1 . Researchers have solved a long-standing mystery: why rocks on a flat lakebed in Death Valley National Park in California sometimes move. Racetrack Playa, the waterless lakebed, is named for the long trails (痕迹) that the rocks, some of which weigh hundreds of pounds, leave in the earth.
What was one of the world’s natural wonders now appears to be the perfect combination of rain, wind, ice and sun, scientists have found. Dr. Norris and James M. Norris, a cousin and co-author, actually saw the rocks moving in December when they went to check on the project.
For their study, they used special global positioning system tools, designed by James Norris, in rocks of various sizes brought from outside the park. They were not allowed to move or change anything of the existing playa (盐湖) stones.
No river flows into the playa, though rainwater sometimes fills part of it to a depth of a few inches. It’s when this happens, and the nights are below freezing and the days are fine, that the rocks may “sail”, the researchers said. On those occasions, the cold night air leaves a sheet (薄片) of ice only an eighth of an inch thick. Then the warmth of the sun causes the sheet to break up. As more ice melts (融化), some of these lesser sheets have room to move. Driven by light winds, the sheets push up against rocks. The wind drives the water, too, which also helps push the ice to some degree. The movement is slow, no more than about 15 feet a minute.
The movements are episodic — the conditions may be just right for a few minutes, and then the sun causes more ice to break and the movement stops. And once the water disappears, it may be years before the rocks move again, even if the playa floods again, because the right temperature and wind conditions may not occur.
1. What do we know about Racetrack Playa?| A．It has flat rocks in the earth. | B．It is covered by rocks. |
| C．It has some valleys. | D．It is usually dry. |
| A．It doubted the method. | B．It was against doing so. |
| C．It felt it was worth a try. | D．It thought it was useless. |
| A．They are moved by big floods. |
| B．They move just because of strong winds. |
| C．They are mainly pushed by wind-driven ice. |
| D．They move very slowly on smooth ice sheets. |
| A．Amazingly big. | B．Extremely slow. |
| C．Happening sometimes. | D．Going on without stopping. |
2 . Serious measures are needed to make the people in Oman fitter, healthier and rid of the several factors that cause overweight and obesity (肥胖). According to Dr Noor al Busaidi, obesity is a global problem, not only in Oman and the MENA region but around the world, too. The prevalence (普遍) of obesity has been increasing steadily over the past 20-30 years. In Oman, the latest survey conducted by the Ministry of Health together with the World Health Organisation has revealed that overweight and obese people has reached 66 per cent in Oman, of which female obesity accounts for 40 per cent.
She further explained that those with a BMI (Body mass index) of 30 and above can be termed as obese while those with a BMI of 25-29.9 can be termed as overweight. Research shows that over 200 various diseases and health conditions including 30 types of cancer, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, etc are associated with obesity, she said, adding, “Obesity is the mother of all diseases, hence it is necessary for people in Oman to watch their weight and take corrective measures.”
“Over the last few years, the World Obesity Federation has also been stressing on obesity- related abuse and laughter. People tend to tease obese people without realizing that many people become obese for reasons beyond their control, like genetic factors or following an accident,” Dr Noor said, adding that we need to fight discrimination against obese individuals in society.
Lastly, Dr Noor emphasized that health is not just the responsibility of the Ministry of Health and that concerted efforts are necessary from the government institutions, non-governmental organizations and individuals in society to make the nation healthy.
