1 . Emerging economies (新兴经济体) struggled to grow through the 2010s and pessimism clouds them now. People wonder how they will pay debts piling up and grow rapidly. The solution is the fast-spreading digital revolution. The world’s largest emerging market has already demonstrated the enormous effects of digital technology. As China’s old industries have slowed sharply over the past decade, the booming technology industry has kept the economy growing steadily.
Now China’s emerging market peers are getting a push from the same digital engines. Since 2014, more than 10,000 tech firms have been launched in emerging markets. From Bangladesh to Egypt, it is easy to find entrepreneurs (企业家) who worked for Facebook or other US giants before coming home to start their own companies.
How can the emerging market countries adopt common digital technologies faster than the richer countries? In societies filled with stores and services, customers are accustomed to using the providers they have. However, in countries where people have difficulty even finding public facilities, a bank or a hospital, they will jump at the first digital option. Though only 5% of the Kenyans carry credit cards, more than 70% have access to digital banking.
The digital impact on productivity is visible. Many governments are moving services online to make them more transparent (透明的) and less affected by corruption (腐败), perhaps the most feared obstacle to doing business in the emerging world. Since 2010, the cost of starting a business has been steady in developed countries while falling sharply in emerging market countries, from 66% to just 27% of the average annual income. Entrepreneurs can now launch businesses affordably, organizing much of what they need on a smartphone.
The era of rapid digitization has only just begun. This offers many developing economies a revolutionary new path to catching up with the living standards of the developed world.
1. Which is a result of digital technology for China?| A．Stable economic growth. | B．Accumulated debts. |
| C．Struggling new industries. | D．Booming old industries. |
| A．To present emerging markets’ digital technologies. |
| B．To show rich nations abandon what they own unwillingly. |
| C．To present emerging markets accept digital options warmly. |
| D．To show poor nations have difficulty building public facilities. |
| A．The steady annual income. |
| B．The low cost of launching businesses. |
| C．The simplified procedure of setting up a business. |
| D．The thorough removal of the most feared obstacle. |
| A．Emerging Economies Are Seeking Their Fortune |
| B．The Digital Impact Is Huge on Global Productivity |
| C．The Era of Rapid Digitization Is Around the Corner |
| D．Digital Technology Will Save Slow Emerging Markets |
2 . Imagine you are floating in space on a huge NASA spacecraft. A satellite is on a collision course with your spaceship. You have just been told by your commanders on Earth to evacuate. You and your teammates have to make rapid decisions for your escape and survival.
Engaging children in a NASA mission (任务) is a lesson that 23 pre-service teachers (职前教师)were taught to carry out at a recent Pre-Service Teacher Institute (PSTI) summer workshop (讲习班)at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
At this two-week workshop, these college students were given hands-on activities designed to increase their skills in teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) . They were shown how to include NASA missions and research into their lesson plans. They met with NASA engineers and were given tours of NASA facilities (设施)by the latter to help them develop and teach a problem-based lesson to children.
“NASA is pleased to support college students who want to teach STEM to young children,” said Lewis Braxton, director of the research center. “It was exciting to see PSII students fully engaged in developing new skills in STEM to meet the challenges of a space-related teaching task,” said Steve Price, the principal investigator of PSTI at California State University, Fresno.
“PSTI has provided me with the necessary tools and techniques to fully develop my skills as a teacher. I’ll use what I’ve learned to help my students succeed in their studies,” said Elijah Carnillo, one of the pre-service teachers.
1. What does the underlined word “evacuate” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．Withdraw. |
| B．Wait. |
| C．Follow. |
| D．Resist. |
| A．To invite students to engage in NASA missions. |
| B．To encourage graduates to work at NASA. |
| C．To introduce the latest space technology. |
| D．To help with space-related STEM teaching. |
| A．They graded their homework. |
| B．They adjusted their work schedules. |
| C．They built them a spacecraft model. |
| D．They showed them some space equipment. |
| A．PSTI: Getting You Ready for Your Class |
| B．STEM: The Key to a Successful Career |
| C．Space: The Final Homework Frontier |
| D．NASA: The Home of Astronauts |
3 . When I was a kid, I used to spend hours listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky on their Sunday night radio show Loveline. I listened so often that I began to use one of their well-known phrases — “good times” — in my daily conversations. Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: behavioral mimicry.
You’ve probably experienced this before: after spending enough time with another person, you might start to pick up on his or her behavior or speech habits. You might even start to develop your friend’s habits without realizing it. There is a large body of literature concerning this sort of phenomenon, and it regularly happens for everything from body gesture to accents to drink patterns (模式). For example, one study found that young adults were more likely to drink their drink directly after their same-sex drinking partners, than for the two individuals to drink at their own paces.
And the effect isn’t limited to real-life face-to-face activities. Another study found that the same you-drink-then-I-drink pattern held even when watching a movie! In other words, people were more likely to take a drink of their drinks in a theater after watching the actors on the screen enjoy a drink. At least I don’t feel so strange anymore, having picked up on Adam Carolla’s “good times”.
New research published today in the journal PLOS ONE indicates that the same sort of behavioral mimicry is responsible for social eating, at least among university-age women of normal weight. That’s right: the young women were more likely to adjust their eating according to the eating pace of their same-sex dining companion.
As with most experiments, these results raise a whole new set of questions. However, the finding that behavioral mimicry may at least partly explain eating behavior is important, and has real effects on health. The researchers note that “as long as people don’t fully recognize such important influences on intake (eating), it will be difficult to make healthy food choices and keep a healthy diet, especially when people are exposed to the eating behavior of others”.
1. The author takes his own example of using “good times” to_______.| A．show the influence of the hosts’ words | B．express his love for radio shows |
| C．prove the popularity of the show | D．introduce the topic of the passage |
| A．behavioral mimicry is beneficial to our health |
| B．behavioral mimicry decides our eating behavior |
| C．people have realized the effect of behavioral mimicry on our health |
| D．It’s impossible to keep a healthy diet without knowing behavioral mimicry |
| A．To introduce behavioral mimicry and its influence. |
| B．To appeal to readers not to fall into others’ habits. |
| C．To advocate healthy food choices among readers. |
| D．To draw readers’ attention to popular radio shows. |
