1 . That artificial food dyes (染料) are unhealthy is not news. Some are known to cause hyperactivity (多动症) in some children, affecting their ability to learn. But regulatory agencies (监管机构) around the world don’t necessarily agree on which food dyes are a problem, or why. That may soon change. A 2021 peer-reviewed report by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment concluded that artificial food dyes “cause or worsen neurobehavioral (神经行为的) problems in some children” and that the current levels that are regarded safe for consumption by the federal government are too high.
California is now considering requiring warning labels on food products and dietary supplements containing the seven most commonly used artificial dyes. The warning label requirement would put California on par with the European Union, which since 2010 has required food products containing certain artificial food dyes to carry warning labels about their negative effect on activity and attention in children.
Artificial dyes are used in foods for one reason: to make products look prettier. Bright colors make candies appealing, especially to kids. But dyes are also in chocolate cake mixes, salad dressings and other products that don’t seem to cry out for a color boost.
In Europe, it was the 2010 label lawmaking that triggered (引发) companies’ decisions to reformulate. “If you’re a company, you do not want to put a warning label on your product.” says Lefferts, an environmental health consultant. Warning labels are why European Starburst Fruit Chews are now colored with natural products, not the artificial dyes that brighten their North American counterparts (同类商品).
Given that artificial food dyes are used far more than needed, we need to be more cautious. After all, we don’t dye fresh fruits and vegetables, but we do dye candy and sprinkles, points out Joe Schwarcz, a chemistry professor at McGill University in Montreal. “The foods in which you find food dyes are foods that are poor in nutrition,” he says. “If you limit foods that contain food dyes, you automatically make your diet better.”
1. What can we learn about artificial food dyes from paragraph 1?| A．A 2021 report confirmed their negative effects. |
| B．The fact that they are harmful is newly revealed. |
| C．Regulatory agencies consider them a serious problem. |
| D．The Federal government thinks their current standard too high. |
| A．In opposition to. | B．In line with. | C．Ahead of. | D．Behind. |
| A．Food companies will stop coloring their products. |
| B．More fresh fruits and vegetables will appear in the market. |
| C．Food companies may replace artificial dyes with natural products. |
| D．It will be hard to find packaged foods without warning labels of dyes. |
| A．Approving. | B．Neutral. | C．Tolerant. | D．Concerned. |
2 . “Why do I live? Why do I wish for anything, or do anything? Is there anything in my life that will not be destroyed by my death?”
These are the words of the famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy, many people ask these difficult questions. And they struggle to find meaning in their life. Tolstoy spent his whole life trying to answer difficult questions like these. His search for answers influenced his writing.
On August 28th, 1828, Leo Tolstoy was born in the country of Russia.
As a child, Tolstoy was a member of the Russian Catholic Church. But as a young man, he began to question that faith. Tolstoy wanted to make his own moral decisions; he was tired of being told what to believe. He thought people could achieve a degree of perfection if they tried hard enough. So he worked very hard at being the best in everything he did. He thought that he would find meaning and truth in success.
In the 1850s, Leo Tolstoy wrote his first stories. He wrote about his experiences in the army. He also told stories about when he was a child. These works were published and Tolstoy became a well-known writer.
Tolstoy was finally successful. He earned the respect he always wanted. Many wealthy and intelligent men met and talked with Tolstoy. Some of the men were writers like him. They talked a lot about faith and the meaning of life. But soon Tolstoy recognized that these men were not perfect. Now he knew they could not answer his questions about faith.
So in the 1860s, Tolstoy tried a different way to find meaning. He opened a school for the children of his serfs—the people who worked on his land. These workers were very poor. He wanted to help them because he thought they were more honest than the wealthy people he knew.
Tolstoy learned many things from his workers. He respected how they worked hard to provide for their families.
He began to believe that marriage and family would give his life meaning. So in 1862, Leo Tolstoy married a young woman named Sonya Behrs.
The next 15 years were the best years of Tolstoy's life. It was during this time that he wrote his most famous books-War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Many literature experts say that War and Peace is one of the greatest books ever written.
Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina communicate Tolstoy's beliefs about the Russian nation, church and people. They also communicate what he thought was the answer to all his questions. Tolstoy believed humans were supposed to live a simple life and take care of their families. Tolstoy thought this would satisfy him and bring him happiness.
Leo Tolstoy is still a very respected writer today. His faith and writings have influenced many people.
Tolstoy's search for the meaning of life is something everyone can understand. His teachings still interest people all over the world.
