2025 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

It's best to think of an accent as a distinct, systematic and rule-governed way of speaking. Accent is not a __26__ for dialect, but it's related. Dialect is an umbrella term for the way a community pronounces words, creates words, and orders words; accent refers to that first part only.

Many __27__ presume that there is a single standard way of speaking in each country, with one single standard accent, and that this perceived standard is __28__ the best form of speech, but linguists often point out that the concept of a standard accent is better understood as an ideal rather than a __29__. In other words, no one speaks "standard English"; rather, it is an imagined way of using language that exists only in grammar and style books.

One reason linguists agree there is no one true standard is that, through the years, there have been __30__ supposed standards, depending on time and place. The standard for English in British newsreels from the 1950s, for example, differs greatly from the standard found on American national news broadcasts today. In fact, there has never been a single standard that's been fully agreed upon — and broadcast outlets across the __31__ have never consistently held to those standards anyway.

Even so, this idea of a standard accent is __32__ and many workplace and educational environments perpetuate the idea that accents that __33__ from the current standard are less appropriate, or even inappropriate. Scholars have found that southern U.S. accent features are more accepted in __34__ such as government, law and service-oriented workplaces, but less accepted in the technology sector. The acceptability of nonstandard accents may __35__ with differences in class and culture, with newer or higher prestige industries expecting more standard speech in the workplace.

Mindfulness has been shown to have a number of meaningful health benefits — it can help reduce anxiety and promote healing in those suffering from chronic illness.

The practice is based on an insight first described in ancient Buddhist texts that human beings have the capacity to observe experience without being caught up in it. This means simply that it is possible to observe ourselves having a craving, or a happy thought, or even a scary emotion, without reacting in the moment in a way that amplifies the feeling or sends the mind spiraling off into thinking about old memories or anticipating events.

This practice of mindfulness can help calm the mind and the body as we learn not to react to experience with likes and dislikes or judgments of good and bad. It does not make us cold or indifferent but more fully present.

One of the challenges of practicing mindfulness in our contemporary world is that there has been a profound transformation in human attention. The artist Jenny Odell argues that in our "attention economy" human attention has been transformed into a commodity that big corporations buy and sell. This economy rests on a technological revolution of mobile phones and social media that makes it possible for corporations to target our attention with their content at every moment.

The devices most people use are a perpetual diversion from the present moment. The result is that it can feel as though our ability to focus, and be fully present, has been stolen. But mindfulness can help us resist the attention economy and relish the things that make life special, like being together with those we love.

Most mindfulness research focuses on the individual benefits of the practice, but some scholars assert that we can not only practice mindfulness for ourselves but also practice it for others. It can help us build stronger, healthier relationships.

The sad truth is that living in the attention economy, most of us have become bad listeners. However, just as it is possible to watch ourselves having an experience without reacting, it's possible to watch another person have an experience without getting tied up in reactivity and judgment.

The gift of mindfulness is a practice of listening with compassion to others describe their experiences. To give this gift means putting away your phone, turning off social media, and setting aside other common distractions. It means practicing being fully present in another person's presence and listening to them with complete attention without judgment, while resisting the urge to make the interaction about you.

If we judge the value of gifts based on their price, this gift may seem worthless, but in a distracted world, it is a precious one.

The other day I had to log into a service I hadn't used before. Since I was a new user, the website decided that it needed to check I wasn't a robot and so set me a Captcha test to determine whether the user is a person or a machine.

I was presented with an image of a roadside scene over which was laid a grid. My "challenge" was to click on each cell in the grid that contained a traffic sign. I did so, a bit irritated. Then I was presented with another image and another grid — also with a request to identify road signs. Like a lamb, I complied, after which the website accepted my input.

And then I realised what I had been doing was adding to a dataset for training the machine-learning software that guides self-driving cars. So, to gain access to an automated service that will benefit financially from my input, I first have to do some unpaid labour to help improve the performance of autonomous vehicles.

Neat, eh? But note also the delicious additional irony that the Captcha is described as an "automated Turing test". The Turing test was conceived, you may recall, as a way of enabling humans to determine whether a machine could respond in such a way that one couldn't tell whether it was a human or a robot. So we have wandered into a world in which machines make us do tricks to prove that we are humans!

The strangest aspect of this unparalleled shift is how under-discussed it has been. The metaphor of the boiling frog comes to mind. Have we become so subtly conditioned by digital technology that we don't see what's been happening to us? Have we been conditioned to accept a world governed by "smart" tech, trading convenience to the point where we become a bit like machines ourselves?

In a recent startling and thoughtful book, two scholars — Brett Frischmann, a law professor, and Evan Selinger, a philosopher — argue that the answer to that question is "yes".

And they're right. There's nothing technophobic about that. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. Technology is supposed to provide tools that serve human ends. But, as the machine-learning Captcha demonstrates, a significant proportion of digital tech now sees (and uses) humans as means to ends that are not ours. In the process, they reduce us to the status of cheery rats running on treadmills designed by people who do not have our interests at heart. So back to the frog metaphor. Are we smart enough to jump out before it's too late? You don't even have to Google it to know the answer.