1 . Binge-watching (刷剧) is when a person watches more than one episode of a show in a row. With developments in the speed and connectivity of the Internet, increases in technology and the rise of on-demand entertainment companies, people can now have their favorite shows stream (流播) directly to their television at their convenience.
This behavior is nothing new. In fact, binge-watching has been officially listed in dictionaries since 2015. The entertainment companies recognize this behavior and many take steps to encourage it. Often, instead of releasing each episode on a week-by-week basis, an entire series will become available concurrently. Once the episode finishes, many platforms will display pop-ups with “you might like” suggestions, or will automatically play the next episode.
However, recent research suggests that out of the more than half of British adults who watch more than one episode of a show back-to-back (一集接一集地), almost a third have admitted missing sleep or becoming tired as a result; and 25% have neglected their household chores (家务活). Next we’ll be missing work!
Bingeing has other connections — binge eating, binge drinking and binge smoking. All of them are often associated with a lack of control and a possible route to addiction. Lindsey Fussell, consumer group director, said, “The days of waiting a week for the next episode are largely gone, with people finding it hard to resist (抗拒) watching multiple episodes around the house or on the move.” If people find binge-watching hard to resist, are we witnessing the birth of a new type of addiction?
The countless number of information and entertainment that television and online media can bring us is, many would say, a good thing. However, when the activity begins to bleed into other areas, causing us to stop functioning, then it becomes a problem. So, what’s the answer? Moderation! Neither a tiny amount, nor too much. After all, as the old proverb says, “A little of what you fancy does you good.”
1. How did the writer develop the first paragraph?| A．By giving a definition. | B．By telling a story. |
| C．By listing some examples. | D．By analyzing the cause and effect. |
| A．For convenience. | B．At the same time. |
| C．In detail. | D．Free of charge. |
| A．people can’t control their feelings | B．people can’t resist the temptation of Bingeing |
| C．people have no patience to do work | D．people are addicted to waiting for a new episode |
| A．To keep online media from stopping functioning. |
| B．To enjoy entertainment as much as possible. |
| C．To learn life lessons from the episodes. |
| D．To watch episodes in a moderate way. |
2 . Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.
Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.
To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.
In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.
Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”
1. What have some students done since ChatGPT was released?| A．They have built language models from ChatGPT. |
| B．They have copied AI-written text from ChatGPT |
| C．They have accessed their assignments through ChatGPT. |
| D．They have passed their writing exams through ChatGPT. |
| A．The more uniform the text is, the more likely it is to be AI-generated. |
| B．The less complex the text is, the more likely it is to be human-written. |
| C．GPTZero sometimes confuses human-written texts with AI-generated texts. |
| D．GPTZero is more familiar with human-written texts than with AI-generated texts. |
| A．User-friendly. | B．Time-efficient. |
| C．Perfectly legal. | D．Completely reliable. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Disapproving. | C．Objective. | D．Ambiguous. |
3 . If you look at the dynamic “Global Temperatures” map on NASA’s website, you can see the historic temperature change over time across the planet as the timeline goes from 1880 to the modern day. By 2019, the entire planet is in red, orange, and yellow colors, indicating temperatures much higher than the historical average in every country and human inhabitance.
If the timeline went to 2023, the map would look even worse. That’s because the summer of 2023 was the hottest ever, according to ocean monitors. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Next July could be worse. Unless we do something quickly, we face dealing with more and more dangerous and expensive natural disasters in the future.
Forest fires sent smoke from Canada across the North American continent, causing New York City to have the worst air quality in its recorded history. Heavy rainstorms fell on Vermont and the Northeastern United States in just a couple of days in the middle of July, which exceeded the amount that area would usually receive in two months and caused extreme damage to homes and businesses. Around the same time, flash flooding in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — north of Philadelphia — killed nearly a dozen people.