1. Which shows the correct order of the following events?①Tolstoy served in the army ②Tolstoy got married ③Tolstoy wrote War and Peace
④ Tolstoy started a school. ⑤Tolstoy became a well-known writer.
| A．①②③④⑤ | B．⑤①③②④ | C．①⑤④②③ | D．⑤④①③② |
| A．Respect | B．Defend. | C．Support. | D．Comfort. |
| A．Leo Tolstoy: Living for writing | B．Leo Tolstoy: Influencing the world |
| C．Leo Tolstoy: Being the best in everything | D．Leo Tolstoy: Searching for the meaning of life |
3 . The term “Hudson River school” was applied to the foremost representatives of nineteenth-century North American landscape painting. Apparently unknown during the golden days of the American landscape movement, which began around 1850s and lasted until the late 1860s, the Hudson River school seems to have emerged in the 1870s as a direct result of the struggle between the old and the new generations of artists each to assert its own style as the representative American art. The older painters, most of whom were born before 1835, practiced in a mode often self-taught and monopolized by landscape subject matter and were securely established in and fostered by the reigning American art organization, the National Academy of Design.
The younger painters returning home from training in Europe worked more with figural subject matter and in a bold and impressionistic technique; their prospects for patronage in their own country were uncertain, and they sought to attract it by attaining academic recognition in New York. One of the results of the conflict between the two factions was that what in previous years had been referred to as the American, native, or, occasionally New York school — the most representative school of American art in any genre — had by 1890s become firmly established in the minds of critics and public alike as the Hudson River school.
The sobriquet was first applied around 1879. While it was not intended as flattering, it was hardly inappropriate. The Academicians at whom it was aimed had worked and socialized in New York, the Hudson’s port city, and had painted the river and its shores with varying frequency. Most important, perhaps, was that they had all maintained with a certain fidelity a manner of technique and composition consistent with those of America’s first popular landscape artist, Thomas Cole, who built a career painting the Catskill Mountain scenery bordering the Hudson River.
A possible implication in the term applied to the group of landscapists was that many of them had, like Cole, lived on or near the banks of the Hudson. Further, the river had long served as the principal route to other sketching grounds favored by the Academicians, particularly the Adirondacks and the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire different ways.
1. According to the passage what was the function of the National Academy of Design for the painters born before 1835?| A．It mediated conflicts between artists. | B．It supervised the incorporation of new artistic techniques. |
| C．It supported their growth and development. | D．It determined which subjects were appropriate. |
| A．In New Hampshire. | B．In the Adirondacks. |
| C．In Vermon. | D．In Europe. |
| A．people | B．sides | C．cities | D．images |
| A．Hudson River School | B．The Nature’s Nation |
| C．Early Painters and Their Drawings | D．North American Landscape Painting |
4 . People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions — and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.
Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.
“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” Jack said. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect the mouth.”
According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.
The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.
It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. “The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions,” Jack said. “Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.”
In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.
1. The discovery shows that Westerners ________.| A．pay equal attention to the eyes and the mouth |
| B．consider facial expressions universally reliable |
| C．observe the eyes and the mouth in different ways |
| D．have more difficulty in recognizing facial expressions |
| A．The participants in the study. |
| B．The researchers of the study. |
| C．The errors made during the study. |
| D．The data collected from the study. |
| A．do translation more successfully |
| B．study the mouth more frequently |
| C．examine the eyes more attentively |
| D．read facial expressions more correctly |
| A．The Eye as the Window to the Soul |
| B．Cultural Differences in Reading Emotions |
| C．Effective Methods to Develop Social Skills |
| D．How to Increase Cross-cultural Understanding |
5 . It was meant to connect us, make us smarter and our lives easier. And it has. But there’s at least one comer of life where the Internet has made things so much more difficult: gift giving.
Once upon a time, if you were struggling to find a present for a loved one, there were easy options to fall back on-DVDs, CDs, video games and other physical media. This wasn’t even that long ago, but now it’s been snatched from our grasp by the Internet offering us the chance, at a relatively low cost, to watch, listen to or read whatever we want, whenever we want. With everything already watched, listened to, or read, buying a present has become near impossible.
Therefore, we all have to work at becoming perfect gift givers, taking all factors into consideration and searching high and low to seek out the ideal present. If we go the extra mile, there’s less chance that the person we have in mind has already bought what we’re considering online.
But as I now consider this exact plan of action, I’m thinking perhaps it’s not all that bad. Maybe the Internet is delivering us a lesson, firm but fair: the era of half-baked present purchasing is over and it’s time to go hard or go home.
In this era of immediate satisfaction, if you want to give someone a useful present, you do have to actually go to the effort of sourcing something nice for them. Perhaps that’s making for a more rewarding gift experience for all involved. And perhaps it also means fewer gifts that are given as an excuse and end up being unused.
