1 . When you think of a map, is north on the top or the bottom? Usually, maps are designed with north on top, though when we think about it, there is no logical reason for this bias (偏见). After all, there is no up or down in space. So what is wrong with south, east or west being on the top of the map? The answer is: nothing at all. In fact, north-up maps only became the norm in the last few hundred years.
Ancient Egyptian maps had south at the top because the Nile River flows downhill from mountains in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the north. Mecca was to the south of most early Muslim civilizations, and south-up maps were designed so that viewers would look up to see Mecca. Medieval Christian maps had east at the top, as they believed the Garden of Eden was in the east. The only early maps that had north at the top were those of early China because the emperor lived in the north.
North seems to have settled at the top of maps during the 16th century, largely thanks to a Flemish mapmaker, Mercator. Mercator was a great admirer of an early Greek mapmaker, who, for reasons now unknown, put north at the top of maps, so Mercator did, too. When Mercator’s world map became the standard map to navigate the oceans, north up became standard as well.
What is the implication of this north-view of the world? Psychologically, people tend to think of up as good and down as bad. Just think of words and phrases like “upmarket”, “upbeat” and “moving up in the world”, and how they contrast with their opposites. Because north is so consistently put at the top of maps, people now think of north as good, too.
Several attempts have been made in recent years by introducing south-up maps to the market. These maps not only give us a chance to see the world differently, but also give everyone the chance to see themselves on top.
1. What can we learn from the first two paragraphs?| A．North-up maps were rare in ancient times. |
| B．Deciding up or down in space is ridiculous. |
| C．Mecca maps were based on a legend. |
| D．The south-up map first appeared in ancient Egypt. |
| A．An illogical reason. | B．The spread of Mercator’s maps. |
| C．People’s preference for up. | D．An age-old tradition in Greece. |
| A．Cautious. | B．Supportive. | C．Uncaring. | D．Disapproving. |
| A．To criticize a phenomenon. | B．To compare various facts. |
| C．To correct a cultural bias. | D．To argue for a viewpoint. |
2 . With almost all big employers in the United States now using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in their hiring processes, the public is considering some urgent questions: How can you prevent discrimination in hiring when a machine is keeping the discrimination? What kind of methods might help?
Some 83% of employers, including 99% of Fortune 500 companies, now use some form of automated tools as part of their hiring process, said the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ( EEOC) chair Charlotte Burrows, at a hearing on Tuesday. She said everyone needs to speak up on the debate over these technologies. “The risks are simply too high to leave this topic just to the experts.”
Last year, the EEOC issued some guidance around the use of cutting-edge hiring tools, noting many of their shortcomings. The agency found that resume( 简历) scanners which prioritize keywords and programs which evaluate a candidate’s facial expressions and speech patterns in video interviews can create discrimination. Take, for example, a video interview that analyses an applicant’s speech patterns to determine their ability to solve problems. A person with a speech problem might score low and automatically be screened out. The problem will be for the EEOC to root out discrimination or stop it from taking place.
The EEOC is considering the most appropriate ways to handle the problem. It’s agreed that inspections are necessary to ensure that the software used by companies avoids intentional or unintentional discrimination. But who would conduct those inspections is a more challenging question. Each option presents risks, Burrows pointed out. A third party may turn a blind eye to its clients, while a government-led inspection could potentially stop innovation.
In previous remarks, Burrows has noted the great potential that AI decision making tools have to improve the lives of Americans, but only when used properly. “We must work to ensure that these new technologies do not become a high-tech pathway to discrimination,” she said.
1. What does Burrows suggest people do?| A．Make their own voice heard. | B．Follow the experts’ suggestions. |
| C．Stop using AI in hiring processes. | D．Watch debates about technologies. |
| A．By scanning keywords. | B．By evaluating resumes. |
| C．By analyzing personalities. | D．By assessing speech patterns. |
| A．High expense. | B．Unfair results. |
| C．Age discrimination. | D．Innovation interruption. |
| A．Favourable. | B．Disapproving. | C．Cautious. | D．Doubtful. |
3 . Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the headache of communicating in a different language?
