1 . 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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2 . 听下面一段长对话，回答小题。1.

A．To ask for her help.	B．To apply for the entry for the competition.
C．To take back his copy of drawing.	D．To confirm the name of his tutor.

2.

A．Improving the designs of saving energy.

B．Designing a typical domestic kitchen appliance.

C．Developing a new use for the existing technology.

D．Adopting different approaches to existing problems.

3.

A．They don’t sell well.	B．They don’t look appealing.
C．They often cost too much.	D．They vary in appearance.

4.

A．To push a button.	B．To turn on the dishwasher.
C．To decorate the pool.	D．To break the glass.

3 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．They expect to see receivers’ happiness.

B．They regard them as fashionable appliances.

C．They want to show their taste in gift choices.

D．They value the feelings delivered by the gifts.

2.

A．Their appearance.

B．Their packaging.

C．Their price.

D．Their usefulness.

3.

A．Write it on the wish list.	B．Tell givers directly what we want.
C．Follow a gift-giving process.	D．Browse Amazon to buy it.

4 . It’s 3000 years ago, and people make the things they need by hand. They use metals, such as bronze and tin, to make tools and weapons, but these metals are hard to find. A group of people called the Hittites begin ________with a unique rock called iron ore, which is easy to find and mine. They make a(n) ________: By heating this rock, they get a new metal, called iron, which they can shape into sharp knives and other tools. The Hittites see little use for iron, ________, beyond making these simple tools. Never in their wildest dreams can they imagine the ________ iron will have on the world. But it’s where the story of the ________ begins.

This early form of iron isn’t strong enough for large things like buildings. Over thousands of years, though, people learned ways to make iron stronger. They ________ their rock ovens, raising the temperature and adding different minerals to the ore. Each experiment ________ the process, as people learned to change iron into carbon steel.

Finally, in 1855, an English engineer named Henry Bessemer invented a machine that turned large amounts of iron into steel in just minutes, which is strong and can be made into nearly any ________, including frames for tall buildings. Still the first skyscraper wasn’t built for almost 30 years. Why? Nobody wanted to walk up and down all those stairs. Tall buildings need a way to elevate people and objects. Although elevators existed, they weren’t safe enough for people. Pretty soon, seeing steel cables supporting bridges led people to ________ how steel cables could make elevators safe. And with safe elevators, you could build much ________ buildings. In 1884, the Home Insurance Building, the first skyscraper, rose. It was 138 feet high — higher than any other building at that time. It had ten storeys and four elevators — a miracle at the time!

The mighty skyscraper is much more than a building, though: It’s a ________ of what we can accomplish when we just try things. Inventions come from ideas, big and small, and from people old and young. So put on your thinking caps, because the great inventions of the future ________ your ideas today!

1.

A．competing

B．struggling

C．cooperating

D．experimenting

2.

A．decision

B．operation

C．discovery

D．occupation

3.

A．therefore

B．however

C．furthermore

D．moreover

4.

A．profit

B．impact

C．response

D．version

5.

A．exploration

B．innovation

C．commitment

D．skyscraper

6.

A．tracked

B．located

C．adjusted

D．employed

7.

A．simplified

B．fulfilled

C．observed

D．improved

8.

A．object

B．shape

C．element

D．command

9.

A．think about

B．look into

C．participate in

D．soak up

10.

A．safer

B．stronger

C．larger

D．taller

11.

A．diagram

B．symbol

C．profile

D．source

12.

A．focus on

B．flood into

C．depend on

D．work out

5 . ChatGPT became the hottest issue due to its ability to produce human-sounding essays, poetry, and screenplays on virtually any subject in seconds. Soon after ChatGPT was released, the potential for it to be misused to do things such as spread misinformation and write junk mails became apparent. Schools and educators also have warned of the potential for students to use it to write essays or other work they have been assigned. Last December, the software passed all three parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination as part of a research experiment.

So the startup, OpenAI behind the viral chatbot, revealed a tool for detecting text generated by artificial intelligence amid growing concerns the technology will be abused by cheaters, junk mail senders and others. OpenAI said that its so-called AI classifier was designed to help people distinguish between text written by a human versus a range of artificial intelligence programs—not just ChatGPT.

OpenAI said it had schools in mind when developing its latest classifier tool. “We recognize that identifying AI-written text has been an important point of discussion among educators, and equally important is recognizing the limits and impacts of AI-generated text classifiers in the classroom,” it said.

