1 . Johannes Fritz, a biologist, needed to come up with a plan, again, if he was going to prevent his rare and beloved birds from going extinct.
To survive the European winter, the northern bald ibis — which had once disappeared entirely from the wild on the continent—needs to migrate (迁徙) south for the winter, over the Alps, before the mountains become impassable. But shifting climate patterns have delayed when the birds begin to migrate, and they are now reaching the mountains too late to make it over the peaks, locking them in an icy death trap. Determined to save them, Mr. Fritz decided he would teach the birds a new, safer migration route by guiding them himself in a tiny aircraft. And he was confident he could succeed in this daring, unconventional plan—because he had done it before.
Mr. Fritz learned to fly, modifying a light aircraft so it would fly at speeds slow enough for his winged students to keep up. In 2004, Mr. Fritz led the first flock from Austria to Italy, and has since led 15 such migrations. Over that time, he has rewilded 277 young ibises, many of which then started to pass the route onto their own young. For now, however, the main worry is getting the birds to follow the aircraft. “While they have a strong bond with their ‘mothers’ and follow them around on the ground, flying is more difficult,” Fritz said.
“Fly Away Home was a huge hit with us biologists,” Mr. Fritz said, recalling the 1996 movie in which characters lead the migration of orphaned Canada geese in a hang glider. When Mr. Fritz declared he’d do the same with the ibises, he was initially laughed at. But through years of trial and error, he succeeded. He even learned to fly like a bird, he said. Mr. Fritz’s two sons, both now teenagers, followed their flying father and the migrating birds on the ground, and his family and colleagues witnessed the risks he was taking. But the inevitable risks are “necessary”, Mr. Fritz said. “It’s not so much a job,” he added, “but my life’s purpose.”
1. Why did Mr. Fritz guide the birds himself in a tiny aircraft?| A．He wanted to learn from them. | B．He showed them a safer flyway. |
| C．They needed to be fed in the air. | D．They were often lost on the way. |
| A．By listing concrete numbers. | B．By conducting a survey. |
| C．By performing experiments. | D．By making a comparison. |
| A．Imaginative and honest. | B．Generous and easy-going. |
| C．Energetic and open-minded. | D．Strong-willed and brave. |
| A．Fritz once starred in a film in 1996. | B．Fritz had no difficulty with his work. |
| C．Fritz thought what he did was rewarding. | D．Fritz was challenged by those around him. |
2 . There are many reasons why some cats are bad-tempered. It’s commonly believed that their temperament can be influenced by the way they are born or raised.
Changes in a cat’s behaviour can often be explained by a health problem. Pain can cause cats to behave differently. It’s easy to mistake a problem as behavioural, which in fact is medical. Should you observe a significant change in your cat’s behaviour, then a visit to the vet is the best place to start.
It pays to remember that cats don’t like to share or queue. Sharing of ‘resources’ such as litter trays and foodbowls can cause stress and anxiety for many cats. It’s always a good idea to provide each cat with their own litter box, food, water bowls and bed. A lack of space to hide from or avoid other cats, competition for territory and lack of individual attention can also add to household friction.
Moving to a new house, the arrival of a new baby, new pets and other types of change can seriously impact cat behaviour. Cats are creatures of habit and tend to be territorial.
| A．Some cats simply do not like being touched and handled. |
| B．Watch out for changes in eating, drinking or litter-box habits. |
| C．When your cat seems lonely, you can hold it gently in your arms. |
| D．If so, offering the cat a high place to sit, such as a climbing tree, can be helpful. |
| E．So a change in routine may cause them to react, including withdrawal or aggression. |
| F．Don’t forget their incredible sense of smell, which is a useful tool of communication. |
| G．In fact, even the sweetest cats can suddenly become bad-tempered and behave out of character. |
3 . A recent study, led by Professor Andrew Barron, Dr. HaDi MaBouDi, and Professor James Marshall, illustrates how evolution has fine-tuned honey bees to make quick judgments while minimizing danger.
