It’s the largest children’s museum in the world. Here, kids and their parents can learn about dinosaurs, ancient Greece, outer-space objects, and much more. In 2018, the museum opened the Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience, where kids can play while learning about the history and culture of sports.
Apollo Mission Control Center
In 1985, it was regarded as a National Historic Landmark. Work began in 2017 to restore it to perfect condition. And now you can visit it firsthand, learning about the engineers, flight controllers, and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the moon landing a reality. The team at the center hosts events about space every day of the year, for kids as young as 4.
Deichman Biblo Toyen
It is one of the coolest libraries. This striking library for only children aged 10 to 15 was designed to inspire. With many colorful exhibits and surprises, each section offers visitors a perfect experience. For those who have just come with a good book to read, there’re plenty of comfortable spots to do so.
Farm Wisconsin Discovery Center
Since it opened in 2018, it has helped kids and other visitors understand and appreciate the food on their tables. It partners with nearby Grotegut Dairy Farm (奶牛场), which bridges the gap between the center and real-world dairy operation. Visitors can take a bus tour of the farm to see it in action. And when any of Grotegut’s cows is ready to have a baby, it’s brought to Farm Wisconsin’s birthing center, where visitors are able to watch it all. But there’s no guarantee that a birth will happen during your visit.
1. What can be learnt about Children’s Museum of Indianapolis?| A．It has a large collection of ancient works. |
| B．It encourages children to play more freely. |
| C．It concerns children’s sports education. |
| D．It’s based on Apollo Mission Control Center. |
| A．Milk the cows. |
| B．Have outdoor experiences. |
| C．Make cheeses. |
| D．Feed a baby cow. |
| A．Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. |
| B．Apollo Mission Control Center. |
| C．Deichman Biblo Toyen. |
| D．Farm Wisconsin Discovery Center. |
2 . When we’re studying a new language, many of us approach it with fear and anxiety. However, we would benefit a lot by changing our focus, according to communication skills trainer Marianna Pascal.
Pascal has spent 20 years in Malaysia helping people speak better English. Over time, she has discovered a surprising truth: How well somebody communicates in a new language has very little to do with his language level — but a lot more to do with his attitude.
Pascal noticed that a lot of Malaysians went into English conversations with the feeling that they were going to be judged by how many mistakes they were going to make. And they had the idea of what good proper English is supposed to be and how far they would have to go to get there.
As a teacher,she’d noticed one specific student named Faisal. Despite not knowing much English,this guy could just sit and listen to anybody very calmly,clearly,and then he could express his thoughts beautifully.
Pascal realized when Faisal entered an English conversation, he didn’t feel judged. He entirely focused on the person that he was speaking to and the result he wanted to get. He got no thoughts about his own mistakes.
Pascal believes that speaking a language is not like those exams that many of us had to take in school,where a tiny spelling or grammar mistake would result in a big red X from the teacher. In the real world, small mistakes don’t matter — what matters is whether we’re able to make ourselves understood. She concludes, “If you want to speak English like Faisal with that great confidence, here’s the one thing that you can do when you speak: Don’t focus on yourself, focus on the other person and the result you want to achieve.”
1. Why was Faisal successful in English conversation according to Pascal?| A．His spoken English was quite excellent. |
| B．His attitude to speaking English was right. |
| C．He and his partner were good friends. |
| D．He made few grammatical mistakes. |
| A．Tolerant. | B．Careful. |
| C．Grateful. | D．Worried. |
| A．Try to express yourself correctly. |
| B．Remember to use a new language. |
| C．Avoid any mistakes while speaking. |
| D．Concentrate on what the other people say. |
3 . Heat stress from extreme heat and humidity (湿度) will annually affect areas that are now home to 1.2 billion people by 2100, assuming current greenhouse gas emissions (排放), according to a Rutgers study.