The classifier isn’t good enough on its own, though it can be used to go with methods that educators, employers and others rely on to determine the source of a piece of text. In evaluations, the new tool correctly identified 26% of AI-written text as “likely AI-written”, while it also had false positives 9% of the time in which it incorrectly labeled human-written text as AI-written. Another problem is that the tool can’t easily tell if a list of facts—U.S. state capitals for example—was written by a person or AI, because the correct answer would be the same. AI-written text can also be edited to escape the classifier.

“While it is impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text, classifiers like ours can be updated and re-trained based on successful attacks,” OpenAI said. “But it is unclear whether detection has an advantage in the long-term.”

1. ChatGPT’s passing the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam is mentioned to __________.

A．account for its operating principles

B．illustrate its complex structure

C．emphasize its growing popularity

D．warn against its potential danger

2. What’s the function of AI classifier?

A．Deepening the impact of AI writers.

B．Identifying the texts generated by AI.

C．Promoting the use of AI in classroom discussion.

D．Arousing educators’ awareness of AI-related technology.

3. What can be concluded from the evaluation of AI classifier?

A．It is a work-in-progress.

B．It is good at storing factual information.

C．It can help a journalist to edit a text.

D．It is a reliable educational tool.

4. What does OpenAI think of AI classifier?

A．It will be reliable after continuous self-update and retraining.

B．Whether it can help educators in the long-term is out of question.

C．Whether it can solve the problems as intended remains a question.

D．It will succeed in detecting all human-written texts in the near future.

7 . How to show others you care

The idea that kindness can boost happiness is hardly new. Studies have shown that prosocial behavior — basically, voluntarily helping others — can help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection, like texting a friend, mean more than many of us realize.     1    

“I have found that kindness can be a really hard sell,” said Tara Cousineau, a clinical psychologist, “People desire kindness yet often feel troubled by the thought of being kind.”     2     They may question whether their gesture or gift will be misinterpreted, or whether it will make the recipient feel pressured to pay it back.

    3     Jennifer Oldham, who lost her 9-year-old daughter Hallie in July, recently created a Facebook group — Keeping Kindness for Hallie — that encourages participants to engage in random acts of kindness. People have bought groceries and donated school supplies in Hallie’s honor. “It will help your own heart, maybe even more than the recipients,” said Ms. Oldham.

If you are not already in the habit of performing random kind acts, or if it does not come naturally to you, start by thinking about what you like to do. It’s not about you being like, ‘Oh man, now I have to learn how to bake cookies in order to be nice’. It’s about:     4     And how can you turn that into an offering for other people?

A．What skills and talents do you already have?

B．Stress can also keep people from being kind to others.

C．Why are recipients less likely to appreciate a random act of kindness?

D．But an act of kindness is unlikely to fail, and in some instances it can create even more kindness.

E．People who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it.

F．But researchers who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new findings strengthen the scientific case for making these types of gestures more often.

8 . Colleges today often operate as machines for putting too many opportunities before already advantaged people. Our educational system focuses too much on helping students take the next step. But it does not give them adequate _______ in thinking about the substance of the lives toward which they are advancing. Many institutions today have _______ that it is an essential part of education to teach the young the art of choosing, and to train them to use _______ to decide which efforts deserve the investment of their lives.

We spent many years teaching on a college campus, trying to help students struggling with their confusion. Eventually, we sought to address this problem _______, by designing a course intended to introduce the young to the art of choosing. The course begins with Plato’s “Gorgias” — a messy dialogue that turns on a(n) _______ over whether the pursuit of virtue or of pleasure is the way to a good life. The dialogue ends _______; no one is satisfied. But with remarkable regularity, it _______ the kind of thinking that students need to better understand the choices that shape their lives.

Students’ first reaction to the “Gorgias” is disbelief, sometimes even horror. It is the dialogue’s _______ that alarms them: the idea that we can seriously argue about what represents the human good. Everything in their education has led them to believe that such arguments cannot bear fruit.

Most students are _______ to discover this art of choosing. Learning to reason about happiness is as delightful as discovering that one’s voice can be made to sing. Why, then, do institutions ________ teach it? In some cases, intelligence members are encouraged to ________ specialized research rather than thinking about the good life. In others, they share the belief that feeling is a more ________ guide to happiness than the mind.

Colleges should self-consciously prioritize initiating students into a culture of ________ reflection on how to live. Doing so will hold them ________ performing their proper work: helping young people learn to give reasons for the choices that shape their lives and to ________ about the ends they pursue.

