1 . Complete the passage using the correct form of the words and phrases below.

logical thinking   comprehension skill   reliable   persuade   critical thinking   financial skill   trend   routine

I recently spoke to Ms Xue about the skills we will need in years to come and the future     1     for jobs and careers. According to Ms Xue, in the future a lot of     2     office and factory jobs will disappear. We need to have many skills which we can start developing now. One of the most important is     3    , which is the ability to analyse and evaluate information.     4     which is the ability to use our reason well, will be highly useful in the workplace, as it will help us use our knowledge     5     others.     6     will be highly valued and companies will always appreciate a     7     person who they can trust to do their job. Even outside the workplace, there are important skills we will need. For example, good     8     will benefit us greatly when we start earning money and have financial responsibilities.

2 . 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. characteristic B.blame C. slave D. accepting E. oriented F. remaining G. properly H. behaviors I. surprise J. resist K. consistently

An American researcher who studied 600 millionaires found how rich you can get comes down to 6 “wealth factors“. She found that six behaviors are related to net worth potential, regardless of age or income. These were thriftiness, confidence, responsibility, planning, focus and social indifference.

Being thrifty comes as no great    1    .“Spending above your means, spending instead of saving for retirement, spending in anticipation of becoming wealthy makes you a    2     to the paycheck, even with an astronomical level of income,”she wrote. To properly build wealth, experts recommend saving 20% your income and living off the    3     80%.

Having confidence is another key    4    , as it helps people to be thrifty. It takes confidence to live within your means. It also takes confidence to invest    5    . Instead of making investing decisions with your emotions, financial planners advise that you should leave your investments alone and focus on a long-term investment plan.

But people can’t invest--or manage their own money--without    6     responsibility for the outcomes. Many millionaires take on personal responsibility--and most also happen to be self-made, meaning they didn’t acquire their wealth through luck. Millionaires don’t count on anyone else to make them rich, and they don’t    7     anyone else if they fall short. They focus on things they can control and align their daily habits to the goals they have set for themselves. They tend to be goal-    8     and hard workers, which enables them to plan financially and focus on seeing those plans through. 92% of the millionaires surveyed developed a long-term plan for their money, and 97% almost always achieved the goals they set for themselves.

And it is these    9     that make it easy for them to be socially indifferent. They    10     lifestyle creep, the tendency to spend more whenever one earns more. Essentially, they don’t yield to pressure to buy the latest thing or to keep up with others or what they have acquired. Instead of being focused on what might make them happy today, they’re focused on their long-term wealth-building plan.

4 . 选词填空

A. minerals     B. agriculture     C. profitable     D. available     E. shortages     F. celebrations G. immigrants     H. increased     I. population     J. fashionable     K. opened

Chinese traders were recorded as making voyages to the north coast of Australia from the 1750s, but were probably visiting Australia long before. Chinese men arrived in Australia in small numbers after the 1788 British settlement as free settlers and criminals. A small population grew rapidly after 1848 under a system of indentured (契约的) labor, after China had     1     its ports to foreign trade in 1842. They worked in rural New South Wales as cooks, farm laborers and etc.

Indentured Chinese     2     worked in all colonies variously as station hands, plantation workers, miners, on public works, cabinet makers, personal servants and in laundries. Most came from the south-eastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian.

Due to labor     3     in West Australia, the Colonial Government organized Chinese contract labor between 1847 and 1898, most working as laborers, cooks and gardeners. Many Chinese people came from rural backgrounds and brought with them     4     and water management skills. By 1885, there were 54 Chinese market gardens in Sydney. By 1901, 67% of New South Wales market gardeners were Chinese.

Gold rushes in Victoria in the 1850s and New South Wales in the 1860s significantly     5     the population of Chinese immigrants in Australia; about 45,000 prospectors arrived in Victoria alone in 1854-58. Numbers continued to increase as gold and other     6     were discovered in Queensland, Northern Territory and Tasmania.

When mining became less     7    , many Chinese people worked successfully to provide goods and services such as furniture making, market gardening, fishing and, particularly, store-keeping including the import and export of goods from overseas. Chinese goods, especially tea, silk, vegetables, herbs and other spices were highly sought-after items of trade by non-Chinese people. Tea rooms, importing and selling many varieties of tea, were very popular. Chinese silk was turned into     8     evening wear and cloaks by Chinese tailors and seamstresses.

Today there is a culturally diverse Chinese     9     in Australia with links to south-eastern China as well as Vietnam and Hong Kong. The Chinese communities in Australia are brought together every year by     10     of Lunar New Year.

