1 . The souk in the city of Fes in Morocco is an ancient shopping center with lots of narrow alleys crowded, with shops and stalls. In the souk, people are making deals. This is business. Moroccan-style, and many people in the souk are bargaining (议价) as hard as they can.
All the sales happen face to face; it’s very personal and very busy! The vendors (摊贩) have everything a shopper could possibly want. There are sandals next to fish bowls, and nearby, birds in cages watch the whole scene. In the souk, there really is something for everyone. A visit to the souk is a lesson in Moroccan bargaining culture. For visitors, the question is not “What should I buy?” but “How should I buy it?” That’s where they get a real education in making a deal.
A Dutch couple talk about what they have learned so far in the souk. “You have to start somewhere around one third of the price they say at first. And then you bargain up to 50 percent,” said the husband. “And they go down twice as hard as we go up with the price! Then you get it at a much lower price than the original one,” added his wife. It’s really a game. The Moroccans are very good at bargaining and probably the best in the world. Visitors, however, had better be careful! Beginners at bargaining pay more. Sometimes 20 to 30 percent more than the price the Moroccan people pay.
The vendors of the souk are not trying to cheat customers. It’s more like a test to find out who is the strongest bargainer. The real test for any bargainer is the carpet shop, where the sellers really pressure customers to buy something. Sometimes, strong salesmen don’t give up easily! One English tourist explains, “Once you end up in a shop, you sit there drinking tea, and you say ‘I don’t want to buy anything.’ But then he’s like, ‘Well, just offer a price...500? What’s your best price?’ And you’re like, ‘We don’t want to buy it.’ And they said, ‘OK, 300!’”
1. Why does the author mention birds in cages in paragraph 2?| A．To describe what the market looks like. |
| B．To show there are various shopping choices. |
| C．To introduce a symbol of the shopping center. |
| D．To compare different goods displayed at stalls. |
| A．Bargain down to half price. |
| B．Start with a high price. |
| C．Start low and then go up. |
| D．Turn to the local for help. |
| A．Customers should avoid being cheated. |
| B．Carpet vendors are good at promoting sales. |
| C．The most popular product in the souk is carpet. |
| D．It’s hard to get people to buy just by price cutting. |
| A．Making a Deal | B．Ancient Market For Trade |
| C．Clever Vendors | D．Face-to-face Shopping |
2 . Utility, Portland’s low-waste and reuse company, started in January 2019 and held its first retail (零售) shop in April. Rebecca Rottman and Nadine Appenbrink, two women on a mission to green their city, are deeply committed to sustainability (持续性) and supporters of zero waste.
They believed that their green-minded city was missing something that was essential to sustainability. So, they started one shop (that is almost zero waste) as a second job for both. It started as a personal journey, looking for clean products that didn’t come in plastic. Their mission is to reduce the amount of single-use plastics by allowing people to bring their own reusable containers.
Every week the women teamed up with local stores to sell their goods and to refill (再装满) products for returning customers. Now they are operating only online for pickup or local delivery in the Portland area. Just shop online and choose a container. Then select pickup or delivery. The products include all-natural dish bar soap—that is locally made, and a wide variety of plastic free kitchen tools.
While not completely zero waste, Utility is striving to get incredibly close. Appenbrink said, “We’re all on a journey. And we want to be as approachable as possible. Utility is to raise awareness about this lifestyle.”
When the shops were running, the women were able to build the community with other like-minded environmental activists and they planned to do community engagement activities like park cleanups. There are also plans to start some DIY classes on how to make natural products like the face cream they sell.
Utility’s concept is so simple that it can be replicated (复制) almost anywhere. Zero waste markets are the way to go to transition (过渡) into the economy that is needed to stop plastic waste, reduce our carbon footprint and have a sustainable future.
