1 . When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr. Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.
Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note — “Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery” — and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically (魔术般) appear.
All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn’t freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.
There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk, thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practical to have a delivery service.
Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch (门廊) . Every so often my son’s friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.
1. Mr. Basille gave the boy a quarter out of his coin changer to __________.| A．show his magical power | B．pay for the delivery |
| C．satisfy his curiosity | D．please his mother |
| A．He wanted to have tea there. | B．He was a respectable person. |
| C．He was treated as a family member. | D．He was fully trusted by the family. |
| A．Nobody wants to be a milkman now. | B．It has been driven out of the market. |
| C．Its service is getting poor. | D．It is not allowed by law. |
| A．He missed the good old days. | B．He wanted to tell interesting stories. |
| C．He needed it for his milk bottles. | D．He planted flowers in it. |
2 . My father left for our native place on Thursday. In fact, he had never traveled by
Later, I looked back on my life. As a child, how many
Old age is like a second childhood and just as we take care of our children, the same
Just the fact that they are old does not mean that they will have to
Take care of your parents. They are precious.
1.| A．bus | B．train | C．ship | D．air |
| A．gave | B．handed | C．took | D．put |
| A．pride | B．excitement | C．admiration | D．ambition |
| A．encouraging | B．warning | C．teaching | D．preparing |
| A．thoroughly | B．slowly | C．immediately | D．suddenly |
| A．helped | B．patted | C．thanked | D．praised |
| A．honest | B．childish | C．nervous | D．emotional |
| A．successes | B．purposes | C．things | D．dreams |
| A．understanding | B．describing | C．solving | D．improving |
| A．parents | B．friends | C．children | D．leaders |
| A．ability | B．responsibility | C．freedom | D．fortune |
| A．song | B．advice | C．attention | D．thing |
| A．struggle | B．wait | C．rest | D．stand |
| A．hand in | B．pick up | C．pay off | D．give up |
| A．wishes | B．jobs | C．plans | D．suggestions |
3 . Tired of standing in line? Wait a bit longer, and you may never have to again.
Amazon has opened 24 of its Amazon Go stores, which use cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) to see what you’ve taken off shelves and charge you as you walk out. Some companies are closely copying Amazon’s approach to using AI-powered cameras fixed in ceilings. But others are trying an entirely different way to skip the checkout: smart shopping carts. These companies have added cameras and sensors (传感器) to the carts, and are using AI to tell what you’ve put in them. Customers pay by entering a credit card, or through an online payment system. When a customer exits the store a green light on the shopping cart shows that their order is complete, and they’re charged.
The companies behind the smart carts, including Caper and Veeve, say it’s much easier to add technology to the shopping cart than to an entire store. Amazon’s Go stores rely on hundreds of cameras in the ceiling. The shelves also include sensors to tell when an item is removed. Ahmed Beshry, co-founder of Caper, believes the technology to run Go is too expensive to use in a large-format grocery store. Neither Caper nor Veeve has said how much their smart shopping carts will cost, making it difficult to compare the different formats. Shariq Siddiqui, CEO of Veeve, said, “We’re always happy when Amazon is doing something. They force retailers (零售店) to get out of their old school thinking.”
Each time a business uses AI and cameras, it raises questions about customers’ privacy and the effect on jobs. Beshry notes that the cameras in his shopping cart point down into the cart, so only a customer’s hand and part of their arm will be captured (拍摄) on camera.
1. What do we know about the smart shopping carts?| A．They are able to recognize goods put in them. |
| B．They are linked to the cameras fixed in the ceilings. |
| C．They flash the green light when the order is canceled. |
| D．They can tell customers where to find what they want. |
| A．It is likely to help retailers to think differently. |
| B．It has attracted many more retailers than before. |
| C．It is far more expensive than their shopping carts. |
| D．It may reduce the cost of running a store greatly. |
| A．That they can only buy goods online. |
| B．That goods in the stores may be more expensive. |
| C．That they have to wait in a line for a longer time. |
| D．That somebody may know their privacy. |
| A．The new technology improves retail sale. |
| B．AI-powered cameras are used in retail stores. |
| C．Artificial intelligence affects the future of job market. |
| D．Smart shopping carts will let you skip the line. |
4 . Scientists say the plant enset, an Ethiopian staple (主食), could be a new superfood and a lifesaver in the face of climate change. The banana-like crop has the potential to feed more than 100 million people in a warming world, according to a new study.
