1 . For many, Labor Day weekend signals the end of summer and an opportunity to host a socially-distanced barbecue (an outdoor meal). But this national holiday—celebrated every year in the United States and Canada on the first Monday in September—has revolutionary (革命性的) origins.
By the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had made working life miserable for people around the world. In many places, workers toiled for at least 12 hours a day six days a week in mines, factories, railroads, and mills. This holiday actually originated in the US on May 1, 1866, in what came to be known as the Haymarket Riot, workers flooded Chicago streets to demand an eight-hour workday.
It would take another conflict in the American Midwest to make Labor Day a national holiday. On May 11, 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, a railroad car manufacturer near Chicago, went on strike to protest their low wages and 16-hour workdays. In August 1893, James Kyle introduced federal legislation (立法) to make Labor Day a public holiday, but for ten months the legislation was put on hold. To quiet the strikers and their supporters, the Senate quickly passed the bill on June 22. The bill passed the House four days later and President Grover Cleveland signed it into law on June 28, 1894.
The holiday is more information May Day labor celebrations. Many observers relax at home or head to outdoor recreational activities, such as boating, barbecues, and camping. It may also be marked with fireworks shows and other events. Labor Day has also become associated with retail sales, as many shop owners try to take advantage of the customers’ day off. It is one of the largest sales events of the year. meaning retail employees actually have to work more on this day. Parades are the most common model of celebration, which often feature processions of labor groups.
1. What do we know about the workers in the late 19th century?| A．They were paid well. | B．They had long workdays. |
| C．They often had a barbecue. | D．Their contributions were recognized. |
| A．Put off. | B．Introduced. | C．Got through. | D．Protected. |
| A．On May 1, 1886. | B．On August 22, 1893. | C．On May 11, 1894. | D．On June 28, 1894. |
| A．The origins of Labor Day. | B．The labor groups achievements. |
| C．The ways to celebrate Labor Day. | D．The official activities on Labor Day. |
2 . Types of Maps
Different types of maps have different uses. Tourist maps, for example, have signs to show places of interest in an area. When tourists read these maps, it is easy for them to find where to go and what to see in a place and it is easy for them to go and find their ways to these places.
Road maps show large areas so that people can plan long journeys. Different types of roads are given different numbers. For example, if you want to go to Wood Green, you just follow No. 621 Road and keep looking at the road signs.
Distribution maps use colors or signs to show facts about an area. For example, where different languages are spoken, how many people live in an area, how cold and hot some places are, or whether a place is short of water.
Some maps, such as railway maps, use straight lines to show everything. This is easy for people to read. Trains are fast. People don’t have to think about small places they go past. They just need to know the two ends of their trips.
1. How can you tell different roads on road maps?
| A．By using different colors. | B．By finding the numbers. |
| C．By following No. 621 Road. | D．By looking at the road signs. |
| A．How to get to Germany. | B．How to plan a long journey. |
| C．Where a famous museum is. | D．Which place is short of water. |
| A．Because railways are straight. |
| B．Because people like straight lines. |
| C．Because people can read them easily. |
| D．Because railways have only two ends. |
3 . My grandfather was a rigid perfectionist. Everything had to be orderly, precise and punctual. I was frightened of him until the day he died. Growing up, my mother desperately wanted to please him. She probably thought he might leave if she didn’t.
In fact, I now think the fear of being left alone, abandoned, was a current throughout much of her life. A few years into my father suffering from Alzheimer, my mother’s voice on the phone sounded so upset that I had to tell her, “Just be with yourself for a little while.”
“No, I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that,” she said abruptly, closing the door on the subject. A while after my father died, she told me that she kept the television on all the time because it made her feel less lonely. “It makes the house seem more lived in,” she said. I had given in to my annoyance and either turned the volume down or turned it off. But after she told me that it filled in some of the loneliness, I never reached for the remote again.
We have had a long journey together, she and I. Over a half-century of memories, now that the journey has ended, I have a choice which ones to study which ones to turn over in my hands and dust off.
I choose to look at the ones that ache with a sweet truth not told often enough: there was love between us. It was just hard to find sometimes. I choose to remember her face on that winter day in Manhattan, when I came to her with a broken heart. I choose to remember walking on the shore with her in summers when we rented a beach house; somehow the sea always transformed us. And how she looked on my wedding day when she handed me a bracelet that had belonged to my grandmother. “Something old,” she said.
