1 . Different types of volunteer opportunities for teenagers exist in a wide range of time periods and fields.
After school opportunities can help teenagers develop a sense of responsibility and a good work attitude. Volunteer opportunities for teenagers looking to volunteer after school include private teaching and volunteering as an instructor.
During the holidays, a wide variety of volunteer opportunities exist to help give back to the surrounding community during times of need.
Volunteering to help pets is an option for teenagers with a love of animals.
| A．Options may also vary according to a child’s age. |
| B．Volunteers can help keep animals clean, fed, and exercised. |
| C．Working with the elderly is another opportunity for teenagers. |
| D．It’s necessary to do some research to find volunteer opportunities. |
| E．They are available after school, during the summer, and over the holidays. |
| F．These opportunities can often be found through local schools or community centers. |
| G．Volunteering at food banks and homeless shelters is a good way to help the less fortunate. |
2 . It's time for people to pick up their boom boxes and dust off their sneakers. Breaking, or competitive break dancing, is going for the gold.
On Dec 7, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that breaking would be an Olympic sport at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. It will be the latest modern sport to be added to the Games. IOC President Thomas Bach said that the new addition of breaking could help the Olympics event be “more youthful”. “We had a clear priority, and this was to introduce sports particularly popular among the younger generation,” Bach said. “And also to take into consideration the urbanization of sport.”
Breaking was originally part of early hip-hop culture in New York in the 1970s. In the decades since, it has spread globally, enjoying huge popularity beyond the US and particularly across Europe and Asia. Though breaking is often categorized as a style of street dance, it more easily lends itself to the field of sports than other styles for the competitive nature.
“Back in the Bronx in New York, when it first started, it was always neighborhoods of kids just battling each other,” 26-year-old break-dancer Victor Montalvo told USA Today. “That's how they did it back in the day.”
“Breaking competitions typically consist of one-on-one battles in which one competitor challenges his or her rival with different moves and the other responds. It's a sport/art just as physically demanding as high-intensity dancing and acrobatics”, Montalvo added.
But as an art, breaking also features coordination and creativity. Some combinations of moves can be practiced, but much of a round is improvised. Combining vitality and creativity, breaking is accepted by young dancers across the world who are motivated by the prospect of representing their countries at the world’s biggest sporting event.
1. What does the underlined words “the gold” in Paragraph 1 refer to?| A．The coins made of gold. | B．The gold medal. |
| C．Great wealth. | D．The deep yellow color. |
| A．It has a short history. | B．It reflects the urbanization of sport. |
| C．It is a new addition to the Olympics. | D．It is popular with the younger generation. |
| A．Creativity. | B．High intensity. |
| C．Physical coordination. | D．Dancing techniques. |
| A．To stress the importance of breaking. | B．To introduce a new Olympic event- breaking. |
| C．To throw light on the rules of breaking. | D．To make a brief historical overview of breaking. |
3 . What Are the Roots of Your Self-Esteem?
Self-esteem is a person's subjective assessment of his or her worth to himself or herself. Self- esteem covers various beliefs about oneself (such as 'Tm a failure" and "I'm beautiful") as well as physiological states, including sadness, joy, and shame. The more we believe that we are worthy of happiness and good things in life, the more self-fulfilled we will be. When we don't believe that we are worthy of these things, our ability to enjoy them can suffer.
Healthy self-esteem as an adult can be a gift given in your childhood. It is a blessing that most people overlook. There are so many ways adults with high self-esteem were supported as children that resulted in them having high self-esteem. For instance, they were praised for what they had achieved.
It is common that these adults also believe that in order to be appreciated they need to be perfect.
How you feel about yourself impacts how you live your life. People with high self-esteem tend to have better relationships than those with low self-esteem.
| A．There is also a good chance that they were spoken to respectfully. |
| B．When we start to doubt what's important in life, we tend to do less of it. |
| C．Since self-esteem is connected to how we perform, it is important to work on it. |
| D．People with poor self-esteem, on the other hand, often experienced the opposite. |
| E．This creates an image in their mind that without accomplishment they are worthless. |
| F．They face failure too, but they understand that failure or success doesn't define them. |
| G．High self-esteem enables you to ask for help and support from the people around you when you need it. |
4 . Several years ago, when someone used camera covers to protect against possible monitoring, it was not popular to talk about it. Today, people use various types of tapes to cover the web cameras and microphones.
There are many types of spyware that can dive into our devices and secretly spy on them, recording everything they do. Such programs may infect not only computers but also smartphones. Your data may be used by hackers who will try to request money for not exposing your private information or by companies like NSO Group who created the Pegasus spyware to “provide authorized governments with technology that helps struggle against terror and crime”.
