1 . If you were to throw, say, a banana peel out of your car while driving along the motorway, that would be a completely harmless action, due to the fact that it’s part of a fruit — right? Actually, no. A banana peel can take up to two years to be naturally processed, and with a third of motorists admitting to littering while driving, that’s a whole lot of discarded banana peels. An orange peel and a cigarette butt has a similar biodegrading (生物降解) term to that of a banana peel, but tin cans last up to 100 years; and plastic bottles last forever, as do glass bottles.
Despite the fact that longer-lasting materials will serve to damage the environment and its animals for longer, we can’t merely measure the severity of a certain type of rubbish by its lifetime. For example, despite having a fairly short length of biodegrading time, more than 120 tons of cigarette-related litter is discarded in the UK every day.
It’s not a cheap habit either: to keep our streets clean annually costs UK taxpayers £500 million, and when you include our green spaces, that goes up to £1 billion. So, it’s not surprising that if caught fly-tipping you could face a £20,000 fine or even jail time and, if you disposed of something dangerous, the court could give you five years to serve. Regardless of how severe these punishments might seem, however, among the reported cases only 2,000 were found guilty out of 825,000, so we still have some way to go in making sure people obey the rules.
1. What does the underlined word “discarded” in para1 mean?| A．Harmless. | B．Processed. | C．Thrown. | D．Long-lasting. |
| A．Glass bottles. | B．Tin cans. | C．Cigarette butts. | D．Banana peels. |
| A．The severity of rubbish can be measured by its lifetime. |
| B．Quite a few people were found guilty of illegally littering. |
| C．Every year UK taxpayers spend £500 million keeping streets free of dirt. |
| D．Cigarette-related litter and peels can be ignored for their fairly short lifetime. |
| A．To inform readers of different biodegrading terms. |
| B．To call for people not to litter illegally. |
| C．To encourage people to use fewer plastic bags. |
| D．To stress the importance of good behavior. |
2 . LAS VEGAS — It was different in the light of day.
There was no “pop, pop, pop” of gunfire, no screams. Just a quiet lot of cars abandoned by those, like Kassidy Owen, who escaped with their lives.
“It’s strange to hear the silence,” Owen said, “because all I remember was the noise.”
The 22-year-old was one of dozens of concertgoers who returned to the scene of the Route 91 Harvest festival on Wednesday morning to fetch the vehicles they left behind as they fled from a gunman raining down bullets from high above in the tower of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino across the street.
Survivors of the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday needed their cars to move on with their lives -- to get back to work, to school, home. It was the first time they were returning to a scene that would forever change them, when joy and celebration and music turned into killing and horror.
Before they could move forward, they had to go back to the place where they thought they were going to die.
Owen had run to her car to hide and had tried to drive away, but she couldn’t. People were running, bodies dropped to the ground, and cars bottlenecked in the parking lot. During a brief pause after more than 10 minutes of gunfire, she worried the lights of her SUV made everyone inside a shining target.
“They’re shooting again!” her best friend’s brother screamed. “Turn off the car!”
That’s when she got out and fled.
“I just remember shutting the door and running,” Owen said.
Now, nearly three days later, she was back, sitting in the driver’s seat of her SUV. Her eyes were swollen and red. This was a long way from over.
“You just keep hearing the gunshots in your head,” Owen said.
1. Why did Kassidy Owen return to the scene of terror?| A．To get back her car for daily life. | B．To show sympathy to the victims. |
| C．To search for her missing friends. | D．To look into the cause of the shooting. |
| A．abandoned | B．jammed |
| C．stopped | D．left |
| A．Because she had escaped being caught. |
| B．Because she wanted to find the gunman. |
| C．Because she couldn’t rid herself of those terrible scenes. |
| D．Because she had saved others’ lives by turning off the car. |
| A．Going back to where they would die | B．Owen’s experience in Las Vegas |
| C．How to survive in a mass shooting | D．Return to the unforgettable scene |
3 . Although we live in an era where everything seems to be available immediately, our study suggests that today’s kids can delay gratification(满足感) longer than children in the 1960s and 1980s,“ said University of Minnesota psychologist Stephanie M. Carlson.” This finding stands in great contrast with the assumption by adults that today’s children have less self-control than previous generations.
The original marshmallow(棉花糖) test conducted by researchers at Stanford University involved a series of experiments in which children aged between 3 and 5 years were offered one treat that they could eat immediately or a larger treat if they waited. Researchers then left the room to see how long the children would wait and watched from behind a one-way mirror.
Interestingly, today's adults thought that children nowadays would be more impulsive and less able to wait, Carlson found. "Our findings serve as an example of how our beliefs can be wrong and how it's important to do research,” said co-author Yuichi Shoda, PhD at the University of Washington.
The researchers offered several possible explanations for why children in the 2000s waited longer than those in prior decades. They noted a statistically significant increase in IQ scores in the last several decades. Another explanation may be society's increased focus on the importance of early education, according to Carlson. The primary objective of preschool changed from largely custodial care (监护) to school readiness in the 1980s. Parenting also has changed in ways that help promote the development of executive function, such as being more supportive of children's self-control, the researchers noted.
