1 . Our electronic devices today store an awful lot of personal information. We use the devices to read and send e-mails, check bank balances, and even pay our bills over the internet. We want to be assured that if our devices are stolen. our personal information stored inside them will remain safe from the thief who physically possesses the device.
To deal with this problem. Apple has come out with a new iPhone that uses biometric(生物识别的)information to lock itself up. The phone has a fingerprint scanner that will lock or unlock the phone. Your fingerprint becomes the key, and this makes it nearly impossible for others to use your phone without your immediate permission- or does it?
At first look, one would think that this type of security would be welcome in the high-tech community where privacy is valued. Instead, some people are even more worried about their privacy. According to revealed documents, the US National Security Agency is able to slip into smartphones, while the agency can also legally force companies to turn over customers' personal information. If this is true, the fingerprint scanner on your smartphone might become a tool for the authorities to collect your fingerprint data.
Another problem with using biometrics to secure devices is that people don't know how secure the systems actually are. Germany's Chaos Computer Club claimed to have slipped into a biometrically secured iPhone within days of the device's release to the public. If this is the case, people who are using this type of security are much more vulnerable than they are led to believe. Although most security systems are hacked by someone eventually, the speed at which biometric security was hacked was very upset to some.
Regardless of how a device is secured, the debate is still attributes to the trade-off between privacy and security. Governments sometimes need to look at large amounts of information in order to defeat terrorist secret plans, and necessarily, some of the data come from you and me. When we use iPhones and other devices, we lose the ability to safeguard information that we would rather keep private, and we are forced to put trust in others.
It will always be difficult to strike a balance between privacy and security with growing changing technology. Nevertheless, one thing is crystal clear: we all have to sacrifice some of our privacy in order to have security for the public.
1. Why do people want to be assured that their electronic devices won’t be stolen?| A．Because people depend too much on it . |
| B．Because electronic devices are necessary in the workplace . |
| C．Because electronic devices are getting more and more expensive. |
| D．Because there is too much personal information in their electronic devices. |
| A．The biometric devices are fully safe. |
| B．Companies keep users’ personal information safe. |
| C．The biometric devices will be the popular way to ensure our privacy. |
| D．The authorities may drive companies to turn in users’ fingerprint data. |
| A．stable. | B．insecure. | C．reliable. | D．difficult. |
| A．the government will eventually know everything about us. |
| B．It is impossible to know who can be trusted in this technological world. |
| C．It is necessary to give up a certain amount of privacy for the sake of security. |
| D．Very few people are willing to use fingerprint security on their new phones. |
2 . Reducing plastic waste isn't easy because the cheap material is found in almost every household item. Now, a delicious and nutritious solution has come up to help reduce our dependence on this environmental hazard.
David Christian, the co-founder of Evoware, says the idea of creating the biodegradable (生物降解的) products came from concern at the country’s high pollution rate. Indonesia is home to four of the world's worst polluted rivers. Since single-use packaging is a large contributor to the problem, Evoware decided to deal with that first.
After investigating various materials, the company settled on seaweed. Unlike corn, commonly used for biodegradable containers, seaweed does not require resources like water or large amounts of space. Since Indonesian farmers already harvest more seaweed than they can sell, it's easy for the company to find the material.
Though they will not reveal their production process, Evoware says the seaweed packaging contains no chemicals and is safe to consume. The company has also invented single-use cups, which can break down 30 days after they're thrown away.
While replacing plastic with the seaweed products may seem appealing to most of us, it is a hard-sell in Indonesia. According to Christian, ''The awareness to reduce single-use plastic is still very low. This makes our bioplastic unnecessary.” Also a factor is the cost, which is higher than using plastic. Hopefully, Evoware will succeed in convincing Indonesians and people worldwide that switching to their products will be helpful to protecting our beautiful planet.
1. What problem did Evoware decide to deal with first?| A．Ways to clean the four worst polluted rivers. |
| B．What nutritious materials for people to use. |
| C．How to deal with single-use packaging. |
| D．Means to contribute to the country's economy. |
| A．It didn't require much space and was easy to get. |
| B．It could be found everywhere in his country. |
| C．It was most commonly used for packaging. |
| D．It grew thickly in most of the polluted rivers. |
| A．Their seaweed products have won government support. |
| B．Sometimes it's hard to get people to reduce the use of plastics. |
| C．Their new products have received worldwide popularity. |
| D．The cost of making seaweed products will be lowered soon. |
| A．Something lasting long. | B．Something hard to accept. |
| C．Something easy to get. | D．Something commonly seen. |
3 . People have speculated (思索) for centuries about a future without work. Some imagine that the coming work-free world will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own all the capital, and the masses will struggle in a wasteland. A different prediction holds that without jobs to give their lives meaning, future people will simply become lazy and depressed.
