An organization has taken measures
Chopstick culture in Shanghai
After opening as a commercial port, Shanghai is proud of
At present, at least 1.8 billion people use chopsticks worldwide. Chopsticks, though small, serve as
When Peng Jingxuan began playing the guzbeng on the streets of France in 2018, she did not expect that the traditional instrument would change her life.
Peng began to study the guzheng when she was 7 years old. In 2017, she went to France to study
“I wanted to make this instrument known to more people,” Peng said. She began to do street performances to
To make this traditional Chinese instrument better known to people in France, Peng carefully selected and arranged each song. She
“
3 . Social media is one of the fastest-growing industries in today’s world. A study conducted by the US think tank (智囊团) Pew Research Center showed that 92 percent of teenagers go online daily.
The wide spread of social media has changed nearly all parts of teenagers’ lives.
Changing relationshipsHigh school student Elly Cooper from Illinois said social media often reduces face-to-face communication.
“It makes in-person relationships harder because people give attention to their phones instead of their boyfriends or girlfriends,” Cooper said.
There’s also a greater possibility of things getting lost in translation over social media.
“If half of your relationship is over social media, you don’t really know how the other person is reacting,” Sienna Schulte, a junior student from Illinois, said.
Yet, some people believe social media has made it easier to start relationships with anyone from anywhere. Beth Kaplan from Illinois met her long-distance friend through social media. He currently lives in Scotland, but they’re still able to frequently communicate with one another.
“I can feel close to someone that I’m talking to via (通过) FaceTime,” Kaplan said.
Wanting to be “liked”The rise of social media has changed the way teenagers see themselves.
The 19-year-old Essena O’Neill announced on the social networking service Instagram that she was quitting social media because it made her obsessed (痴迷) with appearing perfect online.
Negative comments also can do great damage to a teenager’s self-esteem (自尊).
In particular, anonymous (匿名的) social media apps such as Yik Yak may provide opportunities for cyber bullying (网络欺凌).
The app allows users within 5 miles (8 km) to create and add comments to everything. Teenagers who get negative comments on these sites can’t help but feel hurt.
Opening new doorsHowever, Armin Korsos, a student from Illinois, takes advantage of the comments he receives over social media to improve his videos on the social networking site Youtube.
“Social media can help people show themselves and their talents to the world in a way that was never possible before,” Korsos said.
But Korsos recognizes that social media has become a distraction (让人分心的事). “Social media, though it helps people connect with their friends and stay updated, is not all necessary.”
1. What is the article mainly about?| A．The major problems with social media. | B．The effect of social media on teenagers. |
| C．How teenagers benefit from social media. | D．Why social media appeals so much to teenagers. |
| A．It pushes people to meet their friends more often offline. |
| B．It encourages people to pay more attention to those around them. |
| C．It enables users to understand accurately what others are talking about online. |
| D．It allows people to keep in touch with their friends who live far away more easily. |
| A．The use of social media taught him to turn negative comments into motivations. |
| B．Social media can easily become an addiction (着迷), despite its benefits. |
| C．Social media is mostly a distraction to teenagers, so it is unnecessary for it to exist. |
| D．If used well, social media can create opportunities for teenagers to develop themselves. |
For those looking to escape the concrete jungle, maybe it’s time to dive into the bamboo forests of southern Sichuan.
A natural forest that people in Sichuan province tend
Known as one of the country’s 10 most beautiful forests, it
Two years later, the bamboo forest received world-wide
The Bamboo Sea covers Changning and Jiang’an, two counties under the authority of Yibin. Amazed at its vast expanse (浩瀚), Huang Tingjian,
5 . Artists everywhere are getting “understandably nervous” about recent advances in artificial intelligence. Last month, a winner of an art prize at the Colorado State Fair “sparked a violent protest” when he posted the news and explained that he’d created his image using an AI program. Critics quickly accused 39-year-old Lance Allen of cheating. To be fair, Allen had won in the digital art category and made no secret of how the image had been produced. But the rules of art making are clearly changing.
Allen’s creative process, to be clear, “was not a push-button operation, ”said Jason Blain in Forbes. He claims to have spent 80 hours on his entry, first on fine-tuning his text prompts (提示), then by touching up the final image using Photoshop and similar tools, then arranging to print the image on canvas. He made the finished product using AI much as a photographer creates an image using a camera.
But Allen, a tabletop game developer, is awed by AI’s capabilities and urges artists and illustrators to welcome the technology rather than fight it. “Art is dead,” he says. “AI won. Humans lost.” A more inspiring lesson to take from his victory, though, is that image generators are likely to “expand the appreciation for and creation of art” by opening the field to people, like him, who could never draw anything as detailed as his award-winning image. “If anything, we will have more artists,” and as the technology progresses, “we might see the emergence of art styles that none have seen before.”
