1 . People working from home have more options for making their living abroad than ever before. Recently new destinations have launched programs to tempt workers to abandon their home offices for tropical shores and year-round sun.
Montserrat
Remote workers must have medical insurance and an annual income of at least $70,000.
Fees are S500 for individuals-or $750 or higher for families — to apply.
Applicants know within a week if they are approved.
Remote workers must test negative for Covid-19 and quarantine for 14 days at an accommodation of their choice.
Mauritius
Remote workers seeking a "Covid-safe" place to ride out the pandemic can consider Mauritius.
There is no fee to apply, though applicants need long-term accommodation plans, travel and health insurance and proof of sufficient funds to stay in Mauritius, which is defined as at least$ 1,500 in monthly income.
The Bahamas
People who think they may tire of staying on one island can apply for the Bahamas Extended Access Travel Stay program.
The new 12-month residency permit lets remote workers and students live and move between 16 different islands in the Bahamas.
Applications are processed within five days and cost $25 per person.
Travelers need a negative Covid-19 test result.
Dubai
All nationalities can apply for Dubai's new remote working program, provided they make $5,000 per month.
At $287 to apply, fees are lower than most other programs. Applicants must have health insurance and show proof of income.
Travelers must arrive with a negative PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test taken no more than 72 hours before departing.
1. Which place charges least for application?| A．Montserrat. | B．Mauritius. | C．The Bahamas. | D．Dubai. |
| A．Travelers have the longest residency permit. |
| B．Applicants are informed of approval results. |
| C．Remote workers need no Covid-I9 test taken. |
| D．Students are allowed to apply for the program. |
| A．First-class service. | B．Permanent residency. |
| C．Cosy environment. | D．Health insurance. |
2 . When I was a kid, my sister and I would fight all the time over nearly everything. But as we grew older, our bond strengthened by sharing secrets, offering advice and trading clothes. Having a sister by my side while growing up taught me many lessons about the unique bond.
And now, thanks to an 8-year long study that’s making the rounds on the Internet again, science is confirming what I know is true. In the study, researchers discovered that having an older or younger sister can help ease the anxiety for kids between the ages of 10 and 14 years. They also found that people with sisters can “learn how to make up and to have control over their emotions again, which are skills that undoubtedly serve children well.
The revival of this study actually comes on the heels of another newer study, which shows that it’s not just the older kids and parents who influence and shape children as they grow. It turns out that younger siblings(兄弟姐妹) do too, and what’s more, they may also give their older siblings a greater chance of developing empathy (同情).
The Canadian study followed 452 pairs of siblings, all between a year-and-a-half and 4 years old. The researchers found that having a younger sibling increased the older sibling's level of empathy.
This research confirms that sisters are pretty amazing in making the world a much lovely place. As the mom of two boys, I often wonder what kinds of lessons they will learn from their younger sister. Perhaps they will be the same lessons I learned from mine that cooler heads always win. This study gives me hope that all those endless arguments between my kids may actually be laying the groundwork for conflict-settlement skills.
1. What can we learn from the study?| A．Children under four develop empathy fastest. |
| B．It is normal for siblings to quarrel. |
| C．Having siblings is not always a headache. |
| D．Having sisters is helpful to mental health. |
| A．Result | B．Beginning. |
| C．Reappearance. | D．Significance. |
| A．They love their mom very much. |
| B．They have a higher level of empathy. |
| C．They often quarrel with one another. |
| D．They have learned the same lessons as the the author. |
| A．Siblings have a unique bond. |
| B．Siblings have something in common. |
| C．Having siblings is good to children. |
| D．Children having siblings are considerate. |
3 . If our kids don’t fall, they don’t learn to get up. I still remember the day in high school that my mom forgot to pick me up from school. I’m the oldest of four children, and no doubt she’d had a long day with the other kids and it’d slipped her mind. After waiting at school for an hour, I walked the three miles home, and when I got to my house, I shut our front door with anger, stormed into the kitchen and screamed in my mom’s face that she’d forgotten me.