5 . 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. adjustments B. emit C. hit D. lanes E. players   F. preventing G. semi-autonomous H. shift I. supervising J. traditional   K. worn-out

Baby Steps Toward Autonomy…

Companies, like Google and Tesla, didn't even exist when Toyota introduced the Prius in1997. However, they have become major     1     in the auto industry recently. Both of them aim to introduce fully autonomous cars ---that is, cars that drive themselves---within the next several years.

Self-driving cars are expected to be much safer than human-driven ones. But even if the first robot cars     2     the roads in the next few years, most of us probably won't give up driving entirely for at least another 15 or 20 years. In the meantime,     3     cars will gradually take over certain aspects of driving.

Companies have been adding     4     features to cars since the 1990s---things like adaptive cruise control, which uses sensors to adjust a car's speed based on the traffic in front of it, and automated parallel parking. Some cars automatically stop—or at least slow down—if a driver doesn't step on the brake in time to avoid a crash. In a certain model developed in 2017, the driver will be able to change     5     simply by hitting the turn signal for two seconds (the car will take care of the rest). Within a few years, cars may be able to determine when an accident is likely and make     6    to the cabin---moving seats, closing windows , retracting the steering wheel.

Even better than preparing for a crash, of course, is     7    one. Some vehicles     8     warnings when they detect, through cameras and sensors, that a driver is getting sleepy. Future cars might take over for     9     drivers---or automatically pull to the side of the road and shut down. Biometrics(生物识别技术）could aid this process. If a car has sensors that can measure a driver's breath and heart rate, it could     10     into self-driving mode when a driver has a heart attack.

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. incredibly	B. contract	C. approached	D. basis	E. essential	F. blankets
G. professionally	H. granted	I. strikes	J. mutual	K. breakthroughs

The Father of Cool

It is evening, near freezing. The city is practically empty. Fog     1     the Pittsburgh Railroad Station. A young engineer walks the platform, his brain occupied with a problem that has obsessed him for months. And then it     2     him—the Archimedean lightning bolt (闪电) of inspiration. The answer is literally all around him: It’s the fog itself!

The young man’s name is Willis Haviland Carrier. On that foggy night in 1902, he hit upon the theory that became the     3     for modern air-conditioning technology.

Carrier graduated from university as a mechanical engineer in June 1901. A month later, he began working for the Buffalo Forge Company, a firm that   produced heating and exhaust systems     4    . The summer of 1901 was     5     hot. A printing company became frustrated with varying humidity (湿度) levels when trying to print in color. The same paper had to be printed four times in four colors, and if the humidity changed between print runs, the paper would slightly expand or     6    . Even a millimeter’s misalignment (错位) looked awful.

Early the following year, the printing company     7     Buffalo Forge, asking it to devise a system to control humidity in the air as well as the temperature. The firm turned to the 25-year-old Carrier.

By the early 1850s, two     8     in cooling had been achieved: a French engineer designed the first absorption refrigerator; and an American physician was     9     a patent for a machine to make ice. From then on, the challenge would lie in controlling humidity instead of lowering temperature.

Carrier’s partial solution involved circulating cold water and then balancing their temperature with the rate of air flow. It was at the Pittsburgh Railroad Station that the solution came to him. Few other inventors have had such an impact on modern life and yet remained so little-known. Air conditioning, in a sense, has become     10    . And for most of us, the simple ability to cool our homes amid the summer’s heat is more than enough reason to be grateful for Carrier’s fogbound moment of genius.

8 . 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. pressed	B. candidate	C. negative	D. improvements	E. technically	F. ordinarily
G. modified	H. reproduce	I. identical	J. effectiveness	K. sufferers

A failed study, a happy accident and a promising treatment for blindness In the textbooks, science is simple. You come up with an idea, put it to the test, and then accept it or reject it depending on what your experiments reveal. In the real world, though, things are rarely that straightforward, as a paper just published in Science Translational Medicine shows.

The disease in question is Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON). A defective gene in a patient’s mitochondria — the tiny structures that provide a cell’s energy — causes retinal cells to die. That leads to sudden and rapid loss of sight, with many     1     becoming legally blind within a year. It affects between one in 30,000 and one in 50,000 people. Men in their 20s and 30s are particularly susceptible. Treatment is limited and not quite effective.

Since most cases are caused by a mutation (突变) in a single gene, LHON is a good     2     for gene therapy, a form of genetic engineering which aims to replace the defective gene with a working one. With that in mind, Dr Yu-Wai-Man, an ophthalmologist at Cambridge University, and his colleagues loaded up a (an)     3     virus with a corrected copy of the gene and injected it into their patients’ eyes.

