1 . 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 |
2 . Deep in the British Library lie the priceless treasures for pop music lovers. Housed across the main building in St Pancras and the Library’s Boston Spa site are more than 350,000 CDs and 250,000LPs (密文唱片) ,as well as around a quarter of a million 78 RPM discs and countless cassette tapes.
Andy Linehan, the Library’s Curator (馆长) of Popular Music Collections, feels he and his team are not only preserving pop, but they’re also honoring history.“One of the British’s Library’s functions is to be the cultural memory of the nation. We do that with books, journals and newspapers and it’s absolutely right that we should also do it with music,“ he said.
The treasures in the British Library rely on donations from record labels, artists and members of the public. As Andy noted,“If you publish a book, newspaper or magazine in the UK, you’re legally obliged to send a copy to the British Library, but that law does not apply to sound recordings.”
Among the treasures are an early voice recording of Florence Nightingale and a cassette tape that was sold at gigs (现场演唱会) in the early1980s by a sixth-form band called On A Friday. There are also old blues, rare LPs from the 1950s and promotional copies of Beatles singles that only had a couple of hundred pressings.
When it comes to preservation, the team is tirelessly transferring music from media that’s vulnerable and digitising (数字化) it for generations to come.“If anyone can save anything from an old tape which is not in very good condition, it’s our engineers. Because they have equipment and know how to play back everything,“ Andy explained.
Private companies and specialists record labels are also trying their best to ensure music is safeguarded for generations to come. Iron Mountain Entertainment Service offers digital transfer and preservation services for music as well as other media. Cherry Red Records Chairman, Iain McNay, said,“It’s about looking after all that material and letting it see the light of day. We’re music fans who are also protectors.”
1. What can we learn about the treasures from paragraph 1?| A．The number is incredibly large. |
| B．They are all donations from people. |
| C．They represent different times. |
| D．They are not open to the public yet. |
| A．It is technically demanding. |
| B．It is significant in the long term. |
| C．It is commercially beneficial. |
| D．It can boost music composition. |
| A．To emphasize the popularity of the band. |
| B．To reflect the varieties of the collections. |
| C．To indicate the great value of the treasures. |
| D．To convey the urgency of music protection. |
| A．It can arouse people’s interest in pop music. |
| B．It can encourage more people to contribute. |
| C．It will develop the music industry in Britain. |
| D．It will be the cultural memory of generations. |
3 . I was never very neat. Later in life I learned to owe this bouts(发作) of
It came to a head one fateful October evening. Kim came into the room and had some kind of fit because one of my shoes had
When the phone rang she picked it up and I could tell right away it wasn’t good news. I knew Kim had a boyfriend back home and I could tell that he was breaking up with her. Though I didn’t
Therefore,sensing her faint sobbing,I knew I need to make a change.
I
That day
| A．distribution | B．disorganization | C．property | D．prosperity |
| A．appreciate | B．assemble | C．accomplish | D．accelerate |
| A．reserved | B．highlighted | C．labeled | D．dumped |
| A．took over | B．tore down | C．fed up with | D．touched off |
| A．invariably | B．temporarily | C．somewhat | D．somehow |
| A．annoyed | B．attracted | C．frightened | D．refreshed |
| A．survived | B．shattered | C．bounced | D．expanded |
| A．enthusiastic | B．desperate | C．sensible | D．ridiculous |
| A．point | B．mean | C．get | D．set |
| A．sympathy | B．discipline | C．regulation | D．substitute |
| A．corresponded | B．progressed | C．wrestled | D．exploded |
| A．exposed | B．witnessed | C．fueled | D．spotted |
| A．apology | B．criterion | C．conflict | D．parade |
| A．calculator | B．monitor | C．mess-maker | D．ice-breaker |
| A．dominate | B．integrate | C．facilitate | D．withdraw |
4 . Forty-five minutes was considered an appropriate amount of time to supply 12-year-old me — and 20 other teenagers — with enough information about eating disorders to last us through high school. A documentary shown on a dusty VHS tape that had obviously been in use since the early 2000s, about two girls suffering from anorexia and bulimia, had been my only source for eating disorder awareness for five years. No reflection time followed, no discussion was started, and no questions were asked.
