2015年6月英语六级考试真题2试卷.doc

2015年6月六级真题 卷二
Part I Writing (30 minutes)
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on Albert Einstein’s remark “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” You can cite one example or two to illustrate your point of view. You should write at least 150 but no more than 200 words.

Part III Reading Comprehension (40 minutes)
Section A
Travel websites have been around since the 1990s, when Expedia, Travelocity, and other holiday booking sites were launched, allowing travellers to compare flight and hotel prices with the click of a mouse. With information no longer 36. by travel agents or hidden in business networks, the travel industry was revolutionized, as greater transparency helped 37. prices.
Today, the industry is in the throes of a new revolution—this time transforming service quality. Online rating platforms—38. in hotels, restaurants, apartments, and taxis—allow travellers to exchange reviews and experiences for all to see.
Hospitality businesses are now ranked, analysed, and compared not by industry 39. , but by the very people for whom the service is intended—the customer. This has 40. a new relationship between buyer and seller. Customers have always voted with their feet; they can now explain their decision to anyone who is interested. As a result, businesses are much more 41. , often in very specific ways, which creates powerful 42. to improve service.
Although some readers might not care for gossipy reports of brusque bellboys (行李员) in Berlin or malfunctioning hotel hairdryers in Houston, the true power of online reviews lies not just in the individual stories, but in the websites’ 43. to aggregate a large volume of ratings.
The impact cannot be 44. . Businesses that attract top ratings can enjoy exponential growth, as new customers are attracted by good overall reviews and 45. provide yet more (positive) feedback. So great is the influence of online ratings that many companies now hire digital reputation managers to ensure a favourable online identity.
A) accountable I) persisting
B) capacity J) pessimistic
C) controlled K) professionals
D) entail L) slash
E) forged M) specializing
F) incentives N) spectators
G) occasionally O) subsequently
H) overstated
Section B
Plastic surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
[A] A thin magnetic stripe (magstripe) is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they’ve been working hard to break in. That’s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More Than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
[B] Swipe (刷卡) is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-debit (借记) or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious software, inserted secretly into the retailers’ point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
[C] The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U.S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa) that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN(personal identification number) to authenticate(验证) every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
[D] Why haven’t big banks adopted the more secure technology? When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it’s all about relative costs says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter: “ The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing (凸印) it, the small envelop—all put together, you are in the dollar range.” A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
[E] Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U.S. Then consider that there’s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U.S., American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
[F] That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments-security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
[G] Chip-and Pin cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U.S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired　networks made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was　so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions　to be verified locally and securely.
[H] Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It's actually a hybrid (混合体) that will still　have a magstripe, since most U.S. merchants don't have EMV terminals.) Should　you take them up on it? If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
[I] Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses　your credit card fraudulently (欺诈性的), it's the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes　the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and　the events surrounding any fraud. "If it's available, the logical thing is　to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a　co-founder of CreditCardI "I would use credit cards over debit　cards because of liability issues." Cash still works pretty well too.
[J] Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure (基础设施) needed for the technology, especially if consumers don't have access to it. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip　cards if shoppers aren't carrying them—yet there's little point in consumers'　carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren't equipped to use them. (An earlier　effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained traction.) According to　Gumbley, there's a "you-first mentality. The logjam (僵局) has to be broken."
[K] JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
[L] The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculus: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN-compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It's the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
[M] The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don't become EMV—compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
[N] In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads (侵袭) on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets　you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without　surrendering any card info to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication,　which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
[O] Credit and debit cards, though, are going　to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with　magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is　English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a　40-year-old technology." That's why it may be up to consumers to move the　needle on chip and PIN. Says Robertson: "When you get the consumer into a　position of worry and inconvenience, that's where the rubber hits the　road."

46. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your
47. Swipe (刷卡) is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks.
48. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible.
49. The solution could cost as little as $2extra for every piece of plastic issued.
50. A thin magnetic strip (magstripe) is all that stands between your credit-card.
51. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection.
52. Why haven’t big banks adopted the more secure technology?
53. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation.
54. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe.
55. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

Section C
Passage 1
I’ll admit I’ve never quite understood the obsession (难以破除的成见) surrounding genetically modified (GM) crops. To environmentalist opponents, GM foods are simply evil, an understudied, possibly harmful tool used by big agriculture business to control global seed markets and crush local farmers. They argue that GM foods have never delivered on their supposed promise, that money spent on GM crops would be better funneled to organic farming and that consumers should be protected with warning labels on any products that contain genetically modified ingredients. To supporters, GM crops are a key part of the effort to sustainably provide food to meet a global population. But more than that, supporters see the GM opposition of many environmentalists as fundamentally anti-science, no different than those who question the basics of man-made climate change.
For both sides, GM foods seem to act as a symbol: you’re pro-agribusiness or anti-science. But science is exactly what we need more of when it comes to GM foods, which is why I was happy to see Nature devote a special series of articles to the GM food controversy. The conclusion: while GM crops haven’t yet realized their initial promise and have been dominated by agribusiness, there is reason to continue to use and develop them to help meet the enormous challenge of sustainably feeding a growing planet.
That doesn’t mean GM crops are perfect, or a one-sizes-fits-all solution to global agriculture problems. But anything that can increase farming efficiency—the amount of crops we can produce per acre of land—will be extremely useful. GM crops can and almost certainly will be part of that suite of tools, but so will traditional plant breeding, improved soil and crop management—and perhaps most important of all, better storage and transport infrastructure (基础设施), especially in the developing world. (It doesn’t do much good for farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa to produce more food if they can’t get it to hungry consumers.) I’d like to see more non-industry research done on GM crops—not just because we’d worry less about bias, but also because the Monsantos and Pioneers of the world shouldn’t be the only entities working to harness genetic modification. I’d like to see GM research on less commercial crops, like corn. I don’t think it’s vital to label GM ingredients in food, but I also wouldn’t be against it—and industry would be smart to go along with labeling, just as a way of defusing fears about the technology.
Most of all, though, I wish a tenth of the energy that’s spent endlessly debating GM crops was focused on those more pressing challenges for global agriculture. There are much bigger battles to fight.

56. How do environmentalist opponents view GM foods according to the passage?
A). They will eventually ruin agriculture and the environment.
B). They are used by big businesses to monopolize agriculture.
C). They have proved potentially harmful to consumers’ health.
D). They pose a tremendous threat to current farming practice.
57. What does the author say is vital to solving the controversy between the two sides of the debate?
A). Breaking the GM food monopoly.　　　　　　　　B). More friendly exchange of ideas.
C). Regulating GM food production.　　　　　　　　D). More scientific research on GM crops.
58. What is the main point of the Nature articles?
A). Feeding the growing population makes it imperative to develop GM crops.
B). Popularizing GM technology will help it to live up to its initial promises.
C). Measures should be taken to ensure the safety of GM foods.
D). Both supporters and opponents should make compromises.
59. What is the author’s view on the solution to agricultural problems?
A). It has to depend more and more on GM technology.
B). It is vital to the sustainable development of human society.
C). GM crops should be allowed until better alternatives are found.
D). Whatever is useful to boost farming efficiency should be encouraged.
60.What does th