In my opinion, the described protection technique is highly overestimated. Users tape cameras and microphones due to the lack of understanding of how their devices work and how malware(恶意软件)works. Hackers and even secret services do not have enough resources to monitor all victims using cameras or microphones. If they need to yet any information, they get it by sending a targeted malware to your device, which will not be stopped by the tapes. Such a virus will find what to steal -from personal photos and videos to passwords from social networks, browser history, bank accounts and much more.
It is unwise to believe that attackers will not be able to find a way to spy on you, even if the device, discharged to zero, can still deliver data about your location, using the smartphones of the surrounding people as signal repeaters. Let us face it. we live in an era when it is extremely difficult to hide something and a piece of tape is clearly not the most useful tool in the struggle for your privacy.
Again, to be able to spy on you, attackers need to plant malware in your device. To prevent malware from entering your device, do not click suspected links and email attachments. Use strong passwords for email, social media and online banking accounts.
1. What does the underlined word “them” in paragraph 2 refer to?| A．Cameras. |
| B．Types. |
| C．Programs. |
| D．Devices. |
| A．group of hackers. |
| B．A company developing spyware. |
| C．A group of terrorists and criminals. |
| D．A company fighting against crime. |
| A．People know little about their devices. |
| B．Hackers have no access to others. |
| C．It hardly prevents malware from getting privacy. |
| D．It can't cover the cameras completely. |
| A．Protecting privacy on devices. |
| B．Rising trend of using tapes. |
| C．Monitoring devices via cameras. |
| D．Avoiding clicking distrustful links. |
5 . It may seem as if Mother's Day was invented by a company named Hallmark, but people have been taking time on the calendar to give a shout-out to Mom for a long time. The Greeks and Romans had mother goddess festivals — although their celebrations didn't involve the menfolk taking their underappreciated mothers out to dinner. A more recent tradition was Mothering Sunday, which developed in the British Isles during the 16th century. On the fourth Sunday in April, young men and women who were living and working apart from their families were advised to return to their mothers’ houses.
Mother's Day as it is observed in the United States started in the 1850s with Ann Jarvis, a West Virginia woman who held “Mothers' Work Days” to promote health and hygiene(卫生 ) at home and in the workplace. During the Civil War, Jarvis organized women to improve sanitary conditions for soldiers on both sides, and after the war she became a peacemaker, furthering the cause by bringing together mothers of Union and Confederate soldiers and promoting a Mother's Day holiday.
Jarvis's work inspired another 19th-century woman, Julia Ward Howe. In 1870 Howe published her “Mother's Day Proclamation”, which envisioned(设想) the day not as appreciation of mothers by their children but as an opportunity for women to exercise their collective power for peace. Howe started holding annual Mother's Day celebrations in Boston, her hometown, but after about a decade she stopped footing the bill and the tradition faded away.
It was Jarvis's daughter Anna who succeeded in getting Mother’s Day recognized as a national holiday. After her mother died, in May 1905, Anna started holding yearly ceremony on the anniversary and conducting a tireless PR campaign to have the day made a holiday. In 1908 she succeeded in enlisting the support of John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia department store magnate and advertising pioneer, and by 1912 West Virginia and a few other states had adopted Mother's Day. Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson signed a resolution declaring the second Sunday in May a national holiday.
It wasn't long, though, before whatever ideals the day was supposed to celebrate were buried under an amount of greeting cards and candy. By the 1920s Anna Jarvis was campaigning against the holiday she had been instrumental in creating. “I wanted it to be a day of emotionalism, not profit,” she said.
1. It can be inferred from the first paragraph that .| A．mothers didn't get enough appreciation in the past |
| B．Mother's Day was invented by Hallmark |
| C．young people all returned to their mothers' houses |
| D．Greeks and Romans were the first to celebrate Mother's Day |
| A．Ann Jarvis. | B．Julia Ward Howe. |
| C．Woodrow Wilson. | D．Anna Jarvis. |
| A．Because it was extremely emotional. |
| B．Because the festival was not profitable. |
| C．Because the celebrations went against the original spirit. |
| D．Because the day was celebrated in the form of exchanging greeting cards and candy. |
| A．The Definition of Mother’s Day |
| B．The Argument on Celebrating Mother's Day |
| C．The Story Behind the Creation of Mother's Day |
| D．Different Forms of Celebration on Mother's Day |
6 . In order to improve people's sleep, experts have encouraged people to adopt a variety of measures to overcome their stress-related sleeplessness. Among their recommendations: engage in regular exercise, establish a nightly bedtime routine and cut back on screen time. But many people may be overlooking another important factor in poor sleep: diet.
