A group of wandering wild elephants have become an overnight Internet focus in China and global. The group first captured the attention of the locals in March 2020. after they suddenly left their home in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve.
While the original group was made of 16, two of which decided to return home after a week. The rest have continued their journey northward, stopping only for a short break in November 2020 to allow a newly born calf (幼兽) and its mother to rest.
Since leaving the reserve, the elephants have walked over 310 miles. Along the way, they have got into farms for food and water, walked through urban streets, and even paid a visit to a car shop and a retirement home. Thanks to the alarming eye of the government officials no animals or people have been hurt. However, they have destroyed more than $1 million worth.
Researchers are not sure why the elephants decided to leave or where they are headed. While elephants are known to leave their habitats in search of food, this is the longest moving of wild elephants recorded in China. Because of the extreme distance traveled, some doubt that the elephants may be lost. However, other scientists think the elephants were forced to move due to deforestation. Successful protection efforts have almost doubled the elephant population in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve and the surrounding regions. However, their natural habitat has been continuously reduced to make room for agricultural development.
We’ve seen elephants expanding their range for decades now, as their populations increase, and they search for more food for the growing group, Becky Shu Chen, a scientist at the Zoological Society of London, told The Washington Post.
The wandering elephants’ search for a suitable home has not gone unnoticed by the millions of locals that eagerly follow their daily movements on social media Adam Chang, assigned to deliver food to the elephants, says, “Before this meeting, I just felt curious about animals. Now, I think I would volunteer in animal rights groups to preserve those giant creatures.
1. How many elephants went northward in China?| A．16 | B．14. | C．17 | D．15 |
| A．The calves | B．The officials | C．The elephants | D．The scientists |
| A．They didn’t have enough food | B．They had no sense of direction |
| C．The leader of the group led the wrong way | D．People grew crops to attract the elephants |
| A．Some wild elephants went northward. |
| B．China made great progress in protecting. |
| C．Animal protection and agricultural development are contradictory. |
| D．China’s wandering wild elephant group attracts the world’s attention. |
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【推荐1】Tommy, a 26-year-old chimp (猩猩), lives in a small cage in a used truck sales lot in New York. Retired from movie work and whatever else once occupied him, he has no chimp friends—just a TV. He is worlds away from the rainforest of Western Africa, where chimps spend most of their lives in trees, hunting, and socializing together.
His owner hasn’t broken any laws, but an animal rights group called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) is trying to change the view. The group says chimps have such a humanlike intelligence that they should be recognized as “legal persons” and be placed in an animal shelter and wander free.
You’ve probably heard the term “animal rights”, but animals don’t actually have rights in many countries. Animal-welfare laws punish people who mistreat animals, but that’s not the same as chimps having a right to liberty or anything else.
NhRP’s first step is to ask a judge to end people’s unjust arrest on behalf of Tommy and other privately owned chimps. If the court (法庭) decides to recognize chimps as legal persons, NhRP’s next step will be arguing for what rights the chimps should be guaranteed. “The right that they should have is the right to body liberty,” says Wise, a NhRP group member. “They should be able to choose how to live their lives.”
Tommy’s owner, Pat Lavery, says he rescued Tommy from a careless owner about a decade ago and denies the chimp is mistreated or unhappy. “He likes being by himself,” he says.
“There’s a danger in making a jump to say they’re just like people,” says Richard Cupp, a professor who writes about animals and the law. “If we really believe chimps are very, very smart, then who knows if maybe someday we might…say, ‘Hey, here’s a particular human being that’s not very smart at all, maybe the chimps have higher status than this person.’”
1. What can we infer from the text?| A．Great progress has been made on improving animal rights. |
| B．Pat Lavery is thought to mistreat Tommy by NhRP. |
| C．Animal rights are going from bad to worse. |
| D．Animal rights have been admitted in western countries. |
| A．To ensure chimps’ body safety. | B．To stop illegal hunting of chimps. |
| C．To help chimps find their families | D．To help chimps enjoy their freedom. |
| A．Hopeful. | B．Uncaring. | C．Worried. | D．Supportive. |
【推荐2】One night our team was called out to a farm to treat a female elephant who had just miscarried (流产). Arriving after midnight, our team saw a skinny baby elephant which kept hitting his head against the side of a narrow cage (笼子).