1. From the author’s point of view, what did her mother feel in her much time of life?| A．A sense of relief. | B．A sense of excitement. |
| C．A sense of being deserted. | D．A sense of being pleased. |
| A．By giving examples. | B．By stating arguments. |
| C．By interviewing her father. | D．By visiting her grandfather. |
| A．express regret for her grandfather |
| B．show her sympathy toward her mother |
| C．reveal her deep feelings for her mother |
| D．emphasize her concern about the generation gap |
4 . When someone is homeless or trying to recover from a natural disaster, they are in need of a lot of the basic life necessities that many of us take for granted (认为……是理所当然的). While people are often encouraged to donate canned goods, not everyone is thinking about things like shoes.
Of course, you can’t go looking for a new job or a home, if you have no shoes to walk in. One woman in Hays, Kansas took this into consideration, and found a way to help hundreds of people.
Payless stores were going out of business, and shoes were selling for as little as $1 per pair, so a woman named Addy Tritt bought out all the remaining shoes at the Hays Payless store—more than 200 pairs—and donated them to flood victims (灾民) in Nebrsska.
Those shoes were then included in a flood relief shipment taken to farmers in Nebraska by Fort Hays State University. Tritt, who recently graduated from FHSU’s human resources program, wanted to “pay it forward”.
“I have been so lucky,” she said. “There have been so many great people in my life who have inspired me. I see so many terrible things in the news. So many people have helped me when I was down. They influenced me so much that I want to help if I can.”
Tritt has a history of charitable (慈善发) acts. She has donated more than 60 bags of school supplies to Hays students, and organized a baby clothes drive and two supply drives for the animal shelter.
“I really feel I have been directed and guided to help people,” she said. “If you can do something for someone else, you need to find a way even if it is a pair of shoes.”
1. How did Tritt help flood victims?| A．By sending some food to them. |
| B．By helping them find new jobs. |
| C．By selling shoes to raise money for them. |
| D．By buying shoes for them. |
| A．Pay ahead of time. | B．Save some money. |
| C．Pass the love. | D．Put forward the plan. |
| A．The low price of shoes. | B．Other people’s influence. |
| C．Ideas from her school. | D．The sad situation of victims. |
| A．Caring. | B．Independent. |
| C．Clever. | D．Brave. |
The last time Yunnan caught national attention was when some Asian elephants left their home and
7 . Credit Card Management Apps to Stay on Top of Payments
Americans collectively hold about $4 trillion in consumer credit card debt, so a money management app might be worth consideration. Here are two top choices that will help manage the credit life.
For Budgeting: Mint
If you’re seeking an app for both a broad view and a detailed look at your credit cards and overall finances as well as warnings to ensure on-time payments, Mint is perhaps the most popular app in this category. You can create a budget, track card spending in customizable (可定制的) categories, get credit card bill warnings, and more.
Reserve a couple of hours to get started because setting it up takes time. And if you’re completely new to financial apps, tracking and categorizing every transaction (交易) you might make could take some getting used to.
Download Mint from the App Store or Google Play for free.
For Tracking Credit Card Rewards: AwardWallet
You can see all of your credit card rewards — including credit card points such as Citi ThankYou Points, American Express Membership Rewards and Chase Ultimate Rewards—in one place. The app also lets you know when your awards will expire (过期) so you can use them before you lose them.
Arghandewal, who travels all over the world by using points and miles, says the AwardWallet app helps her keep track of everything. “You can link all of your frequent flyer, hotel and even bank rewards accounts and get notices when your rewards balance changes,” she says.
AwardWallet requires access to your email account, which could make some folks uncomfortable. And some loyalty programs aren’t part of the platform.
Download AwardWallet from the App Store for free.
1. The users of Mint can ________.| A．reduce daily transactions | B．get detailed financial advice |
| C．receive warnings of on-time payment | D．track their card spending and rewards |
| A．show why the app is popular | B．explain how to win rewards |
| C．instruct people to download the app | D．persuade people to use the app |
| A．help users manage their credit cards | B．need access to users’ email accounts |
| C．inform users of the expired awards | D．take time for users to get used to them |
8 . The Happy Man
The happy man lives objectively, and has free love and wide interests, through which he secures his happiness. To be the receivers of love is a vital cause of happiness, but the man who demands love is not the man to whom it is given.
What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is enclosed in self? If he is to get out of the vicious (恶性的) circle of unhappiness, it must be by true interests. But before that, he should analyze his trouble first.
Admit to himself every day at least one painful truth.
All unhappiness depends upon lack of integration (融合). There is disintegration within the self,consciously and unconsciously or between the self and society.
| A．There is much he can do about it. |
| B．The man who receives love is the man who gives it. |
| C．The interests will arise when you overcome being self-centered. |
| D．The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. |
| E．Teach himself life is worth even not having great virtue or intelligence. |
| F．Self-denying leaves a man self-absorbed and aware of his own sacrifice. |
| G．Neither divided against the self nor the world, the happy man never fails to unite. |
9 . It was widely believed that, in order to get the first languages off the ground, our ancestors first needed a way to create novel signals that could be understood by others, relying on visual signs whose form was directly similar to the intended meaning. Some gestures can be understood almost anywhere: pointing to direct someone’s attention, for instance.