1. Which of the following diseases is related to obesity based on the text?| A．Near-sightedness. | B．Flu. | C．Yellow fever. | D．Heart disease. |
| A．Female obesity has reached 66 % in Oman. | B．30 types of cancer has nothing to do with obesity. |
| C．Obese people tend to be looked down upon. | D．More medicines should be used to handle obesity. |
| A．Obesity has become a problem that people all over the world are facing. |
| B．The higher a woman’s BMI is, the healthier and slimmer she will become. |
| C．The prevalence of obesity has been decreasing rapidly recently in Oman. |
| D．We should rely on ourselves to fight against obesity without help from others. |
| A．Reduced. | B．Joint. | C．International. | D．Special. |
3 . It’s important for children to take part in social activities during their summer holidays. “Kids should have a break during the summer. They’ve worked hard during the school year and this is their time to relax, but they should continue communicating with their friends and meeting new people,” said Dr. Jin Han. He’s a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Spending time with friends and meeting new people by doing fun and educational activities such as music, arts and sports programs in summer help with their development. “If children spend a lot of time alone on their electronic equipment, then they will fail to communicate with others,” Han said. “In today’s world, it’s very easy for kids to stay indoors all day and keep in touch with others, but that is not a good way to connect with others. Face-to-face communication is necessary and important. Parents should restrict the time their children spend on electronic equipment. For example, the time they spend on their phones cannot be more than one hour a day.”
It’s also important for children to spend quality time with their parents and sisters or brothers. “It’s not the length of time, but the quality of time that families spend together that is really valuable,” Han said. “This type of communication is not something that you can get from anywhere else. It doesn’t matter how old the child is, because family bonding (人与人之间的关系) experiences can happen at any time.”
Having children spend time with friends and families doesn’t have to spend money in the wallet, either. For example, going to the neighborhood swimming pool or having a picnic is a great way to spend quality time together.
1. What does Dr. Jin Han think about the summer holidays according to the first paragraph?| A．It is necessary for children to have a rest during summer holidays. |
| B．Children should relax as much as possible during summer holidays. |
| C．Making new friends in summer holidays is difficult for children. |
| D．Children should prepare for schoolwork in summer holidays. |
| A．Increase. | B．Control. | C．Spend. | D．Employ. |
| A．How long children spend with families matters. |
| B．What to do with families depends on the parents. |
| C．When to spend time with families makes a difference. |
| D．How to enjoy the time with families is of great importance. |
| A．The importance of friends and families. | B．The introduction of some social activities. |
| C．The suitable ways to spend summer holidays. | D．The necessity of face-to-face communication. |
4 . Amazon is reportedly working on a free, ad-supported music offering as another option to its paid Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music services to better compete with Apple Music, Google Music and Spotify. According to Billboard, the free plan could go live as soon as possible. At this time, the service is only available in the US for users who request music by a trial version (HIA), but a full-fledged version of the free ad- based music service is expected to be launched sometime in the future.
Billboard reports that Amazon is now in talks to make an ad-based free level available for its music service. The company is expected to advertise the plan with its Echo speakers. By now, Amazon Music Unlimited runs $ 10 per month standalone (单机), the same as Apple Music and Sportify. Meanwhile Prime Music offers Amazon Prime members a more limited selection of content for no extra charge. A new ad supported free level would make Amazon the third music offering.
Billboard notes that it's not clear how many paying users Amazon currently has, though it may have been around 20 million last year for all of its services. In contrast, Apple Music reportedly hit 28 million paying users in the US alone, beaten by Spotify.
Amazon hasn't disclosed how many paying music users it has, but some reports last year estimated it counts over 20 million users across its offerings and expect it to gain steadily thanks to integration with its market-leading smart speakers.
But Spotify is still the market leader for global users when it comes to music services with close to 100 million users. Amazon’s move could attract more and more users.
1. What does the underlined word "full-fledged" in paragraph 1mean?| A．Modern. | B．Junior. | C．Powerful. | D．Perfect. |
| A．It wants support from users. |
| B．It has too many advertisements. |
| C．It would be the third biggest Music offering. |
| D．It will lose more free users. |
| A．Spotify. | B．Amazon. | C．Google Music. | D．Apple Music. |
| A．Amazon has the most piece of music. |
| B．Amazon will release a free music service. |
| C．Amazon will defeat Apple Music and Spotify. |
| D．Amazon has defeated Apple Music and Spotify. |
5 . Despite what so many people would love to believe, NASA hasn’t discovered any evidence of past or present intelligent life on Mars. So, when the Curiosity rover (好奇号探测器) found something suspicious on the Red Planet’s surface, they were not only surprised but also a little bit worried.