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, technology policy expert Alec Ross argued that, within ten years or so, we would be able to communicate with one another through small earpieces with built-in microphones. That’s because technological progress is extremely fast. It’s only a matter of time. Such is the belief among certain parents that the technology is imminent and they’re wondering if their kids should learn a second language.
It’s true that an increase in the quantity and accuracy of the data loaded into computers will make them cleverer at translating “Noes Bueno dormer mucho” into “It’s not good to sleep too much”. Replacing a word with its equivalent (对等词) in the target language is actually the easy part of a translator’s job. But even this seems to be a difficult job for computers.
It’s so hard for computers because translation doesn’t — or shouldn’t — involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning. And in order to infer meaning from a specific expression, people need to understand a lot of information all at once. Think about all the related clues that help us understand what someone is trying to say: volume, gesture, situations, and even your culture. All are likely to convey as much meaning as the words you use.
Therefore, we should doubt a machine that can’t understand our world like we do. If people from different cultures can upset each other without realizing it, how can we expect a machine to do better? Unless engineers actually find a way to breathe a soul into a computer, undoubtedly when it comes to conveying and interpreting meaning using a natural language, a machine will never fully take our place.
1. What does the underlined word “imminent” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Ready. | B．Confusing. | C．Unpractical. | D．Coming. |
| A．The real meaning of words can vary. |
| B．Their data is not rich enough. |
| C．Their accuracy needs big improvement. |
| D．A man’s soul hasn’t been breathed in them. |
| A．Proper translation can be difficult for computers. |
| B．Slight differences doesn’t matter in translation. |
| C．Machines will translate our world properly. |
| D．Cultures need more attention than words used. |
| A．An Expert’s Prediction. | B．Travel without Headache. |
| C．The Pleasure of Translation. | D．Will the Language Barrier (障碍) Actually Fall? |
4 . After I made it to the city center, I started to feel it might be easy for a foreigner to deal with the great size of Beijing. With growing confidence, I decided to take the subway to the hotel, not realizing that the network didn’t go that far. Impressed with the cleanliness of the station, I bought a ticket and boarded the first subway that came along.
After a few minutes I asked in English a young man seated next to me where I should get off closest to the Friendship Hotel. Wearing a smart business suit and tie, he would surely speak English, wouldn’t he? Unfortunately, he couldn’t understand me but seemed very friendly. I showed him the room card with all the information of the Friendship Hotel in Chinese characters. He looked at it, and then his eyes moved quickly to the carriage (车厢) subway map. Next, he raised three fingers of his right hand.
In Australia, raising fingers at someone is not usually nice, but this man wasn’t smiling. At the next station he showed me two fingers. Now in Australia, that’s really rude, but I got the message. When we stopped at the third station, he didn’t just point to the door, but got up, took me out of the train, and led me to the top of the stairs, and out onto the street. Then he stopped a taxi and told the driver where to take me.
All this came from a man who couldn’t speak my language, and I couldn’t speak his. I was now speechless, especially when he refused my offer of money. I felt a little embarrassed having even thought he would accept a tip.
This experience made it clear I had to learn some Chinese quickly or my adventures might start turning into misadventures.
1. Why does the author decided to take the subway?| A．Because he believed in his ability to deal with the trip |
| B．Because the network covered most of the stops |
| C．Because he lived near the city center |
| D．Because he had a good impression of its cleanliness |
| A．still remained puzzled | B．understood the author well |
| C．answered the author directly | D．pointed at the subway map |
| A．helpful. | B．impolite. | C．warm-hearted. | D．responsible. |
| A．To prove the importance of being careful |
| B．To introduce a young man who didn’t know English |
| C．To complain some cultural misunderstanding |
| D．To describe one of his adventurous experiences |
5 . A five-year-old dog named Kelsey has been praised as a hero for helping to save the life of her owner who slipped in the snow and broke his neck.
