英语四级阅读理解真题及答案

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　　选词填空真题：

　　Section A

　　Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.

　　Question 36 to 45 are based on the following passage.

　　It’s our guilty pleasure: Watching TV is the most common everyday activity,after work and sleep, in many parts of the world. Americans view five hours of TV each day, and while we know that spending so much time sitting ___36___ can lead to obesity(肥胖症) and other diseases, researchers have now quantified just how___37___being a couch potato can be.

　　In an analysis of data from eight large ___38___published studies, a Harvard-led group reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that for every two hours per day spent channel ___39___,the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes(糖尿病)rose 20% over 8.5 years, the risk of heart disease increased 15% over a ___40___, and the odds of dying permaturely___41___ 13% during a seven-year follow-up .All of these___42____are linked to a lack of physical exercise. But compared with other sedentary(久坐的)activities, like knitting ,viewing TV may be especially__43___at promoting unhealthy habits. For one, the sheer number of hours we pass watching TV dwarfs the time we spend on anything else. And other studies have found that watching ads for beer and popcorn may make you more likely to ___44___them.

　　Even so, the authors admit that they didn’t compare different sedentary activities to ___45___whether TV watching was linked to a greater risk of diabetes,heart disease or clearly death compared with, say, reading.

　　注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。

　　A)climbed I)previously

　　B)conseme J)resume

　　C)decade K)suffered

　　D)determine L)suffering

　　E)effectIve M)term

　　F)harmfulN)terminals

　　G)outcomes O)twisting

　　H)passively

　　选词填空答案：

　　36：H 37:F 38:I 39:L 40:C 41:A 42:G 43:E 44:B 45:D

　　36. passively

　　解析：sitting passively 被动坐着

　　从词性判断，36题应该选一个副词来修饰sitting这个动名词，而备选项中只有两个副词，一个是passively被动地，一个是previously之前，再根据语义逻辑，坐着那看电视的行为应该是一种被动行为，而不存在前后之分。

　　37. harmful

　　解析：quantified just how harmful being a couch potato 量化长时间看电视的严重危害

　　通过分析how ( ) being a couch potato can be 这句话的句子成分，得出how 这个副词之后应该接一个形容词，符合词性条件的备选项，一个是effective 有效的，一个是harmful有害的。根据语义逻辑，长时间看电视是有害的，故选harmful。

　　38. previously

　　解析： previously published studies 之前公布的研究

　　38题空格处应该填一个副词来修饰published这个词，参考36题的解析，备选项中现在只剩下一个副词就是previously，刚好填入此处。

　　39. surfing

　　解析：spent channel surfing ，直接翻译为在频道冲浪，意译为看电视。这里的channel频道指代television电视;而“surfing冲浪”指代“watching看”，我们经常看到上网常用surfing一词，这里运用了仿词，将“上网冲浪”的surfing借过来用来指“看电视“。以上可以理解为英语中的委婉表达。

　　40. decade

　　解析：increased 15% over a decade 10年增加了15% 。40题后面出现了一个词并列连词and，说明本句存在并列关系。通读此句，40题在over之后应该填一个表示时间的名词，这样才能和前文over 8.5.years 与后文during a seven-year 　　follow up 形成并列，备选项中只有decade符合条件。

　　41. climbed

　　解析：the odds …climbed 13% 几率增加了13% 。解析同40题，根据and所指向的并列关系，前文说某一种风险增加了20%，某一种风险的增加了15%，此处空格也应该填一个表示上升的动词，备选项只有climbed，爬升。

　　42. outcomes

　　解析：all of these outcomes 所有这些后果。 此题填outcomes，是对前文各种疾病风险的概括。

　　43. effective

　　解析：be especially effective at promoting unhealthy habits 更容易形成不健康的习惯。be effective at doing 有效做某事。这里是讽刺用法，用来强调看电视更容易形成不健康的习惯。

　　44. consume

　　解析：make you more likely to consume them 使你更有可能吃他们，这里注意them指前文出现的beer啤酒和popcorn爆米花，又能表示喝啤酒，又能表示吃爆米花的词只有consume。consume消费，也只吃喝(东西)。

　　45. determine

　　解析：通过句法分析，本句应该填写动词原形，放在to 不定式符号之后。备选项中有3个动词原形，其中consume已经填在了44题，在剩下的resume恢复和determine决定之间，根据语义，应选择determine。

　　段落匹配真题：

　　Section B

　　Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraphfrom which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.

