It is a hot sunny Saturday morning on the farm. Maya, Duksie and Doobie are helping Mama K in her vegetable garden. The children work all morning.
Mama K always gives the children a treat for helping her. Sometimes it’s cake or chocolate; sometimes it’s apples, pears or oranges. Mama K has only one rule. “Share it fair!” The children know they must share the treats equally, so they all get the same amount.
Today Mama K has baked a round strawberry cake with pink icing (糖霜) and berries from her garden. The children wait on the grass for their treat. “Here you go!” smiles Mama K. “But remember the rule. Share it fair!”
Maya has the first turn to share the cake. She uses the knife to draw lines in the icing. The others watch her. She does not cut the cake yet. The others must first agree if her way is fair. “I think I will make two cuts down like this. Now we have three slices, all the same!” Maya shows them. There is one line on the left and the other on the right.
“No way!” says Duksie. “The one in the middle is much too big!” Doobie also shakes his head. Maya laughs and tells Duksie to try.
“Pass me the knife.I’ll do it,” says Duksie First she rubs out Maya’s pattern in the icing, and then she makes one cut across and one down. “Look, I have made my three slices!” “That’s not fair!” shout Maya and Doobie together,.
“Why don’t you try, Doobie?” says Duksie. “I bet you can’t do it!”
“I wish the cake was a square, and then it would be easy!” says Doobie thoughtfully. And then! A picture comes into Doobie’s head. He sees the silver badge (标识) at the front of his father’s big red Benz truck. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I know how to do it,” shouts Doobie.
“How did you work it out?” Maya asks. Doobie smiles to himself. For now it’s his secret. Later, he will tell his dad.
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。
First Doobie uses a knife to smooth Duksie’s lines in the icing.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________With Mama K’s encouragement, Maya takes charge, expertly cutting along Doobie’s lines to make three equal slices.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________“Mom, please,” Ann a begged eagerly. “Please, let me do it by myself!” She had never made cookies by herself before, but at the age of nine, she felt capable of handling many things. Her friends had been baking cupcakes for a year. Yet, it seemed her parents had little faith in her.
“Anna is going to make cookies? Alone?” her brother, Carl, asked with a laugh. “That is going to be disaster!” Carl used big words to act smarter than Anna. Having a big brother could be annoying. Admittedly, Anna always appeared clumsy. But that was before she turned nine. She thought her parents should realize she would do better now.
At her words, a flash of uncertainty crossed her parents’ faces. Would they agree? Holding her breath, she had waited for what seemed like ages. Surprisingly, Mom nodded, saying, “Okay, but please be careful, and remember to take a look at the cookbook first.”
Fueled by determination, Anna raced to the kitchen. With each step, there was a sense of purpose and confidence growing within her. She had already done it with Mom a million times before. Putting the cookbook aside, she got down to baking cookies from memory, breaking eggs, dropping a cold stick of butter, adding salt and then…um…yes, mixing it well! Using a mixer was easy. She turned on the mixer at the medium speed—and whoa. Whoa. Whoa! Butter splattered (飞溅) everywhere, making the kitchen in a mess. Collecting herself, she turned back to the mixing bowl and started again. This time with softer butter.
Anna placed rounded spoonfuls of mixture onto the cookie pan and put it into the oven (烤炉). Within a few minutes, a fantastic smell filled the kitchen- the smell of cookie success! She was going to silence all those doubts. No more eye-rolling from her big brother. No more “You’re too young, Anna” from her parents. She believed she was grown up and mature enough to be relied on.
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。
The moment Anna pulled the pan out of the oven, Carl stepped into the kitchen.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Now she decided to have another try, carefully following the cookbook.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Brad Howard, a Texas father, had enough of his son’s disruptive (扰乱性的) behavior in physics class. Despite multiple warnings and complaints from the teacher about his son’s excessive (过多的) talking, the situation didn’t improve.
So, Brad decided to take matters into his own hands and gave his son, Bradley, a final warning. Brad made a bold promise to his son, saying, “Hey, if we get another call, I’m going to show up in school and sit beside you in class. ”
The 17-year-old Bradley probably thought his dad was just bluffing (唬人) and continued his chatty (爱闲聊的) ways. But when Brad received another email from the teacher, he knew he had to follow through with his threat.
On the morning of the important day, Brad’s wife woke him up and said, “Brad, it’s time for you to go to school. ” It struck him what he had said. He just couldn’t but a bit regret, “Oh, no, what have I done? ”
Despite his unwillingness, Brad was determined to keep his word and headed to his son’s high school.
The sight of Brad sitting next to Bradley in class was a source of amusement for Bradley’s friends, who found the situation ridiculous. Bradley, on the other hand, was less than thrilled.
