1 . “Your mind is a garden; your thoughts are the seeds. The harvest can either be flowers or weeds,” William Wordsworth wrote. In the above quote, William suggests that the process of gardening mirrors human life. Depending on what we “plant” in our lives, we bloom (生长茂盛) or don’t. Before you start to work in your garden, it’s necessary to have a vision for it. Thinking of what you want to grow in your garden and how to lay it out is a good first step in making your vision a fruitful reality. In life, you should consider what you want to create and what you want to achieve, because your mind-garden is like the white paper and the possibilities are endless.
Regardless of what you choose to plant, poor soil isn’t suitable for growth. This is why gardeners take the time and energy to upgrade the soil before planting. So, creating the right soil is important to the realization of your goals and dreams. Fortunately, there are countless ways to make your personal bedrock better. Getting an education is one of the most effective ways, which can help you enrich your life’s soil.
You don’t have to be an enthusiastic gardener to understand the meaning of “You reap(收获) what you sow.” When a gardener wants tomatoes, they just need to plant tomato seeds. It’s a very clear act that produces an expected result. Each of us has the power to decide which “life seeds” to plant. For example, if you plant ill seeds, it's likely that you’ll experience pain in return. Contrarily, if you plant seeds of kindness and understanding, your life will bloom with happiness and love.
A gardener’s truly arduous work begins after the seeds are in the ground because a garden requires a lot of care and attention. Regular watering and weeding are required for a healthy garden. So, to ensure your dreams take root, you should be devoted, aware, and present. After countless hours and energy spent, the crops have grown well and are finally ready to be harvested.
1. What is important before gardeners break ground in their gardens?| A．Receiving some training in planting. |
| B．Drawing up a good plan for their gardens. |
| C．Having the courage to accept the worst outcome. |
| D．Doing research on the common local garden plants. |
| A．Improving the condition of the soil. | B．Growing your most favorable plants. |
| C．Taking care of the plants in your garden. | D．Selecting proper goals in gardening work. |
| A．Your quality of life depends on your positive action. |
| B．Your experience can help you understand plants better. |
| C．Your choice of soil is an important part in your gardening. |
| D．Your knowledge of planting will make you a successful gardener. |
| A．Beneficial | B．Creative | C．Boring. | D．Tough |
2 . Who is a genius? This question has greatly interested humankind for centuries.
Let’s state clearly: Einstein was a genius. His face is almost the international symbol for genius. But we want to go beyond one man and explore the nature of genius itself. Why is it that some people are so much more intelligent or creative than the rest of us? And who are they?
In the sciences and arts, those praised as geniuses were most often white men, of European origin. Perhaps this is not a surprise. It’s said that history is written by the victors, and those victors set the standards for admission to the genius club. When contributions were made by geniuses outside the club—women, or people of a different color or belief—they were unacknowledged and rejected by others.
A study recently published by Science found that as young as age six, girls are less likely than boys to say that members of their gender(性别)are “really, really smart.” Even worse, the study found that girls act on that belief: Around age six they start to avoid activities said to be for children who are “really, really smart.” Can our planet afford to have any great thinkers become discouraged and give up? It doesn’t take a genius to know the answer: absolutely not.
Here’s the good news. In a wired world with constant global communication, we’re all positioned to see flashes of genius wherever they appear. And the more we look, the more we will see that social factors(因素)like gender, race, and class do not determine the appearance of genius. As a writer says, future geniuses come from those with “intelligence, creativity, perseverance(毅力), and simple good fortune, who are able to change the world.”
1. What does the author think of victors’ standards for joining the genius club?| A．They’re unfair. | B．They’re conservative. |
| C．They’re objective. | D．They’re strict. |
| A．They think themselves smart. |
| B．They look up to great thinkers. |
| C．They see gender differences earlier than boys. |
| D．They are likely to be influenced by social beliefs |
| A．Improved global communication. |
| B．Less discrimination against women. |
| C．Acceptance of victors’ concepts. |
| D．Changes in people’s social positions. |
| A．Geniuses Think Alike | B．Genius Takes Many Forms |
| C．Genius and Intelligence | D．Genius and Luck |
3 . My husband and I just spent a week in Paris.
The place wasn’t entirely authentic, though. Unlike a normal Parisian apartment, the plumbing (水管) worked.
Parisians are different from you and me. They never look lazy or untidy. As someone noted in this paper a couple of weeks ago, they eat great food and never gain weight.
In France, quality of life is much more important than efficiency.