But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a world without work would be filled with dissatisfaction. Such visions are based on the downsides of being unemployed in a society built on the concept of employment. In the absence of work, a society designed with other ends in mind could provide strikingly different circumstances for the future of labor and leisure.
These days, spare time is relatively rare for most workers. “When I come home from a hard day's work, I often feel tired,” says John Danaher, a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, adding, “In a world in which I don’t have to work, I might feel rather different — perhaps different enough to throw himself into a hobby with the enthusiasm usually reserved for professional matters.”
Daniel Everett, an anthropologist (人类学家) at Bentley University studied a group of hunter-gathers in the Amazon called the Piraha for years. According to Everett, while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don’t. “They think of it as fun,” he says. “They don’t have a concept of work the way we do.”
Everett described a typical clay for the Piraha: A man might get up, spend a few hours fishing, have a barbecue, and play until the evening. Does this relaxing life lead to the depression and purposelessness seen among so many of today’s unemployed? “I’ve never seen anything like depression there, except people who are physically ill,” Everett says. While many may consider work necessary for human life, work as it exists today is a relatively new invention in the course of human culture. “We think it’s bad to just sit around with nothing to do,” says Everett. “For the Piraha, it’s quite a desirable state.”
1. What might be some people’s attitude towards the work-free world?| A．Objective. | B．Negative. |
| C．Skeptical. | D．Cautious. |
| A．Risks. | B．Losses. |
| C．Challenges. | D．Disadvantages. |
| A．work plays an important role in our future life |
| B．people don’t know how to balance work and life |
| C．people’s work-free future life will be full of charm |
| D．higher unemployment makes life tougher for workers |
| A．To justify John Danaher’s opinion. | B．To show a future life without work. |
| C．To compare different views on work. | D．To introduce the Piraha in the Amazon. |
4 . For several decades, there has been an extensive and organized campaign intended to generate distrust in science, funded by those whose interests and ideologies are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things.
Stressing successes isn’t wrong, but for many people it’s not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question “Why trust science?” is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. If you’ve got a high school science textbook lying around, you’ll probably find that answer in it. But what is typically thought to be the scientific method — develop a hypothesis (假设), then design an experiment to test it — isn’t what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and sometimes, scientists can be found doing many different things.
If there is no identifiable scientific method, then what is the reason for trust in science? The answer is how those claims are evaluated. The common element in modern science, regardless of the specific field or the particular methods being used, is the strict scrutiny (审查) of claims. It’s this tough, sustained process that works to make sure faulty claims are rejected. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a lengthy “peer review” because the reviewers are experts in the same field who have both the right and the obligation (责任) to find faults.
A key aspect of scientific judgment is that it is done collectively. No claim gets accepted until it has been vetted by dozens, if not hundreds, of heads. In areas that have been contested, like climate science and vaccine safety, it’s thousands. This is why we are generally justified in not worrying too much if a single scientist, even a very famous one, disagrees with the claim. And this is why diversity in science — the more people looking at a claim from different angles — is important.
Does this process ever go wrong? Of course. Scientists are humans. There is always the possibility of revising a claim on the basis of new evidence. Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are “always changing their minds.” While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that it explains what might otherwise appear paradoxical (矛盾的): that science produces both novelty and stability. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.
1. How does the author think of the scientific method?| A．Stable. | B．Persuasive. |
| C．Unreliable. | D．Unrealistic. |
| A．Explained. | B．Examined. |
| C．Repeated. | D．Released. |
| A．it is not persuasive to reject those faulty claims |
| B．settled science tends to be collectively overturned |
| C．a leading expert cannot play a decisive role in a scrutiny |
| D．diversity in knowledge is the common element in science |
| A．Put Your Faith in Science | B．Defend the Truth in Science |
| C．Apply Your Mind to Science | D．Explore A Dynamic Way to Science |
5 . Alida Monaco doesn’t spend her summers doing the usual teenage work, like working at the mall. Instead，she ‘ s studying.
