2018年6月英语六级真题及答案(第三套)

2018年6月英语六级真题及答案（第三套）

Part I Writing (30 minutes)

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30minutes to write an essay on the importance of building trust between

businesses and consumers. You can cite examples to illustrate your

words but no more than 200 words.

The Importance of Building Trust Between Businesses and Consumers Today, in the context of this era featured by

increasing commercialization an d digitalization, mutually-trusted relations between businesses and consumers appear to be

particularly important.

As for me businesses should take a leading role in establishing the trust relationship: to be honest with their consumers.

Firstly, if a business has a dishonest attitude toward its customers, the customers will lack purchasing confidence in its

goods or services, which will bring huge economic loss to the business. What's worse, the adverse side effect of such

dishonesty can endanger the business and it is impossible to recover. The collapse of Sanlu Milk Powder Company is a

testament to this. Moreover, the incident of poisonous milk has exerted devastating consequences on the whole milk powder

market. Be sides, because of the proliferation of counterfeit goods, more consumers lose confidence in domestic products,

and then they have no alternative but to resort to foreign brands, which is one reason why cross-border online shopping is

gaining more and more popularity in China.

Therefore, it is high time for us to strengthen the importance of maintaining trust between businesses and consumers to

promote the healthy development t of the whole social economy.

views. You should write at least 150

Part II Listening Comprehension (30 minutes)

说明： 由于 2018 年 6 月六级考试全国共考了两套听力，本套真题听力与前 2 套内容相同，只是选项顺序不同，因此在本套真题中不再重复出现。

Part III Reading Comprehension (40 minutes)

Section A

Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list

of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your

choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on

Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the center. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than

once.

Did Sarah Josepha Hale write "Mary's Little Lamb," the eternal nursery rhyme(儿歌) about a girl named Mary with a

stubborn lamb? This is still disputed, but it's clear that the woman 26for writing it was one of America's most fascinating 27 .

In honor of the poem's publication on May 24, 1830, here's more about the 28 author's life.

Hale wasn't just a writer, she was also a 29 social advocate, and she was particularly 30 with an ideal New England,

which she associated with abundant Thanksgiving meals that she claimed had "a deep moral influence." She began a

nationwide 31 to have a national holiday declared that would bring families together while celebrating the 32 festivals. In

1863, after 17 years of advocacy including letters to five presidents, Hale got it. President Abraham Lincoln, during the

Civil War, issued a 33 setting aside the last Thursday in November for the holiday.

The true authorship of "Mary's Little Lamb" is disputed. According to the New England Historical Society, Hale wrote

only part of the poem, but claimed authorship. Regardless of the author, it seems that the poem was 34 by a real event.

When young Mary Sawyer was followed to school by a lamb in 1816, it caused some problems. A bystander named John

Roulstone wrote a poem about the event, then, at some point, Hale herself seems to have helped write it.

However, if a 1916 piece by her great-niece is to be trusted, Hale claimed for the 35 of her life that "some other people

pretended that someone else wrote the poem".

A) campaign

B) career

C) characters

D) features

E) fierce

F) inspired

G) latter

H)obsessed

I) proclamation

J) rectified

K) reputed

L) rest

M) supposed

N)traditional

O) versatile

Section B

Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains

information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. 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.

Grow Plants Without Water

A) Ever since humanity began to farm our own food, we’ve faced the unpredictable rain that is both friend and enemy.

It comes and goes without much warning, and a field of lush (茂盛的) leafy greens one year can dry up and blow away the

next. Food security and fortunes depend on sufficient rain, and nowhere more so than in Africa, where 96% of farmland

depends on rain instead of the irrigation common in more developed places. It has consequences: South Africa's ongoing

drought—the worst in three decades—will cost at least a quarter of its corn crop this year.

B) Biologist Jill Farrant of the University of Cape Town in South Africa says that nature has plenty of answers for

people who want to grow crops in places with unpredictable rainfall. She is hard at work finding a way to take traits from

rare wild plants that adapt to extreme dry weather and use them in food crops. As the earth's climate changes and rainfall

becomes even less predictable in some places, those answers will grow even more valuable. "The type of farming I'm

aiming for is literally so that people can survive as it's going to get more and more dry," Farrant says.

