I was invited to a cookout on an old friend’s farm in western Washington. I parked my car outside the farm and walked past a milking house which had apparently not been used in many years. A noise at a window caught my attention, so I entered it. It was a hummingbird (蜂鸟), desperately trying to escape. She was covered in spider-webs (蛛网) and was barely able to move her wings. She ceased her struggle the instant I picked her up.
With the bird in my cupped hand, I looked around to see how she had gotten in. The broken window glass was the likely answer. I stuffed a piece of cloth into the hole and took her outside, closing the door securely behind me.
When I opened my hand, the bird did not fly away; she sat looking at me with her bright eyes. I removed the sticky spider-webs that covered her head and wings. Still, she made no attempt to fly. Perhaps she had been struggling against the window too long and was too tired? Or too thirsty?
As I carried her up the blackberry-lined path toward my car where I kept a water bottle, she began to move. I stopped, and she soon took wing but did not immediately fly away.
Hovering (悬停), she approached within six inches of my face. For a very long moment, this tiny creature looked into my eyes, turning her head from side to side. Then she flew quickly out of sight.
During the cookout, I told my hosts about the hummingbird incident. They promised to fix the window. As I was departing, my friends walked me to my car. I was standing by the car when a hummingbird flew to the center of our group and began hovering. She turned from person to person until she came to me. She again looked directly into my eyes, then let out a squeaking call and was gone. For a moment, all were speechless. Then someone said, “She must have come to say goodbye.”
注意：1. 续写词数应为 150 左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题纸的相应位置作答。
A few weeks later, I went to the farm again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________I was just about to leave when the hummingbird appeared.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________2 . A leaked IPCC draft reports, “Widespread use across millions of square kilometers globally of tree-planting and bioenergy crops could have potentially serious consequences for food security and land degradation (退化).” In other words, more massive monocultures (单种栽培) and more bioenergy crops, fueled by more fertilizers, could damage the structure of the environmental soil and its capacity to absorb carbon.
Everyone knows that to help ease the increasing climate crisis, we need to plant new trees. It’s said that the earth could support an additional 9,000,000 square kilometers of forest, potentially hosting 500 billion trees capable of capturing more than 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide at maturity. It would be a serious help to the environment.
Bioenergy now holds a 50 percent share of the world’s renewables consumption—as much as hydro, wind, solar and all others combined. It’s good news, but not entirely. If we consider that increasing desertification and rising ocean levels will take away more arable (可耕种的) land, we arrive at a crucial “trilemma”(三难困境). Should we use our spare soil for agriculture, reforestation or bioenergy?
Such a question would make sense in a multilateral, harmonious world, not on a planet where the richest country cancels an environment-saving agreement, thus encouraging the most tropically-forested nation to set about cutting trees.
Last year, 36,000 square kilometers of forest was cut down. Wouldn’t it be better to start by stopping deforestation altogether? Animal farming takes up 77 percent of the world’s arable land and provides us with 18 percent of the calories. Shouldn’t we cut back on global meat consumption? Modern bioenergy is already available. Shouldn’t we get rid of first-generation biofuels, which are produced from food crops?
1. What’s the IPCC’s attitude to the widespread planting?| A．Ambiguous | B．Positive | C．Disapproving | D．Uncaring |
| A．Add some background information. | B．Summarize the previous paragraphs. |
| C．Provide some advice for the readers. | D．Introduce a new topic for discussion. |
| A．There is less sustainable energy for use. |
| B．No more land is available for bioenergy. |
| C．More trees are cut in the richest country. |
| D．Bioenergy can cause more climate problems. |
| A．Developing farmland as much as possible. |
| B．Planting trees to prevent global warming. |
| C．Using bioenergy to reduce environmental pollution. |
| D．Protecting present resources instead of developing new ones. |
“Sun, sun, sun, here it comes…”
Danny sang while his fingers pressed and pulled skillfully at the guitar strings, delivering a slow and peaceful tune. A circle of audience had formed, nodding and moving slowly to the song.
Lying at the feet of the street performer was his most adoring fan: One-Eyed, a white stray (流浪) dog with pieces of brown. Danny felt the name was suitable considering its physical disability. Usually, One-Eyed would bark loudly as Danny performed. Much to his annoyance, people often mistook the pair as owner and pet. At this time, Danny would reply, “My dog? No!”, eyes rolling at the idea. How he wished the dog would leave him alone instead!
On a snowy night, while Danny was performing, a bird flew downward, landing into the midst of the crowd. It cooed happily as if to harmonize with Danny. Unfortunately, that did not sit well with One-Eyed, which immediately bounced at it and the bird flew away desperately.
The unexpected chaos upturned Danny's hat, which could have been filled with notes and coins from his appreciative audience, leaving it ignored on the ground. "Argh! The hateful dog!” Danny broke down, thinking to himself, “Either the dog goes or I go!”
On the next night, Danny tried to find a new place and chanced upon the park. For a while his earnings were good unsurprisingly as there was a steady flow of visitors. However, that didn't last long. One-Eyed came along and appointed itself as Danny's guardian. "Argh! Here comes the hateful dog again!" That night, Danny hadn't made enough money he should have, all thanks to the troublesome dog.
