2020年9月大学英语六级考试真题（一）Part IWriting(30 minutes)Directions:For this part,you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the saying What is worth doing isworth doing well.You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.Part IListening Comprehension(30 minutes)Section ADirections:In this section,you will hear two long conversations.At the end of each conversation,you willhear four questions.Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once.After you hear aquestion,you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A),B),C)and D).Then markthe corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard.1.A)She can devote all her life to pursuing her passion.B)Her accumulated expertise helps her to achieve her goals.C)She can spread her academic ideas on a weekly TV show.D)Her research findings are widely acclaimed in the world.2.A)Provision of guidance for nuclear labs in Europe.B)Touring the globe to attend science TV shows.C)Overseeing two research groups at Oxford.D)Science education and scientific research.3.A)A better understanding of a subject.C)A broader knowledge of related fields.B)A stronger will to meet challenges.D)A closer relationship with young people.4.A)By applying the latest research methods.C)By building upon previous discoveries.B)By making full use of the existing data.D)By utilizing more powerful computers.Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard.5.A)They can predict future events.C)They have cultural connotations.D)They cannot be easily explained.6.A)It was canceled due to bad weather.C)She dreamed of a plane crash.B)She overslept and missed the flightD)It was postponed to the following day7.A)They can be affected by people's childhood experiences.B)They may sometimes seem ridiculous to a rational mind.C)They usually result from people's unpleasant memories.D)They can have an impact as great as rational thinking.8.A)They call for scientific methods to interpret.B)They mirror their long-cherished wishes.C)They reflect their complicated emotions.D)They are often related to irrational feelings.Section BDirections:In this section,you will hear two passages.At the end of each passage,you will hear three orfour questions.Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once.After you hear a question,youmust choose the best answer from the four choices marked A),B),C)and D).Then mark thecorresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard.9.A)Radio waves.C)Robots.B)Sound waves.D)Satellites.10.A)It may be freezing fast beneath the glacier.C)It may have certain rare minerals in it.B)It may have micro-organisms living in it.D)It may be as deep as four kilometers.11.A)Help understand life in freezing conditions.C)Provide information about other planets.B)Help find new sources of fresh water.D)Shed light on possible life in outer space.Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard.12.A)He found there had been little research on their language.B)He was trying to preserve the languages of the Indian tribes.C)His contact with a social worker had greatly aroused his interest in the tribe.D)His meeting with Gonzalez had made him eager to learn more about the tribe.13.A)He taught Copeland to speak the Tarahumaras language.B)He persuaded the Tarahumaras to accept Copeland's gifts.C)He recommended one of his best friends as an interpreter.D)He acted as an intermediary between Copeland and the villagers.14.A)Unpredictable.C)Laborious.B)Unjustifiable.D)Tedious.15.A)Their appreciation of help from the outsiders.B)Their sense of sharing and caring.C)Their readiness to adapt to technology.D)Their belief in creating wealth for themselves.Section CDirections:In this section,you will hear three recordings of lectures or talks followed by three or fourquestions.The recordings will be played only once.After you hear a question,you must choose the bestanswer from the four choices marked A),B),C)and D).Then mark the corresponding letter on AnswerSheet 1 with a single line through the centre.Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.16.A)They tend to be silenced into submission.C)They will feel proud of being pioneers.B)They find it hard to defend themselves.D)They will feel somewhat encouraged.17.A)One who advocates violence in effecting change.B)One who craves for relentless transformations.C)One who acts in the interests of the oppressed.D)One who rebels against the existing social order.18.A)They tried to effect social change by force.C)They served as a driving force for progress.B)They disrupted the nation's social stability.D)They did more harm than good to humanity.Questions 19 to 21 are based on the recording you have just heard.19.A)Few of us can ignore changes in our immediate environment.B)It is impossible for us to be immune from outside influence.C)Few of us can remain unaware of what happens around us.D)It is important for us to keep in touch with our own world.20.A)Make up his mind to start all over again.B)Stop making unfair judgements of others.C)Try to find a more exciting job somewhere else.D)Recognise the negative impact of his coworkers21.A)They are quite susceptible to suicide.C)They suffer a great deal from ill health.B)They improve people's quality of life.D)They help people solve mental problems.Questions 22 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.22.A)Few people can identify its texture.C)Its real value is open to interpretation.B)Few people can