2019年06月英语六级第2套听力原文及题目

2019年06月英语六级第2套听力原文及题目

Section A
Direction: In this section, you will hear two long conversations. At the end of each conversation, you will hear four questions. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet I with a single line through the centre.

Conversation 1
W: Wow, I would give anything to be more like Audrey Hepburn.
M: I never really understood why so many girls were such big fans of her. I mean I’ve seen the famous films, Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and a few others, but I still don’t fully get it. Was she that great an actress?
W: Well, for me, my adoration goes beyond her movies. She has such a classic elegance about her. She was always so poised. In part, because she spent years training as a ballet dancer before becoming an actress.
M: Why didn’t she stick to dancing as a career?
W: It seems it was fate. She suffered from inadequate nutrition during the war, and therefore a career as a professional dancer would have been too demanding on her body. So she focused on acting instead. Roman Holiday was her first big break, which made her a star.
M: Was that the film that opened with her shopping for jewelry in New York City? You know, the scene she was wearing a black dress and dark sunglasses with a pearl necklace and long black gloves. I see the photo of her in that costume everywhere.
W: No, that was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That costume is often referred to as the most famous little black dress of all time. Her character in that film is very outgoing and charming, even though in real life, Audrey always described herself as shy and quiet.
M: So, what did she do after her acting career?
W: She dedicated much of her life to helping children in need. Her family received international aid during the war when she was growing up. I think that left her big impression on her. That’s where I got the idea to volunteer for children’s charity next weekend.
M: I’ll join you. I may not be as charming as Audrey Hepburn, but I’m all for supporting a good cause.
Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
Question 1: What does the man say he never really understood?
Question 2: What prevented Audrey Hepburn from becoming a professional dancer?
Question 3: What do we learn about Audrey Hepburn in real life?
Question 4: Why did Audrey Hepburn devote much of her life to charity after her acting career?

1.
A) Why Roman Holiday was more famous than Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
B) Why Audrey Hepburn had more female fans than male ones.
C) Why the woman wanted to be like Audrey Hepburn.
D) Why so many girls adored Audrey Hepburn.

2.
A) Her unique personality.
B) Her physical condition.
C) Her shift of interest to performing arts.
D) Her family’s suspension of financial aid.

3.
A) She was not an outgoing person.
B) She was modest and hardworking.
C) She was easy-going on the whole.
D) She was usually not very optimistic.

4.
A) She was influenced by the roles she played in the films.
B) Her parents taught her to sympathize with the needy.
C) She learned to volunteer when she was a child.
D) Her family benefited from other people’s help.

Conversation 2
W: So how is our presentation about the reconstructuring of the company coming along?
M: Fine, I am putting the finishing touches to it now, but we will have to be prepared for questions.
W: Yes, there is already a feeling that this is a top-down change, we really need to get everyone on board.
M: Well, there’s been an extensive consultation period.
W: I know, but there is always the feeling that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
M: People are worried about their jobs too. I think we need to address that while there will be some job changes, there won’t be anyone getting dismissed. In fact, we are looking to take on more staff.
W: Agreed. You can hardly blame people for worrying, though. We need to make it clear that it’s not just change for change’s sake. In other words, we really must make the case for why we are doing it. So, what’s the outline of the presentation?
M: I’ll start with the brief review of the reasons for the change that we really need to make a clean break to restart growth. After that, I’ll outline the new company’s structures and who is going where. Then we will hand it over to you to discuss the timeline and summarize and we’ll take questions together at the end. Anything else?
W: Oh, yeah. We should let the staff know the channels of communication, you know, who they can contact or direct questions to about these changes.
M: Yes, and we can collect some frequently asked questions and present some general answers.
W: Hm, and we will make the presentation and questions available via the company’s own computer network, right?
M: Yes, we’ll make a page on the network where staff can download all the details.
W: Alright, perhaps we should do a practice run of the presentation first.
M: You bet.
Questions 5 to 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
Question 5: What is the man going to do?
Question 6: What does the man say about the restructuring?
Question 7: What will the man explain first?
Question 8: How can the staff learn more about the company’s restructuring?

