1 . Is that “empathy”（移情） or “sympathy” you’re showing? While the two words are often incorrectly used interchangeably, the difference in their emotional impact is important.
Empathy, literally “walk a mile in others’ shoes”, goes beyond sympathy, a simple expression of concern for another person’s misfortune. Empathy requires the ability to recognize the suffering of another person from their point of view and to openly share their emotions, including painful distress. Since it requires shared experiences, people can generally feel empathy only for other people, not for animals. While people may be able to sympathize with a horse, for example, they cannot truly empathize with it.
Sympathy is a feeling and expression of concern for someone, often accompanied by a wish for them to be happier or better off. “Oh dear, I hope the new plan can really work.” In general, sympathy implies a deeper, more personal, level of concern than pity, a simple expression of sorrow. However, unlike empathy, sympathy does not imply that one’s feelings for another are based on shared experiences or emotions.
Psychologists say that empathy is essential in forming relationships and acting toward others. Since it involves experiencing another person’s point of view — stepping outside one’s self —empathy enables genuinely helping behaviors that come easily and naturally, rather than having to be forced.
Empathetic people work effectively in groups, make more lasting friendships, and are more likely to step in when they see others being mistreated. It is believed that people begin to show empathy in infancy and develop the quality through childhood and adolescence. Despite their level of concern for others, however, most people tend to feel deeper empathy for people similar to themselves compared to people outside their family, community, race, or cultural background.
However, taken to extremes, deep or extended feelings of empathy can actually be harmful to one’s emotional health. Empathy can make people angry — perhaps dangerously so — if they mistakenly perceive that another person is threatening a person they care for.
For years, psychologists have reported cases of too empathetic patients endangering the well-being of themselves and their families by giving away their life savings to random needy individuals. Such too empathetic people who feel they are somehow responsible for the distress of others have developed an empathy-based guilt.
1. What does the phrase “walk a mile in others’ shoes” in Paragraph 2 mean?| A．Put oneself in others’ situation. |
| B．Walk a long distance in others’ shoes. |
| C．Accompany others in the long jogging. |
| D．Walk with others to share their experiences. |
| A．Pity = sympathy. | B．Sympathy = empathy. |
| C．Pity < sympathy. | D．Sympathy > empathy. |
| A．Empathy is a feeling that exists between human beings and animals. |
| B．Empathy is essential to form relationship, so the deeper, the better. |
| C．Empathy is to just express sadness to other without shared experiences. |
| D．People are more likely to show empathy to those who have something in common. |
| A．Empathy, Good or Bad? | B．Two Important Human Feelings. |
| C．Empathy vs. Sympathy. | D．Empathy, A Must in Relationship. |
2 . Why do old people dislike new music? As I’ve grown older, I often hear people my age say they just don’t make good music like they used to. Why does this happen? Luckily, psychology can give us some insights into this puzzle. Musical tastes begin to become clear as early as age 13 or 14. By the time we’re in our early 20s, these tastes get locked into place pretty firmly.
In fact, studies have found that by the time we turn 33, most of us have stopped listening to new music. Meanwhile, popular songs released when you’re in your early teens are likely to remain quite popular among your age group for the rest of your life.
There could be a biological explanation for this, as there’s evidence that the brain’s ability to make subtle distinctions between different chords, rhythms, and melodies weakens with age. So to older people, newer, less familiar songs might all “sound the same.”
But there are maybe some simpler reasons for older people’s dislike to newer music. One of the most researched laws of social psychology is something called the “mere exposure effect”, which in essence means that the more we’re exposed to something, the more we tend to like it.
This happens with people we know, the advertisements we see and, the songs we listen to. When you’re in your early teens, you probably spend a fair amount of time listening to music or watching music videos. Your favorite songs and artists become familiar, comforting parts of your routine.
For many people over 30, job and family obligations increase, so there’s less time to spend discovering new music. Instead, many will simply listen to old, familiar favorites from that period of their lives when they had more free time.
Psychology research has shown that the emotions that we experience as teens seem more intense than those that come later. And we also know that intense emotions are associated with stronger memories and preferences. Both of these might explain why the songs we listen to during this period become so memorable and beloved.
