大學(xué)英語四級模擬測試

Researchers, writing in the journal Heart, pooled data from 23 studies and found that social isolation or feelings of loneliness were tied to an increased risk of coronary heart disease (冠心病) and strokes. 

The studies included data from 181,006 men and women ages 18 and over. There were 4,628 coronary events and 3,002 strokes in follow-up periods ___26___ from three to 21 years. Three of the papers ___27___ loneliness, 18 looked at social isolation and two included both. Social isolation and loneliness were determined with questionnaires; the researchers depended on medical records and death ___28___ for determining coronary events and strokes.

The scientists found that loneliness and social isolation increased the ___29___ risk of having a heart attack or a death from heart disease by 29 percent, and the risk of stroke by 32 percent. There were no ___30___ between men and women.

"People have tended to focus from a policy point of view on ___31___ lonely people to make them more ___32___," said the lead author, Nicole K. Valtorta, a research fellow at the University of York in England. "Our study ___33___ that if this is a risk factor, then we should be trying to prevent the risk factor in the first place.

The authors ___34___ that this was a review of observational studies and did not 35 cause and effect.

Teenagers and social networking

A)As a parent of two boys at primary school, I worry about the issues associated with teenagers and social media.Newspapers are constantly filled with frightening accounts of drug addiction and aggressive behaviour supposedly caused by violent videogames. But even when these accounts touch on real concerns, they do not really reflect the great mass of everyday teenage social behaviour: the online chat, the texting, the surfing, and the emergence of a new teenage sphere that is conducted digitally.

B)New technologies always provoke generational panic, which usually has more to do with adult fears than with the lives of teenagers. In the 1930s, parents worried that radio was gaining "an irresistible hold of their children". In the 80s, the great danger was the Sony Walkman ( 隨身聽). When you look at today's digital activity, the facts are much more positive than you might expect.

C)Indeed, social scientists who study young people have found that their digital use can be inventive and even beneficial. This is true not just in terms of their social lives, but their education too. So if you use a ton of social media, do you become unable, or unwilling, to engage in face-to-face contact? The evidence suggests not. Research by Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Centre, a US think tank, found that the most passionate texters are also the kids most likely to spend time with friends in person. One form of socialising doesn't replace the other. It expands it.

D)"Kids still spend time face to face," Lenhart says. Indeed, as they get older and are given more freedom, they often ease up on social networking. Early on, the web is their “third space”, but by the late teens, it's replaced in reaction to greater independence. They have to be on Facebook, to know what's going on among friends and family, but they are ambivalent (有矛盾心理的) about it, says Rebecca Eynon, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, who has interviewed about 200 British teenagers over three years. As they gain experience with living online, they begin to adjust their behaviour, struggling with new communication skills, as they do in the real world.

E)Parents are wrong to worry that kids don't care about privacy. In fact, they spend hours changing Facebook settings or using quick-delete sharing tools, such as Snapchat, to minimise their traces. Or they post a photograph on Instagram, have a pleasant conversation with friends and then delete it so that no traces remain.

F)This is not to say that kids always use good judgment. Like everyone else, they make mistakes—sometimes serious ones. But working out how to behave online is a new social skill. While there's plenty of drama and messiness online, it is not, for most teens, a cycle of non-stop abuse: a Pew study found only 15% of teens said someone had bullied them online in the last 12 months.

G)But surely all this short-form writing is affecting literacy? Certainly, teachers worry. They say that kids use overly casual language and text-speak in writing, and don't have as much patience for long reading and complex arguments. Yet studies of first-year college papers suggest these anxieties may be partly based on misguided nostalgia (懷舊). When Stanford University scholar Andrea Lunsford gathered data on the rates of errors in “freshman composition” papers going back to 1917, she found that they were virtually identical to today.

H)But even as error rates stayed stable, student essays have blossomed in size and complexity. They are now six times longer and, unlike older "what I did this summer” essays, they offer arguments supported by evidence. Why? Computers have vastly increased the ability of students to gather information, sample different points of view and write more fluidly.

I)When linguist Naomi Baron studied students' instant messaging even there she found surprisingly rare usage of short forms such as "u” for "you", and as students got older, they began to write in more grammatical sentences. That is because they want to appear more adult, and they know how adults are expected to write. Clearly, teaching teens formal writing is still crucial, but texting probably isn't destroying their ability to learn it.

J) It is probably true that fewer kids are heavy readers compared with two generations ago, when cheap paperbacks boosted rates of reading. But even back then, a minority of people—perhaps 20%—were lifelong heavy readers, and it was cable TV, not the internet, that struck a blow at that culture in the 1980s. Still, 15%or more of kids are found to be deeply bookish. In fact, the online world offers kids remarkable opportunities to become literate and creative because young people can now publish ideas not just to their friends, but to the world. And it turns out that when they write for strangers, their sense of "authentic audience" makes them work harder, push themselves further, and create powerful new communicative forms.

K)Few would deny that too much time online can be harmful. Some of the dangers are emotional: hurting someone from a distance is not the same as hurting them face to face. If we're lucky, the legal environment will change to make teenagers' online lives less likely to haunt them later on. Just last week, California passed a law allowing minors to demand that internet firms erase their digital past and the EU has considered similar legislation.

L）Distraction is also a serious issue. When kids switch from chat to music to homework, they are indeed likely to have trouble doing each task well. And studies show that pupils don't fact-check information online-"smart searching” is a skill schools need to teach urgently. It's also true that too much social networking and game playing can cut into schoolwork and sleep. This is precisely why parents still need to set firm boundaries around it, as with any other distraction.

M）So what's the best way to cope? The same boring old advice that applies to everything in parenting: moderation. Rebecca Eynon argues that it's key to model good behaviour. Parents who stare non-stop at their phones and don't read books are likely to breed kids who will do the same. As ever, we ought to be careful about our own behaviour.

Section C

Directions:There are 1 passages in this section.Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements.For each of them there arefour choices marked A),B),C)and D).You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter onAnswer Sheet 2with a single line through the centre.

Passage One

Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

The wallet is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. The kind of shopping where you hand over notes and count out change in return now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters, like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk, from a corner shop. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail stores Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, for instance you don’t go and stand at any kind of cash register, when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with ipads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.

Which is nothing more or less than excellent service, if you have the money. But across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But earning money isn’t quick or easy for most of us. Isn’t it a bit weird that spending it should happen in half a blink（眨眼）of an eye? Doesn’t a wallet—that time-honoured Friday-night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness—represent something that matters?

But I’ll leave the economics to the experts. What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment. Everything about the look and feel of a wallet—the way the fastenings and materials wear and tear and loosen with age, the plastic and paper and gold and silver, and handwritten phone numbers and printed cinema tickets—is the very opposite of what our world is becoming. The opposite of a wallet is a smartphone or an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as a pebble（鵝卵石）. Instead of digging through pieces of paper and peering into corners, we move our fingers left and right. No more counting out coins. Show your wallet, if you still have one. It may not be here much longer.