1 . As Valentine’s Day approaches, many people with dogs will not care one bit whether they get a card. A survey by the Kennel Club has found almost one in five said they were so attached to their pet because “dogs don’t let you down” in the same way that other people might.
Hollywood legend Glenn Close took her Havanese dog Pip to the Oscars last year, describing her pet as “the best date a girl can have”. Comedian Miranda Hart and racing driver Lewis Hamilton have gone on holiday with their dogs, and actor Ryan Gosling has taken his cross-breed George, who he describes as “the great love of my life”, on to chat shows for moral support.
This could be due to the numerous benefits that come with dog ownership — from the psychological to the physical. Dogs help their owners unwind, whether that’s with a daily walk in fresh air, or with a cuddle(依偎) on a sofa. They can also be great listeners, help their owners release stress, and can play a part in improving their health and fitness.
Nevertheless, for those dog owners who are still looking for love, the research suggests their pet might help. More than a fifth of those questioned said they had been asked out on a date with their dog appearing best for attracting a potential partner. Among those responding to the survey, 21 percent said they were more likely to date someone who also had a dog.
Mr. Lambert, a spokesman for the Kennel Club, said, “This is quite unsurprising when you consider that dogs are a great ice-breaker, when strangers may otherwise not look twice at each other, and that we tend to have more associations about people who love dogs.”
People who owned a pet dog were also very likely to say their pet may have helped them out romantically.
1. What does the author intend to do in paragraph 2?| A．Summarize the previous paragraph. |
| B．Provide some advice for the pet owners. |
| C．Introduce some celebrities to the readers. |
| D．Give some examples to support the view above. |
| A．Focus. | B．Relax. |
| C．Recover. | D．Participate. |
| A．Because a pet dog serves as a bridge between the parties. |
| B．Because a pet dog is the best friend of mankind. |
| C．Because a pet dog adds to romantic atmosphere. |
| D．Because a pet dog breaks the ice of a conversation. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Positive. |
| C．Disapproving. | D．Reserved. |
2 . What should we get for our kids this holiday? As children get older, giving them something they can experience instead of material things makes them happier, according to a new research led by Chaplin.
The research compared the level of happiness children get from material things with that from experiences. The results showed that children aged 3-12 get more happiness from material things than from experiences. However, older children get more happiness from experiences than from their possessions.
“It means experiences are highly preferred by adolescents, not just expensive material things, like some might think,”Chaplin says. She goes on to explain,”Don’t get me wrong. Young children do love experiences. And given this concept, theme parks such as Disneyland are being built everywhere. In fact, young children are excited throughout the experience. However, for experiences to provide lasting happiness, children must be able to recall details of the events.”
Long after they have unwrapped their Legos and stuffed animals, there will still be a physical reminder to give them happiness. However, young children can’t see or touch experiences after they are over, making it harder for them to appreciate experiences after a long time. There’s an easy fix, though, according to Chaplin.
“Take pictures or videos of family walks, playing in the snow, and birthday parties,”she said.“Children are likely to appreciate those experiences more if there is something to remind them of the event. Additionally, they’ll be able to learn the social value of shared experiences.”
Children will remember and appreciate not only the birthday gifts they received, but also the time spent with family and friends as they recall the experience through concrete reminders such as photos and videos.
Since memory is developed over time, it’s likely that children, especially young ones, may not get as much happiness from past experiences as from possessions. But with age, creating new memories and exploring new interests may be far more valuable than getting possessions.
1. Why are theme parks springing up according to Chaplin?| A．They can offer children lasting happiness. |
| B．Events in them are centered on specific themes. |
| C．Direct involvement in events there caters to children. |
| D．Kids have an affection for the atmosphere they offer. |
| A．solution | B．arrangement |
| C．preparation | D．focus |
| A．Videos appeal to children more than gifts. |
| B．Legos and stuffed animals are not kid’s cup of tea. |
| C．Older children value family time more than younger ones. |
| D．Physical reminders help remember past experiences better. |
| A．Experiences are better gifts for older children. |
| B．Social values should be put in the first place. |
| C．New interests are most precious for children. |
| D．Material possessions bring more happiness to children. |
3 . In a large survey of people's first memories, nearly 40% of participants reported a first memory that is likely to be fictional, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Current research indicates that people's earliest memories date from around 3 to 3. 5 years of age. However, the study from researchers at City, University of London, the University of Bradford, and Nottingham Trent University found that 38.6% of 6, 641 participants claimed to have memories from age 2 or younger, with 893 people claiming memories from age 1 or younger. This was particularly prevalent among middle-aged and older adults.
