1 . An intelligent monitoring system is helping bird protectors in Chenhu Lake Wetland of Wuhan, Hubei province, by collecting data and learning more about the birds’ habits.

The wetland covers about 11,600 hectares and is located in the area where the Yangtze River and Han River meet. Up to 86,000 birds of 227 species inhabited the wetland last year, its figures showed.

A limited number of bird-watchers and patrol guards may miss out counting some of the birds but the system can do it more accurately, according to the reserve. In July last year, the monitoring system, the first of its kind in Hubei, was put into trial(试验)operation in the wetland. It has since recorded real-time monitoring data and assisted with patrolling. The system can detect the type of birds arriving or leaving and which areas they prefer to move around, by identifying species through the sounds they make. It also monitors sounds in the wild and compares them with those in the database.

A video system tracks key protection areas all day. Photos of birds taken will be automatically compared with those in the database, with a combination of audio and video information increasing the recognition accuracy. The reserve’s employees have also added tracking functions in the monitoring system by placing satellite trackers on bean geese migrating. Bean geese have been found to fly from Russian areas.

Feng Jiang, an engineer of the Chenhu wetland nature reserve management bureau, said, “The tracking data has a positive effect on the protection of species globally. Since November last year, we have tried to clarify the migration routes of birds. We monitor where they stay and when they return to the reserve. The data tells us where birds come from and pass by, so we can cooperate with international organizations or countries to better protect them.”

The monitoring system also uses digital technology to build a simulation (模拟) model. By simulating the flow of tourists, researchers can decide the maximum number of visitors in Chenhu Lake and prevent people from disturbing the birds. This can help researchers predict as well the possibility and scope (范围) of the environmental impact on the wetland through the growth of plants there and roll out targeted measures.

1. What is a problem with bird-monitoring in the reserve?

A．Vast area.	B．Lack of experts.
C．Lack of accuracy.	D．Various species.

2. What is the intelligent monitoring system able to do?

A．Monitor the watchers and guards.	B．Recognize the species of birds.
C．Place satellite trackers on birds.	D．Count all the birds correctly.

3. How does the system work?

A．By comforting the birds.	B．By making birds’ sounds.
C．By taking photos of birds.	D．By comparing the collected data.

4. What does the system do to help researchers?

A．Provide birds’ food chains.	B．Prevent the disturbance of birds.
C．Predict the habits of the visitors.	D．Protect the ecosystems in a better way.

2 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入 1 个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

The Baiheliang Underwater Museum,     1    (build) around the White Crane Ridge (白鹤梁) of Fuling District in Chongqing, is China’s first underwater museum. The museum is located on the Yangtze River near the Three Gorges Dam; it opened on May 18, 2009. The    2    (construct) of the museum began in 2002.

Baiheliang has been submerged (淹没) underwater since    3     building of the Three Gorges Dam. It consists     4    a stone ridge that is 1, 600 meters by 15 meters in size, which is now submerged under about 40 meters of water. Before the Three Gorges Dam was built, the ridge was only submerged during the summer and fall. The ridge and the carvings on it were only exposed and     5    (clear) visible when the water level of the Yangtze River dropped during the winter. The inscriptions (题刻)     6    (record) water data about the Yangtze River from the Tang Dynasty onward as well as    7    (poem) written calligraphically could     8    (view) by visitors.

The ridge has now been enclosed in an arch-shaped glass covering    9     is filled with water to ensure equal pressure on both sides. Two underwater passages with long moving stairways have been fixed from the riverbank, enabling museum visitors     10    (enter) and view the inscriptions and fish carvings.

3 . In 1960 Jane Goodall, a British primatologist (灵长类动物学家), observed chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. At that point, it was thought only humans had the capacity to create and use tools, but the chimpanzees were using thin leaves of grass to fish termites (白蚁) from their mounds (土堆).

Since then the distinction between animals and humans has become less obvious. In addition to tool making, chimpanzees — and many other animals besides — display emotion and self-awareness. Studies show that elephants feel sad and rats have empathy. In “The Creative Life of Animals” Carol Gigliotti, a professor in Vancouver, has compiled (汇编) research that examines such behaviour through the lens of creativity.

This requires a more generous definition of creativity. Ms Gigliotti suggests considering creativity from the animal’s point of view instead of human’s. “If animals in their own cultures can solve problems or create products of value to them, it seems accurate to consider these as creative,” she writes.

Beaver lodges (海狸窝) are a case in point: there is no single model for their construction. Each river or lake has its unique features and beavers create a custom-made structure to adapt to the given habitat — so, in Ms Gigliotti’s opinion, lodges deserve to be considered a creative activity.

Though seemingly a book about creativity, the author frequently turns to discuss animal emotion and intelligence. She argues that animal personality is not limited to primate, dogs or cats, but also many other animals including ants, fish and mice.

