1 . Man’s Existential Dilemma

We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals.     1     For ages, when philosophers talked about the the core of man they referred to it as his “essence”, something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found and man’s peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm (艾瑞克·弗洛姆，精神分析心理学家和人本主义哲学家) put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical(悖论的)nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude (有限性). Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history.     2     He can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immerse expansion, this competence, this self-consciousness gives to man almost the status a small god in nature.

    3     This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he is dual, up in the stars’ and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most unpleasant way being that is aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb beings. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue gazing while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over.     4    

Quoted from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death

A．But to live a life with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams makes a huge difference.

B．He is a creator with a mind that soars out the speculate about atoms and infinity.

C．Man’s body was a curse of fate and culture was built upon repression not because he was a seeker of pleasure, but because he was primarily an avoider of death.

D．Yet at the same time, man is a worm and food for worms.

E．Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

F．It was something that had to go right to his core, something that made him suffer his peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape.

2 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages 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.

When scientists accidentally killed     1    turned out to be the world’s oldest living creature, it was bad enough. Now, their mistake has been worsened after further research found it was even older – at 507 years.

The ocean quahog, a type of deep-sea clam, was dredged (捕捞) alive from the bottom of the North Atlantic near Iceland in 2006 by researchers. They then put it in a fridge-freezer,     2    is normal practice, unaware of     3    age. It was only when it was taken to a laboratory     4    scientists from Bangor University studied it and concluded it was 400 years old.

The discovery made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. However, by this time, it was too late for Ming the Mollusc(软体动物),     5    (name) after the Chinese dynasty     6    its life began. Unfortunately, researchers who calculated Ming’s age killed it instantly by opening its shell.

The researchers opened the ancient clam up to judge its age by counting growth rings inside. But the rings were so close together     7    scientists ended up having to count the rings on the outside to be accurate,     8    (lead) CBS journalists to point out that if scientists had just started there, Ming could have lived on. Now, after examining the quahog     9    (closely), and     10    (use) more advanced methods, the researchers have found the animal was actually 100 years older than they first thought.

Dr Paul Butler, from the University’s School of Ocean Sciences, said: “We got it wrong the first time and maybe we were a bit hasty publishing our findings back then. But we are absolutely certain that we’ve got the right age now.” The mollusc was born in 1499 – just seven years after Columbus discovered America and before Henry VIII had even married his first wife, Catherine of Aragon in 1509.

4 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. existing   B. matters   C. plunging   D. identifying   E. regulatory   F. removal G. failure   H. race     I. reached   J. increased     K. declined

Reasons to be Hopeful

The climate emergency is the biggest threat to civilization we have ever faced. But there is good news: we already have every tool we need to beat it. The challenge is not    1    the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.

Some key sectors are already racing ahead, such as electric cars. They are already cheaper to own and run in many places—and when the purchase prices equal those of fossil—fuelled vehicles in the next few years, a critical tipping point will be    2    .

Electricity from renewables is now the cheapest form of power in most places, sometimes even cheaper than continuing to run    3    coal plants. There's a long way to go to feed the world's huge energy demand, but the    4    costs of batteries and other storage technologies seem promising.

And many big companies are realizing that a    5    to invest will be far more expensive as the impacts of global heating destroy economies. Even some of the biggest polluters, such as steel, have seen the green writing on the wall.

Stopping the    6    of forests requires no technology at all, but it does require government action. While progress is poor, countries such as Indonesia have shown    7    action can be effective. Protecting and restoring forests, particularly by empowering local people, is a strong tool.

In the climate crisis, every fraction of a degree    8    and so every action reduces people's suffering. Every action makes the world a cleaner and better place to live-by, for example, cutting the air pollution that ends millions of lives a year.

The real fuel for the green transition is a combination of those most valuable and intangible of commodities: political will and skill. The supply is being    9    by demands for action from youth strikers to chief executives, and must be used to face down powerful vested interests (既得利益者), such as the fossil fuel, airlines and cattle industries. The     10    for a sustainable, low-carbon future is on, and question at core is how much faster we need to go.

