1 . The benefits of regular exercise are well documented but there’s a new bonus to add to the ever-growing list. New researchers found that middle-aged women who were physically fit could be nearly 90 percent less likely to develop dementia in later life, and as they did, it came on a decade later than less sporty women.
Lead researcher Dr. Helena Horder, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said : "These findings are exciting because it’s possible that improving people's cardiovascular （心血管的）fitness in middle age could delay or even prevent them from developing dementia. "
For the study, 191 women with an average age of 50 took a bicycle exercise test until they were exhausted to measure their peak （最大值的） cardiovascular capacity. The average peak workload was measured at 103 watts.
A total of 40 women met the criteria for a high fitness level, or 120 watts or higher. A total of 92 women were in the medium fitness category; and 59 women were in the low fitness category, defined as a peak workload of 80 watts or less, or having their exercise tests stopped because of high blood pressure, chest pain or other cardiovascular problems.
These women were then tested for dementia six times over the following four decades. During that time, 44 of the women developed dementia. Five percent of the highly fit women developed dementia, compared to 25 percent of the women with medium fitness and 32 percent of the women with low fitness.
"However, this study does not show cause and effect between cardiovascular fitness and dementia, it only shows an association. More research is needed to see if improved fitness could have a positive effect on the risk of dementia and also to look at when during a lifetime a high fitness level is most important. " She also admitted that a relatively small number of women were studied, all of whom were form Sweden, so the results might not be applicable to other groups.
1. What is on the ever-growing list mentioned in the first paragraph?| A．Positive effects of doing exercises. |
| B．Exercises suitable for the middle-aged. |
| C．Experimental studies on diseases. |
| D．Advantages of sporty woman over man |
| A．To predict their maximum heart rate. |
| B．To assess their cardiovascular capacity |
| C．To change their habits of working out |
| D．To detect their potential health problems |
| A．It aimed to find a cure for dementia. |
| B．Data collection was a lengthy process. |
| C．Some participants withdrew from it. |
| D．The results were far from satisfactory. |
| A．More Women Are Exercising to Prevent Dementia |
| B．Middle-Aged Women Need to Do More Exercise |
| C．Fit Women Are Less Likely to Develop Dementia |
| D．Biking Improves Women's Cardiovascular Fitness |
2 . Figure skating(花样滑冰)
Figure skating got its name from the designs, or “figures” that are made on the ice by skating.
Special figures were a part of figure skating in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Very complicated(复杂的) and beautiful patterns invented by the skater were drawn on the ice with the skaters blades (冰刀).Some designs that were created included rosettes (花结), stars and crosses.
Figures were the most important part of the original Olympic figure skating events.
In the mid-1930s, Olympic Champion Sonja Henie, increased the popularity of figure skating.
How has figure skating changed since it first started thousands of years ago, and why?
Ice skating began about 4,000 years ago in Finland. The first skates were made of flattened bone that was tied to the bottom of the feet. In the 13th century, the Dutch invented steel blades with edges(刃). In the Netherlands, all classes of people skated.
Today, ice skating can actually be done year-round since there are indoor ice arenas all over the world.
| A．People of all ages participate in ice skating. |
| B．Each special figure was really a work of art. |
| C．However, it was regarded as rude by the British royal family. |
| D．Figure skating was quite popular even before the first Olympics. |
| E．However, they were not fun for the audience to watch or understand. |
| F．Ice skating was a way for people to travel over frozen waters in the winter months. |
| G．She introduced the idea of white figure skates and short skating skirts. |
The official medals of the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games were displayed on October 26th. The organizing committee introduced the medals—called tong xin,
The medals are inspired by yu bi, a Chinese jade artifact
Each medal has carvings of the Olympic rings on one side. The rings represent the pursuit of unity and harmony, and they also represent the Olympic
Gaining
Beijing uncovered the design of the medals for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games on Tuesday,
The rings also symbolize the Olympic rings,
The surrounding rings mimic（模仿） star trails, with 24 dots
With just over four months
"The posters stand out due to their compelling
6 . If you're a sports enthusiast, you know the weight that home field advantage has on the performance of a team.
Crowd Effect
Crowd effect is one of the main causes behind home field advantage in sports. Imagine that you're walking into a stadium surrounded by people cheering for you.
