1 . There are many ways to travel within a city. We can walk, cycle, or take a bus. But no matter which way we travel, we have to follow the route (线路) the city planners laid down for us.
Parkour practitioners (跑酷爱好者), however, see the city in a completely different way. To them, there are no designed routes. There are no walls and no stairs — they jump, climb, roll and crawl to move across, through, over and under anything that they find in their path. The city is their playground.
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has noticed that this activity is drawing more and more people to it — there are 100, 000 people taking part in parkour today in the UK alone, according to The Guardian — and how it is helpful for people to be much stronger: It trains coordination and balance. So the FIG is thinking about recognizing parkour as a new sport and adding it to the Olympics by 2024.
But parkour practitioners themselves don’t seem to be happy with the idea. They see parkour as “a lifestyle”, wrote the website NextSportStar. “It’s a competition against the conditions rather than just a sport.”
Indeed, many do parkour just to “escape the daily routine and experience the city in different ways”, wrote reporter Oli Mould on The Conversation. They see parkour as a way to express themselves through relaxing moves and creative routes while freeing themselves from the pressure.
It’s great that the FIG wants to develop a new sport and stay close to a new cultural form. But it would be greater if they knew that not everything in life is a competition.
1. How do the parkour practitioners do parkour?| A．They plan the way themselves. |
| B．They move on as they wish. |
| C．They run faster than others. |
| D．They follow certain routes. |
| A．It’s a special way of life. |
| B．It draws their attention. |
| C．It helps balance people’s life. |
| D．It’s good for people to keep healthy. |
| A．It is more exciting than other sports. |
| B．It is worth adding to the sporting event. |
| C．It is more a lifestyle than a competition. |
| D．It encourages people to challenge themselves. |
| A．Parkour practitioners |
| B．Making the city their own |
| C．Training in a different way |
| D．A new sports competition |
2 . Forty-five minutes was considered an appropriate amount of time to supply 12-year-old me — and 20 other teenagers — with enough information about eating disorders to last us through high school. A documentary shown on a dusty VHS tape that had obviously been in use since the early 2000s, about two girls suffering from anorexia and bulimia, had been my only source for eating disorder awareness for five years. No reflection time followed, no discussion was started, and no questions were asked.
Flash forward five years I still know nothing. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I learned, via TikTok, that my daily diet of 1,000 calories is barely enough for a two-year-old, let alone a developing teenager. Despite being educated in America’s sixth best county in education, I only had a single image of what an eating disorder looked like: a skin-and-bones teenage girl with sunken eyes. Schools are clearly ill-equipped to educate students on eating disorders and how they can prevent them.
Teenagers have failed to learn about the most common eating disorder in the country because it isn’t taught in many school curriculum: binge eating disorder (暴食症). It is more common than anorexia, affecting 2.8 million Americans, including 1.2 percent of all adolescents. Additionally, it’s reported that males make up 40 percent of those with binge eating disorder, which contradicts the existing opinion that only women are affected by eating disorders.
Instead of learning about eating disorders, my junior health class taught me how to count my calories. According to registered dietitian Christy Harrison, “disordered eating patterns began with calorie counting.” Despite this, health classes across the country continue to require students to track their daily calorie intake.
We need a developed and well-informed eating disorder curriculum. After all, the damage of a seemingly harmless 45-minute video may last someone a lifetime.
1. Why is TikTok mentioned in paragraph 2?| A．To prove the author’s limited calorie intake. |
| B．To imply the author’s rich supply of information. |
| C．To stress the lack of education on eating disorders. |
| D．To highlight the influence of social media on kids. |
| A．Anorexia. | B．Bulimia. | C．Dieting. | D．Binge eating disorder. |
| A．Negative. | B．Positive. | C．Neutral. | D．Ambiguous. |
| A．A science report. | B．A documentary review. |
| C．An argumentative essay. | D．An autobiography excerpt. |
3 . 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. |
4 . How tall are you? Do you tower over your friends and family - or are they people you literally have to look up to?
Of course, our height is out of our control.
In a recent study scientists have discovered a brain receptor, called MC3R, linked to our growing process.
For those eager to be taller, we need to look at the Dutch, who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us as the tallest people in the world. But, of course tall people have to stoop (俯身) through doorways and struggle to fit in cars and can have joint and cardiovascular problems.
| A．Are you getting as tall as you want to be? |
| B．It’s a biological fact influenced partly by genetics. |
| C．So maybe we should be careful for what we wish for. |
| D．Obviously, we’re not all the same, and size doesn’t really matter. |
| E．It’s thought to be the crucial link between food and sex development and growth. |
| F．There is a ceiling for height, and it’s reached when people achieve their genetic potential. |
| G．If this makes you want to be taller, it’s good to know we are taller than we were 150 years ago. |
5 . In the traditional religions of Africa, life doesn’t end with death.
