1 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

The Mystery of Hibernation

What do bears, bats and frogs have in common? They all hibernate.

Hibernation is a state often compared to sleep.    1    usually occurs in winter, when a creature does not move for weeks or months continuously. Creatures hibernate    2    (survive) the cold weather and the absence of food.

A typical example of a hibernating creature is the bat. When winter     3    (come), bats find a safe place in a cave.     4    (look) like they are dead, they hang upside down. Their pulse and breathing rates greatly slow down. Their body temperatures drop as well. These things help them save energy during long winters     5    it is difficult to find food.

Frogs,     6    many amphibians, also hibernate when it gets cold. After digging deep into the mud at the bottom of     7    pond, they do not stir again until it is warm. During hibernation, they breathe through their skins, not their mouths.

Another hibernating creature is the bear. In contrast to other creatures, hibernating bears do not appear     8     they are dead, but seem as though they are very sleepy. If they     9    (disturb) during hibernation, they can get up very quickly. While hibernating, bears stay in their dens,     10    are filled with leaves to make their stay more comfortable and warmer. In spring, having awakened, they leave their dens, thin and hungry.

2 . 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 more word than you need.

A. wraps       B. poorly       C. generating       D. incomplete       E. sufficient       F. further G. Compressing       H. heats       I. uncertainty       J. pressurize       K. drowned

Neptune Rains Diamonds, and Now We Might Finally Know How

Deep within the hearts of Neptune and Uranus, it could be raining diamonds. Now, scientists have produced new experimental evidence showing how this could be possible.

The hypothesis goes that the intense heat and pressure thousands of kilometres below the surface of these ice giants should split apart hydrocarbon compounds, with the carbon    1     into diamond and sinking even deeper towards the planetary cores.

The new experiment used the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS)X-ray laser for the most precise measurements yet of how this “diamond rain” process should occur-and found that carbon transitions directly into crystalline diamond.

Neptune and Uranus are the most    2     understood planets in the solar system. They are extremely far—only a single space probe, Voyager 2, has even been close to them, and only for a flyby, not a dedicated long-term mission.

The atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus are primarily made up of hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane. Below these atmospheric layers, a superhot, superdense fluid of “icy” materials such as water, methane, and ammonia    3     the planet’s core.

And calculations and experiments dating back decades have shown that, with    4     pressure and temperature, methane can be broken down into diamonds—suggesting that diamonds can form within this hot, dense material.

A previous experiment led by physicist Dominik Kraus used X-ray diffraction to demonstrate it. Now Kraus and his team have taken their research a step    5     . “We now have a very promising new approach based on X-ray scattering,” Kraus said about their latest efforts. “Our experiments are delivering important model parameters where, before, we only had massive    6    . The more exoplanets we discover, the more relevant this will become.”

It’s challenging to replicate the interiors of giant planets here on Earth. The first step is to heat and    7     the material to replicate the conditions inside Neptune at a depth of around 10, 000 kilometers: pulses of optical laser are     8     shockwaves in the polystyrene(聚苯乙烯), which    9     the material up to around 5, 000 kelvin. It also creates intense pressure.

In the previous experiment, X-ray diffraction(衍射)was used to then probe the material. This works well for materials with crystalline structures, but less so with non-crystalline molecules, so the picture was    10     In the new experiment, the team used a different method, measuring how X-rays scattered off electrons in the polystyrene.

This allowed them not just to observe the conversion of carbon into diamond, but also what happens to the rest of the sample-it splits off into hydrogen. And there’s pretty much no leftover carbon.

3 . When John Todd was a child, he loved to explore the woods around his house, observing how nature solved problems. A dirty stream, for example, often became clear after flowing through plants and along rocks where tiny creatures lived. When he got older, John started to wonder if this process could be used to clean up the messes people were making.

After studying agriculture, medicine, and fisheries in college, John went back to observing nature and asking questions. Why can certain plants trap harmful bacteria (细菌)? Which kinds of fish can eat cancer-causing chemicals? With the right combination of animals and plants, he figured, maybe he could clean up waste the way nature did. He decided to build what he would later call an eco-machine.

