【推荐1】The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found water and organic carbon molecules (分子) near a massive, active young star that’s situated in a faraway star-forming region of space, suggesting Earth-like exoplanets could form even in the worst environments in our Milky Way Galaxy. Potentially, some of those exoplanets may even exhibit habitable conditions.

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, aimed the mighty James Webb Space Telescope at a star-birthing region known as NGC 6357. The crew’s goal was to analyze the chemical environment surrounding the group’s stars and see whether their orbits could possibly host life.

Located some 5,500 light-years from Earth, NGC 6357 is one of the closest regions to us in which we see massive stars currently forming. As these energetic, young stars burn among thick clouds of dust, they begin to attack their surroundings, creating unforgiving environments in their surroundings. But the new study found that a planet-forming star surrounding one of the stars in this group contains molecules that are conditions for life as we know it, such as water and carbon dioxide.

“This result is unexpected and exciting!” María C. Ramírez-Tannus, an astronomer at MPIA and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “It shows that there are favorable conditions to form Earth-like planets and the elements for life even in the worst environments in our galaxy.”

These findings are good news for life in the universe as they dispel concerns that potentially habitable planets could not form too close to very massive stars. Previously, scientists thought the intensity of ultraviolet (紫外线的) radiation produced by massive stars would interfere (干扰) with the distribution of dust and gas in planet-forming stars, possibly preventing the formation of rocky planets like Earth, for instance. The NGC 6357 group contains more than ten super bright and massive stars, suggesting most of the group’s matter is exposed to high levels of ultraviolet radiation.

1. What’s the great discovery near a young star?

A．Life-friendly elements.	B．The worst environments.
C．New stars in Milky Way.	D．Signs of possible lost seas.

2. How do scientists know young stars in NGC 6357 have conditions for life?

A．By the distance they keep from the earth.

B．By measuring the age of these young stars.

C．By analyzing the elements in environments.

D．By the way they burn among thick clouds of dust.

3. What does the underlined word “dispel” in paragraph 5 mean?

A．Strengthen.

B．Remove.

C．Ignore.

D．Prove.

4. In which section of the website might you find the text?

A．Technology.

B．Literature.

C．Environment.

D．Space.

【推荐3】Animal lovers visiting the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Ya’an of Sichuan province earlier this week were in for a pleasant surprise. They got to see cuddly pandas and watched animal-themed films as part of the 9th Ya’an Panda and Nature Film Week that concluded on Friday.

Sponsored by the China Film Archive and the Ya’an government, the event, which began on Monday, held a series of activities, including a children's film development symposium (研讨会), film screenings and displays showing paintings of giant pandas.

One of the highlights of the event was that 1,735 films from 109 countries and regions were submitted, of which 104 were selected for the film week, according to its organizing committee.

These selected films featured themes such as animal protection, the environment, rainforest ecology, wildlife and caring for endangered species. Thanks to the recommendation of experts from various fields and representatives from the film industry, 42 of the films were shown to the public at 48 sites in Ya’an from Monday to Friday, with 57 free screenings, the committee had said.

Jiang Duan, a local resident of Yucheng district of Ya’an, said that he had been deeply moved after watching a film about how local officials in charge of environmental protection and local villagers in a Chinese city work together, overcoming multiple difficulties to improve the quality of water in the village. “Thanks to the hard work of people in charge of environmental protection nationwide, the environment is improving”, Jiang said.

The event aimed to promote the concepts of green technology, ecology, low-carbon emissions and environmental protection. The inherent green status of Ya'an is quite in line with the green, low-carbon and environmentally friendly status advocated by the film week, said Lin Siwei, deputy director of the China Film Archive.

Ya’an will take this film week as an opportunity to make positive contributions to coexistence between humans and nature and accelerate the construction of an important destination for giant panda cultural tourism, Mayor Peng Yingmei said.

1. What is the purpose of Paragraph 1?

A．To present a fact.	B．To raise a question.
C．To introduce a topic.	D．To make a comparison.

2. What's the typical theme of the selected films?

A．Endangered animals’ protection.	B．Caring for children.
C．Tourism ecological environment.	D．Cooperation of 109 countries.

