3 . Sitting back in my seat, I can’t quite believe that I’m about to travel along the railway that many foreign experts thought was “impossible”. All this time, the song “Sky Railway” has been ___________ inside my head. The words “railways like massive dragons are winding among the mountains” seem particularly _________ as I travel across the “roof of the world”.

I was one of the people who came from all parts of China to work on this railway._______   years to finish, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway is a record of all of our efforts to _______ the most difficult engineering challenges. How to _______ the delicate ecosystem (脆弱的生态) was the most important.

The first landmark to catch my eye is the splendid Qingshuihe Bridge, the world’s longest bridge built over permafrost. Look! A group of Tibetan antelopes is moving _______ the bridge, with some stopping to eat grass at their _________. Thirty-three passages(通道) have been built under the railway to allow the animals to move safely and freely in their natural _______. Wild animals such as these Tibetan antelopes have now been using these _______ for years. They seem totally __________ that we are speeding past at over 100 kilometers an hour.

To prevent ________ to wetlands and grasslands, 675 bridges with ________ about 160 kilometer were built between Golmud and-Lhasa.

The journey has been flying by, and before I know it, we have reached Tanggula Station.________at over 5,000 metres above sea level, this is the ________ railway station in the world. In locations such as this, the thin air,________weather and high levels of UV radiation presented perhaps the greatest ________ for railway workers. To make sure we stayed ________, several oxygen-making stations were built. We were also able to enjoy ________ breaks in lower areas.

As we pass Cuona Lake, I feel a sense of pride and achievement. It is so close to the railway that I want to ________ and touch its pale blue mirror-like surface. I am proud that we built our “impossible” railway, and did so with the ________ that the environment deserves. It truly is an extraordinary “Sky Railway”.

5 . Spring lifts our spirits. It’s a time for Nature to bring us back to life after a cold season. I live not far from the Kairaku Park, which is one of the largest gardens in Japan, and famous for its near 10,000 plum trees. I am fortunate to have them all outside my backyard, and take advantage of the walking paths daily.

I see the same trees and swans every day, but that day was different. At the edge of the small lake, I saw some new-born black swans. They were pretty and cute. They stayed with their mom. While taking a few photos of the sunset, I was interrupted by a high sound going on for some time. So I turned around and saw one little swan was stuck by two stones. Its mother was trying to make it out but failed. I tried to get near but the mother was ever so angry! She wouldn’t allow me to get close, so I turned to an old man sitting on the bench and said, “Excuse me, the swan baby can’t move and I want to help it, but the mother is extremely angry! Could you please do me a favor?”

After hearing my words, the man smiled at me first and then agreed to help me. He drove the mother away with great efforts, and for several times, he was almost hurt by the mother. Thanks to him, I was able to get there and push the little swan out of the gap finally. Oh, I really hoped it wasn’t injured, but at least it was alive and swimming!

In spring, I become more physically active. Things around don’t make us, but Nature does, and it keeps us going. I am positive that all of us have a little piece of nature in our own neighborhoods. Somewhere we will be reminded why natural life is so important because we grow with it! Personally, I am happy that baby birds can put a smile on my face! I struggle for having a small number of “things” in life, and being filled with simple reality — at one with Nature.

9 . 阅读短文，并按照题目要求用英语回答问题。

Short and shy, Ben Saunders was the last kid in his class picked for any sports team. “Football, Tennis, Cricket — anything with a round ball, I was useless.” he says now with a laugh. But back then he was the object of jokes in school gym classes in England’s rural Devonshire.

It was a mountain bike he received for his 15th birthday that changed him. At first the teen went biking alone in a nearby forest. Then he began to cycle along with a runner friend. Gradually, Saunders set his mind on building up his body, increasing his speed, strength and endurance. At age 18, he ran his first marathon.

The following year, he met John Ridgway, who became famous in the 1960s for rowing an open boat across the Atlantic Ocean. Saunders was hired as an instructor at Ridgway’s school of Adventure in Scotland, where he learned about the older man’s cold-water exploits (成就): Intrigued, Saunders read all he could about Arctic explorers and North Pole expeditions, then decided that this would be his future.

Journey s to the Pole aren’t the usual holidays for British country boys, and many people dismissed his dream as fantasy. “John Ridgway was one of the few who didn’t say, ‘You are completely crazy,’” Saunders says.

In 2001, after becoming a skilled skier, Saunders started his first long-distance expedition to ward the North Pole. He suffered frostbite (冻疮), had a closer encounter with a polar bear and pushed his body to the limit.

Saunders has since become the youngest person to ski alone to the North Pole,   and he’s skied more in the Arctic by himself than any other Briton. His old playmates would not believe the transformation.

This October, Saunders, 27, heads south to explore from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back, an 1800-mile journey that has never been completed on skis.

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10 . In the first half of 2022, scientists studying animal communication discovered that some dogs connect objects with words at a similar level to babies. Then what about cats, which are commonly believed to be unconcerned about human affairs?

Saho Takagi, a researcher at Azabu University, doubted cats’ seeming unconcern. “Cats don’t appear to listen to people’s conversations, but in fact, they do.” According to a past research, cats understand human communication better than expected. Like dogs, they can use human pointing and stares to find food. They even can tell the difference between human facial expressions and attentional states, according to a 2021 study. However, cats can do more than that.

Another study showed that cats can discriminate their human-given name from the names of their cat friends (those that live in the same house). The researchers believed that cats learned to connect names with other cats by observing communication between their owners and their cat friends.

In a recently published study, Takagi and her colleagues compared two groups of cats: one group was made up of house cats and lived with at least two other cats; the other was made up of cats that lived in “cat cafés”, which had up to 30 cats. They used a simple, two-phase(阶段) test. During the name phase, the study participant(参与者) was softly placed in front of a laptop computer. Then the researcher played a recording of its owner saying the name of its cat companions(同伴).

Immediately after the name phase came the face phase. A cat’s face appeared on the monitor. Sometimes, the cat that appeared on the screen matched the name spoken; other times the name and the picture did not match. If cats knew the names of their cat friends, they would investigate by staring doubtfully at the monitor when the name and the picture did not match. House cats had a significantly longer stare than café cats, indicating that house cats generally expected an exact cat’s face upon hearing the cat’s name.

“This is the first to show that house cats link human words and their social companions through daily experiences,” the researchers wrote, “However, we could not recognize the mechanism(机制) for learning. But with more and more scientists becoming interested in cats who are much smarter than we praise them, this question is sure to be solved.”