The task John set for himself was to remove harmful substances from some sludge (污泥). First, he constructed a series of clear fiberglass tanks connected to each other. Then he went around to local ponds and streams and brought back some plants and animals. He placed them in the tanks and waited. Little by little, these different kinds of life got used to one another and formed their own ecosystem. After a few weeks, John added the sludge.

He was amazed at the results. The plants and animals in the eco-machine took the sludge as food and began to eat it! Within weeks, it had all been digested, and all that was left was pure water.

Over the years, John has taken on many big jobs. He developed a greenhouse — like facility that treated sewage (污水) from 1,600 homes in South Burlington. He also designed an eco-machine to clean canal water in Fuzhou, a city in southeast China.

“Ecological design” is the name John gives to what he does. “Life on Earth is kind of a box of spare parts for the inventor,” he says. “You put organisms in new relationships and observe what’s happening. Then you let these new systems develop their own ways to self-repair.”

1. What can we learn about John from the first two paragraphs?

A．He was fond of traveling.	B．He enjoyed being alone.
C．He had an inquiring mind.	D．He longed to be a doctor.

2. Why did John put the sludge into the tanks?

A．To feed the animals.	B．To build an ecosystem.
C．To protect the plants.	D．To test the eco-machine.

3. What is the author’s purpose in mentioning Fuzhou?

A．To review John’s research plans.	B．To show an application of John’s idea.
C．To compare John’s different jobs.	D．To erase doubts about John’s invention.

4. What is the basis for John’s work?

A．Nature can repair itself.	B．Organisms need water to survive.
C．Life on Earth is diverse.	D．Most tiny creatures live in groups.

4 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Recently, videos     1     (show) bees in a plastic box drop from the air the moment lights are turned off have circulated (流传) on the Internet. Most people take     2     for granted that for those bees dropping is more dangerous     3     keeping flying. However, it’s not true.

This could link to how bees use the sun’s position     4     (guide) their way back, so once the sun sets, they     5     (immediate) stop moving. Another theory suggests it is a prey (猎物) response, with shade from a large predator (捕食者) above them resulting in bees dropping from the air and falling to the ground,     6     they would have less chance of being spotted.

Either way, such strange behavior of bees is     7     (fascinate) to look at. Some bees have adapted to flying at night, possibly as there is less competition from other     8     (insect). However, whether bees can see in the dark depends on how “night” and “dark”     9     (understand), as some animals can see at night because they have eyes     10     (accustom) to low lighting, while dark can mean a total absence of light.

5 . Directions: After reading the passages below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Fresh warning sounded on plastics problem

Walk along any beach in the world, no matter how isolated, and you will see plastic of some kind washed up on the shoreline,     1    (offer) a reminder of the reckless throwaway culture of the present-day world.

Lately, a study     2     (sound) a fresh warning on the damage caused to the marine ecosystem due to discarded plastics, which eventually has a bearing on human health due to the seafood we consume.

In a paper     3    (title) “A Growing Plastic Smog” published on March 8, 2023 in the peer-reviewed research journal Plos One, researchers called on governments around the world     4    (take) sweeping action to address the “unprecedented plastic pollution” of the world’s oceans.

The plastics break down over time into minute particles that cannot be detected by the naked eye, but find their way into the marine ecosystem and into the seafood humans consume. No one knows for certain     5     the long-term damage will be to marine life and humans, but the study placed much of the blame on the plastics industry for failing to recycle or design for recyclability. “    6     eaten, microplastics can severely damage an animal’s internal tissues. Globally, we have reached a situation     7     we can no longer ignore the plastic pollution pandemic that is infecting our oceans,” he said.