Judge Bias
Travel Effect and Familiarity
Traveling long distances puts athletes under physical and psychological stress. This is especially true in the case of inter-continental matches, during which athletes must travel into different time zones, leaving them defenseless against jet-lag. On the other hand, the home team stays in its comfort zone, without having to undergo any disruption in their regular schedules.
Is There a Home Disadvantage?
The massive crowd support that the home team enjoys does come with a side effect performance pressure. The crowd greatly motivate athletes to perform better and achieve greater success.
| A．The cheering will greatly boost their confidence. |
| B．They applaud and celebrate every shot you take. |
| C．However, it may sometimes have the opposite effect. |
| D．Home field advantage is caused by many factors affecting athletes. |
| E．Therefore, the home team gets an upper hand over the visiting team. |
| F．It has been consistently found that players win more often when playing at home. |
| G．The massive crowd support that a home team gets often puts the judges in a tough spot. |
7 . A school in the UK is giving boys lessons in zumba and ballet to encourage the idea that PE is gender neutral (不分性别的). Steve Frenzel, a school officer, says that boys should be offered different activities in sport including dance. They should see dance as something they can enjoy just as much as girls.
However, giving boys more choices will not solve the problem of girls' disengagement (不参与) with sport, since for years, girls have been kept from playing sport like football and cricket.
A research done by Women in Sport showed that girls begin to lose interest in sport when they are as young as six. “At around the age of six or seven girls start to drop out of sport. What is interesting is that this is the same time that boys start doing more,” said Ruth Holdaway, the chief executive of Women in Sport. “What seems to be happening is up until that age, boys and girls feel the same—they just run around, they don't think about what they are doing, they will explore, they will climb.”
Teachers should not make any assumptions (假定) about which sport girls or boys would like to play. Often teachers will be surprised if they ask girls what they want. There will be an assumption that they want to do dance and many of them will, but they might also want to play football or cricket.
Other steps schools can take to encourage girls to play sport could include making adaptations (适应性变化) to changing rooms.
Girls may think, “If I am going to get hot and sweaty, I need to put my hair up, I need to take it back down, and if I don't have a mirror, I can't do that.”
Small changes like allowing girls more time in the changing rooms, and putting up mirrors, may encourage them to run around and get hot and sweaty during PE lessons.
1. The school mentioned in Paragraph 1 is ______.| A．training boys to be dancers |
| B．opening dance classes for special-needs students |
| C．offering boys chances to do all kinds of sport |
| D．encouraging boys to be more active in PE classes |
| A．Boys get recognized for doing sport. |
| B．Girls lose interest in sport at a very young age. |
| C．Boys are born with greater interest in sport than girls. |
| D．Girls are more willing to do dance as they grow older. |
| A．To introduce a research finding. | B．To praise efforts made by a school. |
| C．To describe some sports events. | D．To discuss some possible solutions. |
8 . Many of the sports in ancient Egypt are still practiced today. In fact, many of the basic elements of sports, like rules and uniforms, were first used by Egyptians. The sports had important functions in society. Some were played for fun and fitness. Others were played to make stronger warriors(武士) and leaders.
The first group of sports, mostly for fun was those like rowing, hunting, and the high jump. Hunting and fishing could be enjoyed by the kings and regular people. The same was for rowing. Rowing needed strength. Teams of people got into boats and followed the commands of a leader. He would give regular, sharp calls to tell them when to row. This technique is still used for rowing teams today. Another popular game was tug-of-war. This was a game where two teams had to pull each other over a line. If team fell forward, they lost. This game is still played today in the country.
The second group of sports prepared people for the army and the temple. These included boxing, horse riding, running, and archery(箭术). They were ways to work on skills for fighting. They were also ways to work on mental and spiritual power. Running a marathon was a good example of this. The king would run to show he had the mental strength to guide his country. Hockey was another Egyptian game. Players held tree branches with a bent end, just like modern hockey sticks. They had to hit a ball made of leather that was brightly colored.
These sports were a part of Egyptian culture. They kept the people happy and fit. The basic rules were created thousands of years ago. They are still seen in some forms today.
