1 . The Summer VolunTeen Program
This program at Brevard Zoo is a 10-week seasonal position that runs from May 31 through early August. Once selected into the program, VolunTeens receive 2 days of training on the first weekend of May, 2021. Upon the completion of training, VolunTeens will be given their official assignment (10 days minimum, either 2 weeks of full-day camp or a single day from Monday to Friday each week, Saturday/Sunday available upon request). Schedules vary, but most assignments run from 9:00 am to 3:00pm. VolunTeens may sign up for additional days as they choose.
Important requirements
The program is for teens between the ages of 13 to 17 who are interested in working with the public. Applicants must be 13 years old by April 1, 2021. And they are supposed to know well about various animals and their living habits. Once accepted, VolunTeens must pay membership fee of $25.00. This covers the costs of a teen manual(手册), a T-shirt and various supplies. VolunTeens are also required to participate in a conservation event.
VolunTeen positions are temporary; however, interested teens are encouraged to apply for the full Zoo Teen Program in the fall. VolunTeen participants are allowed to miss two of their assigned volunteer days on account of summer vacations. On the third miss, VolunTeens may be dismissed from the program. Besides, the program does not provide make-up days and it does not allow switching volunteer days with another VolunTeen.
Benefits
Many students are able to use their volunteer experience to meet the community service requirement for the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship Program. Depending on their school, students may receive credits for their volunteer hours. Volunteers also have the opportunity to work with Education Department staff members and the public, gaining valuable skills for a variety of careers. Making new friends, earning potential employment references, gaining lots of experience and a sense of accomplishment are just a few more reasons to apply!
1. On which of the following days will VolunTeens be trained?| A．May 1&2. | B．May 15 & 16. | C．August 7 &8. | D．August 14&15. |
| A．They need to pay an annual membership fee of $25.00. |
| B．They have to work at the zoo for at least ten weeks. |
| C．They should have a good knowledge of animals. |
| D．They must reach the age of 13 by May31, 2021. |
| A．To encourage teenagers to be a volunteer. |
| B．To explain how to apply for a scholarship. |
| C．To stress the benefits of visiting a local zoo. |
| D．To offer some useful advice to communities. |
2 . It's good to share, right? Growing up as kids we are told to share our toys and not be selfish. We also live in an age where discussing our feelings is encouraged. But when does it all become too much? With new fashion trending all the time, such as dance challenges and wearing a pillow as a dress, the question is: when can sharing become oversharing on social media?
What is oversharing? The term has become associated with social media, but it doesn't only belong to this platform. Imagine you head to a party and you meet someone. Within five minutes they have given away details about their personal life. While some of us may try to escape these people, according to marriage therapist Carolyn Cole, this form of oversharing could come from a strong desire to connect with someone. But how does this translate to social media?
Dr. Christopher Hand, a lecturer in internet psychology, says the more details people disclose, the less sympathy we express when things go wrong. This could be due to a belief that we attract our own negative experiences the more we share them. It seems that the idea of searching for sympathy by oversharing, is generally viewed as negative rather than the cry for help it could actually be.
However, Dr Hand's research also seems to suggest that the more positive posts we share on a platform, the more socially attractive we become. Even back in 2015, Gwendolyn Seidman PhD, said that we should avoid complaining and being negative online. We are supposed not to show off, as it's now known—especially about our love lives. It makes sense—if your date is going 'that well', would you really have time to share a photo with text?
So, how can you know if you are oversharing? Well, why not ask your friends in real life. They would probably be more than happy to tell you if your posts about your breakfast or your complaint about your lack of money really are too much.
1. Why do some people try to overshare at parties?| A．Because they want to catch others' attention. |
| B．Because they just want to show off something. |
| C．Because they have a strong desire to pour out their emotions. |
| D．Because they may expect to make a connection with someone. |
| A．explore | B．expose | C．display | D．discuss |
| A．We will become more socially attractive if we post more on a platform. |
| B．We tend to show sympathy when things go wrong. |
| C．We may be considered negative when seeking for sympathy by oversharing. |
| D．We can show off something positive especially about our love lives. |
| A．To inform. | B．To inspire. | C．To advertise. | D．To condemn. |
3 . Tired of your quiet day-to-day life? How about leaving your computer games behind and taking up an extreme sport?
