2020年12月大學英語六級閱讀真題以及答案（二）

英語六級閱讀真題，不僅強化詞匯與句型理解，更提升閱讀速度與綜合分析能力。實戰(zhàn)演練，讓考生熟悉題型變化，掌握解題技巧，是沖刺六級高分不可或缺的寶貴資源。今天，小編將分享2020年12月大學英語六級閱讀真題以及答案（卷二）相關內容，希望能為大家提供幫助！

Section A

Directions: In this section,there is apassage woith ten blanks.You are required to select onetord for each blank from a list ofchoices given in a tord bank follooing the passage.Read the passage through carefully before making yourchoices.Each choice in the bank is identifed bya leter.Please mark the coresponding leter for each item on AnswerSheet 2 with a single line through the centre.You may not use any of thewords in the bank more than once.

Virtually every activity that entails or facilitates in-person human interaction seems to be in the midst of a total meltdown as the coronavirus(冠狀病毒)outbreak erases Americans'desire to travel. Amtak says bookings are down 50 percent and cancelations are up 300 percent.Hotels in San Francisco are experiencing  26  rates between 70 and 80 percent.Broadway goes dark on Thursday night.Universities,now emptying their campuses,have never tried online learning on this  27  .White-collar companies like Amazon,Apple,and the New York Times are asking employees to work from home for the  28  future.

But what happens after the coronavirus?

In some ways,the answer is:All the old normal stuff.The pandemic(大流行病)will take lives,  29  economies and destroy routines,but it will pass.Americans will never stop going to basketball games.They won't stop going on vacation.Theyll meet to do business.No decentralizing technology so far—not telephones,not television,and not the intermet—has dented that human desire to shake hands,despite technologists'  30  to the contrary.

Yet there are real reasons to think that things will not return to the way they were last week.Small  31  create small societal shifts;big ones change things forgood.The New York transit strike of 1980 is  32  with prompting several long-term changes in the city,including bus and bike lanes,and women wearing sports shoes to work,The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 prompted the development of national health care in Europe.

Here and now,this might not even be a question of  33  .It'snot clear that the cruise industry will  34  .Or that public transit won't go broke without  35  assistance.The infrastructure might not even be in place to do what we were doing in 2019.

A)credentials

B)credited

C)cumulative

D)disruptions

E)federal

F)foreseeable

G)predictions 

H)preference

I)scale

J)strangle

K)subtle

L)summoned

M)survive

N)vacancy

O)wedge

Section B

Directions: In thissection,you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it.Each statement contains informationgiven in one of theparagraphs.Identif the paragraph from which the information is derived.You may choose a paragraph more than once.Each paragraph is marked with a leter.Ansver the questions by marking the correspondingletter on Answer Sheet 2.

Slow Hope

A)Our world is full of—mostly untold—stories of slow hope,driven by the idea that change is possible.They are'slow'in their unfolding,and they are slow because they come with setbacks.

B)At the beginning of time—so goes the myth—humans suffered,shivering in the cold and dark until the titan(巨人)Prometheus stolefire from the gods.Justas in the myth,technology—first fire and stone tools,and later farming,the steam engine and industry,fossil fuels,chemicals and nuclear power—has allowed us to alter and control the natural world.The myth also reminds us that theseadvances have come at a price:asa punishment for Prometheus'crime,the gods created Pandora,and they gave hera box filled with evils and curses.When Pandora's boxwas opened,it unleashed swarms of diseases and disasters upon humankind.

C)Today we can no longer ignore the ecological curses that we have released in our search for warmth and comfort.In engineering and exploiting and transforming our habitat,we have opened tens of thousands of Pandora's boxes.In recent decades,environmental threats have expanded beyond regional boundaries to have global reach and,mosthauntingly,are multiplying at a dizzying rate.On a regularbasis,we arereminded thatwe are running outof time.Year after year, faster andfaster,consumption outpaces the biological capacity of our planet.Stories ofaccelerated catastrophe multiply.We fear the breakdown of the electric grid,the end of non-renewable  resources,the expansion of deserts,the loss of islands,and the pollution of our air and water.