Most climate studies on projected heat stress have focused too much on extreme heat but did not consider the role of humidity, which is another key driver. “When we look at the risks of a warmer planet, we need to pay particular attention to the combined effects of extreme heat and humidity, which are especially dangerous to human health.” said Robert E. Kopp, director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
Rising global temperatures are increasing exposure to heat stress, which harms human health. Heat stress is caused by the body’s inability to cool down properly through sweating. Body temperature can rise rapidly, and high temperatures may damage the brain and other vital organs. What’s more, heat stress can result in heatstroke (中暑), which is the most serious heat-related illness, can kill or cause permanent disability without emergency treatment.
Annual exposure to extreme heat and humidity above safety guidelines will be projected to affect areas that are currently home to about 500 million people, if the planet warms by 1.5℃ and nearly 800 million at 2℃. The planet has already warmed by about 1.2℃ above late 19th century levels.
An estimated 1.2 billion people would be affected with 3℃ of warming, as expected by the end of this century under current global policies. That’s nearly four times the number of people affected today, and nearly 12 times the number who were affected in no industrial age.
1. What can we infer from the first two paragraphs?| A．Many areas will be flooded by the end of 2100. |
| B．Exposure to polluted air may cause cancer. |
| C．Less attention has been paid to the effect of humidity. |
| D．Heat stress makes it harder to forecast the weather. |
| A．Sweating a lot. | B．Damaging organs. |
| C．Causing heart-attack. | D．Leading to high blood pressure. |
| A．About 800 million. | B．About 500 million. |
| C．About 1.2 billion. | D．About 300 million. |
| A．How to prevent heat stress |
| B．Heat stress may affect more people |
| C．The combination of heat and humidity |
| D．The earth may get warmer and warmer |
4 . Robert Ballard was born in 1942. From an early age, he loved the sea. Baliard grew up in Southern California. He spent his free time at the beach near his home. He enjoyed fishing and swimming. He even learned to dive.
When Ballard wasn't at the ocean, he loved reading about it. At age 10, he read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a book which describes the undersea adventures of Captain Nemo. Ballard decided he wanted to be like Captain Nemo when he grew up. His parents helped him follow his dream.
Ballard was a hardworking student. He spent many years learning all he could about the ocean. By the age of 28, he was an expert. In 1970, he took a job as a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. There he studied underwater mountains of the Atlantic Ocean. He came up with ways to predict volcanoes under the oceans. Working with other scientists, Ballard also found previously unknown sea animals. These animals lived far below the ocean's surface, where scientists had believed no animals could live.
By the 1980s, Ballard's interests changed. He developed unmanned vehicles to explore the ocean bottom. His first find, the wellknown ship Titanic, made Ballard famous. He was not happy with just one big find, however. He looked for—and found—other wellknown ships. One was the German battleship Bismarck. Another was the U. S.S. Yorktown, an aircraft carrier that sank during World War Ⅱ.
Today Robert Ballard is still an underwater explorer. He also heads an organization that encourages students to learn about science. Ballard hopes that some of the students will follow in his footsteps. After all, the world's huge oceans are mostly unknown. Who knows what remains to be discovered under the sea?
1. When Ballard worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he ________.| A．explored the undersea world by ship |
| B．thought of ideas to predict underwater volcanoes |
| C．found some unknown sea animals alone |
| D．set up an organization to teach students science |
a. He found the German battleship Bismarck.
b. He read a book about Captain Nemo.
c. He found the famous ship Titanic.
d. He became an expert in science.
| A．b—c—d—a | B．d—b—c—a |
| C．d—c—a—b | D．b—d—c—a |
| A．Ballard was greatly influenced by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. |
| B．Ballard didn't like fishing and swimming in his childhood. |
| C．Ballard's parents felt disappointed at his undersea adventures. |
| D．Human beings have explored more than half of the sea. |
5 . Living with your parents has its advantages… at least when it comes to raising your kids—their grandkids. Because two new studies add to the evidence that grandmothers can improve the survival of grandchildren. That is, unless Grandma’s too old or lives too far away.