As many of these memories dated before the age of 2 and younger, the authors suggest that these fictional memories are based on remembered fragments(碎片) of early experience—such as a pram(婴儿车)，family relationships and feeling sad—and some facts or knowledge about their own infancy or childhood which may have been derived from photographs or family conversations.
“Further details may be unconsciously inferred or added, e. g. that one was wearing nappy when standing in the cot(幼儿床)," added Shazia Akhatr, first author on the study and Senior Research Associate at the University of Bradford.
“When we looked through the responses from participants we found that a lot of these first 'memories' were frequently related to infancy, and a typical example would be a memory based around a pram," explained Martin Conway, Director at the Centre for Memory and Law at City, University of London and coauthor of the paper.
“For this person, this type of memory could have resulted from someone saying something like 'mother and a large green pram'. The person then imagines what it would have looked like. Over time these fragments then become a memory and often the person will start to add things in such as a string of toys along the top," he added.
"Crucially, the person remembering them doesn't know this is fictional," Conway noted. "In fact when people are told that their memories are false they often don't believe it. This partly due to the fact that the systems that allow us to remember things are very complex, and it's not until we're 5 or 6 that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world.
1. What does the underlined word "prevalent" in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Unique. | B．Crazy. | C．Common. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．Some people have clear knowledge about their own infancy. |
| B．Added details are an important clue to recall the childhood. |
| C．Most people claimed to have memories from age 2 or younger. |
| D．Talks between family members influence the earliest memories. |
| A．By making comparison. | B．By setting examples. |
| C．By analyzing data. | D．By referring to documents. |
| A．Many people's earliest memories may be fictional. |
| B．People's earliest memories can date back to 2 or younger. |
| C．The middle-aged and adults specialize in detailing their first memory. |
| D．Memories develop due to our maturing understanding of the world. |
4 . What makes a human being? Is it our thoughts? Our emotions? Our behavior?
All of these things make us who we are, but at the center of the matter is the genome (基因组) — the genes inside our bodies that may determine everything from our hair colour to our intelligence. But if we could change our genome, what would it mean to us?
In an online video posted on Nov 26, He Jiankui, a biological researcher from Southern University of Science and Technology in China, said that he had helped to make the world’s first genetically edited babies.
These are twin girls, born in November, with genes edited in an attempt to help them fight against possible future infection (感染) with the AIDS virus.
He said that he chose to do this because HIV infections are a big problem in China. “I feel such a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also to set an example,” He told the Associated Press(AP).
The announcement has caused an international storm. Some believe that success will benefit the families of HIV patients. Considering that HIV is “a major and growing public health threat,” attempted gene editing for HIV is justifiable, Harvard Medical School genetics professor George Church told AP.
However, others think that gene editing technology is still unsafe to attempt.
“Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with unexpected mutations (突变), causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer,” Julian Savulescu, a specialist in ethics at the University of Oxford, told BBC News.
Others fear that this could open the door to using gene editing technology to make designer babies. It might give the parents the choices to choose everything from their baby’s eye color to intelligence.
“You could find wealthy parents buying the latest ‘upgrades’ for their children, leading to even greater inequality than we already live with,” Marcy Darnovsky, director of the San Francisco Center for Genetics, told BBC News.
However, Merlin Crossley, a biologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, believes that’s a long way off. According to him, many genes produce qualities like height and intelligence — not to mention environmental influences.
And he believes the technology will be better controlled in the future.
