1 . One thing you probably always wondered about is why Americans drive on a different side of the road than their British cousins. It might seem strange that the UK drivers stay on the left, but they are not alone. Around 35% of the world population does the same, including people in Ireland, Japan, and some Caribbean islands.
It is said that originally almost everybody traveled on the left side of the road. However, their mode of transport was quite different from today: Think four legs instead of four wheels. For medieval (中世纪的) swordsmen on horseback, it made sense to keep to the left to have their right arms closer to enemies. Mounting and dismounting was also easier from the left side of the horse, and safer done by the side of the road than in the center.
Things changed in the late 1700s when large wagons pulled by several pairs of horses were used to transport farm products in France and the US. In the absence of a driver’s seat inside the wagon, the driver sat on the left, with his right arm free to use his whip (鞭子) to keep the horses moving. Since he was sting on the left, and wanted other wagons to pass on his left, so he kept to the right side of the road.
The British Government refused to give up their left﹣hand driving ways and made laws to encourage driving on the left. Meanwhile post-revolution France, under their left﹣handed ruler Napoleon, accepted the right side of the road. During all this driving confusion, the British and the French were giving up their power across the globe, and as part of their rapid colonization (殖民化) they insisted that the countries they occupied drive on the same side of the road. This explains why former British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and India drive on the left, while former French colonies like Algeria, Ivory Coast, and Senegal drive on the right.
1. What’s the purpose of the first paragraph?| A．To make a question about two driving patterns. |
| B．To make a comparison about two driving patterns. |
| C．To give background of the text. |
| D．To support the following paragraphs. |
| A．People in ancient times were accustomed to walking on the right of the road. |
| B．People in ancient times usually afforded to hang out by carriage. |
| C．Swordsmen rode warhorses to make them fight better. |
| D．Swordsmen usually rested their warhorses on the left side. |
| A．The history of the left-hand rules in colonial corners. |
| B．The evolution process of the left-hand rules. |
| C．The medieval history of the left-hand rules. |
| D．The progress of the left-hand rules in colonies. |
2 . Many people quote the phrase from Jane Jacobs that “there must be eyes on the street” to emphasize the relationship between urban safety and design. Jacobs’ views on urban safety were, in truth, far more complex than this phrase suggests. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has become the basis of a worldwide movement to foster safer cities.
Jacobs made an important contribution to our understanding of cities by linking the fear of crime and urban design. In a successful city district a person must feel personally safe on the street among all these strangers. It doesn’t take many incidents of violence on a city street to make people fear the street. And as they fear them, they use them less, which makes the streets still more unsafe.
For Jacobs, eyes on the street came from stores and public places, including bars and restaurants along the sidewalks, street vendors and pedestrians. She recommended the installation of bright street lights to “sharpen every pair of eyes”.
Jacobs widened her attention to urban safety in general, including parks and public housing projects. While most planners focus on the green benefits of parks, she argued against underused or dangerous parks. She observed that parks are successful when they encourage a range of activities and users.
She emphasized design and management policies to encourage interaction at public housing sites. She suggest ed integrating public housing communities into existing street patterns and cultivating street activity by including businesses in the buildings. She opposed fencing and security guards, creating a sense of territory and isolating public housing residents from the wider community.
Jacobs wrote about her experience of daily life in the city and urged planners to pay attention to how ordinary people actually use urban space. From her experience as a wife, mother, and resident in New York, she arrived at a more human vision of the city than the experts of the day did. Her concern about urban safety was visionary (有远见的), and her manner of looking at the city still offers a critical viewpoint for evaluating crime prevention and community safety strategies today.
1. Why does the writer mention the phrase quoted from Jane Jacobs in the first paragraph?| A．To call readers’ attention to the phrase. | B．To introduce Jane Jacobs’ book. |
| C．To prove the popularity of Jane Jacobs’ book. | D．To make the phrase better known. |
| A．Warning people of violence in streets. | B．Encouraging different activities in parks. |
| C．Employing security guards in the buildings. | D．Introducing safety policies at public housing sites. |
| A．A book review. | B．A guidebook. | C．An advertisement. | D．A biography. |
3 . Whether you prefer solo dancing or being involved in a more formalized program, dancing offers the obvious plus to your physical health. You're not only moving your body in a rhythmic way and expressing feelings but also burning calories in your body and getting a workout for sure.
In a recent study, researchers compared the effects of walking, stretching and dancing on the wiring and gray matter of the aging brain. The result showed dancing had the significantly positive effect.