Humans are unusual in that women live long past the age at which they stop having babies. “We don’t really see that in nature. Most of the organisms (生物) will reproduce up to their very last moment,” says Patrick Bergeron, a teacher at Bishop’s University in Quebec. This increase in post-reproductive longevity (寿命) is often explained by the so-called “grandmother effect (效应)”.
To explore the “grandmother effect”, Bergeron and his researchers examined nearly 200 years’ worth of French-Canadian population records from the 17th and 18th centuries. At the time, life was hard. In some years, a third of the kids were not even making it to one year of age. But the researchers found that having a grandmother still alive was an advantage. Families with grandmothers alive were larger by about two and the survival of these grandchildren to age 15 was much improved.
This good effect was only seen when the grandmothers lived nearby, which suggests that grandmothers help by playing an active role in their grandchildren’s lives.
Unluckily, that role is harder for them to achieve as they get older, which brings us to the second study. Researchers at the University of Turku in Finland used church records from the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that the advantages connected with having a grandmother on hand depended on her age. Once grandmothers hit 75, the grandchild survival advantages disappeared. In other words, it was better for grandchildren to have no living grandmother at all than it was to live with an old one or one that was in poor health. So a healthy grandma helps make for a healthy grandchild
1. What’s “grandmother effect”?| A．Having a grandmother alive is an advantage. |
| B．Grandmothers are helpful to their children whatever their age. |
| C．Grandmothers are helpful for the survival of their grandchildren. |
| D．Healthy grandmothers living nearby are good for grandchildren’s health. |
| A．Researchers used French-Canadian population records. |
| B．Researchers used church records from the 17th and 18th centuries. |
| C．It was done by researchers from the University of Turku in Finland. |
| D．It found that it was good for grandchildren to have no living grandmother. |
| A．A science report. | B．A diary |
| C．A storybook. | D．A textbook. |
6 . Can you be too beautiful? It is hardly a problem that most of us have to bother — as much as we might like to dream that it were the case.
Yet the blessings and curses of beauty have been a long-standing interest in psychology. Do those blessed with shiny faces and an attractive body live in a cloud of appreciation — or does it sometimes pay to be ordinary? At the most basic level, beauty might be thought to carry a kind of halo (光环) around it; we see that someone has one good quality, and by association, our deep mind may assume that they have other good ones too.
But if beauty pays in most circumstances, there are still situations where it can have opposite results. While attractive men may be considered better leaders, for instance, hidden sexist prejudices (偏见) can work against attractive women, making them less likely to be hired for high-level jobs that require power. And as you might expect, good-looking people of both sexes run into envy — one study found that if you are interviewed by someone of the same sex, they may be less likely to employ you if they judge that you are more attractive than they are.
More worryingly, being beautiful or handsome could harm your medical care. We tend to link good looks to health, meaning that illnesses are often taken less seriously when they affect the good-looking. When treating people for pain, for instance, doctors tend to take less care over the more attractive people.
To conclude, scientists point out that focusing too much on your appearance can itself be harmful if it creates stress and anxiety — even for those already blessed with good looks. “If you are crazy about attractiveness, it may affect your experience and interactions,” she says. It’s an outdated saying, but no amount of beauty can make up for a bad personality. As the writer Dorothy Parker put it so elegantly: “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
1. From paragraph 1, we can learn that .| A．some may be bothered by their unattractive appearance |
| B．most people are not afraid of being too beautiful |
| C．we might always dream about being bothered by others |
| D．being too beautiful can be a problem bothering everyone |
| A．Doctors care more about beautiful patients. |
| B．Beautiful people tend to have a healthy body. |
| C．Attractive women and men have equal chance of leadership. |
| D．Focusing too much on your appearance can be harmful. |
| A．The more beautiful outside, the less beautiful inside. |
| B．Beauty can help make a better personality. |
| C．Beauty cannot make up for bad personalities. |
| D．Ugly people have more confidence in their personality. |
| A．What is Real Beauty? | B．The Bad Effects of Beauty |
| C．Benefits of Beauty | D．Beauty, a Blessing? |
7 . An unusual trip to Hawaii brought two strangers closer and closer and their story deserves a wide spread.