So there’s nothing wrong with your parents because they don’t like your music. Rather it’s all part of the natural order of things.
1. What have studies found about most people by the time they turn 33?| A．They no longer listen to new music. |
| B．They find all music sounds the same. |
| C．They can make subtle distinctions about music. |
| D．They seldom listen to songs released in their teens. |
| A．Tom likes the book, so he reads it more times. |
| B．Andy recites the words repeatedly and he is fed up with them. |
| C．Mike often listens to the same song and becomes more and more interested in it. |
| D．Peter goes to school by bike every day, and therefore his riding skills are better and better. |
| A．Teenagers are much more sensitive. | B．Teenagers are much more emotional. |
| C．Teenagers’ preferences are more lasting. | D．Teenagers’ emotions are more intense. |
| A．Quality issues of new music. | B．Older people’s dislike of new music. |
| C．Older people’s changing musical tastes. | D．Insights into the features of good music. |
3 . Across the country, university students sit in lectures every day, listening to someone speak for an hour in crowded theatres. Most are daydreaming, checking Facebook, surfing the web, texting and tweeting; if they're particularly motivated or the lecture is unusually good, some might actually be paying attention.
At the same time, millions of learners around the world are watching world-class lectures online about every subject imaginable, from fractional reserve banking to moral philosophy to pharmacology, supplied by Harvard, MIT, and The Open University.
One group gets its education for free, and the other pays thousands of pounds per year. It's a situation that can't continue, and unless universities face-up to the internet's fierce competition they won't have any future.
We have a romantic ideal of universities being places of higher education where students absorb knowledge, skills and critical thinking—an ideal modeled over centuries on universities like Oxford and Heidelberg. Since they used a multi-year, highly structured residential course of lectures, tutorials, and exams to produce smart graduates, we now believe that this same model ought to work for the majority of the adult population.
We're wrong. The simple fact is that university lectures never worked that well in the first place—it's just that for centuries, we didn't have any better option for transmitting information. In fact, the success of top universities, both now and historically, is in spite of lectures, not because of it.
The mediocrity of the average lecturer was made very clear when I watched Professor Michael Sandel's fantastically engaging Harvard philosophy lectures on Justice on YouTube, seen by millions around the world. Other universities, including MIT's Open Course Ware and The Open University, now offer videos of lectures free as a matter of course.
Today, we don't go to the music hall to hear songs—we can listen to the most popular performers on iTunes or the radio. Most of us don't visit the theatre for an evening's entertainment—we can watch TV. You can guess where this is heading with universities. Anyone online can now watch thousands of world-class lectures whenever they want. They can pause and rewind if they don't understand something and they can review the transcript when revising. At some universities, they can even email questions to lecturers without the risk of embarrassment. Undergraduate education should be paid for by the government—after all, most of us have enjoyed free or highly subsidized education that also benefits the whole country. However, if universities are going to cost over f 7,000 a year, students should think very hard about whether they're getting value for money.
Freely available online lectures and textbooks give universities the opportunity to reduce costs and increase quality, while focusing resources on what really matters: contact time between teachers and students. The simple fact is that the education most universities provide isn't worth the money. If they don't have world-class reputations, and only a few do—then they need to change fast, or watch an exodus of students away to cheaper, better alternatives.
1. Which of the following cannot be inferred from Paragraph 4?| A．University is Garden of Eden in every learner's heart. |
| B．Oxford and Heidelberg are like the precursor of universities. |
| C．In college, students can equip themselves with knowledge and skills. |
| D．University's educational model has barely changed so far |
| A．Traditional high educational system is not that efficient as expected. |
| B．Most lecturers are little more than talking textbooks. |
| C．Lectures, tutorials and exams have done little in transmit knowledge. |
| D．Lectures are not a decisive factor in judging whether a university is good or not. |
| A．tuition fees vs. free | B．residential vs. network-based |
| C．world-renowned vs. barely recognized | D．boredom vs. entertainment |
| A．Why free online lectures will destroy university. |
| B．Online lecturing vs. traditional universities. |
| C．Universities should get their act together to avoid extinction. |
| D．Online lecturing is gaining ground among educational community. |
4 . The 2021 Nobel Economics Prize has been awarded to Robert Wilson and Paul Milgrom for their work in analyzing auctions and how to make them more efficient.