Erich Fischer, a researcher specializing in climate studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is concerned that natural disasters could get much worse in the future—and in ways we cannot predict. He called for a “strike for climate justice,” which actually took place on Sept. 15, 2023. “The strategy needs to be twofold (双重的) . We need to decrease carbon emissions as much as realistically possible. That is already happening with people using electric cars and other green technologies. At the same time, we also need to find ways to predict the risk of natural disasters ahead of time,” said Erich Fischer.
1. Why does the writer mention the data on NASA’s website in paragraph 1?| A．To explain a concept. | B．To introduce a topic. |
| C．To provide a solution. | D．To make a prediction. |
| A．The severity of natural disasters. | B．The worst air quality in New York City. |
| C．The extreme damage by flash flooding. | D．The cause of the forests fires in Canada. |
| A．He advocated a twofold strategy. |
| B．He suggested forbidding carbon emissions. |
| C．He required people to use more electric cars. |
| D．He emphasized the awareness of climate changes. |
| A．The Hottest Month in History | B．Natural Disasters in the World |
| C．Extreme Weather Could Get Worse | D．Green Technology Would be Needed |
4 . In an increasingly globalized business world, companies demand Human Resources (HR) leaders who can overcome cultural barriers to achieve key goals. This year, students in the Master of Human Resources and Industrial Relations (MHRIR) Program will get hands-on experience leading multicultural teams as they work together with peers (同辈) from all corners of the globe.
“Our students get firsthand experience on global teams, which helps them understand the challenges and the opportunities they will face in the business world,” said MHRIR Program Director Stacy Hove.
Elishka Correa joined the program to explore how HR leaders can help businesses grow quickly in the global marketplace. “Companies appreciate diversity — not only in terms of products and markets, but the people they hire — so that they can expand their business and reach customers in different parts of the world,” she said. “When I go into an organization, I’m not only going to work with Indians or Americans, it’s going to be a mix of people. That trend is beginning to grow, so I think it’s very important to appreciate people from different backgrounds.”
As they progress through the program, the students are discovering unexpected challenges as they work on projects in diverse teams. Each contributor brings a different approach to solving problems, communicating, and challenging one another’s opinions.
Devin Roll, a student from North Dakota, appreciating the unique views his classmates share, said, “The benefits of having cross-cultural experiences go far beyond the classroom. Diverse teams and companies outperform their competitors, and HR leaders act as a vital partner in acquiring and maintaining diversity in the workforce.”
Many of the international students in the program said they would return to their home countries after graduation and bring along connections to their classmates, who would build careers (职业) in countries around the world. They hope to stay in touch, and share their expert knowledge.
1. What is the aim of the program?| A．To help students to set clear goals. |
| B．To provide jobs for foreign students. |
| C．To teach students to run their own business. |
| D．To train students to build multicultural teams. |
| A．It prevents social advance. | B．It makes it easy to hire people. |
| C．It can help business growth. | D．It can put an end to the conflict. |
| A．It is predictable. | B．It is short-lived. | C．It is unidentifiable. | D．It is far-reaching. |
| A．Work for the university. | B．Keep closely connected. |
| C．Stay in their home countries. | D．Reform teaching methods. |
5 . When children are growing up, what they see in their families is what they tend to consider normal. That means family traditions and other activities are generally seen as just normal. If a family eats dinner together or spends time talking with each other, that’s what the child absorbs and internalizes.
Our family traditions are declining as we move toward a more isolated (孤立的) society. How many families no longer share meals around the dinner table, instead choosing to watch TV or text friends on their phones? This tends to isolate and disconnect family members from each other. It also stops families from communicating and catching up on each other’s lives.
For those of us who grew up in a household where families shared meals together and spent time talking with each other, chances are that we are passing along those traditions to our own families. The problem is, children today often want to spend their time in front of screens rather than people. Cell phones, computers and other attention-grabbing devices often mean parents get resistance to traditional family togetherness time. This pressure can lead to parents giving in and letting children do what they want rather than fight with them over sitting at the dinner table. This creates a new normal that no longer values the idea of families and the society at large, connecting with each other.