Among the spirits, the ancestors comprise a special category of their own.
Many African groups believe that the spirits of ancestors remain near their living descendants as guardians of the family and their traditions.
| A．As ancestors, they have some extra powers. |
| B．After death, humans continue to live on as spirits. |
| C．Ancestors have an indispensable significance for some Africans. |
| D．Some of the dead will become spiritual ancestors living in their descendants’ hearts. |
| E．Ancestor worship also plays a very significant role in the mythologies of some African peoples. |
| F．They help in times of trouble as long as their descendants perform proper rituals and pay them due respect. |
| G．For these Africans, the honored dead have become not only objects of worship but also subjects of tales and legends. |
6 . A star athlete at the college where I work recently stopped by my office. After committing a few unforced errors during a weekend match, she was tom apart by self-criticism. “I can’t stop beating myself up,” she told me. “I’m at peak fitness, and I practice hard. How is this happening?”
Many students I teach, like this athlete, believe that all-nighters in the library and hours on the field should get them exactly where they need to go. When they fall short of what they imagine they should accomplish, they are crushed by self-blame.
We talk often about young adults struggling with failure because their parents have protected them from discomfort. But there is something else at play among the most privileged in particular: a false promise that they can achieve anything if they are willing to work for it.
Psychologists have sourced this phenomenon to a misapplication of “mind set” research, which has found that praising children for effort will increase academic performance. But a recent analysis found that while praising effort over ability may benefit high-risk or economically disadvantaged students, it does not necessarily help everyone.
The cruel, messy reality is that you can do everything in your power and still fail. Instead of allowing our kids to beat themselves up when things don’t go their way, we should all question a culture that has taught them that feeling anything less than overwhelmed means they’re lazy, and that where they go to college matters more than the kind of person they are. It’s suggested that parents and teachers spend time helping students find purpose, or goals they genuinely love to pursue and that make an impact on the world, which may help them gain greater life satisfaction and become more psychologically mature.
The point is not to give our kids a pass on working hard. But we would be wise to remind our kids that life has a way of sucker-punching us when we least expect it. It’s often the people who learn to say “stuff happens” who get up the fastest.
1. Which sort of students does the star athlete belong to?| A．Those lacking courage to make self-criticism. |
| B．Those tired of working all night in the library. |
| C．Those believing hard work surely pay off. |
| D．Those overprotected by their parents in life. |
| A．Praising effort over ability will surely be beneficial to all kids. |
| B．The result of the “mindset” research doesn’t apply to all cases. |
| C．Parents should lay more emphasis on their kids’ academic performance. |
| D．Whether praising kids’ effort over ability does good to kids depends. |
| A．By choosing where to go to college for them. |
| B．By pushing them to fight against the cruel reality. |
| C．By discouraging them from making efforts to study hard. |
| D．By encouraging them to stick to a worthy cause they truly love. |
| A．Students should not expect too much from their study. |
| B．Students with positive attitudes can move on more easily. |
| C．Students should bear all the failures on their own. |
| D．Students are sure to succeed if they try their best. |
7 . Physical education, or PE, isn’t required for all high school students. In some schools, it isn’t offered for some different reasons. But should high school students have physical education? The answer is certainly “yes”.
Today many people don’t do sports. But as is known to all. doing sports is very important for an adult. Teaching teens the importance of a healthy lifestyle and making fitness plans now can help teens put exercise in the first place as an adult.
High school isn’t that easy. Many students are under a lot of stress. Stress can be harmful to a student’s studies and life. Doing sports can help them deal with stress better, helping them live a happier life at school.
The American Heart Association says that 10 million kids and teens suffer from obesity (肥胖). Teens should get 60 minutes of physical activity per day to control their weight and to help their bones get stronger. The increase in activities that don’t get teens to move around, such as computer games, means many teens don’t get their required exercise. PE classes act as a public health measure (措施) to encourage physical activities and help teens have healthy weights.
Not doing sports increases teens’ hazard of developing many diseases. An active lifestyle offers a good way of protection from these health problems. As much as 75 percent of health-care spending goes toward treating medical conditions that can be prevented by lifestyle changes, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.
According to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition (PCFSN), students who performed five hours of physical activities each week improved their academic (学业的) performance. Students from programs with no physical activity, who used the extra time for classroom study, did not perform better on tests than those who gave up some study time in support of physical education.
