Natural perfume or artificial perfume?
The use of perfume dates back to earliest times. The ancient Egyptians perfumed the bricks used to build their houses and temples, and wore perfumed fat in their hair.
These days, consumer demand for perfumed products is intense. In the home, from washing-up liquid to paper tissues, soap to shoe polish, fragrance is the common ingredient. Artificial leather is perfumed to make it smell like the real thing, and in Japan, some companies spray perfume through building’s air-conditioning system at key times of the working day.
To meet the demands of the perfume industry, scientific developments have made the companies use substitutes for some natural ingredients. Scientists have also discovered that natural and artificial materials are highly complementary and are acceptable to the consumer. Even the most expensive perfumes are in fact compounds of both natural and artificial ingredients. The French perfume manufacturers were among the first to blend artificial compound when they made the famous perfume Chanel No. 5 in 1923.
Producing natural oils is very expensive. For example, 1000 kilos of jasmine flowers make just one kilo of extract. Using artificial fragrance has reduced the costs of manufacture overall, although the chemical operations involved can be very time-consuming and costly-sixteen or seventeen chemical separations may be needed to produce the right result.
Nevertheless, the use of complex chemical to reproduce fragrance is likely to increase, as the artificial ingredients as well as natural oils gives perfume manufacturers more control over the production process, which is why many classic perfumes owe their characteristic top notes to fruits of science not nature.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2 . Hello, Stranger
Attitudes to strangers tend to follow a familiar pattern. Children are taught never to speak to unknown grown-ups, especially those regarded by their parents as untrustworthy. The onset of adolescence and young adulthood brings a bursting desire to interact with all sorts of people, which. of course, might not gain family approval.
Social circles generally narrow again as people find life-partners, form households and produce offspring of their own. Time becomes scarce; new friendships are often based on sharing the burden of child care.
But that is not the whole story.
In the age of covid-19 and Zoom, the chronological pattern has been changed. Instead of their vague possibilities and risks, strangers have assumed the all-too-literal role as a looming source of infection. During lock-downs they are officially to be avoided. Yet youngsters still long dangerously, for the pleasure of interaction, not just with individuals but anonymous crowds.
| A．This aspect of the story and fear of strangers has bring about frustration among people. |
| B．Some people never recover the youthful enthusiasm for unforeseen encounters. |
| C．Middle-aged people gradually realize that the exchange will be a one-off which can permit freedom and frankness. |
| D．People of all ages have come to miss the human stimulation of busy high streets or trains. |
| E．In mid-life and beyond people can still experience the joy of a random meeting. |
| F．Despite this, the resulting interactions can generate an appealing feeling of escaping familiarity. |
3 . In American culture, I am noticing a lack of respect, especially among children. This should be treated
In 1995, I spent a couple of months in Kenya where I lived with a pastor’s family. This pastor was a part of the Maasai tribes that have some unique customs. One of them is the
In my early 20’s, I worked at a children’s home in South Carolina where the children from 4 to 19 years old were taught to respect their elders. They
Immanuel Kant expressed two
| A．passionately | B．steadily | C．publicly | D．alarmingly |
| A．challenging | B．faking | C．piloting | D．abandoning |
| A．assistance | B．greeting | C．blessing | D．guarantee |
| A．come forward | B．drop by | C．show off | D．fall down |
| A．pretend | B．suspect | C．determine | D．acknowledge |
| A．located | B．ranked | C．addressed | D．defied |
| A．delight | B．delay | C．decline | D．distress |
| A．gesture | B．secret | C．behavior | D．authority |
| A．peers | B．enemies | C．guards | D．owners |
| A．controversial | B．accepted | C．foreign | D．equivalent |
| A．twisting | B．imposing | C．banning | D．sparing |
| A．reason | B．solution | C．harmony | D．consciousness |
| A．similarity | B．response | C．obedience | D．approach |
| A．environmental | B．external | C．voluntary | D．flexible |
| A．luxuries | B．glories | C．instruments | D．models |
4 . In the beginning, there was the prank (玩笑).
When motion pictures first appeared, movie cameras were used simply to record normal events. They showed things such as workers leaving a factory, or a train entering a station. It wasn’t long before simple stories were created for film. Since the films were extremely short, the story also had to be very short. So, in 1985. Louie Lumiere staged a simple prank. His film, originally titled Le Jardinere, is now commonly referred as L’ Arroseur Arrose, or in English, The Sprinkler Sprinkled. It shows a mail using a hose (软管) to water a garden. A boy enters the frame and steps on the hose, stopping the water flow. When the gardener looks into the hose nose, the boy releases the pressure and the gardener gets a face full of water. The boy laughs, but is immediately caught and spanked.