You can ride a bicycle, right? In that case you’re halfway to becoming a mountain biker. All you have to do is take your bike off the road and try some hilly areas. Mountain biking was developed in California in the 1970s and became an Olympic sport in 1996.
Not challenging enough? Skydivers jump from planes at a height of 1,000 to 4,000 meters. You have to be fit but there’s no age limit with this sport. For example, Dilys Price from Cardiff went on her first jump aged 54. The minute she came down, she wanted to go up again. She said: “It was so attractive”.
Some adventures have invented base jumping, in which people jump from tall structures, such as buildings or bridges, with a parachute. Many of their jumps aren’t legal, especially in the cities.Dan Witchalls has jumped off The Shard —London’s 310 meter-high building four times.He says, “Base jumping is scarier than jumping out of a plane. In a plane there is no sense of height, but when you are standing on the edge of the building you can see people and cars, the experience makes it very real.”
It seems there’s no shortage of imagination when it comes to risking life to look cool and get the heart beating wildly. Surfing, diving, rock climbing ...And how about extreme ironing? That is, pressing your clothes on top of a mountain! Extreme ironing is said to have been created in the 1990s in England by a man who saw a large amount of wrinkled clothes and felt bored when doing the cloth ironing. That man was Phil Shaw. For him, the excitement of this sport comes from looking at the viewers’ faces. Shaw says, “Sometimes they look confused; sometimes they laugh. It’s fun to see how people react to it.”
1. What does the author think about mountain biking?| A．A bit boring. | B．Challenging indeed. |
| C．Great fun. | D．Not very hard. |
| A．Skydivers have to be very healthy. | B．Skydiving is not challenging enough. |
| C．Elderly people can also take up skydiving. | D．People can easily become crazy about skydiving. |
| A．The sense of height. | B．Base jumping experience. |
| C．The edge of the building. | D．Jumping out of a plane. |
| A．He liked ironing clothes. | B．He wanted to make clothes ironing more fun. |
| C．He enjoyed different looks on people's faces. | D．He had a good view standing on top of a mountain. |
4 . Did you know it’s possible to swim with whales in the ocean while lying on a hospital bed? Have you imagined experiencing your 74th birthday as a 20-something? Medical virtual reality is an area with interesting an attractive possibilities. Although the field is brand new, there are already great examples of VR having a positive effect on health care. Here are some.
Have you ever lain down on a hospital bed counting the days until you leave the hospital? Brennan Spiegel and his team at the Cedarssinai hospital in Los Angeles introduced VR worlds to their patients to help them reduce stress and pain. With the special glasses, they could escape the four walls of the hospital and enjoy amazing scenery in part in the work of an art studio or swim together with whales in the ocean. So the hospital experience is improved.
As we know, the experience in a hospital is even more stressful for small children who miss their parents and friends. Now, a Dutch company made their dream possible. Through a smart and virtual glasses, VisitU makes live contact possible with a 360-degree camera at the patients’ home, school or special occasions like a birthday celebration or a football game. Though staying in hospital, young patients can relax and still enjoy their lives.
Did you wonder what it feels like to grow old? Embodied Labs created “We Are Alfred” by using VR to show young medical students what ageing means. Everyone can be the imagined Alfred for 7 minutes, and experience what it feels like to live as a 74-year-old man. Thus it's possible to solve the disconnection between young doctors and elderly patients due to their huge age difference.
Mindmotionpro, produced by the Swiss Mindmaze allows patients with a brain injury to “practice” how to lift their arms or move their fingers with the help of virtual reality. The app makes the practice of repetitive movements fun for patients. The mental effort helps their damaged nervous systems to recover much faster than lying helplessly in bed.
1. What is implied in the questions raised in paragraph 1?| A．The characters of medical VR. | B．The function of medical VR. |
| C．The popularity of medical VR. | D．The imagination about medical VR. |
| A．Being given a smart phone. | B．Having fun in the hospital. |
| C．Having access to various activities. | D．Being together with familiar people. |
| A．To make doctors trust their patients |
| B．To help young doctors know much about elderly patients . |
| C．To increase doctors’ interest in their work . |
| D．To help doctors experience the life of an elder. |
| A．Spiegel’ special glasses. | B．The application of VisitU. |
| C．The use of MindMotionPro. | D．The creation of “We Are Alfred”. |
5 . A study of more than five million books, both fiction and non-fiction, has found a marked decline in the use of emotional words over time. The researchers form the University of Bristol used Google Ngram Viewer, an online database for finding the frequency of terms in scanned books, to look for more than 600 particular words identified as representing anger, dislike, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.
