1 . The Best School Camps in Victoria

Burnside Camp

Located on the Surf Coast near Anglesea, Burnside Camp is set over 4-hectare beautiful bushland (灌木丛) close to opollution-free peaches, Running throughout the year, Burnside Camp serves as a fantastic base for groups of up to 88 students. Camp programs centre on outdoor adventure activities. These include biking, canoeing, and exciting bush night hikes.

Mill Valley Ranch

Mill Valley Ranch is one of the best school camps in Victoria for large groups of students. It can accommodate up to 100 students. At Mill Valley Ranch, activity programs typically centre on confidence and character building. When outdoors, this sees young people given the opportunity to experience everything from horse riding to archery (射箭). However, it is also possible to organize a wide range of other team games and activities.

Camp Wilkin

Set in Anglesea, Camp Wilkin covers a 15-acre area home to resident kangaroos, which is in easy reach of quiet bushwalks and fantastic beaches. It offers the best school camp accommodation in Victoria for large groups, accommodating up to 163 students. And it also offers a variety of outdoor activity programs. Camp facilities include large meeting rooms suitable for everything from presentations to group learning activities.

Halls Gap

Halls Gap can hold up to 56 students. One of the best school camps in Victoria for natural sightseeing, it features reserved activities taking the form of short journeys to experience some of the largest waterfalls in Victoria. Halls Gap Camp students can also join in rock climbing. Such activities are in the company of local tour guides.

Hangzhou City is a charming mix of the old and the new. It was     1     capital city of the Southern Song Dynasty in the     2     (twelve) century. Even in those days, it was an     3     (extreme) booming (繁荣的) urban area with a population of about one million. The West Lake Scenic Spot takes one back to ancient times with the reconstructed Leifeng Pagoda (塔). The original pagoda     4     (build) in 975 AD. When it was destroyed, an exact replica (仿制品) appeared in its place.

    5     (compare) with other tourist cities, Hangzhou City is well-known for its beautiful scenery. Almost everyone will be attracted     6     the West Lake Scenic Area when visiting Hangzhou City. The West Lake Scenic Spot consists of several smaller scenic areas like Guo’s Villa, Orioles Singing in the Willows, Su Causeway, Fish & Lotus Pond, etc. The lake is so vast that there are many unique is lands in     7     (it) waters, classic Chinese bridges, flowering gardens, ancient trees and more. There are     8     (bench) near the Broken Bridge so people can either just sit and admire the beautiful sight     9     walk along the path. There is a ferry (摆渡) service that takes visitors all around the lake, so one can spend a wonderful day     10     (explore) all its treasures. Visitors also choose the boat ride around the lake.

3 . A study published Tuesday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that words expressing angry feelings sound alike in several unrelated languages. They’re less likely than other words to include the sounds L, R, W or Y. And more friendly versions of such words often have these sounds added. The finding suggests that certain rules may link the world’s languages, no matter how different they are.

Ryan McKay, co-author of the paper, happened to discover that some of the English curses (诅咒语) seem to have something in common; They’re often short and include the sounds B, P, T or K. Then Dr. McKay teamed up with his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari to learn whether these rules went beyond English.

During the experiment, they asked fluent speakers of Arabic, Korean, German and Spanish to list the worst words they could think of. Once they’d made a list of each language’s most commonly used curses, the researchers compared these with neutral (中性的) words from the same language. To their surprise, the rules still apply.

Next, the scientists asked the same people to listen to pairs of invented words, such as “yog” and “tsog” and guess which word in each pair was a curse. The subjects were more likely to guess that words without L, R. W and Y, such as “tsog”, were curses. Finally, the researchers looked through the dictionary for English curses and their cleaned-up versions. Once again, the cleaned-up versions included more of the sounds L, R, W and Y.

“Most 20th-century language scientists held that any word could have any meaning,” said Dr. McKay. “With curses, though, the sounds themselves seem to carry meaning. This can shape and change our understanding of how languages are formed.”

“It is the first time for researchers to study curses across languages and the finding is very interesting,” said Benjamin Bergen, a language scientist at the University of California, who was not involved in the study. “But it is just another case of what’s called sound symbolism in the language study: A word sounds like what it means.”

4 . The first wave of concerns over artificial intelligence(AI)in 2023 appeared soon after New Year’s Day when classrooms reopened and schools from Seattle to Paris started blocking ChatGPT, a powerful software based on AI large language models, because teenagers were using it to do their homework.

The AI large language models behind such products as ChatGPT work by repeatedly guessing the next word in a sentence after having “learned” the rules from a huge amount of/human-written works. Although they often get facts wrong, their answers appear so natural that Keven, their inventors begin to worry about their possible use for spreading false information.

People became more worried when various AI products started to create not just texts but novel images, music and human voices, which threatened the livelihoods of anyone who writes, draws or sings for a living. It led to strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and legal challenges from artists and bestselling authors. Some of the most respected scientists even warned that the technology’s unchecked progress was possibly threatening human existence. “In the longer term, they might manage our attention,” pioneering AI scientist Fei Fei Lisaid. “They would tell us which video to watch, which book to read or whose communication to respond as AI technology’s abilities improve rapidly. They could be a very good assistant, but also with really big risks.”

Li hoped that 2023 is going to be a year for people to think about what Al is, how to use it and what the effects are — all the good, the bad and the ugly.