Enset or “false banana”, almost unknown outside of Ethiopia, is a close relative of the banana, but is consumed only in one part of this country. The banana-like fruit of the plant is inedible, but the starchy stems (茎) and roots can be used to make porridge and bread. Research suggests the crop can be grown over a much larger range in Africa. “This is a crop that can play a really important role in addressing food security and sustainable development,” said a university professor in Awasa, Ethiopia.
Using agricultural surveys and modelling work, scientists predicted the potential range of enset over the next four decades. They found the crop could potentially feed more than 100 million people and boost food security in Ethiopia and other African countries, including Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.
Study researcher Dr James Borrell, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said planting enset, as an alternative for lean times, could help boost food security. “It’s got some really unusual features that make it absolutely unique as a crop,” he said. “You plant it at any time, you harvest it at any time. That’s why they call it the tree against hunger.”
There is growing interest in seeking new plants to feed the world, given our reliance on a few staple crops. Nearly half of all the calories we eat come from three species — rice, wheat, and maize. “We need to diversify the plants we use globally as a species because all our eggs are in a very small basket at the moment,” said Dr Borrell.
1. What does the underlined word “inedible” in Paragraph 2 mean?| A．Not secure enough. | B．Not diverse enough. |
| C．Not fit to be planted. | D．Not suitable to be eaten. |
| A．It is a special species of banana. |
| B．It can help with solving food shortage. |
| C．It has fed more than 100 million people. |
| D．It can be grown at anytime and anywhere. |
| A．Negative. | B．Objective. | C．Approving. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．To provide a solution to food problems. |
| B．To advertise a unique banana-like staple. |
| C．To recommend a magic crop against hunger. |
| D．To introduce a wonder crop for climate change. |
5 . Have you ever had the urge to open a book and stick your nose straight into the pages? The smell of old books can refresh any book lovers. We don’t know why, but it is just pleasant to us.
Describing the smell can be a challenge. And mere adjectives will likely be of little use to future generations of historians trying to document, understand or reproduce the scent of slowly decaying books. Now, that task may have just gotten easier thanks to the Historic Book Odor Wheel.
In one experiment, researchers asked visitors at the historic library to characterize the scents they smelled. All the visitors selected words like “woody”, “smoky” and “earthy” from the list, and described the smell’s intensity and perceived pleasantness. In another experiment, the study authors presented visitors to the Birmingham Museum with eight smells — one of which was an unlabeled historic book scent and seven were non-bookish, such as coffee, chocolate, fish market and dirty clothes. The researchers then had those museum goers describe the historic book smell.
The top two responses? Chocolate and coffee. “You tend to use familiar associations to describe smells when they are unlabeled,” study author Cecilia Bembibre says.
The team even analyzed the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) (挥发性有机化合物) in the book and the library. Using the data from the chemical analysis and visitors’ smell descriptions, the researchers created the Historic Book Odor Wheel to document the “historic library smell”. Main categories, such as “sweet/spicy”, fill the inner circle of the wheel; descriptors, such as “chocolate/cream”, fill the middle; and the chemical compounds likely to be the smelly source, like furfural, fill the outer circle. The researchers want the book odor wheel to be a tool that “untrained noses” can use to identify smells and the compounds causing them, which could address conservators’ concerns about material composition and historic paper conservation. And hopefully, smells of the past can be reproduced in the lab someday and museums and historians can use it to reconstruct a past we can no longer smell.
