1 .

A．The woman sold her car because she hates driving.

B．The woman thinks it is not convenient to drive a car.

C．The woman will be travelling by subway from now on.

D．The woman moved because she didn’t want to drive anymore.

2 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

It Takes at Least 200 Hours to Make a Close Friendship, and More to Maintain It

Many of us worry that we don’t put in enough time to maintain close friendships. But how much is enough? Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula (公式) for how much time you need to spend on your friends to keep them. Each friendship and friend are unique and develops or ends depending on how we interact.

Forming a friendship in the first place takes a certain number of hours of being together. We need between 40 and 60 hours together for a person we know slightly to become a casual friend. In order to move from casual friends to close friends, we need to spend an additional 140 to 160 hours together for a total of about 200 hours.

However, deeper interactions can quicken that timeline. We can form a close bond in less than 200 hours with meaningful conversations. Contrarily, spending 200 hours together doesn’t necessarily mean a person will become a close friend. They have to want to be your friends. Some co-workers can spend 300 hours together and never become close friends.

When it comes to maintaining friendships, it’s not just the number of hours spent together, but what we do that matters. Engaging in passive activity with friends — like watching a TV series — is fun and enjoyable, but it doesn’t do as much to maintain friendship as having deep conversations, sharing feelings, and being a good listener. And routinely checking in with people we choose to connect with, through calls and texts or in person, helps maintain relationships and leads to higher scores of positive feelings, like happiness.

The key point is that sharing things about ourselves can lead to close friendships. Once that closeness is established, some ways to maintain closeness are supporting friends when things go wrong for them and celebrating their achievements.

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3 . Antarctic Tourism: Should We Just Say No?

More people are visiting Antarctic, the frozen continent than ever before.     1     This has brought a new urgency to the question of how much, if any, tourism should be allowed on the icy continent.

The distance most visitors travel to reach Antarctica makes carbon emissions a serious problem.     2     One study calculated that each tourist between 2016 and 2020 was effectively melting around 83 tonnes of snow, due largely to emissions from vacation ships.

    3     The Antarctic Treaty, established in 1961 to provide governance for the continent, operates on a consultative basis, which means all 56 parties have to agree before a change can be put into action. The last major decision on tourism was a measure passed in 2009 that prohibits vacation ships carrying more than 500 passengers from making landings. That regulation has still not officially been carried out as not every signatory country has accepted it domestically.

There is clear agreement that something needs to change, but no agreement on what those changes should be.     4    

A．The number of visitors hit 100,000 for the first time this tourist season, a 40% jump over the previous record.

B．The Antarctic is at risk not just because of the breakability of its environment, but due to the lack of a single governing body.

C．Should landings be made at a larger number of sites for instance, or should we aim to keep the human footprint as small as possible?

D．If what you really want is to connect with snow and ice and you’re in the northern half, can you catch a train to the nearest snow region instead?

E．The average per-person carbon emissions for an Antarctic tourist are 3.76 tonnes – about the total sum that an individual typically generates in an entire year.

F．There is so little regulation now that almost anything that will protect the areas by an official legal source rather than self-regulated would be really positive.

4 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. convincing       B. disinformation       C. hazards       D. illogical       E. maintain   F. preview G. publicly       H. racing       I. response       J. speed       K. seemingly

OpenAI Unveils A.I. that Instantly Generates Eye-Popping Videos

Last April, a New York start-up called Runway AI revealed technology that let people generate videos. The four-second videos were shadowy and disturbing. But they were a clear sign that artificial intelligence technologies would generate increasingly     1     videos sooner. Just 10 months later, OpenAI has revealed a similar system, Sora, that creates videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie.

OpenAI is among the many companies     2     to improve this kind of instant video generator. The technology could     3     the work of experienced moviemakers. It could also become a quick and inexpensive way of creating online     4    , making it even harder to tell what’s real on the internet.

In an interview, the team behind the technology said the company was not yet releasing Sora to the public because it was still working to understand the system’s     5    . The intention here is to give a(n)     6     of what is likely to happen soon, so that people can see the capabilities of this technology.

Like other generative A.I. technologies, OpenAI’s system learns by analyzing digital data — in this case, videos and subtitles describing what those videos contain. OpenAI declined to say how many videos the system learned from or where they came from, except to say the training included both     7     available videos and videos that were licensed from copyright holders. The company says little about the data used to train its technologies, most likely because it wants to     8     an advantage over competitors.

Sora generates videos in     9     to short descriptions. Though the videos can be impressive, they may include strange and     10     images. The system, for example, recently generated a video of someone eating a cookie — but the cookie never got any smaller.

5 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Walking and Using a Phone is Bad for Your Health

Spend time on any crowded sidewalk and you’ll see heads bent over and eyes cast downward. One recent study of college students found that a quarter of people crossing intersections     1     (absorb) in a device. That screen in your hand isn’t just distracting your attention. It also changes your mood, your manner of walking and etc. — and affects your ability to get from point A to point B     2     running into trouble.

When you walk and use a phone at the same time, you automatically adjust     3     you move. Video footage of walkers has shown that people on phones walk about 10 percent slower than those undistracted ones. These changes can block traffic on the sidewalk. And     4     walking makes up a big portion of your daily physical activity, walking more slowly may have impacts for your fitness.

