1 . For those who can stomach it, working out before breakfast may be more beneficial for health than eating first, according to a study of meal timing and physical activity.
Athletes and scientists have long known that meal timing affects performance. However, far less has been known about how meal timing and exercise might affect general health.
To find out, British scientists conducted a study. They first found 10 overweight and inactive but otherwise healthy young men, whose lifestyles are, for better and worse, representative of those of most of us. They tested the men’s fitness and resting metabolic (新陈代谢的) rates and took samples (样品) of their blood and fat tissue.
Then, on two separate morning visits to the scientists’ lab, each man walked for an hour at an average speed that, in theory, should allow his body to rely mainly on fat for fuel. Before one of these workouts, the men skipped breakfast, meaning that they exercised on a completely empty stomach after a long overnight fast (禁食). On the other occasion, they ate a rich morning meal about two hours before they started walking.
Just before and an hour after each workout, the scientists took additional samples of the men’s blood and fat tissue.
Then they compared the samples. There were considerable differences. Most obviously, the men displayed lower blood sugar levels at the start of their workouts when they had skipped breakfast than when they had eaten. As a result, they burned more fat during walks on an empty stomach than when they had eaten first. On the other hand, they burned slightly more calories (卡路里), on average, during the workout after breakfast than after fasting.
But it was the effects deep within the fat cells that may have been the most significant, the researchers found. Multiple genes behaved differently, depending on whether someone had eaten or not before walking. Many of these genes produce proteins (蛋白质) that can improve blood sugar regulation and insulin (胰岛素) levels throughout the body and so are associated with improved metabolic health. These genes were much more active when the men had fasted before exercise than when they had breakfasted.
The implication of these results is that to gain the greatest health benefits from exercise, it may be wise to skip eating first.
1. The underlined expression “stomach it” in Paragraph 1 most probably means “______”.| A．digest the meal easily | B．manage without breakfast |
| C．decide wisely what to eat | D．eat whatever is offered |
| A．Their lifestyles were typical of ordinary people. |
| B．Their lack of exercise led to overweight. |
| C．They could walk at an average speed. |
| D．They had slow metabolic rates. |
| A．They successfully lost weight. | B．They consumed a bit more calories. |
| C．They burned more fat on average. | D．They displayed higher insulin levels. |
| A．A workout after breakfast improves gene performances. |
| B．Too much workout often slows metabolic rates. |
| C．Lifestyle is not as important as morning exercise. |
| D．Physical exercise before breakfast is better for health. |
2 . The problem of robocalls has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don’t know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams(欺诈). We are finally waking up to the severity of the problem by supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late. By the time these “solutions”(解决方案) become widely available, scammers will have moved onto cleverer means. In the near future, it’s not just going to be the number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you’re hearing is actually real.
That’s because there are a number of powerful voice manipulation(处理) and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year’s I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a convincing human-sounding voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book a reservation without detection.
These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason that robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than precision. A decade of data breaches(数据侵入) of personal information has led to a situation where scammers can easily learn your mother’s name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they’re able to carry out individually targeted campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller’s, tricking you into “confirming” your address, mother’s name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be the worst hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice manipulation technologies may weaken that gradually.
We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone carriers and consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications—using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, which can be tied to your identity.
Credibility is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going to get harder from here on out.
1. How does the author feel about the solutions to problem of robocalls?| A．Panicked. | B．Confused. | C．Embarrassed. | D．Disappointed. |
| A．aim at victims precisely | B．damage databases easily |
| C．start campaigns rapidly | D．spread information widely |
| A．Honesty is the best policy. |
| B．Technologies can be double-edged. |
| C．There are more solutions than problems. |
| D．Credibility holds the key to development. |
| A．Where the Problem of Robocalls Is Rooted |
| B．Who Is to Blame for the Problem of Robocalls |
| C．Why Robocalls Are About to Get More Dangerous |
| D．How Robocalls Are Affecting the World of Technology |
3 . It’s unlikely that we’ll see a dodo, a flightless bird, walking this earth anytime again, according to Beth Shapiro, a evolutionary molecular biologist.
“When most people think about de-extinction, they’re imagining cloning,” Shapiro said. Cloning, the approach that created Dolly, the sheep in 1996 and Elizabeth Ann, the black-footed ferret in 2020, creates an identical genetic copy of an individual by putting DNA from a living adult cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus (细胞核) has been removed. Adult cells contain all the DNA needed to develop into a living animal. Egg cells then use that DNA as a blueprint to turn themselves into many kinds of cells——skin, organs, blood and bones——the animal needs.