1. According to Paragraph 2, what does physical education in high school mean?| A．Making teens attach importance to ęxercise later. |
| B．Removing the stress faced by teens at school. |
| C．Getting teens to encourage adults to exercise. |
| D．Helping teens learn to make good plans |
| A．Happiness. | B．Risk. | C．Safety. | D．Sadness. |
| A．means making students choose between sports and studies |
| B．helps students make good use of all their time |
| C．means students adjust to their studies better |
| D．helps students do better in their studies |
| A．Why high school students should receive physical education. |
| B．Why some schools consider physical education important. |
| C．How schools can help students love doing sports. |
| D．How high school students can live a better life. |
8 . Travel allows us to experience the world. But as we travel, we are also leaving our footprint on every place we visit. This is why culturally immersive (沉浸) travel is so important. Because the wrong kind of travel negatively affects the world. One of the reasons we started this blog was to help others travel better and feel comfortable getting off the beaten path, interacting with locals, and take you “Beyond the traditional Bucketlist”, if you will.
People who only get 2-weeks off per year are often just looking for an easy destination with a beach to relax on. This isn’t travel. This is a vacation. But “Immersive Travel” or “Cultural Travel” is an entirely new type of trip. It is about experiencing and preserving the various traditions around the world. It’s about being open to new experiences and willing to step into another’s shoes. Cultural travel is jumping in with both feet and leaving your idea about what your trip should be behind you. It’s eating local dishes and sleeping in guesthouses. It’s building genuine connections with locals. It’s learning about the history of a country and leaving your trip with a greater understanding of the place you came to see and the people who live there.
Often times in today’s age, “travelers” will visit a country just to snap some photos of the famous sights to post on Instagram or to drink the night away, or even just to relax on a tropical beach. But that kind of vacation can be harmful to the very communities you’re traveling to.
Beyond supporting the local communities and the preservation of local customs and traditions, you’ll also experience some personal benefits through cultural travels. There’s simply no way to travel this way with a closed mind. You’ll get to know different cultures intimately and understand them a lot better. You’ll also become less judgmental of others the more you travel.
1. What’s the author’s purpose in writing the first paragraph?| A．To stress the negative influence of travel. |
| B．To describe the importance of cultural travel. |
| C．To recommend a totally different type of travel. |
| D．To convey his unique feelings about cultural travel. |
| A．establish close connections with the locals during the travel |
| B．choose a tourist attraction for adventure and exploration |
| C．show more interest in the history of a travel destination |
| D．post the photos taken in the journey on the social media |
| A．It is focused on studying local people's lifestyle. |
| B．Its travelers should be open-minded and understanding. |
| C．It is a specific way to make judgments of other cultures. |
| D．Its major concern is preserving local traditions and customs. |
| A．A travel brochure. | B．A blog post. |
| C．A historic magazine. | D．An encyclopedia website. |
9 . Today it is common to see people who walk about with colored wires hanging from their ears wherever they go. They move about in their personal bubbles，sometimes unaware of what’s happening around them.
For me, walking around in my own personal bubble is perfect.
Suppose you’re at work and about to make an incredible breakthrough，but a colleague suddenly turns up. At this precise moment，the slightest disturbance would break your concentration.
Pretty soon，not only will we have pretty colored wires hanging from our ears，but also our brains will be directly plugged into some new high-tech instrument. We’ll be in a virtual world，communicating with everyone else，as we like. In this world，we will all be permanently plugged in.
In the end, there is a thin line between using technology as a tool for making life better and being a slave to it! It’s so strange—suddenly. I don’t feel like wearing my earphones anymore.
| A．Our instruments are changing quickly. |
| B．I also have wires hanging from my ears. |
| C．In the home situation，teenagers love these wires. |
| D．I don’t have to deal with the noise from the environment. |
| E．After all，I am listening to my favourite music and would rather not be disturbed. |
| F．They walk around in their own spaces, with their personal “digital noise reduction systems”. |
| G．Listening to music through earphones is one of the perfect ways to ignore such interruptions. |
10 . Some young people are blocking their parents on social media. Would you add your parents on Wechat?
Some children say they feel uncomfortable with their parents keeping an eye on their everyday activities and photos, as their parents either don’t support the things they do for fun, or would constantly worry over what they consider unsafe or inappropriate behavior.
So, what is your opinion? Should young people share their everyday activities with heir parents through social media like WeChat?
Some are for it. Young people can be friends with their parents.
Most young adults desire independence from their parents.Kids need to make their own choices.
| A．Social media is a good way for children to keep in touch with their parents. |
| B．This has become one of the biggest questions young Chinese facing in a digital age. |
| C．By treating each other as friends, families can work to rebuild their relationships. |
| D．They even say their friends’ circles are for friends of a similar age. |
| E．Blocking their parents on social media allows kids room to grow and build the self-confidence necessary to have a successful life. |
| F．37% of young people said they have blocked their parents from seeing their friends’ circles. |
| G．While others hold a different idea, arguing that the generation gap can’t be underestimated(低估）. |