You can tell this by cafés life. French cafés are always crowded.
| A．Not all the customers are tourists. |
| B．The quality of life in France is equally excellent. |
| C．There was a nice kitchen and a comfortable bed. |
| D．The amazing food is mainly consumed by local farmers. |
| E．That’s not the only reason the French eat less than we do. |
| F．Our aim was to see if we could live, in some way, like real Parisians. |
| G．The food is so delicious that you don’t need much of it to make you happy. |
4 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.
Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
1. What are Von Wong’s artworks intended for?| A．Beautifying the city he lives in. | B．Introducing eco-friendly products. |
| C．Drawing public attention to plastic waste. | D．Reducing garbage on the beach. |
| A．To show the difficulty of their recycling. |
| B．To explain why they are useful. |
| C．To voice his views on modern art. |
| D．To find a substitute for them. |
| A．Calming. | B．Disturbing. |
| C．Refreshing. | D．Challenging. |
| A．Artists’ Opinions on Plastic Safety |
| B．Media Interest in Contemporary Art |
| C．Responsibility Demanded of Big Companies |
| D．Ocean Plastics Transformed into Sculptures |
5 . Hundreds of friends on Facebook can’t replace a handful of close friends in real life, a study has found. In a recent study, researchers discovered that people with only a few friends were at least as happy as those with far more if many of theirs were online.
Social media, the researchers said, has encouraged younger people to have larger but more impersonal networks of “friends”. But instead of trying to amass friends, they added, a better cure for loneliness might be spending time with those you’re closest to.
Scientists from the University of Leeds did their study using data from two online surveys on 1,496 people by a non-profit research organization. People taking part in the study showed their ages, the make-up of their social networks, how often they had different types of social interactions, and their own feelings of well-being. They included details of how often and how they interacted with families or neighbors, and whether they included people who provided services to them in their networks.
The number of close friends someone had appeared to be the only thing which influenced how satisfied they were with their social life.
“Loneliness has less to do with the number of friends you have, and more to do with how you feel about your friends,” said Dr Wändi Bruine de Bruin. Actually, it's often the younger adults who admit to having a bad opinion of their friends.
If you feel lonely, it may be more helpful to make a positive connection with a friend than to try and seek out new people to meet.
1. According to the text, friends made on social media can ______.| A．take the place of friends in real life |
| B．only help people increase the number of friends |
| C．be as important as people’s close friends |
| D．bring people more happiness than friends in real life |
| A．Play the role of. | B．Increase the number of. |
| C．Take advantage of. | D．Think highly of. |
| A．Scientists conducted one online survey on 1,496 people. |
| B．People surveyed mentioned new forms of social networks. |
| C．The number of friends was the only cause of people’s happiness. |
| D．People surveyed showed their ways to interact with families. |
| A．To show us the importance of friends. |
| B．To tell us ways to get rid of loneliness. |
| C．To advise us to make few online friends. |
| D．To present us with the findings of a study. |
6 . Cecilia Chiang, the chef and restaurant owner, was greatly known for introducing regional Chinese dishes to the United States. She helped change the way Americans think about Chinese cooking.
Chiang was born into a wealthy Shanghai family with two full-time chefs—one from the north and one from the south. In 1949 her family settled in Tokyo, opening a restaurant called the Forbidden City. But it was a 1960 trip in San Francisco that set Chiang on her dramatic journey to cooking fame. She was both shocked and amused by the food most Americans considered to be Chinese. “They think chop suey(杂烩) is the only thing we have in China,” she said with a laugh. “ What a shame.”
So Chiang was determined to open a high-end Chinese restaurant that served authentic Chinese food. “Everybody said, ‘You cannot make it. You cannot speak English. You don’t know anything.’” she recalled. In 1961 then, Chiang opened the Mandarin.
The restaurant wasn’t immediately successful. About a year after opening, the Mandarin received a mention from the San Francisco Chronicle (旧金山纪事报). The effect of the powerful writer’s positive comment was immediate. Tourists, dignitaries and celebrities(达官显贵)—from Mae West to John Lennon—flooded into the Mandarin for then -unfamiliar food like tea smoked duck twice cooked pork.
Though the Mandarin was closed years later, Cecilia Chiang’s DNA can be found all over American Chinese food. Her son founded the chain P.F. Chang’s and the son of one of her chefs founded Panda Express.
In early 2017, Chiang shared how she lived to be so old: “I always think about the better side, the good side of everything. I never think about, Oh, I’m going to fail. Oh, I cannot do this. Oh, I feel sorry for myself.” Instead, Chiang wrote books, starred in a PBS documentary series and won the most famous award in American cooking when she was 93 years old.