In the experiment, after volunteers in their 60s and 70s with healthy brains didn't show signs of cognitive (认知的) disorder, researchers placed them in three groups at will. One group walked, another group stretched and did balance training and the last group learned country dancing. The arrangements of the dancing became progressively more challenging over time. They all did the assigned activity for one hour a day, three times a week. After a period of six months, the volunteers' brains were re-scanned and compared to their brains when they had begun their voluntary work.
Agnieszka Burzynska, the study's lead author who is currently a neuroscientist and director of the BRAiN Lab at Colorado State University, found only one group showed a memory improvement — the country dancers. The participants who learned country dancing now had richer white matter in the part of the brain that processed memory. White matter usually breaks down as a person ages, which may lead to cognitive decline. Dancing, therefore, protected the brain from aging-caused neurodegeneration. So, dancing is not just an aerobic activity good for your physical health. It helps your brain, too!
Country dancing, ballroom dancing, tango and waltz are all done with others. When you take part in these dances, you're involved in a beneficial social activity as well. You are also cognitively motivating your brain as you learn the steps of the dances. Dancing therefore might be one of the best physical activities you can choose for brain health.
1. What's the purpose of paragraph 1?| A．To add background material. | B．To introduce the topic of the text. |
| C．To raise questions about exercise. | D．To present experimental conditions. |
| A．They were grouped at random. | B．They were under cognitive decline. |
| C．They were all asked to learn dancing. | D．They were all born in the 1960s and 1970s. |
| A．The brain function of volunteers. | B．The cognitive disorder of volunteers. |
| C．The relationship between age and dancing. | D．The effect of dancing on the volunteers' brains. |
| A．How Dancing Affects People's Lifestyle |
| B．Why Dancing Is the Best Social Activity |
| C．How Dancing Helps People's Brain Health |
| D．Why Country Dancing Is Beneficial to People's Health |
I’d seen Kim around campus long before the winter of my sophomore (大二) year. I’d admired her from afar. She was pretty with smooth hair, always wearing a bright smile. I’d decided that if I were to choose one girl as my friend, she would be the one. Even though our paths crossed several times a day, I felt as if she lived in some remote corner of a distant universe, where I was sure she had no idea that I existed.
She was there the night when I was invited to a party. A favorite band was playing that night, and I welcomed the chance to get out of my stuffy dorm room and away from hard work. I arrived late and took a seat at a table alone in the back of the room. The others didn’t notice me, but I didn’t care. I made a decision to hang out for fifteen minutes and then left.
I heard a familiar laugh.... Then, I saw her sitting with her friends. She seemed to shine, making everything and everybody else in the room fade to insignificance. How I wished I were together with her! I looked around and wondered if anybody else saw her, but they all seemed too caught up in their corners of conversation to notice. How could they not? She was shining.
I imagined myself walking up to her and then saying hello. What would she say? Would she just laugh or simply ignore me? Maybe my voice would crack, and I’d turn and slink away as if it had all been a mistake. Then I could simply spend the rest of my college years going around corners and taking roundabout routes to avoid seeing her.
At that moment, she turned toward the back of the room. Her gaze rested on me. I saw her lean over and whisper something to one of her friends, and then she got up and weaved her way through the cluster of tables.
注意:
1. 所续写短文的词数应为 150 左右;
2. 应使用 5 个以上短文中标有下划线的关键词语;
3. 续写部分分为两段，每段的开头语已为你写好;
4. 续写完成后, 请用下划线标出你所使用的关键词语。
Paragraph 1:
She was coming toward me.
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Paragraph 2:
Many years later, my thoughts sometimes still go back to that night.
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Perhaps the finest nature writer of the Twentieth Century, Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
Carson wrote about how islands were formed, how
6 . Kwane Stewart stepped outside a Modesto, California, convenience store with his morning coffee and spotted a
“I remember returning a week and a half later, the
Stewart was
He knows there are some people who question
| A．sad | B．tired | C．sick | D．homeless |
| A．pet | B．dog | C．cat | D．child |
| A．found | B．examined | C．noticed | D．felt |
| A．signs | B．standards | C．phenomena | D．appearances |
| A．wanted | B．attempted | C．promised | D．offered |
| A．formally | B．possibly | C．readily | D．unwillingly |
| A．memory | B．hair | C．man | D．time |
| A．finally | B．always | C．rarely | D．immediately |
| A．playing | B．running | C．scratching | D．consuming |
| A．sleeping | B．crying | C．suffering | D．wondering |
| A．set | B．cheered | C．choked | D．warmed |
| A．hooked | B．determined | C．worried | D．annoyed |
| A．larger | B．harder | C．funnier | D．truer |
| A．watching | B．wandering | C．circling | D．clearing |
| A．move out | B．stay up | C．come from | D．camp out |
| A．whether | B．when | C．where | D．how |
| A．look for | B．belong to | C．adapt to | D．care for |
| A．somebody | B．anybody | C．everybody | D．nobody |
| A．generous | B．average | C．healthy | D．normal |
| A．support | B．love | C．home | D．joy |
7 . When Mexican scientist of the evolution of animal behavior, Laura Cuaya, moved to Hungary for her postdoctoral studies in Budapest, she brought her pet dog, Kun-kun, along for the ride. Cuaya couldn't help noticing how locals warmed to dogs. This prompted her naturally curious scientific mind to start asking questions. “Here people are talking all the time to Kun-kun, but I always wonder if Kun-kun can recognize that people in Budapest speak Hungarian, not Spanish?” So she set out to find an answer through a scientific study.
