1 . The world has undoubtedly changed in many ways due to the changing climate. Humanity has seen wildfires burn through the rolling hills of California and across Australian forests. Weather patterns have changed, and species of all kinds have had to adapt as well as they can.

A study out of the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts, focuses on the Epaulette shark and their newly born pups. Native to the warm waters near Australia and New Guinea, this small species of shark is very interesting and adaptive. But all the evolutionary adaptive behaviors don’t take these sharks out of harm’s way.

Lauren Benoit, a marine scientist, weighed in on this issue, “Studies have found that warmer waters caused sharks to give birth faster and as a result the premature pups were smaller and lacked energy.” Lauren continued discussing the real impact of climate change on all sharks. “The problem is that the water is warming so rapidly that these sharks may not have enough time to adapt. The same goes for their prey (猎物), who are also trying to deal with the changing environment. Some species may be able to change their migration patterns to follow the colder water.”

The danger is clear and present. Lauren explains: “If these animals are born too soon, then the conditions they need to survive may not be present. Overtime, if some of the babies survive and are able to adapt to these temperatures, then future generations will be able to withstand the warmer environment.”

The warming conditions of the planet will be likely to influence everything living on Earth. Lauren helps us understand why we need to try and stop and change the impact of global warming from a shark’s perspective: “Overall, most sharks are cold-blooded and are very sensitive to temperature. As global ocean temperatures warm, it will become dangerous for shark populations.”

1. What can we know about the sharks in the second paragraph?

A．Warmer waters help them grow better.	B．They have adapted to global warming.
C．Their new born babies are very lovely.	D．Their adaptation fails to keep them safe.

2. How are warm waters affecting sharks?

A．They are challenging their babies’ growth.	B．They are making sharks more sensitive.
C．They are weakening their ability to swim.	D．They are causing sharks to die of coldness.

3. What does the underlined word “withstand” mean in paragraph 4?

A．Ignore.

B．Survive.

C．Create.

D．Change.

4. What is the text mainly about?

A．Sharks’ prey tries to deal with warmer environment.

B．Baby sharks have adapted to higher temperatures.

C．Climate change has posed a threat to baby sharks.

D．Undeniable climate change causes global disasters.

2 . The story started from a popular video, in which a tourist pulled a flower out of the ground in Tibet and boiled it with other food.

He might not know what he dug up was not an ordinary one but snow lotus, an extremely rare species. The exact number existing in the wild is unknown, but scientists believe that the species is dying out and people are not allowed to collect them for private or even scientific use since 2000.

The snow lotus generally only grows above the snowline of the Tibetan Himalayas or Heaven Mountain in Central Asia. In order to survive the harsh environment and strong wind, it grows thick hair on the outside, which keeps the plant from the cold. And it often has to grow around six to eight years before its only flowering time in life.

Only very few plants and animals survive in such an environment. Therefore, each snow lotus is key part of fragile (脆弱的) ecosystem around it. When someone digs one out of the ground, he/she not only wastes the plant’s own years of efforts, but also threatens the ecological (生态的) balance of about one square kilometer around it.

For a long time, many people collect the lotus flowers to sell as herbal (药草的) plants to others, even though their herbal effects are not proved. Regardless of the fact, some traders do misleading advertising about them and illegally sell them at high prices. As a result, the species is in danger. The snow lotus is not the only plant that suffers from the illegal sale of certain people because they carry a sense of mystery. It is time the law offered stricter protection of these rare plants for the ecological environment.

1. What did the author intend to tell us about the tourist?

A．He destroyed an endangered plant.	B．He has good outdoor survival skills.
C．He discovered a special kind of flowers.	D．He has made many popular short videos.

2. Why does the snow lotus have thick hair on the outside?

A．To fight for enough living space.	B．To make the flower less obvious.
C．To protect it from extreme conditions.	D．To prevent it from being dug out easily.

3. What does the author mainly suggest in Paragraph 4?

A．It is hard for people to find a snow lotus.

B．It takes many years for a snow lotus to fully grow.

C．Some rare plants usually grow in weak environments.

D．The snow lotus is very important to the local ecosystem.

4. What lesson can we probably learn from the text?

A．We should call on the public to protect rare plants.

B．We should learn to recognize different plants.

C．We should follow all the laws in our country.

D．We should avoid taking wild plants as food.

3 . FUR, FINS & FEATHERS

Wildlife-watching can turn a day outdoors into a wide-eyed family adventure. Here are four of the best UK experiences this spring.

Ponies on Exmoor

Exmoor National Park is a haven for wildlife, with the area’s native ponies a highlight. Some animals wander around the park, and you will likely see them on four-wheel-drive vehicle adventures. For very young children, don’t miss the Exmoor Pony Center, near Dulverton, home to around 20 native ponies.