The book makes its strongest case when advocating a revision of how to think about, and act towards, animals. Ms Gigliotti points out that humans are only one of millions of species on Earth. She suggests that animals are individuals with complicated and creative lives of their own.

1. What did Jane Goodall find during her observation?

A．Chimpanzees liked to play with termites.

B．Only humans had the capacity to use tools.

C．The animal could use simple tools to get food.

D．There was no distinction between humans and animals.

2. What do we know about “The Creative Life of Animals”?

A．It is a fiction book.

B．It is written by Jane Goodall.

C．It is about the life of chimpanzees.

D．It offers a new insight into animals.

3. What does the author intend to do in paragraph 4?

A．Add some background information.

B．Summarize the previous paragraphs.

C．Provide an example to support ideas.

D．Introduce a new topic for discussion.

4. What might Ms Gigliotti agree with?

A．Creativity is unique to human beings.

B．Animals deserve human’s recognition.

C．Humans are the master of the universe.

D．Small animals don’t possess personalities.

4 . In a series of studies, researchers found highly trained dogs may be more successful than untrained pets in independently solving newly-presented problems.

Researchers have discovered that one of the factors underlying this process may be persistence (坚持). It involves reinforcement, the principle that behaviors that are rewarded become stronger and more frequent. The other side of this is extinction, which refers to the fact that behaviors that are not rewarded grow weaker and become less likely to appear. When extinction sets in, the animal will simply quit before the problem is solved. It is possible that highly trained dogs have learned to persist and thus have developed resistance to extinction, which would make them better problem solvers.

In this recent study, the researchers looked at 26 adult dogs divided into two groups, “trained dogs” and “pet dogs”. There were two tasks that the dogs were tested on. One was a social learning task where the dog had to learn to look directly into the experimenter’s eyes. Every time the dog stared at the experimenter’s face, they received a treat (reinforcement). Once the dogs were performing this task, the extinction stage began, and the staring behavior was no longer rewarded in order to see how persistent the newly learned behavior was.

The second task focused on problem-solving. It involved a flat disk that had bone-shaped plastic bones. The dogs had to learn to remove the plastic bones to obtain the treat hiding under each one. After the series of rewarded trials, the extinction stage began, and no more reinforcements were provided for removing the bones.

In the social learning task, the trained dogs gazed at the experimenters more than the pet dogs during extinction. While in the problem-solving task, the trained dogs picked up a larger number of bones during extinction. In other words, for dogs who had been trained, their newly learned behaviors persisted longer and were stronger than the behaviors of the pet dogs who received no training in any area.

1. How does the author introduce the topic?

A．By stating a fact.	B．By raising a doubt.
C．By making an assumption.	D．By presenting a conclusion.

2. Which of the following can be seen as “reinforcement”?

A．Chaining a dog up while walking it every day.

B．Giving a goat some grass every time it stands up.

C．Putting a fish back into the pool every time it jumps out.

D．Yelling at a cat every time it fails to catch a mouse.

3. How can dogs benefit from training in the experiment?

A．Their newly learned behaviors last longer.

B．They can grow stronger than untrained dogs.

C．They are more likely to live longer.

D．They are better at helping their friends.

4. Which of the following can be the best title of the text?

A．How researchers carry out animal experiments

B．Why trained dogs don’t give up easily

C．Why persistent dogs make better pets

D．How to pick out a suitable pet dog

5 . For years, twice a day Aadya Joshi walked past a dump filled with smelly rubbish in her neighbourhood of south Mumbai on her way to and from school. Originally it was meant to be the garden of the local police station. When she was 15, during her summer holidays, Joshi decided to do something about it. “I walked into the police station and was like, ‘Can I please clean your garden?’” recalls Joshi. “It took three or four weeks to eventually convince them that I was not going to give up halfway and leave them with more work.”

The plot of land covers an area of 60 square meters, about a quarter of a tennis court. But, over the course of four Sundays in the summer, with help of local residents, Joshi did more than clear it. She replanted it with native Indian plants and trees. Joshi said, “The first day that we cleaned up I made the mistake of not wearing gloves and I was sick for two weeks.”

The idea for native planting came from Joshi’s reading on the Miyawaki method of afforestation (植树造林) and the work of University of Delaware ecologist Douglas Tallamy. These both argue that planting the right trees can have a significant impact on restoring insect and animal biodiversity. The results in Mumbai were instantaneous: monkeys now hang out at the police station, and butterflies and birds have made the garden their home.

After creating the garden, Joshi developed a database of 2,000 plants unique to the Indian subcontinent and last year was awarded the annual Children’s Climate prize, founded by Swedish energy company Telge Energi. Her advice for others looking to follow in her footsteps: “If you bite off more than you can chew in the beginning, you will be stuck and lose motivation,” she says. “But something small, like your neighbourhood police station, it’s very manageable.”

