2013年12月大学英语六级考试真题(第二套)
work on “Rubber Soul”, Paul McCartney looked into the possibility of going to America to record their next album. The equipment in American studios was more advanced than anything in Britain, which had led the Beatles great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album,
“Aftermath”, in Los Angeles. McCartney found that EMI’s (百代唱片) contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow suit, and the Beatles had to make do with the primitive technology of Abbey Road.
C) Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their creativity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “A Day in the Life” featured revolutionary sound effects that dazzled and mystified Martin s American counterparts.
D) Sometimes it s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition for British schoolchildren. During the 1980s he noticed an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also “strangely boring”. After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way into British homes.
E) You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage. But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review
Hughes speculated that when a person puts pen to paper, “you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it, when you couldn t write at all”. As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed,
psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble (不着边际的长篇大论).
F) Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.
G) As a poet, Ted Hughes had an acute sensitivity to the way in which constraints on self-expression, like the disciplines of metre and rhyme (韵律), spur creative thought. What applies to poets and musicians also applies to our daily lives. We tend to equate（等同于）happiness with freedom, but, as the psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips has observed,
without obstacles to our desires it’s harder to know what we want, or where we’re heading. He tells the story of a patient, a first-time mother who complained that her young son was always clinging to her, wrapping himself around her legs wherever she went. She never had a moment to herself, she said, because her son was “always in the way”. When Phillips asked her where she would go if he wasn t in the way, she replied cheerfully, “Oh, I wouldn t know where I was!” H) Take another common obstacle: lack of money. People often assume that more money will make them happier. But economists who study the relationship between money and happiness have consistently found that, above a certain income, the two do not reliably correlate. Despite the ease with which the rich can acquire almost anything they desire, they are just as likely to be unhappy as the middle classes. In this regard at least, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.