1 . Trees don’t look at the calendar to see when spring arrives, but they seem to know when spring is here better than we do. The annual shift from winter to spring is a breathtaking event to watch as leaves become green and a lush(苍翠的) environment reveals itself. Recently a research takes a look at why trees in cities are turning green earlier than expected.
Scientists use satellite imagery to see when plants turn green. By comparing spring green ups in the 85 largest US cities, scientists found that on average trees start to turn green nine days earlier in cities due to the combined effect of artificial lights and urban heat effect.
According to the findings, one of the reasons is the artificial light. City lights brightening the night skies, billboard signs lit up on roadways and car headlights all contribute to shifting the regular day to night cycle that plants and trees rely on. In order to stay alive during cruel winters, trees hit the pause button on their growth. Since temperatures can vary dramatically throughout the winter, the length of daylight is the signal trees look for to safely start growing again and turn green.
On average cities are typically 1.8 to 5.4F warmer than rural areas. This is known as the urban heat island effect. The changes in city environments may affect seasonal changes even more than climate warming and mosquito season, water cycles, and also affect pollinators(授粉媒介).
Despite the worries and concern, it isn’t all bad news. “With a longer growing season, trees would be able to absorb more carbon dioxide,” A researcher said. “Hopefully they’d have a longer period to do the cooling effect that can help relieve the urban heating effect in cities.”
1. What is the purpose of the text?| A．To reveal how trees survive bitter winters. |
| B．To warn how human activities disturb nature. |
| C．To explain why trees turn green earlier in cities. |
| D．To clarify how trees turning green earlier benefits cities. |
| A．Bringing out urban heat island effect. |
| B．Comparing the green-up time in sample cities. |
| C．Allowing the city environment to reveal itself. |
| D．Developing pictures shot by the satellite. |
| A．Plant pollinators. | B．Water cycle. | C．Road signs. | D．Street lamps. |
| A．Environment. | B．Education. | C．Entertainment. | D．Business. |
2 . When a leafy plant is under attack, it doesn’t sit quietly. Back in 1983, two scientists, Jack Schultz and Ian Baldwin, reported that young maple trees getting bitten by insects send out a particular smell that neighboring plants can get. These chemicals come from the injured parts of the plant and seem to be an alarm. What the plants pump through the air is a mixture of chemicals known as volatile organic compounds, VOCs for short.
Scientists have found that all kinds of plants give out VOCs when being attacked. It’s a plant’s way of crying out. But is anyone listening? Apparently. Because we can watch the neighbours react.
Some plants pump out smelly chemicals to keep insects away. But others do double duty. They pump out perfumes designed to attract different insects who are natural enemies to the attackers. Once they arrive, the tables are turned. The attacker who was lunching now becomes lunch.
In study after study, it appears that these chemical conversations help the neighbors .The damage is usually more serious on the first plant, but the neighbors, relatively speaking, stay safer because they heard the alarm and knew what to do.
Does this mean that plants talk to each other? Scientists don’t know. Maybe the first plant just made a cry of pain or was sending a message to its own branches, and so, in effect, was talking to itself. Perhaps the neighbors just happened to “overhear” the cry. So information was exchanged, but it wasn’t a true, intentional back and forth. Charles Darwin, over 150 years ago, imagined a world far busier, noisier and more intimate (亲密的) than the world we can see and hear. Our senses are weak. There’s a whole lot going on.
1. What does a plant do when it is under attack?| A．It makes noises. | B．It gets help from other plants. |
| C．It stands quietly | D．It sends out certain chemicals. |
| A．The attackers get attacked. |
| B．The insects gather under the table. |
| C．The plants get ready to fight back. |
| D．The perfumes attract natural enemies. |
| A．predict natural disasters |
| B．protect themselves against insects |
| C．talk to one another intentionally |
| D．help their neighbors when necessary |
| A．The world is changing faster than ever. |
| B．People have stronger senses than before |
| C．The world is more complex than it seems |
| D．People in Darwin’s time were imaginative. |
3 . Humans are not the animal kingdom's only fashionistas. Tits ( ill雀) can be fashion followers, too, apparently. A latest study shows that, given the chance, they decorate their nests with this season's must-have colour.
Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin were following up on a study published in 1934 by Henry Smith Williams, an American naturalist. He noticed that when he put various coloured balls of yarn (纱) out in his garden, almost always one and only one became popular that season for being included into local birds' nests. But which particular color was favoured varied from season to season. This suggested that the colour chosen by one of the early birds was spotted and copied by others.
