The invention discloses a preparation method and application of a carbon sphere/Au (copper) nanometer composite material. The preparation method comprises the following steps of firstly, preparing a carbon sphere, modifying the surface of the carbon sphere by PDDA (poly diallyldimethylammonium chloride), enabling the surface of the carbon sphere to carry positive charges, and utilizing electrostatic attraction to uniformly and quickly adsorb AuC14<-> onto the surface of the carbon sphere in the heating and stirring process with an H2O and DMF mixed solvent; finally, under the protection action of PVP (polyvinylpyrrolidone), using N,N-DMF (N,N-dimethylformamide) as a reduction agent, enabling Au to grow along a particular crystal face, and further reducing in situ in one step, so as to obtain the uniformly loaded carbon sphere/Au nanometer composite material. Compared with the prior art, the preparation method has the advantages that a gold nanoparticle is loaded by using the green, low-price and easily-synthetic carbon sphere as a substrate, the reaction time is short, the operation is simple and convenient, and the repeatability is high; by changing the adding amount of HAuC14, the carbon sphere/Au nanometer composite material with controllable loading amount is obtained; the carbon sphere/Au nanometer composite material has catalyzing property, and especially has excellent catalyzing property on the reduction of 4-nitrophenol.