1 . In the endless sky, the unaided human eye should be able to perceive several thousand stars on a clear, dark night. Unfortunately, growing light pollution has disabled people from the nightly view.
New citizen-science-based research throws alarming light on the problem of “sky glow” — the diffuse illumination (漫射照明) of the night sky that is a form of light pollution. The data came from crowd-sourced observations collected from around the world as part of Globe at Night, a program developed by astronomer Connie Walker.
Light pollution has harmful effects on the practice of astronomy but also on human health and wildlife, since it disturbs the cycle from sunlight to starlight that biological systems have evolved alongside. Furthermore, the loss of visible stars is a great loss of human cultural heritage. Until relatively recently, humans throughout history had an impressive view of the starry night sky, and the effect of this nightly spectacle (壮观) is evident in ancient cultures.
Globe at Night has been gathering data on star visibility since 2006. Anyone can submit observations through the Globe at Night web application. Participants record which one best matches what they can see in the sky without any telescopes or other instruments.
Researchers find that the loss of visible stars indicates an increase in sky brightness of 9.6% per year while roughly 2% is measured by satellites. Existing satellites are not well suited to measuring sky glow as it appears to humans, because they can not detect wavelengths shorter than 500 nanometers (纳米). White LEDs, with shorter wavelengths under 500 nanometers, now are increasingly commonly used in outdoor lighting. But human eyes are more sensitive to these shorter wavelengths at nighttime. Space-based instruments do not measure light from windows, either. But these sources are significant contributors to sky glow us seen from the ground.
“The increase in sky glow over the past decade underlines the importance of redoubling our efforts and developing new strategies to protect dark skies,” said Walker. “The Globe at Night dataset is necessary in our ongoing evaluation of changes in sky glow, and we encourage whoever can to get involved to help protect the starry night sky.”
1. What is a purpose of Globe at Night?| A．To develop new light sources. | B．To collect data on star visibility. |
| C．To help astronomers explore space. | D．To popularize science among citizens. |
| A．Poorer human health. | B．Fewer wildlife species. |
| C．More delicate biological systems. | D．Less nightly culture elements of the sky. |
| A．Satellites play a vital role. | B．White LEDs are widely used. |
| C．Crowd-sourced data are invaluable. | D．Shorter wavelengths are hard to detect. |
| A．Their consistent efforts pay off. | B．The dataset needs to be updated. |
| C．More participants are expected to join in. | D．The sky glow has been over-emphasized. |
2 . Scientists who study happiness know that being kind to others can improve happiness. Acts as simple as buying a cup of coffee for someone can better a person’s mood (心情), for example. Every day life affords many chances for such actions, yet people do not always make use of them.
In a set of studies published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Nick Epley, a behavioral scientist, and I examined a possible explanation. We found that people who perform random (随机的) acts of kindness do not always realize how much of an effect they are having on another person. People usually think little of how others value these acts.
Across our investigations, several results came out. For one, both givers and receivers of the acts of kindness were in more positive moods than usual after these exchanges. For another, it was clear that givers undervalued (低估) their effect; receivers felt much better than the kind givers expected. The receivers also really recognized these acts as “bigger” than the people performing them did.
At first, we studied acts of kindness done for familiar people, such as friends, classmates or family. But later we found that givers undervalued their positive effect on strangers as well. In one experiment, givers in a public park gave away hot chocolate to strangers on a cold winter’s day. Once again, the experience was more positive than the givers expected for the receivers. While the people giving the hot chocolate saw the act as unimportant, it really mattered to the receivers.
Our findings suggest that what might seem small to the givers could matter a great deal to the receivers. Since these warm acts can promote our own mood and brighten the day of another person, why not choose kindness when we can?
