1 . Robots that can cook are in growing demand(需求)in the United States. The increased demand comes at a time when restaurants are trying to put some distance between their workers and customers during the COVID-19.
In a few weeks, White Castle restaurants will test a robot arm that can cook French fries and other foods. The robot, called Flippy, is a product of Miso Robotics, a company based in Pasadena, California.
Robot food service was becoming popular even before the coronavirus pandemic(冠状病毒). Hospitals, college dining areas and other places tried to meet demand for food while keeping labor costs low. Robot chefs appeared at places like Creator, a restaurant in San Francisco. Now, some say, robots may become necessary for the food service industry. "I expect in the next two years you will see much more robotic adoption(采纳)in the food space because of COVID-19," Jain said.
Some peoples say, robots can lower the demand for labor. At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, cafe workers used to spend six hours per day making salads, notes Tonya Johnson, the school's director of nutrition services. But two years ago, the university added a Sally, a kind of robot that now makes around 40 salads per day. By adding Sally, the school was able to cut a job opening in its cooking staff, Johnson said. "I think the pandemic has made us realize how much we need more equipment like Sally," Johnson said.
Miso Robotics co-founder and chief Buck Jordan said fast food restaurants are already having trouble finding workers, partly as a result of a losing population of young workers. Jordan added that his company's position is that "automation(自动化)is not a choice". He added, "You must automate in order to survive in the future."
1. Why is robot food service becoming popular?| A．It can take the place of human beings in the future. |
| B．It can shorten the distance between workers and customers. |
| C．It can meet the demand for food and reduce the cost of labor. |
| D．It can make all kinds of delicious food in a very short time. |
| A．It is just a common robot like others. | B．It is useless to improve the speed of work. |
| C．It makes as many salads as workers. | D．It helps the school employ fewer workers. |
| A．Worried. | B．Supportive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Uncaring. |
| A．The popularity of robots in the food space. |
| B．The reason for choosing robots in restaurants. |
| C．More demand for robot cooks in US restaurants. |
| D．The difficulties in finding enough labor workers. |
2 . Have you wondered what your pets are feeling? When your dog wags(来回摇摆)its tail, does that mean it is happy? A new app called Happy Pets can tell you what's going on.
The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the facial expressions of cats and dogs. Then it can tell you what breed(品种)your pet is and how it is feeling. It can show the five most common feelings-happy, angry, neutral, sad and scared.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia developed the app. The key technology used in the app is facial recognition, a common use of Al. We can unlock our mobile phones or enter train stations with facial recognition readers. But this is the first time that the tech has been used with animals.
The app's AI was first taught to recognize a picture of an animal. Then, it was taught to recognize the facial features of cats and dogs. Next came the most important step-teaching it to detect(察觉)emotions based on certain facial features. For instance, if a dog tightens up its eyes and mouth while changing the position of its ears, this means the dog is scared. To master this skill, the AT program "saw" and "read" thousands of example images.
How accurate are the results? The researchers think they are trustworthy since the app has been tested many times. Interestingly, they have found that cats are harder to read than dogs. In the future, the app might also be able to analyze a pet's body to make its readings more accurate.
1. What is the app Happy Pets used to do?| A．To make pets happy. | B．To tell us how the pets are feeling. |
| C．To recognize an animal's picture. | D．To unlock our mobile phones. |
| A．What emotions the app can recognize. | B．What certain facial features mean. |
| C．How people use the app. | D．How the app's Al was trained. |
| A．It has been used with animals for a long time. | B．It works harder on dogs than cats. |
| C．It uses facial recognition technology. | D．It can analyze a pet's body. |
| A．Show how to make animals happy. | B．Introduce a study on animals. |
| C．Show how to play with animals. | D．Introduce a new app. |
3 . Nowadays more and more people like to travel, especially when vacations come. A great number of people rush out of their homes or companies to travelling spots. They either drive or take a bus, a train, a ship and so on. Some even ride bikes.
