1 . The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired (天生的). But in the 1990s researchers began making surprising discoveries about insect minds. Some species of wasps (黄蜂) recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire impressive social skills. For example, they can infer the fighting strengths of other wasps relative to their own just by watching other wasps fight among themselves.

Given the substantial work on the complexity of insect cognition (认知), it might seem surprising that it took scientists so long to ask whether, if they are that smart, could also be sentient, capable of feeling. Since we have no direct window into the inner world of an animal that cannot verbally communicate its thoughts and feelings, the question of whether insects are sentient remained academic.

15 years ago, I performed an experiment in which we asked whether bumblebees could learn about threat from their natural enemies. We built a plastic spider model with a mechanism that would briefly trap a bumblebee between two sponges before releasing it. The bumblebees showed a significant change in their behavior after being attacked by the robotic spider. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they learned to avoid flowers with spiders and meticulously scanned every flower before landing. Curiously, however, they some times even fled from imaginary threats, scanning and then abandoning a perfectly safe, spider-free flower. Although this incidental observation did not constitute formal evidence of an emotionlike state, it did open the door to the idea that such states might exist in insects.

Some research suggested that insects might have positive states of mind. Researchers discovered that bees actively seek out drugs such as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even treat themselves with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies stressed by being robbed of mating opportunities prefer food containing alcohol, and bees even show withdrawal symptoms when removed from an alcohol-rich diet.

Why would insects consume mind-altering substances if there isn’t a mind to alter? But these suggestive hints of negative and positive mind states still fell short of what was needed to demonstrate that insects are sentient.

2 . Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.

Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects' lives, the researchers said. "We strongly believe artificial light at night — in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution.invasive (入侵的) species, and climate change — is driving insect declines, " the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies.

Insect population collapses have been reported around the world, and the first global scientific review published in February, said widespread declines threatened to cause a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems".

There are thought to be millions of insect species, most still unknown to science, and about half are active at night. Those active in the day may also be disturbed by light at night when they are at rest.

The most familiar impact of light pollution is moths (飞蛾) flapping around a bulb, mistaking it for the moon. Some insects use the polarisation of light to find the water they need to breed, as light waves line up after reflecting from a smooth surface. But artificial light can scupper (使泡汤) this. Insects are important prey (猎物) for many species, but light pollution can tip the balance in favour of the predator if it traps insects around lights. Such increases in predation risk were likely to cause the rapid extinction of affected species, the researchers said.

The researchers said most human-caused threats to insects have analogues in nature, such as climate change and invasive species. But light pollution is particularly hard for insects to deal with.

However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution is relatively easy to prevent. Simply turning off lights that are not needed is the most obvious action, he said, while making lights motion-activated also cuts light pollution. Shading lights so only the area needed is lit up is important. It is the same with avoiding blue-white lights, which interfere with daily rhythms. LED lights also offer hope as they can be easily tuned to avoid harmful colours and flicker rates.

3 . previous recessions (经济衰退), billionaires were hit along with the rest of us; it took almost three years for Forbes’s 400 richest people to recover from losses caused in 2008’s Great Recession. But in the coronavirus recession of 2020, most billionaires have gotten richer than ever before.

Billionaires increased their new billions just as millions of other Americans ran into terrible financial problems. More than 20 million people lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic. Food banks across the country are preparing for another great increase in demand. Why are American billionaires doing so well while so many other Americans suffer? People may find part of the reasons from the following fact. Stocks (股票) are overwhelmingly owned by the wealthy, and the stock market has recovered from its early-pandemic depths much more quickly than other parts of the economy.

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4 . New bio-plastics are being made in laboratories from straw, wood chips and food waste, with researchers aiming to replace oil as the source of the world’s plastic.

The new approaches include genetically modifying bacteria to eat wood and produce useful chemicals. But the bio-plastics are currently significantly more expensive to make than fossil fuel-based plastics.

Land and seas around the world, from high mountains to deep oceans, have become polluted with plastic, prompting major public concern. The world has produced 8bn tons of plastic since the 1950s and demand is still rising.

While some waste plastic is recycled, much of it is burnt to produce electricity, resulting in carbon emissions that drive climate change. In contrast to plastic made from oil, plastics made from plant-based materials only release the carbon the plants absorbed from the air as they grew. Bio-plastics will also give more options for products that biodegrade (生物降解) in the environment, although they can be made very long-lasting if required.