1. What do givers seldom think about?| A．Comments about their acts. |
| B．Effects of their acts on others. |
| C．Scientists’ explanation. |
| D．Taste of happiness. |
| A．Investigations. | B．Moods. | C．Acts. | D．Exchanges. |
| A．To explain a rule. | B．To prove a finding. |
| C．To present a fact. | D．To show a topic. |
| A．Warm Acts Are Usually Valued |
| B．Warm Acts Are Necessary For People |
| C．Kindness Can Have Unexpectedly Positive Results |
| D．Kindness Can Unexpectedly Brighten Our Own Day |
3 . Your mind is very powerful. Yet, if you’re like most people, you probably spend very little time reflecting on the way you think. After all, who thinks about thinking?
If you draw wrong conclusions about whom you are and what you’re capable of doing, you’ll limit your potential. Your thoughts are a catalyst (催化剂) for self-perpetuating (自我持续的) cycles.
Once you draw a conclusion about yourself, you’re likely to do two things: look for evidence that strengthens your belief and consider anything that runs against your belief unimportant. Someone who develops the belief that he’s a failure, for example, will view each mistake as evidence that he’s not good enough.
| A．When he does succeed, he’ll owe it to luck. |
| B．Once that belief gets rooted in his mind, he will suffer a lot. |
| C．That lack of efforts prevents her from having a better career. |
| D．Creating a more positive thought can lead to better outcomes. |
| E．What you think influences how you feel and how you behave. |
| F．However, the way you think about yourself turns into your reality. |
| G．If we make an effort on purpose, you can learn to think more positively. |
4 . Ants know when an earthquake is about to strike, researchers have discovered. Their behavior changes greatly before the quake and they resume normal functioning only a day after it. Gabriele Berberich of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany presented these findings according to Live Science.
Berberich and her team discovered that red wood ants preferred to build their homes right along active faults (断层) in Germany. They counted 15,000 mounds (土堆) lining the faults. These faults are the places where the earth breaks in earthquakes.
Using a special camera that tracked changes in activity, Berberich and her team tracked the ants round the clock for three years. They found that the ants’ behavior changed only when the quake was over magnitude 2.0. There were 10 earthquakes between magnitude 2.0 and 3.2 during this period, and many smaller ones. Humans can also sense quakes over magnitude 2.0 only.
According to Berberich, normal ant activity is made up of going about collecting food during the day and resting in the night. But before an earthquake, the ants didn’t go back to their mound in the night and moved around outside it. This strange behavior continued till a day after the earthquake, Berberich told a news conference, according to Live Science.
How do ants know an earthquake is coming? Berberich suggested that they could either be picking up changing gas or noting small changes in the earth’s magnetic fields (磁场). “Red wood ants have special cells which can sense changes in carbon dioxide levels. They also have special cells for discovering electromagnetic fields,” she said. Berberich and her team are planning to continue the research in areas where there are more and bigger earthquakes.
1. What does the underlined word “resume” in Paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．present. | B．avoid. | C．quit. | D．recover. |
| A．To explain a finding. |
| B．To introduce the topic. |
| C．To make the text interesting. |
| D．To tell how to predict an earthquake. |
| A．They are too excited to rest. |
| B．They don’t collect their food. |
| C．They get lost on their way back home. |
| D．They don’t go inside their mound in the night. |
| A．They can only sense smaller earthquakes. |
| B．They have two ways to predict earthquakes. |
| C．The result of the research is completely reliable. |
| D．They can be depended on to warn people of earthquakes. |
5 . In movies and books, people often describe a decisive moment when they figure out who they are. However, I never thought it actually happened in real life. I never expected to have a “moment” of my own. When it arrived, mine was much more powerful than I could have ever imagined.
During the spring of my junior year, my class watched a documentary called “The Invisible Children.” It was about three college students who take a trip to Africa and document their experience. At first the film was slightly humorous. However, once the group arrived in northern Uganda, the mood changed. They learned what the consequences of a 23-year war had been for thousands of children. Some had lost family and friends, while others were caught by the opposing force and became child soldiers.
Before long, I was sobbing. I couldn’t believe these things were happening, yet at the same time I knew they were. I just hadn’t been paying attention, for in the past 17 years, I was blessedly protected. When the movie ended, I couldn’t get it out of my head. For the next week, I was not myself. Every bite of food I took I thought of Grace, the 15-year-old who had little to eat. When I went to bed, I pictured Sunday, the 14-year-old boy sleeping on a straw mat on the ground in a camp. My whole world shifted.
