1 . The common use of Google Maps, a navigation (导航) app on smartphones, raises the age-old question we meet with any technology: What skills are we losing? But also, importantly: What abilities are we getting?
People who are good at finding their way around or good at using paper maps are usually confused about digital (数字的) maps. For example, they may mess up the direction of north and south. But consider what digital navigation apps have meant for someone like me. Although I travel often, I’m so terrible at finding my way that I still use Google Maps almost every day where I have lived for many years. What seems unnecessary to some has been an important part of my own abilities.
Part of the problem is that reading paper maps requires a special skill set. There is nothing natural about them. In many developed nations, street names and house numbers are meaningful, and instructions such as "go north for three blocks and then west" are usually understandable. In Istanbul, however, where I grew up, none of those hold true. For one thing, the locals hardly use street names, and house numbers often aren’t sequential. After buildings 1,2 and 3 were built, someone might put in another house between 1 and 2, and that’s 4. Therefore, instructions as simple as "go north" would require a helicopter. I got lost all the time.
But since I used Google Maps, I travel with a lot more confidence. As a result, my world has opened up and my native navigation skills have improved, too.
That brings me back to my question: while we often lose some skills after seeking convenience from technology, this new setup may also allow us to gain more abilities and do something more confidently. Maybe when technology closes a door, we should also look for the doors it opens.
1. What do we know about Google Maps from the first two paragraphs?| A．It confuses users like the writer. |
| B．It helps people read maps better. |
| C．It is a technology welcomed by all. |
| D．It is popular but brings doubts as well. |
| A．In a usual order. | B．Easily noticed. | C．of the same kind. | D．Clearly written. |
| A．To introduce the use of Google Maps. |
| B．To share his opinions on Google Maps. |
| C．To show the influence of Google Maps. |
| D．To tell the great popularity of Google Maps. |
2 . I am a part of the Windward Robotics team known as the Omnicats, one of the many clubs offered at my school, My eight teammates and I started out by watching the robotics qualifiers (资格赛) and finals of Chinese teams. We used these robotics videos for inspiration and drew up mind maps of what our team wanted to do.
We meet every day for two hours after school in order to build our robots. Typically, adults oversee what students are building, but my school lets teens take control. It leaves room for more errors, but we’re prouder of our final product.
Before our first real match, a practice one was offered at the actual site. My sub-team had been further along than other teams but quickly fell behind,’ When that big day arrived, I immediately felt my teammates’ nervousness. Our first match was in three minutes. All of us glanced around at each other, anxious and nervous. Our robot was still sitting in a box. Two of our teammates rushed to take the robot for an official examination as the rest of us discussed our strategy.
Our team captain explained that we all should try driving the robot now, while it was early in the season. She gave me the remote. I had only driven for a limited amount of time in practice so I was extremely nervous. Our autonomous code (自动代码) began to run almost immediately after our short discussion. Despite all the drama, we ended up winning the match. Not too bad for the first match! I was so proud. I did not enjoy the pressure of driving but liked building the, robot behind the scenes instead.
We have transferred to a different type of robotics at the end of the season, which involves the whole team designing one giant robot with large tools. I am a part of the electrical team now, so I make sure the motherboard (母板) can supply the robot’s energy needs. We have all enjoyed the rest of the season and learned that robotics is never dull!
1. What does the underlined word in paragraph 2 mean?| A．inspect | B．revise | C．overlook | D．request |
| A．Because they didn’t prepare for it at all. . |
| B．Because it was really too difficult for them. |
| C．Because they didn’t know what the match would be like. |
| D．Because they didn’t make full preparations before the match. |
| A．It was tiring but exciting. |
| B．It was stressful but wonderful. |
| C．It was terrible but delightful. |
| D．It was boring but rewarding. |
| A．Robotics Is Never Dull |
| B．Teamwork for Robots |
| C．A Girl Who Loves Robots |
| D．My First Robotics Match |
3 . Way back in 1965. Seiichi Miyake spent his own money to try and come up with an invention that would help a friend who was suffering vision loss move through the city easily. He came up with the idea of tactile blocks (导盲砖). you will have seen these at crosswalks all over the world, small raised blocks that warn people with low vision or blindness of coming danger and also safety.
