1 . 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. stems     B. insecure       C. squeezed     D. individual       E. glued     F. spreading G. head     H. simply        I. distracting        J. spacious     K. originally

You’ll Often Walk Alone

There has been a quiet pandemic (流行病) developing while most people’s attention has been on Covid-19. The lockdown has worsened a problem that has been     1     in many developed nations for decades: loneliness.

Part of the problem     2     from contemporary employment. Globally, two in five office workers feel lonely at work. This rises to three in five in Britain. Gig-economy (零工经济) jobs can leave people with     3     incomes and without the companionship of colleagues. The pandemic has made it more difficult to make, and maintain, friendships, particularly for new employees. Even before the crisis, the hope that     4     offices would encourage greater camaraderie (友情) proved to be false. Many people find the chatter     5     and withdraw with noise-canceling headphones. They then email colleagues who are sitting only a few desks away.

Perhaps loneliness relates to human history. Mass urbanization is a relatively recent development; if the history of human existence was     6     into a single day, the Industrial Revolution did not occur until almost midnight. For much of that time, humans lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers; cities may just overwhelm the senses. Ms. Hertz points her finger at a recent development: social media. The internet has led too much cyber-bullying (although it has also been a source of companionship during the lockdown). And people     7     to their smart phones spend less time interacting socially.

Some changes in behavior are owing to     8     choice. Before the pandemic no one was stopping people going to church or taking part in sports. They     9     preferred to do other things. Indeed, one reason for the decline in communal activities is that men choose to be with their families rather than     10     to the bar; American fathers spend three times as much time with their children as they did in the 1960s. That is surely a welcome development. So recreating a communal society may be difficult.

2 . 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. celebrated       B. ideals       C. currently       D. enlarged E. formerly       F. incomparable       G. laid       H. referred I. restored       J. scale        K. seat

If you only had an afternoon to experience London on a grand     1    , the Houses of Parliament, also called Palace of Westminster would be a wise place to start. The     2     of the bicameral (两院制的) Parliament including the House of Commons and the House of Lords, is located on the left bank of the River Thames in the borough of Westminster, London.

A royal palace was said to have existed at the site under the Danish king of England Canute. The building, however, spoken of by William Fitzstephen as a(n) “    3     structure,” was built for Edward the Confessor in the 11th century and     4     by William I (the Conqueror). In 1512 the palace suffered greatly from fire and thereafter ceased to be used as a royal residence. A fire in 1834 destroyed the whole palace except the historic Westminster Hall, the Jewel Tower, the cloisters, and the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel.

Sir Charles Barry, assisted by A.W.N. Pugin, designed the present buildings in the Gothic Revival style. Construction was begun in 1837, the cornerstone was     5     in 1840, and work was finished in 1860. The Commons Chamber was burned out in one of the numerous air raids that targeted London during World War II, but it was     6     and reopened in 1950. The House of Lords is an ornate chamber 97 feet in length; the Commons is 70 feet long. The southwestern Victoria Tower is 336 feet high. The Elizabeth Tower,     7     St. Stephen’s Tower, about 320 feet in height, contains the famous tower clock Big Ben. Along with Westminster Abbey and St, Margaret’s Church, the Houses of Parliament were named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987, as symbols of spiritual and democratic     8    .

The Palace is one of the centers of political life in the United Kingdom; “Westminster” has become a metaphor for the UK Parliament and the British Government. The Elizabeth Tower, in particular, often     9     to by the name of its main bell, Big Ben, has become an iconic landmark of London and of the United Kingdom in general, one of the most     10     tourist attractions in the city, and a symbol of parliamentary democracy.

3 . 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. associated       B. dominant        C. frequent        D. implications       E. inferiority F. interpreted       G. physically       H. predicted       I. potentially        J. seconds       K. vitality

Most people do not realize that dreams take up about 25% of the night’s sleep, and each dream period lasts from five to 20 minutes. These is no doubt that dreams play an important role in our lives. If they can be correctly     1     — and that is a big “if” — we can come to understand ourselves better. Here, we look at three common dreams and what they     2     symbolize.