1. Why did Rottman and Appenbrink found the shop?| A．To raise money for a personal journey. | B．To satisfy people’s essential needs. |
| C．To offer more job chances for people. | D．To promote the use of reusable containers. |
| A．By going to the stores by themselves. | B．By taking a container to put goods. |
| C．By ordering goods through Internet. | D．By calling the women in local stores. |
| A．Making natural items. | B．Improving lifestyle. |
| C．Building the community. | D．Trying zero waste. |
| A．It’s easy to copy what Uility did. |
| B．Portland almost goes zero waste. |
| C．The economy of waste markets should change. |
| D．It’s a hard job to stop plastic waste. |
3 . In the world of digital health, Silicon Valley-based Mindstrong stands out. It has a remarkable team and tens of millions of funding. It also has a fascinating idea-its app, based on mental functioning research, can help detect troubling mental health patterns by collecting data on person’s smartphone usage-how quickly they type, for instance.
The company’s app collects information about how people are typing and runs it through a machine learning algorithm (计算程序) to determine which data can predict their emotional state. The idea is to use that data to establish a “normal” pattern-so it can be compared with someone’s typing habits on any given day. If the habits change, slower or more anxious than normal, the app can warn a health care provider.
The promise of this technology has made Mindstrong incredibly popular since it was launched last year; already more than a dozen counties in California have agreed to apply the company’s app to patients. Does the app live up to its promise? There’s no way to tell. Almost no one outside the company has any idea whether it works, leading some experts to wonder if the technology is ready for the real world. “I wouldn’t waste all that time and money in the wild until they get sure that some of those things are as specific as they hope they are,” said Rosalind Picard, a researcher at MIT Media Lab, who is familiar with Mindstrongs work.
“It has passed the gold-standard clinical tests for depression and anxiety,” said Dr. Paul Dagum, the company’s founder. “We’re confident, and we’re already seeing some really exciting results.” Mindstrong officials said that among their most encouraging results is that its app can even predict how a person will feel next week, kind of like a weather app for your mood. “For a clinician(临床医生) or someone looking after a patient, they know that it could be very, very powerful,” Dagum said.
1. What can Mindstrong’s app do?| A．Improve its users’ mental health. | B．Get its users to type more quickly. |
| C．Discover its users’ mental state. | D．Work out the causes of its users’ trouble. |
| A．The ways of collecting data. | B．The app’s working principle. |
| C．The analysis of typing habits. | D．The development of the app. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Positive. | C．Uncaring. | D．Defensive. |
| A．The app has a powerful effect on anxiety. |
| B．The app can also predict weather conditions. |
| C．Care providers could be supporters of the app. |
| D．Doctors benefit more from the app than their patients. |
4 . Celebrated on June16th, World Sea Turtle Day is a day dedicated to one of the world’s oldest and most fascinating creatures. Unfortunately, this is also a day to remind everyone of the sea turtle’s endangered status.
Sea turtles have been around since the time of dinosaurs. They typically live to between 30 and 50 years of age, spending most of their lives at sea. Part of the reptile(爬行动物) family, sea turtles can hold their breath for up to five hours. This comes in handy since some species can dive as deep as 1,000 meters below the water’s surface before needing to come up for air. Sea turtles also like to get around, often migrating very long distances. One species can migrate over 12,000 km from nesting beaches in Japan all the way to feeding grounds near Mexico.
Female sea turtles return to the beach they hatched on to nest. Some species lay up to 250 eggs in a single nest, and each egg takes around 60 days to incubate(孵化). However, it’s estimated that only one in a thousand baby turtles can survive to adulthood.
Although it is worth having a day to celebrate these magnificent animals, World Sea Turtle Day also has a more serious purpose: to raise awareness of their difficult situation. Sea turtles are threatened with extinction. Plastic trash is a big problem because the turtles often mistake bags and other plastic items for food like jellyfish. In fact, half of all sea turtles have consumed plastic at some time in their lives.
Rising global temperature is another threat facing turtles. Turtle eggs that lie on warm sand are more likely to result in female turtles, which affects the animal’s diversity. Also, trash-covered beaches can make it hard for baby turtles to reach the sea.