At the heart of the work for which Milgrom and Wilson have been awarded is the winner's curse.
Wilson's work has shown that the fear of the winner's curse leads rational bidders to bid less than the own valuation.
Milgrom built on this to examine the case of auctions where there is not only a common value but also a private value that differs between bidders. In focusing again on the winner's curse, Milgrom determined that English-style auctions, where the price starts low and is bid upward, are better at avoiding the winner's curse than Dutch-style auctions---where the price starts high and is bid downward.This is because bidders gain more information about an item's value during an English-style auction,as other bidders drop out.
How have such insights help society? For one thing, Milgrom and Wilson developed the Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction'(SMRA). In these auctions, all biddable items are offered at the same time and bidders can bid on any portion of the items.The SMRA is useful,for example,if a company wants to bid for a license in one area only if it can also have the license in another area.
| A．If the auctions were held sequentially,the uncertainty about winning the second auction would depress bids in the first auction. |
| B．It arises from common value auctions where people bid for something whose value is unknown at the time but will be agreed upon later. |
| C．From determining the placement of every ad on a webpage to assigning the rights to fly to hub airports,auctions play a big role in contemporary society. |
| D．Greater uncertainty or the belief that some participants have more information than others will make bidders even more cautious. |
| E．He found that more details about the object's value,such as other bidders' valuations,tend to result in higher revenue. |
| F．This year's Nobel Economics Prize is a clear example of the practical effects on the interests of the public. |
5 . A symbol of a booming children’s book market is a self-styled “kaleidoscope (万花筒) of creative genius for kids”, the magazine Scoop, a startup based in Dalston, east London, which the author Neil Gaiman has described as “the kind of magazine I wish we’d had when I was eight.”
Scoop is the idea of the publisher Clementine Macmillan-Scott. A year ago, hers looked like an impossible venture. But against the odds for little magazines, Scoop has survived. Macmillan-Scott said, “I really wasn’t certain we would get to this point, but we are now approaching our first birthday.” She links the magazine’s fortunes to a prosperous market and reports that “through the hundreds of children, parents and teachers we speak to at our workshops, we know that children are greedy for storytelling.”
Inspired by an Edwardian model, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaperr, Scoop is a mix of innovation and creativity. Establishment heavyweights such as the playwright Tom Stoppard, plus children’s writers such as Raymond Briggs, author of Fungus the Bogeyman, have adopted its cause. The magazine has also given space to 10-year-old writers and pays all contributors, high and low, the same rate — 10p a word.
It’s a winning formula. Macmillan-Scott reports “a quarterly sales increase of roughly 150% every issue”, but is cautious about her good fortune. “It’s all too clear to us that these children are hungry for print.”
Scoop focuses on the most profitable part of the children’s market, Britain’s eight to 12-year-old readers. In literary culture, this is the crucial bridge between toddlers (儿童) and adolescents and its publisher knows it. Macmillan-Scott is committed to listening to readers aged eight to 12, who have an editorial board where they can express their ideas about the magazine. “If we don’t get these children reading,” she says, “we will lose out on adult readers. To be fully literate, you have to start as a child.”
Macmillan-Scott argues against the suggestion that reading is in decline. “If you look at our figures,” she objects, “you’ll find that children do read and that Scoop is part of a craze for reading hardback books. Kids love paper and print. They might play games on a digital device, but they prefer not to read on a Kindle. The real market for e-books is among young adult readers.” Some of her evidence is anecdotal, but her sales figures and readership surveys support a picture of eight to 12-year-olds absorbed in books.
“What our research shows beyond question,” she says, “is that children have a love for reading that’s not seriously threatened by other kinds of entertainment. Reading for pleasure is a very real thing at this age, and the worries that some adults have about children losing interest in reading are simply not grounded in reality.”
