2015年12月大学英语四级真题试卷（三）

There was a time when any personal information that was gathered about us was typed on a piece of paper and【B1】___in a file cabinet. It could remain there for years and, often【B2】___, never reach the outside world.

Things have done a complete about-face since then.【B3】___the change has been the astonishingly【B4】development in recent years of the computer. Today, any data that is【B5】about us in one place or another—and for one reason or another—can be stored in a computer bank. It can then be easily passed to other computer banks. They are owned by individuals and by private businesses and corporations, lending【B6】, direct mailing and telemarketing firms, credit bureaus, credit card companies, and【B7】___at the local, state, and federal level.

A growing number of Americans are seeing the accumulation and distribution of computerized data as a frightening【B8】___of their privacy. Surveys show that the number of worried Americans has been steadily growing over the years as the computer becomes increasingly【B9】, easier to operate, and less costly to purchase and maintain. In 1970, a national survey showed that 37 percent of the people【B10】___felt their privacy was being invaded. Seven years later, 47 percent expressed the same worry. A recent survey by a credit bureau revealed that the number of alarmed citizens had shot up to 76 percent.

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【C1】___toy with a piece of cloth, the baby thinks the toy has disappeared and stops looking for it. A 4-year-old may【C2】that a sister has more fruit juice when it is only the shapes of the glasses that differ, not the【C3】___of juice.

Yet children are smart in their own way. Like good little scientists, children are always testing their child-sized【C4】___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【C5】test your claim. Are you serious? Are you angry? What will happen if she throws the spoon again? She is not doing this to drive you【C6】: rather, she is learning that her desires and yours can differ, and that sometimes those【C7】___are important and sometimes they are not.

How and why does children’s thinking change? In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that children’s cognitive(认知的)abilities unfold【C8】___, like the blooming of a flower, almost independent of what else is【C9】in their lives. Although many of his specific conclusions have been【C10】___or modified over the years, his ideas inspired thousands of studies by investigators all over the world.

A)advocate I)immediately

B)amount J)naturally

C)confirmed K)obtaining

D)crazy L)primarily

E)definite M)protest

F)differences N)rejected

G)favorite O)theories

H)happening

The Perfect Essay

A)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 students 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 itself 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 shy 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 how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions(过渡), 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 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(印记)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)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. 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(独处), the descent into the cold abyss(深渊)of oneself. “ My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective(内省的)descent that writing requires you are not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sustained 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 speech, 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 troublesome” 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(评论). My mother 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 rinding fault. ” Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better 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 if 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 included little-known references and professional jargon(行话). She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures of speech. “Writers can’t bluff(虚张声势)their way through ignorance. ” That was news to me—I would need to find another way to structure my daily existence.

J)She trimmed 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 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 repeatedly 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 achieved 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.

Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?

It 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 would become Silicon Valley.

You only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub(中心): rich people and nerds(痴迷科研的人).

Observation bears this out. Within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like.

Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley. But what did Carnegie-Mellon yield in Pittsburgh? And what happened in Ithaca, home of Cornell University, which is also high on the list?

I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can answer for both. The weather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there’s no interesting old city to make up for it, as there is in Boston. Rich people don’t want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. So while there’re plenty of hackers(电脑迷)who could start startups, there’s no one to invest in them.

Do you really need the rich people? Wouldn’t it work to have the government invest in the nerds?

No, it would not. Startup investors are a distinct type of rich people. They tend to have a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. This helps them pick the right startups, and means they can supply advice and connections as well as money. And the fact that they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.

It’s nice to have people of like mind around. Agreeable people boost your confidence and allow you to relax and feel comfortable. Unfortunately, that comfort can hinder the very learning that can expand your company and your career.

It’s nice to have people agree, but you need conflicting perspectives to dig out the truth. If everyone around you has similar views, your work will suffer from confirmation bias(偏颇).

Take a look at your own network. Do your contacts share your point of view on most subjects? If yes, it’s time to shake things up. As a leader, it can be challenging to create an environment in which people will freely disagree and argue, but as the saying goes-. From confrontation comes brilliance.

It’s not easy for most people to actively seek conflict. Many spend their lives trying to avoid arguments. There’s no need to go out and find people you hate, but you need to do some self-assessment to determine where you have become stale in your thinking. You may need to start by encouraging your current network to help you identify your blind spots.

Passionate, energetic debate does not require anger and hard feelings to be effective. But it does require moral strength. Once you have worthy opponents, set some ground rules so everyone understands responsibilities and boundaries. The objective of this debating game is not to win but to get to the truth that will allow you to move faster, farther, and better.

Fierce debating can hurt feelings, particularly when strong personalities are involved. Make sure you check in with your opponents so that they are not carrying the emotion of the battles beyond the battlefield. Break the tension with smiles and humor to reinforce the idea that this is friendly discourse and that all are working toward a common goal.

Reward all those involved in the debate sufficiently when the goals are reached. Let your sparring partners(拳击陪练)know how much you appreciate their contribution. The more they feel appreciated, the more they’ll be willing to get into the ring next time.