1. How is the topic of gift giving introduced in Paragraph 1?| A．By demonstrating the prospect of the Internet. |
| B．By showing the difficulty in using the Internet. |
| C．By pointing out the shortcoming of the Internet. |
| D．By arguing about the possible benefits of the Internet. |
| A．Numerous gift options. | B．Relative high cost for presents. |
| C．Limited offer from digital giants. | D．Easy access to the Internet versions. |
| A．Purchase satisfactory gifts. | B．Try to select a present. |
| C．Buy fewer gifts as an excuse. | D．Make more valuable presents. |
| A．Confused. | B．Critical. | C．Neutral. | D．Acceptable. |
6 . Why do we talk the way we do? It might date back to when our ancestors left the jungle for the open plain. Between 5.3 million and 16 million years ago, Africa’s landscapes changed from thick, leafy forests to wide-open grasslands. This environmental change pushed our ancestors out of the trees and onto the ground. Along with all of the physical and behavioral changes this may have caused, researchers also believe it may have changed the way we speak.
“Open landscapes provide us with fewer objects to affect signal communication, meaning our voices can travel further compared with that in thick forests,” Charlotte Gannon, a researcher who studies language development, told Newsweek. “The move to these open spaces may have increased the effectiveness of our communication.”
By comparing the vocal calls of the orangutan (大猩猩) , Gannon and her team were able to establish how different calls could travel across different landscapes. In their study, the team played 487 calls from orangutans and measured their audibility (可听度) at set length over an overall distance of over 1,300 feet in the South African plain.
“Our results were surprising,” Gannon said, “The rule of sound spread suggests that lower-frequency (低频率) sounds (the grumphs) would have traveled further than higher-frequency sounds (the kiss squeaks). Our results actually found the opposite to this.” In these environmental settings, consonant (辅音)-like calls traveled a lot further than vowel (元音) -like calls. Actually, around 80 percent of consonant-based calls were audible at 1,300 feet, compared to only 20 percent of vowel-based calls.
Gannon said these results highlight the importance of studying living orangutan to learn about our species’ history. “We can view them as time machines that allow us to recreate key moments of our history so we can learn more about the development of our language,” Gannon said. “Despite their popularity in modern languages, consonants have often been forgotten when discussing speech development. Our research highlights not only their presence in ancient times but their importance to the development of language.”
1. What led to the speech development?| A．Behavioral change. | B．Time development. |
| C．Physical development. | D．Environmental change. |
| A．Less block. | B．Better tools. | C．Louder voice. | D．Larger vocabulary. |
| A．The results of the study. |
| B．The process of the research. |
| C．The purpose of the program. |
| D．The participants of the project. |
| A．The living orangutan can recreate our language. |
| B．Consonants are significant in language development. |
| C．The sound of grumphs travels further than that of kiss squeaks. |
| D．Consonant-like calls travel four times further than vowel-like calls. |
7 . People these days are posting about their lives on social media. But what if you’re a private and introverted person like me? What if you want to live in the moment instead of sharing every bit of your life? To be honest, it’s nobody’s business but your own.
Escaping stalkers (跟踪者).
I’ve been a public person as a jazz vocalist for years. It exposed me to stalkers who felt they knew me, just because I was present everywhere. Needless to say, it brought me much anxiety and stress. At some point I asked myself-is being visible more important than my peace of mind?
Protecting privacy
Another reason I keep my life private is that I prefer to be in the present moment and appreciate it fully. To be on your phone constantly, or to film everything you do, can be quite disrespectful to the people you spend your time with. You lose out on those spontaneous(自发的) moments and a deeper connection. I choose what I share and when I share it, and the rest is for experiencing life without expectations.
Live your life fully, regardless of whether the world knows it or not!
| A．Experiencing life |
| B．Living in the moment |
| C．Don’t I really care about privacy? |
| D．Are my followers more important than my friends and family? |
| E．If you feel like sharing your life openly without hesitation, go for it. |
| F．Here are my reasons for not sharing my personal life on social media. |
| G．It can be quite challenging to go through tough moments with everyone watching. |
8 . Taking a picture of Mars is not easy. Once light bounces off the planet, it can take between 3 to 22 minutes to travel to Earth - so there aren’t truly “live” images of Mars.
But on Friday afternoon, the European Space Agency will offer the closest thing: the first “livestream” of Mars a rare, almost real-time look into space on YouTube, which posts pictures of the planet every 50 seconds as they beam down directly from the camera mounted (安装) on the agency’s Mars Express orbiter (轨道飞行器). We can get a firsthand look at Mars on Friday.
