2015.6 英语六级考试真题试卷（第三套）- 阅读

Questions 36 to 45 are based on the following passage.

Travel websites have been around since the 1990s, when Expedia, Travelocity, and other holiday booking sites were launched, allowing travelers 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 going through a new revolution-this time transforming service quality. Online rating platforms- __38__ in hotels, restaurants, apartments, and taxis-allow travelers to exchange reviews and experiences for all to see.

Hospitality businesses are now ranked, analyzed, 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 unfriendly 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 rapid growth, as new customers are attracted by good 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 favorable online identity.

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A) accountable
B) capacity
C) controlled
D) entail
E) forged
F) incentives
G) occasionally
H) overstated
I) persisting
J) pessimistic
K) professionals
L) slash
M) specializing
N) spectators
O) subsequently

【参考答案】
36-45 CLMKE AFBHO



Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks

A) A thin magnetic strip (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 US. 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 envelope-all put together, you're 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 US. 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 US, 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 US 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 US 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 (欺诈性地), 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 CreditCardlnsider. com. "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 progress.) 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 calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion 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 information 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."

注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2 上作答。

46. It is best to use an EMV card for international travel.
47. Personal information on credit and debit cards is increasingly vulnerable to hacking.
48. The French card companies adopted EMV technology partly because of inefficient telephone service.
49. While many countries use the smarter EMV cards, the US still clings to its old magstripe technology.
50. Attempts are being made to prevent hackers from carrying out identity theft.
51. Credit cards are much safer to use than debit cards.
52. Big banks have been reluctant to switch to more secure technology because of the higher costs involved.
53. The potential liability for retailers using magstripe is far more costly than upgrading their registers.
54. The use of magstripe cards by American retailers leaves consumers exposed to the risks of losing account information.
55. Consumers will be a driving force behind the conversion from magstripe to EMV technology.

【参考答案】
46-55 HBGCA IDLFO


Passage One
Questions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was just as gloomy as anticipated. Unemployment in January jumped to a 16-year high of 7.6 percent, as 598,000 jobs were slashed from US payrolls in the worst single-month decline since December, 1974. With 1.8 million jobs lost in the last three months, there is urgent desire to boost the economy as quickly as possible. But Washington would do well to take a deep breath before reacting to the grim numbers.

Collectively, we rely on the unemployment figures and other statistics to frame our sense of reality. They are a vital part of an array of data that we use to assess if we're doing well or doing badly, and that in turn shapes government policies and corporate budgets and personal spending decisions. The problem is that the statistics aren't an objective measure of reality; they are simply a best approximation. Directionally, they capture the trends, but the idea that we know precisely how many are unemployed is a myth. That makes finding a solution all the more difficult.

First, there is the way the data is assembled. The official unemployment rate is the product of a telephone survey of about 60 000 homes. There is another survey, sometimes referred to as the "payroll survey," that assesses 400 000 businesses based on their reported payrolls. Both surveys have problems. The payroll survey can easily double-count someone: if you are one person with two jobs, you show up as two workers. The payroll survey also doesn't capture the number of self-employed, and so says little about how many people are generating an independent income.

The household survey has a larger problem. When asked straightforwardly, people tend to lie or shade the truth when the subject is sex, money or employment. If you get a call and are asked if you're employed, and you say yes, you're employed. If you say no, however, it may surprise you to learn that you are only unemployed if you've been actively looking for work in the past four weeks; otherwise, you are "marginally attached to the labor force" and not actually unemployed.

The urge to quantify is embedded in our society. But the idea that statisticians can then capture an objective reality isn't just impossible. It also leads to serious misjudgments. Democrats and Republicans can and will take sides on a number of issues, but a more crucial concern is that both are basing major policy decisions on guesstimates rather than looking at the vast wealth of raw data with a critical eye and an open mind.

注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2 上作答。

56. What do we learn from the first paragraph?
A) The US economic situation is going from bad to worse.
B) Washington is taking drastic measures to provide more jobs.
C) The US government is slashing more jobs from its payrolls.
D) The recent economic crisis has taken the US by surprise.

