1 . 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.

2 .

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

3 . 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.

4 . 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.

5 . 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.

6 . 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.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

7 . 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.

8 . I’ve been in an 18-year love-hate relationship with a black walnut tree.

It’s a unique tree. In late September or early October, falling fruits as hard as baseballs threaten the skulls (头骨) of you, your children, your neighbors and those that reside next door to them. Umbrellas in the yard are a must while dining in early August, and as for me, I wear my bike helmet while working in the garden.

The black walnut also releases a chemical substance through its roots as a competitive strategy. It’s poisonous to several common plants. There have been many new plant varieties that I brought home with hopes that maybe the black walnut would accept them, but they failed to flourish.

What does work are native plants that naturally grow in the area. Native plants are important to have around since they provide beneficial pollinators (传粉者) like birds, bees and butterflies with seeds and contribute to a healthy and biodiverse environment. Native plants for this area are generally easy to grow, so they experience less stress.

Have I thought of getting rid of this giant pain in my tiny backyard? Yes, however, getting rid of this tree standing at 50 feet with an 87-inch trunk is next to impossible. It’s also protected under the law. Rightfully so. Trees are important to the urban forest and for all of those that inhabit it.

Sometimes I think about my life without the black walnut. I can’t imagine a spring without the birds who arrive every year and loudly sing their songs before dawn. I’d miss falling asleep on lazy weekend afternoons as I look up into its leaves.

Every spring, I wonder what the season holds: What are the chances of being knocked unconscious while barbecuing? Like any good relationship, I’ll never be pleased. I’m stuck with this tree, so I’ll listen to its needs and give it the space it requires. In return, my walnut offers a habitat for wildlife and a reminder.

1. Why does the author wear a bike helmet while working in the garden?

A．To protect the injured skull.	B．To prevent herself from sunburn.
C．To avoid being hit by the nuts.	D．To reduce the chance of getting bitten by bees.

2. What is the tree’s survival strategy?

A．It attracts beneficial pollinators.

B．It lets out poison to drive away pests.

C．It produces a chemical fatal to some plants.

D．It competes for nutrition with similar species.

3. Which of the following DOESN’T account for the author’s love-hate relationship with the tree?

A．The volume of its fruits may bring inconvenience.

B．The tree outcompetes the native plants in the garden.

C．The tree is home to numerous birds and other creatures.

D．The presence of the tree takes up much space of the garden.

4. The author most probably got a reminder from the tree that ________.

A．it’s better to give than to take

B．trees and plants have their own ways to flourish

C．even a good relationship is not always trouble-free

D．acceptance, instead of resistance, is the better way to be

9 . 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. earth-bound B. repeatedly C. decay D. increasingly E. redirect F. detecting G. complexity H. self-destructing I. exhibit J. protective K. atmosphere

New Effort To Clean Up Space Junk Reaches Orbit (轨道)

A demonstration mission to test an idea to clean up space debris (碎片) was launched Monday morning local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Known as ELSA-d, the mission will     1     technology that could help capture space junk, the millions of pieces of orbital debris that float above Earth.

The more than 8,000 metric tons of debris threaten the loss of services we rely on for     2     life, including weather forecasting, telecommunications and GPS systems.

The spacecraft works by attempting to -attach itself to dead satellites and pushing them toward Earth to burn up in the     3    .

The mission, which will be run from the U.K., will carry out this catch and release process     4     over the course of six months. The goal is to prove the servicer satellite’s ability to track down and remove with its target in varying levels of     5    .

Space junk has been a growing problem for years as human-made objects such as old satellites and spacecraft parts build up in low Earth orbit until they     6    , deorbit, explode or crash with other objects, breaking into smaller pieces of waste.

According to a recent report by NASA, at least 26,000 of the millions of pieces of space junk are orbiting along at 17,500 mph, they could “destroy a satellite on impact”. More than 500,000 pieces are a “mission-ending threat” because of their ability to impact     7     systems, fuel tanks and spacecraft cabins.

The development of other cleanup technologies has been in progress for years. In 2016, Japan’s space agency sent a 700-meter chain into space to try to slow down and     8     space junk. In 2018, a device called RemoveDebris successfully cast a net around a copy satellite.

The European Space Agency also plans to send a(n)     9     robot into orbit in 2025, which the organization’s former director general has referred to as a space “vacuum cleaner”.

These efforts could prove     10     important as private space ventures like SpaceX continue to disorder low Earth orbit with a huge number of satellites.

10 . Humans are not the only ones who underwent self-domestication. So did our close relatives, the bonobos, and the species we call our best friend. A tiny proportion of the genome differentiates dogs from wolves, and yet millions of dogs are comfortably curled up in our homes, while wolves move around at the edge of extinction.

When our research group began its work almost 20 years ago, we discovered that dogs also have extraordinary intelligence: they can read our gestures better than any other species. Wolves, in contrast, are mysterious and unpredictable. Their home is the wilderness, and that wilderness is shrinking.

But not so long ago the evolutionary race between dogs and wolves was so close, it was unclear who would win. Dogs, in fact, did not descend from wolves. Instead, dogs and wolves shared a wolflike ancestor.

Folklore supposes that humans brought wolf puppies into camp and domesticated them. Or as wolf expert David Mech wrote in 1974, “Evidently early humans tamed wolves and domesticated them, eventually selectively breeding them and finally developing the domestic dog from them.” But this story has not held up. Taming an animal occurs during its lifetime. Domestication happens over generations and involves changes to the genome.

So how did wolves turn into dogs? Back in the Ice Age, as our human populations grew more sedentary, we probably created more rubbish, which we then dumped outside our camps. These leavings would have included tempting pieces of food for hungry wolves. Not every wolf would have been able to scavenge, however. These animals would have had to be unafraid of humans, and if they displayed any aggression toward us, they would have been killed. After generations of selection for friendliness without intentional selection by humans, this special population of wolves would have begun to take on a different appearance. Coat color, ears, tails: all probably started to change.

Animals that could respond to our gestures and voices would be extremely useful as hunting partners and guards. They would have been valuable as well for their warmth and companionship, and slowly we would have allowed them to move from outside our camps to our firesides. We did not domesticate dogs. The friendliest wolves domesticated themselves.

1. What can be summarized about wolves and dogs from the first three paragraphs?

A．Wolves are smarter than dogs.

B．They are very much racially divided.

C．They are close relatives but dogs seem to be on the winning side.

D．Dogs have made their ways to indoor life while wolves to the wild.

2. What is the meaning of the underlined word “sedentary” in paragraph 5?

A．diverse	B．limited
C．living in the same place	D．involving regular migration

3. What does the author conclude from the history of dogs and wolves?

A．Dogs evolved from wolves.

B．Selective breeding developed domestic dogs.

C．Taming and domesticating an animal are the same thing.

D．Friendliness as a quality translates into an evolutionary strategy.

4. Which of the following is suitable for a title?

A．From Wolf to Dog	B．Dog: Our Favorite Pet
C．An Intentional Domestication	D．A Competition Story between Wolf and Dog