2020年上半年英语四级考试阅读理解(精选汇编)(最新)

【篇一】2020年上半年英语四级考试阅读理解

A pile of wood

一堆木头

An old material may find a new use in batteries

一种古老的原材料可能会在电池上发挥它的新用途。

ON A list of cutting-edge materials for high-tech applications, you
might not expect to see wood near the top.

在一个应用于高科技的尖端材料目录上，看到木材会名列前茅，你可能不会
想到。

But an experiment by Teng Li and Liangbing Hu of the University of
Maryland may soon put it there.

但是，由马里兰大学的李腾和胡良冰所做的一个实验可能会产生这种意外情
况。

For Dr Li and Dr Hu, writing in Nano Letters, have just described how
wood might be used to make one class of batteries cheaper by permitting
the lithium now employed in them to be replaced with sodium.

根据纳米快报的报道，李博士和胡博士 已经详细说明了，在得到允许的情况
下，用钠取代现在制造电池的锂。再用木材制造某一类电池可能会降 低成本。

As any high-school chemist knows, lithium and sodium are chemically
similar.

任何一个高中的化学家都知道，锂和钠的化学性质很相似。

Sodium ions are, however, five times the size of lithium ions.

然而，钠离子—在缺少一个电子的前提下，钠原子带正电—是锂离子的五倍
大小。

That matters because a battery works by shuttling ions between its
anode and its cathode.

这一点很关键，因为电池就是通过穿梭于它的阴极和阳极之间的离子来工作
的。

The bigger the ion, the more damage this shuttling causes—and the
shorter, in consequence, is the battery's life.

离子越大，它的穿梭难度就越大—因此，电池的工作寿命就越短。

Hitherto, that has ruled sodium out as a plausible ingredient of
batteries.

到目前为止，作为电池的合理组成部分，钠早已被排除在外。

But engineers would still like to devise a commercially viable sodium
battery, because sodium is much more abundant than lithium.

但是，从商业角度来讲，钠资源远比锂资源丰富，所以工程师们仍旧希望能
够发明一种能够 使用的钠电池。

Dr Li and Dr Hu wondered if the problem of electrode damage might be
ameliorated by using a more pliant material for the frames on which the
electrodes are suspended.

李博士和胡博士想弄清楚，如果使用一种构成电池框架的，更柔 韧的材料—
以达到延缓电极的目的，这样是否可以改善有关电极损坏方面的问题。

These frames, which also transmit current to and from the electrodes,
are normally made of metal, and are therefore rigid.

这些电池的组成框架也起着在电极之间传输电流的作用，它们通常是由金属
材料制成，因此硬度很高。

But the two researchers reckoned that suitably treated wood could do
the job of conduction equally well while providing more yielding support
for an electrode that was continually expanding and contracting as ions
moved in and out of it.

但是两位研究者认为，对 木材进行适当的处理后，木材也能同样起到这种传
导的作用，同时，当离子从电极间穿梭时，还能够更好 地增加电极的柔韧性，使
之能够持续地扩张收缩。

To test this idea, they used slivers of wood from yellow pines.

为了测试这种想法，他们从黄松树干上取了些木条子。

First, they coated these with carbon nanotubes, to improve their
conductivity.

首先，他们在这些木条子外面包上了碳纳米，以提高它们的导电性。

Then they applied a film of tin to each sliver.

然后，在每个木条子上面涂上了薄薄的锡。

This done, they immersed the slivers in an electrolyte containing
sodium ions and put the resulting battery through 400 cycles of
discharging and recharging.

完成这些后，研究人员把木条浸在一种含有钠离子的电解液里 ，对这种特殊
的“电池”进行了四百次的循环充放电。

As a control, they built similar batteries using slivers of copper.

为了便于比较，他们用铜条做成了类似的电池。

The wooden battery was not perfect.

这个木电池并不成功。

It's initial capacity was 339 milliamp hours per gram, but that fell
to 145 mAHg over the course of the 400 cycles.

它的初始容量是339毫安每小时，但是经过400次不停地充放电后，降到
了145毫安时克。

This, however, was not bad for a prototype, and far better than the
copper- framed batteries managed.