“But no living cells from dodos exist. Instead,” Shapiro said, “you’d have to start with a closely related animal’s genome (基因组) and then change it into one similar to dodos.” For example， mammoths (猛犸) are also extinct，but they were very closely related to modern Asian elephants, so researchers are attempting to bring mammoths back from extinction by creating a hybrid mammoth with some mammoth genes replacing part of the elephant genome in an elephant egg cell. However, there are likely millions of genetic differences between the genome of an Asian elephant and that of a mammoth according to Shapiro.
As for the dodo, its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon. Mammoths and Asian elephants are pretty closely related, whereas it had been more than 20 million years since the dodo and the Nicobar pigeon had any common ancestors. Genetic differences between the two bird species are therefore much greater, making it a formidable task to create a successful hybrid in the lab, Shapiro said.
Even if scientists manage to bring dodos back, the island where they once lived is a very different place nowadays, which make it impossible to reintroduce dodos without major intervention.
1. What is Paragraph 2 mainly about?| A．The special role of DNA. |
| B．The process of cloning. |
| C．The development of cloning. |
| D．The complexity of cloning. |
| A．Dodos are harder to bring back to life. |
| B．Their living cells are hard to preserve. |
| C．Cloning can be used to recreate extinct animals. |
| D．They share a similar genome with Asian elephants. |
| A．Urgent. |
| B．Possible. |
| C．Tough. |
| D．Different. |
| A．Favorable. |
| B．Intolerant. |
| C．Objective. |
| D．Negative. |
4 . One man’s trash is another man’s treasure is absolutely the case in Turkey where garbage collectors started collecting books that have been thrown away and ended up opening a library.
It started when garbage man Durson Ipek found a bag of abandoned books when he was working and then it snowballed from there. Ipek and other garbage men started gathering the books they found on the streets that were ready for landfills (垃圾填埋地) and as their collection started to grow, so did word of mouth. Soon, local residents started donating books directly. The library was initially available only to the garbage employees and their families to use but as the collection grew, so did public interest and the library was opened to the public in 2017.
“On the one hand, there were those who were leaving these books on the streets. On the other hand, others were looking for these books,” Ankaya mayor Alper Tasdelen told CNN. “We started to discuss the idea of creating a library from these books. When everyone supported it, this project happened.”
All the books that are found are sorted and checked for condition. If they pass, they go on the shelves. Today, the library has over 6,000 books that range from fiction to nonfiction and there’s a very popular children’s section that even has a collection of comic books. An entire section is devoted to scientific research and there are also books available in English and French. The collection has grown so large that the library loans books to schools and educational programs.
“Village school teachers from all over Turkey are requesting books,” Tasdelen told CNN. The government has to hire a full-time employee to manage the library.
This library is incredibly popular. It is frequently filled with the children of the city’s workers and students from nearby schools. There is a waiting room set up for readers and chess boards for the people who visit the library. You can even enjoy a cup of tea in the waiting room.
1. What does the underlined word “snowballed” in paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Declined quickly. | B．Grew slowly. | C．Developed rapidly. | D．Worsened steadily. |
| A．Its great popularity. | B．Its potential significance. |
| C．Its huge collection of books. | D．Its wide variety of readers. |
| A．To raise people’s awareness of recycling. | B．To classify and check the donated books. |
| C．To expand the social influence of the library. | D．To meet the huge demand from rural teachers. |
| A．It’s an excellent place to enjoy tea. | B．It’s crowded with readers every day. |
| C．It needs to improve its management. | D．It provides a very considerate service. |
I must admit, I haven’t always liked animals. In fact, I distrusted them greatly while growing up, and I still fear the ones I don’t know personally. What set my beliefs in stone was being attacked—not once but many times, including the summer after second grade when I was bitten by a rabbit. Then, when I was nine and riding my dirt bike down the road, a large dog charged me and tried to bite my ankle. After all those negative experiences, there was one thing I knew for sure: All creatures, great and small, were no friends of mine.
After college in California, I returned to live the single life in Las Vega. Then I met Lisa. In no time at all, we fell in love, married and moved into a new house. Despite my avoidance of animals, Lisa had a dog called Bailey. Bailey didn’t like me, but he tolerated my existence once he realized I wasn’t going anywhere.
Things changed as spring came. We welcomed a new member of our family: our son Evan. One evening Evan grabbed hold of the dog’s tail. The irritated dog paused and turned to look at his stuck tail but waited patiently until being released. Still the stories I’d heard of animals attacking babies worries me.
