六级考前押睛点题班--阅读讲义

新浪微博@尹延@名师天团四六级阅读讲师优化六级的考试流程14:40—15:00 考生入场15:00—15:10 发答题卡I、II和试卷册15:10—15:40 作文15:40—16:10 听力16:10—16:15 收答题卡I（作文+听力）16:15—17:25 选词填空（5%）匹配题（10%）仔细阅读（20%）翻译（15%）优化阅读的做题流程一．扫读题干1’二．处理文章4’三．对比做答4-7’经典例文分析Passage One Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you'll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women – the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school's picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach – arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management – at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.57. What characterises the business school student population of today?A) Greater diversity. B) Intellectual maturity.C) Exceptional diligence. D) Higher ambition.58. What is the author's concern about current business school education?A) It will arouse students' unrealistic expectations.B) It will produce business leaders of a uniform style.C) It focuses on theory rather than on practical skills.D) It stresses competition rather than cooperation.59. What aspect of diversity does Valerie Gauthier think is most important?A)Age and educational background. B) Social and professional experience.C) Attitude and approach to business. D) Ethnic origin and gender.60. What applicants does the author think MBA programmes should consider recruiting?A) Applicants with prior experience in business companies.B) Applicants with sound knowledge in math and statistics.C) Applicants from outside the traditional sectors.D) Applicants from less developed regions and areas.61. What does Mannaz say about the current management style?A) It is eradicating the tough aspects of management.B) It encourages male and female executives to work side by side.C) It adopts the bully-boy chief executive model.D) It is shifting towards more collaborative modelsPassage Two Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.At the heart of the debate over illegal immigration lies one key question: are immigrants good or bad for the economy? The American public overwhelmingly thinks they're bad. Yet the consensus among most economists is that immigration, both legal and illegal, provides a small net boost to the economy. Immigrants provide cheap labor, lower the prices of everything from farm produce to new homes, and leave consumers witha little more money in their pockets. So why is there such a discrepancy between the perception of immigrants' impact on the economy and the reality?There are a number of familiar theories. Some argue that people are anxious and feel threatened by an inflow of new workers. Others highlight the strain that undocumented immigrants place on public services, like schools, hospitals, and jails. Still others emphasize the role of race, arguing that foreigners add to the nation's fears and insecurities. There's some truth to all these explanations, but they aren't quite sufficient.To get a better understanding of what's going on, consider the way immigration's impact is felt. Though its overall effect may be positive, its costs and benefits are distributed unevenly. David Card, an economist at UC Berkeley, notes that the ones who profit most directly from immigrants' low-cost labor are businesses and employers –meatpacking plants in Nebraska, for instance, or agricultural businesses in California. Granted, these producers' savings probably translate into lower prices at the grocery store, but how many consumers make that mental connection at the checkout counter? As for the drawbacks of illegal immigration, these, too, are concentrated. Native low-skilled workers suffer most from the competition of foreign labor. According to a study by George Borjas, a Harvard economist, immigration reduced the wages of American high-school dropouts by 9% between 1980-2000.Among high-skilled, better-educated employees, however, opposition was strongest in states with both high numbers of immigrants and relatively generous social services. What worried them most, in other words, was the fiscal (财政的) burden of immigration. That conclusion was reinforced by another finding: that their opposition appeared to soften when that fiscal burden decreased, as occurred with welfare reform in the 1990s, which curbed immigrants' access to certain benefits.The irony is that for all the overexcited debate, the net effect of immigration is minimal. Even for those most acutely affected –say, low-skilled workers, or California residents –the impact isn't all that dramatic. "The unpleasant voices have tended to dominate our perceptions," says Daniel Tichenor, a political science professor at the University of Oregon. "But when all those factors are put together and the economists calculate the numbers, it ends up being a net positive, but a small one." Too bad most people don't realize it.52.What can we learn from the first paragraph?A) Whether immigrants are good or bad for the economy has been puzzling economists.B) The American economy used to thrive on immigration but now it's a different story.C) The consensus among economists is that immigration should not be encouraged.D) The general public thinks differently from most economists on the impact of immigration.53.In what way does the author think ordinary Americans benefit from immigration?A) They can access all kinds of public services. B) They can get consumer goods at lower prices.C) They can mix with people of different cultures. D) They can avoid doing much of the manual labor.54.Why do native low-skilled workers suffer most from illegal immigration?A) They have greater difficulty getting welfare support.B)They are more likely to encounter interracial conflicts.C)They have a harder time getting a job with decent pay.D) They are no match for illegal immigrants in labor skills.55.What is the chief concern of native high-skilled, better-educated employees about the inflow of immigrants?A) It may change the existing social structure.B)It may pose a threat to their economic status.C)It may lead to social instability in the country.D) It may place a great strain on the state budget.56. What is the irony about the debate over immigration?A) Even economists can't reach a consensus about its impact.B) Those who are opposed to it turn out to benefit most from it.C) People are making too big a fuss about something of small impact.D) There is no essential difference between seemingly opposite opinions.匹配题The Uses of DifficultyThe brain likes a challenge — and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.[A] Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: “ease of use”. When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.[B] It’s an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends. In 1966, soon after the Beatles had finished work on “Rubber Soul”, Paul McCar tney looked into the possibility of going to America to record their next album. The equipment in American studios was more advanced than anything in Britain, which had led the Beatles’s great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album, “Aftermath” in Los Angeles. McCart ney found that EMI’s (百代唱片) contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow suit, and the Beatles had to make do with the primitive technology of Abbey Road.[C] Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their creativity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “A Day in the Life” featured revolutionary sound effects that dazzled and mystified Martin’s American counterparts.