Family and community traditions are important, not just for the current shared experiences, but for the future as well. Since children internalize their experiences, that means generations to come may not know what it’s like to sit together around the dinner table and truly connect as a family.
That is why it is so important that parents and caregivers create boundaries of behavior that help to keep family traditions alive. If you remember the shared experiences you had with your parents and grandparents, you know the important bonding that took place during those times. It is this shared experience that brings people closer together and is well worth preserving.
1. What is the phenomenon the author describes at the beginning of the text?| A．The increase in shared family meals means a shift towards isolation. |
| B．Increased use of technology replaces traditional family interactions. |
| C．More and more children prefer to spend quality time with the family. |
| D．Family members are more likely to share their updates with each other. |
| A．The inability of parents to understand technology. |
| B．The challenge of preserving traditional family values. |
| C．The influence of technology on children’s education. |
| D．The necessity of controlling children’s digital devices. |
| A．They will be more addicted to advanced technology. |
| B．They will maintain stronger and closer family bonds. |
| C．They may create new and irreplaceable family traditions. |
| D．They may not understand the value of family gatherings. |
| A．Insignificant | B．Irresponsible |
| C．Crucial | D．Overemphasized |
6 . The rise of body neutrality You define (定义) beauty yourself. You are more than a number in measurement. Love yourself the way you are. Body positive messages like theses seem to be everywhere from social media to TV advertisements.
Body positivity’s aim to boost acceptance and appreciation of a variety of body types and sizes may explain why it has such a broad appeal. While some find the body positivity movement to be helpful, others have begun calling the movement toxic and suggesting it may be time to move on from this way of thinking.
More recently, people have voiced concerns. Some feel that the focus on loving your looks actually strengthens society’s stress on appearance over other values. Much body positivity content in advertisements may bring a stereotype (刻板印象) to viewers because it does little to challenge the hidden assumption that people are valued mainly for their appearance. Therefore, the movement still encourages people to be graceful and engage in beauty practices from head to toe. And if you fail to be body positive, it’s you that are at fault.
Many are now moving away from the body positivity movement and the pressures that come from it entirely, and instead are getting behind the body neutrality (中立) movement. Instead of focusing on physical appearance, body neutrality is a profound idea that we can exist without having to think too much about our bodies.
We are all more than just our bodies. We are complicated beings with a range of emotions and feelings about our bodies. And because body neutrality de-emphasizes (不强调) the focus on appearance, it motivates us to better acknowledge all the things our bodies are able to do. Being grateful for being able to take up your hobbies and appreciating your body for what it’s capable of doing are both examples of body neutrality.
Body neutrality can be beneficial to us. It is associated with the positive body image and mental well-being. The good news is that there are many ways you can develop body neutrality, including writing-based treatment, yoga and spending time in nature.
1. What does the underlined word “toxic” in Paragraph 2 mean?| A．Inspiring. | B．Dangerous. | C．Influential. | D．Useless. |
| A．It upsets overweight people. |
| B．It overstates the role of advertising. |
| C．It attracts too much attention to appearance. |
| D．It challenges the traditional standards of beauty. |
| A．Keep fit and you will be confident. |
| B．Accept the imperfection of your body. |
| C．Appreciate your abilities instead of your body. |
| D．Treasure your appearance rather than other values. |
| A．①②/③④/⑤/⑥ | B．①/②③/④⑤⑥ |
| C．①/②/③/④⑤/⑥ | D．①②/③/④⑤/⑥ |
7 . OpenAI’s automated AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm, but not without creating a few issues on the way. With writers, marketers, and seemingly everyone else in between using ChatGPT to generate content, companies worldwide are staring down a tsunami of AI-generated content, With issues of safety and stolen contents constantly swirling around ChatGPT and its output, OpenAI has now released GPT-Classifier, a tool designed to detect whether the text you’re reading was generated by ChatGPT or one of its other GPT tools.