Danny was almost mad with One-Eyed. “What should I do? Call an animal shelter?” Torn by this problem, he walked aimlessly by the lake of the park. With all his mind focused on how to get rid of the dog, Danny didn't watch his steps. Suddenly, he slipped and fell into the lake accidentally. Struggling in the icy water, he cried for help desperately, almost choking to death. Sensing the approach of death, Danny got into overwhelming panic.
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。
Just then, a familiar barking was heard in the distance.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________“My hero! Thank you for saving me,” Danny said gratefully with watery eyes.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________1.濒危野生动物的现状；
2.如何改变日常生活方式；
3.发出倡议。
注意：
1.词数： 100词左右，开头已给出，不计入总词数；
2.可适当增加细节
Dear fellow students,
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. 目前北京垃圾现存的问题
2. 正确处理垃圾的必要性
3. 给出一些具体建议
注：文章开头和结尾已给出字数不少于60。
Dear all students,
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sincerely, Li Hua
President of the Student Union
6 . Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published last December: Policymakers and the rest of us must engage openly with the risk of global collapse. Researchers in many areas have projected the widespread collapse as “a credible scenario(情景) this century”.
A survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, and freshwater shortages might create global collapse. Of course, if you are a non-human species, collapse is well underway.
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world's most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.
The international scholars’ warning letter doesn't say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology, the study of collapse, is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization. Among the signatories(签署者) of the warning was Bob Johnson, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity, “it seems that global collapse is certain to happen in some form, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Johnson said in an email.
“Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits,” the December warning letter says, “can we have the hope to reduce their speed, severity and harm”. And yet messengers of the coming disturbance are likely to be ignored. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. As a poet wrote,
Man is a victim of dope(麻醉品)
In the incurable form of hope.
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent(执着) on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. “Let's look directly into the issue of collapse,” they say, “and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there to make the best of a troubling future.”
1. What does the underlined word “germane” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?| A．Scientific. | B．Credible. |
| C．Original. | D．Relevant. |
| A．worried | B．puzzled |
| C．surprised | D．scared |
| A．The signatories may change the biophysical limits. |
| B．The author agrees with the message of the poem. |
| C．The issue of collapse is being prioritized. |
| D．The global collapse is well underway. |
1.意义：野生动物与人类的生活息息相关
2.现状：野生动物正在被过度捕杀
3.后果：a.生态平衡被破坏 b.人类受到大自然的惩罚
4.建议：a.严惩盗猎者 b.提高环保意识 c.建立自然保护区
参考词汇：自然保护区nature reserve；生态平衡the balance of nature
Protect Wild Animals
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8 . In the 1966 science-fiction movie One Million Years B. C., the movie characters had a time travel and arrived in an ancient landscape inhabited by dinosaurs and early humans. The movie was low on science and high on fiction: by then dinosaurs were long dead and modern humans were millions of years away.
A more accurate picture of Earth’s inhabitants at the time is now being revealed. In research published in Nature, a team of scientists led by Anders Gotherstrom at the University of Stockholm, and Love Dalen at the Centre for Palaeogenetics (古遗传学), also in Sweden, describe sequencing (测序) DNA samples from mammoths (猛犸象) that lived and died in north-eastern Siberia around a million years ago.
The team’s work represents a new record, for their mammoth DNA is, by some half a million years, the oldest ever successfully reconstructed. Extracted (提取) from horses, bears and even Neanderthals and Denisovans, two close cousins of modern humans, such ancient DNA has proved an invaluable tool for investigating the past. Although fossils preserve the basic physical features of extinct animals, they are silent about many crucial details that even an incomplete genome (基因组) can help to fill in.
The trouble with DNA is that it breaks down after death. The more broken down it is, the harder it is to sequence. Scientists think that, after about 6m years, all that would be left would be individual base pairs (碱基对), the equivalent of trying to reconstruct a book from several letters. Under the right conditions, however, such as the extreme cold of Arctic permafrost (冻土层) this decay can be slowed.
Dr. Dalen and his colleagues were interested in three mammoth molars (臼齿) extracted in the 1970s from Siberian geological layers that suggested great age. Samples from each were sent to Dr. Dalen’s laboratory in 2017. Having checked they had not been contaminated by bacteria or the shaking hands of Paleontologists, the DNA were extracted, sequenced, and dated. Whereas DNA samples from a living animal can run to several hundreds of thousands of letters, the ancient mammoth samples yielded merely dozens of letter long. This is close to the limit of what is scientifically usable, says a biologist named Ludovic Orlando.
1. What does the underlined word “contaminated” probably mean?| A．Protected. | B．Polluted. | C．Estimated. | D．Discovered. |
①the limited number of DNA in mammoth samples
②the break-down of mammoth’s DNA after death
③the wide spread of mammoth samples
④the damage done to the mammoth samples from external environment
⑤the difficulty in extraction of the mammoth’s DNA
| A．①②④ | B．②④⑤ | C．②③④ | D．①③④ |
| A．The fact that DNA can break down makes it easier to sequence. |
| B．The incomplete genome can’t give any details of the extinct animals. |
| C．Mammoths’ DNA samples are invaluable for their extremely long history. |
| D．The research team created a new record for reconstructing an ancient book. |
| A．The movie One Million Years B. C revealed the early human civilization. |
| B．Scientists have uncovered the secrets of life by studying mammoths’ DNA. |
| C．The mammoths’ DNA may give a clearer picture of ancient inhabitants on earth. |
| D．Discoveries of mammoths’ DNA samples help the development of DNA reconstruction technology. |
