squared2016年12月英语六级听力原文(含翻译)第二套

2021年1月8日发(作者：谭宗浚)
Conversation One
M: Guess what? The worst food I've ever had was in France.
W: Really? That's odd. I thought the French were all good cooks.
M: Yes. That's right. I suppose it's really like anywhere else, though. You
know, some places are good. Some bad. But it's really all our own fault.
W: What do you mean?
M: Well, it was the first time I'd been to France. This was years ago when I
was at school. I went there with my parents' friends, from my father's school.
They'd hired a coach to take them to Switzerland.
W: A school trip?
M: Right. Most of them had never been abroad before. We'd crossed the
English Channel at night, and we set off through France, and breakfast time
arrived, and the coach driver had arranged for us to stop at this little café. There
we all were, tired and hungry, and then we made the great discovery.
W: What was that?
M: Bacon and eggs.
W: Fantastic! The real English breakfast.
M: Yes. Anyway, we didn't know any better— so we had it, and ugh...!
W: What was it like? Disgusting?
M: Oh, it was incredible! They just got a bowl and put some fat in it. And
then they put some bacon in the fat, broke an egg over the top and put the
whole lot in the oven for about ten minutes.
W: In the oven! You're joking. You can't cook bacon and eggs in the oven!
M: Well. They must have done it that way. It was hot, but it wasn't cooked.
There was just this egg floating about in gallons of fat and raw bacon.
W: Did you actually eat it?
M: No! Nobody did. They all wanted to turn round and go home. You know,
back to teabags and fish and chips. You can't blame them really. Anyway, the
next night we were all given another foreign speciality.
W: What was that?
M: Snails. That really finished them off. Lovely holiday that was!
Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
Question 1. What did the woman think of the French?
Question 2. Who did the man travel with on his first trip to Switzerland?
Question 3. What does the man say about the breakfast at the little French
café?
1
Question 4. What did the man think of his holiday in France?
Conversation Two
M: You say your shop has been doing well. Could you give me some idea of
what “doing well” means in facts and figures?
W: Well, “doing well” means averaging ￡1,200 or more a week for about 7
years, making almost a quarter of a million pounds. And “doing well” means
your earnings are rising. Last year, we did slightly over 50,000 and this year, we
hope to do more than 60,000. So, that's good if we continue to rise.
M: Now, that's gross earnings, I assume. What about your expenses?
W: Yes, that's gross. The expenses, of course, go up steadily. And since
we've moved to this new shop, the expenses have increased greatly, because
it's a much bigger shop. So I couldn't say exactly what our expenses are. They
are something in the region of six or seven thousand pounds a year, which is not
high. Commercially speaking, it's fairly low, and we try to keep our expenses as
low as we can.
M: And your prices are much lower than the same goods in shops round
about. How do the local shopkeepers feel about having a shop doing so well in
their midst?
W: Perhaps a lot of them don't realize how well we are doing, because we
don't make a point of publicizing. That was a lesson we learned very early on.
We were very friendly with all local shopkeepers and we happened to mention to
a local shopkeeper how much we had made that week. He was very unhappy
and never as friendly again. So we make a point of never publicizing the amount
of money we make. But we are on very good terms with all the shops. None of
them have ever complained that we are putting them out of business or
anything like that. I think it's a nice friendly relationship. Maybe if they did know
what we made, perhaps they wouldn't be so friendly.
Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
Question 5. What are the speakers mainly talking about?
Question 6. What does the woman say her shop tries to do?
Question 7. What do we learn about the goods sold at the woman's shop?
Question 8. Why doesn't the woman want to make known their earnings
anymore?
Passage One
Birds are famous for carrying things around.
Some, like homing pigeons, can be trained to deliver messages and
2
packages.
Other birds unknowingly carry seeds that cling to them for the ride.
Canadian scientists have found a worrisome, new example of the power that
birds have to spread stuff around.
Way up north in the Canadian Arctic, seabirds are picking up dangerous
chemicals in the ocean and delivering them to ponds near where the birds live.
Some 10,000 pairs of the birds, called fulmars, a kind of Arctic seabird,
make their nests on Devon Island, north of the Arctic Circle.
The fulmars travel some 400 kilometers over the sea to find food.
When they return home, their droppings end up all around their nesting
sites, including in nearby ponds.
Previously, scientists noticed pollutants arriving in the Arctic with the wind.
Salmon also carry dangerous chemicals as the fish migrate between rivers
and the sea.
The bodies of fish and other meat-eaters can build up high levels of the
chemicals.
To test the polluting power of fulmars, researchers collected samples of
deposit from 11 ponds on Devon Island.
In ponds closest to the colony, the results showed there were far more
pollutants than in ponds less affected by the birds.
The pollutants in the ponds appear to come from fish that fulmars eat when
they're out on the ocean.
People who live, hunt, or fish near bird colonies need to be careful, the
researchers say.
The birds don't mean to cause harm, but the chemicals they carry can cause
major problems.
Questions 9 to 12 are based on the passage you have just heard.
