2015年英語四級考試每日一練(3月24日)
1、聽音頻:
根據所聽到的內容,回題。
A.He made things worse.
B.He messed up the deal.
C.He wasn't trusted by the woman.
D.He had a terrible day.
2、 Questions are based on the following passage.
In his first term. Mayor Michael Bloomberg mapped out a fair plan to get rid of 11,000 tons of New York City garbage every day. The complex proposal was designed to make each district take care of its own trash. It was also supposed to help limit noisy garbage trucks going long distances through, the city to reach marine barges (駁船), railways or out-of-state trash facilities.
Nobody wanted these new garbage transfer stations in their neighborhood, even with promises of new high-tech, low-smell facilities. There are already stations in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, most of them in lower-income commtmities. Only one area of the city--the Upper East Side of
Manhattan--has refused to accept a trash facility. The city should not give in to local resistance.
It is time for residents in that neighborhood to accept a share of the city's garbage problem. The city should build a modern, environmentally sound facility at 91st Street to transfer trash from Manhattan to barges on the East River. That trash, estimated at up to 1,800 tons a day, would then go by barge to other states.
Deputy Mayor Cas Hoiloway said last week that the city has had to fight off "lawsuit after lawsuit" with "every useless argument under the sun" from those opposing the 91st Street facility. Those delays have helped push the cost for building the station from $125 million in 2006 to about $ 226 million now.
An earlier trash station at that site, which was closed in 1999, was badly designed so that trucks idled along York Avenue. The new facility, Mr. Holloway said, has been designed to reduce the congestion problem with longer ramps (匝道) leading to the facility, which sits on the eastern side of Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. The plans also call for higher noise-blocking walls along the ramps.
This terminal is an essential part of the city's 20-year waste management plan. John Doherty, the sanitation (環境衛生) commissioner, told critics at a hearing last week, "We will not entertain any changes to what is a fair and thoughtful, district-based approach that was founded on the principles of environmental equity for all New Yorkers."
Environmental equity, in this case, means that the Upper East Side of Manhattan has to do its part.
The plan worked out by Mayor Michael Bloomberg will______.
A.make garbage trucks no longer necessary
B.need more out-of-state trash facilities
C.reduce the amount of trash in the city
D.make each district deal with its own trash
3、回答題:


A.academic
B.access
C.accompany
D.clearly
E.comprehension
F.context
G.enables
H.encountered
I.enhances
J.entertaining
K.exposes
L.independenfly
M.specific
N.stick
O.survival
36.___________
4、根據材料,回答問題。
Questions 19 to 21 are based on the passage you have just heard.
A.The use of oversized freight containers.
B.Safety problems with railroad tracks.
C.The growth of the automotive industry.
D.The high cost of meeting environmental regulations.
5、
根據材料,回答問題。
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.
A University Degree No Longer Confers Financial Security
A.Millions of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university--and accumulating huge debts in the process--will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job.
B.Their elders have always told them that education is the best way to equip themselves to thrive in a globalised world. Blue-collar workers will see their jobs outsourced and automated, the familiar argument goes. School dropouts will have to cope with a life of cash-strapped (資金緊張的) insecurity. But the graduate elite will have the world at its feet. There is some evidence to support this view. A recent study from Georgetown University's Centre on Education and the Workforce argues that"obtaining a post-secondary credential ( 證書) is almost always worth it." Educational qualifications are tightly correlated with earnings: an American with a professional degree can expect to pocket $3.6m over a lifetime; one with merely a high- school diploma can expect only $1.3m. The gap between more- and less-educated earners may be widening. A study in 2002 found that someone with a bachelor's degree could expect to earn 75% more over a lifetime than someone with only a high-school diploma. Today the disparity is even greater.
C.But is the past a reliable guide to the future? Or are we at the beginning of a new phase in the relationship between jobs and education? There are good reasons for thinking that old patterns are about to change--and that the current recession-driven downturn (衰退) in the demand for Western graduates will morph (改變) into something structural. The strong wind of creative destruction that has shaken so many blue-collar workers over the past few decades is beginning to shake the cognitive elite as well.
D.The supply of university graduates is increasing rapidly. The Chronicle of Higher Education calculates that between 1990 and 2007 the number of students going to university increased by 22% in North America, 74% in Europe, 144% in Latin America and 203% in Asia. In 2007 150m people attended university around the world, including 70m in Asia. Emerging economies—specially China--are pouring resources into building universities that can compete with the elite of America and Europe. They are also producing professional- services firms snch as Tata Consulting Services and Infosys that take fresh graduates and turn them into world-class computer programmers and consultants. The best and the brightest of the rich world must increasingly compete with the best and the brightest from poorer countries who are willing to work harder for less money.
E. At the same time, the demand for educated labor is being reconfigured (重新配置) by technology, in much the same way that the demand for agricultural labor was reconfigured in the 19th century and that for factory labor in the 20th. Computers can not only perform repetitive mental tasks much faster than human beings. They can also empower amateurs to do what professionals once did: why hire a flesh-and-blood accountant to complete your tax return when Turbotax (a software package ) will do the job at a fraction of the cost? And the variety of jobs that computers can do is multiplying as programmers teach them to deal with tone and linguistic ambiguity.
