【推荐1】The decline in sea ice seen in the Arctic in recent decades has been linked by scientists to the spread of a deadly virus in marine (海洋的) mammals. Researchers found that Phocine distemper virus (PDV) had spread from animals in the North Atlantic to populations in the North Pacific.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ice has been retreating by around 12% per decade between 1979 and 2018. These sea ice changes in September (2018) are likely unprecedented (前所未有的) for at least 1, 000 years. “Between 1979 and 2018, the real proportion (比例) of multi-year ice that is at least five years old has declined by approximately 90%,” the IPCC said in their report on the oceans and the cryosphere (冰冻圈) published in September.

Against this changing background, researchers have investigated the likely spread of the PDV infection, which caused a large number of deaths among harbour seals in the North Atlantic in 2002. Melting sea ice is now connecting marine mammals, like these Steller sea lions, which were formerly separated by ice . “As animals move and come in contact with other species, they carry opportunities to introduce and catch new infectious disease, with potentially destructive effects.” said author Dr Tracey Goldstein, from the University of California, Davis.

The authors warn that this trend could continue as they believe climate driven changes in the Arctic ocean will increase. The opportunities for the spread of PDV will likely grow, with uncertain health outcomes for many species.

1. What does the word “populations” in paragraph 1 refer to?

A．The marine mammals.	B．The people.
C．The virus.	D．The land animals.

2. What are the statistics in paragraph 2 about?

A．The loss of sea ice.	B．The formation of sea ice.
C．The effect of sea ice.	D．The proportion of sea ice.

3. What does paragraph 3 try to tell us?

A．How marine mammals adapt to their habitats.

B．How a large number of seals died in the Arctic.

C．How melting ice is linked to the spread of virus.

D．How marine mammals live with the melting ice.

4. In which section of a newspaper may this text appear?

A．Entertainment.	B．Health.
C．Education.	D．Nature.

【推荐2】阅读下面短文，根据题目要求用英语回答问题。请在答题卡指定区域作答。

Many scientists believe our love of sugar may actually be an addiction. When we eat or drink sugary foods, the sugar enters our blood and affects parts of our brain that make us feel good. Then the good feeling goes away, leaving us wanting more. All tasty foods do this, but sugar has a particularly strong effect. In this way, it is in fact an addictive drug, one that doctors suggest we all cut down on.

“It seems like every time I study an illness and search for the first cause, I find my way back to sugar,” says scientist Richard Johnson. One-third of adults worldwide have high blood pressure, and up to 347 million have diabetes (糖尿病). Why? “Sugar, we believe is one of the culprits, if not the major reason,” says Johnson.

Our bodies are designed to survive on very little sugar. Early humans often had very little food, so our bodies learned to be very efficient in storing sugar as fat. In this way, we had energy stored for when there was no food. But today, most people have more than enough. So the very thing that once saved us may now be killing us.

So what is the solution? It’s obvious that we need to eat less sugar. The trouble is, in today’s world, it’s extremely difficult to avoid. From breakfast cereals (谷物) to after-dinner desserts, our foods are increasingly filled with it.

But there are those who are fighting back against sugar. Many schools are replacing sugary desserts with healthier food like fruit. Other schools are growing their own food in gardens, or building facilities (设施) like walking tracks so students and others in the community can exercise.

1. What is one of the reasons for high blood pressure?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
2. Why did our bodies learn to store sugar as fat?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
—The sugar enters our blood and affects parts of our brain that make us feel good, so we should eat more in daily life.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
4. In your daily life, how do you fight against sugar? (In about 40 words)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________

【推荐3】There is virtue in working standing up. It sounds like a fashion. But it does have a basis in science.

That, by itself, may not be surprising. Health ministries ask people for decades to do more exercise. What is surprising is that long periods of inactivity are bad regardless of how much time you also spend on officially approved high-impact stuff like pounding treadmills(跑步机) in the gym. What you need instead, the latest research suggests, is constant low-level activity. This can be so low-level that you might not think of it as activity at all. Even just standing up counts, for it invokes muscles that sitting does not.

Researchers in this field trace the history of the idea that standing up is good for you back to 1953, when a study published in The Lancet found that bus conductors, who spent their days standing, had a risk of heart attack half that of bus drivers, who spent their shifts on their backsides. But as the health benefits of exercise and vigorous(强度大的) physical activity began to become clear in the 1970s, says David Dunstan, a researcher at the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, interest in low-intensity activity --- like walking and standing --- became weaker.

Over the past few years, however, interest has been excited again. A series of studies, none big enough to provide convincing evidence, but all pointing in the same direction, persuaded Emma Wilmot of the University of Leicester, in Britain, to carry out a meta-analysis. This is a technique that combines diverse studies in a statistically meaningful way. Dr Wilmot combined 18 of them, covering almost 800,000 people and concluded that those individuals who are the least active in their normal daily lives are twice as likely to develop diabetes(糖尿病) as those who are the most active. She also found that the immobile are twice as likely to die from a heart attack and two-and-a-half times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease as the most mobile. Crucially, all this seemed to be independent of the amount of vigorous, gym-style exercise that volunteers did.

