2020 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 1 套）

The idea of taxing things that are bad for society has a powerful allure. It offers the possibility of a double benefit— __26__ harmful activities, while also providing the government with revenue.

Take sin taxes. Taxes on alcohol make it more expensive to get drunk, which reduces excessive drinking and __27__ driving. At the same time, they provide state and local governments with billions of dollars of revenue. Tobacco taxes, which generate more than twice as much, have proven __28__ in the decline of smoking, which has saved millions of lives.

Taxes can also be an important tool for environmental protection, and many economists say taxing carbon would be the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Economic theory says that unlike income or sales taxes, carbon taxes can actually increase economic efficiency; because companies that __29__ carbon dioxide into the sky don't pay the costs of the climate change they cause, carbon taxes would restore the proper __30__ to the market.

In reality, carbon taxes alone won't be enough to halt global warming, but they would be a useful part of any climate plan. What's more, the revenue from this tax, which would __31__ be hundreds of billions of dollars per year, could be handed out to citizens as a __32__ or used to fund green infrastructure projects.

Similarly, a wealth tax has been put forward as a way to reduce inequality while raising revenue. The revenue from this tax, which some experts __33__ will be over $4 trillion per decade, would be designated for housing, child care, health care and other government benefits. If you believe, as many do, that wealth inequality is __34__ bad, then these taxes improve society while also __35__ government coffers (金库).

What is the place of art in a culture of inattention? Recent visitors to the Louvre report that tourists can now spend only a minute in front of the Mona Lisa before being asked to move on. Much of that time, for some of them, is spent taking photographs not even of the painting but of themselves with the painting in the background.

One view is that we have democratised tourism and gallery-going so much that we have made it effectively impossible to appreciate what we've travelled to see. In this oversubscribed society, experience becomes a commodity like any other. There are queues to climb Mt. Jolmo Lungma as well as to see famous paintings. Leisure, thus conceived, is hard labour, and returning to work becomes a well-earned break from the ordeal.

What gets lost in this industrialised haste is the quality of looking. Consider an extreme example, the late philosopher Richard Wollheim. When he visited the Louvre he could spend as much as four hours sitting before a painting. The first hour, he claimed, was necessary for misperceptions to be eliminated. It was only then that the picture would begin to disclose itself. This seems unthinkable today, but it is still possible to organise. Even in the busiest museums there are many rooms and many pictures worth hours of contemplation which the crowds largely ignore. Sometimes the largest crowds are partly the products of bad management; the Mona Lisa is such a hurried experience today partly because the museum is being reorganised. The Uffizi in Florence, another site of cultural pilgrimage, has cut its entry queues down to seven minutes by clever management. And there are some forms of art, those designed to be spectacles as well as objects of contemplation, which can work perfectly well in the face of huge crowds.

Olafur Eliasson's current Tate Modern show, for instance, might seem nothing more than an entertainment, overrun as it is with kids romping (喧闹地玩耍) in fog rooms and spray mist installations. But it's more than that: where Eliasson is at his most entertaining, he is at his most serious too, and his disorienting installations bring home the reality of the destructive effects we are having on the planet—not least what we are doing to the glaciers of Eliasson's beloved Iceland.

Marcel Proust, another lover of the Louvre, wrote- "It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees the universe, whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any on the moon." If any art remains worth seeing, it must lead us to such escapes. But a minute in front of a painting in a hurried crowd won't do that.

Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bellies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It's all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are annoyed that new dietary recommendations of the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact.

Broadly, the 2016-2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: more vegetables, leaner meats and far less sugar.

But Americans consume more calories per capita than almost any other country in the world. So the things Americans eat have a huge impact on climate change. Soil tilling releases carbon dioxide, and delivery vehicles emit exhaust. The government's dietary guidelines could have done a lot to lower that climate cost. Not just because of their position of authority: The guidelines drive billions of dollars of food production through federal programs like school lunches and nutrition assistance for the needy.

On its own, plant and animal agriculture contributes 9 percent of all the country's greenhouse gas emissions. That's not counting the fuel burned in transportation, processing, refrigeration, and other waypoints between farm and belly. Red meats are among the biggest and most notorious emitters, but trucking a salad from California to Minnesota in January also carries a significant burden. And greenhouse gas emissions aren't the whole story. Food production is the largest user of fresh water, largest contributor to the loss of biodiversity, and a major contributor to using up natural resources.

All of these points and more showed up in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's scientific report, released last February. Miriam Nelson chaired the subcommittee in charge of sustainability for the report, and is disappointed that eating less meat and buying local food aren't in the final product. "Especially, if you consider that eating less meat, especially red and processed, has health benefits," she says.

So what happened? The official response is that sustainability falls too far outside the guidelines' official scope, which is to provide "nutritional and dietary information."

Possibly the agencies in charge of drafting the decisions are too close to the industries they are supposed to regulate. On one hand, the USDA is compiling dietary advice. On the other, their clients are US agriculture companies.

The line about keeping the guidelines' scope to nutrition and diet doesn't ring quite right with researchers. David Wallinga, for example, says, "In previous guidelines, they've always been concerned with things like food security—which is presumably the mission of the USDA. You absolutely need to be worried about climate impacts and future sustainability if you want secure food in the future."