1 . A crucial period for learning the rules and structure of a language lasts up to around age 17 or 18, say psychologist Joshua Hartshorne of MIT and his colleagues.
Previous research had suggested that grammar-learning ability developed in early childhood before hitting a dead end around age 5. However, Hartshorne’s team reports online in Cognition that people who started learning English as a second language in an English-speaking country by age 10 to 12 ultimately mastered the new tongue as well as folks who had learned English and another language at the same time from birth. Both groups, however, fell somewhat short of the grammatical fluency displayed by English-only speakers. After ages 10 to 12, new-to-English learners reached lower levels of fluency than those who started learning English at younger ages because time ran out when their grammar-absorbing ability fell starting around age 17.
Aiming for a sample of tens of thousands of volunteers, Hartshorne began by contacting friends on Facebook to take an online English grammar quiz, which used a person’s responses to guess his or her native language and dialect (方言) of English. Then volunteers filled out a questionnaire asking where they had lived, languages they had spoken from birth, the age at which they began learning English and the number of years they had lived in an English-speaking country.
In the end, the researchers analyzed responses of 669,498 native and nonnative English speakers. Statistical calculations focused on estimating at what ages people with varying amounts of experience peaking English reached peak grammar ability.
Researchers who study language learning regard the new study as fascinating, but exploratory. According to psycholinguist David Barner of the University of California, San Diego, Hartshorne’s team can’t yet say that language skill develops along a single timeline. Different elements of grammar, such as using correct word order or subjects and verbs that agree with one another, might be learned at different rates, Barner says. It’s also unclear whether the responses of volunteers to an online, 132-item grammar test reflect how well of poorly they actually speak English, he says.
What’s more, language learning involves more than a crucial period for acquiring grammar, cautions linguist David Birdsong of the University of Texas at Austin. For instance, growing up speaking two languages at once puts still poorly understood burdens on the ability to grasp grammar, he says.
In the new study, people who were bilinguals from birth fell short of peak English grammar scores achieved by English-only speakers. That’s consistent with evidence that bilinguals cannot easily turn off one language while speaking another, Birdsong says. Interactions between tongues spoken by one person may slightly depress how much can be learned about both languages, even if bilingual communication still reaches high levels, he suggests.
1. Hartshorne and his colleagues found that____ .| A．one reaches a higher level of fluency at age 10 |
| B．one learns a second language fastest at about age 12 |
| C．one gets a good grasp of English grammar before age 5 |
| D．one’s ability to master grammar declines at around age17 |
| A．social media |
| B．experiments in the lab |
| C．literature review |
| D．face-to-face interviews |
| A．language skill develops along a single timeline |
| B．online volunteers do not cover a wide enough range |
| C．different grammar items may be acquired at different paces |
| D．the quiz in the new study does not include enough questions |
| A．They can achieve a perfect grammar score. |
| B．Grammar learning is the biggest burden for them. |
| C．They are able to make a swift shift between languages. |
| D．Speaking two languages affects their language acquisition. |
2 . A study confirmed that the cracks found on Mars’s surface last year by the Curiosity Rover are evidence of ancient lakes that likely dried up about 3.5 billion years ago. The new study provides further evidence of what the climate on the Red Planet may have been like in its ancient past.
The study, published online in Geology, proved that cracks on Mars’s surface previously photographed by Curiosity are dry mud cracks which could have only been formed when wet ground was exposed to the air. This conclusion was based on an analysis of a single area of rock known as “Old Soaker.”
Researchers used the Curiosity rover and information from its many tools including the Mars Hand Lens Imager, ChemCam Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) and the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) to study both the physical appearance and the chemistry of the rock, which is described as no bigger than a coffee table.
The analysis showed that cracks on the rocks were formed by exposure to air, rather than heat or the flow of water. In addition, the shape of the cracks suggests it experienced a single drying event on the planet, rather than getting wet and drying over repeatedly. The position of the cracks, closer to the center of the ancient lake rather than alongside it, also suggests that the lake levels changed often, rising and falling over time.