1. It can be learned from the passage that Scoop ________.| A．is aimed at teenagers in Britain |
| B．has taken a year to publish its first issue |
| C．has got its name from Arthur Mee’s newspaper |
| D．pays as much to young writers as to famous ones |
| A．conclusive | B．undeniable |
| C．defensive | D．unconvincing |
| A．Children would rather listen to stories than tell stories by themselves. |
| B．Magazines for children aged under 8 are not very common in Britain. |
| C．Scoop illustrates the power of printed books in the face of digital revolution. |
| D．Research carried out by Scoop has been questioned by those writing for children. |
| A．the market for children’s e-books remains to be explored |
| B．a child who dislikes reading won’t love reading when grown up |
| C．other kinds of entertainment have influenced children’s reading habits |
| D．it is necessary for adults to worry about children’s lack of interest in reading |
6 . Who is to blame for the shapes of our noses?
If you are not satisfied with the shape of your nose, blame it on climate, not your parents or grandparents. In a study published this week in the journal PLOS Genetics, researchers from the Pennsylvania State University found that human noses may have been shaped, in part, by a long process of adaptation to local climate conditions.
The findings were based on an examination of the size and shape of noses on people with West African, South Asian, East Asian, or Northern European ancestry. It showed that the width of the nostrils is strongly related to temperature and absolute humidity (绝对湿度), but not the result of genetic drift (遗传漂变).
One purpose of the nose is to condition the air we breathe, to ensure that it is warm and moist when it reaches the lungs, which helps to prevent infections.
People with narrower nostrils probably had better and had more offspring than people with wider nostrils, in colder climates.
The researchers said that it may be worth investigating whether the shape of the nose impacts ones risk of contracting breathing diseases when living in a climate that is different from one's ancestors.
| A．This leads to a gradual decrease in nose width in populations living far away from the equator (赤道) |
| B．Wider nostrils (鼻孔) seem to warm and humidify the inside of nose better to protect us from being infected |
| C．Narrower nostrils seem to alter the airflow so that noses can humidify and warm the air more efficiently |
| D．Generally, wider noses are more common in warm and humid climates, while narrower noses are more common in cold and dry climate |
| E．This can clearly explain why our ancestors aren’t to blame for the nose shapes and sizes |
| F．Investigations into nose shape evolution and climate adaptation may have medical implications as well |
7 . Fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales remain in the wild, and not even 100 of them are breeding females. Their biggest survival threats are boat strikes and getting caught in fishing gear. Protecting these whales, such as by turning boats from dangerous encounters, requires positioning them more reliably -- and new technology, described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, could help make that possible.
To listen for marine life, researchers often install underwater microphones called hydrophones on buoys (浮标) and robotic gliders (滑翔机). The recorded audio is changed into spectrograms -- visual representations of sound used to precisely recognize, for instance, specific whale species’ calls. But those distinctive sounds are often drowned out by other noise. In recent years researchers have used a machine-learning technique called deep learning to automate this analysis, but background sounds still block reliability.
Now researchers have trained two deep-learning models specifically to cut through the noise. They started by giving the models thousands of “clean” spectrograms with only North Atlantic right whale calls. Then they slowly added in thousands of spectrograms mixed with typical background sounds, such as tanker engines. The program can successfully turn noisy spectrograms into clean ones, reducing false alarms and helping spot whales before they reach dangerous areas, the scientists say.
Shyam Madhusudhana, a Cornell University data engineer, who was not involved in the study, says he would want to see if such models could be used to locate other marine mammals (哺乳动物), too. “Humpback whales and dolphins have much more complex speech pathways than the right whale,” he notes. And University of East Anglia machine-learning researcher Ben Milner, one of the study’s authors, wants to take this technology above water as well -- to Ukrainian forests, where he hopes to identify animals near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
University of St. Andrews behavioral ecologist Peter Tyack, who was not involved in the study, says this new system should be used to figure out where whales are throughout the year, so that these areas can be protected. “In terms of estimating the density and the number of these whales in places where it’s hard to see them,” Peter says, “this technology could be fantastic.”
