| A．He was bitten by a horse. | B．He was bitten by a dog. | C．He lost his horse. |
I didn’t see the thin plastic tape running across the bread bag when I put the bread in my shopping cart or when I checked out. It wasn’t until I unpacked the bread at home that I realized that I’d broken the rules again.
That stupid plastic tape joined the long list of mistakes I made in just one week of trying to eat plastic-free. Last month, I challenged myself to purchase a week’s worth of food without bringing home any plastic. That meant no yogurt containers or plastic packages.
I chose a budget of $115 (roughly half-way between the average weekly grocery bill for a family of two in Massachusetts). On Saturday afternoon, I pulled into the parking lot of a well-known zero-waste shopping center.
I started in the produce section, where I typically got a plastic bag of organic baby carrots. This time, I could not go there because every vegetable in the organic section was packed in plastic containers. But I found some beautiful carrots among the non-organic produce. Then I saw the plastic price labels hanging off their rubber bands. I rolled my cart past the green beans and grapes, all inside the plastic. I weighed loose apples, onions and sweet potatoes. My anxiety kicked in — a feeling that I wouldn’t have enough. So, I bought a head of cabbage.
I tapped prices into the calculator on my phone. Leaving the produce section, I was in good shape, at $32. It was time to search for protein.
I headed to the meat counter. Again, everything was prepackaged in plastic. But the man behind the glass kindly agreed to put some chicken and meat, separately, in paper bags. Together they were $21.
Tofu, cheese, yogurt and pretty much everything in the dairy section were prepackaged in plastic. Even the bottled milk had a plastic cap. But there were lots of eggs in those paper bags.
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。
At checkout, I still had $62 left but I could not find anything else without plastic.
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At the moment, I realized that perhaps I shouldn’t have had aimed too high.
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3 . Much of gardening is learned by trial and error — for many, mostly error. But the good news is that we can learn from others’ mistakes as well as our own.
Failing to test the soil
Proper soil pH value is vital for successful gardening. That’s because nutrition is available to plants only at proper pH levels, which vary for each type of plant. For example, blueberry plants will likely turn yellow and produce less if the pH level is higher than 5.5.
Watering incorrectly
Most garden plants require 1 to 1.5 inches of water per week. But leaving the work to a sprinkler (喷头) puts your plants at risk.
A plant labeled as needing “full sun” will likely disappoint you if it is planted in the shade. And no matter how much you hope otherwise, “water tolerant” will never mean “likes wet soil”. Selecting plants suited to your growing conditions will result in a better-looking and healthier garden that requires less care.
Protecting the roots improperly
Proper covering keeps water and helps keep soil temperatures even. So it’s an important part of gardening. Improper covering, however, can kill your plants. Apply 2 to 3 inches of covering around plants. Never pile up against them.
| A．Applying proper nutrition to the soil |
| B．Planting wrong plants at wrong places |
| C．Here are some well-tested tips on good gardening |
| D．Instead, snake a watering tube over the soil surface |
| E．Otherwise, it will lock in too much water and heat which might kill them |
| F．Fortunately, test tools are relatively cheap and available at gardening stores |
| G．Here are some of the common gardening mistakes -and how to avoid them |
4 . Earthquakes have rocked the planet for many years. Studying the quakes of the past could help scientists better understand modern earthquakes, but tools to do such work are exiguous.
Enter zircons. Researchers used this special means to home in on the temperatures within a fault (地壳断层) during earthquakes millions of years ago. The method offers insights into the strength of long-ago quakes, and can improve the understanding of how today’s earthquakes release energy, the researchers reported in the April Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems.
“The more we understand about the past, the more we can understand what might happen in the future,” said Emma Armstrong, a professor specializing in earthquakes at Utah State University in Logan. Armstrong and his colleagues focused on California’s Punchbowl Fault. That now-quiet portion of the larger San Andreas Fault was probably active between 1 million to 10 million years ago, Armstrong said.
Heat from friction (摩擦) is generated in a fault when it slips and touches off an earthquake. Previous analyses of preserved organic material suggested that temperatures within the Punchbowl Fault peaked between 465℃ and 1065℃. The researchers suspected that zircons in rocks from the fault could narrow that broad window. Zircons often contain the radioactive chemical elements uranium (U) and thorium ( Th), which decay (衰变) to helium (He) at a predictable rate. That helium (He) then builds up in the crystals. But when a zircon is heated past a temperature criticality value—the size of which depends on the zircon’s composition—the accumulated helium (He) escapes.
Measuring the amounts of the three elements in zircons from the fault suggests that the most in-tense earthquake generated temperatures lower than 800℃. That roughly halves the range previously reported. The finding provides useful clues to the amount of heat released by quakes, something difficult to measure for modern earthquakes because they often occur at great depths. Armstrong plans to continue studying zircons, in the hope of finding more ways to take advantage of them for details about ancient quakes.