D)Acceleration is the signature ofour time.Populations and economic activity grew slowly for much of human history.For thousands of years and well into early modern times,world economies saw no growth at all,but from around the mid-19th century and again,in particular,since the mid-20th,the real GDP has increased at an enormous speed,and so has human consumption.In the Middle Ages,households in Central Europe might have owned fewer than 30 objects on average;in 1900,this number had increased to 400,and in 2020 to 15,000.The acceleration of human  production,consumption and travel has changed the animate and inanimate spheres.It has echoed through natural processes on which humansdepend.Species extinction,deforestation,damming of rivers,occurrence of floods,the depletion of ozone,thedegradation of ocean systems and many other areas are all experiencing acceleration.If represented graphically,the curve for all these  changes looksrather like that well-known hockey stick:with litte changeover millennia(數(shù)千年) and a dramatic upswing over the past decades.

E)Some of today's narratives about the future seem to suggest that we too,like Prometheus,will be saved by a new Hercules,a divine engineer,someone who will mastermind,manoeuvre and manipulate our planet.They suggest that geoengineering,cold fusion or faster-than-light spaceships might transcend once and for all the terrestrial constraints of rising temperatures,lack of energy,scarcity of food,lack of space,mountains of waste,polluted water—you name it.

F)Yet,if we envisage our salvation to come from a deus ex machina(解圖之神),from a divine engineer or a tech solutionist who will miraculously conjure up a new source of energy or another cure-all with revolutionary potency,we might be looking in the wrong place.The fact that we now imagine our planet as a whole does not mean that the ?rescue'of our planet will come with one big global stroke of genius and technology.It will more likely come by many small acts. Global heating and environmental degradation are not technological problems.They are highly political issues that are informedby powerful interests.Moreover,if history is a guide,then we can  assume that any major transformations will once again be followed by a huge set of unintended consequences.So what do we do?

G)This much is clear:we need to find ways that help us flatten the hockey-stick curves that reflect our ever-faster pace of ecological destruction and social acceleration.If we acknowledge that human manipulationof the Earth has been a destructive force,we can also imagine that human endeavours can help us builda lessdestructive world in the centuries to come.We might keep  making mistakes.But we will also keep leaning from our mistakes.

H)To counter the fears of disaster,we need to identify stories,visions and actions that work quietly towards a more hopeful future.Instead of one big narrative,a story of unexpected rescue by a larger-than-life hero,we need multiple stories:we need stories,not only of what Rob Nixon of Princeton University has called the?slow violence'of environmental degradation(that is,the damage that is often invisible at first and develops slowly and gradually),but also stories of what I call‘slow hope'.

I)We needan acknowledgement of our present ecological plight but also a language of positive change,visions  of a better future.In The Principleof Hope(1954-1959),Emst Bloch,one of the leading philosophers of the  future,wrote that‘the most tragic form of loss..is the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could bedifferent’.We need to identify visions and paths that wil helpus imagine a different,more just and more ecological world.Hope,for Bloch,has its starting point in fear,in uncertainty,and in crisis:it is a creative force that goes hand in hand with utopian (烏托邦的)‘wishful images'.It can be found in cultural products of the past—in fairy tales,in fiction,in architecture,in music,in the movies—in products of the human mind that contain'the outlines of a better world'.What makes us‘a(chǎn)uthentic’as humans are visions of our*potential".In other words:living in hope makes us human.

J)The power of small,grassroots movements to make changes that spread beyond their place of origincan be seen with the Slow Food movement,which began in Italy in the 1980s.The rise of fast-food restaurants after the Second World War produced a society full of cheap,industrially made foodstuffs.Under the leadershipof Carlo Petrini,the Slow Food movement began in Piedmont,a region of ltaly with a long history of poverty,violence and resistance to oppression.The movement transformed it into a region hospitable to traditional food cultures—based on native plants and breeds of animals.Today,Slow Food operates in more than 160 countries,poor and rich.It has given rise to thousands of projects around the globe,representing democratic politics,food sovereignty,biodiversity and sustainable agriculture.

K)The unscrupulous(無所顧忌的)commodification of food and the destruction of foodstuffs will continue to  devastate soils,livelihoods and ecologies.Slow Food cannot undo the irresistible developments of the global food economy,but it can upset its theorists,it can*speak differently', and it can allow people andtheir local food traditions and environments to flourish.Even in the United States—the fast-food nation—small farms and urban gardens are on the rise.The US Department of Agriculture provides an Urban Agriculture Toolkit and,according to a recent report,American millennials(千禧一代) are changing their diets.In 2017,6 per cent of US consumers claimed to be strictly vegetarian,up from I per cent in 2014.As more people realise that'eating is an agricultural act',as the US poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry put it in 1989,slow hope advances.

