2024 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

A)Trade is one of the policy areas where the hostility that exists between populists (民粹主义者) and classical liberals is most visible. Free-traders point to the undeniable good that tariff-free trade has done for consumers across the world and to the observable alleviation of poverty in corners of the world where previously closed markets have been opened up. Protectionists point to the domestic producers who've paid the price for this globalized economy in the form of lost livelihoods and hollowed-out communities.

B)The ongoing conservative civil war often degenerates into content-free tribal warfare, but trade is a rare exception. There are substantial, thought-out policy proposals on both sides of the argument.

C)Consequently, trade as a topic of discussion provides an opportunity for liberals and populists to have a real meeting of minds. Fruitful debates might actually take place in this area, as opposed to the familiar ritual we've become accustomed to of condemnation met with counter-condemnation.

D)Strange as it might sound, the problem with trade in the modern world isn't a matter of dollars and cents. It's a matter of false consciousness. This observation is bound to set Marxist alarm bells ringing in the minds of some readers, but it was first made by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840.

E)Tracking the economic development of mankind from primitive to modern societies, Tocqueville observed a paradox unfolding over the centuries as economic realities and human experience of those realities strayed further and further from each other. In primitive societies, he notes, the division of labor was as yet undeveloped for the most part, requiring each person, family, or tribe to be relatively independent when it came to meeting their own basic material needs. Men built their own dwellings, farmed their own land, tended to their own livestock. This is not to deny that basic forms of trade took place, but, for the most part, our primitive ancestors lived fairly self-reliant, if crushingly poor, lives.

F)However, the exclusively local and face-to-face nature of economic and political organization in the ancient and prehistoric worlds constantly impressed upon these primitive peoples the uncontrollable reality of others and their needs. As Tocqueville notes, "as soon as a man begins to deal with common affairs in public, he begins to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow men as he had first imagined, and that in order to obtain their support he must often lend them his cooperation."

G)At the advent of the modern world, the division of labor spread further and further throughout society. Each person became more and more dependent on others for their basic needs. And yet, robbed of the engagement with our neighbors and with our local communities that our ancestors were forced into by circumstance, we feel ourselves to be more and more independent of one another. As we become more and more dependent on others, we become less and less conscious of our dependence on others. This is the paradox of trade in the modern world.

H)The false consciousness that this paradox generates causes havoc on the debates we have about free trade. There is scarcely a single commodity in any American household that isn't dependent for its manufacture and sale, through one supply chain or another, on scores of different people spread out across the entire globe. But as Tocqueville already foresaw in 1840, we do not feel dependent on these strangers for our way of life. No sense of the dependence of our own material welfare on their work ever strikes our national consciousness. We rarely contemplate the globalized avenues of free trade with gratitude.

I)There are two reasons for this. The first, to put it bluntly, is money. Money allows us to purchase the work of others without giving any thought to them as human beings. Unlike our ancestors in their primitive townships, we rarely have to meet face-to-face the people who've invented, built, shipped, or supplied our goods. No relationship has to be built before an exchange can take place. Simply agree on a price, and you can have any goods you wish without taking a second thought for the human being involved on the other side of the transaction. In this way, money makes us feel more independent than we actually are. Each of us senses the hold that it has over our fellows. We know that if we bid highly enough we can buy ourselves out of the time-consuming labor of building relationships. Money is kind of like magic in that way. It gives us a set of rituals to perform and promises that if we do so we'll be able to wield power over others. The illusion is created that having enough money to buy something is the equivalent of knowing how to make it yourself. Gratitude for the anonymous men and women who make up the supply chain rarely makes its way into our consciousness.

J)Anonymity, in fact, is the second root cause of the free-trade paradox. Modernity has emancipated everyone from the limits of location and community. By and large, when we trade, we trade with strangers; when we vote, we vote for strangers; when we watch, read, or listen to stories, the tellers of the tales are strangers. As opposed to the ancestors Tocqueville compares us to, we do not know the people with whom we have to do, in either the economic or the political sphere. This is simply the shadow side of the miracle of markets, which, for the first time in history, have allowed strangers to look after each other. They've also allowed each of us to live more and more of our lives exclusively as strangers to other people. This is how Tocqueville—rather pessimistically—describes us: Each, standing apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of others; his children and personal friends forming for him the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them. He touches them, but he does not feel them. He exists only in and for himself.

K)The last sentence but one is as apt a summary as one could hope to come by of how each of us functions in the modern economy: "He touches them, but he does not feel them."

