1 . Every year more people recognize that it is wrong to kill wildlife for “sport”. Progress in this direction is slow because shooting is not a sport for watching, and only those few who take par realize the cruelty and destruction.
The number of gunners, however, grows rapidly. Children too young to develop proper judgments through independent thought are led a long way away by their gunning parents. They are subjected to advertisements of gun producers who describe shooting as good for their health and gun-carrying as a way of putting redder blood in the veins（血管）. They are persuaded by gunner magazines with stories honoring the chase and the kill. In school they view motion pictures which are supposedly meant to teach them how to deal with arms safely but which are actually designed to stimulate（刺激）a desire to own a gun.
Wildlife is disappearing because of shooting and because of the loss of wildland habitat Habitatloss will continue with our increasing population, but can we slow the loss of wildlife caused by shooting? There doesn't seem to be any chance if the serious condition of our birds is not improved. Wildlife belongs to everyone and not to the gunners alone. Although most people do not shoot, they seem to forgive shooting for sport because they know little or nothing about it. The only answer, then, is to bring the truth about sport shooting to the great majority of people.
Now, it is time to realize that animals have the same right to life as we do and that there is nothing fair or right about a person with a gun shooting the harmless and beautiful creatures. The gunners like to describe what they do as character-building, but we know that to wound an animal and watch it go through the agony of mortality can make nobody happy. If, as they would have you believe, gun-carrying and killing improve human character, then perhaps we should encourage war.
1. According to the text, most people do not seem to be against hunting because .| A．they have little knowledge of it. |
| B．it helps to build human character. |
| C．it is too costly to stop killing wildlife. |
| D．they want to keep wildlife under control. |
| A．difficulty. | B．tress. | C．pain. | D．sadness. |
| A．teach them how to deal with guns safely. |
| B．praise hunting as character building. |
| C．describe hunting as a physical exercise. |
| D．encourage them to have guns of their own. |
| A．Hunting to build human character makes no sense. |
| B．War in the best way to improve human character. |
| C．We are on the edge of war against gunners. |
| D．Protecting wildlife from gunners is extremely difficult. |
2 . Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci the art world has never lacked talent. And now, a new painter is ready to join the list although this one isn’t even human.
Next month, auction house Christie’s Prints and Multiples will make history by offering the first piece of art created by artificial intelligence(AI) for sale. The painting is a portrait of a man called Edmond De Bela-my, and is expected to be sold for up to $10,000.
The work, which features a man with a mysterious look on his face, was created by software developed by the French art group Obvious. Laugero-Lasserre, an art collector, called the work “grotesque and amazing at the same time”. This isn’t the first example of AI-produced artwork, as Al has already been used to write poems and compose songs, However, many people doubt whether it should be called art at all.
According to Russian writer Leo Tolstroy(1828-1910), art is about creating emotion(情感). It’s a means of joining people together in the same feelings’ he once said.
So, if the emotion behind art is what makes it, the ability to create and use tools is what makes hurman beings different from other species. And as a tool itself, the AI technology used to create the portrait is the result of a lot of effort made by several designers. Together, they “fed” the AI a huge collection of paintings from the 14th to the 18th centuries, until it was able to work out how to make similar paintings of its own.
The introduction of AI art could be the beginning of a new artistic movement. However, not everyone is ready to welcome these high-tech artists just yet.
“The human mind is what’s behind the AI technology. And the human mind is not a cold, hard fact,” said Oscar Schwartz, a professor of AI. “Rather, it in something that’s created with our opinions and something that changes over.”
1. Why does the author mention the artists in Paragraph 1?| A．To introduce their works. | B．To make an advertisement. |
| C．To present a piece of news. | D．To focus the topic on the AI. |
| A．Strange. | B．Simple. | C．Messy. | D．Understandable. |
| A．limited | B．decisive | C．changeable | D．meaningful |
3 . Why can’t some people even get an inch of what they dream of becoming? Blame it on pure dreaming and lack of surrounding goals for achieving their dreams.
Setting goals is very significant part of accomplishing and positive actions. It is like scaling (攀爬) a 200 feet construction and marking in the early hours on what feet you would like to reach at this specific period.
People who set goals literally generate a map of their goal settings in life, marking where they should start, where to pause, where to study a bit, and where and when to end. Once this map comes into being, it allows the map drawer to check where he is in the scheme (安排) of things and whether or not he is making some planning that will take him closer to his goals.
By surrounding goals, people will know how they are doing and what they should be doing to get their goals or dreams in life. They will know if they can relax or if they have to double their efforts when they are falling short of what is expected of them.
Goal surroundings means a person isproactivein dealing with challenges that may affect his plans. Being proactive means one is able to outline possible difficulties that may occur as well as the solutions to these difficulties. By doing this, a person is not easily scared or defeated when challenges occur because he has already prepared for them. He knows they can happen and he has prepared a solution or strategy when that time comes.
