dala2010年12月英语六级真题及答案详解

2021年1月13日发(作者：邵荣棠)

My Views on University Ranking
Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Into the Unknown
The world has never seen population ageing before. Can it cope?
Until the early 1990s nobody much thought about whole populations
getting older. The UN had the foresight to convene a “world assembly on
ageing” back in 1982, but that came and went. By 1994 the World Bank had
noticed that something big was happening. In a report entitled “Averting
the Old Age Crisis”, it argued that pension arrangements in most
countries were unsustainable.
For the next ten years a succession of books, mainly by Americans,
sounded the alarm. They had titles like Young vs Old, Gray Dawn and The
Coming Generational Storm, and their message was blunt: health-care
systems were heading for the rocks, pensioners were taking young people
to the cleaners, and soon there would be intergenerational warfare.
Since then the debate has become less emotional, not least because
a lot more is known about the subject. Books, conferences and research
papers have multiplied. International organisations such as the OECD and
the EU issue regular reports. Population ageing is on every agenda, from
G8 economic conferences to NATO summits. The World Economic Forum plans
to consider the future of pensions and health care at its prestigious Davos
conference early next year. The media, including this newspaper, are
giving the subject extensive coverage.
Whether all that attention has translated into sufficient action is
another question. Governments in rich countries now accept that their
pension and health-care promises will soon become unaffordable, and many
of them have embarked on reforms, but so far only timidly. That is not
surprising: politicians with an eye on the next election will hardly rush
to introduce unpopular measures that may not bear fruit for years, perhaps
decades.
The outline of the changes needed is clear. To avoid fiscal (财政)
meltdown, public pensions and health-care provision will have to be reined
back severely and taxes may have to go up. By far the most effective method
to restrain pension spending is to give people the opportunity to work
longer, because it increases tax revenues and reduces spending on pensions
at the same time. It may even keep them alive longer. John Rother, the
AARP’s head of policy and strategy, points to studies showing that other
things being equal, people who remain at work have lower death rates than
their retired peers.
Younger people today mostly accept that they will have to work for
longer and that their pensions will be less generous. Employers still need
to be persuaded that older workers are worth holding on to. That may be
because they have had plenty of younger ones to choose from, partly thanks
to the post-war baby-boom and partly because over the past few decades


many more women have entered the labour force, increasing employers’
choice. But the reservoir of women able and willing to take up paid work
is running low, and the baby-boomers are going grey.
In many countries immigrants have been filling such gaps in the labour
force as have already emerged (and remember that the real shortage is still
around ten years off). Immigration in the developed world is the highest
it has ever been, and it is making a useful difference. In still-fertile
America it currently accounts for about 40% of total population growth,
and in fast-ageing western Europe for about 90%.
On the face of it, it seems the perfect solution. Many developing
countries have lots of young people in need of jobs; many rich countries
need helping hands that will boost tax revenues and keep up economic growth.
But over the next few decades labour forces in rich countries are set to
shrink so much that inflows of immigrants would have to increase
enormously to compensate: to at least twice their current size in western
Europe’s most youthful countries, and three times in the older ones.
Japan would need a large multiple of the few immigrants it has at present.
Public opinion polls show that people in most rich countries already think
that immigration is too high. Further big increases would be politically
unfeasible.
To tackle the problem of ageing populations at its root, “old”
countries would have to rejuvenate (使年轻) themselves by having more of
their own children. A number of them have tried, some more successfully
than others. But it is not a simple matter of offering financial incentives
or providing more child care. Modern urban life in rich countries is not
well adapted to large families. Women find it hard to combine family and
career. They often compromise by having just one child.
And if fertility in ageing countries does not pick up? It will not
be the end of the world, at least not for quite a while yet, but the world
will slowly become a different place. Older societies may be less
innovative and more strongly disinclined to take risks than younger ones.
By 2025 at the latest, about half the voters in America and most of those
in western European countries will be over 50—and older people turn out
to vote in much greater number than younger ones. Academic studies have
found no evidence so far that older voters have used their power at the
ballot box to push for policies that specifically benefit them, though
if in future there are many more of them they might start doing so.
Nor is there any sign of the intergenerational warfare predicted in
the 1990s. After all, older people themselves mostly have families. In
a recent study of parents and grown-up children in 11 European countries,
Karsten Hank of Mannheim University found that 85% of them lived within
25km of each other and the majority of them were in touch at least once
a week.
Even so, the shift in the centre of gravity to older age groups is