“Plastics are an incredible enhancement to our daily lives,” said Paul Mines, CEO of Biome Technologies in the UK, which has spent t5m in the last five years on bio-plastics research. “But we can’t go on using fossil fuel-based materials. About 6-7% of every barrel (桶) of oil is used to make plastics.”

“Using plant materials is feasible,” said professor Simon, at the University of York. “Replacing half of the nation’s plastic bottles could be done using just 3% of the sugar beet crop, 5% of wheat straw or 2.5% of food waste,” he said.

Currently, just a few thousand tons of bio-plastic are used in the UK each year, compared to millions of tons of conventional plastic. Mines said this could rise to about 20,000 tons in the next five years.

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5 . 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.

6 . We had finally decided to skip our traditional family dinner and make the trip to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when Kerry was 5. Like many other families we packed a small backpack with sliced turkey sandwiches and juice boxes. After getting off the train, we were walking up to the entrance when Kerry spotted a homeless woman sitting in the shadows, invisible to all except my curious daughter.

“What’s that?” she asked. Linda and I looked at each other, worried about the need to explain something very different than the happy scene we were about to join. During our first years of parenthood we’d discussed how we would explain such topics as life, death, and love. But homelessness? It came so suddenly that we just gave as simple an explanation as we could and continued on to the parade.

The following year, we decided to attend the parade again. So the night before Thanksgiving we went shopping for sliced turkey for sandwiches. “Can we bring some sandwiches for those people?” she inquired, Again, Kerry caught us off guard. “Why?” was my first reaction. But we knew immediately whom she meant. How could we refuse? Why would we refuse? This was a golden opportunity to honor Kerry’s sense of charity. Six-year-old Kerry was teaching us an important lesson. That night we prepared and packed two-dozen sandwiches into our now overstuffed backpack.

Scanning the shadows after reaching Manhattan again, Kerry spotted a homeless man sitting in the same spot as last year. We stopped and took out the first of the little feasts from the pack. Without a word of instruction, we handed it to Kerry. She walked over to the man slowly, handing the sandwich to him. Neither spoke a word. Then we were off to the parade, stopping along the way to distribute the rest of the sandwiches, except one for each of us.

Somehow, no giant Thanksgiving sit-down feast ever tasted as good as those sandwiches. Over the next decade we did the same things again and again. After all, there’s nothing like sharing a turkey sandwich with new friends.

7 . Human speech contains more than 2,000 different sounds, from the common “m” and “a” to the rare clicks of some southern African languages. But why are certain sounds more common than others? A ground-breaking, five-year study shows that diet-related changes in human bite led to new speech sounds that are now found in half the world’s languages.

More than 30 years ago, the scholar Charles Hockett noted that speech sounds called labiodentals, such as “f” and “v”, were more common in the languages of societies that ate softer foods. Now a team of researchers led by Damián Blasi at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, has found how and why this trend arose.

They discovered that the upper and lower front teeth of ancient human adults were aligned (对齐), making it hard to produce labiodentals, which are formed by touching the lower lip to the upper teeth. Later, our jaws changed to an overbite structure (结构), making it easier to produce such sounds.

The team showed that this change in bite was connected with the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period. Food became easier to chew at this point. The jawbone didn’t have to do as much work and so didn’t grow to be so large.

Analyses of a language database also confirmed that there was a global change in the sound of world languages after the Neolithic age, with the use of “f” and “v” increasing remarkably during the last few thousand years. These sounds are still not found in the languages of many hunter-gatherer people today.

This research overturns the popular view that all human speech sounds were present when human beings evolved around 300,000 years ago. “The set of speech sounds we use has not necessarily remained stable since the appearance of human beings, but rather the huge variety of speech sounds that we find today is the product of a complex interplay of things like biological change and cultural evolution,” said Steven Moran, a member of the research team.

What is paragraph 5 mainly about?

8 . My First Marathon(马拉松)

A month before my first marathon, one of my ankles was injured and this meant not running for two weeks, leaving me only two weeks to train. Yet, I was determined to go ahead.

I remember back to my 7th year in school. In my first P.E. class, the teacher required us to run laps and then hit a softball. I didn’t do either well. He later informed me that I was “not athletic”.