然而，对于一个电池雏形来说，结果并不算坏，而且这个结果远比那个铜电
池好得多。

They had an initial capacity of 50 mAHg.

铜电池的初始容量是50毫安时克。

That fell to 22 mAHg after just 100 cycles.

然而仅仅在100次不停地充放电后，就减小到了22毫安时克。

Wood, then, seems a plausible candidate for battery frames.

所以，木村似乎是电池架构的合理备用材料。

Obviously you are not going to see wooden-framed batteries in your
phone or laptop anytime soon.

很明显，人们要想在自己的手机或笔记本电脑中看到这种木材架构的电池，
要很久以后了。

But that was never the plan for Dr Li and Dr Hu.

但是，李博士和胡博士的计划可不是这样的。

What their work might lead to is giant sodium-ion batteries for the
overnight storage of electricity from solar power stations.

他们的研究结果可能会产生一种巨型钠电池，用来储存隔夜的太阳能发电站
的电流。

Cheap storage is the missing part of the solar-energy jigsaw—for
solar cells themselves are now cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels,
in sunny climes at least.

便宜的太阳能储存是 完善太阳能行业目前所急需的—因为与化石燃料相比，
现在的太阳能电池已经很便宜了，至少在阳光明媚 的天气是这样的。

The search for solutions to the solar-energy problem has concentrated
on making man-made materials more and more sophisticated.

解决太阳能能源的研究一直专注于制造越来越复杂的人工材料。

It would be a delicious irony if the jigsaw was completed not by one
of these snazzy new substances but by one of the oldest materials around.

如果太阳能行业这个拼图的完美不是来自于这些时尚的新材料，而来源于人
们周围一种最古老的材料，那 将会是一个极大的讽刺。

【篇二】2020年上半年英语四级考试阅读理解

The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun

反对公司管理像学校改革的运动已经开始

THE INTERNSHIP, a film about two middle-aged no-hopers who land work
experience at Google, is a dire offering even by the standards of Hollywood
summer comedies.

《挨踢实习生》是一部关于两个有工作经 验没有希望转正的中年人在谷歌的
故事，即使是按好莱坞夏天喜剧的标准，这也是一部作品。

But it does get one thing right: that it is rather absurd for a
technology firm to provide slides for staff to play on, and to let them
wear silly propeller-hats.

但有一件事情是对 的：一家科技公司为员工提供幻灯片演讲是相当荒谬的，
而且让他们戴上傻螺旋桨一样的帽子。

Google is not alone in its juvenile tastes.

在对青年人的口味上谷歌不是一家。

Box, a Silicon Valley company, has installed swings in its
headquarters.

硅谷的Box公司在其总部安装秋千。

Red Bull, an energy- drinks firm, has a reception desk in the shape
of a giant skateboard in its London office.

能量饮料公司红牛在其伦敦办公室内有一个巨大的滑板样的接待桌。

Businesses of all types have moved towards sitting workers in groups
in open-plan rooms, just like at nursery school.

各类企业都在逐渐为员工提供开放式办公室，就像托儿所。

Time was when firms modelled themselves on the armed forces, with
officers and chains of command.

企业在模仿 军队的指挥官和指挥链。

Now many model themselves on learning-through-play Montessori
schools.

现在有很多通过在实践中学习蒙台梭利学校的模式。

Montessori management has plenty of supporters in the higher reaches
of business.

蒙台梭利的管理拥有很多公司高层的支持。

The bosses of Google, Amazon and Wikipedia were all educated in
Montessori schools.

谷歌，亚马逊和维基百科的老板都在蒙特梭利学校接受过教育。

So was Will Wright, a video-game pioneer.

视频游戏先锋威尔·赖特也是这样。

Messrs Page and Brin credit their Montessori education with their
enthusiasm for thinking differently.

佩奇和布林把他们对不同思维方式的热情归于他们在蒙台梭利接受的教育。

Mr Bezos thanks it for his enthusiasm for experimentation—for
planting seeds and going down blind alleys as he puts it.