C) Extreme conditions produce extremely tough plants. In the rusty red deserts of South Africa, steep-sided rocky hills

called inselbergs rear up from the plains like the bones of the earth. The hills are remnants of an earlier geological era,

scraped bare of most soil and exposed to the elements. Yet on these and similar formations in deserts around the world, a

few fierce plants have adapted to endure under ever-changing conditions.

D) Farrant calls them resurrection plants (复苏植物). During months without water under a harsh sun, they wither,

shrink and contract until they look like a pile of dead gray leaves. But rainfall can revive them in a matter of hours. Her

time-lapse (间歇性拍摄的) videos of the revivals look like someone playing a tape of the plant's death in reverse.

E) The big difference between "drought-tolerant" plants and these tough plants: metabolism. Many different kinds of

plants have developed tactics to weather dry spells. Some plants store reserves of water to see them through a drought;

others send roots deep down to subsurface water supplies. But once these plants use up their stored reserve or tap out the

underground supply, they cease growing and start to die. They may be able to handle a drought of some length, and many

people use the term "drought tolerant" to describe such plants, but they never actually stop needing to consume water, so

Farrant prefers to call them drought resistant.

F) Resurrection plants, defined as those capable of recovering from holding less than 0.1 grams of water per gram of

dry mass, are different. They lack water-storing structures, and their existence on rock faces prevents them from tapping

groundwater, so they have instead developed the ability to change their metabolism. When they detect an extended dry

period, they divert their metabolisms, producing sugars and certain stress-associated proteins and other materials in their

tissues. As the plant dries, these resources take on first the properties of honey, then rubber, and finally enter a glass-like

state that is "the most stable state that the plant can maintain," Farrant says. That slows the plant's metabolism and protects

its dried-out tissues. The plants also change shape, shrinking to minimize the surface area through which their remaining

water might evaporate. They can recover from months and years without water, depending on the species.

G) What else can do this dry-out-and-revive trick? Seeds—almost all of them. At the start of her career, Farrant studied

"recalcitrant seeds (顽拗性种子)," such as avocados, coffee and lychee. While tasty, such seeds are delicate—they cannot

bud and grow if they dry out (as you may know if you've ever tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit). In the seed world,

that makes them rare, because most seeds from flowering plants are quite robust. Most seeds can wait out the dry,

unwelcoming seasons until conditions are right and they sprout (发芽). Yet once they start growing, such plants seem not to

retain the ability to hit the pause button on metabolism in their stems or leaves.

H) After completing her Ph. D. on seeds, Farrant began investigating whether it might be possible to isolate the

properties that make most seeds so resilient (迅速恢复活力的) and transfer them to other plant tissues. What Farrant and

others have found over the past two decades is that there are many genes involved in resurrection plants' response to dryness.

Many of them are the same that regulate how seeds become dryness-tolerant while still attached to their parent plants. Now

they are trying to figure out what molecular signaling processes activate those seed-building genes in resurrection

plants—and how to reproduce them in crops. "Most genes are regulated by a master set of genes," Farrant says. "We're

looking at gene promoters and what would be their master switch."

I) Once Farrant and her colleagues feel they have a better sense of which switches to throw, they will have to find the

best way to do so in useful crops. "I'm trying three methods of breeding," Farrant says: conventional, genetic modification

and gene editing. She says she is aware that plenty of people do not want to eat genetically modified crops, but she is

pushing ahead with every available tool until one works. Farmers and consumers alike can choose whether or not to use

whichever version prevails："I'm giving people an option."

J) Farrant and others in the resurrection business got together last year to discuss the best species of resurrection plant

to use as a lab model. Just like medical researchers use rats to test ideas for human medical treatments, botanists use plants

that are relatively easy to grow in a lab or greenhouse setting to test their ideas for related species. The Queensland rock

violet is one of the best studied resurrection plants so far, with a draft genome (基因图谱) published last year by a Chinese

team. Also last year, Farrant and colleagues published a detailed molecular study of another candidate, Xerophyta viscosa, a

tough-as-nail South African plant with lily-like flowers, and she says that a genome is on the way. One or both of these

models will help researchers test their ideas—so far mostly done in the lab—on test plots.

K) Understanding the basic science first is key. There are good reasons why crop plants do not use dryness defenses

already. For instance, there's a high energy cost in switching from a regular metabolism to an almost-no-water metabolism.

It will also be necessary to understand what sort of yield farmers might expect and to establish the plant's safety. "The

yield is never going to be high," Farrant says, so these plants will be targeted not at Iowa farmers trying to squeeze more

cash out of high-yield fields, but subsistence farmers who need help to survive a drought like the present one in South

Africa. "My vision is for the subsistence farmer," Farrant says. "I'm targeting crops that are of African value."