1. The surprising thing mentioned in Paragraph 2 is that ______.

A．Low-level activities are better than high-level ones.

B．Long periods of inactivity are bad to people’s health

C．The benefits of high-impact exercise are not highly approved by people

D．Strong physical activities cannot make up for the bad effects of inactivity.

2. Why did people lose interest in low-intensity activity in the 1970s?

A．Researchers didn’t devote much to studying their health benefits.

B．The health benefits of high-impact exercise were widely recognized.

C．It was believed to be unable to invoke all the muscles of the body.

D．It was proved not so effective in reducing the risk of heart attacks.

3. The findings made by Dr Wilmot ______.

A．disagreed with her assumption

B．consisted with the results of the 1953 study

C．changed her original research objectives

D．confirmed David Dunstan’s research results

4. What’s the passage mainly about?

A．The history of the theory.

B．The benefits of standing up.

C．Low-level activity and health.

D．A series of epidemiological studies.

【推荐1】请认真阅读下面短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。

Do a country’s inhabitants get happier as it gets richer?

Most governments seem to believe so, given their continuous focus on increasing GDP year by year. Reliable, long-term evidence linking wealth and happiness is, however, lacking. And measuring well-being is itself full of problems, since it often relies on surveys that ask participants to assess their own levels of happiness subjectively.

Previous research has shown that people's underlying levels of happiness are reflected in what they say or write. Dr Sgroi and Dr Proto therefore consulted newspaper archives and Google Books, a collection of more than 8m titles that constitute around 6% of all books physically published. They searched these texts for words that had been assigned a psychological “valence”(效价)—a value representing how emotionally positive or negative a word is—while controlling for the changing meanings of words such as “gay” and “awful”(which once most commonly meant “to inspire awe”). The result is the National Valence Index, published this week in Nature Human Behaviour.

Placed alongside the timeline of history, the valence indices(the plural of index) for the places under study, show how changes in national happiness reflect important events. In Britain, for example, happiness fell sharply during the two world wars. It began to rise again after 1945, peaked in 1950, and then fell gradually, including through the so-called Swinging Sixties, until it reached a nadir(最低点)around 1980. America’s national happiness, too, fell during the world wars. It also fell in the 1860s, during and after the country's civil war. The lowest point of all came in 1975, at the end of a long decline during the Vietnam war, with the fall of Saigon and America's humiliating defeat.

In Germany and Italy the first world war also caused dips in happiness. By contrast, during the second world war these countries both got happier as the war continued. Initially, that might be put down to their early successes, but this can hardly explain German happiness when the Red Army was at the gates of Berlin.

The researchers assume that what is being measured here is the result of propaganda (宣传) and censorship(审查), rather than honest opinion. But they cannot prove this. Earlier in Italian history, though, there was a clear and explicable(可解释的) crash in happiness in 1848, with the failure of revolutions intended to unite into a single nation that was then half a dozen disparate states. Surprisingly, however, successful unification in the 1860s also saw a fall in happiness.

Does Wealth Ensure Happiness?
Passage outline	Supporting details
General information	* The majority of governments think it does, continuously concentrating their     1     on growing annual GDP. * More reliable, long-term evidence    2     to be explored. * Participants of surveys give a    3     assessment on levels of happiness.
4    of research	* You can judge whether people are happy according to their    5       and writing. * Some words usually represent positive emotions while “gay” and “awful” often mean    6    .
Typical     7	* In Britain and America, the level of happiness    8     with the start and the end of various wars. *     9     the above two countries, German and Italy experienced a different situation.
A strange truth	* Whether unification succeeds or not doesn’t necessarily     10     the high level of happiness.

【推荐2】Cool Butterfly Effect: Insect Equipment Could Inspire Heat-Radiating Tech

Devising better cooling materials has become a pressing issue as the climate warms, and some scientists are turning to nature for ideas. Small creatures with low body mass, such as insects, have to deal with the fact that they warm up much faster than large mammals. When butterflies land on tree branches in the sun, for example, their relatively large wings can overheat within seconds.

    1     Researchers have now uncovered these colorful insects’ built-in cooling mechanisms.

Heat is generated by the vibration of molecules. The more molecules a material can expose on its surface, the more heat it can release in a process called radiative cooling. Those made of folded layers shaped like waves, for example, cool off much faster than solid objects because they have more exposed surface area.     2     The wings themselves are complex systems that contain both living and nonliving structures, covered by various types of scales made of chitin—a rigid substance that is also found in some fungi(真菌). The researchers found that the scales covering these structures have different shapes that radiate heat in different ways. To decipher how these complex systems work, the team studied several types of butterflies

The scientists’ work is ‘‘remarkable’’, says Aaswath Raman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘‘    3     Butterfly wings are extremely light, and the microstructures involved are extremely small and thin. So this discovery can inspire ways of getting rid of heat in very lightweight systems. ‘”

    4     It might work in a variety of colors. Many conventional buildings tend to be white because that it does not absorb heat. But painting too many things white does not look pleasing, says Qiaoqiang Gan, a photonics scientist. ‘‘We still need a colorful world, ‘‘ Gan says, noting how vivid butterflies are in nature. ‘‘Butterfly wings give us an example that colorful structures can also result in cooling.”