5 . A lone humpback whale travelled more than 9,800 kilometers from breeding areas in Brazil to those in Madagascar, setting a record for the longest mammal migration even documented.

Humpback whales are known to have some of the longest migration distances of all mammals, and this huge journey is about 400 kilometers father than the previous humpback record. The finding was made by Peter Stevick, a biologist at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

The whale's journey was unusual not only for its length, but also because it travelled across about 90 degrees of longitude from west to east. Typically, humpbacks move in a north-south direction between cold feeding areas and warm breeding grounds.

The whale, a female, was first spotted off the coast of Brazil, where researches photographed its tail fluke and took skin samples to determine the animal's sex. Two years later, a tourist on a whale-watching boat snapped a photo of the humpback near Madagascar.

To match the two sightings, Stevick's team used an extensive international catalogue of photographs of the undersides of tail flukes, which have distinctive markings. Researchers routinely compare the markings in each new photograph to those in the archive.

The scientists then estimated the animal's shortest possible route: an are skirting the southern tip of South Africa and heading north-east towards Madagascar. The minimum distance is 9,800 kilometers, says Stevick, but this is likely to be an underestimate, because the whale probably took a roundabout way to feed on frill in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica before reaching its destination.

Most humpback-whale researches focus on their efforts on the Northern Hemisphere because the Southern Ocean near the Antarctica is a tough environment and it is hard to get to, explaining Rochelle Constantine, who studies the ecology of humpback whales at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. But, for whales, oceans in the Southern Hemisphere are wider and easier to travel across, says Constantine. Scientists will probably observe more long-distance migrations in the Southern Hemisphere as satellite tracking becomes increasingly common, she adds.

Daniel Palacios, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Monoa, says that record-breaking journey could indicate that migration patterns are shifting as populations begin to recover from near-extinction and the population increases. But the reasons why whale did not follow the usual migration routes remain a mystery. She could have been exploring new habitats, or simply have lost her way. “We generally think of humpback whales as very well studied, but then they surprise us with things like this,” Palacios says. “Undoubtedly there are a lot of things we still don't know about whale migration.”

1. In what way was the whale's journey considered unusual?

A．It covered a long distance from west to east.

B．A female whale rather than a male one completed it.

C．The whale moved from its breeding ground to its feeding area.

D．No one had ever spotted the whale other than at its destination.

2. Why did the researchers compare the markings on tail flukes?

A．There is a vast collection of such markings.	B．The markings there last by far the longest.
C．No two whales share the same markings.	D．The markings are easiest to photograph.

3. What can be inferred from the passage?

A．More evidence should have been provided that the whale had even arrived at Madagascar.

B．South Hemisphere can provide more information about humpback whales' migration.

C．The whale's actual route might well have been shorter than the scientists had estimated.

D．North Hemisphere's environment is becoming tougher for whales to survive.

4. What is the passage mainly about?

A．A female whale was spotted twice in the Southern Ocean.

B．Research on whales is a breakthrough.

C．Whales' migration routes vary with the climate change.

D．A whale surprises researchers with her journey.

7 . The Bitter Truth Behind Vanilla

Vanilla is one of the world’s most popular spices and an important ingredient in products ranging from chocolate to perfume. However, the wholesale price of vanilla has reached up to $600 per kilogram, when just a few years ago it fetched a tenth of that. What is happening?

Madagascar supplies more than 80 percent of the world’s natural vanilla. In the 19th century, the French introduced Bourbon vanilla to their African island colony. Today, vanilla represents 20 percent of Madagascan exports, worth around $600 million at current prices. However, it is a difficult crop to grow. A vine takes three to four years to mature.     1     Nine months later, the green beans must be hand-picked when perfectly ripe to optimize their vanillin content (the compound that gives vanilla its flavor). Months of blanching(焯水), sweathing(焖煮) and gradual drying in the sun are then necessary to produce the aromatic(芳香的) spice. Six hundred hand-pollinated blossoms yield about six kilos of green beans, which convert to one kilo of dried beans.