You can’t blame traditional artists if they’re unhappy. Image generators work their magic, after all, by analyzing the aesthetics (美学) of millions of pre-existing images. One of the most complicated image generators “makes crystal clear just how destructive this technology will be,” said Loz Eliot in New Atlas. Given a specific prompt, it can produce an image of just about anything you can imagine and even follow the style of a favorite artist’s work. Its arrival marks “an incredible popularization of visual creativity” while aiming “a knife to the heart of anyone who’s spent decades improving their artistic techniques hoping to make a living from them.”
1. Why are artists getting nervous about AI recently?| A．A winner of an art prize used AI. | B．Lance Allen cheated in the art competition. |
| C．The digital art will soon dominate. | D．There will be great changes in art creation. |
| A．It was no easy work for Allen even with Al. | B．Allen worked as a photographer creating an image. |
| C．AI played a key role in Allen’s art creation. | D．Although with AI, Allen’s creation counted a lot. |
| A．Human has been beaten by AI. | B．AI will make art more popular. |
| C．Greater artists and new art styles will appear. | D．AI enables amateurs to win art competitions. |
| A．It works by analyzing images created by human. |
| B．It can produce images beyond people’s imagination. |
| C．It makes artists’ long-time effort meaningless. |
| D．It makes it impossible for artists to make a living. |
6 . Waiting for the airplane to take off, I was happy to get a seat by myself. Just then, an air hostess approached me and asked, “Would you mind
The girl was named Kathy. She had been in a car accident and now was on her way for
I was very glad I had reached beyond my comfort zone to sit next to Kathy and feed her. Love sometimes flows beyond human borders and removes the fears that keep us
| A．changing | B．losing | C．taking | D．giving |
| A．comfortable | B．suitable | C．favorable | D．available |
| A．wanted | B．decided | C．regretted | D．promised |
| A．pleasure | B．travel | C．treatment | D．business |
| A．know | B．say | C．realize | D．recognize |
| A．eat | B．choose | C．feed | D．support |
| A．offering | B．needing | C．stopping | D．trying |
| A．fast | B．far | C．close | D．impolite |
| A．girl | B．neighbor | C．passenger | D．stranger |
| A．unusual | B．important | C．direct | D．shameful |
| A．refused | B．wondered | C．cried | D．did |
| A．warmed | B．jumped | C．broken | D．cheered |
| A．money | B．time | C．life | D．energy |
| A．separate | B．independent | C．silent | D．upset |
| A．happen | B．stretch | C．wait | D．continue |
7 . In the field of education technology, some apps might be getting too smart. There are more and more apps providing help for students.
PhotoMath
The new, seemingly magic app allows users to take pictures of a math problem, and then receive a step-by-step solution. It is now the number one free app on the App Store. A PhotoMath spokeswoman says educators have welcomed the app with positive reviews, but the software causes a lot of angry public discussion and disagreement. Why? It is because students can use it to cheat when doing their math homework.
iHomework
Whether you’re a high school student or a college student, there’s one thing you’ve got for sure: a lot of homework. iHomework can help you keep track of all your homework. It can help you arrange it in a particular order according to types, or based on deadlines.
Homework Helper
Chinese Internet search company Baidu has launched an app called Homework Helper with which students can get answers to homework. Users post a picture or type their homework questions onto online forum (论坛), and those who answer the questions can win e-coins that can be used to buy devices like laptops. The app has logged 5 million downloads, much to the concern of many parents who argue that the students spend less time thinking about challenging problems.
WolframAlpha
WolframAlpha is similar to PhotoMath, but it focuses on older students studying high levels of math and doesn’t support photos. The service also produces step-by-step solutions to advanced topics, making it a popular tool for college students.
1. What is the public’s worry about the app PhotoMath?| A．It can’t recognize pictures. |
| B．It doesn’t provide a step-by-step solution. |
| C．It makes cheating at homework more likely to happen. |
| D．It encourages students to use smart phones more frequently. |
| A．It is thought highly of by teachers. |
| B．It is unpopular among Chinese students. |
| C．Many parents think it harmful to children’s study. |
| D．Answering questions on the app wastes students’ time. |
| A．PhotoMath. | B．iHomework. | C．Homework Helper. | D．WolframAlpha. |
8 . The baguette, a long, thin French bread, is being added to UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH,非物质文化遗产) list. UNESCO experts gathering in Morocco this week decided that the simple French bread — made only of flour, water, salt, and yeast — was worth U.N. recognition, after France’s culture ministry warned of a “continuous drop” in the number of traditional bakeries (烘焙坊), with some 400 closing every year over the past half century.
The UN cultural agency’s chief, Audrey Azoulay said, “The decision honors more than just bread; it recognizes the ‘graceful skills of bakers’ and ‘a daily ritual (仪式)’.” Azoulay added, “It is important that such baking knowledge and social practices can continue to exist in the future.”