This creased the first film comedy type. Prank films became the common way to get laughs from an audience during the earliest days of cinema. It is an extremely simple but infinitely flexible method of creating a moment of tension and release. The audience gets to be “in on the joke” watching the situation being set up. The trap is sprung, forming the highest of the event. Usually, the prankster is caught, and spanked, giving closure to the narrative.
Similar stories involved people simply misbehaving and getting their comeuppance. Mr. Flip (The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, 1909), directed by Gilbert M. Anderson, featured Ben Turpin as a lifeless flirt (打情骂俏). He goes to various shops and offices, trying to touch the cheeks of female workers. In each of the events, he gets punished. The women pokes him in the bottom with scissors, the customers in the bar spray soda water in his face, and the switchboard operator can somehow send electric shocks to the telephone he is using.
A comic strip called Foxy Grandpa by Carl E. Schultze featured an old man with a pair of rascally grandsons. They would try to play tricks on him, but he would always turn the tables on them by using his wits. The strip was developed into a vaudeville (杂耍表演) character played by Joseph Hart, who went on to play the same part in silent films.
It would be a mistakes to think of this as an outdated style of comedy. Prank films are certainly still a hit on YouTube. It is also a useful way to design an animated narrative. The best example would be the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Each of the Coyote’s theme is comparable to a prank. He sets up a trap, tries to spring it on the Road Runner, it fails, and he gets the worst of it.
1. The author believes that The Sprinkler Sprinkled ________.| A．was a record of normal life events |
| B．created the first sound comedy movie |
| C．was made in a time of technical limitation |
| D．was about a gardener making fun of a boy |
| A．share | B．punishment |
| C．dismissal | D．responsibility |
| A．The audience take delight in seeing the prankster suffering pain. |
| B．Prank films gradually lose their appeal, giving way to animations. |
| C．In Mr. Flip, Ben deserves the treatment as he takes advantage of women. |
| D．The grandfather in the Foxy Grand pa always falls into his grandson’s tricks. |
| A．By analyzing statistics. | B．By making comparisons. |
| C．By giving instructions. | D．By presenting examples. |
Walmart has a plan to tackle the climate crisis. Can it pull it off?
Every day a seemingly never-ending stream of toothbrushes, toilet paper, tape, thumbtacks, toys and
The retailer, which was for many years
Walmart has declared its mission
Over the past years, Walmart
"It's extraordinary," said Michael Vandenbergh, co-director of the Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt Law School,
Yet it's an uphill task for a retail giant with a business model based on providing tens of millions of low-priced products to a growing number of customers. The big question will be
6 . The internet has transformed the way people work and communicate. It has upended(颠倒) industries, from entertainment to retailing. But its most profound effect may well be on the biggest decision that most people make -- choosing a mate.
In the early 1990s the notion of meeting a partner online seemed freakish, and not a little pathetic. Today, in many places, it is normal. Smartphones have put virtual bars in people's pockets, where singletons can mingle free from the constraints of social or physical geography.
Digital dating is a massive social experiment, conducted on one of humanity's most intimate and vital processes. Its effects are only just starting to become visible.
The greater choice of meeting one Mr/Mrs. Right makes the digital dating market far more efficient than the offline kind. For some, that is bad news. Because of the gulf in pickiness between the sexes, a few straight men are doomed never to get any matches at all. On Tantan, a Chinese app, men express interest in 60% of women they see, but women are interested in just 6% of men; this dynamic means that 5% of men never receive a match.
For most people, however, digital dating-offers better outcomes. Research has found that marriages in America between people who meet online are likely to last longer, such couples profess to be happier than those who met offline. Online dating is a particular boon(好处、益处) for those with very particular requirements. I date allows daters to filter out matches who would not consider converting to Judaism, for instance.
The fact that online daters have so much more choice can break down barriers; evidence suggests that the internet is boosting interracial marriages by bypassing homogenous social groups. But daters are also more able to choose partners like themselves. Assortative mating already shoulders some of the blame for income inequality. Online dating may make the effect more pronounced: education levels are displayed prominently on dating profiles in a way they would never be offline.
But even if the market does not become ever more concentrated, the process of coupling (or not) has unquestionably become more centralised. Romance used to be a distributed activity which took place in a profusion of bars, clubs, churches and offices; now enormous numbers of people rely on a few companies to meet their mate. That hands a small number of coders(编程员) tremendous power to engineer mating outcomes. Competition offers some protection against such a possibility; so too might greater transparency over the principles used by dating apps to match people up.
