2014年12月大学英语六级真题试卷（一）

If you are attending a local college, especially one without residence halls, you’ll probably live at home and commute to classes. This arrangement has a lot of【B1】___. It’s cheaper. It provides a comfortable and familiar setting, and it means you’ll get the kind of home cooking you’re used to instead of the monotony(单调)that【B2】___even the best institutional food.

However, commuting students need to【B3】___to become involved in the life of their college and to take special steps to meet their fellow students. Often, this means a certain amount of initiative on your part in【B4】___and talking to people in your classes whom you think you might like.

One problem that commuting students sometimes face is their parents’ unwillingness to recognize that they’re adults. The【B5】___from high school to college is a big one, and if you live at home you need to develop the same kind of independence you’d have if you were living away. Home rules that might have been【B6】when you were in high school don’t apply. If your parents are【B7】to renegotiate, you can speed the process along by letting your behavior show that you have the responsibility that goes with maturity. Parents are more willing to【B8】their children as adults when they behave like adults. If, however, there’s so much friction at home that it【B9】your academic work, you might want to consider sharing an apartment with one or more friends. Sometimes this is a happy solution when family【B10】___make everyone miserable.

Children are natural-born scientists. They have【C1】___minds, and they aren’t afraid to admit they don’t know something. Most of them,【C2】, lose this as they get older. They become self-conscious and don’t want to appear stupid. Instead of finding things out for themselves they make【C3】___that often turn out to be wrong.

So it’s not a case of getting kids interested in science. You just have to avoid killing the【C4】___for learning that they were bom with. It’s no coincidence that kids start deserting science once it becomes formalised. Children naturally have a blurred approach to【C5】knowledge. They see learning about science or biology or cooking as all part of the same act—it’s all learning. It’s only because of the practicalities of education that you have to start breaking down the curriculum into specialist subjects. You need to hnave specialist teachers who【C6】___what they know. Thus once they enter school, children begin to define subjects and erect boundaries that needn’t otherwise exist.

Dividing subjects into science, maths English. etc. is something we do for【C7】___. In the end it’s all learning, but many children today【C8】___themselves from a scientific education. They think science is for scientists, not for them.

Of course we need to specialise【C9】___. Each of us has only so much time on Earth, so we can’t study everything. At 5 years old, our field of knowledge and【C10】___is broad, covering anything from learning to walk to learning to count. Gradually it narrows down so that by the time we are 45, it might be one tiny little corner within science.

A)accidentally I)formulas

B)acquiring J)ignite

C)assumptions K)impart

D)convenience L)inquiring

E)eventually M)passion

F)exclude N)provoking

G)exertion O)unfortunately

H)exploration

Meaning is Healthier Than Happiness

[A]For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone over 1,000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including Happy Money, Happy-People-Pills For All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners.

[B]One of tne consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life ourcomes including—most promisingly—good health Many studies have noted the connection between a happy nunc and a healthy body—the happier we are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. In an overview of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: “Inductions of well-being lead to healthy functioning and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health.”

[C]But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS)challenges tne rosy picture Happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. It might ever be bad.

[D]Of course, its important to first define happiness. A few months ago, I wrote a piece called “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy” about a psychology study that dug into what happiness really meant to people It specifically explored the difference between a meaningful life and a happy life.

[E]It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. But the researchers, who looked at a large sample of people over a month-long period, found that happiness is associated with selfish “taking” behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless “giving” behavior.

[F]“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desires are easily satisfied, and complicated relationships are avoided,” the authors of the study wrote. “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need. ” While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, told me. “ Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy. “

[G]The new PNAS study also sneds light on the difference oetween meaning ino happiness, but an the biological level. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Steve Cole, a genetics and psychiatry(精神病学)researcher at UCLA. examined the self-reported levels of happiness and meaning in 80 research subjects.

[H]Happiness was defined, as in the earlier study, by feeling good. The “esearchers measurea happiness by asking subjects questions like “How often did you feel happy?” How often did you feel interested in life?” and “ How often did you feel satisfied?” The more strongly people endorsed these measures of “ hedonic(享乐主义的)well-being, ” or pleasure, the higher they scored on happiness.

[I]Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self. They measured meaning by asking questions like ’How often did you feel that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to it?” and “How often did you feei that you had something to contribute to society?” The more people endorsed these measures of “ eudaimonic(幸福论的)well-being”—or, simply put. virtue—the more meaning they felt in life.

[J]After noting the sense of meaning and happiness that each subject had, Fredrickson and Cole, with their research colleagues, looked at the ways certain genes expressed themselves n each of the participants. Like neuroscientists who use fMRI(功能磁共振成像)scanning to determine how regions m the brain respond to different stimuli, Cole and Fredrickson are interested in how the body, at the genetic level, responds to feelings of happiness and meaning.