The next morning, we moved him to a new home and gave him the name “Hope”. One of the volunteers, Lek, tried hard to make Hope accept milk from her, but he attempted to hurt her many times. Hope kept trumpeting (吼叫) over and over the first three nights. The fourth night he finally fell into a sleep and Lek used this opportunity to get close, patting and comforting him. When he would wake up, she ran from his pen (围栏). She did this every night until Hope accepted her. Then Hope was let out of the pen to take a walk with the volunteers.
Eight months later, Hope’s owner came to take him back. He was to be trained for work. But the owner’s request was refused. The more Hope stayed with us, the more we loved him and we couldn’t let him go back to cruel training and hard work. With the help and kind support from Jody Thomas (USA) and Leonor Gonzo (Australia), Hope won his freedom to stay with us. These kind volunteers became Hope’s foster parents after helping to buy his freedom.
Hope today is happy in his new home at this elephant haven. As his name suggests, he is our Hope and we will see him grow up as a free elephant and let him back to nature one day to be a real king of the jungle.
1. How was Hope when we first saw him?| A．Excited. | B．Anxious. | C．Curious. | D．Calm. |
| A．She attempted to alarm him of danger. |
| B．She delivered food and supplies to him. |
| C．She helped him to adapt to the new environment. |
| D．She treated him and got him recover from illness. |
| A．Hope finally worked on the farm for some time. |
| B．Hope’s owner was paid some money to let him stay. |
| C．The volunteers trained Hope to do some farm work. |
| D．Hope refused to go back to the farm with his owner. |
| A．A shelter. | B．A farm. |
| C．A zoo. | D．A school. |
【推荐3】Social distancing is not a new concept in the natural world, where infectious diseases are commonplace. Through specialized senses animals can detect certain diseases and change their behavior to avoid getting ill.
In 1966, while studying chimps (猩猩) in a Tanzanian national park, zoologist Jane Goodall observed a chimp named McGregor who had caught a highly infectious virus. His fellow chimps attacked him and threw him out of the troop. In one instance, McGregor approached chimps in a tree. He reached out a hand in greeting, but the others moved away without a backward glance.
“For a full two minutes, old McGregor sat motionless, staring after them,” Goodall notes in her 1971 book In the Shadow of Man. “It’s really not that different to how some societies react today to such a tragedy.”
Not all animals are so aggressive toward their ailing neighbors. Sometimes it’s as simple as avoiding those who may infect you.
When Kiesecker, a lead scientist in America, studied American bullfrog in the late 1990s, he found that bullfrogs could not only detect a deadly smell of infection in other bullfrogs, but healthy members actively avoided those that were sick. Bullfrogs rely on chemicals signals to determine who is sick or not.
Caribbean lobsters also shun diseased members of their community, well before they become infectious. It takes about eight weeks for lobsters infected with the deadly virus Panulirus argus mininuceovirus to become dangerous to others. Normally social animals, lobsters begin keeping away from the diseased as early as four weeks after infection – once the lobsters can smell certain chemicals released by sick individuals.
Overall, it’s important to note that, unlike us, animals don’t realize if they stay home, they might actually reduce the infection rate,” Kiesecker explains. “As humans, we have that ability. It’s a big difference.”
1. What can we learn about the chimps from Goodall’s observation?| A．They kept a distance from one another. |
| B．They became aggressive when infected. |
| C．The infected avoided contact with others. |
| D．The infected were forced to leave the group. |
| A．Avoid. | B．Cure. | C．Get rid of. | D．Get along with. |
| A．Humans are more sensitive to virus. |
| B．Humans are less likely to get infected. |
| C．Humans treat infectious diseases in a wiser way. |
| D．Humans can detect chemical signals more quickly. |
| A．Help Me Out |
| B．Leave Me Alone |
| C．Stay Away From Us |
| D．Stay Home Stay Healthy |
【推荐1】Overtourism Is For Real: How Can You Help?