“The mud cracks are exciting because they help us to understand this ancient lake system,” lead study author Nathaniel Stein, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said, referring to the ancient lake system on the planet.
Scientists have known of the existence of ancient water on Mars for years. A 2015 NASA study that measured water in Mars’s atmosphere suggested that ancient oceans may once have had more water than our own Arctic Ocean. However, because the planet has less gravity and a thinner atmosphere than Earth, this water evaporated(蒸发) into space over the course of several billion years.
1. What is the Curiosity Rover?| A．An organization. | B．A scientist. |
| C．A planet. | D．A machine. |
| A．The cracks are near the center of an ancient lake. |
| B．Mars was getting wet and drying more than once. |
| C．The lake level on Mars seldom changes over time. |
| D．The cracks on the rocks were formed by water flow. |
| A．Ancient water still exists on Mars now. |
| B．The gravity on Mars is stronger than that on Earth. |
| C．The atmosphere on Earth is thicker than that on Mars. |
| D．The ancient Arctic Ocean had more water than it has now. |
| A．Water on Mars. | B．A trip to Mars. |
| C．A study on Mars. | D．Cracks on Mars. |
3 . Pigeons in London have a bad reputation. Some people call them flying rats. And many blame them for causing pollution with their droppings. But now the birds are being used to fight another kind of pollution in this city of 8. 5 million.
“The problem for air pollution is that it’s been largely ignored as an issue for a long time,” says Andrea Lee, who works for the London-based environmental organization Client Earth. “People don’t realize how bad it is,and how it actually affects their health. ‘‘ London’s poor air quality is linked to nearly 10,000 early deaths a year. Lee says, citing report released by the city manager last year, “If people were better informed about the pollution they’re breathing,” she says,”they could pressure the government to do something about it. ‘‘
Nearby, on a windy hill in London’s Regent’s Park, an experiment is underway that could help-the first week of flights by the Pigeon Air Patrol. It all began when Pierre Duquesnoy, the director for DigitasLBi, a marketing firm, won a London Design Festival contest last year to show how a world problem could be solved using Twitter. Duquesnoy, from France, chose the problem of air pollution.
“Basically, I realized how important the problem was,v he says. “But also I realized that most of the people around me didn’t know anything about it. ‘‘ Duquesnoy says he wants to better measure pollution, while at the same time making the results accessible to the public through Twitter.
“So, “ he wondered, “how could we go across the city quickly collecting as much data as possible?” Drones ( 无人驾驶飞机)were his first thought. But it’s illegal to fly them over London. “But pigeons can fly above London,right?” he says. “They live -actually? they are Londoners as well. So, yeah, I thought about using pigeons equipped with mobile apps. And we can use not just street pigeons, but racing pigeons, because they fly pretty quickly and pretty low. “
So it might be time for Londoners to have more respect for their pigeons. The birds may just be helping to improve the quality of the city's air.
1. What can we infer about London’s air quality from paragraph 2?| A．Londoners are very satisfied with it. |
| B．The government is trying to improve it. |
| C．The government has done a lot to improve it. |
| D．Londoners should pay more attention to it. |
| A．entertain Londoners | B．solve a world problem |
| C．design a product for sale | D．protect animals like pigeons |
| A．Because they are too expensive | B．Because they fly too quickly. |
| C．Because they are forbidden. | D．Because they fly too high. |
| A．London’s New Pollution Fighter |
| B．London’s Dirty Secret |
| C．Clean Air in London |
| D．Causes of Air Pollution in London |
4 . 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. |
5 . When you start working on something but don’t finish it, thoughts of the unfinished work continue to jump into your mind even when you’ve moved on to other things. Psychologists refer to this psychological phenomenon as the Zeigarnik effect. The effect was first observed by a Russian psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik. While sitting in a busy restaurant in Vienna, she noted the waiters had better memories of unpaid orders. Once the bill was paid, however, the waiters had difficulty remembering the exact details of the orders.
In one of her studies, participants were asked to complete simple tasks such as putting together puzzles, or solving math problems. Half of the participants were interrupted halfway through these tasks. After an hour-long delay, Zeigarnik asked the participants to give an account of what they’d been working on. She discovered that those who had their work interrupted were twice as likely to remember what they had been doing as those who had actually completed the tasks.