5.
A) Give a presentation.
B) Raise some questions.
C) Start a new company.
D) Attend a board meeting.

6.
A) It will cut production costs.
B) It will raise productivity.
C) No staff will be dismissed.
D) No new staff will be hired.

7.
A) The timeline of restructuring.
B) The reasons for restructuring.
C) The communication channels.
D) The company’s new missions.

8.
A) By consulting their own department managers.
B) By emailing questions to the man or the woman.
C) By exploring various channels of communication.
D) By visiting the company’s own computer network.

Section B
Direction: In this section, you will hear two passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear three or four questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.

Passage 1
Airline passengers have to deal with a lot these days, getting bumped from flights and losing luggage on top of the general line anxiety that nervous passengers always feel. At the Cincinnati northern Kentucky international airport, miniature horses deliver a calming force two times a month.
Denver and Ruby are two of the thirty-fourth therapy horses brought in from a local farm. They can usually be found in the ticket counter area interacting with travelers. More than thirty airports across the country now have therapy dogs. San Francisco has a therapy pig. San Jose, California, began a dog program after the terrorist attacks of September the eleventh.
Since its beginning, the program has now grown and has twenty-one therapy dogs and a therapy cat. The animals don’t get startled. They have had hundreds of hours of airport training, so they are used to having luggage and people crowding around them. These professional animals are probably better at finding their way in the airports than the most frequent of travelers. The passengers often say that seeing animals makes them feel much better and helps them to calm down before a flight.
This little bit of support can sometimes make a big difference. Some passengers enjoy the animals so much that they call the airport to schedule flights around their visits. Visits to nursing homes and schools are also a regular part of the horse’s schedule. Their owner is already working on a new idea for a therapy animal donkeys.
Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard.
Question 9: What is special about the Cincinnati northern Kentucky international airport?
Question 10: What are the trained animals probably capable of doing in an airport?
Question 11: What do some passengers try to do?

9.
A) It helps passengers to take care of their pet animals.
B) It has animals to help passengers carry their luggage.
C) It uses therapy animals to soothe nervous passengers.
D) It allows passengers to have animals travel with them.

10.
A) Avoiding possible dangers.
B) Finding their way around.
C) Identifying drug smugglers.
D) Looking after sick passengers.

11.
A) Schedule their flights around the animal visits.
B) Photograph the therapy animals at the airport.
C) Keep some animals for therapeutic purposes.
D) Bring their pet animals on board their plane.

Passage 2
Hello, viewers. Today I’m standing at a two-thousand-year-old Roman-era site. Here the brightly colored scenes that once decorated a mansion are being dug up. These scenes are turning up in the southern French city of Oral, surprising the historians who have been working here since two thousand fourteen, patches of paint still clinging to the stone walls of the bedroom and reception hall. Some of these painted walls are preserved in places to a height of one meter. In addition, thousands of fragments that fell off the walls have been recovered, these pieces have been put back together with great care and display a variety of images. Some of these images include figures never seen before in France, such as a woman playing a stringed instrument, possibly a character from mythology.
The paintings were done with such skill and with such expensive dyes that experts believe the artist originally came from Italy. They were likely hired by one of the city’s elite, perhaps a Roman official wanted Pompeii-like interior to remind him of home. He was probably stationed in this provincial trading port, founded in 46 B.C. as a colony for veterans of the Roman army. Or maybe a wealthy local wanted to show off his worldly sophistication. The paintings may yield even more stunning surprises as additional sections are put together, like pieces of a puzzle, whoever it was that created such magnificent pieces of art, they surely had no idea that their work would still be around thousands of years later.
Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard.
Question 12: Where is the speaker standing?
Question 13: What do the thousands of fragments display when they are put back together?
Question 14: What makes experts think the paintings were done by artists from Italy?
Question 15: What do we learn from the passage about the owner of the mansion?

12.
A) Beside a beautifully painted wall in Arles.
B) Beside the gate of an ancient Roman city.
C) At the site of an ancient Roman mansion.
D) At the entrance to a reception hall in Rome.