36. There are a couple of plants tough and adaptable enough to survive on bare rocky hills and in deserts.

37. Farrant is trying to isolate genes in resurrection plants and reproduce them in crops.

38. Farmers in South Africa are more at the mercy of nature, especially inconsistent rainfall.

39. Resurrection crops are most likely to be the choice of subsistence farmers.

40. Even though many plants have developed various tactics to cope with dry weather, they cannot survive a prolonged

drought.

41. Despite consumer resistance, researchers are pushing ahead with genetic modification of crops.

42. Most seeds can pull through dry spells and begin growing when conditions are ripe, but once this process starts, it

cannot be held back.

43. Farrant is working hard to cultivate food crops that can survive extreme dryness by studying the traits of rare wild

plants.

44. By adjusting their metabolism, resurrection plants can recover from an extended period of drought.

45. Resurrection plants can come back to life in a short time after a rainfall.

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 marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark

the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the center.

Passage One

Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

Human memory is notoriously unreliable. Even people with the sharpest facial-recognition skills can only remember so

much.

It's tough to quantify how good a person is at remembering. No one really knows how many different faces someone

can recall, for example, but various estimates tend to hover in the thousands—based on the number of acquaintances a

person might have.

Machines aren't limited this way. Give the right computer a massive database of faces, and it can process what it

sees—then recognize a face it's told to find—with remarkable speed and precision. This skill is what supports the enormous

promise of facial-recognition software in the 21st century. It's also what makes contemporary surveillance systems so scary.

The thing is, machines still have limitations when it comes to facial recognition. And scientists are only just beginning

to understand what those constraints are. To begin to figure out how computers are struggling, researchers at the University

of Washington created a massive database of faces—they call it MegaFace—and tested a variety of facial-recognition

algorithms (算法) as they scaled up in complexity. The idea was to test the machines on a database that included up to 1

million different images of nearly 700,000 different people—and not just a large database featuring a relatively small

number of different faces, more consistent with what's been used in other research.

As the databases grew, machine accuracy dipped across the board. Algorithms that were right 95% of the time when

they were dealing with a 13,000-image database, for example, were accurate about 70% of the time when confronted with 1

million images. That's still pretty good, says one of the researchers, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman. "Much better than we

expected," she said.

Machines also had difficulty adjusting for people who look a lot alike—either doppelgangers (长相极相似的人),

whom the machine would have trouble identifying as two separate people, or the same person who appeared in different

photos at different ages or in different lighting, whom the machine would incorrectly view as separate people.

"Once we scale up, algorithms must be sensitive to tiny changes in identities and at the same time invariant to lighting,

pose, age," Kemelmacher-Shlizerman said.

The trouble is, for many of the researchers who'd like to design systems to address these challenges, massive datasets

for experimentation just don't exist—at least, not in formats that are accessible to academic researchers.

Training sets like the ones Google and Facebook have are private. There are no public databases that contain millions

of faces. MegaFace's creators say it's the largest publicly available facial-recognition dataset out there.

"An ultimate face recognition algorithm should perform with billions of people in a dataset," the researchers wrote.

46. Compared with human memory, machines can ________.

A) identify human faces more efficiently

B) tell a friend from a mere acquaintance

C) store an unlimited number of human faces

D) perceive images invisible to the human eye

47. Why did researchers create MegaFace?

A) To enlarge the volume of the facial-recognition database.

B) To increase the variety of facial-recognition software.

C) To understand computers' problems with facial recognition.

D) To reduce the complexity of facial-recognition algorithms.

48. What does the passage say about machine accuracy?

A) It falls short of researchers' expectations.

B) It improves with added computing power.

C) It varies greatly with different algorithms.

D) It decreases as the database size increases.

49. What is said to be a shortcoming-of facial-recognition machines?

A) They cannot easily tell apart people with near-identical appearances.

B) They have difficulty identifying changes in facial expressions.

C) They are not sensitive to minute changes in people's mood.

D) They have problems distinguishing people of the same age.

50. What is the difficulty confronting researchers of facial-recognition machines?

A) No computer is yet able to handle huge datasets of human faces.

B) There do not exist public databases with sufficient face samples.

C) There are no appropriate algorithms to process the face samples.