Setting goals will enable people to track their progress in whatever hard work they set out to do. It will help people become more confident in themselves and more motivated to get their plans.
1. The purpose of this passage is to ________.| A．explain the difference between the two goals |
| B．show the importance of surrounding goals |
| C．tell us how to set and achieve one’s goals |
| D．tell us setting goals makes one confident |
| A．positive | B．careful |
| C．brave | D．prepared |
| A．achievements come to those who are well prepared |
| B．everyone faces the situation which is scaring or threatening |
| C．the higher one sets his goal, the more achievements he will have |
| D．success never comes to people who always blame |
4 . Turtles have a habit of eating plastic objects floating in the sea, which may kill them. Many believe that it is because floating plastic bags look similar to jellyfish, which many types of turtles love to eat. However, lots of plastic objects that turtles eat do not look like jellyfish at all. Joseph Pfaller of the University of Florida doubts that the smell of sea micro-organisms（微生物） which live on floating plastic objects attract turtles to eat.
The kind of idea first appeared in 2016. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, noticed that certain chemicals, especially dimethyl sulphide（二甲基硫）, which can be found on plastics where micro-organisms live, are those which many seabirds sniff（嗅）to find food. These birds are more likely to eat plastics.
Since turtles usually appear above the sea surface and sniff the air when going to their feeding areas, Dr. Pfaller believed that they are following these same chemicals like those seabirds and mistakenly think that floating plastic objects are edible.
To test that idea, he and his team did an experiment using loggerhead turtles. They exposed 15 turtles to four smells: the smell of clean water; the smell of turtle-feeding food; the smell of a clean plastic bottle; and the smell of a bottle that had been kept in the ocean for five weeks to allow micro-organisms to grow on it. When sniffing both the smell of turtle-feeding food and that of five-week-old bottles, turtles kept their noses out of the water more than three times as long, and took twice as many breaths as they did when sniffing the smell of fresh bottle-plastic or clean water.
Though they have not yet tested whether dimethyl sulphide on the five-week-old bottles cause turtles to eat plastic objects, Dr. Pfaller and his team think it is highly possible.
1. Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined word "edible"?| A．pleasing the eyes | B．suitable for use as food |
| C．holding the attention | D．concerned with actual use |
| A．Seabirds prefer the smell of the plastic bottles. |
| B．Seabirds feed on the food similar to the turtles'. |
| C．Seabirds produce a certain micro-organism. |
| D．Seabirds break up the plastics without difficulty. |
| A．To suggest a new way to study turtles. |
| B．To stress the importance of sea protection. |
| C．To introduce the findings on the cause of turtles' death. |
| D．To discuss the overusę of the plastic bottles. |
| A．Education. | B．Entertainment. |
| C．Science. | D．Health. |
5 . Many people with autism (自闭症) have trouble making eye contact, reading the emotions in other faces, and sharing affection. And no drugs are approved to treat such social impairments. Now, results from a Stanford University study suggest increasing levels of vasopressin (加压素) -a hormone (荷尔蒙) active in the brain known to promote bonding in many animals-can improve social deficits in children with autism.
Recently, Karen Parker, a scientist at Stanford University, and her colleagues have turned up evidence that monkeys that were less social had lower levels of vasopressin. The group also found children with autism who had the most social impairment had the lowest vasopressin levels.
The Stanford team gave a nasal (鼻的) spray containing vasopressin to 17 children with autism, aged 6 to 12 years. Another 13 children with autism served as a control group and got a placebo (无效对照的) spray, before and after the 4-week treatment, the research team asked parents to rate the children on a questionnaire called the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2), which asks, for example, how often the children "would rather be alone than with others."
It turned out that vasopressin-treated children showed significantly more improvement-a seven-point-greater reduction-on the SRS-2 than those in the placebo group, the team reported in Science Translational Medicine. Those results "are very exciting," especially because the team didn't see major side effects, says Angela Sirigu, who is also investigating hormones for autism treatment.
Children with higher levels of vasopressin at the start of the study saw greater improvements. That's unexpected, Sirigu says—you'd expect children who were the most deficient in the hormone to benefit the most from the increase. Or maybe vasopressin is a marker for some other, yet-unknown feature of the children that predicts how much they'll improve with the treatment
The only weakness Pelphrey found with the Stanford study was its sample size: "if it were double, I would be jumping up and down." Still, he says, "I'm kind of rocking back and forth in my chair with excitement."