Cuaya and her colleagues decided to use brain images from MRI scanning to shed light on her hunch. They worked with dogs of various ages that had, until the experiment, only heard their owners speak just one of the two languages, Spanish or Hungarian. Not surprisingly, getting the dogs to happily take part in the experiment took some creative coaxing and animal training! The researchers first needed to teach Kun-kun and her 17 fellow participating dogs including a labradoodle, a golden retriever and Australian shepherds, to lie still in a brain scanner. Their pet parents were always present, and they could leave the scanner at any point.
The research team played children's book classic The Little Prince in both Spanish and Hungarian while scanning the dogs' brains with an MRI machine. They were looking for evidence that their brains reacted differently to a familiar and unfamiliar language. The researchers also played scrambled versions of the story to find out if dogs could distinguish between speech and non-speech.
The images reveal that dogs' brains show different patterns of activity for an unfamiliar language than for a familiar one — the first time anyone has proved, researchers say, that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages. This means that the sounds and rhythms of a familiar language are accessible to non-humans.
Interestingly, the team also found that the brains of older dogs were more skilled at detecting speech “suggesting a role for the amount of language exposure”. They suggest that dogs have refined their ability to distinguish between human languages over the long process of domestication.
1. What is paragraph 1 mainly about?| A．The background of the study. | B．The significance of the study. |
| C．The concern of the researcher. | D．The introduction to the researcher. |
| A．Age limits. | B．Brain patterns. | C．Language exposure. | D．Owners' commands. |
| A．practical | B．contradictory | C．compromising | D．groundbreaking |
| A．Dogs Can Tell Foreign Languages | B．Dog Brains Have Different Patterns |
| C．Old Dogs Know More About Human Speech | D．Dogs Can Differ Speech From Non-Speech |
8 . A recent study by University of Delaware researchers suggests exercise can help kids to learn and remember vocabulary. The article, published in the Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, details one of the first studies on the effect of exercise on vocabulary learning in children.
Children ages 6 to 12 were taught new words before doing one of three things- swimming , taking part in CrossFit exercises or completing a coloring sheet. The children who swam were 13% more accurate in follow-up tests of the vocabulary words.
It makes sense to the lead researcher, Maddy Pruitt, herself a former college swimmer. “Motor movement helps in learning new words,” she said, explaining that exercise is known to increase levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor(脑衍生神经营养因子).Then why did swimming make a difference while CrossFit did not? Pruitt attributes(归因) it to the amount of energy each exercise demands of the brain. Swimming is an activity the kids could complete without much thought or instruction. It was more automatic, while the CrossFit exercises were new to them. The children needed to learn the moves, which required mental energy.
Pruitt conducted the research as part of her Master s Capstone Project and graduated in 2020. She now works as a speech-language pathologist (病理学家) at a primary school in South Carolina, where she puts her findings into practice.
“My sessions are very rarely at a table,” she said. “I’ll take my kids out to the playground or we’ll take a walk around the school.”
Pruitt’s adviser and coauthor Giovanna Morini is building on the findings in her lab. Morini said most research into exercise examined it from the angle of a healthy lifestyle, not much entering the area of language acquisition.
“We are so excited about this study because it applies to clinicians, caregivers and educators who can put it into practice, Morini said.” It’s simple stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. But it could help boost the outcomes.
1. What were all the children asked to do in the study?| A．Complete vocabulary tests. | B．Teach others new words. |
| C．Identify different colors. | D．Share swimming skills. |
| A．The way of the study. | B．The subject of the study. |
| C．The applications of the findings. | D．The reasons for the study result. |
| A．By setting up clinics with other researchers. |
| B．By training the students to swim regularly. |
| C．By adding physical exercise to her sessions. |
| D．By asking the students to learn complex words. |
| A．Kids Are Supposed to Exercise Before Studying |
| B．Exercise Contributes to Kids’ Vocabulary Growth |
| C．Swimming Does Good to People’s Physical Health |
| D．Research Should Be Done on Language Acquisition |
9 . A robot the size of a large bulldozer (推土机) moves along the bottom of the deep sea. It eats metallic (含金属的) rock and soft mud. The stuff travels up a long pipe to a ship, where workers and machinery separate out the rock and throw the mud back into the ocean. This is a mining operation. The rock contains a mixture of metals, including ones called rare earth metals. People use these materials to make batteries and electronics like computers and phones.
