1 . 
Take Off with Historic Hiring Growth
A message from Kate Gebo
Welcome aboard!
We are so happy to have you fly with us. I’m sure you’ve thought about United as a way to travel, and with over 95,000 employees and growing, our company is also the center for rewarding careers.
I could not be prouder to lead Human Resources at United during this exciting time for our company, while we’re building the biggest and best airline in the history of aviation. Earlier this year, we announced that we are on track to hire at least 15,000 new employees by the end of this year.
When people think of career opportunities at United, they often think of being a pilot or flight attendant. In reality, our organization has a wide variety of roles in addition to our fantastic pilots and flight attendants, with jobs and functions to keep our airports running and our planes flying.
Whether it’s for operational roles, such as ramp service employees, customer service representatives, and aircraft technicians, or for corporate roles in human resources, digital technology, and social media, we’re hiring across every function of the airline, seeking strong talent that will take us to new heights.
A role at United is not just a job; it’s a career. Many of our employees have taken on new roles in different departments throughout their tenure (聘用期), which we support to develop and invest in our workforce. In the past seven years, more than 1,500 frontline employees were promoted to management roles, and 78 % of our senior leaders were promoted internally.
Beyond the traditional career paths, we’re proud to create new paths to help our talent pipelines fulfill some of the industry’s most critical job functions. Aviate, our pilot career development program, offers aspiring and established pilots a path to the United flight deck. Calibrate is our full-time, paid apprenticeship program for those wanting to go into aircraft maintenance and other technical operational roles. Our newly launched Innovate program helps provide the skills and experiences needed to succeed in a technology career at United.
We’re hiring from coast to coast, at our seven major hubs and across a broad range of positions. If you’re ready to join me and 95,000 of the industry’s best and brightest at United, I encourage you to visit careers.united.com today to see what opportunities await you. Your career is cleared for takeoff.
United with you,
Kate Gebo
Executive Vice President,
Human Resources and Labor Relations
1. What is the main purpose of this passage?| A．Guarantee to provide first-class customer service. |
| B．Promote frontline employees to management roles. |
| C．Introduce jobs available in some departments of United. |
| D．Advertise for United to enroll pilots and flight attendants. |
| A．Visit careers.united.com, and you can see positions available. |
| B．Employees at United can change their jobs with interest. |
| C．Employees have to keep their positions throughout their tenure. |
| D．The United is making efforts to be the biggest and best airline. |
| A．The full-time, paid apprenticeship program. | B．The traditional United career path. |
| C．The newly launched Innovate program. | D．The new paths for talent pipelines. |
Kangaroos can “talk” to us
Kangaroos can “talk” to people, according to a new study. The report is the first research of its kind to be done on marsupials—a type of creature whose young get carried in skin pockets on their mother’s body. It suggests kangaroos are cleverer than previously thought.
Researchers from the University of Roehampton in the UK and the University of Sydney in Australia tested kangaroos at the Australian Reptile (爬行动物) Park, Wildlife Sydney Zoo and Kangaroo Protection Co-operative. The scientists put food in a box that the kangaroos could not open, and waited to see what the animals would do. Rather than giving up, 10 out of the 11 kangaroos actively looked at the person who had put the food in the box and then looked at the box. The researchers said this could be interpreted as the kangaroos requesting help to open the container.
Dr Alexandra Green, a co-author of the study, told The Guardian newspaper that some of the kangaroos actually approached the person and started scratching (挠) and sniffing (嗅) him, then looked back at the box. “So they were really trying to communicate,” Green said. This behaviour is not uncommon in animals. However, it is usually only seen in domesticated animals, such as pets or farm animals. The lead author of the study, Dr Alan McElligott, explained, “Through this study, we were able to see that communication between creatures can be learnt and that the behaviour of looking at humans to access food is not related to domestication. “Indeed, kangaroos showed a very similar pattern of behaviour we have seen in dogs, horses and even goats, when put to the same test,” he added.