Dream 1: I can see their laughing faces. laughing at me. But they aren’t as smart. If they were, they’d be up here flying with me!

This dream has both positive and negative     3     . On the positive side, the dream may express a strong desire to travel and get away from everyday routine. It may also symbolize a powerful desire to achieve. On the other hand, this dream can mean the person has a problem or is afraid of something and they wish to escape. The dream could represent a(n)     4     complex, which the dreamer attempts to escape from by literally and     5     putting themselves up above others.

Dream 2: I’m moving fast now, but it’s still behind me. Doesn’t matter how fast I go, I still can’t escape.

Although this is a traditional symbol of health and     6     like the first one, it too can suggest the dreamer is trying to escape from danger. Usually, fear is the     7     emotion. By running hard, the dreamer can possibly escape the threat. However, they can also stop moving. This makes the fear even more terrifying. One possible interpretation suggests that the person is under pressure in their everyday life.

Dream 3: I’m sweating and my heart is beating. I’m trapped, trapped in my own bed.

This symbol is     8     with fear and embarrassment: suddenly the dreamer loses all power of movement. They try hard to move their arms and legs, but they simply cannot. Frozen in a terrifying situation with no escape, they become more and more terrified as the     9     go by. Another     10     context for this dream is failing to do something in public, often something that you are normally very good at, such as your job. Not only is this extremely embarrassing, but it also shows a deep-seated fear of losing a job and a livelihood.

4 . 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. established       B. present        C. compared          D. light          E. annoyingly F. distinct   G. beneficial       H. well-being        I. experiences        J. devote        K. striking

Honey Bees Remember Happy and Sad Times

While the brains of honey bees are tiny, the insects are capable of some surprisingly advanced thinking. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society has now cast new     1     on the insect’s cognitive abilities.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that honey bees can remember positive and negative     2     — such as taking care of their young or fending off an enemy. These memories are stored in specific areas of their brains, according to how good or bad they are.

Scientists have long known that vertebrates — animals with tail bones — like ourselves are capable of sorting memories of pleasure and pain in     3     brain areas such as this. However, this has never been documented before in the minds of bees.

“We found that bees     4     different parts of their brain to processing social information that is either negative or positive,” Gene Robinson, an author of the study, told Newsweek. This discovery is     5    given how small their brains are; we did not expect such spatial separation of social information of different valence. Valence is a term used in psychology when discussing emotions to refer to the intrinsic (内在的) positivity or negativity of an event, object, or situation.

In the study, the researchers looked at regions of the honey bee brain that’s     6     in other invertebrates (非脊柱动物), referred to as “mushroom bodies,” which are associated with sensory processing, learning and memory. They     7     the expressions of genes following aggressive or collaborative social interactions, demonstrating that different parts of the these mushroom bodies were specially activated depending on the valence of the interaction — in other words, whether the interaction was harmful or     8    .

“These findings can help us better understand ‘biological embedding (嵌入),’ or how social information ‘gets under skin’ to affect the behavior,’ he said. “Biological embedding is an important issue in understanding health and     9     in humans.”

Furthermore, because the type of memory that the researchers documented is     10     in the brains of vertebrates, the latest findings demonstrated a link between vertebrate and invertebrate cognition despite the two animal groups diverging (分岔) in evolutionary terms around 600 million years ago.

5 . 选词填空

A. convinced     B. probably       C. generalize     D. distinguish       E. attached       F. prominent     G. notorious       H. narrowed       I. readily        J. households       K. displays

Cats are     1     for their indifference to humans: Almost any owner will testify to how     2     these animals ignore us when we call them. But according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports, domestic cats do recognize their own names - even if they walk away when they hear them.

Atsuko Saito, a behavioral scientist at the University of Tokyo, previously showed that cats can recognize their owners’ voices. In her latest study she     3     this down, investigating whether they respond to hearing their names. The study included 78 cats from Japanese     4     and a ”cat cafe.“ (Such cafes, where patrons can interact with felines, are popular in Tokyo and have started to catch on in London and New York.)