But he warns that it should not be the only approach to preventing ship strikes. In his work, Tyack has found that North Atlantic right whales can be silent for hours at a time -- so passive sound monitoring could easily miss one. And killing just a few, he adds, “could lead to extinction of the population.”
1. What does the new technology do to help protect the North Atlantic right whales?| A．Locating the right whales precisely. |
| B．Turning boats to encounter the right whales. |
| C．Guiding the right whales away from fishing boats. |
| D．Positioning fishing boats reliably and thus deadly strikes. |
| A．They turn off the nearby alarms that may create background noises. |
| B．They can eliminate disturbances shown on a spectrogram sheet. |
| C．They add thousands of mixed sounds such as vehicle engines. |
| D．They can prevent whales from reaching dangerous areas. |
| A．Shyam and Ben are both scientists at different universities who know each other well |
| B．all of the three scientists consider the extended use of the technology could face challenges |
| C．Shyam and Ben both hope that the deep learning model can go beyond its current application |
| D．Peter thinks the technology should have been used to figure out where it’s hard to see the whales |
| A．Latest Techs on Marine Lifesaving |
| B．Save the Right Whale by Noise-cutting |
| C．See Whales’ Noise through Human’s Eyes |
| D．Non-professional Scientists’ Role in Saving Whales |
8 . All Miss Price had been told about the new boy was that he’d spent most of his life in some kind of orphanage, and that the gray-haired “aunt and uncle” with whom he now lived were really foster parents (养父母), paid by the Welfare Department of the City of New York. A less devoted teacher might have pressed for more details, but Miss Price was content with the rough outline. It was enough to fill her with a sense of mission that shone from her eyes, from the first morning he joined the fourth grade.
He arrived early and sat in the back row, his backbone very straight, his ankles crossed precisely under the desk and his hands folded on the center of its top, and while the other children were filling in, he received a long, expressionless stare from each of them.
“We have a new classmate this morning,” Miss Price said, “His name is Vincent Sabella, and he comes from New York City. I know we’ll all do our best to make him feel at home.”
This time they all swung around to stare at once, which caused him to duck his head slightly and shift his weight from one side to the other. Ordinarily, the fact of someone’s coming from New York might have held a certain status, for to most of the children the city was a frightening, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day. But anyone could see at a glance that Vincent Sabella had nothing to do with it. Even if you could ignore his twisted black hair and gray skin, his clothes would have given him away: ridiculously new pants, ridiculously old sports shoes and a yellow sweatshirt, much too small, with the faded remains of a Mickey Mouse design stamped on its chest.
The girls decided that he wasn’t very nice and turned away, but the boys remained in their inspection, looking him up and down with faint smiles. This was the kind of kid they were accustomed to thinking of as “tough,” the kind whose stare has made all of them uncomfortable at one time or another in unfamiliar neighborhoods; here was a unique chance for revenge.
1. What can you learn about Miss Price and Vincent from the first two paragraphs?| A．Since nobody had ever seen Vincent’s parents, he now lived all by himself. |
| B．Miss Price knew Vincent so well that she’d like to focus every bit of attention on him. |
| C．Miss Price didn’t know much about Vincent, but that didn’t stop her wanting to care about him. |
| D．Vincent sat in the back row so as not to arouse any unnecessary attention caused by his late arrival. |
| A．To illustrate Vincent’s distant origin. |
| B．To demonstrate children’s desire to go to see their fathers. |
| C．To emphasize Vincent’s low social status from his shabby clothes. |
| D．To state a certain distinction between Vincent and people’s imagination. |
| A．Devoted but shy. | B．Nervous and uneasy. |
| C．Untalkative and tough. | D．Sensitive but unfortunate. |
| A．They were either unconcerned or unfriendly toward him. |
| B．They used to consider people like Vincent to be very tough. |
| C．They barely noticed the new boy sitting in the back of the classroom. |
| D．They were very curious about the newcomer in a kind and considerate manner. |
9 . The inside story of how a “band of misfits” saved Lego
When executives at toymaker Lego first learned that adults were buying large quantities of their interlocking plastic bricks and getting together to build Lego creations of their own, “they thought it was very strange,” says Paal Smith-Meyer.