Williams's work was, however, forgotten until they came across it while following up on a different study, published by a team at the University of Toulouse, suggesting fashion-following, too. Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin therefore set out to re-run Williams's experiment, but this time to collect some actual numbers.
The birds they followed were part of a well-monitored population of blue tits in a wood near the institute. Most birds in this wood carried tracking devices fitted to them after their capture in mist nets. That allowed the institute's researchers to keep track of a vast number of individuals by recording their arrival at food containers throughout the wood. Instead of food, these containers were loaded with wool of different colors. Interestingly, researchers soon found that most nests of blue tits included only the color of the wool first chosen by a nestbuildcr.
Tits, then, do seem to be “on trend”, when it comes to nest-building materials. Why that should happen remains obscure. Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin suspect the fashion leaders are older birds, and that evolution favours younger ones copying their elders since those elders have evidently survived what fortune has to throw at a tit. Williams’s original work, though, suggests such initial choices are at random-a bit like those of the leaders of human fashions.
1. What can we learn from Paragraph 2?| A．Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin contributed to William's work. |
| B．Early birds' color preference was copied by their fellows. |
| C．The yam was the most popular material to decorate local birds' nests. |
| D．The color of the yam favored by local birds was fixed throughout the year. |
| A．They observed the blue tits. |
| B．They studied the habits of blue tits. |
| C．They adopted the data-collecting method. |
| D．They fitted tracking devices to food containers. |
| A．Hidden. | B．Evident. | C．Complicated. | D．Shallow. |
| A．Birds favor certain colors in decoration. |
| B．Young birds follow their elders in fashion. |
| C．Young birds are just as intelligent as people. |
| D．Birds are just as fashion-conscious as people. |
4 . It has always been assumed that noise is a problem unique to animals. But a new study by Ali Akbar has revealed that plants suffer too.
That plants can be damaged indirectly by noise pollution has never been in doubt. Since most flowering species depend upon pollinators (授粉者) and most fruit-bearing species need animals to spread around their seeds, it is obvious that if these animal partners are harmed by noise then their botanical counterparts will do badly, too. What has remained unknown is whether or not plants themselves suffer directly from noise pollution.
Scientists have previously assumed that plants may be able to sense sound waves as they are struck by them. A number of experiments have confirmed this in recent years — plants heavily exposed to ultrasound in the lab have shown a range of negative responses including the expression of stress-related genes, slowed growth and reduced development of seeds.
Yet attacking plants with ultrasound is not the same as growing them in the presence of actual traffic noise. To this end, Ali Akbar decided to set up an experiment to study precisely this questions.
Working with a team of colleagues, he grew marigolds (孔雀草) and sage (鼠尾草) in his lab that are commonly found in urban environments. The plants were divided into two groups after getting mature. One group was exposed to 73 decibels of traffic noise. The other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days had passed, samples were taken from the youngest fully expanded leaves on every plant in the experiment and studied.
None of the plants exposed to the traffic noise did well. Analysis of their leaves revealed that all of them were suffering. The team found that a range of hormones(荷尔蒙) normally associated with healthy growth and development in plants were present at significantly reduced levels in the plants exposed to the noise. Two stress hormones, which are normally produced to prevent insect attacks and deal with salty soil or very cold temperatures, were elevated.
Ali Akbar’s findings make it clear that though plants lack ears, the noise of traffic still bothers them enough to trigger dramatic stress responses that are not much different to those that would be found in plants exposed to drought, highly concentrated salt or heavy metals in their soil.
The next question is whether all noise pollution affects all species in the same way. The natural world is by no means silent. Whether some plant species have evolved coping mechanisms, which might one day be collected and transferred into urban-living species, is a mystery worth exploring.
