1 . In 2013, my husband Robin took a new job in Ghana. We relocated from London, where I worked as a photographer, to the capital, Accra.Robin worked,but my visa didn’t permit me to, and I was left homesick and lacking
In September 2018,after one bad thunderstorm,I found a bird,barely a month old,on the ground. He was
For the next 84 days, the
| A．purpose | B．interest | C．experience | D．confidence |
| A．family | B．sports | C．nature | D．school |
| A．grateful | B．alive | C．stressed | D．scared |
| A．envied | B．controlled | C．recognized | D．abandoned |
| A．survive | B．fight | C．escape | D．play |
| A．go with | B．care for | C．focus on | D．speak about |
| A．travel | B．stay | C．wild | D．change |
| A．rare | B．lazy | C．proud | D．tiny |
| A．noises | B．dances | C．flights | D．stops |
| A．kindly | B．cheerfully | C．once | D．never |
| A．remind | B．promise | C．cheat | D．motivate |
| A．attracted | B．honored | C．shocked | D．rewarded |
| A．high | B．strong | C．smart | D．calm |
| A．Raising | B．Tolerating | C．Evaluating | D．Amusing |
| A．secret | B．message | C．news | D．lesson |
2 . 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. |
Milo is a rescue dog, adopted by twenty-year-old Mary Swift. But the dog is also a rescuer.
One morning in November 2021, Swift was ready to go jogging as usual, with Milo following her happily. To her surprise, as soon as she opened the front door, Milo took off running towards the gate quickly. It was very unusual. He always ran after his master.
Outside the gate, Milo was looking around the neighborhood, looking a little alert. Suddenly, he ran straightly to the house across the street, barking loudly and sniffing around. He seemed unsatisfied with this house. He quickly ran to the one next door. He stopped there and turned to Swift, barking more loudly, with his tail swinging crazily. Swift followed him, shouting sharply “Stop, Milo!” Some passing neighbors were looking disapprovingly (不满地) at them.
Swift was kind of embarrassed. Not everyone wanted a strange dog on their property and liked hearing a dog’s barks in the quiet morning. She tried to get Milo to go back, but Milo seemed not to follow the master’s order. He started to scratch on the front door. Swift wondered, “Why is he trying to break into the house?” She looked at the house, which belonged to Sherry Starr, who was 85 years old and seldom walked out of her house. It was the time for her to trim her bushes in the garden. Somehow, she wasn’t there that day.
Although Swift was a little doubtful, she still tried to drag Milo away. But at this time she could hear a sound coming through an open upstairs window.
注意：1.续写词数应为80左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
It was a voice yelling “Help”.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 . “I like pigs,” Winston Churchill supposedly once said. “Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.” Whether Churchill’s contemporary George Orwell also liked pigs is less clear. But he, too, surely saw something in them that was lacking in other domestic beasts, for it was they who ended up running the show in novel Animal Farm. Pigs, then, are intelligent social creatures.
And, like all animals, they sometimes fight. A study just published in Animal Cognition by Ivan Norscia, a biological anthropologist at the University of Turin, in Italy, and his colleagues, looked at how a group of 104 domestic pigs went about resolving such incidents. In total, Dr. Norscia and his team studied the details of 216 pig conflicts over the course of six months.
Some pigs tend to be attackers; others tend to be victims. Who is what depends largely on weight, for, among pigs pounds mean power. The attacker might bite, kick, bump or lift the victim (or string together a sequence of those actions). Most conflicts ended in seconds, but some lasted a minute or two.
In most animal species that would be that. However, many of the pig conflicts Dr. Norscia observed had interested parties beyond the protagonists (主角). He therefore wanted to understand the role of these bystanders in resolving fights —and what this says about pigs’ cognitive (认知) abilities.
Since there was usually not enough time for a bystander pig to intervene during the heat of a conflict (though this did occur), he and his colleagues looked at what happened in the three minutes directly following an aggressive interaction. Sometimes, they found, the protagonists made up on their own —for instance, by touching noses.
On other occasions, though, a third pig stepped in. Sometimes this bystander acted as a peacemaker, engaging with the attacker and reducing the number of subsequent attacks compared with what might otherwise have been expected. Sometimes, by contrast, the bystander engaged with the victim. This appeared to calm the victim down, for it reduced anxiety-related behavior such as shaking and scratching.