GPT-Classifier attempts to figure out if a given piece of text was human-written or the work of an Al-generator. While ChatGPT and other GPT models are trained extensively on all manners of text input, the GPT-Classifier tool is fine-tuned on a dataset of pairs of human-written text and AI-written text on the same topic. In other words, the GPT-Classifier attempts to compare similarities between known human text and known AI text to find inconsistency that reveal the source writer.
While the idea of easily spotting AI-generated text will be music to the ears of editors and educators, OpenAI has warned that its classifier is not fully reliable.
A test of the GPT-Classifier spotted a human-generated example and marked it very unlikely to be AI-generated, and also correctly indicated that a ChatGPT-generated piece on USB issues was possibly AI generated. Currently, GPT-Classifier correctly identifies 26%of AI-written text while labeling 9%of human text as AI-written. OpenAI also notes that the tool’s accuracy typically improves as the length of the input text increases. For now, although GPT-Classifier is up and running and available for testing, it’s best to take its labeling with a pinch of salt
Even with the GPT-Classifier’s limitations, the demand for reliable ChatGPT detection is likely to see many people turn to this tool. OpenAI’s commitment to building and releasing a free GPT detection tool is important because as more students, Writers, programmers, and others use AI-text generation tools, understanding and detecting this input will become vital.
1. What is paragraph 2 mainly about?| A．GPT-Classifier’s components. | B．GPT-Classifier’s vast datasets. |
| C．GPT-Classifier’s high productivity. | D．GPT-Classifier’s working principle |
| A．Accept with certain doubt. | B．Reform with sufficient testing. |
| C．Judge with reasonable grounds. | D．Classify with multiple attempts. |
| A．GPT-Classifier wipes out users’ belief in AI. |
| B．GPT-Classifier demands more students’ trust. |
| C．GPT-Classifier meets diverse growing needs. |
| D．GPT-Classifier has a limited range of services. |
| A．Critical. | B．Opposing. | C．Tolerant. | D．Approving. |
8 . Escape to a New Life— Everyone’s Dream?
A TV series in Wales has become a heated issue by becoming the number one choice for teenagers to watch.
The main character is a young farmer and the series is about country life, making the popularity of the series all the more surprising. The series is calm and relaxing and really the opposite to city life. Escape to a New Life describes the Welsh countryside as a beautiful and peaceful place and its people as very caring and happy.
The series director believes that this is what young people want today. She says the success of the series is because teenagers want a happier and healthier life away from the pressures of deadlines and exams. She figures this series offers a form of escape from their fast and stressful lives.
Despite this, many parents and teachers are worried about the effect this is having on young people. Parents report that their children are just watching this series and neglecting everything else, using Escape to a New Life as an excuse for not completing homework, or refusing to revise for exams, citing a need for a happier and less stressful life.
One father, Paul McGregor, said his daughter Charlotte had changed a lot. He said, “She used to be in the school athletics team and loved the javelin, but now she only wants to watch the TV series and has been dropped from the team. She no longer completes her homework saying it doesn’t matter as she just wants to ‘escape to a new life’”.
Paediatrician, Dr. Elisa Carhart who specialises in child mental health, says that TV can influence young people’s decisions in life, but believes that if a young person reacts as strongly as Charlotte, it’s likely there are other reasons for the change in her behaviour.
1. What is the TV series Escape to a New Life mainly about?| A．How people escape from city life. | B．How a Welsh farmer lives his life. |
| C．How teenagers balance work with life. | D．How the young live a relaxing life. |
| A．Paying no attention to. | B．Making the most of. |
| C．Feeling at home with. | D．Complaining about. |
| A．Unfavorable. | B．Supportive. | C．Unclear. | D．Forgiving. |
| A．One should not jump in with both feet. |
| B．One man’s meat is another man’s poison. |
| C．We’d better be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud. |
| D．We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. |
9 . Stories have long been employed to instill (灌输) moral and cultural values in young children, but there is little research exploring the effectiveness of such stories.
“As parents, we want to know how effective the stories actually are in promoting honesty.” say lead author Kang Lee of the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto and co-author Victoria Talwar of McGill University. “Is it ‘in one ear, out the other,’ or do children listen and take the messages to heart?”
