2 . Science may never know what memories play on the mind of the California sea hare, a foot-long marine snail, when it eats algae — a sea plant — in the tide pools of the Pacific coast.

But in a new study, researchers claim to have made headway in understanding the simplest kind of memory a creature might form.

David Glanzman, a neurobiologist at the University of California, believes the kinds of memories that trigger a defensive reaction in the snail are encoded not in the connections between brain cells, as many scientists would argue, but in RNA molecules (分子) that form part of an organism’s genetic machinery.

In an experiment to test the idea, Glanzman implanted wire into the tails of California sea hares, and gave them a series of electrical shocks. The procedure sensitized the animals so that when they were prodded (戳) in a fleshy spout called a siphon, they contracted their gills (鳃状呼吸器官) in a strong defensive action.

After sensitizing the sea snails, Glanzman extracted RNA from the animals and injected it into other sea snails to see what happened. He found the recipient sea snails became sensitized, suggesting the “memory” of the electrical shocks had been transplanted. When Glanzman repeated the experiment with RNA from sea snails that had been hooked up to wires but not shocked, the reaction behavior did not transfer.

Despite the result, the work has not found widespread acceptance. “Obviously further work needs to be carried out to determine whether these changes can happen without failure in a wide range of conditions,” said Prof Sherilynn Vann, who studies memory at Cardiff University. “While the sea hare is a fantastic model for studying basic neuroscience, we must be very cautious in drawing comparisons to human memory processes.”

Tomas Ryan, who studies memory at Trinity College Dublin, is firmly unconvinced. “It’s interesting, but I don’t think they’ve transferred a memory,” he said. “This work tells me that maybe the most basic behavioral responses involve some kind of switch in the animal and there is something in the liquid that Glanzman extracts that is hitting that switch.”

But Ryan added that different thinking about memory was badly needed: “In a field like this which is so full of accepted beliefs, we need as many new ideas as possible. This work takes us down an interesting road, but I have a huge amount of skepticism about it.”

1. Why were the sea hares given electrical shocks?

A．To rob them of their memory.

B．To see how they defend themselves.

C．To break the connection between nerves.

D．To make them sensitive to external stimulations.

2. What conclusion may Glanzman draw from the experiment?

A．Memory can be encoded and changed by people.

B．Only with strong stimulation can sea snails form reaction.

C．The memory giving rise to sea snail’s sensitization is held in RNA.

D．The sea snail’s defense is probably enabled by connectivity of brain cells.

3. According to the passage, the limitations of Glanzman’s experiment involve the following EXCEPT ________.

A．The recipient sea snail’s response may require further confirmation.

B．Variables (变量) in the experiments may not have remained the same.

C．Something else other than RNA in the extract may lead to the recipient’s reaction.

D．The sea snail “memory transplant” may not apply to more complex memory process.

4. The underlined word “skepticism” in the last paragraph is closest in meaning to ________.

A．criticism

B．doubt

C．relief

D．optimism

3 . The Decision That Changed My Life

We make decisions every day. Whether it is a small decision like what to wear that day or a big decision like where to go to college, these decisions have at least some influence on the rest of our lives. I wanted to talk about a decision I made that has changed my life forever.    1    I know that it seems like such a tiny decision, but it truly has changed my life.

I gave up soda about a month and a half before my trip to the Bahamas as a healthy step towards “getting in shape” for my trip. At first I thought it was going to be really hard giving it up, but after that first two weeks I wasn’t thinking about soda at all. One tiling led to another and I started eating better, working out more and just generally living a healthier life. I had already seen a difference in my life following this healthier life style.    2     During my trip I was extremely tempted to drink soda because all we were drinking was water.    3    

That was because I wanted to show those who maybe thought I wouldn’t be able to do it that they were wrong. Soon the urge to drink soda somewhat disappeared and I really did not even become tempted by it by the end of the trip. I got home to the States and when I got back home I decided to weigh myself. I had lost 20 pounds on my trip!

