1 . Singapore uses about two billion liters of water every day-a number it expects could double in the next four decades.
That kind of consumption is adding pressure to the Asian city state to address growing concerns about global water shortage. So it's building new technology to prepare itself for a future where obtaining clean water will be even more difficult. "Singapore truly has become a global water center,"said Shane Snyder,executive director of the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. “But as it stands, it imports approximately 40% of its water today. And with climate change,that water has become far less dependable.”
Singapore, meanwhile, is home to more than five million people and is covered in fountains,reservoirs and other water features-including the world's tallest indoor waterfall, The Rain Vortex that pumps about 45,000 liters of water per minute. But it has no natural water sources of its own,instead relying heavily on recycled water and imports from its neighbors.
Snyder's research facility is one of several places developing solutions for Singapore's water dependency. The hope is to create projects that could be used across the city. "What we have become used to as reliable water may quickly change-so we have to be prepared,and we have to be thinking about the basic facilities in advance. " Snyder said. " There's a big drive to become water independent-to control our own future -and that is largely dependent on the technologies we're developing. "
Another company,Wateroam, is already taking innovation from Singapore to the rest of the region. Founded in 2014,Wateroam says it has developed a lightweight,portable filtration（过滤）device that has already provided clean drinking water to more than 75,000 people across Southeast Asia. Wateroam CEO David Pong said one of the most innovative aspects of the product is its simplicity. The water filtration device is no bigger than a bicycle pump,yet it can provide clean water to villages of 100 people for up to two years.
"We've been very blessed to have access to clean drinking water," Pong said. It's necessary to bring the privilege to the rest of the region, and advocate that clean water is an essential aspect for life on Earth,according to him.
1. What worsens the water shortage problem in Singapore?| A．More water imports. | B．The lack of technology. |
| C．The increasing population. | D．Double water consumption. |
| A．Searching for natural water sources. |
| B．Controlling the increase of population. |
| C．Importing water from more neighbors. |
| D．Using technologies to provide clean water. |
| A．It is easy to carry and use. |
| B．It is larger than a bicycle pump. |
| C．It has already been used across Asia. |
| D．It has already been in use for two years. |
| A．Clean water is an essential aspect for life on Earth. |
| B．Technology can help Singapore out with its water shortage. |
| C．The increasing water consumption is adding pressure to Singapore. |
| D．Singapore's filtration device has provided many people with clean water. |
2 . The other day, my sister and I were sitting in the restaurant, trying to have a conversation, but her children, four-year-old Willow and seven-year-old Luca, would not stop fighting. The arguments——over a fork, or who had more water in a glass--never stopped.
Then my sister reached into her handbag, produced two shiny iPads, and handed one to each child. Suddenly, the two were quiet. They sat playing games and watching videos, and we continued with our conversation.
After our meal, as my sister stuffed the iPads back into her bag, she said, “I don’t want to give them the iPads at the dinner table, but if they keep them occupied for an hour so we can eat in peace, I often just hand them over. I am afraid that it’s bad for them. I do worry that it makes them think it’s OK to use electronics at the dinner table in the future.”
Dr. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles says that the brain is highly sensitive to stimuli(刺激物), like iPads and smartphone screen, and if people spend too much time on one technology, and less time interacting(互动)with people like parents at the dinner table, that could prevent the development of certain communication skills.
“Conversations with each other are the way children learn to have conversations with themselves, and learn how to be alone,” said Sherry Turkle, a professor of science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She fears that children who do not learn real interactions, which often have imperfections, will come to know a world where perfect, shiny screens give them a false sense of intimacy(亲密) without risk. However, they need to be able to gather themselves and know who they are. So someday they can form a relationship with another person without a panic of being alone. “If you don’t teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely,” she said.