Since that day, I haven’t been able to picture my future in a way that doesn’t involve going to Africa and doing what I can to help. Ultimately, this is why I decided to major in engineering. With an engineering degree, my potential for change will be limitless. I will build wells and schools, and design irrigation systems. Engineering is tough, but I know—in what Yeats called “my deep heart’s call”—that this is what I’m supposed to do with my life.
1. How did the author think of a decisive moment at first?| A．It was impossible. | B．It was unforgettable. |
| C．It was common. | D．It was powerful. |
| A．It amused him. | B．It changed his perspectives of life. |
| C．It made him unsure of himself. | D．It made him lose the desire to eat or sleep. |
| A．To achieve his goal. | B．To be well acknowledged. |
| C．To challenge himself. | D．To realize his childhood dream. |
| A．Celebrity. | B．Health. | C．Education. | D．Science. |
6 . Though researchers have long known that adults build unconscious (无意识的) preferences over a lifetime of making choices between things that are essentially the same, the new finding that even babies engage in this phenomenon demonstrates that this way of justifying choice is intuitive (凭直觉的) and somehow fundamental to the human experience.
“The act of making a choice changes how we feel about our options,” said Alex Silver, a Johns Hopkins researcher. “Even infants who are really just at the start of making choices for themselves have this preference.”
The findings are published today in the journal Psychological Science. People assume they choose things that they like. But research suggests that’s sometimes backwards: we like things because we choose them. And, we dislike things that we don’t choose. “Adults make these inferences unconsciously,” said co-author Lisa Feigenson, a Johns Hopkins scientist in child development. “We justify our choice after the fact.”
This makes sense for adults in a consumer culture who must make random choices every day, between everything from toothpaste brands to styles of jeans. The question was when exactly people start doing this. So they turned to babies, who don’t get many choices so, as Feigenson puts it, are “a perfect window into the origin of this tendency.”
The team brought 10-to 20-month-old babies into the lab and gave them a choice of objects to play with; two equally bright and colorful soft blocks. They set them far apart, so the babies had to crawl to one or the other — a random choice. After the baby chose one of the toys, the researchers took it away and came back with a new option. The babies could then pick from the toy they didn’t play with the first time, or a brand new toy. Their choices showed they “dis-prefer the unchosen object.”
To continue studying the evolution of choice in babies, the lab will next look at the idea of “choice overload.” For adults, choice is good, but too many choices can be a problem, so the lab will try to determine if that is also true for babies.
1. What is people’s assumption about the act of making choices?| A．They like what they choose. |
| B．They choose what they like. |
| C．They base choices on the fact. |
| D．They make choices thoughtfully. |
| A．To help them make better choices. |
| B．To guide them to perceive the world. |
| C．To track the root of making random choices. |
| D．To deepen the understanding of a consumer culture. |
| A．They like novel objects. |
| B．Their choices are mostly based on colors. |
| C．Their random choices become preferences. |
| D．They are unable to make choices for themselves. |
| A．The law of “choice overload”. |
| B．The problem of adults’ many choices. |
| C．Why too many choices can influence adults. |
| D．Whether babies are troubled with many choices. |
7 . Open-air jazz, locally-grown vegetables, Focaccia bread, goat cheese, and Narcan training all competed against a rainstorm last Tuesday at Westside Farmers Market’s annual College Night.
And the vendors (商贩) held out pretty well. Even as the raindrops intensified, folks kept exploring the tables stationed in the parking lot of St. Monica Church. Among the crowd were a number of college students, mostly from the University of Rochester, likely brought in by the College Night awards being offered — a five-dollar token (购物券), a handbag, and a prize raffle entry, all free of charge.
