1 . Art Builds Understanding
Despite the long history of scholarship on experiences of art, researchers have yet to capture and understand the most meaningful aspects of such experiences, including the thoughts and insights we gain when we visit a museum, the sense of encounter after seeing a meaningful work of art, or the changed thinking after experiences with art. These powerful encounters can be inspiring, uplifting, and contribute to well-being and flourishing.
According to the mirror model of art developed by Pablo P. L. Tinio, aesthetic reception corresponds to artistic creation in a mirror-reversed fashion. Artists aim to express ideas and messages about the human condition or the world at large.
In addition, art making and art viewing are connected by creative thinking. Research in a lab at Yale University shows that an educational program that uses art appreciation activities builds creative thinking skills. It showed that the more time visitors spent engaging with art and the more they reflected on it, the greater the correspondence with the artists’ intentions and ideas.
Correspondence in feeling and thinking suggests a transfer — between creator and viewer — of ideas, concepts, and emotions contained in the works of art. Art has the potential to communicate across space and time.
| A．The viewers gain a new perspective on the story. |
| B．The theory of aesthetic cognitivism describes the value of art. |
| C．This helps to create connections and insights that otherwise would not happen. |
| D．To do so, they explore key ideas and continually expand them as they develop their work. |
| E．After spending more time with the work, the viewer begins to access the ideas of the artist. |
| F．For example, in one activity, people are asked to view a work of art from different perspectives. |
| G．Participants were more original in their thinking when compared to those who did not take part in the program. |
2 . The environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that offends our sense of justice. A business may maximize the amount of money it makes by damaging the environment and hurting people. When government regulation is effective, and the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may out-compete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and the public doesn’t care.
It is easy to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not charities but profit-making companies, and they are under obligation to maximize profits for shareholders by legal means.
Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through destructive environmental policies. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make such destructive policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.
The public can do that by accusing businesses of harming them. The public may also make their opinion felt by choosing to buy sustainably harvested products; by preferring their governments to award valuable contracts to businesses with a good environmental track record; and by pressing their governments to pass and enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices.
In turn, big businesses can exert powerful pressure on any suppliers that might ignore public or government pressure. For instance, after the US public became concerned about the spread of a disease, transmitted to humans through infected meat, the US government introduced rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of the disease spreading. But the meat packers refused to follow these, claiming that they would be too expensive to obey. However, when a fast-food company made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers dropped, the meat industry followed immediately. The public’s task is therefore to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure.
Some readers may be disappointed or outraged that I place the ultimate responsibility for business practices harming the public on the public itself. I also believe that the public must accept the necessity for higher prices for products to cover the added costs of sound environmental practices. My views may seem to ignore the belief that businesses should act in accordance with moral principles even if this leads to a reduction in their profits. But I think we have to recognize that, throughout human history, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found that not only did moral principles need to be made explicit, they also needed to be enforced.
My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish. I believe that changes in public attitudes are essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.
1. The main idea of Paragraph 3 is that environmental damage__________.| A．is the result of ignorance of the public |
| B．requires political action if it is to be stopped |
| C．can be prevented by the action of ordinary people |
| D．can only be stopped by educating business leaders |
| A．reduce their own individual impact on the environment |
| B．learn more about the impact of business on the environment |
| C．raise awareness of the effects of specific environmental disasters |
| D．influence the environmental policies of businesses and governments |
| A．Meat packers stopped supplying hamburgers to fast-food chains. |
| B．Meat packers persuaded the government to reduce their expenses. |
| C．A fast-food company forced their meat suppliers to follow the law. |
| D．A fast-food company encouraged the government to introduce regulations. |
| A．Will the world survive the threat caused by big businesses? |
| B．How can big businesses be encouraged to be less driven by profit? |
| C．What environmental dangers are caused by the greed of businesses? |
| D．Are big businesses to blame for the damage they cause to the environment? |
3 . If you’ re reaching for the last piece of pizza at a party, and meanwhile see another hand going for it, your next move probably depends on how you feel and whom the hand belongs to. Your little sister — you might just grab the pizza. Your boss — you probably will give up. But if you’re hungry and feeling particularly confident, you might go for it.
Now researchers have made progress in understanding how mammals’ brain encodes social rank and uses this information to shape behaviours — such as whether to fight for that last pizza slice. They discovered that an area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was responsible for representing social rank in mammals; changes to a mouse’s mPFC affect its dominance (支配) behaviour. But it was unknown how the mPFC represented this information and which neurons (神经元) were involved in changing dominance behaviour.
In the new study, Professor Kay Tye let groups of four mice share a cage, allowing a social hierarchy (等级) to naturally develop — some mice became more dominant and others more subordinate. As soon as the mice were paired up, he discovered, the activity of their mPFC neurons could predict — with 90 percent certainty — the rank of their opponent.