“Animal lives are full of decisions,” says Professor Barron. “A honey bee has a brain smaller than a sesame (芝麻) seed. And yet it can make decisions faster and more accurately than’ we can. A robot programmed to do a bee’s job would need the backup of a supercomputer.”
Bees need to work quickly and efficiently. They need to make decisions. Which flower will have a sweet liquid? While they’re flying, they face threats from the air. While landing, they’re vulnerable to potential hunter, some of which pretend to look like flowers.
Researchers trained 20 bees to associate each of the five different colored “flower disks” with their visit history of reward and punishment. Blue flowers always had sugar juice. Green flowers always had a type of liquid with a bitter taste for bees. Other colors sometimes had glucose (葡萄糖). “Then we introduced each bee to a ‘garden’ with artificial ‘flowers’. We filmed each bee and timed their decision-making process,” says Dr. MaBouDi. “If the bees were confident that a flower would have food, they quickly decided to land on it, taking an average of 0.6 seconds. If they were confident that a flower wouldn’t have food, they made a decision just as quickly. If unsure, they took on average 1.4 seconds, and the time reflected the probability that a flower had food.”
The team then built a computer model mirroring the bees’ decision-making process. They found the structure of the model looked very similar to the physical layout of a bee brain. “AI researchers can learn much from bees and other ‘simple’ animals. Millions of years of evolution has led to incredibly efficient brains with very low power requirements,” says Professor Marshall who co-founded a company that uses insect brain patterns to enable machines to move autonomously, like nature.
1. Why does Professor Andrew Barron mention “a supercomputer”?| A．To illustrate how a honey bee’s brain resemble each other. |
| B．To explain how animals arrive at informed decisions fast. |
| C．To demonstrate how a robot could finish a honey bee’s job. |
| D．To emphasize how honey bees make decisions remarkably. |
| A．Easily harmed by. | B．Highly sensitive to. |
| C．Deeply critical to. | D．Closely followed by. |
| A．Their judgments about reward and punishment. |
| B．Their preference for the colors of flower disks. |
| C．Their confirmation of food’s presence and absence. |
| D．Their ability to tell real flowers from artificial ones. |
| A．The power of bee brains is underestimated. | B．Biology can inspire future AI. |
| C．Autonomous machines are changing nature. | D．AI should be far more efficient. |
1. What did NASA call the area?
| A．The Light of Venezuela. |
| B．The Lightning Capital of the World. |
| C．The Never-ending Storm of Catatumbo. |
| A．The warm ocean current. |
| B．The strong mountain winds. |
| C．The special geographical location. |
| A．About 12%. | B．About 30%. | C．About 70%. |
| A．The man is afraid of lightening very much. |
| B．The locals are surprisingly fearless of lighting. |
| C．About 12,000 American people get hit in their lifetime. |
5 . When wind blows through a bigleaf maple (大叶枫), paper-thin, wing-like seeds called samaras gently spin towards the ground. The fruit’s tissue allows the wind to guide it further away from the tree. Inspired by the seeds, researchers designed a tiny, winged microchip, no larger than a grain of sand, that is powerful enough to monitor environmental pollution and airborne disease.
Called the microflier, the microchip has no motor to push it forward in the air but instead was designed to catch the wind. To perfect the microchip’s flying capability and shape, scientists took inspiration from the forms of various airborne seeds. The research team improved various designs until the microfliers flew slowly and more steadily than nature’s samara seeds. The slower falling rate allows the microchip to keep flying for longer, which gives it more time to collect data and monitor air pollutants and airborne diseases.
To perfect the microflier’s flight, researchers took inspiration from children’s pop-up books to create the three-dimensional wings. Usually, electronic microchips are flat, two-dimensional objects, but something flat won’t take flight. To make the 3-D shape, John A. Rogers and his team built a stretched rubber base that the microchip rests on. The wings pop into flight mode when the rubber base is relaxed.