However, an international research team, led by experts from the University of Birmingham and the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, have discovered that certain vocalizations (发声法) can also be iconic and recognizable to people around the world — even when a speaker is not simply imitating a well-known sound. These findings, published in Scientific Reports, may help explain the rise of modern spoken language.
In 2015, language researchers challenged some English speakers to make up sounds representing various basic concepts (“sleep”, “child”, “meat”, “rock”, and more). When other English speakers listened to these sounds and tried matching them to concepts, they were largely successful. But “we wanted to be able to show that these vocalizations are understandable across cultures,” says study co-author and University of Birmingham cognitive scientist Marcus Perlman.
So Perlman and his colleagues conducted online and in-person experiments in seven countries, from Morocco to Brazil. They recruited more than 900 participants, who spoke a total of 28 languages, to listen to the best-understood vocalizations from the 2015 investigation and select matching concepts from a set of words or images. Vocalizations that called forth well-known sounds — for example, dripping water — performed best. But many others were also understood at rates significantly above chance across all languages tested, the team found. “There is a notable degree of success outside of just onomatopoeia (象声词),” Perlman says.
This is likely because certain patterns related to sound are universal, the team suggests. For example, short and basic sounds often convey the concept of “one” and repeated sounds are typically associated with “many”. Likewise, low-pitched sounds accompany something big, and high-pitched sounds convey small size. These findings of “iconic” sounds could help scientists understand how human ancestors started using rich acoustic (传音的) communication, says co-author Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguist at the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics in Berlin. The human voice, she says, might “afford enough iconicity to get language off the ground.”
University of Tübingen linguist Matthias Urban, who was not involved in the research, agrees. “It’s unclear how words came into being in the first place,” he says. Iconic vocalizations are “potentially one pathway that could have been involved.”
1. What does the underlined word “iconic” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Symbolic. | B．Comic. | C．Magic. | D．Classic. |
| A．well explain the rise of English culture |
| B．throw light on the origin of spoken language |
| C．demonstrate that onomatopoeia may be popular |
| D．show how our ancestors imitate unknown sounds |
| A．The English language is universally understood. | B．Sound patterns may be related to their meanings. |
| C．Sign language appeared earlier than spoken language. | D．Words were evolved from vocalizations in ancient times. |
| A．From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language |
| B．Iconic Vocalizations are Created for Communication |
| C．Made-up Sounds Convey Meanings across Cultures |
| D．How Language Began: Gesture and Speech in Evolution |
10 . It might seem like something from a science fiction movie, but scientists today are working on ways to combine certain kinds of bacteria with tiny robots. Scientists want to use these creations to improve the way we give medical treatment. They claim that drug therapy (疗法), disease diagnosis, and even surgery could be greatly aided by the use of nanobiotechnology. Nano-means “tiny”, and bio-means “life”. This tiny technology will use living organisms in combination with electronics.
Electronics makers already use tiny robots to build complex but very tiny circuits. Medical scientists want to use these robots to repair patients’ damaged organs or to direct medicines to affect specific cells. For example, tiny robots could be engineered to deliver chemotherapy (化疗) directly to cancer instead of to the entire body.
Existing electronics are the right size, but they lack practical use. Robots that can be built small enough to enter a person’s cells would be too tiny to move on their own. Therefore, scientists want to use tiny organisms such as bacteria to act as vehicles for the robots. The bacteria will be “driven” through the bloodstream by magnetic pulses (磁脉冲). Once the bacteria are in the correct locations, the robots will be able to do their jobs. In theory, these robots will cause less damage to the body than traditional methods of delivering medicines or performing surgeries.
Nanobiotechnology has yet to be put into practice, but many people already have concerns about its use. Some people worry about the ethic (道德标准) involved with controlling live organisms—and the possible side effects for their human hosts.
1. What does the second paragraph mainly talk about?| A．The application of tiny robots. | B．The influence of tiny robots. |
| C．The operation of tiny robots. | D．The origin of tiny robots. |
| A．Cheaper medicine. | B．Less harm to the body. |
| C．Longer life expectancy. | D．Faster performance of surgeries. |
| A．can locate he bacteria. | B．are driven by medicine. |
| C．can act as vehicles. | D．are carried by bacteria. |
| A．A computer textbok | B．A life magazine |
| C．A science magazine | D．A biology textbook |