Then my worst fear occurred. I sat on the couch (沙发) reading after a long day while my wife worked at the dining-room table paying the bills. I saw Evan crawl across the family-room carpet as he made his way behind the couch. One minute, all was quiet and then Bailey entered the room and headed to where Evan had crawled. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard the dog start a fearful barking behind me.
注意：1.续写词数应为150左右;
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Throwing the book away, I rushed around the couch with great fear.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Having witnessed our dog killing a scorpion (蝎子) and saving my son, I was speechless.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________6 . The rhino census (犀牛普查) is out, bearing good news for the greater one-horned rhinos! In September, 2022, the International Rhino Foundation (IRF) documented in a report that there is a baby boom in this population, representing an increase of 167 percent.
According to the report, there are a total of 4,014 greater one-horned rhinos living in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. Although this is positive news, their IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) status still remains vulnerable.
In India alone, the home to 70 percent of the world’s greater one-horned rhinos, there was an increase of 274 rhinos since the last biannual census, according to the organization Rhino Review.
An important reason for this baby boom is the fact that Assam, India, has enlarged Kaziringo National Park, home to the world’s largest one-horned rhino population. The park went from 430 square kilometers to 1,040 square kilometers. This gives more breeding areas for the rhinos, and they are closed to visitors during breeding season.
India and Nepal are also protecting the rhinos by enforcing wildlife crime laws. To reduce rhino death by poaching (偷猎), the IRF donates vehicles and equipment, plus education including guard training and crime investigation.
The IRF data for other rhino species is not as promising, although the greater one-horned rhino numbers are encouraging for future conservation. According to the report, there is a decline in Sumatran rhinos, Africa’s white rhinos, while the Javan rhino population is stable and threatened by loss of habitat.
The State of the Rhino report offers hope for these other species. Given that the greater one-horned things were once close to extinction, with fewer than 100 living in the world, their recovery is incredible. This demonstrates that there are solutions when organizations and people work together. Let us hope that this successful rhino baby boom will affect other endangered wildlife species around the globe.
1. What contributes to the baby boon of one-horned rhinos in Assam, India?| A．Extending the protected areas for rhinos. |
| B．Raising fund to set up more reserves for rhinos. |
| C．Leaving the one-horned rhinos alone in the wild. |
| D．Keeping visitors away from the Kaziringo National Park. |
| A．By cooperating with other organizations. |
| B．By enhancing anti-poaching efforts. |
| C．By transferring the rhinos to other habitats. |
| D．By guarding the rhinos with new equipment. |
| A．Rhinos are no longer a vulnerable species. |
| B．Rhinos will affect other wildlife in the world. |
| C．Everyone can play a role in protecting nature. |
| D．It is possible to protect other endangered species. |
| A．To inform good news on the greater one-horned rhinos. |
| B．To show the measures taken to protect the one-horned rhinos. |
| C．To introduce an endangered species—the greater one-horned rhinos. |
| D．To indicate the decline of other species of rhino population. |
7 . My 5-year-old daughter Kai walked around a bus stop, picking up candy wrappers and plastic bottles and throwing them in the waste bin. We were a visiting family here, but she was cleaning the sidewalk, which didn’t shock me, nor was I
Our cleanup project began when we drove past an empty field one day and Kai
However, it seems we can never
Now Kai hopes to become a marine biologist to protect sharks one day. She still has many years to
The last time our family was at the beach, we still picked up plastic bottles. Most
| A．embarrassed | B．discouraged | C．concerned | D．frightened |
| A．apologized | B．confirmed | C．spotted | D．explained |
| A．loose | B．magic | C．processed | D．abandoned |
| A．trade | B．mistake | C．replace | D．change |
| A．pulled over | B．blew up | C．turned down | D．gave in |
| A．due to | B．ahead of | C．other than | D．instead of |
| A．official | B．serious | C．optional | D．regular |
| A．deliver | B．remove | C．track | D．produce |
| A．stress | B．comfort | C．anger | D．pride |
| A．mess | B．platform | C．court | D．house |
| A．scary | B．pleasant | C．historic | D．real |
| A．decide | B．struggle | C．survive | D．contribute |
| A．safe | B．giant | C．distant | D．sick |
| A．personally | B．memorably | C．technically | D．universally |
| A．promise | B．threat | C．reminder | D．favor |
8 . Have you ever spent half an hour searching the Internet which, as you find out afterwards, lasted three hours, or opened a book shortly after breakfast and a little while later noticed that the room was getting darker?
Most people can remember experiencing such a state. Your mind wasn't wandering; you were totally focused and concentrated on that activity, to such an extent that you were not even aware of yourself. Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flow states, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His celebrated book Flow: The Psychology of Happiness became an instant best-seller, making its way to the top self-help classics.
