1 . When I was in my college, I have a full class schedule and a part-time job. I
After graduation, I decided to go to the
Me? Sports? No way. I was not
But just as I was beginning to feel comfortable.my friend suggested we play tennis
The first few months were quite
Obviously, if I hadn’t stepped outside of my comfort zone (区域), I would have never
| A．seldom | B．always | C．finally | D．still |
| A．lazy | B．overweight | C．diet | D．good |
| A．woods | B．court | C．gym | D．zone |
| A．often | B．independently | C．skillfully | D．properly |
| A．calm | B．inspired | C．angry | D．bored |
| A．relaxed | B．rich | C．afraid | D．athletic |
| A．changed | B．expected | C．followed | D．traveled |
| A．formally | B．normally | C．again | D．instead |
| A．hardly | B．strongly | C．partly | D．strangely |
| A．Awkwardly | B．Actively | C．Amazingly | D．Rudely |
| A．carrying | B．missing | C．seeing | D．holding |
| A．useful | B．sweet | C．satisfying | D．hard |
| A．in peace | B．in person | C．in surprise | D．in a hurry |
| A．questioned | B．wondered | C．discovered | D．remembered |
| A．excitement | B．fear | C．duty | D．pride |
2 . On Oct. 11, hundreds of runners competed in a cross-country race in Minnesota. Melanie Bailey should have
As reported by a local newspaper, Bailey was more than two-thirds of the way through her
Once there, Lenoue was
As for Bailey, she is more
Although the two young women were strangers before the
| A．designed | B．followed | C．changed | D．finished |
| A．delay | B．chance | C．trouble | D．excuse |
| A．judge | B．volunteer | C．classmate | D．competitor |
| A．race | B．school | C．town | D．training |
| A．agreed | B．returned | C．stopped | D．promised |
| A．courage | B．aid | C．patience | D．advice |
| A．went away | B．stood up | C．stepped aside | D．bent down |
| A．medical | B．public | C．constant | D．equal |
| A．interrupted | B．assessed | C．identified | D．appreciated |
| A．hunger | B．pain | C．cold | D．tiredness |
| A．worried | B．ashamed | C．confused | D．discouraged |
| A．game | B．problem | C．lesson | D．deal |
| A．leave | B．cure | C．bother | D．understand |
| A．ride | B．test | C．meet | D．show |
| A．secret | B．display | C．benefit | D．exchange |
3 . The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it’s right for you.
To do so, I divided the book into two parts. In part one, I describe the philosophical foundations of digital minimalism, starting with an examination of the forces that are making so many people’s digital lives increasingly intolerable, before moving on to a detailed discussion of the digital minimalism philosophy.
Part one concludes by introducing my suggested method for adopting this philosophy: the digital declutter. This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. At the end of the thirty days, you will then add back a small number of carefully chosen online activities that you believe will provide massive benefits to the things you value.
In the final chapter of part one, I’ll guide you through carrying out your own digital declutter. In doing so, I’ll draw on an experiment I ran in 2018 in which over 1,600 people agreed to perform a digital declutter. You’ll hear these participants’ stories and learn what strategies worked well for them, and what traps they encountered that you should avoid.
The second part of this book takes a closer look at some ideas that will help you cultivate (培养) a sustainable digital minimalism lifestyle. In these chapters, I examine issues such as the importance of solitude (独处) and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now spent on mindless device use. Each chapter concludes with a collection of practices, which are designed to help you act on the big ideas of the chapter. You can view these practices as a toolbox meant to aid your efforts to build a minimalist lifestyle that works for your particular circumstances.
1. What is the book aimed at?| A．Teaching critical thinking skills. | B．Advocating a simple digital lifestyle. |
| C．Solving philosophical problems. | D．Promoting the use of a digital device. |
| A．Clear-up. | B．Add-on. | C．Check-in. | D．Take-over. |
| A．Theoretical models. | B．Statistical methods. |
| C．Practical examples. | D．Historical analyses. |
| A．Use them as needed. | B．Recommend them to friends. |
| C．Evaluate their effects. | D．Identify the ideas behind them. |
A. It turned out that the second group remembered the information better. In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder (文件夹).
B. According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memory as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive (交互) memory. This doesn’t mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.
C. As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remembering less? If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory—your brain? Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.
D. In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow her research team wanted to know whether the Internet is changing memory. In one experiment, they gave people 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information while the second group understood that the computer would not save it.
E. Surprisingly, people later remembered the folder location better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called ”transactive memory“.
