1 . ①A group of 41 states and the District of Columbia began a legal case against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, insisting that the company knowingly used features on its platforms to cause children to overuse them. The accusations in the lawsuit raise a deeper question about behavior: Are young people becoming addicted to social media and the internet? Here’s what the research has found.
②David Greenfield, a psychologist and founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Conn, said the devices tempt users with some powerful approaches. One is “intermittent reinforcement,” which creates the idea that a user could get a reward at any time. But when the reward comes is unpredictable. Adults are easily influenced, be noted, but young people are particularly at risk, because the brain regions that are involved in resisting temptation and reward are not nearly as developed in children and teenagers as in adults. Moreover, the adolescent brain is especially accustomed to social connections, and social media is all a perfect opportunity to connect with other people.
③For many years, the scientific community typically defined addiction in relation to substances, such as drugs, and not behaviors, such as gambling or internet use. That has gradually changed. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official reference for mental health conditions, introduced the idea of internet gaming addiction.
④A subsequent study explored broadening the definition to “internet addiction.” The author suggested further exploring diagnostic criteria and the language, for instance, noting that terms like “problematic use” and even the word “internet” were open to broad interpretation, given the many forms the information and its delivery can take.
⑤Dr. Michael Rich, the director of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, said he discouraged the use of the word “addiction” because the internet, if used effectively and with limits, was not merely useful but also essential to everyday life.
⑥Greenfield agreed that there clearly are valuable uses for the internet and that the definition of how much is too much can vary. But he said there also were obvious cases where immoderate use disturbs school, sleep and other vital aspects of a healthy life. “Too many young consumers can’t put it down, ” he said.“ The internet, including social media like Meta, are the drugs affecting the mind.”
1. What was Meta accused of?| A．It added problematic features to its platform. |
| B．It started a discussion to mislead young people. |
| C．It tempted children to use social media too much. |
| D．It conducted illegal research on its parent company. |
| A．their under-developed brain |
| B．the random pattern of rewards |
| C．their desire to be socially connected |
| D．the possibility of escaping from reality |
| A．Addiction is something about behaviors instead of substances. |
| B．The online language can be interpreted from a broad perspective. |
| C．Current diagnostic criteria of “internet addiction” isn’t satisfactory. |
| D．There should be an agreement on the definition of the word “internet”. |
| A．proper use of the internet does good to children |
| B．the internet is to blame for disturbing healthy life |
| C．there are cases against immoderate use of the internet |
| D．the word “addiction” is improperly used on the internet |
One Medical
On Thursday, Amazon announced its first major acquisition (收购) under Mr. Jassy’s occupation as C.E.O., spending $3.9 billion for One Medical, a chain of primary care clinics around the country. The deal is a sign of Amazon’s health care ambitions. As the company has
Health care has been
Amazon wants to be the “front door” through which customers
| A. cultivate B. reassuring C. opposing D. objective E. confidence F. evidence G. perceived H. functioning I. estimate J. existing K. scientism |
Why Doubt Is Essential To Science
The confidence people place in science is frequently based not on what it really is, but on what people would like it to be. When I asked students at the beginning of the year how they would define science, many of them replied that it is a(n)
But doubt in science is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, science, when properly
As a historian of science, I would argue that it's the responsibility of scientists and historians of science to show that the real power of science lies precisely in what is often
Scientists understand this, but in the
4 . Modern medicine’s ability to keep us alive makes it tempting to think human evolution may have stopped. But if we look at the rate of our DNA’s evolution, we can see that human evolution hasn’t stopped – it may even be happening faster than before.
Evolution is a gradual change to the DNA of a species over many generations. It can occur by natural selection, when certain traits created by genetic changes help an organism survive or reproduce. Such genes are thus more likely to be passed on to the next generation, so they increase in frequency in a population. Gradually, these changes and their associated traits become more common among the whole group.
By looking at global studies of our DNA, we can see evidence that natural selection has recently made changes and continues to do so. Though modern healthcare disrupts a key driving force of evolution by keeping some people alive longer, in countries without access to good healthcare, populations are continuing to evolve. Survivors of infectious disease outbreaks drive natural selection by giving their genetic resistance to offspring. Our DNA shows evidence for recent selection for resistance of killer diseases like Lassa fever and malaria. Selection in response to malaria remains in regions where the disease remains common.
