It is reported that a record-breaking high-speed rail will connect Inner Mongolia in the north to Hainan in the south. According to the Shaanxi Development and Reform Commission, the proposed line will operate at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour(217 mph).
Beginning in Inner Mongolia's Baotou city and running through southern Shaanxi, Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi and Guangdong, its final stop would be in Haikou city on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province.
Though the exact length of the proposed route has not been released, it will likely become the world's longest high-speed rail line as the journey by road between Baotou and Haikou is approximately 3,000 kilometers(1,864 miles)long. Currently, the world's longest high-speed rail line is almost 2,300 kilometers long(1,429 miles),running from Beijing to Guangzhou.
The proposed rail is part of China's aim to create another “Silk Road of the 21st Century” and improve the country's transportation network while driving land development and urbanization(城市化)in some provincial areas.
Many of the provinces through which the high-speed trains will travel are near major bodies of water, such as the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi province, the Yangtzi River in Hubei and the South China Sea, where the line would end. It will also take passengers to popular tourist attractions including Zhangjiajie, Xi'an, Guilin and minority areas in western Hunan and Hubei.
“The country is now shifting its focus and investing in the western regions and economically underdeveloped areas, making up for China's long debt to these areas,” Tan yuzhi, professor of the School of Economics and Management at Hubei University for Nationalities, told local media. “ The project will significantly narrow regional disparities(差异)and solve minority issues.”
However, Deng Hongbing, director of China University of Geosciences' Center for Regional Economic and Investment Center, said that if the north-to-south railway is to go ahead, there needs to be a sound ecological program in place to ensure the protection of these underdeveloped and ecologically sensitive areas.
1. What is the passage mainly talking about?| A．China has decided to invest in the western areas. |
| B．Another high-speed train line is being planned. |
| C．The train will speed up to 350 kilometers per hour. |
| D．China has produced the best high-speed train line. |
| A．9 | B．8 | C．7 | D．6 |
| A．it will be the most convenient high-speed rail line in China |
| B．it will benefit the underdeveloped areas a lot in the west |
| C．it will transport goods faster from north to south |
| D．it will do good to the environment alongside the line |
| A．Favourable | B．Doubtful. | C．Puzzled. | D．Negative. |
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【推荐1】General Motors (GM) is one of the world’s major automakers (汽车制造商). In January, the company set a goal: It will stop selling gas-powered cars by 2035. It means the company will make more battery-powered vehicles.
This is a big moment for the auto industry. Scientists say it’s important to move away from gas powered vehicles. Doing so will fight climate change. Transportation causes about 25% of global carbon emissions (排放物). Three-quarters of that is from road travel. Countries are taking action. In China, most new vehicles sold must be electric by 2035. The United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands will not allow sales of new gas-powered cars in 2030.
Venkat Viswanathan is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He told TIME for Kids, “It is now very clear that going electric is the future.”
Electric cars run on lithium-ion (锂离子) batteries, which power our mobile devices. Making these batteries has an environmental cost. Lithium is taken from the earth, like the oil used to make gas. But the long-term cost is much smaller. “When you use up a battery, you can recycle the material,” says Jessika Trancik, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Electric cars have another environmental effect. They need energy to recharge. They get the energy from power plants. These places burn oils. But countries can turn to cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar power. If they do, electric vehicles will get cleaner too. Even now, they’re cleaner than cars that run on gas.
1. What will GM do in 2035?| A．Stop producing all vehicles. | B．Produce just electric cars. |
| C．Sell more gas-powered cars. | D．Find more energy sources. |
| A．To bring convenience to road travel. | B．To deal with climate change. |
| C．To promote sales of electric cars. | D．To set up more power plants. |
| A．They are cleaner than solar power. | B．They have no environmental cost. |
| C．Their materials are recyclable. | D．They are cheaper than oil. |
| A．The Sales of Gas-powered Cars | B．How to Sell More Electric Cars |
| C．Carmakers’ Plan of Going Electric | D．Electric Cars Are the Future |
【推荐2】Later this month, the city center of London will be car-free for the day. More than 12 miles of roads in the capital will be closed off from vehicles. Though the car-free day is largely symbolic, the government expects people can walk or ride bikes more often instead of driving cars after the activity.
Besides London, there are other cities around the world doing the same thing. Oslo, Paris and Montreal have experimented with a variety of ways to ban cars. Barcelona has created some superblocks as part of a plan to limit vehicles in 70 percent of the city’s streets. Leaders in some US cities are also exploring plans to extremely cut down on cars and promote walking, bikes and other forms of travel.
Some people point out cars block city streets while producing harmful chemicals into the air, creating noise pollution and endangering people around them. Cars take up a huge amount of room that could be used to create more enjoyable living space for people. So, limiting the number of drivers on the road is also seen as a major step in fighting climate change.
However, others say the plans of car-free areas are unrealistic, considering the large amount of money spent on the basic systems and services and public transportation that would be required to make them successful. Some argue they would unfairly benefit rich people who have enough money to live in city centers while making travel more difficult for lessaffluentpeople in the suburbs.