bound to have a profound effect on societies, not just economically and
politically but in all sorts of other ways too. Richard Jackson and Neil
Howe of America’s CSIS, in a thoughtful book called The Graying of the
Great Powers, argue that, among other things, the ageing of the developed
countries will have a number of serious security implications.
For example, the shortage of young adults is likely to make countries
more reluctant to commit the few they have to military service. In the
decades to 2050, America will find itself playing an ever- increasing role
in the developed world’s defence effort. Because America’s population
will still be growing when that of most other developed countries is
shrinking, America will be the only developed country that still matters
geopolitically (地缘政治上).
Ask me in 2020
There is little that can be done to stop population ageing, so the
world will have to live with it. But some of the consequences can be
alleviated. Many experts now believe that given the right policies, the
effects, though grave, need not be catastrophic. Most countries have
recognised the need to do something and are beginning to act.
But even then there is no guarantee that their efforts will work. What
is happening now is historically unprecedented. Ronald Lee, director of
the Centre on the Economics and Demography of Ageing at the University
of California, Berkeley, puts it briefly and clearly: “We don’t really
know what population ageing will be like, because nobody has done it yet.
“
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡1上作答。
1. In its 1994 report, the World Bank argued that the current pension
system in most countries could ______.
[A] not be sustained in the long term
[B] further accelerate the ageing process
[C] hardly halt the growth of population
[D] help tide over the current ageing crisis
2. What message is conveyed in books like Young vs Old?
[A] The generation gap is bound to narrow.
[B] Intergenerational conflicts will intensify.
[C] The younger generation will beat the old.
[D] Old people should give way to the young.
3. One reason why pension and health care reforms are slow in coming
is that ______.
[A] nobody is willing to sacrifice their own interests to tackle the
problem
[B] most people are against measures that will not bear fruit
immediately
[C] the proposed reforms will affect too many people’s interests
[D] politicians are afraid of losing votes in the next election


4. The author believes the most effective method to solve the pension
crisis is to ______.
[A] allow people to work longer [C] cut back on health care provisions
[B] increase tax revenues [D] start reforms right away
5. The reason why employers are unwilling to keep older workers is
that ______.
[A] they are generally difficult to manage
[B] the longer they work, the higher their pension
[C] their pay is higher than that of younger ones
[D] younger workers are readily available
6. To compensate for the fast-shrinking labour force, Japan would need
______.
[A] to revise its current population control policy
[B] large numbers of immigrants from overseas
[C] to automate its manufacturing and service industries
[D] a politically feasible policy concerning population
7. Why do many women in rich countries compromise by having only one
child?
[A] Small families are becoming more fashionable.
[B] They find it hard to balance career and family.
[C] It is too expensive to support a large family.
[D] Child care is too big a problem for them.
8. Compared with younger ones, older societies are less inclined to
______________________________.
9. The predicted intergenerational warfare is unlikely because most
of the older people themselves _________________________.
10. Countries that have a shortage of young adults will be less willing
to commit them to ____________________________. Part III Listening
Comprehension (35 minutes)
Section A
Section C

Psychologists are finding that hope plays a surprisingly vital role
in giving people a measurable advantage in realms as (36) _____________
as academic achievement, bearing up in tough jobs and coping with (37)
______________ illness. And, by contrast, the loss of hope is turning out
to be a stronger sign that a person may (38) ______________ suicide than
other factors long thought to be more likely risks.
“Hope has proven a powerful predictor of (39) ______________ in every
study we’ve done so far,” said Dr. Charles R. Snyder, a psychologist
who has devised a (40) ______________ to assess how much hope a person
has.
For example, in research with 3,920 college students, Dr. Snyder and
his (41) ______________ found that the level of hope among freshmen at


the beginning of their first semester was a more (42) ______________
predictor of their college grades than were their S.A.T. scores or their
grade point (43) ______________ in high school, the two measures most
commonly used to predict college performance.

(44)”______ __________________________________________________ _______
____________________________,” Dr. Snyder said. “When you compare
students of equivalent intelligence and past academic achievements, what
sets them apart is hope.”
In devising a way to assess hope scientifically, Dr. Snyder
(45)________________________
_______________________________. “That notion is not concrete
enough, and it blurs two key components of hope,” Dr. Snyder said.
(46)”___ __________________________________________________ __________
______.”
Part IV Reading Comprehension (Reading in Depth) (25 minutes)
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Most young boys are trained to believe that men should be strong, tough,
cool, and detached. Thus, they learn early to hide vulnerable emotions
such as love, joy, and sadness because they believe that such feelings
are feminine and imply weakness. Over time, some men become strangers to
their own emotional lives. It seems that men with traditional views of
masculinity are more likely to suppress outward emotions and to fear
emotions, supposedly because such feelings may lead to a loss of composure
(镇定). Keep in mind, however, that this view is challenged by some
researchers. As with many gender gaps, differences in emotionality tend
to be small, inconsistent, and dependent on the situation. For instance,
Robertson and colleagues found that males who were more traditionally
masculine were more emotionally expressive in a structured exercise than
when they were simply asked to talk about their emotions.
Males’ difficulty with “tender” emotions has serious consequences.
First, suppressed emotions can contribute to stress-related disorders.
And worse, men are less likely than women to seek help from health
professionals. Second, men’s emotional inexpressiveness can cause
problems in their relationships with partners and children. For example,
men who endorse traditional masculine norms report lower relationship
satisfaction, as do their female partners. Further, children whose
fathers are warm, loving, and accepting toward them have higher
self-esteem and lower rates of aggression and behavior problems. On a
positive note, fathers are increasingly involving themselves with their
children. And 30 percent of fathers report that they take equal or greater
responsibility for their children than their working wives do.
One emotion males are allowed to express is anger. Sometimes this