Yet such concerns should not obscure(使模糊) the good that comes from the modern way of romance. The right partners can elevate(提升) and nourish(滋养) each other. The wrong ones can ruin both their lives. Digital dating offers millions of people a more efficient way to find a good mate. That is something to love.
1. Which is NOT the benefits brought by digital dating?| A．A straight man sees a higher chance of finding a mate. |
| B．Certain requirements can be met through filtering out the unqualified potential 'candidates'. |
| C．Efficiency of finding a mate has been raised thanks to the wider choices. |
| D．People who find like-minded matches online are happier in their marriages. |
| A．marked | B．subtle | C．difficult | D．inviting |
| A．The desire of people to find a mate quickly. |
| B．The heavy reliance of people on a dating website or professional company. |
| C．The higher chance of meeting a mate online. |
| D．The narrower distribution of people seeking mates. |
| A．Indifferent. | B．Neutral | C．Supportive | D．Critical. |
7 . Home to 8.2 million people, 36 percent of whom were born outside the United States, New York, known as the Big Apple, is the biggest city in America. Nearly twenty times bigger than the capital, Washington DC, you might expect New York to be twenty times more dangerous. Actually, it's safer. Recent figures show that New York now has fewer crimes per 100,000 people than 193 other US cities. It's also healthier than it used to be. For example, the smoking rate has gone down from 21.5 percent a few years ago, to 16.9 percent today.
New Yorkers should be delighted, shouldn't they? In fact, many feel that New York is losing its identity. It used to be the city that never sleeps. These days it's the city that never smokes, drinks or does anything naughty (at least, not in public). The Big Apple is quickly turning into the Forbidden Apple.
If you decided to have a picnic in Central Park, you'd need to be careful - if you decided to feed the birds with your sandwich, you could be arrested. It's banned. In many countries a mobile phone going off in the cinema in annoying. In New York it's illegal. So is putting your bag on an empty seat in the subway. If you went to a bar for a drink and a cigarette, that would be OK, wouldn't it? Er ... no. You can't smoke in public in New York City. In fact, you can't smoke outdoors on the street or in parks either. The angry editor of Vanity Fair magazine, Graydon Carter, says, "Under New York City law it is acceptable to keep a gun in your place of work, but not an empty ashtray. " He should know. The police came to his office and took away his ashtray.
But not all of New York's inhabitants are complaining. Marcia Dugarry, seventy-two, said, "The city has changed for the better. If more cities had these laws, America would be a better place to live."
The new laws have helped turn the city into one of the healthiest - and most pleasant places to live in America -- very different from its old image of a dirty and dangerous city. Its pavements are almost litter-free, its bars clean and its streets among American's safest. Not putting your bag on subway seats might be a small price to pay.
1. The author writes Paragraph 1 in order to tell the reader that New York is _________.| A．bigger than Washington D. C. | B．the city with most immigrants |
| C．safer and healthier | D．the most populated city in the U. S. |
| A．Eating sandwich in the Central Park. | B．Putting a bag on an empty subway seat. |
| C．Turning on the sound of the mobile phone. | D．Smoking at home. |
| A．Some of New York's new laws are not reasonable. |
| B．A gun is much easier to get than an ashtray. |
| C．The police had no right to take away his ashtray. |
| D．There should be a law to keep guns away from people. |
| A. resulting B. repeatedly C. relatively D. unusual E. difficult F. fluent G. fed H. mastered I. planning J. previously K. convenient |
How and why, roughly 2 million years ago, early human ancestors evolved large brains and began making
Roger Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a solution. Together with his team, he analyzed 1.7 million-year-old sandstones that formed in an ancient river at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The region is famous for the large number of human fossils that have been discovered there, alongside an impressive assembly of stone tools. The sandstones themselves have
Dr. Summons and his colleagues say the hot springs would have provided a(n)
Loving Legacy
Magic wands, flying broomsticks, terrifying monsters... these are the features of the fantasy genre. And over the last few decades, Harry Potter has remained at the top of the list for
Harry Potter might have started off as
I grew up reading Harry Potter. Like millions of other children, I waited on my eleventh birthday for an owl carrying a letter to inform me that I
Some may think that fantasy or science fiction has no place in literature, as they corrupt the mind and provide no useful lessons. These people are wrong. Characters in popular fantasy or science fiction novels are not much different from those in classic literature novels. Each embodies the emotion, character and thought
学校正在招募暑期支教志愿者，你有意申请参加此次志愿服务，请写封申请信，需包含以下内容：
1. 你为什么申请这个岗位？
2. 对此岗位，你有什么优势？
3. 如果你被录用，你将会怎么做？
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
