1 . Back in the early 2000s, lots of people couldn’t have imagined life without alarm clocks, CD players, calendars, cameras, or lots of other devices. But along came the iPhone and other smartphones, and they took over the functions of dozens of things we used to think were essential.
The smartphone story could even be a model for fighting climate change; not because smartphones use a small part of the energy of all the things they replace - although they do-but because they represent a different approach to design in general. And that approach is to focus on function rather than form. That requires focusing on understanding the underlying problem，and then engineering a wide range of potential solutions. This approach could revolutionize how we think about energy efficiency.
Traditionally, improvements in energy efficiency have mostly focused on individual devices, which can be quite fruitful. But focusing on individual devices is like if Apple had spent effort inventing a better alarm clock, a better CD player, a better calendar, and a better camera. Now with an iPhone, we don’t need the standalone(独立运行的) devices at all, because it can function as all of them.
So when it comes to using energy efficiently, rather than just installing a more efficient heater，some people have focused instead on the desired function: staying warm. They designed and coated their house so well that they could get rid of their heater altogether, letting them heat their house with 99% less energy.
In the same way, rather than just making cars more efficient, what if we focus on the desired function-getting where we want when we want-and create an efficient transportation system where we can drive less or get rid of our personal cars entirely?
The most energy efficient car or heater is no car, or no heater, while still being able to get around and stay warm. In other words, it’s not thinking efficient, it’s thinking different.
1. What makes the iPhone a good example of environmental protection?| A．Perfecting individual devices. | B．Combining possible functions. |
| C．Adopting a simplest design. | D．Reducing the energy consumption. |
| A．Using recyclable materials. | B．Revolutionizing technologies. |
| C．Figuring out various solutions. | D．Concentrating on the essential needs. |
| A．Fruitless. | B．Out-of-date. | C．Adequate. | D．Perfect. |
| A．Think out of the box. | B．Differences make it unique. |
| C．Be economical with energy. | D．Step out of the comfort zone. |
2 . Blind Olympic Athletes Show the Universal Nature
Tune into any sports coverage on TV, and you will see many athletes proudly raise their arms and heads in victory, while a much larger number hang their shoulders and necks in defeat. Studies have revealed why—they are universal behaviours, performed by humans in response to success and failure.
The discovery came from Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia and David Matsumoto from San Francisco State University, who wanted to see how people showed feelings of pride and shame.
The answer was Athens, during the 2004 Olympic Games. Its sister competition—the Paralympics—included many athletes who were born blind.
These actions were also remarkably consistent between contestants from every part of the world. Tracy and Matsumoto argue that pride and shame deserve a place alongside other primary emotions like happiness, fear and surprise.
| A．Analyzing the data, they found that the sighted and sightless athletes behaved in almost exactly the same ways. |
| B．In fact, the culture was found to have only a very small effect on their body language. |
| C．In particular, they wanted to know whether these expressions were culturally determined and learned through observation. |
| D．The athletes’ behaviours give strong evidence that they have had the actions naturally since birth. |
| E．The result suggested that the athletes were showing their pride based on careful observation. |
| F．Therefore, they could not have witnessed how other people reacted to winning and losing. |
| G．They are inborn behaviours and are accompanied by their own distinct sets of actions. |
The Impact of Social Media on Adolescents (青少年)
Using social media has become a routine activity for most young people. In recent years the number of young people using social media has increased dramatically, so a large part of their social and emotional development is occurring while they are on the Internet.
Social media allow young people to achieve many of the online tasks that are important to them offline: staying connected with friends and family, making new friends, and exchanging ideas. Some schools successfully use blogs as teaching tools, which has the benefit of improving skills in written expression and creativity. At the same time, social media helps them get what they want, increase their knowledge and confidence in their academic (学业的) performance.
While social media provides many benefits, it can also have a negative impact on young people, both physically and mentally. It is easy to become addicted, and research shows that students who spend too much time on social media can suffer from poor sleep, eye fatigue, negative body image, depression, anxiety and more. Research also indicates that there are frequent online expressions of offline behaviours, which have introduced problems such as cyberbullying and online harassment (骚扰).
