2 . When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr. Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.

Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note — “Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery” — and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically (魔术般) appear.

All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn’t freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.

There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk, thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practical to have a delivery service.

Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch (门廊) . Every so often my son’s friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.

1. Mr. Basille gave the boy a quarter out of his coin changer to __________.

A．show his magical power	B．pay for the delivery
C．satisfy his curiosity	D．please his mother

2. What can be inferred from the fact that the milkman had the key to the boy’s house?

A．He wanted to have tea there.	B．He was a respectable person.
C．He was treated as a family member.	D．He was fully trusted by the family.

3. Why does home milk delivery no longer exist?

A．Nobody wants to be a milkman now.	B．It has been driven out of the market.
C．Its service is getting poor.	D．It is not allowed by law.

4. Why did the author bring back home an old milk box?

A．He missed the good old days.	B．He wanted to tell interesting stories.
C．He needed it for his milk bottles.	D．He planted flowers in it.

3 . Donna Strickland was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou.It’s the first time in 55 years that a woman has won this famous prize, but why has it taken so long? We look at five other pioneering female physicists — past and present — who actually deserve the prize.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Perhaps the most famous snub (冷落): the student Bell discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, when she was a PhD student at Cambridge.The Nobel Prize that recognised this landmark discovery in 1974, however, went to her male supervisor, Antony Hewish.Recently awarded a £2.3 million Breakthrough Prize, which she gave away to help under-represented students, she joked to The Guardian, “I feel I’ve done very well out of not getting a Nobel Prize.”

Lene Hau

Hau is best-known for leading the research team at Harvard University in 1999 that managed to slow a beam of light, before managing to stop it completely in 2001.Often topping Nobel Prize prediction lists, could 2019 be Hau’s year.

Vera Rubin

Rubin discovered dark matter in the 1980s, opening up a new field of astronomy.She died in 2016, without recognition from the committee.

Chien-Shiung Wu

Wu’s “Wu experiment” helped disprove the “law of conservation of parity”.Her experimental work was helpful but never honoured, and instead, her male colleagues won the 1957 Nobel Prize for their theoretical work behind the study.

Lise Meitner

Meitner led groundbreaking work on the discovery of nuclear fission.However, the discovery was acknowledged by the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was won by her male co-lead, Otto Hahn.

1. When was the discovery of radio pulsars recognised by the Nobel?

A．In 1944．

B．In 1967．

C．In 1974．

D．In 1980．

2. Which woman is most likely to win a Nobel Prize later according to the text?

A．Donna Strickland.	B．Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
C．Lene Hau.	D．Vera Rubin.

3. What do we know about the five females?

A．The five female scientists did greatly in chemistry.

B．Vera Rubin had opened up a new field in geometry.

C．Lise Meitner’s teacher won a Nobel Prize for her work.

D．The five female scientists haven’t been awarded Nobel Prize.

4 . Music is not just a set of sounds and rhythms. Its influence on brain is much deeper than any other human experience. Keep on reading to know all these amazing power of music.

A recent study suggests that preterm (早产的) babies appear to experience less pain and feed more when listening to music. Experts led by Dr. Manoj Kumar of the University of Alberta,Canada,found that music had a beneficial effect on reducing pain for preterm babies experiencing painful medical tests. It also appeared to benefit full-term babies during operations.

Many people experiencing brain damage have speech and movement-related problems. Music can help recover from brain injuries. As a different and effective treatment, doctors often advise such patients to listen to good music to improve the parts of the brain responsible for these two functions. When people with neurological (神经的) disorders hear a musical beat, it helps them to regain a balanced walk.

Though music cannot make deafness disappear, it really can stave off the loss of hearing. There was an experiment involving 163 people where 74 were musicians. Participants were asked to pass some listening tests. Musicians heard the sounds better than non-musicians, and this difference gets clearer with age. This means that a 70-year-old musician hears better than a 50-year-old non-musician, even in a noisy environment.

Besides, music mends a broken heart. It is not about a thrown-away love,   but about a heart attack. The matter is that music can help people recover from a heart attack or heart operation by reducing blood pressure, slowing down the heartbeat rate, and reducing anxiety. Listening to the quality music produces positive emotions, improves the movement of blood, and expands blood vessels, thus, promoting quick recovery of the whole cardiovascular (心血管的) system.

