1 . For nearly two decades, a thin, sun-burnt postal worker could frequently be seen carrying packages along a dangerous mountain trail in the Taihang Mountains.
The 10-kilometer-long route, which is between 20 centimeters and 1 meter wide, is known as the “cat road” by locals, meaning that it is so dangerous that only cats could walk on it. Whereas, Zhao Yuefang, a postal worker in Ewu township in Huguan county, Shanxi province, had to walk the route every day to deliver mail.
Every day at the crack of dawn, he would start his journey along the “cat road”. From picking up the day’s post to delivering it to villagers and returning along the same route, it took Zhao four days. During rainy and snowy seasons, the mountain road, part of which hugs the cliffs, would become slippery and dangerous. One day in the winter of 2003, the “cat road” was covered in thick snow and he slipped off the trail. Fortunately, he was able to stop his sharp descent by grabbing a tree branch and slowly managed to climb to safety.
By 2012, Zhao had walked more than 300,000 km and delivered over 800,000 pieces of mail. Born and raised in the deep mountains, Zhao truly understands the significance of mail deliveries to villagers. “They depend on the mail to keep in touch with the outside world,” he said. “Their sheer joy written on their face while receiving any post struck me,” he added.
In 2012, a 67-km-long tourist highway was built and gone were those days when Zhao risked his life to walk on the “cat road”. But Zhao was even busier than before. “The number of packages I handle daily now exceeds the number I used to deal with in the past,” said Zhao, adding that villagers are turning to online shopping and ordering more and more goods by post.
1. Why is the mountain trail referred to as “cat road”?| A．It’s shaped like a cat. | B．It’s intended for cats. |
| C．It is too narrow and risky. | D．It rains cats and dogs there. |
| A．Fall. | B．Pain. |
| C．Turn. | D．Landing. |
| A．Persistent and dedicated. | B．Diligent and ambitious. |
| C．Considerate and confident. | D．Courageous and generous. |
| A．The villagers’ respect for him. |
| B．His being born and raised there. |
| C．Today’s huge number of the packages. |
| D．The value of the deliveries to the locals. |
The Peasants (II)
At noon they hoe up weeds;
Their sweat drips on the soil.
Who knows the rice that feeds
Is the fruit of hard toil!
Food is a necessity for survival. But do you know how much work goes into producing it? The poem The Peasants (II),
The first two lines describe a common scene
Simple as the poem is in its language, it is profound in the theme, reminding people
Next time you want to throw away food, please think twice.
I clearly remember the day I walked into class with a big change — my very first pair of eye glasses and I was the first to wear glasses in my primary school. I was filled with excitement, eager to show them off to my friends. I had chosen pink framed glasses, thinking they would look fantastic on me.
I had never worn glasses before, so selecting them felt like a fun shopping experience. I got to pick the shape I liked and even chose a pretty pink and purple colour combination.
The reason behind getting the glasses was my poor eyesight. I couldn’t copy words and proper grammar from the blackboard because I sat at the back of the class, and everything was too vague for me to see. My friend would read aloud every phrase to me so that I could write them down, like a parrot.
Wearing those glasses was like stepping into a 3D cinematic world. I could see everything as clearly and each tiny detail felt like a delightful surprise.
However, on the day I wore my glasses to school, everyone’s reaction to my transformation was beyond my expectation. All the boys laughed and even teased me. Some kind-hearted girls forced a smile and told me that my glasses looked good on me, but I knew they didn’t. They all lied.
Though I needed those glasses more than I wanted them, yet I started to dislike my new glasses in the following week. A month passed, my classmates still weren’t used to seeing me in glasses and I took them off during the lunch break or when the classes were dismissed. However, little did I know that my decision to wear them would change the lives of many of my friends.
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。
One Monday, one of my friends looked at me with curiosity.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________A week later, I was shocked to see the same friend return to school with a pair of glasses.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 . On a hot afternoon Rhiannon was driving her old van down the highway. As she
A medical student witnessed the accident and came to her
Luckily, Rhiannon was saved. Not for the bandage, she would not have
Rhiannon also had a message for the other
| A．rolled down | B．broke off | C．turned down | D．switched off |
| A．stick | B．grab | C．touch | D．possess |
| A．handle | B．engine | C．window | D．wheel |
| A．Consequently | B．Automatically | C．Frequently | D．Slowly |
| A．awake | B．astonished | C．unconscious | D．crazy |
| A．vision | B．action | C．rescue | D．mind |
| A．bandaging | B．curing | C．pressing | D．uncovering |
| A．Without delay | B．Out of sympathy | C．For certainty | D．In despair |
| A．tidying | B．removing | C．collecting | D．checking |
| A．suffered | B．struggled | C．stayed | D．survived |
| A．searched | B．browsed | C．received | D．posted |
| A．guidance | B．gesture | C．expression | D．encouragement |
| A．tireless | B．faultless | C．nameless | D．speechless |
| A．apology | B．application | C．invitation | D．appreciation |
| A．peers | B．strangers | C．relatives | D．fellows |
5 . Would a person born blind, who has learned to distinguish objects by touch, be able to recognize them purely by sight if he regained the ability to see? The question, known as Molyneux’s problem, is about whether the human mind has a built-in concept of shapes that is so inborn that a blind person could immediately recognize an object with restored vision. Alternatively, the concepts of shapes are not inborn but have to be learned by exploring an object through sight, touch and other senses.