“We expected animals might only signal rank when they are in a competition,” says co-researcher Nancy. “But it turns out animals walk around with this representation of social rank all the time.”
When the researchers next asked whether the activity of the mPFC neurons was associated with behaviour, they found something surprising. The brain activity patterns were linked with slight changes in behaviour, such as how fast a mouse moved, and they also could predict — a full 30 seconds before the competition started — which mouse would win the food reward.
The winner was not always the more dominant, but the one engaged in a “winning mindset”. Just as you might sometimes be in a more competitive mood and be more likely to snatch that pizza slice before your boss, a subordinate mouse might be in a more “winning mindset” than a more dominant mouse and end up winning.
The areas of the mPFC associated with social rank and “winning mindset” are next to one another and highly connected. Signals on social rank impact the state of the brain involved in “winning mindset”. In other words, a subordinate mouse’s confidence and “winning mindset” may partially decrease when faced with a dominant one.
“This is further evidence to suggest that we are in different brain states when we are with others compared to when we’re alone,” says Tye. “Regardless of who you’re with, if you’re aware of other people around you, your brain is using different neurons.”
1. The author writes Paragraph 1 in order to ________.| A．tell an interesting story | B．present a typical example |
| C．introduce a major topic | D．provide a convincing proof |
| A．The mPFC neurons. | B．The researchers. |
| C．The brain activity patterns. | D．The changes in behaviour. |
| A．mPFC neurons change dominance behaviour. |
| B．Brain activities can influence social hierarchy. |
| C．Dominant opponents boost “winning mindset”. |
| D．Social rank and “winning mindset” affect behaviour. |
| A．Those eager to win may succeed. | B．When alone, we are more confident. |
| C．Social rank guides competitive behaviour. | D．“Winning mindset” establishes dominance. |
内容包括：
1. 比赛的时间和地点
2. 比赛的场景及结果
3. 活动的意义
注意：1.词数 100 左右；
2.题目自拟。
友好学校：sister school
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5 . I was at the Gathering for Science in Boston, on 22 April 2017, as were 70.000 other scientists. We were there to stand up for facts and truth.
Where are the crowds of scientists now? Since then, harms from science denial have only increased: global suffering has grown owing to inaction on climate change, and some epidemics have risen along with vaccine skepticism.
I've been out there talking to the science deniers, and I've asked my scientist friends to come with me. “Those people just aren't worth talking to.” they'll say. “I wouldn't make a difference anyway.” What's wrong. Those people can and do change their minds, although it requires someone to put in the time to overcome distrust.
To be sure, many experts have launched themselves against misinformation, enduring abuse on social media and even threats to their safety. But when scientists turn down my invitations, it's not because of fear. Most often, their excuses are grounded in the “backfire effect”, a questionable 2010 finding that people sometimes embrace misconceptions more strongly when fared with corrective information, implying that pushing back against falsehoods is counter-productive. Even the researchers whose results were exaggerated to popularize this idea do not embrace it anymore, and argue that the true challenge is learning how best to target corrective information.
In fact, evidence is growing that rebuttals can he effective. Science deniers all draw on the same flawed reasoning techniques: cherry-picking evidence, relying on fake experts, and engaging in illogical reasoning. A landmark 2019 study showed that critiquing the flawed techniques can contain the spread of misinformation.
So how does “technique rebuttal” work in practice?
Arnaud Gagneur and his colleagues at the University of Sherbrooke conducted more than 1.000 20-minute interviews in which they listened to new parents' concerns about vaccinations and answered their questions. Those parents' children were 9% more likely to receive all the vaccines on the schedule than were those of uninterviewed parents whose babies were delivered in the same maternity ward. One mother told him: “It's the first time that I've had a discussion like this, and I feel respected, and I trust you.” It is self-evident in science communication that you cannot convince a science denier with facts alone; most science deniers don't have a lack of information, but a lack of trust.
So what should scientists do? Even non-experts can use technique rebuttal. A geologist can engage a neighbor who is vaccine hesitant. A protein biologist can coach an aunt or uncle who wants “more evidence” that climate change is real. Instead of shilling to more comfortable conversations, engage in respectful exchange. If you spend more time asking questions than offering explanations, people will be more likely to pay attention to the explanations that you do offer.
