【推荐1】The past ages of man have all been carefully labeled by anthropologists (人类学家). Descriptions like “Paleolithic (旧石器时代) Man”, “Neolithic (新石器时代) Man”, etc., neatly sum up whole periods. When the time comes for anthropologists to turn their attention to the twenty-first century, they will surely choose the label “Legless Man”. Histories of the time will go something like this: “In the twenty-first century, people forgot how to use their legs. Men and women moved about in cars, buses and trains from a very early age. There were lifts in all large buildings to prevent people from walking. And the surprising thing is that they didn’t use their legs even when they went on holiday. They built cable railways, ski-lifts and roads to the top of every huge mountain. All the beauty spots on earth were mined by the presence of large car parks.”

The future history books might also record that we lost the right of using our eyes. In our hurry to get from one place to another, we failed to see anything on the way. Air travel gives you a bird’s-eye view of the world or even less if the wing of the aircraft happens to get in your way. When you travel by car or train, the unclear picture of the countryside constantly slides over the window. When you mention the most impressive place-names in the world, the typical 21st century traveler always says “I’ve been there.” - meaning “I drove through it at 100 miles an hour on the way to somewhere else.”

When you travel at high speeds, the present means nothing: you live mainly in the future because you spend most of your time looking forward to arriving at some other place. But actual arrival, when it is achieved, is meaningless. You want to move on again. By traveling like this, you skip all experience. The traveler on foot, on the other hand, lives in the present. For him traveling and arriving are one and the same thing: he arrives somewhere with every step he makes. He experiences the present moment with his eyes, his ears and the whole of his body. At the end of his journey he feels a delicious physical tiredness. Satisfying sleep will be his: the just reward of all true travelers.

1. Anthropologists name man nowadays “Legless Man” because__________.

A．people prefer using modern traffic	B．lifts prevent people from walking
C．people use their legs less and less	D．people travel without using legs

2. According to the passage, what might make people lose the right of using their eyes?

A．The modern means of transportation.	B．A bird’s-eye view of the world.
C．The unclear sight from the vehicles.	D．The fast-paced life style.

3. From the passage, we know traveling at high speeds means__________.

A．appreciating beautiful scenery	B．focusing on the next destination
C．experiencing skilled adventures	D．feeling physical tiredness

4. What does the author intend to tell us?

A．Human’s history develops very fast.

B．Traveling makes the world small.

C．Modem transportation devices have replaced legs.

D．The best way to travel is on foot.

【推荐2】The bike-sharing companies that are powering a transportation revolution in China’s urban centers are not like those in the rest of the world. Their bikes have no docking ports or assigned zones for parking. Instead, riders open their smartphone apps, hop on, and start riding. So easy!

In 2015, Ofo, China’s bike-share pioneer, launched its first fleet of bicycles in Beijing. The bikes’ bright yellow frames were soon met by the orange-rimmed（镶边）, basket-equipped models launched by Mobike, Ofo’s main competitor today. In little over a year, the two companies have had a huge impact on revitalizing (重振) cycling in China, particularly among young people.

Ofo placed 1 million bicycles across 35 cities and registered 15 million users in its first years, while Mobike has now gained more than 10 million unique users and bicycles in 21 cities. Inspired by their success, at least 10 other companies have jumped into the market, launching their own app-powered, brightly colored bikes in quick succession. But Mobike and Ofo are far ahead of them.

The two industry leaders each take a different marketing method to a similar product. The Mobike app uses GPS to display bikes’ locations to users. They can use the map to reserve a bike and walk over to it. A scan of the bike’s QR code (二维码) unlocks the bike, and when users manually（手动地） lock the bike at the end of their trip, the app records the trip’s end and the bike will pop back up on the map as available. Equipped with this wireless technology, Mobikes cost between 1,000 and 3,000 yuan. Rides cost 1 yuan for an hour or a half hour, depending on whether a user chooses a “Lite” or regular bike, and the deposit (押金) required to the service is 299 yuan.

Ofo, meanwhile, is devoted not just to producing its own bikes, which have slim yellow bodies and cost about 250 yuan, but also to connecting existing bikes to its network----- a philosophy that begins with the practice of 2000 bikes offered to a campus bike-share program. The 2000 bikes were the first generation of Ofo. Yet the majority of the company’s bikes are currently ones that have been specially manufactured and fitted with their lock system. Unlike Mobike,Ofo bikes themselves are offline: their locations are tracked through users’ cell phones. Users find a free bike, enter the license plate number into their app, and receive the bike unlock code. When they have reached their destination, they end the ride on the app and manually lock the bike. Rides cost 1 yuan for an hour and the deposit is 99 yuan.

1. Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?

A．The bike rides based on apps are available whenever you need.

B．The bike body in bright color only attracts young people to choose cycling.

C．Ofo knows their bikes’ location by scanning the bike’s QR code.

D．The bikes are locked automatically when the users reached their destination.

