1 . You may not get enough physical activity throughout the day, especially since sitting still is required or encouraged in many jobs, at school, and in social situations. But there’s something you should know.
What counts as being physically inactive?
While there is no strict definition of what can be considered a sedentary lifestyle, researchers have a few different measures to assess what a sedentary lifestyle is. One measure is the time an individual spends seated during waking hours.
Is physical inactivity dangerous?
How can you prevent being inactive?
Health authorities recommend exercise at a medium level for either 30 minutes a day for five days a week or a total of 2 hours and 30 minutes per week.
| A．Walking is an easy activity to add to your day |
| B．There are many options for exercise |
| C．Being physically inactive or sedentary can increase health risks |
| D．In the short term, being inactive can increase depression or anxiety |
| E．Fixing a sedentary lifestyle takes some conscious effort at first |
| F．Spending four to six waking hours sitting or lying down is considered sedentary |
| G． Simply walking more or doing household chores positively impacts health |
2 . For his entire life, Sergio Peralta from the US dreamed about playing catch. When he was born, his right hand didn’t fully develop, with only tiny fingers at the end of his arm. So he learned to write, eat and carry books with only one hand. Over the years, the 15-year-old lost hope that anything would change.
Peralta said on his first day of high school he honestly felt like hiding his hand in his sleeve, so nobody would ever find out. But his classmates, to his surprise, supported him in a way he never expected. The school’s engineering teacher, Jeff Wilkins, came and told him that his fellow students might be able to help.
“They ended up offering, ‘We could build your prosthetic (假体的) hand,’ and I never expected it,” he told CBS News. “Like, never in a million years.” Three students used their access to online models of prostheses and a 3D printer to make a plan. After four weeks, their project came to fruition. They used polylactic acid (聚乳酸), a common material in 3D printing that’s also used to make electronic devices, as the hand’s main fabric. They applied another plastic material commonly found in phone shells to make the fingers spread and squeeze objects. And they added a fishing line, so Peralta could fix the hand to his forearm.
Bob Cotter, the principal of Hendersonville High School, told the BBC that his students are encouraged to turn concepts “into reality”, adding that Peralta’s new prosthesis is “a proof to the students who care about each other”.
Peralta-who grew up learning to do everything with his left hand-was even able to catch a baseball with the prosthetic hand created by his classmates. “When I caught it for the first time, everyone started freaking out.” Peralta said with a smile. “It was the first time I caught a ball with my right hand in my IS years.”
1. How did Sergio feel about his hand when he started high school?| A．He felt at a loss for it. | B．He felt unaffected by it |
| C．He was optimistic about it. | D．He was open to accepting it |
| A．It was finished in four months. | B．It could be controlled by a phone. |
| C．Its main material is polylactic acid. | D．Its fingers were not flexible enough. |
| A．The students’ critical thinking. | B．The students’ imagination. |
| C．The students’ determination. | D．The students’ mutual support. |
| A．Feeling panicked. | B．Becoming overjoyed. |
| C．Calming down. | D．Showing concern. |
3 . The Children’s Museum of Manhattan Exhibitions Beginning in 2024
Adventures with Dora and Diego (Ages: 3-6 years)
Join Diego on a series of animal rescue missions. Learn facts about animals and their habitats by helping Diego rescue animals in trouble. Explore a cave, a beach and the rainforest or rub animal footprints, even build a Bear’s nest! By helping Dora and her friends. kids will learn problem-solving skills, and gain a greater appreciator and awareness of Latin American culture.
Inside Art (Ages: 4-10 years)
The exhibition continues our tradition of providing families with access to beautiful, complex, and challenging art, as well as access to working artists and opportunities for art making. Come to celebrate art as a vehicle for building healthy communities and explore ideas of home and identity.
PlayWorks (Ages: birth years)
We’ve designed every aspect of PlayWorksTM to help families prepare children to enter school. By combining hands-on games and learning, PlayWorksTM creates a fun and rewarding experience for children.
For adults, PlayWorksnTM provides an opportunity to observe each child’s unique learning style and appreciate how play creates a strong foundation for later learning. This innovative environment includes Alphie -a giant talking dragon who “cats” letters! Come lo get more resources to support your child’s language development.
Superpowered Metropolis: Early Learning City (Ages: 2-6 years)
The exhibit invites children and their grown-ups to feel like heroes, building their learning brain skills together. These skills, known as executive functions, include self-control. working memory, and mental flexibility. Children practice these learning “superpowers” with Zip, Zap, and Zoom, who guide families on a series of city adventures exploring the subways, parks, music, travel, tree houses, and more.