Most of the early success stories of car-free areas have taken place in dense (密集的）European cities that were designed before cars existed，which leads to a question -- whether the idea would work in modern cities that were built to provide space for cars. Therefore, large-scale changes that would make car-free city living possible would likely take years to take place. And at each step, public sentiment (情绪）and political will must be behind the movement.
1. Several cities are mentioned in Paragraph 2 to show________.| A．people around the world are in favor of car-free cities. |
| B．car-free cities have already appeared in large numbers. |
| C．governments have a major effect on car-free city plans. |
| D．many cities are making efforts to reduce cars in the streets. |
| A．Healthy. | B．Wealthy. | C．Famous. | D．Educated. |
| A．Positive. | B．Negative. | C．Objective. | D．Doubtful. |
【推荐3】Like expensive watches that never break, the world’s best airports can be boring. You land, move through passport control and check into a hotel within minutes. The experience is pleasant, but not memorable. The worst airports have more characters. To adapt Tolstoy, lovely airports are all alike, but every wretched airport is wretched in its own way.
To work out which is the world’s worst airport, we conducted a survey of our correspondents who travelled a lot. It attracted more, and more passionate, responses than nearly any other internal survey we have done.
Although each awful airport is unique, four themes occur again and again: danger, bullying by officials, theft and delay. Sometimes, all these enhance each other. For example, it takes ages to get through Lubumbashi airport (in the Democratic Republic of Congo) because security officials slow things down in the hope that passengers will give them “un Cadeau” to hurry up. If you hand over $1, they let you board without your bags getting checked at all. Such deals make air travel in places like Congo slower, riskier, costlier and much more unpleasant.
Air travellers make tempting targets for thieves. They are rich enough to afford an air ticket, which in many places makes them rich indeed. They carry luggage, some of it valuable. They are often far from home and unfamiliar with local rules. And airports are full of choke points through which travellers must pass if they are to board their planes, creating opportunities for dishonest officials to charge them. The ones in Manila are especially creative. Some have been known to plant bullets in luggage so they can “find” them and demand money not to have the owners arrested.
Rules change at borders, and some airport officials enforce them mindlessly. One correspondent recalls that in Santiago, Chile: “I once got detained for two hours for failing to declare an unopened, sealed bag of almonds. I then had to write a declaration expressing my regret for bringing the nuts. When I failed to do so without cracking up I was threatened with arrest. The lady next to me was being interrogated for carrying a lone banana.”
Poor countries have an excuse for poor airports. Rich countries do not, which is perhaps why travellers are particularly annoyed to find grottiness (恶心) in, say, Brussels, the heart of the European Union. Our Charlemagne columnist writes of Charleroi, its second airport: “It is dirty and crowded, and has terrible food. The planes leave and land at unreasonble hours. And the only real way into town is a coach that runs every 30 minutes and is frequently overbooked: more than once I’ve queued in the rain only to see it drive off as I reach the front.”
1. The last sentence of the first paragraph implies that _______.| A．each bad airport is unique |
| B．good airports are hard to find |
| C．awful airports have a lot in common |
| D．the world’s best airports are not that good |
| A．explain how delay occurs in African airports |
| B．illustrate how the four themes are interrelated |
| C．argue against the necessity of airport security officials |
| D．give an example of what $1 means to people in Congo |
| A．agents | B．passengers | C．stores | D．barriers |
| A．It is located in a rich country. |
| B．It used to be dirty and crowded. |
| C．It used to be close to the city center. |
| D．It is the country’s second largest airport. |
【推荐1】Young British adults get daily news depending less on traditional media, and instead they choose TikTok. TikTok is the fastest growing news source for UK adults, according to a survey.
TikTok is used by 7% of adults for news, according to the UK’s communications watchdog, up from 1% in 2020. The growth is primarily driven by young users. Ofcom’s (英国通信管理局) annual report on news consumption in the UK showed that for teenagers aged 12-15, Instagram has defeated BBC to become the most popular news source, closely followed by TikTok and YouTube.
“Teenagers today prefer to keep up to date by scrolling (滚屏) through their social feeds rather than pick up a newspaper or turn to TV news,” said Yih-Choung Teh, a director from Ofcom. “And while youngsters find news on social media to be less reliable, they sing high praise for these services for serving up a range of opinions on the day’s topical stories.” The Ofcom study showed that news organisations are having to compete with non-journalist TikTokers as news sources on the platform. For those who consume news on TikTok, their main source is other people they follow(44%), followed by friends and family (32%) and then news organisations (24%). The most popular official news source on TikTok is the BBC, followed by Sky News and ITV. TikTok has more than 1 billion users worldwide and is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company.
Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters institute for the Study of journalism, said their research indicated that TikTok was not used as a platform for serious current affairs. “Even though young people see it as a good place to get news about celebrities or issues that are not about life and death, they don’t see it as a platform for serious news.” he said.
The Ofcom report shows BBC remains the most popular news source among adults (53%), followed by ITV(35%) and then Facebook (32%), which remains the most popular social media source for news.