As her plane sliced through the sky above the ocean, there came a sudden thunderstorm. Five minutes later, Uemoto and her copilot McMahon heard a strange sound. Then, without warning, they lost power to both of the engines. It took them a moment to process the fact that they might crash. The pilots powered through the items on the emergency checklist. Nothing worked. As the plane was falling, they jumped into the ocean.
By ten that night, their bodies began trembling uncontrollably in the cool night air. Something must be done to pull them through. Swimming on her stomach, Uemoto had McMahon wrap his arms around her knees so he could rest his head on the back of her legs. To be with someone else and to feel another person's comforting presence in the darkness somehow made the suffering bearable.
When the sun rose the next morning, they caught sight of the island of Hawaii, the destination they had dared dream! Suddenly, Uemoto saw a shark, which made her breath catch in her throat. "What do we do? What do we do?" Uemoto asked, panicked. "Just keep looking forward! If it comes close, I'll kick it in the eye!" said McMahon evenly. Unexpectedly, the shark circled them for about 30 minutes. Then, as quietly as it had appeared, it swam off. Uemoto and McMahon breathed a sigh of relief.
After struggling in the water for over 20 hours, there came a US Navy helicopter. It flew overhead and next banked towards them. Uemoto and McMahon burst into tears. Alone, either of them would have died. But together, they made it.
1. What caused the plane to crash?| A．A sudden thunderstorm hit the plane. |
| B．The engines of the plane broke down. |
| C．The pilots operated the plane improperly. |
| D．The emergency list failed to help the pilots. |
| A．He calmed his partner down. |
| B．He kicked the shark in the eye. |
| C．He was scared to death at the shark. |
| D．He managed to drive the shark away. |
| A．Ambitious and humorous. | B．Clear-headed and generous. |
| C．Demanding and appealing. | D．Strong-willed and considerate. |
| A．A Race against Death |
| B．A Test of Friendship |
| C．A Wonder Made by Joined Hands |
| D．A Struggle Fought in the Darkness |
8 . Sweetest Day is always the third Saturday in October. This holiday is much more important in some regions than in others (Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo being the biggest Sweetest Day cities). It is a holiday that is gaining in popularity every year throughout the country.
Sweetest Day is celebrated on the third Saturday in October as a day to make someone happy. It is an occasion which offers all of us an opportunity to remember not only the sick, aged, and orphaned, but also friends, relatives and associates whose helpfulness and kindness we have enjoyed.
Over 60 years ago, a Cleveland man, believing that the city’s orphans and shut-ins (卧病在床的人) too often felt forgotten and neglected, formed the idea of showing them that they were remembered. He did this through the distribution(分发) of small gifts. With the help of his friends and neighbors, he distributed these small remembrances on a Saturday in October. During the years that followed, other Clevelanders began to participate in the celebration ceremony, which came to be called “Sweetest Day”. In time, the Sweetest Day idea of spreading cheer to the underprivileged(弱势群体)was broadened to include everyone, and became an occasion for remembering others with a kind act or a small remembrance. And soon the idea spread to other cities all over the country.
Sweetest Day is not based on any single group’s religious belief or on a family relationship. It is a reminder that a thoughtful word or deed enriches life and gives it meaning. Because for many people remembering takes the form of gift-giving, Sweetest Day offers us the opportunity to show others that we care, in a practical way.