1. How does music affect preterm babies?

A．It helps develop their potential in music.

B．It helps reduce their pain.

C．It helps improve their hearing systems.

D．It helps repair their neurological systems.

2. What does the underlined phrase “stave off” in Paragraph 4 mean?

A．Cause.	B．Increase.
C．Prevent.	D．Expand.

3. Why can music mend a broken heart?

A．It has a positive effect on human body systems’ work.

B．It can encourage people to do sports.

C．It helps make a person outgoing.

D．It helps patients recover more quickly than medicine does.

4. What may be the best title for the text?

A．People Who Can Benefit From music.

B．The Best Time to Listen to Music.

C．The Way to choose Quality Music.

D．How Music Affects Our Mind and Body.

5 . When I was five or six years old, I remember watching TV and seeing other children suffer in other parts of the world. I would say to myself, “When I grow up, when I can get rich, I will save kids all over the world.”

At 17, I started my career here in America, and at the age of 18, I started my first charity organization. I went on to team up with other organizations in the following years, and met, helped, and even lost some of the most beautiful souls, from six-year-old Jasmina Anema who passed away in 2010 from leukemia(白血病), and whose story inspired thousands to volunteer as donors, to my grandmother who lost her battle against cancer in 2012. And her death is the very reason and the driving force behind the Clara Lionel Foundation(CLF). We’re all humans. And we all just want a chance: a chance of life, a chance of education, a chance of a future, really. And at the CLF, our mission is to impact as many lives as possible, but it starts with just one.

People make it seem too hard to do charity work. The truth is that you don’t have to be rich to help others. You don’t need to be famous. You don’t even have to be college-educated. But it can start with your neighbor, the person right next to you, the person sitting next to you in class, and the kid down the block in your neighborhood. You just do whatever you can to help in any way that you can. And today, I want to challenge each of you to make a decision to help one person, one organization, one situation that touches your heart. My grandmother used to say, “If you’ve got a dollar, there’s plenty to share.”

1. What did the author want to do at a young age?

A．Watch TV.	B．Help other children.
C．Become wealthy.	D．Grow up quickly.

2. What directly caused the author to create and develop the CLF?

A．A six-year-old kid’s request.	B．Many volunteers inspiration.
C．Her grandmother’s death of cancer.	D．Other organizations’ encouragement.

3. What does the underlined word “one” in Paragraph 2 refer to?

A．A chance.	B．A life.
C．A task.	D．An organization.

4. What does the author suggest people do in the last paragraph?

A．Challenge their friends to offer help.

B．Work hard to get a college education.

C．Do little things to help those around them.

D．Share everything they have.

6 . A new APP uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tell you what your pet is thinking. It’s called Happy Pets and it analyses an animal’s facial features, tells you what breed(血统) it is and indicates which of the five most common animal emotions—happy, angry, neutral, sad and scared.

The Happy Pets app uses AI, or machine learning. It’s a technology that’s used for vision in robotics and self-driving cars and it works by taking in images and assigning importance to them. One common use for AI is in facial recognition technology. Many of us can unlock our mobile phones with an image of our face and it’s important part of security processes in, for instance, airports.

But this is the first time this kind of technology has been used for animals. It then had to learn to recognize facial features. This is sophisticated because photos can be taken in so many different ways: from the side, above, below, in bright light. And different animals can have such different facial features. Think about how different the noses of a border collie(边境牧羊犬) and bulldog are, for instance. Once the AI behind Happy Pets had learned all this, it then had to be able to detect emotions based on specific facial features that are associated with each emotion, which it has learned from thousands of examples. For instance, if a dog tightens its eyes and mouth while changing the position of its ears in a particular way, it’s a sign of being scared.

In an online article for Melbourne University’s Pursuit, the researchers write they’re happy with how the app performs. The researchers would love feedback about how they could develop the app further.

1. Which of the following may go beyond Happy Pets’ function?

A．Learning the kinds of pets.

B．Showing pets’ main feelings.

C．Teaching pets’ facial recognition.

D．Analyzing the pets’ facial features.

2. What is the facial recognition technology commonly used as now?

A．The robot’s eye.	B．A security system.
C．The vision of self driving.	D．A machine learning system.

3. What does the underlying word “sophisticated” in Paragraph 3 meaning?

A．Typical.

B．Complex.

C．Scientific.

D．Traditional.

