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大学英语四级考试 2015 年 6 月真题(第三套)
Part I Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay based on the
picture below. You should start your essay with a brief description of the picture and
then comment on parents’ role in their children’s growth. You should write at least 120
words but no more than 180 words.
Part I Listening (30 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear three news reports. At the end of each news
report, you will hear two or three questions. Both the news report and the questions will
be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the
four choices marked A),B).C) and D).Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer
Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.
Questions 1 and 2 are based on the news report you have just heard.
1. A) The three researchers shared evenly the Nobel prize.
B)The three winners studied the same subject.
C)This year's first Nobel prize was awarded for medicine.
D)All of the Nobel prizes have been made public.
2. A) Youyou Tu's treatment is more hi-tech.
B)Youyou Tu's treatment is more traditional.
C)Youyou Tu focuses on roundworm-caused infections.
D)Youyou Tu invented a completely new therapy.
1Questions 3 and 4 are based on the news report you have just heard.
3. A) NASA sent a new Mars lander.
C) Scientists revealed a new space theory.
B) Different soil samples were studied.
D) Liquid water has been found on Mars.
4. A )Mars is not as dry as what we used to think.
B)Mars could support life at the moment.
C)They have found living things on Mars.
D)Soil samples from Mars are the same as those of the Earth.
Questions 5 to 7 are based on the news report you have just heard.
5. A) A kidnapper. C) Her 4-year-old son.
B) Her rival. D) Her drunken husband.
6. A) She is brutal in nature. C) She loves shooting and killing.
B ) She is a die-hard racist. D) She is a firm gun-rights supporter.
7. A) It is against the law to own a gun.
B)Women are not allowed to possess a gun.
C)Improper storing of guns constitutes a crime.
D)All the citizens have the right to carry a gun.
Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear two long conversations. At the end of each
conversation, you will hear four questions. Both the conversation and the questions will
be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the
four choices marked A),B), C) and D).Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer
Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.
Questions 8 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
8. A) He likes Sweden better than England.
B)He prefers hot weather to cold weather.
C)He is an Englishman living in Sweden.
D)He visits London nearly every winter.
9. A) The bad weather. C) The cold houses.
B) The gloomy winter. D) The long night.
10. A) Delightful. C) Depressing.
B)Painful. D) Refreshing.
211.A)They often stay up late reading.
B)They work hard and play hard.
C)They like to go camping in summer.
D)They try to earn more and spend more.
Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
12.A) English literature. C) French.
B) Management. D) Public Administration.
13.A) English teaching. C) Careers guidance.
B) Staff training. D) Psychological counselling.
14.A) They went to the same university.
B)They all love to engage in management.
C)The jobs they choose are not related to their major.
D)They received the same job training.
15.A) Its generous scholarships. C) its well-designed courses.
B)Its worldwide fame. D) Its pleasant environment.
Section C
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage,
you will hear three or four questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken
only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four
choices marked A),B),C) and D).Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1
with a single line through the centre.
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the passage you have just heard.
16. A) Characteristics of Japanese artists.
C) The art of Japanese brush painting.
B) Some features of Japanese culture.
D) The uniqueness of Japanese art.
17. A) To calm themselves down.
C) To show their impatience.
B) To enhance concentration.
D) To signal lack of interest.
18.A)How listeners in different cultures show respect.
B)How speakers can win approval from the audience.
C)How speakers can misunderstand the audience.
D)How different Western and Eastern art forms are.
Questions 19 to 22 are based on the passage you have just heard.
319.A) Directing personnel evaluation.
B)Buying and maintaining equipment.
C)Drawing up plans for in-service training.
D)Interviewing and recruiting employees.
20.A) Some of his equipment was damaged in a fire.
C) Two of his workers were injured at work.
B) The training program he ran was a failure.
D) Two of his employees committed theft.
21.A) A better relationship with his boss.
C) A better-paying job in another company.
B) Advancement to a higher position.
D) Improvement in the company's management.
22.A) She has more self-confidence than Chris.
B)She works with Chris in the same division.
C)She has more management experience than Chris.
D)She is competing with Chris for the new job.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard.
23.A) They help us see the important values of a culture.
B) They guide us in handling human relationships.
D) They help us express ourselves more effectively.
D) They are an infinite source of human knowledge.
24.A) Their wording may become different.
B)The values they reflect may change.
C)Their origins can no longer be traced.
D)They may be misinterpreted occasionally.
25. A) Certain values are shared by a large number of cultures.
B)Some proverbs are assuming more and more importance.
C)Old proverbs are constantly replaced by new ones.
D)Certain values have always been central to a culture.
Part III Reading Comprehension (40 minutes)
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.
4Question 26 to 35 are based on the following passage.
The U. S. Department of Education is making efforts to ensure that all students have
equal access to a quality education. Today it is 26 the launch of the Excellent
Educators for All Initiative. The initiative will help states and school districts support
great educators for the students who need them most.
