1 . According to a 2018 report, people aged between 16 and 24 make up 15 per cent of the population but only 10 per cent of museum-goers. Similarly, people of colour aged over 35 go half as much as you would expect from their population size.

We have reached the point of recognizing a disconnect between art and audiences but haven’t yet determined how to bridge the gap. Two answers to tackling this challenge lie in telling a greater diversity of art histories and communicating these stories in more modern and accessible ways.

If you have ever tried to power through reading a museums complex wall text, you know art discussions can be full of special terms. In 2018, I started a podcast called Art Matters for the charity Art UK with the aim of discussing art from a pop-culture angle with topics that would engage younger and more diverse audiences. It offers an accessible pathway to art history with conversations on topics such as film, psychology and even Beyoncé, with few special terms. The series has been a useful way of connecting art to current events. Art history is about storytelling; art content shines when there is an effort to bring audiences along for the discussion.

More traditional institutions are paying attention. This summer, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles issued a social-media challenge for people to recreate paintings using items they had at home. Users displayed incredible creativity ---- toilet rolls featured frequently ---- and the museum was flooded with submissions. This reaction proves that there is a hidden desire for audiences to engage with art topics if the format is appealing.

Many people are intimidated (威胁) by art and feel that there’s a base level of understanding required to join the conversation. The Getty initiative embraced the visuality of art and served as a reminder that there are many pathways to engaging with it.

Another interesting byproduct of the Getty challenge was the attention given to a diversity of artworks. British opera singer Peter Brathwaite, for example, made scores of stunning recreations highlighting centuries of black portraiture, including a collaboration with London’s National Portrait Gallery. His efforts counter the perception that there are not many historical portraits of black figures. It is imperative (势在必行的) that we do a better job of showcasing the many complex and diverse stories that are represented in art. In doing so, we preserve more histories and welcome wider diversity of people.

Social media have offered a platform for people who have not traditionally had a seat at the table. Anyone can recognize a gap in the field and address it. Accounts have amassed tens of thousands of followers by dedicating their feeds to female artists, artists of of colour and more. Their followings are proof positive that there is a hunger to hear these art histories, and these themes work brilliantly for museum programming.

But there is only so much that can be done without Britain’s museums and galleries changing meaningfully from within. We need to see a better balance of these stories represented in permanent collections. We also need a much wider diversity of people and interests represented on boards and executive teams.

Ensuring that art ---- and writing and talking about art ---- resonates throughout the population depends on the rising generation of storytellers, inside institutions and out, getting the funding and support they need to paint a brighter picture for the sector.

1. Which of the following is NOT an example of the answers to tackling the challenge?

A．Engaging audiences in discussions in the podcast Art Matters

B．Holding pop-culture discussions with the charity Art UK

C．Encouraging people to recreate paintings with household items

D．Portraying historical black figures through art recreations

2. The podcast Art Matters bears the following features EXCEPT ________.

A．connecting art history to popular topics

B．having only a few special terms

C．being accessible to the poor and needy

D．engaging more diverse audiences

3. We can conclude from the passage that common audiences ________.

A．lack the ability to understand and talk about art history

B．prefer to view artworks and hear art stories on social media

C．long to engage with art topics and diverse art history stories

D．hope more people of colour are represented on museum boards

4. Which of the following best serves as the title for this passage?

A．Art for Change	B．Don’t Fear Art
C．Art on Social Media	D．Art for All

5 . Directions: Read the following three passages. 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.

An Extension of the Humans Brain

Other people can help us compensate for our mental and emotional deficiencies(欠缺), much as a wooden leg can compensate for a physical deficiency. To be exact, other people can extend our intelligence and help us understand and adjust our emotions. When another person helps us in such ways, he or she is participating in what I’ve called a “social prosthetic (义肢的) system.” Such systems do not need to operate face-to-face, and it’s clear to me that the Internet is expanding the range of my own social prosthetic systems. It’s already a big bank of many minds. Even in its current state, the Internet has extended my memory and judgment.

Once I look up something on the Internet, I don’t need to keep all the details for future use-I know where to find that information again and can quickly and easily do so. More generally, the Internet functions as if it were my memory. This function of the Internet is particularly striking when I’m writing; I’m no longer comfortable writing if I’m not connected to the Internet. It’s become natural to check facts as I write, taking a minute or two to dip into PubMed, Wikipedia, or other websites.

As for the judgment, the Internet has made me smarter in matters small and large. For example, when I’m writing a textbook it has become second nature to check a dozen definitions of a key term, which helps me dig into the core and understand its meaning. But more than that, I now regularly compare my views with those of many others. If I have a “new idea,” I now quickly look to see whether somebody else has already thought of it, or something similar-and I then compare what I think with what others have thought. This certainly makes my own views clearer. Moreover, I can find out whether my reactions to an event are reasonable enough by reading about those of others on the Internet.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

6 . 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. 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     1     advanced stone tools, is one of the great mysteries of evolution. Some researchers argue these changes were brought about by the invention of cooking. They point out that our bite weakened around the same time as our larger brains evolved, and that it takes less energy to absorb nutrients from cooked food. As a result, once they had     2     the art, early chefs could invest less in their digestive systems and thus invest the     3     energy savings in building larger brains capable of complex thought. There is, however, a problem with the cooking theory. Most archaeologists (考古学家) believe the evidence of controlled fire stretches back no more than 790,000 years.

