1 . There is an old saying in China that goes, “The days of the Sanjiu period are the coldest days.” “Sanjiu period”, which is in Minor (较小的) Cold, refers to the third nine-day period (the 19th to the 27th day) after the day of the Winter Solstice (冬至). There are many different customs related to Minor Cold in China.
Eating hotpot
During Minor Cold people should eat some hot food to benefit the body and defend against the cold weather. Winter is the best time to have hotpot and braised mutton with soy sauce. But it is important to notice that too much spicy food may cause health problems.
Eating huangyacai
In Tianjin, there is a custom to have huangyacai, a kind of Chinese cabbage, during Minor Cold. There are large amounts of vitamins A and B in huangyacai. As huangyacai is fresh and tender, it is fit for frying, roasting and braising.
Eating glutinous rice (糯米饭)
According to tradition, the Cantonese eat glutinous rice in the morning during Minor Cold. Cantonese people add some fried preserved (腌制的) pork, sausage and peanuts and mix them into the rice.
Eating vegetable rice
In ancient times, people in Nanjing took Minor Cold quite seriously, but as time went by, the celebration of Minor Cold gradually disappeared. However, the custom of eating vegetable rice is still followed today. The rice is steamed and is unspeakably delicious. Among the ingredients (原料), aijiaohuang (a kind of green vegetable), sausage and salted duck are the specialties in Nanjing.
1. What do we know about Minor Cold?| A．The Sanjiu period is in this period. | B．It refers to the Winter Solstice. |
| C．It lasts twenty-seven days. | D．It marks the first day of winter. |
| A．Eating hotpot. | B．Having vitamin A and B pills. |
| C．Having huangyacai. | D．Buying cabbage. |
| A．travel | B．fashion | C．culture | D．science |
2 . Every year, young, talented, and ambitious nature conservationists (自然环境保护主义者) from all over the world participate in the presentation of the Future For Nature (FFN) Award, an honorable international award.
The Future For Nature aims to:
·Reward and fund individuals for their outstanding efforts in the protection of species of wildlife
·Encourage winners to sustain their dedicated work.
·Help winners to raise their profiles, extend their professional network and strengthen their funding basis.
Benefits
·The winners each receive 50, 000 euros and may make their own decision to spend the money in the service of nature conservation.
·FFN offers the winners a platform and brings their stories to the attention of conservationists, financiers and a wide audience, allowing them to increase their impact and gain more access to funds.
·FFN is building a growing family of winners, dedicated people who form a community of people with the same interest. FFN offers them the opportunity to meet each other and continue to learn with each other in order to continue their fight for nature as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Qualifications
The candidate (候选人) :
·Must be born on or after the 31st May 1988 and before the 28th of August 2005.
·Is able to explain his/her conservation work in fluent English (written and spoken)
·Has achieved substantial and long-term benefits to the conservation status of one or more animal or plant species.
·Must be determined to continue his/her conservation work, as the Award aims to stimulate (激励) the winner’s future work. It is not an “end of career” prize.
Additional Remarks
For the 2024 Future For Future Awards, we are again searching for natural leaders, who have proven that they can make a difference in species’ survival.
From all applications, 6 to 10 nominees (被提名者) will be selected. These applicants will be asked to provide additional information, which will be used to select the final Awardees. Ultimately, three inspiring wildlife heroes are selected as the winners.
Application Process: Apply online through the Apply Now link
Application Deadline: 28th August, 2023
1. Which is one of the aims of the Future For Nature?| A．To help more green groups. | B．To fund academic education. |
| C．To inspire conservation efforts. | D．To raise environmental awareness. |
| A．ask experts for advice | B．meet those with same interest |
| C．benefit the local community | D．promote self-created platforms |
| A．meet the age requirement | B．apply via mail by the deadline |
| C．hand in the application in English | D．provide additional personal information |
1. What do we learn from the conversation about Miss Rowling’s first book?
| A．It was about a little animal. |
| B．It took her six years to write. |
| C．It was about a little girl and her pet. |
| A．She knows how to write best-selling novels. |
| B．She started writing when she was very young. |
| C．She can make a living by doing what she likes. |
4 . Recent experiments exposed four common disease-causing bacteria to a Mars-like environment with its lack of water, insufficient atmospheric pressure, deadly radiation and poisonous salts. The bacteria remained alive for various periods of time, researchers report in the January Astrobiology.