“All children are 27 to a high-quality education regardless of their race, zip
code or family income. It is 28 important that we provide teachers and principals
the support they need to help students reach their full 29 ” U. S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan said. “Despite the excellent work and deep 30 of our nation’s teachers
and principals, students in high-poverty, high-minority schools are unfairly treated across
our country. We have to do better. Local leaders and educators will
31 their own creative solutions, but we must work together to 32 our focus on
how to better recruit, support and 33 effective teachers and principals for all
students, especially the kids who need them most.”
Today’s announcement is another important step forward in improving access to a
quality education, a 34 of President Obama’s year of action. Later today, Secretary
Duncan will lead a round table discussion with principals and school teachers from across
the country about the 35 of working in high-need schools and how to adopt promising
practices for supporting great educators in these schools.
A) announcing I) distributing
B) beneficial J) enhance
C) challenges K) entitled
D) commitment L) potential
E) component M) properly
F) contests N) qualified
G) critically O) retain
H) develop
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.
Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break
A) Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a
grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are
5done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.
And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would
immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.
B) EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system
and will make its automated （自动的） software available free on the Web to any
institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade
student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
C) The new service will bring the educational consortium （联盟）into a growing conflict
over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for
multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial
intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread
acceptance by educators and has many critics.
D) Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the
instant-grading software would be a useful teaching tool, enabling students to take
tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said
the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system,
where students often wait days or weeks for grades. “There is a huge value in learning
with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much
better with instant feedback.”
E) But skeptics (怀疑者) the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtime
critic , Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together
nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks.
He has also been highly critical of studies claiming that the software compares well to
human graders.
F) He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition (呼吁)
opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals
Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected
nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from famous people like Noam Chomsky.
G) “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in
part. “Computers cannot ‘read’. They cannot measure the essentials of effective
written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense,
ethical (伦理的) position, convincing argument, meaningful organization, and clarity,
among others.
H) But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. It
offers free online classes from Harvard, MIT and the University of California-
Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Georgetown and the
6University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates
for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year,
including adding international schools.
I) The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays
or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to
train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and
almost instantly. The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system
created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical（数字的）rank.
J) EdX is not the first to use the automated assessment technology, which dates to early
computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies offering commercial
programs to grade written test answers, and four states—Louisiana, North Dakota,
Utah and West Virginia—are using some form of the technology in secondary schools.
A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a
“second reader,” to check the reliability of the human graders.
K) But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is likely to give the
technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that it would work with EdX to
develop a joint educational system that will make use of the automated assessment
technology.
L) Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members
to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated
assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get
immediate feedback on their work, so that lean turns into a game, with students
naturally (吸引) toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne
Roller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.
M) Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of the
Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 prizes aimed at
improving software that grades essays and short answers. More than 150 teams
entered each category. A winner of one of the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was
hired by EdX to help design its assessment software.
N) “One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Victor Vuchic,
a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with
multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they
cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.”
O) Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the
Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the
experiment. In his view, the technology—though imperfect—has a place in
educational settings.
7P) With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students
meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the
technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of
teaching is much better than at most schools.
Q) Often they come from very famous institutions where, in fact, they do a much better
job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There
seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”
36. Some professionals in education are collecting signatures to voice their opposition to
automated essay grading.
37. Using software to grade students’ essays saves teachers time for other work.
38. The Hewlett contests aim at improving essay grading software.
39. Though the automated grading system is widely used in multiple-choice tests,
automated essay grading is still criticized by many educators.
40. Some people don’t believe the software grading system can do as good a job as
human graders.
41. Critics of automated essay scoring do not seem to know the true realities in less
famous universities.
42. Critics argue many important aspects of effective writing cannot be measured by
computer rating programs.
43. As class size grows, most teachers are unable to give students valuable comments as
to how to improve their writing.
44. The automated assessment technology is sometimes used to double check the work of
human graders.
45. Students find instant feedback helps improve their learning considerably.
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
Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.
Boys' schools are the perfect place to teach young men to express their emotions and
involve them in activities such as art, dance and music.
8Far from the traditional image of a culture of aggressive masculinity(阳刚), the
absence of girls gives boys the chance to develop without pressure to conform to a
stereotype, a US study says.
Boys at single-sex schools were said to be more likely to get involved in cultural and
artistic activities that helped develop their emotional expressiveness, rather than feeling
they had to conform to the “boy code” of hiding their emotions to be a "real man".
The findings of the study go against received wisdom that boys do better when
taught alongside girls.
Tony Little, headmaster of Eton, warned that boys were being failed by the British
education system because it had become too focused on girls. He criticised teachers for
failing to recognise that boys are actually more emotional than girls.
The research argued that boys often perform badly in mixed schools because they
become discouraged when their female peers do better earlier in speaking and reading
skills.