[D] Sometimes i t’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise that it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition for British schoolchildren. During the 1980s he noticed an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also “strangely boring”. After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way into British homes.[E] You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage. But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review Hughes speculatedthat when a person puts pen to paper, “you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it, when you couldn’t write at all”. As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed, psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble (不着边际的长篇大论).[F] Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.[G] As a poet, Ted Hughes had an acute sensitivity to the way in which constraints on self-expression, like the disciplines of metre and rhyme (韵律)，spur creative thought. What applies to poets and musicians also applies to our daily lives. We tend to equate (等同) happiness with freedom, but, as the psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips has observed, without obstacles to our desires it’s harder to know what we want, or where we’re heading. He tells the story of a patient, a first-time mother who complained that her young son was always clinging to her, wrapping himself around her legs wherever she went. She never had a moment to herself, she said, because her son was “always in the way”. When Phillips asked her where she would go if he wasn’t in the way, she replied cheerfully, “Oh, I wouldn’t know where I was!”[H] Take another common obstacle: lack of money. People often assume that more money will make them happier. But economists who study the relationship between money and happiness have consistently found that, above a certain income, the two do not reliably correlate. Despite the ease with which the rich can acquire almost anything they desire, they are just as likely to be unhappy as the middle classes. In this regard at least, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.[I] Indeed, ease of acquisition is the problem. The novelist Edward St Aubyn has a narrator remark of the very rich that, “not having to consider affordability, their desires rambled on like unstoppable bores, relentless (持续不断的) and whimsical (反复无常的) at th e same time.” When Boston College, a private research university, wanted a better feel for its potential donors, it asked the psychologist Robert Kenny to investigate the mindset of the super-rich. He surveyed 165 households, most of which had a net worth of $25m or more. He found that many of his subjects were confused by the infinite options their money presented them with. They found it hard to know what to want, creating a kind of existential bafflement. One of them put it like this: “You know, Bob, you can just buy so much stuff, and when you get to the point where you can just buy so much stuff, now what are you going to do?”[J] The internet makes information billionaires out of all of us, and the architects of our online experiences are catchin g on to the need to make things creatively difficult. Twitter’s huge success is rooted in the simple but profound insight that in a medium with infinite space for self-expression, the most interesting thing we can do is restrict ourselves to 140 characters. The music service This Is My Jam helps people navigate the tens of millions of tracks now available instantly via Spotify and iTunes. Users pick their favourite song of the week to share with others. They only get to choose one. The service was only launched this year, but by the end of September 650,000 jams had been chosen. Its co-founder Matt Ogle explains its raisond’être (存在的理由) l ike this: “In an age of endless choice, we were missing a way to say: ‘This. This is the one you should listen to.”[K] To day’s world offers more opportunity than ever to follow the advice of the Walker Brothers and make it easy on ourselves. Compared with a hundred years ago, our lives are less tightly bound by social norms and physical constraints. Technology has cut out mu ch of life’s donkeywork, and we have more freedoms than ever: we can wear what we like and communicate with hundreds of friends at once at the click of a mouse. Obstacles are everywhere disappearing. Few of us wish to turn the clock back, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves how useful the right obstacles can be. Sometimes, the best route to fulfillment is the path of more resistance.46. The rigorous requirements placed on the writing of poetry stimulate the poet’s creativity.47. With creativity, even old-fashioned instruments may produce spectacular sound effects.48. More money does not necessarily bring greater happiness.49. It is a false assumption that lessons should be made easier to learn.50. Obstacles deliberately placed in the creation of music contribute to its success.51. Those who enjoy total freedom may not find themselves happy.52. Ted Hughes discovered many long poems submitted for poetry competition were composed on computers.53. Maybe we need to bear in mind that the right obstacles help lead us to greater achievements.54. An investigation found that many of the super-rich were baffled by the infinite choices their money made available.55. One free social networking website turned out to be successful because it limited each posting to one hundred and forty characters.选词填空Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage.Some performance evaluations require supervisors to take action. Employees who receive a very favorable evaluation may deserve some type of recognition or even a promotion. If supervisors do not acknowledge such outstanding performance, employees may either lose their 36 and reduce their effort or search for a new job at a firm that will 37 them for high performance. Supervisors should acknowledge high performance so that the employee will continue to perform well in the future.Employees who receive unfavorable evaluations must also be given attention. Supervisors must 38 the reasons for poor performance. Some reasons, such as a family illness, may have a temporary adverse 39 on performance and can be corrected. Other reasons, such as a bad attitude, may not be temporary. When supervisors give employees an unfavorable evaluation, they must decide whether to take any 40 actions. If the employees were unaware of their own deficiencies, the unfavorable evaluation can pinpoint (指出) the deficiencies that employees must correct. In this case, the supervisor may simply need to monitor the employees 41 and ensure that the deficiencies are corrected.If the employees were already aware of their deficiencies before the evaluation period, however, they may be unable or unwilling to correct them. This situation is more serious, and the supervisor may need to take action. The action should be 42 with the firm’s guidelines and may include reassigning the employees to new jobs, 43 them temporarily, or firing them. A supervisor’s action toward a poorly performing worker can 44 the attitudes of other employees. If no 45 is imposed on an employee for poor performance, other employees may react by reducing their productivity as well.用单纯与忍耐迎接自己的幸福。