1 . As more and more people speak the global language of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will be likely to die out by the next century, according the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations — UNESCO and National Geographic among them — have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.
Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Center, Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of Thangmi and Their Culture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.
Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.
At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials —including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes — which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded — the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project — Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to schools but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.
1. Many scholars are making efforts to ________.| A．promote global languages | B．rescue disappearing languages |
| C．search for languages communities | D．set up language research organizations |
| A．having detailed records of the languages | B．writing books on language users |
| C．telling stories about language speakers | D．living with the native speakers |
| A．The cultural studies in India. | B．The documents available at Yale. |
| C．His language research in Bhutan. | D．His personal experience in Nepal. |
| A．Write, sell and donate. | B．Record, repair and reward. |
| C．Collect, protect and reconnect. | D．Design, experiment and report. |
2 . “Now I just don’t believe that.” Surely all of us, at some point, have watched a movie and thought: It’s simply badly researched, or, the makers must think we’re idiots.
The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph ran a humorous piece on unconvincing tech moments from some top movies. Let’s see what they are all about.
The Daily Telegraph writer Tom Chivers’ first example is from the end-of-the-world movie Independence Day, in which a character comes up with a virus which destroys Windows, the computer system the alien spacecraft uses. “It’s a good thing they didn’t have Norton Anti-virus,” jokes Chivers.
It’s just one case of a movie that takes a lot of license with its science. Another one Chivers mentions is from Star Wars, where glowing beams of light traveling through space look very impressive. But the problem is that in space there are no air particles for the light to reflect off. In reality, they’d be invisible, which wouldn’t look so cool on the big screen.
Chivers’ second piece of Star Wars nonsense is the sound the fighters make in the movies:“the bellow (咆哮) of an elephant mixed with a car driving on a wet road”. But sound needs a medium to travel through, like air. In space, there wouldn’t actually be any sound at all.
Few people would deny that the mind-bending Matrix films are made for great viewing, but for Chivers, the science in the movies is a little silly.
And finally, as Chivers points out, DNA is not replaceable. But this bit of elementary genetics passed the makers of the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day by. In the film the bad man has “gene therapy” to change his appearance and his DNA, which is completely impossible in our real world.
1. What does the passage mainly deal with?| A．Plots of some famous movies. |
| B．Characters in space movies. |
| C．Popularity of space movies. |
| D．Mistakes made in some movies. |
| A．The newspapers. |
| B．Unconvincing tech moments. |
| C．Some top movies. |
| D．Heroes in the movies. |
| A．light looks very impressive |
| B．light seems like glowing beams |
| C．glowing beams cannot be seen |
| D．light can’t travel through space |
| A．Most people like Matrix films. |
| B．Most people suspect the truth of Matrix films. |
| C．Few people enjoy viewing Matrix films. |
| D．Chivers thinks science is not acceptable. |
3 . Several years ago, when someone used camera covers to protect against possible monitoring, it was not popular to talk about it. Today, people use various types of tapes to cover the web cameras and microphones.
There are many types of spyware that can dive into our devices and secretly spy on them, recording everything they do. Such programs may infect not only computers but also smartphones. Your data may be used by hackers who will try to request money for not exposing your private information or by companies like NSO Group who created the Pegasus spyware to “provide authorized governments with technology that helps struggle against terror and crime”.
In my opinion, the described protection technique is highly overestimated. Users tape cameras and microphones due to the lack of understanding of how their devices work and how malware(恶意软件)works. Hackers and even secret services do not have enough resources to monitor all victims using cameras or microphones. If they need to yet any information, they get it by sending a targeted malware to your device, which will not be stopped by the tapes. Such a virus will find what to steal -from personal photos and videos to passwords from social networks, browser history, bank accounts and much more.
It is unwise to believe that attackers will not be able to find a way to spy on you, even if the device, discharged to zero, can still deliver data about your location, using the smartphones of the surrounding people as signal repeaters. Let us face it. we live in an era when it is extremely difficult to hide something and a piece of tape is clearly not the most useful tool in the struggle for your privacy.