Later that night, my dad told me I no longer had a ride to school the next day. I figured my mom would still take me, but when the morning came, she refused. It was midterm, and as a straight-A student ready to start college applications, being late wasn’t an option (选择). In my mind, missing these tests would have been the end of my academic career. I begged my mom. I told her she was ruining my future and everything I’d worked for. But she held her ground, and that day, I walked to school. And I missed my tests.
My mom didn’t rescue me from failure. She let me suffer from it. She let me figure it out. She let me learn. Now, as a mom myself, I’ve realized that I want my kids to experience failure because failure is how we grow, learn and think outside of ourselves. It’s how we self-educate to learn what’s right and respectable, and what’s not. It’s how we become responsible and enthusiastic. Falling down makes us better because we learn how to get up.
1. What is one of the reasons that the author got angry that day?| A．She was tired. | B．She failed in a test. |
| C．She was late for school. | D．She had to walk home by herself. |
| A．Terrible. | B．Meaningful. | C．Embarrassing. | D．Colorful. |
| A．gave in to me | B．said yes to me |
| C．stayed in the place | D．kept to her idea |
| A．My Way of Growing | B．The Value of Failure |
| C．My Love for Mother | D．Failure in My Life |
4 . Covid-19 has brought a great deal of trouble for all of us since March 2020. During this time, mobile phones have been the solution for the boredom and restlessness caused from staying indoors. The most downloaded apps on play store 2020 are;
TikTok
TikTok was the most downloaded app. With over 111.9 million downloads, TikTok has seen a huge growth in 2020, twice more than what it got in 2019. 20% of its total downloads were from India and around 9. 3% of the total downloads were in the US.
Zoom
Zoom was the second most installed app in the overall downloads category. With nearly 94. 6 million installs, Zoom is the most used app for online meetings and virtual classrooms. 17% of its downloads were in the US and India. Offices and educational institutes were shut down and to continue working and studying from home, people relied heavily on Zoom for video conferencing and calling.
WhatsApp ranked third in overall downloads with more than 100 million downloads. It is one of the most popular and widely used chat applications; WhatsApp also supports communication between international phone networks.
It ranked fourth in the overall downloaded list. Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking application. Facebook builds technologies that give people the power to connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.
1. What do we know about TikTok?| A．It is an India-based app. | B．It has most users in America. |
| C．It is used for growing business. | D．It has doubled its download than in 2019. |
| A．TikTok. | B．Zoom. | C．WhatsApp. | D．Facebook. |
| A．Communication. | B．Training. | C．Teaching. | D．Payment |
5 . Just like humans, birds too rely on sound to communicate. However, they do not have a “language” in the true sense of the word and instead produce a variety of sounds to convey different emotions.
Often, birds recognize their mates(or young) by sound rather than sight. Hungry young birds use begging calls to let their mothers know it is feeding time. Alarm calls, flight calls and warning calls are other sounds made frequently by adults.
A new study shows that songbirds rehearse(排演) their songs even in their sleep. The activity in the brain of the birds when asleep is similar to the brain activity when the birds were awake and singing. The team used tiny recording devices to measure the activity of individual brain cells in four songbirds both when they were singing and when they were asleep.
Apparently the bird stores a song after hearing it, and then rehearses it later in its sleep. Scientists now believe the birds “dream of songs and tunes” to help them master the fine art of singing and that sleep plays a key role in the learning process!
Many songbirds learn to sing listening to adult birds of the same species. However, if separated from the adults, the young birds develop sounds which are hard to understand instead of normal song patterns. Researchers carried out an experiment in which a male bullfinch (灰雀) was raised by a female canary(金丝雀). The bullfinch soon learned the canary’s song and when it was later mated to a female bullfinch, Mr.Bullfinch taught his children the canary’s songs.
Last year, a British survey of London’s songbirds showed that the city’s birds are losing their tunes. Birds could hardly hear one another, over the traffic noise; as a result, instead of copying the sweet notes of the adults, young birds were copying the sounds they heard most often, namely car horns and beeping cellphones!