We can use this effect to our advantage. For example, if you’re struggling to memorize something important, momentary interruptions might actually work to your advantage. Rather than simply remember the information over and over again, review it several times and then take a break. While you’re focusing on other things, you’ll find yourself mentally returning to the information you were studying.
We often put off tasks until the last moment, only completing them in a rush at the last possible moment. Unfortunately, this tendency can lead to heavy stress and even poor performance. One way to overcome this is to put the Zeigarnik effect to work. Start by taking the first step, no matter how small. Once you’ve begun，but not finished your work, you’ll find yourself thinking of the task until, at last, you finish it. You might not finish it all at once, but each small step you take puts you closer to your final goal.
1. What does the Zeigarnik effect refer to ?| A．Waiters tend to have good memories. |
| B．Once interrupted, one will forget things easily. |
| C．Most people can’t focus on one thing for a long time. |
| D．People remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones. |
| A．Describe their tasks. | B．Express their feelings. |
| C．Test their intelligence. | D．Design simple activities. |
| A．Repeat over and over again. | B．Divide up our study session. |
| C．Focus on several tasks at a time. | D．Have enough rest before studying. |
| A．How to get rid of heavy stress. |
| B．Why we should set a final goal. |
| C．How to break the habit of delaying work. |
| D．Why we always complete tasks in a rush. |
6 . I’ve spent two decades observing what makes people lucky and trying to help people increase their luck. I teach entrepreneurship (社会学). We know many new enterprises fail, and innovators (创业者)need luck.
With my students, I spend much time encouraging them to get out of their comfort zone and take some risks. I do this myself all the time. About a dozen years ago, during a flight, I decided to take a little risk. I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. I introduced myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. I learned all about the future of the publishing industry and we exchanged contact (联系) information. So about three quarters through the night, I decided to take another risk. I showed him a book plan I was doing in my class. Although he was very polite, he said it wasn’t right for us.
A couple of months later, I told him I was doing a project on transforming the book, the future of publishing and invited him to come to my class. So he gladly came to my class. We had a great experience. A few months later, I wrote to him again, sending a bunch of video clips (剪辑) from another project my students had made. He was so stricken by one of them that he thought there was a book in it. I was a little bit hurt, but it was all right. So I invited him and his colleagues to have lunch together. Later, one of his editors asked me if I had considered writing a book. And I pulled out the exact same plan I had showed his boss a year earlier. Within two years, my book had sold over a million copies.
1. We can infer from the author’s experience on the plane that .| A．the publisher was stricken by his book |
| B．that was his first experience by plane |
| C．the first risk during the night didn’t work out |
| D．the experience made him transform his book |
| A．To have their book published. | B．To help to increase his luck. |
| C．To assess their writing skills. | D．To help them see their strength. |
| A．Take the Lead | B．Everything is Possible |
| C．Win in Danger | D．Luck and Risk |
| A．Publishing books. | B．A series of small risks. |
| C．Being turned down frequently. | D．Meeting with the stranger on the plane. |
7 . Luis Reynoso says he’s always tried to get involved (牵涉) in his children’s education: attending meetings on school-improvement projects and providing classroom food. But when his youngest daughter’s school invited families to attend a nine-week program Let’s Change the Course organized by a leading education advocacy group here to learn about parenting and school participation, he realized his past efforts barely scratched the surface.
Each weekly session touched on different parenting themes, like setting up a special space at home for kids to do homework, like the importance of confidence. One of the most helpful sessions, he recalls, focused on what a child should know academically in each grade and how to talk to teachers about his daughter’s performance. “The workshops really woke me up,”says Mr. Reynoso.
Levels of parental participation in Mexican schools have long been low. Many people commonly believe a child's education is the school s job to get involved. In some parts of the country, a mother's or father's own lack of education can play into a sense that they have nothing to contribute. And even in private schools, where there might be more adults with fixed jobs and the participation is very rare, with some parents viewing their tuition (学费) bill as their educational contribution. There are also cases where the schools themselves ignore the potential of parents in a child's education, discouraging communication between families and schools.
