1 . The weather is getting hotter and you’ll be getting thirstier playing basketball or riding home from school. A cold drink may be just the thing. But be careful what you pour down your throat. Something that looks cool may not be good for your health.
There are plenty of so-called energy drinks on the market. Most of them have an attractive color and cool name. Their nutrition lists also contains various things from vitamins to ginseng. Sounds great!
But after a careful check you may find that most energy drinks contain high levels of caffeine. These drinks are typically 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 raises your heartbeat. Because of this, the International Olympic Committee has limited their use. The amount of caffeine in most energy drinks is at least as high as in a strong cup of coffee or strong tea.
There are potential health dangers linked to energy drinks. Just one can of energy drink can make you nervous, have difficulty sleeping and can even cause heart attacks.
Teenagers should be discouraged from taking drinks with a lot of caffeine in them, an expert from the Australia Nutrition Foundation said.
1. The teenagers like drinking energy drinks because of the following EXCEPT that ________.| A．they have an attractive color and cool name | B．they contain high levels of caffeine |
| C．they can keep them awake and better at sports | D．they are said to have various nutrition |
| A．dropped | B．stopped | C．helped | D．asked |
| A．advertisements play an important part in getting people to buy the goods |
| B．the amount of caffeine in most energy drinks is lower than that in a strong cup of coffee |
| C．Australian teenagers drink more energy drinks than those in the other countries |
| D．The energy drinks are typically aimed at young people |
| A．What’s the Use of Energy Drinks? | B．Who can Drink Energy Drinks? |
| C．What is That in Energy Drinks? | D．Why can’t We Buy Energy Drinks? |
2 . Many college students turn to ADHD（注意缺陷障碍）medicine during the exam week, which is regarded as “smart drugs” that will help their academic（学术的）performance. The thinking is that if the drugs help students with ADHD improve their focus, they should provide the same benefit for people who don’t have the disorder.
But a new study shows that drugs can actually damage brain function of healthy students who take the drug hoping to boost their intelligence. “It’s not a smart drug which will suddenly improve their ability to understand information they read,” said Lisa Weyandt, a professor at the University of Rhode Island.
To test whether this effect is real or not, researchers organized 13 students to take part in two five-hour study sessions（一段时间）in the lab. The students took the standard 30mg ADHD drugs before one session, and a sugar pill before the other. Students on ADHD drugs did experience an increase in their blood pressure and heart rates. “The medicine was having an effect on their brain,” Weyandt said. The students also showed an improvement in their ability to focus, the researchers found.
However, students on ADHD drugs experienced no improvement in reading comprehension, reading fluency or knowledge reviews, compared to when they’d taken a sugar pill. “We read aloud stories to them and asked them to recall information from the stories, ”she said. “That didn’t improve.”
Worse, the ADHD drug actually harms students’ memory. It’s often misused because people pull all-nighters and they’re tired, and they think it’s going to keep them awake. Maybe it does, but it’s certainly not going to help their academic work. The brain is still developing until the mid to late 20s. It’s important to keep it healthy. There’s also a chance that ADHD drugs could endanger a student’s heart health.
1. Why do some college students take ADHD drugs?| A．To improve their sleeping. | B．To get higher marks. |
| C．To make them feel relaxed. | D．To treat brain disorder. |
| A．Analyze. | B．Affect. |
| C．Improve. | D．Understand. |
| A．They became more focused. |
| B．Their blood pressure was reduced. |
| C．Their reading fluency was greatly raised. |
| D．They could remember better and more quickly. |
| A．In a drug instruction. | B．In a biology textbook. |
| C．In a travel magazine. | D．In a news report. |
3 . Just over 12 months ago I gave myself a challenge: give up spending on all but the essentials for a whole year. It hasn't always been easy, but a year on I am wealthier and wiser. Embarrassingly, I have also realized just how much money I've squandered down the pub, in restaurants and through mindless shopping.
Free of any financial worries, I was spending without thinking. Stuck in a cycle of consumerism, I was struggling in vain to spend my way to happiness. Giving up spending for a year was an extreme approach but I wanted to taste extreme frugality (节俭), shake up my spending patterns and overpay my mortgage (按揭) instead of shopping. I could continue to pay my bills, including mortgages, broadband, phone bill, charity donations, life insurances, money to help my family and basic groceries.
It was not easy, especially in the first few months. There were lows, such as when I missed my favourite jazz concerts and hit films. There have also been some awkward moments when I've turned up to a friend's house for dinner empty-handed. I did a lot of washing up at my friends' houses in return this year.
I did find new ways to live, however. Using sites such as Eventbrite I have been to film screenings, wine tasting evenings and theatre productions for free. Living in London I have a wealth of free cultural activities on my doorstep and I've been to more art exhibitions this year than ever before. I even managed a free holiday, cycling the Suffolk and Norfolk coast and camping on beaches. It's something I'd never done before and probably wouldn't have, were it not for the challenge.