1. What does the underlined word “exiguous” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．Scarce. | B．Difficult. | C．Pricey. | D．Extraordinary. |
| A．They can lead to various earthquakes. | B．They determine how much of their energy. |
| C．They can reduce the fault temperature range. | D．They would decay over long periods. |
| A．Impact of changing earthquakes on zircons. |
| B．Origin and development of enter zircons. |
| C．Difference between modern and ancient quakes. |
| D．More ways to use zircons for ancient quake study. |
| A．Earthquakes Bring about Global W arming |
| B．Ancient Zircons Help to Unearth Earthquakes |
| C．An Innovative Means Makes a Hit in Studying |
| D．Zircons Changed Our Views of Earthquakes |
China has detailed measures to boost its climate change monitoring and risk prevention capabilities, marking a significant step forward in the country’s efforts
The country will seek to build a climate-resilient society
The first time China
As the global climate
6 . Time to load up some popular games: new research indicates pigs possess the mental capability to play video games. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, tested the ability of four pigs (Hamlet, Omelette, Ebony and Ivory) to play a simple joystick (操纵杆) game with their noses, moving a cursor (光标) to four targets on the screen. Although the animals didn’t demonstrate the skills to win a round any time, they did show an understanding of some elementary games. Performing well not by chance, the pigs appeared to recognize the movement of the cursor was controlled by the joystick. The fact that they did so well despite a lack of flexible fingers is “extraordinary”, according to the researchers.
“It is no small achievement for an animal to grasp the concept that the behaviour they are performing is having an effect elsewhere. That pigs can do this to any degree should give us pause as to what else they are capable of learning and how such learning may impact them, “said Purdue University’s Dr Candace Croney, the study’s lead author.
Researchers also noted that while the pigs could be taught to play the game using food as positive motivation, they also responded well to social interaction. In fact, when the game was made more challenging and the pigs became unwilling to participate in it, “only oral encouragement by the experimenter” would see training continue.
These findings are the latest to highlight the intelligence of pigs. Not only have they been shown to use mirrors to find hidden food, but studies have also demonstrated how pigs can be taught to “come” and “sit” after oral commands.
As with any sentient (有感觉力的) beings, how we interact with pigs and what we do to them impacts and matters to them. We therefore have a moral duty to understand how pigs acquire information, and what they are capable of learning and remembering, because it ultimately offers the potential for how they understand their interactions with us and their environments.
1. What can be learned from Paragraph 1?| A．The pigs sometimes won the video games. |
| B．The pigs operated joysticks with their noses. |
| C．The pigs competed with each other in the games. |
| D．The pigs sometimes performed well accidentally. |
| A．Stop us from advancing. | B．Affect us in learning. |
| C．Make us think seriously. | D．Force us to train pigs better. |
| A．Their being inspired by human words. | B．Their being driven by food. |
| C．Their being willing to keep trying. | D．Their being motivated by challenges. |
| A．Smart Pigs: Best Animal Players | B．Flexible Noses: Fun Games |
| C．Oral Commands: Pig Learners | D．Pig Players: Learning Potential |
7 . It’s peak cold and flu season, which means taking a lot of preventative measures. Frequent hand-washing is a must. As is avoiding co-workers or friends who are sick. But we humans are not the only animals that change behavior to keep diseases at bay. So do ants.
“So there are the foragers and the nurses — it’s two different groups of work,” said Natha of the University of Lausanne. She and her colleagues observed ants to see their reaction to the presence of a disease.
“The nurses being made of young workers typically, stay inside the nest and take care of the eggs. And the foragers are all the workers spending most of time at outside of the nest to collect food and defend the territory.”
Forager ants are at greater risk of getting exposed to diseases because they leave the safety of the nest. So the researchers sprayed a common virus on a small group of forager ants and then followed their movements to see the way other ants reacted.
“We marked all ants in the colony with individual labels, which carries these two-dimensional bar code marks like QR code which is automatically detected and recorded using a tracking system.”
After the infection, the nurse and forager ants stayed within their working places and interacted less outside of their work group. The researchers also saw that forager ants spent more time outside of the nest. “They increase that amount by 15 percent, so by quite a long large amount.”
Isolating behavior stops the spread of the virus. “Something that’s quite interesting in these ants that’s been shown by the study is that in their ability to avoid infecting other members of the community, ants may be more advanced than we are,” Natha said.