13.
A) A number of different images.
B) A number of mythological heroes.
C) Various musical instruments.
D) Paintings by famous French artists.

14.
A) The originality and expertise shown.
B) The stunning images vividly depicted.
C) The worldly sophistication displayed.
D) The impressive skills and costly dyes.

15.
A) His artistic taste is superb.
B) His identity remains unclear.
C) He was a collector of antiques.
D) He was a rich Italian merchant.

Section C
Direction: In this section, you will hear three recordings of lectures or talks followed by three or four questions. The recordings will be played only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.

Recording 1
Good afternoon, class. Today I want to discuss with you a new approach to empirical research. In the past, scientists often worked alone. They were confined to the university or research center where they worked. Today, though, we are seeing mergers of some of the greatest scientific minds, regardless of their location. There has never been a better time for collaborations with foreign scientists. In fact, the European Union is taking the lead. Spurred on by funding policies, half of European research articles had international co-authors in 2007, this is more than twice the level of two decades ago. The European Union’s level of international co-authorship is about twice that of the United States, Japan, and India. Even so, the levels in these countries are also rising. This is a sign of the continued allure of creating scientific coalitions across borders.
Andrew Schubert, a researcher at the institute for science policy research, says that the rising collaboration is partly out of necessity. This necessity comes with the rise of big science. Many scientific endeavors have become more complicated. These new complications require the money and labor of many nations. But he says collaborations have also emerged because of increased possibilities.
The internet allows like-minded scientists to find each other. Simultaneously, dramatic drops in communication costs ease long-distance interactions, and there’s a reward. Studies of citation counts show that international co-authored papers have better visibility. Schubert says international collaboration is a way to spread ideas in wider and wider circles. Caroline Wagner, a research scientist at George Washington University, notes that international collaborations offer additional flexibility. Whereas local collaborations sometimes persist past the point of usefulness, because of social or academic obligations, international ones can be cultivated and dropped more freely. The collaborative trend is true across scientific disciplines. Some feels though have a greater tendency for it. Particle physicist and astronomers collaborate often. This’s because they must share expensive facilities. Mathematicians, by contrast, tend historically towards solitude. As a consequence, they lag behind other disciplines. However, Wagner says partnerships are rising there too. The level of collaboration also varies from country to country. There are historical and political reasons as to why collaborations emerge, says Wagner. This rise is also apparently boosted by policies embedded in European framework funding schemes. These policies underlie funding requirements that often require teamwork.
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.
Question 16: What do we learn about the research funding policies in the European Union?
Question 17: Why do researchers today favor international collaboration?
Question 18: What do we learn about the field of mathematics?

16.
A) They encourage international cooperation.
B) They lay stress on basic scientific research.
C) They place great emphasis on empirical studies.
D) They favour scientists from its member countries.

17.
A) Many of them wish to win international recognition.
B) They believe that more hands will make light work.
C) They want to follow closely the international trend.
D) Many of their projects have become complicated.

18.
A) It requires mathematicians to work independently.
B) It is faced with many unprecedented challenges.
C) It lags behind other disciplines in collaboration.
D) It calls for more research funding to catch up.