The last 12 months have taught me what things I really need. I can honestly say I'm happier now. I've gained confidence and skills, done things and met lovely people I wouldn't have otherwise done or met.
1. What does the underlined word “squandered” in paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Saved. | B．Wasted. | C．Donated. | D．Earned. |
| A．try to form a virtue of frugality | B．change her former spending habits |
| C．pay off her mortgage as soon as possible | D．reserve money for her everyday bills |
| A．She did a lot of washing and cooking in pubs. |
| B．She tried cycling and camping for the first time. |
| C．She explored more cultural activities in London. |
| D．She attended concerts and wine evenings for free. |
| A．Discouraging | B．Challenging | C．Beneficial | D．Embarrassing |
4 . When you choose a friend, you should be very careful. A good friend can help you study. You can have fun together and make each other happy. Sometimes you will meet fair weather (晴天) friends. They will be with you as long as you have money or luck, but when you are down, they will run away. How do I know when I have found a good friend? I look for certain qualities of character, especially understanding, honesty and reliability (可靠).
Above all else, I look for understanding in a friend. A good friend tries to understand how another person is feeling. He is not quick to judge. Instead, he tries to learn from others. He puts himself in the other person’s place, and he tries, to think of ways to be helpful. He is, also a good listener.
At the same time, however, a good friend is honest. He does not look for faults in others. He notices their good points. In short, good friends will be honest to each other and accept each other.
Another quality of a friend is reliability. I can always depend on a good friend If he tells me he will meet me somewhere at a certain time? I can be sure that he will be there. If I need a favour, he will do his best to help me. If I am in trouble > he will not run away from me.
There is a fourth quality that makes a friend special, A special friend is someone with whom we can have fun. We should enjoy our lives, and we would enjoy our friendship. That is why I especially like friends who are fun to be with. A good friend likes the same things I like. We share experience and learn from each other. A good friend has a good sense of humour, too. He likes to laugh with me. That is how we share in the joy of being friends. And I know that he is looking for the same quality in me.
When I meet someone who is reliable, honest, and understanding, I know I’ve found a friend!
1. If you have fair weather friends, what will happen to you?| A．You will become rich |
| B．You can be sure that you get real friends |
| C．You will be refused when you get into trouble |
| D．They will give you all that they have when you need help |
| A．Honesty. | B．Reliability. |
| C．Understanding. | D．A sense of humour. |
| A．Cloudy. | B．Unusual. | C．Unhappy. | D．Pleased. |
| A．the qualities of a friend | B．where to choose friends |
| C．how to get along with friends | D．the importance of having a friend |
5 . Salad plants have already been grown in old shelters and tunnels. Urban farming is a regular topic of interest at places like the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, where leaders consider whether the world's food system, blamed for causing both obesity and malnutrition, can be fixed. There are already plenty of urban farming projects around the world, particularly in the US, Japan and the Netherlands, from urban fish and plant farms to vertical farming.
“It's becoming an expanding industry,” said Richard Ballard, one of the founders of the farm Growing Underground. “There're several other businesses starting up in London in containers, and there are other vertical farms around the country now.”
Growing Underground is not a standard farm. The rows of crops could be in almost any tunnel, but these plants are 100 feet below Clapham High Street and show that urban agriculture is, in some cases at least, not a fad. The underground farm has occupied a part of the Second World War air-raid shelters for nearly five years, and Ballard is planning to expand into the rest of the space later this year.
Growing Underground supplies herb and salad mixes to grocery shops, supermarkets and restaurants. Being in London creates an advantage, Ballard says, as they can harvest and deliver in an hour.
He adds other advantages. Being underground means temperatures never go below 15℃ surface greenhouses need to be heated. They can do more harvests: 60 crops a year, compared with about seven in a traditional farm. Electricity to power the lights is a major cost, but the company believes renewable energy will become cheaper.
Similar British companies include the Jones Food Company in Lincolnshire, while in the US AeroFarms has several projects in New Jersey, and Edenworks in Brooklyn.
1. What do we know about urban farming?| A．It leads to a healthier lifestyle. | B．It is rarely discussed at the WEF. |
| C．Different farming methods are used. | D．Local governments pay efforts to develop it. |
| A．A dream that's easy to realize. | B．A field controlled for a long time. |
| C．An approach to a serious problem. | D．A fashion that’s popular for a short time. |
| A．It is more productive than a traditional farm. | B．It provides food directly to the customers. |
| C．Its major products are herbs and salads. | D．It uses less energy than a greenhouse. |
| A．Current food system causes health problems |
| B．Growing Underground attracts more people |
| C．Traditional farming will be replaced soon |
| D．Urban farming is still thought costly and time-consuming |
6 . A few years ago, I had the honor of traveling through Accra, Ghana, an African city. As I rode down a main avenue, images grabbed my attention. On one side of the street, African children dressed in rags were playing in an open gutter (排水沟). On the other side of the street, there was a billboard advertisement featuring palm trees, a beach, and a white man lowering sunglasses from his eyes. If you are a fan of the American police shows, it’s not hard to see that the man in the ad is David Caruso, the righteous(正义的) cop in Crime Scene Investigation: Miami.
