2023 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

Modern U.S. cities were designed to make exercise unnecessary. Cars and elevators once symbolized urban areas as machines for more efficient living. Now it is clear that these improvements provide great benefits but also __26__ health costs. Recent studies show that urban __27__ encourages more driving and is associated with heavier weight. This __28__ suggests that the layout and design of cities can hinder or promote healthier lifestyle choices and it is __29__ that urban planners bear this in mind.

Unfortunately, urban planning still centers in large part on solving the problems of the past. Of course cities still need to __30__ standard public health practices, such as separating toxic facilities from homes and restricting heavy truck traffic through __31__ residential areas. But it's also important to create healthier cities—and the discussion is already underway. More and more city planners are paying increasing attention to encouraging physical activity by making it easier and safer for people to recreate, walk, bike and take public transportation. Many studies of __32__ show that people live the longest in environments where physical activity is part of everyday life.

Providing more walkable spaces, better protected bike lanes and more __33__ spaces are important steps. But even smaller changes can be effective.

Cities can close off streets on weekends to encourage communities to get out and walk. They also can provide more seating in public places, so that less-fit residents can rest during their journeys. Using public spaces in cities as places where people can exercise promotes __34__, rather than allowing physical activity to become restricted to private gyms with often-expensive monthly fees that __35__ less wealthy people from joining.

Research is meant to benefit society by raising public awareness and creating products and innovations that enhance development. For research to serve its full purpose, the results must leave the confines of research laboratories and academic journals.

Findings effectively communicated can go a long way to serve the interests of the public. They can help address social injustices or improve treatments offered to patients.

Many researchers seem to be content with sharing the results of their studies in academic journals or at conferences. But few journals allow everybody to read the findings. Even articles freely available are usually written in academic language incomprehensible to the average reader.

For researchers in the tenure-track system, their main goal is winning tenure, which in part can be achieved by getting a number of papers published in prominent journals. Pressures like this mean community-level outreach is not prioritised.

Many researchers lack the writing skills to describe their results to a general audience. They may also worry about whether the public will understand their findings, or about findings being used to influence controversial policies. These concerns cause some researchers to shy away from communicating their findings outside the academic community.

Propagating research findings beyond academic publications is particularly crucial for addressing certain social discrepancies. It can help families, communities, healthcare providers, policymakers, government agencies and other stakeholders to understand and respond to crises that plague society.

The benefits of sharing findings flow both ways. Engaging with other researchers and the public can lead to unexpected new connections and new ideas that could suggest fruitful new directions for research.

To benefit both researchers and the communities, the need to find innovative, accessible ways to share the work cannot be overstated.

Institutions and funding organisations should support more researchers to publish in open access journals so that the public doesn't have to pay to read them. Institutions and researchers should invest in partnerships that expand capacity for sharing results more broadly.

Furthermore, ethics committees should make it mandatory for researchers to share their results with the public. Every research participant should opt in or out of receiving results, as part of the process of giving informed consent.

There could be misunderstanding of the findings presented by the researcher because of technical terms. But this can be resolved by researchers engaging the services of professional writers or communication officers to help with translating their study into more accessible language and share it widely with media outlets and the public.

Sharing results with the people who are most affected by them makes us better researchers and ensures that our work can be used to improve people's lives. Institutions and collaborators must recognise the value of doing so.

Spiders make their presence felt in late August and through early autumn. This is the mating season of some of the most common varieties, when male house spiders come out of hidden corners to look for females, and garden spiders reach adult size and spin their most dazzling webs.

Yet while the spider is a familiar fixture of nursery poems or songs and Halloween decorations, its relationship with humans is complicated. Fear of spiders is common and has serious impacts on the lives of sufferers. Its prevalence appears unrelated to any rational assessment of risk. Spiders in the UK are almost all harmless. Farmland species perform valuable ecosystem services, by preying on insects that are our competitors for crops. But they are a constant source of human anxieties—with a cultural association with witches and wickedness dating back to the middle ages.

Does this perhaps explain, in part, the lack of data about how spiders are faring in our age of ecological crisis? British butterflies are the most studied group of insects in the world, due to the long tradition of collecting and observing them. But spider conservationists point out that it was only in the 1980s that the classification of house spiders was properly sorted out. And while information about insect populations is gathered by experiments that measure the numbers hitting windscreens or traps, there have been few attempts to count spiders.

The huge reductions in the numbers of flying insects can only mean a reduction in spiders' food supply. A recent landmark study identified a 75% fall in insect populations between 1989 and 2016, with pesticide use thought to be to blame along with the destruction of wild areas for development. This means the overall picture for spiders is worrying, as it is for most creatures. But conservationists are most concerned about those varieties that are threatened due to habitat loss and fragmentation, which makes it impossible for them to migrate.

Of around 650 spider species regularly recorded in the UK, the majority thrive in marshes and wasteland. Conservation efforts, often led by determined individuals, have helped some species to recover by reintroducing them to new areas. With rewilding now firmly on the environmental policy agenda, the hope is that in future, spiders will be enabled to migrate by themselves, adapting to climate change by moving along wildlife corridors.

It seems unlikely that spiders will ever attract the same level of human enthusiasm as bees, birds or butterflies, in spite of their unique status as nature's spinners. But as they reveal themselves in all their splendour this autumn, it would be a good thing if more animal lovers recognised the ways in which spiders are simply terrific.