大学英语四级-260及答案解析.doc

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1、大学英语四级-260 及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：0，分数：0.00)The Recorded WorldAs cameras become ubiquitous (普遍存在的 ) and able to identify people, more safeguards on privacy will be needed. A. “This season there is something at the seaside worse than sharks,“ declared a newspaper in 189

2、0. “It is the amateur photographer.“ The invention of the handheld camera shocked the 19th-century society, as did the “Kodak fiends“ (柯达狂人) who patrolled beaches snapping sunbathers. B. More than a century later, amateur photography is once more a troubling issue. Citizens of rich countries have go

3、t used to being watched by closed-circuit cameras that guard roads and cities. But as cameras shrink and the cost of storing data falls sharply, it is individuals who are taking the pictures. C. Some 10,000 people are already testing a prototype of Google Glass, a miniature computer worm like eyegla

4、sses. It aims to have all the functions of a smartphone in a device put on a person“s nose. Its flexible frame holds both a camera and a tiny screen, and makes it easy for users to take photos, send messages and search for things online. D. Glass may fail, but a wider revolution is under way. In Rus

5、sia, where insurance fraud is commonly seen, at least 1 million cars already have cameras on their dashboards (仪表盘) that film the road ahead. Police forces in America are starting to issue officers with video cameras, pinned to their uniforms, which record their interactions with the public. Collar-

6、cams help anxious cat-lovers watch their wandering pets carefully. Paparazzi (狗仔队) have started to use drones to photograph celebrities in their gardens or on yachts. Hobbyists are even devising clever ways to get cameras into space. E. Ubiquitous recording can already do a lot of good. Some patient

7、s with brain injuries have been given cameras: looking back at images can help them recover their memories. Dash-cams can help resolve insurance claims and encourage people to drive better. Police-cams can discourage criminals from making groundless complaints against police officers and officers fr

8、om abusing criminals. A British soldier has just been convicted of murdering a wounded Afghan because the act was captured by a colleague“s helmet-camera. Videos showing the line of sight of experienced surgeons and engineers can help train their successors and be used in liability disputes. Lenses

9、linked to computers are reading street-signs and product labels to partially sighted people. F. Optimists see broader benefits ahead. Plenty of people carry activity trackers, worn on the wrist or placed in a pocket, to monitor their exercise or sleep patterns; cameras could do the job more effectiv

10、ely, perhaps also spying on their wearers“ diets. “Personal black boxes“ might be able to transmit pictures if their owner falls victim to an accident or crime. Tiny cameras trained to recognise faces could become personal digital assistants, making conversations as searchable as documents and e-mai

11、ls. Already a small band of “life-loggers“ (生活记录器) stored years of footage (镜头) into databases of “e-memories“. G. Not everybody will be thrilled by these prospects. A perfect digital memory would probably be a pain, preserving unhappy events as well as cherished ones. Suspicious spouses and employe

12、rs might feet entitled to review it. H. The bigger worry is for those in front of the cameras, not behind them. School bullies already use illegal snaps from mobile phones to embarrass their victims. The web is full of secret photos of women, snapped in public places. Wearable cameras will make such

13、 immoral photography easier. And the huge, looming issue is the growing sophistication of face-recognition technologies, which are starting to enable businesses and governments to get information about individuals by searching the billions of images online. The combination of cameras everywherein ba

14、rs, on streets, in offices, on people“s headswith the algorithms (算法) run by social networks and other service providers that process stored and published images is a powerful and alarming one. We may not be far from a world in which your movements could be tracked all the time, where a stranger wal

15、king down the street can immediately identify exactly who you are. I. Well, we still strongly held beliefs that technological progress should generally be welcomed, not fearedruns up against an even deeper impulse, in favour of liberty. Freedom has to include some right to privacy: if every move you

16、 make is being recorded, liberty is limited. J. One option is to ban devices that seem annoying. The use of dashboard cameras is forbidden in Austria. Drivers who film the road can face a （分数：25.00）(1).Not everyone feels happy about the prospects of cameras.（分数：2.50）(2).Individuals began to use came

