2019年06月大学英语六级真题（第2套）及答案解析

W: Wow, I would give anything to be more like Audrey Hepburn. M: I never really understood why so many girls were such big fans of her. I mean, I've seen the famous films, Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany's and a few others, but I still don't fully get it. Was she that great of an actress? W: Well, for me, my adoration goes beyond her movies. She had such a classic elegance about her. She was always so poised, in part because she spent years training as a ballet dancer before becoming an actress. M: Why didn't she stick to dancing as a career? W: It seems it was fate. She suffered from inadequate nutrition during the war, and therefore, a career as a professional dancer would have been too demanding on her body. So she focused on acting instead. Roman Holiday was her first big break which made her a star. M: Was that the film that opened with her shopping for jewelry in New York City? You know, in the scene, she was wearing a black dress and dark sunglasses with a pearl necklace and long black gloves. I see the photo of her in that costume everywhere. W: No, that one is Breakfast At Tiffany's. That costume is often referred to as the most famous little black dress of all time. Her character in that film is very outgoing and charming, even though in real life, Audrey always described herself as shy and quiet. M: So what did she do after her acting career? W: She dedicated much of her life to helping children in need. Her family received international aid during the war when she was growing up. I think that left a big impression on her. That's where I got the idea to volunteer for children's charity next weekend. M: I'll join you. I may not be as charming as Audrey Hepburn, but I'm all for supporting a good cause.

W: So, how is our presentation about the restructuring of the company coming along? M: Fine. I'm putting the finishing touches to it now. M: ...But we'll have to be prepared for questions. W: Yes, there's already a feeling that this is a top down change. We really need to get everyone on board. M: Well, there's been an extensive consultation period. W: I know, but there's always the feeling that if it isn't broke, don't fix it. M: People are worried about their jobs, too. I think we need to stress that while there will be some job changes, there won't be anyone getting dismissed. In fact, we're looking to take on more staff. W: Agreed. You can hardly blame people for worrying though. We need to make it clear that it's not just change for change's sake. In other words, we really must make the case for why we are doing it. W: ...So what's the outline of the presentation? M: I'll start with a brief review of the reasons for the change that we really need to make a clean break to restart growth. After that I'll outline the new company's structures and who's going where. Then I'll hand it over to you to discuss the timeline and summarize and we'll take questions together at the end. Anything else? W: Oh, yeah, we should let the staff know the channels of communication, you know, who they can contact or direct questions to about these changes? M: Yes, and we can collect some frequently asked questions and present some general answers. W: Um, and we'll make the presentation and the questions available via the company's own computer network, right? M: Yes, we'll make a page on the network where staff can download all the details. W: All right. Perhaps we should do a practice round of the presentation first. M: You bet.

Airline passengers have to deal with a lot these days, getting bumped from flights and losing luggage on top of the general anxiety that nervous passengers always feel. At the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, miniature horses deliver a calming force two times a month. Denver and Ruby are two of the 34 therapy horses brought in from a local farm. They can usually be found in the ticket counter area interacting with travelers. More than 30 airports across the country now have therapy dogs. San Francisco has a therapy pig. San Jose, California, began a dog program after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Since its beginning, the program has now grown and has 21 therapy dogs and a therapy cat. The animals don't get startled. They have had hundreds of hours of airport training, so they are used to having luggage and people crowding around them. These professional animals are probably better at finding their way in the airports than the most frequent of travelers. The passengers often say that seeing animals makes them feel much better and helps them to calm down before a flight. This little bit of support can sometimes make a big difference. Some passengers enjoy the animals so much that they call the airport to schedule flights around their visits. Visits to nursing homes and schools are also a regular part of the horses' schedule. Their owner is already working on a new idea for a therapy animal—donkeys. calming force two times a month.

Hello, viewers. Today I'm standing at the 2000-year-old Roman-era site. Here the brightly-colored scenes that once decorated a mansion are being dug up. These scenes are turning up in the southern French city of Arles, surprising the historians who have been working here since 2014. Patches of paint still cling to the stone walls of the bedroom and reception hall. Some of these painted walls are preserved in places to a height of one meter. In addition, thousands of fragments that fell off the walls have been recovered. These pieces have been put back together with great care and display a variety of images. Some of these images include figures never seen before in France, such as a woman playing a stringed instrument, possibly a character from mythology. The paintings were done with such skill and with such expensive dyes that experts believe the artists originally came from Italy. They were likely hired by one of the city's elite. Perhaps a Roman official wanted Pompeii-like interior to remind him of home. He was probably stationed in this provincial trading port founded in 46 B.C. as a colony for veterans of the Roman army. Or maybe a wealthy local wanted to show off his worldly sophistication. The paintings may yield even more stunning surprises as additional sections are put together, like pieces of a puzzle. Whoever it was that created such magnificent pieces of art, they surely had no idea that their work would still be around thousands of years later. once decorated a mansion are being dug up.