The idea that I was “not athletic” stuck with me for years. When I started running in my 30s, I realized running was a battle against myself, not about competition or whether or not I was athletic. It was all about the battle against my own body and mind. A test of wills!

The night before my marathon, I dreamt that I couldn’t even find the finish line. I woke up sweating and nervous, but ready to prove something to myself.

Shortly after crossing the start line, my shoe laces (鞋带) became untied. So I stopped to readjust. Not the start I wanted!

At mile 3, I passed a sign: “GO FOR IT, RUNNERS!”

By mile 17, I became out of breath and the once injured ankle hurt badly. Despite the pain, I stayed the course walking a bit and then running again.

By mile 21, I was starving!

As I approached mile 23, I could see my wife waving a sign. She is my biggest fan. She never minded the alarm clock sounding at 4 a.m. or questioned my expenses on running.

I was one of the final runners to finish. But I finished! And I got a medal. In fact, I got the same medal as the one that the guy who came in first place had.

Determined to be myself, move forward, free of shame and worldly labels (世俗标签), I can now call myself a “marathon winner”.

What does the story mainly tell us?

9 . Born with severe hearing loss, Li has found her way to communicate with the world—through painting.

Before learning to paint, Li always felt lonely in a silent world. She knew she was different from her peers because she could not hear. But a painting class in primary school opened for her a door to creativity and a way of expression.

“I still remember my first mural, which was to help a kindergarten to design and paint its wall,” Li says. “The project made me realize how happy I was immersing myself into painting.”

To pursue her passion for art, Li went to study advertising design at a vocational and technical school. “Painting brushes can help me create a colorful world in my imagination, telling my thoughts on paper, instead of through voices,” Li said.

Graduating from college in 2005, Li got a job as a typist at a public institute. But she could not communicate well with her other colleagues. Her husband understood how she felt because he lost his hearing due to medication when he was 1 year old. He is also an art lover. In March 2016, under her husband’s suggestion, Li quit her job and joined her husband’s company, which specializes in 3D wall and ground paintings.

Wall painting is a demanding job because it requires people to work outdoors, whether in extremely cold or hot weather. As all the people are hearing-impaired in their company, communication with clients is the most common challenge that the team faces.

Now in many parks and scenic spots, the couple have created large-scale murals and interactive pavement painting that make onlookers a part of the drawings.

“My husband and I want to introduce painting to more people like us and help them find their own way to make a living,” Li says. Now Li has an apprentice who just graduated from college. While coaching the newcomer, Li is exploring her own style and hopes to become an illustrator and open her own exhibition one day.

“They’re energetic young people with a passion to create new things, and you can feel that in their paintings,” one of their clients said. “They’re also a professional, dedicated team, often working late into the night on the designs for us.”

Li hopes that their stories can encourage more hearing-impaired people to build their own careers and achieve their goals, regardless of how tough it may be.

What does the passage mainly tell us?

10 . The International Baccalaureate (IB) Program is an internationally recognized qualification for entry into higher education. Usually, 16-to-19-year-olds take it during the last two years of high school. High-achieving high school students who want an international perspective in a variety of subjects should consider this program.

The IB Program includes three required courses. The first, Theory of Knowledge, discusses where knowledge comes from and how to analyze information. The second required course, Extended Essay, involves researching a subject of the student’s choice and writing a 4,000-word essay on it. The third requirement, called Creativity, Activity, Service, requires 50 hours of work outside of class in each of the three areas. Creativity includes theater, music and art. Activity refers to sports, and service means volunteering.

The program includes classes in six other subject areas as well: language and literature, language acquisition, individuals and societies, sciences, mathematics and the arts. Students are expected to take one class from each subject area. However, they can choose an additional course from one of the other areas as a substitution for the arts requirement.

The IB Program introduces students to a wide range of courses. This can give students a leg up in university applications because it shows they can learn about many different subjects. On the other hand, the variety of subjects means that students can only take one or two classes in any one area. Therefore, students who want to specialize in fields such as medicine or engineering may as well take more classes in a single subject area. IB may not be a good fit for these students.

The IB Program is time-consuming and intellectually challenging. Not all students will desire or feel equipped to put in the work. For those who pursue it, however, the IB Program offers a wide-ranging education focused on developing skills students will need in life.