1. What is mainly talked about in the first paragraph?| A．An strange reading habit. | B．Fascination for smells of books. |
| C．Addiction to reading books. | D．A dislike for smelling books. |
| A．By referring to familiar items. | B．By using adjectives to label them. |
| C．By analysing chemical compounds. | D．By connecting them with food smells. |
| A．To record historic library smells. | B．To identify smells and compounds. |
| C．To remove the conservators’ worries. | D．To put different scents into different libraries. |
| A．Creating a whole new scent. | B．Improving the people’s sense of smell. |
| C．Restoring smells of historic documents. | D．Extracting components of “old book smell”. |
6 . In order to live in the wild, tigers need water to drink, animals to hunt, and plants in which to hide. As the mountains, jungles, forests, and long grasses that have long been home to tigers disappear, so do tigers. Agricultural expansion, new roads, and industrial expansion push tigers into smaller and smaller areas of land. Without wilderness, the wild tiger will not survive.
Asia’s explosive population growth demands that more and more land be changed to agriculture. Indonesia, for example, has the same population as the United States, but only ten per cent of the land area. Almost all of Indonesia’s lowland forest has been cleared for rice planting.
In India, where there are about 60 per cent of the world’s wild tigers, the human population has grown by 50 per cent in the past 20 years. Over the past 40 years, China’s population, the largest in the world, has more than doubled and 99 per cent of China’s original forest habitat has been destroyed.
Tigers compete with humans and industry for land. Local people hunt the same prey (猎物) as tigers do, making tigers to turn to domestic animals and, even humans. Threatened villagers often poison, or shoot the encroaching (侵犯) tigers. In addition to food, local communities also need to use the surrounding areas of forest for livestock grazing (放牧) and wood for fuel.
To protect tigers from hunting and the rapidly increasing loss of land, wildlife conservationists (自然资源保护者) have worked with governments to establish wildlife reserves. Reserves are protected areas ranging in size from China’s Xioaling at 21 km2 to Indonesia’s Kerinci Seblat at 14,846 km2.
1. Why does the author mention Indonesia?| A．To tell us Indonesia has a large population. |
| B．To show its rapid development of agriculture. |
| C．To show Indonesia’s serious forest destruction. |
| D．To tell us its rice planting is of great importance. |
| A．In the USA. | B．In Indonesia. |
| C．In China. | D．In India. |
| A．Finding less to eat. | B．Cutting down wood. |
| C．Industry’s development. | D．Human’s illegal hunting. |
| A．Tiger Habitat Loss | B．Humans and Tigers |
| C．Importance of Reserves | D．Importance of Tiger Protection |
7 . Have you experienced a condition when listening to a very loud music makes your heartbeat so fast that you can actually feel the
But why does this happen? Experiments found that the
It is believed that people who havens lower heart rate have a longer life.
Therefore, it is used as a
| A．light | B．shallow | C．heavy | D．mild |
| A．nature | B．anxiety | C．respect | D．security |
| A．integrated | B．changed | C．linked | D．marked |
| A．compared | B．adapted | C．exposed | D．opposed |
| A．style | B．beauty | C．fantasy | D．effect |
| A．formed | B．developed | C．translated | D．made |
| A．brings out | B．brings up | C．brings about | D．brings in |
| A．enjoyable | B．unbearable | C．unforgettable | D．beneficial |
| A．helpful | B．joyful | C．grateful | D．doubtful |
| A．Interestingly | B．Similarly | C．Absolutely | D．Unbelievably |
| A．limit | B．competition | C．fame | D．risk |
| A．speeds up | B．holds up | C．slows up | D．puts up |
| A．selflessness | B．calmness | C．loneliness | D．restlessness |
| A．learning | B．relaxation | C．permission | D．cooperation |
| A．hardens | B．touches | C．saddens | D．heals |
8 . Before uploading a photo of ourselves to social media, chances are that we’ll use an app to smooth our skin, make our eyes look bigger, and lips fuller. With a couple of taps on our mobile phone, we can get a quick fix and present the “best” version of ourselves to the world. However, the problem is, when we simply edit our imperfections away, we’re also changing the way we look at ourselves.
Last month, researchers published the article Selfies—Living in the Era of Filtered (过滤的) Photographs. The article analysed photo editing apps’ bad influences on people’s self-respect and their possibility to cause appearance anxieties. The researchers also warned that such apps make it difficult to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. “These apps allow one to change his or her appearance in minutes and follow an unrealistic standard of beauty,” the article reads.