1. How did the researchers track the infected ants?| A．They labeled the movements of infected ants. |
| B．They used the QR codes to follow the ants’ movements. |
| C．They had some nurse and forager ants infected with the virus. |
| D．They applied a tracking technology to record the ants’ movements. |
| A．Forager ants stayed inside the nest more. |
| B．Infected ants tended to stay away from healthy ants. |
| C．The nurses stayed inside the nest, working as usual. |
| D．Forager ants, together with coworkers, stayed outside more. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Objective. | C．Appreciative. | D．Conservative. |
| A．How ants keep diseases at bay in the nest. |
| B．Ants change movements to fight against diseases. |
| C．The measures all the ants take to prevent diseases. |
| D．Similarities between human and ants in controlling diseases. |
A new United Nations climate report predicts Africa’s rare glaciers (冰川) will disappear in the next 20 years. The report, called State of the Climate in Africa,
The report warns that
The report notes that last year was Africa’s third
Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the WMO, said massive displacement, hunger and increasing climate events such as droughts and flooding are likely
9 . People use laughter to connect and bond with others. It’s how we tell friends that we find their jokes funny, or how kids in a park show that they are having fun. Laughter is so important to humans, even if they belong to different cultures or speak different languages. What about animals? Scientists are studying if there is a connection between animals’ laughing and playing.
Sasha Winkler, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studies biological anthropology (人类学)，including the study of animal behavior. She noticed that the small monkeys she worked with, liked to play together by chasing each other. While having fun together, they made panting (喘气) sounds, almost like they were out of breath, which reminded Winkler of their quiet laughter. This made Winkler wonder whether other animals did so while they were playing.
To find out whether other animals laugh and play, Winkler teamed up with another scientist named Greg Bryant, a professor and vice chair in the Department of Communication at UCLA. Together, they found and read dozens of reports written by other scientists who study animals. Winkler and Bryant looked for any mentions in any animal of sound signaling like the panting of the monkeys during their playing.
In April 2021, Winkler and Bryant published their findings in a science journal. Through their research, they identified 65 species or groups of animals, which laugh while playing. The animals that laugh the most include primates (灵长类) like monkeys and apes, rodents (啮齿动物) like rats, and mammals that live in the ocean like dolphins. Their work won’t only help us understand animals better but it could also help us understand how humans develop or change over time. Next, they will carry on more study to find more.
1. What is the function of paragraph 1?| A．To conclude the main idea. |
| B．To put forward the topic. |
| C．To offer the supporting evidences. |
| D．To add the background information. |
| A．They can hardly breathe. |
| B．They tend to laugh separately. |
| C．They laugh at a low sound. |
| D．They don’t laugh at all. |
| A．It is great progress in the study of animals and humans. |
| B．It is only based on the findings in a science journal. |
| C．Over 65 groups of animals laugh while playing. |
| D．They do the research only by studying primates and rodents. |
| A．Science. | B．Education. | C．Health. | D．Entertainment. |
10 . Imagine an island untouched by humans and without any large mammals.Colorful and strange birds of all shapes and sizes fly over forests and seaside hills. The sky is painted with endless clouds. Flightless birds nest safely on the ground, and seabirds cover the beaches. The sound of the bird song is overwhelming. The Maori named this place “Aotearoa,” Land of the Long White Cloud. The world now knows it as New Zealand.
When the Maori sailed their canoes across the Pacific Ocean from their homeland, Hawaiki, at least 120 different species of birds lived in Aotearoa. Eleven species of moa , an ostrich-like bird, moved freely, and the largest stood 11 feet tall. The Haast’s eagle dominated the skies with its wing span of nearly 10 feet. Because bats were the only mammals, Aotearoa was an actual bird paradise.
Unfortunately, the Maori overhunted the moa for meat. As the moa disappeared, the Haast’s eagle lost its primary food source. By the time Europeans arrived in New Zealand, both birds were extinct.
When European settlers arrived, they brought animals that attacked birds. These non-native animals exploded in number because they had no predators. Birds also lost habitat as forests were cut down for wood and pastures.
Within a few hundred years of humans discovering and living in New Zealand, more than half the unique bird species were extinct. The whekau,found throughout New Zealand in the 1800s, was declared extinct in 1914. The piopio,considered the best songbird in Aotearoa, was last seen in the mid-1900s.
Thirty percent of the species now alive are in danger because of other animals and loss of habitat. Scientists estimate nature would take 50 million years to replace the birds lost over the last 1,000 years. New Zealand conservationists are working to save the threatened species.
1. What does the first paragraph tell us?| A．New Zealand is a paradise for birds. |
| B．Aotearoa does not really exist. |
| C．The Maori founded New Zealand. |
| D．No mammals lived on the island. |
| A．Partners. | B．Killers. | C．Friends. | D．Settlers. |
| A．Threats from man and other animals. |
| B．The arrival of Europeans. |
| C．The lack of food sources. |
| D．The increase in farmland. |
| A．Why local officials stop hunting. |
| B．What living conditions for natives are like. |
| C．How many animals have survived on the island. |
| D．What efforts conservationists take to guard bird species. |