However you want to celebrate World Sea Turtle Day, take some time to spread the word about what we can do to protect these ancient animals. Reducing the amount of plastic we use is just one small way we can help make sure sea turtles stick around for another 100 million years.
1. Which of the following best explains “comes in handy” underlined in Paragraph 2?| A．is useful | B．is interesting | C．is close | D．is difficult |
| A．Turtles are a species which hates going around. |
| B．Turtles’ rate of survival is low though they are productive. |
| C．Turtles came into being long after the extinction of dinosaurs. |
| D．Turtles, belonging to reptile family, spend most of their lives on land. |
| A．Turtle eggs lying on warm sand tend to result in female turtles. |
| B．Sea turtles often mistake plastic bags and other plastic items for food. |
| C．Sea turtles are captured by fishermen for food or for other purposes. |
| D．Baby turtles will have difficulty in reaching the sea when they are on trash-covered beaches. |
| A．The factors of causing sea turtles to die out. |
| B．Raising the awareness of protecting sea turtles. |
| C．A brief introduction of sea turtles’ living habits. |
| D．How sea turtles lay eggs. |
5 . The first astronauts
Since the earliest times, people have looked up at the stars, the moon and the planets. Today people use modern machines
When did humans first go into space? The story began not so very long ago,
Scientists wanted to make travelling to space as
Albert Ⅱ was the first monkey to go into space in 1949. Sadly he died
Scientists wanted to know the answer to the important question: could
| A．look | B．to look | C．looking | D．looked |
| A．thousand | B．thousands | C．thousand of | D．thousands of |
| A．explore | B．to explore | C．explored | D．exploring |
| A．as | B．or | C．but | D．so |
| A．safe | B．safer | C．safest | D．the safest |
| A．they | B．them | C．their | D．theirs |
| A．whom | B．what | C．that | D．whose |
| A．die | B．died | C．have died | D．will die |
| A．shouldn’t | B．may not | C．don’t have to | D．needn’t |
| A．if | B．because | C．after | D．since |
| A．Luck | B．Lucky | C．Unlucky | D．Luckily |
| A．at | B．on | C．in | D．for |
| A．a | B．an | C．the | D．/ |
| A．send | B．sent | C．is sent | D．was sent |
| A．another | B．other | C．others | D．the others |
6 . I’m Savannah and I remember beginning to grow up that winter night when my parents and I were returning from my aunt’s house, and my mother said that we might soon be leaving for America. We were on the bus then. I was crying, and some people on the bus were turning around to look at me. I remember that I could not bear the thought of never hearing again the radio program for school children to which I listened every morning.
In fact, I think I cried very little when I was saying goodbye to my friends and relatives. When we were leaving, I thought about all the places I was going to see — the strange and magical places I had known only from books and pictures. The country I was leaving and never to come back to was hardly in my head then.
The four years that followed taught me the importance of being positive but the idea did not come to me at once. For the first two years in New York I was really lost — having to study in three schools as a result of family moves. I did not quite know what I was or what I should be. Mother remarried and things became even more complex for me. Some time passed before my stepfather and I got used to each other. I was often sad, and saw no end to “the hard times.”
My responsibilities in the family increased a lot since I knew English better than everyone else at home. I wrote letters, filled out forms, translated at interviews with immigration (移民) officers, took my grandparents to the doctor and translated there, and even discussed telephone bills with company representatives.
From my experiences, I have learned one important rule: Almost all common troubles go away at last! Something good is certain to happen in the end when you do not give up, and just wait a little! I believe that my life will turn out all right, even though it will not be that easy.
1. What did Savannah miss most about home when leaving for America?| A．Her dear friends and relatives. | B．The radio programme for pupils. |
| C．The country she was leaving. | D．The places she was familiar with. |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Indifferent. | C．Pessimistic. | D．Desperate. |
| A．For her family moved more frequently. | B．For her mother ended up in divorce. |
| C．For her English was better than others. | D．For she disagreed with her stepfather. |
| A．Her future will be loaded with more troubles. | B．It will be difficult to learn to become mature. |
| C．There will be more good days than expected. | D．Good things will happen if she keeps trying. |
7 . According to a new study by Tampere University in Finland, making eye contact with a robot may have the same effect on people as eye contact with another person. The result predicts that interaction between humans and humanoid robots will be surprisingly smooth.
