1 . Have you ever lost yourself in doing something so that you lost track of time? Everything around you—from the ringing of phones to the people passing in the hallways—seemed to be away.

Most of us have had this experience at one time or another. This is a mental state called “flow”. When it happens, we completely focus on the task before us so that nothing else seems to matter. We feel energetic, even joyful, about what we are doing.

The idea of flow was introduced and first studied by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihályi. His flow model shows the emotional states, which we’re likely to experience when trying to complete a task, depend on the difficulty of the challenge and our skill levels. For example, if the task is low challenging and doesn’t require a lot of skills, we’re likely to feel apathy and bored towards it. But facing a challenging task without the required skills could easily result in worry and anxiety. To perform at our best, we need a task with a high difficulty level, and we believe we have well-developed skills to do it. This moves us to a position where we can experience “flow”.

________? During flow, people can improve performance and get better result, faster. For instance, artists who Csikszentmihályi interviewed, said that they were highly productive, and that their work was done perfectly “without putting in much effort” in the flow state. Flow can also make people more curious and creative because they have to seek new challenges and information to keep the state. With flow, people have greater levels of happiness and satisfaction in their activities.

Flow often happens during creative activities and sports activities. But flow states aren’t just something experienced by artists, writers, or sports persons. Flow can happen anytime a person is deeply engaged in a task, including during learning activities. Many people want to achieve flow more often in their daily lives. While doing a task, having clear plans, adding something challenge-able and giving and receiving feedback in time can help achieve flow. It’s more difficult to achieve flow if the focus is disturbed, so it’s necessary that smartphones, TV and other distractions get turned off.

A．

B．

C．

D．

Kiska, the last captive killer whale in Canada—also known as “the loneliest whale in the world”—died in March, 2023.

In 1979, when Kiska was three years old, she was caught from the North Atlantic Ocean and taken to an aquarium in Iceland. She lived with four other young killer whales, including Keiko, the future star of the “Free Willy” movies. In the same year, she and Keiko were sold to a theme park in Canada called Marineland. The pair lived there together in the 1980s. Keiko was later saved and sent to the ocean near Iceland, but Kiska had to spend her whole life in Marineland.

Kiska suffered a lot while living in Marineland. She was trained to perform for the public for nearly thirty years, even in a bad health condition. Throughout her life in captivity, she gave birth to five babies. Sadly, all of them died at young ages. After that, Kiska lived alone in the pool. No family members swam by her side. No friends invited her to play. She really wanted to go back to the ocean, but she couldn’t.

Killer whales are able to feel deep emotions better than humans, so it is hard to imagine the trauma Kiska experienced. She spent her final years swimming in endless circles or simply floating lifelessly. Kiska even hit her head against the pool purposefully.

Videos of Kiska’s self-harm received over 229, 000 views online. What happened to her shows how cruel it is to keep animals in captivity. In 2019, Canada banned the captivity of whales. Hopefully there will be more ways to help as many captive animals as possible return to nature.

The science fiction movie The Wandering Earth Ⅱ has been quite popular since its release on Jan 22. The space elevators in the movie are quite impressive—elevator cars travel quickly between the cables hat connect Earth’s surface and the space station. This device may not only be imagined in the future.

Early in 1895, Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was inspired by the Eiffel Tower. He pointed out that if humans could build a tower high enough to reach space, people would be able to travel by space elevators. However, such a tower is impossible because no matter how large its base is, it would not be able to support the whole system.

Scientists then considered the idea in a different way. Earth’s satellites, about 36, 000 kilometers high in the sky, appear to be fixed in space. They rotate around Earth once every day. According to Scientific American, if such a satellite could drop cables towards Earth, and the cables could be fixed to Earth’ surface, then the whole system would rotate along with Earth.

This seems possible, but one of the challenges that stop engineers from building the elevators is the cables’ material. According to an article by the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, a carbon nanotube might be the most proper material. It weighs 1. 6 grams and it can hold more than 800 tons which is about the weight of 160 elephants. Since its discovery in 1991, scientists have been trying to create a carbon nanotube as long as possible. However, the longest carbon nanotube with a perfect structure was only about half a meter. It was developed by a team at Tsinghua University in 2013.