The price of Madagascan vanilla was once set by the government.     2     Madagascar’s government was eventually forced to end its price-fixing regime(体制). Food giants such as Unilever and Nestlé also increased their use of synthetic vanillin, which can be produced from reliable sources, adding to the pressure. For 30 years, Madagascar’s vanilla farmers earned just a pittance, and many ended up leaving the business. But even with fewer producers, the price of natural vanilla stayed low.

It was not until public tastes started shifting towards all things natural that farmers’ fortunes revived. From around 2011, some manufacturers began focusing once more on natural vanilla. In 2015, Nestlé announced plans to use only natural ingredients in five years, and Hershey’s followed suit.     3     Extreme weather, weak crop-security, and exporters who hoard inventory(囤货) and speculate (做投机买卖) on further rises have also kept prices high.

    4     To prevent theft of their now rather valuable crops, farmers have taken to harvesting the beans early, thereby reducing the overall quality of the crop. That forces the government to make greater efforts to enforce penalties(处罚). If it manages this, Madagascar could yet savor the benefits of its near monopoly(垄断).

A．It’s expensive because it’s both labor-intensive and time-consuming to grow.

B．Demand has therefore surged, and with it prices - in part because natural supplies are insufficient.

C．If pollination (授粉) is successful, it will take another eight to nine months until the plant matures.

D．This rise has not been without its challenges.

E．The flowers open for just one day a year, so pollination is done completely by hand.

F．But such were the prices it demanded for vanilla that in the 1980s buyers turned their attention to the cheaper, poor-quality version available elsewhere, in particular Indonesia.

8 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. implications       B. piece       C. survival       D. revolution E. varying        F. climatic       G. stretching       H. delicately        I. migrate       J. merely       K. shifts

Climate Change

When global warming finally came, it came aggressively. In some regions, temperatures rose several degrees in less than a century. Sea levels shot up nearly 40 feet, flooding coastal settlements and forcing people to     1    inland. Deserts spread throughout the world as vegetation shifted greatly in North America, Europe and Asia. After driving many of the animals around them to near extinction, people were forced to abandon their old way of life for a new    2    strategy that resulted in widespread starvation and disease.

As environmentalists meet in Rio de Janeiro this week to think carefully about the global climate of the future, earth scientists are in the middle of a(n)     3    in understanding how climate has changed in the past and how those changes have transformed human existence. Researchers have begun to     4    together an inspiring picture of the powerful geological and astronomical forces to change the planet’s environment from hot to cold, wet to dry and back again over a time period     5    back hundreds of millions of years.

Most importantly, scientists are beginning to realize that the     6     changes have had a major impact on the evolution of the human species. New research now suggests that climate     7     played a key role in nearly every significant turning point in human evolution. Indeed, the human history has not been     8     touched by global climate change. Some scientists argue it has in some instances been driven by it.

The new research has far-reaching     9     for the environment summit in Rio. Among other things, the findings demonstrate that dramatic climate change is nothing new for planet Earth. The pleasant global environment that has existed over the past 10,000 years is a mere bright spot in a much larger pattern of widely     10    climate over the ages. In feet, the pattern of climate change in the past reveals that Earth’s climate will almost certainly go through dramatic changes in the future even without the influence of human activity.

9 . Chemists in mid-1500s Nuremburg had discovered that bird droppings were a rich source of saltpetre, a vital ingredient in the making of gunpowder. As a consequence pigeon droppings used to be almost as valuable as silver. Understandably, by the middle of the following century, there were an estimated 26,000 pigeon houses in Britain.

The practice of keeping the pigeon was introduced to Britain by the Romans. The Normans kept pigeons in specially constructed niches in castles and courtyards. When the pigeon houses in Britain were built, they were a vital source of meat and feathers. The latter were particularly prized as a source of warmth. Droppings gathered from the pigeon houses was a rich fertilizer, too.

The pigeon house was not only a source of food and revenue in medieval times, but also a status symbol. The privilege of building or owning pigeon houses was reserved for the rich. Towards the end of her rule, Queen Elizabeth I decided to open pigeon-breeding to the free market. Then, pigeon houses sprang up all over the countryside.