It used to be that a summer job was considered a teenage thing. Today, Monaco ,who has never had a summer job, is part of growing trend (趋势)teenagers focusing on their studies, even during the summer. That’s down from 72% of Americans aged 16 to 19 who worked in July of 1978, according to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Fierce (激烈的)competition, older workers returning to the workforce and weak economic growth are all adding to the decrease of teenagers in the workforce. But as schoolwork grows increasingly heavy and homework eats up more time, data suggest the biggest reason why some teens won’t be working this summer is that they simply don’t1 have time.
For college - bound teens, some teachers even advise students not to waste time on a summer job. “ Some of my students only have about six weeks off in the summer,” said Shannon Reed, a lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh and a former high school English teacher.” I could never advise that they get jobs during that short break. ”
Young people who don’t work may miss out on valuable skills that they’11 need control and help people learn to deal with adult situations. But Monaco, who plans to attend Harvard, isn’t fazed by her lack(缺乏)of work experience. “Maybe I have missed out on a couple of life skills, “she said. “ But I don’t think it will harm me in way .”
1. What is the trend of American teenagers?| A．They are becoming lazy. |
| B．They are fond of doing holiday jobs. |
| C．They are focusing more on studies than on jobs. |
| D．They are becoming particular about (挑剔)holiday jobs |
| A．The reasons for teenagers giving up work. |
| B．The fierce competition teenagers face. |
| C．The structure (结构)of America’s workforce. |
| D．The effects of America9 s weak economy. |
| A．uncaring. | B．favorable(支持的). | C．worried. | D．doubtful. |
| A．supported. | B．helped. | C．upset. | D．confused. |
6 . The first science project I ever did was in fifth grade with my partner, Delaney. We looked online together for ideas and came up with an experiment to slide glass balls down a slope covered with different-textured materials. Our project was torn to pieces by our teacher. Our procedure wasn’t thorough. She told us we should consider waiting another year to enter the science fair. I felt so discouraged.
That night, I folded up our poster and started thinking about all of the things I could do differently the next year. I wanted to find a topic I cared about, one that interested me. As a beginner of the piano, I was curious about how the piano I practiced on for five hours every week could make the sounds that it did. I learned about something called “sympathetic resonance,” a phenomenon that allows string to vibrate (振动) together when played. I built my next project around this and ended up getting first place at the science fair the following year.
Today, I am 22 years old, a climate scientist. In the decade since I did my very first science project, I have wondered a lot about what it takes to be a good scientist. To me, what makes a truly good scientist is what makes a good person.
A good scientist has patience — patience for others, patience for herself or himself, and patience when things go wrong. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work on a NASA asteroid-sample retrieval mission called OSIRIS-Rex. The spacecraft launched in September 2016, headed to the asteroid Bennu. Late last year, finally, it reached its destination. In four years, OSIRIS-Rex will bring a piece of the asteroid back to earth so that scientists can learn more about it. Scientific discoveries do not take place overnight, and many are small and gradual. Missions like the one I worked on often take years to complete. Success almost never comes quickly or easily.
A good scientist is open-minded. It can be easy to ignore people you disagree with or to assume the worst about them. But we should be open to ideas that are not what we expected when we set out. We should take the time to consider other people’s opinions, even when they conflict with our own. There is so much we don’t know, but we do know some things. We live in a world where knowledge and uncertainty can and do coexist. As scientists, we should have both confidence in ourselves and humility as we move through our lives.
Of course, good scientists are driven by curiosity. But curiosity does not have to be limited to science. When we are curious about other people, we can become more considerate. When we are curious about other perspectives, we can become more understanding. After all, it costs nothing to be kind to someone — at school, at the grocery store, with your friends, with your family. A kind gesture can make someone’s day, even save someone’s life. You never know what people are going through unless you take the time to find out. Curiosity is not and never will be something to be ashamed of. Curiosity is our superpower. But it’s also what makes us human. All we have to do is ask.
1. What are the first two paragraphs mainly about?| A．The daily life of a scientist. |
| B．The procedures of choosing a project. |
| C．The personal experience of a scientist. |
| D．The achievements a scientist ever made. |
| A．Being modest. | B．Being cautious. |
| C．Being sceptical. | D．Being ambitious. |
| A．Curiosity kills the cat. |
| B．Practice makes perfect. |
| C．When one door shuts, another opens. |
| D．Nothing is impossible for a willing heart. |
| A．To evaluate the effect of a science project. |
| B．To analyze the personalities of a scientist. |
| C．To explain the consequence of an experiment. |
| D．To compare some approaches to be a scientist. |
7 . I was in the seventh grade, and we had moved to New Jersey in November. By then, everyone already had had their own friends, and no one wanted to talk to a new girl. To make things worse, they put me in ''Section L''. I found out later that everyone called Section L ''Loserville''. It was sort of an open secret that it was the section for troublemakers and not-so-smart kids. When I found out, I wanted to scream. I had always been a good student and had amazing friends, and now everyone thought I was a loser!
