2014年12月大学英语四级真题试卷（三）

In the center of a big city there are usually dozens of large office buildings that house big banks, corporation headquarters, and government agencies. Thousands of people work in these buildings. People who do all the office work are called white-collar workers.【B1】______and receptionists, bookkeepers and computer operators work for many different kinds of companies.

Many office workers dream of working their way up to the top, from clerk to【B2】___of a corporation. The way lies through middle management. Middle management includes junior executives, who may fill【B3】jobs, supervise other workers in the company,【B4】action to top management, or see that the company’s policies are【B5】. At the very top are the senior executives. They【B6】the policies for their own companies, especially【B7】. The Chief Executive Officer, or CEO, of a large【B8】___has a great deal of power and influence.

It is believed that one can start out at the bottom and go all the way to the top. Because financial matters are so important, some accountants become top executives. In companies where technology is important, people with an engineering background can also rise to the top. Nowadays, however, education【B9】___in the selection of people for management jobs. Universities in many countries offer courses in business administration. The graduates of these courses often start out in middle management jobs. From there, they can easily get promoted if they show the necessary【B10】___and ability.

For decades, Americans have taken for granted the United States’ leadership position in the

development of new technologies. The innovations (创新)that resulted from research and development during World War II and afterwards were【C1】___to the prosperity of the nation in the second half of the 20th century. Those innovations, upon which virtually all aspects of【C2】society now depend, were possible because the United States then【C3】the world in mathematics and science education. Today, however, despite increasing demand for workers with strong skills in mathematics and science, the【C4】___of degrees awarded in science, math, and engineering are decreasing.

The decline in degree production in what are called the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math)seems to be【C5】___related to the comparatively weak performance by US schoolchildren on international assessments of math and science. Many students entering college have weak skills in mathematics. According to the 2005 report of the Business-Higher Education Forum, 22 percent of college freshmen must take remedial (补习的)math【C6】, and less than half of the students who plan to major in science or engineering【C7】___complete a major in those fields.

The result has been a decrease in the number of American college graduates who have the skills,【C8】___in mathematics, to power a workforce that can keep the country at the forefront (前沿)of innovation and maintain its standard of living. With the【C9】performance of American students in math and science has come increased competition from students from other countries that have strongly supported education in these areas. Many more students earn【C10】___in the STEM disciplines in developing countries than in the United States.

A)accelerating I)especially

B)actually J)future

C)closely K)led

D)contemporary L)met

E)courses M)procedures

F)critical N)proportions

G)declining O)spheres

H)degrees

Ban Sugary Drinks—That Will Add Fuel to the Obesity War

A)On a train last Thursday, I sat opposite a man who was so fat he filled more than one seat. He was pale and disfigured and looked sick to death, which he probably was: obesity (肥胖症)leads to many nasty ways of dying. Looking around the carriage, I saw quite a few people like him, including a couple of fatty children with swollen cheeks pressing against their eyes. These people are part of what is without exaggeration an epidemic (流行病)of obesity.

B)But it is quite unnecessary: there is a simple idea—far from new—that could spare millions of such people a lifetime of chronic (长期的)ill health, and at the same time save the National Health Service(NHS)at least & 14 billion a year in England and Wales. There would, you might think, be considerable public interest in it. This simple idea is that sugar is as good—or as bad—as poison and should be avoided. It is pure, white and deadly, as Professor John Yudkin described it 40 years

ago in a revolutionary book of that name. The subtitle was How Sugar Is Killing US.

C)In its countless hidden forms, in ready meals, junk food and sweet drinks, sugar leads to addiction (瘾), to hormonal upsets to the appetite, to metabolic (新陈代谢的)malfunctions and obesity and from there to type 2 diabetes (糖尿病)and its many horrible complications. If people really grasped that, they would try to kick the habit, particularly as Britain is the “ fat man of Europe”. They might even feel driven to support government measures to prevent people from consuming this deadly stuff. Yet so far this idea has met little but resistance.

D)It is not difficult to imagine the vested interests (既得利益集团)lined up against any sugar control—all the food and drink manufacturers, processors, promoters and retailers who make such easy pickings out of the magic powers of sugar. Then there are the liberals, with whom I would normally side, who protest that government regulation would be yet another instance of interference in our lives.

E)That is true, but people should realise that you cannot have a welfare state without a nanny state (保姆国家), to some degree. If we are all to be responsible for one another’s health insurance, through socialised medicine, then we are all closely involved in one another’s health, including everyone’s eating and drinking. That has already been admitted, finally, with smoking. But it has yet to be admitted with overeating, even though one in four adults in this country is obese and that number is predicted to double by the year 2050. Quite apart from anything else, obesity will cripple the NHS.

F)Recently, though, there have been signs that the medical establishment is trying to sound the alarm. Last month the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC)published a report saying that obesity is the greatest public health issue affecting the UK and urging government to do something.

G)The report offers 10 recommendations, of which the first is imposing a tax of 20 percent on sugary drinks for at least a year, on top of the existing 20 percent value-added tax. That at least would be an excellent start. The amounts of sugar in soft drinks are horrifying, and turn straight to fat. As Professor Terence Stephenson, head of the AMRC, has said, sugary soft drinks are “ the ultimate bad food. You are just consuming neat sugar. Your body didn’t evolve to handle this kind of thing. “

H)Precisely. The risks of eating too much fat or salt (which are very different)pale into insignificance compared with the harm done by sugar. And it is everywhere.