The number of pigeon houses across the British countryside was not universally welcomed. Each day the birds flew off to feed themselves on other people’s crops. By the middle of the 17th century, the problem of pigeons was so great that people feared that the destructive pigeons would turn England into a desert.

Luckily, an agricultural revolutionary, Charles Townsend, had introduced the turnip to Britain around 1700, keeping farm livestock fat enough to eat through the dark winter months. Later, vast quantities of natural saltpetre were discovered in Chile and California. Keeping pigeons went out of fashion.

Now, the homeless pigeons flew off to find somewhere else to live. One species discovered that Britain’s rapidly growing towns and cities were full of the sort of rock-faces they liked to rest on—humans called them “buildings”. Over time they’d become the wild urban pigeon that we know today.

1. Which of the following people in Britain would be least likely to keep pigeons in the late Middle Ages?

A．Fruit growers.

B．The nobles.

C．Gunpowder makers.

D．The miners.

2. What can be inferred from the passage?

A．Farm livestock used to be too thin for lack of food in the dark months in Britain.

B．Townsend revolutionized agricultural development in Britain around 1700.

C．The Normans set an undesirable example of raising pigeons for the British people.

D．England was once faced with the threat of disappearance because of pigeons.

3. According to the passage, why are there so many pigeons in the cities in Britain today?

A．Because people think it a sign of status and keep them to show off.

B．Because pigeons like to stay on hard surfaces which can be abundantly found in cities.

C．Because pigeons find enough food supplies when tourists and citizens feed them in squares.

D．Because the government encourages pigeon raising as a profitable investment.

4. Which is the best title of the passage?

A．A brief history of pigeon houses in Britain.

B．From function to fashion — the pigeon houses in Britain.

C．Profitable pigeon houses in Britain.

D．Pigeon houses in Britain as valuable as silver.

10 . There was a time when we thought humans were special in so many ways. Now we know better. We are not the only species that feels emotions, or follows a moral code. Neither are we the only ones with personalities, cultures and the ability to design and use tools. Yet we have all agree that one thing, at least, makes us unique: we alone have the ability of language.

It turns out that we are not so special in this aspect either. Key to the revolutionary reassessment of our talent for communication is the way we think about language itself. Where once it was seen as an unusual object, today scientists find it is more productive to think of language as a group of abilities. Viewed this way, it becomes apparent that the component parts of language are not as unique as the whole.

Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently, it was considered uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have collected a list of gestures observed in monkeys and some other animals, which reveals that gestures plays a large role in their communication. Ape(猿) gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them.

In an experiment carried out in 2006 by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews in the UK, they got a person to sit on a chair with some highly desirable food such as banana to one side of apes and some undesirable food such as vegetables to the other. The apes, who could see the person and the food from their enclosures, gestured at their human partners to encourage them to push the desirable food their way. If the person showed incomprehension and offered the vegetables, the animals would change their gestures - just as a human would in a similar situation. If the human seemed to understand while being somewhat confused, giving only half the preferred food, the apes would repeat and exaggerate their gestures - again in exactly the same way a human would. Such findings highlight the fact that the gestures of the animals are not merely inborn but are learned, flexible and under voluntary control - all characteristics that are considered preconditions for human-like communication.

1. It is agreed that compared with all the other animals, only human beings ________.

A．own the ability to show their personalities

B．are capable of using language to communicate

C．have moral standards and follow them in society

D．are intelligent enough to release and control emotions

2. According to the passage, humans are not so special in language ability because language ________.

A．involve some abilities that can be mastered by animals

B．is a talent impossibly owned by other animals

C．can be divided into different components

D．are productive for some talented animals

3. What can we learn from that experiment by Cartmill and Byrne?

A．Apes can use language to communicate with the help of humans.

B．Repeating and exaggerating gestures is vital in language communication.

C．Some animals can learn to express and communicate through some trials.

D．The preferred food stimulates some animals to use language to communicate.

4. What is probably the best title of the language?

A．Language involves gestures!	B．Animals language - gestures!
C．So you think humans are unique?	D．The similarity between humans and apes.