Miyake designed the blocks in two ways. The dotted blocks warn the visually disabled that they are approaching danger. This type is most commonly found on the edge of pavement and railway platforms. A block with a barred pattern warns the pedestrians (行人) that they are following a safe path. Pedestrians can recognize these blocks and their patterns with either their vision walking stick, their feet or with the help of a vision assistance animal.
His block designs were first adopted by the city of Okayama on March 18,1967 , next to a school for the blind. In the 1970 s, the blocks were installed across all Japanese railway stations.
Since their invention, the tactile blocks have had a few changes including a pattern with smaller raised dots or more pill-shaped raised blocks indicating different directional cues around the world. For example, when the dots are raised in lines in the direction of movement, it might mean steps ahead. For those without vision loss, the blocks may simply blend (融合) into the urban environment but they play a critical role in giving more independence to those with a disability in vision.
However, the tactile blocks have their critics too. Some argue that they might do more harm than good to those with mobility difficulties such as the elderly who may trip on the uneven surface. Moving forward into a world that is more accessible to people with disability, cities are turning to designers who have vision disability themselves.
1. What can we learn from the passage?| A．Seiicbi Mipake, who was suffering vision loss, came up with the invention. |
| B．The visually disabled benefit a lot from the invention in their daily life. |
| C．A block with a barred pattern warns the pedestrians of the danger ahead. |
| D．The tactile blocks were originally intended to blend into the urban environment |
| A．To guide the visually disabled more accurately. |
| B．To prevent pedestrians from tripping over the blocks. |
| C．To make the tactile blocks better integrate in the surroundings. |
| D．To help people with visual disability to walk in a line. |
| A．They are better designers. |
| B．They are more sympathetic. |
| C．They know better about their world. |
| D．They demand less from the government. |
4 . If you do not use your arms or your legs for some time, they become weak; when you start using them again, they slowly become strong again. Everybody knows this, and nobody would think of questioning this fact.
If a friend complains that his arms are weak, we know that it is his own fault. But if he tells us that he has a poor memory, many of us think that his parents are to blame, or that he is just unlucky, and few of us realize that it is just as much his own fault as if it was his arms or legs that were weak.
Have you ever noticed that people who cannot read or write usually have better memories than those who can?
| A．Why is this? |
| B．What do you think of it? |
| C．Someone else says that he is poor in health. |
| D．The position is exactly the same as that of two people. |
| E．So if you want a good memory, practice remembering. |
| F．Not all of us can become extremely strong or extremely clever. |
| G．Yet many people do not seem to know that the memory works in the same way. |
5 . You’re stuck in a sea of standstill traffic when it begins: hunger pangs, the kind that release a steady stream of fast food fantasizing. With your grumbling stomach growing louder, your options are limited: You can wait a few hours for the roadways to clear or leave your car idling（挂空挡）on the highway while you set off on foot (please don’t do this).
Now Burger King, is betting that hungry drivers will welcome a third option: a direct-to-driver delivery concept the company has labeled the “Traffic Jam Whooper.” Reached by email, Gustavo Lauria, co-founder of the advertising agency We Believers, which developed the vehicle delivery concept, said the new approach allows the burger chain to gain advantage on a time of day in which the city’s terrible traffic typically slows business. “This was an opportunity for Burger King to generate new profits out of those hungry drivers”, Lauria added.
Lauria claims Burger King is the first fast food brand to deliver food to people in the middle of a traffic jam. In Mexico City, the company said, delivery drivers are already receiving an average of 7, 000 orders per day, mostly to homes and offices. To make the traffic jam delivery process possible, Burger Kings Mexico app activates the service after identifying crowded areas in Mexico City during periods of high traffic. Customers can only place an order if the app determines that the driver will be locked in traffic for at least 30 minutes and they are within a 1. 8-mile distance of a Burger King restaurant, the company said.
