1 . Smartphone Bans in School
Today's students all over the world are losing an hour a week of productivity due to their smartphone activity.
That is what two researchers from the London School of Economics are arguing with their new study that examined 130,000 students in 91 British schools that employed various smartphone-use policies. Then, they looked at how their respective students performed in 16-year-olds' national exams.
In what may not come as a surprise to some, researchers Richard Murphy and Louis-Philippe Beland found that as schools' phone policies evolved since 2001, with some choosing to completely ban smartphones, school test scores improved by an average of 6.4 percent. The increase in scores from underachieving students was even more significant as they saw their scores increase by an average of 14 percent.
“The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy," the researchers told CNN. "We found the effect of banning phones for these students was the same as an additional hour a week in school, or increasing the school year by five days."
Professor Murphy and Beland said their study does not mean that smartphones and other technology have no place in assisting learning.
“There are, however, potential drawbacks to new technologies," they told CNN, citing the temptation to text, play games or chat on social media. Therefore, smartphones will not be completely out of classrooms anytime soon. Smartphone ownership among young people and children has skyrocketed in the past few years. Pew Research and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University reported that as of 2013, 78 percent of teens aged 12 to 17 owned a cellphone, 47 percent of which were smartphones.
The use of smartphones in schools is a controversial topic. Parents want to be able to reach their children while teachers complain about the effect they have on classes.
In March, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ended a decade-long city-wide ban on smartphones in public schools and left them to make up their own rules.
But Murphy and Beland said the decision may not have a good result.
“Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in schools. So by allowing phones in schools, New York may unintentionally increase the inequalities of outcomes.”
1. Which of the following is TRUE about the research?| A．It examined 130,000 underachieving students. |
| B．It proves that smartphones are no good for students' studies. |
| C．Smartphone ownership among teens aged 12 to 17 amounted to about 50 percent. |
| D．In schools with smartphone bans, scores of the underachieving students increased by 14%. |
| A．Improved. | B．Interested. | C．Assisted. | D．Affected. |
| A．lose about an hour every day |
| B．relatively lose five days for learning |
| C．increase their scores by an average of 6.4 percent |
| D．decrease their scores by an average of 14 percent |
| A．Smartphone bans in schools are beneficial. |
| B．Smartphones cause students many problems. |
| C．Some students use smartphones too much. |
| D．Heavy smartphone use can harm students' learning abilities. |
2 . The term "adulting" started as a sort of joke-whenever a millennial(千禧一代)would do something age-acceptable, this was an act of "adulting". Now, though, millennials obviously require training in being an adult.
Rachel Flehinger has founded an Adulting School, which includes online courses on simple sewing, conflict solution and cooking. The cause for such classes is that many millennials haven't left childhood homes-in America 34 percent of adults aged 18 to 34 still lived with their parents as of 2015, up from 26 percent ten years before.
There's a good deal of truth to this. If you're living at home,with Mom and Dad doing their best to spoil（溺爱）you, you're less likely to know how to do laundry, cook or make the bed. Dependency breeds enervation.
But living at home doesn't necessarily lead to dependency. As of 1940, more than 30 percent of 25-to-29-year-olds lived at home with parents or grandparents.They were adulting, even while living at home. Parents expected their kids to do chores, to prepare for life. Instead of blaming living at home, then, we have to blame our style of parenting. The truth is that we've simply become lazier as parents.
So what's the real problem?
We're more likely to let our kids lie on a sofa than tell them to get a job and pay rent. We don't push our kids to build families of their own, as life spending has increased. Americans aren't expected to start building a life, particularly middle-and-upper-class Americans, until they're nearing their 30s. Then the question is how we can encourage young people to "adult" in non-circumstance-driven fashion.
1. What does the last sentence "Dependency breeds enervation" in the third paragraph mean?| A．Present kids are too lazy to do housework. |
| B．Parents would like to do housework by themselves. |
| C．Kids depend on their parents. |
| D．Dependency makes kids unable to do things. |
| A．Millennials would like to be trained in being an adult. |
| B．Millennials don't adult because they still live in their childhood homes. |
| C．Parents are too lazy to do chores. |
| D．In the 1940s kids were adulting even when they were living at home. |
| A．Millennials should leave home early to adult. |
| B．"Adulting" is hard mostly because parents hardly push their children into society. |
| C．Americans aren't expected to start building a life until they're nearing their 30s. |
| D．Adulting schools with online courses are popular. |
| A．The government should put off the age of adulthood. |
| B．Parents should leave kids in charge of society. |
| C．Parents should put responsibility on young people. |
| D．Pushing kids to adult is painful for parents. |
3 . Piaget’s theory of cognitive (认知) development is a theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. It was first created by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget(1896-1980). The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually come to acquire, construct, and use it. Piaget’s theory is mainly known as a developmental stage theory.