They found that almost all of the categories showed a drop in these “mood words” over time. Only in the category of fear was there an increase in usage.
“It is a steady and continuous decline,” said Dr Alberto Acerbi. He assumed that the result might be explained by a change in the position occupied by literature, in a crowded media landscape. “One thing could be that in parallel to books the 20th century saw the start of other media. Maybe these media—movies, radio, drama—had more emotional content than books.”
Although both joy and sadness followed the general downwards trend, the research, published in the journal PLOS One, found that they also exhibited another interesting behavior: the ratio (比率) between the two varied greatly, apparently mirroring historical events. During the Roaring Twenties the joy-to-sadness ratio reached its highest point that would not occur again until before the recent financial crash. Then, in 1941, the ratio plunged at the height of World War II.
Nevertheless, the researchers held a reserved opinion about their claim that their result reflected wider social trends. In the paper, they even argue that the opposite could be true. “It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression (压抑) of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing ‘filled with romance’… perhaps,” they conclude, “songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”
1. The study was carried out by way of_________.| A．scanning the books with an online scanner | B．counting the number of words in the books |
| C．searching digitized texts for emotional words | D．analyzing different topics of the books |
| A．Usage decreased in all the categories of mood words. |
| B．Usage of most mood words kept falling over time. |
| C．The decline was caused by the rise of other media. |
| D．The unfavorable position of literature led to the decline. |
| A．increased | B．changed | C．dropped | D．twisted |
| A．their research result reflected wider social trends. |
| B．their research result was the contrary of social trends. |
| C．there was a suppression of desire in Elizabethan English life. |
| D．catwalk models reflect the population better than songs and books. |
6 . Vegetable gardens may not be as visually pleasing as the variety of flowers, but Floridians looking to save some green by growing their own salad fixings can soon do so without fear. Gov. Ron DeSantis this week signed a law that bans local governments from carrying orders against homeowners from raising veggies in their yards.
The law, which takes effect July 1, puts an end to that particular power of towns and cities across the state to prohibit vegetable gardens for “aesthetic（审美的）purposes”.
The issue became a cause after a couple living in Miami Shores Village opposed the decision of a $ 50 a day fine for growing vegetables in their front yard, as they’d done for years.
Hermine Ricketts and her husband Tom Carroll fought City Hall in a case that wound its way up the state’s court system, with judges consistently ruling against their money-saving and health-conscious project.
After the Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of Miami Shores’ right to control design and landscaping standards, the couple replaced their vegetables with pink flamingos (红鹳花) .
Their cause was not lost, however. State lawmakers proposed and passed a law that effectively voids the court rulings, with Rob Bradley, who sponsored the bill, reportedly calling the village’s action a “vast overreach”.
The lawmaker noted the difficulty that many families experience getting fresh and affordable food, calling bans against vegetable and fruit gardens ridiculous.
About a third of all households in the U. S. grow some of their own food, according to the National Gardening Association. The group says a 600-square-foot garden that costs around $ 70 a year to keep can grow 300 pounds of fresh produce worth about $ 600 annually.
1. Why will some Floridians plant salad fixings?| A．To protect the environment. | B．To beautify their home. |
| C．To build their own gardens. | D．To cut daily expenses. |
| A．They started a public health-conscious campaign. |
| B．They never gave in to the Miami Shores’ demand. |
| C．They paid a $50 daily fine to Miami Shores Village. |
| D．They were not backed by the Florida Supreme Court. |
| A．It’s sensible. | B．It’s ridiculous. |
| C．It’s ambitious. | D．It’s costly. |
7 . Volunteer Day
What better way is there to enjoy your own hobbies while helping others at the same? Come to Volunteer Day and choose which activity you’d like to join for the day.
See below for a list of volunteer opportunities for Volunteer Day so you can begin thinking about which activity you might want to join.
A list of volunteer activities:
Plant flowers: Do you enjoy being outside in nature? City Parks Association has many great opportunities for people who love to be outdoors. Help plant flowers and bushes in city parks, help lay paths at Cave Springs Park, or help pick up rubbish around the river banks. These activities are very active, so remember to be prepared with plenty of drinking water!