A growing body of research suggests that the foods you eat can affect how well you sleep, and your sleep patterns can affect your diet choices. Dr. St-Onge has spent years studying the relationship between diet and sleep. In this research, she and her assistants selected 26 healthy adults and controlled what they ate for four days, providing them regular meals prepared by nutritionists while also monitoring how they slept at night. On the fifth day, the subjects were allowed to eat whatever they wanted.
Their work suggests that rather than stressing one or two specific foods with supposedly sleep-inducing properties, it is better to focus on the overall quality of your diet. They discovered that eating more fat and less fiber from foods like vegetables, fruits and whole grains led to reductions in slow-wave sleep, which is the deep kind. In general, the experiments have also found that carbs have a significant impact on sleep: People tend to fall asleep much faster at night when they consume a high-carb diet compared to when they consume a high-fat or high-protein diet.
But the quality of carbs matters. In fact, they can be a double-edged sword when it comes to sleep. Dr. St-Onge has found that when people eat more sugar and simple carbs - such as white bread and pasta—they wake up more frequently throughout the night. In other words, eating carbs may help you fall asleep faster, but it is best to consume "complex" carbs that contain fiber, which may help you obtain more deep, healthy sleep.
1. Which factor might be ignored in poor sleep?| A．Regular exercise. | B．Bedtime schedule. | C．Screen time. | D．Proper diet. |
| A．We can have a better sleep with all carbs. | B．Sleep and diet can influence each other. |
| C．Carbs contribute to easier sleep than high-fat diets. | D．We'd better focus on one or two specific food, |
| A．Carbs are essential to better sleep | B．Carbs' influence depends on its quality. |
| C．Carbs can be consumed as many as possible. | D．Carbs should be taken in frequently. |
| A．A Recent Research on Sleep and Diet | B．A Method of Having a Good Sleep |
| C．The Relation between Sleep and Diet | D．The Sleep Patterns and Diet Choices |
7 . Tips for Cutting the Cost of Travel
Whether for pleasure or business reasons, it is normal for us to sometimes want to pack our bags, hit the road, and head to a new destination.
•
•Choose a cheaper means of transportation. While everyone likes to fly to their travel destination for ease and speed, flying isn’t the only transport option available. Depending on where you’re living and where you’re headed, you can always select public transport.
•Don’t use hotels.
•Use a travel credit card. When you apply for these cards, you can control opportunities like signing-up bonuses(红利), most of which are offered by airline credit cards.
| A．Save on airfare |
| B．Surf the website for tickets |
| C．While traveling is an exciting experience |
| D．These bonus points can help you increase a lot of miles |
| E．Staying at someone’s house can be cheaper than booking a hotel |
| F．So research what’s available and choose the best option for your budget |
| G．If you’re a budget sensible traveler looking to reduce the travel costs |
8 . We recognize our friends’ faces. And we’re not alone. Many social animals can identify individuals of their own species by features of their faces. That's important, because they need to be able to change their behavior depending on who they meet. And a recent research has shown that some species of monkeys, birds, and domesticated (家养的) animals can even tell different faces apart by looking at photographs alone.
Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.
She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side pictures by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their present keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored (忽视) the stranger’s face about 75%of the time. In fact, even though the horses didn't get it right every single time, they were at least as correct in picking out their earlier keeper as they were at identifying their present one.
The results suggest that not only can horses differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces, they also naturally understand that photographs are two dimensional representations (二维呈现) of real life, without any other intimations such as smell or sound. And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal parter, the domestic dog.
In addition, horses seem to have a strong long-term memory for human faces, like their long lifespan and history of domestication. In future experiments, the researchers would like to test whether looking at photos of people that they have had bad experiences with in the past might cause horses to act anxious or even avoidance. So maybe think twice before doing anything that might give a horse a long face.
1. Why did researchers show the horses both the keeper’s photos and the strangers’?| A．To find out what horses would do in the experiment. |
| B．To see why horses could recognize the keeper in the pictures. |
| C．To test whether horses could recognize the strangers in pictures. |
| D．To study to what degree horses can make out different people in pictures. |
| A．Clues. | B．Differences. |
| C．Photographs. | D．Senses. |
| A．Whether horses can live longer than other animals. |
| B．Whether horses can remember human's faces for a long time. |
| C．Whether horses can show their emotions at the sight of photos. |
| D．Whether horses are better at recognizing photos than other animals. |
| A．To talk about animals’ species. |
| B．To explain animals’ facial features. |
| C．To show animals’ behaviour for adaptation. |
| D．To introduce animals’ ability to identifying faces. |
9 . The biggest and the smallest of the world’s animals are most at risk of dying out, according to a new analysis, with vertebrates (脊椎动物) in the so-called “Goldilocks zone”—not too big and not too small—winning out. Action is needed to protect animals at both ends of the scale, they say. The research adds to evidence that animals are dying out on such a scale that a sixth extinction is considered under way.