In 2020, a team of scientists found that several bacterial species that live on or inside the human body were able to grow in a medium like the nutrient-poor conditions. That made some of the researchers wonder how such bugs would hold up under the unforgiving environment of Mass. So several members of that team, along with microbiologist Tommaso Zaccaria, did the experiment about four microbes (微生物), which usually live harmlessly on or in us but can lend to diseases when stressed.
“At the beginning, we thought that the environment on Mars would have a harmful effect on the cells so it would limit their growth.” says Zaccaria, a microbiologist in Cologne. “But instead, we saw that it was the opposite.”
He and his colleagues are now trying to figure out just how the microbes held on. Perhaps on Mars, the bacteria managed to find small areas with enough water, nutrients and protection from the deadly UV radiation. Zeccaria says. The researchers are also interested in determining how the human body will respond to bugs that have gone through such hard conditions.
The results suggest that human missions to Mars should bring plenty of different antibiotics (抗生素) to deal with disease-causing bacteria surviving on the Martian surface. And since we don’t want to accidentally mistake a terrestrial (地球上的) bug for a native Martian one while searching for life on Mars, Zaccaria also recommends that areas of the Red Planet be set aside like national parks, where humans would send only robotic vehicles and not our bacteria-carrying bodies.
Waters, a scientist who was not involved in the experiments, points out that human intelligence will hopefully find ways to solve such problems, which shouldn’t scare us away from sending people beyond our planet.
1. What is the purpose of the experiment?| A．To show the similarity between the earth and Mars. |
| B．To prove that some microbes have strong ability to live. |
| C．To find out how some bacteria survive tough environment. |
| D．To explain how harmless microbes lead to diseases under stress. |
| A．Amazed. | B．Disappointed. | C．Satisfied. | D．Concerned. |
| A．High stress. | B．Certain radiation. | C．Salty water. | D．Much heat. |
| A．Setting up more national parks on the earth. |
| B．Continuing to search the whole Mars for life. |
| C．Bringing more microbes to Mars for further research. |
| D．Leaving special areas for robotic vehicles on Mars. |
5 . When you go running in the woods in your running tights, elastane (氨纶) is the reason why they fit you so comfortably. Elastane is an elastic material that allows the fabric to stretch and adapt to your body.
But when elastane fibres are mixed with cotton, wool, nylon or other fibres, as is the case in many clothes today, the clothes become almost impossible to recycle. It is extremely difficult to separate out the different fibres, and therefore the materials in the clothes cannot be recycled.
But this may change, says Assistant Professor Steffan Kvist Kristensen from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center at Aarhus University. Together with a number of colleagues, he is behind a new technology that can separate out fibres in mixed fabrics.
“We’ve developed a method to remove elastane completely from nylon. We’re not quite there yet with cotton, because some of the cotton fibres are broken down in the process. But we believe that, with some minor adjustments, we can solve this problem,” he says.
It is not easy to separate elastane and other fibres once they have been woven(编织) together. Clothes are made by winding the main fibres, such as nylon or cotton, around the elastane fibres, which consist of long chains of molecules (分子). The fibres only break apart if we break the long chains of molecules, explains Steffan Kvist Kristensen.
By heating the clothes to 225 degrees Celsius and adding a specific alcohol, the researchers have found a method to break down the bonds in elastane chain. When this happens, the chains fall apart and the materials separate. “The whole process takes place in what is in effect a large pressure cooker that we feed the clothes into. We then add a little alcohol and a potassium hydroxide(氢氧化钾) base and heat it up. Then we let it cook for just over four hours, and when we open the lid again, the different fibres will have been separated.” says Steffan Kvist Kristensen.
So far, Steffan Kvist Kristensen and his colleagues have only experimented with two nylon stockings at a time. The technology is therefore not yet ready for application at industrial scale.
1. What can we learn about elastane from the passage?| A．It is an eco-friendly material. | B．It is a kind of stretchable fabric. |
| C．It makes the clothes far from recycling. | D．It is made up of short chains of molecules. |
| A．To separate more fibres. | B．To reduce the heating time. |
| C．To increase the temperature to 225℃. | D．To ensure the safety of the experiment. |
| A．It can separate all sorts of fibres. |
| B．It needs plenty of energy to work. |
| C．There is a long way before it is widely used. |
| D．There is no possibility to separate elastane from cotton. |
| A．Satisfied. | B．Confident. | C．Critical. | D．Unclear. |
6 . Art museums are full of centuries-old paintings with details of plants that today give us clues about evolution and breeding.
Exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Harvesters created in 1565 shows farmers cutting wheat nearly as tall as they are. “Nowadays, if you walk through a wheat field, you basically see that w heat is about knee height. The short wheat is essentially a consequence of breeding from the second half of the 20th century,” said biologist Ive De Smet.
According to De Smet, wheat is just one example of how historical artworks can allow us to track the transformation of crops over time. He has teamed up with art historian David Vergau wen to seek similar kinds of artworks around the world.
As friends since childhood, their interest in plants in artworks began with a visit to a museum in Russia, where they noticed an old-looking watermelon in an early-7th-century painting. A watermelon is usually believed to be red on the inside. However, that one appeared to be pale and white. De Smet assured the painter had done a poor job. But Verguawen had a different idea. “This is one of the best painters ever in that era. So, if he painted it like that, that’s the way it must have looked like.”
Other paintings revealed that there were both red and white watermelons grown in the 17th century. The chemical compound that makes watermelons red is lycopene (番茄红素). “There must have been some sort of mutation (突变) preventing the accumulation of that color. Now, with all the genetic knowledge that we have of various plant species, we can look in more de tail at how something comes about.”
De Smet and Verguawen hope to create an online research database of historical plant artworks. They call for contributions of art enthusiasts around the world via the social media. But they caution, the source paintings need to be realistic. “If you’re going to use, for example, Picasso’s paintings to try and understand what a pear looked like in the early 20th century, you might be misled.” Instead, such an attempt could be fruitless.
1. What can we infer about wheat from Paragraph 2?| A．It became shorter and shorter as it evolved. |
| B．It was about knee height in the 16th century. |
| C．It might have had no short varieties before the 1950s. |
| D．It showed different heights as farmers’ heights changed. |
| A．Their lifelong friendship. | B．A white watermelon in a painting. |
| C．Their professional background. | D．An argument over the best painters. |
| A．To give an example of historical plant artwork. |
| B．To showcase the contributions of art enthusiasts. |
| C．To describe the appearance of a pear in the early 20th century. |
| D．To emphasize the significance of using realistic source paintings. |
| A．Plant evolution progresses throughout history. |
| B．Old art provides fascinating insights into agriculture. |
| C．Ancient art demonstrates the presence of white watermelons. |
| D．Plants serve as a popular subject in numerous historical artworks. |
Within the Qing (1644-1911) imperial court, a unique collection of paintings can be identified, which were created by European missionaries (传教士) working at the imperial court.
One outstanding example is Pine, Hawk, and Lingzhi Fungus (《嵩献英芝图》),
Perspective, the Western painting technique introduced by Lang Shining, also found its
8 . The e-mail request came in to Ekiben restaurant in Baltimore late on a Thursday afternoon: tempura broccoli. The man who sent the e-mail was writing
Steve Chu, one of the Asian restaurant’s co-owners, read the e-mail and quickly replied with an
Brandon Jones, the son-in-law, was
That Friday after work, Chu loaded his truck and then
“As soon as she opened the door, she
The Joneses invited Chu and his team to join them for dinner, but they needed to get back to Baltimore. Chu also wouldn’t accept any money from the family
Rina was happy that her mother was able to enjoy her beloved broccoli with a side order of remarkable kindness one last time. “My mom cried later about their
| A．instead of | B．on behalf of | C．in honor of | D．in celebration of |
| A．recipe | B．ingredient | C．material | D．refreshment |
| A．constructive | B．sustainable | C．realistic | D．alternative |
| A．fresh | B．visual | C．worthy | D．delicious |
| A．fond | B．astonished | C．pleased | D．pessimistic |
| A．firm | B．habitat | C．location | D．enterprise |
| A．set | B．flew | C．headed | D．marched |
| A．pull over | B．pull down | C．pull through | D．pulled into |
| A．boxing | B．giving | C．holding | D．filling |
| A．realized | B．received | C．grabbed | D．recognized |
| A．noble | B．loyal | C．humble | D．representative |
| A．in reward | B．in particular | C．in need | D．in reality |
| A．restore | B．invest | C．fulfill | D．facilitate |
| A．passion | B．optimism | C．generosity | D．recognition |
| A．precisely | B．temporarily | C．occasionally | D．permanently |
9 . The Ministry of Education and three other ministries have jointly issued a notice about launching a national campaign on short-sightedness prevention and control to protect children’s eyesight.