2. Which of the following is close to the meaning of the underlined word “succession ”in the 3rd paragraph?

A．successful experience.	B．movement to action.
C．continuous process .	D．production line.

3. How are Ofo bikes different from Mobikes?
① no need for online condition.
② without their own lock system.
③ not only to produce ofo bikes but also put existing ones to use.
④ to unlock the bike through app.
⑤ to lock the bike by QR code

A．①②⑤	B．②③④
C．②④⑤	D．①③④

4. What is the best title of the passage?

A．Bike-sharing business models: Mobike and Ofo.

B．A real transportation innovation（创新）: app-powered bicycles.

C．The successful secret of two bike-sharing companies.

D．Cool experience of app-powered bicycles.

【推荐3】Right in front of the Minneapolis Central Library, a row of green bikes sits parked in a special stand. Each bike is designed with the logo “ Nice Ride”-- the name of the city’s bike-share program.

Nice Ride bikes are a lot like the library books that people come here to borrow. To rent a bike, you simply use your membership card at a Nice Ride bike station. Members can rent one of l, 200 bikes from 138 stations throughout Minnesota’s largest city. People use the Nice Ride bikes to go to work, to go out on business , or just to enjoy the city’s many bike paths.

The rise of bike-share programs like Nice Ride is encouraging more people than ever to choose biking over driving. Skyrocketing gas prices and concerns about the environment have also gotten people to dust off their bike helmets, pump air into flat tires, and hit the road.

Why ride? Not only is biking good exercise but switching from a car to a bike also cuts down the  amount  of pollution  in  the  air. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse  gas linked to climate change, is one of the many polluting substances that come out of a car’s tail pipe.

Bike-share systems are found around the world in cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, Australia. The largest program with 70,000 bikes--is in Wuhan, China.

To make roads friendlier to non-motorists, the U. S. Department of Transportation has invested more than a billion dollars in cycling and pedestrian projects in recent years. The money went toward building thousands of miles of on-street bike lanes and pedestrian-only passages called greenways.

1. Which of the following can people do with the bikes?

A．Earn a living.	B．Enjoy bikeways.
C．Compete in a race.	D．Rent them out to others.

2. What is Paragraph four mainly about?

A．Benefits of biking.	B．Pollution caused by cars.
C．Methods to use the bikes.	D．Measures to decrease pollution.

3. Which of the following is true of Nice Ride?

A．China has better public bike systems.

B．It will take the place of taxi companies.

C．It attracts more people to choose biking.

D．The government lacks money to support it.

4. What is the author’s purpose in writing this text?

A．To seek advice for Nice Ride.

B．To compare Nice Ride with libraries.

C．To raise money for bike-share programs.

D．To introduce the bike system in public places.

【推荐1】Are you having difficulty falling asleep? Try drinking a glass of warm milk. If that doesn’t work, listen to some soft, beautiful music. Still no luck? Try think about sheep jumping over a fence. If you are still awake, take a sleeping pill. People who take pills often become dependent on the drugs. So you lie awake knowing that the new workday will soon arrive. If you have been in such condition for at least one month, you may have primary insomnia(失眠症).

A new study has found that you might fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep longer if you try “cerebral hypothermia.” It is not a complex medical process. It just means cooling down your brain. Eric Nofzinger and Naniel Buysse from the University of Pittsburgh Medical School led the study. They examined twelve people who had sleeping problems. Twelve others had no sleeping problems. Each of them wore a soft plastic cap on their head at bedtime.

The caps had tubes inside filled with water. The researchers moved the water through the tubes and then changed the temperature of the water. Other studies showed that people who had sleeping problems often had more chemical reactions in the front of their brain. The researchers thought cooling down the brain might help.

On the first two nights of testing, the patients wore caps with no water. On the next two nights, the caps were worn, but the water was not cooled. Then the researchers cooled the water a little for another two nights. On the final two nights of the study, the temperature of the water was made much cooler. The researchers found that the water caps didn’ t help the patients until the temperature was about 14℃. Most of the patients fell asleep faster and slept better when the coolest water was moving around their head.

Dr Nfzinger and Dr. Buysse noted that this was only the beginning of the brain temperature study. But they believed they had discovered something important that needed more research.

1. The first paragraph is written to _________.

A．put forward the topic of the passage.

B．explain how serious insomnia is

C．tell us the causes of sleeping problems.

D．tell us the danger of having sleeping problems.

2. From the passage we know that “cerebral hypothermia” is actually _________.

A．a complex medical process.

B．a psychological treatment.

C．a simple physical treatment.

D．a difficult scientific theory.

3. In the study, researchers helped people fall asleep faster through _________.

A．increasing chemical reactions in the front of their brain.

B．making them feel safe with a cap on their head

C．asking them to drink water to cool down

D．lowering the temperature of their brain

4. What is paragraph 4 mainly about?

A．The cause of the study.

B．The function of the caps.

C．People’s reactions to the study.

D．Some details of the study.