Thanks to a handful of employees who worked to change attitudes inside the company, Lego is no longer embarrassed by its adult fans.
Today Lego is the world’s largest and most profitable toymaker. The Lego brick was named “Toy of the Century” in 1999, and in 2014 Time magazine crowned it the “Most Influential Toy of All Time”, ahead of Barbie, G.I. Joe, and the Easy Bake Oven.
The enthusiasm and buying power of Adult Fans of Lego — or AFOLs, as they’re known in the industry — played a major role in the company’s rise to the top.
Lego founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen always knew he wanted to market his products exclusively to kids. As the company grew over its first six decades, few imagined that its products could appeal as much to adults as to children.
Despite the benefits AFOLs brought to the brand, executives at the company’s corporate offices in Billund, Denmark had little interest in catering to adult customers. As fan mail and product ideas poured in from AFOLs around the world, the company posted its off-putting position: “We don’t accept unsolicited ideas.”
“Adult fans were often seen as a source of irritation,” says Jake McKee, a Lego executive from 2000 to 2006 who oversaw the company’s Global Community Development team.
| A．But insiders say the road from “kids only” to “adults welcome” was a long, uphill climb. |
| B．AFOLs are also organizing unofficial Lego fan conventions and networking in online user groups. |
| C．Gone are the days when labels on Lego boxes stated that the contents were appropriate only for boys ages 7 to 12. |
| D．Attitudes began to shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the once-invulnerable toymaker started to struggle. |
| E．AFOLs were having a dramatic impact on Lego’s bottom line years before the company recognized their value. |
| F．“Before the late 1990s, the company didn’t think their adult fans had value,” says Smith-Meyer, who held a variety of senior posts at Lego from 2000 to 2014. |
10 . Robots really are replacing us flesh-and-bone types. They’re making lunch, writing novels… the list goes on and on. What human can compete — especially given that robots don’t complain, ask for raises, or get drunk at the Christmas party? To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the coining of the word robot by Karel Capek, we thought it would be fun to take a look at another side of robotkind.
You Call That Service?
A few years back, a Japanese hotel hired 243 robots to cover positions ranging from doorman to bellboy. Unfortunately, the check-in robots had trouble answering guests’ questions and photo-copying passports, while bellboy robots kept banging into walls and tripping over curbs. One in-room assistant robot sprang to attention every time the guest snored (打鼾), saying, “Sorry, I couldn’t catch that. Could you repeat your request?”
You Look Familiar
Facial recognition software has one problem — it can’t always recognize faces. The American Civil Liberties Union proved that point when it used the Amazon Rekognition software to match photos of criminals to 28 members of Congress. But what about soccer ball recognition? During a match last year, a Scottish soccer team unveiled AI-programmed video cameras designed to automatically follow the ball. Alas, the cameras constantly mistook the referee’s bald head for the soccer ball.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Anger Sophia
“Sophia” is a social humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics. She/It has an attractive face, with high cheekbones, and impressive eyebrows. And she can hold a conversation to rival the mere chat of Apple’s Siri. This is surely the robot of the future. When CEO David Hanson and Sophia appeared on a TV program, Hanson asked the robot the question humans have been asking themselves for years: “Sophia, do you want to destroy humans?” Without hesitation, Sophia — smiling a bit too broadly for our taste — responded, “OK, I will destroy humans.” Humans, you have been warned.
1. “Another side” of robotkind in the first paragraph can be described as ________.| A．advanced | B．aggressive | C．amazing | D．awkward |
| A．The robots are functioning properly as human labor. |
| B．The robot Sophia interpreted Hanson’s question as a request. |
| C．The facial recognition software makes accurate searches for the target. |
| D．The hotel in-room robot paid close attention to the guest’s health condition. |
| A．Robots Gone Wild | B．Robots On the Rise |
| C．Robots Taking Over | D．Robots Under Debate |