With the rapid progress in robotics, it is expected that people will increasingly interact with so-called social robots in the future. Despite the artificiality of robots, people seem to react to them socially. For instance, people may sense different qualities, such as knowledge ability, sociability and likability in robots based on how they look or behave.
Previous surveys have been able to throw light on people’s sensory ability of social robots and their characteristics, but the very central question has remained unanswered. Does interacting with a robot cause similar reactions to people as interacting with another human?
Researchers at Tampere University investigated the matter by studying the physiological (生理的) reactions that eye contact with a social robot produces. In the new study, the research participants sat face to face with another person or a humanoid robot. The person and the robot looked either directly at the participants and made eye contact or avoided their gaze. At the same time, the participants’ skin conductance (电导率), which reflected the activity of the autonomous nervous systems, the electrical activity of the cheek muscle reflecting positive affective reactions, and the heart rate reduction were measured.
The result showed that all the above-mentioned physiological reactions were stronger in the case of eye contact when compared to averted gaze (转移目光). This result is shared with both another person and a humanoid. Eye contact with the robot and another human focused the participants’ attention and brought about a positive emotional response.
“Our result shows that the non-linguistic (非语言的), interaction-regulating signals of social robots can affect humans in the same way as similar signals presented by other people. Such evidence allows us to assume that as robot technology develops, there may be no barrier to interaction between social robots and humans,” says doctoral researcher Helena.
1. What does the new study focus on?| A．When robots can respond like humans. |
| B．How humans make eye contact socially. |
| C．The reasons for humans having qualities of social robots. |
| D．Humans’ response when interacting with robots and humans. |
| A．Averted gaze makes no difference to robots. |
| B．Social robots can’t affect humans’ response. |
| C．Robots feel stronger than humans when interacting. |
| D．Eye contact with robots contributes to a positive response. |
| A．They can interact with humans smoothly. |
| B．They will have a side effect on interaction. |
| C．They can have regulating interaction as humans. |
| D．They will send out accurate human linguistic signals. |
| A．By assuming relative effects. | B．By presenting past discoveries. |
| C．By referring to a questionnaire survey. | D．By indicating the result of research. |
A schoolgirl has created a solar-powered backpack that filters (过滤) out air pollution after being inspired by her asthmatic (患哮喘病的) mother.
Eleanor Woods, 12, from a town in northern England, entered the “Backpack to the Future” competition after her mother put the application form in her room. She went on to win the award for her innovative bag.
The “Backpack to the Future” competition was launched to change perceptions, encourage more diversity within engineering and to show children how they could combine an interest in fashion with a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering or maths).
Powered by green energy from solar power and a dynamo — a machine that changes mechanical energy into electrical energy — the backpack filters polluted air before fanning out cleaner air nearby.
“I have an air filter at home because my mum has mild asthma. My Breathe Better Backpack is all about keeping my friends, family and classmates safe using an air filter. It looks cool and will help get kids outside and fight off colds,” said Eleanor. “The first thing that came to mind is that blue is one of my favorite colors and blue feels clean and the bubbles on the outside have a clean theme for breathing.”
The pandemic encouraged Eleanor’s awareness of how pollution affects a person’s health and the spread of diseases. Spending a lot of time with her asthmatic mum over several lockdowns gave the 12-year-old food for thought. The schoolgirl added, “My generation is really aware of pollution, and we have lessons on it at school along with diseases spreading, and this is another reason I designed this, because it is getting much worse.” The young designer said she is becoming increasingly aware of the pollution that surrounds her, as she lives on a main road. Eleanor said, “I walk to school, next to the road, and can taste the petrol when buses come through.”
Speaking after winning the competition, Eleanor said the impact of her backpack will he far- reaching. “If just a few people start using it, it could be really good for the planet,” she said.