Humans are also adapting to their environment. Gene change allowing humans to live at high altitudes have become more common in populations in Tibet, Ethiopia, and the Andes. The spread of genetic changes in Tibet is possibly the fastest evolutionary change in humans, occurring over the past 3,000 years. This rapid increase in frequency of a mutated gene that increases blood oxygen content gives locals a survival advantage in higher altitudes, resulting in more surviving children.
Diet is another source for adaptations. Studies show that natural selection favoring a change allowing adults to produce lactase – the enzyme (酶) that breaks down milk sugars – is why some groups of people can digest milk. Over 80 per cent of northwest Europeans can, but in parts of East Asia, where milk is much less commonly drunk, an inability to digest lactose is the norm. Like high altitude adaptation, selection to digest milk has evolved more than once in humans and may be the strongest kind of recent selection.
Yet, despite these changes, natural selection only affects about 8 per cent of our genome. But scientists can’t explain why some genes are evolving much faster than others. We measure the speed of gene evolution by comparing human DNA with that of other species. One fast-evolving gene is human accelerated region 1 (HAR1), which is needed during brain development. A random section of human DNA is on average more than 98 per cent identical to the chimp comparator, but HAR1 is so fast evolving that it’s only around 85 per cent similar. Though scientists can see these changes are happening – and how quickly – we still don’t fully understand why fast evolution happens to some genes but not others.
1. Which of the following statements may the author agree with?| A．Evolution occurs among several people overnight. |
| B．Genes may change and some are beneficial to people’s lives. |
| C．Evolution is done when the whole population possesses a certain gene. |
| D．The changed genes leading to higher survival rates are chosen deliberately. |
| A．explains | B．causes | C．upsets | D．heals |
| A．some people can resist infectious diseases like malaria |
| B．children in Tibet tolerate living environments with thin air |
| C．northwestern Europeans digest lactose better than East Asians |
| D．the human gene HAR1 resembles that of a chimp to a lesser extent |
| A．What Is Natural Selection? |
| B．Are Humans Still Evolving? |
| C．Why Will Certain Genes Evolve? |
| D．How Do Mutated Genes Function? |
5 . When a company takes on the task of providing financial services to people overlooked by large banks, that would seem to be a good thing: Such customers need bank accounts, debit cards, and credit just like everyone else. In 2016, nearly 10 million American households didn't have any interaction with a bank, and nearly 25 million households had bank accounts but used alternative financing options (such as prepaid debit cards, alternative credit cards, or payday loans) to make ends meet.
One would hope that financial offers geared toward the under-banked—who often have low credit scores, histories of financial instability, and limited education—would include modest interest rates, easily decipherable (简单易懂的) language, and enough oversight (监管) to ensure that already-struggling families don't get taken advantage of. But that is often not the case. For examples, payday lenders frequently charge astronomically high interest rates for those who are unable to quickly pay off their debts, and prepaid-card companies often include additional fees that owners of standard debit cards don't have to deal with, such as charges for simply loading money onto their cards.
These practices can leave people, who are already struggling to get their finances in order, in even worse shape than they were when they signed up for a new product. The problem isn't that companies targeting the under-banked exist at all, but that many exploit a lack of financial knowledge and alternative options to extract excess money from their customers.
Credit-card issuers that target those with poor credit scores are another group with questionable practices, according to a recent report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In its research, the CFPB found that the costs of cards issued by these companies are significantly higher than the costs of cards issued by more traditional competitors. These specialized lenders are much more likely to approve not just subprime individuals (次级贷款人), but the deepest subprime individuals-those with credit scores that fall below 600.
Why isn't a higher approval rate for those with very bad credit a good thing? Isn't that more inclusive? Not always. Some credit-card companies' business models depend on charging their customers high fees — people who are unlikely to be able to afford them. These increased fees are for things that are inescapable, such as monthly account maintenance. (Major credit-card companies, on the other hand, are making most of their money from collecting late payments and interest, not recurring fees.) Customers of these subprime companies don't need to do anything unusual to rack up fees-that's just a part of signing up.
But perhaps worse than the high costs of the cards is the way that these companies recruit customers. They target them by mailing pre-approved offers that contain intentionally opaque, high-level financial language and agreements that are, on average 70 percent longer than card agreements from other lenders, according to the CFPB.