Deep-sea mining hasn’t happened yet. But it probably will occur within the next decade. No country owns any part of the deep sea. So an organization called the International Seabed Authority (ISA) decides who is allowed to mine there. The ISA has allowed 29 organizations to explore the deep sea and make plans for mining. One company plans to begin mining in the year 2027.
Scientists and environmentalists, though, warn that mining could destroy deep-sea ecosystem. In 1989, ecologist Hjalmar Thiel carried out a test. His team searched the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean, in a spot with lots of the metallic rocks that miners want. They didn’t actually collect any of the rocks. But they disturbed the mud, just as a mining operation would. The plume (飘升之物) of mud fell back down over the ocean floor burying creatures living there. As of 2015, the area they disturbed had not recovered. Signs of the search are still there. Sponges (海绵动物), corals, and other animals have not moved back in. That means mining could have harmful, long-lasting consequences for deep ocean life. Scientists want to understand the deep sea better before disturbing it.
Leaving the deep sea alone sounds great, but people need those metals. “Mines on land are soon going to run out,” geologist Steven Scott of the University of Toronto told Smithsonian Magazine, “Every electronic device in the world has rare earth metals in it…we need raw resources.” New energy technologies including solar and wind power and electric cars, rely on these metals as well. We may need to mine them from the sea in order to switch to greener energy sources.
1. Why is a deep-sea mining operation carried out?| A．To test the function of the underwater robot. |
| B．To separate the rock from the mud. |
| C．To obtain rare earth metals. |
| D．To study the elements of the deep-sea mud. |
| A．It possesses the ownership of the whole deep sea. |
| B．It may help the deep-sea exploration carried out scientifically. |
| C．It can make the deep-sea natural resources shared fairly. |
| D．It works out mining plans for different countries. |
| A．People depend on rare earth metals for car production. |
| B．We mustn’t mine anything from the deep sea. |
| C．Deep-sea resources will replace those on land. |
| D．Rare earth metals help us develop green energy. |
10 . In 1823, a young woman noticed a strange fossil on a beach near Lyme Regis, England. She dug out the bones and had them carried to her home. She carefully arranged the skeleton on a table. Then she saw something extraordinary. The creature's neck was a meter long-more than half the length of its body. It was unlike any animal living on Earth.
Even at a young age, Mary Anning had a talent for spotting "curies" fossils. Her father died in 1810, leaving her family in debt, so Mary began selling her fossils to collectors. A year later, aged just 12, she made her first major discovery—a crocodile-like skull with a long skeleton. It turned out to be a sea creature that lived long ago. Named ichthyosaur, or "fish-lizard", it was the first extinct animal known to science.
Fossil hunting brought in money, but it was a dangerous occupation. One day, a rock fall killed her dog and almost buried Mary. Despite the dangers, she continued to look for new finds. The long-necked fossil she uncovered in 1823 was another long-dead sea reptile. Known as a plesiosaur, it would inspire legends—including that of the Loch Ness Monster.
Mary was not only a skilled fossil hunter, she also carefully examined and recorded her finds. However, she received little credit from other scientists. Only one of her scientific writings was published in her lifetime, in 1839. She was also not allowed to join London's Geological Society, as only men could become members.
Mary Anning died in 1847, but her contributions have not been forgotten. Her finds are now displayed in museums in London and Paris. The beach near her home is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, known as the Jurassic Coast. Her life continues to inspire visitors hoping to find their own fossil wonders. According to Britain's Natural History Museum, Mary Anning was "the greatest fossil hunter the world has ever known". She was also a scientist who changed the way we think about life on Earth.
1. The word “curies" in paragraph 2 means_________.| A．beautiful | B．huge | C．common | D．unusual |
| A．She won high praise from other scientists. |
| B．She published several scientific articles in her lifetime. |
| C．She had a narrow escape from a rock fall near the beach. |
| D．She was later a member of the London Geological Society. |
| A．To show how Southern England has the most important fossil finds in the world. |
| B．To persuade the readers that the Jurassic Coast is in need of protection. |
| C．To give an example of how important Mary Anning's discoveries are to the world. |
| D．To encourage more people to find their own fossil wonders. |