1. What did Willow and Luca fight about?| A．Little things. | B．iPads. |
| C．Delicious food. | D．Interesting things. |
| A．She loved doing it very much | B．She was uncertain about its effects. |
| C．She felt it was worth a try. | D．She felt surprised at its effect. |
| A．Provide their children with various technologies. |
| B．Teach their children communication skills. |
| C．Limit their children’s screen time. |
| D．Talk to their children at the dinner table. |
| A．Children are afraid of taking risks. |
| B．Children try to escape from the real world. |
| C．Children can’t deal with time when they have to be alone. |
| D．Children can’t live without electronic devices. |
3 . When I was eighteen, I couldn’t wait to get my first job, which meant I made the first step toward adulthood.
But it was difficult to get a work permit. One day I was dropped off by my parents at the
My parents did take me to specialists. After much time and money spent seeking an
Then an important phone call from an editor changed my life. An article I
Should I be thanking that misguided doctor? By falsely predicting that I could never work a day, he fueled my
| A．station | B．company | C．clinic | D．lab |
| A．operation | B．treatment | C．examination | D．argument |
| A．suspect | B．acknowledge | C．confirm | D．advocate |
| A．urgent | B．obvious | C．accurate | D．ordinary |
| A．reminded | B．robbed | C．warned | D．informed |
| A．assistance | B．medicine | C．allowance | D．balance |
| A．dance | B．shine | C．widen | D．tear |
| A．asked | B．permitted | C．forced | D．encouraged |
| A．pleasure | B．worry | C．trouble | D．stress |
| A．admitted | B．penned | C．wanted | D．described |
| A．gave | B．lit | C．came | D．put |
| A．although | B．after | C．since | D．unless |
| A．feared | B．sought | C．brought | D．rejected |
| A．imagination | B．personality | C．motivation | D．responsibility |
| A．low | B．far | C．long | D．close |
4 . Gestures-such as pointing or waving-go hand in hand with a child's first words, and twins lag (滞后)behind single children in producing and using those gestures,two studies from Georgia State University psychology researchers show.
The lag in gesture among twins may be mostly due to lower parental input, Ozcaliskan said. It's likely that parents caring for twins engage in shorter conversations with their children, including gesturing less, because their attention is divided and their labor is doubled.However, parents of single children used a greater amount and diversity of gestures than parents of twins. Ozcaliskan said she had grown curious about gesture because it had not yet been studied among twins. We have already known that twins are initially at a disadvantage where language is concerned. Most of the time, these lags are within the normal range of differences, and nothing to worry about. Almost all children will catch up to each other by around age three and a half.
“However,there was almost nothing in research on gesturing among twins," Ozcaliskan said. Babies start using pointing around 10 months, a few months before they produce their first words. Gesture helps them convey what they can't yet communicate in speech and prepares the way for children's early words.
Twins sometimes develop their own systems of communication, even their own “twin language," which has also been shown to delay language acquisition. “Perhaps it also delays the use of gestures. Gesture and speech together form a closely integrated system in a child's development, and a child's first gestures often precede their first attempts at speech," Ozcaliskan said.
＂Gesture is a very powerful tool," she said. “Pay attention to your child's gestures, and then provide verbal(言语的） descriptions to help their language development, such as naming objects when children point to them."
1. What mainly causes twins to produce and use fewer gestures?| A．Reduced parental input. |
| B．Undivided parental attention. |
| C．Too much “twin language". |
| D．Slow language development. |
| A．count on |
| B．go with |
| C．come before |
| D．call up |
| A．When the child smiles, parents smile big smiles as well. |
| B．When the child makes a small mistake, parents ignore it. |
| C．When the child points to a doll, parents pass it to him or her quickly. |
| D．When the child points to a bottle, parents point to it, saying “bottle". |
| A．Twins fall behind single children in early gesturing. |
| B．Twins are at a disadvantage in language of a lifetime. |
| C．Enough research has been done on twins' gesturing. |
| D．Gestures prepare children for future development. |
5 . A quarrel at home may result in you falling ill. Don't laugh, it's true. Family matters including living habits and even the way we speak have a big effect on our health, doctors say.