3. What can we learn about Jiang Duan according to Paragraph 5?

A．He advocates environmental protection nationwide.

B．He deeply impresses the local residents in Ya’an.

C．He takes charge of the environmental protection department.

D．He appreciates the cooperative work of local officials and villagers.

4. What is the best title for the passage?

A．Pandas Need, to Be Protected

B．Ya’an Is a Place Worth Visiting

C．A Wonderful Environmental Protection Activity

D． Animals and Nature in Focus at Ya’an Film Week

【推荐1】In 2016, Luncz and her colleagues realized that Brazilian capuchins (卷尾猴) produced stone flakes (小薄片) from the rocks they used to pound (击打) food and dig without necessarily meaning to. It made the team wonder whether the artefacts (人工制品) really reflected any technical planning by those early humans.

Since then, Luncz and her colleagues have been studying tool use in long-tailed macaques (猕猴) on the islands of Phang Nga Bay in Thailand (泰国的攀牙湾). The team set up motion-activated cameras (动作感应摄像头) to study the behaviour of the wild macaques. During 100 hours of footage (镜头)，the team witnessed monkeys accidentally creating flakes as they struck nuts between two stones and then leaving the broken stones to find new, whole stones.

This is almost exactly what the capuchins did in the earlier study. The team then compared 1119 stone flakes from the macaques’ nut-cracking sites with artefacts found at hominin (古人类) sites in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. The monkeys’ thin, flat, wide stone flakes—ranging from 1.3 to 7.9 centimetres in length—were “almost the same” with flakes that were associated with ancient humans up to 3.3 million years ago, says Tomos Proffitt, another member of the research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The findings could challenge the current understanding of early stone technology, says Proffitt. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all of the old material is not intentional,” he says. “But what our study shows is that we can’t be 100 per cent certain that every single flake in the early Stone Age archaeological record was intentionally made. There may be a component within that record that’s unintentional.”

1. What did Luncz and her colleagues realize in 2016?

A．Brazilian capuchins used the stone flakes to cook food.

B．Brazilian capuchins could make artefacts like humans.

C．Brazilian capuchins didn’t produce stone flakes from the rocks on purpose.

D．Brazilian capuchins were more capable of producing stone flakes than early humans.

2. What might capuchins do in the earlier study?

A．They kept the broken stones for future use.

B．They created flakes when they searched for food.

C．They were desperate to find new, whole stones to make stone tools.

D．They accidentally created flakes as they struck nuts between two stones.

3. What did the team find out after they made the comparison in Paragraph 3?

A．The monkeys’ flakes were associated with ancient humans.

B．The flakes used by hominins were actually made by monkeys.

C．The monkeys’ stone flakes ranged from 1.3 to 7.9 centimetres in width.

D．The monkeys’ stone flakes were quite similar to those from early humans.

4. What do you know from the last paragraph?

A．All of the old stone material was unintentional.

B．We could be sure to say all the flakes were made out of purpose.

C．The findings confirmed the current understanding of early stone technology.

D．Some flakes in the early Stone Age archaeological record might be unintentional.

【推荐2】In 1810, during his first Grand Tour of Europe, Byron carved his name into a column base of the Temple of Poseidon on the Aegean coast. Although Byron himself might not have actually written the name that is left there, the story has become part of the history of the monument, searched for by his admirers among the hundreds of other names carved all over the temple.

Modern graffiti, however, is met with a very different reaction. In 2014 a Russian tourist was fined €20,000 for carving a large “K” on a wall of the Colosseum in Rome, the fifth such incident that year.

What is the thinking behind such acts? Are tourists aiming for ill fame to become part of the monument’s history? Or is it simply part of the experience of visiting the site? And, further, why is historical graffiti, which was equally destructive, considered historic heritages? The motives behind them are, after all, probably the same, however, graffiti comes to tell us about lives and moments that might otherwise have been lost.