Question 9. What have Canadian scientists found about some seabirds?
Question 10. What does the speaker say about the seabirds called fulmars?
Question 11. What did scientists previously notice about pollutants in the
Arctic?
Question 12. What does the speaker warn about at the end of the talk?
Passage Two
In recent years, the death rate among American centenarians— people who
have lived to age 100 or older— has decreased, dropping 14 percent for women
and 20 percent for men from 2008 to 2014.
3
The leading causes of death in this age group are also changing.
In 2000, the top five causes of death for centenarians were heart disease,
stroke, flu, cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
But by 2014, the death rate from Alzheimer's disease for this age group had
more than doubled— increasing from 3.8 percent to 8.5 percent— making the
progressive brain disease the second leading cause of death for centenarians.
One reason for the rise in deaths from Alzheimer's disease in this group may
be that developing this condition remains possible even after people beat the
odds of dying from other diseases such as cancer.
People physically fit enough to survive over 100 years ultimately give in to
diseases such as Alzheimer's which affects the mind and cognitive function.
In other words, it appears that their minds give out before their bodies do.
On the other hand, the death rate from flu dropped from 7.4 percent in 2000
to 4.1 percent in 2014.
That pushed flu from the third leading cause of death to the fifth.
Overall, the total number of centenarians is going up.
In 2014, there were 72,197 centenarians, compared to 50,281 in 2000.
But because this population is getting larger, the number of deaths in this
group is also increasing— 18,434 centenarians died in 2000, whereas 25,914
died in 2014.
Questions 13 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard.
Question 13. What does the speaker say about the risk of dying for
American centenarians in recent years?
Question 14. What does the speaker say about Alzheimer's disease?
Question 15. What is characteristic of people who live up to 100 years and
beyond?
Recording One
Okay. So let's get started.
And to start things off I think what we need to do is consider a definition.
I'm going to define what love is but then most of the experiments I'm going
to talk about are really focused more on attraction than love.
And I'm going to pick a definition from a former colleague, Robert Sternberg,
who is now the dean at Tufts University but was here on our faculty at Yale for
nearly thirty years.
And he has a theory of love that argues that it's made up of three
components: intimacy, passion, and commitment, or what is sometimes called
4
decision commitment.
And these are relatively straightforward.
He argued that you don't have love if you don't have all three of these
elements.
Intimacy is the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of
bonding.
Operationally, you could think of intimacy as you share secrets, you share
information with this person that you don't share with anybody else.
Okay. That's really what intimacy is, the bond that comes from sharing
information that isn't shared with other people.
The second element is passion.
Passion is the drive that leads to romance.
You can think of it as physical attraction.
And Sternberg argues that this is a required component of a love
relationship.
The third element of love in Sternberg's theory is what he calls decision
commitment, the decision that one is in a love relationship, the willingness to
label it as such, and a commitment to maintain that relationship at least for
some period of time.
Sternberg would argue it's not love if you don't call it love and if you don't
have some desire to maintain the relationship.
So if you have all three of these, intimacy, passion and commitment, in
Sternberg's theory you have love.
Now what's interesting about the theory is what do you have if you only
have one out of three or two out of three.
What do you have and how is it different if you have a different two out of
three?
What's interesting about this kind of theorizing is it gives rise to many
different combinations that can be quite interesting when you break them down
and start to look them carefully.
So what I've done is I've taken Sternberg's three elements of love, intimacy,
passion and commitment, and I've listed out the different kinds of relationships
you would have if you had zero, one, two or three out of the three elements.
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.
Question 16. What does the speaker say about most of the experiments
mentioned in his talk?
5
Question 17. What does Robert Sternberg argue about love?
Question 18. What question does the speaker think is interesting about
Sternberg's three elements of love?
Recording Two
Hi! I am Elizabeth Hoffler, Master of Social Work.
I am a social worker, a lobbyist, and a special assistant to the executive
director at the National Association of Social Workers.
Today we are going to be talking about becoming a social worker.
Social work is the helping profession.
Its primary mission is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic
needs of all people, with a particular focus on those who are vulnerable,
oppressed, and living in poverty.
We often deal with complex human needs.
Social work is different from other professions, because we focus on the
person and environment.
We deal with the external factors that impact a person's situation and
outlook.
And we create opportunity for assessment and intervention, to help clients
and communities cope effectively with their reality and change that reality when
necessary.
In thousands of ways social workers help other people, people from every
age, every background, across the country.
Wherever needed, social workers come to help.
The most well-known aspect of the profession is that of a social safety net.
We help guide people to critical resources and counsel them on
life-changing decisions.
There are more than 600,000 professional social workers in the country,
and we all either have a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, or a PhD in Social
Work.
There are more clinically trained social workers than clinically trained
psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses combined.
Throughout this series you will learn more about the profession, the
necessary steps to get a social work degree, the rich history of social work, and
the many ways that social workers help others.
Later in this series, you will hear from Stacy Collins and Mel Wilson, fellow
social workers at the National Association of Social Workers.
6