Puffins on Skomer Island

Skomer might be less than a mile off the Pembrokeshire coast but arriving on this rocky, dramatic island still feels like landing on a distant shore. During breeding season (April to early July), you can expect to spot puffins, but there’s plenty more for families to enjoy, too. However, visitor numbers are capped each day, so book your boat trip well ahead of time.

Eagles and Otters on Mull

The inner Hebridean Island of Mull has superb birdwatching certificates and a rich marine life, too. Keep your eyes on the sky for golden and white-tailed eagles — the former a Highland icon, the latter the UK’s largest bird of prey. The coast, meanwhile, is home to shy but spellbinding otters (水獭). Mull Magic offers themed wildlife tours, including the Otter Detective Walk, the Eagle Walk and Birds, Beaches & Butterflies.

Seals in Norfolk

The county’s coastline is famous for its seals, with three key locations allowing you to admire colonies from a responsible distance. Hunstanton is a good bet in the summer months, and Horsey Beach is an excellent option for seeing baby seals during the winter breeding seasons, but Blakeney Points is the best year-round choice, with both harbor and grey seals seen in large numbers. Various operators run family-friendly bout trips from nearby Morston Quay, with departures throughout the year.

1. Which tour is strongly recommended for little kids?

A．Ponies on Exmoor.

B．Puffins on Skomer Island.

C．Eagles and Otters on Mull.

D．Seals in Norfolk.

2. What is special about Skomer Island?

A．You can see puffins in August.	B．It’s quite far away from the shore.
C．You can enjoy themed wildlife tours.	D．It puts limits on the number of visitors.

3. Where can visitors watch seals breeding all year?

A．Hunstanton.

B．Hebridean Island.

C．Blakeney Points.

D．Horsey Beach.

4 . In the wild, it all depends on you with your survival knowledge and equipment to life.     1     You must be familiar with the use of equipment. The weight of the equipment should be no more than 20kg. Here are some necessities that are advised to take.

You’d better take a compass. It is not heavy. It is entitled to a place in your equipment. The use of the compass is the most effective. Some people may say GPS is very popular now.     2     In cold, hot, wet and other bad conditions, such as about 10 degrees below zero in the northeast, GPS uses 30% more electricity than room temperature.

Besides that, I will talk about the role of fire. Fire plays an important role not only in cooking food, but also in helping us resist the cold.     3     The ordinary plastic lighters sold on the street are actually good, light weight and easy to use.

    4     At least it is about 1.5 meters long and 30 — 50 cm wide. Putting a scarf around your neck can prevent sunburn by sunshine, can make it a simple sun hat, marching in bright light or desert. You can also make nets and catch fish and shrimp, birds and insects in the wild.

No matter how high-end your outdoor clothing is, you still need to take a raincoat. Choosing a suitable raincoat is very important. The separation kind of raincoat is more convenient. The raincoat doesn’t just protect you from the rain.     5    

If the survival of the wild is compared to a building, then the strong will is the foundation, the survival knowledge is the wall, the proper training is the roof, the equipment is just to make you live in more comfortable decoration.

A．First, one better option is to take GPS.

B．The survival scarf in the wild is our essential survival tool.

C．Good equipment can let you have a more comfortable experience.

D．Bicycle raincoat can cover your bag but you can’t stretch out your hand.

E．However, the more complex things are, the more likely they are to go wrong.

F．In order to let you enjoy better treatment in the wild, you have to take a lighter.

G．It can also be used as tents and waterproof mats to keep you warm and get water for you.

5 . Wang Yaping’s dream of becoming an astronaut was inspired by Yang Liwei’s 2003 space flight, which was China’s first manned space mission.

Born in a small village in Yantai, Shandong Province in 1980, Wang had been an enthusiastic long-distance runner since primary school, and competed in local sports meetings.

In 1997, Wang, a high school student, was encouraged to register for the pilot recruitment program by her classmates because she was good at sports and didn’t wear glasses. The 17-year-old had been considering applying to a teaching college, as her parents suggested.

Given her strong build and ability to stay calm under pressure, Wang passed all tests as well as physical examinations and became a female pilot in China. After four years of systemic education and tough training, Wang eventually learned to fly four different types of aircraft before graduation.

During her service as a military pilot, she accumulated 1,567 hours of flight time and was involved in major tasks such as the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake relief effort and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

In May 2010, Wang became a member of China’s first batch of female astronauts. The joy of being selected did not last long as the hard training quickly sank in.

In the first year, Wang could not get the top level in the high-G training, during which she had to endure eight times the force of gravity in a spinning centrifuge. The training imitates the environment when the spacecraft takes off, enters orbit and returns. Wang improved her performance by doing extra core-strength exercises every day to strengthen her back and abdominal muscles. She got the top level at the end of 2011. Wang realized her space dream in 2013 as part of the Shenzhou-10 mission.