He couldn’t believe that his dad had actually gone through with his threat, The embarrassment of having his own father sitting beside him in class was enough to make him regret his behavior. As the class started, Bradley could feel all eyes on him and his dad. He could sense the judgment and the whispers from his classmates.
“Hey, Bradley, it looks like your dad is really serious about this, ” one of his friends whispered across the hallway, trying to hold back a laugh.
“Yeah, this is so embarrassing, ” Bradley whispered, his cheeks turning a deep shade of red.
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。
But as the class progressed, something unexpected happened.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________After school, Bradley hesitantly approached his dad with newfound appreciation.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 . The curb cut (下斜路缘) is a convenience that most of us rarely, if ever, notice. Yet, without it, daily life might be a lot harder — in more ways than one. Pushing a baby stroller (婴儿推车) onto the curb, skateboarding onto a sidewalk or taking a full grocery cart from the sidewalk to your car — all these tasks are easier because of the curb cut.
But it was created with a different purpose in mind.
It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the 1970s, most sidewalks in the United States ended with a sharp drop-off. That was a big deal for people in wheelchairs because there were no ramps (斜坡) to help them move along city blocks without assistance. According to one disability rights leader, a six-inch curb “might as well have been Mount Everest”. So, activists from Berkeley, California, who also needed wheelchairs, organized a campaign to create tiny ramps to help people dependent on wheels move up and down curbs independently.
I think about the “curb cut effect” a lot when working on issues around health equity (公平). The first time I even heard about the curb cut was in a 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece by PolicyLink CEO Angela Blackwell. Blackwell rightly noted that many people see equity “as a zero-sum game.” Basically, there is “a prejudice that intentionally supporting one group hurts another.” What the curb cut effect shows, Blackwell said, is that “when society creates the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully, everyone wins.”
There are multiple examples of this principle at work. For example, investing in policies that create more living-wage jobs or increase the availability of affordable housing certainly benefits people in communities that have limited options. But the action also provides those people with opportunities for better health and the moans to become contributing members of society — and those benefits everyone. Even the football huddle (围成一团以秘密商讨) was initially created to help deaf football players at Gallaudet College keep their game plans secret from opponents who could have read their sign language. Today, it’s used by every team to prevent the opponent from learning about game-winning strategies.
So, next time you cross the street, or roll your suitcase through a crosswalk or ride your bike directly onto a sidewalk, think about how much the curb cut, the design that benefits one group of people at a disadvantage, has helped not just that group, but all of us.
1. By “might as well have been Mount Everest” (paragraph 3), the disability rights leader implies that a six-inch curb may become ______.| A．as famous as the world’s highest mountain | B．an almost impassable barrier |
| C．a connection between people | D．a most unforgettable matter |
| A．it’s fair to give the disadvantaged more help than others |
| B．it’s impossible to have everyone be treated equally |
| C．it’s necessary to go all out to help the disabled |
| D．it’s not worthwhile to promote health equity |
| A．Reading machines for blind people helped build the navigation system in the car. |
| B．The four great inventions of ancient China spread to the west. |
| C．Your reaching out to the disadvantaged contributes to more people doing it. |
| D．A butterfly flapping its wings in one country leads to a Tornado in another country. |
| A．Everyday items are originally invented for people with disabilities. |
| B．Everyone in a society should pursue what is in his or her interest. |
| C．A disability rights leader changed the life of his fellow men. |
| D．Caring for disadvantaged groups may finally benefit all. |
1.
2.
3.
4.
| A．Health. | B．Education. | C．Employment. |
| A．Have an interview. |
| B．Raise some money. |
| C．Receive some training |
Postcards from the World
While the sun washed over the grass of my grandmother’s front garden, I sank into one of her armchairs familiar to me. Life, as I knew it, had changed. My beloved grandmother, my Nanny, as a ”parent“ in the absence of my father, had cancer. It was terminal (晚期的).
As she watched Getaway, a Sunday afternoon TV program, she remarked to me that she’d never left Australia and that now she never would. Seeing her restricted to ”travel" by watching TV, I swallowed the sadness that came with knowing that chapters of her life were to be left unwritten.
At work, feeling helpless, I wiped tables and took orders and thought. Hard. The Saturday afternoon lunch rush was not enough to stop me from my thoughts. Collapsed with growing sorrow, I was reminded of the power of Facebook and the collective strength of human sympathy. I raced from the end of my shift to ask strangers on the Internet for help.
My Nanny Del has cancer. It’s terminal and she will never see the world. Please send her postcards so she can see the world from her armchair. I can offer nothing but gratitude.
