1 . Members of a native community in the arctic (北极的)areas of Sweden say their reindeer (驯鹿)are facing possible hunger from unusual weather related to climate change. The local Sami community takes care of about 8,000 reindeer throughout the year. The animals are moved between traditional feeding areas in high mountains close to Norway in the summer and forests farther east in the winter.
A community member, Inga, is worried about his reindeer. He said climate change has affected the area's weather activity and created food shortages. "If we don't find better areas for them where they can feed themselves and find food, the reindeer will die from hunger,” Inga said. He verified the problem by reaching down into the snow and pulling up a hard piece of ice close to the soil.
The area received unusual snowfall early in the fall, followed by rain that froze. Inga said this traps the plants that reindeer eat under a thick cover of ice. Some of the hungry reindeer have now moved away from their traditional feeding areas in search of food.
Community members say half the reindeer moved towards the east as planned. But the rest headed back to the mountains, where they face the risk of attacks by other animals or being caught in an avalanche (雪崩). Older members of the Sami community say that in the past, they only remember bad winters about once every ten years. But now, Inga says “extreme and strange weather are appearing more and more often,“ happening several times a year.
Snowfall is common for the area. But as temperatures increase, rain can also fall, creating a “rain-on-snow” effect. When this happens, food remains trapped under the ice where the reindeer cannot reach it. This causes the animals to grow weaker and struggle to make it through the winter. Weather changes have hit the Sami community hard.
“We don't want money because we can’t buy better weather with money. We need the EU to take action and they need to do it now,“ said Inga.
1. What problem do reindeer meet with at present?| A．Cold weather. | B．Risk of hunger. |
| C．Long march for food. | D．Polluted environment. |
| A．Proved. | B．Solved. | C．Ignored. | D．Answered. |
| A．Traps under the snow. | B．Hunt from human beings. |
| C．Rocks falling down the mountain. | D．Threat from other animals. |
| A．Flood. | B．Drought. |
| C．Rain-on-snow effect. | D．Snowfall. |
2 . Smoking in your own home in Thailand may now be considered a crime, if the smoke is considered harmful to other people in the house.
The new law, Family Protection and Development Promotion Act, was initiated (启动) by the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security and was announced in the Royal Gazette on May 22, 2019. The law aims at limiting smoking at home which might be hazardous for others’ health living under the same roof. In that case, it will be considered as “domestic violence”. The new law came into force on August 20.
According to the center for research and knowledge management for tobacco control, at the Faculty of Medical Science of Mahidol University, there are about 4.9 million households where one or more family members smoke. An average of 10.3 million people have unconsciously become passive smokers because they’ve been breathing in smoke at home. Scientific studies show that passive smokers are at greater risk of being affected by cancer.
Of 75 child patients from houses where smoking is practiced, 76% of them were found to have nicotine traces in their urine (尿液), with 43% of them having nicotine content going beyond permitted levels. Smoking at home also may lead to physical or emotional violence because of aggressiveness (攻击性) when there is a lack of smoking, and might as well ruin relationships between smokers and non-smoker family members.
According to the new law, anyone who thinks they are affected by domestic smoking can report to officials concerned so that inspectors will be sent to investigate and take legal action against the smokers. Once confirmed, the court may order a person to receive treatment to quit smoking in an attempt to protect the person’s family. In February in 2019, Thailand had banned smoking at six of its airports along with a ban in public places.
1. What do we know about the new law in Thailand?| A．It came into effect on May 22. |
| B．It aimed at protecting the health of non-smokers. |
| C．It regarded smoking at home as a kind of domestic violence. |
| D．It clearly claimed that smoking at home is a crime. |
| A．Anxious. | B．Harmful. |
| C．Beneficial. | D．Essential. |
| A．The purpose of initiating the law. |
| B．Responses to the new law. |
| C．Actions to quit smoking. |
| D．Bad consequences of smoking at home. |
| A．Smoking is illegal anywhere in Thailand. |
| B．Passive smokers are not likely to suffer from cancer. |
| C．People tend to be more aggressive when they are smoking. |
| D．Thailand is making efforts to create a smoke-free environment. |
3 . A living, bio-degradable (可生物降解的) fabric named "Biogarmentry" has been invented.