After their attempt to test it in blind children failed, Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London and his team carried out another experiment on bumblebees. To test whether bumblebees can form an internal representation of objects, they first trained the insects to distinguish globes from cubes using a sugar reward. The bees were first trained in the light, where they could see but not touch the objects. Then they were tested in the dark, where they could touch but not see the items. The researchers found that the insects spent more time in contact with the shape they had been trained to associate with the sugar reward, even though they had to rely on touch rather than sight to distinguish the objects.
The researchers also did the opposite test with untrained bumblebees, first teaching them with rewards in the dark and then testing them in the light. Again, the bees were able to recognize the shape associated with the sugar reward, though they had to rely on sight rather than touch in the test. In short, bees have solved Molyneux’s problem because the fact suggests that they can picture object features and access them through sight or touch.
However, some experts express their warning s against the result. Jonathan Birch, a philosopher of science, cautions that the bees may have had prior experience associating visual and tactile (触觉) information about straight edges and curved surfaces in their nests.
1. What is Molyneux’s problem about?| A．Whether mankind’s sense of touch outweighs sight. |
| B．Whether mankind’s idea of shape is inborn or learned. |
| C．Whether blind people can identify the shape of an item. |
| D．Whether the blind can regain their sense of touch after recovery. |
| A．By experimentation on blind children. |
| B．By conducting controlled experiments. |
| C．By rewarding bumblebees with sugar. |
| D．By observing bumblebees in their nests. |
| A．Skeptical. | B．Supportive. |
| C．Dismissive. | D．Ambiguous. |
| A．Scientists Found Senses Matter |
| B．Visual-Tactile Puzzle Has Been Solved |
| C．Experiments Will Help the Blind Regain Sight |
| D．Bumblebees May Help Solve Molyneux’s Problem |
1．运动的重要性；
2．介绍自己最喜欢的一项运动及原因；
3．号召大家参加运动会。
注意：
1．写作词数应为80左右；
2．请在答题卡的相应位置作答。
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7 . One day, you might be ordering your favorite pizza from a robot.Researchers at a university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are working on creating a pizza-making robot.
“Robots are basically preprogrammed to repeat the same actions over and over,” says David Held, a robot expert from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the members of a pizza-making team．But making pizza has challenges.For instance, the flour (面粉) will become squishy when meeting water, with a shape that can change in many ways.Also, pizza-making requires many steps—such as rolling and cutting—and several tools, including a rolling, a knife and so on.In what order should the steps be done? Which tools should be picked, and when? “If you need to do a cooking task, there are several levels that you have to reason about,” Held says.Once people get the hang of it, “We don’t even need to think about exactly how we’re doing it- it sort of just happens.But robots can’t really “understand what to do on their own”.
To start, the team used a computer to consider how a robot could lift, fatten, gather, move and cut dough (生面团).The method has two levels of robotic reasoning: one that thinks how it should approach the overall task, and the other that thinks how it should move its “hands” to perform each action．The result was better than with the usual programming techniques.“We got a little bit closer to the right shape than the former methods,” Held says．“‘But there’s still a lot of room for improvement.”
For now, people will continue to make pizza the old-fashioned way: with their own hands.Sill, a pizza-making robot is a good goal.And if a robot could deal with dough, it could also work with other objects that can change shapes.“You can imagine robots helping in hospitals, or robots that clean up toys in day cares,” Held says.“The general goal is to eventually have robots that can help with whatever the task may be.”
1. What does the underlined word “squishy” in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Soft. | B．Dirty. | C．Plain. | D．Precious. |
| A．Separating flour from water. |
| B．Doing all the steps in order. |
| C．Using several tools at once. |
| D．Repeating the same actions. |
| A．Methods of moving a pizza. |
| B．Problems with pizza making. |
| C．Improvements to the pizza robot. |
| D．Suggestions on how to make pizza. |
| A．They will help humans in different fields. |
| B．They will replace humans to do all the work. |
| C．They will do better than humans in day cares. |
| D．They will do whatever task as well as humans. |
8 . The week my eldest son finished pre-school education, I decided to clear out the playroom filled with his toys. Toys had kept him company whenever his mother and I were busy with other duties, and over the years we had collected a really large number of them. Here are some of what I found: 13 puzzles, 4 games for practising maths, and a speaker box that could play Mozart to develop musical ability.
Our masses of playthings may have been extreme, but it was by no means unusual. American families spend, on average, around 600 dollars every year on toys; a 10-year-old child in the UK may have owned 238 toys, totaling about 6,500 pounds.