“This research shows us that beach cleanups and citizen science projects that focus on the environmental fate of plastics have little impact on solving the enormity of the plastic problem. Marcus Eriksen, lead author of the study, said in a statement that the findings were a “stark warning     8     we must act now at a global scale”. “We’ve found an alarming trend of exponential growth of microplastics in the global ocean since the millennium, which     9    (expect) to reach over 170 trillion plastic particles,” said Eriksen, adding that the exponential increase in microplastics across the world’s oceans makes     10     necessary to “bring in an age of corporate responsibility for the entire life of the things they make”.

6 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．How to handle spiders.

B．Spiders in the United States.

C．People’s fear of spiders.

D．A special kind of spider.

2.

A．Most spiders will not bite even when handled.

B．Most spiders are poisonous and dangerous.

C．Most spiders are likely to attack people.

D．Most spiders have sharp eyes.

3.

A．Because she cannot find a husband for herself.

B．Because the female spider is larger than the male one.

C．Because the female spider often eats her husband.

D．Because she is a black female spider.

7 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Worst man extinctions may have been caused by rising mountains

The birth of a mountain range in     1     is now South Africa may have helped to drive one of the most severe mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

The Permian extinction     2    (strike) about 252 million years ago. It is traditionally thought     3    (wipe) out at least 80 percent of species in the sea and on land.

But we have discovered that another mass extinction happened not long before, with most of the land extinctions happening during the     4    (early) period, roughly 260 million years ago at the end of the Capitanian Age by leaving ecosystems depleted of species,     5    (make) them vulnerable to disruptions from the volcanic eruptions.

The extinction on land was huge, says Spencer Lucas at the New Mexico museum of Natural History. The team he led studied the fossilized teeth of DiictodonFelikeys,     6     plant-eating, mammal-like reptile that was common at that time. But there was no sign     7     temperatures rose during that period. The team was puzzled     8     they realized the fossils     9    (date) back to that period belonged to South Africa’s Cape Fold mountains, which may once have been as the Himalayas are today.

The mountains could have stopped moisture     10     the sea reaching Pangaea’s interior, thus leading to drying and ultimately die-offs — without a corresponding increase in temperature.

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

A. applications	B. connections	C. emotions	D. identify	E. intervene	F. notifications
G. sacred	H. shared	I. specialize	J. stressed	K. technological

Animal Communication

Many pet owners long to talk with their animals. After all, if pets were able to talk, people could take care of them more easily and have closer emotional     1     to them, so a number of companies are working on devices and apps that could translate what animals say.

One such app is called MeowTalk. Using voice recognition software, this app recognizes different sounds a cat makes and offers English translations of them. For example, one type of sound might mean “feed me” while another could be translated “let me outside.” The app can use machine learning to assess its translations and improve at recognizing one particular cat’s voice. In other words, it can     2     in understanding your cat in particular. This is important because cats do not all have a(n)     3     language, but individual cats frequently use particular sounds to mean certain things.

In the future, MeowTalk could connect to a smart collar that would hear the cat meow and play the translation out loud. Perhaps if the cat is outside and needs to be let in, it could even send     4     to the owner’s phone.

For dogs, a Japanese company called Inupathy has developed a harness (保护带) with a heart rate monitor and an app. The heart rate monitor is used to assess a dog’s     5    . This is possible because, like humans, dogs’ heart rates go up when they are excited or     6    . The harness also has a light that turns red when the dog is excited, but when the dog is relaxed, the light is blue.

The most obvious use of this technology is to help pet owners     7     with and provide for their pets better. The more owners know about their pets, the easier it is to meet their needs.

There are other     8     of technology that help us understand animals. For example, some sheep farmers are using artificial intelligence to scan and determine if they are in pain, which helps them find out sick animals. As a result, they can     9     more quickly to treat the animal.

Anyone who interacts regularly with animals could benefit from understanding their animals better. Thus these     10     developments might transform the way we interact with the creatures around us.