To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience He believed that children construct an understanding of the world around them, experience differences between what they already know and what they discover in their environment and then adjust their ideas accordingly. Besides, Piaget claimed that cognitive development is at the center of the human organism, and language is depending on knowledge and understanding acquired through cognitive development.
Piaget’s earlier work received the greatest attention. Child-centered classrooms and “open education” are direct applications of Piaget’s views. Despite its huge success, Piaget’s theory is not perfect and Piaget has recognized it himself: for example, the theory supports sharp stages rather than continuous development.
Piaget noted that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change. Reality is defined (给...下定义) in reference to the two conditions that define dynamic systems, Specifically, he argued that reality involves transformations and states. Transformations refer to all manner of changes that a thing or person can experience States refer to the conditions or a appearances in which things or persons can be found between transformations. For example, there might be changes in shape or form, in size, or in placement or location in space and time. Thus, Piaget argued, if human intelligence is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and the static aspects of reality.
1. What does the underlined “it” in the first paragraph refer to?| A．The knowledge itself. | B．Cognitive development. |
| C．The theory. | D．The development of human intelligence. |
| A．wasn’t well received in the beginning | B．is an application of “open education” |
| C．comes with some limitations | D．is about human nature and development |
| A．Space and time. | B．The conditions and the appearances. |
| C．Changes in shape and form. | D．Transformations and states. |
| A．Piaget’s contribution to a theory. | B．Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. |
| C．The development of Piaget’s theory. | D．The applications of Piaget’s theory. |
4 . Imagine this: you walk into work and the camera above the doors scans your face, opening them automatically without you lifting a finger. Oh, but you need to run to the chemist's at lunch. You walk up to a camera, and your prescription（药方）is deposited in front of you. After work, you look at your face in the mirror, and it reminds you to wear sun-cream the next day. Sounds pretty good, right?
Now imagine this: when you are walking down the street, a pair of policemen pull their guns and tell you to drop to the ground. After several days in jail, they let you know you were misidentified as a violent criminal on the loose. Regardless of your innocence, you're in the system. Now wherever you go, cameras that capture you will alert police to watch out for you. Even worse, as you enter stores, the facial recognition system lets the staff know a recently arrested individual has entered the building. Doesn't sound so good?
As fantastical as either of those pictures might seem, it's quite possible that this will be the future we're headed towards. The "benefits" of the technology are already being implemented by airlines, as seen by JetBlue Airways. Rather than scanning a boarding pass or handing over a passport, you simply stare into a camera and you're identified. This does save time and make processes the best possible, but it raises the question: do you have the right to your own face? Who is responsible for the protection of this information? Can I even remove my face from this database and just go the old-fashioned way?
We humans have the never-ending need to make things smoother, better and faster. This desire has helped drive the remarkable progress we have achieved as a society. However, it's time to take a step back and ask some necessary questions. We need to discuss whether we actually need the extensive use of facial recognition technology and how to ensure law enforcement (执行) doesn't abuse this technology. If we act now, I believe we can succeed in preventing technology companies from infiltrating（潜入）every aspect of our lives. If we don't, though, I fear the worst.
1. What does the underlined word "fantastical" probably mean?| A．Unreal. | B．Optimistic. | C．Reasonable. | D．Unbearable. |
| A．Inequality of rights. | B．Disorder of society. |
| C．Violation of privacy. | D．Denial of responsibility. |
| A．Improper enforcement of laws. | B．People's lack of awareness. |
| C．Ignorance of the technology. | D．Companies' pursuit of profit. |
| A．How do we live safely with facial recognition technology? |
| B．Are we prepared for the use of facial recognition technology? |
| C．What will the future be like without facial recognition technology? |
| D．Can we prevent the development of facial recognition technology? |
5 . How can we possibly cope with the large amount of information about virus spread, canceled plans and uncertainty about the future? Some people are buried in the fear, anxiety and sadness, checking news sites and social media constantly. Others try to be prevented from knowing it all and ignore the outside world.
There's a third option, though. Rather than fully getting involved in the negative or ignoring it, we can do our best to experience joy alongside everything else that is sad in the world. In fact, research that and others have conducted suggests that allowing the two different emotions to coexist may actually benefit us in the long run.