Now in its 15th year, Westside volunteer Jackie Farrell said the market partners merely with local farms, businesses, and community groups to populate its tables. “Our mission really is to serve the people in the community, getting them health and nutrition information, and connecting them to the farmers who grow the produce,” Farrell said, “Everything has to be local. It’s a producer-only market, so you have to grow or produce whatever you’re going to sell here.” Those producers had diverse offerings. Vegetables, of course, were abundant but sellers also pushed cheeses, spreads, bread, prepared pasta dishes, and much more.
The community groups offering information were diverse too. Recovery All Ways, a local nonprofit with a stated “mission to support anyone affected by substance use disorder” handed out Narcan and trained people in its use. Their station was next to a Moms Demand Action tent, where staffers provided information on physical safety. SNAP-Ed nutrition and benefits educators also ran a table.
The activities of the stations were scored by live music. The University’s Midnight Ramblers performed, and a local jazz band played away as the rain showers started rolling in.
Farrell hoped that the College Night promotion would help make students more comfortable crossing the bridge into the Rochester community. “We love college students, and we keep encouraging them that all they have to do is go across the bridge.”
1. What attracted college students to the College Night?| A．Free prizes. | B．Scenery in the rain. |
| C．Interesting books. | D．Featured goods. |
| A．It is managed by farmers themselves. |
| B．Its visitors are mostly university students. |
| C．Its offerings are locally grown or prepared. |
| D．Farmers provide more vegetables than corn. |
| A．Crowded and chaotic. | B．Busy and festive. |
| C．Luxurious and splendid. | D．Romantic and peaceful. |
| A．Westside Farmers Market is flowering rapidly |
| B．College Night channels products to community |
| C．College Night bridges university and community |
| D．Westside Farmers Market is expanding nationwide |
8 . Vijay Gupta is known to classical music lovers across the United States. He serves as the first violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In that job, he often plays to large crowds, including many very rich people. When he is not performing, he organizes concerts for homeless people. “They have reminded me why I became a musician.” He said.
Last week, Gupta was recognized for being a founder and the artistic director of Street Symphony. The group has performed at homeless shelters, jails and halfway houses for about eight years. Gupta is among the 25 winners of the 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant”. Each winner will receive $ 625,000 over five years to use as they wish. The money is coming from a private group, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It awards grants (补助金) to people whose work it considers exceptional and whose work “inspires hope in us all”. Gupta said he got the idea for Street Symphony while teaching Nathaniel Ayers, a trained musician whose mental illness led to his homelessness.
The 31-year-old winner said he did not know yet how he would spend the money. He has been a performer since the age of seven and the award will give him “space to breathe, plan and look ahead”.
Another winner is Rebecca Sandefur, an associate professor (副教授) of sociology and law in the University of Illinois. The Associated Press says her research actively supports new ways to involve poor communities in the U. S. justice system.
47-year-old Sandefur created the first national mapping of civil legal aid providers. It shows which states have the financial(金融的)resources to provide such aid and which don’t. She also found that the cost of legal services was only one of the things preventing poor people from getting lawyers. Among the others were fears of unfairness(不公平)in the legal system. Sandefur noted that a lot of attention had been paid to problems with the criminal justice system, but more attention must be paid to the civil side of the law, which also affected millions of people.
1. Why does Gupta win the award?| A．For his achievements in classical music. |
| B．For performing for large crowds. |
| C．For organizing a group playing for the homeless. |
| D．For the companionship with Nathaniel Ayers. |
| A．It is founded by the government. |
| B．It offers $ 625,000 to 25 winners in 2018. |
| C．It allows the winners to use the money freely. |
| D．It awards people who make great contributions to society. |
| A．She made it easier to get legal help for the poor. |
| B．She made the legal system fairer. |
| C．She paid more attention to the criminal justice system. |
| D．She offered legal aid to the poor freely. |
| A．Grants winners, inspiring the poor |
| B．The city homeless, in need of help |
| C．Vijay Gupta, an extraordinary violinist |
| D．MacArthur Foundation, awarding exceptional work |
9 . In Iceland, these green houses melt into the natural landscape, a technique that first appeared with the arrival of British settlers during the 9th through 11th centuries. Unlike their previous warm and wet climate, wood was rare and slow to regenerate. Turf (草皮) became their first pick to make shelters.