Play with animals: Do you love animals? Lovely Friends is an organization that visits local animal shelters and provides volunteers to spend time with the animals while their cages are being cleaned. Play with puppies, snuggle with cats, or hand-feed rabbits.
Paint houses: Do you enjoy making art? If so, this volunteer opportunity might be just right for you! Happy Homes is a local organization that provides home repairs for needy people in the form of painting. For elderly or physically disabled people who cannot do repairs to their homes, Happy Homes provides volunteer painters to repaint old homes, outside or in. Happy Homes also provides painters to create beautiful wall paintings inside schools or community centers.
1. An outdoor lover probably takes part in _______.| A．Plant flowers | B．Paint houses |
| C．Read to children | D．Play with animals |
| A．Read books to children. |
| B．Spend time with animals. |
| C．Help plant bushes in parks. |
| D．Pick up garbage along the river. |
| A．educate children | B．attract volunteers |
| C．comfort the elderly | D．encourage the disabled |
8 . Modern medicine’s ability to keep us alive makes it tempting to think human evolution may have stopped. But if we look at the rate of our DNA’s evolution, we can see that human evolution hasn’t stopped – it may even be happening faster than before.
Evolution is a gradual change to the DNA of a species over many generations. It can occur by natural selection, when certain traits created by genetic changes help an organism survive or reproduce. Such genes are thus more likely to be passed on to the next generation, so they increase in frequency in a population. Gradually, these changes and their associated traits become more common among the whole group.
By looking at global studies of our DNA, we can see evidence that natural selection has recently made changes and continues to do so. Though modern healthcare disrupts a key driving force of evolution by keeping some people alive longer, in countries without access to good healthcare, populations are continuing to evolve. Survivors of infectious disease outbreaks drive natural selection by giving their genetic resistance to offspring. Our DNA shows evidence for recent selection for resistance of killer diseases like Lassa fever and malaria. Selection in response to malaria remains in regions where the disease remains common.
Humans are also adapting to their environment. Gene change allowing humans to live at high altitudes have become more common in populations in Tibet, Ethiopia, and the Andes. The spread of genetic changes in Tibet is possibly the fastest evolutionary change in humans, occurring over the past 3,000 years. This rapid increase in frequency of a mutated gene that increases blood oxygen content gives locals a survival advantage in higher altitudes, resulting in more surviving children.
Diet is another source for adaptations. Studies show that natural selection favoring a change allowing adults to produce lactase – the enzyme (酶) that breaks down milk sugars – is why some groups of people can digest milk. Over 80 per cent of northwest Europeans can, but in parts of East Asia, where milk is much less commonly drunk, an inability to digest lactose is the norm. Like high altitude adaptation, selection to digest milk has evolved more than once in humans and may be the strongest kind of recent selection.
Yet, despite these changes, natural selection only affects about 8 per cent of our genome. But scientists can’t explain why some genes are evolving much faster than others. We measure the speed of gene evolution by comparing human DNA with that of other species. One fast-evolving gene is human accelerated region 1 (HAR1), which is needed during brain development. A random section of human DNA is on average more than 98 per cent identical to the chimp comparator, but HAR1 is so fast evolving that it’s only around 85 per cent similar. Though scientists can see these changes are happening – and how quickly – we still don’t fully understand why fast evolution happens to some genes but not others.
1. Which of the following statements may the author agree with?| A．Evolution occurs among several people overnight. |
| B．Genes may change and some are beneficial to people’s lives. |
| C．Evolution is done when the whole population possesses a certain gene. |
| D．The changed genes leading to higher survival rates are chosen deliberately. |
| A．explains | B．causes | C．upsets | D．heals |
| A．some people can resist infectious diseases like malaria |
| B．children in Tibet tolerate living environments with thin air |
| C．northwestern Europeans digest lactose better than East Asians |
| D．the human gene HAR1 resembles that of a chimp to a lesser extent |
| A．What Is Natural Selection? |
| B．Are Humans Still Evolving? |
| C．Why Will Certain Genes Evolve? |
| D．How Do Mutated Genes Function? |
9 . I took a deep breath and walked through the front door, my arms full of groceries. A challenge lay ahead of me, someone who could hardly boil water: cooking the Easter Sunday dinner. What if I made everyone sick? It could truly be our family’s last super meal.