A．So they have evolved sophisticated ways to cool themselves.

B．We can make these micro-structures into our own artificial processes.

C．It turns out that parts of butterflies’ wings exploit a similar principle.

D．Such structures release warmth very efficiently, protecting the organs from overheating.

E．Along with its light weight, a butterfly-inspired cooling material might have another advantage.

F．Although far from a commercial application, such resulting material could eventually be used for purposes such as painting buildings.

【推荐3】According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Readers were “listeners attentive to a reading voice,” and “the text addressed to the ear as much as to the eye.” The significance of reading aloud continued well into the nineteenth century.

Using Charles Dickens’s nineteenth century as a point of departure, it would be useful to look at the familial and social uses of reading aloud and reflect on the functional change of the practice. Dickens habitually read his work to a domestic audience or friends. In his later years he also read to a broader public crowd. Chapters of reading aloud also abound in Dickens’s own literary works. More importantly, he took into consideration the Victorian practice when composing his prose, so much so that his writing is meant to be heard, not only read on the page.

Performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. Apart from promoting a pleasant family relationship, reading aloud was also a means of protecting young people from the danger of solitary（孤独的）reading. Reading aloud was a tool for parental guidance. By means of reading aloud, parents could also introduce literature to their children, and as such the practice combined leisure and more serious purposes such as religious cultivation in the youths. Within the family, it was commonplace for the father to read aloud. Dickens read to his children: one of his surviving and often-reprinted photographs features him posing on a chair, reading to his two daughters.

Reading aloud in the nineteenth century was as much a class phenomenon as a family affair, which points to a widespread belief that Victorian readership primarily meant a middle-class readership. Those who fell outside this group tended to be overlooked by Victorian publishers. Despite this, Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, managed to distribute literary reading materials to people from different social classes by reducing the price of novels. This was also made possible with the technological and mechanical advances in printing and the spread of railway networks at the time.

Since the literacy level of this section of the population was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act a considerable number of people from lower classes would listen to recitals of texts. Dickens’s readers, who were from such social backgrounds, might have heard Dickens in this manner. Several biographers of Dickens also draw attention to the fact that it was typical for his texts to be read aloud in Victorian England, and thus literacy was not an obstacle for reading Dickens. Reading was no longer a chiefly closeted form of entertainment practiced by the middle class at home.

A working class home was in many ways not convenient for reading: there were too many distractions, the lighting was bad, and the home was also often half a workhouse. As a result, the Victorians from the non-middle classes tended to find relaxation outside the home such as in parks and squares, which were ideal places for the public to go while away their limited leisure time. Reading aloud, in particular public reading, to some extent blurred the distinctions between classes. The Victorian middle class defined its identity through differences with other classes. Dickens’s popularity among readers from the non-middle classes contributed to the creation of a new class of readers who read through listening.

Different readers of Dickens were not reading solitarily and “jealously,” to use Walter Benjamin’s term. Instead, they often enjoyed a more communal experience, an experience that is generally lacking in today’s world. Modern audiobooks can be considered a contemporary version of the practice. However, while the twentieth and twentieth-first-century trend for individuals to listen to audiobooks keeps some characteristics of traditional reading aloud—such as “listeners attentive to a reading voice” and the ear being the focus—it is a far more solitary activity.

1. What does the author want to convey in Paragraph 1?

A．The history of reading aloud.

B．The significance of reading aloud.

C．The development of reading practice.

D．The roles of readers in reading practice.

2. How did the practice of reading aloud influence Dickens’s works?

A．He started to write for a broader public crowd.

B．He included more readable contents in his novels.

C．Scenes of reading aloud became common in his works.

D．His works were intended to be both heard and read.

3. How many benefits did reading aloud bring to a Victorian family?

A．2.	B．3.
C．4.	D．5.

4. Where could a London steel worker possibly have gone to for reading?

A．Working place.	B．His/her own house.
C．Nearby bookstores.	D．Trafalgar Square.

5. What change did reading aloud bring to Victorian society?

A．Different classes started to appreciate and read literary works together.

B．People from lower social classes became accepted as middle-class.

C．The differences between classes grew less significant than before..

D．A non-class society in which everyone could read started to form.

6. What is likely to be discussed after the last paragraph?

A．New reading trends for individuals.

B．The harm of modern audiobooks.

C．The material for modern reading.

D．Reading aloud in contemporary societies.