Across Europe, turf bricks — widely available — were cut from local bogs (沼泽) and transported for use at higher lands. The turf was then laid over a wooden structure to form walls and a thick roof — to keep cold out from tough northern climates. Turf walls were replaced as frequently as every 20 years, and even up to 70 years.
It is difficult to find out its precise origins in the archaeological record. However, evidence of similar constructions can be found in many countries throughout the ages. Historic records suggest that up to 50 percent of Icelandic houses were partly comprised of turf until the late 19th century. As populations began to gather in cities like Reykjavik, wood buildings replaced stones and earth architecture. After fires burned up the city in 1915, concrete became the material of choice. In 1918 Iceland gained independence from Denmark, setting in motion a wave of nationalism that threatened the survival of turf houses. Advocates of modernization argued that Reykjavik paled in comparison to the grand architecture that graced the skylines of Paris, Berlin, and London. Traditional techniques were criticized as “rotten Danish wood” from a troubled era, and there was a campaign to clear them in favor of modern buildings — a move later criticized by many as destruction of cultural heritage.
A tourism boom in the latter half of the 20th century encouraged Iceland to reexamine the value of traditional architecture. Do Icelanders still live in turf houses? The quickest way to answer this question would be no. You might still see an occasional grass roof but that has everything to do with architecture and Icelanders wanting to hold on to their beloved heritage rather than any need for turf as insulation (隔热) material.
1. Why did people use turf to build houses in the past?| A．It matched nature perfectly. | B．It could be changed often. |
| C．It was long-lasting and accessible. | D．It was a request by settlers. |
| A．People packed into Reykjavik. | B．Traditional architecture was in favor. |
| C．Turf houses were almost unable to exist. | D．Concrete became a new building material. |
| A．It starts coming to life. | B．It will live on. |
| C．Its material will improve. | D．It is out of date. |
| A．Iceland’s turf stretches brightly across Europe |
| B．Iceland’s turf — An important building material |
| C．Iceland’s turf houses — An exceptional example |
| D．Iceland’s turf houses survive beautifully with nature |
10 . When he was 7, Diebedo Francis Kere left his native village Gando at the insistence of his father so that he might learn to read and write. Gando had neither a school nor electricity nor running water. Kere returned home on holidays, and at the end of every visit, the women villagers would reveal a penny tucked in their waistbands — often their last penny — that they’d give him as a parting gift. The pennies were their way of contributing to the boy’s education.
It was a worthwhile investment: Kere is now an architect, and in 2001, he did return to Gando to build his first education building, Gando Primary School. Kere settled on a method of fortifying (加固) locally made clay bricks with concrete and created a floating, double-roof system that allows hot air to rise out of the building and cool air to come in. Colorful shutters (百叶窗) allow teachers to direct sunlight into the room depending on the hour of the day. Most significantly, the school was built by village members — who helped produce the bricks, build the walls and polish the mud floors. This not only allowed the village to build a new school in a timely and economical fashion but it also taught marketable construction techniques to untrained laborers.
For this work and other high-profile projects, Kere became the first African architect to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. “Francis Kere’s work shows us the power of materiality rooted in place. It is sustainable to the earth and its residents — in lands of extreme scarcity (缺乏),” announced Tom Pritzker, chairman of the award.
Of his work, Kere said in a statement, “It is not because you are rich that you should waste material. It is not because you are poor that you should not try to create quality.”
1. What does the underlined word “tucked” mean in the first paragraph?| A．Spread. | B．Chosen. | C．Occupied. | D．Hidden. |
| A．It was made from modern materials. | B．It was built together by local residents. |
| C．It reflected the villagers’ high techniques. | D．It was equipped with good air conditioners. |
| A．His African origin. | B．His living environment. |
| C．His sustainable projects. | D．His education background. |
| A．Critical and careful. | B．Generous and cautious. |
| C．Curious and responsible. | D．Ambitious and creative. |