During their experiments Saito and her colleagues used what behavioral psychologists call the habituation-dishabituation method. This involves repeatedly exposing a subject to a stimulus (in this case a spoken word) until the subject no longer     5     any reaction. Then the subject is presented with a test stimulus ( in this case, its name), and researchers observe whether it reacts. This step helps rule out responses to random stimuli.

For the new study, the scientists first had cat owners repeatedly say four words that were similar to their cats’ names, until the cats habituated to those words. Next the owners said the actual names, and the researchers looked at whether individual cats (when living among other cats) appeared able to distinguish their monikers. The cats had more pronounced responses to their own names - moving their ears, heads or tails, or meowing - than to similar words or other cats’ names.

Then the researchers had people unfamiliar to the cats speak the names, to test whether the cats still recognized them. Although their responses were less     6     than when their owners called them, they still appeared to recognize their names after being habituated to other words.

”This new study clearly shows that many cats react to their own names when spoken by their owners,“ says biologist John Bradshaw, who studies human-animal interactions at the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute and was not involved in the new study. But Bradshaw says he is less     7     cats can recognize their names when spoken by someone unfamiliar. ” I think that it’s entirely possible that some cats are able to     8     between one human voice and another, but I’d like to see more trials before I’d say that the evidence is compelling,“ he says.

Saito says she thinks feline pets learn to recognize their names because of what is in it for them. ”I think cats associated their names with some rewards or punishments,“ she says - adding that she thinks it is unlikely the cats understand their names are     9     to them. ”There is no evidence that cats have the ability to recognize themselves, like us,“ she explains. ”So, the recognition about their name is different from ours.“ Still, she says, it may be possible to teach cats to recognize other words. Whether that could allow humans to train cats to respond to commands - as dogs readily do -- is another matter.

”Cats are just as good as dogs at learning,“ Bradshaw says. ”They’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learned.“ Most cat owners would     10     agree.

6 . 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. precisely       B. statistical       C. gender       D. enrolled       E. restriction       F. spotted G. frank       H. execute       I. identified       J. confidence       K. dramatically

Female Grandmaster—Hou Yifan

Even by the standard of chess geniuses, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game     1     with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mentioned two big hairpins that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt     2     or limitations,” she told me recently from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen university’s Faculty of Physical Education.

“My parents never told me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days her hair falls to her shoulders and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and     3    . She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the     4     of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete versus the number of men who do: around sixteen percent of tournament players are     5     as female and most of them are children. As a purely     6     matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extreme of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the inequality at the top of the game, about which Hou is     7    . “You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen,” she told me, of the absence of women from chess highest echelon(梯队). For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child she     8     a chess set in a shop window and liked the shapes of the pieces. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher and showed enough talent that her parents     9     her a year early in the local school which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings on a sheet of paper. Then they would set up their boards, dutifully     10     their copied instructions and launch their wild attacks.

She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team and won the girls under ten championship in 2003. In the next year, she finished boys under ten tournament tied for first.

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. benefit   B. displayed   C. documentation   D. elegantly   E. improbable   F. intrusive G. label       H. lessen     I. massive            J. positively   K. promotional

Norway’s new law on edited photos

A new law in Norway makes it illegal for advertisers and social media influencers to share     1     photos online without disclosing whether the images were altered.It modifies the 2009 Marketing and Control Act and sets to go into effect when the King of Norway decides it should.

The law concerns advertisers and people who receive “payment or other     2    ” in exchange for their posts. It will impact “brands, companies, and influencers’ sponsored posts,” and concerns posts on all social media sites.

The new law requires disclosures for edits made after the image was taken and before, such as Snapchat and Instagram filters that modify one’s appearance. Examples of edits that people who are being paid for pictures are required to     3    include “enlarged lips, narrowed waists, and exaggerated muscles,” among other things.