F.Several economists, including Paul Krugman, have begun to argue that post-industrial societies will be characterized not by a relentless rise in demand for the educated but by a great "hollowing out", as mid-level jobs are destroyed by smart machines and high-level job growth slows. David Autor, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out that the main effect of automation in the computer era is not that it destroys blue-collar jobs but that it destroys any job that can be reduced to a routine. Alan Blinder of Princeton University, argues that the jobs graduates have traditionally performed are if anything more "offshorable" than low-wage ones. A plumber or lorry-driver's job cannot be outsourced to India. A computer programmer's can.
G. A university education is still a prerequisite for entering some of the great industries, such as medicine, law and academia (學術界), that provide secure and well-paying jobs. Over the 20th century these industries did a wonderful job of raising barriers to entry--sometimes for good reasons (nobody wants to be operated on by a barber) and sometimes for self-interested ones. But these industries are beginning to bend the roles. Newspapers are fighting a losing battle with the blogosphere. Universities are replacing tenure-track professors with non-tenured staff. Law firms are contracting out routine work such as"discovery" (digging up documents relevant to a lawsuit) to computerized-search specialists such as Blackstone Discovery. Even doctors are threatened, as patients find advice online and treatment in Walmart's new health centers.
H.Thomas Malone of MIT argues that these changes--automation, globalizafion and deregulation--may be part of a bigger change: the application of the division of labor to brain-work. Adam Smith's factory managers broke the production of pins into 18 components. In the same way, companies are increasingly breaking the production of brain-work into ever tinier slices. TopCoder chops up IT projects into bite-sized chunks and then serves them up to a worldwide workforce of freelance coders.
I.These changes will undoubtedly improve the productivity of brain-workers. They will allow consumers to sidestep (規避 ) the professional industries that have extracted high rents for their services. And they will empower many brain-workers to focus on what they are best at and contract out more tedious tasks to others. But the reconfiguration of brain-work will also make life far less cozy and predictable for the next generation of graduates.
The creative destruction that has happened to blue-collar workers in the past also starts to affect the cognitive elite.
6、
回答題
農歷一月一日是中國的春節(Spring Festival),是新一年的開始。就像西方的圣誕節一樣,人們會買很多東西如衣服、食品或煙花爆竹給孩子們。在除夕那一天,人們還會在門上貼門神和春聯(couplets)。此外,年夜飯(reunion dinner)也是必不可少的。全家人圍坐在一張桌子上分享美食,有說有笑。到了新年那一天,人們便開始走親訪友了。每到這時,孩子們是開心的,因為他們可以從長輩那里得到壓歲錢。
Climate change has claimed its latest victim:Limacina helicina,a planktonic,predatory(捕食的)sea snail that’s a member of the taxonomic group more(36)__________ known as sea butterflies.(The name is(37)__________ from the wing-like lobes(葉瓣)the tiny creatures use to get around.)In a study(38)__________ published in joumal Proceedings of the Royal Society B,a group of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)and Oregon State University have fQund that the Pacific Ocean’s decreasing pH—its acidifying(酸化),in other words-is dissolving L.helicina’s thin shells.
The researchers collected sea butterfly(39)__________ from 13 sites along the Pacific coast(between Washington and southern CaliforniA.,going over each with a scanning electron microscope.More than half of the shells(53%)from onshore individuals(40)__________ signs of“severe dissolution damage,”while 24%of(41)
__________ individuals suffered dissolution damage.The study’s(42)__________ investigator,Dr.NinaBednarsek of NOAA,described the affected L.helicina shells as having a texture not unlike“cauliflower”or“sandpaper.”
According to the paper,there was a“strong positive(43)__________ ”between the proportion of sea butterflies with severe shell dissolution damage and“the percentage of undersaturated(未達到飽和的)water”near the ocean’s surface.The researchers conclude“shell dissolution owing to(human.caused ocean(44)_________)
has doubled in near shore habitats since pre.industrial conditions across this region and is on track to triple by 2050,”a truly(45)__________ prediction.Moreover,the broader implications for ecosystem are unclear,as damaged shells make it harder for L.helicina to fight infections,stay buoyant,and protect themselves from predators.
A.showed
B.recently
C.protected
D.commonly
E.derived
F.samples
G.offshore
H.principal
I.noticed
J.correlation
K.encouraging
L.seaward
M.acidification
N.grim
O.pollution
__________
簡答題
7、 中華民族的傳統文化博大精深,源遠流長。早在2000多年前,就產生了以孔盂為代表的儒家學說(Confucianism)和以老子和莊子為代表的道家學說(Taoism),以及其他許多也在中國思想史上有地位的學說和學派(doctrines)。這就是有名的諸子百家(the masters’ hundred schools)。從孔夫子到孫中山。中華民族的傳統文化有許多寶貴的思想和品質,許多人民性和民主性的好東西。比如,強調仁愛、強調群體、強調天下為公。
8、
9、
10、麻將是中國人主要的休閑娛樂之一。它起源于中國,其歷史可追溯到三四千年以前。麻將原是皇家和王公貴族們的游戲,在長期的歷史演變過程中,逐步從宮廷流傳到民間,到清朝中期基本定型。麻將自1920年傳入美國后。受歡迎的程度并不比在中國遜色。在南加州就常常舉辦麻將比賽。有人說,麻將之所以在國外那么受歡迎,正是源于外國人對中國古老文化的認知和認同(recogn i t i on and acceptance)。
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