36.It seems some people today dream that a cutting-edge new technology might save them from the present ecological disaster.

37.According to one great thinker,it is most unfortunate if we lose the ability to think differently.

38.Urgent attention should be paid to the ecological problems we have created in our pursuit of a comfortable life.

39.Even in the fast-food nation America,the number of vegetarians ison the rise.

40.The deterioration of the ecological system is acceleratingbecause of the dramatic increase of human production and consumption.

41.It is obvious that solutions must be found to curb the fast worsening environment and social acceleration.

42.Many people believe changing the world is possible,though it may take time and involve setbacks.

43.It might be wrong to expect that our world would be saved at one stroke with somemiraculous technology.

44.It is human nature to cherish hopes for a better world.

45.Technology has givenus humans the power to change the natural world,but we have paid a price for the change.

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 marhed A),B),C)and D).You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single linethrough the centre.

Passage One

Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

Vegetarians would prefer not to becompelled to eat meat.Yet the reverse compulsion(強迫)is hidden in the proposals for a new plant-based “planetary diet.”Nowhere is this more visible than in India.

Earlier this year,theEAT-Lancet Commission released its global report onnutrition and called for a global shift to a more plant-based diet and for“substantiallyreducing consumption of animal source foods.”In countries like India,that call could become a tool to aggravate an already tense political situation and stress already undernourished populations.

The EAT report presumes that“traditional diets”in countries like India include litle red meat, which might be consumed only on special occasions or as minor ingredients in mixed dishes.

In India,however,there is a vast difference between what people would wish to consume and what they have to consume because of innumerable barriers around class,religion,culture,cost, geography,etc.Policymakers in India have traditionally pushed for a cereal-heavy "vegetariandiet" on a meat-eating population as a wayof providing the cheapest sources of food.

Currently,under an aggressive Hindu nationalist government,Muslims,Christians,disadvantaged classes and indigenous communities are being compelled to give up their traditional foods.

None of these concerns seem to have been appreciated by the EAT-Lancet Commission's representative,Brent Loken,who said“India has got such a great example”in sourcing protein from plants.

But how much of a model for the world is India's vegetarianism?In the Global Hunger Index 2019,the country ranks 102nd out of 117.Data from the National Family Health Survey indicate that only 10 percent of infants of 6 to 23 months are adequately fed.

Which is why calls for a plant-based diet modeled on India risk offering another whip with which to beat already vulnerable communities in developing countries.

A diet directed at the affluent West fails to recognize that in low-income countries undermourished children are known to benefit fromthe consumption of milk and otheranimal source foods,improving cognitive functions,while reducing the prevalence of nutritional deficiencies as well as mortality.

EAT-Lancet claimedits intention was to“spark conversations”among all Indian stakeholders. Yet vocal critics of the food processing industry and food fortification strategies have been left out of the debate.But the most conspicuous omission may well be the absence of India'sfarmers.

The government,however,seems to have given the report a thumps-up.Rather than addressing chronic húnger and malnutrition through an improved access towholesome and nutrient-dense foods, the government is opening the door for company-dependent solutions,ignoring the environmental and economic cost,which wll destroy local food  systems.It's a model full of danger for future generations.

46.What ismore visible in India than anywhere else according to the passage?

A)People's positive views on the proposals for a“planetary diet.”

B)People's reluctance to be compelled to eat plant-based food.

C)People's preferences for the kind of food they consume.

D)People's unwillingness to give up their eating habits.

47.What would the EAT-Lancet Commission's report doto many people in countries like India?

A)Radically change their dietary habits.

B)Keep them further away from politics.

C)Make them even more undernourished.

D)Substantiallyreduce their food choices.

48.What dowe learn from the passage about food consumption in India? 

A)People's diet will not change due to the EAT-Lancet report.

B)Many people simply do not have access to foods they prefer.

C)There isa growing popularity of a cereal-heavy vegetarian diet.

D)Policymakers help remove the barriers to people's choice of food.