However, there is another way of travelling — poorism. People have a tour in the poorest areas of the world. Some people may take a one-day poor tour, and some even pay to stay in very poor neighborhoods to experience the lowest living standards in the world. Poorism tours take place around the world, and not just in the third world countries. You can, for instance, tour New York neighborhoods in the Bronx, in the Bund of Shanghai. Such tours can take people into the heart of poor areas within some large and rich cities. These tours may awaken people to pay more attention to long-standing poverty, or the effects of war.
Some suggest that tours in the poor areas can raise social care. And the money from the tour can be donated to help the people there.
1. What's the meaning of the underlined word “poorism” in the second paragraph?| A．贫困 | B．穷人 | C．穷游 | D．可怜的人 |
| A．to show how rich they are |
| B．to experience the poor life |
| C．to enjoy the beautiful scenes |
| D．to see poor people |
| A．care for the poverty more |
| B．know about the countryside |
| C．go to big cities |
| D．go into the heart of rich cities |
4 . I have a neighbour we call “Happy”．I have never seen her angry at anything and never heard her say a harsh (苛刻的) word to anyone or about anyone.
Happy and her husband Ben, 70，have a huge garden. They spent many happy hours together working on it. Most of the neighbours watched interestingly as Ben doubled the size of their garden. As the cost of food climbed faster than Ben’s beans，we all wished we also had such a large garden. As the rest of us spent our dollars at the market，Happy could be seen picking beans in her back yard.
Last month，Happy and Ben invited most of the neighbourhood over for an “all-day food fest”．We were told to bring gloves and arrive very early in the morning. We didn’t know what was about to take place.
By 9：00 am，there were nine of us in the garden picking tomatoes，beans，okra and squash. By 10：00 am，there was lots of laughter. We shared a lot of stories. By five o'clock，everyone was a little drunk from the wine and beer. After dinner，we played games. As we were leaving，Happy and Ben handed each of us a shopping bag filled with the bounty (收成) of the day，already packaged and frozen. What a delightful gift!
Well，the point wasn’t so much about the food. The true gift was a day of friends enjoying one another’s company. None of it would have happened if it had not been for Happy and Ben’s garden. Now they have a blog about gardening in case we decide to plant a garden. And I am so proud of my tomato plants!
1. We can infer that Happy and her husband Ben .| A．are a generous and warmhearted couple |
| B．sometimes quarrel with each other |
| C．live on the food they grow in their garden |
| D．don’t like spending time with others |
| A．they didn’t have to spend so much money on food |
| B．they could grow vegetables and sell them at the market |
| C．they could invite their neighbours and hold parties in it |
| D．they could spend happy time together with their family in it |
| A．To ask them to attend a birthday party. |
| B．To help them get to know each other. |
| C．To let them enjoy what they grew in the garden. |
| D．To ask them to share some interesting stories. |
| A．The writer used to have a big garden. |
| B．The writer didn’t like the food he received. |
| C．It was the first time for the writer to stay with so many people. |
| D．The writer has also started to grow vegetables. |
5 . In our daily lives, we probably make silly mistakes. While these moments can be worrying, they can also be handled with humor. When we share a laugh at our mistakes, we can calm ourselves down with a thread of understanding and acceptance.
When one morning in a rush to school, I spilled (泼洒) my cup of orange juice. I immediately thought of the precious minutes I would have to spend in cleaning up the floor. I raced back and forth to the sink (洗碗槽)with a kitchen cloth soaked (浸透)with juice to wash off. My legs were shaking as I watched from my window the school bus coming to my street. Within a minute, I had thrown the orange juice-soaked cloth to the sink and ran outside to join the group of kids in entering the bus. When thinking about my morning rush to clean up the spilled juice on the bus, I realized how much unnecessary stress and worry I put myself through. I ended up smiling to myself about my minor nervousness over spilled juice.
