2020年12月英语六级真题(第3套)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on why students should be encouraged to develop creativity. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.
Section A
Section B
Section C
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.
Social distancing is putting people out of work, canceling school and tanking the stock market. It has been by fear, and it is creating even more fear as money problems and uncertainty grow. However, at its core is love, and a sacrifice to protect those most to the coronavirus' (冠状病毒) effects—the elderly, people with compromised immune systems, and those whose life-saving resources would be used up by a epidemic.
Americans make life-saving decisions every day as a matter of course. We cut food into bite-sized pieces, we wear seatbelts, and we take care not to exceed the speed limit. But social distancing is in that it is completely self-sacrificing. Those who will benefit may be the elderly relatives of the person we didn't pass in Starbucks, on the subway, or in the elevator.
Social distancing is millions of people making hundreds of sacrifices to keep the elderly alive. It doesn't include the to run from society or make an excuse to avoid one's obligations—such as life-saving medical work or the parental obligation to buy groceries. What it does include is applying love through caution. And in doing so, it offers an opportunity for those who care about the elderly to find new ways to love them.
If we're not as much in our normal work or school, we have extra time to call parents and grandparents. We can also ask elderly relatives how to best support them and use our sacrifices as an opportunity to bring us, our community and the world .
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 lifelong learning is the international passport to success
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
Why does social media trigger feelings of loneliness and inadequacy? Because instead of being real life, it is, for the most part, impression management, a way of marketing yourself, carefully choosing and filtering the pictures and words to put your best face forward.
Online 'friends' made through social media do not follow the normal psychological progression of an interpersonal relationship. You share neither physical time nor emotional conversations over the Internet. You simply communicate photographs and catchy posts to a diverse group of people whom you have 'friended' or 'followed' based on an accidental interaction. This is not to say that your social media friends can't be real friends. They absolutely can, but the two are not synonymous. Generally speaking, there are no unfiltered comments or casually taken photos on our social media pages. And, rightfully so, because it wouldn't feel safe to be completely authentic and vulnerable with some of our 'friends' whom we don't actually know or with whom trust has yet to be built.
Social media can certainly be an escape from the daily grind, but we must be cautioned against the negative effects, such as addiction, on a person's overall psychological well-being.
As humans, we yearn for social connection. Scrolling (滚动) through pages of pictures and comments, however, does not provide the same degree of fulfillment as face to face interactions do. Also, we tend to idealize others' lives and compare our downfalls to their greatest accomplishments, ending in feelings of loneliness and inadequacy.
Social media can lead people on the unhealthy quest for perfection. Some people begin to attend certain events or travel to different places so that they can snap that 'perfect' photo. They begin to seek validation through the number of people who 'like' their posts. In order for it to play a psychologically healthy role in your social life, social media should supplement an already healthy social network. Pictures and posts should be byproducts of life's treasured moments and fun times, not the planned and calculated image that one is putting out into cyberspace in an attempt to fill insecurities or unmet needs.
Ultimately, social media has increased our ability to connect with various types of people all over the globe. It has opened doors for businesses and allowed us to stay connected to people whom we may not otherwise get to follow. However, social media should feel like a fun experience, not one that contributes to negative thoughts and feelings. If the latter is the case, increasing face to face time with trusted friends, and minimizing time scrolling online, will prove to be a reminder that your social network is much more rewarding than any 'like,' 'follow' or 'share' can be.
Passage Two
Imagine that an alien species landed on Earth and, through their mere presence, those aliens caused our art to vanish, our music to homogenize, and our technological know-how to disappear. That is effectively what humans have been doing to our closest relatives—chimps (大猩猩).
Back in 1999, a team of scientists led by Andrew Whiten showed that chimps from different parts of Africa behave very differently from one another. Some groups would get each other's attention by rapping branches with their knuckles (指关节) while others did it by loudly ripping leaves with their teeth. The team identified 39 of these traditions that are practiced by some communities but not others—a pattern that, at the time, hadn't been seen in any animal except humans. It was evidence, the team said, that chimps have their own cultures.
It took a long time to convince skeptics that such cultures exist, but now we have plenty of examples of animals learning local traditions from one another.
But just when many scientists have come to accept the existence of animal cultures, many of those cultures might vanish. Ammie Kalan and her colleagues have shown, through years of intensive fieldwork, that the very presence of humans has eroded the diversity of chimp behavior. Where we flourish, their cultures wither. It is a bitterly ironic thing to learn on the 20th anniversary of Whiten's classic study.
'It's amazing to think that just 60 years ago, we knew next to nothing of the behavior of our sister species in the wild,' Whiten says. 'But now, just as we are truly getting to know our primate (灵长类) cousins, the actions of humans are closing the window on all we have discovered.'
'Sometimes in the rush to conserve the species, I think we forget about the individuals,' says Cat Hobaiter, a professor at the University of St. Andrews. 'Each population, each community, even each generation of chimps is unique. An event might only have a small impact on the total population of chimps, but it may wipe out an entire community—an entire culture. No matter what we do to restore habitat or support population growth, we may never be able to restore that culture.'
No one knows whether the destruction of chimp culture is getting worse. Few places have tracked chimp behavior over long periods, and those that have are also more likely to have protected their animals from human influence.
Obviously conservationists need to think about saving species in a completely new way—by preserving animal traditions as well as bodies and genes. 'Instead of focusing only on the conservation of genetically based entities like species, we now need to also consider culturally based entities,' says Andrew Whiten.
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.
本页为2020年12月英语六级真题(第3套),支持听力、阅读、写作和翻译在线练习。
写作题目:why students should be encouraged to develop creativity
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