1 . There’s a song in your head. You keep hearing it repeatedly. You can’t make it stop, and it’s driving you crazy! Has this happened to you? Maybe you have suffered from an earworm, which is a memory of a song.

Earworms are common. A study showed that 90 percent of people experience them. Why do we get earworms? According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, music affects us whether we pay attention to it or not. We’re surrounded by music all the time in our everyday lives. Sacks wonders if there is a higher incidence of earworms today because of all this music in our environment.

Research on the primary auditory cortex supports Sack’s ideas. The auditory cortex is the part of the brain that processes sound. It’s a short-term storage system for small amounts of auditory information. Some of this auditory information is forgotten, and some of it goes into long-term memory. However, songs appear to stay in the auditory cortex for a long time.

James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, thinks that only certain types of songs become earworms. These songs are repetitive, simple, and incongruous — something unexpected such as uneven rhythm. Your brain pays a lot of attention to a song like this, Kellaris says. Because it is repetitive and unusual, it stays longer in the auditory cortex. At that point, Kellaris believes, it becomes an annoying earworm.

Advertisers often use jingles — short songs that are easy to remember to promote sales. Advertisers want jingles to stick in people’s minds to keep them thinking about their products. It seems that advertisers have learned what Kellaris has found out in his research.

Is there any way to get rid of an earworm? Here are some tips Kellaris collected: replace the earworm song with another song, try to distract yourself by doing an intense activity such as exercising, or tell someone about your earworm. What if none of these strategies work? Then perhaps you should just sit back and try to enjoy the music in your head!

1. How does the author lead to the topic?

A．By giving a definition.	B．By describing a phenomenon.
C．By drawing a conclusion.	D．By clarifying a question.

2. What does the author want to explain by mentioning “auditory cortex”?

A．The mechanism of earworms.	B．The lasting effect of memory.
C．The necessity of the research.	D．The significance of music.

3. In which paragraph does the author explain the features of the earworm music?

A．Paragraph 2.

B．Paragraph 3.

C．Paragraph 4.

D．Paragraph 5.

4. What can be the best title for the text?

A．Earworms — the Songs in Your Head	B．Jingles — the Typical Earworms
C．How Do Earworms Change Our Life?	D．How Do We Live with Earworms?

2 . Angus Neish dared to hope that his fine-looking cattle, bred at Rodmead Farm in Wilt-shire, would nab a prize at the Royal Bath and West Show last month. The annual fair, held near Shepton Mallet, in Somerset, is England’s oldest and grandest. As well as a fiercely competitive livestock parade, it features Morris dancing, sheep-shearing and a vintage fairground. Its pony-chariot races are second to none. Many contestants performed vigorously before a large crowd. 100,000 turned out for some of the three-day show.

Britons love a fair. No one is sure exactly how many shows there are across the country, but at least 400 days of such rural events happen annually across the country. Roughly one in ten Britons attend them each year. It appears their popularity is rising.

In late June, it was the turn of the Royal Highland Show, near Edinburgh, where 217,000 people—breaking a record set in 2019—rolled up. It is estimated that the event last year boosted nearby businesses by almost £40m ($51m).

Why do people go? Nostalgia (怀旧) is evidently a draw. At Bath and West, as colored flags flapped, visitors formed queues, bought cream teas and listened as a military band played wartime hits. Rural shows also have a purpose. Many fairs were founded to spread the knowledge of new farming technology among rural populations. Some of that mission lives on.

A secondary goal is to better educate those who flood in from towns and cities—urban folk make up a decent share of those who pack the grounds. Some consumers also come armed with powerful knowledge of food supply chains—as well as sometimes picky personal preferences for organic, local, animal-friendly and environmentally sound products. Laura Williams, of the Royal Welsh Show, notes that visitors are “much more invested in farming and interested in where their food comes from” than in years past.

A last purpose, naturally, is for farmers to excel against their rivals in friendly competition. In this respect, Mr. Neish enjoyed an utterly successful day. In a first for Bath and West, his cattle scooped all four of the top prizes on offer in their categories. Such victories do not bring immediate, large financial rewards, but should boost the reputation of his breeding program.

1. What do we know about the fair last month?

A．It saw high attendances.

B．It was a monthly show.

C．It was a fierce art competition.

D．It conveyed British moral values.

2. What’s the purpose of the shows?

A．To narrow the urban-rural gap.

B．To promote wartime hit records.

C．To offer an insight into farming.

D．To erase competition among farmers.

3. What will Mr. Neish gain from Bath and West?

A．An instant profit.

B．Marketing strategies.

