1 . People love to hate on pigeons (鸽子) for the way they mess up parked cars or rush to food scraps on the sidewalk. But with more than 300 species of wild pigeon found on Earth-many of them amazing it’s time to truly understand the animal. “Pigeons are biological wonders,” says Rosemary Mosco, author of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching. “They can take off almost vertically (垂直地). They see colors we can’t, hear sounds we can’t, and find their way across hundreds of miles using ways we don’t fully understand,” she says. “They’re the world’s most overlooked birds.”
Pigeons are unbelievably complex and intelligent animals. They are one of only a small number of species to pass the “mirror test” a test of self-recognition. They can also recognize each letter of the human alphabet, differentiate between photographs, and even distinguish different humans within a photograph. Besides, pigeons are known for their outstanding navigational abilities. They use a range of skills, such as using the sun as a guide and an internal “magnetic compass (指南针)”. A study at Oxford University found that they will also use landmarks as signposts and will travel along man-made roads and motorways, even changing direction at crossroads. Pigeons also have excellent hearing abilities. They can detect sounds at far lower frequencies than humans are able to, and can thus hear distant storms and volcanoes.
Despite the social idea as dirty and disease-ridden, pigeons are actually very clean animals and there is very little evidence to suggest that they are spreading disease. Pigeons and humans have lived in close relationship for thousands of years. Although pigeon droppings are seen by some as a problem in modern society, a few centuries ago they were seen as extremely valuable. They were viewed as the best available fertilizers (肥料) and armed guards would even stand by pigeon houses to stop others taking the droppings.
1. What can we know about pigeons from paragraph 1?| A．They do great harm to people. |
| B．They are still unknown to people. |
| C．They are the world’s most amazing birds. |
| D．They have abilities beyond people’s imagination. |
| A．The ability to see colors. |
| B．The ability to detect sounds. |
| C．The ability to guide directions. |
| D．The ability to recognize photographs. |
| A．Pigeons’ hearing. | B．Pigeons’ differences. |
| C．Pigeons’ qualities. | D．Pigeons’ intelligence. |
| A．Pigeons are dangerous. | B．Pigeons are priceless. |
| C．Pigeon waste is valuable. | D．Pigeon waste is poisonous. |
2 . Mr. Asada is just one of many growers in Shizuoka, one of Japan’s largest wasabi-growing(山葵种植)regions, who must face rising challenges from global warming and the effect of untended forests. Already. these hazards have gradually weakened the centuries-old culture of wasabi in the area and damaged the future of one of the area’s most important agricultural products and its tourism business.
Over the last decade, the number of wasabi produced in Shizuoka has dropped by close to 55 percent, according to the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The wasabi that comes in tubes and packets is actually a mixture of wasabi and horseradish(辣根)—or includes no wasabi at all. These days. almost only expensive restaurants have access to fresh wasabi. giving their customers a chance to experience the unique flavor and traditional culture of wasabi.
Wasabi plants grow up in spring water that flows down from the mountains, helping to improve their flavor and sweetness. Over time. local growers say, the spring water has worsened in quality due to a large number of cypress trees which grow like crazy in the untended forests.
Global warming has upset the balance even further. The delicate wasabi plants, which take more than a year to be full-grown, do best in conditions no higher than about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. In recent years, heat waves in Japan have regularly pushed temperatures into the 90s and even above 100 degrees. causing more stems to rot.
Government researchers and local growers have started to experiment with crossbreeding in an effort to develop better wasabi varieties that will grow strong even in the rising heat. The challenge is that. unlike with other crops such as cucumbers or tomatoes. getting seeds and growing seedlings from wasabi requires advanced technology. Most growers rely on specialized companies to clone seedlings in labs and greenhouses. Crossbreeding new varieties needs difficult pollination(授粉)efforts, and most of all. time.
1. What’s the meaning of the underlined word “hazards” in paragraph 1?| A．signals | B．adventures |
| C．threats | D．measures |
| A．It is popular in Japan. | B．It likes high temperature. |
| C．It is damaged by the cypress trees. | D．It will develop into new species very soon. |
| A．They attempt to get seeds from wasabi. |
| B．They make efforts to develop species standing the heat. |
| C．They depend on companies to clone seedlings. |
| D．They help complete the process of pollination. |
| A．Wasabi under severe threats | B．Global warming risks wasabi |
| C．Wasabi—a popular food choice | D．Researchers and growers are saving wasabi |
3 . Any 25th birthday is a cause for celebration. But it was even more so for Janus, a two-headed Greek tortoise (龟). Living in the Natural History Museum of Geneva, Switzerland, Janus is now believed to be the world’s oldest two-headed tortoise. The museum celebrated the special occasion with a day-long party filled with fun events, which included taking photos with the birthday “boy”.
