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. adventure               B. carelessly       C. existence               D. exploit        E. inaccessible F. minimized        G. reflects        H. responsible        I. accounts   J. visible            K. wilderness

Antarctica is the highest, driest and coldest place on Earth. It is also the remotest, a fact which     1     for its unspoiled environment. It is widely described as the last     2     on our planet. The cold climate is     3     for maintaining the continent’s year-round ice fields. Even though Antarctica receives more sunlight than the equator(赤道), the temperatures are lower because the ice sheet     4     the heat back into space.

For centuries, Europeans wondered about the     5     of a South-Polar continent, but no one actually knew for certain Antarctica was there until 1820 when European explorers “discovered” it. Since then, men have gone to Antarctica in search of     6    . Testing their abilities, several teams of explorers set out in 1911 to be the first men to stand at the South Pole.

Once completely     7    , Antarctica has more recently been playing host to adventurers seeking for excitement, scientists interested in experimenting, and companies looking to     8     this wild area for profit.

Yet, Antarctica’s fragile and complicated eco-system is threatened by its human visitors. Damage to the environment occurs as people come looking for resources beneath the ice, or     9     leave their garbage behind. Currently, countries are working to ensure that the damage to Antarctica’s environment is     10    , and that Antarctica will remain an unspoiled place.

2 . 请阅读下面的篇章，并根据其内容提示，从方框中所给的8个词语中选出5个，并用其正确形式填空。

chance,     come up with,     athlete,     go up,     steady,     run through,     that,     send up

The Great Wall Marathon

The Great Wall of China is one of the new wonders of the world, with breathtaking views. In 1998 Soren Rasmussen     1     the idea of organizing a Great Wall marathon. Rasmussen and two running experts chose a route along part of the Great Wall. The marathon has taken place annually in May since 1999. In the initial event, just 292 runners participated but numbers have gone up     2    —in 2015 there were 2,500 runners from over 160 countries.

The Great Wall marathon is considered to be one of the toughest in the world. The part of the route that is actually on the Great Wall includes two exhausting up-and-down sections about 8 km long with 5,146 steps. It’s such a steep climb in parts     3     it’s hard to walk up—never mind run! The weather is hot and humid, with temperatures of around 30℃, but it can be hotter. Part of the route passes through a dry river bed with huge boulders (巨石). Runners who arrive there later in the day find it challenging because the boulders have become so hot that it’s like     4     a sauna.

So who does the marathon? Surprisingly, the marathon attracts both professional     5     and people who want to run for fun or simply do something different. Some runners stop every 10-15 minutes to take photos, chat to the locals and enjoy the scenery! If the thought of doing such a marathon horrifies you, then you can do a half marathon or an 8-km fun run instead.

3 . 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. accessible        B. beats       C. bridges       D. device       E. fundamentally       F. habitually G. kneels            H. partial        I. powerful       J. showcases        K. stage

Feeling the Dance

Lights move in time to the rhythmic beat issuing from a floor speaker as hip-hop performer Shaheem Sanchez gets ready. Sanchez, who is deaf,     1     beside the speaker and places his hand on top of it, allowing the sound waves to course through his body. His head nods as he counts the     2     , catching the rhythm. Then rising, his body moves in so perfect time to the music that dancer and music unite in a single artistic expression. In this moment, art     3     the gap between two worlds: the deaf and the hearing.

Sanchez is one of a growing number of professional dancers with full or     4     hearing loss, working to redefine what it means to experience music and, in a larger sense, communicate with others.

Antoine Hunter is another artist who is inspiring a new generation of dancers to take the     5     . As the director of the Urban Jazz Company in San Francisco, Hunter experienced the way that dance could help people better understand each other, which     6     altered his life.

But there were few opportunities for a black deaf dancer when Hunter was first finding his feet. He had to create a world in which he could perform. Now he’s sharing it with others, both in his studio and through the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival. The event     7     the talents of deaf and hard of hearing people from around the world.

To get more people moving, Hunter ensures that his dance company is fully     8     to students of all abilities. There are interpreters for deaf and blind students, and a(n)     9     that turns sound waves into vibrations (震动). These vibrations travel across the floor so dancers can feel the music in their feet.

All around the world, deaf dancers are turning in     10     performances. Digital media is not only making these performances more visible, but also providing deaf dancers more opportunities to show off their talents. Artists like Sanchez upload performances to online platforms, where they get thousands of views. This allows deaf artists to express themselves to a larger audience.

5 . 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.

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. abandoned B. challenge C. colored D. demonstrate E. ensures F. initiatives G. innovation H. pilot I. purchased J. recycled K. tailors

Lego: One Step Closer to Being Sustainable

The Lego Group is one step closer to reaching its goal of making all its products from sustainable materials by 2030.

The Danish toymaker revealed a prototype (雏形) brick made from     1     plastic. In a news release, Lego said the PET plastic from     2     bottles makes up the first brick to meet the company’s “strict quality and safety requirements.” One way the company     3     safety is by sourcing materials from suppliers that use processes approved by the US Food & Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority.

“The biggest     4     on our sustainability journey is rethinking and innovating new materials that are as long-lasting, strong and high quality as our existing bricks—and fit with LEGO elements made over the past 60 years,” Lego Group Vice President of Environmental Responsibility Tim Brooks said. “With this prototype we’re able to    5     the progress we’re making to the public.”

It will be “some time” before bricks made from used materials can be     6    , Lego said. The company will continue to test and develop the PET formulation (配方) and decide whether to move to the     7     production phase, which is expected to take at least a year. One factor the company is testing is how the material can be     8    .

