1 . Esports (electronic sports) are organized competitions where players — often referred to as “athletes” — face off against each other in video games. They are not just games in a sense. Actually, they are a sport that can improve the players’ thinking ability, hand-eye coordination, willpower and team spirit.
The esports industry has experienced significant growth in recent years around the world, though it’s still in the nascent stage, which means it has huge growth potential going forward.
While the assumption is that esports are only a recent phenomenon, in reality the first esports-like event was held back in 1972, when some Stanford University students competed against one another in the game Spacewar. The prize? A year-long subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.
The ’80s saw the first true videogame tournament, with over 10,000 players gathering for the Space Invaders Championship. However, most of the period saw that players focused on beating each other’s highest scores rather than competing in organized tournaments.
As gaming became more popular, the ’90s became the first decade when esports (a term which wasn’t yet coined) began to really take off, with companies such as Nintendo and Sega holding professional gaming tournaments. This is also when we began to see money becoming a factor in professional gaming. But it is the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament that is considered the world’s first real esports event. Only a few weeks later, the Cyberathlete Professional League was formed — an organization which is considered a pioneer of esports.
Due to the normalization of gaming and the Internet (along with technological advances), the real surge ( 激增 ) of esports came in the recent decade. It was then that we began seeing what we now know to be modern-day esports. As streaming platforms such as YouTube took off, people began to show interest in not only playing videogames but watching them too. Popular tournaments now sell out stadiums and professional players can earn millions from prize money, advertising and salaries.
1. What does the underlined word “nascent” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Beginning. | B．Peak. |
| C．Mature. | D．Final. |
| A．By providing examples. | B．By making comparisons. |
| C．By following the order of time. | D．By following the order of importance. |
| A．They spread worldwide overnight. |
| B．Prize money appeared in the 1990s. |
| C．The first real esports event was held in 1972. |
| D．The athletes in esports are programmers. |
| A．They are getting popular. |
| B．They become too commercialized. |
| C．They boost the normalization of the Internet. |
| D．Their development relies on advertising. |
2 . Happiness is not a warm phone, according to a new study exploring the link between young life satisfaction and screen time. The study was led by professor of psychology Jean M. Twenge at San Diego State University (SDSU).
To research this link, Twenge, along with colleagues Gabrielle Martin at SDSU and W. Keith Campbell at the University of Georgia, dealt with data from the Monitoring the Future (MtF) study, a nationally representative survey of more than a million U. S. 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders. The survey asked students questions about how often they spent time on their Phones, tablets and computers, as well as questions about their face-to-face social interactions and their overall happiness.
On average found that teens who spent more time in front of screen devices — playing computer games, using social media, texting and video chatting — were less happy than those who invested more time in non-screen activities like sports, reading newspapers and magazines, and face-to-face social interactions.
"The key to digital media use and happiness is limited use," Twenge said. "Aim to spend no more than two hours a day on digital media, and try to increase the amount of time you spend seeing friends face-to-face and exercising — two activities reliably linked to greater happiness."
Looking at historical trends from the same age groups since the 1990s, it's easy to find that the increase of screen devices over time happened at the same time as a general drop-off in reported happiness in U. S. teens. Specifically, young peopled life satisfaction and happiness declined sharply after 2012. That's the year when the percentage of Americans who owned a smartphone rose above 50 percent. By far the largest change in teens' lives between 2012 and 2016 was the increase in the amount of time they spent on digital media, and the following decline in in-person social activities and sleep.
1. Which method did Twenge's team use for the study?| A．Calculating students' happiness. |
| B．Asking students certain questions. |
| C．Analyzing data from a survey. |
| D．Doing experiments on screen time. |
| A．By making a comparison. |
| B．By giving an example. |
| C．By making an argument. |
| D．By introducing a concept. |
| A．To draw a conclusion from the study. |
| B．To offer some advice to the readers. |
| C．To prove social activities' importance. |
| D．To support the researchers' finding. |
| A．Quitting Phones Equals Happiness |
| B．Screen Time Should Be Banned |
| C．Teens' Lives Have Changed Sharply |
| D．Screen-addicted Teens Are Unhappier |
3 . When Earth was just a tiny young thing，it birthed many new continents - then it swallowed them all up, leaving just a few traces behind, a new study shows.
These first continents had a special skill for living fast and dying young, but in doing so, they paved the way for solid continents that eventually led to the emergence of plate tectonics（版块运动）， the new study suggests.
For hundreds of millions of years, the current continents have been more or less stable. But very little is known about the continents that existed early on in Earth's history.
To learn more about that early history, the researchers used computers to model the interactions of rock and magma（岩浆） in the Earth’s crust（地壳） and below. The modeling showed that the earliest continents, known as the Hadean (4.6 to 4.0 billion years ago), were weak and likely to destruction. Modern continents have a comprehensive high tensile strength, meaning it’s hard to tear them apart by stretching.
By the time the Archean (4.0 billion to 2.5 billion years ago) began ending the Hadean, the crust which had first formed was almost entirely replaced by the seeds of the modern continents.
In a sense, the researchers found, those lost Hadean continents made the later, more stable continents possible.
The emergence of continents at the close of the Hadean also contributed fertilizer that would later help seed life on Earth, the researchers wrote. Bits of them broke off and entered the atmosphere and oceans, providing necessary nutrients for the life forms that soon emerged.
1. Compared with the modern continents, the Hadean was________.| A．younger | B．firmer | C．weaker | D．bigger |
| A．It existed 4.0 million years ago. | B．It disappeared before the Archean began. |
| C．It helped make more stable continents. | D．It provided all the necessary nutrients. |
| A．By listing researchers’ findings. | B．By giving a lot of examples. |
| C．By making comparisons. | D．By listing a lot of numbers. |
| A．A science fiction. | B．A science magazine. |
| C．A travel brochure. | D．An encyclopedia. |
4 . China’s TikTok, which has taken the world by storm, is working its magic in its home nation, too.
The Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, has amassed (累积) 400 million daily active users, parent company Byte Dance (字节跳动) revealed in its annual report this week. This is an impressive growth for the addictive video app, which had 250 million daily active users in January last year.
The report, which describes users’ behavior and trends, shows the cultural difference between China and the US, said Katherine Wu, an investor at New York-based firm Notation Capital.
Things that trend in these two countries are completely different. For example, knowledge-based content is extremely popular in China, but less so in the U.S. Also, those creators that did the most dance videos in China are users born in the 60s, while in the US, it seems that it’s mostly teenagers who are creating the dances.
Byte Dance claimed that Douyin has established itself as the largest knowledge, culture and art platform in China. 14.89 million “knowledge-based content videos” were shared on the app last year, it claimed. For example, one of the world’s most valued startups claimed that the number of users who posts videos about chemistry reached 130 million people last year. “On the art and culture front, videos related to those topics had 543.1 billion plays on Douyin last year.” it claimed.
Education has become a main use case for Byte Dance. TikTok, which is estimated to have earned more than $50 million last year, already counts educational content as one of the most consumed categories on its app across the world. The app launched an educational campaign in India last year, where it has amassed more than 200 million users.
1. The difference in trends between China and the US reflects the difference in ________.| A．culture | B．education |
| C．knowledge | D．hobby |
| A．Music videos | B．Knowledge-based videos |
| C．Humorous videos | D．Videos about chemistry |
| A．analyzing reasons | B．showing survey results |
| C．stating arguments | D．providing statistics and examples |
| A．To introduce the app --TikTok. |
| B．To help customers use TikTok. |
| C．To reveal the popularity of TikTok. |
| D．To recommend TikTok to customers. |