1. According to the passage, what was the purpose of sports?| A．They could stop people from being angry at the king. |
| B．They could stop people from working too much. |
| C．They could keep people busy with no time to fight. |
| D．They could keep people happy and in good shape. |
| A．clear | B．hopeful |
| C．keen | D．energetic |
| A．To explain how hockey is not fashionable. |
| B．To state his opinion on ancient Egyptian games. |
| C．To provide another example of an old game played today. |
| D．To contrast its simplicity with the complexity of other games. |
9 . Though the Tokyo Olympic Games drew to a close on August 8, 2021, the public is still watching the athletes. Their outfits and the technologies that helped them in the competition have aroused people’s interest.
Su Bingtian, the first Chinese sprinter to reach an Olympic 100m final, has ascribed his breakthrough to scientific training. “It takes Su 47 steps to run 100 meters. Each step counts,” Liang Dong, a member of Su’s training team, told Shenzhen Evening News. “Randy Huntington, Su’s American coach and a biomechanics expert in track and field, has collected a lot of data on outstanding sprinters and built a database. He put in all of Su’s data and got a near-optimal model. When Su is training, the team uses high-speed cameras to record his training and compares it with the model to find out his weaknesses.”
Technology has also brought a new boost to table tennis. On July 27, the semifinal match between China’s Sun Yingsha and Japan’s Mima Ito was in full swing at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. You wouldn’t have guessed that besides players, referees and audiences, a powerful AI platform was monitoring the match.
Every serve, swing and movement of Mima Ito was captured by this AI cloud platform deployed in Tokyo. At an average speed of 100 Mbps, the data was transmitted to the technical team of the Zhejiang University Table Tennis Intelligent Big Data Analysis Platform,2,442 kilometers away from the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, according to The Paper.
The Tokyo Olympic Games have seen not only scientific support in training, but many high-end technologies in athletes’ devices. For example, the Kenya women’s volleyball team’s GPS devices fed data on each player’s strength, heart rate and so on to coaches, who used the information to prevent injury and personalize training plans for each individual, South China Morning Post reported.
1. Which of the following can replace the underlined word “ascribed” in Paragraph 2?| A．attached |
| B．owed |
| C．adapted |
| D．devoted |
| A．Table tennis. |
| B．Sprint. |
| C．Women’s volleyball. |
| D．Archery. |
| A．Enhancing Sports with Technology |
| B．A report about the Tokyo Olympic Games |
| C．An Al platform monitoring the Tokyo Games |
| D．Devices and Training Determine Athletes’ Competition |
10 . Fitness tracking devices (健康追踪装置) often suggest we take 10,000 steps a day. But the goal of taking 10,000 steps, which many of us believe is scientific, in fact comes by accidents and history rather than research.
The 10,000-steps target became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, mass-produced a pedometer(计步器) with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, looked like a walking man. It also translated as “10,000-steps meter,” creating a walking aim that, through the decades, somehow has been accepted widely.
But today’s best science suggests we do not need to take 10,000 steps a day for our health or longevity. A 2019 study by Dr. Lee and her colleagues found that women in their 70s who take as few as 4,400 steps a day reduced their risk of early death by about 40 percent, compared to women completing 2,700 or fewer steps a day. The risks for early death continued to drop among the women walking more than 5,000 steps a day, but benefits plateaued(处于停滞状态)at about 7,500 daily steps. In other words, older women who completed fewer than half of the mythic(神话的)10,000 daily steps tended to live longer than those who covered even less ground.
Another study last year of almost 5,000 middle-aged men and women found that 10,000 steps a day are not a requirement for longevity. In that study, people who walked for about 8,000 steps a day were half as likely to die early from heart disease or any other cause as those who walked 4,000 steps a day.
According to recent estimates, most adults in Western nations average fewer than 5,000 steps a day. The good news is that increasing our current steps by even a few thousand additional ones most days could be an achievable goal, Dr. Lee said. If, like many people, we currently take about 5,000 steps a day during the course of everyday activities like shopping and housework, adding the extra 2,000 to 3,000 steps would take us to a total of between 7,000 and 8,000 steps most days, which, Dr. Lee said, seems to be the step-count sweet spot.
1. Which of the following is true about the 10,000-steps target?| A．It is scientific. | B．It has been proved. |
| C．It was created accidentally. | D．It was put forward by a Japanese. |
| A．fitness | B．ill-health |
| C．short life | D．long life |
| A．Less than 3000 | B．About 4000 |
| C．About 7000 | D．Over10,000 |
| A．A science report | B．A news report |
| C．A health magazine | D．A textbook |