A paragraph in the notice says that primary and secondary school students should engage in appropriate outdoor activities during class breaks. Additionally, 30 minutes of physical activity during the daily midmorning break will be organized to give students more time to engage in outdoor activities and long-distance viewing, enabling their eyes to rest fully from visual fatigue.
Midmorning breaks can address more than just vision problems. Physical activity during breaks helps children to not only exercise but also reduce stress, making subsequent classroom learning more focused and effective. At the same time, midmorning physical activities provide children a platform to engage in social activities, strengthening their social adaptation abilities.
Sometime toward the end of 2023 there was a huge demand after some schools did away with even 10-minute breaks for primary and secondary school students. The Ministry of Education responded by saying that it would further regulate activities in schools. Before the latest notice was introduced, several related policies had been guaranteeing midmorning physical activity for primary and secondary school students, which have now been implemented in many cities, showing good results.
To effectively utilize (利用) the 30-minute midmorning break, teachers play an essential role because they can enrich the activities to the maximum extent by combining the interests and hobbies of children of different age groups and adding various sports activities that will benefit children the most. At the same time, it should be clear that the midmorning break is not only the responsibility of physical education teachers. It requires joint efforts from physical education teachers, class teachers and other staff members to ensure the breaks are used effectively.
To make the most of the 30-minute midmorning break, it is also crucial to stimulate the enthusiasm of children. Innovating the form and content of the midmorning break and mobilizing children’s enthusiasm and initiative to participate in midmorning activities are urgent priorities.
1. What do the underlined word “fatigue” mean in paragraph 2?| A．Failure. | B．Disability. | C．Loss. | D．Tiredness. |
| A．Midmorning activities should appeal to children. |
| B．Children should be forced to engage in midmorning activities. |
| C．Midmorning activities should be restricted to traditional sports. |
| D．Physical education teachers should take full charge of the the midmorning break. |
| A．Children Should Participate in More Activities |
| B．Midmorning Break Should Be Extended to 30 Minutes |
| C．Kids Should Have a Better Break for Eyesight Protection |
| D．Physical Activities Should Be Organized for Children’s Health |
Nearly a hundred objects of historical value from the Confucius Museum are now on show at the exhibition, Rites, Music, and Costumes, which runs until May 26 at the China National Silk Museum, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. It shows how Confucianism was an essential part of the Chinese liyue culture, an education of social etiquette (礼仪) through engaging in poetry, rites, music and dancing.
These artifacts mark the significance of Confucius and how his teachings have been followed throughout centuries. Several exhibits are being shown in Zhejiang for the first time.
9 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays. 73-1 Yuhuangshan Lu, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. 0571-8703-5223.
A brush with greatnessIn his life, Li Jianchen taught at several universities to help cultivate (培养) for the country many artists and architects of note. Besides his respectable accomplishments in teaching, he was also acknowledged as the “father of modern Chinese watercolor”.
An exhibition now on at Jiangsu Art Museum shows selected watercolors by Li, from his donations to the museum. Painted at different stages of his career, these works trace the evolution of his art, reflecting changing social needs and artistic tendencies. The show ends on March 31.
9 am-85 pm, closed on Mondays. 333 Changjiang Lu, Nanjing, Jiangsu province. 025-8961-0810.
Spanish expressionDifferent Cycles from Different Eras United by a Single Paintbrush, an exhibition currently running at Shenzhen Art Museum in Guangdong province, brings together 118 paintings produced by Spanish expressionist Jorge Rando since the 1960s. They are from the dozen series he has created over the past five decades, revisiting themes such as a mother’s love, nature, landscapes, butterflies and cycling, to name a few.
In 2019, Rando’s works were shown in Hunan and Sichuan provinces. The current exhibition in Shenzhen runs until May 26.
9 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays. 32 Donghu Yijie, inside Donghu Park, Aiguo Lu, Luohu district, Shenzhen, Guangdong province. 0755-2542-6069.
1. Where is this text probably taken from?| A．A textbook. | B．A travel brochure. |
| C．A newspaper. | D．A club leaflet. |
| A．Music and dancing. | B．Paintings. |
| C．Watercolors. | D．Sculptures. |
| A．They are about Chinese art. |
| B．The exhibits are donations. |
| C．They will end on the same day. |
| D．They are painting exhibitions. |