These days I don’t usually spill orange juice, but I do sometimes spill a bit of spaghetti sauce on my pant or put on my sweater backwards when I’m really tired and in a hurry for school. In each of my mistakes, I try to remind myself not to take myself so seriously. It takes me a minute to calm down, take a deep breath and smile at my carelessness. It is the ability to see mistakes in a different way that enables me to find humor in everyday moments.
Humor, however, doesn’t always have to arise from silly mistakes. Kids may have a good laugh at comic books, classic jokes and stories told by friends and parents. What matters more is not where you find the humor in life, but that you can appreciate it.
1. When we make mistakes in our daily lives, we ________.| A．should treat them properly | B．may try to enjoy ourselves |
| C．must know the value of them | D．had better forget them in time |
| A．He prepared breakfast busily. | B．He had some clothes washed. |
| C．He made a cup of orange juice. | D．He did some cleaning at home. |
| A．makes many mistakes now the then |
| B．tries to keep himself calm with humor |
| C．has been used to being busy every day |
| D．always makes other people around happy |
| A．We should try to find where humor lies. |
| B．We can be happy by enjoying humor. |
| C．It is natural for us to make mistakes. |
| D．Reading is a good habit for every person. |
6 . Do you still remember Jurassic Park, an amazing movie where science brings dinosaurs back from extinction? Now some very smart scientists are working on a way to revive, not dinosaurs, but other extinct species like the woolly mammoth （长毛象）using the gene editing technology known as CRISPR.
As an evolutionary biologist, obviously, it would be amazing to bring back extinct creatures. But even if we can bring them back, we are not going to be able to control how they evolve in the future. No man is an island and neither is any other creature. We need an ecosystem in order to survive. So we can think a lot about the examples of reintroducing species into the environment, like the gray wolves into Yellowstone. Ecology is very complicated and it certainly wasn't important when we first introduce rabbits into Australia, which was a total disaster eventually.
All animals like birds and mammals have to learn from their parents. If we bring them back to life, who are going to be around to teach them? We have examples where in California we've had the reproduction of the condors （秃鹰）.What scientists tried to do is to feed the babies using a mother condor puppet. When these poor creatures were released into the wild, they had an unnatural liking for humans. They didn't behave the way they should have, for condors.
According to Performing Animal Welfare Society, a healthy elephant costs about $70,000 per year to care for and an elderly elephant costs a good deal more. Of course, we are not talking about one. We're talking about many creatures. I don't think these creatures will have a future.
1. Why does the author mention the film in the first paragraph?| A．To recall an amazing movie. |
| B．To promote some extinct species. |
| C．To introduce the topic to be discussed. |
| D．To get to know some intelligent scientists. |
| A．Humans need a balanced ecosystem to survive. |
| B．To bring back extinct creatures was an unwise idea. |
| C．Helping endangered species proves to be beneficial for humans. |
| D．There were all sorts of positive effects about reintroducing species. |
| A．Condor. | B．Gray wolf. | C．Rabbit. | D．Elephant. |
| A．Is Jurassic Park an Amazing Movie? |
| B．What do Creatures Need to Survive? |
| C．Should We Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life? |
| D．How does an Evolutionary Biologist Protect Animals? |
7 . Be careful what you say around your dog. It might understand more than you think.
A border collie named Lucky recognizes the names of about 200 objects, say researchers in Germany. The dog also appears to be able to learn new words as easily as a 3-year-old child. Its word-learning skills are as good as those of a parrot or chimpanzee(黑猩猩).
In one experiment, the researchers took all 200 items that Lucky is supposed to know and divided them into 20 groups of 10 objects. Then the owner told the dog to go and fetch one of the items and bring it back. In four tests, Lucky got 37 out of 40 commands right. As the dog couldn’t see anyone to get clues, the scientists believe Lucky must understand the meanings of certain words.
In another experiment, the scientists took one toy that Lucky had never seen before and put it in a room with seven toys whose names the dog already knew. The owner then told Lucky to fetch the object, using a word the dog had never heard before.