Travel promotes understanding, expands our minds, makes us better people, and boosts local economies and communities, but the rapid growth of travel has led to overtourism in certain regions and destinations.
●Choose mindfully. Overvisited destinations are that way for a reason: they’re special. With so many online posts featuring the same places, it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out. Go somewhere only when the landscape, culture or food deeply draws you.
●Get creative. The best way to ease pressure on over-touristed destinations is to go somewhere else. Though overtourism is described as a problem affecting the entire world, it’s actually concentrated to a small number of extremely popular spots. That means you have tons of less-visited options to choose from.
●
Visiting a place that others call home is a privilege (荣幸). Do your part to preserve what makes a destination special in the first place.
| A．Visit during off-peak times. |
| B．So, should we stop traveling? |
| C．Travel for you and no one else. |
| D．Can overtourism be avoided then? |
| E．You can still find relatively undiscovered places. |
| F．You’ll find yourself virtually alone, or close to it. |
| G．Consider giving back to the communities you’re visiting. |
【推荐2】The concept of showing movies outdoors isn’t novel. However, it let an auto-parts salesman such as Hollingshead find a way to give a car-loving society one more activity they could do in their cars.
He first imagined the drive-in as the answer to a problem. “His mother was rather fat for indoor theater seats,” says Jim Kopp of the United Drive-in Theatre Owners Association. “So he seated her in a car and put a 1928 projector (放映机) on top of the car, and tied two bed sheets to trees in his yard.”
Hollingshead experimented for a few years before he created a ramp (坡道) system for cars to park at different heights so everyone could see the screen. He opened the gates to his theater in 1933. A few others followed.
“Drive-ins started to take off in the 1950s,” Kopp says. “They offered family entertainment. People could sit in their cars and bring their babies... Drive-ins offered more comfort than indoor theaters.” The indoor theaters were easier about scheduling, and could show one film five or six times a day instead of only at night.
D. Vogel, owner of the Benjies Drive-In near Baltimore, Md, says the price of land is the real reason many drive-ins disappeared. “People would build on the outer areas of town, and the town would grow,” he says. “Many drive-ins were mom-and-pop businesses that few sons and daughers chose to continue running. The results were a decreasing (减少的) number of drive-ins throughout the country.” Today about 400 drive-ins remain in the United States and another 100 drive-ins exist mainly in Canada and Australia.
“The digital cinema will be both a threat and an opportunity for drive-in owners,” says Patrick Corcoran, the association’s director of media and research. “Digital will allow them to get new movies sooner than they do. But the digital cinemas will be expensive to manage, and some people may not be able to do it.”
Kopp of course bets on the drive-ins’ survival. He and his wife bought an outdoor theatre. He says they have invested about $300,000 to modernize the technology. Today the theatre can hold 265 cars and show movies on a 60-foot-by-80-foot screen.
1. Why did Hollingshead let his mother watch the movie in a car?| A．It was too noisy in the theater. |
| B．His mother loved staying in a car. |
| C．There would be more space for his mother. |
| D．It was difficult for his mother to see clearly in a theater. |
| A．They can sell more tickets than indoor theaters. |
| B．They give people more freedom to do things. |
| C．They take less space than indoor theaters. |
| D．They are much cheaper than indoor theaters. |
| A．The appearance of digital cinemas. |
| B．The decreasing number of first runs. |
| C．The competition from indoor theaters. |
| D．The high price of land that drive-ins took. |
| A．Positive. | B．Concerned. |
| C．Critical. | D．Doubtful. |
【推荐3】Out on the graceful avenues and main roads of Paris, a battle has been approaching.
A century and a half after Baron Haussmann plowed (犁地) through the city to straighten out and broaden the narrow twisted streets, the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, a kind of anti-Haussmann has slowly been reducing the size of main roads for years.
