2022 年 12 月大学英语四级考试真题（第 3 套）

A)A few years ago I found myself teaching a university class on evil. It was for third-year criminology students to help them contextualize theory and research within controversial current topics. It was a huge success. The debates were heated and interesting. I could see people's views change within the course of a single lecture. Over the past 13 years, as a student, lecturer and researcher, I've enjoyed discussing the science of evil with anyone willing to listen. What I like most is destroying the cliche (陈词滥调) of good and evil, and replacing them with scientific insight. We need a more informed way of discussing behavior that at first we cannot, or should not, begin to understand.

B)Without understanding, we risk dehumanizing others, writing off human beings simply because we don't comprehend them. We must try to understand what we have labeled evil. We tend to think evil is something that other people are. We think of ourselves as "good people", and even when we do morally wrong things, we understand the context of our decisions. With others, however, it is far easier to write them off. If their actions deviate (偏离) substantially from what we consider acceptable, we may label them evil. We need to be careful with this. Calling someone evil is often similar to saying they cannot change, and perhaps aren't even a human at all. However, when you actually go monster-hunting, and you look deeply at the people behind shocking behavior, you may be surprised.

C)As a child I used to love the Scooby-Doo cartoons. Arriving in their "Mystery Machine", the gang would have to find a monster who was terrorizing a neighborhood. They would run around looking for clues and at the end unmask the bad guy. It was always a normal person in a costume. There were no monsters. Like the Scooby crew, we may find ourselves hunting for an easy fix, one word for people who do bad things. But if we take a good look, the word 'evil' is insufficient—there are no simple explanations for why humans do bad things: instead there are many, and they are all marvelously different.

D)Evil is typically referred to when there is deviance from social norms: formal deviance is the violation of laws, like theft, murder, and attacks, while informal deviance involves violations of social norms, like lying. Evil behavior is typically thought to embrace one or both forms. However, deviance can also describe a behavior that simply differs from the norm.

E)Perhaps this is where we can find the good side of our bad side. Deviating from the norm can make us villains (恶棍), but it can also make us heroes. A child deviates from social pressures when they stand up for another child being bullied in school. A soldier deviates when they choose not to follow orders to kill an innocent civilian. An employee in a big tech company deviates when they expose its wrongdoings.

F)Creativity is also a deviation. Here, too, things are complex. Thinking creatively has given us modern medicine, technology and modern political structures, but it has also given us poison and nuclear weapons. Great benefit and great harm can come from the same human tendency.

G)In a research paper, Evil Genius, published in 2014, the behavioral scientists Francesca Gino and Scott Wiltermuth wanted to examine whether people who behave unethically in one task are more creative than others on a subsequent task, even after controlling for differences in baseline creative skills. The unethical behavior they chose was dishonesty.

H)Over five experiments researchers gave participants tasks in which they could cheat. In one study, they were given matrixes (矩阵) and had to find two numbers that added up to 10, Participants were asked to self-report how well they did at the end of the study: 59% cheated by saying that they solved more matrixes than they actually had.

I)After each task, the researchers measured participants' performance on the Remote Associates Test. This shows participants three words at a time that appear to be unrelated, and the person has to think of a fourth word that is associated with all of them. For example, you might get "Fox, Man, Peep", or "Dust, Cereal, Fish". In order to find the linking words ("Hole" for the first, "Bowl" for the second) you need to be creative. The more you get right, the more creative you are thought to be because you have come up with uncommon associations.

J)For every one of the five studies, they found the same thing—participants who cheated in the first task did better on the creativity task. Why? Like other forms of unethical behavior, lying means breaking rules. It involves being deviant, going against the social principle that people should tell the truth. Similarly, being creative involves thinking outside the box", deviating from expectations. They involve similar thought patterns, so stimulating one stimulates the other. Can we learn from this? Perhaps. To be more creative, we could try lying in a controlled environment. Find online logic games and cheat at them, play Scrabble (拼字游戏) with a dictionary, or write a story about something that is untrue? Such tasks can get our brains thinking flexibly, beyond our normal comfort zone. This is not a call to become a compulsive (强迫性的) liar, but a controlled liar.