1. According to the passage, birds recognize their mates by ________.| A．using their own words | B．listening to their sounds |
| C．looking at their appearances | D．singing the same songs |
| A．Flight calls. | B．Alarm calls. |
| C．Begging calls. | D．Warning calls. |
| A．young birds learn to sing from whom they live together with |
| B．birds only learn how to sing from the same adult species |
| C．it's not easy for adult birds to teach young birds songs |
| D．a canary's song is more beautiful than a bullfinch's |
| A．traffic noise makes young birds become deaf |
| B．birds in the city can sing as sweetly as those in the wild |
| C．birds in the city recognize their mates mainly by sight |
| D．noise pollution causes much trouble for birds in the city |
6 . Tracking wildlife is a tough job. Take the case of a one-eared leopard named Pavarotti.
Kasim Rafiq, a wildlife biologist at Liverpool John Moores University. “So I used to get up at the crack of dawn, follow his tracks and try and find him. So one day, I went out, and I was looking for him. And his tracks took me off road through this woodland area...and...”
Before he knew it, the wheel of his Land Rover was stuck in a deep hole. He wasted several hours getting it out. And then, on the way back to camp, he came across some local tour guides and their safari (观赏野兽的旅行) guests, who’d had way better luck spotting Pavarotti. “Basically, they laughed and they talked to me that they’d seen him that morning.”
Rafiq then realized that tourist wildlife sightings might be an untapped source of information about wild animals.
So he and his team worked with a safari lodge in Botswana to analyze 25,000 tourist photographs of wildlife. They compared those data to the estimates they made with traditional wildlife biology methods.
It turned out that the estimates from tourists’ photos were just as good as those gleaned (四处搜集) from traditional methods. And the tourists were actually the only ones to see elusive (难以捉摸的) leopards — the researchers would have missed the cats without the citizen science data. The results are in the journal Current Biology.
The idea is not to put wildlife researchers out of a job. “The reality is there are so many interesting things we still have to find out about these large carnivores (食肉动物) and so many conservation (保护) projects that need to be carried out that we don’t have the time or resources to do them all.” And tourist photos might help make sure that all the local carnivores are spotted.
Thanks for listening for Scientific American-60-Second Science. I’m Christopher Intagliata.
1. What happened to Rafiq when he tracked Pavarotti?| A．He was lost in the woods. |
| B．He was trapped in a deep hole. |
| C．He found Pavarotti with tourists’ help. |
| D．He met Pavarotti on the way back to camp. |
| A．The photos are sources of information about wildlife. |
| B．The photos are mirrors of the wildlife researchers’ life. |
| C．The photos taken by tourists are of high quality. |
| D．The photos taken by tourists are especially beautiful. |
| A．The researchers have missed the data of cats. |
| B．The information from tourists’ photos was equally good. |
| C．The value of tourist photos hasn’t been proven. |
| D．Only the traditional methods can track wildlife. |
| A．On TV. | B．In a magazine. | C．On a radio. | D．In a book. |
7 . I have a special place in my heart for libraries. I have for as long as I can remember. I was always an enthusiastic reader, sometimes reading up to three books a day as a child. Stories were like air to me and while other kids played ball or went to parties, I lived out adventures through the books I checked out from the library.
My first job was working at the Ukiah Library when I was 16 years old. It was a dream job and I did everything from shelving books to reading to the children for story time.
As I grew older and became a mother, the library took on a new place and an added meaning in my life. I had several children and books were our main source (来源) of entertainment. It was a big deal for us to load up and go to the local library, where my kids could pick out books to read or books they wanted me to read to them.
I always read, using different voices, as though I were acting out the stories with my voice and they loved it! It was a special time to bond with my children and it filled them with the wonderment of books.
Now, I see my children taking their children to the library and I love that the excitement of going to the library lives on form generation to generation.