The correct object was chosen in seven out of l0 tests, suggesting that the dog had worked out the answer by process of elimination(排除法). A month later, Lucky remembered half of the new names,which is even more impressive.
Lucky is thought to be smarter than the average dog. For one thing, Lucky is a border collie, a breed(品种)known for its mental abilities. In addition, the 9-year-old dog has been trained to fetch toys by their names since the age of nine months.
It’s hard to know if all dogs understand at least some of the words we say. Even if they do, they can’t talk back. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to sweet-talk your dog every now and then. You might just get a big, wet kiss in return!
1. From paragraph 2, we can infer that_________.| A．chimpanzees have very good word-learning skills |
| B．dogs are smarter than parrots and chimpanzees |
| C．animals are as clever as human beings |
| D．dogs have similar learning abilities as 3-year-old children |
| A．Lucky is smart enough to get all commands right |
| B．Lucky can recognize different things including toys |
| C．Lucky has developed the ability of learning mathematics |
| D．Lucky won’t forget the names of objects once recognizing them |
| A．To train your dog. | B．To talk to your dog. |
| C．To be careful with your dog. | D．To be friendly to your dog. |
8 . From the moment you open your eyes in the morning, you can feel sweat (汗水)running down your body, even if you’re barely moving at all. That’s what most people in China felt like this summer. In fact, the entire northern hemisphere(半球 )saw high temperatures in July. The Arctic Circle(北极圈) was no exception(例外). Temperatures in the city of Norilsk, which is in the Arctic Circle, reached a record high of 32 ℃, The Atlantic reported. Temperatures there are usually just 10 ℃ at this time of the year.
The heat wave in the Arctic is mainly a long-term result of global warming, according to the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. In fact, while the whole world is getting warmer, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This is called the polar amplification effect(极地放大效应).
The most direct impact(影响) of Arctic warming is the melting of Arctic ice. According to NASA, Arctic sea ice is now disappearing at a rate of 13. 2 percent every 10 years. NASA said that if this continues, the Arctic will have no ice by the year 2040. This has put some Arctic animals, like polar bears, in danger. The ice that the bears live on has shrunk(缩小), the Toronto Star reported.
Melting ice can also cause sea levels to rise in the long term. Since 1993, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3. 2 cm every 10 years, the Guardian reported. Some countries, such as Tuvalu(图瓦卢) in the South Pacific Ocean and Maldives(马尔代夫) in the Indian Ocean, are at risk of disappearing into the sea.
1. Which of the following is true?| A．Some countries in the ocean will disappear in 10 years. |
| B．China is the hottest in the northern hemisphere this summer. |
| C．The temperatures in Norilsk used to be lower than this summer. |
| D．The world gets warmer because of the heat wave in the Arctic. |
| A．The heat wave in the Arctic. |
| B．The result of global warming. |
| C．Getting warmer in the world. |
| D．The Arctic getting warm faster. |
| A．The polar will become dangerous. |
| B．Sea levels rise in the long term. |
| C．There will be an end of water shortage. |
| D．There will be no ice in the world by 2040. |
| A．Heat hits Arctic. |
| B．Arctic animals are in danger. |
| C．The world became hotter than before. |
| D．Some countries may disappear into the sea. |
9 . Scientists have learned a lot about the kinds of food people need. They say that there are several kinds of food that people should eat every day, they are: (1)green and yellow vegetables of all kinds; (2)citrus(柑桔)fruits and tomatoes; (3)potatoes and other fruits and vegetables; (4)meat of all kinds, fish and eggs; (5)milk and foods made from milk; (6)bread or cereal(谷类), rice is also in this kind of food; (7)butter, or something like butter.
