1 .

A．It will cool down a bit over the weekend.

B．He hopes the weather forecast is accurate.

C．Swimming in a pool has a relieving effect.

D．Summer has become hotter in recent years.

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 word more than you need.

A. houses   B. approaching   C. appear   D. talent   E. exclusively F. lowered   G. hiding   H. limits   I. dramatically   J. natural   K. sensitive

Dolphin Senses

New research involving trained dolphins seems to further prove that these animals can sense electricity. The     1     may allow them to better lock onto hidden fish hunted and direct the path.

The ability to sense electric fields is known as electroreception(电感受). All animals produce a weak electric field, but electroreception has almost     2     been found in water creatures. About a decade ago, scientists published research suggesting that some dolphins have passive electroreception. And in 2021, researchers in Germany released their own study finding that dolphins likely have it, too.

This new research is a follow-up to that latter study by the same team—one intended to better describe the     3     of electroreception in bottlenose dolphins. The researchers teamed up with scientists from the Nuremberg Zoo, which currently     4     six dolphins. They specifically worked with two bottlenose dolphins named Donna and Dolly. They first trained them to rest their jaws on a metal bar in the water, and then to respond to an electric field     5     them by swimming away within five seconds. They then gradually     6     the strength of this field to test the dolphins’ sensitivity.

The findings further prove that bottlenose dolphins can indeed sense electricity, but suggest that some dolphins are better at it than others. Donna, for instance, was a bit more     7     and able to respond correctly to a weaker field than Dolly.

The electroreception found in dolphins doesn’t     8     to be as strong as it is in the typical shark, but it’s probably still useful enough for them to find fish     9     underneath sand, stones or mud within a few centimeters away. Other studies have suggested that dolphins also possess a sense that acts as a sort of     10     GPS for them. So these dolphins’ electroreception might provide an explanation for that ability as well, Huttner said.

3 .

A．Return the dog to her relative.	B．Place a ban on dogs.
C．Clean her apartment.	D．Stay with her relative.

4 . 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. carved          B. unknowingly            C. ecosystem          D. artificial          E. elemental F. changing       G. practically        H. wrinkled        I. unmoving          J. species       K. inspection

Magical Creatures: AN APPRECIATION OF AUTUMN MOTH (蛾)

Moths seem to have a bit of a bad reputation: to some they are ill indications or something scary, to others they are dull in comparison to our well-loved butterflies. But moths are an essential part of a(n)     1    , and important food sources for species like birds and bats. And for me, moths are far from dull.

My first meeting with an Angle Shades moth was nearly a non-encounter. I almost passed by without noticing it, thinking it was a fallen leaf on a fence post. But there was something about it that stopped me in my tracks. Its angular shape perhaps? Or the way it sat,     2    , despite the breeze. Closer     3     revealed cream and buff shell-shaped wings, painted with triangles of light pink and brown. Suddenly, it transformed from a(n)     4     leaf into a living thing before my eyes. I’ve been fascinated ever since.

The Canary-shouldered Thorn, with its hairy buttercup-coloured body and yellow and orange wings, reminds me of a fallen silver birch (白桦树) leaf. A night-flyer, it favours gardens and woodlands, and is often drawn to     5     light, meaning that your torch beam may be attracting moths as well as lighting your way in the dark. It’s also worth double-checking any leaves in farm houses, as these sheltered spots are a favourite hiding place of another overwintering     6    : the Herald moth. This elegant creature’s beautiful wings look as though they’ve been     7     by hand and painted with bronze.

There’s more to these imitators than fallen leaves. The Green-spotted Crescent, which     8     disappears on rough branches, has metallic green spots integrating with the moss (苔藓). Maybe I’ve already     9     crossed paths with one, though. As we dig out our big coats and slip on boots for walks beneath branches, how many moths are we missing? These clever creatures aren’t bad indications, but     10     parts of nature, with a gift for fancy-dress.

5 . 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.