1. Why does the author mention Winston Churchill in the first paragraph?| A．To prove pigs are clever. | B．To show pigs are inspirational. |
| C．To state Churchill loves pigs. | D．To introduce the topic of the text. |
| A．Their ages. | B．Their weight. |
| C．Their safety needs. | D．Their cognitive abilities. |
| A．To comprehend the role of bystanders in conflict resolution. |
| B．To figure out the relationship between pigs. |
| C．To record the details of 216 pig conflicts. |
| D．To find out the reason for pigs’ conflicts. |
| A．By shaking it. | B．By touching its nose. |
| C．By scratching its back. | D．By offering comfort to it. |
In May 2021, Congo’s Mount Nyiragongo, one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes, burst to life without warning. Lava erupted from cracks and
Now, using data from monitoring stations,
6 . Biologists in the United States are sounding an alarm about a deadly disease that has been attacking a quiet, intelligent animal: the bat. The disease, called white-nose syndrome, is an infection caused by a fungus (真菌) that attack the nose, wings, and other skin areas on the bodies of bats while they are hibernating (冬眠) in large groups in their caves. The disease was first discovered in a New York cave in the winter of 2006, and it is spreading quickly. Infected caves have been discovered in 19 states and in Canada.
Scientists have discovered that the source is a strain of a cold-loving fungus usually found in polar regions. They are not sure how the fungus kills bats. One theory is that the fungus causes discomfort. The bats began to become upset and partially wake up from hibernation. This activity causes them to burn precious stored body fat and die of starvation. Experts estimate that over 5. 5 million bats across nine species have disappeared because of the disease. Wildlife experts fear that if the infection spreads to more bat populations in the Southeast and Midwest, endangered bat species, such as the Indiana bat and Virginia big-eared bat, may be in grave danger of extinction.
Why should Americans care about the loss of these creatures? In warm months, bat fly at night, eating up to their body weight in insects. They control the populations of insects that bite, eat crops, destroy forests, and spread disease. Because of this, the United States government is getting involved. It has heard announcements from bat experts and is taking seriously their pleas (请愿) for funding to study the disease. The possibility of what one lawmaker called “an ecological and economic disaster” is very real if the deadly disease spreads further.
1. What causes white-nose syndrome among the bats?| A．Ecological pollution. | B．The lack of food. |
| C．The freezing climate. | D．A cold-loving fungus. |
| A．How the fungus possibly affects bats. |
| B．Why the bats’ hibernation is disturbed. |
| C．Where the experts discovered the disease. |
| D．What contributed to the concern of the experts. |
| A．The spread of the disease. | B．The destruction of the forests. |
| C．The imbalance of the ecosystem. | D．The decrease of the insect population. |
| A．To introduce laws to protect bats. |
| B．To approve funding for bat disease research. |
| C．To declare the coming of an ecological disaster |
| D．To appeal to people to stay away from infected bats. |
7 . Lizards that once resided in forests but now hang around urban areas of Puerto Rico have genetically morphed (变化) to survive life in the city, researchers have found.
The Puerto Rican crested anole, a brown lizard with a bright orange throat fan, has sprouted special scales (鳞片) to better cling to smooth surfaces such as walls and windows, scientists say. “We are watching evolution as it’s unfolding,” said Kristin Winchel, a biology professor. As urbanization intensifies around the world, it’s important to understand how organisms adapt and humans can design cities in ways that support all species, Winchell said.
The study analyzed 96 Anolis lizards, comparing the genetic makeup of forest-dwellers to those living in Puerto Rico’s capital. Scientists found that 33 genes within the lizard genome were repeatedly associated with urbanization.
“You can hardly get closer to a smoking gun,” said Wouter Halfwerk, an evolutionary ecologist who was not involved in the study. He said he was impressed that the scientists were able to detect such a clear genomic signature of adaptation: “The ultimate goal within the field of urban adaptive evolution is to find evidence for heritable traits and their genomic architecture.”
The changes in these lizards, whose life spans are roughly seven years, can occur quickly, within 30 to 80 generations, enabling them to escape from predators and survive in urban areas, Winchell added. The larger limbs, for example, enable them to run more quickly across a hot parking lot, and the special scales to hold onto surfaces far more smooth than trees.
The study focused on adult male lizards, so it’s unclear whether females are changing in the same way or at the same rate as males, and at which point in a lizard’s life the changes are occurring. Halfwerk, whose own research showed how one frog species changed its mating call in urban areas, said scientists should look next for possible constraints (限制) on the evolutionary response and how morphology relates to mating behavior.
