A group of artists, writers and intellectuals has launched a new “university” in London, designed to help those too tied up with work to appreciate the finer things in life, like art, books and travel.
The School of Life, operating out of a small shop in the arty district of Bloomsbury, describes itself as a “chemist for the mind” that plans to offer “cultural solutions to everyday ailments (疾病)”. It hopes to inspire those who have got out of the habit of reading decent books, cannot keep conversation flowing at dinner parties, or need to expand their holiday horizons. The philosopher Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, and Sophie Howarth, a former curator (馆长) at the Tate Modem Gallery, are among the staff members.
The founders believe that people with too little time to spare need instruction in how to live a more fulfilled (有成就感的) existence. Perhaps you have a burning question for a paleontologist(古生物学家). “Perhaps you’re considering a career change and want to talk first-hand to a photographer or landscape designer. The School of Life has a large professional staff who are willing to meet with you for an hour of chat in exchange for a small fee,” the website explains, listing 50 experts.
Among courses being offered later this year are instruction in life, love, work, family and politics. A typical course, in love, will explore why relationships are so complicated and why attraction ebbs and flows. “We draw on ideas from philosophy, psychoanalysis (心理分析), literature and art. We discover what the likes of Plato, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Freud had to say about compassion , empathy and self-love,” the instructors promise.
Courses run for six weeks and cost 195 pounds.
1. From Paragraph 1 we know the purpose of “the university” is to .| A．help people live a finer life |
| B．tell people how to spend their spare time |
| C．make money by setting up a university on the internet |
| D．offer education to those who have little chance to go to university |
| A．pursue a quality life | B．try to improve communicative skills |
| C．get into the habit of reading good books | D．seek solutions to their physical diseases |
| A．free chatting online with arty people | B．chatting with instructors face to face |
| C．making appointments with chemists | D．attending public lectures given by founders |
| A．A new university — solutions to everything | B．A new university — instructions to your career |
| C．The School of Life — a chemist for mind | D．The School of Life — a school for health |
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【推荐1】Also known as Adlerian psychology, individual psychology offers a refreshing perspective and insights into interpersonal relationships, fear and trauma (精神创伤). It is a theory of human behavior that focuses on the basic need of belonging and the importance of engaging in constructive actions. The Courage to Be Disliked, using the theories of Alfred Adler, follows a dialogue between a philosopher or a teacher and a young man. The philosopher helps his student to understand how each of us is able to determine the direction of our own life, free from the past trauma and the expectations of others.
Alfred Adler believes that our past trauma don’t define our future. Instead, we choose how trauma affect our present or future lives. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead, and we make whatever suits our purposes out of them. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
In other words, he claims that one doesn’t suffer from the shock of their experiences (the trauma), but that we feel that way because that was our goal in the first place. Adler conveys an example of a person that doesn’t want to step out of his house due to anxiety and fear filling him up every time he steps outside. The philosopher asserts that the person creates fear and anxiety so that he stays inside.
Why? Because possibly he’ll have to face the uncertainty of being out there, facing the mass. Possibly, the man believes that he’s so average that nobody will like him. So, it’s better to stay home and not risk feeling unwanted emotions.
In the Adlerian worldview, the past doesn’t matter. You don’t think about past causes; you think about present goals. You choose an emotion or behavior to achieve a present goal.
1. Why does the author mention The Courage to Be Disliked?| A．To propose a solution. | B．To offer a definition. |
| C．To introduce the topic. | D．To present the background. |
| A．They can be overcome by personal choices. | B．They should be avoided at all costs in life. |
| C．They will always define a person’s future. | D．They have no impact on a person’s mental well-being. |
| A．Recommends. | B．States. | C．Promises. | D．Denies. |
| A．To introduce Adler in detail. | B．To analyze the causes of fear and trauma. |
| C．To explore the effects of past experiences. | D．To call on people to focus on the present and future. |
【推荐2】In this period of anxiety about the size of our waists and what we consume, simple dietary rules are appealing.“Eat like our ancestors”is a particularly catchy slogan (口号) to live by.
But who are these ancestors we are supposed to follow? Are they our great-great-grandparents, cooking healthy things? Or are they hairy animals we imagine “cavemen“ to be? The popular ancient diet blames modern health problems on the birth of agriculture, claiming that we should stick to eating meat, nuts and berries.
This kind of stone age trend is based on the false assumption that palaeolithic (旧石器时代的) peoples all ate the same food, regardless of their location. Nevertheless, England’s 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man would not have eaten the same foods as his contemporaries on the Kenyan plain. The amount of meat peoples ate, and how much was obtained by hunting, are also up for debate.