1. Which exhibition is suitable for a boy aged 3 who is learning spelling?| A．Adventures with Dora and Diego | B．Inside Art |
| C．Superpowered Metropolis: Early Learning City | D．PlayWorks |
| A．Learn more about nature and culture. | B．Draw a map of city subways and parks. |
| C．Graduate with a specific qualification. | D．Get resources for language learning. |
| A．They are free of charge for kids. | B．They are only designed for kids. |
| C．They improve kids’ academic performance. | D．They provide kids with hands-on experience. |
Dayushan Island is located in Fuding, Fujian province, known
Its coast is eroded (侵蚀) by seawater,
The best thing to do here is to hike up the hills and find a high spot
5 . Two new community initiatives offering the opportunity to borrow everything from sewing machines to party supplies are aiming to reduce waste and consumption.
Tools n Things Library in Leederville, Perth is a community library designed to allow community members to get access to the things they might need around the house instead of buying them in a hardware (五金店) store.
“That’s our philosophy — don’t buy, borrow. Many people buy things just for a small task at home, and then they won’t use them for a couple of years,” library volunteer Rex Breheny said.
The project is run by volunteers who founded it in 2019, and after an interruption in 2020 because of the pandemic (大流行病), it has now grown to several hundred members who can come and borrow things twice a week. In a way it is a return to an old tradition of neighbors borrowing each other’s tools and forming connections in the process.
Tools n Things Library is the first of its kind in Perth, and another called Share Shed has just started in Bassendean. Its co-founder Renee McLennan said they wanted to expand beyond tools to all sorts of things that people might use rarely, like camping equipment or entertaining needs.
“We’re doing the kind of equipment you’d use for a party. Instead of everybody buying disposable plates, and cups and things like that, we’ve got quality glasses and cutlery (餐具), as well as decorations that people can use for those events that they might have once a year,” she said.
The Share Shed is being considered as a way to tackle consumer culture. The world cannot continue to support our current level of resource consumption — at present overconsumption means that each year we consume 75 per cent more than the planet can regenerate.
“Borrowing items and shifting our thinking from an ownership to an access model helps to reduce the number of things that are produced and limits waste. At the same time, sharing the things that we use every now and then is a great way of connecting with people who live locally,” Bod Anderson, an officer in Perth said.
1. Why were the initiatives launched?| A．To introduce two new communities. |
| B．To advocate consuming fewer resources. |
| C．To call on people to fight against pandemic. |
| D．To encourage people to borrow daily necessities. |
| A．It is out of use. | B．It is well received. |
| C．It is out of fashion. | D．It is often interrupted. |
| A．Wider options. | B．Better quality. |
| C．Longer duration. | D．Newer equipment. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Supportive. | C．Critical. | D．Objective. |
6 . Parrots consistently top the charts of the world’s smartest animals. A new discovery published by the Royal Society Open Science reveals to us what sets the intelligent individual monk parakeet (和尚鹦鹉) apart in a group.
Previously, it was thought that these birds introduced themselves to others with a sort of “catchphrase” that distinguished their identity. However, after running the vocalizations (发声) collected in this study through a machine learning program, a team led by Simeon Smeele, a doctoral student at Aarhus University in Denmark, found that the birds actually had “voiceprints” like humans that identify themselves in the group.
The researchers studied thousands of monk parakeet vocalizations from hundreds of birds in Barcelona across two years and ran these recordings through the program that identifies small differences in their calls.
“The voiceprint is the underlying quality of a voice that you can recognize in humans, and this is the first time that has been shown in another vocal learner,” Smeele said. For example, the voiceprint of your father is how you know it’s his voice, even if he isn’t present. “This is what I think could explain how they recognize each other, because it can be stable over very long periods of time.” he added.
“This shows that these birds also have that sort of information that they might be using in their complicated social interactions,” said Emily Du Val, Ph.D., a behavioral ecologist at Florida State University. “Research into animal communication has the potential to motivate the public into action to conserve animals. Recognizing who each other is and understanding how they interact with one another are important for human life,” she said.
This model can potentially be applied to other animals with vocal recognition like bottlenose dolphins, bat s and elephants. Future research will look into whether these voiceprints are recognized by all parakeets in the community or only a circle of close relatives.
