2 . Crime fiction books have been popular with readers for many decades-so popular, in fact, that at a recent London Book Fair sales of the genre (类型) overtook general fiction for the first time ever, a development that had been widely anticipated. Commercial success, of course, does not impress everyone and there are those who believe crime fiction should not be held in such high regard. Well-known in this group is Sebastian Franklin, who has argued that most crime fiction books look more like crossword puzzles than literature. However, increasingly this is a minority opinion as crime fiction is becoming recognized as a rich and dynamic literary genre in around the world.

Crime writing really came to the public’s notice in the 1920s and 1930s with the books of the British author Agatha Christie. Christie was a productive writer, publishing more than 60 detective novels over a 50-year period, beginning in 1920.

Without a doubt, there are certain elements that tend to be repeated in Christie’s books. The stories generally focus on a well-off circle of people, whose peaceful lives are thrown into chaos by an unexplained crime. The location is often a restricted space of some sort: a train, an island, a boat, or a village. This is quite different, for example, to the world of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who often has the entire city of London as his hunting ground.

The books are also action-packed just like today’s most popular thrillers (惊悚小说). Christie mastered the art of the page-turner: events unfold so quickly and unpredictably that we keep reading to find out what happens next. The most significant consequence is that it is so simple to overlook vital clues.

It is worth reading a Christie book a second time just to notice how carefully she hides crucial information about the criminal’s identity.

A survey of contemporary crime writing shows that Agatha Christie’s legacy (遗产) is more important now than at any time previously, at the very point when crime writing has become the most popular of all book genres.

1. What does the author intend to do in paragraph 3?

A．Contrast Christie’s different techniques.	B．Reveal a weakness of Christie’s writing style.
C．List some features of a typical Christie story.	D．Identify a famous writer important to Christie.

2. Which words will the author use to describe Christie’s books?

A．Lengthy but understandable.	B．Attractive and exciting.
C．Simple and loosely-organized.	D．Quickly-written but popular.

4 . Despite being connected online, no matter what state you’re from, each city still retains its own language and slang. At my public high school in Los Angeles, we had our own secret language. A party was a “yart”. A beer was a “brewsky”. If I tried to use these words in front of anyone that didn’t live in Los Angeles, they would have no idea what was going on. When I came to college and used these words around my roommate from the East Coast, she would look at me with a blank stare.

Teenagers are often blamed for pulling apart standard linguistic patterns. The way my parents used to talk isn’t the same way that teenagers talk now. But it reflects the dynamic nature of language, which evolves over time due to various influences, including generational shifts and technological advancements. Teenagers, at an age when they are actively exploring their identity and seeking to differentiate themselves from previous generations, often play a significant role in this evolution.

It’s interesting to note that people around the world all have different terms for everyday things. Last year, I came across a British show called Love Island, which is a reality show that mixes people from different parts of the U. K. in a “villa”(another word Americans don’t typically say) for about eight weeks. As a bystander, the way they talked felt so elegant and fun, but to them, it was just normal.

Whether the way we talk is regional or from online, the soul of communication lies in its power to connect people, foster understanding, and facilitate interactions that shape our personal and social lives. I have often found it’s the way we connect with the people we live around.

Why does the author mention the British show in paragraph 3?

A．To demonstrate worldwide language diversity.

B．To speak highly of British English.

C．To recommend a reality show.

D．To introduce everyday expressions in Britain.

5 . Fallen leaves are everywhere as winter comes. Traditionally, people sweep up the fallen leaves, put them in bags and send them to landfills. But there is a growing movement to leave leaves on the ground. They’ll naturally break down over the winter into rich organic matter. The matter also shelters some insects.

But some leaves prevent the growth of other plants. Black walnut (黑胡桃), for example, contains a poison in its leaves that kills many plants, including apples, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes. Besides, whole leaves should not be permitted to remain on walkways, where they could make the path dangerously slippery. They should also not be left on grass lawns, where they are likely to cause disease. In areas that experience snow cover, water would become trapped between grass and leaves. In areas without snow, whole leaves that cover grasses block water and sunlight from reaching the soil below.

Many people choose to break up the leaves using a machine and let the pieces fall between pieces of grass. Then the pieces break down further in the soil. However, this treatment can kill insects and their eggs.

Another method is to take the leaves off the lawn and spread them lightly to cover garden beds. The leaves mostly break down by spring and almost entirely by summer. But if not, they should be removed before spring growth begins.

Leaves also can be used to make leaf mold (腐叶土), a type of fertilizer made entirely from leaves. Just put the leaves in a corner, add nitrogen fertilizer (氮肥), and then water them to keep them wet inside. It may take a year or two, but the leaves will break down into a nutritious soil.

Fallen leaves build rich soil, protect plant roots and shelter wildlife, in your garden, and elsewhere. Done correctly, leaving the leaves is one of the best ways to turn yard waste into free fertilizer, which is good for plants, the environment, and saving money. Why waste that important resource?