Flash forward five years I still know nothing. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I learned, via TikTok, that my daily diet of 1,000 calories is barely enough for a two-year-old, let alone a developing teenager. Despite being educated in America’s sixth best county in education, I only had a single image of what an eating disorder looked like: a skin-and-bones teenage girl with sunken eyes. Schools are clearly ill-equipped to educate students on eating disorders and how they can prevent them.
Teenagers have failed to learn about the most common eating disorder in the country because it isn’t taught in many school curriculum: binge eating disorder (暴食症). It is more common than anorexia, affecting 2.8 million Americans, including 1.2 percent of all adolescents. Additionally, it’s reported that males make up 40 percent of those with binge eating disorder, which contradicts the existing opinion that only women are affected by eating disorders.
Instead of learning about eating disorders, my junior health class taught me how to count my calories. According to registered dietitian Christy Harrison, “disordered eating patterns began with calorie counting.” Despite this, health classes across the country continue to require students to track their daily calorie intake.
We need a developed and well-informed eating disorder curriculum. After all, the damage of a seemingly harmless 45-minute video may last someone a lifetime.
1. Why is TikTok mentioned in paragraph 2?| A．To prove the author’s limited calorie intake. |
| B．To imply the author’s rich supply of information. |
| C．To stress the lack of education on eating disorders. |
| D．To highlight the influence of social media on kids. |
| A．Anorexia. | B．Bulimia. | C．Dieting. | D．Binge eating disorder. |
| A．Negative. | B．Positive. | C．Neutral. | D．Ambiguous. |
| A．A science report. | B．A documentary review. |
| C．An argumentative essay. | D．An autobiography excerpt. |
5 . Soft robots that have no batteries, motors or electronics and that are powered and controlled from a distance by light or magnets（磁铁）are a popular field of research. But there are barriers to overcome before they can be used in practical applications, including the need for a cheap manufacturing process.
Zhang Li at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues discovered that a magnet-controlled robot can be created easily and at low cost.
In experiments, his team created sticky tape robots of various shapes around a centimetre across that change their geometry depending on the presence and direction of a magnetic field. Some of the robots were able to move through water or along flat surfaces and one device was able to crawl（爬）across the surface of pie stomach tissue in the lab and place a small therapeutic patch（补丁）onto a gastric ulcer（胃溃疡）before leaving the patch and moving away.
Zhang says that these devices could be used in the future to deliver drugs or carry out simple medical procedures in the stomach or intestines. “It can be used in this kind of folded, small scale, and when it reaches a large empty space it can open up,” he says. “It’s very much like a satellite, where after its launch into outer space the solar panels will open up. So when you swallow this device, it should have a very small size.”
There are hurdles to overcome prior to clinical trials, however. “The first thing is safety, because currently we’re using a very strong magnet called a neodymium-iron-boron magnet. It’s actually not that safe,” says Zhang. “It’s kind of toxic to the cells.”
1. What is paragraph 3 mainly about?| A．How the robots function. | B．What changes the robots’ geometry. |
| C．Whether the robots are marketable. | D．What inspired the creation of the robots. |
| A．By citing clinical trials. | B．By analyzing cause and effect. |
| C．By quoting wise sayings. | D．By comparing it to something similar. |
| A．Harmless. | B．Complicated. | C．Poisonous. | D．Flexible. |
| A．Soft Robots Make Your Life Convenient. |
| B．Soft Robots Can Crawl Inside Your Organs. |
| C．Soft Robots Are Ready for Cheap Production. |
| D．Soft Robots Can Perform Complex Operations. |
6 . If you’ re reaching for the last piece of pizza at a party, and meanwhile see another hand going for it, your next move probably depends on how you feel and whom the hand belongs to. Your little sister — you might just grab the pizza. Your boss — you probably will give up.
Now researchers have made progress in understanding how mammals’ brain encodes social rank and uses this information to shape behaviors — such as whether to fight for the last pizza slice. They discovered that an area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was responsible for representing social rank in mammals; changes to a mouse’s mPFC affected its dominance behavior. But it was unknown how the mPFC represented this information and which neurons(神经元) were involved in changing dominance behaviour.
In the new study, Professor Kay Tye let groups of four mice share a cage. Some mice became more dominant and others more subordinate. As soon as the mice were paired up, he discovered, the activity of their mPFC neurons could predict — with 90 percent certainty — the rank of their opponent.