It is hoped that the study will give people a more positive attitude towards kangaroos, which are sometimes seen as harmful creatures that damage farmers’ crops.
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3 .
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| A．no taxes of any kind are put on municipal bonds |
| B．Investment in municipal bonds is relatively safe |
| C．Hennion & Walsh are billionaire investors |
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| A．It shares risk-free bond investing skills. |
| B．It recommends bond investing specialists. |
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| D．It proposes investing plans for reference only. |
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| C．sheltered by the government in a way |
| D．subject to the major infrastructure projects |
| A．Municipal bond administrators. |
| B．Federal tax calculators. |
| C．The copyright owners of the Bond Guide. |
| D．Senior-citizen investors. |
4 . If you search the internet these days, you’ll likely run across some strange-looking, yet cheerful cartoon characters. These computer-created people have small heads and overdone bodies. They’re created in daring color with arms and legs that look like giant wet noodles. The happy figures are often moving or doing something creative.
In 2017 Facebook paid a design team to develop a positive illustration system. One of the designers took that message to heart. She worked to show human connection, motion, energy and joy in her drawings. She “wanted to picture that sense of joy people feel when they’re sharing things together....” The name which was given to the new art form when it was completed was very appropriate. They named it Alegria, which means joy in Spanish. Before long Alegria became the go-to style for many technology and media businesses. Corporations such as Google, Airbnb and YouTube began using Alegria or art with Alegria-type similarities. Today you can find Alegria art across the internet, in print, on magazine covers and more.
Why did Alegria art become popular so quickly? There are many reasons. As websites depended on illustrations to fill space, Alegria-type art became increasingly useful. The style is flat, simple and easy to create. By comparison, more detailed art designs require extra time, skill and money to produce. Businesses also love the fact that Alegria’s characters celebrate diversity by featuring international cultural events. The illustrations convey good feelings. Those feelings help people believe they can trust the companies that feature them on their pages.
For some consumers, though, that’s a problem. These people think some companies have simply papered over their problems with positive images. They’ve failed to address their wrongdoings or make lasting changes. For many, however, Alegria is a nice visual language that represents happiness. From children hugging to couples dancing, the images are all about positive energy. All in all, it seems that Alegria is the perfect name of this playful, fun art style.
1. Which of the following features makes Alegria art style so well received quickly?| A．Its cheerful room-filling images. |
| B．Its trustworthy figures. |
| C．Its role as cultural representatives. |
| D．Its eye-catching details. |
| A．Alegria images may help hide faults |
| B．positive images convey funny messages |
| C．illustrations can be audio in some way |
| D．small-sized cartoon characters enjoy popularity |
| A．system and creativity | B．technology and impact |
| C．popularity and profit | D．meaning and function |
Men may eat more in summer
Winter may be seen as the time to fill up with food, but in fact, sunny summer months are when men eat more calories—unlike women.
The effect seems to occur because sunlight makes the skin release an appetite-stimulating hormone (激素), says Carmit Levy at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Levy and her colleagues noticed the effect in experiments in mice, in which male animals exposed to UV light (紫外线) ate more food.
To see if humans do the same, the team used data on about 3000 people who had filled in questionnaires as part of the Israeli government’s national health and nutrition survey. Between March and September, the men consumed about 17 per cent more calories per day than they did during the rest of the year, while the women’s food intake stayed about the same.
Human appetite is influenced by many complex systems, but a substance called ghrelin, a hormone produced in the body that stimulates appetite, seems to be the only hormone that directly stimulates eating. It was thought to be mainly produced by the stomach when empty. “It tells the brain to eat more,” says Caroline Gorvin at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Further investigation revealed that exposing male mice to UVB (紫外线 B 段波) radiation, which is present in sunlight, raised levels of ghrelin production by fat cells in their skin. This was blocked by the female sex hormone, which may explain why the effect wasn’t seen in the female mice or the women. Boosted ghrelin production was also seen in men’s skin samples that were exposed to UV light in the lab.