Looking down at a smartphone while walking can also increase the amount of force     5     (place) on the neck and upper back muscles, which could reduce balance and increase the risk of falls.

It’s now widely accepted that walking in natural spaces is good for your mental health. It appears that     6     (get) these benefits, it’s important that your attention is on the environment, rather than on your phone.

Most of us understand that walking and using a phone can be risky. Some cities, like Honolulu,     7     (pass) laws to control distracted walkers. But research on those dangers has turned up some surprises. One study has looked at the connection between “phone-related distracted walking” and emergency department visits. Using government data     8     (extend) over the years 2011 to 2019, the researchers turned up nearly 30,000 walking injuries occasioned by phones.

If you’re distracted by a phone, you’re definitely putting     9     at some risk. So how do you stay safe? If you do walk and use your device at the same time, stop when you’re around stairs, crosswalks and messy or uneven ground,     10     accidents are more likely to occur.

6 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．Why we need to write down our plans.

B．Why some tasks or responsibilities matter.

C．Why it is necessary to spare time for handwriting.

D．Why we should let go of some unimportant things.

2.

A．Be more motivated at work.

B．Reconsider the value of a task.

C．Fulfill our commitment to the community.

D．Raise our awareness of social responsibility.

3.

A．Giving them up.	B．Assigning them to others.
C．Typing them down.	D．Adding to their meaningfulness.

7 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。1.

A．Healthy diets.	B．Good sleep quality.
C．Cost efficiency.	D．Sense of safety.

2.

A．They are equipped with computers.	B．They are technology-supported.
C．They can keep weather records.	D．They have several electricity panels.

3.

A．Delivering food to those who need it.

B．Taking friends anywhere in the world.

C．Streaming videos of their new way of life.

D．Meeting the basic needs of people in remote areas.

4.

A．It is acceptable.	B．It is expensive.
C．It is out of date.	D．It is problematic.

8 .

A．Which countries are similar?	B．How to fix things?
C．How to keep fit?	D．Who are facing these problems?

9 .

A．At the airport.	B．At a subway station.
C．At the school gate.	D．At a bus stop.

10 . The emergence of black holes undoubtedly marks the beginning of a revolution. Black holes have many peculiar properties, such as the alteration of space and time, the radiation of gravitational waves and so on. Scientists are still trying to study the properties and evolution of black holes in order to better understand the origin and evolution of the universe.

Recently, a team of astronomers may have found a solo-wandering black hole using a strange trick of gravity called microlensing (微透镜效应), but the results still have to be confirmed.

Sometimes it’s tough being an astronomer. Nature likes to hide the most interesting things from easy observation. Take, for example, black holes. Except for the strange quantum (量子) phenomenon of Hawking radiation, black holes are completely black. They don’t emit a single bit of radiation – they only absorb, hence their name.

To date, the only way astronomers have been able to spot black holes is through their influence on their environments. For example, if an orbiting star gets a little too close, the black hole can absorb the gas from that star, causing it to heat up as it falls. We can watch as stars dance around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Even the famed pictures of the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy(星系) aren’t photographs of the black holes themselves. Instead, they are radio images of everything around them.

But surely not all black holes have other light-emitting objects around them to help us find them. To find these wanderers, astronomers have tried their luck with microlensing. We know that heavy objects can bend the path of light around them. This is a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the slight bending of starlight around our own sun was one of the first successful tests of the theory.

Microlensing is pretty much what the name suggests. When astronomers get extremely lucky, a wandering black hole and pass between us and a random distant star. The light from that star bends around the black hole because of its gravity, and from our point of view, the star will appear to temporarily flare in brightness.

And when I say “extremely lucky” I mean it. Despite trying this technique for over a decade, it is only now that astronomers have found a candidate black hole through microlensing. Two teams used the same data, a microlensing event recorded from both the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope in Chile and the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) telescope in New Zealand. One team found that the mass was somewhere around seven times the mass of the sun – definitely black hole territory. But the other team estimated a much smaller mass, around 2-4 times the mass of the Sun. If the true mass of the object is at the lower end of that spectrum (光谱), then the wanderer is probably not a black hole.

1. Why does the author say it is hard to be an astronomer?

A．Einstein’s theory is hard to understand.

B．Many things in nature are not easy to observe.

C．Understanding the evolution of the universe is not easy.

D．Whether the black hole has been found remains to be seen.

2. What is the example in Para. 4 trying to prove?

A．Stars’ wandering in black holes.

B．Black holes’ absorbing the star’s gas.

C．The relationship between stars’ heating and black holes.

D．Finding black holes by observing environmental changes.

3. What does the author tell us about the discovery of black holes?

A．People can often find black holes with glowing objects.

B．Research groups can work together to find black holes.

C．Glowing objects around black holes help us find them sometimes.

D．Understanding the properties of black holes helps find them.

4. What conclusion can we draw from the last paragraph?

A．To persevere in the end is to win.

B．Facts speak louder than words.

C．Failure is the mother of success.

D．Things are not always what they seem.