2016年12月大学英语六级考试真题与答案下载(第二套)

　　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 centre.

　　Passage One

　　Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

　　Dr. Donald Sadoway at MIT started his own battery company with the hope of changing the world's energy future. It's a dramatic endorsement for a technology most people think about only when their smartphone goes dark. But Sadoway isn't alone in trumpeting energy storage as a missing link to a cleaner, more efficient, and more equitable energy future.

　　Scientists and engineers have long believed in the promise of batteries to change the world.Advanced batteries are moving out of specialized markets and creeping into the mainstream, signaling a tipping point for forward-looking technologies such as electric cars and rooftop solar propels.

　　The ubiquitous (无所不在的) battery has already come a long way, of course. For better or worse, batteries make possible our mobile-first lifestyles, our screen culture, our increasingly globalized world. Still, as impressive as all this is, it may be trivial compared with what comes next.Having already enabled a communications revolution, the battery is now poised to transform just about everything else.

　　The wireless age is expanding to include not just our phones, tablets, and laptops, but also our cars, homes, and even whole communities. In emerging economies, rural communities are bypassing the wires and wooden poles that spread power. Instead, some in Africa and Asia are seeing their first lightbulbs illuminated by the power of sunlight stored in batteries.

　　Today, energy storage is a $ 33 billion global industry that generates nearly 100 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. By the end of the decade, it's expected to be worth over $ 50 billion and generate 160 gigawatt-hours, enough to attract the attention of major companies that might not otherwise be interested in a decidedly pedestrian technology. Even utility companies, which have long Viewed batteries and alternative forms of energy as a threat, are learning to embrace the technologies as enabling rather than disrupting.

　　Today's battery breakthroughs come as the. world looks to expand modern energy access to the billion or so people without it, while also cutting back on fuels that warm the planet.Those simultaneous challenges appear less overwhelming with increasingly better answers to a centuries-old question: how to make power portable.

　　To be sure, the battery still has a long way to go before the nightly recharge completely replaces the weekly trip to the gas station. A battery-powered world comes with its own risks, too. What happens to the centralized electric grid, which took decades and billions of dollars to build, as more and more people become "prosumers," who produce and consume their own energy onsite?

　　No one knows which--if any--battery technology will ultimately dominate, but one thing remains clear. The future of energy is in how we store it.

　　46. What does Dr. Sadoway think of energy storage?

　　A. It involves the application of sophisticated technology.

　　B. It is the direction energy development should follow.

　　C. It will prove to be a profitable business.

　　D. It is a technology benefiting everyone.

　　47. What is most likely to happen when advanced batteries become widely used?

　　A. Mobile-first lifestyles will become popular.

　　B. The globalization process will be accelerated.

　　C. Communications will take more diverse forms.

　　D. The world will undergo revolutionary changes.

　　48. In some rural communities of emerging economies, people have begun to ___________.

　　A. find digital devices simply indispensable

　　B. communicate primarily by mobile phone

　　C. light their homes with stored solar energy

　　D. distribute power with wires and wooden poles

　　49. Utility companies have begun to realize that battery technologies ___________.

　　A. benefit their business

　　B. transmit power faster

　　C. promote innovation

　　D. encourage competition

　　50. What does the author imply about the centralized electric grid?

　　A. It might become a thing of the past.

　　B. It might turn out to be a "prosumer".

　　C. It will be easier to operate and maintain.

　　D. It will have to be completely transformed.

　　Passage Two

　　Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

　　More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as distinct groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.

　　Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. In an article published in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories need to be phased out. "Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Pääbo, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes (基因组) of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.

　　Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said that modem genetics research is operating in a paradox: on the one hand, race is understood to be a useful tool to illuminate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity.

　　Assumptions about genetic differences between people of different races could be particularly dangerous in a medical setting. "If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.

　　So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Yudell said scientists need to get more specific with their language, perhaps using terms like "ancestry" or "population" that might more precisely reflect the relationship between humans and their genes, on both the individual and population level. The researchers also acknowledged that there are a few areas where race as a construct might still be useful in scientific research: as a political and social, but not biological, variable.

　　"While we argue phasing out racial terminology (术语) in the biological sciences, we also acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism, although filled with lots of challenges, remains necessary given our need to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities (差异) between groups. " Yudell said.

　　51. Du Bois was opposed to the use of race as ________.

　　A. a basis for explaining human genetic diversity

　　B. an aid to understanding different populations

　　C. an explanation for social and cultural differences

　　D. a term to describe individual human characteristics

　　52. The study by Svante Pääbo served as an example to show ________.

　　A. modern genetics research is likely to fuel racial conflicts

　　B. race is a poorly defined marker of human genetic diversity

　　C. race as a biological term can explain human genetic diversity

　　D. genetics research should consider social and cultural variables

　　53. The example of the disease cystic fibrosis underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry demonstrates that ________.

　　A. it is absolutely necessary to put race aside in making diagnosis

　　B. it is important to include social variables in genetics research

　　C. racial categories for genetic diversity could lead to wrong clinical predictions

　　D. discrimination against black people may cause negligence in clinical treatment

　　54. What is Yudell's suggestion to scientists?

　　A. They be more precise with the language they use.

　　B. They refrain from using politically sensitive terms.

　　C. They throw out irrelevant concepts in their research.

　　D. They examine all possible variables in their research.

　　55. What can be inferred from Yudell's remark in the last paragraph?

　　A. Clinging to racism prolongs inequity and discrimination.

　　B. Physiological disparities are quite striking among races.

　　C. Doing away with racial discrimination is challenging.

　　D. Racial terms are still useful in certain fields of study.