The dichotomy of images was a reminder not only of the international impact of American pop culture, but of the specific influence of TV police shows.
In Hollywood, I’m a rare creature, a black man who has made a career writing for network police shows, having eventually created my own show, S.W.A.T., for CBS. For me, writing television can never simply be about entertainment. The unjust death of the African American George Floyd keeps me wondering how the shows we are writing contribute to the understanding of the justice system, class, race, and the image of black men. I look at this not as a creative burden, but a necessary responsibility.
The past 60 years have seen numerous cop shows like Dragnet and Adam 12, where police, typically are beacons(灯塔) of morality who never do wrong while criminals are always people of color, particularly black men. This can make for wildly popular entertainment, but it also risks mistaking fantasies for reality. People watch TV to see heroes, but how are we defining who a hero is? For people of color, especially black people, the viewing experience is complex.
1. The images the author saw in Africa imply________.| A．the unrealistic advertisement |
| B．TV police shows’ great popularity |
| C．poor education of African children |
| D．the background of American culture |
| A．Contrast. | B．Trend. |
| C．Confusion. | D．Boom. |
| A．He writes plays for pleasure. |
| B．He is very creative and influential. |
| C．He has created many shows including Dragnet. |
| D．He has high sense of justice and responsibility. |
| A．Ambiguous. | B．Objective. |
| C．Disapproving. | D．Appreciative. |
7 . We recognize our friends’ faces. And we’re not alone. Many social animals can identify individuals of their own species by features of their faces. That's important, because they need to be able to change their behavior depending on who they meet. And a recent research has shown that some species of monkeys, birds, and domesticated (家养的) animals can even tell different faces apart by looking at photographs alone.
Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.
She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side pictures by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their present keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored (忽视) the stranger’s face about 75%of the time. In fact, even though the horses didn't get it right every single time, they were at least as correct in picking out their earlier keeper as they were at identifying their present one.
The results suggest that not only can horses differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces, they also naturally understand that photographs are two dimensional representations (二维呈现) of real life, without any other intimations such as smell or sound. And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal parter, the domestic dog.
In addition, horses seem to have a strong long-term memory for human faces, like their long lifespan and history of domestication. In future experiments, the researchers would like to test whether looking at photos of people that they have had bad experiences with in the past might cause horses to act anxious or even avoidance. So maybe think twice before doing anything that might give a horse a long face.
1. Why did researchers show the horses both the keeper’s photos and the strangers’?| A．To find out what horses would do in the experiment. |
| B．To see why horses could recognize the keeper in the pictures. |
| C．To test whether horses could recognize the strangers in pictures. |
| D．To study to what degree horses can make out different people in pictures. |
| A．Clues. | B．Differences. |
| C．Photographs. | D．Senses. |
| A．Whether horses can live longer than other animals. |
| B．Whether horses can remember human's faces for a long time. |
| C．Whether horses can show their emotions at the sight of photos. |
| D．Whether horses are better at recognizing photos than other animals. |
| A．To talk about animals’ species. |
| B．To explain animals’ facial features. |
| C．To show animals’ behaviour for adaptation. |
| D．To introduce animals’ ability to identifying faces. |
8 . It was America’s deadliest wildfire in at least 100 years and the most destructive in California history. The Camp Fire started at 6:33 a.m. on November 8, touched off by faulty electrical transmission lines in the town of Paradise. It burned for 17 days and consumed 153,336 acres north of Sacramento. In all, the fire caused $16.5 billion in damage, destroying nearly 19,000 buildings, leaving 50,000 homeless, and killing 85.
Shane Grammer, a creative director for Disney’s theme parks, followed the news of the fire. When his childhood friend Shane Edwards posted pictures of his white chimney—the only part of his house to survive—Grammer felt helpless. And then he had an idea.
On December 31, Grammer spent three hours spray-painting a strikingly frightening black- and-white image of a woman on the chimney—a reminder, perhaps, of the beauty of life, or even just of life itself. Grammer posted the image on Instagram. The victims of the fire, especially, could not contain themselves. “Beautiful and unforgettable,” one said. Another posted, “You bring beauty and hope.”
Suddenly, Grammer realized that what he had thought was a purely artistic expression had morphed into something deeper, the nature of true art. “When the first picture moved so many people in this community, I knew I had to come back up,” Grammer told KRCR-TV in Redding. Over a period of three months he returned eight times, painting 17 portraits of victims on walls, pickups, and pieces of buildings. “There is hope,” he explains. “There is beauty in the ashes.”