In the wild, Greek tortoises can live up to two hundred years in their natural habitat. However, two-headed tortoises, like Janus, usually do not survive for that long. Unlike normal tortoises, they are unable to take back their two heads into their shell, making them highly easy to be attacked.
Janus, who has spent his entire life in the museum, faces no such danger. But life is not without challenges for the two-headed tortoise who also has two hearts and two pair s of lungs. Each head controls the front and back legs on its side of the body. The right head is more curious and more awake. The left head is more passive and loves to eat. This can lead to confusion when the two heads decide to go in different directions. To make matters worse, the two heads frequently rub against each other, resulting in skin sores (溃疡). Janus also has a hard time rolling back onto his feet when he accidentally turns over. If left on their backs for too long, tortoises can get sunburned, dehydrated (脱水的) and even die.
Fortunately, Janus has a special caregiver, Angelica Bourgoin, to make sure he lives along and health y life. The tortoise receives a daily massage and is bathed in green tea and flower water. He eats a special diet of organic fruits and vegetables, keeps active with walks, and rides on his custom skateboard. With such loving care, the two-headed tortoise will surely continue to break many more records for long life.
1. Why is it hard for two-headed tortoises to survive in the wild?| A．They can’t avoid biting each other. |
| B．They can’t find enough food to eat. |
| C．They can’t hide from their enemies. |
| D．They can’t run as fast as normal ones. |
| A．In the museum. | B．In a pet store. |
| C．In the ocean. | D．In Bourgoin’s home. |
| A．Different decisions. | B．The death of thirst. |
| C．The pain on his skin. | D．Two halves of body. |
| A．Free. | B．Tough. | C．Boring. | D．Easy. |
Alexis Langlois, who manages a large farm, heard her neighbor crazily knocking on her front door on a Monday afternoon.
“There’s an emergency”, Amber Countryman yelled. “The horses are stuck in the water.” Langlois was struck with “absolute panic”. She threw on her winter boots — without socks — and rushed toward the small pond on the 80-acre property. She was surprised by what she saw: four horses were in the water up to their necks in 10 feet of ice water.
She immediately called 911.While waiting for help to arrive, “people just started showing up,” she said. “Neighbors were pouring in. People came with ropes, chainsaws, shovels and pick axes.”
“I grabbed a bunch of supplies,” said Countryman, whose two teenagers and their friend also as sited with the effort.
“It was-8℃that day,” she said, adding that she brought out handwarmers and water for the helpers.
Everyone was determined to get the horses out of the pond — which is about 15feetwide.
Beneath a six-inch layer of ice, the water was “just barely above freezing”, said Chris Yerkes, the South Kalispell Fire Department chief who rushed to the pond with about a dozen volunteer personnel.
When the firefighters arrived, neighbors had already attempted to pave a path through the ice toward the edge of the pond using pick axes, sledgehammers and shovels, and “we continued with that effort.” Yerkes said. Unfortunately, “as we got closer to the edge, we realized there was about three to four inches of mud.”
The thick layer of mud — which the rescuers couldn’t cut through — blocked the horses from climbing out. Firefighters enlisted additional support from Flathead County Animal Control, as well as staff from local equestrian organization Rebecca Farm.
“There had to have been at least 60 people here,” Langlois said. “It was very swift action on everybody’s part.”
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。
Paragraph 1
It took nearly two hours to find a workable solution that could bring all four horses to safety.
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Paragraph 2
To get the horses out, they used a powerful tractor (拖拉机) to get the animals out of the mud and ropes to pull them over the edge.
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One solar term gives way to another as summer takes hold. After Xiao man, or “grain buds”, it’s time for Mang zhong, or “grain in ear”,
Mang refers to the thistle (蓟) on the seeds of grain plants and zhong refers to harvesting and sowing,
In Chinese, mang has the same
Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi described the busy scene of people
6 . Sixty-six years ago, there was one human-built object in Earth’s orbit. It was Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, launched in October 1957. Try to guess how many human-made objects are circling the planet now. Ready?
Your answer is wrong, unless you guessed 100 trillion. That’s a jaw-dropping number. It was provided by an international team of researchers writing in the journal Science. For years, this junk has formed an ever-growing mass near Earth. It’s a danger to spacecraft. The researchers are calling for a global treaty to limit the number of satellites and the amount of rubbish in space.