K)In addition to benefits for creativity, deviance can be a good thing in other ways. Even Philip Zimbardo, the author of the Stanford prison experiment, who showed how easily we can be led to behave badly, believes that the future of deviance research may lie more in understanding extreme pro social behavior, such as heroism. Like evil, we often view heroism as only a possibility for outliers—for people who are abnormal. But Zimbardo asks: "What if the capability to act heroically is also fundamentally ordinary and available to all of us?" Some say we should never meet our heroes, lest they disappoint us when we find out how normal they are. But this should be liberating, not disappointing. We are all capable of behaving like outliers. It's time for us to understand deviance, and realize its potential for good as well as for harm.

Even though we are living in an age where growing old is thought of as an inevitable misery, this doctor has been changing the game for seniors over the last 25 years. It all started in 1991 when the Harvard-educated physician was transferred from working in a stressful emergency room to being the medical director of a nursing home in upstate New York. The depressing and regimented (严格管制的) environment got him thinking on what exactly could improve the residents, conditions. Even though animals in nursing homes were illegal at the time, Dr. Bill Thomas took a chance. Based on a hunch (直觉), he brought in two dogs, four cats, hens, rabbits, 100 birds, a multitude of plants, a flower garden, and a vegetable patch. The change was dramatic. There was a 50% drop in medical prescriptions along with a dramatic decrease in death rates — but most importantly, the residents were simply happier. Dr. Thomas's approach, named the Eden Alternative, has driven nursing homes to allow a more autonomous (自主的) and creative living space for their elderly. It erases the belief that growing old means growing useless. He encourages residents to think of their age as an enriching new phase of life rather than the end of it. Thomas, now a speaker and author of several books, also created small, independently-run residences with their own bedrooms and bathrooms, and he has been preaching a singular message that getting old is not a bad thing. "Within six weeks, they had to send a truck around to pick up all the wheelchairs," Thomas told the Washington Post. " You know why most people in nursing homes use wheelchairs? Because the buildings are so big." The 56-year-old doctor's methods have been adopted in Australia, Japan, Canada, and America with enormous success. Last year he published Second Wind: Navigating the Passage to a Slower, Deeper, and More Connected Life, a guide on how to shift our perspectives on aging and growth. He is currently traveling through North America performing with his guitar and his enthusiasm on his Age of Disruption Tour.

Research shows that in developed countries, more affluent and educated people tend to consume higher-quality diets—including more fruits and vegetables, fish and whole grains. On the contrary, economically disadvantaged people report diets that are nutrient-poor and energy-dense. They are less likely to have food-purchasing habits that conform to public health recommendations. These dietary differences are often accompanied by higher rates of obesity and diabetes among lower- income people. This relationship between social class and diet quality and health is extensively documented. However, the research does not explain why this is the case- a question that has significant implications for designing effective policies and initiatives to improve diets and prevent chronic diseases. Public-health initiatives to promote healthy diets often focus on providing nutrition education and recipes (食谱). These approaches, however, often presume less food literacy (i.e. food knowledge and skills) among low-income people. Are unhealthy diets really the result of poor choices, limited food skills and knowledge? Research suggests that adults in food-insecure households are just as likely as those in food-secure households to adjust recipes to make them more healthy. They are also just as proficient in food preparation and cooking skills. There is no indication that increasing food skills or budgeting skills will reduce food insecurity. Instead, disadvantaged groups are constrained by their economic, material and social circumstances. For example, low income is the strongest predictor of food insecurity in Canada, where one in eight households experiences insufficient access to nutritious foods. It's well-established that food prices are an important determinant of food choice. Low-income households report that they find it difficult to adopt dietary guidelines because food prices are a barrier to improving their diets. When researchers estimate the cost of diets people actually eat, higher-quality diets are typically more costly. While this may be so, it does not, in itself, prove that healthy diets are necessarily more expensive or cost-prohibitive. After all, not all socio-economically disadvantaged people consume poor diets. We can easily think of a number of foods and recipes that are both inexpensive and nutritious. The internet is full of recipes for "eating well on a budget."