describe it precisely.D)Its importance is often over-estimated.23.A)It has never seen any changeC)It is a well-protected government secret.B)It has much to do with color.D)It is a subject of study by many forgers.24.A)People had little faith in paper money.C)It predicted their value would increase.B)They could last longer in circulation.D)They were more difficult to counterfeit.25.A)The stabilization of the dollar value.C)A gold standard for American currency.B)The issuing of government securities.D)A steady appreciation of the U.S.dollar.PartⅢReading Comprehension(40 minutes)Section ADirections:In this section,there is a passage with ten blanks.You are required to select one word for eachblank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage.Read the passage through carefullybefore making your choices.Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter.Please mark the correspondingletter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.You may not use any of thewords in the bank more than once.Overall,men are more likely than women to make excuses.Several studies suggest that men feel theneed to appear competent in all 26,while women worry only about the skills in which they'veinvested 27.Ask a man and a woman to go diving for the first time,and the woman is likely tojump in,while the man is likely to say he's not feeling too well.Ironically,it is often success that leads people to flirt with failure.Praise won for 28 a skillsuddenly puts one in the position of having everything to lose.Rather than putting their reputation on theline again,many successful people develop a handicap-drinking,29,depression-that allowsthem to keep their status no matter what the future brings.An advertising executive 30 fordepression shortly after winning an award put it this way:"Without my depression,I'd be a failure now;with it,I'm a success‘on hold.”In fact,the people most likely to become chronic excuse makers are those 31 with success.Such people are so afraid of being 32 a failure at anything that they constantly develop onehandicap or another in order to explain away failure.Though self-handicapping can be an effective way of coping with performance anxiety now and then,in the end,researchers say,it will lead to 33.In the long run,excuse makers fail to live up to theirtrue 34 and lose the status they care so much about.And despite their protests to the 35they have only themselves to blame.A)contraryF)labeledK)potentialB)fatigueG)legaciesL)realmsC)heavilyH)masteringM)reciprocalD)heavingI)momentumN)ruinE)hospitalizedJ)obsessedO)viciouslySection BDirections:In this section,you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it.Eachstatement contains information given in one of the paragraphs.Identify the paragraph from which theinformation is derived.You may choose a paragraph more than once.Each paragraph is marked with aletter.Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.Six Potential Brain Benefits of Bilingual EducationA)Brains,brains,brains.People are fascinated by brain research.And yet it can be hard to point toplaces where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience (findings.But there is one happy link where research is meeting practice:bilingual (education."In thelast 20 years or so,there's been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism,"says Judith Kroll,aprofessor at the University of California,Riverside.B)Again and again,researchers have found,"bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain forlife,"in the words of Gigi Luk,an associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.Atthe same time,one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what's often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs.C)Traditional programs for English-language learners,or ELLs,focus on assimilating students intoEnglish as quickly as possible.Dual-language classrooms,by contrast,provide instruction acrosssubjects to both English natives and English learners,in both English and a target language.The goal isfunctional bilingualism and biliteracy for all students by middle school.New York City,NorthCarolina,Delaware,Utah,Oregon and Washington state are among the places expanding dual-language classrooms.D)The trend flies in the face of some of the culture wars of two decades ago,when advocates insisted on"English first"education.Most famously,California passed Proposition 227 in 1998.It was intendedto sharply reduce the amount of time that English-language learners spent in bilingual settings.Proposition 58,passed by California voters on November 8,largely reversed that decision,paving theway for a huge expansion of bilingual education in the state that has the largest population of English-language learners.E)Some of the insistence on English-first was founded on research produced decades ago,in whichbilingual students underperformed monolingual (English speakers and had lower IQ scores.Today's scholars,like Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto,say that research was "deeplyflawed.""Earlier research looked at socially disadvantaged groups,agrees Antonella Sorace at theUniversity of Edinburgh in Scotland."This has been completely contradicted by recent research"thatcompares groups more similar to each other.F)So what does recent research say about the potential benefits of bilingual education?It turns out that,in many ways,the real trick to speaking two languages consists