Again, to be able to spy on you, attackers need to plant malware in your device. To prevent malware from entering your device, do not click suspected links and email attachments. Use strong passwords for email, social media and online banking accounts.
1. What does the underlined word “them” in paragraph 2 refer to?| A．Cameras. |
| B．Types. |
| C．Programs. |
| D．Devices. |
| A．group of hackers. |
| B．A company developing spyware. |
| C．A group of terrorists and criminals. |
| D．A company fighting against crime. |
| A．People know little about their devices. |
| B．Hackers have no access to others. |
| C．It hardly prevents malware from getting privacy. |
| D．It can't cover the cameras completely. |
| A．Protecting privacy on devices. |
| B．Rising trend of using tapes. |
| C．Monitoring devices via cameras. |
| D．Avoiding clicking distrustful links. |
4 . A rainforest is an area covered by tall trees with the total high rainfall spreading（扩大） quite equally through the year and the temperature rarely falling below 16°C. Rainforests have a great influence on the world environment because they can take in heat from the sun and adjust the climate.
Without the forest cover, these areas would reflect（反射）more heat into the atmosphere, warming the rest of the world. Losing the rainforests may also influence wind and rainfall patterns，potentially（潜 在地） causing certain natural disasters all over the world.
In the past hundred years, humans have begun destroying rainforests in search of three major resources ： land for crops, wood for paper and other products, land for raising farm animals. This action affects the environment as a whole. For example, a lot of carbon dioxide in the air comes from burning the rainforests. People obviously have a need for the resources we gain from cutting trees but we will suffer much more than we will benefit.
There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, when people cut down trees, generally they can only use the land for a year or two. Secondly, cutting large sections of rainforests may provide a good supply of wood right now, but in the long run it actually reduces the world’s wood supply. Rainforests are often called the world's drugstore. More than 25% of the medicines we use today come from plants in rainforests. However, fewer than 1% of rainforest plants have been examined for their medical value. It is extremely likely that our best chance to cure diseases lies somewhere in the world’s shrinking（减 少）rainforests.
1. Rainforests can help to adjust the climate because they______.| A．reflect more heat into the atmosphere |
| B．bring about high rainfall throughout the world |
| C．rarely cause the temperature to drop lower than 16°C |
| D．absorb（吸收） the heat from the sun, reducing the effect of heat from the sun on the earth |
| A．We will lose much more than we can gain. | B．Humans have begun destroying rainforests. |
| C．People have a strong desire for resources. | D．Much carbon dioxide （二氧化碳）comes from burning rainforests. |
| A．we can get enough resources without rainforests |
| B．there is great medicine potential in rainforests |
| C．we will grow fewer kinds of crops in the gained land |
| D．the level of annual rainfall affects wind patterns |
| A．How to Save Rainforests? | B．How to Protect Nature? |
| C．Rainforests and the Environment. | D．Rainforests and Medical Development. |
5 . The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is important to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious reddening of face or a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, trust and cheat. They also spend plenty of time trying to dissimulate.
Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America, facial recognition is used by churches to track prayers’ attendance; in Britain, by shopkeepers to spot past thieves. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China, it verifies the identities of ride-hailing (网约车) drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.
Compared with human skills, such applications might expand steadily in scale. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode them. Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about major changes to our understanding of privacy, fairness and trust.
Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric (计量生物学的) data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. FindFace, an app in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a social network, and can identify people with a 70% accuracy rate. Even if private firms are unable to join the dots between images and identity, the state often can. Photographs of half of America’s adult population are stored in databases that can be used by the FBI. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.