Moreover, the stone age trend is focused on what’s perceived to be good for our bodies, without any concern for the rest of nature, including other humans whose livelihoods are threatened by western overconsumption. Were I to eat like my Punjabi farming great-grandparents, my diet would be based on the wheat and milk products that people in the Punjab have relied on for probably at least the last two thousand years. But delicious and “original” as it might be for me to follow its lead, the morals of industrially farmed milk products in the 21st century make the situation more confusing and complicated.
Now, probably more than ever before, what we eat connects us to the fate of other beings, human and non-human, and to the fate of our planet. A dogmatic (武断的) approach to this would be a mistake. Better to preserve what’s worth keeping and remain clear-eyed about our cooking past, much of which is unknowable, immoral and impossible to follow in any case.
1. What does the text concern?| A．An ancient study. |
| B．An immoral case. |
| C．A balanced diet. |
| D．A popular belief. |
| A．To illustrate an opinion. |
| B．To present a fact. |
| C．To clarify a concept. |
| D．To introduce a theory. |
| A．The eating behavior of our great-grandparents. |
| B．The connection between food choice and nature. |
| C．The relationship among eating,hunting and farming. |
| D．The impact of food overconsumption on the environment. |
| A．Punjabi diet:popular again |
| B．Should we eat like our ancestors? |
| C．Is the fate of the planet in our hands? |
| D．Our cooking past:a complicated history |
【推荐3】A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need.
Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped(刮落)from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life forms. These millimeter-wide “xenobots” can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload(like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut.
“These are novel living machines,” says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. “They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact：a living, programmable organism.” “We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do,” says co-leader Michael Levin, “like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination(污染物), gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries(动脉)to scrape out plaque.”
People have been manipulating(操纵)organisms for human benefit since at least the dawn of agriculture, genetic editing is becoming widespread, and a few artificial organisms have been manually assembled in the past few years—copying the body forms of known animals. But this research, for the first time ever, “designs completely biological machines from the ground up," the team writes in their new study.
Many people worry about the implications of rapid technological change and complex biological manipulations. "That fear is not unreasonable,” Levin says. "When we start to deal with complex systems that we don't understand, we're going to get unintended consequences.” “If humanity is going to survive into the future, we need to better understand how complex properties, somehow, emerge from simple rules,” says Levin. Much of science is focused on "controlling the low-level rules. We also need to understand the high-level rules." In other words, “this study is a direct contribution to getting a handle on what people are afraid of, which is unintended consequences,” Levin says.
1. What do we know about the “xenobots” from Paragraph 2?| A．They need to be carried to a specific place. |
| B．They're capable of self-healing after injury. |
| C．They are scraped from some new life forms. |
| D．They can remove an object to another place. |
| A．recycle microplastic in the oceans |
| B．take in nasty compounds |
| C．programme other organisms |
| D．take away the plaque in arteries |
| A．People never created these biological robots in history. |
| B．These machines were copied from the very beginning. |
| C．The research is completely carried out on the playground. |
| D．Organisms have been developed since agriculture. |
| A．This study is bound to bring about panic in public. |
| B．People boycott employing rapid technological change. |
| C．Science is focused on controlling the low-level rules. |
| D．Some study is likely to contribute to unexpected results. |
Most painters discover a style of painting that suits them and stick to that, especially if people admire their pictures. But Picasso, the great Spanish painter, was like a man who had not yet found his own particular style of painting. He kept on struggling to find the perfect expression till his death in 1973.
Some of Picasso’s paintings are rich, soft, colored and beautiful. Others are ugly and cruel and strange. But such paintings allow us to _____________ for ourselves. They force us to say to ourselves, “What does he see that makes him paint like that?” And we begin to look beneath the surface of the things we see.
Picasso painted thousands of pictures in different styles. Sometimes he painted the natural look of things. Sometimes he seemed to break them apart and throw the pieces in our faces. He showed us what the mind knows as well as what the eye sees. At the age of 90 he remained as curious about the world as he had been when he was young. That is why people have called him “the youngest painter in the world”.
1. What is the best title of the passage? (Please answer within 10 words.)2. Which sentence in the passage can be replaced by the following one ?
At times, things in some of his pictures seemed to be in disorder.