1. According to the passage, the “Backpack to the Future” competition aims to ________.| A．introduce the diversity within engineering |
| B．develop people’s interest in fashion design |
| C．encourage application of STEM to fashion |
| D．raise the public awareness of air pollution |
| A．cure her mother’s mild asthma by transforming energy |
| B．help those who need air filters by reducing air pollution |
| C．attract kids1 attention by its colors and bubbles outside |
| D．prevent diseases spreading by fanning out cleaner air |
| A．The outside design of it shows the theme of the competition. |
| B．Eleanor’s inspiration to invent it comes from bubbles. |
| C．It is equipped with an energy transfer to produce fresh air. |
| D．Its impact on the competition will be far-reaching. |
| A．Use of Backpack Brings Benefits to Environment |
| B．Young Designers are Becoming Aware of Pollution |
| C．Mother assists Schoolgirl in Winning Competition |
| D．Schoolgirl Creates Bag that Filters out Air Pollution |
9 . In 2013, I realised that I needed a break from the office work, so I set out travelling. But I had no idea how much the decision would change me for the rest of my life!
Before travelling, I was always worried about what other people think of me. How I looked and dressed was really important to me. I was always worried about putting on weight, getting darker, wondering if I was good-looking enough to socialise and be one of the people I used to hang out with. It doesn’t matter now. I’m more confident with my colour, my weight, and how I dress.
I used to compete a lot even when I was still a kid. I always wanted to impress people with how smart I was, how I could handle any task… But now, why should I feel like I need to compete? I only need to impress myself. My life is already complete; I just have to make sure that whatever I do will be positive (积极的) and make me a better person.
I was a 24-year-old Filipina with a successful career (事业) and had all of the things I could buy. But when I started travelling, I was no one. I had to learn a lot of things when travelling and I loved it!
I thought the only skills I needed to improve were Microsoft Office and networking. Well, I can now proudly say that I know how to fix beds in a hotel style, how to cook breakfast for a lot of guests, and how to work in a restaurant!
Besides the skills I’ve learned volunteering, I have completed several certifications (资格证) to start making money to support my new lifestyle. I am now a yoga teacher, an Ayurveda massage therapist (按摩师) and an English teacher. Now, with the new skills and certifications, I can work wherever I want!
1. Why did the author start travelling?| A．To escape from her then job. | B．To make herself a better person. |
| C．To look for an interesting lifestyle. | D．To experience different kinds of jobs. |
| A．It improved her social skills. | B．It made her more impressive to people. |
| C．It changed the way she saw herself. | D．It helped her realise the true meaning of life. |
| A．By time. | B．By space. | C．By comparisons. | D．By examples. |
10 . Some animals live in families. Some live in big groups. And others live mostly by themselves. Animals have to find the right
A giant panda
Lions are hunters.
Tigers are stealthy hunters who sneak up on prey such as deer or wild pigs — then pounce! But hunting is
Herds of musk oxen crowd together for
What brings ladybugs (瓢虫) together? It’s time to hibernate for the winter by bunching together, and then the ladybugs keep each other warm.
1.| A．road | B．place | C．way | D．season |
| A．notice | B．hold | C．sight | D．care |
| A．mainly | B．originally | C．finally | D．hardly |
| A．searching | B．following | C．raising | D．fighting |
| A．Therefore | B．However | C．Otherwise | D．Besides |
| A．catching | B．bringing | C．taking | D．cheating |
| A．alone | B．lonely | C．together | D．separately |
| A．pairs | B．groups | C．numbers | D．quantities |
| A．live | B．move | C．find | D．build |
| A．hard | B．soft | C．cold | D．green |
| A．stays | B．leaves | C．reaches | D．hides |
| A．easy | B．hard | C．impossible | D．necessary |
| A．together | B．in groups | C．alone | D．nearby |
| A．food | B．fun | C．sale | D．protection |
| A．circle | B．square | C．line | D．wall |