1. What can we learn from the passage?| A．The Gathering for Science addressed online abuse. |
| B．The silence of scientists worsens harm from science denial. |
| C．Ineffective vaccines speed up the spread of some epidemics. |
| D．The author's friends find it valuable to talk with science deniers. |
| A．suggests caution before correcting others |
| B．emphasizes the effectiveness of rebuttals |
| C．results from flawed reasoning techniques |
| D．enjoys wide support in the academic field |
| A．the interviewed parents agreed to vaccination due to the sufficiency of the information |
| B．geologists and protein biologists need to make sure the conversations are comfortable |
| C．scientists are encouraged to listen carefully and ask questions during interaction |
| D．scientists should teach non-experts how to conduct respectful exchanges |
| A．express concerns for misinformation |
| B．analyze the main cause of science denial |
| C．advocate employing technique rebuttal |
| D．present the problems scientists encounter |
6 . Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published last December: Policymakers and the rest of us must engage openly with the risk of global collapse. Researchers in many areas have projected the widespread collapse as “a credible scenario(情景) this century”.
A survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, and freshwater shortages might create global collapse. Of course, if you are a non-human species, collapse is well underway.
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world's most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.
The international scholars’ warning letter doesn't say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology, the study of collapse, is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization. Among the signatories(签署者) of the warning was Bob Johnson, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity, “it seems that global collapse is certain to happen in some form, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Johnson said in an email.
“Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits,” the December warning letter says, “can we have the hope to reduce their speed, severity and harm”. And yet messengers of the coming disturbance are likely to be ignored. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. As a poet wrote,
Man is a victim of dope(麻醉品)
In the incurable form of hope.
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent(执着) on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. “Let's look directly into the issue of collapse,” they say, “and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there to make the best of a troubling future.”
1. What does the underlined word “germane” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?| A．Scientific. | B．Credible. |
| C．Original. | D．Relevant. |
| A．worried | B．puzzled |
| C．surprised | D．scared |
| A．The signatories may change the biophysical limits. |
| B．The author agrees with the message of the poem. |
| C．The issue of collapse is being prioritized. |
| D．The global collapse is well underway. |
7 . In a few decades, artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass many of the abilities that we believe make us special.
One of the most significant pieces of news from the US in early 2017 was the efforts of Google to make autonomous driving a reality. According to a report, Google’s self-driving cars clocked 1,023, 330 km, and required human intervention 124 times. That is one intervention about every 8,047 km of autonomous driving. But even more impressive is the progress in just a single year: human interventions fell from 0. 8 times per thousand miles to 0.2, a 400% improvement. With such progress, Google’s cars will easily surpass my own driving ability later this year.
Driving once seemed to be a very human skill. But we said that about chess, too. Then a computer beat the human world champion, repeatedly. The board game Go(围棋) took over from chess as a new test for human thinking in 2016, when a computer beat one of the world's leading professional Go players.
Perhaps, if we continue to improve information-processing machines, we’ll soon have helpful rational（理性的）assistants.
| A．So we must aim to complement the rationality of the machine, rather than to compete with it. |
| B．With computers conquering what used to be deeply human tasks, what will it mean in the future to be human? |
| C．We must face our fears if we want to get the most out of technology and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of humanity. |
| D．This is a grand challenge for our age and it may require an “irrational” response. |
| E．But most of all we need to keep the long-term perspective in mind: that even if computers will outsmart us, we can still be the most creative. |
| F．Actually, it all comes down to a fairly simple question: What’s so special about us? |
| G．Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”. |
8 . The Occupy Wall Street protest movement has raised serious questions about the role of capitalist institutions, particularly corporations in American society. Well before the first protester set foot in Zucotti Park, a heckler(扰乱分子) urged Mitt Romney to tax corporations rather than people. Romney’s response-- “Corporations are people” stirred a brief but intense controversy. Now thousands of demonstrators have in effect joined the heckler, denouncing(抨击) corporations as “enemies of the people.”
Far more important than questions about what corporations are is the question of what attitude we should have toward them. Should we, as corporate public relations statements often suggest, think of them as friends (if we buy and are satisfied with their products) or as family (if we work for them)? Does it make sense to be loyal to a corporation as either a customer or as an employee？More generally, even granted that corporations are not fully persons in the way that individuals are, do they have some important moral standing in our society？
My answer to all these questions is no, because corporations have no core dedication to fundamental human values. Such corporations exist as instruments of profit for their shareholders. In fact, left to themselves, they can be serious threats to human values that conflict with the goal of corporate profit. Corporations are a particular threat to truth, a value essential in a democracy, which places a premium on the informed decisions of individual citizens. The corporate threat is most apparent in advertising, which explicitly aims at convincing us to prefer a product regardless of its actual merit. Their defining goal is to generate profit. There are cases when telling the truth is the best means to advance corporate profits. In 1982, when seven people in Chicago died from poisoned Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson appealed to its credo, which makes concern for its customers primary corporate goal，and told the entire truth about what had happened. This honesty turned a potential public-relations disaster into a triumph. But Johnson & Johnson’s impressive corporate credo ends by saying, “Our final responsibility is to our stockholders and must make solid profit. The credo is unclear about what happens when there is a conflict between responsible action and long-term profit.