A New Orchid was Found in Japan

Nature is full of secrets. There are still many things to find out about it. One of those things was discovered last week in Japan. It is rare to find a new plant in Japan. An amateur naturalist came across a new species of orchid     1     other flowers in Tokyo. Scientists also found the flower elsewhere in other districts, an indication that the new species     2     deserve further investigation.

The newly-found orchid is beautiful. It is pink and white, it has a central stem, around     3     grow tiny, bell-shaped flowers, and its delicate petals (花瓣) look like they are made from glass. The flower is a neighbor to a(n)     4     (relate) orchid species common in Japan.

Sometimes unknown species are often living right under our noses — in parks, gardens and even in planters on balconies. That’s     5     researchers in Japan recently recognized this new species of orchid. Professor Kenji Suetsugu from Kobe University said the discovery of new species in usual places means it is necessary to keep exploring, even in everyday places that     6     (not look) so remarkable.

There are about 28,000 orchid species worldwide. The new orchid belongs to a class called Spiranthes. There are about 50 different kinds of Spiranthes. They are     7     (familiar) kind of orchid in Japan, for they appeared in a Japanese poem dating to 759 AD. Professor Suetsugu said he and his colleagues were “delighted     8     (identify) a new species”. He said it was exciting because it wasn’t found hidden deep in a rainforest or jungle. The discovery of the new orchid is good news. However, many orchids are on the endangered species list due to habitat loss. We need to protect natural environments to stop flowers     9     (disappear). The world will be far less colourful     10     we lose more orchids.

6 . 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. motivate       B. accidentally       C. highlighting       D. plantations       E. engaging F. apparent       G. purpose H. sensitive       I. increasingly       J. decent       K. treat

Ball- Rolling Bumble Bees Just Wanna Have Fun

Playtime isn’ t just for children. Lab- kept bumble bees roll small wooden balls around for no

    1     purpose other than fun, a new study reveals. It supports evidence that bees experience pleasure,    2     the importance of protecting them in the wild and treating them well in their natural habitats.

“It is super cool,” says Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. “We usually think about insects as being so different that they lack complex behaviors.” But not everyone is convinced the behavior is in fact play.

Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, and his colleagues    3     came across the new evidence. The team was studying how bumble bees learn complex behaviors from their comrades by training the insects to move wooden balls to specific locations. If a bee moved a ball to the right place, it got a sugary     4    . The researchers noticed that some bees moved the balls even when no reward was offered. They just seemed to like going back to them and playing around with them and rolling them all over the place. The careful design of the experiments has convinced him the bees are indeed     5     in play.

Because play implies a capacity to experience emotions, documenting it in insects could have    6     implications. Insects are     7     being raised for animal feed, and there are no regulations governing their welfare. Honey bees are also known to become stressed and more     8     to disease and bee communities collapse when industrialized beekeepers transport them long distances on trucks to     9     and vast fields without diverse flowers nearby, Chittka says. The researchers hope their findings might also     10     greater fellow feeling for — and protection of — wild insects.

7 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Plan for Domino Effects on Sustainability Goals

Climate change is causing ever-more-extreme events, from storms and droughts to floods and violent windstorms, and these risks interact across many environmental and social systems. A heatwave can spark forest fires, which lead to air pollution. Drought-wrecked harvests can result in food-price unpredictability.

Yet these domino effects are barely considered in most countries’ strategies for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Many countries that are working hard to reach these goals insufficiently consider the impact of extreme weather. Take Germany as an example. Its 2018 strategy on sustainable development runs to 60 pages yet the word ‘disaster’ appears only once. There is no analysis of the consequences of an increase in such events.

Although many people are now aware that climate change is making fires, floods, heatwaves and storms more frequent, more severe or both, this knowledge isn’t changing policy or research enough. Part of the problem is perception. Future disasters feel unreal to decision-makers, as we’ve experienced with so many governments’ lack of pandemic preparedness, despite years of warning that something similar to COVID-19 was a case of when, not if. Other obstacles are inadequate national and international governance, and communication challenges. The research community has not yet provided effective guidance.