Bezos先生感谢蒙台梭利是因为他对实验的热情，正如他所说的播种和减少
弯路。

Mr Wright says SimCity comes right out of Montessori.

赖特先生说模拟城市正是出自蒙特梭利。

The nostrums of some management gurus sound remarkably like those of
the progressive educationalists of the 1960s.

一些管理大师的秘方听起来非常像那些20世纪60年代的教育改革者。

For example Gary Hamel, of London Business School, and Jeffrey Pfeffer,
of Stanford Business School, praise companies that dismantle hierarchies
and encourage experimentation.

例如伦敦商学院的加里·哈默尔和斯坦福大学商学院的杰弗里·普费弗，称
赞公司消除等级和鼓励试验。

It is not just rich-world businesses that are buying into this
philosophy:

不只是富有的企业相信这一理念：

HCL Technologies, an Indian software company, invites workers to
write assessments of their bosses—and publishes them.

印度软件公司HCL邀请工人对老板进行评价并进行公开。

But it would be wrong to conclude that the success of Google and Amazon
vindicates Montessori management.

但是仅用谷歌和亚马逊的成功就支持蒙特梭利管理的推断或许是错误的。

Both companies have pragmatically mixed progressive ideas with more
traditional ones such as encouraging internal competition and measuring
performance.

这两家公司都追求实用主义，混合了务实进取的理念，如传统的鼓励内部竞
争和绩效量化。

Mr Bezos is also an enthusiastic employer of ex-military personnel.

贝索斯先生也是一位喜欢雇佣前军事人员的雇主。

As in education, where traditionalists have staged a
counter- revolution against the progressives, some academics are now
questioning Montessori management's basic assumptions—particularly its
faith in free-flowing creativity, endless collaboration and all things
open-plan.

在教育界，保守者上演了一场反改革的运动，现在一些学者质疑蒙特梭利管
理的基本假设， 特别是其对自由流动的创造力，无限的协作和完全开放的信念。

For example, Morten Hansen of the University of California, Berkeley
studied 182 teams who were trying to win a contract on behalf of a
professional-services firm.

例如，加州大学伯克利分校的莫滕·汉森研究了试图赢得代表一个专业服务
公司的合同的182个团队。

He found that the more time they spent consulting others, the less
likely they were to win a deal.

他发现，他们越是花更多的时间咨询别人就越不太可能赢得这笔交易。

This shows, he says, that collaboration has costs as well as benefits.

他说这说明合作有效益也有成本。

These need to be weighed against each other, instead of simply
assuming that the more teamwork the better.

这些都需要对各方面进行权衡，而不是简单地假设团队合作越多结果就越
好。

Mark de Rond, a Cambridge academic who once rowed for the university,
argues that the most successful teams are marked by internal competition
and clashing egos as well as Kum Bay Yah-style togetherness.

曾为剑桥大学赛艇的学者 马克·德·ROND认为最成功的球队是存住内部竞
争和冲突以及自我风格的统一性。

A focus on interpersonal harmony can actually hurt team performance,
he suggests.

他说把重点放在人际和谐上会对球队的表现不利。

Jake Breeden, a management thinker at Duke Corporate Education,
worries that too much reliance on teamwork can create a culture of learned
helplessness in which managers are terrified to take decisions without
yet another round of consultations.

杜克大学企业教育管理思想家杰克·布里登担心在管理 者害怕在征求他人
意见之前做出决定的团队里过于依赖团队合作会创造一种后天性无助的文化。

Excessive collaboration can lead to the very opposite of creativity:

过多的合作可能会走向创造力的反面：

groupthink, conformity and mediocrity.

群体思维，整合和平庸。

It is especially damaging at the top of an organisation. BlackBerry,
a smartphone- maker, believed that having two CEOs with complementary
skills would produce the best of both worlds:

这对组织的顶部害处特别大。智能手机制造商黑莓相信两位具有互补技能的
CEOs 会有的产出：

Jim Balsillie was a professional manager and Mike Lazaridis was a
technician.

吉姆·贝尔斯利是一名职业经理人，迈克·拉扎里迪斯是技术员。

The company soon discovered the truth of Napoleon's dictum that one
bad general is worth two good ones.