“We expected animals might only signal rank when they are in a competition,” says co-researcher Nancy. “But it turns out animals walk around with this representation of social rank all the time.”
When the researchers next asked whether the activity of the mPFC neurons was associated with behaviour, they found something surprising. The brain activity patterns were linked with slight changes in behaviour, such as how fast a mouse moved, and they also could predict — a full 30 seconds before the competition started — which mouse would win the food reward.
The winner was not always the more dominant, but the one engaged in a winning mindset. Just as you might sometimes be in a more competitive mood and be more likely to snatch that pizza slice before your boss, a subordinate mouse might be in a more winning mindset than a more dominant mouse and end up winning.
The areas of the mPFC associated with social rank and winning mindset are next to one another and highly connected. Signals on social rank impact the state of the brain involved in winning mindset. In other words, a subordinate mouse’s confidence and winning mindset may partially decrease when faced with a dominant one.
“This is further evidence to suggest that we are in different brain states when we are with others compared to when we’re alone,” says Tye.
1. What is the purpose of the first paragraph?| A．To provide background information. | B．To state the importance of social rank. |
| C．To give readers an example of social rank. | D．To introduce the topic of the reading passage. |
| A．The mPFC neurons. | B．The researchers. |
| C．The brain activity patterns. | D．The changes in behaviour. |
| A．Brain activities can influence social rank. |
| B．Dominant opponents boost winning mindset. |
| C．Social rank and winning mindset affect behaviour. |
| D．Animals only exhibit their rank in competition. |
| A．Winning mindset establishes dominance. |
| B．Social rank guides competitive behaviour. |
| C．A subordinate mouse can never been a winner. |
| D．Awareness of different people around you make your brain use different neurons. |
7 . All 50 states received final approval Tuesday to begin construction on a first nationwide network of EV charging stations (电车充电站) that places one roughly every 50 miles (80 kilometers) along interstate highways, part of the Biden administration’s plan to encourage widespread use of zero-emission cars.
The Transportation Department said it had OK’d EV charger plans from a last set of 17 states, causing the release of $1. 5 billion in federal funds to all jurisdictions (权限) nationwide — or $5 billion over five years — to build or upgrade chargers along 75, 000 miles (120, 000 kilometers) of highway from coast to coast, with a goal of 500, 000 EV chargers nationwide. Plans for the other 33 states and the District of Columbia were approved earlier this month.
By year’s end, drivers could start seeing expansions and upgrades to existing highway EV stations in states such as California, Colorado, Florida and Pennsylvania that now have at least four fast-charger ports, enabling EVs to fully recharge in about an hour.
“America led the original car revolution in the last century, and . . . we’re prepared to lead in the 21st century with electric vehicles,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He said the plans will “help ensure that Americans in every part of the country can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles.”
The approval is a major step toward building widespread acceptance and use of electric vehicles among consumers, who most often express unwillingness over EVs’ shorter range and limited use of public chargers. President Joe Biden has set a goal that 50% of new U. S. car sales be electric by 2030, and his administration touts (推销) new tax credits next year of up to $7, 500 as making electric vehicles accessible for everyday Americans. Still, the five-year plans suggest a potentially long and rough road ahead for a highway EV network, with states saying risks such as a lack of electricity grid capacity (电网容量), supply chain shortages and equal rights concerns.