[K]Cole’s past work has linked various kinds of chronic adversity to a particular gene expression pattern. When people feel lonely, are grieving the loss of a loved one. or are struggling to make ends meet, their bodies go into threat mode. This triggers the activation of a stress-reiated gene pattern that has two features: an increase in the activity of pro-inflammatory(促炎症的)genes and a decrease in the activity of genes involved in anti-virai responses.

[L]Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for oactenai threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is, of course, associated with major illnesses like heart disease and various cancers.

[M]“Empty positive emotions”—like the kind people experience during manic(狂喜的)episodes or artificially induced euphoria(欣快)from alcohol and drugs— “ are about as good for you as adversity,” says Fredrickson.

[N]It’s important to understand that for many people. a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap; many people score jointly high(or jointly low)on the happiness and meaning measures in the study. But for many others. there is a dissonance(不一致)—they feel that they are low on happiness and high on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness. but low m meaning. This last group, which has the gene expression pattern associated with adversity, formed “5 percent of study participants. Only one quarter of the study participants had what the researchers call ” eudaimonic predominance” —that is, their sense of meaning outpaced their feelings of happmess.

[O]This is too bad given the more beneficial gene expression pattern associated with meaningfulness. People whose levels of happiness and meaning line up, and people who have a strong sense of meaning but are not necessarily happy, showed a de-activation of the adversity stress response. Their bodies were not preparing them for the bacterial infections that we get when we are aione or in rouble, but for the viral infections we get when surrounded by a lot of other people.

[P]Fredrickson’s past research, described in her two books. Positivity and Love 2. 0, has mapped the benefits of positive emotions in individuals. She has found that positive emotions broaden a person’s perspective and help protect people against adversity. So it was surprising to her that hedonic well-being, which is associated with positive emotions and pleasure, did so badly in this study compared with eudaimonic well-being.

[Q]” It’s not the amount of hedonic happiness that’s a problem. “ Fredrickson tells me, ” It’s that it’s not matched by eudaimonic well-being. It’s great when both are in step. But if you have more hedonic well-being than would be expected, that’s when this[gene]pattern that’s similar to adversity emerged. “

[R]The terms hedonism and eudaimonism bring to mind the great philosophical debate, which has shaped Western civilization for over 2,000 years, about the nature of the good life. Does happiness lie in feeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the virtue ethicists(伦理学家), think? From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. ” Jung’s wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.

Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven)simple rules.

The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing; it even includes a bibliography of “ success studies”. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are “ measurable and actionable”—guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on “calculating the elements of advantage” and “detailed analysis”.

The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 “exceptional companies” , only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.

Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.

Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is “the halo(光环)effect” , whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of date over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche(隙缝市场)and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.

Until recently, the University of Kent prided itself on its friendly image. Not any more. Over the past few months it has been working hard, with the help of media consultants, to play down its cosy reputation in favour of something more academic and serious.

Kent is not alone in considering an image revamp(翻新). Changes to next year’s funding regime are forcing universities to justify charging students up to ￡9,000 in fees.

Nowadays universities are putting much more of a focus on their brands and what their value propositions are. While in the past universities have often focused on student social life and attractions of the university town in recruitment campaigns, they are now concentrating on more tangible(实在的)attractions, such as employment prospects, engagement with industry, and lecturer contact hours, making clear exactly what students are going to get for their money.

The problem for universities is that if those benefits fail to materialise, students notice. That worries Rob Behrens, who deals with student complaints. “ Universities need to be extremely careful in describing what’s going to happen to students.” he says. “As competition is going to get greater for attracting gifted students, there is a danger that universities will go the extra mile. “

One university toid prospective engineering students they would be able to design a car and race it at Brands Hatch, which never happened, he says. Others have promised use of sophisticated equipment that turned out to be broken or unavailable. “ If universities spent as much money on handling complaints and appeals appropriately as they spend on marketing, they would do better at keeping students, and in the National Student Survey returns,” he says.

Ongoing research tracking prospective 2012 students suggests that they are not only becoming more sophisticated in thinking about what they want from a university, but are also spending more time esearching evidence to back up institutional claims.

Hence the growing importance of he student survey. From next September, all institutions will also be expected to publish on their websites key information sets, allowing easier comparison between institutions, between promises and reality, and the types of jobs and salaries graduates go on to.

As a result, it is hardly surprising that universities are beginning to change the way they market themselves. While the best form of marketing for institutions is to be good at what they do, they also need to be clear about how they are different from others.

And it is vital that once an institution claims to be particularly good at something, it must live up to it. The moment you position yourself, you become exposed, and if you fail in that you are in trouble.