“It’s easy to forget that they are not the first wave of AI products. Computer vision techniques developed by Li and other scientists have helped sort through a huge database of photos to recognize objects and individual faces and guide self-driving cars. Speech recognition advances have made voice assistants like Siri and Alexa a normal thing in many people’s lives,” said Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri Inc.

5 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。

I grew up in southeastern Michigan. I was a fan of Detroit Tigers, a famous baseball team, as a young boy.

My childhood dream was to be like my hero, Al Kaline, and someday play for the Tigers. My Dad would take me to Tiger Stadium several times a year and my hero Al Kaline would never let me down. We never attended a game that he didn’t get at least one hit.

I was crazy about baseball. If there was a game in my high school, I was never absent. I kept practising so that I could achieve my dream of playing for the Tigers, and I was doing well at each level of play. Later, I got a chance to sign up for a strong American Legion baseball program. There I met our coach, Bob Ohm, who knew a lot of baseball and taught each of us the basics as well as more advanced baseball skills. With Bob Ohm’s help and my hard work, I had set new records in many baseball championships.

My dream to be like my hero seemed to draw near. One summer, I went up to play the final season in Marinette. There were scouts who came to find the best players. This was it! My big chance!

Well, as the game progressed I hit the ball very well getting five hits in the game. Unfortunately, I also made four mistakes. The final mistake actually drew laughter from the crowd.

注意：

1. 续写词数应为150个左右；

2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。

After the game, I knew my dream of playing professional baseball was lost.

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Today, I teach baseball in a high school.

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7 . People tend to use trees for papermaking. But maybe electronics (电子) engineers are missing out on something here. “It turns out that two major building blocks of wood have a lot of electrical qualities,” says Magnus Berggren, a professor at Linköping University.

His team has been working to make parts for electronics from the forest. Right now, they’re focusing on two materials of trees. The first material is cellulose, which can make energy. Lignin, the second material, can store that energy, just as a battery does. The team has found when pressed, cellulose can produce electricity.

Some device must then store the electricity until it’s needed. Batteries can do this. But batteries aren’t very green. They have harmful materials. That’s where lignin comes in.

Batteries cause electrons to flow from one place to another, which can produce electricity. In a typical battery, one material must give electrons. The other must accept them. Lignin can do both. A weak acid (酸) encourages lignin to produce electrons. “With a metal wire (金属线) to guide those electrons, you’ll have electricity,” says Berggren.

Berggren’s team use this quality to create its new lignin-based battery. Typical batteries use a metal wire as a path to guide the flow of electrons into or out of the device. But since Berggren wants to make a battery of the forest, he looks for a natural way. Once again, he turns to cellulose.

This natural material can serve as a wire-like path for electrons. To make it work well, Berggren lines them with another chemical known as PEDOT, which isn’t from a tree. But when PEDOT is added to cellulose, they can conduct electricity like a wire. “With a weak acid, now you have a battery,” Berggren says. “And two of its three materials come from the forest.”

Berggren can imagine one day having mobile phone batteries made largely from forest products. Tree-based electronics might also be useful in lighting.

8 . Leah Brown aged 36 fell several hundred feet from Oregon’s highest mountain right before the eyes of a group of volunteer rescue workers who rushed to her aid and helped save her life.

The woman was coming down a popular path (小路) on Mt. Hood, about 70 miles east of Portland, on Saturday morning, according to the local police. Mt. Hood is the highest in Oregon, standing at around11.240 feet.

The fall was seen by members of Portland Mountain Rescue (PMR), a volunteer organization focused on helping people in mountainous areas. The group called 911 and rushed to the woman, providing medical care. They helped keep the woman warm for seven hours as the police worked to get her off the mountain safely. Finally, the woman was evacuated (转移) to a parking lot at 9:30 pm and taken to a hospital.

The climber, Leah Brown, said she didn’t know what caused her fall. “I can only guess it was either an ice tool or a crampon (冰爪) that didn’t land and stick like it should have, so I became detached from the mountain,” Brown said. “The thing I’d like to most stress is my appreciation for the members of PMR who evacuated me and took good care of me the whole time,” Brown added. “They saved my life. ”

In a statement after the rescue, PMR warned of the dangerous winter conditions at the mountain. “The short days and lower temperatures mean that the snow tends to be very hard and icy, and the conditions tend to be much steeper. Climbing the mountain in icy conditions is much more difficult,” the group said.

9 . Their father passed away, their mother is laid off, and the family has no heat in their house as the winter sets in. This is just one of the _________ stories that social workers in Northwest Suburban High School District 214 have _________.

Sometimes the solution is _________, like paying for a couple of nights’ stay at a local hotel, or providing a gift card to buy _________. When social workers are able to _________ that good news, there’s a sense of relief (宽慰), and usually tears from students and their parents who are _________ difficult times. “It’s things that we wouldn’t even think of, but for the family it is a big _________,” said Raymundo Galarza, a social worker with 214 Cares.

_________ in District 214 three years ago, 214 Cares is here to stay, now addressing _________ needs of students and their families, from helping pay the rent to putting food on the table. But the needs have __________, so social workers are trying to __________ the 214 Cares fund (专款) by calling on people to donate (捐赠) money.

“There have been other needs that have come forward, like medical costs for students,” said Michael Happ, the program’s director. “So there’s a real __________ for us to have a fund, which is trustworthy, and __________ by the community. People know they can give __________ to 214 Cares and it will go to help those kids and their families __________ in our community.”