2026年大学英语六级考试模拟试卷二

Questions 1 to 10 are based on the following passage.More than half of American adults____1____vitamin pills.Data from the National Health and Nutri-tion Examination Survey (NHANES)____2____a trend away from all-in-one multivitamins and toward specific supplements—especially fish oil and vitamin D.Most of this is self-prescribed.According to an analysis of the NHANES data, less than a quarter of supplements are taken at the___3_____o f a health professional.Most of this nutritional enthusiasm does no____4____, and for those with inadequate diets or special health concerns, supplements can do a world of good.But it is wise to keep in mind that doses that far exceed the recommended dietary allowances set by the Institute of Medicine can be hazardous.A reminder comes from a recent study linking____5____B vitamins to a heightened risk of hip fracture.The study combed through the vitamin habits of nearly 76,000 postmenopausal women____6____in the decades-long Nurses' Health Study.Lo and behold, those who took high doses of vitamin B6 (35 milligrams or more daily), together with B12 (20 micrograms or more), had a nearly 50 per-cent____7____risk of fracturing their hip than those taking low doses or none.High doses of B6 alone also raised the risk.The study____8____similar findings in a large Norwegian trial that looked at whether these vitamins and folic acid could reduce heart attacks and strokes in patients with narrowed blood vessels.Alas, they did not, and to the great____9____ of researchers, high doses were linked to hip frac-tures.Taken together, “the results are quite____10____”says Haakon Meyer,a professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at the University of Oslo.

Revitalising Credit Suisse(A)Tidjane Thiam is not the first non-Swiss cluef executive of Credit Suisse（瑞士信贷）.His American predecessor, Brady Dougan, held the job for eight years.But Mr.Dougan was an insider, having been at the firm for ages.Mr.Thiam was anything but a citizen oflvory Coast,where he was a govemment minister in the late 1990s, he had been a consultant at McKinsey and had overseen the European arm of Aviva and the whole of Prudential, two British insurers.Before taking the top job at Credit Suisse in 2015, he had never even worked for a bank.Charming in person and intimidating and forceful by reputation, Mr.Thiam walked straight into a tempest.(B)From the start he knew that Credit Suisse's defenses against disaster were uncomfortably thin.Its common equity tier 1 capital(普通股一级资本)covered just 10.3% of risk-weighted assets (RWAS，风险加权资产)，less than at any of its peers.To bolster them Mr.Thiam quickly raised SFr6bn ($6.3bn)in equity.Unleashing his inner consultant, he set about reorganising the bank's structure, steering it towards wealth management and away from the riskier whirlpools of investment banking.(C)But within months a nightmare had unfolded.In the last quarter of 2015 Credit Suisse made a stonking net loss(净亏损）of SFr6.4bn, as it wrote down（减低账面价值）the value of its investment bank and was buffeted by trading losses.More cash glugged away when the bank settled American charges that it had mis-sold residential mortgage-backed securities a decade before.Another share sale, raising SFr4bn, ensued in 2017.(D)The firm's shares—and presumably Mr.Thiam-still bear the imprint of those rights issues（权利股发行）and write-downs.Their price is half what it was when Mr.Thiam took over, and about 70% of tangible book value（有形账面价值）.The bank is still not free of legal and ethical shadows: it is being sued over loans in Mozambique before his time.(E)Nevertheless, Mr.Thiam has survived and now argues the worst is over.The restructuring programme was completed last year.The s“strategic resolution unit" (SRU)（战略重组单位，瑞士信贷事业部之一）housing dud assets（无用资产），which once held a quarter of RWAS, has been closed.hi the latest quarter the firm's retum on tangible equity climbed to 9.7%, roughly what investors regard as par（标准；票面价值；平均数量）for banks.Many European banks struggle to do as well (although Credit Suisse's bigger neighbour, UBS, which shified its weight from investment banking to wealth management afew years earlier, rang up 11.9%).The question now is whether the restyled Credit Suisse can progress from mere stability towards higher profitability and growth.