1. What can we learn from Joshi’s words in the second paragraph?

A．The work was enjoyable and rewarding.

B．The garden was too large to clean.

C．The cleaning was hard and dangerous.

D．Joshi was sick of the cleaning work.

2. What does the underlined word “instantaneous” in paragraph 3 probably mean?

A．Dangerous.

B．Profitable.

C．Costly.

D．Immediate.

3. What can we learn from Joshi’s advice in the last paragraph?

A．All roads lead to Rome.

B．Time and tide wait for no man.

C．The longest journey starts from the first step.

D．Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

4. What is the purpose of the text?

A．To demonstrate the environment problems.

B．To call on attention to India’s young people.

C．To persuade readers to donate to a environment program.

D．To advocate a teenager’s efforts in caring about the world.

6 . In 2021, scientists studying animal communication discovered that some dogs associate objects with words at a similar level to babies. Then what about cats, which are commonly believed to be indifferent to human affairs?

Saho Takagi, a researcher at Azabu University, doubted cats’ seeming indifference. “Cats don’t appear to listen to people’s conversations, but in fact, they do.” According to previous 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 2016 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 household). The researchers believed that cats learned to associate names with other cats by observing interactions between their owners and their cat friends.

In a recently published study, Takagi and her colleagues compared two groups of cats: one group consisted of household cats that lived with at least two other cats; the other consisted 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 was softly placed in front of a laptop computer. Then the researcher played a recording of its owner saying the name of one of its kitty 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 image 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 image did not match. House cats had a significantly longer stare than café cats, indicating that household cats generally expected a specific cat’s face upon hearing the cat’s name.

“This is the first evidence that household 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 give them credit for, this question is sure to be resolved.”

1. What does the author want to stress by comparing cats and dogs in Paragraph 2?

A．Cats and dogs are all clever animals.

B．Cats and dogs get along well with humans.

C．Cats’ ability to learn is stronger than dogs’.

D．Cats’ ability goes beyond body language recognition.

2. Which of the following can replace the underlined word “discriminate” in Paragraph 3?

A．Protect.

B．Tell.

C．Excuse.

D．Learn.

3. What did the researchers conclude about house cats from the study?

A．They are curious about cat names.

B．They are dependent on their owners.

C．They know the names of their cat friends.

D．They like communicating with each other.

4. What is the unsettled question of the study?

A．How cats can recognize other cats’ faces.

B．Whether cats are much smarter than expected.

C．Whether cats can understand human interactions.

D．How cats link human words and their social companions.

7 . Local authorities and firefighters in the United States are always on the lookout for new and creative methods to help control wildfires. Especially during the hot and dry summer months, thousands of wildfires cause damage to forests every year. The city of West Sacramento in North California has found a creative secret weapon to help deal with this phenomenon: goats.

These friendly animals have been assisting the city with wildfire prevention and fire risks by eating weeds, dry grass and dead trees. When the goats eat the things that are likely to catch fire, they prevent the problem from happening.

Wildfires occur naturally when dry plants are ignited(点燃)by the sun’s heat and catch on fire. However, most wildfires are caused by human carelessness, including unattended campfires, cigarettes and other flammable objects. The best strategy to battle the fires and minimize the damage is to attempt to remove the fuel that enables the spread of the flames, in this case the dry weeds, trees and plants. If the things that are most likely to catch fire are gone, the fire is less likely to spread.

The love able goats are able to reach difficult areas that people are not able to access. About 400 of these goats can clear two acres per day. They even fertilize(使肥沃)the area, a natural and free side effect of eating all those dry plants. Firefighters and government officials cannot be happier with the results.

“For us, the combination of turning to goats for help with the quick fire response is an effective method of keeping our neighbors safe from disastrous wildfires,“said assistant Fire Chief Khari Helae.” With climate change and the fact that our vegetation is being affected because of climate change, it’s necessary to focus on our fuel reduction program.”

1. How do goats assist the city in dealing with wildfires?

A．By identifying the fuel in forests.	B．By consuming dry plants.
C．By leading firefighters to fire sources.	D．By eating up green tree leaves.

2. What can we say about the new method?

A．It is complex but rewarding.	B．It causes damage to local land.
C．It is well accepted worldwide.	D．It is environmentally-friendly.

3. What can be learned from Khari Helae’s words?

A．He spoke highly of the new method.	B．He was dissatisfied with fire responses.
C．He was optimistic about climate change.	D．He considered fuel reduction impractical.

4. Which of the following is the best title for the text?

A．Goats Help Keep Wildfires Under Control	B．Firefighters Are Being Gradually Replaced
C．Disastrous Wildfires Need to Be Controlled	D．Animals Are Fighting Against Climate Change

8 . In a study involving sweat samples from 335 people, trained dogs sniffed out 97 percent of the coronavirus cases that had been identified by PCR tests and all 31 COVID-19 cases among 192 people who didn’t have symptoms, researchers reported.