【推荐2】At a time when almost anything can be purchased with just one click, it’s become an automatic response to simply replace what breaks. Generations raised in the earlier half of the 20th century will say that this wasn’t always so: household appliances（器具）, clothing, electronics and more used to be bought under the assumption that, with the occasional repairs, they would last a lifetime.

Now, some conscientious consumers are taking matters into their own hands and joining the Repair Café movement. Founded in Amsterdam in 2009 by sewing expert Martine Postma, the original nonprofit has expanded to more than 1,500 locations worldwide. These pop-up events, which are run by volunteers, offer lessons in how to fix anything from fixing a button to an unresponsive laptop.

“There’s juice and treats and you get to meet new people,” says Bennett, a retired civil servant and volunteer fixer at the Repair Cafe Toronto, where she mends jewellery. She brings her own specialized tools but says most items could be repaired by anyone with a pair of pliers and some determination. “Something that is broken took time and resources to make, so if you’re throwing it out, you’re wasting those resources. ”

If you can’t find a Repair Cafe near you, it’s easy to start one. RepairCafe. org offers a starter manual with step-by-step instructions.

Changing how we acquire things is necessary, but there’s also something to be said for simply not getting them in the first place. “Most of us have more than what we need,” says Marina. “This can lead to a lot of anxiety, like—think about everything packed in the back of your closet; do you own those things or do they own you?” She suggests we train ourselves to make mindful purchases.

Lazarovic, whose delayed purchase went even further, explains that less shopping has freed up more time for family activities, dinner with friends and making art. By doing so, as she puts it, “I got out of that need-to-buy-it craze and in the end I feel good that I’ve made something.”

1. How would people raised in the 1940s deal with broken home appliances?

A．Sell them at a lower price.	B．Press the button to find the fault.
C．Repair them to last longer.	D．Donate them to recycling stations.

2. What does Bennett say about her work?

A．She likes the good food people bring for her work.

B．Helping make repairs means saving resources.

C．She will set up her own Repair Cafe soon.

D．She learned to repair jewels after she retired.

3. Which of the following best explains “conscientious” underlined in Paragraph 2?

A．Responsible.	B．Generous.
C．Powerful.	D．Irreplaceable.

4. What good does Lazarovic think less shopping will do to us?

A．It’ll make us less anxious about used things at home.

B．It’ll force us to make donations of unwanted things.

C．It’ll lead us to explore the world more responsibly.

D．It will provide us more time for beneficial events.

【推荐3】Babies are surrounded by human language, always listening and processing. Eventually, they put sounds together to produce a “Daddy” or a “Mama”. But what still confuses neuroscientists is exactly how the brain works to put them all together.

To figure it out, a team of researchers turned to a frequent stand-in(代替)for babies when it comes to language learning: the song-learning zebra finch(斑胸草雀). “We’ve known songbirds learn their song by first forming a memory of their father’s song or another adult’s song. Then they use that memory to guide their song learning,” said Neuroscientist Todd Roberts. “It's been a long-term goal of the field to figure out how or where in the brain this memory is. This type of imitative learning that birds do is very similar to the type of learning that we engage in regularly—particularly when we’re young, we use it to guide our speech learning.”

Roberts and his team had a feeling that the interface(交叉区域)between sensory areas and motor areas in the brain was critical for this process, and they focused on a group of brain cells called the NIF.

“In order to prove that we could identify these circuits, we thought if we could implant a false memory.” First, they used a virus to cause the neurons(神经元)in the birds’ NIf to become sensitive to light. Then, using a tiny electrode as a flashlight, which activated(激活)the neurons. The length of each pulse of light corresponded with the amount of time the neurons would fire. And the birds’ brains took that time period as the length of each note.

Soon enough, the birds began to practice the notes they had learned, even though they never really heard the sounds. Amazingly, the birds produced them in the correct social situations. The researchers say this is the first time anybody has found exactly a part of the brain necessary for generating the sorts of memories needed to copy sounds.

“This line of research is going to help us make out where in the brain we encode memories of relevant social experiences that we use to guide learning. We know that there are several neurodevelopmental disorders in people that have really far-reaching effects on this type of learning.”

1. The zebra finch is researched because its song-learning mode ______.

A．is like the way babies learn speed

B．decides whether it will sing songs

C．helps it to say “Daddy” or “Mama”

D．reflects its talent for imitating its father’s song.

2. What does the underlined word “it” in Paragraph 2 refer to?

A．The interface in the brain.

B．Imitative learning type like birds.

C．Guidance from adults.

D．The way of regular learning.

3. What can we learn from the research led by Roberts?

A．a bird only sings what it heard before

B．The brain produces tiny electrodes.

C．Birds are sensitive to flashlights.

D．Scientists activated some neurons by using an electrode.

4. What do the Roberts’ team expect of this line of research?

A．A change in our way of listening and processing.

B．A chance to have relevant social experiences.

C．A better knowledge of the secrets of learning.

D．Identification of neurodevelopmental disorders.