小編提醒各位考生，做英語閱讀理解要注意的是，閱讀理解所有的答題依據(jù)都來源于文章，來源于作者觀點態(tài)度!不能因為自己認為某個原因說得過去、某個做法是合理的就偏離文章原意作答，這樣可能就陷入了出題人為我們挖的陷阱。為了幫助考生們順利通 過英語六級考試，下面是站為大家分享的2019年12月英語六級閱讀真題預測4，希望對您有所幫助。

12月英語六級閱讀真題預測4

Peer Pressure Has a Positive Side

A) Parents of teenagers often view their children'sfriends with something like suspicion. They worrythat the adolescent peer group has the power topush its members into behavior that is foolish andeven dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driverwith a same-age passenger in the car is at higherrisk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.

B) In a 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; andadults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the playermust avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinbergand Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peerslooking on.

C) Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when theirpeers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless whenother young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless ofwhether they were on their own or observed by others." The presence of peers makesadolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks," Steinberg and Gardnerconcluded.

D) Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that thisinterpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined thequestion of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, theycame to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts areproposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to thepresence of friends and leverage it to improve education.

E) In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI (磁共振) toinvestigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain. Theyscanned the brains of 40 teens and adults who were playing a virtual driving game designed totest whether players would brake at a yellow light or speed on through the crossroad.

F) The brains of teenagers, but not adults, showed greater activity in two regions associatedwith rewards when they were being observed by same-age peers than when alone. In otherwords, rewards are more intense for teens when they are with peers, which motivates them topursue higher-risk experiences that might bring a big payoff (such as the thrill of just makingthe light before it turns red). But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have itsadvantages. In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleaguesused a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate howthe presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information.

G) The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescentsengaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negativeoutcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in solitude." What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively whentheir peers are present than when they're on their own," Steinberg says. And this finding couldhave important implications for how we think about educating adolescents.

H) Matthew D. Lieberman, a social cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, LosAngeles, and author of the 2013 book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, suspectsthat the human brain is especially skillful at learning socially significant information. He pointsto a classic 2004 study in which psychologists at Dartmouth College and Harvard Universityused functional MRI to track brain activity in 17 young men as they listened to descriptions ofpeople while concentrating on either socially relevant cues (for example, trying to form animpression of a person based on the description) or more socially neutral information (suchas noting the order of details in the description). The descriptions were the same in eachcondition, but people could better remember these statements when given a social motivation.

I) The study also found that when subjects thought about and later recalled descriptions interms of their informational content, regions associated with factual memory, such as themedial temporal lobe, became active. But thinking about or remembering descriptions in termsof their social meaning activated the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—part of the brain's socialnetwork—even as traditional memory regions registered low levels of activity. More recently, as he reported in a 2012 review, Lieberman has discovered that this region may be part of adistinct network involved in socially motivated learning and memory. Such findings, he says, suggest that" this network can be called on to process and store the kind of information taughtin school—potentially giving students access to a range of untapped mental powers."

J) If humans are generally geared to recall details about one another, this pattern is probablyeven more powerful among teenagers who are very attentive to social details: who is in, whois out, who likes whom, who is mad at whom. Their desire for social drama is not—or not only—a way of distracting themselves from their schoolwork or of driving adults crazy. It is actuallya neurological (神經的) sensitivity, initiated by hormonal changes. Evolutionarily speaking, people in this age group are at a stage in which they can prepare to find a mate and start theirown family while separating from parents and striking out on their own. To do thissuccessfully, their brain prompts them to think and even obsess about others.

K) Yet our schools focus primarily on students as individual entities. What would happen ifeducators instead took advantage of the fact that teens are powerfully compelled to think insocial terms? In Social, Lieberman lays out a number of ways to do so. History and Englishcould be presented through the lens of the psychological drives of the people involved. Onecould therefore present Napoleon in terms of his desire to impress or Churchill in terms of hislonely gloom. Less inherently interpersonal subjects, such as math, could acquire a socialaspect through team problem solving and peer tutoring. Research shows that when we absorbinformation in order to teach it to someone else, we learn it more accurately and deeply, perhaps in part because we are engaging our social cognition.

L) And although anxious parents may not welcome the notion, educators could turn adolescentrecklessness to academic ends." Risk taking in an educational context is a vital skill thatenables progress and creativity," wrote Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist atUniversity College London, in a review published last year. Yet, she noted, many young peopleare especially unwilling to take risks at school—afraid that one low test score or poor gradecould cost them a spot at a selective university. We should assure such students that risk, and even peer pressure, can be a good thing—as long as it happens in the classroom and notin the car.

36. It is thought probable that the human brain is particularly good at picking up sociallyimportant information.

37. It can be concluded from experiments that the presence of peers increases risk-taking byadolescents and youth.

38. Students should be told that risk-taking in the classroom can be something positive.

39. The urge of finding a mate and getting married accounts for adolescents' greater attentionto social interactions.

40. According to Steinberg, the presence of peers increases the speed and effectiveness ofteenagers' learning.

41. Teenagers' parents are often concerned about negative peer influence.

42. Activating the brain's social network involved in socially motivated learning and memorymay allow students to tap unused mental powers.

43. The presence of peers intensifies the feeling of rewards in teens' brains.

44. When we absorb information for the purpose of imparting it to others, we do so withgreater accuracy and depth.

45. Some experts are suggesting that we turn peer influence to good use in education.

英語六級閱讀參考答案：

36.H

37.C

38.L

39.J

40.G

41.A

42.I

43.F

44.K

45.D