The earliest graffiti of a person’s name on a monument has been identified by the historian Lionel Casson in a cave at Wadi Hammamat in Egypt in 2000 BC. The name of Hena is cut into the sandstone alongside a list of his achievements. In ancient Greece, too, stoas (柱廊) were the meeting places of philosophers and the places for school boys’ lessons. We therefore often see alphabets and Homeric poems written on their walls.

And it is not just monuments and buildings: Miltiades, a general from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, carved his name into the helmet he wore. In the Athens, too, a Spartan shield (盾) was found with words noting that the Athenians captured it during the Battle in 425 BC. Without such graffiti, the objects would still be impressive, but far less useful for historians, as their writing provides an exact original place.

In the 21^st century, however, with the rapid increase in tourism, if everyone decided to leave their mark, these sites would be irretrievable (不可挽回地) destroyed. Perhaps Beijing’s controversial new free graffiti zones on certain sections of the Great Wall of China will satisfy the desire to carve our own piece of history into the limited resource of the monument, though it seems unlikely that it will easily be contained to one area. Regardless, it is important that we protect these monuments — and the graffiti that some of them already contain.

1. Why is Baron’s carving his name into the column base mentioned in the first paragraph?

A．To introduce the related topic.	B．To attract more people to copy him.
C．To show his admirers to search.	D．To become part of the story of the monument.

2. What can we infer from the passage?

A．It was actually Byron that wrote and carved his name there.

B．It was the fifth time that the Russian tourist had been fined that year.

C．Ancient graffiti was carved more than on monuments and buildings.

D．The motives behind ancient and modern graffiti are completely the same.

3. Where was the earliest graffiti of a person’s name on a monument discovered?

A．In a cave in Egypt.	B．In a temple on the Aegean coast.
C．On a wall of the Colosseum in Rome.	D．In an ancient meeting place in Greece.

4. Which of the following might be the best title for the text?

A．What was the Earliest Graffiti?	B．What’s the Way to Protect Graffiti?
C．What Can We Learn From Ancient Graffiti?	D．What was the Motivation of Ancient Graffiti?

【推荐3】In his first year at Harvard, Manny Medrano made a big breakthrough. With the help of his professor Gary Urton. Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cora (打结的绳子)used for record keeping in the Inca Empire(印加帝国).

The Inca Empire reached the height of its power in 15th- and l6th-century Peru (秘鲁). When the Spanish arrived, the Inca had established the largest and most complex society in the Americas, but they left behind no written records. The only ones the Inca are known to have kept are in the form of khipus. In 2002, Urton began Harvard s Khipu Database Project. He traveled to museums around the world to record the numbers of knots, lengths of cords, colors of fibers, and other details about every Inca: khipu he could find.

Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many had to do with census(人口普查) data. Others appeared to be calendar systems. But, until recently, none of the khipus Urton studied could be understood on a very detailed level.

A turning point came when Urton began looking into a set of six khipus from the 17th-centurySanta River Valley region of Northwest Peru. One day, Urton picked up a book and happened to spot a Spanish census document from the same region and time period. “A lot of the numbers that were recorded in that census record matched those six khipus exactly, Urton says. Then he couldn't help mentioning it to his students. Medrano, who was among these students, asked if he could help during spring break.

Urton agreed to allow Medrano to look into the Santa Valley khipus and the Spanish census. Medrano recalls looking through spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. He noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to correspond to(符合, 对应) the social status (地位) of the 132 people recorded in the census document. The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people's first names. After spring break, Medrano told his professor about his theories. Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two wrote a paper together.

1. Why did Urton travel to museums around the world?

A．To gather data for a project.

B．To learn how to make khipus.

C．To help Peru connect with the world.

D．To collect khipus as one of his hobbies.

2. How did Urton probably feel after seeing the Spanish census document?

A．Excited.	B．Puzzled.
C．Grateful.	D．Relieved.

3. What did Medrano find out about the khipus?

A．Local people s first names came from Spanish

B．The colors of the strings tended to be the same.

C．How a cord was made differed in every period

D．How a cord was tied was related to one's social status

4. What is the main idea of the text?

A．The Inca Empire had a long history.

B．The Inca Empire was a complex society.

C．A student assisted his professor in a technical paper.

D．A student uncovered the hidden secret of knotted cords.