Space elevators require far less energy and money than rockets. With space elevators, space tasks would be carried out more easily and more frequently. Although scientists have not solved the key problem, they will continue doing research on carbon nanotubes. Maybe one day the space elevator will enter our life.

You might not know Giorgio Morandi (1890—1964), the Italian painter. But you might know the Morandi colors, which are named after him. And these years, Morandi and his art have got popular all around the world.

The Morandi colors are not bright. They look like they’re covered with a layer of gray. Morandi made the colors himself. He mixed gray and white with each color so that they became less bright. Morandi colors are quiet and give people a peaceful feeling. They appear in everything from fashion design to daily crafts.

Besides these special colors, Morandi is well-known for drawing small, still objects and scenery from daily life. He would often paint the same group of objects again and again. They include bottles, cups, vases, flowers, and things outside his window. He once said that the feelings and pictures around us were very difficult to express, because they were decided by form, color, space and light. So he drew things in different situations to show their colors and shapes.

Morandi had many books about traditional Chinese art. Did he learn from it? We don’t know. But some people compare the stillness of Morandi’s works with the peaceful feeling of Song Dynasty paintings. They show the same feeling in some way.

Morandi and his art help us to relearn how to look at things we didn’t see, and how to look at the objects we thought to be meaningless before. Morandi influenced a lot of artists and led to the birth of minimalism, a kind of modern art which shows the simplification of form and color.

A．

B．

C．

D．

5 . In order to know more about bumblebees, Tony looked through some websites on the computer at weekends. Below is what he has found.

	Bumblebees are 10 mm to 25 mm long. They are the same size as a strawberry.
	Bumblebees do not store food to spend winter. They only store little food to feed their babies and the egg-producing queen. Sometimes the food is used for cold, windy and rainy days.
	Different bumblebees have different lengths of tongues—from 6 mm to more than 20 mm. Some tongues are nearly as long as bumblebees’ bodies.
	Bumblebees can sting more than once, because their stingers are smooth and will not remain in the skin when they fly away.
	Bumblebees’ wings move quickly at 130-240 beats every second. That is at 8400 rpm. IU is faster than a racing car at 8250 rpm.
	Bumblebees don’t have ears. People don’t know whether or how a bumblebee can hear sound waves in the air. However they can feel the vibrations of sounds.

A common helicopter is a VTOL, as it takes off up-and-down vertically, rather than landing like a plane. If we power it with electricity, then it’s an eVTOL. Some might call eVTOLs “flying cars”, but they’re more exactly called electric helicopters.

Thanks to the progress in electric research and the growing need for new transport, this technology has developed. What makes them suitable for use in cities? First of all, an electric transportation is better for the environment than a fuel-powered one. For this to be true, the electricity will need to come from a renewable source. Besides, it has been tested that a two-hour ride by car through traffic rush hours would be shortened to an 18-minute ride by eVTOL aircraft. Moreover, eVTOL aircraft have been reported as being 100 times quieter than common aircraft. As for price, travelling by eVTOL aircraft will cost almost the same as common rideshare services that we have nowadays every mile.

_________. Presently, there are still no rules which are offered to guide the use of eVTOL aircraft, but they will need laws before they can start to fly. Besides, eVTOL aircraft aren’t designed for less-than-perfect weather conditions. Wind speed, rain, and air temperature all will affect their performance. What’s more, the battery is still a big problem for longer trips and larger aircraft. The road to improve eVTOL technology is still very long.

Anyway, many companies are interested in this technology, including Airbus and Boeing. They actively joined in eVTOL development. Airbus has its single-seat eVTOL named Vahana and four-seat City Airbus in the works. Boeing is also working with carmaker Porsche to develop a better eVTOL transport.

Actually, the eVTOL which makes air transportation easier, is expected to be used for many purposes in addition to transporting people. For example, it can be used for transporting food and water. And it could also serve as a mobile cell tower in places under natural disasters.