17、ras because cameras became smaller and the cost of storing data declined sharply.（分数：2.50）(3).American police officers pinned video cameras to their uniforms so as to record their interactions with the public.（分数：2.50）(4).Society should try harder to regulate technologies about where and how they ca

18、n be used.（分数：2.50）(5).Recording every move of people will do harm to liberty.（分数：2.50）(6).A newspaper in 1890 claimed that the amateur photographer was more terrible than sharks at the seaside.（分数：2.50）(7).Privacy would be gone very quickly if no measures are taken to protect it right now.（分数：2.50）

19、(8).Optimists believe that cameras can bring much more benefits in the future.（分数：2.50）(9).Increasingly sophisticated face-recognition technologies are making businesses and governments able to get personal information.（分数：2.50）(10).Pictures taken by cameras can help some patients with brain injurie

20、s regain their memories.（分数：2.50）Asia“s Lonely HeartsWomen are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious. A. Twenty years ago there was a debate about whether there were specific “Asian values“. Most attention focused on the doubtful claims that democracy was not among them. Bu

21、t a more interesting, if less noticed, argument was that traditional family values were stronger in Asia than in America and Europe, and that this partly accounted for Asia“s economic success. In the words of Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore and a keen advocate of Asian values, the C

22、hinese family encouraged “scholarship and hard work and thrift and deferment (推迟) of present enjoyment for future gain“. B. On the face of it his claim appears persuasive still. In most of Asia, marriage is widespread and illegitimacy (私生) almost unknown. In contrast, half of marriages in some Weste

23、rn countries end in divorce, and half of all children are born outside wedlock (已婚状况). The recent riots across Britain, whose origins many believe lie in an absence of either parental guidance or filial (子女的) respect, seem to underline a profound difference between East and West. C. Yet marriage is

24、changing fast in East, South-East and South Asia, even though each region has different traditions. The changes are different from those that took place in the West in the second half of the 20th century. Divorce, though rising in some countries, remains comparatively rare. What“s happening in Asia

25、is a flight from marriage. D. Marriage rates are falling partly because people are postponing getting married. Marriage ages have risen all over the world, but the increase is particularly marked in Asia. People there now marry even later than they do in the West. The mean age of marriage in the ric

26、hest placesJapan, Taiwan China, South Korea and Hong Kong Chinahas risen sharply in the past few decades, to reach 29-30 for women and 31-33 for men. E. A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all. Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably h

27、alf of those will always be. Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapo

28、re, 27%. F. So far, the trend has not affected Asia“s two giants, China and India. But it is likely to, as the economic factors that have driven it elsewhere in Asia sweep through those two countries as well; and its consequences will be exacerbated (加剧) by the sex-selective abortion practised for a

29、 generation there. By 2050, there will be 60m more men of marriageable age than women in China and India. G. Women are retreating from marriage as they go into the workplace. That“s partly because, for a woman, being both employed and married is tough in Asia. Women there are the primary caregivers

30、for husbands, children and, often, for ageing parents; and even when in full-time employment, they are expected to continue to play this role. This is true elsewhere in the world, but the burden that Asian women carry is particularly heavy. Japanese women, who typically work 40 hours a week in the o

31、ffice, then do, on average, another 30 hours of housework. Their husbands, on average, do three hours. And Asian women who give up work to look after children find it hard to return when the children are grown. H. Not surprisingly, Asian women have an unusually pessimistic view of marriage. Accordin

32、g to a survey carried out in 2011, many fewer Japanese women felt positive about their marriage than did Japanese men, or American women or men. I. At the same time as employment makes marriage tougher for women, it offers them an alternative. More women are financially independent, so more of them

33、can pursue a single life that may appeal more than the hard and boring traditional marriage. More education has also contributed to the decline of marriage, because Asian women with the most education have always been the most reluctant to wedand there are now many more highly educated women. J. The

34、 flight from marriage in Asia is thus the result of the greater freedom that women enjoy these days, which is to be celebrated. But it is also creating social problems. Compared with the West, Asian countries have invested less in pensions and other forms of social protection, on the assumption that