“During Friday’s one-hour livestream, the time between the images being taken from orbit around Mars and appearing on your screen will be about 18 minutes,” James Godfrey, the spacecraft operations manager at the ESA’s mission control center, said in a statement. “That’s 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth in their current configuration, and about one minute to pass through the wires and servers on the ground. ”
“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now - as close to a Martian(火星人) ‘now’ as we can possibly get!’
In 50-second intervals, the camera shoots across Mars, showing a side of the planet entering night, as well as some clouds billowing out on the comer. The livestream celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Mars Express mission which was launched in 2003 to better understand the planet, as well as search for traces of water.
It’s with this camera, originally meant for engineering purposes, that we’ll get ”live“ images on Friday evening from 18:00 CEST in the first MarsLIVE. What makes this unique, is that it’s a one-hour livestream from Mars but don’t expect a detailed view of the Red Planet!
1. What can we learn from this text?| A．Watching the MarsLIVE, people will have a completely real-time view of the Mars. |
| B．The audience can watch the MarsLIVE thanks to the camera on the Mars |
| C．About 20 years ago, the ESA launched an orbiter to search for Martians. |
| D．The MarsLIVE is to celebrate the launch of the Mars Express mission in 2003. |
| A．Equipment. | B．Orbit. | C．Planet. | D．Spacecraft. |
| A．The live images taken from orbit around Mars. |
| B．The 20th anniversary of the Mars Express mission. |
| C．The first ”livestream“ of Mars to be shown on YouTube. |
| D．A rare and almost real-time look into space on YouTube. |
| A．The camera was originally used to shoot the Mars. |
| B．We can get truly live Mars images in the first MarsLIVE. |
| C．Detailed images about the Mars can’t be ensured. |
| D．The unique MarsLIVE will live up to viewers’ expectation. |
9 . In the joyful summer Chadalavada spent with Jayasree, his grandmother in 2018, the pair watched endless movies. Late one evening, Jayasree, who had recently been diagnosed (诊断) with Alzheimer’s, got up in her nightdress and went to make tea at her home in India. After she returned to her bedroom, Chadalavada went into the kitchen to find that his grandmother had left the gas on!
Chadalavada decided to invent a wearable device to help people like his grandmother. Now aged 17, Chadalavada is ready to start making the Alpha Monitor. The device, which can be worn as an armband, sets off an alarm when the wearer with Alzheimer’s starts to move and warns a caregiver if the patient falls or wanders off.
Most similar devices run on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, so when a person moves out of their frequencies’ limited range the connection is lost and with it the monitoring. But the Alpha Monitor can detect a person more than a mile away in cities and three miles in the countryside thanks to the long-range technology, known as LoRa, it uses.
Teaching himself with YouTube videos about robotics and electronics, Chadalavada has developed several prototypes (模型). To understand the needs of people with Alzheimer’s, he spent time in a day centre run by the Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India. There, the cofounder told him that the device “had to be something light that can be worn on any part of the body”. She says: “Many patients don’t like having to wear a watch and they take it off.”
In March, when Chadalavada’s school exams are over, he will put the finishing touches to the monitor, with the aim of getting the device ready for market by September. He is confident that it should be sold at an affordable price for most people.
Chadalavada hopes to study robotics at a university abroad. His aim is simple: “I want to create products to help people in India for the whole world.”
1. Why did Chadalavada invent the Alpha Monitor?| A．To treat Alzheimer’s. |
| B．To entertain senior citizens. |
| C．To improve Alzheimer’s caregiving. |
| D．To ensure fire safety at the elderly’s homes. |
| A．It is more comfortable to wear. | B．It has a longer service time. |
| C．It offers a remoter monitoring. | D．It uses higher frequency controls. |
| A．Where his invention could be polished. |
| B．What people with Alzheimer’s felt like. |
| C．How Alzheimer’s disease could be cured. |
| D．Whether his invention would be profitable. |
| A．He enjoys living simply. | B．He has an innovative mind. |
| C．He used to be a health worker. | D．He longs to be a robotics professor. |
10 . Is it possible to build muscle and meanwhile lose fat? Please allow us to bring the following two facts to your attention first.
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1. What plays a role in both fat losing and muscle building?| A．Caloric intake. | B．Balanced diet. |
| C．Muscle tissue. | D．Physical fitness. |
| A．Effective questioning. | B．Perception of time. |
| C．Enthusiasm for sports. | D．A little willpower. |
| A．A health brochure. | B．A commercial advertisement. |
| C．A critical comment. | D．An essay on a wellness website. |