C．A chance to advertise.

D．An academic reputation.

4. What can be a suitable title for the text?

A．Rural shows: Victors’ stage

B．Masses of farmers: True winners

C．Farm products: Sweeping British

D．Fun of the fair: Gaining popularity

3 . Whenever you pick up an apple and prepare to eat it, you may notice a small sticker attached to the fruit with a row of four or five numbers on it.That string of numbers is something called a Price Look-Up (PLU) code.     1     It’s designed to help supermarkets get to know their inventory (库存) of fruits and vegetables, and to make it easy for checkout clerks to know what to charge for a particular item. Thus, you can get through the line and out of the door more quickly.

From the code, you can also know what specific variety of a particular fruit or vegetable you’re going to enjoy — whether it’s a Honeycrisp apple or a Shamouti orange. And it may tell you the size of the fruit or vegetable.     2     You may know whether it was grown conventionally (常规地) or on an organic farm.

A volunteer committee developed PLUs in 1988. One important reason why PLUs were invented was to enable supermarkets to tell the difference between conventionally grown fruits and vegetables and higher-priced organic food. As organic produce was being introduced then, cashiers often wrongly sold it at the conventional price.     3     There are now more than 1,500 different PLUs in use around the globe.     4     Just type in the code from a sticker on a piece of fruit, and it will tell you that 3114, for example, refers to an extra large green mango,belonging to the Keitt or Francis varieties of that fruit.

    5     The produce industry has been trying to develop biodegradable (可生物降解的) PLUstickers, but it’s difficult to do that. Eventually, PLUstickers may be replaced altogether by lasers that mark the codes on fruits and vegetables.

A．The function is fairly simple.

B．PLU codes have a long history.

C．You probably think organic food is healthier.

D．The appearance of PLUs helped solve this problem.

E．Besides, it shows where the fruit or vegetable comes from.

F．The future of fruit and vegetable stickers is still uncertain.

G．You can use the PLU search app to know what a particular one means.

4 . A former starchitect (明星建筑师) who designed villas for Pakistan’s celebrities now rebuilds villages completely destroyed by natural disasters.

October 2005, a catastrophic earthquake claiming some 79, 000 people in Pakistan reduced the villages to ruins in mud. Yasmeen Lari, a then-65-year-old architect was there to help lead the reconstruction of settlements. Working with volunteer architects and engineers from Pakistan and abroad, she started drawing plans for earthquake-resistant homes.

Over the following decades, Lari designed various houses and devices inside. Lari’s shelters, inspired by traditional designs and made with sustainable materials such as bamboo, mud and lime (石灰) that are sourced locally first, can better withstand disasters. Bamboo homes on stilts (柱子) allow water to flow through, while cross-bracing (交叉支撑) provides strength and flexibility during earthquakes. Lari’s insistence on low-cost, zero-waste and zero-carbon buildings reflects her commitment to the planet.

This sustainable inspiration has fuelled many of Lari’s designs, which now include household innovations. For instance, more than 80, 000 of her well-received limecrete and smokeless cookstoves were built. The device, which won a UN World Habitat Prize in 2018, costs about E8 to make and is fuelled with agricultural waste. The stoves stand higher than flood levels, making them safer than smoky, open cooking fires on the ground.

Now at age 83, Lari is still fizzing with ideas about zero-carbon designs, skills building and self-sustaining villages.

1. Which can best describe Yasmeen Lari?

A．Insistent and conventional.	B．Productive and stubborn.
C．Innovative and committed.	D．Economical and academic.

2. What is an advantage of Lari’s shelters?

A．They accommodate homeless villagers.	B．They are all made of local materials.
C．They follow traditional designs.	D．They are resistant to earthquakes.

3. What do we know about the stove Lari designed?

A．It costs a lot.	B．It generates smoke.
C．It gains popularity.	D．It burns animal waste.

4. What can be a suitable title for the text?

A．From architect to humanitarian	B．The greatest architect ever
C．Rebuilding destroyed villages	D．Designing household devices

6 . The road to a Nobel Prize, the most respected scientific award in the world, is growing ever longer, with almost half of winners now waiting more than 20 years from making a Nobel-worthy discovery to receiving the prize.

One analysis shows that the average time between publishing the work and receiving one of the science prizes has nearly doubled in the past 60 years. Across the three science prizes, chemistry now has the longest “Nobel lag”—an average of 30 years over the past decade—and physiology or medicine has the shortest, at 26 years.