1. What does the underlined word “dissimulate” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．Hide emotions from others. |
| B．Make known to the public. |
| C．Act in disregard of laws. |
| D．Become friends with others. |
| A．Applications. | B．Breakthroughs. | C．Human abilities. | D．Human skills. |
| A．Safety and first aid. |
| B．Social services. |
| C．Finance and trade. |
| D．Fairness and trust. |
| A．Benefits resulting from facial breakthrough |
| B．Facial Recognition: nowhere to hide |
| C．The power of human faces |
| D．Technologies concerning facial recognition |
6 . The Assassin's Creed series has been about building immersive （沉浸式的）and accurate historical worlds. As their newest game releases f Assassins Creed Origins, they have also released their Discovery Tours. These tours give players a chance to walk the streets of ancient Egypt, explore Alexandria and the pyramids, and learn about wildlife and geography. For students, experiencing the ancient world in this interactive way can be more interesting and effective than just reading a textbook or watching a documentary about what they are studying.
Assassins Creed is not the only game series that can be educational either. What is important about the role of historical games is the level of choice. When watching a film, students are passive receivers of content. However, when playing a game students have an active role to play in history. A focus on choice and consequence is an important element of teaching and understanding history, so historical games can be a valuable teaching tool even if they aren't completely historically accurate. They have the power to immerse students in faraway worlds and allow them to think critically about cause and consequence, think about why historical events unfolded the way they did, and even think about possible alternative outcomes. All of these are critical for historical thinking processes. No longer do students need to rely only on reading textbooks or on instructors for knowledge.
When carrying this out in your class, remember that not all students enjoy playing video games, but they can still be a valuable learning tool. The instructor also needs to be an active facilitator and taking note of teachable moments. A video game is not going to teach a class ； it requires an awesome instructor to make everything come together. With the power of video games, ancient worlds no longer need to be limited to the pages of a textbook.
1. What does the underlined phrase “this interactive way“ in paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Walking an ancient street. | B．Playing a new game. |
| C．Reading a textbook. | D．Watching a documentary. |
| A．Why it is different from the film. | B．Why it gains popularity. |
| C．How it benefits teaching. | D．How it came into being. |
| A．The teachers. | B．The players. |
| C．The designers. | D．The audiences. |
| A．A vivid description of ancient architecture. |
| B．An account of a new history learning method. |
| C．A detailed explanation of a social problem. |
| D．An online advertisement of a stylish trend. |
7 . Picture this: You’re searching the Internet and come across a website with interesting articles. Some are news stories. Their goal is to share information. Others only look like news stories. They’re actually advertisements, or ads. The goal of an ad is to get you to buy something. How do you, the reader, tell the difference between a news story and an ad?
Back when I was growing up, it was easier. We got most of our information from newspapers. Big news stories appeared on the front page, and ads were boxed off and clearly labeled. But on the Internet, the two are often presented together. It can be hard to tell which is which.
That’s why the research group I direct conducted a study. My research team showed kids like you the home page of a popular digital magazine. We asked them to tell us what was a news story and what was an ad. Most were great at identifying certain types of ads. “It has a coupon code, a big company logo, and the words limited time offer,” one student wrote about an ad on the site. So where did kids get stumped?
Some ads seem the same as real news stories. They have headlines and contain information. But they may also include the words sponsored content. Sponsored means “paid for,” and content refers to the information in the story. “Sponsored content” is a way of saying that something is an ad. Most kids in our study, even if they used the Internet often, didn’t know this.
Just because something is sponsored doesn’t necessarily mean it’s false. It means someone paid money for it to appear. Companies pay so that readers will see their stories, buy their products, and like what the company stands for.
As a reader, you have a right to know who’s behind the information you’re consuming. So look for the phrase sponsored content. (And look carefully. Sometimes, it will be written in tiny letters.) The Internet is a vast sea of information. To use it well, we not only have to know how to swim but also how to avoid the sharks. Learning to tell the difference between an ad and a news story is an important step to becoming Internet smart.