D) They have trouble converting face datasets into the right format.

Passage Two

Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

There're currently 21.5 million students in America, and many will be funding their college on borrowed money. Given

that there's now over $1.3 trillion in student loans on the books, it's pretty clear that many students are far from sensible.

The average student's debt upon graduation now approaches $40,000, and as college becomes ever more expensive, calls to

make it "free" are multiplying. Even Hillary Clinton says that when it comes to college, "Costs won't be a barrier."

But the only way college could be free is if the faculty and staff donated their time, the buildings required no

maintenance, and campuses required no utilities. As long as it's impossible to produce something from nothing, costs are

absolutely a barrier.

The actual question we debate is who should pay for people to go to college. If taxpayers are to bear the cost of

forgiving student loans, shouldn't they have a say in how their money is used?

At least taxpayers should be able to decide what students will study on the public dime. If we're going to force

taxpayers to foot the bill for college degrees, students should only study those subjects that're of greatest benefit to

taxpayers. After all, students making their own choices in this respect is what caused the problem in the first place. We

simply don't need more poetry, gender studies, or sociology majors. How do we know which subjects benefit society?

Easy. Average starting salaries give a clear indication of what type of training society needs its new workers to have.

Certainly, there're benefits to a college major beyond the job a student can perform. But if we're talking about the benefits to

society, the only thing that matters is what the major enables the student to produce for society. And the value of what the

student can produce is reflected in the wage employers are willing to pay the student to produce it.

A low wage for elementary school teachers, however, doesn't mean elementary education isn't important. It simply

means there're too many elementary school teachers already.

Meanwhile, there're few who're willing and able to perform jobs requiring a petroleum engineering major, so the value

of one more of those people is very high.

So we can have taxpayers pick up students' tuition in exchange for dictating what those students will study. Or we can

allow students both to choose their majors and pay for their education themselves. But in the end, one of two things is true:

Either a college major is worth its cost or it isn't. If yes, taxpayer financing isn't needed. If not, taxpayer financing isn't

desirable. Either way, taxpayers have no business paying for students' college education.

51. What does the author think of college students funding their education through loans?

A) They only expect to get huge returns.

B) They are acting in an irrational way.

C) They benefit at taxpayers' expense.

D) They will regret doing so someday.

52. In the author's opinion, free college education is ________.

A) impractical

B) unsustainable

C) a goal to strive for

D) a way to social equality

53. What should students do if taxpayers are to bear their college costs?

A) Work even harder to repay society.

B) Choose their subjects more carefully.

C) Choose majors that will serve society's practical needs.

D) Allow taxpayers to participate in college administration.

54. What does the author say about the value of a student's college education?

A) It is underestimated by profit-seeking employers.

B) It is to be proved by what they can do on the job.

C) It is well reflected in their average starting salary.

D) It is embodied in how they remove social barriers.

55. What message does the author want to convey in the passage?

A) Students should think carefully whether to go to college.

B) Taxpayers should only finance the most gifted students.

C) The worth of a college education is open to debate.

D) College students should fund their own education.

Part IV Translation (30 minutes)

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English. You should write

your answer on Answer Sheet 2.

自行车曾经是中国城乡最主要的交通工具，中国一度被称为“自行车王国”。如今，随着城市交通拥堵和空气污染日益严重，骑自行车又开始流行起来。近来，中国企业家将移动互联网技术与传统自行车结合在一起，发明了一种称为共享单车（shared bikes）的商业模式。共享单车的出现使骑车出行更加方便，人们仅需一部手机就可以随时使用共享单车。为了鼓励人们骑车出行，很多城市修建了自行车道。现在，越来越多的中国人也喜欢通过骑车健身。

Bicycle used to be the leading means of transportation in China's cities and villages, and China was once called "the

Kingdom of Bicycles". Nowadays, with traffic congestion and air pollution becoming more and more serious in cities ,

riding a bicycle is becoming popular again. Recently, China's entrepreneurs have combined mobile Internet technologies

with bicycles and invented the business model of bike-sharing. The appearance of shared bikes has made it more convenient

for people to get around, and people can ride bikes at anytime only with the help of a mobile phone. To encourage people to

travel by bike, many cities have built bike lanes. Now, more and more Chinese people like exercising by riding bikes.

Part III Reading Comprehension

26-35: KCMEH ANIFL

36-45: CHAKE IGBFD

46-55: ACDAB BACCD