9 . 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. associated     B. relaxation        C. outlook       D. urged     E. harmony     F. motivated G. exaggerating     H. contrary        I. track          J. equivalent     K. convinced

In 1865 The Great Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted looked out over the Yosemite Valley and saw a place worth saving. He     1     the California legislature to protect it from crazy development. Olmsted had already designed Central Park City; he was     2     that beautiful green spaces should exist for all people to enjoy. “It is a scientific fact,” he wrote, “that the occasional observation of natural scene of an impressive character…is favorable to the health and vigor of men and especially to the health and vigor of their intellect.”

Olmsted was     3     ; his claim was based less on science than on intuition. But it was intuition with a long history. It went back at least to Cyrus the Great, who some 2500 years ago built gardens for     4     in the busy capital of Persia. Paracelsus, the 16^th century German-Swiss physician, gave voice to that same intuition when he wrote, “that art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician.” In 1798, sitting on the banks of the River Wye, William Wordsworth marveled at how “an eye made quiet by the power of     5     ” offered relief from “the fever of the world” . American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir inherited that     6     along with Olmsted, they built the spiritual and emotional case for creating the world’s first national parks by claiming that nature had healing powers.

There wasn’t much evidence then—but there is now:     7     by large-scale public health problems such as obesity, depression, and persuasive nearsightedness, all clearly     8     with time spent indoors. Strayer and other scientists are looking with renewed interest at how nature affects our brains and bodies.

In England researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School recently analyzed mental health data from 10000 city dwellers and used high resolution mapping to     9     where the subjects had lived over 18 years. They found that people living near more green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment (all of which are also correlated with health). In 2016 an international team overlaid health questionnaire responses from more than 31000 Toronto residents onto a map of the city, block by block. Those living on blocks with more trees showed a boost in heart and metabolic health     10     to what one would experience from a $20000 gain in income. Lower mortality and fewer stress hormones circulating in the blood have also been connected to living close to green space.

10 . In 1985, scientists reported a change in the atmosphere, a hole or thinning of ozone (臭氧) over Antarctica. Scientists were not sure what was causing.

Most scientists believe that man-made chemicals are destroying the ozone. They also have found signs of ozone loss in other parts of the atmosphere.

Ozone is found both in the air we breathe and in the upper atmosphere. Near the earth, ozone in the air is a danger to life. It is a waste product. But ozone found 10 to 50 kilometres up in the atmosphere protects life on earth. Ozone forms in the atmosphere through the action of solar radiation (太阳辐射). Once formed, the ozone blocks harmful radiation from reaching the earth. Scientists say a reduction in ozone and an increase in the harmful radiation will cause many more cases of skin cancer and will harm crops, animals and fishes.

The report said it is about 8 degrees colder 15 kilometres above earth than it was in 1979. Scientists think the first loss of ozone reduces the amount of solar energy the atmosphere can take in. This cools the atmosphere, increases ice cloud production and leads to more ozone loss.

Scientists found signs the ozone problem has spread. The study shows that the loss of ozone over the areas with larger population in North America and Europe was at least three times greater than scientists had thought. The ozone levels reduced much more seriously during winter months than in warmer months. This is not surprising because the amount of ozone in the atmosphere changes with the temperature.

An international effort is being made to stop the loss of ozone in the atmosphere. But many experts fear that the effort will not produce results fast enough to prevent harm to life on the earth.

1. The passage is mainly about ______.

A．a change in atmosphere

B．the solar radiation

C．the ozone problem

D．a hole in Antarctica

2. According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?

A．Ozone in the atmosphere is a danger to life.

B．Since ozone in the air is harmful to life, the less ozone in the atmosphere the better.

C．Ozone is a kind of man-made chemical product.

D．The ozone up above us can stop harmful radiation from getting to the earth.

3. From the passage we learn that ______.

A．the scientists have done a great deal to stop the earth getting warm

B．the temperature in 1979 was much colder than it is now

C．ozone holds solar energy and helps atmosphere take it in

D．successful efforts have been made to stop the loss of the ozone

4. This passage mainly wants to ______.

A．draw people’s interest in atmosphere

B．call the public attention to ozone problem

C．help people to know the change in air

D．tell people some information about atmosphere