Over the past two years, Wang has logged in over 6,000 hours of strict training. The most tiring exercise was the seven-hour underwater training session during which she had to wear a special suit that weighed over 100 kilograms to simulate extravehicular activities in a weightless environment.

Wang has become the first female taikonaut to work in China’s Tiangong space station as well as the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk.

1. Why did Wang want to become an astronaut?

A．Because she was able to stay calm under pressure.

B．Because she was good at sports and didn’t wear glasses.

C．Because she was influenced by China’s first manned space flight.

D．Because she was advised to register for the pilot program by her parents.

2. From this passage, we can know that ________.

A．Wang won a long-distance runner championship

B．Wang was the first Chinese female to take a spacewalk

C．Wang went to a teaching college encouraged by her classmates

D．Wang thought the seven-hour underwater training session was easy

3. What did Wang do after she joined China’s first batch of female astronauts?

A．She learned to fly four different types of aircraft.

B．She participated in the Shenzhou-10 mission of China.

C．She received four years of systemic education in university.

D．She got involved in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake relief effort.

4. Which of the following words can best describe Wang?

A．Calm and friendly.	B．Warm-hearted and creative.
C．Modest and honest.	D．Hardworking and determined.

6 . 阅读下面短文，根据题目要求用英文回答问题。请在答题卡指定区域作答。

While most spiders hunt alone, there are a few hundred species of social spiders that live in colonies. A.studiosus is one of them. Up to 50 individuals gather together to spin large collective webs, which catch larger prey than each spider could trap on its own.

All the colony members look the same, but they don’t all behave in the same way. The females can be aggressive or docile (温驯的). It’s surprisingly easy to realize their personalities—just put two of them in a small box overnight and check on them the next morning. If they’re both docile, they will have built a joint web in one corner of the box. If one of them is aggressive, the pair will be at opposite corners.

Colin Wright from the University of Pittsburgh has now found that these personality types do different jobs within the web, creating a natural division of labor. They’re a little like ants, where small workers clean and look for food, and big soldiers guard and defend. But unlike these insects, the social spiders don’t have castes (社会阶层) with different builds. Instead, their roles are defined by their personalities.

When Wright’s team first started studying A.studiosus, they couldn’t work out what the docile spiders did. They didn’t seem to repair webs, keep enemies away, or catch prey. But when the researchers checked the fates of colonies in the wild, they found that those with a mix of docile and aggressive members were more likely to survive than those with just a single type. The docile members were clearly doing something important.

It turns out that they act as the colony’s babysitters. They spend most of their time standing watching over the eggs, or directly feeding the youngsters by regurgitating (反刍) food—just like a mother bird might. Meanwhile, the aggressive spiders generally avoid these tasks; instead, they spend most of their time building the web, catching prey, and defending their colonies. Compared to the docile spiders, the aggressive ones are better at those tasks, because the docile females rarely respond to enemies—and when they do respond, they do so slowly.

For now, it’s not clear why the spiders naturally fall into their respective careers, or even what drives their different personalities in the first place. The team are now trying to answer these questions. In the meantime, Wright suggests that biologists should pay more attention to personality types, when trying to understand how animal societies work.

1. According to the passage, what are the two personality types of female A.studiosus?
2. What are the aggressive female spiders mainly responsible for?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
In an A.studiosus colony, the division of labor is based on the different builds of the spiders.
4. Do you think personality traits influence human career choices? Why or why not? (In about 40 words)

8 . World in a dish: The garden path

Imagine a plate holding two strawberries, identical in appearance. One came from the supermarket, meaning it was probably harvested when it was still unripe, loaded onto a refrigerated truck and driven hundreds of miles.     1     The other strawberry was picked from a garden minutes before being eaten.

The first one will probably taste like a slightly soft cucumber, with light berry flavors and strong sour tastes. The second is likely to be sweet and floral; the flavor will stay in the mouth, as the pleasant smell will on the hands.     2     They are convenient and available in the northern hemisphere (北半球) in February.

    3     This attitude misunderstands the ultimate appeal of gardening. It mistakes the product for the purpose. It is true that a garden can produce peas that offer a taste of spring while finding tomatoes in the shops can take some time, effort and expense.

A garden, especially in the early years, can also produce little but frustration. Beginning gardeners may plant the wrong crops for their soil. Squirrels have an annoying habit of taking single bites of cucumbers, beans and tomatoes, then leaving the rest on the vine (藤) to rot.     4    

No matter.     5     The deepest pleasure — as with cooking, writing, bringing up children or almost anything worthwhile — is in the work itself. To garden is to patiently, lovingly and diligently help life flourish, in the ground and above it.