Using social media becomes a risk to adolescents more than they can realise. When people go on to websites, they leave evidence of their visits. This ongoing record of online activity is called the “digital footprint”. One of the biggest threats to young people on social media is to their digital footprint and future reputations (名誉). Young people who lack an awareness of privacy issues often post inappropriate material without understanding that “what goes online stays online”. As a result, future jobs and college acceptance maybe put in danger by inexperienced clicks of the mouse.
1. Why is a large part of young people’s social and emotional development occurring on the Internet?2. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
Young people’s improper digital footprint may have an impact on cyberbullying and online harassment.
3. You have been physically distanced from school for more than one month in this term. How do you make full use of social media to better your life and study? Please give one or two examples. (In about 40 words)
The colour was rushing to his cheeks, and his eyes were wide open,
I’m part of an android football team. About once a year we
Festivals
How to Stop Overthinking
We all have times when we worry, whether it’s about work, health, family, relationships or a host of other reasons. But is there a point when you may think and worry too much?
Overthinking is an unhealthy habit that typically causes more stress by focusing on the negative instead of coming up with logical solutions. For example, we may start worrying about a specific situation at work, which leads to worrying about money or losing jobs.
But why do we tend to overthink? This is often due to cognitive errors, which are basically errors in logical thinking, such as all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralisation. Although overthinking is hard to break, Natacha Duke, a registered psychotherapist, outlines strategies that can help.
“Healthy distraction can be useful,” says Duke. Activities like reading and taking a walk can help keep our stress levels down. They can reduce our baseline level of anxiety and make us less likely to overthink.
Duke adds, “Keeping a daily journal can help us actively manage stress before our feelings expand out of control.” As we practise journaling our emotions and thoughts, it becomes easier to identify when we’re starting to worry. Stopping worrying early will ultimately help us feel better and stay focused on what matters most to us.
Some people constantly think about questions like “What if I lose my job?” or “What if I get sick?” While having these thoughts is normal, it becomes a problem when we focus only on the worst-case situation. “For every ‘what if’ worry, change this to an ‘if then’ statement where you come up with ideas to deal with the worry or the worst-case situation,” says Duke. “Focus on having a concrete plan in place.”
So, face the problems, then challenge and reframe them. Finally, we will develop effective ways to cope with overthinking.
1. What is overthinking?2. What causes overthinking?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
A man can stop overthinking if he changes “what if” questions to “if then” statements, because it helps him focus on the worst-case situation.
4. Besides the suggestions mentioned in the passage, what other advice will you give to a person who is always overthinking?
8 . Why We Listen to Music with Lyrics(歌词) We Don’t Understand
From French electronic to K-pop and Spanish jazz, it’s common for us to listen to songs we don’t necessarily understand.
But why? It all starts with what’s called “sound symbolism(语音表意),” which refers to the study of the relationships between utterances(发声) and their meaning. In music, there’s something about the appeal of words as sounds, beyond their meaning in a language.
| A．The interrelationship of melody and pitch is important. |
| B．This is why fast-paced music is so popular for running. |
| C．Of course, this isn’t to ignore the importance of lyrics in music. |
| D．Things like a musician’s image also help convey meaning through songs. |
| E．So, when listening to a foreign song, we enjoy the lyrics as sounds and not words. |
| F．It seems that not knowing the language of the lyrics doesn’t stop us from liking a song. |
| G．Some musical techniques and elements can also help convey certain moods and messages. |
9 . A person could be forgiven for believing 20 years ago that the Internet would soon revolutionise academic publishing, because it became possible for publishers to spread scholarly work at the click of a button — much cheaper than the traditional subscription-based (订阅) model. Recognising the opportunity, many scholars and librarians began to advocate a new, open access model, in which articles are made freely available online to anyone. The result would be a true online public library of science.
However, more than two decades later, the movement has made only slight progress, and the traditional subscription-based model remains entrenched.