In the past, people may have compared their looks to those of famous people. But for today’s young people, beauty standards are most likely set by what they see on social media. “From birth, they are born into an age of social platforms where their feelings of self-worth can be based purely on the number of likes and followers that they have, which is linked to how good they look,” British cosmetic doctor Tijion Esho told The Independent. This is why many young people suffer an identity trouble when it comes to appearance.
“Now you’ve got this daily comparison of your real self to this fake self that you present on social media,” Renee Engeln, a professor of psychology, told the HuffPost website. Engeln further pointed out that when people spend too much time making such comparisons, they may become “beauty sick” and find it difficult to accept what they actually look like. “Because between you and the world is a mirror. It’s a mirror that travels with you everywhere. You can’t seem to put it down,” she told The Washington Post. So when we look in a real mirror, we shouldn’t think to ourselves, “Do I look as good as myself in the filtered photos?” Instead, we should think, “I feel good; I have my health.”
1. Before uploading a photo to social media, we will probably _________.| A．have an operating to make our eyes look bigger |
| B．use some cream to smooth our skin |
| C．use an app to fix our photo |
| D．edit our perfections away |
| A．In many ways, photo editing apps are beneficial to people. |
| B．Photo editing apps are likely to cause people’s anxieties about their appearance. |
| C．Photo editing apps can make people more beautiful. |
| D．Photo editing apps help people judge realistic beauty. |
| A．Because they compare their looks to those of famous people. |
| B．Because beauty standards are set by social media. |
| C．Because their feelings of self-worth depend on their own likes and dislikes. |
| D．Because their feelings of self-worth depend on their appearance. |
| A．We should feel good about what we actually look like. |
| B．We should spend more time making comparison of our real self to fake self. |
| C．We should take a mirror with us everywhere. |
| D．We should try to look as good as ourselves in the filtered photos. |
9 . I fell in love with Yosemite National Park the first time I saw it. My parents took us there for camping. On the way out, I asked them to wait while I ran up to El Capitain, a
About 15 years ago I started seeing a lot of
I tried
In 2004, together with some climbers, I set a date for a
Each year volunteers come for the cleanup from everywhere. In 2007 alone, 2,945 people picked up 42,330 pounds of trash.
I often hear people
| A．distant | B．huge | C．narrow | D．loose |
| A．immediately | B．finally | C．gradually | D．recently |
| A．imagining | B．painting | C．describing | D．climbing |
| A．garden | B．home | C．lab | D．palace |
| A．material | B．resources | C．waste | D．goods |
| A．more | B．most | C．less | D．least |
| A．throwing away | B．picking up | C．breaking down | D．digging out |
| A．kill | B．save | C．wait | D．spend |
| A．cleanup | B．party | C．picnic | D．concert |
| A．dropped out | B．showed up | C．looked around | D．called back |
| A．demand | B．receive | C．achieve | D．overcome |
| A．plan | B．visit | C．contact | D．difference |
| A．talk | B．complain | C．argue | D．quarrel |
| A．doing | B．thinking | C．questioning | D．watching |
| A．method | B．explanation | C．example | D．research |
10 . My husband Adlai and I often went camping to celebrate special occasions. In fact, our anniversary (周年纪念日) was coming up. But this time I felt a sense of
For birthdays and anniversaries,
I never
As a result of their their
| A．duty | B．excitement | C．loss | D．fear |
| A．except for | B．instead of | C．with regard to | D．as for |
| A．send | B．discuss | C．spread | D．exchange |
| A．destroyed | B．watched | C．locked | D．examined |
| A．waiting | B．missing | C．appearing | D．dropping |
| A．hopeless | B．successful | C．dangerous | D．safe |
| A．got away | B．set out | C．gave up | D．came back |
| A．friends | B．customers | C．relatives | D．strangers |
| A．discovered | B．hidden | C．returned | D．passed |
| A．satisfied | B．moved | C．tired | D．frightened |
| A．easy | B．interesting | C．boring | D．difficult |
| A．needs | B．experiments | C．projects | D．efforts |
| A．kindness | B．understanding | C．encouragement | D．protection |
| A．partly | B．luckily | C．necessarily | D．secretly |
| A．talk | B．feel | C．plan | D．hate |