The thin fragment was suspicious enough to guarantee its own name, with NASA’s Curiosity rover team calling it the “Pettegrove Point Foreign Object Debris,” named for the location where it was discovered. With no idea what it was or where it came from, the rover’s handlers began to worry that it might actually be a piece of the rover itself, suggesting some unseen damage or other issue with the robot. Thankfully, those concerns seem to have been unfounded.
In a new update from NASA the object has now been identified as a natural piece of rock rather than a piece of any man-made craft or vehicle. The team analyzed the bizarre object with a tool called the ChemCam RMI. The instrument uses a laser (激光器) to sniff out the makeup of anything it’s pointed at, and the results for this particular piece of debris revealed that it’s actually just a very thin piece of rock.
NASA describes the inspection: The planning day began with an interesting result from the previous plan’s ChemCam RMI analysis of a target that was referred to as “Pettegrove Point Foreign Object Debris” (PPFOD), and speculated to be a piece of spacecraft debris. In fact it was found to be a very thin flake of rock, so we can all rest easy tonight—Curiosity has not begun to shed its skin!
How this particularly thin sliver of rock got to where it is—and why it seems to be a different colour than the surrounding sand and debris —remains unexplained, but at least the rover isn’t falling apart.
1. What attitude does NASA hold towards the newly found thin fragment?| A．Positive. | B．Surprised. | C．Interested. | D．Amazed but worried. |
| A．Its finder. | B．Its location. | C．Its researcher. | D．Its shape. |
| A．Strange. | B．Changeable. | C．Normal. | D．Common. |
| A．How this particularly thin sliver of rock got to where it is. |
| B．Why it seems to be a different colour than the surrounding sand and debris. |
| C．Whether the rover is falling apart. |
| D．None of them. |
6 . It's hard for doctors to do a thorough eye exam on small children. But a new smartphone app takes advantage of parents' fondness for taking pictures of their children to look for signs that a child might be developing an eye disease.
The app is the result of a father's five-year quest to find a way to catch the earliest signs of eye diseases, and prevent loss of vision. Five years ago, doctors diagnosed (诊断）Noah Shaw's retinoblastoma—a rare type of eye cancer—when he was 4 months old. To make the diagnosis, the doctors shined a light into Noah's eye, and got a pale reflection from the back of the eyeball, an indication that there was something wrong there. Noah's father Bryan, a scientist, wondered if he could see that same pale reflection in pictures of his baby son. Sure enough, he saw the reflection, which doctors call "white eye", in a picture taken right after Noah was born.
Then Bryan decided to create an app that could scan photos for signs of this reflection. Now, that app exists, called CRADLE. To test the app, Bryan and his colleagues analyzed more than 50, 000 pictures taken of 40 children. Half had no eye disease and half had. "On average, the app detected 'white eye' in pictures collected 1. 3 years before diagnosis," says Bryan.
The app isn't perfect. It sometimes misses "white eye" when it's there, and sometimes says it's there when it's not. That latter condition is a problem. Even though the so-called false positive occurs less than 1% of the time, that's not good enough. There are about 4 million children born in the U. S. each year. A 1% false positive rate would mean tens of thousands of children showing up at the doctor unnecessarily.
Still, Bryan is upbeat about the promise of the app. "This is exciting new technology, and this is how I think we're going to go about screening for a number of diseases in the future," he says.
1. What inspired Bryan to create CRADLE?| A．His son's diagnosis. |
| B．His family photos. |
| C．His hobby of taking pictures. |
| D．His working experience as a scientist. |
| A．lt is a sign of some eye diseases. |
| B．It hardly causes serious loss of vision. |
| C．It refers to the white part of an eyeball. |
| D．It occurs when no light is reflected from the eye. |
| A．It may delay the treatment of a patient. |
| B．It may badly affect the future of the app. |
| C．It may raise serious doubts about doctors. |
| D．It may cause a waste of medical resources. |
| A．Curious. | B．Cautious. |
| C．Optimistic. | D．Worried. |
7 . If you’re in a job performing dull tasks, you might think that a robot could do the work instead. But perhaps we underestimate(低估)how much technology already helps with the activities that we would otherwise have to do. And as artificial intelligence progresses, we might find it replaces us in the workplace altogether.