The chip gathers data with sensors across its surface that can sense and monitor pH levels, test for heavy metals or chemicals, and track air pollution. An antenna (天线) on the microflier then sends all the collected data to a computer or phone. Rogers and his team are planning to test out the electronic chips soon by dropping thousands of the chips in a field. The microfliers will change color depending on the number of heavy metals present in the field where they land. A drone will then fly over the area and take photos of the microflier’s colors, allowing researchers to map out the pollutants.
Rogers and his team also designed the microchips to break down over time to prevent environmental pollution.
1. What is the winged microchip designed to do?| A．Guide seeds from the tree. | B．Prevent airborne diseases. |
| C．Keep track of air qualities. | D．Catch the wind to fly away. |
| A．Where researchers draw inspiration. | B．How the microflier has improved. |
| C．What the microchip does for humans. | D．Why the microflier flies more stably. |
| A．Drop chips in the field. | B．Monitor the soil color. |
| C．Map out air pollutants. | D．Handle soil pollution. |
| A．Winged microchips for monitoring environment |
| B．Microflier: A flying device of spreading seeds |
| C．Drone: A photographer of microflier’s colors |
| D．Electronic chips for finding airborne diseases |
6 . Working at a bank in New York City in the mid-2010s, Anna Sacks was not living the life she wanted. Sure, she was happy. But she wanted to do something that felt important.
Some people seeking meaning might read a self-help book or perhaps volunteer a few hours a week. Sacks packed up her life and moved to Connecticut to participate in Adamah, a farming program that focuses on sustainable living and growing sustainable food. When she returned to New York, her life was with a new purpose and many new skills to make her dreams a reality.
“One of the things that really stuck with me from Adamah was how little waste they produced and how they handled the waste they did have, primarily through composting (堆肥),” she says. The Adamah program opened Sacks’ eyes to the damage consumer culture is doing on a local, national, and global level, and the need to find solutions. So in 2017, she began what she calls “trash walking”.
During tours around her community, Sacks picks through garbage to look for reusable items. Soon, her “trash walking” expanded to include corporate trash along with residential trash. Surprisingly, she discovered a wide range of really great stuff-like clothing, decorations, and food -all of which she documents on TikTok.
Under the name The Trash Walker, Sacks quickly gained popularity for her videos that highlight the problems with consumerism. “The root issue is overproduction, which leads to overconsumption, which leads to a large amount of waste,” she says.
The fact is, companies often choose to trash items rather than give them away to people who might need them. A big reason for this waste is the way our current tax laws are structured, Sacks says. Sellers who destroy goods can claim the cost as a loss on their taxes and be refunded. If they give away goods, they can claim only a small amount as a charitable reduction on their taxes.
Sacks’ main focus is simply getting people to pay attention to how many unnecessary things they buy and then throw away. “Once you become aware of the way you consume, you can see ways you improve, ”she says.
1. Why did Anna Sacks leave New York?| A．To learn how to grow food. | B．To pursue a more meaningful life. |
| C．To realize her dream as a volunteer. | D．To accept the invitation from a program. |
| A．The significance of trash walking. | B．The hard truth of consumer culture. |
| C．The sustainable food people produced. | D．The way people there dealt with the waste. |
| A．The tax refund. | B．The tax reduction. |
| C．The overproduction. | D．The poor quality of goods. |
| A．Consumer culture accounts for wasting. | B．Corporate trash outweighs residential trash. |
| C．Turning to farming leads to sustainable living. | D．Trash walking is the key to becoming wealthy. |
7 . In parts of Africa, people communicate with a wild bird — the greater honeyguide-in order to locate bee habitats and harvest their stores of honey. It’s a rare example of cooperation between humans and wild animals, and a potential instance of cultural coevolution (共同进化). Brian Wood from UCLA and Claire Spottiswoode from University of Cape Town were lead authors on a study showing how this valuable partnership is maintained and varies across cultures.