Made from algae (藻) the textile (纺织品) purifies the air around it through photosynthesis (光合作用).
Researchers claim it’s the first living textile, and have fashioned the material into sheer, cloak-like garment. While prototypes (雏形) like these are still in the early stages of research and design, and far from mass production, they challenge the fashion industry to reimagine ways it can reduce its large carbon footprint through alternative fabrics.
Fashion is one of the world's most polluting industries. It's responsible for more carbon emissions than international flights and shipping combined, amounting to 10% of all greenhouse gasses emitted globally. The crops traditionally used to make clothing absorb carbon as they grow, but most natural materials are still carbon emitters. Take a single T-shirt made of cotton as an example. The estimated footprint of a cotton shirt over its lifetime is 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of carbon dioxide, with most of that emitted during the energy-intensive production and dyeing (染色) processes.
In recent years, environmental start-ups have proposed a number of alternative natural fibres, many Of which have the potential to sequester carbon but none have been shown to achieve zero emissions. As algae has the ability to trap carbon, a carbon-negative raincoat made of marine algae has been created. Algae-based materials are, currently, where electric vehicle technologies were a decade ago. The technology is now ready for prime time. When the resulting garments are commercially available, we can imagine people wearing their own organic cloak, spraying their organism as they go to work and encouraging their algae to purify the air.
1. What's the text mainly about?| A．A textile helping purify air. | B．An industry causing pollution. |
| C．A way to achieve zero-emission. | D．A trend in the fashion industry. |
| A．An international flight. | B．Clothing made of cotton. |
| C．A petrol-powered vehicle. | D．A raincoat made Of algae. |
| A．Increase. | B．Create. | C．Capture. | D．Release. |
| A．Skeptical | B．Optimistic. | C．Conservative. | D．Objective. |
4 . As people get older, the types of friends they have tend to change. As young adults, humans have a lot of friends. With age, they often prefer to spend their time with just a few close, positive individuals. Researchers long believed that this change was unique to humans, but a new study finds that chimps also have similar tendencies.
One explanation for the humans to get picky about social connections has to do with awareness of our limited life span. “People monitor how much time we have left in our life and choose emotionally-fulfilling relationships in old age,” says one of the study's lead authors Alexandra G. Rosati, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. As people age, they don’t want to be surrounded by a large group of negative friends, but would prefer to be near a handful of optimistic individuals.
Rosati and her colleagues were curious whether chimps would show similar features even though they don’t seem to be aware of their upcoming death. Researchers used 78, 000 hours of observations made over 20 years from the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda. The data looked at the social interactions of 21 male chimps between 15 and 58 years old. The researchers only studied male chimps because they show stronger social bonds and have more social interactions than female chimps.
Researchers found that wild chimpanzees share a similar pattern. “They interact with others in more positive ways as they get older. Younger adults, in contrast, show more aggression and were more likely to form one-sided relationships where their partner did not reciprocate. ”says Rosati. For example, the older chimpanzees would sit close to their long-time companions and groom (给……梳毛) each other, while younger chimps had more one-sided relationships where they would groom a friend, but the action wasn't returned. The study was published in the journal Science.
“This aging pattern may be the result of shared changes in our abilities to manage our emotions with age,” Rosati says. “This shared pattern between chimpanzees and humans could represent an adaptive response where older adults focus on important social relationships that provide benefits and avoid interactions that have negative consequences as they lose competitive fighting ability.”