I did text my friends in Illinois almost every night, especially my best friend, Ana. At first my friends wanted to hear all about it. But then some stopped texting back once I said something about how miserable I was. One night when I was texting with Ana, I complained about another friend who had just done that. Anas texts came really fast for the next few minutes and they surprised me. She said that she was tired of hearing about how bad everything was in New Jersey, too. She said she did not want to hurt my feelings but that I needed to stop feeling so sorry for myself all the time, and I had to try to make things better.
The next day, I thought a lot about what Ana had said. She was right!
I wish I could say that everything changed overnight after that, but it didn't, I was still stuck in ''Loserville'', and some people were still mean (苛刻) to me, even though I tried to just stay out of their way.
But what did change was me — I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and did something about making friends. I signed up to make sets for the school play. I met a lot of new people there, and suddenly I had friends to say hi to in the halls!
I still miss Illinois sometimes, but life in New Jersey isn't so hard anymore. Even though I couldn't change my situation, I could change my attitude — and that made all the difference.
1. ''Loserville'' is a section for ________.| A．smart students | B．low achievers |
| C．class leaders | D．new comers |
| A．Ana didn’t text back to her | B．she was a good student |
| C．her friends hurt her feelings | D．she was unfairly treated |
| A．She managed to go back to Illinois. | B．She ended the friendship with Ana. |
| C．She began to make friends with others. | D．She fought back with her classmates. |
| A．Everlasting Friendship | B．Say Goodbye to ''Loserville'' |
| C．An Incident at School | D．Unhappiness in ''Loserville'' |
8 . Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. Time communicates in many ways.
Consider the different parts of the day, for example. The time of the day when something is done can give a special meaning to the event. It is not customary to telephone someone every early in the morning. If you telephone him early in the day, the time of the call shows that the matter is very important and requires immediate attention. If someone receives a call during sleeping hours, he assumes it is a matter of life or death. The time chosen for the call communicates its importance.
In social life, time plays a very important part. In the United States, guests tend to feel they are not highly regarded if the invitation to a dinner party is extended only three or four days before the party date. But this is not true in all countries. In other areas of the world, it may be considered foolish to make an appointment too far in advance because plans which are made for a date more than a week away tend to be forgotten.
The meaning of time differs in different parts of the world. Thus, misunderstandings often arise between people from cultures that treat time differently. Promptness(准时) is valued highly in American life, for example. If people are not prompt, they may be regarded as impolite or not fully responsible. In the U.S., no one would think of keeping a business partner waiting for an hour; it would be too impolite. A person who is five minutes late is expected to make a short apology.
This way of treating time is quite different from that of several other cultures. This helps to explain the unfortunate experience of a certain agriculturist from the United States, assigned to duty in another country. After a long delay, the agriculturist was finally agreed an appointment with the Minister of Agriculture. Arriving a little before the appointed hour, the agriculturist waited. The hour came and passed. At this point he suggested to the secretary that perhaps the minister did not know he was waiting in the outer office. This gave him the feeling of having done something to solve the problem, but he had not. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, then forty-five. To an American, that is the beginning of the “insult period”. No matter what is said in apology, there is little that can remove the damage done by an hour’s wait in an outer office. Yet in the country where this story took place, a forty-five-minute waiting period was not unusual.
In the West, particularly in the United States, people tend to think of time as something fixed in nature. As a rule, Americans think of time as a road stretching into the future, along which one progresses. The road has many sections, which are to be kept separate— “one thing at a time”. People who cannot plan events are not highly regarded. Thus, an American may feel angry when he has made an appointment with someone and then finds a lot of other things happening at the same time.
Since time has such different meanings in different cultures, communication is often difficult. We will understand each other a little better if we can keep this fact in mind.