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     4     yielded some of the world’s earliest complex hand axes — large tear-drop-shaped stone tools that are associated with Homo erectus (直立人). Creating an axe by     5     knocking thin pieces off a raw stone in order to create two sharp cutting edges requires a significant amount of     6    . Their appearance is therefore thought to mark an important moment in intellectual evolution. Trapped inside the Olduvai sandstones, the researchers found     7     biological molecules (分子) that are often interpreted as biomarkers for heat-tolerant bacteria. Some of these live in water between 85°C and 95°C. The molecules’ presence suggests that an ancient river within the Gorge was once     8     by one or more hot springs.

Dr. Summons and his colleagues say the hot springs would have provided a(n)     9     “pre-fire” means of cooking food. In New Zealand, the Maori have traditionally cooked food in hot springs, either by lowering it into the boiling water or by digging a hole in the hot earth. Similar methods exist in Japan and Iceland, so it is plausible, if     10     to prove, that early humans might have used hot springs to cook meat and roots. Nonetheless, fire would have offered a distinct advantage to humans, since it is a transportable resource.

8 . Space exploration has always been the province of dreamers: The human imagination readily soars where human innovation struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the decade's end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated(共鸣) with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous dream speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had turned out concrete results and transformed American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up conflicting with each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely practical and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is actually unrealistic in its aims.

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised（妥协） space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no successor. The endless argument is that funds are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Among the current concerns about the federal deficit (赤字), reaching toward the stars seems an unnecessary luxury---as if saving one-thousandth of a single year's budget would solve our problems.

But human innovation struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic devices that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, mapping out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are designing a bottom-up attack on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within reach of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us---not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed on each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can get over what were once considered inborn limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, healthcare. Tomorrow we will overcome these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is capable of greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

1. The author mentions Cyrano de Bergerac in order to show that _________.

A．imagination is the mother of invention

B．creativity is essential to science fiction writers

C．it takes patience for humans to realize their dreams

D．dreamers have always been interested in science fiction

2. Concerning the dreams of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, which of the following statements is NOT true?

A．They symbolized human beings' confidence in achievements.

B．They brought about dramatic changes in American society.

C．They are in complete conflict with each other.

D．They both sounded very much unrealistic to Americans.

3. Which of the following does the author imply in paragraph 3?

A．Space shuttle program is too dangerous for Americans to carry on.

B．The tight budget is to blame for the unsuccessful space program.

C．More problems on Earth call for our immediate attention.

D．Space program, necessary to the national dream, should be continued.

4. What does the author think of the problems facing human beings?

A．They pose a serious challenge to future human existence.

B．They can be solved sooner or later with human innovation.

C．Their solutions need joint efforts of the public and private sectors.

D．They can only be solved by people who are intelligently superior.

10 . Directions：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. advanced        B. concerns     C. governance     D. data     E. determined     F. track     G. identify     H. precautions       I. leading     J. technological       K. transform

The Rise of the Smart City

The information revolution is changing the way cities are run and the lives of its residents. Cities have a long way to go before they can be considered geniuses. But they're getting smart pretty fast.

In just the past few years, mayors and other officials in cities across the country have begun to draw on     1     about income, traffic, fires, illness, parking tickets and more—to handle many of the problems of urban life. Whether it's making it easier for residents to find parking places, or giving smoke alarms to the households that are most likely to suffer fatal fires, big-data technologies are beginning to     2     the way cities work.

Cities have just scratched the surface in using data to improve operations, but big changes are already under way in     3     smart cities, says Stephen Goldsmith，a professor of government and director of the Innovations in Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School.“In terms of city     4     we are at one of the most consequential periods in the last century,” he says.

Although cities have been using data in various forms for decades，the modern practice of civic analytics (民情分析) has only begun to take off past few years, thanks to the     5     changes. Among them: the growth of cloud computing, which dramatically lowers the costs of storing information; new developments in machine learning, which put     6     analytical tools, in the hand of city officials, the Internet and the rise of inexpensive sensors that can keep     7     of vast amount of information such as traffic or air pollution; and the widespread use of smart phone apps and mobile devices that enable citizens and city workers alike to monitor problems and feed information about them back to city hall.

All this data collection raises understandable privacy     8    . Most cities have policies designed to safeguard citizen privacy and prevent the release of information that might     9     any one individual. In theory, anyway. Widespread use of sensors and video can also present privacy risks unless     10     are taken. The technology “is forcing cities to face questions of privacy that they haven't had to face before,” says Ben Green, a fellow at Harvard's BerkmanKlein Center for Internet and Society and lead author of a recent report on open-data privacy.