But in single-sex schools teachers can tailor lessons to boys' learning style, letting
them move around the classroom and getting them to compete in teams to prevent
boredom, wrote the study's author, Abigail James, of the University of Virginia.
Teachers could encourage boys to enjoy reading and writing with “boy-focused”
approaches such as themes and characters that appeal to them. Because boys generally
have more acute vision, learn best through touch, and are physically more active, they
need to be given “hands-on” lessons where they are allowed to walk around. “Boys in
mixed schools view classical music as feminine（女性的）and prefer the modern genre
（类型）in which violence and sexism are major themes,” James wrote.
Single-sex education also made it less likely that boys would feel they had to
conform to a stereotype that men should be “masterful and in charge” in relationships. “In
mixed schools, boys feel compelled to act like men before they understand themselves
well enough to know what that means,” the study reported.
46.The author believes that a single-sex school would .
A ) force boys to hide their emotions to be “real men”
B)help to cultivate masculine aggressiveness in boys
C)encourage boys to express their emotions more freely
D)naturally reinforce in boys the traditional image of a man
47.It is commonly believed that in a mixed school boys .
A) perform relatively better
C)behave more responsibly
B ) grow up more healthily
D)receive a better education
948.What does Tony Little say about the British education system?
A) It fails more boys than girls academically.
C) It fails to give boys the attention they need.
B) It focuses more on mixed school education.
D) It places more pressure on boys than on girls.
49.According to Abigail James, one of the advantages of single-sex schools is .
A)teaching can be tailored to suit the characteristics of boys
B)boys can focus on their lessons without being distracted
C)boys can choose to learn whatever they are interested in
D)teaching can be designed to promote boys’ team spirit
50.Which of the following is characteristic of boys according to Abigail James’ report?
A) They enjoy being in charge.
C)They have sharper vision.
B)They conform to stereotypes.
D) They are violent and sexist.
Passage Two
Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.
It's an annual argument. Do we or do we not go on holiday? My partner says no
because the boiler could go, or the roof fall off, and we have no savings to save us. I say
you only live once and we work hard and what's the point if you can't go on holiday. The
joy of a recession means no argument next year—we just won't go.
Since money is known to be one of the things most likely to bring a relationship to
its knees, we should be grateful. For many families the recession means more than not
booking a holiday. A YouGov poll of 2,000 people found 22% said they were arguing
more with their partners because of concerns about money. What's less clear is whether
divorce and separation rates rise in a recession— financial pressures mean couples argue more
but make splitting up less affordable. A recent research shows arguments about money
were especially damaging to couples. Disputes were characterised by intense verbal ( 语
言上的) aggression, tended to be repeated and not resolved, and made men, more than
women, extremely angry.
Kim Stephenson, an occupational psychologist, believes money is such a big deal
because of what it symbolizes, which may be different things to men and women. “People
can say the same things about money but have different ideas of what it's for,” he explains.
“They'll say it's to save, to spend, for security, for freedom, to show someone you love
them.” He says men are more likely to see money as a way of buying status and of
showing their parents that they've achieved something.
“The biggest problem is that couples assume each other knows what's going on with
their finances, but they don't. There seems to be more of a taboo (禁忌) about talking about
money than about death. But you both need to know what you're doing, who's
10paying what into the joint account and how much you keep separately. In a healthy
relationship, you don't have to agree about money, but you have to talk about it.”
51.What does the author say about vacationing?
A) People enjoy it all the more during a recession.
C) It makes all the hard work worthwhile.
B) Few people can afford it without working hard.
D) It is the chief cause of family disputes.
52. What does the author mean by saying “money is known. to bring a relationship to its knees”
(Line 1, Para.2)?
A) Money is considered to be the root of all evils.
C) Few people can resist the temptation of money.
B) Some people sacrifice their dignity for money.
D) Disputes over money may ruin a relationship.
53.The YouGov poll of 2,000 people indicates that in a recession .
A) conflicts between couples tend to rise
C) couples show more concern for each other
B) it is more expensive for couples to split up
D) divorce and separation rates increase
54.What does Kim Stephenson believe?
A) Money is often a symbol of a person's status.
C)Men and women spend money on different things.
B)Money means a great deal to both men and women.
D) Men and women view money in different ways.
55.The author suggests at the end of the passage that couples should .
A)put their money together instead of keeping it separately
B)make efforts to reach agreement on their family budgets
C)discuss money matters to maintain a healthy relationship
D)avoid arguing about money matters to remain romantic
E)
Part IV Translation (30 minutes)
Section A
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.
在西方人心目中，和中国联系最为密切的基本食物是大米。长期以来，大米在中国人的饮
食中占据很重要的地位，以至于有谚语说“巧妇难为无米之炊”。中国南方大多种植水稻，人
们通常以大米为主食；而华北大部分地区因为过于寒冷或过于干燥，无法种植水稻，那里的主
要作物是小麦。在中国，有些人用面粉做面包，但大多数人用面粉做馒头和面条。
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