“It’s hard to get genies (妖怪) back into bottles — but I’m optimistic that this technology, which I think of as ‘genetic surgery’, could be controlled quite effectively in the future,” Crossley told ABC News.
1. Why did He Jiankui make the genetically edited babies?| A．Because he wanted to be a leader in gene editing technology. |
| B．Because he tried to do his part in fighting against HIV infection. |
| C．Because he attempted to help the twin girls who were infected with AIDS. |
| D．Because he wanted to became the first to make the genetically edited babies in the world. |
| A．Gene editing can cause genetic problems sooner or later in life |
| B．Gene editing may widen the gap between the rich and the poor |
| C．Gene editing may enable wealthy parents to design their babies |
| D．Gene editing can determine everything inside a person’s body |
| A．Absurd. | B．Hopeless. | C．Acceptable. | D．Skilful. |
| A．Gene editing: the genie in the bottle |
| B．Gene editing: the way we should go |
| C．Gene editing: hope or fear for human beings |
| D．Gene editing: a great success in human history |
5 . Micro plastics are tiny bits of plastic often too small to be seen. Plastic doesn't decompose like natural materials. Instead, it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. No one knows exactly how much plastic is in the oceans. Since the sea is so large and so deep, it s hard to get a good idea of how much plastic it contains. But in recent years, scientists have made greater efforts to get a more accurate idea.
Some studies have suggested that since 1950. about 17 million metric tons(公吨)of plastic have entered the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists believe that the plastic previously found on beaches and on the surface of the water is only about 1% of all the plastic in the oceans. Researchers from the United Kingdom (UK) want to find out where the other 99% was.
For two months in 2016 the researchers took samples at 12 different locations in the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to South America. They collect water samples from three different depths in the top 200 meters. By running the water through special fllters(过滤器),they were able to collect the micro plastics, which they could view and study with a microscope.
Based on their measurments. the researchers learned that just the top 200 meters of the Atlantic Ocean holds between 12 and 21 million metric tons of plastics. But the Atlantic Ocean is very deep, and the scientists only checked the top 200 meters. They say that if microplastics are spread through the rest of the Atlantic like they were in the top 200 meters, thin there are probably about 200 million metric tons of microplastics in the Atlantic Ocean.
Though the scientists only studied the Atlantic ocean the results suggest that there may be far more microplastic in all oceans than we realized. The problems go far beyond ocean pollution. Microplastic particles have been found just in everywhere around the world from Antarctica to the bottom of the sea.
Scientist predict that the amount of plastic entering our oceans is likely to triplet over the next 20 years. Having a good idea of how much plastic is already then might be a good first step to fighting the problem.
1. What does the underlined word “decompose” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．turn up | B．break down |
| C．give off | D．bring out |
| A．Previous data of plastic consists of only a very small part. |
| B．There is only 17 million metric ton of plastic on the earth. |
| C．The amount of plastic in the seas is on the decrease in recent years. |
| D．The amount of plastic in the seas is increasing by 1 % yearly. |
| A．Pessimistic. | B．Confident. |
| C．Objective. | D．Conserved. |
| A．More pollutants will turn out in the future. |
| B．Measures will be taken to deal with plastic. |
| C．The oceans will be cleaned in the future. |
| D．More people will be aware of plastic pollution. |
6 . 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. |
7 . “Instagram(a social networking app) will cut out many users’ accounts on December 20. To protect your account, repost this warning #KeepMyAccountSafe.” Every few months, it happens again-a dozen of annoying posts from my kids’ friends suddenly start to appear on my Instagram news feed.
According to a new study by Stanford University, most kids don’t know what news is fake. Researchers asked more than 7,800 middle school and high school students to complete 56 tasks, like distinguishing an advertisement from a real news story on a website and determining which blog in a series was most reliable. They found that students judged the credibility of blogs based not on the source of the material, but on how much detail they contained, or whether a large photo was attached.
“Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media, they can distinguish fake news, but our work shows the opposite to be true,” wrote lead study author Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.
