2015年6月大学英语六级真题试卷（三）

Self-image is the picture you have of yourself, the sort of person you believe you are. Included in your self-image are the【B1】___in which you place yourself, the roles you play, and other similar descriptors you use to identify yourself. If you tell an【B2】you are a grandfather who recently lost his wife and who does volunteer work on weekends, several elements of your self-image are brought to light—the roles of grandparent, widower, and【B3】___citizen.

But self-image is more than how you picture yourself: it also involves how others see you. Three types of feedback from others are【B4】___how they see us: confirmation, rejection, and disconfirmation. Confirmation occurs when others treat you in a manner【B5】with who you believe you are. You believe you have leadership abilities and your boss put you【B6】a new work team. On the other hand, rejection occurs when others treat you in a manner that is inconsistent with your【B7】. Pierre Salinger was appointed senator from California but subsequently lost his first election. He thought he was a good public official, but the voters【B8】thought otherwise—their vote was inconsistent with his self-concept. The third type of feedback is disconfirmation, which occurs when others fail to【B9】your notion of self by responding neutrally. A student writes what he thinks is an excellent composition, but the teacher writes no encouraging remarks. Rather than【B10】___how others classify you, consider how you identify yourself. The way in which you identify yourself is the best reflection of your self-image.

Travel websites have been around since the 1990s, when Expedia, Travelocity, and other holiday booking sites were launched, allowing travelers to compare flight and hotel prices with the click of a mouse. With information no longer【C1】___by travel agents or hidden in business networks, the travel industry was revolutionized, as greater transparency helped【C2】___prices.

Today, the industry is going through a new revolution—this time transforming service quality. Online rating platforms—【C3】______in hotels, restaurants, apartments, and taxis—allow travelers to exchange reviews and experiences for all to see.

Hospitality businesses are now ranked, analyzed, and compared not by industry【C4】___, but by the very people for whom the service is intended—the customer. This has【C5】a new relationship between buyer and seller. Customers have always voted with their feet: they can now explain their decision to anyone who is interested. As a result, businesses are much more【C6】, often in very specific ways, which creates powerful【C7】___to improve service.

Although some readers might not care for gossipy reports of unfriendly bellboys (行李员) in Berlin or malfunctioning hotel hairdryers in Houston, the true power of online reviews lies not just in the individual stories, but in the websites’【C8】______to aggregate a large volume of ratings.

The impact cannot be【C9】___. Businesses that attract top ratings can enjoy rapid growth, as new customers are attracted by good reviews and【C10】___provide yet more positive feedback. So great is the influence of online ratings that many companies now hire digital reputation managers to ensure a favorable online identity.

A) accountable I) persisting

B) capacity J) pessimistic

C) controlled K) professionals

D) entail L) slash

E) forged M) specializing

F) incentives N) spectators

G) occasionally O) subsequently

H) overstated

Plastic Surgery

A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks

[A]A thin magnetic stripe (magstripe) is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they’ve been working hard to break in. That’s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.

[B]Swipe (刷卡) is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit- (借记) or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i. e. malicious software, inserted secretly into the retailers’ point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.

[C]The solution could cost as little as $ 2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV (short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa) that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN (personal identification number) to authenticate (验证 ) every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code. )

[D]Why haven’t big banks adopted the more secure technology? When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it’s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. “ The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing (凸印) it, the small envelope—all put together, you’re in the dollar range. ” A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop. )

[E]Multiply $ 3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there’s an estimated $ 12. 4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. , American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.

[F]That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. “ Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data,” he says. “ It creates a text file that gets stolen. “

[G]Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired networks made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.

[H]Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It’s actually a hybrid (混合体) that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don’t have EMV terminals. ) Should you take them up on it? If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.

[I]Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently (欺诈性地), it’s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. “ If it’s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank,” says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. “I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. ” Cash still works pretty well too.

[J]Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure (基础设施) needed tor the technology, especially if consumers don’t have access to it. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren’t carrying them—yet there’s little point in consumers’ carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren’t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress. ) According to Gumbley, there’s a “you-first mentality. The logjam (僵局) has to be broken. “

[K]JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.

[L]The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $ 6. 75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN-compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. “ It’s the ultimate nightmare,” a retail executive from a well- known chain admitted to -TIME.

