1 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. estimates       B. lack       C. potential       D. crucial       E. transforms       F. rejected                   G. anxiety          H. unemployed        I. routine        J. impact        K. affects

Joblessness is far more than an economic misfortune. It can be psychological disaster for the     1     and their families. It can cause illness, divide families and create a downward spiral (螺旋式下降) of feelings of worthlessness and     2     of self-esteem. According to research done by M. Harvery Brenner, associate professor of health at Johns Hopkins University, every 1% increase in the unemployment rate     3     37,000 deaths over the next 6 years, including over 20,000 deaths from heart attacks, 900 suicides and nearly 500 deaths from cirrhosis of the liver (肝硬化). In addition, Brenner     4     that 7,500 unemployed or their families will be admitted to prison after committing a crime or to a mental hospital. “The     5     goes well beyond the individual who loses a job,” said Brenner. “Stress caused by economic factors     6     our national life at every level.” Men who have been socialized as the family breadwinner are especially hard hit by unemployment. They suffer greater depression and     7     and have a higher possibility of psychotic behavior than men who are employed. “Nine month on this seems to be a     8     point when hope and patience give out,” said a leading psychologist. “After that illness, suicide, alcoholism, divorce, and even crime grow at an epidemic (流行的) rate.” Left without a job, many workers feel they have nothing to look forward to. They miss their co-workers and the     9     of going to work. For many, the sense of hopelessness grows worse every time they are     10     for a new job. When this happens often enough, the rejection unemployed workers feel may be exacerbated (恶化) if some friends and neighbors avoid them as if they had a contagious disease (传染病).

2 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. manually       B. alternative       C. approaches       D. trained       E. promise       F. sorting G. categories       H. advanced       I. potentially       J. equivalent       K. anticipating

Will AI be the first to discover ET or alien life?

From the hills of West Virginia to the flats of rural Australia, some of the world’s largest telescopes are listening for signals from distant alien civilizations. The search for extraterrestrial(地球外的) intelligence, known as SETI, is an effort to find signals that might have come from a(n)     1     civilization in a far-away solar system. Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), is used to help astronomers quickly filter the vast amounts of data. As AI reshapes many scientific fields, what     2     does it hold for the search for life beyond Earth?

“It is a new era for SETI research that is opening up thanks to machine-learning technology,” says Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. When it comes to analyzing data, going through millions of observations     3     isn’t practical. A common     4     method is to use algorithms(算法) that look for signals matching astronomers’ expectation. But those algorithms can overlook     5     interesting signals that are slightly different from what astronomers are expecting.

When it comes to AI, machine-learning algorithms are     6     on large amounts of data and can learn to recognize the Earthly interference. Thus, it makes them very good at     7     out the noise. Machine learning is also good at picking up the extraterrestrial signals that don’t fall into conventional     8     and so might have been missed by earlier methods, says Dan Werthimer, a SETI scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Peter Ma, a mathematician and physicist at the University of Toronto, Canada, agrees. “We can’t always be     9     what ET might send to us,” he says.

Still, SETI will probably continue to use a mixture of classical and machine-learning     10     to screen through data, says Jean-Luc Margot, an astronomer at UCLA. Classical algorithms remain excellent at picking up candidate signals, and machine learning is “not a cure-all”, he says. “The machines can’t do it all, yet,” agrees Werthimer.

3 . Finish the story with the phrases in the box.

Both Jo and I            up to            in their names          as well            A couple of years            pulled out          pretty seriously            in need

    1    ago, my wife and I    2     a gift catalogue for people    3     and invited each of our kids to choose something that we could buy     4    . When we handed the list to our nine-year-old daughter, we expected her to choose a toilet or a sewing machine or something similar. But instead, she thought it through    5     and chose village development package, which was worth    6    $5,000.     7     were surprised and ashamed, as our daughter’s generosity really challenged our finances and pushed the limits of our generosity    8    .

4 . Use the correct forms of the words to complete the passage about Californians’ love for sport.

golf          premier            temporary     dive             frequency            citizen

Sport is an important part of the culture in California. Because of the good climate, Californians can spend a lot of time outdoors, so many people play a sport of some kind. The larger towns and cities have many facilities for their     1    , such as football fields, swimming pools, and    2     courses. And for those who like walking, climbing, surfing, and    3    , there are the mountains and some of the world’s     4     beaches. Californians also enjoy watching sport, so lots of people go to live sporting events     5    . The excitement and party atmosphere of live sport can make people    6     forget all their problems and relax.