(F)Mr.Thiam may have studied engineering in Paris, but instead of elegant simplicity he opted for an unusual, complex and asymmetrical structure for the firm, based around five divisions.One houses a Swiss universal bank.Another contains all the Asian businesses.Three functional divisions cover the rest of the world—wealth management, investment banking and global markets (trading).(G)In total, markets-related activities accounted for half of RWAS in 2015.Now their share is just one-third.Reckoning that banks' sales and trading revenues would stagnate, thanks to overcapacity and technological advance, Mr.Thiam chose “not to be all things to all people and to have very low costs”.Growth would come instead from managing the assets of rich people—especially the very rich indeed.The trading platform would still be needed, but at a size to serve those clients.(H)He borrows a parallel(类似的事情)from his former trade.Insurers prefer policies with repeated premiums to one-offs.Revenues from managing the assets of the wealthy, Mr.Thiam says, recur like the former, because once clients place money with you, then, if you look after them, they tend to stay; trading revenues come and go like single premiums.Net new assets in wealth management in all territories have been growing at about 5%a year, and profits at 15%.(I)Mr.Thiam's aim to be “the bank for entrepreneurs” is the rationale for the dedicated division for Asia, which is minting billionaires fast.If you are a tycoon whose personal and business finances are intertwined, you might want to sell shares in your firm and invest the proceeds: why should you face the hassle of dealing with different parts of the firm? About half of wealth-management infiows in Asia, Mr.Thiam says, come from referrals by local investment bankers.J 1 He had also bet on Asia at Prudential, trying to buy AIA,a big regional life insurer.But that was predicated on(以……为基础）the growing mass of the region's middle class.At Credit Suisse,he is after the truly rich.In Asia's fragmented wealth-management market, Credit Suisse's SFr219bn of assets, or a 12% share, ranks a healthy second, according to Magdalena Stoklosa of Morgan Stanley.UBS leads the pack.(K)Asia still accounts for just one-sixth of revenue and pre-tax profits.After decades of globetrotting,the anchor of the firm remains reliable Switzerland, which yields fully half of profits.Two-thirds of total growth in assets under management in the past three years, Mr.Thiam says, has come from existing clients, which are also more profitable than new ones.(L)Yet with wealth on the up and trading in retreat, revenue growth has been sluggish.Profits have risen mainly because costs have been cut.Operating costs have been slashed by 18% in four years.Rather than shave budgets across the board (全面地 ), Mr.Thiam canned whole activities,such as private banking in America.“Cost cuts have to be binary,” he says.Then fixed expenses,such as floor space and computer systems, can be got rid of He has also become stricter about spending on contractors and consultants.Rather than worry about the ratio of cost to income, a standard gauge of efficiency, he sets absolute targets, so that increases in revenue go to profit rather than being spent.Budgets are still scrutinised in weekly meetings.(M)Though an outsider, Mr.Thiam has relied mainly on insiders.He brought in Pierre-Olivier Boué e, the chiefoperating officer, a colleague at McKinsey and Aviva and his chiefrisk officer at Prudential, and Adam Gishen, the head ofinvestor relations and communications, who advised him at the Pru.But he has mainly promoted from within.The chief financial officer, David Mathers, has been in his job since 2010.That is unusual; incoming bosses at other troubled banks have swept away more senior people.Iqbal Khan, the head of international wealth-management, left abruptly in July.(N)With its time in purgatory seenungly over, Credit Suisse is aiming to push its rote into double figures.Market conditions perm itting, it aimed to breach 10% this year, but that now looks a stretch.With global interest rates falling, trade wars raging and markets jittery, the months ahead may be tricky for banks and wealth managers everywhere.(O)After four years, Mr.Thiam is an outsider no more.Running one of Europe's banks is a hazardous occupation: ask John Cryan, sacked after less than three years at Deutsche Bank in 2018, or John Flint, ousted from HSBC this month, after 30 years at the bank but a mere year and a halfin the hot seat.Mr.Thiam says he wants to become a Swiss citizen in due course.He was recently elected to the Intemational Olympic Comnuttee, based in Lausanne.Perhaps he will stay a while yet.

Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage.By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a perma-nent change in the habits of behaviour, of thought and of attitude.It is in being thus susceptible to the environment that man differs from the animals, and the higher animals from the lower.The low-er animals are influenced by the environment but not in the direction of changing their habits.Their instinctive responses are few and fixed by heredity.When transferred to an unnatural situation, such an animal is led astray by its instincts.Thus the “ant-lion” whose instinct implies it to bore into loose sand by pushing backwards with abdomen, goes backwards on a plate of glass as soon as danger threatens, and endeavors, with the utmost exertions to bore into it.It knows no other mode of flight,“or if such a lonely animal is engaged upon a chain of actions and is interrupted, it either goes on vainly with the remaining actions (as useless as cultivating an unsown field)or dies in helpless in-activity”.Thus a net-making spider which digs a burrow and rims it with a bastion of gravel and bits of wood, when removed from a half finished home, will not begin again, though it will continue an-other burrow, even one made with a pencil.Advance in the scale of evolution along such lines as these could only be made by the emer-gence of creatures with more and more complicated instincts.Such beings we know in the ants and spiders.But another line of advance was destined to open out a much more far-reaching possibility of which we do not see the end perhaps even in man.Habits, instead of being born ready-made (when they are called instincts and not habits at all)were left more and more to the formative influ-ence of the environment, of which the most important factor was the parent who now cared for the young animal during a period of infancy in which vaguer instincts than those of the insects were moulded to suit surroundings which might be considerably changed without harm.This means, one might at first imagine, that gradually heredity becomes less and environment more important.But this is hardly the truth and certainly not the whole truth.For although fixed au-tomatic responses like those of the insect-like creatures are no longer inherited, although selection for purification of that sort is no longer going on, selection for educability is very definitely still of importance.The ability to acquire habits can be conceivably inherited just as much as can definite responses to narrow situations.Besides, since a mechanism-is now, for the first time, created by which the individual (in contradiction to the species)can be fitted to the environment, the latter be-comes, in another sense, less not more important.And finally, less not the higher animals who pos-sess the power of changing their environment by engineering feats and the like, a power possessed to some extent even by the beaver, and preeminently by man.Environment and heredity are in no case exclusive but always supplementary factors.

Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage.Last year at airports across the world, 18% of flights were delayed, leaving millions of passen-gers stuck with a lot of time on their hands.Most of us can kill time at airports with a bit of shopping or the distractions provided by our smartphones, but some instead choose to get creative.Richard Dunn is a case in point.Earlier this month, he found himself stuck overnight at Las Vegas' Mc-Car ran International Airport, and decided to pass the time by shooting a music video of himself singing the Celine Dion cover of “All by Myself.”Make a game ofitEarlier this month, Daniel Wiersema, from Austin, Texas, was travelling with fellow members of the American Outlaws, a soccer fan club that travels to matches worldwide to show support for the USA.He was one of 530 members who flew to Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup.At George HW Bush In-ternational Airport, however,he and his fellow fans found they had time to kill before boarding “Myself and about eight others began passing a ball around, and it broke into a full out game,” he recalls. People-watching Sometimes, people-watching provides its own rewards.Training consultant Nick Holyoake found this to be true while waiting around at arrivals at London's Stansted Airport.He happened to notice a woman who, despite her bright yellow dress and smiley face balloon, looked “sad and soli-tary”, he says“She looked like she made such an effort for someone who was either late or never coming,” Holyoake guesses.“The contrast between the bright yellow of her hopefulness and the re-ality that all was most likely not going smoothly impressed me.” When he noticed her cover her face with the balloon, he couldn't help but snap a picture.Hit the loungeSome travelers, meanwhile, found themselves actually relishing their flight delays.Freddy Sherman, a luxury travel blogger, was so pleased with the facilities at Istanbul Ataturk Airport's VIP Lounge that he hated to board his flight.In addition to a spacious billiards area, the lounge also has a flight simulator (飞行模拟器 ).“I travel frequently and have experienced a lot of airport lounges,but this one constantly amazes me with all the thigs to see, do and eat,” he says.“I actually wanted my plane to be delayed so I could spend more time there.”