As a consequence, many efforts to achieve the SDGs will, like a house of cards, fall at the first shaking. Our global efforts need to be much more vigorous to the changing and interconnected nature of risk in a warming world.

What now? Researchers must create models that are more understandable and useful to policymakers. When possible, SDG targets and indicators should be redesigned to capture weakness to heatwaves, fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, mudslides and more. And politicians need to be convinced to invest in precautionary measures and adaptation.

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8 . When Carolyn Kurle first visited Alaska’s Hawadax Island, then known as Rat Island, she immediately noticed the silence. “When you’re on an island that’s never had rats, it’s just like birds everywhere — it’s really loud,” she says. “So when you get to an island that does have rats, you really notice because it’s cacophony versus quiet.”

Nowadays Hawadax is once again a noisy place. Roughly a decade after a successful effort to rid the island of its predatory rodents (捕食性啮齿动物), a mass of seabirds has returned. And the benefits have extended across the island’s entire seashore ecosystem, which is again full of diverse life. These findings, published in Scientific Reports, show that certain ecosystems can recover with surprising speed if given the chance.

“This study is an example of something positive that can happen when we humans take action to clean up after ourselves,” says Kurle, who is lead author of the study and a conservation ecologist at the University of California, San Diego. “It also highlights how everything is interlinked, especially in coastal systems.”

The greedy rodents colonized Hawadax after a Japanese shipwreck in the 1780s, and they quickly wiped out seabird communities. Kurle’s first findings, published in 2008, showed that the rats affected not just birds but the entire food chain — all the way down to algae (藻类). Without birds to eat seashore invertebrates (无脊椎动物), populations of snails and other species feeding on plants exploded and consumed much of the marine kelp (巨藻), which provides crucial habitat for other organisms. “Certain invasive species can have impacts beyond those that are most obvious,” Kurle says.

Those early findings inspired the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation, to wipe out the rats by dropping poison on Hawadax. Kurle and her colleagues secured funding to survey the island 5 and 11 years after taking the action. They found that its ecosystem had steadily recovered and now resembles that of other Aleutian Islands that were never invaded by rats, with significantly fewer marine invertebrates and much more kelp cover.

“Very few rat-eradication projects have focused on the impact on marine ecosystems, so the Hawadax Island case is really noteworthy,” says University of Tennessee, Knoxville, ecologist Daniel Simberloff, who was not involved in the study. “This is a very cool, elegant result from an academic ecology standpoint and, of course, is important in terms of conservation.”

1. What does “cacophony” in paragraph 1 most probably mean?

A．Silent night.	B．Messy beach.
C．Limited space.	D．Disagreeable sounds.

2. According to paragraph 4, which of the following can be important for small animals or plants?

A．Greedy rodents.	B．Marine kelp.
C．Seashore invertebrates.	D．Invasive species.

3. The efforts made in the “Hawadax Island Case” include the following EXCEPT ________.

A．setting traps and catching rats

B．raising money for follow-up study

C．joining hands with conservation groups

D．comparing Hawadax with other rat-free islands

4. What is the main idea of this passage?

A．Birds and rats cannot co-exist.

B．Rats are invasive species that must be rooted out.

C．Ecosystem is too delicate to restore itself once disturbed.

D．Removing invaders on land can benefit marine populations.

9 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Rock Climbing — conservationists’ new concern

Now, with its first appearance at this year’s Tokyo Olympics, the once minority sport is set to reach new heights. Yet the popularity of rock climbing and its sister sport, bouldering (where climbers scramble up large rocks without the use of ropes or safety belts), is raising questions about the damaging environmental effects of climbing chalk — a common and essential climbing tool.

Made from magnesium carbonate (碳酸镁), climbing chalk is the same substance that gymnasts and weightlifters use to improve their grasp on bars and weights. In fact, it was first introduced to rock climbing in the 1950s by John Gill. Since then, amateur and professional climbers alike have come to depend on the chalk’s properties of removing water and increasing friction (摩擦力) — and have been leaving long stripes of the stuff on rock faces around the world.