The man, Bob, was alone when he left his farmhouse on New Year’s Eve to collect firewood.Expecting a journey of only several meters, Bob was wearing just long johns (衬裤), a shirt and slippers when he went outside, although the temperature was around －4℃.
After the accident, he was unable to move in the snow. Fortunately, Kelsey came to his assistance.
“I was shouting for help, but my nearest neighbor is about 400 meters away, and it was 10:30 p. m.,” Bob explained. “By the next morning, my voice was gone and I couldn’t yell for help, but Kelsey didn’t stop barking.”
Kelsey’s companion kept him warm by lying on top of him. She licked his face and hands to keep him awake. “Kelsey kept barking but never left my side,” Bob recalled. “I knew I couldn’t give up and that it was my choice to stay alive.”
Bob spent 20 hours in the freezing cold. When he finally lost consciousness, his dog kept barking. Finally, hearing the barking, Bob’s neighbor discovered him at 6:30 p. m. on New Year’s Day and called the emergency services at once. When Bob arrived in hospital, his body temperature was below 21℃. However, doctors were surprised to find that he didn’t have any frostbite (冻疮). They believed it was because of Kelsey’s determination to keep him warm. Dr. Chaim Colen, the doctor who treated Bob, said, “His dog really saved him.He was very fortunate.”
Bob said he was very grateful to both Dr. Colen and his Kelsey. “They saved my life. They are truly heroes!”
1. What happened to Bob on New Year’s Eve?| A．He left his dog alone in his farmhouse. |
| B．He was praised for saving a dog owner. |
| C．He broke his neck and couldn’t move. |
| D．He heard his neighbor’s shouting for help. |
| A．To keep warm. |
| B．To stay alive. |
| C．To keep Bob awake. |
| D．To seek help from others. |
| A．Helpful. | B．Fortunate. |
| C．Grateful. | D．Friendly. |
| A．A Neckbreaking Accident |
| B．The Magic Night |
| C．Warmth on a Winter’s Night |
| D．Determination to Keep Alive |
6 . Every festival has its own meaning. Labor Day, for example, celebrates the value of hard work. Thanksgiving is about showing thanks to people around you. And Valentines’ Day is a time when you express love to your loved ones. But somehow it now seems that all festivals we just care about one thing — shopping. And that can be a big problem.
“In a way, over-consumption (过度消费) is the mother of all our environmental problems,” Kalle Lasn once told CNN. Lasn is the organizer of Buy Nothing Day, a day set up in Canada in 1992 to fight against unhealthy spending habits, and has now become an international event. It’s held on the day, which is known as Black Friday — a famous shopping day in the US and Canada.
You can see the irony (讽刺) here.
Even though the idea of Buy Nothing Day was brought up 26 years ago, we seem to need it now more than ever. It’s just as Lasn said, all the different kinds of pollution in our lives today — bad air quality, the reduction of forest area, endangered animal species, and plastic bags found in the ocean — seem to be the same cause: over-consumption.
The latest example is the Singles’ Day shopping craze of Nov 11, which saw a new sales record. But as Nie Li, a campaigner at Greenpeace, told Reuters, “Record-setting over-consumption means record-setting waste.” And it was reported that last year the Singles’ Day packages left more than 160,000 tons of waste, including plastic and cardboard. The Collins Dictionary has also just named “single-use” its Word of the Year, pointing out the problem that there’re too many things we tow out after only using them once.
So, Buy Nothing Day might only be here for one day a year, but it’s not just to remind us to the a break from shopping on that day, but to change our lifestyle completely, focusing on fun “with people we care about” rather than wasting money on useless things.