1. Cecilia Chiang opened the Mandarin in order to ________.| A．remember her 1960 trip in San Francisco |
| B．Serve real Chinese food to the Americans |
| C．Show her shock and amusement towards food |
| D．Continue her family tradition of running restaurants |
| A．It is in the charge of Chiang’s son now. |
| B．It wasn’t successful until two years later. |
| C．It turned out pretty popular among Americans. |
| D．It changed the way Americans think about China. |
| A．Talented and active. |
| B．Ambitious and selfless. |
| C．Optimistic and creative. |
| D．Positive and determined. |
7 . Researchers say they have translated the meaning of gestures that wild chimpanzees (黑猩猩) use to communicate. They say wild chimps communicate 19 specific messages to one another with a “vocabulary” of 66 gestures. The scientists discovered this by following and filming groups of chimps in Uganda, and examining more than 5,000 incidents of these meaningful exchanges.
Dr Catherine Hobaiter, who led the research, said that this was the only form of intentional communication to be recorded in the animal kingdom. Only humans and chimps, she said, had a system of communication where they deliberately sent a message to another group member.
“That’s what’s so amazing about chimp gestures,” she said. “They’re the only thing that looks like human language in that respect.”
Although previous research has shown that apes and monkeys can understand complex information from another animal’s call, the animals do not appear to use their voices intentionally to communicate messages. This was a significant difference between calls and gestures, Dr Hobaiter said.
Chimps will check to see if they have the attention of the animal with which they wish to communicate. In one case, a mother presents her foot to her crying baby, signaling: “Climb on me.” The youngster immediately jumps on to its mothers back and they travel off together. “The big message from this study is that there is another species (物种) out there. that is meaningful in its communication, so that’s not unique to humans,” said Dr Hobaiter.
Dr Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Manchester, said the study was praiseworthy in seeking to enrich our knowledge of the evolution of human language. But, she added, the results were “a little disappointing”.
“The vagueness of the gesture meanings suggests either that the chimps have little to communicate, or we are still missing a lot of the information contained in their gestures and actions,” she said. “Moreover, the meanings seem to not go beyond what other animal convey with non-verbal communication. So, it seems the gulf remains. ”
1. What do chimps and humans have in common according to Dr Hobaiter?| A．Memorizing specific words. | B．Understanding complex information. |
| C．Using voices to communicate. | D．Communicating messages on purpose. |
| A．It was well designed but poorly conducted. |
| B．It was a good try but the findings were limited. |
| C．It was inspiring but the evidence was unreliable. |
| D．It was a failure but the methods deserved praise. |
| A．Difference. | B．Conflict. | C．Balance. | D．Connection. |
| A．Chimpanzee behaviour study achieved a breakthrough |
| B．Chimpanzees developed specific communication skills |
| C．Chimpanzees: the smartest species in the animal kingdom |
| D．Chimpanzee language: communication gestures translated |
8 . Most of us marry creativity to our concept of self either we're "creative" or we aren't, without much of a middle ground. "I'm just not a creative person!" a frustrated student might say in art class, while another might blame her talent at painting for her difficulties in math, giving a comment such as, "I'm very right-brained."
Dr. Pillay, a tech entrepreneur and an assistant professor at Harvard University, has been challenging these ideas. He believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to ignore the traditional advice that urges you to "believe in yourself." In fact, you should do the opposite: Believe you are someone else.
Dr. Pillay points to a 2016 study demonstrating the impact of stereotypes on one's behavior; The authors. educational psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three groups, instructing the members of one to think of themselves as "romantic poets" and the members of another to imagine they were "serious librarians" (the third group was the control). The researchers then presented all the participants with ten ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as romantic poets came up with the widest range of ideas, whereas those in the serious-librarian group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors.
These results suggest that creativity is not a fixed individual characteristic but a "malleable product of context and perspective, as long as he or she feels like a creative person. Dr. Pillay argues that, besides identifying yourself as creative, taking the bold, creative step of imagining you are somebody else is even more powerful. So, wish you were more creative? Just pretend!
1. According to the passage， who is more likely to unlock his creative potential?| A．An art major who always believes in himself. |
| B．A math major who has excellent academic performance |
| C．A physics major who likes to imagine himself as a poet. |
| D．A history major who works as a librarian on weekends. |
| A．The creativity of the college students. |
| B．The stereotypes of the college students. |
| C．The impact of stereotypes on one's behavior |
| D．The influence of creativity on one's behavior. |
| A．stable | B．sustainable | C．predicable | D．changeable |
| A．there is no doubt that we are either creative or not |
| B．a student who doesn't do well in art class is not creative |
| C．right brain determines whether a person is creative or not |
| D．if we pretend to be creative， then we might be really creative |
9 . British anthropologists Russell Hill and Robert Barton of the University of Durham, after studying the results of one-on-one boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling matches at the Olympic Games, conclude that when two competitors are equally matched in fitness and skill, the athlete wearing red is more likely to win.