Early on, Lauria wrote, the act was met with disbelief. The challenges were complex: making sure real-time data of geographic location was accurate enough, and the creation of a hands-free way to take orders on cellphones in a country that has adopted serious punishment for drivers who use cellphones behind the wheel.
Though the company did not offer a timeline, Burger King says it expects to roll out the Traffic Jam Whopper in other overcrowded cities, such as Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and Shanghai.
1. What does the “Traffic Jam Whopper” (paragraph 2) refer to?| A．A proposal intended to ease the traffic jam during peak hours. |
| B．A practice which allows drivers to have food delivered directly to their cars. |
| C．A platform which makes it convenient for drivers to order food via cellphones. |
| D．An association monitoring whether drivers are observing traffic rules strictly. |
| A．promote its business culture | B．make a shift in its sales pattern |
| C．achieve an increase in its profit | D．popularize its business into more cities |
| A．The Traffic Jam Whopper poses a threat to the safety of cyclists. |
| B．Drivers will be allowed to type on their cellphones during traffic jams. |
| C．Technological barriers may block the traffic jam delivery process. |
| D．Drivers can instantly choose to activate Burger Kings app at will. |
6 . Road trip stories are basically wild adventures of self-discovery. But the book Me (Moth) carves out a path through ancestry (祖先), pains and art.
Moth is a dancer with a loving, supportive family - until a terrible car accident takes them all away. Now she doesn't dance any more and lives with her sad aunt, wearing borrowed clothes and living on what feels like borrowed time, because not even the wisdom and Hoodoo (扶都教) passed down to her by her grandfather can bring back her family or ease her pain. Her survivor's guilt is so strong that she makes herself almost invisible.
Until the new boy at school, Sani, notices her. He sings when he thinks no one is listening and he sees Moth like no one else does. The two young people decide on a road trip across the country and hope to make some sense of their life on the way.
Novels in poetic language can sometimes feel awkward, but the book, Me (Moth) spills effortlessly across the page, becoming the song that Moth and Sani write together on their journey. It's all in Moth's voice, and her words dance, giving the reader a real sense of how she can move her body if she isn't afraid to. The language is sometimes so beautiful and terrible that it catches me off guard.
During their trip to the South, Moth and Sani stop to pay respect to the spirits of those who came before them, and to think about their strengths as well as the pains that they've suffered. As they do so, their own strengths and pains are connected with the ones that came before.
1. What can we learn from the underlined part in paragraph
| A．She is sad with her aunt. |
| B．She wears borrowed clothes. |
| C．She doesn't have time to dance. |
| D．She feels guilty of surviving alone. |
| A．Painful. | B．Joyful. | C．Rewarding. | D．Challenging. |
| A．A biography. | B．A book review. |
| C．A love story. | D．A travel journal. |
7 . A demonstration mission to test an idea to clean up space debris (碎片) was launched Monday morning local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. ELSA-d, which stands for End-of-Life Services by Astroscale, will be carried out by a "servicer satellite" and a "client satellite" (客户卫星) that launched together. The mission will exhibit technology that could help capture space junk, the millions of pieces of orbital debris that float above Earth. The more than 8,000 metric tons of debris threaten the loss of services we rely on for earth-bound life, including weather forecasting, telecommunications and GPS systems. The spacecraft works by attempting to attach itself to dead satellites and pushing them toward Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. The mission, which will be run from the U.K., will carry out this catch and release process repeatedly over the course of six months.
Space junk has been a growing problem for years as human-made objects such as old satellites and spacecraft parts build up in low Earth orbit until they decay, deorbit, explode or crash with other objects, breaking into smaller pieces of waste. According to a recent report by NASA, at least 26,000 of the millions of pieces of space junk are orbiting along at 17,500mph, and they could "destroy a satellite on impact". More than 500,000 pieces are a "mission-ending threat" because of their ability to impact protective systems, fuel tanks and spacecraft cabins.