Wang Xiaoyu, a Senior 2 girl from Xichang, Sichuan Province, fainted (晕倒) in class when she heard her classmates quarrel at the top of their voices. Quarrels between her parents also put the girl into a coma. It is because she is suffering from depression , caused by bad relations at home, doctors explained."We don't get sick or stay well by ourselves," says Dr Robert Ferrer from the US. Ferrer shows that family forces may explain up to a quarter of health problems, in his recent research.
The genes you get from your family may cause illness. If one of your parents has a heart attack, your risk of being affected (影响) may double. But effects on health are not only written in our DNA.
Unrelated people who live under the same roof also get similar problems. Diet, lifestyle and environment affect our health, too.
Ferrer's research also found that if teenagers feel they are ignored (忽视) or unimportant at home they are more likely to get sick.
We may never fully understand all the effects that families have on our health. But just as individual problems can have effects on others, a small improvement can have big benefits , Ferrer said.
1. Which of the following can best explain why Wang Xiaoyu fainted in class?| A．Because her classmates often quarreled in class. |
| B．Because her parents used to quarrel. |
| C．Because of her depression caused by bad family relations. |
| D．Because her classmates shouted loudly at her. |
| A．We get sick or stay well by ourselves. |
| B．Only the genes we get from our family have a big effect on our health. |
| C．Our health has nothing to do with diet, life style and environment. |
| D．Teenagers who are ignored at home get sick more easily than those who are not. |
| A．embarrassment | B．faint | C．tiredness | D．sadness |
| A．Family relations. | B．The reasons why we get sick. |
| C．Happy family makes you healthy. | D．A research about teenagers' health. |
6 . Few people can refuse a delicious ice cream, especially on a hot day. The only thing that stops the fun is that the treat is hard to enjoy slowly, ending up with a sticky, melted mess. Now, researchers from Colombia’s Pontifical Bolivarian University may have found an unlikely thing to help solve this age-old problem — a kind of fibre from banana plant waste.
Bananas, as you probably know, grow in groups on a tree-like plant. Each group is connected to a central rachis (叶轴), which is thrown once the fruit has been gathered. The team, which was led by Dr. Robin Zuluaga Gallego, began by abstracting /drawing out cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) from the powdered rachis. The tasteless fiber, thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair, was then added to 100 grams of ice cream mix.
With the right amount of CNFs mixed in, the dessert lasted longer in its frozen state than the traditional ice cream, extending the amount of time that the treat can be enjoyed. What was even more exciting was that the fibre increased the stickiness of the low-fat ice cream to levels higher than the full-fat one. Since this is what determines the frozen treat’s creaminess and taste, CNFs could help create the healthier ice cream without influencing the taste of it.
The researchers, who presented their findings at the American Chemical Society( ACS) meeting in New Orleans in March, 2018, next plan to study how different types of fat, such as coconut oil, influence the behaviour of CNFs in other frozen treats.
The Colombian researchers are not the only ones working on creating a slower-melting ice cream. In 2015, scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland found that a natural protein called BsIA was very effective in keeping the treat frozen for longer periods of time. With both teams fighting to be the first to get to the market, the future of everyone’s favorite dessert certainly looks bright.
1. What prevents people enjoying an ice cream slowly?| A．A kind of fibre from bananas. |
| B．The ice cream’s quick melting. |
| C．The ice cream’s stickiness. |
| D．The fat in the ice cream. |
| A．To improve its taste. |
| B．To increase its stickiness. |
| C．To reduce its fat content. |
| D．To make it melt more slowly. |
| A．The ice cream. | B．The fiber. |
| C．The fat. | D．The stickiness. |
| A．BsIA is popular in the market. |
| B．CNFs are more useful and expensive than BsIA. |
| C．Ice creams with CNFs have been on sale at the market. |
| D．Slowly enjoying an ice cream will soon become a reality. |
7 . The Amazon Echo, a voice-driven computer that sits on a table top and answers to the name Alexa, can call up music tracks and radio stations, tell jokes, answer simple questions and control smart appliances. Even before Christmas it was already resident in about 4% of American households. Voice assistants are being widely used in smart phones, too: Apple’s Siri handles over 2 billion commands a week, and 20% of Google searches on Android-powered handsets in America are input by voice. Dictating e-mails and text messages now works reliably enough to be useful. Why type when you can talk?