in managing not to speak one of thoselanguages at a given moment-which is fundamentally a feat of paying attention.Saying "Goodbye"tomom and then "Guten tag"to your teacher,or managing to ask for a crayola roja instead of a redcra)on(蜡笔)，requires skills called“inhibition”and“task switching.”These skills are subsets of anability called executive function.G)People who speak two languages often outperform monolinguals on general measures of executivefunction."Bilinguals can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the abilityto switch from one task to another,"says Sorace.H)Do these same advantages benefit a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten insteadof as a baby?We don't yet know.Patterns of language learning and language use are complex.ButGigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes inbrain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth,even when they didn't beginpracticing a second language in earnest before late childhood.DYoung children being raised bilingual have to follow social cues to figure out which language to use withwhich person and in what setting.As a result,says Sorace,bilingual children as young as age 3 havedemonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind-both of which arefundamental social and emotional skills.J)About 10 percent of students in the Portland,Oregon public schools are assigned by lottery to dual-language classrooms that offer instruction in Spanish,Japanese or Mandarin,alongside English.Jennifer Steele at American University conducted a four-year,randomized trial and found that thesedual-language students outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school-year's worthof learning by the end of middle school.Because the effects are found in reading,not in math orscience where there were few differences,Steele suggests that learning two languages makes studentsmore aware of how language works in general.K)The research of Gigi Luk at Harvard offers a slightly different explanation.She has recently done asmall study looking at a group of 100 fourth-graders in Massachusetts who had similar reading scores ona standard test,but very different language experiences.Some were foreign-language dominant andothers were English natives.Here's what's interesting.The students who were dominant in a foreignlanguage weren't yet comfortably bilingual;they were just starting to learn English.Therefore,bydefinition,they had a much weaker English vocabulary than the native speakers.Yet they were just asgood at interpreting a text."This is very surprising,"Luk says."You would expect the readingcomprehension performance to mirror the vocabulary-it's a cornerstone of comprehension."L)How did the foreign-language dominant speakers manage this feat?Well,Luk found,they also scoredhigher on tests of executive functioning.So,even though they didn't have huge mental dictionaries todraw on,they may have been great puzzle-solvers,taking into account higher-level concepts such aswhether a single sentence made sense within an overall story line.They got to the same results as themonolinguals,by a different path.M)American public school classrooms as a whole are becoming more segregated by race and class.Dual-language programs can be an exception.Because they are composed of native English speakersdeliberately placed together with recent immigrants,they tend to be more ethnically and economicallybalanced.And there is some evidence that this helps kids of all backgrounds gain comfort withdiversity and different cultures.N)Several of the researchers also pointed out that,in bilingual education,non-English-dominant studentsand their families tend to feel that their home language is heard and valued,compared with aclassroom where the home language is left at the door in favor of English.This can improve students'sense of belonging and increase parents'involvement in their children's education,including behaviorslike reading to children."Many parents fear their language is an obstacle,a problem,and if theyabandon it their child will integrate better,"says Antonella Sorace of the University of Edinburgh."We tell them they're not doing their child a favor by giving up their language."O)One theme that was striking in speaking to all these researchers was just how strongly they advocatedfor dual-language classrooms.Thomas and Collier have advised many school systems on how to expandtheir dual-language programs,and Sorace runs "Bilingualism Matters,"an international network ofresearchers who promote bilingual education projects.This type of advocacy among scientists isunusual;even more so because the "bilingual advantage hypothesis"is being challenged once again.P)A review of studies published last year found that cognitive advantages failed to appear in 83 percent ofpublished studies,though in a separate analysis,the sum of effects was still significantly positive.Onepotential explanation offered by the researchers is that advantages that are measurable in the veryyoung and very old tend to fade when testing young adults at the peak of their cognitive powers.And,they countered that no negative effects of bilingual education have been found.So,even if theadvantages are small,they are still worth it.Not to mention one obvious,outstanding fact:"Bilingualchildren can speak two languages!"36.A study found that there are similar changes in brain structure between those who are bilingual from