Dr. Jeff Larsen and his colleagues invented an expression known as the “coactivation model of mixed emotions”, and the basic idea is that we may be able to deal with, and learn from negative emotions like sadness if we experience them concurrently with positive emotions like joy at the same time. Here, positive emotions provide a psychological buffer (缓冲),making it easier for people to deal with the things they don't want to face.
The comedian Mitch Hedberg proposed ananalogythat captures this essence quite well, noting that it would be cool if you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach. Then they would get there, and the carrot would say, “It's cool, he's with me.” Applied to our emotional lives, we could do a better job in digesting,processing gaining insight into the negative events in our lives if we could do so alongside the positive.
Several years ago, my partner Jon Adler and I set out to test this exact idea. Specifically, we looked at sample of adult volunteers who signed up for weekly mental , health therapy sessions. Between each week, they reported the feelings they were having and also took a few questionnaires that were meant to assess their overall health. This design allowed us to examine how different emotional experiences would impact mental health in a longitudinal fashion, over the course of 12 weeks.
It's worth noting first that everyone seemed to improve a bit as the weeks marched on:therapy helps and so does time. More to the point, though, mixed emotions at one time point were positively associated with improvements in psychological well-being at the next time point. The more of a mixture of, say, happiness and sadness someone experienced today, the better feeling they'd experience next week.
However, when we looked at mixed emotions that were experienced in a given week, they weren't associated with improved mental health in that same week.
The true benefit from mixed emotions may not happen immediately, but rather, likely happen sometime in the future.
1. What does the author recommend people do with a flood of bad news?| A．Take no notice of it at all. |
| B．Make better plans to fight against it. |
| C．Take in all of the negative emotions. |
| D．Get involved in the negative and enjoy happiness as well. |
| A．Mixed emotions remain to be proved. |
| B．The negative emotion is easy to deal with. |
| C．The positive emotion makes it easier for people to succeed. |
| D．Mixed emotions allow people to handle the negative better. |
| A．Exhibition. | B．Promotion. | C．Similarity. | D．Requirement. |
| A．To measure the volunteers health on the whole. |
| B．To record what the volunteers are experiencing. |
| C．To treat the mental diseases of the adults. |
| D．To over turn the theory co activation model of mixed emotions. |
| A．Ignore bad news completely to make you cutoff from outside and feel happy. |
| B．Make your negative emotions less severe by focusing on positive ones. |
| C．Negative emotions will eventually benefit people in the long run. |
| D．Positive and negative emotions can not coexist at the same time. |
6 . It has been four years since the Flashfood App was set to hit Canadian grocery stores and make it easier for shoppers to buy soon-to-expiry (保质期) food at a discount. Much to my delight, I heard it advertised recently on a radio station and figured it’s time for an update, especially since people became more aware of food waste’s role in the climate crisis.
The first thing I did was download the App. I hadn’t done it before because it was limited to a few locations, but now it’s all over Canada. I could see immediately that many brands of yogurt are all marked down 50 percent. Users pay for the food using the App, and then pick it up at a marked location in the store. There is no need for you to worry about them actually being bad.
It makes sense for retailers to get behind this App because it offers a win-win situation for everyone involved. Flashfood sells 75% of the products made available through its App while saving consumers an average of 50% on those grocery items, and it has 300 000 active users right now. That number is expected to grow naturally as Flashfood partners with more grocers.
“As a food retailer, we are in the business of providing food, not wasting it. The Flashfood program allows us to provide our customers with a convenient and environmentally sustainable (可持续的) way to purchase food. Loblaw sells 77% of the items it puts on Flashfood, moving an average of ＄800 to ＄1000 worth of goods weekly at each of its largest stores,” said Gord Chem, senior VP with Loblaw’s Real Canadian Superstores.
I love looking for discount deals at the grocery store and always keep an eye out for the hot pink clearance stickers. But it’s always random, and I never know what I’m going to get from week to week. The appeal of Flashfood is that I can see what’s available, pre-purchase it, and leave it off my shopping list.
1. What can we know about the food on the Flashfood?| A．It’s delivered directly to the customers. | B．Users can pay for it in the marked store. |
| C．Much of it is charged at half the price. | D．It’ll be a month away before it goes bad. |
| A．reliable | B．doubtful | C．creative | D．beneficial |
| A．By making a comparison. | B．By listing some examples. |
| C．By explaining the cause. | D．By introducing the result. |
| A．Customers can buy much cheaper food on a recent app. |
| B．Canadians have a smart approach to reducing food waste. |
| C．A win-win situation has been set for Canadians involved. |
| D．Canadians adopt a new way of protecting the environment. |
7 . “Do not tell anyone”. We often hear these words when someone tells us a secret. But keeping a secret is hard. We’re often tempted（引诱）to “spill the beans”, even if we regret it later.