1. What’s the authors purpose of writing the first paragraph?| A．To express the people’s love for all festivals. |
| B．To talk about the meaning of the festivals. |
| C．To appreciate the value of the festivals. |
| D．To bring out the topic of the passage. |
| A．To help people save money. | B．To cut the cost for daily life. |
| C．To prevent over-consumption. | D．To set up a new sales record. |
| A．Opposed (反对的). | B．Supportive. |
| C．Unknown. | D．Neutral (中立的). |
| A．Creating a New Lifestyle | B．Buy Nothing Day |
| C．Festivals Around the World | D．A Change in People’s Life |
7 . It’s 3 o’clock and you’ve been hard at work. As you sit at your desk, a strong desire for chocolate overcomes you. You try to busy yourself to make it go away. But it doesn’t. Here is another situation. Perhaps you are not feeling well. The only thing you want to eat is a big bowl of chicken soup, like your mom used to make when you were sick as a child. Food cravings area strong desire for a specific type of food. And they are normal.
Scientists at the website How Stuff Works compare hunger and cravings this way. Hunger is a fairly simple connection between the stomach and the brain. They even call it simply “stomach hunger.” When our stomachs bur x up all of the food we have eaten, a hormone (荷尔蒙) sends a message to one part of the brain for more food, which regulates our most basic body functions such as thirst, hunger and sleep. The brain then produces a chemical to start the appetite and you eat. Hunger is a function of survival.
A craving is more complex. It activates (使活跃) brain areas related to emotion, memory and reward. These are the same areas of the brain activated during drug-craving studies. So, some scientists call food cravings “mind hunger.” People often crave foods that are high in fat and sugar. Foods that are high in fat or high in sugar produce chemicals in the brain. These chemicals give us feelings of pleasure.
In a 2017 study, researchers at Cambridge University found that “dieting or restricted eating generally increases the possibility of food craving”. So, the more you deny yourself a food that you want, the more you may crave it. However, fasting is a bit different. They found that eating no food at all for a short period of time lessened food cravings.
So, the next time you crave something very specific, know that your brain maybe more to blame than your stomach.
1. What is the function of the first paragraph?| A．To remind readers of their own special food. |
| B．To deepen the understanding of hunger. |
| C．To report the discovery of craving study. |
| D．To lead to the topic of the whole passage. |
| A．It shows food is linked to feelings. |
| B．It ensures a person survives hunger. |
| C．It means the stomach functions well. |
| D．It proves the brain decides your appetite. |
| A．The decrease of chemicals. | B．The increase of food desire. |
| C．The refusal of fat and sugar. | D．The disappearance of appetite. |
| A．The functions of brain areas. | B．What hunger is all about. |
| C．The findings of food craving. | D．What dieting may bring us. |
8 . What are scientists?They are often described as gray-haired white-coated dull scholars.
But the world has changed.Young scientists are making their voices heard and releasing their powers on the world stage.
This is also true in China.Rising stars include new materials expert Gong Yongji,university professor Liu Mingzhen,and biologist Wan Ruixue.At the age of 28 in 2018,Wan Ruixue received the 2018 Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists.This is a global prize to reward outstanding scientists at an early stage of their careers.
She focuses mainly on biomedicine (生物医学) and artificial intelligence.“Both are cutting-edge (前沿) technologies at an early stage of development,” she said.
“So,I think they have great potential to be developed.I think in the study of cutting-edge technologies,China and other leading countries in the world are standing on the same starting line.And in the study of structural biology,China is likely to become the leader.”
She felt it was her fate to become a biologist.“I grew interested in the natural world,when I was very young,” she said.In 2009,she entered Sun Yat-sen University.
In her third year at the university,she realized that she wanted to do something related to biomedicine.So she emailed China’s top biologist Shi Yigong,hoping to join his lab at Tsinghua University.
Shi recognised her talent and welcomed her.Years of efforts at the lab have paid off.Her research on the high-definition 3D structure of spliceosome led to a scientific breakthrough.
Unlike many of other young scientists who choose to pursue further study abroad,Wan currently has no plan to go overseas.
“The whole ecosystem for scientific research is continually improving in China,” she said,adding that the country has great science facilities.