Both Google and Facebook are now taking steps to control misleading news from making its way on their platforms, but they won’t be able to eliminate it completely. That is why it’s now more important than ever to teach our kids to think critically when it comes to believing various information sources.
“In the coming months, we look forward to sharing our assessments and working with educators to create materials that will guide young people in the sea of disinformation they encounter online,” said Wineburg.
1. How does the author introduce the topic of the passage?| A．By stating opinions. | B．By showing findings. |
| C．By quoting sayings. | D．By citing a post. |
| A．The source of the material. | B．The popularity of the website. |
| C．The amount of details. | D．The size of relevant photos. |
| A．Digest. | B．Update. | C．Estimate. | D．Remove. |
| A．Stronger Together: The Internet Changes Our Life |
| B．Be Careful: Kids Are Bad at Identifying Fake News |
| C．Reliable News Has No Place on Social Media |
| D．Educators Have a Long Way to Go to Guide the Young |
8 . Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive (认知的) psychologist at Harvard, has spent her career testing the world's most complex learning system-the mind of a baby. Babies might seem like no match for artificial intelligence (AI). They are terrible at labeling images, hopeless at mining text, and awful at video games. Then again, babies can do things beyond the reach of any AI. By just a few months old, they’ve begun to grasp the foundations of language, such as grammar. They’ve started to understand how to adapt to unfamiliar situations.
Yet even experts like Spelke don’t understand precisely how babies — or adults, for that matter — learn. That gap points to a puzzle at the heart of modern artificial intelligence: We're not sure what to aim for.
Consider one of the most impressive examples of AI, Alpha Zero, a programme that plays board games with superhuman skill. After playing thousands of games against itself at a super speed, and learning from winning positions, Alpha Zero independently discovered several famous chess strategies and even invented new ones. It certainly seems like a machine eclipsing human cognitive abilities. But Alpha Zero needs to play millions more games than a person during practice to learn a game. Most importantly, it cannot take what it has learned from the game and apply it to another area.
To some AI experts, that calls for a new approach. In a November research paper, Francois Chollet, a well-known AI engineer, argued that it’s misguided to measure machine intelligence just according to its skills at specific tasks. “Humans don’t start out with skills; they start out with a broad ability to acquire new skills,” he says. “What a strong human chess player is demonstrating is not only the ability to play chess, but the potential to fulfill any task of a similar difficulty.” Chollet posed a set of problems, each of which requires an AI programme to arrange colored squares on a grid (格栅) based on just a few prior examples. It’s not hard for a person. But modern machine-learning programmes-trained on huge amounts of data — cannot learn from so few examples.
Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT's Center for Brains, Minds & Machines, works closely with Spelke and uses insights from cognitive science as inspiration for his programmes. He says much of modern AI misses the bigger picture, comparing it to a cartoon about a two-dimensional world populated by simple geometrical (几何形的) people. AI programmes will need to learn in new ways — for example, by drawing causal inferences rather than simply finding patterns. “At some point — you know, if you’re intelligent — you realize maybe there's something else out there,” he says.
1. Compared to an advanced AI programme, a baby might be better at _______________.| A．labeling images | B．identifying locations |
| C．playing games | D．making adjustments |
| A．Stimulating. | B．Measuring. | C．Beating. | D．Limiting. |
| A．AI is good at finding similar patterns |
| B．AI should gain abilities with less training |
| C．AI lacks the ability of generalizing a skill |
| D．AI will match humans in cognitive ability |
| A．What is exactly intelligence? |
| B．Why is modern AI advanced? |
| C．Where is human intelligence going? |
| D．How do humans tackle the challenge of AI? |
9 . “A CAREER BOOK about Asians? Aren’t they doing fine…?” So begins Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling, a very large scholarly book by Jane Hyun published in 2005. Because Asian-Americans had higher incomes and education levels and committed fewer crimes than their average countrymen, they were seen as a model minority. Despite this, they rarely rose to the top of companies. A mix of individual, cultural and organizational barriers — the “bamboo ceiling” of the book’s title — seemed to prohibit them from rising.