1. What did scientists believe in the past?| A．Noise is a problem directly facing both animals and plants. |
| B．Plants can be affected by noise in an indirect way. |
| C．Animal partners can do harm to their botanical partners. |
| D．Sound waves can damage plants because they have senses. |
| A．Ultrasound is similar to traffic noise in that it doesn’t harm plants. |
| B．Plants exposed to ultrasound exhibit negative signs of growth. |
| C．Traffic noise causes plants to grow unhealthily and slowly. |
| D．Plant leaves contain hormones dealing with a harsh environment. |
| A．Plants growing in silence have a reduced level of hormones |
| B．Plants exposed to noise respond differently from those in drought. |
| C．Different noise pollution has the same effect on all species. |
| D．An increase in stress hormones in plants means they are in hardship. |
| A．Some plants may not necessarily be harmed by the sound in nature. |
| B．Some plants have surely developed a method to cope with traffic noise. |
| C．Unban-living species can be engineered to grow well in the natural world. |
| D．The silence in nature promotes the development of noise coping mechanisms. |
5 . My 5-year-old daughter Kai walked around a bus stop, picking up candy wrappers and plastic bottles and throwing them in the waste bin. We were a visiting family here, but she was cleaning the sidewalk, which didn’t shock me, nor was I
Our cleanup project began when we drove past an empty field one day and Kai
However, it seems we can never
Now Kai hopes to become a marine biologist to protect sharks one day. She still has many years to
The last time our family was at the beach, we still picked up plastic bottles. Most
| A．embarrassed | B．discouraged | C．concerned | D．frightened |
| A．apologized | B．confirmed | C．spotted | D．explained |
| A．loose | B．magic | C．processed | D．abandoned |
| A．trade | B．mistake | C．replace | D．change |
| A．pulled over | B．blew up | C．turned down | D．gave in |
| A．due to | B．ahead of | C．other than | D．instead of |
| A．official | B．serious | C．optional | D．regular |
| A．deliver | B．remove | C．track | D．produce |
| A．stress | B．comfort | C．anger | D．pride |
| A．mess | B．platform | C．court | D．house |
| A．scary | B．pleasant | C．historic | D．real |
| A．decide | B．struggle | C．survive | D．contribute |
| A．safe | B．giant | C．distant | D．sick |
| A．personally | B．memorably | C．technically | D．universally |
| A．promise | B．threat | C．reminder | D．favor |
Of all the events in the universe, solar eclipses may lead to the
When the sun, moon and the earth are
Some spiders start breaking
Once it
Most of us never forget the person that was there for us in our darkest times. Apparently, penguins (企鹅) don’t either.
On a typical day, off the coast of a small Brazilian island, Joao Pereira de Souza headed out fishing. He was disheartened to find that an oil leak had polluted the waters. Staring out at the oily waves, he decided it was not a good day to fish. But walking on the beach that day, he found a struggling penguin, covered in oil and starving.
Joao took the penguin home, and spent a whole week gently cleaning it and nursing it back to health. He named it Dindim, a Portuguese word meaning “ice pop”. Dindim is a Magellanic penguin, a species known for living in the seas of South America. In order to breed (繁殖), they must return to Patagonia, 5,000 miles from Joao’s home.
After a week of rehabilitation (康复), Joao patiently took Dindim back to the sea and taught it how to swim again. When Dindim could swim quite well, Joao took it out into the sea by boat and dropped it off to encourage it to swim back to its home. But when he was back to shore, he found the penguin waiting for him. Joao made two more attempts later, but each time the bird would just return to Joao’s home. It seemed that Dindim had already formed a family bond with Joao and wouldn’t leave.
Joao had no choice but to keep the little creature. During the following months, Dindim would follow behind Joao to fish on the coast joyfully. Dindim also liked to lie on Joao’s lap, letting Joao give it showers, allowing Joao to feed it fish and to pick it up. Joao and his family enjoyed the company of Dindim. But deep inside Joao’s heart, he knew Dindim belonged to the wild. Gradually, the hot summer days witnessed the change of its new feathers. Was it time to say “goodbye”?
注意：
1. 续写词数成为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Suddenly one morning, Joao found Dindim disappeared.
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A few months later, Joao heard some familiar cries in his backyard.
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8 . With no special equipment, no fences and no watering, two abandoned agricultural fields in the UK have been rewilded (重新野化), in large part due to the efforts of jays, which actually “engineered” these new woodlands. Researchers now hope that rewilding projects can take a more natural and hands-off approach and that jays can shed some of their bad reputations.
The two fields, which researchers have called the New Wilderness and the Old Wilderness, had been abandoned in 1996 and 1961 respectively. The former was a bare field, while the latter was grassland—both lay next to ancient woodlands. Researchers had suspected that the fields would gradually return to wilderness, but it was impressive to see just how quickly this happened, and how much of it was owed to birds.
Using aerial data, the researchers monitored the two sites. After just 24 years, the New Wilderness had grown into a young, healthy wood with 132 live trees per hectare, over half of which (57%) were oaks. Meanwhile, the Old Wilderness resembled a mature woodland after 39 years, with 390 trees per hectare.