The resulting “chalk graffiti” has become so bad in the United States that parks are beginning to restrict its use. Utah’s Arches National Park allows only colored chalk that mostly matches rocks, while Colorado’s Garden of the Gods National Natural Landmark banned all chalk and chalk substitutes.

Beyond the visual pollution, new research suggests chalk may be harming the plants that grow on rocks. The latest study on the effects of climbing chalk, released October 2020, found that it negatively impacted both the growing and survival of four species of ferns and mosses (蕨类和苔藓) inhabiting rocks in laboratory settings.

That matters because some climbing spots, such as erratic boulders (the study’s focus), host unique ecosystems. These unpredictable boulders — rocks scattered across the globe by large masses of slowly flowing ice at the end of the Ice Age — are islands of vegetation, different from the land they sit on.

It’s not even clear whether chalk improves climbing performance at all. Some papers found no additional grip benefits, while others found the opposite. Some climbers may find it helpful, says Daniel Hepenstrick, a co-author of the 2020 study and a doctoral candidate at ETH Zürich.

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10 . Science may never know what memories play on the mind of the California sea hare, a foot-long marine snail, when it eats algae — a sea plant — in the tide pools of the Pacific coast.

But in a new study, researchers claim to have made headway in understanding the simplest kind of memory a creature might form.

David Glanzman, a neurobiologist at the University of California, believes the kinds of memories that trigger a defensive reaction in the snail are encoded not in the connections between brain cells, as many scientists would argue, but in RNA molecules (分子) that form part of an organism’s genetic machinery.

In an experiment to test the idea, Glanzman implanted wire into the tails of California sea hares, and gave them a series of electrical shocks. The procedure sensitized the animals so that when they were prodded (戳) in a fleshy spout called a siphon, they contracted their gills (鳃状呼吸器官) in a strong defensive action.

After sensitizing the sea snails, Glanzman extracted RNA from the animals and injected it into other sea snails to see what happened. He found the recipient sea snails became sensitized, suggesting the “memory” of the electrical shocks had been transplanted. When Glanzman repeated the experiment with RNA from sea snails that had been hooked up to wires but not shocked, the reaction behavior did not transfer.

Despite the result, the work has not found widespread acceptance. “Obviously further work needs to be carried out to determine whether these changes can happen without failure in a wide range of conditions,” said Prof Sherilynn Vann, who studies memory at Cardiff University. “While the sea hare is a fantastic model for studying basic neuroscience, we must be very cautious in drawing comparisons to human memory processes.”

Tomas Ryan, who studies memory at Trinity College Dublin, is firmly unconvinced. “It’s interesting, but I don’t think they’ve transferred a memory,” he said. “This work tells me that maybe the most basic behavioral responses involve some kind of switch in the animal and there is something in the liquid that Glanzman extracts that is hitting that switch.”

But Ryan added that different thinking about memory was badly needed: “In a field like this which is so full of accepted beliefs, we need as many new ideas as possible. This work takes us down an interesting road, but I have a huge amount of skepticism about it.”

1. Why were the sea hares given electrical shocks?

A．To rob them of their memory.

B．To see how they defend themselves.

C．To break the connection between nerves.

D．To make them sensitive to external stimulations.

2. What conclusion may Glanzman draw from the experiment?

A．Memory can be encoded and changed by people.

B．Only with strong stimulation can sea snails form reaction.

C．The memory giving rise to sea snail’s sensitization is held in RNA.

D．The sea snail’s defense is probably enabled by connectivity of brain cells.

3. According to the passage, the limitations of Glanzman’s experiment involve the following EXCEPT ________.

A．The recipient sea snail’s response may require further confirmation.

B．Variables (变量) in the experiments may not have remained the same.

C．Something else other than RNA in the extract may lead to the recipient’s reaction.

D．The sea snail “memory transplant” may not apply to more complex memory process.

4. The underlined word “skepticism” in the last paragraph is closest in meaning to ________.

A．criticism

B．doubt

C．relief

D．optimism