1. What helps the monk parakeets recognize each other?| A．The catchphrase. | B．The intelligence. |
| C．The voiceprint. | D．The communication. |
| A．By combining “catchphrase” with “voiceprints”. |
| B．By keeping track of the monk parakeets’ relatives. |
| C．By collecting vocalizations and identifying their differences. |
| D．By comparing humans’ voiceprints with monk parakeets’. |
| A．The information that voiceprints can express. |
| B．The potential influence that voiceprints can bring. |
| C．The animals among which voiceprints are identified. |
| D．The range where parakeets’ voiceprints are recognized. |
| A．Mon k Parakeets Are Great Vocal Learners |
| B．Mon k Parakeets Resemble Humans in Communication |
| C．“Voiceprints” Are Found in Animals’ Social Interactions |
| D．“Voiceprints” Help Monk Parakeets Identify Themselves |
7 . “It’s too sugary, I can’t manage very many,” said a friend. She wasn’t talking about dessert but about some fresh cherries. I bit into another cherry and realized she was right. The fruit was so sweet that it was as if it had been pre-sugared.
But the cherries of my childhood were much less sweet than today’s cherries. Some of them were hardly sweet at all, which made it all the more exciting when you happened upon a super sweet one.
Is modern fruit getting sweeter? The answer is yes. Some of the most powerful evidence comes from zoos. In 2018, Melbourne Zoo in Australia had stopped giving fruit to most of its animals because cultivated fruit was now so sweet that it was causing tooth decay and weight gain.
Breeding isn’t the only reason that modern fruit is sweeter; there’s also climate change. It’s found that since the 1970s, with rising temperatures, Fuji apples have become significantly sweeter and softer.
But the sweetness of modern fruit is not without its problems, especially for people with diabetes, who have to be careful to moderate their intake of higher - sugar fruits such as pineapple. Fruit that is bred sweeter also tends to be lower in the phytochemicals (植物化学成分) that make it so healthy.
Health aside, maybe the real problem with modern fruit is that it has become yet another sweet thing in a world filled with sugar. Even grapefruit, which used to be quite bitter, is sometimes now as sweet as oranges. If you’ve never tasted a sour cherry, how can you fully appreciate a sweet one? Experts put forwards some thoughts about how to appreciate the various tastes of modern fruit.
1. Why does the author mention her friend’s words in Paragraph 1?| A．To introduce the topic of the extreme sweetness of modern cherries. |
| B．To highlight the content of friend’s preference for sour cherries. |
| C．To emphasize the importance of pre-sugaring fruits. |
| D．To show the breeding and selection of modern fruit. |
| A．The author believes it has no impact on health. |
| B．The author sees it as a triumph of plant breeding. |
| C．The author thinks it is a bit worrying in today’s world. |
| D．The author is concerned that it will lead to bitterness in fruit. |
| A．It is short of healthy phytochemicals. |
| B．It may not be as tasty as it used to be. |
| C．It could lack variety and contrast in taste. |
| D．It doesn’t meet people’s need for sweetness. |
| A．The advice on selecting modern fruit. |
| B．The approaches to freeing bitter fruit. |
| C．The comments about cultivated grapefruit. |
| D．The research into the health of zoo animals. |
8 . Meteorites (陨石) can offer clues about what the early solar system was like. But finding them is far from difficult. Now, some scientists are turning to drones (无人机) and machine learning to help spot freshly fallen meteorites much more efficiently. “A team of six people on a meteorite-hunting expedition can search about 200,000 square meters per day,” says Seamus Anderson, a planetary scientist in Australia.
Around 2016, Anderson began toying with the concept of using drones to take pictures of the g round to look for meteorites. That idea blossomed into a Ph.D. project. In 2022, he and his colleagues reported their first successful recovery of a meteorite spotted with a drone. They’ve since found four more meteorites at a different site. Drone-based searches are much faster than the standard search way. “You’re going from about 300 days of human effort down to about a dozen or so,” he says.
Anderson and his workmates have used drones to search for meteorites in remote parts of Western Australia and South Australia. The team is tipped off about a fall site by networks of ground-based cameras that track meteoroids flashing through the Earth’s atmosphere. The researchers have to do a series of fun but difficult work before the hunt. They pack a four-wheel drive vehicle with drone and computer equipment, battery charging stations, generators, fuel, food, camping equipment, tables, chairs and much more. The drive to the fall site can take more than a day, often on rough or nonexistent roads. Anderson says, “You hope you don’t pop a tire.”