3. Please fill in the blank with proper words to complete the sentence.(Please answer within 10 words.)
4. Translate the underlined sentence in the last paragraph into Chinese.
【推荐2】In 1981, the artist Vitek Kruta escaped to Germany. He was nineteen years old at the time. Vitek's home was in Prague. He loved his country, but he could not stay there because the government wanted to put him into prison. “The government wanted total control of all art and music，” he explains. “We had to have art shows in secret. My kind of painting was against the law. The rock music that my band played was against the law. There was no future for me there. ”
In Germany, Vitek first had to learn the language. He spent eight months taking lessons at a language school. It was easy for him to understand and read German, but he could not speak it. Then one night, he had a dream. In his dream, he started talking with others in German! The following day, he discovered that he could speak much better.
Next, Vitek got back to his studies in art. He learned to restore (修复) old buildings such as churches and castles. He spent ten years doing this kind of work, and then he faced another_big_change in his life: He got a job offer in the United States. Vitek knew hardly any English, but he did not let that stop him. After all, he had a great deal of experience learning new languages. So he decided to make the move.
Today, Vitek is a painter, an architect (建筑师), and much more. He is a man with a lot of energy. He works in his studio, he teaches art classes, and he manages an art school. He also likes to bring together people with different talents and abilities to do big art projects in public places so that anyone can see and enjoy them. He says these projects “bring art back to the people”．
1. Vitek Kruta went to Germany in 1981 to ________.| A．have art shows there |
| B．further his studies in art |
| C．avoid being put into prison |
| D．experience different cultures |
| A．changing his job |
| B．moving to the US |
| C．escaping from Germany |
| D．learning a new language |
| A．love for art |
| B．lifestyle |
| C．art works |
| D．hobbies and interests |
| A．He was born in 1962. |
| B．He is a man of many gifts. |
| C．He now lives in the US. |
| D．He is good at learning languages. |
【推荐3】“I grew up on Jackson’s music and I still have all his stuff on My iPod. I think that Michael Jackson will go down in history as one of our greatest entertainers. His brilliance as a performance also was paired with a tragic and in many ways，sad personal life.”
Michael Jackson was a singer，songwriter，dancer and celebrity icon with a vast catalog of hit records and countless awards to his credit. Beyond that，he had transfixed the world like few entertainers before or since. As a solo performer，he had enjoyed a level of superstardom previously known ——Barack Obama
only to Elvis Presley，the Beatles and Frank Sinatra.
Michael Jackson was unquestionably the biggest pop star of the 80s’，and certainly one of the most popular recording artists of all time.
Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29,1958.The fifth and youngest son of steelworker Joe Jackson，Michael displayed a talent for music and dance from an extremely young age. His father began to organize a family musical group around his three eldest sons in 1962，and Michael joined them the following year，quickly establishing himself as a dynamic stage performer. Dubbed the Jackson 5，the group signed to Motown in 1968 and issued their debut single in October 1969，when Michael was just 11 years old. I Want You Back，ABC，The Love You Save and I’ll Be There all hit number one in 1970，making the Jackson 5 the first group in pop history to have their first four singles top the charts. Later in 1972，Jackson had his first number one solo single，Ben. In 1977，he met producer/composer Quincy Jones for the first time. With Jones producing，Jackson recorded his first solo album as an adult，Off the Wall.
Released（发行） in 1982，the Quincy Jones produced Thriller refined the strengths of Off the Wall：the dance and rock tracks were more driving，the pop tunes and ballads softer and more soulful，and all of it was recognizably Michael. There was no surprise that Thriller was a hit；what was a surprise was its staying power .Jackson’s duet with McCartney，The Girl Is Mine，was a natural single choice，and it peaked at number two；then Billie Jean and the Van Halen track Beat It both hit number one，for seven and three weeks respectively.
Michael Jackson died from heart disease on June 25 at age 50.
1. According to the passage，which of the following is NOT true?| A．Barack Obama likes Michael Jackson’s song very much. |
| B．Barack Obama and Michael Jackson are good friends. |
| C．Michael is good at music as well as at dance. |
| D．Michael Jackson had his first number one solo single when he was 14 years old. |
a．Barack Obama，President of the US，assessed the whole life of Michael Jackson.
b．The family musical group signed to Motown.
c．Michael joined the family musical group.
d．His father began to organize a family musical group.
e．Thriller became a hit.
| A．a－c－e－b－d | B．d－c－b－e－a |
| C．b－e－a－c－d | D．d－e－b－c－a |
| A．Michael Jackson’s job. |
| B．How Michael Jackson performed. |
| C．Michael Jackson’s great achievements. |
| D．Michael Jackson’s life. |