With the bread’s new status (地位), the French government said it planned to create a baguette day, called the “Open Bake house Day”, to connect the French better with their heritage. Bakers in France seemed proud, if unsurprised. “Of course, it should be on the list because the baguette symbolizes the world. It’s universal,” said Asma Farhat, a baker at Julien’s Bakery. “If there’s no baguette, you can’t have a proper meal. In the morning you can toast it, for lunch it’s a sandwich, and then it accompanies dinner.”
Despite the decline in traditional bakery numbers, France’s 67 million people still buy baguettes at a variety of sales points, including in supermarkets. According to France’s “Bread Observatory”, the French eat 320 baguettes of one form or another every second. The problem is, observers say, that they can often be poor in quality. “It’s very easy to get bad baguette in France. It’s the traditional baguette from the traditional bakery that is in danger. It’s about quality not quantity,” said one local resident, Marine Fourchier.
1. Why did UNESCO’s decide to add the French bread to UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list?| A．Because it has a long history. | B．Because it is made of simple materials. |
| C．Because it is in danger of disappearing. | D．Because it is made in traditional bakeries. |
| A．He felt honored. | B．His attitude was unclear. |
| C．He thought it was embarrassing. | D．He thought it was meaningful. |
| A．Baguettes should be served all the day. | B．Baguettes are common in the French diet. |
| C．Baguettes should have been put on the list earlier. | D．Baguettes and sandwiches are equally important. |
| A．The baguette — a cultural heritage that is of poor quality. |
| B．Protecting the baguette — everyone can make a difference. |
| C．Protecting the baguette — quality is more important than quantity. |
| D．The baguette — a new comer on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. |
9 . “Colour” and “color”, “favourite” and “favorite”, “honour” and “honor”… Have you ever wondered why Americans spell those words without a “u”? Is it because they are lazy? Of course not. In fact, the difference in spelling was started by Noah Webster (1758-1843). He was a teacher who reformed (改革) English to make American identity (特征) stronger. Linguists (语言学家) celebrate his birthday on October 16 every year.
After the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), Webster believed that Americans should have their own dictionary, rather than rely on British dictionaries. He dropped the British “u” in some words. And he changed “centre” into “center” for children to learn English by spelling words more like what they sounded. He used “subway” instead of British word “underground”. Some other examples are “soccer” and “football”, “fall” and “autumn”.
Webster wasn’t shy about expressing his opinions. In defining (定义) preposterous (unreasonable), he wrote: “A republican government in the hands of female is preposterous.”
Webster spent 28 years on the project before completing the 70,000-word dictionary with his American-style spelling in 1828. He also added local words.
His dictionary was widely used in schools. Linguists believed it helped a new country achieve unity (统一) and cultural independence at a time when most people cared about political freedom.
“He was the creator of our language and the creator of American identity,” said Joshua Kendall, who is working on a book about Webster. “He at last brought us together through our language.”
1. Which is NOT true about Webster’s dictionary?| A．It has local words in it. | B．It is a 70,000-word dictionary. |
| C．All the words are spelled without “u”. | D．Its words are in American-style spelling. |
| A．依赖 | B．信任 | C．容忍 | D．放弃 |
| A．It is the only dictionary that Americans still use today. |
| B．It helped to bring Americans together besides its cultural influence. |
| C．It has no influence on the development of American English. |
| D．It helped to make American English more useful than British English. |
| A．The development of the British English. |
| B．American English is better than British English. |
| C．Noah Webster added local words to the dictionary. |
| D．Noah Webster wrote an American English dictionary and reformed English. |
10 . An era in which an Alzheimer’s diagnosis can begin in a doctor’s office is now arriving. The new technology can detect early signs of disease from a blood sample, which is helping doctors to identify the memory-robbing disorder more accurately.
Last fall, a blood test developed by C2N Diagnostics in St. Louis, Mo. , became available to most of the U.S. as a routine lab test. It has also received a CE mark as a diagnostic medical device in the European Union — indicating it has met safety, health and environmental protection standards for the region.
The C2N test, called PrecivityAD, uses an analytic technique to detect specific types of B-amyloid, a protein fragment that is a pathological (病理学的) feature of disease. B-amyloid proteins accumulate and form plaques (斑块) visible on brain scans two decades before a patient notices memory problems. As plaques build up in the brain, levels of ß-amyloid decline in the surrounding fluid.
Such changes can be measured in spinal fluid (脊髓液) samples — and now in blood, where ß-amyloid concentrations are significantly lower. PrecivityAD is the first blood test for Alzheimer’s to be cleared for widespread use and one of a new generation of such assays that could enable early detection of the leading disease — perhaps decades before the onset of the first symptoms.
1. According to the passage, which can help doctors identify Alzheimer’s?| A．hair. | B．blood. | C．skin. | D．tongue. |
| A．To decline in the surrounding fluid. | B．To form plaques visible on brain scans. |
| C．To accumulate and cause memory problems. | D．To serve as a pathological feature of disease. |
| A．Tests. | B．Trials. | C．Treatments. | D．Analysis. |
| A．Indifferent. | B．Doubtful. | C．Supportive. | D．Pessimistic. |