Recording 2
Good evening, in 1959, on the day that I was born, a headline in Life magazine proclaimed Target Venus, There May Be Life There. It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus’s atmosphere and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid, I thrilled to tales of adventure and Isaac as most juvenile science fiction novel, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. For many of my peers, though, Venus quickly lost its romance. The very first thing that scientists discovered with a mission to another planet was that Venus was not at all the earthly paradise that fiction had portrayed.
It is nearly identical to our own planet and bulk properties such as mass, density, and size. But its surface has been cooked and dried by an ocean of carbon dioxide, trapped in the burning death grip of a runaway greenhouse effect. Venus has long been held up as a cautionary tale for everything that could go wrong on a planet like earth. As a possible home for alien life, it has been voted the planet least likely to succeed. But I have refused to give up on Venus. And over the years, my stubborn loyalty has been justified. The rocky views glimpsed by the Nearer Nine and other Russian landers suggested a tortured volcanic history that was confirmed in the early 1990s by the American Magellan orbiter, which used radar to peer through the planet’s thick clouds and map out a rich, varied and dynamic surface. The surface formed mostly in the last billion years, which makes it fresher and more recently active than any rocky planet other than earth.
Russian and American spacecraft also found hints that its ancient climate might have been wetter, cooler, and possibly even friendly to life. Measurements of density and composition imply that Venus originally formed out of basically the same stuff as earth that presumably included much more water than the tiny trace we find blowing in the thick air today. Thus, our picture of Venus at around that time life was getting started on earth is one of warm oceans, probably rich with organic molecules splashing around rocky shores and volcanic vents. The sun was considerably less bright back then.
So, Venus was arguably a cozy, a habitat for life than earth.
Questions 19 to 21 are based on the recording you have just heard.
Question 19: What do we learn from the Life magazine article?
Question 20: What are scientists’ findings about Venus?
Question 21: What information did Russian and American space probes provide about Venus?

19.
A) Scientists tried to send a balloon to Venus.
B) Scientists discovered water on Venus.
C) Scientists found Venus had atmosphere.
D) Scientists observed Venus from a space vehicle.

20.
A) It resembles Earth in many aspects.
B) It is the same as fiction has portrayed.
C) It is a paradise of romance for alien life.
D) It undergoes geological changes like Earth.

21.
A) It might have been hotter than it is today.
B) It might have been a cozy habitat for life.
C) It used to have more water than Earth.
D) It used to be covered with rainforests.

Recording 3
I’m a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, I specialize in cultural psychology, examining similarities and differences between East Asians and North Americans. Our research team has been looking at cultural differences in self-enhancing motivations, help people have positive feelings towards not only themselves but things connected to themselves. For example, when you own something, you view it as more valuable than when you don’t own it. It’s called the endowment effect. The strength of that effect is stronger in western cultures than in East Asian cultures. So we’ve been looking at other ways of seeing whether this motivation to view oneself positively is shaped by cultural experiences.
We’ve also started to look at how culture shapes sleep. We are still in the exploratory stages of this project, although what’s noteworthy that East Asians on average sleep about an hour and a half less each night than North Americans do. And it’s not a more efficient sleep, not like they’re compressing relatively more value out of their hours. Other studies have found that even infants in East Asia sleep about an hour less than European infants. So we’re trying to figure out how culture shapes the way you sleep.
Our experiment does not take place in a sleep lab, instead, we lend people motion-detecting watches and they wear them for a week at a time. Whenever they are not having a shower or swimming, they keep it on. These kinds of watches are used in sleep studies as a way of measuring how long people are sleeping, how efficient the sleep is, and whether they are waking up in the night. Ideally, I’d like to take this into a controlled lab environment. We’ll see where the research points us. We usually start off with the more affordable methods. And if everything looks promising, then it will justify trying to build a sleep lab and study sleep across cultures that way. Why do we study sleep? Sleep is something that has really been an unexplored topic cross-culturally. I’m attracted to it because culture isn’t something that only shapes the way our minds operate, it shapes the way our bodies operate too, and sleep is at the intersection of those.
Question 22 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.
Question 22: What does the speaker mainly study?
Question 23: What does the speaker say about North Americans?
Question 24: How did the speaker conduct the sleep study?
Question 25: What does the speaker say about research on sleep?

22.
A) Causes of sleeplessness.
B) Cross-cultural communication.
C) Cultural psychology.
D) Motivation and positive feelings.

23.
A) They attach great importance to sleep.
B) They often have trouble falling asleep.
C) They pay more attention to sleep efficiency.
D) They generally sleep longer than East Asians.

24.
A) By asking people to report their sleep habits.
B) By observing people’s sleep patterns in labs.
C) By having people wear motion-detecting watches.
D) By videotaping people’s daily sleeping processes.

25.
A) It has made remarkable progress in the past few decades.
B) It has not yet explored the cross-cultural aspect of sleep.
C) It has not yet produced anything conclusive.
D) It has attracted attention all over the world.

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