4. Why does Happy Pets have to learn to recognize faces?

A．Because faces can definitely show animals feelings.

B．Because it wants to have emotions of humans.

C．Because it enables Happy Pets to detect emotions based on specific facial features.

D．Because the types of animals are based on the looks.

7 . It was my first day at school in London and I was half-excited and half-frightened. On my way to school I wondered, what questions the other boys would ask me and practiced all the answers: “I am nine years old. I was born here but I haven’t lived here since I was two. I was living in Farley. It’s about thirty miles away. I came back to London two months ago.” I also wondered if it was the rule for boys to fight strangers like me, but I was tall for my age. I hoped they would decide not to risk it.

No one took any notice of me before school. I stood in the center of the playground, expecting someone to say “hello”, but no one spoke to me.

My teacher was called Mr. Jones. There were 42 boys in the class, so I didn’t stand out there either, until the first lesson of the afternoon. Mr. Jones was very fond of Charles Dickens, so he asked several boys if they knew Dickens’ birthplace, but no one guessed right. A boy called Brian, the biggest in the class, said: “Timbuktu” and Mr. Jones went red in the face. Then he asked me. I said: “Portsmouth” and everyone stared at me because Mr. Jones said I was right. This didn’t make me very popular, of course. “He thinks he’s clever,” I heard Brian say.

After that, we went out to the playground to play football. I was in Brian’s team, and he obviously had Dickens in mind because he told me to go in goal. No one ever wanted to be the goalkeeper.

“He’s big enough and useless enough,” Brian said when someone asked him why he had chosen me.

As the boy kicked the ball hard along the ground to my right, I threw myself down quickly and saved it. All my team crowded round me. My bare knees were grazed and bleeding. Brian took out a handkerchief and offered it to me.

“Do you want to join my team?” he said.

At the end of the day, I was no longer a stranger.

1. The writer prepared to answer all of the following questions EXCEPT “________”.

A．How old are you?	B．Where are you from?
C．Do you want to join my team?	D．When did you come back to London?

2. We can learn from the passage that ________.

A．boys were usually unfriendly to new students	B．the writer was not greeted as he expected
C．Brian praised the writer for his cleverness	D．the writer was glad to be a goalkeeper

3. The underlined part “I didn’t stand out” in paragraph 3 means that the writer was NOT ________.

A．eye-catching

B．nervous

C．important

D．surprised

4. The writer was offered a handkerchief because ________.

A．he was in Brian’s team	B．he was no longer a new comer
C．he was beginning to be accepted	D．he pushed a player on the other team

8 . Can exercise during childhood protect you against memory loss many decades later? Exercise early in life seems to have lifelong benefits for the brain, in rats at least.

“This is an animal study, but it shows that physical activity at a young age is very important — not just for physical development, but for the whole lifelong track of cognitive (认知的) development during ageing,” says Martin Wojtowicz of the University of Toronto, Canada. “In humans, it may delay the appearance of Alzheimer’s symptoms (阿兹海默氏症), possibly to the point of preventing them.”

Wojtowicz’s team divided 80 young male rats into two equal groups, and placed running wheels in the cages of one group for a period of six weeks. Around four months later — when the rats had reached middle age — the team taught all the rats to connect an electric shock with being in a specific box. When placed in the box, they froze with fear.

Two weeks later, the team tested the rats in three situations: exactly the same box in the same room, the same box with the room arranged differently, and a completely different box in a different room.

The rats without access to a running wheel when they were young now froze the same percentage of times in each of these situations, suggesting they couldn’t remember which one was dangerous. But those that had been able to run in their youth froze 40 to 50 percent less in both changed box settings.

“The results suggest the amount of physical activity when we’re young, at least for rats, has influence on brain and cognitive health — in the form of better memories — when we’re older,” says Arthur Kramer of Northeastern University in Boston, who has found that, in humans, exercise promotes the growth of new brain cells.

1. The study shows that________.

A．physical activity is of great importance for physical health

B．using the running wheels is very beneficial to the rats’ growth

C．physical activity can prevent human’s Alzheimer’s symptoms

D．the more exercise a rat has when young, the better memory it will have when older

2. How are Paragraph 3 and 4 mainly developed?

A．By giving examples.	B．By describing the process.
C．By analyzing causes.	D．By showing differences.

3. What does the underlined word in Paragraph 2 refer to?

A．Benefit.