“Our study demonstrates the bird’s ability to learn distinct voiced signals that are traditionally used by different honey-hunting communities, expanding possibilities for mutually beneficial cooperation with people,” Wood said. “Honeyguides seem to know the landscape well, gathering knowledge about the location of bee nests, which they then share with people,” Spottiswoode said. “People are eager for the bird’s help.” The honeyguides also benefit from locating the colonies: They eat the leftover honeycomb.
Spottiswoode and Wood’s study was done in cooperation with the Hadza in Tanzania, with whom Wood has been conducting research since 2004, and the Yao community of northern Mozambique. Their prior work in both communities documented differences in how each culture attracts honeyguides. Among the Hadza, a honey-hunter announces a desire to partner with the bird by whistling. In Mozambique, Yao honey-hunters do so with a “Brr!”... followed by a “...hmm!”
Using mathematical models and audio playback experiments, the team studied these signals, their usefulness to people and their impacts on birds. They experimentally exposed honeyguides in Tanzania and Mozambique to the same set of prerecorded sounds. This enabled the researchers to test whether honeyguides had learned to recognize and prefer the specialized signals that local honey-hunters used or were naturally attracted to all such signals.
The honeyguides in Tanzania were over three times more likely to cooperate when hearing the calls of local Hadza people than the calls of ‘foreign’ Yao. The honeyguides in Mozambique were almost twice as likely to cooperate when hearing the local Yao call, compared to the ‘foreign’ Hadza whistles.
The study proposes that differences in honeyguide-attracting signals are not random, but make practical sense. While honey-hunting, both the Hadza and Yao come across mammals (哺乳动物), but only the Hadza hunt them, using bows and arrows. The Hadza’s hunting might explain the less notable whistles they use. Filmed interviews show Hadza hunters explaining that they can evade being detected by their prey (猎物) because their whistles “sound like birds.” Contrarily, the signal the Yao use to communicate with the honeyguide can help scare off animals they find dangerous.
1. By cooperating with honey-hunting communities, honeyguides can _____.| A．nest near human culture |
| B．locate bee habitats easier |
| C．have access to more food |
| D．become familiar with the landscape |
| A．To study their mathematical models. |
| B．To check if they are a natural preference. |
| C．To investigate their usefulness to humans. |
| D．To see if they increase birds’ ability to find honey. |
| A．The human-bird relationship can change with new signals. |
| B．The Yao community hunts animals while looking for bee nests. |
| C．The honeyguides are more responsive to calls from the local people. |
| D．The signals from the Hadza were more effective in attracting honeyguides. |
| A．How mammals react to different signals. |
| B．How hunting techniques are applied to prey. |
| C．How whistles enable honeyguides to find targets. |
| D．How signals are associated with hunting practice. |
8 . A sleeping animal cannot look for food or flee from danger. But the fact that sleep is widespread among animals shows its restorative powers are essential. Some animals, though, try to have their cake and eat it. Dolphins and ducks sleep with half their brains, leaving the other half on guard. A paper in Science by Dr Le reports another innovative workaround. Chinstrap penguins take their sleep in thousands of naps, tiny micro- sleeps-or at least when they are nesting.
Chinstraps sleep with either their whole brain or just one half. Data confirmed they sleep in the ocean or on land. Ducks sleep in long periods, while the penguins nod of for several seconds at a time, hundreds of times an hour. The naps average 4 seconds in length; 72% lasted less than 10 seconds. Micro-sleeps aren’t unknown. Exhausted humans, like jet-lagged (倒时差) tourists and parents of newborn babies, can experience them. Totaling the duration, the researchers concluded Chinstraps get around 12 hours of sleep daily.
Two explanations are given for Chinstraps’ sleep pattern. The first is to do with external threats. Penguins hatch eggs alone while their partners are away seeking for food. Colonies (领地) are threatened by big birds that’ll steal unattended eggs. Broken sleep is a clever strategy of getting some shut-eye during long egg-guarding periods.