1. What’s the real purpose of the EV network plan?| A．To unlock the advantages of EVs. |
| B．To enable the spread of EV chargers. |
| C．To make the government funds available to all states. |
| D．To encourage the spread of environment-friendly EVs. |
| A．the number of chargers to be built | B．the miles of EV chargers to cover |
| C．the approval of the charger plans | D．the introduction of the whole plans |
| A．examples of successful building | B．the bright future of EV market |
| C．possible problems in some states | D．the impressive progress of the plan. |
| A．All 50 states can use EV chargers now |
| B．States get final OK to highway EV chargers |
| C．Advantages and disadvantages of EVs. |
| D．A 5-year plan to promote EVs in the USA. |
8 . Have you heard of the save soil movement? It was
The efforts of Sadhguru have
The movement aims to
The main motive of the campaign was to bring together people from all around the world to protect the soil’s health. Sadhguru has become
Sadhguru is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy. He has been a(n)
| A．launched | B．sponsored | C．experienced | D．commanded |
| A．resulted in | B．originated from | C．paid back | D．reacted to |
| A．airports | B．companies | C．conferences | D．locations |
| A．abilities | B．struggles | C．characters | D．requests |
| A．transform | B．address | C．drag | D．confirm |
| A．messages | B．responses | C．proposals | D．positions |
| A．exhausted | B．ambitious | C．successful | D．confident |
| A．improvement | B．awareness | C．imagination | D．standard |
| A．locally | B．individually | C．nationally | D．globally |
| A．urging | B．requiring | C．cheering | D．permitting |
| A．stable | B．ongoing | C．favorable | D．temporary |
| A．However | B．Besides | C．Therefore | D．Meanwhile |
| A．ensure | B．bring | C．affect | D．define |
| A．strong | B．pleasant | C．determined | D．influential |
| A．circumstance | B．lifestyle | C．atmosphere | D．soil |
9 . I had gone from being a daughter in my parents’ home to marrying and being a wife. Within a year of marrying, I had a child and a new role— mother. It seemed that I was
In between having four more children,
And then I wrote a short story aimed at children. I typed it and sent it out. To my great surprise, it was accepted. I wrote more stories. Many of them were
“I didn’t know you
| A．sometimes | B．seldom | C．always | D．never |
| A．apparently | B．importantly | C．interestingly | D．strangely |
| A．urging | B．comforting | C．instructing | D．supporting |
| A．looked for | B．looked after | C．looked up to | D．looked down upon |
| A．wait | B．rank | C．exist | D．stand |
| A．replaced | B．received | C．rejected | D．resisted |
| A．status | B．chance | C．passion | D．voice |
| A．casual | B．tight | C．flexible | D．rough |
| A．honest | B．outgoing | C．independent | D．ambitious |
| A．difference | B．fortune | C．conclusion | D．promise |
| A．find | B．free | C．appreciate | D．obtain |
| A．benefited from | B．got rid of | C．gave in to | D．suffered from |
| A．argument | B．dialogue | C．friendship | D．bargain |
| A．deepened | B．adjusted | C．formed | D．worsened |
| A．justice | B．achievement | C．belonging | D．security |
10 . Ever fought with a problem? Picked up a new skill? Encountered a difficult concept? The language of learning is full of references to parts of the body outside the brain. Perhaps that’s because these phrases suggest something deeper. Researchers are detecting that learning is easier, quicker and more long-lasting if it involves the body.
“In the past, people have argued that as we grow, we become more able to think abstractly (抽象地),” says Andrew Manches, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Conventional (传统的) thinking might suggest that teachers should help prevent children from using body gestures to prepare them for the adult world. But in truth, the physical world never really leaves our thinking. For example, when we process verbs such as lick, kick and pick, medical scanners show that the parts of our brain that control the muscles in our face, legs and hands, respectively, light up with activity.
Science is beginning to back up the idea that actions really might speak louder than words in the classroom. Spencer Kelly, a psychologist at Colgate University in New York, has found that people spend three times as much time gesturing when they think the message they get across is remarkably important, suggesting that even if only at the subconscious (潜意识的) level, we appreciate the communicative value of our body language. Kelly has also found evidence that a teacher is more appealing to students when he or she uses arm and hand movements to stress points.
Also, some studies indicate that young children obtain more if their teacher uses gestures when explaining a concept. Meanwhile, Sunsan Wagner Cook, a psychologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has found that children pick up new concepts more effectively, if they are taught to mirror and repeat gestures their teacher uses.
1. How did people in the past understand learning?| A．The older a student grows, the less likely he will think abstractly. |
| B．Teachers are advised to encourage students to use body gestures. |
| C．Body gestures should be removed to promote adult-like thinking. |
| D．The physical world never really leaves our thinking. |
| A．By presenting different researches. |
| B．By explaining some rules. |
| C．By making some predictions. |
| D．By analyzing the theory. |
| A．People use gestures every time they convey the messages. |
| B．Body movements can increase a teacher’s popularity. |
| C．Young students like to mirror their teacher’s gestures. |
| D．Body language is more powerful than spoken language. |
| A．The Language of Learning: A Vital Approach |
| B．Body Gestures: A Sharp Tool for Fast Learning |
| C．Body Language: A Universal Language Signal |
| D．Thinking Abstractly: A Symbol of Adult World |