B．Development.

C．Exercise.

D．Study.

4. What is the author’s attitude towards the animal study?

A．Objective.

B．Critical.

C．Negative.

D．Doubtful.

9 . Scientists say a huge percentage of bird species are in danger because their habitats, or homelands, are disappearing.

Traditional migration paths take birds through countries that are not protecting the places for birds to stop, rest and feed. The scientists studied the migration or flight paths of almost 1,500 species. They decided that 91 percent of them passed through dangerous areas.

The major danger for migratory birds is development. Buildings and pavements have covered the places where birds stop and feed as they move from one part of the world to another. One of the scientists who worked on the study says “Many of these important places have been lost to land reclamation because of urban, industrial and agricultural land expansion”.

The problem, according to scientists, is that many of these small birds die along their migration paths because they don’t have a safe place to feed and rest. There is no place to restore their energy for the next part of their journey. Countries in North Africa, Central Asia and those along the coasts of East Asia are having the most difficult time in protecting land. The scientists say these countries do not have enough areas that are safe for birds. One species that doesn’t exist now is the Eskimo curlew. “Our world gets poorer every time we lose a species,” one of the scientists says.

The researchers say countries need to work together and come up with safe stopping areas for birds that pass through their boundaries. For example, one country might have preserved safe zones for migrating birds. But a neighbor country might not. A bird might die.

One scientist who is not connected with the report tells Los Angeles Times that while some habitats are changing, more work can be done to make urban areas safe for birds.

He says small changes, like planting more native plants or keeping cats out of the areas birds would be likely to use, could make a big difference.

1. What mainly caused the disappearing of birds’ habitats?

A．The decrease of awareness to protect birds.	B．Natural disasters.
C．Overuse of land by human beings.	D．The rising sea level.

2. What may be the main reason for many birds’ death on the way of migration?

A．Tiredness and hunger.	B．Beast attack on the ground.
C．Hunting of humans.	D．The long journey.

3. According to the last two paragraphs, how should we protect the migrating birds?

A．By keeping fewer cats or dogs.

B．By restoring their destroyed habitats.

C．By helping change the birds’ migration paths.

D．By preserving the ecological environments on their migration paths.

4. What is the author’s purpose in writing the passage?

A．To call on people to protect the birds’ habitats.

B．To analyze the reasons for disappearing of birds’ habitats.

C．To offer some solutions to the problem of birds’ habitats.

D．To tell us a huge percentage of bird species are in danger.

10 . Laptop computers are popular all over the world. People use them on trains and airplanes, in airports and hotels. These laptops connect people to their workplace. In the United States today, laptops also connect students to their classrooms.

Westlake College in Virginia will start a laptop computer program that allows students to do schoolwork anywhere they want. Within five years, each of the 1, 500 students at the college will receive a laptop. The laptops are part of a $10 million computer program at Westlake, a 110-­year-­old college. The students with laptops will also have access to the Internet. In addition, they will be able to use e­mail to “speak” with their teachers, their classmates, and their families. However, the most important part of the laptop program is that students will be able to use computers without going to computer labs. They can work with it at home, in a fast­food restaurant or under the trees — anywhere at all!

Because of the many changes in computer technology, laptop use in higher education, such as colleges and universities, is workable. As laptops become more powerful, they become more similar to desktop computers. In addition, the portable computers can connect students to not only the Internet, but also libraries and other resources. State higher­education officials are studying how laptops can help students. State officials are also testing laptop programs at other universities, too.

At Westlake College, more than 60 percent of the staff use computers. The laptops will allow all teachers to use computers in their lessons. As one Westlake teacher said, “Here we are in the middle of Virginia and we’re giving students a window on the world. They can see everything and do everything.”

1. The main purpose of the laptop program is to give each student a laptop to ________.

A．use for their schoolwork

B．access the Internet

C．work at home

D．connect them to libraries

2. Which of the following is TRUE about Westlake College?

A．All teachers use computers.

B．1, 500 students have laptops.

C．It is an old college in America.

D．Students there can do everything.

3. “A window on the world” in the last paragraph means that students can ________.

A．attend lectures on information technology

B．travel around the world

C．get information from around the world

D．have free laptops

4. What can we infer from the passage?

A．The program is successful.

B．The program is not workable.

C．The program is too expensive.

D．We don’t know the result yet.