2025 年 06 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

No beast on Earth is tougher than the tiny tardigrade (缓步类动物). It can __26__ being frozen at -272°Celsius, being exposed to the vacuum of outer space and even being __27__ with 500 times the dose of X-rays that would kill a human. In other words, the creature can endure conditions that don't even exist on Earth. And researchers are looking to the microscopic animals to learn how to prepare humans and crops to handle the __28__ of space travel.

The tardigrade's indestructibility stems from its __29__ to its environment—which may seem surprising, since it lives in __30__ comfortable places, like the cool, wet patches of moss (苔藓) that dot a garden wall.

But it turns out that a tardigrade's damp, mossy home can dry out many times each year. Drying is pretty __31__ for most living things. It does damage to cells in some of the same ways that freezing, vacuum and radiation do. Tardigrades, however, have __32__ special strategies for dealing with these kinds of damage.

As a tardigrade dries out, its cells produce several strange proteins that are unlike anything found in other animals. In water, the proteins are shapeless. But as water disappears, the proteins self-assemble into long fibers that fill the cell's __33__. The fibers support the cell's membranes (细胞膜) and proteins, preventing them from breaking or __34__.

Emulating tardigrades could one day help humans colonize outer space. Food crops could be engineered to produce tardigrade proteins, allowing these organisms to grow more efficiently on spacecraft where levels of radiation are elevated compared with on Earth.

So if humans ever succeed in reaching the stars, they may accomplish this __35__, in part, by standing on the shoulders of the tiny eight-legged endurance specialists in your backyard.

Why are we so worried about our careers? Partly it's to do with money, but there's a psychological aspect to our fears as well.

We worry because we suspect—not wrongly—that the world is full of a frightening sort of person ready to judge us ruthlessly and swiftly: a person we can call a snob.

A snob is anyone who takes a relatively small part of us and uses it to come to a rigid conclusion about how much of their attention we deserve. In the past, that might be your ancestry and royal connections. Nowadays, the snob cares about one thing only: what you do for a living.

This explains why the first question we will be asked in any new social context is "What do you do?" and according to how we answer, snobs will either welcome us with broad smiles, or leave us in the cold.

And that is why we are fired up by such a desperate urge to achieve and impress.

Sometimes our behaviour is mistaken for greed and vanity, but it is more than this. A lot of our interest in fancy cars, jobs and houses has nothing to do with materialism. It has to do with a hunger for the respect and esteem that is only available in our societies through the acquisition of material goods. It isn't the goods themselves we seek, it is the love we stand to gain through our possession of them. The next time we see someone driving a Ferrari, we shouldn't condemn them for their greed, we should pity them for the intensity of their need for love from the world.

At the root of snobbery is a lack of imagination and confidence about how to decide who in the world is valuable. The snobs are brutally misguided and slavish in their beliefs about how the superior individuals can be identified. For snobs, it is the already acclaimed and already successful who are the only ones worthy of respect. There is no room in their timid regimented minds to imagine that someone might be clever, kind or good—and yet somehow have been overlooked entirely by society, their qualities lying hidden beneath an unfamiliar veil, and having as yet discovered no obvious outlet.

The true answer to snobbery is not to say that there is no such thing as a better or worse person, but to insist that better or worse exist in constantly unexpected places and carry none of the outward signs of distinction. And because we are such poor judges of the worth of others, our ultimate duty remains to be kind, good, curious and imaginative about pretty much everyone who ever crosses our path.

Women have historically been paid less. But in the US in the 1980s, they began to catch up - fast. During that decade , the gender pay gap closed by about one percentage point a year. Had that trend continued, the gender wage gap would have been closed by 2017.

But the trend didn't continue, and the gap remained yawning.

According to a new study from academics at Harvard, the stagnation can be put down, perhaps counterintuitively, to the introduction of state and federal family leave policies.

The academics argue that during the 1990s, as governments began to introduce leave policies, it was mainly women who took advantage of them. Though the leave policies might have helped those women to stay in the workplace — instead of dropping out to have families -- those who returned saw their wages had increased at lower rates than the men.

After family leave was introduced in the US, in fact, the rate of gender wage convergence fell to just 0.03 percentage points per year, and has remained there ever since.

Those monitoring the process towards salary equity at work have long watched as progress slowed in many countries around the world. In fact, that progress began to reverse during the pandemic (大流行病).

The gender pay gap is one of the most outstanding examples of that lack of parity (平等), and still exists just about everywhere. The motherhood penalty has become a shorthand for describing why: In many places, especially rich countries, women earn the same as men until they reach their childbearing years. Women who have children begin to see their salaries lag behind their male counterparts.

Part of this is because women take on more of the unpaid labor at home, which can eat into time available for work and energy for career advancement. But it's also because mothers are passed over for raises and promotion, and because time out of the workplace sets women back, even if that time is taken voluntarily, and supported by company or government policy.

What would have happened if leave policies hadn't been introduced? The study doesn't go into that question, other than to say that if the 1980s trend continued, we would have been at parity by now.

It's possible, however, that the journey towards wage parity would have stalled either way. If women's gains in the 1980s were made through the erasure of things like bias, once those less uncontrollable problems had been addressed, there would still have been an issue with women—who are the ones to bear children and take care of them in the early weeks because of biological factors like the ability to breastfeed, forcing them to take breaks, whether or not those breaks were mandated.