“Despite offering longer and more complex credit-card terms than mass market issuers, they send those mailings disproportionately to consumers with lower levels of formal education,” the CFPB report found. “Specifically, agreements for credit-card products marketed primarily by subprime specialist issuers are particularly difficult to read.” According to the report, making sense of these statements would typically require at least two years of college or post-high-school education. Less than half of the people targeted by these lenders have any college education, and the number of such households sent direct mail by these lenders doubled between 2016 and 2018.
1. The examples cited in paragraph 2 are intended to show that ______________.| A．payday loans are no better product than prepaid debit cards |
| B．American large banks often ignore the already-struggling families |
| C．financial company should provide high-quality service to poor families |
| D．poor American households are exploited by the financial companies |
| A．a lack of update for economic information |
| B．a greater personal financial loss |
| C．the sign-up of a new financial product |
| D．the exploitation of alternative choices |
| A．useful for its professional content |
| B．convincing for its pre-approved format |
| C．misleading for its vague instruction |
| D．objective for its high-level financial language |
| A．Poorly educated consumers are welcomed by the financial company. |
| B．Complex credit-card terms are needed for the lender’s safety. |
| C．Credit card could be issued only to people with college education. |
| D．There might be a boom for financial company between 2012 and 2014. |
To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. Decades after Mao Zedong declared that women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts (对应者)in the United States.
Rjpa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth “creates this excitement”， and builds on a cultural and historical legacy (遗产)in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to.
One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China’s power elite ( 精 英 ). In the US, that shift followed decades of battles over equality and women’s rights. In China, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally.
That’s true, too, in the executive suite. Grant Thornton International, the tax consultancy, found that roughly eight out of 10 companies in China had women in senior management roles, compared with approximately half in the European Union and two thirds in the US. Similarly, in China, 31 percent of top executives are female, compared with 20 percent in America.
Thirdly, child care is easily accessible in China, enabling them to pursue their careers after giving birth to their children. Fourthly, ambition has become a matter of necessity in fast-paced China, and both the husband and wife have to work in order to keep up with the skyrocketing housing prices.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7 . Not too many decades ago it seemed “obvious” both to the general public and to sociologists that modern society has changed people’s natural relations, loosened their responsibilities to kin (亲戚) and neighbors, and substituted in their place superficial relationships with passing acquaintances. However, in recent years a growing body of research has revealed that the “obvious” is not true. It seems that if you are a city resident, you typically know a smaller proportion of your neighbors than you do if you are a resident of a smaller community. But, for the most part, this fact has few significant consequences. It does not necessarily follow that if you know few of your neighbors you will know no one else.
Even in very large cities, people maintain close social ties within small, private social worlds. Indeed, the number and quality of meaningful relationships do not differ between more and less urban people. Small-town residents are more involved with kin than are big-city residents. Yet city dwellers compensate by developing friendships with people who share similar interests and activities. Urbanism many produce a different style of life, but the quality of life does not differ between town and city. Nor are residents of large communities any likelier to display psychological symptoms of stress or alienation, a feeling of not belonging, than are residents of smaller communities. However, city dwellers do worry more about crime, and this leads them to a distrust of strangers.
These findings do not imply that urbanism makes little or no difference. If neighbors are strangers to one another, they are less likely to sweep the sidewalk of an elderly couple living next door or keep an eye out for young trouble makers. Moreover, as Wirth suggested, there may be a link between a community’s population size and its social heterogeneity (多样性). For instance, sociologists have found much evidence that the size of a community is associated with bad behavior including gambling, drugs, etc. Large-city urbanities are also more likely than their small-town counterparts to have a cosmopolitan(见多识广)outlook, to display less responsibility to traditional kinship roles, to vote for leftist political candidates, and to be tolerant of nontraditional religious groups, unpopular political groups, and so—called undesirables. Everything considered, heterogeneity and unusual behavior seem to be outcomes of large population size.