Hill and Barton report that when one competitor is much better than the other, colour has no effect on the result. However, when there is only a small difference between them, the effect of colour is enough to tip the balance. The anthropologists say that the number of times red wins is not simply by chance, but that these results are statistically significant.
Joanna Setchell, a primate (灵长目动物) researcher at the University of Cambridge, has found similar results in nature. She studies the large African monkeys known as mandrills. Mandrills have bright red noses that stand out against their white faces. Setchell’s work shows that the powerful males—the ones who are more successful with females—have a brighter red nose than other males.
As well as the studies on primates by Setchell, another study shows the effect of red among birds. In an experiment, scientists put red plastic rings on the legs of male zebra finches and this increased the birds’ success with female zebra finches. Zebra finches already have bright red beaks (鸟喙), so this study suggests that, as with Olympic athletes, an extra flash of red is significant. In fact, researchers from the University of Glasgow say that the birds’ brightly coloured beaks are an indicator of health. Jonathan Blount, a biologist, and his colleagues think they have found proof that bright red or orange beaks attract females because they mean that the males are healthier. Nothing in nature is simple, however, because in species such as the blue footed booby, a completely different colour seems to give the male birds the same advantage with females.
Meanwhile, what about those athletes who win in their events while wearing red? Do their clothes give them an unintentional advantage? Robert Barton accepts that “that is the implication” of their findings. Is it time for sports authorities to consider new regulations on sports clothing?
1. According to their research, Hill and Barton conclude that _____.| A．the colour of clothing has an effect on most sport events |
| B．red should be the choice of colour for clothing in sports |
| C．red plays a role when competitors are equally capable |
| D．athletes perform better when surrounded by bright red |
| A．achieve | B．seek | C．keep | D．change |
| A．male birds use different body parts to draw attention |
| B．red is not the only colour to attract female birds |
| C．blue gives female birds the same advantage |
| D．blue can indicate how healthy a bird is |
| A．What Colour Implies More Power? | B．A Tip on Clothing. |
| C．Need to Change the Rules in Sports? | D．Red Is for Winners. |
10 . What is the nature of the scientific attitude, the attitude of the man or woman who studies and applies physics, biology, chemistry, geology, engineering, medicine or any other science?
We all know that science plays an important role in our societies. However, many people believe that our progress depends on two different aspects of science. The first aspect is the application of the machines, products and systems of knowledge that scientists and technologists develop. The second is the application of the special methods of thought and action that scientists use in their work.
What are these special methods of thinking and acting? First of all, it seems that a successful scientist is curious - he wants to find out how and why the universe works. He usually pays attention to problems which he notices have no satisfying explanation, and looks for relationships even if the data available seem to be unconnected. Moreover, he thinks he can improve the existing conditions and enjoys trying to solve the problems which this involves.
He is a good observer, accurate, patient and objective and uses the facts he observes to the fullest. For example, trained observers obtain a very large amount of information about a star mainly from the accurate analysis of the simple lines that appear in a spectrum(光谱).
He does not accept statements which are not based on the most complete evidence available. He rejects authority as the only basis for truth. Scientists always check statements and make experiments carefully and objectively.
Furthermore, he does not readily accept his own idea, since he knows that man is the least reliable of scientific instruments and that a number of factors tend to disturb objective investigation.
Lastly, he is full of imagination since he often has to look for relationships in data which are not only complex but also frequently incomplete. Furthermore, he needs imagination if he wants to guess how processes work and how events take place.
These seem to be some of the ways in which a successful scientist or technologist thinks and acts.
1. Which of the following statements about a curious scientist is TRUE?| A．He doesn't find confidence and pleasure in work. |
| B．He makes efforts to investigate potential connections. |
| C．He is interested in problems that are explained. |
| D．He looks for new ways of acting. |
| A．easily appreciate others' research work |
| B．easily believe in unchecked statements |
| C．always accept authority as the only basis for truth |
| D．always use evidence from observation to the fullest |
| A．Objective and careful. | B．Curious and casual. |
| C．Cautious and arrogant. | D．Subjective and down-to-death . |
| A．Key to a successful scientist. | B．Scientists’ ways of thinking and acting |
| C．Progress in modern society. | D．Application of modern technology. |