1. The purpose of the first paragraph is to ______.| A．tell the difference between a news story and an ad |
| B．criticize the websites for too many ads on them |
| C．show the writer’s preference for newspapers |
| D．make readers interested and involved in what is going to be talked about |
| A．the website gets paid for allowing something to appear on it |
| B．something is false |
| C．something isn’t necessarily an ad |
| D．readers have to buy the products advertised on the website |
| A．Fierce sea animals. |
| B．Very bad people on the Internet. |
| C．Unwanted information. |
| D．Websites which contain ads. |
| A．Watch Out for Traps on the Internet |
| B．Make the Most of the Internet |
| C．Be Internet Smart |
| D．Be Aware of Your Rights |
8 . Math, Taught like Football
Growing up, I thought math class was something to be endured, not enjoyed. I disliked memorizing formulas and taking tests, all for the dull goal of getting a good grade. But my problem wasn’t with math itself. In fact, I spent countless hours as a child doing logic and math puzzles on my own, and as a teenager, when a topic seemed particularly interesting, I would go to the library and read more about it.
By high school, none of my teachers questioned my mathematical talent, but none of them really encouraged it, either. No one told me that I could become a professional mathematician. What I wanted to do then was to play college football. My ambition was to get an athletic scholarship to attend a Big Ten school.
The chances of that happening were very low. In high school, I was just an above-average athlete and my high school was not a “feeder” school for college sports programs.
That didn’t stop me from dreaming, though. And it didn’t stop my coaches from encouraging me to believe I could reach my goal, and preparing and pushing me to work for it. They made video tapes of my performances and sent them to college coaches around the country. It didn’t matter that I didn’t initially attract much interest from the big schools. My coaches kept picking up the phone, and kept convincing me to try to prove myself. In the end, a Big Ten school, Pennstate, did offer me a scholarship.
A growing body of research shows that students are affected by more than just the quality of a lesson plan. They also respond to the passion of their teachers and the engagement of their peers, and they seek a sense of purpose. They benefit from specific instructions, constant feedback and a culture of earning that encourages resilience in the face of failure.
Until I got to college, I didn’t really know what mathematics was. I still thought of it as problem sets and laborious computations. Then one day, one of my professors handed me a book and suggested that I think about a particular problem. It wasn’t easy, but it was fascinating.
My professor kept giving me problems, and I kept pursuing them. Before long, he was introducing me to problems that had never been solved before and urging me to find new techniques to help crack them.
I am now a Ph. D. candidate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I have published several papers in mathematical journals. I still feel that childlike excitement every time I complete a proof. I wish I’d known this was possible when I was a kid.
1. Why did the writer think math class in school was “something to be endured” before entering college?| A．Because he wasn’t interested in math. |
| B．Because his math teachers didn’t care to push him. |
| C．Because he was too smart and talented for math class. |
| D．Because he was training hard for an athletic scholarship. |
| A．passion | B．constant feedback |
| C．a sense of purpose | D．specific instructions |
| A．was busy looking for problem sets to crack |
| B．began to realize what mathematics really is |
| C．met with laborious computations in his studies |
| D．studied on his own just as he was in high school |
| A．Feeling the children excitement. |
| B．Different mathematical research. |
| C．Generating curiosity and creativity. |
| D．Being a professional mathematician. |
9 . As a CEO of a startup, you get used to hearing"no".You also face an endless continuation of what feels like shocking crises, like nearly running out of cash, losing a key customer,discovering a widespread product failure, or having to shut down operations because of a global pandemic. But it turns out that these disasters can actually be good for you. In fact,I'm not sure whether you can innovate without them. Here's what all our crises have taught me.
It's good to be uncomfortable. We once had a key customer request-a battery capability that we'd never developed before. The customer made it clear that if we couldn't develop this capability, they'd be less confident in our product. We wrestled with the risks, not least of which was the potential embarrassment if we couldn't meet the customer's needs. We knew we'd face many technical problems if we tried to go into operation. Yet we decided to try to satisfy the customer, even if it wasn't obvious at first how we could get it done. A few weeks later we delivered something beyond what the customer had asked for, and we've since grown this capability into a powerful sales tool and potential revenue stream-not to mention it strengthened our relationship with the customer.