1. What does the underlined word “releasing” in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Giving out. | B．Getting over. |
| C．Finding out. | D．Taking over. |
| A．Anxious. | B．Confident. |
| C．Disappointed. | D．Satisfied. |
| A．Her teacher led her into the field. |
| B．She finds it’s easier than she thought. |
| C．Her contribution has been recognised. |
| D．She thinks it’s boring but worth trying. |
| A．China’s Breakthrough in Science |
| B．Rising Young Scientists in China |
| C．Wan Ruixue:A Successful Young Scientist |
| D．New Image of Chinese Scientists |
9 . Some people say that friendship is the only channel through which human beings can ever experience the value of life. In our daily life it is likely that you share some common interests with others—they may like the same sport, go to the same school or like the same kind of music as you do. Since you often meet them, they become your acquaintances(熟人). Although some people develop many acquaintances, only a few become their good friends in their lifetime because there are differences between acquaintances and friends.
It is said that true friendship begins when someone knows what you are really like, but still likes you anyway. A true friend shows loyalty from the very beginning of the relationship. A friend will go through challenges to help you without expecting anything in return. A “friend” today may probably become a “true friend” tomorrow when they get involved in unexpected circumstances together with you. For example, when you are going through a difficult experience and your friend is there to help you out. However, some acquaintances might leave you when you badly need their help. At this time, you can experience what true friendship is.
In our life, some people seem to go through life with plenty of friends. They may be funny or they may have a bright and pleasant personality. For these people, wherever they go, people seem to like them and welcome their company. But when they go through challenging life experiences, some of their friends are not there to help them. Therefore we can say some of their friends are not real friends and their friendship is just skin-deep(表面的).
However, others seem to go through life with no friends at all. They like to be alone, to travel by themselves or to do their own things. It’s a pity that few of these people find success in life because they have no friends. They lack the best gift in life—friendship.
1. According to the passage, which of the following statements about acquaintances is TRUE?| A．Not all of them can become your friends. |
| B．You seldom meet them in your life. |
| C．They are sure to become your good friends. |
| D．They have all of the same interests as you do. |
| A．go to the same school as your friend |
| B．see your friend often |
| C．enjoy the same kind of music as your friend |
| D．get into trouble |
| A．it doesn’t matter whether one has friends or not |
| B．people without friends are always unhappy |
| C．people with bright personality are easy to have friends |
| D．it’s easier to lose a friend than to get one |
| A．Regretful. | B．Angry. | C．Hopeful. | D．Interested. |
10 . Good relationship are definitely good sources of happiness in life. We all want happy relationships but if we do not keep that relationship alive, it can also be one of the most distraught things in life. There may be no hard and fast rules in making good relationships, as each of us has different preferences and points of view as to what is a great relationship. The following are some major key players in making relationships work.
It is often said that building good relationship is all about communication. Good communication indeed governs a good relationship—knowing the right thing to say, when to say it, how to say it, and accepting some things that are better left unsaid. I personally think communication must be broadened because relationships involve more decisions to make. From study to work, from money to entertainment and even in things about yourself or about your friends that you do not know, communication is necessary in these aspects of the relationships.
Of course, being with someone is not saying that you totally agree with him or her all the time. You and your friends come from different family backgrounds, raised in different environment so there may be disagreement here and there. However, it is important in making relationship work to express disagreements without pushing the relationship to end. Again, good communication and learning to compromise(妥协) at times are necessary.
As relationships last longer, you may also discover things about you and your friends that you may not have known before. Therefore supporting each other on both your “hidden selves” can also make a good relationship.
Love is an important aspect of building relationships and for me, I always believe that love needs open communication, respect, support and understanding each other in making relationships work.
1. The underlined word “distraught” in Paragraph 1 probably means _________.| A．interesting | B．surprising | C．funny | D．upset |
| A．supporting each other in anything helps build a good relationship |
| B．a white lie is necessary sometimes |
| C．compromises are necessary at any time |
| D．your friends need to have the same backgrounds with you |
| A．Communication. | B．Support. |
| C．Hidden selves. | D．Love. |
| A．Forbidden Rules in Building Good Relationships. |
| B．Keys to Making Relationships Work. |
| C．Different Opinions on Good Relationships. |
| D．The Importance to Express Disagreements. |