49.What does the passage say about a plant-based diet modeled on India? 

A)It may benefit populations whose traditional diet is meat-based.

B)It may beanother blow to the economy in developing countries.

C)It may help narrow the gap between the rich and poor countries.

D)It may worsen the nourishment problem in low-income countries.

50.How does the Indian government respond to the EAT-Lancet Commission's proposals?

A)It accepts them at the expense of the long-term interests ofits people.

B)It intends them to spark conversations among all Indian stakeholders.

C)It gives them approval regardless of opposition from nutrition experts.

D)It welcomes them as a tool to address chronic hunger and malnutrition.

Passage Two

Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

Back in 1964,in his book Games People Play,psychiatrist Eric Beme described a pattern of conversation he called"Why Don't You—Yes But",which remains one of the mostirritating aspects of everyday social life.The person adopting the strategy is usually a chronic complainer.Something is terrible about their relationship,job,or other situation,and they moan about it ceaselessly,but find some excuse to dismiss any solution that's proposed.The reason,of course,is that on some level they don't want a solution;they want to be validated in their position that the world is out to get them.If they can"win"the game—dismissing every suggestion until their interlocutor(對話者)gives up in annoyance—they get to feel pleasurably righteous(正當?shù)?in their resentments and excused from any obligation to change.

Part of the trouble here is the so-called responsibility/fault fallacy(謬誤) .When you're feeling hard done by—taken for granted by your partner,say,or obliged to work for a half-witted boss—it's casy to become attached to the position that it's not your job to address the matter,and that doing so wouldbe an admission of fault.But there's a confusion here.For example,if I were to discover a newbormat my front door,it wouldn't bemy fault,but it most certainly would be my responsibility. There would be choices to make,and no possibility of avoiding them,since trying to ignore the matter would be a choice.The point is that what goes for the baby on the doorstep is true in all cases: even if the other person is 100% in the wrong,there's nothing to be gained,long-term,from using this as a justification to evade responsibility.

Should you find yourself on the receiving end of this kind of complaining,there's an ingenious way to shut it down—which is to agreewith it,ardently.Psychotherapist Lori Gotlieb describes this as“over-validation”.For one thing,you'll be spared further moaning,since the other person's motivation was to confirm her beliefs,and now you're confirming them.But for another,as Gottlieb notes,people confronted with over-validation often hear their complaints afresh and start arguing back.The notion that they're utterly powerless suddenly seems unrealistic—not to mention rather annoying—so they're prompted instead to generate ideas about how they might change things.

“And then,sometimes,something magical might happen,”Gottlieb writes.The other person “might realise she's not as trapped as you are saying she is,or as she feels.”Which illustrates the irony of the responsibility/fault fallacy:evading responsibility feels comfortable,but turns out to be a prison;whereas assuming responsibility feels unpleasant,but ends up being freeing.

51.What is characteristic of a chronic complainer,according to psychiatrist Eric Berne? 

A)Theyonly feel angry about their ll treatment and resent whoevertries to help

B)They are chronically unhappy and ceaselessly find fault with people around them

C)They constantly dismis others'proposals while taking no responsibility for tackling the problem.

D)They lack the knowledge and basic skills required for sucessful conversations with their interlocutors.

52.What does the author try to illustrate with the example of the newbom on one's doorstep? 

A)People tend to think that one should not be heldresponsible for others'mistakes.

B)It is easy to become attached to the position of overlookingone's own fault. 

C)People are often at a loss when confronted with a number of choices.

D)A distinction should be drawn between responsibility and fault.

53.What does the author advise people to do to chronic complainers? 

A)Stop them from going further by agreeing with them.

B)Listen to their complaimts ardently and sympathetically.

C)Ask them to validate their beliefs with further evidence.

D)Persuade them to clarify the confusion they havecaused.

54.What happens when chronic complainers receive over validation?

A)They are motivated to find ingenious ways to persuade their interlocutor.

B)They are prompted to come up with ideas for making possible changes.

C)They are stimulated to make more complaimts.

D)They are encouraged to start arguing back.

55.How can one stop being a chronic complainer according to the author?

A)Analysing the so-called responsibility/fault fallacy. 

B)Avoiding hazardous traps in everyday social life.   

C)Assuming responsibility to freeoneself.

D)Awaiting something magical to happen.