1. What is the favorite platform for teenagers aged 12-15 to read news?| A．Instagram. | B．BBC. | C．TikTok. | D．YouTube. |
| A．Youngsters think highly of social media because they provide reliable news. |
| B．TikTok is in the possession of the UK. |
| C．For people reading news on TikTok, their main sources are still traditional news organizations. |
| D．News organizations have to compete with TikTokers to release news on TikTok. |
| A．Positive. | B．Objective. | C．Negative. | D．Indifferent. |
| A．A textbook. | B．A comprehensive newspaper. | C．A travel journal. | D．A fiction. |
【推荐2】About half a billion people depend on the ecosystems created and sustained by corals. And with climate change threatening coral’s survival, marine scientist Enric Sala had a goal that might have seemed impossible.
“We wanted to get into a time machine, go back hundreds of years and actually see a coral reef like they used to be everywhere, before we started exploiting them and polluting them and killing them all over the world, ” Sala said.
The goal was made possible during an expedition Sala led in 2009. The team traveled to a corner of the South Pacific Ocean, to see if the vibrant reefs there held any clues that could help them understand how to bring damaged reefs in other parts of the ocean back to health.
“The bottom was covered by thriving (茂盛的) coral. Vivid colors surrounded me - purples, reds, oranges, yellows and greens. It was so beautiful, ” Sala said.
His team presented their findings to officials in the island country of Kiribati. The government took steps to protect the waters from fishing and other human activity. But between 2015 and 2016, record levels of ocean warming damaged half the coral reefs the team had been studying.
After hearing that news, they lost hope for the health of coral reefs. Last year, they went in for another dive. Despite the reported conditions, the reef had somehow restored itself, filled with life and color once more. Sala and his team were overjoyed. This is something that Sala says can be owed to two key factors.
The first is, thankfully, half of the corals didn’t die. Despite the rise in temperatures, there were enough surviving corals left behind to help reproduce the reefs. The second was the Kiribati government’s decision to fully protect those waters.
“It has an abundance of fish. So they were eating all the algae (藻类) that would smother (窒息) the dead coral skeletons and make it impossible for the corals to come back. Luckily, other places like the Caribbean also witness the good change, ” Sala explained.
1. What unlikely goal does Sala have?| A．Schooling people to protect corals. |
| B．Preventing people from damaging corals. |
| C．Appealing to people to deal with climate change. |
| D．Going back to the past when corals were thriving. |
| A．Half of the damaged coral reefs restored themselves. |
| B．A flood of fish ate all the algae covering the dead corals. |
| C．The government protected waters and survival corals multiplied. |
| D．The government took measures to stop fishing and human activity. |
| A．It hardly offers enough nutrition to fish. |
| B．It has also suffered large losses of corals. |
| C．It is impossible for the corals to come back. |
| D．It has an abundance of algae. |
| A．How Did the Coral Reefs Restore? |
| B．Where Are the Damaged Coral Reefs? |
| C．What Does Biodiversity Show in the Ocean? |
| D．What Are the Disadvantages of Climate Change? |
【推荐3】With China’s large trade volume, the increased use of the Chinese currency renminbi (RMB) in international trade will help stabilize the international trading system, a leading business insider has said.
The RMB, or the yuan, is getting increasingly popular and acceptable as more and more countries are willing to sign currency exchange deals with China, and more countries are starting to use the currency to settle cross-border trade, said Wu Kegang, director of BCC LinkTo China, a partnership project between the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) and the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
“I think in the future, a large number of Chinese companies who are dealing with international trade probably will start using RMB as the currency of settlements,” Wu told Xinhua in a recent interview. “When that happens, then the Chinese currency would truly become the international currency of choice.”
Noting that China has been the largest trader of the world for several years, Wu told Xinhua that the speeding up of the currency’s internationalization is very timely and “doesn’t surprise me at all.”
He said the volume of China’s trade is seen as an important stabilizing factor of global trading system now, and the currency getting more involved in international trade will be able to help stabilize the international trading system and also boost confidence for the Chinese economy.
During the interview, he also refuted some negative reports about China from many international observers, “particularly they use the Western economic theory to monitor and observe Chinese economy.”
Wu, who just came back from a two-month trip in China, said the situation on the ground is a lot more stable. “The manufacturing, the economy is a lot more stable than the media have reported over the last three years,” he noted.
“The internationalization of the currency will also provide evidence for the outside world to see how strong and resilient (有弹性的) the economy is,” he said.
1. What is Wu’s attitude towards the internationalization of the Chinese currency?| A．Pessimistic. | B．Surprised. | C．Suspicious. | D．Optimistic. |
| A．disproved | B．approved | C．drafted | D．praised |
| A．To introduce a leading business insider. |
| B．To warn people of the instability of Chinese economy. |
| C．To cast light on the potential impact of the Chinese currency on international trade. |
| D．To demonstrate the relationship between the Chinese currency and Western economic theory. |
| A．Environment. | B．Fashion. | C．Business. | D．Entertainment. |