As a novelist, I’ve found a new relationship with libraries. I encourage readers to go to their local library when they can’t afford to purchase a book. I see libraries as a safe haven (避风港) for readers and writers, a bridge that helps put together a reader with a book. Libraries, in their own way, help fight book piracy (盗版行为) and 1 think all writers should support libraries in a significant way when they can. Encourage readers to use the library. Share library announcements on your social media. Frequent them and talk about them when you can.
1. Which word best describes the author’s relationship with books as a child?| A．Inseparable. | B．Uneasy. | C．Awful. | D．Casual. |
| A．Pleasure from working in the library. | B．A closer bond developed with the readers. |
| C．Fun from acting out the stories. | D．Joy of reading passed on in the family. |
| A．Give money to book fairs. | B．Write for social media. |
| C．Buy her novels. | D．Support libraries. |
| A．Reading: A Source of Knowledge | B．My Idea about writing |
| C．My Love of the Library | D．Library: A Haven for the Young |
8 . In the mid-1980s, a study compared mtDNA from people around the world. It found that people of African descent (后裔) had twice as many genetic differences from each other than as did others. Because mutations (基因突变) seem to occur at a steady rate over time, scientists were able to conclude that modern humans must have lived in Africa at least twice as long as anywhere else. They now calculate that all living humans descend from a single woman who lived roughly 150,000 years ago in Africa, “Eve”. If geneticists are right, all of humanity is linked to Eve through an unbroken chain of mothers. This Eve was soon joined by “Y-Chromosome (染色体) Adam”, the genetic father of us all, also from Africa. DNA studies have confirmed that all the people on Earth, with all their shapes and colors, can trace their ancestry to ancient Africans.
What seems certain is that at a remarkably recent date—probably between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago—one small group of people, the ancestors of modern humans outside of Africa, left Africa for western Asia, either by migrating around the northern end of the Red Sea or across its narrow southern opening.
Once in Asia, genetic evidence suggests, the population split. One group stopped temporarily in the Middle East, while the other commenced a journey which would last tens of thousands of years. Moving a little further with each new generation, they followed the coast around the Arabian Peninsula, India, and Southeast Asia, all the way to Australia. ''The movement was probably unnoticeable,'' says Spencer Wells. ''It was less of a journey and probably more like walking a little farther down the beach to get away from the crowd.''
Although archaeological evidence of this 13,000-kilometer (8,000-mile) migration from Africa to Australia has almost completely disappeared, genetic traces of the group that made the trip do exist. They have been found in the DNA of native peoples in the Andaman Islands near Myanmar, in Malaysia, and in Papua New Guinea, and in the DNA of nearly all Australian aborigines (土著). Modern discoveries of 45,000-year-old bodies in Australia, buried at a site called Lake Mungo, provide some physical evidence for the theories as well.
People in the rest of Asia and Europe share different but equally ancient mtDNA and mutations. The mutations which they possess show that most are descendants of the group that stayed in the Middle East for thousands of years before moving on. Perhaps about 40,000 years ago, modern humans first advanced into Europe.