Fortunately, things are changing. A big shoe dropped when the University of California (UC) Libraries, one of the biggest library systems, declined to renew its contract with Elsevier, a leading scientific publisher. Elsevier wanted the Libraries to pay two fees: One for its package of licensed journals and the other for the use of Elsevier’s open access model. UC Libraries wanted the licensed journals fee to cover the open access fee; they also wanted open access to all UC researches published in Elsevier journals. When the two sides couldn’t come to terms, the Libraries walked away.
Actually, the open access revolution is more likely to be led by research funding agencies, who can use their purse power to promote open access. A team of funders, Coalition S, insisted that any research they fund should be published in a journal that makes all of its articles freely and immediately available to the public, which is called Plan-S.
Now that some librarians and funders are flexing their muscles, what should academics do? The worst response would be to complain that Plan-S deprives(剥夺) them of academic freedom. Some thoughtful academics might worry that a shift to open access would affect their promotion. After all, subscription journals are more familiar and more prestigious (有威望的) in the current system. However, if enough academics support open access, the system could reach a tipping point beyond which subscriptions no longer signal prestige. Reaching that point would take considerable time and efforts, but it is possible.
When the journal system began in 1665, it was kind of a form of open access. Journals allowed academics to learn openly from one another. It was only in the 1900s that the journal system became thoroughly commoditized(商品化). Now is the time to bring it back to its roots.
1. What does the underlined word probably mean?| A．Uncertain. | B．Rooted. | C．Limited. | D．Popular. |
| A．The duration of the contract. | B．The way of payment. |
| C．The charge for open access model. | D．The choice of licensed journals. |
| A．Academics welcome open access model with full heart. |
| B．Open access model will soon achieve a dominant position. |
| C．Publishers are willing to abandon the subscription model gradually. |
| D．Establishing a true online public library of science requires joint efforts. |
| A．Critical. | B．Supportive. | C．Disapproving. | D．Indifferent. |
10 . The technology for speech-recognition systems has advanced greatly since its appearance in the 1950s. Many voice systems can understand the language when spoken at a normal conversational rate. But even the advanced human-machine interfaces(人机交互) used today are unable to trick the listeners into thinking a computer is a human. Why is this? Simply put, it’s because human beings rely on more than words to convey ideas or interpret messages, such as tones, facial expressions, body movements, and objects in the world around them.
One significant recent achievement in the field of talking computers is virtual personal assistants (VPAs) on mobile phones. If you tell a mobile phone VPA that you want to schedule a lunch with a friend, it can set the appointment in your phone in seconds. The VPA can also hold a basic “conversation” and has earned fame for its elementary sense of humour. Still, the humour is preprogrammed and can be triggered only when human users speak certain key words.
While the potential for “real” communication between a human and a machine may seem exciting, this possibility concerns some people. Some experts worry about people’s attachment to these machines and fear that the art of successful human-to-human conversation will be undeveloped in younger generations. They worry that people won’t be able to display the right emotion or tone in conversations because they haven’t been practising those skills. Others fear that machines will take over functions that were traditionally performed by humans, such as customer service. Another concern often associated with the development of new technology is the invasion of privacy(侵犯隐私)．When people use certain speech-recognition applications, they leave behind an audio track of their speech. When you ask a VPA for directions, your speech is sent and saved to a remote server for processing. This digital trail may lead to data mining, or the collection of large quantities of personal data.
For now, however, the continuing evolution of speech-recognition software is worth expecting. Leading companies in the field hope to make human communication with machines as seamless as possible, just like communicating with another human.
1. According to the passage, what can a VPA do?| A．Entertain users with original jokes. | B．Make people regard it as a human. |
| C．Hold preprogrammed conversations. | D．Display the right tones in conversations. |
| A．One VPA service was priced higher for protecting users’ privacy. |
| B．An airline bore high costs for applying VPAs to its online service. |
| C．An app failed to offer the right direction when given spoken instructions. |
| D．Some teenagers became more socially awkward due to the addiction to VPAs. |
| A．To inform readers of the double-edged quality of a new technology. |
| B．To inspire readers to explore the future of a new technology. |
| C．To promote the application of a new technology. |
| D．To stress the convenience of a new technology. |
| A．The worries over VPAs. | B．Talking to technology. |
| C．The world of technology. | D．Listening to “a real person.” |