35、 the family will look after ageing or ill relatives. That can no longer be taken for granted. K. The decline of marriage is also contributing to the collapse in the birth rate. Fertility in East Asia has fallen from 5.3 children per woman in the late 1960s to 1.6 now. In countries with the lowest ma

36、rriage rates, the fertility rate is nearer 1.0. That is beginning to cause huge demographic (人口统计学的) problems, as populations age with startling speed. And there are other, less obvious issues. L. Can marriage be revived in Asia? Maybe, if expectations of those roles of both sexes change; but shifti

37、ng traditional attitudes is hard. Governments cannot make laws to abolish popular prejudices. They can, though, encourage change. Relaxing divorce laws might boost marriage. Women who now steer clear of wedlock might be more willing to tie the knot if they know it can be untiednot just because they

38、can get out of the marriage if it doesn“t work, but also because their freedom to leave might keep their husbands on their toes. Family law should give divorced women a more generous share of the couple“s assets. Governments should also legislate to get employers to offer both maternal and paternal

39、leave, and provide or subsidise (资助) child care. If taking on such expenses helped promote family life, it might reduce the burden on the state of looking after the old. M. Asian governments have long taken the view that the superiority of their family life was one of their big advantages over the W

40、est. That confidence is no longer warranted. They need to wake up to the huge social changes happening in their countries and think about how to cope with the consequences.（分数：25.00）(1).The increase of marriage ages is one of the reasons for falling marriage rates.（分数：2.50）(2).Asian women are very p

41、essimistic about marriage.（分数：2.50）(3).It“s quite possible that half of the Japanese women who remain single in their early 30s will never get married.（分数：2.50）(4).Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, thought highly of Asian values.（分数：2.50）(5).The decline of marriage leads to a much lo

42、wer birth rate in a short time.（分数：2.50）(6).Regardless of different traditions in each region, marriage is changing fast in East, South-East and South Asia.（分数：2.50）(7).As more women can support themselves financially, more of them are able to choose a single life instead of marriage.（分数：2.50）(8).Un

43、til now, China and India haven“t been influenced by the trend of not marrying.（分数：2.50）(9).Asian people now even get married later than the Westerners.（分数：2.50）(10).Many Asian women“s choice of running away from marriage can create social problems.（分数：2.50）China Has Hipsters, TooA. Nowadays, as Chin

44、a“s middle class swells in numberand its people discover the pleasures and disappointments of a life spent pursuing material comfortthere has come the emergence of a distinct counter-culture. In Chinese, they are the wenyi qingnian, or wenqing for short, literally meaning “cultured youth“. It“s Chin

45、a“s closest equivalent to the alternately beloved and criticized English word, “hipster“. B. What does a typical “cultured youth“ look like? Baidu Baike, China“s version of Wikipedia, contains an entry on the term that quotes the writer and musician Guo Xiaohan: “I think I“m a wenyi qingnian, and a

46、very typical one. I like poetry, novels, indie music (独立音乐), European cinema, taking pictures, writing blogs, cats, gardening, making dessert and designing environmentally friendly bags.“ C. Spiritual at heart, yet living in a very material, money-driven modern society, wenqing are marked as highly

47、individualistic, romantic, cultural connoisseurs (行家). D. They are more likely to be middle-to-upper class citizens, and stand in deliberate contrast to their Louis Vuitton-bag toting, BMW-driving, nouveau riche (暴发户) counterparts. They are defined much less by what they own, and much more by how th

48、ey think. And as Faye Li, a 27-year-old NGO worker in Beijing, said with slight mockery, “They always like to be different from everybody else.“ E. Like hipsters, wenqing strongly resist labeling themselves as such. The term “cultured youth“ can divide Chinese audiences, alternately attracting admir

49、ation or mockery. A perfect example emerged on Sina Weibo with this post entitled, “Shanghai “cultured youth“ girls aboard a subway reading poetry“. F. The post features a video showing three women dressed in striped dresses with tiny, feathered top hats pinned to their hair. On board a crowded subway carriage they read aloud a poem about nature. Some commenters congratulated the performers, commending them for their creativity and daring. But others called the video “rubbish“ or noted that there did not seem to be much difference between “cultured youth“ and “dumbass youth“ which wri