I also wanted to give some advice for those who were in the same situation as I was, where you wanted/needed to give up something that you think you can’t live without.    4     My friends really helped me out by supporting me and reminding me of the reason why I was doing it. Lastly, remember why you are giving it up. Use the goal of you losing weight or being generally healthier to motivate you through the struggle. In the end, giving up soda changed my life and I don’t regret my decision what so ever.

A．You need a support system.

B．I almost gave up a couple of times but stayed strong.

C．I felt happier, more energized and just all around better.

D．Weeks and weeks went by and I still was not missing drinking soda.

E．I hope you are inspired by my story to give up something that is bad for you.

4 . Trying to make a big decision while you’re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to ______ doing that. Most people prefer to have sufficient time to analyze a situation and consider the ______. Feeling stressed changes how people ______ risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the ______ of a possible outcome. Pressure can result in ______ attention and the use of unconscious reasoning. It can force a decision-maker to sort the relevant factors from the irrelevant, and can ______ clear thinking with specific priorities. 

It’s a bit ______ that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California. “This is sort of not what people would think,” Mather says, “Stress is usually associated with disagreeable experiences, so you’d think that maybe I’m going to be more focused on the ______ outcomes.” But researchers have found that when people are under stress — by being told to hold their hand in ice water for a few minutes, for example, or give a speech — they start paying more attention to positive information and ______ negative information. “Stress seems to worsen their learning from negative feedback,” Mather says. This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides. So someone who’s deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the ______ might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute (通勤)。

The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in ______, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. “The compulsion to get the reward comes stronger and they’re less able to ______ it,” Mather says. So a person who’s under stress might think only about the good feelings they’ll get from negative things like a drug, while the ______ shrink to the distance.

Stress also ______ the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more ______ to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative. Mather links this to another research that finds, at difficult times, men tend to face the situation, while women are likely to be more conservative.

1.

A．try

B．delay

C．deny

D．forbid

2.

A．requirements

B．reasons

C．chances

D．alternatives

3.

A．weigh

B．overlook

C．confuse

D．classify

4.

A．imperfection

B．risk

C．advantage

D．uncertainty

5.

A．conflicted

B．focused

C．unexpected

D．separated

6.

A．break off

B．hold up

C．account for

D．bring out

7.

A．surprising

B．fortunate

C．reasonable

D．pleasant

8.

A．conscious

B．immediate

C．negative

D．favorable

9.

A．neglecting

B．enhancing

C．analyzing

D．evaluating

10.

A．position

B．decision

C．qualification

D．schedule

11.

A．judgement

B．progress

C．relationship

D．addiction

12.

A．value

B．adopt

C．resist

D．maintain

13.

A．downsides

B．desires

C．defeats

D．benefits

14.

A．declines

B．increases

C．eliminates

D．worsens

15.

A．reliable

B．reluctant

C．qualified

D．willing

5 . Chances are you’re quite bored of your home by now. Oh sure, you know how lucky you are, if you have a warm and comfortable place to live when so many don’t. But a person could live in a full-on palace and still, at this point in a generation-defining global pandemic, think, “If I have to spend one more day looking at this cornicing (榐板) and those enormous wall sconces (壁式烛台), I will genuinely hurl myself off the balcony.” So allow me to share the greatest tip of all time for making your home more fun: get some wallpaper.

People are very cautious about wallpaper, especially the patterned type. I didn’t fully understand this until my partner and I were house–hunting half a decade ago, after we found out I was expecting twins. Off we went to look at family houses and, while the prices were horrific, the houses were, to my mind, even worse. That’s not fair: they were perfectly fine, but there was something about them that sent me plunging into a low-grade depression. I tried to explain it to the increasingly frustrated estate agents: maybe they were dark? Or they just had a bad atmosphere? Were the ceilings too low? At last, I understood: every house I looked at was painted all white or–worse!–dull grey. Literally, every single one, and I assume the people who lived in them thought they looked fashionable and safely neutral. To me they brought back memories of teenage years spent in a psychiatric unit (精神病病房).