Part of her environmental plan is to clean up air pollution and make the city friendly for bicycles and other two wheeled vehicles like electric scooters (踏板车). “I think it could be a good idea - not to have cars in the town centers and the motorists who love four wheels. It’s a bit of a war of the bikes and scooters against cars,” the Mayor said. High speed lanes along the Seine, which people in the suburbs relied on to and from Paris each day, have been shut down to make room for joggers and cycles. This is part of a Paris Administration’s dream of getting rid of cars in Paris as much as possible.
The Mayor wants to transform the big space and today the big space is occupied by cars, and car drivers. “We have half of the public space in Paris, which is dedicated to cars,” she said. But for motorists, it is as bad as the reduction of the speed limit on most streets in town to 30 kilometers. The constant flashes of speed radar cameras bare witness to how many motorists just can’t bring themselves to go that slow. They say the reduced speed limits are just another way to get the cars out of the city.
The head of a motorist association claims commuters (通勤者) have no alternative but to use their cars because public transportation is overcrowded and often unreliable. And for those who live around Paris, it’s really unfair. They need their car, or they can’t go to work. It’s something incredible. And so while Paris has taken major action to rid the streets of automobiles and make the city more bicycle friendly, going green is not proving to be politically very simple.
1. What’s the purpose of the Mayor’s plan?| A．To object to Baron Haussmann. | B．To create a greener city. |
| C．To start a war of bikes against cars. | D．To get rid of cars in Paris. |
| A．Debatable. | B．Problem-solving. |
| C．Economical. | D．Environment-friendly. |
| A．The present road condition. | B．Shortage of government funding. |
| C．Many unsolvable practical problems. | D．Lack of public environmental awareness. |
| A．Paris: A Livable City | B．Paris: Cars or Bikes? |
| C．Paris: A Bicycle City | D．Paris: Green is Coming! |
【推荐1】Sorry to say, our brains naturally start slowing down at the cruelly young age of 30. It used to be thought that this couldn't be helped, but people of any age could train their brains to be faster and, in effect, younger. Our brain is a learning machine. Given the right tools, we can train our brains to act like they did when we were younger. All that is required is dedicated (专注的)practice: exercise for the mind.
Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has developed a computer-based training schedule to speed up how the brain processes information, called Brain Fitness Program. Since much of the data we receive comes through speech, the program works with language and hearing to improve both speed and accuracy.
Over the course of your training, the program starts asking you to distinguish sounds (between “dog”and “bog”, for instance) at an increasingly faster rate. It’s a bit like a tennis. instructor, shooting balls at you faster and faster over the course of the summer to keep you challenged. Though you may have started out slow, a month later you’re pretty quick, ” says Merzenich.
The biggest finding in brain research in the last ten years is that the brain at any ag6: is highly adaptable. If you ask your brain to learn, it will learn. And it may speed up in the process.
To keep your brain young, you can do one of a million new activities that challenge and excite you: playing Ping-Pong or contract bridge, doing puzzles, learning a new language or a dance, taking piano lessons, building a model airplane, mastering gardening technique, discovering the secrets of beer-making and, sure, relearning advanced mathematics.
Anything that closely engages your focus and is strongly rewarding will kick your brain into learning mode and will definitely improve it. Give one of these interesting brain exercises airy.
1. Why does the author call our brain a learning machine?| A．It works well at any age. | B．It can be trained to be sharp. |
| C．It helps us acquire knowledge. | D．It can be used to store information. |
| A．To speak a language at high speed. |
| B．To tell apart words that sound similar. |
| C．To receive tennis training with an instructor. |
| D．To list words that have the same meaning. |
| A．It can be faster and faster. | B．It can be slower and slower. |
| C．It's hard to predict. | D．Ifs likely to be hurt. |
| A．To stress the functions of the brain. |
| B．To show different attitudes towards ageing. |
| C．To tell readers how to keep their brain young. |
| D．To advise people to gain pleasure from activities. |
【推荐2】Tara Luizzi is a personal stylist in Washington DC. She says that, like it or not, other people size us up by the way we look. In other words, they make judgment about us before we even speak. And part of what they are considering is what we choose to wear.