1. The underlined word "deficits" in the first paragraph can be replaced with .| A．advantages | B．surplus | C．weaknesses | D．strengths |
| A．the purpose of the experiment | B．the samples of the experiment |
| C．the principle of the experiment | D．the method and steps of the experiment |
| A．had no side effect on children with autism |
| B．most benefited children with the most social impairment |
| C．had a positive effect on children in the test group |
| D．had a negative impact on children in the test group |
| A．Run another trial of vasopressin enrolling 100 children. |
| B．Give tested children a longer treatment to reach the maximum benefits. |
| C．Decrease vasopressin in tested children to see the opposite results. |
| D．Increase vasopressin in adults with autism to see its influence. |
6 . Setting goals is common in our life. We look ahead, predict what may make us happy in the future, and then narrow down the things to something specific. For the most part, having goals is better than not having any, but there are also problems that come with spending an entire life living from goal to goal.
For one thing, we try to predict an unpredictable future. Who is to say that what you want next year is the same thing you want right now? What if what you want right now isn't in the right direction over the long term?
Secondly, and just as importantly, you only confine your expectations of happiness and satisfaction to the goal you have set so that you often forget that other things in your life can also add just as much joy to your experience. This creates a strange problem.
To solve this problem, we have to move towards something more unclear. Going after interestingness. I think, is what we should do.
Interestingness doesn't mean looking for pleasure only. It’s deeper than that. It's doing that random (随机的) project you had no plan to do because you have a feeling that you might just learn something you didn't know about yourself. It's seeing a person you just met not as a possible partner or someone who can do something for you but simply as someone who may open a new, unknown and unique world for you.
Goals incorrectly assume (假设) that we already know what we want. Interestingness is more modest. It makes up its mind as it moves, slowly blowing from one thing to another, until it catches something that lies beyond prediction at last.
1. Setting goals is to predict an unpredictable future because __________.| A．it ignores possible changes in our life |
| B．it proves meaningless in the long run |
| C．it may lead us to the opposite direction |
| D．it fails to reach our true possibilities |
| A．Devote. | B．Limit. | C．Deliver. | D．Compare. |
| A．Bringing us self satisfaction at once. |
| B．Improving our relationship with others. |
| C．Making us gain something unexpected. |
| D．Helping us successfully predict the future. |
| A．To ease our worry about the future. |
| B．To express a new thought on setting goals. |
| C．To point out disadvantages of an aimless life. |
| D．To recommend a new way of achieving success. |
7 . Teenagers need to know their changes in body, mind and emotions that young adults experience. And they also need to give careful thought to how they can best get used to such changes. Growing bodies need movement and exercise, but not just in ways that focus on competition. Because they are adjusting to their new bodies and whole new mental and emotional challenges, teenagers are especially self-conscious (自我意识) and need the confidence that comes from achieving success.
However, the typical teenage lifestyle is already filled with so much competition that it would be unwise to plan activities in which there are winners chosen, for example, publishing newsletters written by students, displaying (展示) student artwork. Small clubs can provide many chances for leadership, as well as for practice in successful group work. Anyway, making friends is important to teenagers. Shy students also need to enter some kind of organization with a supportive adult hardly seen in the background.
In these activities, it is important to remember that young teenagers have long attention time. A variety of activities should be organized so that participants (参与者) can remain active as long as they want and then go on to do something else without letting the other participants alone. This does not mean that adults can allow the students to quit in the middle of the activities. Instead, they can help students win a sense of commitment by playing roles that are within their ability and their attention and by having clear rules.
1. From the first paragraph, we can know that____________.| A．teenagers are weak in body, mind and emotions |
| B．teenagers have to enter a number of competitions |
| C．teenagers are different from either young kids or adults |
| D．teenagers are not able to get used to their changes |
| A．Publishing the newsletters written by students. |
| B．Displaying the winners of student artwork. |
| C．Choosing the best storytellers of a story telling activity. |
| D．Playing games and sharing learning ways at an English corner. |
| A．Responsibility. | B．Achievement. | C．Organization. | D．Credit. |
| A．Teenagers in middle schools. | B．Middle school club organizers. |
| C．Primary school teachers. | D．Parents with small kids. |
8 . According to a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research, both the size and consumption habits of our eating companions can influence our food intake. And contrary to existing research that says you should avoid eating with heavier people who order large portions(份), it's the beanpoles with big appetites you really need to avoid.
To test the effect of social influence on eating habits, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 95 undergraduate women were individually invited into a lab to ostensibly(表面上)participate in a study about movie viewership. Before the film began, each woman was asked to help herself to a snack. An actor hired by the researchers grabbed her food first. In her natural state, the actor weighed 105 pounds. But in half the cases she wore a specially designed fat suit which increased her weight to 180 pounds.
Both the fat and thin versions of the actor took a large amount of food. The participants followed suit, taking more food than they normally would have. However, they took significantly more when the actor was thin.
For the second test, in one case the thin actor took two pieces of candy from the snack bowls. In the other case, she took 30 pieces. The results were similar to the first test: the participants followed suit but took significantly more candy when the thin actor took 30 pieces.
