2021年12月英语四级真题 第1套

Section C
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A）, B）, C）and D）. You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.

Passage One
Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

As many office workers adapt to remote work, cities may undergo fundamental change if offices remain under-utilized. Who will benefit if working from home becomes the norm?
Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers.
Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of parasitic（寄生的）capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public—and now personal—realm, rather than on generating new value.
Though employers are backed by a chorus of remote work advocates, others note the loneliness, reduced productivity and inefficiencies of extended remote work.
If working from home becomes permanent, employees will have to dedicate part of their private space to work. This requires purchasing desks, chairs and office equipment.
It also means having private space dedicated to work: the space must be heated, cleaned, maintained and paid for. That depends on many things, but for purposes of illustration, I have run some estimates for Montréal. The exercise is simple but important, since it brings these costs out of the realm of speculation into the realm of meaningful discussion.
Rough calculations show that the savings made by employers when their staff works from home are of similar value to the compensation workers should receive for setting up offices at home.
What does this mean for offices in cities? One of two things may happen: Employers pass these costs onto employees. This would be a form of expropriation（侵占）, with employees absorbing production costs that have traditionally been paid by the employer. This represents a considerable transfer of value from employees to employers.
When employees are properly compensated, employers' real estate savings will be modest. If savings are modest, then the many advantages of working in offices—such as lively atmosphere, rapidity of communication, team-building and acclimatization（适应环境）of new employees—will encourage employers to shelve the idea of remote work and, like Yahoo in 2013, encourage employees to work most of the time from corporate office space.

随着许多办公室职员适应了远程办公，如果办公室一直得不到充分利用的话，一些城市可能会发生根本性的变化。如果在家办公成为惯例，那么谁会从中受益呢？
雇主认为，当员工从在办公室工作转变为在家办公时，他们将在房地产上节省大量资金。[46] 然而，能节省这些资金是将成本转嫁给员工的结果。
除非员工得到了充分的补偿，否则这可能成为寄生资本主义的一种变化形式，由此，企业的利润越来越依靠从公众领域——而现在是从个人领域——中榨取价值，而不是产生新的价值。
尽管远程办公的支持者们异口同声地支持雇主，[47] 但是其他人注意到了长时间在家办公带来的孤独感、下降的生产力和工作效率。
如果在家办公成为永久性的事情，那么员工将不得不牺牲自己的部分私人空间用来工作。这需要购买办公桌椅和办公设备。
这还意味着牺牲私人空间用来工作：这一空间，必须供暖，有人清洁和维护，以及支付费用。[48] 这取决于很多因素，但是为了进行说明，我针对蒙特利尔做了一些估算。这个估算很简单但是很重要，因为它使这些成本脱离了臆想的范畴，进入了有意义的讨论的范畴。
[49] 粗略的计算表明，当员工在家办公时雇主省下来的资金与员工在家里设立办公室应得的补偿价值大体相当。
这对于在城市中的办公室来说意味着什么？以下两种情况之一可能会发生：雇主将这些成本转嫁给员工。这将是一种侵占，员工需要承担原本一直是雇主支付的生产成本。这代表着价值从雇员向雇主的巨大转移。
当员工得到了适当的补偿，雇主节省的房地产费用就不会太多。如果节省的成本不多，那么在办公室工作的诸多好处——比如充满活力的氛围、快捷的沟通、团队建设和新员工对环境的适应——将鼓励雇主暂时搁置远程办公的想法，并且像2013年雅虎那样，鼓励员工大部分时间在公司的办公场所工作。

Passage Two
Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

The human thirst for knowledge is the driving force behind our successful development as a species. But curiosity can also be dangerous, leading to setbacks or even downfalls. Given curiosity's complexity, scientists have found it hard to define.
While pinning down a definition has proven tricky, the general consensus is it's some means of information gathering. Psychologists also agree curiosity is intrinsically（内在地）motivated. Curiosity covers such a large set of behaviors that there probably isn't any single “curiosity gene” that makes humans wonder about and explore their environment. That said, curiosity does have a genetic component. Genes and the environment interact in many complex ways to shape individuals and guide their behavior, including their curiosity.
Regardless of their genetic makeup, infants have to learn an incredible amount of information in a short time, and curiosity is one of the tools humans have found to accomplish that gigantic task.
Hundreds of studies show that infants prefer novelty. It's what motivates non-human animals, human infants and probably human adults to explore and seek out new things before growing less interested in them after continued exposure.
But curiosity often comes with a cost.
In some situations, the stakes are low and failure is a healthy part of growth. For instance, many babies are perfectly proficient crawlers, but they decide to try walking because there's more to see and do when they stand upright. But this milestone comes at a small cost. A study of 12- to 19-month-olds learning how to walk documented that these children fell down a lot. Seventeen times per hour, to be exact. But walking is faster than crawling, so this motivates expert crawlers to transition to walking.
Sometimes, however, testing out a new idea can lead to disaster. For instance, the Inuit people of the Arctic regions have created incredible modes to deal with the challenges of living in northern climates, but what we forget about are the tens of thousands of people that tried and failed to make it in those challenging landscapes.

[51] 人类对知识的渴望是我们作为一个物种成功发展的驱动力。但好奇心也有可能是危险的，它会导致挫折甚至衰落。鉴于好奇心的复杂性，科学家们发现很难给它下定义。
虽然确定一个定义很难，[52] 但普遍的共识是，它是一种收集信息的方式。心理学家也赞同好奇心是有内在动机的。
好奇心涵盖了如此多的行为，以至于很可能没有任何单一的“好奇心基因”让人类对环境产生好奇并加以探索。即便如此，好奇心确实具有遗传因素。[53] 基因和环境以许多复杂的方式相互作用，以塑造个人并指导他们的行为，包括他们的好奇心。
无论婴儿的基因构成如何，他们都不得不在短时间内学习数量惊人的信息，而好奇心是人类发现的用来完成这一重大任务的工具之一。
[54] 数百项研究显示，婴儿更喜欢新奇事物。这是促使非人类动物、人类婴儿，甚至可能是人类成年人探索和寻找新事物的动力，而在持续接触后，他们对新事物的兴趣会减弱。
[55] 但是好奇心常常是有代价的。
在某些情况下，风险很低，并且失败是成长的健康组成部分。例如，许多婴儿是非常熟练的爬行者，但他们决定尝试走路，因为当他们直立时，能看到更多的东西，做更多的事情。但要到达这个里程碑也要付出小小的代价。一项针对12至19个月大的孩子学习如何走路的研究记录了这些孩子经常摔倒。准确地说，每小时摔倒十七次。但是走路比爬行更快，所以这一点激励着爬行专家们（指婴儿）转向走路。
[55] 但是有时检验一个新的想法可能会导致灾难。例如，北极地区的因纽特人创造了不可思议的模式来应对北方气候中的挑战，但我们忘记的是，数以万计的人尝试在这些极具挑战的环境中生存却失败了。