2014年6月大学英语四级真题试卷（一）

Among the kinds of social gestures most significant for second-language teachers are those which are【B1】___in form but different in meaning in the two cultures. For example, a Colombian who wants someone to【B2】him often signals with a hand movement in which all the fingers of one hand, cupped, point downward as they move rapidly【B3】. Speakers of English have a similar gesture though the hand may not be cupped and the fingers may be held more loosely, but for them the gesture means goodbye or go away, quite the【B4】of the Colombian gesture. Again, in Colombia, a speaker of English would have to know that when he【B5】height he must choose between different gestures depending on whether he is【B6】a human being or an animal. If he keeps the palm of the hand【B7】the floor, as he would in his own culture when making known the height of a child, for example, he will very likely be greeted by laughter; in Colombia this gesture is【B8】for the description of animals. In order to describe human beings he should keep the palm of his hand【B9】to the floor. Substitutions of one gesture for the other often create not only humorous but also【B10】___moments. In both of the examples above, speakers from two different cultures have the same gesture, physically, but its meaning differs sharply.

Many Brazilians cannot read. In 2000, a quarter of those aged 15 and older were functionally illiterate(文盲). Many【C1】___do not want to. Only one literate adult in three reads books. The【C2】Brazilian reads 1. 8 non-academic books a year, less than half the figure in Europe and the United States. In a recent survey of reading habits, Brazilians came 27th out of 30 countries. Argentines, their neighbors,【C3】___18th.

The government and businesses are all struggling in different ways to change this. On March 13 the government【C4】______a National Plan for Books and Reading. This seeks to boost reading, by founding libraries and financing publishers among other things.

One discouragement to reading is that books are【C5】______. Most books have small print-runs, pushing up their price.

But Brazilians’ indifference to books has deeper roots. Centuries of slavery meant the country’s leaders long【C6】______education. Primary schooling became universal only in the 1990s.

All this means Brazil’s book market has the biggest growth【C7】______in the western world.

But reading is a difficult habit to form. Brazilians bought fewer books in 2004, 89 million, including textbooks【C8】___by the government, than they did in 1991. Last year the director of Brazil’s national library【C9】. He complained that he had half the librarians he needed and termites(白蚁)had eaten much of the【C10】___. That ought to be a cause for national shame.

A)average I)normal

B)collection J)particularly

C)distributed K)potential

D)exhibition L)quit

E)expensive M)ranked

F)launched N)simply

G)named O)treasured

H)neglected

The Touch-Screen Generation

A)On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps(应用程序)for phones and tablets(平板电脑)gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. The gathering was organized by Warren Buckleitner, a longtime reviewer of interactive children’s media. Buckleitner spent the breaks testing whether his own remote-control helicopter could reach the hall’s second story, while various children who had come with their parents looked up in awe(敬畏)and delight. But mostly they looked down, at the iPads and other tablets displayed around the hall like so many open boxes of candy. I walked around and talked with developers, and several quoted a famous saying of Maria Montessori’s, “ The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence. “

B)What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking(戳)their fingers in the sand or running them along stones or picking seashells. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine.

C)In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “ direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers. ” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then. In 2006, 90% of parents said that their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Nevertheless, the group took largely the same approach it did in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids.(For older children, the academy noted, “ high-quality programs” could have “ educational benefits. “)The 2011 report mentioned “smart cell phone” and “new screen” technologies, but did not address interactive apps. Nor did it bring up the possibility that has likely occurred to those 90% of American parents that some good might come from those little swiping(在电子产品上刷)fingers.

D)I had come to the developers’ conference partly because I hoped that this particular set of parents, enthusiastic as they were about interactive media, might help me out of this problem, that they might offer some guiding principle for American parents who are clearly never going to meet the academy’s ideals, and at some level do not want to. Perhaps this group would be able to express clearly some benefits of the new technology that the more cautious doctors weren’t ready to address.

E)I fell into conversation with a woman who had helped develop Montessori Letter Sounds, an app that teaches preschoolers the Montessori methods of spelling. She was a former Montessori teacher and a mother of four. I myself have three children who are all fans of the touch screen. What games did her kids like to play, I asked, hoping for suggestions I could take home.