Why are Black walnut leaves mentioned?

A．To analyse their unique features.	B．To compare their main differences.
C．To change people’s opinions on leaves.	D．To show the potential dangers of some leaves.

6 . Imagine you can open your fridge, open an app on your phone and immediately know which items will go bad soon. This is one of the applications that a new technology developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego would enable.

The technology combines a chip (芯片) integrated into product packaging and a software update on your phone. The phone becomes capable of identifying objects based on signals the chip sends out from specific frequencies, in this case Bluetooth or WiFi. In an industrial setting, a smartphone equipped with the software update could be used as a radio frequency identification (RFID) reader.

The work uses breakthroughs in backscatter (反向散射) communication, which uses signals already generated by your smartphone and re-directs them back in a format your phone can understand. Effectively, this technique uses less power than the latest technology to generate WiFi signals.

The custom chip, which is roughly the size of a grain of sand and costs only a few pennies to produce, needs so little power that it can be entirely powered by LTE signals, a technique for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices. The chip turns Bluetooth signals into WiFi signals, which can in turn be detected by a smartphone with that specific software update.

The technology’s broader promise is the development of devices that do not need batteries because they can harvest power from LTE signals instead. This in turn would lead to devices that are significantly less expensive that last longer, said Dinesh Bharadia, one of the paper’s senior authors.

“E-waste, especially batteries, is one of the biggest problems the planet is facing, after climate change,” Bharadia said.

For future research, the team will integrate this technology into other projects to demonstrate its capabilities, and they also hope to commercialize it, either through a startup or through an industry partner.

1. How does the chip interact with the phone?

A．By providing power for the phone.	B．By producing LTE signals for the phone.
C．By giving Bluetooth signals to the phone.	D．By sending WiFi signals back to the phone.

2. What is the potential of the technology according to Bharadia?

A．Reducing e-waste.	B．Making batteries cheap.
C．Supplying power to LTE signals.	D．Decreasing the cost of LTE signals.

9 . The UK is home to 26 world-ranked universities of the top 200 globally. At the heart of each university is the library, a space for students to access resources, absorb knowledge and gather thoughts. Here are some of our must-visit libraries across the UK.

The British Library, London

Located in London, the British Library is home to over 170 million items. The collections offer a glimpse into literary heritage over the ages, from books to maps to manuscripts. Visitors can browse treasures including Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook. Students with a reading pass are known to spend hours at a time in the reading rooms.

Bodleian Old Library, Oxford

Dating back to 1488, the Bodleian Old Library has three notable reading rooms. It is celebrated for its late Gothic architecture. You may recognize the elaborately carved ceiling from scenes in Harry Potter.Students at the university automatically get access to the library.

John Rylands Library, Manchester

......

In which column of a newspaper can the passage be found?

A．Culture

B．Fashion

C．Science

D．Entertainment

10 . Today, poetry and science are often considered to be mutually exclusive career paths. But that wasn’t always the case. The mathematician A da Lovelace and the physicist James Clerk Mahwah were both accomplished poets. The poet John Keats was a licensed surgeon. Combining the two practices fell out of favor in the 1800s. But translating research into lyrics, haiku, and other poetic forms is resurging (再现) among scientists as they look for alternative ways to inspire others with their findings.

“Poetry is a great tool for questioning the world,” says Sam Illingworth, a poet and a geoscientist who works at the University of Western Australia. Through workshops and a new science-poetry journal, called Consilience, Illingworth is helping scientists to translate their latest results into poems that can attract appreciation from those outside of their immediate scientific field.

Stephany Mazon, a scientist from the University of Helsinki in Finland, joined one of Illingworth’s workshops. In the workshop, she was grouped with other scientists and tasked with writing a haiku, a 17-syllable-long poem, which spotlighted water, a fluid that featured in all of the group members’ research projects. “It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to write the poem,” Mazon says. She plans to continue writing. “We do a disservice (伤害) to ourselves to think that scientists can’t be artistic and that art can’t be use a to communicate scientific ideas,” Mazon says.

That viewpoint is echoed by Illingworth, who thinks science communication initiatives are too often dominated by public lectures with their hands-off PowerPoint slides. “Actually, when science communication involves writing and sharing poems, it invites a two-way dialogue between experts and nonexperts,” he says. Scientist-poet Manjula Silva, an educator at Imperial College London, agrees. Poetry provides a way to translate complex scientific concepts into a language that everyone can understand, Silva says.

Scientists and poets are both trying to understand the world and communicate that understanding with others. The distinction between scientists and poets is less than people might think. We’re all just people with hopefully really interesting things to say and to share.

What does Illingworth think of the dominant ways of science communication?

A．Conventional.

B．Effective.

C．Innovative.

D．Complex.