Simple though it may seem, voice has the power to transform computing, by providing a natural means of interaction. Windows, icons and menus, and then touch screens, were welcomed as much easier ways to deal with computers than entering complex keyboard commands. But being able to talk to computers abolishes the need for a “user interface(界面)” at all. Just as mobile phones were more than existing phones without wires, and cars were more than carriages without horses, so computers without screens and keyboards have the potential to be more useful, more powerful than people can imagine today.
Voice will not wholly replace other forms of input and output. Sometimes it will remain more convenient to converse with a machine by typing rather than talking (Amazon is said to be working on an Echo device with a built-in screen). But voice is sure to account for a growing share of people’s interactions with the technology around them, from washing machines that tell you how much of the cycle they have left to virtual assistants in corporate call centres. However, to reach its full potential, the technology requires further breakthroughs and a resolution of the tricky questions it raises around the trade-off between convenience and privacy.
Computer-dictation systems have been around for years. But they were unreliable and required lengthy training to learn a specific user’s voice. Computer’s new ability to recognise almost anyone’s speech dependably without training is the latest manifestation (证明) of the power of “deep learning”, an artificial intelligence technique in which a software system is trained to use millions of examples, usually selected from the Internet. Thanks to deep learning, machines now nearly equal humans in transcription accuracy, computerized translation systems are improving rapidly and text-to-speech systems are becoming less robotic and more natural-sounding. Computers are, in short, getting much better at handling natural language in all its forms.
Although deep learning means that machines can recognize speech more reliably and talk in a more natural manner, they still don’t understand the meaning of language. That is the most difficult aspect of the problem and, if voice-driven computing is truly to flourish, one that must be overcome. Computers must be able to understand context in order to maintain a coherent conversation about something, rather than just responding to simple, one-off (一次性的) voice commands, as they mostly do today (“Hey, Siri, set a timer for ten minutes”). Researchers in universities and at companies are working on this problem, building “bots” that can hold more detailed conversations about more complex tasks, from searching information to making travel arrangements.
Many voice-driven devices are always listening, waiting to be activated(激活). Some people are already concerned about the implications of internet-connected microphones listening in every room and from every smart phone. Not all audio is sent to the cloud - devices wait for a trigger phrase (“Alexa”, “OK, Google”, “Hey, Cortana”, or “Hey, Siri”) before they start passing the user’s voice to the servers that actually handle the requests - but when it comes to storing audio, it is unclear who keeps what and when.
1. According to Paragraph l, the Amazon Echo ________.| A．has been sold out before Christmas |
| B．has been used by most American families |
| C．came on the market later than Apple’s Siri |
| D．is more useful than smart phones in dictating e-mails |
| A．It is vital to accurate identification of human voices. |
| B．It is almost the same as the computer-dictation system. |
| C．It has helped machines understand the meaning of language. |
| D．It has helped machines beat humans in accuracy and reliability. |
| A．The devices will be in charge of their life. |
| B．The devices need to be activated before working. |
| C．They are in the dark about their data’s ownership. |
| D．Their voices can be recognized by every smart phone. |
| A．Worried. | B．Doubtful. |
| C．Supportive. | D．Objective. |
8 . Much of the public debate around early childhood education comes down to which matters more： academics or play. That's a false dilemma. Play is really the way that young children learn and guided play is the key. It's a way that they experience the world, and it helps them learn more deeply.
We should be concerned that the“skill and drill”approach to teaching academics is most frequently used in classrooms serving at-risk preschoolers, in an attempt to close the gap on school readiness. Unfortunately, these teaching methods can turn young kids off to school and introduces the possibility of shame and anxiety. 46 Skill and drill” doesn't teach kids the curiosity and critical (批判的）thinking skills that they need to develop in early childhood.