　　Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break

　　[A] Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

　　[B]EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated(自动的)software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

　　[C] The new service will bring the educational consortium(联盟)into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread acceptance by educators and has many critics.

　　[D] Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that theinstant-grading software would be a useful teaching tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades. “There is a huge value in leaning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

　　[E] But skeptics(怀疑者)say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies claiming that the software compares well to human graders.

　　[F] He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition(呼吁)opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professsionals Against MachineScoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from famous people like Noam Chomsky.

　　[G] “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read’.They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical(伦理的)position, convincing argument, meaningful organization, and clarity, among others.”.

　　[H] But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. It offers free online classes from Harvard, MIT and the University of Californian-Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools.

　　[I] The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantly. The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical(数字的)rank.

　　[J] EdX is not the first to use the automated assessment technology, which dates to early computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers, and four states—Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia—are using some form of the technology in secondary schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader,”to check the reliability of the human graders.

　　[K] But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is likely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that is would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that will make use of the automated assessment technology.

　　[L] Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,”or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating(吸引) toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

　　[M] Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 prizes aimed at improving software that grades essays and short answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner of one of the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to help design its assessment software.

　　[N] “One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,”said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is 　that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.”

　　[O] Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology—though imperfect—has a place in educational settings.

　　[P] With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of teaching is much better than at most schools.

　　[Q]“Often they come from very famous institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,”Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

　　注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。

　　46. Some professionals in education are collecting signatures to voice their opposition to automated essay grading.

　　47. Using software to grade students’ essays saves teachers time for other work.

　　48. The Hewlett contests aim at improving essay grading software.

　　49. Though the automated grading system is widely used in multiple-choice tests, automated essay grading is still criticized by many educators.

　　50. Some people don’t believe the software grading system can do as good a job as human graders.

　　51. Critics of automated essay scoring do not seem to know the true realities in less famous universities.

　　52. Critics argue many important aspects of effective writing cannot be measured by computer rating programs.

　　53. As class size grows, most teachers are unable to give students valuable comments as to how to improve their writing.

　　54. The automated assessment technology is sometimes used to double check the work of human graders.

　　55. Students find instant feedback helps improve their learning considerably.

　　段落匹配答案：

　　46-50FBMCE 　51-55QGPJD

　　仔细阅读真题：

　　Section C

　　Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.

　　Passage One

　　Questions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.

　　Across the rich world, well-educated people increasingly work longer than the less-skilled. Some 65% of American men aged 62-74 with a professional degree are in the workforce, compared with 32% of men with only a high-school certificate. This gap is part of a deepening divide between the well-educated well-off and the unskilled poor. Rapid technological advance has raised the incomes of the highly skilled while squeezing those of the unskilled. The consequences, for individuals and society, are profound.

　　The world is facing an astonishing rise in the number of old people. And they will live longer than ever before. Over the next 20 years the global population of those aged 65 or more will almost double, from 600 million to 1.1 billion. The experience of the 20th century, when greater longevity (长寿) translated into more years in retirement rather than more years at work, has persuaded many observers that this shift will lead to slower economic growth, while the swelling ranks of pensioners will create government budget problems.

　　But the notion of a sharp division between the working young and the idle old misses a new trend, the growing gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Employment rates are falling among younger unskilled people, whereas older skilled folk are working longer. The divide is most extreme in America, where well-educated baby-boomers (二战后生育高峰期出生的美国人) are putting off retirement while many less-skilled younger people have dropped out of the workforce.

　　Policy is partly responsible. Many European governments have abandoned policies that used to encourage people to retire early. Rising life expectancy(预期寿命), combined with the replacement of generous defined-benefit pension plans with less generous defined-contribution ones, means that even the better-off must work longer to have a comfortable retirement. But the changing nature of work also plays a big role. Pay has risen sharply for the highly educated, and those people continue to reap rich rewards into old age because these days the educated elderly are more productive than the preceding generation. Technological change may well reinforce that shift: the skills that complement computers, from management knowhow to creativity, do not necessarily decline with age.

　　注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。

　　56. What is happening in the workforce in rich countries?

　　A) Younger people are replacing the elderly.

　　B) Well-educated people tend to work longer.

　　C) Unemployment rates are rising year after year.

　　D) People with no college degree do not easily find work.

　　57. What has helped deepen the divide between the well-off and the poor?

　　A) Longer life expectancies.