该公司很快就发现了拿破仑的名言：一个不好的将军好于两个好将军的真
理。

According to one survey around 70% of all offices in America have gone
open-plan.

据一项调查显示，美国约70%的办公室已经是开放式的。

Yet evidence is mounting that this is a bad idea.

然而越来越多的证据显示这是一个坏主意。

Over the past five years Gensler, a design firm, has asked more than
90,000 people in 155 companies in ten industries what they think of this
way of working.

设计公司 Gensler，在过去的五年里调查十大行业155家公司的90,000人
怎么评价这种工作方式。

It has found an astonishing amount of antipathy.

发现绝大多数人对此反感。

Workers say that open-plan offices make it more difficult to
concentrate, because the hubbub of human and electronic noise is so
distracting.

他们说开放式办公室使他们更难以集中精神，因为其他人的喧闹和电子噪音
是如此令人分心。

What they really value is the ability to focus on their jobs with as
few distractions as possible.

他们看重的是尽可能少分心把注意力放在工作上。

Ironically, going open-plan defeats another of Montessori
management's main objectives:

具有讽刺意味的是，开放式的方式击败了另一个对蒙特梭利管理的主要目
标：

workers say it prevents them from collaborating, because they cannot
talk without disturbing others or inviting an audience.

工作人员说这会阻碍他们合作，因为他们不邀请别人或者想不打扰别人时就
没法进行讨论。

Other studies show that people who work in open-plan offices are more
likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress and airborne infections
such as flu.

其他研究表明，在开放式办公室工作的人更容易患高血压，压力更大大，更
易被传染，如流感。

Time for some discipline—and separate offices

是时候进行惩罚了-和单独的办公室

It was the unthinking and indiscriminate application of child-centred
education techniques, with little attention paid to outcomes, that
eventually brought about a backlash.

以儿童为中心的教育技术没头没脑的和不分青红皂白的应用，而且很少重视
结果，最终带来了反弹。

The more thoughtful critics did not wish to turn the clock back
entirely and return to rote learning and tyrannical teachers; they simply
said that structure and order have their place too.

深思熟虑的批评不希望时光完全倒流到死记硬背和 教师强横的时代，他们只
是说结构和顺序也有自己的位置。

The same seems to be happening now in business.

现在在商业领域似乎也有同样的情况。

Mr Breeden argues, sensibly, that managers should treat collaboration
and creativity as techniques rather than dogmas.

布里登辩解说，很明显管理者应该把协作和创造力当做技巧而非教条。

Diane Hoskins of Gensler speculates that her company's findings about
open-plan offices are so striking that they may mark the beginning of a
new era in workplace organisation.

公司Gensler的黛安·霍斯金斯推测，她们公司的开放办公室表现是如此引
人注目，标志着办公室 组织方式的一个新时代。

When workers start being moved back into separate booths, and the
office slide is replaced with a noticeboard bearing a list of staff
instructions, you will know that the counter-revolution is well under way.

当工人开始被搬回到单独的办公间，办公室不知不觉替换的一个列着员工说< br>明的布告板，你就会知道，反改革的工作正在顺利进行。

【篇三】2020年上半年英语四级考试阅读理解

Nanotechnology

纳米技术

A fab result

生物工厂

A novel way of making computer memories, using bacteria

制造计算机存储器的新奇方法：使用细菌

FOR half a century, the essence of progress in the computer industry
has been to do more with less.

半个世纪以来，计算机产业发展的本质就是花钱更少，成事更多。

Moore's law famously observes that the number of transistors which
can be crammed into a given space doubles every 18 months.

摩尔定律的论断是：能够放入某空间内的晶体管数量每18个月翻一番。

The amount of data that can be stored has grown at a similar rate.

储存的数据也有着类似的增长速率，

Yet as components get smaller, making them gets harder and more
expensive.

但是随着部件越来越小，它们的制造难度和成本也逐渐增加。

On May 10th Paul Otellini, the boss of Intel, a big American chipmaker,
put the price of a new chip factory at around $$10 billion.