“This native woodland restoration was approaching the structure (but not the species composition) of long-established woodlands within six decades,” the researchers explained in the study.
Part of this reforestation was done by the wind, and researchers suspect that previous ground disturbance may have aided the woodland establishment—which is good news, as it would suggest that agricultural areas may be reforested faster than anticipated. However, animals—Eurasian jays, thrushes, wood mice, and squirrels—also played an important role in helping the forests take shape. This handful of species provided much of the natural regeneration needed for the forest to develop. Jays, in particular, seem to have done a lot of heavy lifting.
1. What does the underlined word “shed” in Paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Be opposed to. |
| B．Be ashamed of. |
| C．Get used to. |
| D．Get rid of. |
| A．The scale of the woodlands. |
| B．The diversity of the fields. |
| C．The rate of the changes. |
| D．The frequency of the wilderness. |
| A．The woodland restoration was approaching the structure of long-established ones. |
| B．Much of the wilderness of the fields was owed to birds. |
| C．Previous ground disturbance aided the woodland establishment. |
| D．How quickly the fields returned to wilderness over time. |
| A．The essential role of humans in the reforestation. |
| B．The factors that contribute to the reforestation. |
| C．The importance of woodland establishment. |
| D．The threats faced by a handful of wild animals. |
9 . Sammie Vance approached her principal at Haley Elementary with the idea of installing “buddy benches” into her school playground to help others feel less lonely. The principal
Pretty soon, Sammie’s Buddy Bench Project began commanding the
This is, of course, not just a beautiful story about helping others. It’s also a major win for
| A．complained | B．allowed | C．approved | D．spoke |
| A．costly | B．heavy | C．productive | D．valueless |
| A．reviewed | B．recreated | C．removed | D．recycled |
| A．kept track of | B．reached out to | C．sang high praises for | D．got rid of |
| A．Unfortunately | B．Accordingly | C．Apparently | D．Eventually |
| A．born | B．promoted | C．obtained | D．commented |
| A．attraction | B．attention | C．acceptance | D．admission |
| A．campaigns | B．contests | C．assemblies | D．awards |
| A．nicknamed | B．introduced | C．defined | D．named |
| A．the other day | B．to date | C．by then | D．until recently |
| A．sustainability | B．changeability | C．adaptability | D．visibility |
| A．though | B．as | C．if | D．when |
| A．combined | B．mixed | C．involved | D．fitted |
| A．fields | B．walls | C．oceans | D．rains |
| A．explanations | B．questions | C．ways | D．causes |
“Sun, sun, sun, here it comes…”
Danny sang while his fingers pressed and pulled skillfully at the guitar strings, delivering a slow and peaceful tune. A circle of audience had formed, nodding and moving slowly to the song.
Lying at the feet of the street performer was his most adoring fan: One-Eyed, a white stray (流浪) dog with pieces of brown. Danny felt the name was suitable considering its physical disability. Usually, One-Eyed would bark loudly as Danny performed. Much to his annoyance, people often mistook the pair as owner and pet. At this time, Danny would reply, “My dog? No!”, eyes rolling at the idea. How he wished the dog would leave him alone instead!
On a snowy night, while Danny was performing, a bird flew downward, landing into the midst of the crowd. It cooed happily as if to harmonize with Danny. Unfortunately, that did not sit well with One-Eyed, which immediately bounced at it and the bird flew away desperately.
The unexpected chaos upturned Danny's hat, which could have been filled with notes and coins from his appreciative audience, leaving it ignored on the ground. "Argh! The hateful dog!” Danny broke down, thinking to himself, “Either the dog goes or I go!”
On the next night, Danny tried to find a new place and chanced upon the park. For a while his earnings were good unsurprisingly as there was a steady flow of visitors. However, that didn't last long. One-Eyed came along and appointed itself as Danny's guardian. "Argh! Here comes the hateful dog again!" That night, Danny hadn't made enough money he should have, all thanks to the troublesome dog.
Danny was almost mad with One-Eyed. “What should I do? Call an animal shelter?” Torn by this problem, he walked aimlessly by the lake of the park. With all his mind focused on how to get rid of the dog, Danny didn't watch his steps. Suddenly, he slipped and fell into the lake accidentally. Struggling in the icy water, he cried for help desperately, almost choking to death. Sensing the approach of death, Danny got into overwhelming panic.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Just then, a familiar barking was heard in the distance.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________“My hero! Thank you for saving me,” Danny said gratefully with watery eyes.
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