The tests show that the social environment is extremely influential when we're making decisions. If this fellow participant is going to eat more, so will I. Call it the “I’ll have what she's having” effect. However, we'll adjust the influence. If an overweight person is having a large portion, I'll hold back a bit because I see the results of his eating habits. But if a thin person eats a lot, I'll follow suit. If he can eat much and keep slim, why can't I?
1. What is the recent study mainly about?| A．Food safety. | B．Movie viewership. |
| C．Consumer demand. | D．Eating behavior. |
| A．Big eaters. | B．Overweight persons. |
| C．Picky eaters. | D．Tall thin persons. |
| A．To see how she would affect the participants. |
| B．To test if the participants could recognize her. |
| C．To find out what she would do in the two tests. |
| D．To study why she could keep her weight down. |
| A．How hungry we are. | B．How slim we want to be. |
| C．How we perceive others. | D．How we feel about the food. |
9 . All across America, students are anxiously finishing their “What I Want To Be …” college application essays, advised to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by experts and parents who insist that’s the only way to become workforce ready. But two recent studies of workplace success contradict the traditional wisdom about “hard skills”.
Google originally set its hiring systems to sort for computer science students with top grades from top science universities. In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring theory by quickly dealing with large amounts hiring, firing, and promotion data collected since the company’s establishment.
Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM capability comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing comprehension into others; being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.
Those characteristics sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in more experts to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs (Master of Business Adminstration).
Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments. Project Aristotle analyzes data on inventive and productive teams. Google takes pride in its A-teams, assembled with top scientists, each with the most specialized knowledge and able to throw down one creative idea after another. Its data analysis revealed, however, that the company’s most important and productive new ideas come from B-teams comprised of employees who don’t always have to be the smartest people in the room.
Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, understanding, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.
STEM skills are vital to the world we live in today, but technology alone, as Steve Jobs famously insisted, is not enough. We desperately need those who are educated to the human, cultural, and social as well as the computational.
1. The underlined word “contradict” most probably means “_____”.| A．add to | B．back up | C．bring about | D．conflict with |
| A．determine what makes a workplace-ready student |
| B．check whether its hiring system serves the purpose |
| C．prove soft skills are more important than hard ones |
| D．impress its competitors with the employees’ excellence |
| A．Emotional safety enables people to express themselves freely. |
| B．Listening and hearing helps develop problem-solving abilities. |
| C．Learning from mistakes doesn’t necessarily mean improvement. |
| D．Those without specialized knowledge can also make inventions. |
| A．STEM skills our society needs for better education |
| B．The principal focus students have on application essays |
| C．The surprising thing Google learned about its employees |
| D．The soft skills Google programmers lack for career growth |
10 . In the first days of space exploration, one concern was the possibility that astronauts or spacecraft might be hit by meteoroids. Scientists calculated that this possibility was extremely small because meteoroids are rare. Astronauts and spacecraft, on the other hand, would almost certainly encounter space debris, which poses a greater threat.
However, in the 60 years since the beginning of space exploration, large quantities of human-made orbital debris have accumulated. Much of the debris consists of satellites that have stopped functioning or rocket booster sections that separated from the main spacecraft. Some of the debris consists of items lost by astronauts. Still more of the debris is the result of collisions. such as when one satellite collides with another or with a large piece of debris.
NASA estimates there are millions of debris particles that are too small to be tracked. These circle Earth at a speed of up to 17, 500 miles per hour, making even the smallest particles dangerous. One scientist calculated that a chip of paint hitting the window of a spacecraft at orbital speeds will hit with the same amount of force as a bowling ball traveling at 60 mph. Such an impact occurred on the space shuttle Challenger's second flight.
Larger objects are even more dangerous, but they can be monitored and avoided. Many satellites have the ability to adjust their course slightly and can be remotely directed to avoid collisions with larger objects that would damage or destroy the satellites. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have departments dedicated to cataloging, modeling, and predicting the movements of space debris.
To avoid adding to the amount of debris, obsolete satellites may need to be able to take themselves out of orbit as their usefulness comes to an end. Until a way to remove these remains is implemented. however. those 500, 000 pieces of large fragments, along with the millions of smaller pieces, will continue to orbit Earth.
1. According to the text, which of the following statements is TRUE?| A．Up to now, there is still no efficient way to clean the space debris. |
| B．Satellites should be monitored more to avoid being hit by space debris. |
| C．Most of the space debris consists of satellites that have stopped functioning. |
| D．To decrease space debris, the number of the satellites sent to space should be controlled. |
| A．Problems caused by old satellites and equipment. |
| B．Better tracking of the space debris that is orbiting Earth. |
| C．The types of space debris that is causing problems. |
| D．Why space exploration was carried out in the beginning. |
| A．private. | B．artificial |
| C．useful | D．outdated. |