Short-term failure is good. A few years ago, our company began to expand our manufacturing output in response to a customer's need. In the process we discovered something unusual we hadn't seen during smaller-scale production. Our team dived into failure analysis, and we finally put the problem down to a single material within the battery. We'd used this material for years, but now we needed a replacement. Once we made that change,the battery quality and reliability greatly improved.
It's okay to show weakness. One of my hardest days as CEO was the day when I found out I was pregnant.We were in the middle of raising a funding round, and I had been traveling nonstop for a year. Until that day, I had assumed that my role as CEO was to display strength and confidence. With the mounting pressure I was harder on myself than I needed to be, and now I had the added stress of being pregnant.I decided to acknowledge to my team that I was breaking down. They united together and found ways to operate more smoothly and communicate more effectively, supporting me to focus my time on most pressing goals. This gave me not only the space to plan for the company’s future,but also to prepare for my own new normal: leading while becoming a first-time mother.
1. What does the underlined word "them" in Paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Frequent rejections. |
| B．Financial crises. |
| C．Global pandemics. |
| D．Endless disasters. |
| A．Customers' requests should be carefully evaluated. |
| B．Meeting challenges can bring about extra benefits. |
| C．The company should keep launching new products. |
| D．Innovation is the only way to win fierce competition. |
| A．By drawing a comparison. |
| B．By giving an example. |
| C．By challenging assumptions. |
| D．By doing an experiment. |
| A．Learn to let go |
| B．Make it as a CEO |
| C．Think deep sometimes |
| D．Make friends with crises |
10 . Having a microchip implanted in a man's brain may be common in sci-fi movie plots, but it may soon become an actual possibility.
Elon Musk -a US tech tycoon, founder of Space X- has been working on this technology. On Aug 28, Musk gave a display of the chip, which was implanted into the head of a pig named Gertrude.
The chip, developed by Musk's company Neuralink, is the size of a coin. But don't let its size fool you. The tiny chip has over 3,000 electrodes （电极）attached to flexible threads, which can monitor about 1,000 neurons （神经元）.It collects neural signals from an area of the brain, and then transmits those signals wirelessly to nearby computers, according to MSN. That enabled researchers to monitor Gertrude's brain activity while she was walking around in the display.
Though the technology is still in its early stage, it is encouraging for humans. This technology would solve a lot of brain injuries and is essentia] for Al symbiosis, which will allow the human brain to combine with an artificial intelligence.
When the device can be applied to humans, its main goal will be to help those who have mobility difficulties. Musk hopes this technology can also be used to help those with hearing and eyesight issues.
Although such a device could repair those problems, putting it into practice is by no means a piece of cake. Currently, the device can transmit signals from about 500 neurons in the pig's brain. Compared to 80 billion neurons in a human brain, this number is tiny. And to cover the whole human brain also means the electrodes have to be much smaller.
Also, implanting the chip into the brain poses a potential danger. There is a risk of the immune system attacking this foreign body.
Right now, the hope of controlling the brain via controlling a few neurons seems overly optimistic. "There are many technological challenges ... to overcome before Neuralink can put its devices to the purposes," Yuan Lanfeng, an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, told China Daily.
1. What do we know about Elon Musk's microchip?| A．It was inspired by sci-fi movie plots. |
| B．It is able to collect wireless signals. |
| C．It is tiny in size but powerful in function. |
| D．It has been implanted into a human's brain. |
| A．The operation of the chip in Gertrude’s brain. |
| B．The attachment of electrodes to flexible threads. |
| C．The development of neurons inside Gertrude's brain. |
| D．The transmission of signals from a nearby computer |
| A．To monitor animals’ brain activity. |
| B．To help people with mobility issues. |
| C．To develop a cure for immune system problems. |
| D．To contribute to the research on Al technologies. |
| A．Worried. | B．Excited. | C．Optimistic. | D．Challenged. |