However, pure free play—an approach advocated more frequently by wealthier groups—also misses the mark. “I hear a lot about just ‘free play classrooms’. ” But Suzanne Bouffard, an education researcher, said if it only involves setting out materials and not thinking about learning goals, there’s a real missed opportunity. For example, she said, researchers have found that children used more complex language about building activities when they had a goal in mind.
What effective preschools aim for is “guided play”，in which adults create a purposeful play environment that encourages students to explore，For example, in setting up blocks, a teacher might put up pictures of buildings to inspire kids. They may ask students, “What are you doing?” and gently push kids’ thinking by offering new information.
Of course, the ability to find this balance rests with teachers. Good teachers make it look really easy，That's why it's really important that we invest(投入）in teachers and give them the training to guide play without overly controlling it and to encourage kids to develop an understanding of letters and numbers without “skill and drill”.
1. Which of the following matters most in early childhood education?| A．Having guided play. | B．Learning after play. |
| C．Seeing the world. | D．Studying academic courses. |
| A．It works best for preschoolers. |
| B．It helps develop kids’ curiosity. |
| C．It limits kids’ development. |
| D．It bridges the gap on school readiness. |
| A．Meets learning goals. | B．Loses points in exams. |
| C．Troubles the classroom. | D．Fails to achieve the goal. |
| A．To encourage the kids to copy. |
| B．To offer extra information. |
| C．To share the teaching purpose with the kids. |
| D．To inspire the kids to explore. |
9 . You know that overnight success usually takes at least 10 years? One man said, “My overnight success was the longest night of my life, I spent many days and nights just getting there.”
Many people who have failed do not know how close they are to success when they give up.
| A．They don’t actually fail; they just give up too easily. |
| B．They made all the efforts without any results. |
| C．Remember, “Rome was not built in a day.” |
| D．Education can’t, for the world is full of educated losers. |
| E．And they keep doing it till they get the success they want. |
| F．Never forget, it is persistence that matters. |
| G．Give it all you’ve got and you can never fail. |
10 . A Welcome Gift
Dario and his mother loved their new apartment. The living room was large enough for their piano. That night, the two of them
The next morning,
“Maybe we could go and
“What if we invited them to come here for a
They both loved the
Finally, the day of the party
“I heard you playing the other night,” she said. “The sounds woke me out of bed. I
Dario’s mother smiled at Mrs. Gilbert. “I think maybe we
“You play, you play!” Mrs. Gilbert said. “I like what you play! Just not so loud at night.” She pointed to the book she had given them. “These songs are not such
“These songs are beautiful music.” Dario’s mother said. “We will be
“And we won’t play so loud or late!” Dario said. He was already looking forward to
| A．sat | B．stood | C．lay | D．walked |
| A．voice | B．ring | C．music | D．cry |
| A．therefore | B．however | C．otherwise | D．instead |
| A．note | B．poster | C．bill | D．report |
| A．proud | B．rich | C．lucky | D．nice |
| A．neighbors | B．friends | C．relatives | D．audience |
| A．blame | B．instruct | C．question | D．visit |
| A．party | B．concert | C．show | D．play |
| A．experience | B．idea | C．performance | D．action |
| A．to | B．with | C．for | D．from |
| A．continued | B．arrived | C．passed | D．finished |
| A．order | B．sell | C．share | D．advertise |
| A．treated | B．presented | C．helped | D．served |
| A．promised | B．admitted | C．agreed | D．worried |
| A．give | B．send | C．offer | D．owe |
| A．realize | B．remember | C．understand | D．accept |
| A．sweet | B．strange | C．funny | D．loud |
| A．brave | B．sorry | C．happy | D．afraid |
| A．changing | B．practicing | C．recording | D．writing |
| A．equality | B．freedom | C．warmth | D．sympathy |