5月10日，美国芯片巨头因特尔总裁兼CEOPaul Otellini宣布将花费上百
亿美元建设新工厂。

Happily for those that lack Intel's resources, there may be a cheaper
option—namely to mimic Mother Nature, who has been building tiny devices,

对于不像因特尔那么有钱的厂家的好消息是，他们或许可以选择更便宜的方
式—模拟大自然。

in the form of living cells and their components, for billions of years,
and has thus got rather good at it.

对于大自然来说，她建造 微小设备已经有数十亿年了，所以自然是信手拈来，
当然，这些设备都是以活细胞和其组份的形式呈现。

A paper published in Small, a nanotechnology journal, sets out the
latest example of the technique.

发表在纳米技术期刊《微小》的一篇论文描述了这一新技术的示例，

In it, a group of researchers led by Sarah Staniland at the University
of Leeds, in Britain, describe using naturally occurring proteins to make
arrays of tiny magnets, similar to those employed to store information
in disk drives.

该技术团队由英国利兹大学的Sarah Staniland领导，他们用自然生成的 蛋
白质让微型磁性材料进行排列，这与磁盘驱动器上储存信息的磁性材料排序是类
似的。

The researchers took their inspiration from Magnetospirillum
magneticum, a bacterium that is sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field
thanks to the presence within its cells of flecks of magnetite, a form
of iron oxide.

研究人员从趋磁细菌上获得了灵感，由于该细菌内部存在磁性颗粒，所以对
地球磁场非常敏感。

Previous work has isolated the protein that makes these miniature
compasses. Using genetic engineering, the team managed to persuade a
different bacterium—Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous critter that is a
workhorse of biotechnology—to manufacture this protein in bulk.

他们先要把制造这种微型罗盘的蛋白质分离出来，并采用基因工程技术设法
让另一种细菌—大肠杆菌来批量生产这种蛋白质，而大肠杆菌在生物体内普遍存
在，是生物工程 中的常用苦力。

Next, they imprinted a block of gold with a microscopic chessboard
pattern of chemicals.

然后他们用化学方法绘制微小的棋盘图案，并把图案的每一块染成金黄色，

Half the squares contained anchoring points for the protein.

每块区域的一半用该蛋白质做固定点，

The other half were left untreated as controls.

另一半不做任何处理作为对照，

They then dipped the gold into a solution containing the protein,
allowing it to bind to the treated squares, and dunked the whole lot into
a heated solution of iron salts.

再把这些金黄色的 棋盘浸入含蛋白质的溶液中，并允许溶液中的蛋白质与棋
盘上的固定蛋白质结合，最后把该棋盘全部浸入 加热的铁盐溶液中。

After that, they examined the results with an electron microscope.

他们再用电子显微镜观察实验结果，

Sure enough, groups of magnetite grains had materialised on the
treated squares, shepherded into place by the bacterial protein.

果然，棋盘上的固定蛋白质区域产生了成群的磁铁颗粒，并由细菌蛋白质控
制在相应位置。

In principle, each of these magnetic domains could store the one or
the zero of a bit of information, according to how it was polarised.

基本上每个磁域都能按极化的方式存储一个字节信息的1或0。

Getting from there to a real computer memory would be a long road.

但是要制成真正的计算机存储器还有很长的路要走，

For a start, the grains of magnetite are not strong enough magnets
to make a useful memory, and the size of each domain is huge by modern
computing standards.

首先对于可用的存储器来说，那些磁铁颗粒的磁性还不够强大， 并且每个区
域的尺寸对现在计算机标准来说太大了。

But Dr Staniland reckons that, with enough tweaking, both of these
objections could be dealt with.

但Staniland认为，只要做些足够的调整，那些困难都将不是问题。

The advantage of this approach is that it might not be so
capital-intensive as building a fab.

这种方法的好处就是不用像因特尔那样如此资源密集地去建造新工厂，在制
造不 断发展的产品时也不需要同样多的设备，

Growing things does not need as much kit as making them. If the
tweaking could be done, therefore, the result might give the word
biotechnology a whole new meaning.

所以，如果这种调整可以成功的话，生物技术将会有一个全新的定义。