1. Why do humans change their preference for friends in old age?| A．They don’t like making new friends. |
| B．Their friends pass away one by one. |
| C．They adapt to the changes in nature. |
| D．They know their life is running out. |
| A．To show the study was done scientifically. |
| B．To show how scientists tried to prove their assumption. |
| C．To show how hard it was to observe the chimps. |
| D．To show male chimps are unaware of upcoming death. |
| A．Repay their kindness. | B．Take care of them. |
| C．Get along well with them. | D．Sit close to them. |
| A．People Prefer Positive Partners in Old Age |
| B．Positive Bonds Benefit Chimps in Many Ways |
| C．Aging Chimps like Us Get Picky About Friends |
| D．Chimps Share Similar Tendencies with Humans |
5 . Stories are a powerful way to communicate. We all learn through stories. I’ve raised a three-step formula anyone can use to create powerful stories that will help you make your point. First, identify your truth. Second, think of the decisive experiences that have led you to this "truth". Third, shape those experiences into a story that you can tell at the drop of a hat. Here’s an example of how I have used this formula.
Years ago, I had an assignment to conduct a team-building session. The client was my friend. I arrived at his office 5: 00 p. m. the day before our session. He asked me if I had an agenda for tomorrow’s meeting. I told him that, first we'll do A, then B, followed by C. We’ll finish up with D. Still he asked if I had an agenda.
At first, I thought he hadn’t been listening to what I just said, so I repeated myself, "First we'll do A, then B, followed by C. We’ll finish up with D. "He said," Yes, I know. That's what you just said. Do you have an agenda?
At that point, it dawned on me that he was looking for a printed agenda. I said, "No, but we really don't need one. I’ve done many meetings like this. It will go fine.” He said, “I’m not comfortable winging it.” So we created an agenda using Powerpoint. The next day, the meeting went off smoothly. We followed the agenda I had in my head and he had on the PowerPoint slide. Everyone agreed it was one of the best meetings of this type they had ever attended.
It became clear to me that if I want to influence not just this client, but anyone, I need to adapt my communication style to theirs. From that day on, I modify my communication style to meet the needs of the other person.
1. What does Paragraph 1 mainly talk about?| A．How to form powerful stories | B．Stories come from experiences. |
| C．How to communicate with powerful stories. | D．Stories play an important part in communication. |
| A．By listing figures. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By making remarks. | D．By presenting research findings. |
| A．The author winged it. |
| B．The author's friend used Powerpoint. |
| C．The author and his friend created an agenda separately. |
| D．The author and his friend made an agenda using Powerpoint. |
| A．Adopt | B．Follow | C．Change | D．Create |
6 . Traveling to new destinations can widen our horizons and build up our confidence. But packing up those trips is a different matter altogether. For some, it is a must that they have everything in their bag so they feel at home in any country. For others, traveling light is the key to easy traveling. Those in the former group could be described as the tourist type, while those in the latter group are more of the traveler type. So, as a traveler, how do you pack the right way?
Have a travel packing list. You may require special equipment such as a helmet while on an adventure, but that would be useless if you were headed to a beach for a peaceful time with your partner. For a travel junkie(着迷者), the first thing you should do is create a list and have it saved on your computer or your smartphone. As you travel more, you will learn what you actually need and what you can easily leave at home—having a travel checklist is as essential(必不可少的) as having tickets for the plane.
Choose the right bag. A big backpack that can contain all the essentials is the perfect fit for a week-long hiking tour. But when you are staying in one place for months at a stretch and plan to do all sorts of adventurous and non-adventurous activities the destination has to offer, it is vital that you have an expandable(可扩张的) bag with lots of space because you will require different things for different activities.
Roll your clothes to save space. Ask any travel expert, and they will tell you this: rolling the clothes instead of folding them while packing saves a lot of space and time. This way, you can pack a month’s worth of clothes into a small bag that is easy to travel with.