After arriving, the team flies its primary drone at an altitude of about 20 meters. Its camera takes an image of the ground once every second, and the scientists download the data every 40 minutes or so when the drone lands to receive fresh batteries. A typical day of flying can net over 10,000 images, which are then divided digitally into 100 million or so smaller sections. Those “tiles”, each 2 meters on a side, are fed into a machine learning algorithm (算法) that has been trained to recognize meteorites based on images of real land rocks which are spray-painted black.
1. Why do the scientists study meteorites?| A．To spot the planetary course. | B．To promote machine learning. |
| C．To test the functions of drones. | D．To explore the past of solar system. |
| A．Their barriers. | B．Their causes. |
| C．Their efficiency. | D．Their concept. |
| A．Fun and light. | B．Smooth and flexible. |
| C．Difficult and unpleasant. | D．Complicated and tough. |
| A．By dividing them in half. | B．By storing them for analysis. |
| C．By combining them into a picture. | D．By linking them with a digital printer. |
9 . Recent research confirms what our farming ancestors have known for centuries about hedges (树篱). They conserve precious soil by acting as windbreaks and absorbing rainwater that would otherwise wash it from the fields. And hedges store carbon, putting them in the front line of our bi d to tackle the climate crisis.
However, hedges have had a tough time in the poor countryside, with farmers encouraged to tear them down in pursuit of maximum production and larger field s to accommodate ever-larger machinery. What’s more, some hedges have been ignored. If left to their own devices, they’ll eventually become a line of trees. Some hedges each year lose their structures and fail to fulfil the primary duty as a barrier. Around a half of the nation’s hedges have disappeared in the past century.
There are signs that “the tide is turning”. The search for net zero has aroused many organizations’ interest in the humble hedge’s role as a carbon sink. The Climate Change Committee is recommending a 40 percent increase in hedges: an additional 200,000 km. Such recommendations are starting to drive policy. Cash-pressed farmers will be encouraged to create new hedges and improve their management of existing ones under the new Environmental Land Management Schemes, which will replace many of the existing agricultural support payments in coming years. Meanwhile, initiatives such as Close the Gap, led by the Tree Council, is providing funding and support to plug the gaps in existing hedges with new planting. There’s even an app to help time-pressed farmers do a quick survey to spot where their hedges need some help.
This is a good time for hedges. Take some of the most pressing challenges facing the countryside, and indeed, the world as a whole — the climate crisis, soil erosion (侵蚀), insect attack and wider biodiversity loss — and hedges are part of the solution.
1. What does recent research show about hedges?| A．They are unique landscapes in the rain. |
| B．They act as dividing lines between fields. |
| C．They have long been helpful to agriculture. |
| D．They are frequently washed away from the fields. |
| A．Their suffering. | B．Their production. |
| C．Their duties. | D．Their structures. |
| A．Puzzled. | B．Concerned. | C．Humble. | D．Indifferent. |
| A．Hedges: Ancient Resources |
| B．Hedges: Official Recommendations |
| C．Restoring Hedges: Bringing Benefits to the Environment |
| D．Researching Hedges: Originating from Farmers’ Request |
Today was Sunday, so I was in no hurry to get out of bed. As I rolled over and stretched, I heard my father shouted, “Oh, dear, fire!” There was unmistakable urgency in his voice. Upon hearing that, I got up and hurried downstairs. And my mother who was preparing breakfast also stopped cooking immediately. My father showed us a video shot by some witness, where we saw a fire inside a building. My mother stood beside him and shook her head.
“What a pity! Is it local?” my mother asked. As a policeman, my father had a keen observation ability. “It’s your hospital!” he watched the screen carefully and said in surprise.
It turned out that a building of the hospital where my mother worked as a head nurse was on fire. We found out later that an old wire first caused the building to catch fire and it began to spread. The camera captured the firefighters’ figures in black and orange uniform as they aimed endless streams of water at the fire.
“I have to get there,” said my mother, feeling anxious. My father and I offered to go with her. She threw on uniform and drove to the site.
Luckily, the fire didn’t spread to the building where my mother worked. After making sure that it was safe, we came to my mother’s office. My mother’s co-workers came to the office off and on as well. They were horrified at the sight of the next building but still thought about how to help.
Through a front window, I suddenly saw the rows of medical records in the next building, and I hurried to tell my mother. She felt really nervous and instantly consulted with her co-workers about how to cope. The situation was very urgent. They knew that if they waited until the firefighters who were busy evacuating (疏散) patients got here, those recordings might burn up. The fire broke out before the records, which were irreplaceable histories of their patients, could be entered into the computer.
注意：
1. 续写词数应为 150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
They decided to rescue the records, and my father and I offered to help.
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Finally, some firefighters arrived.
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