But the importance of family participation is something many non-profit, education advocates and recently the government are starting to home in on Mexico. Part of Mexico’s 2013 national education reform stresses the importance of parents playing a more active role in their child’s education, encouraging an increase in parental-participation programs, including Let’s Change the Course.
Susana Castellanos, headmaster of a school in Mexico City, says, “People are recognizing you have to work together to create happy successful citizens. It’s no longer acceptable to set apart the roles of teacher vs. parent vs. school headmaster.”
1. What does Reynoso mean by the underlined sentence in Paragraph 1?| A．His previous efforts were in vain. |
| B．He missed the key point of participation. |
| C．His daughter disagreed with what he did. |
| D．He failed to catch the importance of school. |
| A．The necessity to set up a space for kids to do homework. |
| B．The academic requirements for kids in different periods. |
| C．The importance of knowing children’s performance. |
| D．The ways to increase students’ confidence. |
| A．How to contribute more to children’s education. |
| B．How to know the levels of parental participation in Mexican schools. |
| C．Why schools failed to provide chances for parents to get involved, |
| D．Why parents played a less active role in school education in Mexico. |
| A．The number of parental-participation programs rose. |
| B．Many non-profit educational organizations were set up. |
| C．Teachers role in school education started to get increased. |
| D．Parents began to attach importance to children's education. |
8 . Learning a second language is tricky at any age and it only gets tougher the longer you wait to open that dusty French book. Now, in a new study, scientists have pinpointed the exact age at which your chances of reaching fluency in a second language seem to plummet: 10.
The study, published in the journal Cognition, found that it’s “nearly impossible” for language learners to reach native-level fluency if they start learning a second tongue after 10. But that doesn’t seem to be because language skills go downhill. “It turns out you’re still learning fast. It’s just that you run out of time, because your ability to learn starts dropping at around 17 or 18 years old,” says study co-author Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College.
Kids may be better than adults at learning new languages for many reasons. Children’s brains are more plastic than those of adults, meaning they’re better able to adapt and respond to new information. “All learning involves the brain changing,” Hartshorne says, “and children’s brains seem to be a lot more skilled at changing.”
Kids may also be more willing to try new things (and to potentially look foolish in the process) than adults are. Their comparatively new grasp on their native tongue may also be advantageous. Unlike adults, who tend to default (默认) to the rules and patterns of their first language, kids may be able to approach a new one with a blank slate (石板).
These findings may seem discouraging, but it was heartening for scientists to learn that the critical period for fluent language acquisition might be longer than they previously thought. Some scientists believed that the brief window closes shortly after birth, while others stretched it only to early adolescence. Compared to those estimates, 17 or 18 — when language learning ability starts to drop off — seems relatively old.
“People fared better when they learned by immersion (沉浸), rather than simply in a classroom. And moving to a place where your desired language is spoken is the best way to learn as an adult. If that’s not an option, you can mimic an immersive environment by finding ways to have conversations with native speakers in their own communities,” Hartshorne says. By doing so, it’s possible to become conversationally proficient — even without the advantage of a child’s brain.
1. The underlined word “plummet” in Paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to “__________”.| A．decrease | B．rise |
| C．end | D．vary |
| A．Children are too young to grasp a second language. |
| B．Age 10-18 is the best time to learn a second language. |
| C．Adults go beyond the critical period for learning a second language. |
| D．Communicating with native speakers enables you to master all the language skills. |
| A．Adults are less influenced by their mother tongues. |
| B．Adults spend more time responding to new information. |
| C．Adults are only too willing to experience something awkward in the process. |
| D．Adults prefer an immersive environment to a classroom in learning a second language. |
| A．the best age to learn a second language |
| B．the approaches to learning a second language |
| C．why kids learn a second language more easily than adults |
| D．whether adults can learn a second language like their younger selves |
9 . Store owners have been inventing new tricks to get consumers into their stores and purchasing their goods. Even as we find new strategies to resist, neuroscientists (神经科学家) are employed at marketing agencies across the country to best figure out what is going through a consumer’s brain at each point in the decision process.