Walter Mischel of Columbia University, who co-authored this paper, noted that “while the results indicate that the children’s ability to delay is not weakened on the marshmallow test, the findings do not speak to their willingness to delay gratification when faced with the many temptations now available in everyday life.”
1. According to the passage, what is the adults' assumption about today's children?| A．They are not easy to please. |
| B．They are less able to control themselves. |
| C．They don't like things that are easy to get. |
| D．They have different personalities from previous generations. |
| A．productive | B．considerate |
| C．clear-minded | D．hot-headed |
| A．They are more prepared to go to school. |
| B．They are not as clever as previous generations. |
| C．They are taught self-control only by their teachers. |
| D．They don’t need any custodial care in their early childhood. |
| A．Most children nowadays can't resist the temptations of everyday life. |
| B．Children chose to delay gratification willingly in the marshmallow test. |
| C．The test can’t accurately measure children's willingness to delay gratification. |
| D．Children’s ability to delay gratification is weakened because there are many temptations. |
4 . It’s at this time of the year that marathon recovery, not marathon training, starts to take center stage.
Research indicates that the muscle damage from running a marathon can last up to two weeks. The research also indicates that muscle soreness(肌肉酸痛)is not a good indicator of muscular healing. In other words, just because you aren’t sore anymore doesn’t mean that you are fully healed. This is the danger for marathon runners: post-marathon muscular soreness fades after a few days but minor damage within the muscle cells remains. If you return to full training too soon — running more and faster than the tissues are ready for — you risk delaying full recovery and the chance to get ready for your next goal.
The solution, it appears, is to recognize(and accept)that the muscles will take a while to heal and to be prepared to take it easy for the first couple of weeks (even longer if you’re particularly sore after your marathon). While the research isn’t very promising when it comes to things to do to reduce soreness and aid healing, a couple of concepts appear to help. First, providing gentle blood flow to the area helps bring healing nutrients into the muscles and also helps to remove waste products and damaged tissue. Walking and gentle massage(按摩)can help, particularly in the first few days after a marathon. Once muscle soreness has significantly reduced (usually two to four days after the race), light jogging can commence. Just be mindful to run very slowly.
No runner wants to get super fit and then lose that during the recovery process. But since you must reduce your training load following your marathon, it can be difficult as to how much and how soon to insert running into your post-marathon training.
1. When should marathon runners return to full training?| A．About half a month after the competition. |
| B．A few days after soreness disappears. |
| C．Before the tissues recover completely. |
| D．Before the next game draws closer. |
| A．Through family care. | B．By doing gentle exercise. |
| C．Through medical treatment. | D．By removing damaged tissue. |
| A．Fit. | B．Heal. | C．Start. | D．Mend. |
| A．Recovery after Marathon. | B．Soreness with Sports. |
| C．Healing Muscle Soreness. | D．Reducing Training Load. |
5 . Screens during meals rob kids of opportunities to improve language and communication skills （storytelling, making jokes, etc.）, as well as to develop patience and even imagination as they entertain themselves waiting for food to arrive.
Meals are an opportunity to connect, to learn more about and enjoy each other. They strengthen the bonds that will bring benefits to the rest of our lives. We squander that opportunity when we stick a screen in front of our kids during dinner.
Of course, we all want to have enjoyable family meals, which is why I love Bruce Feiller's book "The Secrets of Happy Families", in which he devotes an entire chapter to ways to make them fun and meaningful for everyone---such as "fill in the blank" sentences you make up. Sharing something good and something challenging makes for pleasant conversations, too. And I've had fun playing Uno with my daughters until the food arrives in a restaurant.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (小儿科）also offers guidelines to help families manage children's screen time. The academy recommends avoiding digital media for children under 2, except for video-chatting, and limiting screen time to just one hour a day of high-quality programming for children ages 2 to 5.
Fundamentally, we all benefit from more human connection, not less — and that's especially true for children. Schools, airplane trips, most jobs, games, even "social" interaction were all once done without screens but now are filled with them. And while we have gained some advantages, including new connections, we have lost something fundamental, as well.
Less is always more when it comes to screens, even if they are effective at keeping kids quiet. But soon after complaining that they are "bored, ” kids have a natural tendency to fill the screenless void （空虚）with creative games, art, exploration and conversation. There are no studies that warn against having too many hours of those activities.
Let's all work harder to keep family meals special by getting rid of the iPads and nourishing our personal connections as we nourish our bodies.
1. What's the author's attitude to the kids' staring at screens during meals?| A．Disapproving. | B．Favorable. |
| C．Cautious. | D．Unconcerned. |
| A．Take. | B．Waste. |
| C．Expect. | D．Create. |
| A．Keep quiet. |
| B．Refuse to eat. |
| C．Feel bored all the time. |
| D．Find ways to entertain themselves. |
| A．To introduce the iPads to the children. |
| B．To stress the importance of family meals. |
| C．To appeal for family meals without screens. |
| D．To teach parents how to punish their children. |