One of the activities during Qingming Holiday is a “Spring Outing”,
Before the COVID-19 epidemic,
Online ticket sales for red tourism scenic spots, local history museums, as well as cemetery parks (陵园) and
6 . To know parents’ influence on students’ learning, researchers studied 438 kids and their parents. Before a school year started, the researchers asked parents to write down how anxious they would feel in different situations connected with math like planning their money spending or checking their house’s size. They also checked their children’s math ability and math anxiety in a school year.
The study found kids whose parents were anxious about math learned less math over the school year. And these kids didn’t perform as well on the tests as those who hadn’t been exposed to much anxiety. Besides, these kids also were more likely to become nervous about math themselves. But these kids only “caught” that anxiety if their parents has often tried to help with their homework. This is an example of good intentions having a had result.
The study’s result appeared in Psychological Science. Erin Maloney led the study. As someone who has personally experienced math anxiety, she says, “I was always very nervous about math, not only taking test but also learning the new concepts. So I really tried to balk at math, including finding excuses to miss math tests and not wanting to do math homework.” It was only after she how math could be applied to her passion that she started to enjoy math.
Parents with math anxiety should still support their kids as the kids work on math homework, though. But they should know helping kids with schoolwork requires more than just going over facts and concepts. Parents should help kids look for ways to have fun with math, like playing math-based games. When kids have difficulty in learning, encourage them to bravely face it but don’t make them nervous.
What can students do if they’re already nervous about math? Maloney says, “My earlier study showed that students who wrote about their fears of math for 7 to 10 minutes before taking a math test performed better on that test. After the writing process, many students said their fears weren’t such a big deal.”
1. The 438 kids’ parents were asked to present ________.| A．their attitudes to school education | B．their opinions on kids’ math ability |
| C．their ways to solve kids’ math anxiety | D．their math anxiety levels in their daily life |
| A．Kids are more likely to be afraid of math. |
| B．Some parents pay little attention to their kids’ study |
| C．Kids can pick up negative thoughts about math from their parents. |
| D．Parents should help with their kids’ homework at little as possible. |
| A．Working closely with their math teachers | B．Seeking help during their learning process |
| C．Sparing some time to go over their notes daily | D．Removing math anxiety by admitting it to themselves. |
7 . Pieter Bruegel’s iconic 1565 painting The Harvesters hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work shows people harvesting wheat nearly as tall as they were. “Nowadays, however, if you walk through a wheat field, you basically see that wheat is about knee — height. The reduced height is essentially a consequence of breeding (培育) along with genes for increasing production to feed a growing population,” biologist De Smet explained.
De Smet says wheat is just one example of how historical artwork can allow us to track the transformation of food crops over time. He teamed up with art historian Vergauwen, a friend since childhood, to document such artwork around the world. They have been mainly looking at things where they can spot changes in shape, color and size.
Their interest in plants in artwork began with a visit to the Hermitage Museum, where they noticed an odd-looking watermelon in an early-17th-century painting. It appeared to be pale and white on the inside. Biologist De Smet assumed the painter had done a poor job. But art historian Vergauwen had a different idea. “No, this is one of the best painters ever from that era. So if he painted it like that, that’s the way it must have looked like,” he explained.
Other paintings revealed that both red and white watermelons were grown during the 17th century. “With all the genetic knowledge we now have, we can look in more detail how something comes about,” De Smet said. “For example, until the 18th century, European strawberries appeared tiny in paintings — they then grew in size as they were crossbred (杂交) with North American varieties.”
Ultimately, the team hopes to create an online research database of historical plant artwork. They seek the contributions of art enthusiasts around the world via the social media. “However,” Vergauwen reminds, “if you’re going to use, for example, Picasso to try and understand how a pear looked in the early 20th century, you might be misled.”
1. What can we learn about the painting The Harvesters?| A．It shows how people successfully grew wheat. |
| B．It proves that wheat was much shorter in the past. |
| C．It explains the consequence of different breeding methods. |
| D．It gives clues about how wheat in the 16th century looked like. |
| A．Their preference for food crops. |
| B．Their friendship since childhood. |
| C．Their divided views on an old painting. |
| D．Their shared interest in the Hermitage Museum. |
| A．Ant enthusiasts are not careful enough. | B．The source paintings need to be realistic. |
| C．Abstract paintings often mislead people. | D．Picasso’s paintings are hard to understand. |
A. For example, governments can use tax systems and place restrictions on the marketing of foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar. They can also provide healthy food in schools.
B. It is expected to rise by 100% among boys under 18, but go up even more sharply by 125% among girls the same age.
C. About 2.6 billion people around the world are already overweight. But on current trends, that is expected to rise to more than 4 billion people within 12 years, according to a research by the World Obesity Federation.