For now, robotic technology is providing a helping hand for businesses, particularly in manufacturing(制造业), assisting humans in performing work more efficiently and sometimes more accurately. For online shopping, for example, robots have become vital in giant warehouses. They sort and move millions of objects of all different shapes and sizes, although humans are still needed to pick and distribute the goods.
The advancement of robotics in the workplace is good for some businesses; the ones who research, develop, build and use them. The British government estimates that by 2035, artificial intelligence could add around £ 630bn to the UK economy. But there are still tasks that robots can’t yet do, and that’s the challenge for companies such as Automata. Its co-founder, Suryansh Chandra, told the BBC that his technology will do its best to eliminate boring, repetitive jobs that humans don’t like and aren’t very good at, and also create new ones that are likely to replace them.
It seems certain that robots will eventually be able to do more and more of the jobs that are currently performed by humans, so should we be worried by the rise of the machines? Some experts fear hundreds of thousands of jobs could disappear as robots replace human workers. A recent report suggests that 14 percent of jobs are “at high risk of automation” and 32 percent of jobs could be “basically transformed”, with the manufacturing sector at the highest risk.
But as complete automation is some way off, for now we’ll have to work side-by-side with our robot colleagues — and manage to go hand in hand with them before they learn to kick us out of the door!
1. The second paragraph is mainly written to .| A．show how robots can help humans | B．name industries suitable for robots |
| C．explain why robots can replace humans | D．explore potential profits that robots can make |
| A．Remove. | B．Secure. | C．Rediscover. | D．Create. |
| A．Possible risks for manufacturing sector. |
| B．Remarks on the future of the rising industry. |
| C．Predictions about the tendency of technology. |
| D．Worries about the future job trend due to machines. |
| A．Watch out for robots. | B．Get along with robots. |
| C．Mind our own business. | D．Learn to kick robots out. |
8 . A quarrel at home may result in you falling ill. Don't laugh, it's true. Family matters including living habits and even the way we speak have a big effect on our health, doctors say.
Wang Xiaoyu, a Senior 2 girl from Xichang, Sichuan Province, fainted (晕倒) in class when she heard her classmates quarrel at the top of their voices. Quarrels between her parents also put the girl into a coma. It is because she is suffering from depression , caused by bad relations at home, doctors explained."We don't get sick or stay well by ourselves," says Dr Robert Ferrer from the US. Ferrer shows that family forces may explain up to a quarter of health problems, in his recent research.
The genes you get from your family may cause illness. If one of your parents has a heart attack, your risk of being affected (影响) may double. But effects on health are not only written in our DNA.
Unrelated people who live under the same roof also get similar problems. Diet, lifestyle and environment affect our health, too.
Ferrer's research also found that if teenagers feel they are ignored (忽视) or unimportant at home they are more likely to get sick.
We may never fully understand all the effects that families have on our health. But just as individual problems can have effects on others, a small improvement can have big benefits , Ferrer said.
1. Which of the following can best explain why Wang Xiaoyu fainted in class?| A．Because her classmates often quarreled in class. |
| B．Because her parents used to quarrel. |
| C．Because of her depression caused by bad family relations. |
| D．Because her classmates shouted loudly at her. |
| A．We get sick or stay well by ourselves. |
| B．Only the genes we get from our family have a big effect on our health. |
| C．Our health has nothing to do with diet, life style and environment. |
| D．Teenagers who are ignored at home get sick more easily than those who are not. |
| A．embarrassment | B．faint | C．tiredness | D．sadness |
| A．Family relations. | B．The reasons why we get sick. |
| C．Happy family makes you healthy. | D．A research about teenagers' health. |
9 . When Emanuel received an email from Professor Richard English. Queen’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the School of History, Anthropology,Philosophy and Politics, encouraging him to apply for a PhD in Politics in Belfast, it was a pinch-me moment Emanual never thought would be possible. After all, just a few short years ago, he was living on the streets couch-surfing at friends’ houses and weeding gardens to make ends meet. Now, one of the world’s leading political academics was preparing to welcome him to Queen’s University over 4,000 miles away.
