2015年12月英語四級考試真題(第3套)

1、2015年12月英語四級考試真題試卷（第三套）Part I Writing (30 minutes)Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the saying "Never go out there to see what happens, go out there to make things happen. " You can cite examples to illustrate the importance of being part

2、icipants rather than mere onlookers in life. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.注意：此部分試題在答題卡1上_Part Listening Comprehension ( 30 minutes)Section ADirections: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations.At the end of each conversation, one

3、 or more questions will be asked about what was said.Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once.After each question there will be a pause.During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A, B, C,and D.and decide which is the best answer.Then mark the corresponding letter

4、 on Answer .Sheet I with a single line through the center.1.A) They admire the courage of space explorers.B) They were going to watch a wonderful movie.C) They enjoyed the movie on space exploration.D) They like doing scientific exploration very much.2.A) In a school library. B) At a gift shop.C) In

5、 the office of a travel agency. D) At a graduation ceremony.3.A) He used to work in the art gallery. B) He does not have a good memory.C) He is not interested in any part-time jobs. D) He declined a job offer from the art gallery.4.A) He will be unable to attend the birthday party.B) The woman shoul

6、d have informed him earlier.C) He will go to the birthday party after the lecture.D) Susan has been invited to give a lecture tomorrow.5.A) Set a deadline for the staff to meet. B) Assign more workers to the project.C) Reward those having made good progress. D) Encourage the staff to work in small g

7、roups.6.A) Where she can leave her car. B) The rate for parking in Lot C.C) How far away the parking lot is. D) The way to the visitor's parking.7.A) He regrets missing the classes. B) He has benefited from exercise.C) He plans to take the fitness classes. D) He is looking forward to a better li

8、fe.8. A) How to select secretaries. B) How to raise work efficiency.C) The responsibilities of secretaries. D) The secretaries in the man's company.Questions 9 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 9.A) It is used by more people than English. B) It is more difficult to learn t

9、han English.C) It will be as commonly used as English. D) It will eventually become a world language.10.A) Its popularity with the common people. B) The effect of the Industrial Revolution.C) The influence of the British Empire. D) Its loan words from many languages.11.A) It has a growing number of

10、newly coined words.B) It includes a lot of words from other languages.C) It is the largest among all languages in the world.D) It can be easily picked up by overseas travellers.Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12.A) To place an order. B) To apply for a job.C) To

11、return some goods. D) To make a complaint.13.A) He works on a part-time basis for the company.B) He has not worked in the sales department for long.C) He is not familiar with the exact details of the goods.D) He has become somewhat impatient with the woman.14.A) It is not his responsibility. B) It w

12、in be free for large orders.C) It depends on a number of factors. D) It costs 15 more for express delivery.15.A) Make inquiries with some other companies.B) Report the information to her superior.C) Pay a visit to the saleswoman in charge.D) Ring back when she comes to a decision.Section BDirections

13、：In this section, you will hear 3 short passages.At the end of each passage, you will hear some 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 lett

14、er on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the center.Passage One Questions 16 to 18 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 16.A) No one knows for sure when they came into being.B) No one knows exactly where they were first made.C) No one knows for what purpose they were invented.D)

15、 No one knows what they will look like in the future.17.A) Measure the speed of wind. B) Give warnings of danger.C) Pass on secret messages. D) Carry ropes across rivers.18.A) To find out the strength of silk for kites. B) To test the effects of the lightning rod.C) To prove that lightning is electr

16、icity. D) To protect houses against lightning.Passage TwoQuestions 19 to 22 are based on the passage you have just heard.19.A) She was born with a talent for languages. B) She was trained to be an interpreter.C) She can speak several languages. D) She enjoys teaching languages.20.A) They want to lea

17、rn as many foreign languages as possible.B) They have an intense interest in cross-cultural interactions.C) They acquire an immunity to culture shock.D) They would like to live abroad permanently.21.A) She became an expert in horse racing.B) She learned to appreciate classical music.C) She was able

18、to translate for a German sports judge.D) She got a chance to visit several European countries.22.A) Take part in a cooking competition. B) Taste the beef and give her comment.C) Teach vocabulary for food in English. D) Give cooking lessons on Western food.Passage ThreeQuestions 23 to 25 are based o

19、n the passage you have just heard.23.A) He had only a third-grade education. B) He once threatened to kill his teacher.C) He often helped his mother do housework. D) He grew up in a poor single-parent family.24.A) Stupid. B) Active. C) Brave. D) Careless.25.A) Watch educational TV programs only. B)

20、Write two book reports a week.C) Help with housework. D) Keep a diary.Section CDirections: In this section, you will hear a passage three times.When the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea.When the passage is read for the second time, you are required

21、 to fill in the blanks with the exact words you have just heard.Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.When you look up at the night sky, what do you see? There are other _26_ bodies out there besides the moon and stars. One of the most _27_ of t

22、hese is a comet (彗星).Comets were formed around the same time the Earth was formed. They are _28_ ice and other frozen liquids and gases. _29_ these "dirty snowballs" begin to orbit the sun, just as the planets do.As a comet gets closer to the sun, some gases in it begin to unfreeze. They _