People in different countries and different places of the world eat different kinds of things. Foods are cooked and eaten in many different kinds of ways. People in different countries eat at different times of the day. In some places people eat once or twice a day; in other countries people eat three or four times a day. Scientists say that none of the differences is really important. It doesn’t matter whether foods are eaten raw or cooked, canned(罐装的)or frozen(冷冻的). It doesn’t matter if a person eats dinner at 4 o'clock in the afternoon or at eleven o'clock at night. The important thing is what you eat every day.
There are two problems, then, in feeding the large number of people on the earth. The first is to find some ways to feed the world’s population so that no one is hungry. The second is to make sure that people everywhere have the right kinds of food to make them grow to be strong and healthy.
1. According to the scientists, which of the following is the healthiest for your lunch?| A．Chicken, apples, cereal and cabbages. | B．Potatoes, carrots, rice and bread. |
| C．Oranges, bananas, fish and tomatoes. | D．Beef, pork, fish and milk, |
| A．have the right kinds of food to eat | B．cook their food in the same way |
| C．have their meals at the same time | D．eat food in different ways |
| A．People in some places don’t have enough to eat. |
| B．There are too many people in the world. |
| C．One of the problems is that no one is hungry. |
| D．The scientists are trying to make people grow to be strong and healthy. |
| A．What to do with the two problems. | B．When people eat their lunch. |
| C．How to cook food in different ways. | D．Why people eat different kinds of food. |
10 . Drive south from San Francisco on scenic Highway One to the once sleepy beach town of Half Moon Bay, where you’ll find Francis Beach, part of the Half Moon Bay State Beaches. With summertime water temperatures ranging from 13 to 18 degrees, a wet suit for swimming and surfing is a must. Although it’s often foggy, on clear days you can see out to Pillar Point Harbor, a wonderful fishing site.
Rent a sea kayak(小艇) from Half Moon Bay Kayak Co, the first kayak company in the country to equip their boats with a GPS tracking device(装置). You can rent such a sea kayak and you will be at perfect surf wave,Mavericks($15 per hour; www.hmbkayak,com).
Hikers and runners will enjoy the gentle wind along the waterfront seaside path,connecting several beaches, or at the paths of Pursima Cree Redwoods Open Space Preserve in the hills above town.
Where to eat: Stay by the Half Moon Bay Brewery for high quality dishes, made with locally grown ingredients, or go back with the locals and a Maverick’s Amber Ale on the waterfront deck(www.hmbbrewingco.com).
Where to stay: For five-star expensive hotels, check into the Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay (from $305, www.ritzcarlton.com/resorts/half _moon_bay/). Enjoy the open-air dishes in the comfort of the new Ocean Terrace Restaurant overlooking the sea and be sure to enroll(使加入)the kids in the year-round Rita Kids program. For even more open-air living, book one of the 52 seaside campsites at Francis Beach’s state campground. In April, the campsite equipment was renewed and now includes hot showers ($25 a night; www.reserveamerica.com).
1. This text is mainly written for_________.| A．Tourists who want to travel to Francis Beach |
| B．People who are interested in American geography |
| C．Kids who enjoy the year-around Ritz Kids program |
| D．Hikers and runners wishing to enjoy the sea breezes along the beach |
a.Swimming b. surfing c. hiking d. fishing e.enjoying the open-air dishes f. enrolling the kids in the Ritz Kids program
| A．a,b,c,e | B．b, c, d, e | C．a, b, e, f | D．c, d, e, f |
| A．There were no campsite facilities at Francis Beach’s state campground before April. |
| B．Only Half Moon Bay Kayak Co has boats equipped with a GPS tracking device |
| C．You don’t have to pay for camping at Francis Beach’s state campground. |
| D．Half Moon Bay used to be an unknown beach town |
| A．www.hmbkayak.com | B．www.hmbbrewingco.com |
| C．www.ritzcarlton.com | D．www.reserveamerica.com |
| A．Enjoy Your Visit on Francis Beach. | B．Eat on Francis Beach |
| C．Travel to Francis Beach with a Kayak. | D．Enjoy Beautiful Scenery of San Francisco. |