1. In which way is a traveler different from a tourist?| A．He pays more attention to travel light. |
| B．He builds up more confidence than a tourist. |
| C．He thinks it a must to have everything ready. |
| D．He prefers to travel at home rather than go abroad. |
| A．Choosing the right backpack. |
| B．Learning to roll the clothes. |
| C．Buying a set of equipment. |
| D．Making a travel checklist. |
| A．very difficult |
| B．very important |
| C．quite interesting |
| D．quite troublesome |
| A．It will make the packing slower. |
| B．It will make the packing much easier. |
| C．It can save a traveler much more money and time. |
| D．It can save a traveler a lot of space and time. |
7 . That morning, I dropped our eldest at kindergarten and returned home to let our two younger children play while I worked on my medical report. It was a wonderful chance to work from home, but it hit me that my career in hospital wasn't making a difference in anyone's life. I needed something that would stretch my limits and push me to grow. My career enabled me to work from home. I could work from home, and become a foster mother, providing safety for a child who needed it desperately.
On Monday morning. I picked up the phone and dialed the number I had Googled for the nearest Department of Children's Services. The man on the other end was receptive to my questions and explained the next step of training, involving eight weeks of classes designed to prepare and educate foster parents. We continued through all the classes, the home visits, background checks, and seemingly endless steps.
Five long months after we were approved, the phone rang. In the middle of the night, I woke my husband and rushed to East Tennessee Children's Hospital. Our placement was waiting for us in the emergency room, sick and lack of nutrition. It didn't take long for us to realize the full depth of her suffering. Six months later, her half-brother came to us by our request. We now had five children under our care.
On August 12, 2016, our family of seven walked into a small courtroom. The children's lawyer and social worker were there. With just a few words, our adoption was finalized. These two amazing children weren't going home, because they were already home. We are their forever family, and they are our forever children. We may not be able to change the entire world, but we have changed the world entirely for our new children.
1. How did the author feel about her hospital work?| A．Lacking of motivation. | B．Filled with challenge. |
| C．Highly motivating. | D．Unusually Demanding. |
| A．She felt sympathetic for abused children she knew. |
| B．She wanted to make a difference in other people. |
| C．She felt confident about her ability to raise children. |
| D．She experienced training to raise children properly. |
| A．The child to be adopted. | B．The need to get trained. |
| C．The approval of adoption. | D．The official at the hospital. |
| A．To put the adopted kids elsewhere. | B．To receive another adopted child. |
| C．To make the adoption officially legal. | D．To begin the kids' adoption in her home. |
8 . The weather is getting hotter. You are thirsty playing basketball or riding home from school. A cold drink may be just the thing. But be careful what you are drinking. Something that looks cool may not be good for your health. There are plenty of “energy drinks” on the market. Most of them have beautiful colors and cool names. The lists on them tell you they are helpful to your health. Sounds great!
But after a careful check you may find that most energy drinks have lots of caffeine(咖啡因) in them. These drinks are especially aimed at young people, students, busy people and sports players. Makers sometimes say their drinks make you better at sports and can keep you awake.But be careful not to drink too much. Caffeine makes your heart beat fast. Because of this, the International Olympic Committee(OC) has limited(限制) its use. Caffeine in most energy drinks is at least as strong as that in a cup of coffee or tea. Possible health dangers have something to do with energy drinks. Just one box of energy drink can make you nervous, have difficulty sleeping and can even cause heart problems.Scientists say that teenagers should be discouraged from taking drinks with a lot of caffeine in them.
1. Many people like drinking energy drinks because of the following EXCEPT that______.| A．they have beautiful colors and cool names |
| B．they have lots of caffeine |
| C．they can keep them awake and better at sports |
| D．they are said to be helpful to health |
| A．Encouraged. |
| B．Stopped. |
| C．Helped. |
| D．Disliked. |
| A．Advertisements are important in getting people to buy energy drinks. |
| B．Energy drinks are helpful to teenagers' study. |
| C．Sports players need to drink a lot of energy drinks. |
| D．Energy drinks are especially aimed at teenagers. |
| A．What's the Use of Energy Drinks? |
| B．Who Can Drink Energy Drinks? |
| C．What's That in Energy Drinks? |
| D．Why Can't We Buy Energy Drinks? |
9 . Facebook has developed a kind of AI (人工智能), translating between any pair of 100 languages without depending on first translating to English.