Alfred Nobel’s will stated that the prizes should be awarded “to those who, during the previous year, shall have given the greatest benefit to mankind.” In reality this has only happened a few times. But in the first half of the twentieth century, it was common for Nobel prize winners to be in their 30s -and that is unheard of now, says Santo Fortunato, now a computational social scientist at Indiana University.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, says Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Cornell University. It could be that the overall number of breakthroughs is increasing each year, so awards cannot keep up with the number of people who deserve to be recognized, he says. It is also the case that the importance of some works, which Yin describes as “sleeping beauties” are only realized years or decades later. Besides, the lengthening gap could be a sign that there has been a decrease in “disruptive” science - important studies or discoveries that change the paradigm (范式) of their field. This could be causing the Nobel committees to focus more on the past.

Fortunato points out that, if the gap continues to grow, outstanding scientists could miss out on the award owing to the Nobel Committee’s rule banning posthumous prizes (追授奖项). “It has to stop at some point,” he says, adding that a rethink of the posthumous-awarding ban would allow more people’s work to get the recognition that it deserves.

1. Why does the writer mention the numbers in the first two paragraphs?

A．To explain a rule.	B．To present a fact.
C．To clarify a concept.	D．To make a prediction.

2. What can we learn about the Nobel prize winners from the paragraph 3?

A．None of them are in their 30s nowadays.	B．Their names are unheard of by the public.
C．None of them receive the prizes several times.	D．They must make contributions the year before.

3. Why might be a cause of the Nobel lag?

A．The change in standards.	B．The requirement of the award.
C．The increase in breakthroughs.	D．The tradition of the committees.

4. What does Fortunato suggest in the last paragraph?

A．Reconsidering the current rule.	B．Establishing a better committee.
C．Stopping the award presentation.	D．Recognizing more people’s work.

8 . 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。

Mr. Barnes was a very wealthy man who lived in the early days in the United States. It was one of his chief pleasures to walk through the countryside near his home, and as he walked, he often noticed a particularly fine group of cattle. One day he stopped to visit the rancher (牧场主) who owned the cattle and purchased a cow from him with the agreement that the cow would be delivered to his house the following day.

The next day as Mr. Barnes was out for his morning walk, he saw a young boy trying his hardest to lead the cow over to Mr. Barnes’ field. The boy, who did not know Mr. Barnes, called to him, “Please sir, would you come and help me with this cow? It is so stubborn!”

Mr. Barnes readily agreed and went over to help. As they walked along together, he asked the boy, “How much do you expect to get for delivering the cow?”

“I… I don’t know,” the boy said, “but I think I’ll get something because the people who are buying the cow live in that house, and those people are very kind to everyone.”

By now the stubborn cow was walking along nicely, so Mr. Barnes excused himself and took a path through a wooded area that led to his back door. As soon as he got into the house, he gave one of his trusted workers a fifty-dollar bill and told him to give it to the boy who was delivering the cow. After the cow had been left at the house and the boy was returning to the ranch, Mr. Barnes went out again and met the boy on the road.

“Well, how much did you get?” asked Mr. Barnes.

“Five dollars,” answered the boy.

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。
Mr. Barnes felt surprised when hearing the answer.
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The boy agreed, and they walked back to the house together.
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9 . 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

For most people, adopting (收养) a pet is one of the best decisions that they can ever make in their lives. In addition to giving an animal a home and a loving family, the owner will find the company of a pet brings more happiness than expected.

For someone like Maria, having a pet was very suitable. She was all alone after moving to a new apartment in Brazil, which made her feel lonely.

So when she found a cute black puppy named Chips, she knew she had to take him home. Maria thought that Chips would be able to fill the emptiness that she had been experiencing from living all alone.

Maria was right. Once she took the puppy home, they immediately bonded. However, as Maria had to work during the day, she was worried about leaving Chips home alone in her apartment. She was also worried that his crying would upset her neighbors.

One night, when she returned home, outside her door was a package with a folded note attached to it. Maria knew that she was in trouble. She hoped that she would not be evicted (驱逐) from her new apartment because of Chips. She loved Chips so much, and she was afraid that she might have to get rid of him because he made too much noise whenever she was away. Maria was frightened and wondered who could have left it at the door because she had little contact with the people in the building except her neighbor, Angelia. In fact, they only said hello few times.

However, when she noticed the names on the folded note, she found that it wasn’t addressed to her but to her dog, Chips, and that it was “written” by another dog named Corote. Maria opened the package first and found a few toys for pets.

注意：续写词数应为150个左右。

Curious, Maria opened the note and started reading it.

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With Chips following her, Maria knocked at Angelia’s door.       

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