2020年下半年英语六级阅读理解真题：长篇阅读

根据全国大学英语六级考试大纲可知，阅读理解部分由词汇理解（1篇）、长篇阅读（1篇）和仔细阅读（2篇）构成。词汇理解的篇章长度为250-300词；长篇阅读的篇章长度约1200词；仔细阅读的每篇长度为400-450词。阅读理解部分的分值比例为35% ，其中词汇理解占5%，长篇阅读占10%，仔细阅读占20%。考试时间40分钟。以下是希赛网英语四六级频道为大家搜集整理的2020年12月英语六级阅读理解真题及参考答案。

Part Ⅲ Reading Comprehension (40 minutes)

Section B

Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it.Each statement contains information given in ome of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from xwhich the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once.Fach paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questioms by marking thecorresponding letter om Ansuer Sheet 2.

Six Potential Bain Benefits of Bilingual Education

A) Brains, brains, brains. People are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings. But there is one happy link where research is meeting practice: bilingual  education.“In the last 20 years or so, there"s been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism ,says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of Califonia, Riverside.

B) Again and again, researchers have found,“bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for life," in the words of Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard"s Graduate School of Education.At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what"s often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs.

C) Traditional programs for English-language leamers, or ELLs, focus on assimilating students into English as quickdy as possible. Dual-language classrooms, by contrast, provide instruction across subjects to both English natives and English leamers, in both English and a target language.The goal is functional bilingualism and biliteracy for all students by middle school. New York City ,North Carolina, Delaware, Utah, Oregon and Washington state are among the places expanding dual-language classrooms.

D) The trend fies in the face of some of the culture wars of two decades ago , when advocates insisted on“English first” education. Most famously, Califomnia passed Proposition 227 in 1998. It was intended to sharply reduce the amount of time that English-language leamers spent in bilingual settings. Proposition 58，passed by California voters on November 8, largely reversed that decision,paving the way for a huge expansion of bilingual education in the state that has the largest population of English-language leamers.

E) Some of the insistence on Englih-first was founded on research produced decades ago, in which bilingual students underperformned monolingual English speakers and had lower IQ scores. Today"s scholars, like Elen Bialystok at York University in Toronto, say that research was “deeply flawed. ”“ Earlier research looked at socially disadvantaged groups, ”agrees Antonella Sorace at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.“This has been completely contradicted by recent research"”that compares groups more similar to each other.

F) So what does recent research say about the potential benefts of bilingual education? It tuns out that, in many ways, the real trick to speaking two languages consists in managing not to speak one of those languages at a given moment- -which is fundametally a feat of paying attention. Saying “Goodbye" to mom and then“Guten tag" to your teacher, or managing to ask for a crayola roja instead of a red crayon, requires skills called “ inhibition”and “task switching.” These skills are subsets of an ability called executive function.

G) People who speak two languages often outperform monolinguals on general measures of executive function.“ Bilinguals can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another,”says Sorace.

H) Do these same advantages beneft a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don"t yet know. Patterns of language learning and language. use are complex. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from bith, even when they didn"t begin practicing a second language in eamest before late childhood.

I) Young children being raised bilingual have to follow social cues to fngure out which language to use with which person and in what setting. As a result, says Sorace，bilingual children as young as age 3 have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind- -both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills.

J) About 10 percent of students in the Portland, Oregon public schools are assigned by lottery to dua]-language classrooms that offer instruction in Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, alongside English.Jennifer Steele at American University conducted a four-year, randomized trial and found that these dual-language students outperforned their peers in English-reading skills by a full school-year"s worth of learning by the end of middle school. Because the effects are found in reading, not in math or science where there were few differences, Steele suggests that learning two languages makes students more aware of how language works in general.

K) The research of Gigi Luk at Harvard offers a slightly different explanation. She has recently done a small study looking at a group of 100 fourth-graders in Massachusetts who had similar reading scores on a standard test, but very different language experiences. Some were foreign-language dominant and others were English natives. Here"s what"s interesting. The students who were dominant in a foreign language weren"t yet comfortably bilingual; they were just starting to leam English.Therefore, by definition, they had a much weaker English vocabulary than the native speakers.Yet they were just as good at interpreting a text. “ This is very surprising," Luk says.“You would expect the reading comprehension performance to mirror the vocabulary- -it"s a cormerstone of comprehension.*

L) How did the foreign-language dominant speakers manage this feat? Well, Luk found, they also scored higher on tests of executive functioning. So, even though they didn"t have huge mental dictionaries to draw on, they may have been great puzzle- solvers, taling into account higher-level concepts such as whether a single sentence made sense within an overall story line. They got to the same results as the monolinguals, by a different path.

M) American public school classrooms as a whole are becoming more segregated by race and class.Dual-language programs can be an exception. Because they are composed of native English speakers deliberately placed together with recent immigrants， they tend to be more ethnically and economically balanced. And there is some evidence that this helps kids of all backgrounds gain comfort with diversity and different cultures.

N) Several of the researchers also pointed out that, in bilingual education, non-English- dominant students and their families tend to feel that their home language is heard and valued,compared with a classroom where the home language is left at the door in favor of English. This can improve students" sense of belonging and increase parents" involvement in their children"s education,including behaviors like reading to children. “ Many parents fear their language is an obstacle,a problem, and if they abandon it their child will integrate better," says Antonella Sorace of the University of Edinburgh.“We tell them they"re not doing their child a favor by giving up their language.”

O) One theme that was striking in speaking to all these researchers was just how strongly they advocated for dual-language classrooms. Thomas and Collier have advised many school systems on how to expand their dual-language programs, and Sorace runs “ Bilingualism Matters," a intermational network of researchers who promote bilingual education projects. This type 0 advocacy among scientists is unusual; even more so because the“bilingual advantage hypothesis" is being challenged once again.

P) A review of studies published last year found that cognitive advantages failed to appear in 83 percent of published studies , though in a separate analysis , the sum of effects was still signifcantly positive.One potential explanation offered by the researchers is that advantages that are measurable in the very young and very old tend to fade when testing young adults at the peak of their cognitive powers. And, they countered that no negative effects of bilingual education have been found.So,even if the advantages are small, they are still worth it. Not to mention one obvious, outstanding fact:“ Bilingual children can speak two languages! " "

36. A study found that there are similar changes in brain structure between those who are bilingual from birth and those who start leaming a second language later.

37. Unlike traditional monolingual prograns, bilingual classrooms aim at developing students" ability to use two languages by middle school.

38. A study showed that dual-language students did significantly better than their peers in reading English texts.

39. About twenty years ago, bilingual practice was strongly discouraged, especially in California.

10. Ethnically and economically balanced bilingual classooms are found to be helpful for kids to get used to social and cultural diversity.

41. Researchers now claim that earlier research on bilingual education was seriously flawed.

42. According to a researcher , dual-language experiences exert a lifelong influence on one"s brain.

43. Advocates of bilingual education argued that it produces positive effects though they may be limited.

44. Bilingual speakers often do better than monolinguals in completing certain tasks because they can concentrate better on what they are doing.

45. When their native language is used, parents can become more involved in their children"s education.