One clue is body size. Research on birds and mammals has shown that those with larger bodies are more likely to go extinct. Yet, when the researchers made a database of thousands of birds, mammals, fish, amphibians (两栖动物) and reptiles (爬行动物) at risk of extinction, they found disproportionate (不成比例的) losses at the large and small ends of the scale.
“Surprisingly, we found that not only the largest of all vertebrate animal species are most threatened, but the very tiniest ones are also highly threatened with extinction,” Prof. Ripple told BBC News.
Large animals, such as elephants, rhinos (犀牛) and lions have long been the target of protection efforts. However, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians that are the giants of their kind, such as the whale shark, Somali ostrich (鸵鸟) and the Chinese giant salamander (蝾螈), tend to be overlooked. Meanwhile, small species at risk--such as frogs and shrews (鼩鼱)--receive very little attention.
“I think, for the smallest species, first of all we need to bring higher awareness to them, because the larger ones get a lot of attention, but the smaller ones get very little,” said Prof. Ripple.
In the study, vertebrates with the smallest and the largest bodies were found to be most at risk of disappearing, whether they were on land or living in oceans, streams or rivers.
Heavyweights are threatened mainly by hunting, while featherweights are losing out to pollution and cutting down forests. “Ultimately, reducing global consumption of wild meat is a key step to reduce negative impacts of hunting, fishing, and trapping on the world’s vertebrates,” they write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
1. What made the researchers feel surprised?| A．A sixth of animals are dying out. |
| B．Small animals are in great danger. |
| C．Great losses of birds and mammals. |
| D．Big animals are at risk of disappearing. |
| A．Transform our habits. | B．Change our concepts. |
| C．Find ways to save small animals. | D．Take measures to stop pollution. |
| A．Loss of forests. | B．Climate change. |
| C．Human activities. | D．Environmental pollution. |
| A．Size Matters When It Comes to Extinction Risk |
| B．Large Animals Are Badly in Need of Protection |
| C．Why a Great Number of Animals Are Dying out |
| D．What We Should Do to Protect Endangered Species |
10 . This could be the perfect gift for the partner, who embarrasses you on the dance floor. Smart socks, which can teach to dance, may be the answer for anyone with two left feet.
The socks have been developed as a running tool to help runners improve their skills. Thanks to the socks, users can accurately record not only how far and fast they run but also how well. It means the user maximizes their performance, and reduces damage to body and prevents hurt. The hi-tech socks are made of special fibers that watch the movements of your feet. They look, feel and can be washed like normal clothes.
Sensors (传感器) record each movement and send it by an ankle transmitter (脚踝发射器) to a smart phone. Then a “virtual coach” application shows the information and can tell the user what they are doing wrong, and help to improve skill in any task with feet.
The socks should be useful to athletes and weekend joggers. “People think running is so easy and of course everybody can do it but not necessarily safely and well,” Dr. Davide Vigano said. A recent study showed that between 60 and 80 percent of runners got hurt per year. This is pretty much more than any other human activity. Researchers say the technology can also be developed to teach people how to dance, play sports such as golf, or even to help to teach women to walk better in high heels.
Mr. Vigano said, “People could all benefit from the idea. We have had interest from all sorts of sports, like skiing, football, cycling and golf. Anything where you have to use your feet can use it. It could even be put in high heels to help women walk in them safely.”
Socks are just the start, and the technology could be used in gloves, hats and boots. The socks, anklet and software package, are expected to be sold for around￡120, which will go on sale in March.
1. What does the underlined part “anyone with two left feet” refer to?| A．People who are disabled. |
| B．People who are interested in dancing. |
| C．People who are not good at dancing. |
| D．People who invented the socks. |
| A．They feel much softer than normal clothes. |
| B．They can monitor the movement of feet. |
| C．They are expensive to produce. |
| D．They act as a smart phone for users. |
| A．They can improve the skill of running. |
| B．They can help women walk better in high heels. |
| C．They can teach people to dance well. |
| D．They can be worn for days without washing. |
| A．everyone can make good use of the smart socks |
| B．users can run as fast as they like with the socks |
| C．60 to 80 percent of runners would like to buy the smart socks |
| D．no runners will get hurt, thanks to the socks |