Facebook’s system was trained on a data set of 7.5 billion sentence pairs collected from the web across 100 languages, though not all the languages had an equal number of sentence pairs. “What I was really interested in was cutting out English as a middle man. Globally there are plenty of countries where they speak two languages that aren’t English,” says Angela Fan of Facebook AI, who led the work.
For some language pairs, the new system shows prominent improvements in translation quality. For example, translating from Spanish to Portuguese is extremely strong because Spanish is the second-most spoken first language worldwide, meaning the researchers can get a lot of data. Translation between English and Belarusian (白俄罗斯语) also is improved because the AI can translate Russian into English, which shares similarities with Belarusian.
While the system isn’t in use on the social network site, Facebook plans to put it to work soon to manage the 20 billion translations made every day when people click “Translate” on posts (帖子) written in more than 160 languages. “Future work will be done on other languages,” says Fan, “especially for languages where we don’t have a lot of data, like South-East Asian and African languages.”
The work “breaks away from the English-centric models and tries to build more different models,” says Shelia Castilho of the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University, Ireland, “That’s pretty new and different. But it’s hard to know if the AI does a right translation work,” says Castilho. “The users may not know the other language, so they cannot judge the correctness of the translation.”
1. What’s Angela Fan’s purpose of doing the research?| A．To collect data of all kinds of people. |
| B．To make learning different languages easier. |
| C．To achieve her dream of becoming a translator. |
| D．To avoid using English as a middle man in translation. |
| A．Famous. | B．Important. | C．Obvious. | D．Generous. |
| A．There is much data on Spanish. |
| B．Portuguese is similar to Spanish. |
| C．Researchers have a good knowledge of the two languages. |
| D．Spanish is spoken by the largest number of people. |
| A．The safety of AI translation. | B．The correctness of AI translation. |
| C．The way of using Facebook. | D．The number of posts on the website. |
| A．Facebook AI Can Talk with the Users |
| B．Facebook Wants to Buy a New System |
| C．Facebook AI Can Translate Any Pair of 100 Languages |
| D．Facebook Has Lost Many Users |
10 . The only known white giraffe in the world has been fitted with a GPS tracking device in an effort to protect him from poachers (偷猎者) in Kenya. The unique male giraffe now stands alone after a female and her calf were killed by poachers in March, 2020.
The GPS tracking device, secured to one of the animal’s horns, will give hourly updates of his location, said the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy. Rangers will be able to monitor the giraffe’s movements in the conservancy located in Garissa County, eastern Kenya.
“The giraffe’s living range has been blessed with good rains in the recent past and the abundant vegetation is a good sign for the future of the white male,” said Ahmed Noor, manager of the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy.
Noor thanked the Kenya Wildlife Service, Save Giraffes Now and the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) for their help in safeguarding wildlife species.
“Our mission is to work with communities, secure their livelihoods as well as protect the unique wildlife like the only known white giraffe,” said Antony Wandera, the senior wildlife monitoring officer at the NRT.
The male giraffe has a rare genetic trait called leucism (变白), which results in the partial loss of pigmentation (肤色) in an animal and makes it easy to spot for poachers. Unlike albinism (白化), animals with leucism continue to produce a dark pigment in their soft tissue, meaning the giraffe’s eyes are dark.
In March, 2020, the remains of two of the stunning white giraffes that lived at the Kenyan wildlife reserve were found dead, killed by poachers.
The world’s tallest land animal has lost 40％ of its population in just 30 years, the African Wildlife Foundation estimates.
1. Why do people fit the white giraffe with a GPS tracking device?| A．To entertain the white giraffe. |
| B．To find a better way to feed him. |
| C．To prevent him from being killed. |
| D．To learn more about the white giraffe. |
| A．Every day. | B．Every hour. |
| C．Every week. | D．Every two hours. |
| A．Job. | B．Dream. | C．Interest. | D．Suggestion. |
| A．The population of white giraffes is increasing. |
| B．The white giraffe has become extinct in the world. |
| C．Few organizations show interest in protecting wild animals. |
| D．The population of giraffes in the world has been decreasing. |