1. According to the passage, an announcement broadcast during class must be very important because ________．| A．it is a customary time to make. | B．it makes everyone surprised. |
| C．it requires immediate attention. | D．it speaks more plainly than words. |
| A．the value of promptness for Americans. |
| B．the cultural differences in treating time. |
| C．the bad manners of the Minister of Agriculture. |
| D．the importance of time in different parts of the day. |
| A．boring. | B．patient. |
| C．shameful. | D．hopeless. |
| A．they are concerned with the value of time. |
| B．they know how to communicate with each other. |
| C．they escape dealing with many things at one appointed time. |
| D．they keep in mind that different cultures treat time differently. |
9 . One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone (无人机) into a remote-controlled pollinator (授粉媒介) by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.
Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades. Thus, the decline of bees isn't just worrisome because it could disrupt ecosystems, but also because it could disrupt agriculture and economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, but none of them are especially effective yet.
Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven't figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire. “It’s very tough work,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. His particular contribution to the field involves a gel, one he’d considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it hadn’t dried up or degraded at all. “I was so surprised because it still had high viscosity,” Miyako said.
The chemist noticed that when dropped, the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen (花粉). He and his colleagues chose a drone and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to mimic a bee’s fuzzy body. They coated those horsehairs in the gel, and then controlled the drones over lilies, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one, thus fertilizing it.
The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones whose horsehairs had been coated with the gel had about 10 times more pollen than those that had not been coated with the gel.
Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties. There’s a lot of work to be done before that's a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more controllable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, with better GPS and artificial intelligence.
1. What does the underlined word “viscosity” in Para.3 probably mean?| A．Hardness. | B．Stickiness. |
| C．Flexibility. | D．Purity. |
| A．bees disrupt both agriculture and economy |
| B．scientists have invented self-powered robot insects |
| C．bees in the United States are on the edge of extinction |
| D．Miyako found the special feature of the gel by chance |
| A．its body is made like a bee’s |
| B．its GPS works more efficiently |
| C．some flowers are coated with the gel |
| D．horsehairs with the gel are attached to it |
| A．are not yet ready for practical use |
| B．may eventually replace bees in the future |
| C．are much more efficient than bee pollinators |
| D．can provide a solution to economic depression |
10 . From linguists’ point of view, grammar is a set of patterns for how words are put together to form phrases or clauses, whether in spoken or written. Different languages have different patterns. Some scholars have tried to identify patterns common to all languages. But apart from some basic features, few of these so-called linguistic universals have been found.
The study of these patterns open up “an ongoing debate” between two positions, known as prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism thinks a given language should follow consistent rules, while descriptivism sees variation and adaptation as a natural and necessary part of language. From much of history, the vast majority of language was spoken. But as people became more interconnected, writing gained importance. Written language was standardized to allow broader communication and ensure that people in different parts around could understand each other.
Language purists worked to establish and promote this standard by detailing a set of rules that reflected the established grammar of their times. And rules for written grammar were applied to spoken language as well. Speech patterns that deviated from the written rules were considered signs of low social status. And many people who are grown-ups speaking in these ways were forced to adopt the standardized form.
More recently, however, linguists have understood that speech is a separate phenomenon from writing with its own regularities and patterns. Most of us learn to speak at such an early age that we don’t even remember it. We form our spoken skills through unconscious habits, not memorized rules. And because speech also uses mood and intonation for meaning, its structure is often more flexible, adapting to the needs of speakers and listeners. This could mean avoiding complex clauses that are hard to understand in real time, making changes to avoid awkward pronunciation or removing sounds to make speech faster. This linguistic approach that tries to understand and map such differences without dictating correct ones is known as descriptivism. Rather than deciding how language should be used, it describes how people actually use it and tracks the innovation they come up with in the process.
But while the debate between prescriptivism and descriptivism continues, the two are not mutually exclusive. At its best, prescriptivism is useful for informing people about the most common established patterns at a given point in time. Ultimately, grammar is best considered as a set of linguistic habits that are constantly being negotiated and reinvented by the entire group of language users. Like language itself, it’s a wonderful and complex fabric woven through the contributions of speakers and listeners, writers and readers, prescriptivists and descriptivists from both near and far.
1. The underlined word “deviated” in Paragraph 3 probably means ______.| A．copied | B．updated |
| C．differed | D．originated |
| A．focuses on established language patterns |
| B．accepts the differences between languages |
| C．follows the innovations in language patterns |
| D．attaches more importance to written language |
| A．A new understanding of language. | B．The beliefs held by prescriptivists. |
| C．The impact of grammar on language. | D．The ongoing debate between linguists. |
| A．The importance of Grammar | B．The History of Grammar |
| C．Grammar: Rules or Habits | D．Grammar: Writing Rules |