Good afternoon, class. Today I want to discuss with you a new approach to empirical research. In the past, scientists often worked alone. They were confined to the university or research center where they worked. Today, though, we are seeing mergers of some of the greatest scientific minds, regardless of their location. There has never been a better time for collaborations with foreign scientists. In fact, the European Union is taking the lead. Spurred on by funding policies, half of European research articles had international co-authors in 2007. This is more than twice the level of two decades ago. The European Union's level of international co-authorship is about twice that of the United States, Japan and India. Even so, the levels in these countries are also rising. This is a sign of the continued allure of creating scientific coalitions across borders. Andrew Schubert, a researcher at the Institute for Science Policy Research, says that the rising collaboration is partly out of necessity. This necessity comes with the rise of big science. Many scientific endeavors have become more complicated. These new complications require the money and labor of many nations. But he says collaborations have also emerged because of increased possibilities. The Internet allows like-minded scientists to find each other. Simultaneously, dramatic drops in communication costs ease long-distance interactions. And there is a reward. Studies of citation counts show that internationally co-authored papers have better visibility. Schubert says international collaboration is a way to spread ideas in wider and wider circles. Caroline Wagner, a research scientist at George Washington University, notes that international collaborations offer additional flexibility. Whereas local collaborations sometimes persist past the point of usefulness because of social or academic obligations, international ones can be cultivated and dropped more freely. The collaborative trend is true across scientific disciplines. Some fields, though, have a greater tendency for it. Particle physicists and astronomers collaborate often. This is because they must share expensive facilities. Mathematicians, by contrast, tend historically towards solitude. As a consequence, they lag behind other disciplines. However, Wagner says partnerships are rising there, too. The level of collaboration also varies from country to country. There are historical and political reasons as to why collaborations emerge, says Wagner. This rise is also apparently boosted by policies embedded in European framework funding schemes. These policies underlie funding requirements that often require teamwork. European research articles had international co-authors in 2007. They encourage international cooperation.

Good evening. In 1959, on the day that I was born, a headline in Life magazine proclaimed "Target Venus: There May be Life There!" It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus's atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid, I thrilled to tales of adventure and Isaac Asimov's juvenile science-fiction novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. For many of my peers, though, Venus quickly lost its romance. The very first thing that scientists discovered with the mission to another planet was that Venus was not at all the Earthly paradise that fiction had portrayed. It is nearly identical to our own planet in bulk properties such as mass, density, and size. But its surface has been cooked and dried by an ocean of carbon dioxide. Trapped in the burning death-grip of a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus has long been held up as a cautionary tale for everything that could go wrong on a planet like Earth. As a possible home for alien life, it has been voted the planet least likely to succeed. But I have refused to give up on Venus, and over the years my stubborn loyalty has been justified. The rocky views glimpsed by Venera, and other Russian landers suggested a tortured volcanic history. That was confirmed in the early 1990s by the American Magellan orbiter, which used radar to peer through the planet's thick clouds and map out a rich, varied, and dynamic surface. The surface formed mostly in the last billion years, which makes it fresher and more recently active than any rocky planet other than Earth. Russian and American spacecraft also found hints that its ancient climate might have been wetter, cooler, and possibly even friendly to life. Measurements of density and composition imply that Venus originally formed out of basically the same stuff as Earth. That presumably included much more water than the tiny trace we find blowing in the thick air today. Thus, our picture of Venus at around the time life was getting started on Earth is one of warm oceans, probably rich with organic molecules, splashing around rocky shores and volcanic vents. The sun was considerably less bright back then. So, Venus was arguably a cozier habitat for life than Earth. observations of Venus's atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there.

I'm a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. I specialize in Cultural Psychology, examining similarities and differences between East Asians and North Americans. Our research team has been looking at cultural differences in self-enhancing motivations, how people have positive feelings towards not only themselves, but things connected to themselves. For example, when you own something, you view it as more valuable than when you don't own it. It's called the "endowment effect". The strength of that effect is stronger in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures. So we've been looking at other ways of seeing whether this motivation to view oneself positively is shaped by cultural experiences. We've also started to look at how culture shapes sleep. We are still in the exploratory stages of this project, although what's noteworthy is that East Asians on average sleep about an hour and a half less each night than North Americans do. And it's not a more efficient sleep, not like they're compressing relatively more value out of their hours. Other studies have found that even infants in East Asia sleep about an hour less than European infants. So we're trying to figure out how culture shapes the way you sleep. Our experiment does not take place in a sleep lab. Instead, we lend people motion-detecting watches, and they wear them for a week at a time. Whenever they are not having a shower or swimming, they keep it on. These kinds of watches are used in sleep studies as a way of measuring how long people are sleeping, how efficient their sleep is, and whether they are waking up in the night. Ideally, I'd like to take this into a controlled lab environment. We'll see where the research points us. We usually start off with the more affordable methods and if everything looks promising, then it will justify trying to build a sleep lab and study sleep across cultures that way. Why do we study sleep? Sleep is something that has really been an unexplored topic cross-culturally. I'm attracted to it because culture isn't something that only shapes the way our minds operate; it shapes the way our bodies operate too, and sleep is at the intersection of those. Asians and North Americans.