“My feeling is that you don’t have a second chance to make a great first impression. So, I think it is very important to have a look that is pulled-together and conveys(传递) who you are and your status(身份，地位)of life. No matter what, you should try to always walk out of the door looking pulled-together—whether it is on the weekend or during the work days. People take you more seriously when you are pulled-together and dress to a certain level.”
A recent study suggests that people who are dressed more formally perfonn better at some work tasks.
In the research, those wearing suits demanded more in their business deal. Those who are dressed more casually were more willing to give in, or give up. The other task was to use big picture thinking to solve a problem. The men in suits were more able to think about the big picture, as the way a boss would. Those in casual clothes focused more on smaller details of the problem. This type of thinking is what you would expect from someone in a lower position.
Tara Luizzi compares clothing to armor(盔甲) what warrior puts on for protection in battle. “When you feel confident in yourself, I think you have a better day. So, I use clothing as the armor to the world. Let’s say you’re having a horrible day or you’re nervous about your presentation or maybe the big meeting. If you wear something you love or you feel great in, you’re going to walk in with more confidence.”
1. Why does the author advise the readers to dress properly?| A．People will know your status of life. |
| B．You can get along well with other people. |
| C．People will know the size of your clothes. |
| D．People will show respect to you. |
| A．Measure the size of us. | B．Give comments on us. |
| C．Make a judgment about us. | D．Show interest in us. |
| A．One can use clothes to protect himself from being harmed. |
| B．Wearing proper clothes helps one achieve more in work. |
| C．Clothes can be used to keep one off the world. |
| D．One feels nervous easily because of being dressed casually. |
【推荐3】SF or sci-fi, short for science fiction, is a form of fiction that deals mainly with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals. It appeared in the West, where the social transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution first led writers and intellectuals (知识分子) to think of the future impact of technology, and was popularized in the 1920s by the American publisher Hugo Gernsback. The Hugo Awards, given annually since 1953 by the World Science Fiction Society, are named after him.
Science fiction writers, whose themes are around space travel, robots, alien beings, and time travel, etc., often seek out new scientific and technical developments in order to forecast freely the techno-social changes. Though writers in antiquity sometimes dealt with themes common to modern science fiction, their stories made no attempt at scientific and technological explanation, the feature that distinguishes (区分) science fiction from earlier imaginative writing, such as fantasies and horror works.
Science fiction itself comes in two main types: hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. Hard science fiction is based on scientific accuracy and known facts, featuring “real” science. This approach can enhance the authenticity of the story and the idea that the plot’s event could, likely, happen. Examples of hard science fiction include Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Time Machine, etc. Soft science fiction places greater emphasis on the human aspects of the story, integrating sciences of human behaviour. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness are all soft science fiction novels.
The purpose of this genre (体裁) is to explore the possible about the unknown. It gives readers an idea of what might happen in the future if certain events—such as scientific breakthroughs or technological advances—come to pass and how humans might respond accordingly. Given its imaginative nature, science fiction inspires readers to forecast a more advanced, innovative, and adventurous future.
Science fiction is creative ground for filmmakers. Besides, there are plenty of science fiction themes of popular small-screen programmes on television, as well as in graphic novels and comic books.
1. What’s mainly discussed in the first paragraph?| A．The origin of sci-fi. |
| B．An introduction of Hugo Awards. |
| C．The functions of Industrial Revolution. |
| D．The impact of writers and intellectuals in the 1920s. |
| A．They are not created in modern times. |
| B．Their themes are uncommon to modern sci-fi’s. |
| C．They are based on neither science nor technology. |
| D．Their explanations cannot be understood by modern people. |
| A．Value. | B．Truth. | C．Reputation. | D．Calculation. |
| A．Sci-Fi Writers | B．Hard Sci-Fi and Soft Sci-Fi |
| C．Science Fiction | D．Sci-Fi Filmmakers |