L)This is the greatest challenge facing defenders of free trade. It's exceedingly difficult for human beings to feel gratitude toward strangers, and the global marketplace that has made us so rich has also made us strangers to one another. Our brains are hardwired for tribal life, and tribes do not take kindly to strangers. Impressing a sense of dependence upon and gratitude toward foreign strangers is therefore an uphill task.

M)If free-traders are going to win policy arguments in the future, they'll have to find a way of forging bonds of affection between American consumers and foreign producers. Only by de-anonymizing the men and women who supply us with the goods and services we enjoy from overseas and by creating a sense of solidarity and relationship across borders that transcends economic interest can free trade win the day. Otherwise, the inborn biological upper hand that protectionists have in the form of nationalist solidarity is bound to win the day at the ballot box.

There are hundreds of personality quizzes online that assert they can ascertain whether the right or left half of your brain is dominant. Left-brained people are supposedly logical and excel at language and math while right-brained people are more imaginative, emotionally intelligent and skilled with spatial reasoning. There's just one problem: That's not how brains work. Popular science enthusiasts sort of took this idea and ran with it, and it's become woven in popular culture now, and it's not going away. Despite this enduring belief, there's no such thing as being "right-brained" or "left-brained." Whether you're someone who tends more towards creativity or logic has nothing to do with one hemisphere of your brain being dominant over the other. But the actual science of how the two halves of our brains work together is sometimes stranger than fiction. The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right. In all vertebrate (脊椎的) animals, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body and vice versa. And scientists have long known, thanks to the behaviors of patients who suffered brain injuries, that different areas of the brain do different things. But many scientists struggled with this idea, because the very suggestion that the left and right halves of the brain operate differently disrupted the idea that nature tends toward perfect symmetry. Work by neuroscientists (神经科学家) has revealed the importance of different hemispheres of the brain for different activities. However, their research quickly saw some misinterpretations in the general public: Some presumed creative people must be right-brained and logical people left-brained. It is proven that not only is personality unrelated to the different halves of the brain, but people aren't really right- or left-brained to begin with. The idea that we have left-dominant people and right-dominant people, and that this is related to personality, is categorically false. That's never been supported in the neuroscience community. Neuroscientists don't believe that and never have. What scientists learned is that there are really important differences between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. It's just that they have nothing to do with personality or whether cognitive strategy is more logical or free spirited or creative. While researchers have shown the limitations of how the hemispheres of our brains influence our lives, it's not difficult to understand the appeal of such ideas. People are endlessly fascinated by themselves and their friends, and the subtle differences in how people think about the world are really meaningful to them. When you come up with an online quiz that tells us something about ourselves, we're drawn to that. It's irresistible. But you have to take it with an enormous grain of salt.

One hundred thirty-five students, four teachers, one giant classroom: This is what 9th grade looks like at Westwood High School, in Mesa, Arizona's largest school system. There, an innovative teaching model has taken hold, and is spreading to other schools in the district and beyond. Five years ago, faced with high teacher turnover and declining student enrollment, Westwood's leaders decided to try something different. Working with professors at Arizona State University's teachers college, they piloted a classroom model known as team teaching which allows teachers to dissolve the walls that separate their classes across physical or grade divides. The teachers share large groups of students—sometimes 100 or more—and rotate between group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups, or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet to hammer out a personalized program for every student the team will focus on that day. By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate, Mesa's administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off. "Teachers are doing fantastic things, but it's very rare a teacher walks into another room to see what's happening," said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools. "Our profession is so slow to advance because we are working in isolation." Of course, overhauling teaching approaches can't fix all the frustrations teachers have, such as low pay, but early results from Mesa show team teaching may be helping to reverse low morale. In a survey of hundreds of the district's teachers, researchers found those who worked on teams reported greater job satisfaction, more frequent collaborations with colleagues, and more positive interactions with students. Another benefit of teams, teachers say, is that they can help each other improve their instruction. During one planning session, English teacher Jeff Hall shared a performance appraisal with a science teacher: Her recent lecture on something she called "the central dogma of biology" had bewildered him and their other teammates. "If the science is too confusing for me, can you imagine the frustration you feel as kids?" Hall said. But the science teacher, he said, wouldn't have known about the confusion on her own. The model is not for everyone. Some teachers approached about volunteering for a team have said they prefer to work alone. Team teaching can also be a scheduling nightmare, especially at schools like Westwood where only some staff work in teams. There are also thorny questions like how to evaluate four teachers on the performance of 135 students. But for the time being, it seems to be working.