1.

A．assistance

B．protection

C．recognition

D．treatment

2.

A．forgotten

B．promised

C．repeated

D．responded

3.

A．determination

B．imagination

C．memory

D．reason

4.

A．controversially

B．effortlessly

C．resistantly

D．systematically

5.

A．argument

B．lecture

C．performance

D．session

6.

A．automatically

B．inconclusively

C．indirectly

D．unnecessarily

7.

A．abuses

B．awakens

C．demonstrates

D．echoes

8.

A．assumption

B．pattern

C．progress

D．variation

9.

A．grateful

B．quick

C．reluctant

D．shocked

10.

A．commonly

B．effectively

C．rarely

D．strictly

11.

A．direct

B．emphasize

C．review

D．sponsor

12.

A．detailed

B．formal

C．qualified

D．reliable

13.

A．logical

B．moral

C．spiritual

D．theoretical

14.

A．eager for

B．patient with

C．responsible for

D．skilled at

15.

A．complain

B．experiment

C．question

D．reflect

9 . What is Key to Learning and Creativity?

IQ is often regarded as a crucial driver of success, particularly in fields such as science, innovation and technology.     1     But the truth is that some of the greatest achievements by our species have primarily relied on qualities such as creativity, imagination, curiosity and so on.

Many of these characteristics are embedded in what scientists call “cognitive flexibility” — a skill that enables us to switch between different concepts, or to adapt behaviour to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment.     2     This includes changing strategies for first-rank decision-making. In our ongoing research, we are trying to work out how people can best boost their cognitive flexibility.

Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is not leading to success and to make the appropriate changes to achieve it. If you normally take the same route to work, but there are now roadworks on your usual route, what do you do? Some people remain inflexible and stick to the original plan, despite the delay.     3    

Cognitive flexibility may have affected how people coped with the pandemic lockdowns, which produced new challenges around work and schooling. Some of us found it easier than others to adapt our routines to do many activities from home.     4     Others, however, struggled and eventually became more inflexible in their thinking. They stuck to the same routine activities, with little flexibility or change.

A．It also supports academic and work skills such as problem solving.

B．In fact, many people have an endless fascination with the IQ scores of famous people.

C．More flexible people adapt to the unexpected event and try every means to find a solution.

D．It is essentially about learning to learn and being able to be flexible about the way you learn.

E．That’s because people who are cognitively flexible are better recognising potential faults in themselves and using strategies to overcome these faults.

F．Such flexible people may also have changed these routines from time to time, trying to find better and more varied ways of going about their day.

10 . 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. structured       B. treasures       C. revolution             D. accessible       E. professions       F. responsive G. promises       H. formalized       I. popularized             J. declared       K. creation

How the Victorians Invented the “ Staycation ”

Holidays feel like an important refreshment after such a tough year. While international travel is possible, it’s not exactly easy, so many are choosing to stay closer to home, taking a “staycation ”. This year holidaymakers are discovering the     1     of the UK’s coast and the beauty of its landscapes.

Domestic tourism as we know it began in the 19th century when the idea of the holiday was just becoming     2     . Expanding railways and changing work practices meant people had more leisure time for travelling. International travel was becoming easier but wasn’t     3     to all, so the Victorians chose to spend this newfound “ free ” time in the UK.

This gave way to the     4     of hot new holiday destinations, mostly on the UK’s coast. Great British seaside towns, from Bournemouth to Brighton, appealed to people with     5     of fun, sea and clean air — many of the things that continue to attract people today.

The great summer holiday as we know it was designed by the Victorians. The 19th century saw the industrial     6     and the rise of industrial capitalism, where factories were booming and work structures were more clearly and severely defined and presented. This led to the emergence of administrative     7     , like clerks, and an emerging middle class.

There was more     8     working time, including shift work in factories and time off on Sundays. As a result, working-class people had leisure time to use, and by the 1890s some skilled workers had half days on Saturdays, leading to the birth of the “ weekend ” — though this was not     9     until much later in the 20th century.

In 1871 the Bank Holidays Act was passed. This appointed certain days as holidays on which banks closed, though, over the years, more businesses began observing these days off work. Before 1830, banks closed only on the 40 saints’ days of the year, though by 1834 this was just four days, including Christmas day. From 1871, any day could be     10     a bank holiday, not just saints’ days.