1. Which of the following is TRUE according to the first paragraph?| A．More and more people are now celebrating Sweetest Day in the whole country. |
| B．Sweetest Day is a holiday which always falls on the Saturday in October. |
| C．Sweetest Day is much more important in big cities than in small cities. |
| D．Only a few religious have the tradition to celebrate the holiday. |
| A．the city’s orphans and shut-ins | B．a city named Cleveland 60 years ago |
| C．a man who cared orphans and shut-ins | D．a man’ s friends, relatives and associates |
| A．a kind act | B．a family party | C．gift-giving | D．a small remembrance |
| A．it is the people in Cleveland who spread Sweetest Day to other cities |
| B．only with the help of the man’s friends and neighbors, he got a small remembrance |
| C．over 60 years ago, a man too often felt forgotten and neglected |
| D．all people loved to be remembered by others on Sweetest Day in Cleveland |
9 . Do you know how children in other countries spend their schooldays and what kind of games they always play?
Children in Brazil
| School | The school year runs from February to December. Children attend (上学) school for about four hours in the morning or the afternoon. About a quarter of children in Brazil do not attend school at all. |
| Play | Football is the most popular sport. Brazil’s beautiful beaches also make swimming and volleyball popular. |
| Family | Brazilian families are often large. Nearly a third of the population is under eighteen! |
| School | The school day begins from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, with a two-hour lunch break. Schools close on Wednesday and Sunday, and are closed for a half day on Saturday. |
| Play | Football, bicycling and tennis are favorite sports in France. In some areas, pelote, a traditional ball game, is also very popular. |
| Family | Most French mothers work. The majority of preschool (幼儿园) children attend day care centres known as crèches. France has laws about naming children and all names have to be chosen from an official list. |
| School | Schools in Japan are very competitive (竞争的). Even pre-schoolers may attend “cramming (填鸭式教学的) schools” to prepare for exams. There is a summer break about six weeks, but the children have homework during this time. |
| Play | Comic books have been popular in Japan since the 1700s. Comics now account for about 40% of all published materials in Japan. Kite flying is enjoyed by people of every age. |
| Family | Homes in Japan are small on average. The typical family of four lives in five small rooms. Most fathers in Japan work long hours. As a result, some children only see their fathers on weekends or holidays. |
① Kite flying. ② Bicycling. ③ Football. ④ Pelote.
| A．②③④ | B．①②③ |
| C．①④ | D．①②③④ |
| A．Places with beautiful beaches. |
| B．The name of the place where French mothers work. |
| C．A day care centre for preschool children. |
| D．Cramming schools to improve children’s exam results. |
| A．like to read comic books | B．write their names on an official list |
| C．only see their fathers on weekdays | D．do not attend school |
10 . As you grow rapidly through your teenage years，you will experience a lot of changes. The changes may seem difficult and they may seem to happen quickly. Don't panic（恐慌）！You will deal successfully with them！You are a young adult now！
With more responsibility，you will find more freedom to make your own choices. This is a time to be well informed（知晓）about your choices so that you can make healthy balanced decisions that will help shape your future. You may already know your career path or you may have no idea at all what you want to do. Both situations are fine！Work hard and the right opportunity will present（展现）itself to you.
Young adulthood means greater freedom and more choices. You will probably want to be independent. But try not to shut your family out of your life. You should learn to think of others even though you are old enough to look after yourself. Your family have been with you since you came into this world.
It is also perfectly natural in this time for you to spend more time with your friends than your family. Choose your friends wisely. A true friend will stand by you no matter what happens. This period is part of the life cycle. There are some people who will be with you throughout life's journey and there will be some people with whom you par（分离）and go separate ways. Leaving school can be hard. The reality is that you may not ever see all of your classmates again.
You are a young adult. It is your life. No one can live it for you. The choices that you make from now on will be your choices. So making the right choices will be important to you. Life is for living. Enjoy your life wisely！
1. Who do the underlined words "some people" in Paragraph 4 probably mean ___________?| A．your parents | B．your classmates |
| C．true friends | D．your relatives |
| A．a period of complete freedom |
| B．too hard for young people to get through |
| C．an important time for the young to make the right choices |
| D．a very important period for young students to leave their parents |
| A．Teenagers | B．Teachers. |
| C．Young parents | D．Adults. |