The development of other cleanup technologies has been in progress for years. In 2016 , Japan's space agency sent a 700 -meter chain into space to try to slow down and redirect spacejunk. In 2018, a device called Remove Debris successfully cast a net around a copy satellite. The European Space Agency also plans to send a self-destructing robot into orbit in 2025 , which the Organization's former director general has referred to as a space "vacuum cleaner".
These efforts could prove increasingly important as private space ventures like SpaceX continue to fill low Earth orbit with a huge number of satellites in a mess.
1. What is ELSA-d?| A．A spacecraft aimed to remove space junk. |
| B．A satellite sent up to save the GPS system. |
| C．A program designed to prove the satellite's ability. |
| D．A mission intended to send a client satellite into space. |
| A．Remove Debris is regarded as a space "vacuum cleaner" |
| B．space junk is a potential threat to the launch of spacecrafts |
| C．the U.K. is the first country to develop cleanup technology |
| D．ELSA-d will make dead satellites burn up in the atmosphere |
| A．Cleanup Technologies Are Developing Rapidly |
| B．Constant Missions to Explore Space in the Future |
| C．New Effort to Clean up Space Junk Reaches Orbit |
| D．The Appeal for Solution to the Space Junk Problem |
8 . You’re rushing to school and a man ahead of you suddenly falls down. Do you stop to help? In a study of bystanders, it was found that some people look away or keep on walking rather than stop and get involved.
“There is an inclination (倾向) to decide that no action is needed,” says Ervin Staub, a psychologist (心理学家) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who studies the role of bystanders. “The first thoughts that come into your mind often keep you from offering help.”
Time and again, good and caring people fail to come to the aid of others. They know they should act and yet, for reasons they themselves don’t understand, people sometimes don’t respond. Longtime researchers of bystander behavior continue to struggle with the question, “Why?”
One thing we do know is that the more ambiguous a situation is, the less likely people are to help. Let’s say you see vapors (水汽) coming out of a building. You ask yourself,“Is it steam (蒸汽) or smoke?” If you are not sure, you look to other people for a clue about how to react. If you see other people doing nothing, you think, “Of course, that’s just steam.” You don’t want it to be smoke, because then you would have to do something about it.
Another one is known as "the bystander effect". This says that the more people there are observing an emergency (突发事件), the less responsible each one of them personally feels. For example, if you are the only person in the world who can act to save someone in a dangerous situation, you are more likely to act. However, if you are one of 100,000 people who could save the situation, you would be happier if one of the other 99,999 people did it!
“If you notice trouble, force yourself to stop and judge the situation instead of walking on,” says Ervin Staub. Then try to involve other people; you don’t have to take on all the responsibility of being helpfu1. According to Staub, it is sometimes just a matter of turning to the person next to you and saying, “It looks like we should do something.” Once you take action, most people will take their cues (提示) from you and also help.
1. According to Ervin Staub, when accidents happen, people’s first thoughts ________.| A．prevent them from helping | B．force them to give a hand |
| C．often lead to embarrassment | D．depend on others’ reaction |
| A．dangerous | B．difficult |
| C．unclear | D．unpleasant |
| A．many people have the same ideas |
| B．more people carry out more responsibility |
| C．people usually think a lot before difficulties |
| D．people tend to behave in the same way as most other people do |
| A．Don’t Just Stand There | B．Stick to Your Decision |
| C．Think Before You Leap | D．It’s the Thought that Counts |
9 . I’m a TV show host. One Sunday, I took my 7-year-old daughter by the sea for lunch. On arriving at the beach, I saw JoJo, a rich man in the hotel business. We sat down to chat in an open-air cafe.
Suddenly our talk was interrupted (打断) by a stranger, who politely asked permission to speak to me. Often people want to tell me something about my TV show, when I’m out on the streets.