According to the professor, Asim Shah, keeping a secret may well “become a burden”. This is because people often have an “eager and anxious urge（冲动）to share it with someone”. An earlier study, led by Anita, a scientist at the University of Notre Dame, US, suggested that keeping a secret could cause stress. People entrusted（托付）with secrets can suffer from depression, anxiety, and body aches, reported the Daily Mail.
Secrets are so often getting out. Why do people share them at all? Shah explained that people often feel that it will help them keep a person as a friend. Another reason people share secrets is guilt over keeping it from someone close to them. A sense of distrust can develop when people who are close do not share it with each other. “Keeping or sharing secrets often puts people in a position of either gaining or losing the trust of someone, ”according to Shah.
He added that talkative people could let secrets slip out. But this doesn’t mean that it is a good idea only to share secrets with quiet people. A quiet person may be someone who keeps everything inside. To tell such a person a secret may cause them stress, and make them talk about the secret.
Shah said that to judge whether to tell someone a secret, you’d better put yourself in their position, Think about how you would feel to be told that you mustn’t give the information away. Shah also recommended that if you accidentally give up someone’s secret you should come clean about it. Let the person know that their secret isn’t so secret anymore.
1. Why does the author say keeping a secret may “become a burden”?| A．Because people are born not to be able to keep secrets. |
| B．Because when people have secrets, their bodies ache. |
| C．Because keeping secrets is certain to cause depression. |
| D．Because keeping secrets could probably be harmful to health. |
| A．2. | B．3. | C．4. | D．5. |
| A．To fall by accident. | B．To let out secrets on purpose. |
| C．To spread secrets to everyone around. | D．To give away secrets unintentionally. |
| A．Quiet people are more likely to keep the secrets to themselves. |
| B．Sharing secrets helps establish friendship or get over the, sense of guilt. |
| C．Putting yourself in others’ shoes helps realize the importance of keeping secrets. |
| D．A person who is asked to keep a secret will suffer from psychological problems only. |
8 . The Ebro Delta, in Spain, famous as a battleground during the Spanish Civil War, is now the setting for a different contest, one that is making rice farmers fight against two enemies: the rice-eating giant apple snail, and rising sea levels. What happens here will have a bearing on the future of European rice production and the overall health of southern European wetlands.
Located on the Mediterranean, just two hours south of Barcelona, the Ebro Delta produces 120 million kilograms of rice a year, making it one of the continent’s most important rice-growing areas. As the sea creeps into these fresh-water marshes, however, rising salinity (盐度) is hurting rice production. At the same time, this sea-water also kills off the greedy giant apple snail, an introduced pest that feeds on young rice plants. The most promising strategy has become to play one enemy off against the other.
The battle is currently being waged on land, in greenhouses at the University of Barcelona. Scientists working under the banner “Project Neurice” are seeking varieties of rice that can withstand the increasing salinity without losing the absorbency that makes European rice ideal for traditional Spanish and Italian dishes.
“The project has two sides,” says Xavier Serrat, Neurice project manager and researcher at the University of Barcelona, “the short-term fight against the snail, and a mid- to long-term fight against climate change. But the snail has given the project greater urgency.”
Originally from South America, the snails were accidentally introduced into the Ebro Delta by Global Aquatic Technologies, a company that raised the snails for fresh-water aquariums (水族馆) but failed to prevent their escape. For now, the giant apple snail’s presence in Europe is limited to the Ebro Delta. But the snail continues its march to new territory, says Serrat. “The question is not whether it will reach other rice-growing areas of Europe, but when.”
Over the next year and a half investigators will test the various strains of salt tolerant rice they’ve bred. In 2018, farmers will plant the varieties with the most promise in the Ebro Delta and Europe’s other two main rice-growing regions along the Po in Italy, and France’s Rhone. A season in the field will help determine which, if any, of the varieties are ready for commercialization.
As an EU-funded effort, the search for salt-tolerant varieties of rice is taking place in all three countries. Each team is crossbreeding a local European short-grain rice with a long-grain Asian variety that carries the salt resistant gene. The scientists are breeding successive generations to arrive at varieties that incorporate salt tolerance but retain about 97 percent of the European rice genome (基因组).