D. Therefore, governments and policymakers around the world need to do all they can to avoid passing health, social and economic costs on to the younger generation.
E. The research also shows that obesity(肥胖)among children and young people is increasing faster than among adults. By 2035, the number of obese youth is expected to be at least double the rate seen in 2020.
9 . Researchers in Australia and the US are working on a project to bring the thylacine(袋狼)back from extinction, the last one of which died in the 1930s.
The team say it can be recreated using stem cells and gene—editing technology, and the first thylacine could be reintroduced to the wild in 10 years’ time. The group of Australian and US scientists plan to take stem cells from a living marsupial(有袋动物)species with similar DNA, and then use gene—editing technology to “bring back” the extinct species or an extremely similar one. It would represent a remarkable achievement for the researchers attempting it, and require a number of scientific breakthroughs. “I now believe that in 10 years’ time we could have our first living baby thylacine since they were hunted to extinction close to a century ago,” said Professor Andrew Pask, who is leading the research from the University of Melbourne.
The population of thylacine declined when humans arrived in Australia tens of thousands of years ago, and again when dingoes, a species of wild dog, appeared. Eventually, the thylacine could only be found on the island of Tasmania, and was ultimately hunted to extinction.
The idea of bringing back the thylacine has been around for more than 20 years. In 1999, the Australian Museum started to pursue a project to clone the animal; and various attempts have been made ever since to gain or rebuild DNA from samples, which is capable of surviving and developing.
This latest project is a partnership between University of Melbourne and Texas—based company Colossal, which made headlines last year with its plans to use similar gene editing technology to bring mammoth(猛犸象)back to life technology yet to become reality.
Many outside experts are rather dubious about the science behind it, suggesting de—extinction(物种复活)is just science fiction. But if scientists were to succeed in bringing back the thylacine, it would mark the first “de—extinction” event in history.
1. What can be inferred from the first two paragraphs?| A．The thylacine became extinct a decade ago. |
| B．Scientists will take stem cells from a thylacine. |
| C．Gene—editing technology is needed to recreate the thylacine. |
| D．The thylacine can be recreated with the existing technologies. |
| A．in Tasmania | B．in Texas |
| C．in Melbourne | D．in the Australian Museum |
| A．Worried. | B．Doubtful. |
| C．Confident. | D．Ambitious, |
10 . Australian film star Hugh Jackman explains how his now film, The Son, has changed him, which is critical to his life.
Jackman has never fully managed a character like his now film, The Son. It is based on a 2018 play by Florian Zeller, who previously entered the film industry with another work, The Father. While this involves Alzheimer’s, it looks at another mental health issue. Jackman plays Peter, a workaholic divorcee whose world falls apart when his adolescent son begins to suffer from depression.
Jackman’s performance deserves a second Oscar nomination in his career. “I think what interests me most about Peter is that it’s important for him to feel like a strong and capable person,” Jackman said. “And that makes it harder for him to admit that maybe he’s not equipped and maybe he doesn’t know what to do. Some of the guilt of leaving home, which is not resolved, makes him more determined to be the one who can solve the problem, to save his son—to be a father whose father is not.”
To say that the film goes deep into Jackman’s skin is an understatement. “I think it still works in me because we talk about it, relive it and understand it,” he admitted. “When I watch it, I find myself very emotional. I’m not just talking about stories. I think it’s a process that requires a jot of trust and revelation(揭露).”
Jackman admits the film changed his attitude towards mental health. He began receiving treatment during filming—an indoor cleanup that most middle—aged people can probably do. It also reshaped his own relationship with his children. Jackman and his wife adopted a son, Oscar (now 22) and daughter, Ava (17). “I’ve not been the same since I made this film,” he said. “I’m more open about my weakness with them, with my kids.”
1. What can we learn about Jackman according to paragraph 2?| A．He is a workaholic divorce. |
| B．His son suffers from depression. |
| C．He entered the film industry with The Father. |
| D．He completely handled the character in The Son. |
| A．Because the character Peter is strong and capable. |
| B．Because the character Peter suffers inner struggle. |
| C．Because the character Peter can help him win an Oscar nomination. |
| D．Because like the character Peter, he is also guilty of leaving home. |
| A．He paid more attention to his own mental health. |
| B．He spent more time on the cleaning of his home. |
| C．He decided to adopt a son and a daughter. |
| D．He could accept his children’s weakness better. |
| A．A science report. | B．A museum guide. |
| C．An entertainment magazine. | D．A history textbook. |