　　B) A rapid technological advance.

　　C) Profound changes in the workforce.

　　D) A growing number of the well-educated.

　　58. What do many observers predict in view of the experience of the 20th century?

　　A) Economic growth will slow down.

　　B) Government budgets will increase.

　　C) More people will try to pursue higher education.

　　D) There will be more competition in the job market.

　　59. What is the result of policy changes in European countries?

　　A) Unskilled workers may choose to retire early.

　　B) More people have to receive in-service training.

　　C) Even wealthy people must work longer to live comfortably in retirement.

　　D) People may be able to enjoy generous defined-benefits from pension plans.

　　60. What is characteristic of work in the 21st century?

　　A) Computers will do more complicated work.

　　B) More will be taken by the educated young.

　　C) Most jobs to be done will be creative ones.

　　D) Skills are highly valued regardless of age.

　　Passage Two

　　Questions 61 to 65 are based on the following passage.

　　Some of the world’s most significant problems never hit headlines. One example comes from agriculture. Food riots and hunger make news. But the trend lying behind these matters is rarely talked about. This is the decline in the growth in yields of some of the world’s major crops. A new study by the University of Minnesota and McGill University in Montreal looks at where, and how far, this decline is occurring.

　　The authors take a vast number of data points for the four most important crops: rice, wheat, corn and soyabeans(大豆). They find that on between 24% and 39% of all harvested areas, the improvement in yields that took place before the 1980s slowed down in the 1990s and 2000s.

　　There are two worrying features of the slowdown. One is that it has been particularly sharp in the world’s most populous(人口多的)countries, India and China. Their ability to feed themselves has been an important source of relative stability both within the countries and on world food markets. That self-sufficiency cannot be taken for granted if yields continue to slow down or reverse.

　　Second, yield growth has been lower in wheat and rice than in corn and soybeans. This is problematic because wheat and rice are more important as foods, accounting for around half of all calories consumed. Corn and soyabeans are more important as feed grains. The authors note that “we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars rather than on crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world.”

　　The report qualifies the more optimistic findings of another new paper which suggests that the world will not have to dig up a lot more land for farming in order to feed 9 billion people in 2050, as the Food and Agriculture Organisation has argued.

　　Instead, it says, thanks to slowing population growth, land currently ploughed up for crops might be able to revert(回返)to forest or wilderness.This could happen. The trouble is that the forecast assumes continued improvements in yields, which may not actually happen.

　　注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。

　　61. What does the author try to draw attention to?

　　A) Food riots and hunger in the world.

　　B) News headlines in the leading media.

　　C) The decline of the grain yield growth.

　　D) The food supply in populous countries.

　　62. Why does the author mention India and China in particular?

　　A) Their self-sufficiency is vital to the stability of world food markets.

　　B) Their food yields have begun to decrease sharply in recent years.

　　C) Their big populations are causing worldwide concerns.

　　D) Their food self-sufficiency has been taken for granted.

　　63. What does the new study by the two universities say about recent crop improvement efforts?

　　A) They fail to produce the same remarkable results as before the 1980s.

　　B) They contribute a lot to the improvement of human food production.

　　C) They play a major role in guaranteeing the food security of the world.

　　D) They focus more on the increase of animal feed than human food grains.

　　64. What does the Food and Agriculture Organisation say about world food production in the coming decades?

　　A) The growing population will greatly increase the pressure on world food supplies.

　　B) The optimistic prediction about food production should be viewed with caution.

　　C) The slowdown of the growth in yields of major food crops will be reversed.

　　D) The world will be able to feed its population without increasing farmland.

　　65. How does the author view the argument of the Food and Agriculture Organisation?

　　A) It is built on the findings of a new study.

　　B) It is based on a doubtful assumption.

　　C) It is backed by strong evidence.

　　D) It is open to further discussion.

　　仔细阅读答案：

　　56 B) Well-educated people tend to work longer.

　　57 B) A rapid technological advance.

　　58 A) Economic growth will slow down.

　　59 C) Even wealthy people must work longer to live comfortably in retirement.

　　60 D) Skills are highly valued regardless of age.

　　61 C) The decline of the grain yield growth.

　　62 A) Their self-sufficiency is vital to the stability of world food markets.

　　63 D) They focus more on the increase of animal feed than human food feed grains.

　　64 D) The world will be able to feed its population without increasing farmland.

　　65 B) It is based on a doubtful assumption.