星火：2008年12月英语六级模拟试卷样题及解析

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　　Part Ⅰ Writing (30 minutes)

　　Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled On Paying back Student Loans. You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.

　　1. 现今，在高校有许多大学生通过助学贷款完成自己的学业

　　2. 但是有些学生毕业后没有能力或拒绝按时还贷

　　3. 我认为贷款的学生应如何对待还贷问题

　　On Paying back Student Loans

　　Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)

　　Directions：In this part you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer sheet 1.

　　For questions 1-4, mark

　　Y (for YES) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;

　　N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage;

　　NG (for NOT GIVEN) if the information is not given in the passage.

　　For questions 5-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.

　　Reading Baby's Mind

　　The helpless, seemingly awkward infant staring up at you from his little bed, has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined. A wealth of new research is leading child psychologists to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual abilities of even very young babies. Science is now giving us a much different picture of what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions-jealousy, empathy (移情), frustration-that were once thought to be learned much later.

　　A New Baby Research

　　Little Victoria Bateman is blue-eyed and as cute a baby as there ever was. At 6 months, she is also trusting and unsuspecting, which is a good thing, because otherwise she'd never go along with what's about to happen. It's a sunny June afternoon in Lubbock, Texas, and inside the Human Sciences lab at Texas Tech University, Victoria's mother is settling her daughter into a high chair, where she is the latest subject in an ongoing experiment aimed at understanding the way babies think. Sybil Hart, an associate professor of human development and leader of the study, trains video cameras on mother and daughter. Everything is set. Hart hands the mother, Cheryl Bateman, a children's book, Elmo Pops In, and instructs her to engross herself in its pages. "Just have a conversation with me about the book, " Hart tells her. "The most important thing is, do not look at Victoria. " As the two women chat, Victoria looks around the room, feeling a little bored.

　　After a few minutes, Hart leaves the room and returns cradling a lifelike baby doll. Dramatically, Hart places it in Cheryl Bateman's arms, and tells her to embrace the doll while continuing to ignore Victoria. "That's OK, little baby, " Bateman coos, hugging and rocking the doll. Victoria is not bored anymore. At first, she cracks her best smile. When that doesn't work, she begins kicking. But her mom pays her no mind. That's when Victoria loses it. Soon she's crying so hard it looks like she might spit up. Hart rushes in. "OK, we're done, " she says, and takes back the doll. Cheryl Bateman goes to comfort her daughter. "I've never seen her react like that to anything, "she says. Over the last 10 months, Hart has repeated the scene hundreds of times. It's the same in nearly every case: tiny babies, overwhelmed with jealousy. Even Hart was stunned to find that infants could experience an emotion, which, until recently, was thought to be way beyond their grasp.

　　Findings of Baby Research

　　The new research is sure to confuse new parents-see, Junior is a genius-but it's more than just an academic exercise. Armed with the new information, pediatricians (儿科医生) are starting to change the way they evaluate their youngest patients. In addition to tracking physical development, they are now focusing much more deeply on emotional advancement. The research shows how powerful emotional well-being is to a child's future health. A baby who fails to meet certain key "emotional milestones" may have trouble learning to speak, read and, later, do well in school. By reading emotional responses, doctors have begun to discover ways to tell if a baby as young as 3 months is showing early signs of possible psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, learning disabilities and perhaps autism.

　　One of the earliest emotions that even tiny babies display is, admirably enough, empathy. In fact, concern for others may be hard-wired into babies' brains. Place a newborn down next to another crying infant, and chances are, both babies will soon be wailing (悲叹) away. "People have always known that babies cry when they hear other babies cry, " says Martin Hoffman, a psychology professor at New York University who did the first studies on infant empathy in the 1970s. "The question was, why are they crying?" Does it mean that the baby is truly concerned for his fellow human, or just annoyed by the racket? A recent study conducted in Italy, which built on Hoffman's own work, has largely settled the question. Researchers played for infants tapes of other babies' crying. As predicted, that was enough to start the tears flowing. But when researchers played babies, recordings of their own cries, they rarely began crying themselves. The verdict:"there is some empathy in place, right from birth, " Hoffman says. The intensity of the emotion tends to fade over time. Babies older than 6 months no longer cry but grimace (作苦相) at the discomfort of others. By 13 to 15 months, babies tend to take matters into their own hands. They'll try to comfort a crying playmate. "What I find most charming is when, even if the two mothers are present, they'll bring their own mother over to help, " Hoffman says.