The state of flow happens under very specific conditions-when we encounter a challenge that is testing for our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is just about possible to meet this challenge. So both the challenge and the skills are at high levels, stretching us almost to the limit. If challenges exceed skills, one can become anxious. If skills exceed challenges, we usually become bored. Neither of these two cases result in flow.
What is also interesting in flow is the almost total absence of emotions during the actual process. One seems to be almost beyond experiencing emotions, most likely because the awareness of self is not present. Mihaly himself is also very much aware of the potential negative impact of the flow. One philosopher once describes his own experience of flow: “When I get totally involved in the conversation, I am not aware of myself, the world around or the passage of time. Sometimes, I may become addictive to that existence, unwilling to cope with other daily routines of life, like forgetting dinner, and saying goodbye to my children.”
1. What is the purpose of Paragraph 1?| A．To offer a general background of the topic. | B．To make an overall outline for the passage. |
| C．To introduce the topic of the passage. | D．To clarify the definition of the topic. |
| A．Adopting a dog. | B．Watching TV. |
| C．Playing the chess. | D．Arguing with others. |
| A．The state of flow is little conditional. | B．Genius at normal schools often gets bored. |
| C．Challenges at high levels push us to the limit. | D．Skills play the most important part in flow. |
| A．To show the drawbacks of the flow. | B．To stress the value of self-awareness. |
| C．To underline the absence of emotions. | D．To indicate the difficulty of enjoying the flow. |
9 . From sleep machines to Al-controlled house cleaning robots, a wide variety of advanced technologies and products are being exhibited at the 4th China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai. Here are some products you don’t want to miss.
Electric bicycle Brina 2
For many people,a daily commute (通勤) is often a source of headache. Emove Inc, an exhibitor from Argentina, has presented electric bicycle Brina 2 as a solution. Running on long-ange batteries, the e-bike has a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour. Almost all the components are designed within the carbon fiber frame. Its scientific design makes the ride more stable and comfortable than other conventional e-bikes.
AI robot — a right-hand assistant for life and production
AIrobot from AgileRobotsAG, a leading intelligent robotics company from Germany, helps make life and work easier. With the ability to synthesize (综合) and adjust motion tracks in real-time, the robot is a great assistant. For instance, it can aid humans in tasks like loading and unloading, polishing and quality inspection.
Power-PROXT — a reliable stretcher bed
Power-PROXT is an electric ambulance stretcher bed designed by Stryker Corporation from the U.S.Compared with traditional stretchers, Power-PROXT is driven by a high-speed motor that enables it to easily lift or lower a load weighing 318 kilograms within 2.4 seconds. More importantly, it can smoothly and safely lift and move, providing greater safety for patients.
Sleeping cabin — a night guard for sound sleep
A recent study found that more than two-thirds of surveyed university students in Brazil are experiencing poor sleep quality.The sleeping cabin made by The Dow Chemical Company from the U.S. can provide its users a better sleep. As a combination of great material and technology, the cabin can provide customers with a deeper and more refreshing sleeping experience.
1. Which product most probably interests a factory manager?| A．Brina2. | B．AI robot. | C．Power-PROXT. | D．Sleeping cabin. |
| A．Travel to work. | B．Quality control. | C．First aid. | D．Sleep improvement. |
| A．Cutting-edge. | B．Eco-friendly. | C．Cost-effective | D．Efficiency-enhancing. |
10 . Tom’s father is a lawyer. In his spare time, he likes to go out in the country and take some pictures of animals.
For a long time, Tom had wanted to go with his father on one of his
Tom and his father drove to the farm which
It was still dark when Tom heard the alarm clock the next morning. He wondered why it was running so early. He couldn’t remember
He ran downstairs. The others were already in the
They ate breakfast quickly. They didn’t talk
| A．trips | B．buses | C．shows | D．mountains |
| A．after | B．when | C．until | D．unless |
| A．led | B．stuck | C．got | D．belonged |
| A．cost | B．spent | C．slept | D．took |
| A．where | B．how | C．who | D．what |
| A．happily | B．sleepily | C．quietly | D．suddenly |
| A．imagined | B．pronounced | C．forgot | D．remembered |
| A．valley | B．town | C．farm | D．station |
| A．dressed | B．ordered | C．eaten | D．prepared |
| A．bathroom | B．kitchen | C．dining-room | D．sitting-room |
| A．seemed | B．felt | C．tasted | D．smelled |
| A．lonely | B．soundly | C．much | D．highly |
| A．wake | B．go | C．put | D．come |
| A．of | B．with | C．in | D．by |
| A．before | B．what | C．after | D．that |