[M]The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don’t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.

[N]In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads (侵袭) on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.

[O]Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. “It seems crazy to me,” says Gumbley, who is English, “ that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology. ” That’s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Says Robertson: “ When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that’s where the rubber hits the road. “

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was just as gloomy as anticipated. Unemployment in January jumped to a 16-year high of 7.6 percent, as 598,000 jobs were slashed from U. S. payrolls in the worst single-month decline since December, 1974. With 1. 8 million jobs lost in the last three months,there is urgent desire to boost the economy as quickly as possible. But Washington would do well to take a deep breath before reacting to the grim numbers.

Collectively, we rely on the unemployment figures and other statistics to frame our sense of reality. They are a vital part of an array of data that we use to assess if we’re doing well or doing badly, and that in turn shapes government policies and corporate budgets and personal spending decisions. The problem is that the statistics aren’t an objective measure of reality: they are simply a best approximation. Directionally, they capture the trends, but the idea that we know precisely how many are unemployed is a myth. That makes finding a solution all the more difficult.

First, there is the way the data is assembled. The official unemployment rate is the product of a telephone survey of about 60,000 homes. There is another survey, sometimes referred to as the “payroll survey,” that assesses 400,000 businesses based on their reported payrolls. Both surveys have problems. The payroll survey can easily doulbe-count someone: if you are one person with two jobs, you show up as two workers. The payroll survey also doesn’t capture the number of self-employed, and so says little about how many people are generating an independent income.

The household survey has a larger problem. When asked straightforwardly, people tend to lie or shade the truth when the subject is sex, money or employment. If you get a call and are asked if you’re employed, and you say yes, you’re employed. If you say no, however, it may surprise you to learn that you are only unemployed if you’ve been actively looking for work in the past four weeks: otherwise, you are “marginally attached to the labor force” and not actually unemployed.

The urge to quantify is embedded in our society. But the idea that statisticians can then capture an objective reality isn’t just impossible. It also leads to serious misjudgments. Democrats and Republicans can and will take sides on a number of issues, but a more crucial concern is that both are basing major policy decisions on guesstimates rather than looking at the vast wealth of raw data with a critical eye and an open mind.

At some point in 2008, someone, probably in either Asia or Africa, made the decision to move from the countryside to the city. This nameless person pushed the human race over a historic threshold, for it was in that year that mankind became, for the first time in its history, a predominantly urban species.

It is a trend that shows no sign of slowing. Demographers (人口统计学家) reckon that three-quarters of humanity could be city-dwelling by 2050, with most of the increase coming in the fast-growing towns of Asia and Africa. Migrants to cities are attracted by plentiful jobs, access to hospitals and education, and the ability to escape the boredom of a farmer’s agricultural life. Those factors are more than enough to make up for the squalor (肮脏), disease and spectacular poverty that those same migrants must often at first endure when they become urban dwellers.

It is the city that inspires the latest book from Peter Smith. His main thesis is that the buzz of urban life, and the opportunities it offers for co-operation and collaboration, is what attracts people to the city, which in turn makes cities into the engines of art, commerce, science and progress. This is hardly revolutionary, but it is presented in a charming format. Mr. Smith has written a breezy guidebook, with a series of short chapters dedicated to specific aspects of urbanity—parks, say, or the various schemes that have been put forward over the years for building the perfect city. The result is a sort of high-quality, unusually rigorous coffee-table book, designed to be dipped into rather than read from beginning to end.

In the chapter on skyscrapers, for example, Mr. Smith touches on construction methods, the revolutionary invention of the automatic lift, the practicalities of living in the sky and the likelihood that, as cities become more crowded, apartment living will become the norm. But there is also time for brief diversions onto bizarre ground, such as a discussion of the skyscraper index (which holds that a boom in skyscraper construction is a foolproof sign of an imminent recession).

One obvious criticism is that the price of breadth is depth: many of Mr. Smith’s essays raise as many questions as they answer. Although that can indeed be frustrating, this is probably the only way to treat so grand a topic. The city is the building block of civilisation and of almost everything people do: a guidebook to the city is really, therefore, a guidebook to how a large and ever-growing chunk of humanity chooses to live. Mr. Smith’s book serves as an excellent introduction to a vast subject, and will suggest plenty of further lines of inquiry.