“Safely neutral”: has there ever been a more depressing template (样板) for a home? “Safely neutral” is timidity, the decorating equivalent of a fear of letting yourself have fun in case people laugh at you, or a refusal to state an opinion in case you get it wrong. How so many people can bear to live like that is beyond my comprehension. I know not everyone is a maximalist, but I find it puzzling that people won’t commit to patterned wallpaper because they worry they’ll get tired of it, yet paint their home in the most boring shades possible. Be your fearless self! Make your stamp! If not on the world, then at least on your walls.

By the time we moved into our (entirely white, God help me) house, I was a month away from giving birth to two surprisingly big boys. I could no longer walk, but this in no way broke my stride when it came to sorting out the wallpaper. This was a home I hoped to live in for the next two decades, so I went all out and spent so much on wallpaper that we couldn’t really afford furniture for a while.

1. It can be learned from paragraph 2 that ________.

A．the estate agents finally figured out why the author didn’t like the houses

B．the unaffordable housing prices sent the author into a minor depression

C．the houses the author was hunting turned out to be disappointingly uniform

D．the teenager experience of being in a psychiatric unit troubled the author

2. What does the author think of “safely neutral”?

A．It may bring about ridicule from others.

B．It will make a home much less depressing.

C．It is too abstract for people to understand.

D．It robs us of the chance to pursue pleasure.

3. The underlined sentence in paragraph 3 can be best illustrated as ________.

A．throwing away the apple due to the core	B．dealing with a man as he deals with you
C．killing two birds with one stone	D．cherishing imaginary or groundless fears

4. What’s the purpose of the passage?

A．To highlight the vital importance of wallpaper.

B．To reveal how to add color to home decoration.

C．To indicate why people tend to get depressed.

D．To explain what safe neutrality is all about.

8 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

These days it seems that everywhere you turn you hear stories about how people are psychologically falling apart. On an individual level, I feet it. My late thirties brought about the worst clinical depression I have ever faced.

But there is a real crisis     1     (affect) both men and women in our society — a cultural crisis. We inhabit a cultural landscape that     2     (strip) of meaningful life markers. Of course many rites of passage (人生重大仪式) endure to this day in the modern world — Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, Quinceaneras, Seijin-no-hi, to name but a few. Some might argue that we just need to embrace the ones we have.

But that's not going to work. For one, our world bears very little resemblance to the world     3     gave rise to these traditional rites. Besides, today we live on average much longer lives than we did     4     these traditions were first established. We're not the same people as we were when we developed these tires. It only makes sense, therefore, for us     5     (develop) new ones.

This is     6     my essay starts to run by. I don't know how to do that. Does one crowd-source a ceremony? Does one outsource it to an unusually creative event planning firm — possibly with the help of a philosopher, or a science fiction author?

In an inspiring 2017 TEDx lecture, tech CEO Ron Fritz tells the story of     7     he and his family created entirely new "coming-of-age" rituals for their own children. It involves all the traditional components: involvement of    8     (extend) family and friends, a physical endurance part, a learning-from-an-elder part, and solitary contemplation, I felt immediately jealous, as I had never had     9     like that during my own life. To my mind, this is one of the great blind spots in our modern world. If we're lucky we get some memorable birthday parties, a fun high school graduation, and a not too bad wedding. And after that we're on our own.

This year I turned 42. According to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything. Why not make that our culture's new age threshold (开端) for a middle-aged rite of passage?

We have every reason to be happy about moving into our forties. We live longer and healthier lives than any of our ancestors     10     have dreamed of, and have access to opportunities and information previously unimaginable. Surely we can still be creative in how we live and celebrate our lives.

9 . American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years.The complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul（全面修订）of immigration rules for farm workers.

Congress has obstructed（阻挠）efforts to create a more straightforward visa for agricultural workers that would let foreign workers stay longer in the U.S.and change jobs within the industry.    1     .