1. What can be inferred from the first paragraph?| A．Mutations occasionally take place over time |
| B．Modern humans probably have only one ancestor. |
| C．Modern humans must have lived in Africa for a shorter time than anywhere else. |
| D．Scientists confirm all of humanity is linked to Eve with physical evidence . |
| A．Most of the migrants turned back into Africa. |
| B．They separated into two groups. |
| C．Most of the migrants moved directly into Europe. |
| D．They stayed in the Middle East for tens of thousands of years. |
| A．Discovery of human remains in Australia | B．DNA of people in Southeast Africa |
| C．DNA of immigrants to Australia | D．Discoveries from modern societies in Asia |
| A．Finding Y-Chromosome Adam | B．Who were the First Humans? |
| C．The Discovery of DNA in Africa | D．Migrating Out of Africa |
9 . Adult Education Courses
Computer Studies Technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and we rely more and more on computers for everything from cooking to organizing our taxes. This six-week course will give you an understanding of computer fundamentals, including the use of software packages (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and how to use the Internet. Start: May 2,2019 Time: Wed 7 pm-9pm Cost: $300 Length: 6 weeks Place: Sydney College | Woodwork Learn the basics of woodworking with simple hands-on projects to build your confidence and skills. Each lesson explores a different area of woodworking that will provide you with the skills needed for any woodworking project. Flexible learning allows you to choose only the lessons that interest you. Start: April 15,2019 Time: Mon 5 pm-7pm Cost: $30 per lesson Length:12 weeks Place: Adult Learning Centre |
Web Design We provide advanced training in software, design, and coding for the web. Students must have already completed a recognized basic web design course or have at least 2 years’ relevant work experience. Students completing the course will receive the Diploma in Advanced Web Design. Start: June 1,2019 Time: Weekdays 9 am-4pm Cost: $4,990 Length: 40 weeks Place: University of Technology | Art This practical course is intended to help established artists take their creativity further. From sketching and color, to composition, painting and experimenting with style, you will study and explore an engaging variety of creative media and subject matter. Start: April 21,2019 Time: Thurs. 3 pm-6pm Cost: $750 Length:15 weeks Place: City Art |
1. Which course awards students an official certificate?
| A．Art. | B．Woodwork. | C．Computer Studies | D．Web Design.. |
| A．Web Design and Art. | B．Computer Studies and Woodwork. |
| C．Woodwork and Web Design. | D．Computer Studies and Art. |
| A．$30. | B．$180. | C．$250. | D．$360. |
10 . “Anyone who offends China will be killed no matter how far the target is.” That is the tagline for Wolf Warriors 2, the Chinese box office hit. It sees a soldier entering into an African war-zone and saving hundreds of lives from Western bad guys. It’s basically the plot of your typical Hollywood action movie, but this time it’s a Chinese man upholding justice and keeping the world safe.
Following in the footsteps of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, martial arts expert Wu Jing is among a new generation of directors who were initially Chinese action stars. His first Wolf Warrior film came out in 2014, but it didn’t catch much attention. Mainstream movies, especially those promoting patriotism, usually don’t do very well in China. Wolf Warrior 2, however, has become a phenomenon. The massive response in China also made the film top the global box office worldwide last weekend, beating Hollywood blockbuster Dunkirk.
Many moviegoers said online that they were touched by the patriotic plot. “This movie is the best Chinese action movie,” one social media user wrote. “Shockingly good — hot blood and tough guys. I cried after watching it,” said another.
One reason for the enthusiastic response compared to the first Wolf Warrior film is its improved action scenes. Many in China have praised the film for its fighting scenes and special effects, saying they are of “Hollywood quality”. The movie, which is entirely privately funded, has also been lauded for its attention to details and features of close replicas of many of the latest weapons used by the Chinese army. Timing has also contributed to its success, with the Chinese nation in the times of a new wave of patriotism.
The film first came out just ahead of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese army, a hugely symbolic event for the country. Over the weekend, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) held a grand military parade, which presented the latest weapons of China. In a serious speech, which in parts was not different from lines from the film, President Xi Jinping promised to fight anyone who tried to tear China apart.
1. The text is meant to ________.| A．introduce a recent action movie |
| B．explain why Wu Jing is a successful director |
| C．compare Wolf Warriors 2 with Hollywood movies |
| D．claim that China is a super power in terms of weapons production |
| A．it doesn’t promote patriotism |
| B．its combat scenes are of higher quality |
| C．the weapons in the movie are the most advanced |
| D．Wu Jing is becoming better at directing after failing his first movie |
| A．Dunkirk has attracted more audiences compared to Wolf Warriors 2. |
| B．Social media users think highly of Wu Jing’s acting skills. |
| C．In the past, movies about patriotism often appeal to the public. |
| D．Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Wu Jing were actors at first. |
| A．encouraged | B．praised | C．criticized | D．awarded |
