2024 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

About 23% of the global population lives in absolute poverty. In developing countries there is a low life expectancy, a high infant __26__ rate, high levels of unemployment and illiteracy, nutritional levels below acceptable standards and widespread disease with very little or poor quality medical assistance. Others live __27__ wealthy and luxurious lives and so the wealth is distributed in a very __28__ manner. These are the central problems to questions of charity though charity also includes many other areas such as assisting the elderly.

We all __29__ when very rich people pledge to give away most of their billions, but they are usually left with millions to pass on, still much more than most people would expect to earn in their lifetime. Even comparatively __30__ salaries in the west are very high when compared globally. Someone on £20,000 could easily afford to give away £2,000 per year and still have plenty to live on plus some luxuries.

Most people agree that giving to charity is morally __31__ but charitable behaviour tends to be regarded as above and beyond the call of duty. Some argue, however, that charitable behaviour is morally required. This means that to fail to behave charitably would be wrong. The majority of arguments in this vein refer to giving aid to poorer nations but they may also refer to giving time within one's __32__ community. Arguments tend to place different requirements on people in different income brackets and __33__ entirely people who are merely making ends meet. Some argue that people should all contribute a certain percentage of their earnings. I will __34__ together all those arguments that place a moral requirement on people to give to charity, despite the fact that there is wide disagreement as to the __35__ of that moral requirement.

There are hundreds of personality quizzes online that assert they can ascertain whether the right or left half of your brain is dominant. Left-brained people are supposedly logical and excel at language and math while right-brained people are more imaginative, emotionally intelligent and skilled with spatial reasoning. There's just one problem: That's not how brains work.

Popular science enthusiasts sort of took this idea and ran with it, and it's become woven in popular culture now, and it's not going away.

Despite this enduring belief, there's no such thing as being "right-brained" or "left-brained." Whether you're someone who tends more towards creativity or logic has nothing to do with one hemisphere of your brain being dominant over the other. But the actual science of how the two halves of our brains work together is sometimes stranger than fiction.

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right. In all vertebrate (脊椎的) animals, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body and vice versa. And scientists have long known, thanks to the behaviors of patients who suffered brain injuries, that different areas of the brain do different things.

But many scientists struggled with this idea, because the very suggestion that the left and right halves of the brain operate differently disrupted the idea that nature tends toward perfect symmetry.

Work by neuroscientists (神经科学家) has revealed the importance of different hemispheres of the brain for different activities. However, their research quickly saw some misinterpretations in the general public: Some presumed creative people must be right-brained and logical people left-brained. It is proven that not only is personality unrelated to the different halves of the brain, but people aren't really right- or left-brained to begin with. The idea that we have left-dominant people and right-dominant people, and that this is related to personality, is categorically false. That's never been supported in the neuroscience community. Neuroscientists don't believe that and never have.

What scientists learned is that there are really important differences between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. It's just that they have nothing to do with personality or whether cognitive strategy is more logical or free spirited or creative. While researchers have shown the limitations of how the hemispheres of our brains influence our lives, it's not difficult to understand the appeal of such ideas. People are endlessly fascinated by themselves and their friends, and the subtle differences in how people think about the world are really meaningful to them. When you come up with an online quiz that tells us something about ourselves, we're drawn to that. It's irresistible. But you have to take it with an enormous grain of salt.

One hundred thirty-five students, four teachers, one giant classroom: This is what 9th grade looks like at Westwood High School, in Mesa, Arizona's largest school system. There, an innovative teaching model has taken hold, and is spreading to other schools in the district and beyond.

Five years ago, faced with high teacher turnover and declining student enrollment, Westwood's leaders decided to try something different. Working with professors at Arizona State University's teachers college, they piloted a classroom model known as team teaching which allows teachers to dissolve the walls that separate their classes across physical or grade divides.

The teachers share large groups of students—sometimes 100 or more—and rotate between group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups, or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet to hammer out a personalized program for every student the team will focus on that day.

By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate, Mesa's administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off.

"Teachers are doing fantastic things, but it's very rare a teacher walks into another room to see what's happening," said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools. "Our profession is so slow to advance because we are working in isolation."

Of course, overhauling teaching approaches can't fix all the frustrations teachers have, such as low pay, but early results from Mesa show team teaching may be helping to reverse low morale. In a survey of hundreds of the district's teachers, researchers found those who worked on teams reported greater job satisfaction, more frequent collaborations with colleagues, and more positive interactions with students.

Another benefit of teams, teachers say, is that they can help each other improve their instruction. During one planning session, English teacher Jeff Hall shared a performance appraisal with a science teacher: Her recent lecture on something she called "the central dogma of biology" had bewildered him and their other teammates.

"If the science is too confusing for me, can you imagine the frustration you feel as kids?" Hall said. But the science teacher, he said, wouldn't have known about the confusion on her own.

The model is not for everyone. Some teachers approached about volunteering for a team have said they prefer to work alone. Team teaching can also be a scheduling nightmare, especially at schools like Westwood where only some staff work in teams. There are also thorny questions like how to evaluate four teachers on the performance of 135 students. But for the time being, it seems to be working.