5 . Complete the announcements with the correct forms of the verbs in the box. Then read them aloud.

prohibit            expect            set to            make sure          fasten             make             stow        switch off

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome onboard Flight SP432 from Beijing to Hong Kong. We are currently third in line for take-off and     1    to be in the air in about ten minutes. At this time, your portable electronic devices must    2     “flight mode” or    3     until an announcement     4    upon arrival. Smoking     5     throughout the flight. Thank you for your cooperation. Enjoy your flight!

…

Ladies and gentlemen, as we start our descent, please    6     your seats and tray tables are in their full upright position. Make sure your seat belts are securely     7    and all carry-on luggage    8     underneath the seats in front of you or in the overhead bins. Thank you!

6 . Read the introduction to a science fiction novel and complete the passage using the correct forms of the words in the box.

explore             translate             discover             regard             represent            set up             recruit write             get caught up             connect

Science fiction    1     by many people as a mirror through which our future can be freely imagined and    2    . The Three-Body Problem,     3    by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, is one of those astonishing predictions about the future. The work was first published in a Chinese sci-fi magazine in 2006 and printed as a three-volume book in 2008. When the first volume    4     into English by Chinese-American author Ken Liu, it attracted attention around the world, becoming the first Asian winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The book    5     many themes such as space exploration, alien contact, AI, and the future of humans.

The Three-Body Problem begins with the stories of two unrelated people, Ye Wenjie and Wang Miao. Ye     6    to join a secret project in a remote area of China, which    7     to contact alien life forms. In the other story, set 20 years later, Wang Miao     8    in a popular online game called “Three Body”, in which people live on an unknown planet with three suns. But Wang discovers it is more than a game—it uncovers a great danger threatening human existence. How are these two people’s stories     9    ? And how will their behaviour change Earth’s future and the civilisations of other planets? Answers to all these questions are waiting to     10    when you go on reading.

7 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. clarify        B. consistent        C. conversely        D. criteria        E. misinterpreted        F. perceived G. qualify        H. reflection        I. significance        J. simultaneously       K. valuable

In recent years we’ve all become more health conscious. However, in doing so we seem to have    1    health. Health is no longer something everyone is born with. Health is a commodity. It is something you can have more of. And to    2    for this extra health you have to buy a tracksuit, eat vitamin pills, have a therapist and learn to do one-handed press-ups.

This all sounds quite harmless — until you realise it implies that people who are not perfectly formed, who are not young, sporty and sun-tanned, are less    3    people. We all want to be healthy but we should perhaps come down off the exercise bike and    4    what the word health actually means.

For a start, health is not beauty and fitness. You can have wonderful hair and huge muscles, while your internal organs are in a terrible state. The outer person is not a direct    5    of the inner person. Second, health is not a purely physical state. It’s mental as well. There are lots of fit people who are not psychologically sound and,    6    , a lot of quite seriously disabled people who are bright, happy and perfectly in tune with themselves. Besides, the    7    for physical and mental health are a matter of opinion, containing a strong social element. There’s a tribe in the Amazon rainforest which regards you as unwell if you don’t have marks of fungal (真菌) infection on your skin.

Taking all this into account, health is a terribly difficult word to define. It is nevertheless of grave    8    to do so, because unless we know what health is we don’t know what to aim for. My own favourite definition of health is ‘psychological health is the ability to love and to work’. It’s an easy thing to aim for and at the same time very difficult to arrive at. There are, however, occasional moments in everyone’s life when you experience,    9    , a great love for those around you and also a great sense of personal fulfilment. These brief moments are very hard to achieve, but they are    10    as a more worthwhile aim in life than trying to look like a supermodel.

8 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. stillness       B. refuge   C. thundering   D. withered   E. oppressive F. unattended G. gripped       H. creaked   I. approaching J. somewhere   K. hastily

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: ‘What was it that I was worrying about when I went to bed last night? Oh, yes the fighting. There was a battle,     1    ,yesterday! Oh, who won?’ She sat up    2    , rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was    3     even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent. No wagons    4     by. No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had sought    5    in Macon. And she could hear nothing from their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.