Emanuel never knew who his father was and his mom was mentally ill when she gave birth to him, so the hospital took him off her and he was unofficially adopted for the first few years of his life. What followed was a childhood with uncertainty as Emanuel was passed between the adoption system and family members.
Through his high school and community college years, he moved from house to house, living with friends at times and living on the streets at others.
Determined to change all that despite his rocky start in life, Emanuel involved himself in school-doing everything he could to earn extra tuition (学费) money in his spare time. But getting accepted into university was scarcely possible because a person like him couldn’t get a regular student loan.
Fortunately, the government backed him, having created a policy allowing disadvantaged persons to access funding for higher education. He graduated from the University of the West Indies with a 1st Class Honors degree and went on to do his Masters.
Emanuel knows that his story could have been very different.
“I discovered Professor Richard English online and sent him an email honestly, not thinking he would reply and to my surprise, he did. I applied for the highly competitive Commonwealth Shared Scholarship Scheme in order to fund my research at Queen’s. When I was told I was successful, my whole world changed.”
1. What does the underlined word “pinch-me” in Paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Expected. | B．Unbelievable. | C．Awkward. | D．Anxious. |
| A．His father was mentally ill. |
| B．He was abandoned by his mother. |
| C．He was once adopted by his relatives. |
| D．He lived with his friends now and then. |
| A．By receiving a regular student loan. |
| B．By earning the tuition all by himself. |
| C．By borrowing the money from friends. |
| D．By getting support from the government. |
| A．Well begun is half done. |
| B．It’s never too old to learn. |
| C．You are the master of your life. |
| D．Lost time is never found again. |
10 . Magic (魔术) is believed to have begun with the Egyptians, in 1700 BC. A magician named Dedi of Dedsnefu was reported to have performed for the pharaoh (法老), or the king. He was also known to have entertained (使娱乐) the slaves who built the pyramids. The “Cups and Balls” trick that he was particularly good at is still performed by magicians all over the world today.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were also fascinated by the idea of magic. Actually, one of their main interests was the art of deception (欺骗). This explains why at that time the priests even built magic devices into their temples. These devices made it possible for doors to open by themselves and wine to flow magically out of statues’ mouths. This was done mainly to make people believe that the priests had unusual power.
Magic however, was not well accepted before the 1800s. Magicians were thought to be freaks(怪物) and, were only allowed to perform in a circus. It was in the 19th century that the magician Robert Houdin came along and changed people’s views and attitudes about magic. It was because of Robert Houdin that many magicians were able to add Dr. or MD to their names. Today magicians try hard to find new ways to show their practiced skills. Magic is now entertainment for families all over the world.
1. What is the best title for the passage?| A．Magical Tricks | B．A Great Magician |
| C．Magic as Entertainment | D．The History of Magic |
| A．amused | B．encouraged | C．attracted | D．moved |
| A．They performed magical tricks to entertain people. |
| B．They made the statues in the temples drink wine as they wished. |
| C．They treated the people with wine flowing down from statues’ mouths. |
| D．They built magic devices in the temples to make doors open by themselves. |
| A．Magic should be used only in temples. |
| B．Magic could only be performed in a circus. |
| C．Magic was performed by freaks and doctors. |
| D．Magic was the major daily activity for the pharaohs. |
| A．Magic began about 3,700 years ago. |
| B．Dedi of Dedsnefu performed magic for kings only. |
| C．Robert Houdin was the first magician to perform magic. |
| D．The “Cups and Balls” trick has been performed for about 1,700 years. |