1. What do researchers find about lizards in the study?| A．Lizards evolve to adapt to the human cities. |
| B．Lizards are not capable of surviving in the urban areas. |
| C．Lizards have a negative impact on smooth surfaces of modern buildings. |
| D．Lizards no longer have natural habitat in forests as a result of urbanization |
| A．By analyzing previous research data. |
| B．By comparing different lizard species. |
| C．By citing the famous scientists’ words. |
| D．By studying Anolis lizards in urban and natural areas. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Tolerant. | C．Indifferent. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．All frog species have changed its mating call in urban areas. |
| B．Only adult male lizards evolve to have larger limbs and special scales. |
| C．Halfwerk will continue to study how morphology relates to mating behavior |
| D．The future study might focus on the limitations on the evolutionary response. |
8 . A cap and trade system is a method for managing pollution, with the end goal of reducing the overall pollution in a nation, region, or industry. Many supporters of pollution control are in favor of the concept of such systems, arguing that well-designed cap and trade systems are extremely effective, and that they make sense economically as well.
Under a cap and trade system, a government authority first sets a cap, deciding how much pollution in total will be allowed. Next, companies are issued credits, essentially licenses to pollute, based on how large they are, what industries they work in, and so forth. If a company comes in below its cap, it has extra credits that it may trade with other companies.
For companies that come in below their caps, this system is great, because they can sell their extra credits, profiting while reducing their pollution. For companies that cannot get their pollution under control, the system punishes them for their excess pollution while still bringing overall pollution rates down. In a sense, the need to purchase credits acts as a fine, encouraging companies to reduce their emissions.
By creating a cap, nations make it clear that they want to reduce overall emissions, rather than just fining companies for excessive emissions or trying to force all companies to reduce their emissions by a set percentage. Cap and trade systems allow for flexibility, which usually benefits the market. Some people view the concept as preferable to a taxation or fining system, because it is easier to administer and it results in a pollution reduction. These systems are most commonly used for carbon emissions, leading people to refer to it as “carbon trading”, and there is a potential for a global carbon trading market, in which more efficient nations could trade credits with other countries.
1. What can be inferred about the cap and trade system?| A．It can greatly promote economy in a nation. |
| B．It will soon be welcomed by all companies. |
| C．It is well-designed and extremely effective. |
| D．It is environmentally and economically friendly. |
| A．Those who always have more extra credits. |
| B．Those whose overall pollution is below their caps. |
| C．Those who have never been fined for overall pollution. |
| D．Those who help other companies reduce their pollution. |
| A．All the pollution will be reduced by the cap and trade system. |
| B．Carbon trading is likely to be conducted among countries. |
| C．Carbon trade is more effective than the cap and trade system. |
| D．The taxation and fining system now is out of use. |
| A．The use of credits in reducing pollution. |
| B．Efficient ways to manage overall pollution. |
| C．An introduction of the cap and trade system. |
| D．Potential application of the cap and trade system. |
Monarchs (帝王) rarely give up their thrones willingly, and these monarch butterflies are no exception. They’re currently endangered after a big drop in their migratory population. Scientists believe climate change, pesticides and
“Now we have more butterflies. The colony is bigger, and not just here. There is another place
Their migration is so striking
10 . Designers are increasingly using different kinds of materials to produce products that do not harm the environment. Reused plastic bottles, wood, plant fiber, and even seaweed are being used in place of traditional materials for household goods and clothing.
Unusual materials
Nina Edwards Anker’s candleholder and ceiling lamp look like ancient pieces of paper placed around electronic lights known as LEDs. But a closer look shows that they are made of algae (藻类). Anker came up with the idea while working on a doctoral research project at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
A show for new materials in Germany
Heimtextil is an international trade show, or fair, for new textiles in Frankfurt, Germany. This year’ fair placed attention on making new products that came from reused materials.
“We’ll see companies demonstrating how inorganic materials like nylon, plastic and metal can be reused,” Olaf Schmidt, Heimtextil’s vice president of textiles and textile technology, said.
He added, “And there’s seaweed, used to produce sound pad and panels that provided great insulation (隔音), are fire-resistant and regulate humidity (湿度) well.”
Many companies using other materials
Patagonia, North Face and Timberland are among the companies now using natural materials to produce goods. Italian company Frumat has developed a plant-based leather made from the waste created by apple juice makers. Pinatex helps support farms in the Philippines by using waste from the pineapple harvest to create material that is sold to makers of shoes, clothing and other products.
1. Where is this text probably taken from?| A．A science report. |
| B．A personal diary. |
| C．An environment journal. |
| D．An academic article. |
| A．Insulating the sound. |
| B．Making ceiling lamps. |
| C．Adjusting wetness. |
| D．Preventing fires. |
| A．2 | B．3 | C．4 | D．5 |