There are 9,000 active satellites in orbit, the scientists report. That could grow to more than 60,000 by 2030. The rest of that 100 trillion figure includes everything from used-up booster rockets and stray bolts to metal flecks and paint chips. Don’t think a paint chip is harmless. Travelling at 17,500 miles per hour, it can strike a spacecraft hard. The International Space Station is dotted with dents and holes. Astronauts often take shelter in an attached spacecraft to wait out a passing swarm of space debris (残骸). That way, if the station is severely damaged, they can escape in a hurry.
The mess we’ve made in space is like the mess we’ve made in the oceans. Think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s a mass of floating junk twice the size of Texas. We’ve had centuries to make the ocean dirty. But it has taken just decades for us to do the same in space. That’s why the Science authors include experts in satellite technology and in ocean plastic pollution. “As a marine biologist, I never imagined writing a paper on space,” writes Heather Koldewey, who works at the Zoological Society of London. Cleaning up space, she says, has a lot in common “with the challenges of tackling environmental issues in the ocean.”
Coauthor Moriba Jah is an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Marine debris and space debris,” he writes, “are both a human-made damage that is unavoidable.”
1. Why is Sputnik mentioned in paragraph 1?| A．To provide background information. |
| B．To introduce the topic. |
| C．To make a comparison. |
| D．To tell a story. |
| A．What caused space debris. |
| B．The number of space debris. |
| C．The seriousness of space pollution. |
| D．What astronauts often do in space. |
| A．Ocean pollution is very serious. |
| B．Ocean is the same as space. |
| C．Space pollution is getting worse. |
| D．She is going to write a paper on space. |
| A．There is the same amount of marine debris and space debris. |
| B．Humans are to blame for the space pollution. |
| C．Marine and space pollution are unavoidable. |
| D．Humans can do nothing to prevent space pollution. |
1. What does the speaker probably do?
| A．A firefighter. | B．A plane designer. | C．A news reporter. |
| A．From a river. | B．From a lake. | C．From the Fire Center. |
| A．It’s time-wasting. | B．It’s quite easy. | C．It’s dangerous. |
| A．It has been put out. | B．It lasted 20 hours. | C．It is still spreading. |
The African penguin is expected to go extinct in the wild in just over a decade, given its current population decline. The main reason is a lack of food caused by disturbance to ocean conditions from global heating and
1.活动基本信息；
2.活动的意义。
注意：
1.写作词数应为80左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Planting in My School
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10 . On one October morning in 2021, Mark A. Michaels was observing a tree in a forest when he spotted a bird flying below the branches about 50 yards away. Based on the bird’s size and long neck, Michaels first assumed he was looking at a duck. But then he noticed it occasionally folding its wings during flight, something he says that ducks don’t do — but woodpeckers do. “Ivory-bill!” he recalls shouting, now certain that the bird was an ivory-billed woodpecker (象牙喙啄木鸟), a species that hasn’t been identified in the wild since 1944.
Despite his certainty, not everyone agrees this woodpecker remains in the wild. In September 2021, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) claimed that the ivory-billed woodpecker, along with 22 other species, is extinct. However, the data supporting the idea are debated. Debatable evidence presented at a meeting in January 2022 convinced USFWS that disagreement among scientists as to the ivory-billed woodpecker’s existence was considerable enough. As a result, on July 6, the agency issued a pause of extinction.
The ongoing case highlights some of the challenges researchers face in determining whether a species has actually gone extinct. According to guidelines issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an organization that tracks species’ protection statuses, a species is extinct when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died. “But researchers typically don’t know when or if that last death has occurred,” says H. Resit Akcakaya, an ecologist at Stony Brook University.
Moreover, there are costs to making the wrong call about a species’ existence in the wild, he adds. Continuing to regard an actually extinct species as endangered can lead to undervalued extinction rates, and confuse the bigger protection picture, as well as misdirect financial resources away from protecting endangered species to searching for ones that no longer exist. On the other hand, declaring something extinct when it really isn’t can lead to further harm on a struggling species.
1. What convinced Mark that the bird was an ivory-billed woodpecker?| A．Its unique way of flight. | B．Its special living conditions. |
| C．Its similar appearance to ducks. | D．Its disappearance from the wild. |
| A．USFWS is heatedly debating with the public. |
| B．The ivory-billed woodpecker has a high status |
| C．Mark is certain about his discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker. |
| D．Disagreement about the ivory-billed woodpecker’s existence is huge. |
| A．IUCN’s guidelines are practical and reasonable. |
| B．Researchers should track species’ conservation statuses. |
| C．The last death of an ivory-billed woodpecker has occurred. |
| D．It’s difficult to determine whether a species is extinct or not. |
| A．Determining a species’s existence will cost lots of money. |
| B．Numerous pictures of endangered species have been taken |
| C．Determining a species’s existence without mistakes is important. |
| D．Financial resources are removed from protecting endangered species. |