Skin hasn’t previously been thought to play a role in appetite, says Gorvin. The reason for the effect is unclear, but it may be an adaptive response to fuel greater physical activity in summer, says Levy.
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6 . In the film Inside Out, 11-year-old Riley’s emotions are personified as brightly colored internal figures that drive her behaviors. The same five emotions—anger, fear, disgust (憎恶), sadness, and joy—appear in every other character’s head as well, functioning in much the same way in each individual. In Western cultures, this is the case, argues psychologist Batja Mesquita in Between Us. Emotions in such contexts, she writes, are considered “MINE,” or “Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist,” the latter defined in the book as always having the same properties.
This conception of emotion is not universal, however. Emotions elsewhere, she argues, are thought of as “OURS”—“OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated.” Using this distinction, Mesquita sets about contrasting emotions in “the West,” where the individual is the top concern, with “the Rest,” where community is prioritized.
Mesquita describes amae as a central emotion in Japanese culture, where it builds interdependence by encouraging tolerance in parenting process. She describes hasham—which includes shame, embarrassment, and social respectability—as a fundamental emotion for Egyptian Bedouins (游牧人). Such observations provide a background for her to explore a range of issues, including childhood socialization, the nature of friendship, the role of language in shaping emotions, and cross-cultural communication in a globalized world.
Despite Mesquita’s emphasis on cross-cultural emotions, there is little discussion of whether the MINE-OURS dichotomy (二分法) accurately explains global cultural variation. Other scholars have noted, for example, that hunter-gatherer societies at the same time emphasize both individual self-government and social cooperation. And in an apparent contradiction to her earlier arguments, Mesquita herself ultimately concludes that Westerners have OURS emotions.
Taken as a whole, however, the book contributes much to the discussion of the origins of emotions, presenting a remarkable collection of cross-cultural studies intermixed with personal stories about foreign residents’ struggles to reunite diverse emotional and social worlds. In chapter 8, for example, Mesquita describes an incident where she—a Dutch native living in the United States—bumped into the famous American psychologist Hazel Markus at a conference Markus helped organize. Wishing to express understanding of Markus’s workload, Mesquita declared “You look a little tired.” The remark appeared to make Markus nervous and confused but was intended as an expression of sympathy—to sympathize in Dutch is to acknowledge suffering, not offer comfort as in the US.
The book’s take-home message is fundamental: There are no natural emotions, no inborn emotions, no universal emotions. Mesquita argues that emotions are “meaning making” and “a preparation for action” and that the idea of “emotions as inner states” is a Western construct. Instead, she suggests that emotions are a “dance” cocreated between people who live in a specific cultural context at a particular historical moment.
1. In Between Us, Mesquita indicates that ______.| A．the Japanese build kids’ emotion of shame in parenting |
| B．MINE-OURS dichotomy is the very cause of cross-cultural emotions |
| C．emotions outside “the West” are considered community-centred |
| D．hunter-gatherers have both emotions of “OURS” and “MINE” |
| A．the emotion of sympathy is to offer help in Dutch culture |
| B．foreign residents from different cultures usually unite as one |
| C．as Dutch Mesquita shows her personality of warmth and caring |
| D．cross-cultural emotional exchanges probably cause misunderstanding |
| A．Family education hardly influences one’s emotions. |
| B．Sociocultural contexts largely contribute to emotions. |
| C．Western people’s emotions have no properties of OURS. |
| D．Internal factors play a vital role in shaping how we feel. |
| A．The cultural landscape of emotions | B．The cultural origin of emotions |
| C．The cultural convention of emotions | D．The cultural shock of emotions |
7 .