57. What does the author think of the unemployment figures and other statistics?
A) They form a solid basis for policy making.
B) They represent the current situation.
C) They signal future economic trends.
D) They do not fully reflect the reality.

58. One problem with the payroll survey is that _____.
A) it does not include all the businesses
B) it fails to count in the self-employed
C) it magnifies the number of the jobless
D) it does not treat all companies equally

59. The household survey can be faulty in that _____.
A) people tend to lie when talking on the phone
B) not everybody is willing or ready to respond
C) some people won't provide truthful information
D) the definition of unemployment is too broad

60. At the end of the passage, the author suggests that _____.
A) statisticians improve their data assembling methods
B) decision makers view the statistics with a critical eye
C) politicians listen more before making policy decisions
D) Democrats and Republicans cooperate on crucial issues Passage Two


Passage Two
Questions 61 to 65 are based on the following passage.

At some point in 2008, someone, probably in either Asia or Africa, made the decision to move from the countryside to the city. This nameless person pushed the human race over a historic threshold, for it was in that year that mankind became, for the first time in its history, a predominantly urban species.

It is a trend that shows no sign of slowing. Demographers reckon that three-quarters of humanity could be city-dwelling by 2050, with most of the increase coming in the fast-growing towns of Asia and Africa. Migrants to cities are attracted by plentiful jobs, access to hospitals and education, and the ability to escape the boredom of a farmer's agricultural life. Those factors are more than enough to make up for the squalor (肮脏), disease and spectacular poverty that those same migrants must often at first endure when they become urban dwellers.

It is the city that inspires the latest book from Peter Smith. His main thesis is that the buzz of urban life, and the opportunities it offers for co-operation and collaboration, is what attracts people to the city, which in turn makes cities into the engines of art, commerce, science and progress. This is hardly revolutionary, but it is presented in a charming format. Mr. Smith has written a breezy guidebook, with a series of short chapters dedicated to specific aspects of urbanity-parks, say, or the various schemes that have been put forward over the years for building the perfect city. The result is a sort of high-quality, unusually rigorous coffee-table book, designed to be dipped into rather than read from beginning to end.

In the chapter on skyscrapers, for example, Mr. Smith touches on construction methods, the revolutionary invention of the automatic lift, the practicalities of living in the sky and the likelihood that, as cities become more crowded, apartment living will become the norm. But there is also time for brief diversions onto bizarre ground, such as a discussion of the skyscraper index (which holds that a boom in skyscraper construction is a foolproof sign of an imminent recession).

One obvious criticism is that the price of breadth is depth; many of Mr. Smith's essays raise as many questions as they answer. Although that can indeed be frustrating, this is probably the only way to treat so grand a topic. The city is the building block of civilisation and of almost everything people do; a guidebook to the city is really, therefore, a guidebook to how a large and ever-growing chunk of humanity chooses to live. Mr. Smith's book serves as an excellent introduction to a vast subject, and will suggest plenty of further lines of inquiry.

注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2 上作答。

61. In what way is the year 2008 historic?
A) For the first time in history, urban people outnumbered rural people.
B) An influential figure decided to move from the countryside to the city.
C) It is in this year that urbanisation made a start in Asia and Africa.
D) The population increase in cities reached a new peak in Asia and Africa.

62. What does the author say about urbanisation?
A) Its impact is not easy to predict.
B) Its process will not slow down.
C) It is a milestone in human progress.
D) It aggravates the squalor of cities.

63. How does the author comment on Peter Smith's new book?
A) It is but an ordinary coffee-table book.
B) It is flavoured with humourous stories.
C) It serves as a guide to arts and commerce.
D) It is written in a lively and interesting style.

64. What does the author say in the chapter on skyscrapers?
A) The automatic lift is indispensable in skyscrapers.
B) People enjoy living in skyscrapers with a view.
C) Skyscrapers are a sure sign of a city's prosperity.
D) Recession closely follows a skyscraper boom.

65. What may be one criticism of Mr. Smith's book?
A) It does not really touch on anything serious.
B) It is too long for people to read from cover to cover.
C) It does not deal with any aspect of city life in depth.
D) It fails to provide sound advice to .