The     6    that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of the mornings of the queer quiet week preceding it. She rose quickly, without her usual preliminary burrows and stretches, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, some heartening sight. But the road was empty. She noted how the leaves on the trees were still dark green but dry and heavily coated with red dust, and how     7    and sad the untended flowers in the front yard looked.

As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullen as the first distant thunder of a(n)    8    storm.

‘Rain,’ she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, ‘We certainly need it.’ But, in a split instant: ‘Rain? No! Not rain! Cannon!’

Her heart racing she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying to discover from which direction it came. But the dim     9    was so distant that, for a moment, she could not tell. ‘Make it from Marietta,’ she prayed. ‘Or Decatur. But not from the south! Not from the south!’ She    10    the windowstill tighter and strained her ears and the far-away booming seemed louder. And it was coming from the south.

9 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. spatial   B. specifically   C. deprived       D. seniors       E. basis       F. clinical G. maintaining       H. functioning       I. involved       J. contact       K. separate

Working from home and staying inside has become second nature to many people over the last two years. A new study, however, is warning not to get too comfortable with an inactive social life. Researchers from Penn State report     1     an active social life into old age can help adults improve their mental ability on a day-to-day     2    .

The study concludes that when elderly adults (between 70 and 90 years-old) have more frequent and pleasant social interactions, they also display stronger cognitive     3     over the next few days.

Dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease     4    , is a major problem worldwide, with estimates showing it will only get worse. Worryingly, Alzheimer’s related deaths have increased by 16 percent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Making matters worse is the fact that modern medicine has yet to develop an effective drug for curing Alzheimer’s. With this in mind, study authors say it’s imperative to find other ways to fight mental decline in old age - especially before it reaches the     5     stage.

The team collected data on 312 older adults over the course of 16 days using their smartphones to reach these findings. Each day, participants reported on how many social interactions they’d had so far, who they interacted with, and whether it was a positive or negative experience. The group did this five    6     times throughout the day. Importantly, researchers counted digital or phone-based interactions as social activity in this experiment.

Additionally, after each prompt     7     also had to complete three cognitive tests. One test assessed processing speed and attention, another measured     8     working memory, and the last exam measured intra-item feature memory binding.

Researchers quickly noted that whenever a person had interacted often with close friends on a given day, they usually scored higher on the cognitive tests than others who interacted less frequently with close friends or family.

Interestingly, whenever an older adult hadn’t experienced a certain type of social interaction for some time, they performed much better on cognitive tests on the days they did socialize. For instance, if one participant hadn’t talked to their family in weeks, they usually scored higher on days they finally made     9    .

“Our findings suggest that the lack of positive social interactions in daily life could be a critical risk factor for declining cognitive function later in life,” Prof. Zhaoyang concludes. “Older adults who are relatively more       10     in certain social interaction experiences could potentially benefit the most from interventions that help to ‘boost’ their usual levels of social interactions in daily life.”

10 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. artificial   B. reflect C. remains D. accidentally E. overtaken F. recover G. disappearance   H. functionally     I. scheme   J. adaptations   K. preserved

A Mammoth Project

A US company called Colossal has raised 11 million dollars to bring mammoths (猛犸象) back from extinction. Mammoths died out about 3,700 years ago but their bodies are sometimes     1     in ice. This allows scientists to     2     their DNA, which could hold the key to bringing mammoths back to life.

A team of scientists at Colossal plan to use information from mammoth     3     to edit the DNA of Asian elephants — their closest living relatives. The team will focus on DNA that is linked to bushy hair and other     4     for cold weather. These were what helped mammoths survive on the Arctic steppe — ancient chilly grasslands. By adding this DNA to egg cells from Asian elephants, they hope to create an elephant-mammoth mix, which could develop into a baby either inside a living Indian elephant or in a(n)     5     organ.

Colossal hopes that the first set of calves could be born this way in six years. “We want something that is     6     equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at - 40°C and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees,” said Church, the founder of Colossal. It’s hoped that the destructive habits of the hybrids (杂交种) could help restore areas of Arctic steppe that have been     7     by trees since mammoths became extinct. That can help keep the world cooler.

Arctic grasslands     8     more heat from the Sun than forests and can absorb more of the gases released by human activity. However, not everyone agrees with the     9    . Professor Adrian says the extinction of mammoths had little to do with the     10     of steppe grasslands. He points out that it would take thousands of mammoths to have an effect on the environment.