Grammer’s work in Paradise has now become a movement. He has traveled the world painting pictures in dark places that badly needed some light: an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico; a youth ministry in San Francisco. “I want to do something powerful and create art that moves people,” he says.
1. What can we learn from paragraph 1?| A．The Camp Fire was caused by nature. |
| B．California has witnessed many wildfires. |
| C．There should be a ban on using electricity. |
| D．The damage of the Camp Fire was inestimable. |
| A．Disappointing. | B．Impressive. | C．Frightening. | D．Abstract. |
| A．Changed. | B．Broke. | C．Divided. | D．Burst. |
| A．They are creative masterpieces. |
| B．They are drawn using a special technique. |
| C．They bring people hope out of misfortune. |
| D．They mainly focus on dark sides of society. |
9 . One spring day, once the flowers have begun to open, a bee will hover and zip through your yard and dive-bomb your picnic table. While you’re thinking about avoiding an attack, that bee is focused on something else entirely: me.
A honeybee has about six weeks to live. Today, like most days, her task is to fly as many as three miles from home, stick her long, straw-like tongue into a hundred or so flowers. When the bee has had her fill, she’ll fly home. There the bee will deposit what she has got into the mouth of one of her co-workers, who will relay it to another, and so on for about 20 minutes, until the mixture is ready to be placed into the comb. Then she and her 50,000 or so mates will hover in the dark all night every night, flapping their wings to create hot, breezy conditions to remove the water from the mixture. Several sunrises later, they will seal me off in a golden cell of beeswax. In her lifetime, our bee may visit 4,000 flowers, and yet will produce only one-twelfth of a tea spoon of me.
The average American consumes nearly a pound and a half of me every year, in tea, on toast, and beyond. If I do say so myself, I am a timeless treasure. Literally—I never go bad.
Unfortunately, my good health is not guaranteed. The problem lies in the growth of industrial agriculture and the use of pest control chemicals, as well as changes in weather patterns, all of which reduce the number of flowers bees have to visit. I’d appreciate your letting your own garden grow just a little wild. My future depends on all of us protecting nature’s wild flowers, thus helping the bees, who give so much—to you, to me—without ever asking for anything in return.
1. What does “me” in the passage refer to?| A．The flower. | B．The bee. | C．Garden | D．Honey. |
| A．Bees’ special talent. | B．Bees’ hard work. |
| C．Bees’ living environment. | D．Bees’ social behavior. |
| A．A bee will surely attack picnickers |
| B．A bee will generally live a long life. |
| C．American consumers can’t go without “me”. |
| D．The drying process of “me” can take a few nights. |
| A．To appeal for help for honeybees. | B．To talk about the history of a treasure. |
| C．To put forward techniques for gardeners. | D．To argue against the control of chemicals. |
10 . Kamikatsu, a small town in Japan, has shown the world that our garbage has far-reaching effects, and not just on our environment.
The experiment in going zero waste started when the town built a new incinerator 20 years ago. But almost immediately, the incinerator was determined to be a health risk due to the poisonous gases when garbage was burned in it. It was too expensive to send waste to other towns, so locals had to come up with a new plan. Then the Zero Waste Academy was born, which helped perform this plan.
Now Kamikatsu people separate their waste into 45 different categories. But in the beginning, it wasn't easy to convince local people to do all this work, and there was some pushback. Only after that initial education period did most residents come on board.
This is all great news for waste reduction of course, but it has also had some unexpected social benefits as well. Like much of Japan, Kamikatsu's population is aging, and about 50 percent of the locals are elderly. The fact that the whole community takes their trash in to be recycled has created a local action and interaction between generations.
That idea has been purposefully expanded to include a circular shop where household goods are dropped off and others can take them, and a tableware "library" where people can borrow extra cups, glasses, silverware and plates for celebrations.
"The elderly see this not as a waste-collection service, but an opportunity to socialize with the younger generation and to chat. When we visit them, they prepare lots of food and we stay with them for a while, we ask how they are," Sakano, the founder of the Zero Waste Academy, said.
Sakano's ideas are truly revolutionary if you think about it. She's proving that community can be found through handling the stuff we no longer want and need.
1. What is mainly talked about in paragraph 2?| A．What harmful effects garbage burning has. |
| B．Why garbage sorting is necessary in Japan. |
| C．How the idea of zero waste was put forward. |
| D．What the Zero Waste Academy functions as. |
| A．Inactive response. | B．Generous reward. |
| C．Bitter suffering. | D．Beneficial guidance. |
| A．Reducing waste. | B．Creating community. |
| C．Increasing people's income. | D．Developing a new technology. |
| A．Technology. | B．Health. | C．Workplace. | D．Lifestyle. |