1. Which of the following statements best describes the organization of the first paragraph?| A．An argument is examined and possible solutions given. |
| B．Two contrasting views are presented. |
| C．Research results concerning the quality of urban life are presented in order of time. |
| D．A detail description of the difference between urban and small-town life is given. |
| A．could not develop long-standing relationships. |
| B．did not have the same interests as their neighbors. |
| C．tended to be associated with bad behavior. |
| D．usually had more friends. |
| A．disrupt people’s natural relations. |
| B．make them worry about crime. |
| C．cause them no to show concern for one another. |
| D．cause them to be suspicious of each other. |
| A．the better its quality of life |
| B．the more tolerant and open-minded it is. |
| C．the likelier it is to display psychological symptoms of stress. |
| D．the more similar its interests |
8 . Each stage of life has different major demands mainly because our needs change. As children, a period of deep uncertainty and sensitivity,
At each stage, although everyone may
For each period of life, the needs are decided by that stage, and as we grow older, whether we like it or not, we gain
Physically, even when we stay fit and able, the body cannot deliver in quite the same way as youth. This comes as a(n)
| A．finance | B．security | C．marriage | D．education |
| A．testing | B．sharing | C．changing | D．setting |
| A．financial advisor | B．childhood companion | C．life partner | D．household keeper |
| A．take action | B．calm down | C．look forward | D．pay attention |
| A．believe | B．persevere | C．vary | D．persist |
| A．easy | B．random | C．formal | D．similar |
| A．noble | B．fresh | C．reasonable | D．superior |
| A．experience | B．responsibility | C．respect | D．agreement |
| A．individualism | B．materialism | C．idealism | D．socialism |
| A．resist | B．enjoy | C．evolve | D．strengthen |
| A．unexpectedly | B．terribly | C．comparatively | D．necessarily |
| A．inquiry | B．instinct | C．refusal | D．shock |
| A．worsen | B．manage | C．judge | D．feel |
| A．wrinkled | B．depressed | C．impressive | D．serious |
| A．with high requirements | B．in full circle | C．without difficulty | D．on a large scale |
9 . Endangered languages can be found throughout the world. Many languages now have fewer than 100 or even fewer than 10 speakers. The crisis is not limited to remote regions of the world. When Europeans first arrived in North America, 312 different languages were
Different researchers offer different definitions of “endangered”. The system of
Languages become endangered due to a number of
Initiatives to
| A．at hand | B．at risk | C．in use | D．in view |
| A．ancient | B．evolving | C．local | D．surviving |
| A．assessment | B．classification | C．description | D．research |
| A．age | B．background | C．number | D．religion |
| A．committee | B．century | C．generation | D．government |
| A．content | B．occupations | C．situations | D．themes |
| A．advisedly | B．efficiently | C．primarily | D．rarely |
| A．balancing | B．complicating | C．historical | D．interrelated |
| A．cultural | B．mental | C．moral | D．religious |
| A．foreign | B．informal | C．isolated | D．national |
| A．For example | B．In contrast | C．In response | D．Vice versa |
| A．boom | B．develop | C．disappear | D．suffer |
| A．ceases | B．changes | C．increases | D．starts |
| A．difference | B．influence | C．shift | D．variety |
| A．enrich | B．purify | C．refresh | D．standardize |
10 . Concerns about the harm caused by “too much” screen time—particularly when it is spent on social media—are widespread. But working out what a “healthy”
Some negative experiences on social media—like
Consider the picture painted by a UNICEF review of existing research into the effects of digital technology on children’s
The UNICEF report highlighted a 2017 study that examined 120,000 UK 15-year-olds. Among those teenagers who were the lightest users, it was found that increasing the time spent using technology was linked to
A broader look at evidence provided by some other high quality studies again suggests the story is not
So how much time should our children spend looking at screens? It is difficult to be
| A．amount | B．comparison | C．experience | D．medium |
| A．accounting for | B．boasting of | C．commenting on | D．worrying about |
| A．general | B．particular | C．private | D．public |
| A．domestic | B．material | C．physical | D．psychological |
| A．complex | B．dramatic | C．harmless | D．predictable |
| A．improved | B．maximum | C．relative | D．small |
| A．As a rule | B．In contrast | C．On the whole | D．Worse still |
| A．convincing | B．definite | C．probable | D．true |
| A．estimating | B．experiencing | C．reducing | D．tracing |
| A．connection | B．power | C．promotion | D．risk |
| A．balanced | B．independent | C．precise | D．subjective |
| A．agree | B．forget | C．object | D．remember |
| A．equally | B．readily | C．reluctantly | D．weakly |
| A．emotion therapy | B．social media | C．TV broadcasting | D．video game |
| A．confident | B．optimistic | C．rough | D．wild |