I resolved not to breathe a word of this; if nothing came, I couldn’t bear to carry her disappointment along with my own. . And if something should wander into our humble little letterbox, I vould consider it a blessing and embrace it gratefully.
Days turned to weeks: Nothing. And Nanny’s health declined rapidly. I was trying to balance my full-time study, babysitting and waiting tables with the tiring responsibility of caring for my grandmother. As I helped Nanny in the early hours of those mornings, she would chat to me, sometimes reflections of her lifetime, and other times, the disturbance caused by medication. She seldom talked about her regret of being unable to travel, but I was still hoping for something.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150个左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
One afternoon, about six weeks after my Facebook post, a travel-worn postcard arrived in our letterbox.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________My dreams of armchair travels became a reality.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________8 . 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. |
9 . In July 1915, sick James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had devoted 36 years to the dictionary. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.
The story of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable tales in “The Dictionary People”. Conceived (构思) in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project comprising 3,000 people. The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, old-fashioned, new” words were used. What is surprising about this random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.
The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, an editor for the OED, went into the archives (档案馆) of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. “The Dictionary People” is her work of detective scholarship, presenting the lives behind the names.
The dictionary’s contributors are an engaging cast, including one of Karl Marx’s daughters and J. R. R. Tolkien. For some, the dictionary was something addictive: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations. Murray, too, was assiduous. He once wrote to George Eliot to ask about a word choice in “Romola”, published 17 years earlier.
Ms Ogilvie’s book is full of strange but interesting tales. Many dictionary lovers engaged in another crowdsourcing fashion: collecting and measuring rainwater. The presentation of the book is irregular, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. For example, in her first chapter, “A for Archaeologist (考古学家),” she relates the early life of Margaret A. Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist. There are 26 alphabetical (按字母顺序排列的) chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors. This is a clever concept.
1. What did the OED’s volunteers do?| A．They deleted the words going out of use. |
| B．They listed instances of changes in word use. |
| C．They corrected the misuse of common words. |
| D．They added new words to keep up with the times. |
| A．What Ogilvie achieved with it. | B．How Ogilvie told the stories in it. |
| C．What inspired Ogilvie to write it. | D．Who helped Ogilvie to complete it. |
| A．Hard-working. | B．Easy-going. | C．Energetic. | D．Flexible. |
| A．Interesting and creative. | B．Encouraging and influential. |
| C．Traditional and funny. | D．Descriptive and surprising. |
10 . Jackdaws (寒鸦) are the smallest member of the crow family. They often live in a crowd. Indeed, when cold weather comes, they gather in the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) every evening so that they can sleep in the same place. If you’ve ever heard jackdaws during their evening gatherings and morning departures, you’ll know they are not quiet birds. Despite being fairly low-volume during the day, they are really loud on either side of their night-time get-togethers. Why might this be?
A team of the Cornish Jackdaw Project set out to determine why jackdaws are so noisy before they depart from their sleeping spot. The team’s theory was that the morning calls might be a jackdaw version of “voting”. The researchers suspected that each individual’s call might count as an “I’m in!”. When a certain amount of “I’m in!”s are called —and so a certain volume of noise is reached -the group might then depart as a unit.
To test this idea, the researchers artificially increased the level of calls during the jackdaws’ natural morning calls. Their expectation was that, if jackdaws really are “voting with their voice” to decide when to depart the sleeping site, artificially adding calls would make them leave earlier than they naturally would have done. Subsequent experiments confirmed their expectation. The team therefore showed that jackdaws use their calls as a sort of voting system.
You might wonder why this happens. The researchers suggest that individual jackdaws benefit from the voting system because they are less at risk of being killed and they can get more access to social information — such as where to find food.
So the loud calls of jackdaws in the morning are therefore not the pure chaos it sounds like. If you are ever being driven mad by the sound in the morning, you can find comfort in the fact that the louder they get, the sooner they will leave you in peace.
1. What aspect of jackdaws confused scientists?| A．Their strong team spirit. | B．Their preference for noisy habitats. |
| C．Their collective sleeping habit. | D．Their unusual calling behavior. |
| A．They stopped calling together. | B．They left their sleeping spot earlier. |
| C．They became noisier and more active. | D．They changed their sleeping location. |
| A．A signal of seeking food. | B．A strategy for better survival. |
| C．A way to attract potential partners. | D．A method of displaying social skills. |
| A．Jackdaws are Noise Makers. |
| B．Jackdaws Have a Complex Voting System. |
| C．Jackdaws ‘Vote’ to Make a Group Decision. |
| D．Jackdaws ‘Vote’ to Choose Their Group Leaders. |