Perhaps half of U.S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants.As fewer such workers enter the country，the characteristics of the agricultural workforce are changing. Today's farm laborers.while still predominantly born in Mexico，are more likely to be settled rather than migrating and more likely to be married than single.They're also aging. At the start of this century，about one-third of crop workers were over the age of 35.Now more than half are.And picking crops is hard on older bodies.One oft-debated cure for this labor shortage remains as implausible as it's been all along：Native U.S.workers won't be returning to the farm.

Mechanization isn't the answer，either--not yet，at least. Production of corn，cotton，rice，soybeans，and wheat has been largely mechanized，but many high-value，labor-intensive crops，such as strawberries，need labor.    2     .

As a result，farms have grown increasingly reliant on temporary guest workers using the H-2A visa to fill the gaps in the workforce.Starting around 20l2，requests for the visas rose sharply；from 2011 to 2016 the number of visas issued more than doubled.

    3     . Even so，employers complain they aren't given all the workers they need.The process is cumbersome，expensive，and unreliable.One survey found that bureaucratic delays led H-2A workers to arrive on the job an average of 22 days late.The shortage is compounded by federal immigration raids，which remove some workers and drive others underground.

In a 2012 survey，71 percent of tree-fruit growers and almost 80 percent of raisin and berry growers said they were short of labor.Some western farmers have responded by moving operations to Mexico.    4     . Little more than a decade later，the share of imports was 25.8 percent.

In effect，the U.S.can import food or it can import the workers who pick it.

A．One trouble with U.S. agricultural workforce is the high mobility of crop workers.

B．The H-2A visa has no numerical cap，unlike the H-2B visa for nonagricultural work，which is limited to 66，000 a year.

C．Even dairy farms，where robots do a small share of milking have a long way to go before they're automated.

D．From1998 to 2000，14.5percent of the fruit Americans consumed was imported.

E．To attract younger laborers to the farm work is the much argued solution to the labor shortage in U.S.farming.

F．If this doesn't change，American businesses，communities，and consumers will be the losers.

10 . Direction: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. sign     B. expands     C. sustainability     D. investigate     E. flexible     F. admitted       G. costly     H. passed       I. extends     J. submit     K. revelations

The Japan that can’t keep up

The spotlight has cost losses of Kobe Steel, Japan’s largest steelmaker, whose customers include Ford Motor and Boeing. Its market of $ 2.7 billion is about $ 1.7 billion less than before it admitted to the fake data. As the criticism over Kobe’s behavior     1    , Japan’s reputation for excellence may be the biggest loser.

Japanese manufactures were once held in awe (敬畏) for their mastery of     2     manufacturing and continuous improvement, which revolutionized business practices the world over. But an increasing number of companies in China, South Korea, and elsewhere are now capable of competing with — and often beating — Japan’s long-established enterprises, forcing them to scramble (争抢).

The latest     3     of just how desperate many Japanese companies have become to stay ahead of foreign rivals: Kobe Steel Ltd.     4     this month that for years it had faked data on the quality of its aluminum, copper, and steel products. Now Kobe Chief Executive Officer Hiroya Kawasaki is leading an internal committee to     5     quality issues. And the U.S. Department of Justice has requested Kobe Steel     6     documents related to the data, the company said, adding that it will cooperate.

Unfortunately for Japan Inc.’s reputation as a trusted supplier, such     7     have repeatedly commanded headlines. Japan obviously doesn’t have a monopoly on corporate shenanigans (诡计), but fraud is particularly     8     for the nation because its flagship manufactures have banked for years on a reputation for quality. “Japanese manufactures are very aware that their brand, their reputation, the     9     of their business rest on quality,” an expert says.

Two major factors seem to be pushing the nation’s manufactures to cross the line. First, Japanese companies face enormous pressure from upstart Chinese rivals. Secondly, a whistle blower protection law     10     in Japan in 2006 has increased the chance of wrongdoing coming to light — and the digitization of records and internal conversations has made it easier for incriminating data to be passed along to regulations or authorities.