We consumers overspend due to the fact that we have a fear of missing the really good deal or having to pay more for the same thing and lose money. Normally, the prefrontal cortex ( 前 额皮 层 ) controls our emotional reactions to things, and keeps us from acting unreasonably by calming down our fears. But an advertiser can disturb our prefrontal cortex just by displaying flashy deal signs, encouraging it to do math on how much money we might save now by buying more of something we don’t actually need yet.
Nostalgia, that regretful affection for past events, is another strong influencer during the holiday season, and it’s shaped by emotion. Emotion—whether good or bad—enhances the formation of memories, engaging more parts of the brain. So hearing a nephew singing a carol, for instance, might reawaken memories associated with that particular song in a much more powerful way than hearing that same nephew sing another song. These kinds of memories are brought back even more easily by sensory input. This might be why we are often greeted by a sensory reminder everywhere we go in a month.
Wherever you purchase gifts, there are social influences on what you buy as well. The holidays are a time when we are especially conditioned to pay more for the label because we’re buying gifts. Receiving a brand-name gift sends the message that “this person has spent more on me, so he or she must value me more.” And it makes sense. If two things seem pretty much the same, how do I know which to choose? Humans have survived as a social species, and we have to rely on each other. So when our brains are trying to make decisions, one of the shortcuts is to assume that if a lot of other people prefer something (and higher cost is often a predictor of that), then there must be a reason.
Much of our holiday spending is driven by unplanned purchases. Plan ahead, resist the urge to purchase in the moment, make notes for comparison shopping, and if the deal is actually good, then it will hold up to inspection and you’ll feel good about your purchases later. Before you blow your budget this season, remember that your brain might be fooling you into that next purchase.
1. From Paragraph 2, we learn that ______.| A．the prefrontal cortex is the calculation center |
| B．the common consumers always act unreasonably |
| C．the sight of flashy deal signs may fill consumers with fear |
| D．the advertisers make consumers pay more for the same thing |
| A．Creating a festival atmosphere. | B．Following the current fashion. |
| C．Preparing more free samples. | D．Offering a bigger discount. |
| A．They are more reliable. | B．They are a sign of social status. |
| C．They make people feel valued. | D．They are favored by most people. |
| A．buy in the moment | B．reduce our budget |
| C．return unnecessary products | D．make a plan in advance |
10 . The managing editor is usually the person in charge of the daytoday editorial process of a newspaper. He or she makes sure that the newspaper comes out on time each day and that costs are kept within a budget (预算). He or she is usually responsible for hiring and firing news room staff, and serves as the spokesperson for the newspaper. The managing editor may also be involved in story, photo and graphics (图形) selection, assignments, laying out pages, and editing copy and writing headlines.
The news editor is in charge of the news pages of the newspaper. He or she makes decisions on which stories are used and which are not. The news editor and his or her assistants also lay out pages of the paper.
The copy editor edits wire and local stories and writes headlines. The copy editor is often the last person to see a story before it actually appears in print.
The city editor makes sure that the news in the city is covered and that as many local stories as possible get into each edition.The city editor supervises (监督) the local general assignment, beat and speciality reporters.
The state editor supervises reporters who cover communities and areas outside the city but still within the circulation (流通) area of the newspaper.
The national editor supervises reporters in bureaus in cities outside the circulation area of the newspaper. Most newspapers rely on the wire services for national news, but some have correspondents who work in other cities and report to the national editor.
1. If you want to apply for a job in a newspaper news room, you are likely to be interviewed by ________.| A．the news editor | B．the national editor |
| C．the city editor | D．the managing editor |
| A．the managing editor is mainly responsible for laying out pages of the paper |
| B．the news editor determines which stories are used |
| C．the copy editor is often the first person to see the story |
| D．the national editor supervises the local general assignment, beat and speciality reporters |
| A．reporters | B．postmen |
| C．writers | D．messengers |
| A．How newspapers are made. | B．People in a newspaper news room. |
| C．How news is collected and edited. | D．People in charge of the newspaper industry. |