Fifteen years later Asians are still under-represented. In the technology sectors, Asians make up over 30% of the workers but less than 15% of bosses. In 2017 Asians made up roughly 6% of the country’s population but only 3% of the bosses of S&P 500 (标准普尔 500 指数) firms.
Some prominent Asians run big companies. Arvind Krishna is IBM’s new boss. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft and Sundar Pichai leads Alphabet. But few other Asians have joined their ranks — and, revealingly, these stars all have Indian roots. There are fewer South Asians in America than East Asians, but they still made up 13 of all 16 Asian S&P 500 CEOs.
Why are there so few Asians among America’s business elite? And if a bamboo ceiling is to blame, why do South Asians break through more easily? These questions are the focus of a study by Jackson Lu of MIT Sloan School of Management and colleagues, who surveyed hundreds of senior executives and business-school students. They found that while discrimination exists, it is not destiny. South Asians endure greater racism than East Asians but still outperform even whites (if success is weighed against share of population). Their research also rules out lack of ambition: a greater share of Asians than whites endeavor for high-status jobs.
That leaves culture. The researchers conclude that South Asians tend to be more determined and confident than East Asians in how they communicate at work, which fits Western concepts of how a leader should behave. The same tendency for confident remarks featured in “The Argumentative Indian”, a book by Amartya Sen, a Nobel-prize winning economist. The researchers owe East Asians’ silence to Confucian values of modesty and respect for social ranking. Sometimes bravery and bombast are needed to break bamboo.
1. What does “bamboo ceiling” refer to?| A．The top of an American technology company. |
| B．A roof made of bamboo typical of Asian buildings. |
| C．Promotion obstacles facing Asian employees in America. |
| D．The invisible discrimination against Asians in the USA. |
| A．Lacking representatives. | B．Hard to show their talents. |
| C．Being underestimated. | D．Unable to land a job. |
| A．A small population. | B．Discrimination. | C．Lack of ambition. | D．Culture. |
| A．Western people prefer modesty to confidence in communication. |
| B．The confidence they demonstrate consists with Western leadership. |
| C．They endure greater racism and become more ambitious. |
| D．Their ambition urges them to endeavor for high-status jobs. |
10 . A new course on world heritage, and its conservation offers a good opportunity for the young people to learn about the heritage(遗产) of humanity and gain a sense of responsibility to help protect the planet we live on.
According to a world heritage education programme jointly launched by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) and China’s Ministry of Education, the course will first be offered at several schools in Beijing before being included as a mandatory course(必修课) for high school students nationwide.
The new course covers photos slide shows and documentaries on the magnificence of the world heritage sites. The class aims to tell children what world heritage is and why and how it should be protected. A total of 171 nations, including China, have signed the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage Listed are 754 sites all over the world, of which 29 are in China—the third most after Spain and Italy. Currently, protection of the country’s cultural and natural resources leaves much to be desired. Education is undoubtedly the best way to cultivate people’s sense for protecting cultural and natural resources.
The introduction of such a programme in Chinese classrooms will certainly help our young people realize the significance of common heritage, learning about world heritage sites, the history and traditions of different cultures, ecology, and the importance of protecting biological and cultural diversity.
More importantly, it will help cultivate a sense of responsibility in the minds of young participants. This is critical in protecting these cultural and natural legacies, as well as our living environment and the limited resources for sustainable development.
1. Which of the statements is TRUE according to the passage?| A．The world heritage education programme was jointly launched by the United States and China’s Ministry of Education. |
| B．The course will first be offered at all the schools in Beijing. |
| C．Protection of the country’s cultural and natural resources has been perfect thanks to people’s efforts. |
| D．China ranks high among the countries with 29 sites listed on the list. |
| A．What world heritage is. | B．Why we should protect world heritage is. |
| C．How world heritage should be protected. | D．All of the above. |
| A．employ | B．affect |
| C．develop | D．appreciate |
| A．To inform us of the reason for protecting the heritage. |
| B．To tell us the way to protect the heritage. |
| C．To tell us a new course. |
| D．To tell us heritage preservation starts with education. |