None of this means that corporations are evil or that socialism should replace the free-enterprise system. As Michel Foucault said of all power structures, it’s not that corporations are bad but that they are dangerous. The self-serving corporate speech that fills our media and halls of government is particularly dangerous for our democracy. At least for this reason, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are right to distrust corporations.
1. Mitt Romney most probably believes that ___________.| A．individuals should pay more taxes than corporations |
| B．corporations should not be forced to pay more taxes |
| C．people should care more about corporations’ development |
| D．corporations should enjoy all the legal rights as people do |
| A．should be set as moral examples of the society |
| B．take employees’ faithfulness as part of their goals |
| C．contribute little to the most essential human values |
| D．are actually means by which people share profits |
| A．corporations always make profits at the expense of people’s health |
| B．customers should always keep an eye on the quality of any product |
| C．corporations take economic profit as their priority essentially |
| D．corporation profit is always in contradiction with customer interests |
| A．Corporations, People and Truth |
| B．Corporations Are Different from People |
| C．Corporations Are Untrustworthy |
| D．The Occupy Wall Street Protest |
9 . In a recent series of experiments at the University of California, researchers studied toddlers’ thinking about winners and losers, bullies (欺凌) and victims.
In the first experiment, toddlers (学步儿童) watched a scene in which two puppets (木偶) had conflicting goals: One was crossing a stage from right to left, and the other from left to right. The puppets met in the middle and stopped. Eventually one puppet bowed down and moved aside, letting the other one pass by. Then researchers asked the toddlers which puppet they liked. The result: 20 out of 23 toddlers picked the higher-status puppet — the one that did not bow or move aside. It seems that individuals can gain status for being dominant (占优势的) and toddlers like winners better than losers.
But then researchers had another question: Do toddlers like winners no matter how they win? So, researchers did another experiment very similar to the one described above. But this time, the conflict ended because one puppet knocked the other down and out of the way. Now when the toddlers were asked who they liked, the results were different: Only 4 out of 23 children liked the winner.
These data suggest that children already love a winner by the age of 21-31 months. This does not necessarily mean that the preference is inborn: 21 months is enough time to learn a lot of things. But if a preference for winners is something we learn, we appear to learn it quite early.
Even more interesting, the preference for winners is not absolute. Children in our study did not like a winner who knocked a competitor down. This suggests that already by the age of 21-31 months, children’s liking for winners is balanced with other social concerns, including perhaps a general preference for nice or helpful people over aggressive ones.
In a time when the news is full of stories of public figures who celebrate winning at all costs, these results give us much confidence. Humans understand dominance, but we also expect strong individuals to guide, protect and help others. This feels like good news.
1. One of the purposes of the experiments is to ________.| A．teach toddlers how to gain higher status |
| B．offer toddlers a chance to watch a scene |
| C．observe the process of toddlers’ solving a conflict |
| D．find out toddlers’ attitude toward winners and losers |
| A．obeying rules |
| B．gaining status |
| C．giving in to the other |
| D．showing good manners |
| A．They are excellent learners. |
| B．They are always changeable. |
| C．They show mercy to the loser. |
| D．They value kindness over winning. |
| A．Disappointing. | B．Encouraging. |
| C．Unexpected. | D．Controversial. |
10 . Can We Stop Food Longing Through Imaginary Eating?
Are you fighting an urge to reach for chocolate? Then, let it melt in your mind, not in your mouth. According to the recent research, imagining eating a specific food reduces your interest in that food, so you eat less of it.
This reaction to repeated exposure to food—being less interested in something because you’ve experienced it too much—is called habituation.
The research is the first to show that habituation can occur through the power of the mind. “If you just think about the food itself—how it tastes and smells—that will increase your appetite,” said Carey Morewedge, a well-known psychologist. “It might be better to force yourself to repeatedly think about chewing and swallowing the food in order to reduce your longing.
Morewedge conducted an interesting experiment. 51 subjects were divided into three groups. One group was asked to imagine putting 30 coins into a laundry machine and then eating three chocolates.
| A．What’s more, this only works with the specific food you’ve imagined. |
| B．People were advised to try different methods to perform the experiment. |
| C．For example, a tenth bite is desired less than the first bite, according to the study. |
| D．All of them then ate freely from bowls containing the same amount of chocolate each. |
| E．It meant those who repeatedly imagined eating would concern about some specific food. |
| F．This requires the same motor skills as eating small chocolates from a packet, the study says. |
| G．This study is part of the research looking into what makes us eat more than we actually need. |