Body pressure, or “kroppspress” in Norway, is a major topic of conversation in the country, the Ministry of Children and Family Affairs said in its report. “Young people are exposed to a(n)    4     pressure to look good through advertising and social media, and the models     5     are often digitally retouched, which exposes young people to an ideal of beauty that is impossible to achieve.”

By prohibiting advertisers and influencers from posting such photos without proper     6     with a government-authorized stamp, the Ministry said it hopes to    7     the negative impacts of body pressure on young people. “It is especially important to prevent the desire to make more     8     and long-lasting changes in one’s own look,” the Ministry said.

Some of Norway’s top influencers have already thought     9     about the new law, “Young people today are growing up to a completely     10     beauty ideal,” Husebye, who was awarded “Influencer of the Year”,said “I feel that the new law can only help them to understand that this is not how you look, but it has been edited.”

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 be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. hike       B. requires          C. hosts          D. man-made       E. attraction      F. Belonging   G. peak   H. introduce   I. romantic     J. fascinating     K. sun-bathe

Touring “Treasure Island”

Chinese mainland tourists will be able to visit Taiwan via charted flights in July according to two landmark agreements signed on June 13. So, 21^st Century invited two young Taiwanese to     1     their favorite site on the island.

Yangming Mountain, north of Taipei

Young couples can definitely enjoy a     2     evening on the mountain and a bird’s eye view of the Taipei city. College students often visit the mountain for a     3    : others ride motorbike to the top. The mountain and the nearby town of Pei-tou have many hot springs, which often appear in romantic Taiwan TV dramas.

Ali Mountain, Jiayi County

Ali Mountain is the general name for 18 hills. The highest     4     of Ali Mountain is Tower Hill, which has a height of 2,663 meters. Ali Mountain is famous for its “five rare sites” - the sunrise, the Ali mountain Forest Railway, the famous Alishan Sacred Tree, the Grand Sea of Clouds and the Flamboyant Cherry Blossom. The best time to visit the     5     scenery is during the comfortable midsummer.

Taipei 101 tower, Taipei

The 101-floor landmark is one of the world’s tallest completed skyscrapers. Besides the shops inside and outside the tower, Taipei 101     6     splendid firework shows during festivals. A new     7     next to the tower is under construction. It will be a     8     beach on which the public will be permitted to     9    .

Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Memorial Hall and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Taipei

The squares in front of these halls are open all day to the public. They have become a paradise to colleges students, who often meet there for an activity that     10     space. You will run into students dancing, rehearsing skits or even playing musical instruments.

10 . 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. content B. demands   C. guard     D. depressed   E. prioritized   F. fits G. failure   H. meant   I. competed     J. mere     K. independent

Happiness, as the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moracs put it, is “like a feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.”

Humans are not designed to be happy or even     1    . Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce, like every other creature in the natural world. A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower your     2     against possible threats to your survival.

Evolution has     3     the development of a big frontal lobe(脑叶)in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and analytical abilities) over a natural ability to be happy. Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological(神经系统的)and intellectual functions, but happiness, being a(n)     4     idea with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.

In fact, experts in this field argue that nature’s     5     to eliminate depression in the evolutionary process is due precisely to the fact that depression as an adaption plays a useful role in times of difficulty, by helping the     6     individual get away from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win.

Our emotions are mixed and at times contradictory, like everything else in our lives. Research has shown that positive and negative emotions can coexist in the brain relatively     7     of each other. This models show that the right hemisphere processes negative emotions preferentially, whereas positive emotions are dealt with by the left-sided brain.

It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be consistently happy. Instead, we are designed to survive and reproduce. These are difficult tasks, so we are     8     to struggle, seek safety, fight off threats and avoid pain. The model of competing emotions offered by coexisting pleasure and pain     9     our reality much better than the unachievable bliss(极乐)that the happiness industry is trying to sell us. In fact, pretending that any degree of pain is abnormal will only develop feelings of inadequacy and frustration.

So, if you are unhappy at times, this is not a shortcoming that     10     urgent repair. Far from it. This fluctuation(波动)is, in fact, what makes you human.