2017年4月23日
2015年6月大学英语六级考试真题（第一套）
Reading comprehension Section A Innovation, the elixir (灵丹妙药) of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution hand weavers were ___36___ aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has ___37___ many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispend with, just as the weavers were. For tho who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such disruption is a natural part of rising ___38___. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more ___39___ society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and rvices. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was ___40___ on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not rendered ___41___, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of cretaries has___42___, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers. Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects oftechnology may make them
psycho是什么意思>clustering>you are everywherekickbacklves evident faster than its ___43___. Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology's ___44___ will feel like a tornado (旋风), hitting the rich world first, but ___45___ sweeping through poorer countries too. No
american education
government is prepared for it.
thescientistSection B
Why the Mona Lisa Stands Out
[A] Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to e what the fuss is about? If so, you‟ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himlf that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?
[B] The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in class and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can‟t e they‟re superior, that‟s your problem. It‟s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilid historical accidents. inquiry
[C] Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings ri to the top of the cultural league. Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture cour he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two conds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesr known but of comparable quality. The were expod four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting‟s students had grown to like tho paintings more simply becau they had en them more.
[D] Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of the men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The fame pasd down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were expod to, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it‟s not just the mass who tend to rate what they e more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars”, Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”
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[E] The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts, who is employed by Microsoft to study the dyn
amics of social networks, had a similar experience to Cutting in another Paris muum. After queuing to e the “MonaLisa” in its climate-controlled bulletproof box at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos in the previous chamber, to which nobody emed to be paying the slightest attention? monte
[F] When Watts looked into the history of “the greatest painting of all time”, he discovered that, for most of its life, the “Mona Lisa” remained in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, who works were worth almost ten times as much as the “Mona Lisa”. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo‟s portrait of his patron‟s wife rocketed to the number-one spot. What propelled it there wasn‟t a scholarly re-evaluation, but a theft.
[G] In 1911 a maintenance worker at the Louvre walked out of the muum with the “Mona Lisa” hidden under his smock. Parisians were aghast at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid little attention. When the muum reopened, people queued to e the gap where the “Mona Lisa” had once hung in a way they had never do
ne for the painting itlf. From then on, the “Mona Lisa” came to reprent Western culture itlf.
[H] Although many have tried, it does em improbable that the painting‟s unique status can be attributed entirely to the quality of its brushstrokes. It has been said that the subject‟s eyes follow the viewer around the room. But as the painting‟s biographer, Donald Sassoon, dryly notes, “In reality the effect can be obtained from any portrait.” Duncan Watts propos that the “Mona Lisa” is merely an extreme example of a general rule. Paintings, poems and pop songs are buoyed or sunk by random events or preferences that turn into waves of influence, rippling down the generations.
