Passage 1

　　Well my current research is really about consumer behavior. So recently I've looked at young people's drinking and it's obviously a major concern to Government at the moment.

　　I've also looked at how older people are represented in the media; again, it's of major current interest with older people becoming a much larger proportion of UK and indeed world society.

　　I'm also interested in how consumers operate online, and how that online behavior might be different from how they operate offline when they go to the shops.

　　Well, I think that the important thing here is to actually understand what's happening from the consumer's perspective. One of the things that businesses and indeed Government organizations often fail to do is to really see what is happening from the consumer's perspective.

　　For example, in the case of young people's drinking, one of the things that I've identified is that drinking for people say between the ages of 18 and 24 is all about the social activity.

　　A lot of the Government advertising has been about individual responsibility, but actually understanding that drinking is very much about the social activity and finding ways to help young people get home safely and not end up in hospital is one of the things that we've tried to present there.

　　The key thing about consumer behavior is that it's very much about how consumers change. Markets always change faster than marketing; so we have to look at what consumers are doing.

　　Currently I teach consumer behavior to undergraduates in their second year and we look at all kinds of things in consumer behavior and particularly how consumers are presented in advertising.

　　So they get involved by looking at advertising and really critically assessing the consumer behavior aspects of it and getting involved sometimes doing primary research.

　　For example, last year my students spent a week looking at their own purchasing and analyzed it in detail from shopping to the relationship that they have with their retail banks and their mobile phone providers. I think they found it very useful and it also helped them identify just what kind of budgets they had too. The fact of the matter is that there's a whole range of interesting research out there and I think as the years go on, there's going to be much more for us to consider and certainly much more for students to become involved in.

　　16. What is the speaker currently doing?

　　17. What has the speaker found about young people's drinking?

　　18. What does the speaker say that his students did last year?

　　Passage 2

　　Sweden was the first European country to print and use paper money, but it may soon do away with physical currencies.

　　Banks can save a lot of money and avoid regulatory headaches by moving to a cash-free system, and they can also avoid bank robberies, theft, and dirty money.

　　Claer Barrett, the editor of Financial Times Money, says the Western world is headed toward a world without physical currency.

　　"Andy Holder — the chief eco|nomist at The Bank of England — suggested that the UK move towards a government-backed digital currency. But does a cashless society really make good economic sense?

　　"The fact that cash is being drawn out of society, is less a feature of our everyday lives, and the ease of electronic payments — is this actually making us spend more money without realizing it?"

　　Barrett wanted to find out if the absence of physical currency does indeed cause a person to spend more, so she decided to conduct an experiment a few months ago.

　　She decided that she was going to try to just use cash for two weeks to make all of her essential purchases and see what that would do to her spending. She found she did spend a lot less moneybecause it is incredibly hard to predict how much cash one is going to need — she was forever drawing money out of cash points. Months later, she was still finding cash stuffed in her trouser pockets and the pockets of her handbags.

　　During the experiment, Barrett took a train ride. On the way, there was an announcement that the restaurant car was not currently accepting credit cards. The train cars were filled with groans because many of the passengers were traveling without cash.

　　"It underlines just how much things have changed in the last generation," Barrett says. "My parents, when they were younger, used to budget by putting money into envelopes — they'd get paid and they'd immediately separate the cash into piles and put them in envelopes, so they knew what they had to spend week by week. It was a very effective way for them to keep track of their spending. Nowadays, we're all on credit cards, we're doing online purchases, and money is kind of becoming a less physical and more imaginary type of thing that we can't get our hands around."

　　Q19. What do we learn about Sweden?

　　Q20. What did Claer Barrett want to find out with her experiment?

　　Q21. What did Claer Barrett find on her train ride?

　　Q22. How did people of the last generation budget their spending?

　　Passage 3

　　Why should you consider taking a course in demography in college? You’ll be growing up in a generation where the baby boomers are going into retirement and dying. You will face the problems in the aging of the population that have never been faced before. You will hear more and more about migration between countries and between rural areas and cities. You need to understand as a citizen and as a tax payer and as a voter what’s really behind the arguments.

　　I want to tell you about the past, present and future of the human population. So let’s start with a few problems. Right now, a billion people are chronically hungry. That means they wake up hungry, they are hungry all day, and they go to sleep hungry. A billion people are living in slums, not the same billion people, but there is some overlap. Living in slums means they don’t have infrastructure to take the garbage away, they don’t have secure water supplies to drink.

　　Nearly a billion people are illiterate. Try to imagine your life being illiterate. You can’t read the labels on the bottles in the supermarket, if you can get to a supermarket. Two-thirds of those people who are illiterate are women and about 200 to 215 million women don’t have access to birth control they want, so that they can control their own fertility. This is not only a problem in developing countries. About half of all pregnancies globally are unintended. So those are examples of population problems.

　　Demography gives you the tools to understand and to address these problems. It’s not only the study of human population, but the populations of non-human species, including viruses like influenza, the bacteria in your gut, plants that you eat, animals that you enjoy or that provide you with meat. Demography also includes the study of non-living objects like light bulbs and taxi cabs, and buildingsbecause these are also populations. It studies these populations, in the past, present and future, using quantitative data and mathematical models as tools of analysis.

　　I see demography as a central subject related to economics. It is the means to intervene more wisely, and more effectively in the real world, to improve the wellbeing, not only of yourself – important as that may be – but of people around you and of other species with whom we share the planet.

　　Questions 23-25 are based on the recording you have just heard.

　　23. What is one of the problems the speaker mentions in his talk?

　　24. What does the speaker say about pregnancies?

　　25. How does the speaker view the study of populations?

　　相关推荐：

　　2017年6月英语四六级真题及答案解析※ 关注微信，对答案看解析！

　　四六级评分标准 ※ 最新算分器 ※ 英语四六级题库估分[手机题库下载]

　　2017年6月四六级成绩查询时间 ※ 微信查分提醒 ※ 四六级合格分数线