These findings are evidence that dogs could be effective for mass screening efforts at places such as airports or concerts and may provide friendly alternatives for testing people who fear the tests, says Dominique Grandjean in France.

Dogs’ noses also identified more COVID-19 cases than did antigen (抗原) tests, but sometimes mistook another virus for the coronavirus, Grandjean and colleagues found. What’s more, evidence suggests the dogs can pick up cases 48 hours before people test positive by PCR.

In the study, dogs were trained in coronavirus detection by rewarding them with toys—usually tennis balls. “It’s playtime for them,” Grandjean says. It takes about three to six weeks, depending on the dog’s experience with odor detection, to train a dog to pick out COVID-19 cases from sweat samples. For detection, the dogs sniffed used face masks or housing sweat samples collected from human volunteers’ underarms. Results showed that dogs perform as well as or even better than PCR tests for detecting the virus that causes COVID-19, Furton says. He and colleagues have used dogs at schools, a music festival and in a small trial screening airline employees for coronavirus infections.

One of the biggest advantages dogs have over other tests is their speed, Furton says. “Even with what we call a rapid test, you’re still going to have to wait tens of minutes or even hours, where the dog in a matter of seconds can make a response.” However, dogs take time to train and there currently aren’t even enough dogs trained to detect explosives, let alone diseases, Otto says.

Another drawback is that people don’t think of them as high-tech, though they’re one of the highest-tech devices we have.

1. What can we learn about the study from the first paragraph?

A．Dogs were trained to test COVID-19.

B．Sweat samples are perfect to test COVID-19.

C．Dogs can identify most COVID-19 cases.

D．PCR tests failed to meet public expectation.

2. What’s the disadvantage of using dogs for COVID-19 tests?

A．Dogs may be unfriendly to people when doing tests.

B．Dogs lack experience dealing with large screens.

C．Dogs may need a long time to identify the disease.

D．Dogs may recognize other diseases as coronavirus.

3. What can we infer about trained dogs according to Furton?

A．They perform well at detecting COVID-19 virus.

B．They do better at detecting explosives than viruses.

C．They are widely used in public places like schools.

D．They like to be rewarded with toys after training.

4. How does Otto view getting dogs to do COVID-19 tests?

A．Supportive.

B．Disapproving.

C．Fearful.

D．Confident.

9 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

There are many scenic spots in the world. Some are the best form of architecture ever built and seen. The Great Wall, Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Egypt and Petra     1     (actual) prove the point that architecture is an age old art and profession.

Not many people know the only piece of construction that can     2     (see) from the moon is the Great Wall of China,     3     total length built in all dynasties is 21,196.18 kilometers. It is the world’s longest man made structure.

Taj Mahal is a beautiful piece of architecture of all times, which was constructed by     4     (use) materials from all over India and Asia.     5     is believed that over 1,000 elephants were used to transport building materials. It     6     (take) the efforts of 22,000 laborers, painters, artists and stonecutters to shape Taj Mahal.

One of the best     7     (place) to experience traditional architecture is Egypt. The Pyramids of Egypt make us extremely amazed at how     8     (create) the architects in ancient times were and what efforts were made by ancient people.

Petra is another place     9     (visit) great structures. This ancient city was the capital of the Arab kingdom of the Nabateans,     10     trade center. The city is famous for water tunnels and stone structures carved in the rock.

10 . When the monthly electricity bill came home, parents always couldn’t believe their eyes, as the amount was much more than needed.     1     Here are some tips for parents to educate their children on how to save energy.

Switch off the lights. Assign one day in a week for a “turn off” practice, for a few hours. Tell the kids the significance of using less electricity and how it impacts the environment.     2    

Use energy-efficient transportation. When parents and their children are out on vacation, have a cycling outing. When the whole family rides bicycles together, it not only serves as a great bonding exercise, but it also teaches the children about eco-friendly transportation options.     3    

Play a game.     4     Engage them in a game instead. Ask the little ones to walk around the house with pen and paper, and make a note of all the equipment that consumes energy. Let them suggest what measures can be taken within the home to reduce consumption of electricity and go green. Parents can stick small notes near these appliances to give them interesting information on conservation.

    5     Create a theatre-like experience at home on a Sunday and gather everyone in the family, especially the kids, to watch an informative film about environmental issues or climate change. If parents have slightly older children, they can discuss the film and ask them what they think.

A．Watch an environmental film.

B．Talk with children about their opinions.

C．Play some games related to environmental protection.

D．Lecturing kids about environmental issues won’t help.

E．It makes them aware of the environmental effect of cars.

F．Light up some candles and play a board game to keep the children occupied.

G．So parents should urge their children to take up environment -friendly projects.