【推荐1】Looking almost as fresh as the day it was bought, this McDonald’s Happy Meal is in fact six months old. Photographed every day for the past six months by Manhattan artist Sally Davies, the kids meal of fries and burger hasn’t any signs of mould(霉菌) or decay(腐烂).

Sally put the Happy Meal on a shelf in her apartment and watched it with increasing shock. Even her dogs stopped trying to steal a free tasty snack.

“I bought the meal on April 10 this year and brought home to see how it changed,” she said. “I chose McDonald’s because it was nearest to my house, but the project could have been about any other fast food. The first thing that shocked me on the second day of the experiment was that it no longer gave out any smell. And my dogs stopped circling the shelf.”

Sally expected the food to go mouldy after a few days. In fact, Mrs. Davies’ surprise turned to shock as the food still had not shown any signs of decay after two weeks. “It was then that I realized that something strange might be going on with this food that I had bought,” she explained. “The appearance of the food did not change as the weeks turned to months. And now, at six months old, the food is plastic to touch. The only change that I can see is that it has become as hard as a rock.”

The experiment has brought her amusement rather than fear. “Maybe I would be frightened at seeing this if I were a meat eater.” she said.

1. Sally Davies kept the record of the McDonald’s Happy Meal by_________.

A．touching it

B．drawing pictures of it

C．smelling it

D．taking photos of it

2. Mrs. Davies didn’t have the feeling of fear because _________.

A．the experiment could prove nothing

B．she was a brave person

C．she didn’t eat any meat

D．this was not the case with all fast food

3. Before the experiment, Sally Davies had thought the food would_________.

A．turn into plastic

B．become tasteless

C．be covered with mould

D．be stolen by her dog

4. What does the passage mainly tell us?

A．McDonald is the most convenient food

B．McDonald’s Happy Meal tends to get bad easily

C．How to store the kids meal of fries and burger.

D．McDonald’s Happy Meal shows no sign of decay after six months

【推荐2】Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.

So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.

Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what’s acceptable without facing the consequences of “real life.”

1. Which word can replace the underlined word “innovative” in Paragraph 1?

A．Traditional.

B．Dangerous.

C．Useful.

D．New.

2. What is the potential threat caused by the novel communication tools?

A．Sheltering us from virtual life.	B．Removing face-to-face interaction.
C．Leading to false mental perception.	D．Making us rely more on hi-tech media.

3. What can be inferred from the last two paragraphs?

A．Technologies have changed our relationships.

B．The digital world is a recipe for pushing limits.

C．Love can be better conveyed by text message.

D．The digital self need not take responsibility.

4. Which of the following is a suitable title for the text?

A．Addiction to the Virtual World	B．Cost of Falling into Digital Life
C．Interpersonal Skills on the Net	D．The Future of Social Media

【推荐1】A painting stamped with more than 4.8 million fingerprints and cost over 80, 000 yuan in paper has set the Guinness World Record for the largest fingerprint painting.

The fingerprint painting, named Descendants of the Dragon, was created by Kuang Xianpeng, a 35-year-old painter from Zhuzhou, Hunan Province. It describes a mix of nine Chinese dragons and six arts in ancient Chinese culture.

With a surface area of 1195. 14 square meters, 51. 526 meters long and 23. 195 meters wide, the whole painting used 685 pieces of xuan paper and took Kuang over two years to complete. It also took 40 volunteers two whole days to lay out the painting for Guinness certification officer to measure.

Kuang said it was a very arduous journey, and he had used up all his spare time to finish the work. “It was very hard to master the amount of strength you put in your fingers, ” he said. “You can’t press too hard or too light. Otherwise, your prints will blur. I have wasted over 300 pieces of paper due to blurred fingerprints. ”

The Guinness certification officer Luo Qiong said this world record wasn’t easy to earn. She said each fingerprint must be clear, the painting must have more than four different colors, and the distance between each fingerprint mustn’t be more than 1 centimeter.

The world record for this category had been broken 15 times since 2014, with the previous one set by an Indian with a work measuring 1, 188 square meters.

Before this painting, Kuang had spent 14 years in drawing a pen-and-ink painting of 247 meters long and 1. 6 meters wide, telling stories of historical myths. He also said he would never stop exploring more creative works.

1. What can we know about the painting created by Kuang Xianpeng?

A．It’s worth at least 80, 000 yuan.

B．It measures 1, 188 square meters.

C．It took him 14 years to complete it.

D．It consists of over 4.8 million fingerprints.

2. Which of the following best explains “arduous” underlined in Paragraph 4?

A．Difficult.	B．Satisfying.
C．Thrilling.	D．Frightening.

3. What’s probably the key factor in creating the work?

A．The colors of paints.

B．The amount of strength.

C．The quality of xuan paper.

D．The distance of fingerprints.

4. What is Kuang Xianpeng like according to the text?

A．He is full of creativity.

B．He is full of imagination.

C．He is very courageous.

D．He is rich in experience.

【推荐3】A 5,300-year-old Chinese city that provides the earliest example of civilization in the country has been named China’s latest UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Zhejiang Province was designated a “cultural site“ at the ongoing UNESCO meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, bringing the total number of Chinese heritage sites to 55—surpassing (超过) Italy as the country with the largest number in the world.

The ruins, located in Hangzhou, sit on the plain of river networks in the basin of the Yangtze River and date back to around 3,300 BC. The site covers an area of 14.3 square kilometers and includes relics of 11 dams, cemetery sites (墓址), a water protection system and walls that give evidence to an early Chinese city civilization, with planting rice as the economic foundation.

The discovery of the site was of “primary importance” as it provides good evidence that Chinese civilization started around 5,000 years ago — 1,000 years earlier than previously thought. Colin Renfrew, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge said, “So when we are talking about the origins of state society in China, we can think of the Liangzhu instead of the Shang civilization around 1,500 BC.”

The site was first discovered in 1936 when a team of archaeologists unearthed some pottery (陶器) and began searching for further evidence. A breakthrough came in 1986 when a cemetery site with around 1,200artifacts was uncovered. The walls of the city were discovered in 2007 and the surrounding water protection system was unearthed in 2015. Archaeologists think that it would have taken 4,000 people working for ten years to build the system.

The decision to add the site to the UNESCO list is the result of more than twenty years’ work, with preparations starting in 1994. The site is now open to tourists, but the number allowed to visit the site is limited to 3,000 a day and bookings must be made online.

1. What does the underlined word “designated” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?

A．Cited.

B．Named

C．Developed.

D．Created.

2. Why is the discovery of the site very important?

A．It proves state society’s origins around 1500 BC.	B．It proves the existence of Shang civilization.
C．It proves China’s 5000-year-old civilization.	D．It proves China has the longest civilization.

3. What can be inferred from the text?

A．A burial site was first unearthed in 1994.

B．The discovery proves China has the longest history around the world.

C．It took UNESCO 20 years to include the site in its list.

D．China is taking measures to protect the site.

4. Where can the passage be found?

A．In a novel	B．In a news report
C．In an art magazine	D．In an advertisement