Many viruses can insert their genes into the DNA of their hosts. That is     4     a bad thing, because cells so subverted (破坏) produce more copies of the virus. In this case, the hope was that infection would be a good thing. The defanged virus could not     5    . But it was capable of replacing the damaged gene with a working copy.

Most medical studies make use of a control group, against which the     6     of the treatment can be measured. Here, the researchers controlled the experiment by injecting only one of each patient’s eyes - chosen at random - with the virus. The other eye was given a sham injection, in which a syringe (注射器) was     7     against the eyes, but nothing came out of it. Using two eyes in the same patient makes for a perfect control: their genetic make-up is     8    , and any confusing lifestyle factors are removed from the equation.

The researchers had hoped to see a big improvement in the treated eyes, compared with the untreated ones. They did not, and for that reason the study failed in its primary objective. Instead, in more than three-quarters of their patients, they saw substantial     9     in both eyes.

On the face of it, that was bizarre. Only one eye had received the treatment, after all. The virus, it seems, had found a way to travel from one eye to the other, probably via the optic nerve. Although it had a happy outcome in this case, the prospect of a gene-therapy virus travelling to places it is not intended to go might worry regulators.

And, though the study was     10     a failure, its practical success means that an effective treatment for LHON may at last be in reach. GenSight Biologics, the company that has developed the treatment, has already sent its results to Europe’s medical regulator. It hopes to hear back by the end of 2021.

9 . 选词填空

A. convincing     B. correct        C. discouraging        D. encouraging     E. festive     F. increase G. instead          H. knowledge     I. misperceptions     J. otherwise          K. untrue

Changing Someone’s Mind at the Dinner Table

Family gatherings can bring up topics we prefer to avoid. With the     1     season in full swing, it might be hard to stay away from some annoying relatives. At some point, you know they will say something like: “Genetically modified foods are not safe to eat” or “Climate change is a conspiracy (阴谋)”. (Again, all these statements are    2    .)

If this happens, you don’t have to just sit there quiet. “Is it worth making an effort to     3     people?” says Jason Reifler at the University of Exete, who studies ways of challenging     4    . “I think so.”

Obviously, it is far more difficult to prove false beliefs wrong than to spread them. Anyone can spread a lie, but it usually takes a bit of time and     5     to explain why a statement is wrong.

Take a classic: “The climate has always changed, it’s nothing to do with humans.” To fight this, you need to explain how the world is now warming at an alarming rate, when     6     it would be cooling slightly were it not for our carbon dioxide emissions.

But sometimes there are shortcuts to make your point     7    . “Parallel” arguments can often highlight logical errors very effectively, says John Cook of George Mason University. For instance, the “climate is always changing” myth is like claiming that because people have always stolen from each other, leaving your house unlocked won’t     8     the risk of burglary (入室抢劫).

But you need to be aware of the backfire effect. This is the idea that trying to change someone’s false belief can make them believe it more strongly. This was     9     news for the fight against false beliefs. “The last thing you want to do when debunking (驳斥) misinformation is make matters worse,” wrote Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol, in The Debunking Handbook, a short guide published in 2011. However, more recent studies are far more     10    . “It’s not as common as we initially thought,” says Lewandowsky.

10 . 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. diplomatic   B. capturing C. defended D. legendary E. battling   F. presented G. definite   H. historical I. influence J. justification K. characteristics

King Arthur is the figure at the heart of the Arthurian legends. He is said to be the son of Uther Pendragon and Igraine of Cornwall. Arthur is near     1    in Celtic stories. In early Latin records, he is     2    as a military leader. In later romance, he is described as a king and emperor.

One of the questions occupying those interested in King Arthur is whether or not he is a     3    figure. The debate has spread since the Renaissance, when Arthur’s authenticity was vigorously     4    , partly because the Tudor kings traced their ancestry to Arthur and use that connection as a     5    for their rule. Modern scholars have generally assumed that there was some actual person at the heart of the legends, though not of course a king with a band of knights in shining armor—though O. J. Padel in ‘The Nature of Arthur’ argues that historical     6     that we attach to Arthur can be associated with a figure who was not historical to start with.

If there is a historical basis to the character, it is clear that he would have gained fame as a warrior     7     the Germanic invaders of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Since there is no     8     evidence for or against Arthur’s historicity, the debate will continue. But what cannot be denied is the     9     of the figure of Arthur on literature, art, music, and society from the Middle Ages to the present. Though there have been numerous historical novels that try to put Arthur into a sixth century setting, it is the legendary figure of the late Middle Ages who has been     10     everyone’s imagination.