Penguins with nests near the edge of the colony are at greater risk than those in the centre, but enjoy more extended naps. The second is threats from within, as penguin colonies are noisy, crowded places. They steal nesting materials from careless neighbors, so penguins in the crime-ridden centre find it harder to sleep than those in the safer suburbs.
Choosing between those theories requires more research. Dr Lee said, “Nor can we measure how restorative such naps are. Chinstraps are evidently able to hatch their young under such conditions, which suggests they’re getting something from their constant nodding-off. So, humans nurturing their newborns should take heart.”
1. Why do dolphins and ducks sleep with only one side of their brains?| A．To enjoy their cake. | B．To establish a nice nest. |
| C．To be watchful during naps. | D．To obtain high-quality sleep. |
| A．Engaging in numerous naps a day. | B．Sleeping nowhere beyond the ocean. |
| C．Ranging from 4 seconds to 12 hours. | D．Always sleeping with the entire brain. |
| A．Penguins live safely in natural colonies. | B．Penguins encounter a variety of challenges. |
| C．Penguins hatch their eggs away from colony. | D．Penguins at the core of the colony sleep longer. |
| A．Their duration is hard to detect. | B．They distract the restorative effects. |
| C．Adopting them aids human newborns. | D．Taking this sleep mode favors penguins. |
9 . Leave-No-Trace Camping
For those of us who love spending time in the great outdoors, wild spaces are very special. These are places we visit to recharge, or to fill our hearts with natural beauty.
Its principles are to treat the wilderness the way a decent visitor would and leave everything just as you found it, with no evidence that you passed through.
You can carry out these ideals in a number of ways. Begin by packing out all your litter. Whenever you go camping, take an empty trash bag with you and put all garbage into the bag. In addition, try not to damage vegetation.
It’s also important that you should not take things away from the wilderness. Rocks, plants, flowers and seashells are all part of the natural landscape.
Leave-No-Trace camping is about being respectful and thoughtful. It’s about honoring the natural world and the creatures that live in it. If you love seeing an untouched mountain stream or a lovely field of wildflowers, then you’ve already taken the first step.
| A．This means not stepping into a wild animal’s space. |
| B．This is also called “low impact” or “no impact” camping. |
| C．Once taken away, they won’t be there for others to enjoy. |
| D．An increasing number of people take up camping in the wilderness. |
| E．When you put up your tent, try to find a place that’s already bare of plants. |
| F．We hate to see them littered with rubbish or any reminders of previous visitors. |
| G．Follow these basic practices and you can be models of the Leave-No-Trace philosophy. |
Tomatoes: The Real Magical Fruit
“Fresh tomato plants! Straight out of the ground! 50 cents each!” I shouted in the school hall. In my hands, I carried a shoebox with little tomato plants. Their homes were plastic bottles, without the top half. Most people ignored my product, but some handed me 50 cents and picked out a 2-week-old baby tomato plant.
About a month before this, I started gardening. I pulled up grass in my little garden for several days in a row. Satisfied with my work, I continued to the second step — begging my dad to take me to the supermarket. He agreed!
When my dad turned off the engine and opened the door, I practically skipped inside the supermarket. We headed straight for the garden center. I picked up planters, seeds and dirt. My dad helped and showed me the best dirt and tomato plant types to get. We got to the register, and my dad, knowing what would happen, helped me pay.
As soon as I got home, I began to plant them in my garden. The following days witnessed my visits to the garden and my parents were amazed by my devotion to my new-found love.
Then was the part where I met my problem — I planted too many tomato seeds. I realized this all too late, about 10 days later when they all started sprouting (发芽) up and I counted 45 tomato plants. A few days went by and then I ended up with 85 tomato plants.
I did what all high schoolers would do when they messed up — I asked people around. I even got a notebook to write down their suggestions. Sadly, I got the same answer from most people, “Just let them die.” WHAT?! Let my beautiful plants die? They had so much potential! They could make 20 — 30 tomatoes per plant! We were talking about the possibility of around 2,550 tomatoes!
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。
So, I decided to solve it in my way.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The result was better than I had thought.
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