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| A．designed by seniors with great minds |
| B．designed for seniors without enough brains |
| C．tailored specially to the elderly’s needs |
| D．made to ease the elderly’s financial burdens |
| A．it can even read emails to the users |
| B．it has a 22-inch hi-resolution screen |
| C．it has hundreds of online games to choose from |
| D．its buttons are easy to see and understand |
| A．Low-charge Software updates. | B．No put-together task. |
| C．Lightning-fast Microsoft processors. | D．Discounted introductory price. |
| A. defensively B. exited C. initiatively D. landscape E. respond F. thought G. towered H. unaffected I. uninhabited J. welcoming K. winding |
Danger in the desert
That day we were deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert. There the
We had come to this desert to conduct DNA studies on giant horsetails that somehow grow well in one of Earth’s driest places. We were searching for plants in the most remote locations, where they would be
We’d been warned that the trip could be dangerous. Because we were traveling so far from fuel sources, we were told to take along a can of gas. Our destination was at the end of a(n)
We had found the amazing plants and their bright green stocks
9 . The Rise of Fake News
In December 2016 Edgar M. Welch drove six hours from his home to Washington DC, where he opened fire in a pizzeria with a gun. He had formerly read an online news story about the restaurant being the headquarters of a group of child abusers (虐童者).
The story above is one of the most famous examples of the growing phenomenon called ‘fake news’. The conspiracy theory (阴谋论) about the pizzeria began to appear on websites and social networks in late October. This was quickly claimed to be false news by publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Fake news stories can be hard to control for several reasons. Many people mistrust established news sources and others just don’t read them, so the exposing of a fake story by a serious newspaper or TV channel has limited effect. In addition, the internet is very hard to police.
Reasons why people create fake news are various. Some have political motives, to belittle their opponents. Other websites, like The Onion, deliberately publish fake news as satire — humorous comment on society and current affairs. Another group is in it for the profit: many people clicking on entertaining fake news stories can bring in a lot of advertising income. One man running fake news sites from Los Angeles made up to US $ 30,000 a month in this way.
| A．A New York Times article on this got 250,000 hits. |
| B．He decided to investigate for himself; fortunately, no one was hurt. |
| C．There are also those who seem to be motivated partly by money and partly by boredom. |
| D．Those amazing stories about famous people will be covered by the mainstream media if true. |
| E．When caught misusing one media platform, users simply go to another one or start up a website themselves. |
| F．However, many people thought these papers were themselves lying for political ends and instead of disappearing, the fake story snowballed. |
10 . The Tragic Story Behind Pablo Picasso’s Masterpiece
What would be the best way today to protest against a war? How could you influence the largest number of people? In 1937, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso expressed his anger at war with Guernica, his muralsized painting displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World’s Fair. It has since become the 20th century’s most powerful indictment(控诉)against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today.
Much of the painting’s emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, about 3. 49 meters tall and 7.76 meters wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with 6; spatial detachment(空间上的超然).
Guernica is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Adolf Hilter’s powerful German air force bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value. For over three hours, 25 bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives and bombs on the village. Twenty more fighter planes strafed (低空扫射)and killed defenseless civilians trying to escape. The destruction was horrifying: Fires burned for three days, and 70 percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population, 1,600 civilians, were wounded or killed.
On May 1, 1937, news of the bombing reached Paris.
On first glance, Guernica’s composition appears confused, throwing the viewer into the midst of intensely violent action. The space is ambiguous (不明确的)with the shifting perspectives and multiple viewpoints characteristic of Picasso’s earlier Cubist style.
There has been almost endless debate about the meaning of the images in Guernica. When questioned about its possible symbolism, Picasso said, “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise, it would be better if he wrote them out in words. The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”
| A．In the end, the painting does not appear to have one exclusive meaning. |
| B．This technique further demonstrates the boundaries of fragmented figures, explicating what is reality and what is illusion. |
| C．It feels like it wraps around you, immersing you in its larger-than-life figures and action. |
| D．Images overlap and intersect, making it hard to distinguish their boundaries. |
| E．As compensation, Picasso was provided with a studio in Paris large enough to accommodate the enormous canvas on which to create the work. |
| F．Picasso, sympathetic to the government of his homeland, was horrified by the reports of devastation and death. |
