
revolutionary. The image, which also contained
novel descriptions of ants, fascinated
a European audience that was more concerned with
the exotic story unfolding before
them
than the gender of the person who painted it.
[J]
“All of these things
shook up their nice, neat little view,” Dr.
Etheridge said. But later, people of the Victorian
era
thought differently. Her work had
been reproduced, sometimes incorrectly. A few
observations were deemed impossible.
“She'd been called a silly woman for
saying that a spider could eat a bird,” Dr.
Etheridge said. But Henry Walter Bates, a
friend of Charles Darwin, observed it
and put it in book in 1863, proving Merian was
correct.
[K] In the same plate, Merian
depicted and described leaf-
cutter ants
for the first time. “In America there are large
ants
which can eat whole trees bare as
a broom handle in a single
night,
”
she wrote
in the description. Merian noted how the
ants took the leaves below ground to
their young. And she wouldn't have known this at
the time, but the ants use the leaves