Making the holiday meal was my brother’s job, not mine. I could never fill his shoes. Peter had died in September at the age of 45 from a heart attack, but he’d been a natural in the kitchen all his life. He planned every course in detail, from the crescent rolls to the Dutch apple pie.
My family was lost without him, and we went out to dinner for Thanksgiving and ordered pizza for Christmas. By the time Easter rolled around, though, I couldn’t bear the idea of another holiday surrounded by takeout (外卖食品) boxes. Peter would have hated that. To him, there was nothing more important than a meal made with love. So I convinced Mom that we should cook Easter dinner together. But we were terrible cooks.
I had been thinking what to cook for Easter dinner. I’d bitten off more than I could chew. No one could do this half as well as Peter.
I stepped into the family room. Mom was still at church, but her newspaper was opened on the coffee table, to the sports section, as usual. She was a huge Notre Dame women’s basketball fan, and the featured story was about the forward Devereaux Peters. I read the headline and nearly dropped my grocery bags, Filling Peters’ Shoes.
That afternoon, cooking in the kitchen, I didn’t feel so alone. Mom and I pulled together and the Easter feast was not that bad. The ham may have been a little dry, but it was all made with love— just like Peter would have wanted.
1. What would Peter have preferred to do if holidays had come?| A．To go out to have dinner. | B．To order pizza. |
| C．To show off his cooking skills. | D．To cook a big dinner for his family. |
| A．the Easter dinner was the family’s last dinner |
| B．Mom persuaded the author to cook the Easter dinner |
| C．Peter enjoyed cooking a dinner with love |
| D．their Easter dinner this year was a complete failure |
| A．she wasn’t confident in cooking the Easter dinner |
| B．she was not able to eat a lot of food |
| C．the Easter dinner made her sick |
| D．she couldn’t cook the dinner alone |
| A．Cooking in the Kitchen | B．Filling Peter’s Shoes |
| C．Happy Easter Day | D．Terrible Cooks |
10 . Our ability to collect data gets far ahead of our ability to fully use it, yet data may hold the key to solving some of the biggest global challenges facing us today.
Take, for instance, the frequent outbreaks of waterborne diseases as a consequence of war or natural disasters. The most recent example can be found in the country, where roughly 10,000 new suspected cases of cholera(霍乱) are reported each week — and history is filled with similar stories. What if we could better understand the environmental factors that contributed to the disease, predict which communities are at higher risk, and put in place protective measures to stop the spread? Answers to this question and others like it could potentially help us prevent a catastrophe.
As a big data scientist, I studied data from wide-ranging, public sources to identify patterns, hoping to predict trends that could be a threat to global security. Various data streams are important because the ground truth data (such as surveys) is often delayed, limited, incorrect or, sometimes, nonexistent.
For example, knowing the incidence(发生率) of mosquito-borne disease in communities would help us predict the risk of mosquito-spread disease such as dengue, the leading cause of illness and death in the tropics. However, mosquito data at a global (and even national) level is not accessible.
To address this gap, we’re using other sources such as satellite pictures, climate data and population information to forecast the risk of dengue. Specifically, we had success in predicting the spread of dengue in Brazil at the regional, state and city level using these data streams as well as clinical observation data and online searchers that used terms related to the disease. While our predictions aren’t perfect, they show promise.
Similarly, to forecast the flu season, we have found that online searches can complement(补充) clinical data. Because the rate of people searching the internet for flu symptoms often increases during their beginning, we can predict a sharp increase in cases where clinical data delays. All of this shows the potential of big data. The information is there; now it’s time to use it.
1. What do the examples in paragraphs 2 and 4 show?| A．Big data is still hard to get and use. |
| B．People aren’t skilled at dealing with big data. |
| C．Big data is not always an imagined method. |
| D．Catastrophes might be prevented with big data. |
| A．is a main form of multiple data streams |
| B．is an effective way to collect information |
| C．is sometimes unreliable and unavailable |
| D．is a timely alternative to multiple data streams |
| A．The lack of big data on mosquitoes. |
| B．The lack of different data streams. |
| C．The risk of an outbreak of a disease. |
| D．The ignorance of how a disease spreads. |
| A．How do we collect and use data? |
| B．What are the challenges facing us now? |
| C．How can big data help save the world? |
| D．What is the answer to preventing catastrophes? |