1. Why does the author mention the Spanish Civil War at the beginning of the passage?| A．It has great impact on the lives of Spanish rice farmers. |
| B．It is of great significance in the records of Spanish history. |
| C．Rice farmers there are engaged in another kind of battle of similar importance. |
| D．Rice farmers there are experiencing the hardships of wartime. |
| A．Striking the weaker enemy first. | B．Killing two birds with one stone. |
| C．Eliminating the enemy one by one. | D．Using one evil to fight against the other. |
| A．It can survive only on southern European wetlands. |
| B．It will invade other rice-growing regions of Europe. |
| C．It multiplies at a speed beyond human imagination. |
| D．It was introduced into the rice fields on purpose. |
| A．Cultivating ideal salt-resistant rice varieties. |
| B．Increasing the absorbency of the Spanish rice. |
| C．Introducing Spanish rice to the rest of Europe. |
| D．Popularizing the rice crossbreeding technology. |
9 . LAS VEGAS — It was different in the light of day.
There was no “pop, pop, pop” of gunfire, no screams. Just a quiet lot of cars abandoned by those, like Kassidy Owen, who escaped with their lives.
“It’s strange to hear the silence,” Owen said, “because all I remember was the noise.”
The 22-year-old was one of dozens of concertgoers who returned to the scene of the Route 91 Harvest festival on Wednesday morning to fetch the vehicles they left behind as they fled from a gunman raining down bullets from high above in the tower of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino across the street.
Survivors of the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday needed their cars to move on with their lives -- to get back to work, to school, home. It was the first time they were returning to a scene that would forever change them, when joy and celebration and music turned into killing and horror.
Before they could move forward, they had to go back to the place where they thought they were going to die.
Owen had run to her car to hide and had tried to drive away, but she couldn’t. People were running, bodies dropped to the ground, and cars bottlenecked in the parking lot. During a brief pause after more than 10 minutes of gunfire, she worried the lights of her SUV made everyone inside a shining target.
“They’re shooting again!” her best friend’s brother screamed. “Turn off the car!”
That’s when she got out and fled.
“I just remember shutting the door and running,” Owen said.
Now, nearly three days later, she was back, sitting in the driver’s seat of her SUV. Her eyes were swollen and red. This was a long way from over.
“You just keep hearing the gunshots in your head,” Owen said.
1. Why did Kassidy Owen return to the scene of terror?| A．To get back her car for daily life. | B．To show sympathy to the victims. |
| C．To search for her missing friends. | D．To look into the cause of the shooting. |
| A．abandoned | B．jammed |
| C．stopped | D．left |
| A．Because she had escaped being caught. |
| B．Because she wanted to find the gunman. |
| C．Because she couldn’t rid herself of those terrible scenes. |
| D．Because she had saved others’ lives by turning off the car. |
| A．Going back to where they would die | B．Owen’s experience in Las Vegas |
| C．How to survive in a mass shooting | D．Return to the unforgettable scene |
10 . Recently, researchers at the University of Toronto figured out a way with a quick video selfie to accurately measure blood pressure with your smartphone’s camera by developing a technology known as transdermal optical imaging (TOI)(透皮光学成像).
Cameras on smartphones can catch red light reflected from hemoglobin (血红素）under our skin, which permits TOI to visualize and measure blood flow changes. Researchers measured the blood pressure of 1,328 Canadian and Chinese adults by getting two-minute videos of their faces on an iPhone. “From the video got by the technology, you can see how the blood flows in different parts of the face and through this flow, you can get a lot of information,” said Kang Lee, lead author of the study.
Lee also helped create an app called Anura, which allows people to try out the TOI software for themselves, giving them the ability to record a 30-second video of their face and receive measurements for stress levels and resting heart rate. Lee said more research was needed to make sure that the measurements were as accurate as possible, explaining that the study didn’t test people with very dark or very fair skin.
“In order to improve our app to make it usable, particularly for people with hypertension (高血压)，we need to collect a lot of data from them, which is very hard because a lot of them are already taking medicine,” Lee explained. “We cannot tell them not to take medicine, but from time to time, we get participants who don’t take medicine so we can get hypertensive people this way.”
The scientists said there were many potential applications of the technology, including providing health services for those who lived in remote areas.
1. What is mainly talked about in Paragraph 2？| A．Information offered by TOI. | B．New findings on hypertension. |
| C．How TOI is put into smart phones. | D．How the TOI technology works. |
| A．Living a life free from stress. | B．Improving the heart function gradually. |
| C．Accessing health services for free. | D．Knowing abnormal blood pressure earlier. |
| A．Equipping phones with better cameras. |
| B．Allowing phones to record longer videos. |
| C．Collecting data from more diverse samples. |
| D．Persuading participants not to take medicine. |
| A．To predict future applications of TOI. |
| B．To introduce TOI and an app related. |
| C．To describe functions of cameras on phones. |
| D．To evaluate the quality of an app called Anura. |
