历年6级阅读真题(整理版).docx

PAGE PAGE # 历年英语六级阅读真题(2012,6…2006,12) 2012年12月英语六级阅读真题 (1) Passage One Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans. From self-service checkout lines at the supermarket to industrial robots armed with saws and taught to carve up animal carcassesin slaughter-houses, these ever-more-intelligent machines are now not just assisting workers but actually kicking them out of their jobs. Automation isn Jut st affecting factory workers, either. Some law firms now use artificial intelligence software to scan and read mountains of legal documents, work that previously was performed by highly paid human lawyers. Robotscontinue to have an impact on blue-collar jobs, and whitecollarjobs are under attack by microprocessors, sa” ys Edward Learner, an economics professor at UCLA s Anderson School of Management and director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, a survey of the U.S. and California economies. Learner says the recession permanently wiped out 2.5 million jobs. U.S. gross domestic product has climbed back to prerecession levels, meaning we re producin much as before, only with 6 percent fewer workers. To be sure, robotics are not the only job killers out there, with outsourcing stealing far more gigs than automation. Jeff Burnstein, president of the Robotics Industry Association, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Mich., argues that robots actually save U.S. jobs. His logic: companies that embrace automation might use fewer still workers, but thatbestter than firing everyone and moving the work overseas. workers, but that It *s not that robots are cheaper than humans, though often they are. It *s that they are better.“In some cases the quality requireme It *s that they are better. stringent that even if you wanted to have a human do the job, you couldn t, ” Burnstein says. Same goes for surgeons, who are using robotic systems to perform an ever-growing list of operations—not because t