23、30_ dust particles from the comet to form a huge cloud. As the comet gets even nearer to the sun, a solar wind blows the cloud behind the comet, thus forming its tail. The tail and the _31_ fuzzy (模糊的) atmosphere around a comet are _32_ that can help identify this _33_ in the night sky.In any given

24、year, about a dozen known comets come close to the sun in their orbits. The average person can't see them all, of course. Usually there is only one or two a year bright enough to be seen with the _34_ eye. Comet Hale-Bopp, discovered in 1995, was an unusually bright comet. Its orbit brought it _

25、35_ close to the Earth, within 122 million miles of it. But Hale-Bopp came a long way on its earthly visit. It won't be back for another four thousand years or so.Part Reading Comprehension(40 minutes)Section ADirections : In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks.You are required to s

26、elect 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 2with a single line throu

27、gh the center. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage. Children do not think the way adults do. For most of the first year of life, if something is out of sight, it's out of mind. If you cover a baby's _36_ toy with a

28、 piece of cloth, the baby thinks the toy has disappeared and stops looking for it. A 4-year-old may _37_ that a sister has more fruit juice when it is only the shapes of the glasses that differ, not the _38_ of juice.Yet children are smart in their own way. Like good little scientists, children are

29、always testing their child-sized _39_ about how things work. When your child throws her spoon on the floor for the sixth time as you try to feed her, and you say, "That's enough! I will not pick up your spoon again!" the child will _40_ test your claim. Are you serious? Are you angiy?

30、What will happen if she throws the spoon again? She is not doing this to drive you _41_ ; rather, she is learning that her desires and yours can differ, and that sometimes those _42_ are important and sometimes they are not.How and why does children's thinking change? In the 1920s, Swiss psychol

31、ogist Jean Piaget proposed that children's cognitive(認知的) abilities unfold _43_ , like the blooming of a flower, almost independent of what else is _44_ in their lives. Although many of his specific conclusions have been _45_ or modified over the years, his ideas inspired thousands of studies by

32、 investigators all over the world.A) advocate B) amount C) confirmed D) crazy E) definiteF) differences G) favorite H) happening I) immediately J) naturally K) obtaining L) primarily M) protest N) rejected O) theoriesSection BDirections: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten stat

33、ements 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 S

34、heet 2.The Perfect EssayA) Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual life, even when I didn't. Her expectations were high-impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.B) When good student

35、s turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page: " Flawless. " This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Of course, I had heard that genius could show its

36、elf at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn't get very far. The first person I told was my mother.C) My mother, who is just sh

37、y of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset by my hubris(得意忘形) or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her red pen showed me

38、 how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions (過渡), structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative

39、 criticism.D) First off, it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leaves an existential imprint (印記) on you as a person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we should never listen to these people.E)

40、 Criticism, at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mental life is getting in the way of good writing.

41、 Conveniently, they are also the people who care enough to see you through this painful realization. For me it took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer's block-I was not able to produce anything for three years.F) Franz Kafka once said:" Writing is utter solitude (獨

42、處), the descent into the cold abyss (深淵) of oneself. " My mother's criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective (內(nèi)省的) descent that writing requires you are not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her susta

43、ined tutoring suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. "It is a thing of no great difficulty," according to Plutarch, "to raise objections against another man's s

44、peech, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome. " I am sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother's guidance, but I can't recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the "extremely tro

45、ublesome" work of ongoing criticism.G) There are two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce " a better in its place. " In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques (評論). My moth

46、er was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to Marcus Cicero's claim that one should " criticize by creation, not by finding fault. " Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become bett

47、er on his own terms-a process that is often extremely painful, but also almost always meaningful.H) My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so i

48、f she found any-the type I could have found on my own-I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was " flawless," she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began.I) She criticized me when I inc

49、luded little-known references and professional jargon (行話) ?She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures of speech. "Writers can't bluff (虛張聲勢) their way through ignorance. " That was news to me-I would need to find another way to structure my daily existence.J) She trimmed

50、 back my flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value of restraint in expression. " John," she almost whispered. I leaned in to hear her: "I can't hear you when you shout at me. " So I stopped shouting and bluffing, and slowly my writing

51、improved.K) Somewhere along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I missed something important in my mother's lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps the point of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willingly finish. Whitman rep

52、eatedly reworked "Song of Myself' between 1855 and 1891. Repeatedly. We do our absolute best with a piece of writing, and come as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique, however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we had achi

53、eved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson I took from my mother. If perfection were possible, it would not be motivating.46. The author was advised against the improper use of figures of speech.47. The author's mother taught him a valuable lesson by pointing out l

54、ots of flaws in his seemingly perfect essay.48. A writer should polish his writing repeatedly so as to get closer to perfection.49. Writers may experience periods of time in their life when they just can't produce anything.50. The author was not much surprised when his school teacher marked his

55、essay as "flawless".51. Criticizing someone's speech is said to be easier than coming up with a better one.52. The author looks upon his mother as his most demanding and caring instructor.53. The criticism the author received from his mother changed him as a person.54. The author gradu

56、ally improved his writing by avoiding fancy language.55. Constructive criticism gives an author a good start to improve his writing.Section CDirections: 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 ma

57、rked 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 center.Passage OneQuestions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it? I

58、t wouldn't be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a Silicon Valley?It's the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo wou