He asked to speak to me alone, so we stood a bit away from my table. He said, “I’m James, 35 years old, father of a 7-year-old girl, who’s very sick. She needs treatment abroad. The doctors said that if she was treated in the UK, she would probably survive. But I’m poor, so can you please help me?”
Speechless, I looked at the man whose eyes were full of tears and asked how I could help. After we talked for a while, I went to sit back at the table. JoJo asked me, “What’s wrong with you? Your face changed.” I told him. JoJo was sorry for this family and said I had the means through the media to help him. Later we headed off to our destinations.
All weekend I thought about James, his daughter and his family. I even thought about doing a special TV show to raise money for this sick child.
On Monday morning I was at the office after I finished hosting my show, when my assistant said a man needed to speak to me. It was JoJo. He walked into my office. JoJo is so busy with his hotel business that I never imagined he had time to come and see me at the studios.
“Please, call the man with the sick child and tell him that I’ll pay all the money for his sick daughter’s treatment,” JoJo said, with a cheque (支票) in his hand. “I’ve been married for 35 years. I wasn’t lucky enough to have a child. I want to help this child now.” I picked up the phone to call James.
Now James’ daughter is well and living a normal life. JoJo often visit her. I’m so happy that there are so many good people on earth.
1. Why did James ask the author for help?| A．He guessed the author knew many rich people. |
| B．He knew that the author was a rich person. |
| C．He thought the author could help him through the media. |
| D．He once got help from the author. |
| A．To support the author’s work. |
| B．To show his love for a child. |
| C．To show his sympathy for the poor. |
| D．To set a good example to other rich people. |
| A．Kind people are everywhere. |
| B．The media are powerful. |
| C．Famous hosts are always troubled. |
| D．Even the richest person is not always lucky |
10 . Rising global meat consumption is likely to have a destructive environmental effect, increasing carbon emissions(排放)and reducing biodiversitiy (生物多样性), scientists have warned.
A new analysis suggests that meat consumption is set to climb sharply as the world population increases along with average individual incomes.
“What's happening is a big concern.” said Tim Key from the University of Oxford. “On a broad level you can say it is bad for the environment.”
The review,published in the journal Science, found that high levels of meat consumption also have negative health consequences, leading to an increased risk of cancer and other diseases.
The average amount of meat consumed per person globally has nearly doubled in the past 50 years, which means total meat production has been growing much faster than the rate of population growth, having increased four-or five-fold(五倍)since 1961.
There are recent indications that some countries,including the U.K.,may have reached "peak meat". The U.K's 2017 National Food Survey found meat consumption have fallen by 4.2% and that of meat products by nearly 7% since 2012. However, middle-income countries, particularly China and others in East Asia, are still seeing a rise. A recent review by the UN outlines how meat production-particularly livestock(家畜)-is linked to far higher carbon emissions than vegetables, fruit and grain.
Livestock farming is also a major contribution to biodiversity loss, as forests and wild land are given over to agricultural land to grow animal feed.
Processed meat has been ranked by the WHO alongside alcohol and tobacco as cancer causes. According to research of cancer, if no one ate processed or red meat in Britain, there would be 8,800 fewer cases of cancer a year.
1. What's the environmental effect of eating meat?| A．Raising livestock may destroy grasslands and forests. |
| B．Eating meat leads to the increase of human population. |
| C．Meat production adds to the amount of carbon emissions on Earth. |
| D．Keeping too much livestock destroys the balance of nature. |
| A．Eating huge amounts of meat. |
| B．Increasing carbon emissions in the air. |
| C．Reducing diversity of plants. |
| D．Risking developing cancer. |
| A．People farm forests and wild land to grow food for livestock. |
| B．Plants and animals die from carbon released by livestock. |
| C．Many plants and animals have become food for livestock. |
| D．Farm animals have consumed what humans use for food. |
| A．It's a necessary part of human diet. |
| B．It's like cigarettes and alcohol which can cause cancer. |
| C．It can reduce carbon release. |
| D．It contributes to the fall of meat consumption. |