During the past two centuries, educators, toy companies and parents like us have acted as if the purpose of play is to prepare children for adulthood. The more book learning we could pack up as play, and then give to our children, the better. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, toys were increasingly bought for the purpose of building better brains in order to build more competitive and successful grownups. By 2020, the different kinds of educational toys had made nearly $65 billion worldwide. Toys that teach — from the Speak & Spell to the See & Say — are now a part of many young lives.
“This generation of parents is asking toys to provide an end product, and that end product is success,” Richard Gottlieb, an influential toy industry advisor, commented. “They want toys to get their children into Harvard.”
“The model has been, ‘If I get toys that do schoolish things, then that’s good,’” Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist, said. “But that really goes against what the developmental science is telling us. For a long time, we’ve been getting our children, and their toys, all wrong.”
1. Why does the author mention toys in his house?| A．To present the varieties of toys. |
| B．To advise others to buy fewer toys. |
| C．To show parents’ craziness for toys. |
| D．To complain of too many toys in his house. |
| A．By listing numbers. | B．By quoting opinions. |
| C．By providing examples. | D．By drawing comparisons. |
| A．They can keep children happy. |
| B．They can make children positive. |
| C．They can reduce children’s stress. |
| D．They can promote children’s success. |
| A．Do We Need to Buy Toys? | B．Are Toys a Part of Our Life? |
| C．Can Toys Bring Us Happiness? | D．Have We Got Toys All Wrong? |
9 . It was the first run of a family ski weekend in Colorado.The perfect spring morning greeted us with clear skies and a warm temperature.We planned the course on the mountain map and set off.Then, three minutes into the run, my left ski came off; then my right ski turned over and took my leg with it, and then I heard the sharp sound.I lay on the snow, screaming.My brother and husband stopped and took me down the mountain to the hospital．
After an operation, the doctor told me that I wouldn’t walk for three months.It seemed like a blow.“How can we get everything done?” I turned to Adam, my husband.Who would get the kids to the bus at 7:15 a.m. , since my husband was in his office by 6 a.m. each day? Who would deal with the two dogs? Who would prepare dinner? Who would drive to tennis practices? “We’ll work it out,” Adam said.I nodded, because we didn’t have the other choice．
But something unexpected happened: friends both near and far were searching for ways they could help.Parents at our school bus stop offered to drop my kids off each afternoon.My kids ran up the steps each day to check on me.My husband, the man who, in the past, had to be told what to do and when to do it, pulled our family back up.
Finally, I returned to the shopping and the bus pickups. I made dinners again.I organized everyone and sent them out the door.But something had changed in our family, in me.Now I am quicker to ask for help if I am the one needing.
1. In which activity did the author break her legs?| A．Hiking． | B．Horse riding． | C．Snow skiing． | D．Mountain climbing． |
| A．Serious． | B．Anxious． | C．Confused． | D．Impressed． |
| A．My attitude changed． | B．Things went on smoothly． |
| C．My friends became active． | D．My husband got everything done． |
| A．We should enjoy our life． | B．We should live in the moment． |
| C．We should value our family． | D．We should be brave to ask for help． |
10 . We’ve collected some of the greatest royal (皇家的) palaces and castles to visit in Britain. Here are our picks.
Windsor Castle, Berkshire
Windsor Castle is the oldest castle in the world. It used to be an official accommodation for Her Majesty the Queen and was the place where the wedding of Prince Hary and Meghan Markle was held. The site of Windsor Castle was chosen and built by William in around 1070 to guard the western ways to London from a possible attack.
Open all year round to the public.
Buckingham Palace, Westminster
The official accommodation of the King and Queen and one of Britain’s most recognized historic sites, Buckingham Palace is often used for national celebrations and events. It was bought in 1761 by George II for his wife Queen Charlotte.
Buckingham Palace is open to the public during the summer months and for a limited number of tours in December, January and at Easter each year.
Kew Palace, Richmond-Upon-Thames
Sitting on the banks of the River Thames in London, Kew Palace might be the smallest of the royal palaces. With the big Kew Gardens around, the palace was built in 1631 for the London silk businessman, Samuel Fortreas.
Kew Palace is open for the summer season.
Hampton Court Palace, Surrey
Set on the edge of the River Thames, Hampton Court Palace in Surrey was a Tudor palace created by Cardinal Wlosey in the early 16th century and was once home to Henry VII over the years. There are beautiful gardens nearby and the palace was opened to the public in 1838 by Queen Victoria.
Open all year round, except 24-26 December.
1. Why was Windsor Castle built?| A．To promote western culture. |
| B．To find new ways to the west. |
| C．To guard London from attacks. |
| D．To protect the roads to London. |
| A．They are very small. |
| B．They are near the River Thames. |
| C．They were built by a businessman. |
| D．They were opened to the public by a Queen. |
| A．Windsor Castle. | B．Buckingham Palace. |
| C．Kew Palace. | D．Hampton Court Palace. |