To find out, Lee and Talwar conducted an experiment with 268 children aged 3 to 7. Each child played a game that required guessing the identity of a toy based on the sound it made. In the middle of the game, the experimenter left the room for a minute, instructing the child not to glance at a toy left on the table. For most children, this temptation (诱惑) was too hard to resist. When the experimenter returned, she read the child a story, either The Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Pinocchio, or George Washington and the Cherry Tree. Afterward, the experimenter asked the child to tell the truth about whether he or she glanced at the toy.
Contrary to the experimenters’ expectations, Pinocchio and The Boy Who Cried Wolf , which associate lying with negative consequences, were no more effective at promoting honest behavior than a fable unrelated to honesty, in this case The Tortoise and the Hare. Only the made-up tale about young George Washington seemed to inspire the kids to admit glancing: Children who heard the tale in which the future first president was complimented because of admitting his mistake and rewarded a candy were three times more likely to tell the truth than their fellows who heard other stories.
“Our study shows that to promote moral behavior such as honesty, emphasizing the positive outcomes of honesty rather than the negative consequences of dishonesty is the key,” note they. “This may apply to other moral behaviors as well.”
They also warn that more research is necessary to determine whether moral stories influence kids’ behavior in the long term. Still, they have been quick to take advantage of the findings. Talwar reports a shift in her own parenting practices: “It really seems to work. I use this now with my child.”
1. What is the aim of the experiment mentioned in the text?| A．To find out which story is instructive at school. |
| B．To make sure if the children can resist the temptation. |
| C．To see the effectiveness of stories in promoting honesty. |
| D．To ensure the precision in guessing the identity of the toy. |
| A．Criticized. | B．Praised. | C．Ignored. | D．Respected. |
| A．She will apply the finding to her child. |
| B．Her child shows a strong interest in the story. |
| C．Her parents have changed their way of education. |
| D．She perceives the positive influence on her child. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Contradictory. | C．Sympathetic. | D．Objective. |
10 . From writing Shakespeare-style poetry to making music, ChatGPT has amazed he world since its launch in late 2022 by the US-based company OpenAI. It even passed several law exams in four courses at the Unlversity of Minnesota, US.
The AI program can answer questions on a whole host of topics and write essays, stories and any other written texts you can think of. It does this by drawing on information collected from a large corpus (语料库) of text data.
What makes ChatGPT so impressive? As Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI said n an interview, “It’s not actually a fundamentally new technology that made this (ChatGPT) have a moment.” According to MIT Technology Review, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, a large language model. Because texts are more complex than the meaning of every word combined, language models require a type of neural network (神经网络) that can make sense of texts.
One breakthrough behind today’s model is a network called Transformer, which was invented by Google researchers in 2017. The neural network can infer word meanings by tracking where the word appears in a sentence. Transformer can therefore gather the meaning of texts more accurately.
The GPT models were built by OpenAI combined Transformer with unsupervised (无人指导的) learning, meaning that the models can learn by themselves without being told what to look at. ChatGPT can now generate human-like responses instantly due to the large scale (规模) of texts It made sense of and learned from.
“One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT is that it comes back, very confidently, with falsities,” Michael Wooldridge at the Alan Turing Institute in London, UK. This means that ChatGPT doesn’t know the truth about the world — it learns information from various resources but It cannot decide what is true or false. As for education, many US schools recently banned students from using ChatGPT on school networks because students began to use it as a shortcut for essays.
1. What aspect of ChatGPT is most impressive?| A．The neural network. | B．The large text database. |
| C．The ability to combine words. | D．The application of technology. |
| A．Data-based communication. | B．Learning from masses of texts. |
| C．Human-guided machine learning. | D．Collecting texts for a large corpus. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Confused. | C．Objective. | D．Confident. |
| A．Is ChatGPT a Good Translator? |
| B．Should ChatGPT be Banned at School? |
| C．Can ChatGPT Choose True Information? |
| D．Will ChatGPT be the Wonder of Modern Technology? |