“Experimentation and failing is an important part of learning and     9    . Just as kids build, unbuild and rebuild with LEGO bricks at home, we’re doing the same in our lab,” Brooks said.

The move follows last year’s announcement that the company was making a $400 million investment over three years into sustainability     10    . It included phasing out the single-use plastic bags from its boxes and instead using recyclable paper for its packaging.

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. lonely       B. convey       C. touches       D. inconvenience       E. widely       F. accompanying G. composition       H. captures       I. abandon       J. sensory       K. wearing

An Innovative Painter

Alan is a pioneering painter, working with oil paint on canvas in a traditional way. It is only in his use of paint that he differs from the usual practice of using brushes.

Although he does use a brush to draw the main lines of his     1    , he uses painting knives to apply the paint. Early on he found that paint laid on with painting knives gave him the particular body and texture (质地) he wanted to     2     his subjects. The knife is capable of an enormous variety of marks, from delicate     3     to fierce sweeping and slices of paint. The knife’s sharp edged marks create their own dynamic of light and shade. Alan possesses many painting knives of different sizes, but tends to favour three or four, which are now     4    thin with constant use. He is still discovering new possibilities with the knife, driven by the demands of a new subject. Although Alan’s paintings are made in the studio, they are all composed from drawings made outdoors. These drawings are the seed corn on which all his paintings are based. The marks that go down on paper make sure he     5    not just the actual scene but also the changing light, the direction of the wind and the     6     sounds and smells. For the painter, the whole     7     experience remains fixed within the drawing long after he has left the scene.

Throughout his life Alan has travelled     8    for particular places that fuel his creative imagination. He is an adventurous seeker, regardless of the     9     or difficulty of some of the locations. Long ago he decided to     10    the idea of working on large oil paintings out of doors because it involved canvases, oil paints and many other tools around. He now travels light, taking only sketchbooks, pens and a few watercolours with him. This gives him the freedom to draw anywhere and to catch the fleeting moment — the “here-and-now-ness” of the place.

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. based       B. genuinely       C. irrelevant       D. outsized       E. persist       F. previously G. profile       H. reasoning       I. shaped       J. similar       K. subsequent

It happens just about every time I go to a restaurant with my daughter. I open the menu and scan the options. Then I glance at the children’s menu. Oftentimes, the menu is pretty    1    , with the same pasta and tomato sauce. But the items on the children’s menu are usually less expensive, and I’ll think to myself: Wow, good deal.

If I think again for a moment, though, the deal isn’t really a deal. After all, I estimated the cost of the pasta    2    on the adult menu, not on the actual cost of making some bow-tie noodles and serving them with a red sauce.

My faulty    3    is the product of anchoring, a cognitive bias (认知偏差) that can weaken our critical thinking.

According to researchers, anchoring is when people rely on    4    but easily accessible facts to make judgments. Our minds give too much weight to initial impressions or numbers that influence our    5    thoughts. In my case, the prices on the adult menu    6    or anchored my judgment about the value of the items on the children’s menu.

Studies show that anchoring effects    7    no matter how weak the connection between the anchor and the actual decision. One study found that “estimates of an athlete’s performance were influenced by the number on his jersey ( 运 动 衫 ).” In other words, people thought that an athlete with a higher jersey number was better than an athlete with a lower number, all else being equal.

Anchoring affects all kinds of decisions, even those made by experts who should know better. In particular, a recent study shows that anchoring is far more common in the financial world than    8     believed, with substantial anchoring effects influencing performance in the stock market. A study showed that investors valued firms more highly if the firms had higher stock prices. So, if two companies have the same financial    9    except that Company X has fewer shares at a higher price than Company Y, then Company X’s shares will sell better over the long run than Company Y’s. Why? Because the stock price — the anchor — enhances the company’s perceived value.

The phenomenon of anchoring shows that while we think of ourselves as rational and logical beings, unrelated details can have a(n)     10    influence on our reasoning. The best solution is to improve critical thinking skills. Otherwise, you might be a victim of anchoring, dragged down by your bias, whether you notice it or not.

10 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper -word given in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one more word than you need.

A. stimulated B. anticipation C. empowering D. initiative E. boost F. prohibiting G. cited H. integral I. facilitate J. mirror K. instrumental

Helping Eighth Graders Discover a Wider World of Science

Salina Morales, an eighth-grade student, wants to work with animals when she gets older. She was excited and full of    1     at the prospect of a class visit to the American Museum of Natural History. Salina is among thousands of eighth graders in New York public schools whose science education will be given a(n)     2     by a new partnership between the schools and seven of the city’s science-oriented institutions.

The program, called Urban Advantage, aims to provide professional development and resources to teachers,     3     class and individual museum visits, and ultimately help eighth graders complete science projects required for graduation. The Museum of Natural History is leading the     4    .

“The real push behind this project is the crisis in science education, which is a(n)     5     part of a student’s learning and growth,” Ellen V. Futter, the president of the Museum of National History, said. According to a report, 43 percent of American eighth graders do not have a basic understanding of science. Among the most frequently    6     reasons are the inadequacy of teacher education programs and the lack of teaching resources. Too often, the science class is about memorizing facts and does not    7     the truly exciting process of using scientific methods and tools to observe and analyze natural phenomena. As a result, too few of our children are     8     to pursue study or careers in key scientific fields.

Over the course of three years, Urban Advantage will reach the city’s entire eighth-grade population. The City Council was     9     in developing Urban Advantage, providing more than $1 million funding. “This is a big deal for New York,” the Councilwoman said. It’s very hard to get a new initiative going, but we made it happen because everyone believed in the importance of    10     science education.