I)It is difficult to buy anything in a supermarket, other than plain, unprepared meat, fish or vegetables, that doesn’t have a large amount of sugar in it.This has come about because the prevailing scientific views of the 1960s and 1970s ignored the evidence about sugar, and instead saw fat as the really serious risk, both to the heart and other organs, as well as the cause of obesity. J)The fashion was to avoid fat.But finding that food with much of its fat removed is not very appetising, food producers turned to sugar as a magic alternative flavour enhancer, often in the forms of syrups (糖浆)that had recently been developed from corn, and put it generously into most prepared foods and soft drinks.

K)This stuff is not just fattening. It is addictive. It interferes with the body’s metabolism, possibly via the activity of an appetite-controlling hormone. There’s plenty of evidence for this, for those who will accept the truth.

L)Theoretically, people ought to make “healthy choices” and avoid overeating.But sugar additives are not easy to identify and are hard to avoid.So the snacking, overdrinking and overeating that makes people fat is not really their own fault: obesity is in large part something that is being done to them. It should be stopped, or rather the government should stop it.

M)Going round my local supermarket, I am constantly astonished that it is still legal to sell all the poisons stacked high on the shelves.The problem is that they are worse than useless.They are poisonous. They are known to be addictive.They are known to make people obese.And giving small children sweet drinks or bottles of fake juice all day long is nothing less than child abuse.

N)Clearly, the sale of such stuff ought to be illegal. I hate to think of yet more government regulation. But a bit of tax on sweet soda and a little more health education, a bit of cooking in schools and banning vending machines ( 自动售货机)here and there—as suggested by the AMRC report—is not going to achieve very much.Labelling is quite inadequate.What is needed is legislation banning high levels of sugary syrups used in foods and drinks.

O)In June 2012, the then minister for public health said the government was not scared of the food industry and had not ruled out legislation, because of the costs of obesity to the NHS. However, nothing has happened yet. Why not have another Jammie Dodger biscuit and forget about it.

The rise of the Internet has been one of the most transformative developments in human history, comparable in impact to the invention of the printing press and the telegraph. Over two billion people worldwide now have access to vastly more information than ever before, and can communicate with each other instantly, often using Web-connected mobile devices they carry everywhere. But the Internet’s tremendous impact has only just begun.

” Mass adoption of the Internet is driving one of the most exciting social, cultural, and political transformations in history, and unlike earlier periods of change, this time the effects are fully global,” Schmidt and Cohen write in their new book, The New Digital Age.

Perhaps the most profound changes will come when the five billion people worldwide who currently lack Internet access get online. The authors do an excellent job of examining the implications of the Internet revolution for individuals, governments, and institutions like the news media. But if the book has one major shortcoming, it’s that the authors don’t spend enough time applying a critical eye to the role of Internet businesses in these sweeping changes.

In their book, the authors provide the most authoritative volume to date that describes—and more importantly predicts—how the Internet will shape our lives in the coming decades. They paint a picture of a world in which individuals, companies, institutions, and governments must deal with two realities, one physical, and one virtual.

At the core of the book is the idea that “ technology is neutral, but people aren’t. ” By using this concept as a starting point, the authors aim to move beyond the now familiar optimist vs. pessimist dichotomy (对立观点)that has characterized many recent debates about whether the rise of the Internet will ultimately be good or bad for society. In an interview with TIME earlier this week, Cohen said although he and his co-author are optimistic about many aspects of the Internet, they’re also realistic about the risks and dangers that lie ahead when the next five billion people come online, particularly with respect to personal privacy and state surveillance (监视).

In 1950, a young man would have found it much easier than it is today to get and keep a job in the auto industry. And in that year the average autoworker could meet monthly mortgage (抵押贷款)payments on an average home with just 13. 4 percent of his take-home pay. Today a similar mortgage would claim more than twice that share of his monthly earnings.

Other members of the autoworker’s family, however, might be less inclined to trade the present for the past. His retired parents would certainly have had less economic security back then. Throughout much of the 1960s, more than a quarter of men and women age 65 and older lived below the poverty level, compared to less than 10 percent in 2010.

In most states, his wife could not have taken out a loan or a credit card in her own name. In 42 states, a homemaker had no legal claim on the earnings of her husband. And nowhere did a wife have legal protection against family violence.

Most black workers would not want to return to a time when, on average, they earned 40 percent less than their white counterparts (职位相当的人), while racially restrictive agreements largely prevented them from buying into the suburban neighborhoods being built for white working-class families.

Today, new problems have emerged in the process of resolving old ones, but the solution is not to go back to the past. Some people may long for an era when divorce was still hard to come by. The spread of no-fault divorce has reduced the bargaining power of whichever spouse is more interested in continuing the relationship. And the breakup of such marriages has caused pain for many families.

The growing diversity of family life comes with new possibilities as well as new challenges. According to a recent poll, more than 80 percent of Americans believe that their current family is as close as the one in which they grew up, or closer. Finding ways to improve the lives of the remaining 20 percent seems more realistic than trying to restore an imaginary golden age.