A．The real joy of gardening is the time spent doing it.

B．Growing your own vegetables ensures a reliable supply.

C．Well-stocked supermarket shelves are available all week.

D．Some columnists long considered gardening a waste of time.

E．However, supermarket strawberries are not entirely without advantages.

F．By the time it reached the plate it may have been off the vine for two weeks.

G．And even expert gardeners can lose a season's harvest to uncooperative weather.

9 . Called “America’s wolf”, the red wolf is the only large predator whose historic range is found entirely within the United States, stretching from Texas to New England. But hunting gradually reduced its range, and it was declared extinct in the wild in 1980.

Recovery efforts in the wild began in 1987 on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. In a ground-breaking successful experiment, eight captive (圈养的) wolves were released this year into North Carolina, eventually growing into a population over 100, reaching a peak of around 120 wolves in 2012. But illegal hunting and management changes by the Fish and Wildlife Service resulted in their numbers plummeting.

In the spring, conservationists celebrated a small bit of good news when four captive-born pups (幼兽) were placed into a cave and successfully adopted by a wild red wolf mother. Meanwhile, another four adults were released into the wild. The pups are thought to be still alive and healthy. But the adults didn’t go well. In the months after release, three were struck by cars and killed, and the fourth was fatally shot on private land.

To boost the population after these deaths, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced in November that it planned to release nine adult red wolves into their recovery area this winter, land within and surrounding two wildlife reserves.

The Service also recently announced it would withdraw a 2018 proposal to shrink (缩小) the red wolves’ protected area in North Carolina by 90 percent, after a lawsuit accused the agency of going against the Endangered Species Act. Ron Sutherland of the Wildlands Network says it’s crucial that the agency has abandoned this wrong-headed proposal. And yet the situation now is even more urgent than it was in 2018 — this should launch the conservation community in the U. S. into crisis mode to save this species and bring it back from the extinction.

1. What does the underlined word “plummeting” in paragraph 2 mean?

A．Promising.

B．Declining.

C．Multiplying.

D．Increasing.

2. What can we infer from paragraph 3?

A．The released wolves lived well.

B．The population boosted after the release.

C．The red wolf faced greater threat than before.

D．The released red wolves still needed protection.

3. What would the Service do to save red wolves?

A．Shrink the red wolves’ reserves.

B．Make a proposal to protect the red wolves.

C．Put some red wolves in some specific places.

D．Force the protected area into the state of emergency.

4. What does the text focus on?

A．The protection of red wolves.	B．Challenges faced by red wolves.
C．Reasons for red wolves extinction.	D．The relationship between red wolves and humans.

10 . Many birds have shrunk in size as the temperatures have increased during the past 40 years. And the reduction in body size is so common that scientists have suggested it may be a universal response to warming conditions.

However, a new study, published in Ecology Letters, indicates that not all birds are equally affected when it comes to reductions in body size. Birds with bigger brains relative to body size have not shrunk as much as those with smaller brains.

Study lead author Justin Baldwin said, “As temperatures warm, body sizes are shrinking. But larger-brained species are shrinking less strongly than small-brained species.”

The researchers analyzed information on some 70,000 birds that died when they collided (碰撞) with buildings in Chicago between 1978 and 2016. They found that birds with very big brains relative to body size have shown only about one-third of the reduction in body size.

“Relative brain size is related to increased learning ability, increased memory, longer lifespans and more stable population dynamics,” said Baldwin. “In this case, a bigger-brained species of bird might be able to reduce the influence of climate change by seeking out habitats with cooler temperatures, for example.”

“One of the first things that jump out to me from these findings is that we can already see that climate change is having a much stronger effect on species that have poorer ability to deal with environmental change through their behavior.” said Professor Botero at Washington University.

North America has lost nearly one-third of its birdlife in the last half-century. The findings of this recent study, therefore, are very important to bird management and protection.

1. What does the underlined word “shrunk” mean in Paragraph 1?

A．Increased.

B．Indicated.

C．Decreased.

D．Affected.

2. Which statement does Justin Baldwin agree with?

A．Climate change has the same effect on birds in different brain sizes.

B．All birds are not equally affected when it comes to reductions in body size.

C．Birds with small brains are shrinking less strongly than ones with large ones.

D．Relative brain size is only connected with enhanced learned ability and memory.

3. What are the findings of the recent study vital for?

A．Finding cooler habitats.

B．Conserving and saving birds.

C．Reducing the impact of climate change.

D．Ensuring more stable population dynamics.

4. What is the passage mainly about?

A．Climate change makes birds fewer.

B．Brain size increases make lifespans longer.

C．Humans can protect birds better in the future.

D．Big brains help birds cope with climate change better.