“They don’t play all that much. “

Really? Why not?

“Because I don’t allow it. We have a rule of no screen time during the week, unless it’s clearly

educational. “

No screen time? None at all? That seems at the outer edge of restrictive, even by the standards of

overcontrolling parents.

” On the weekends, they can play. I give them a limit of half an hour and then stop. Enough. “

F)Her answer so surprised me that I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The small kid was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. “At home,” she assured me, “I only let her watch movies in Spanish. “

G)By their reactions, these parents made me understand the problem of our age: as technology becomes almost everywhere in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, distrustful of what it might be doing to their children. Technological ability has not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate(航行)all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets as precision surgical(外科的)instruments, devices that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some great robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has a girlfriend who lives only in the virtual world.

H)Norman Rockwell, a 20th-century artist, never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never been adjusted to accommodate that now-common scene. Add to that our modern fear that every parenting decision may have lasting consequences—that every minute of enrichment lost or mindless entertainment indulged(放纵的)will add up to some permanent handicap(障碍)in the future—and you have deep guilt and confusion. To date, no body of research has proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her nervous system—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what is a parent to do?

When young women were found to make only 82 percent of what their male peers do just one year out of college, many were at a loss to explain it.

All the traditional reasons put forward to interpret the pay gap—that women fall behind when they leave the workforce to raise kids, for example, or that they don’t seek as many management roles— failed to justify this one. These young women didn’t have kids yet. And because they were just one year removed from their undergraduate degrees, few of these women yet had the chance to go after(much less decline)leadership roles.

But there are other reasons why the pay gap remains so persistent. The first is that no matter how many women may be getting college degrees, the university experience is still an unequal one. The second is that our higher education system is not designed to focus on the economic consequences of our students’ years on campus.

Now that women are the majority of college students and surpass men in both the number of undergraduate and advanced degrees awarded, one might think the college campus is a pretty equal place. It is not. Studies show that while girls do better than boys in high school, they start to trail off during their college years. They enroll in different kinds of classes, tend to major in less rigorous(非常严格的)subjects, and generally head off with less ambitious plans.

As a result, it’s not surprising that even the best educated young women enter the workplace with a slight disadvantage. Their college experience leaves them somewhat confused, still stumbling(栽倒)over the dilemmas their grandmothers’ generation sought to destroy. Are they supposed to be pretty or smart? Strong or sexy(性感的)? All their lives, today’s young women have been pushed to embrace both perfection and passion—to pursue science and sports, math and theater—and do it all as well as they possibly can. No wonder they are not negotiating for higher salaries as soon as they get out of school. They are too exhausted, and too scared of failing.

Reading leadership literature, you’d sometimes think that everyone has the potential to be an effective leader.

I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I see way fewer truly effective leaders than I see people stuck in positions of leadership who are sadly incompetent and seriously misguided about their own abilities.

Part of the reason this happens is a lack of honest self-assessment by those who aspire to(追求)leadership in the first place.

We’ve all met the type of individual who simply must take charge. Whether it’s a decision-making session, a basketball game, or a family outing, they can’t help grabbing the lead dog position and clinging on to it for dear life. They believe they’re natural born leaders.

Truth is, they’re nothing of the sort. True leaders don’t assume that it’s their divine(神圣的)right to take charge every time two or more people get together. Quite the opposite. A great leader will assess each situation on its merits, and will only take charge when their position, the situation, and/or the needs of the moment demand it.

Many business executives confuse leadership with action. They believe that constant motion somehow generates leadership as a byproduct. Faced with any situation that can’t be solved by the sheer force of activity, they generate a dust cloud of impatience. Their one leadership tool is volume: if they think you aren’t working as hard as they think you should, their demands become increasingly louder and harsher.

True leaders understand the value of action, of course, but it isn’t their only tool. In fact, it isn’t even their primary tool. Great leaders see more than everyone else: answers, solutions, patterns, problems, opportunities. They know it’s vitally important to do, but they also know that thinking, understanding, reflection and interpretation are equally important.

If you’re too concerned with outcomes to the extent that you manipulate and intimidate others to achieve those outcomes, then you aren’t leading at all, you’re dictating. A true leader is someone who develops his or her team so that they can and do hit their targets and achieve their goals.