1 . Nicholas Epley, a behavioural scientist, and I conducted a series of studies and concluded that kind acts as simple as buying a cup of coffee for someone can promote a person’s happiness. Everyday life affords many opportunities for such actions, yet people do not always catch them.     1    

We firstly studied acts of kindness done for familiar people such as friends, classmates or family.     2     For instance, in one experiment, people wrote notes to friends and family “just because”. In another, they gave cupcakes away to workmates. Across these experiments, we asked both the person performing a kind act and the one receiving it to fill out questionnaires (问卷).

Across our studies, several strong patterns appeared. For one, both performers and receivers of the acts of kindness were in more positive moods than normal after these kind acts.     3     The receivers felt significantly better than the kind actors expected. The receivers also reliably rated these acts as “bigger” than the people performing them did.

    4    In one experiment, participants at an ice-skating rink (溜冰场) in a public park gave away hot chocolate to people they didn’t know on a cold winter day. Again, the experience was more positive than the performers expected for the receivers. Although the people giving out the hot chocolate saw the act as relatively small, it really mattered to the receivers.

These findings suggest that what might seem small when we are deciding whether or not to do something nice for someone else could matter a great deal to the person we do it for, These warm acts can improve our own emotional health and brighten the day of another person.     5    

A．So why not choose kindness when we can?

B．For another, it was clear that performers undervalued their impacts.

C．From one situation to the next, the specific acts of kindness differed.

D．We found that participants didn’t realize their positive impacts on strangers as well.

E．Our research also revealed one reason why people may not realize their actions’ impacts.

F．We compared the performers’ expectation of the receivers’ moods with their actual experiences.

G．It is because people performing kind acts undervalue how much receivers value their behaviour.

2 . Thursday would be huge. But when coach announced the championship game would be a night game on Thursday, Devin's heart _______. The concert was at the same time as the game. And Ms. Poltis had _______ Devin to sing a brief solo (独唱). Thinking the soccer team was on the edge of a title and he was a big reason — he _______ the league in scoring, Devin frowned (皱眉). He couldn't disappoint his team by _______ the game.

That night, Devin lay in bed, staring at the trophies (奖杯) from races, baseball leagues and free-throw contests which _______ his shelves. The solo was only four lines in the middle of a song, but the thought of singing _______ made him shiver (颤抖). He'd never sung a solo before. Now it was a relief to know he didn't have to. The soccer game was a perfect _______. While at the moment Ms. Poltis' words came to his mind "I chose you not because you're the best singer but because you work hard, like the person in the song. And you have a very nice voice. So don't be nervous. Be proud." It was no secret that several other choir members had _______ singing voices than he did. But he liked the song, and he _______ how kind and inspiring Ms. Poltis always was. Finally Devin made a choice and whispered the solo with ________, "no matter how hard the struggle. I will never let you down…"

1.

A．bled

B．sank

C．hurt

D．beat

2.

A．taught

B．allowed

C．chosen

D．ordered

3.

A．led

B．won

C．joined

D．formed

4.

A．watching

B．playing

C．entering

D．skipping

5.

A．lined

B．piled

C．covered

D．decorated

6.

A．loudly

B．outside

C．alone

D．proudly

7.

A．platform

B．request

C．condition

D．excuse

8.

A．louder

B．stronger

C．softer

D．deeper

9.

A．appreciated

B．accepted

C．confirmed

D．praised

10.

A．tension

B．patience

C．sorrow

D．confidence

3 . When you need to find a solution to a design problem, you could ask yourself, “What animals or plants face a similar problem in their lives, and how do they handle it?”    1     Termites (白蚁) in Africa control the temperature and air currents in their nests by having thick walls and air spaces in the top part. The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe was designed in a similar way, with thick overhangs shading the windows, and all the offices connected to a big chimney letting hot air escape. This allows it to stay cool while using much less air-conditioning.    2    

Engineer Nakatsu also asked himself the same question.    3     A keen birdwatcher, Nakatsu realised that kingfishers also experience an abrupt pressure change when diving into the water, but their beaks allow them to pierce through the water smoothly. His team found that putting a long, pointed nose on the train greatly reduced the loud booms in the tunnel and allowed it to run faster.

Having a big picture of the world we live in also helps us understand how technology can be used to protect instead of destroy it.    4     On the other hand, plastic packaging creates a lot of waste and pollution. One company has come up with an alternative material made of com husk waste and some big companies are starting to use it.

    5     Nakatsu worries that children today do not have the opportunity to touch and feel nature. He advises that students in university should study more than one narrow field so that they do not just have one fixed way of thinking.

A．In nature, everything gets recycled.

B．To mimic (模仿) nature, we must be familiar with it.

C．It turns out that natural beauty often has a logical reason behind it.

D．Large cities full of people are often compared to ants’ colonies (群).

E．This idea was used to arrange hundreds of mirrors at a solar power plant.

F．It could be a good solution for the hot and crowded cities in Southeast Asia too.

G．His problem was that the pressure from a bullet train rushing into a tunnel at high speed caused loud noises.

4 . Episodic memory (情景记忆) allows humans to revisit past personal experiences in their minds, and it was once thought to be a special skill of humans. Although there are still arguments about the extent of this type of memory in non-human animals, scientists have proved that creatures like rats and dogs can pass tests that are developed to assess episodic memory over the past two decades. “Curiously, there is a lack of research investigating dolphins’ episodic memory,” University of Cambridge cognitive (认知的) scientist James Davies says. Therefore, this surprising fact encourages him to fill this gap.

The team used “where” and “who” questions in their research, each on a different test. Each dolphin was first trained to retrieve a ball from the water, and then trained to get a ball by approaching a person holding it in front of them while ignoring an empty-handed person standing at a different spot. During this training, the locations were randomized (使随机化) and the person holding the ball differed each time, so that those details were irrelevant to learning the retrieving behavior. Then, for the tests, the dolphins were asked to retrieve the ball as they had learned to do, but after 10 minutes, something changed-this time, the ball couldn’t be seen, as it was now behind one of the two people’s backs. In the “where” tests, the ball was hidden in the same spot as in the training, but both people had been changed, while in the “who” tests, the locations of the people changed but the ball remained with the person who’d had it previously.

Eight dolphins went through each of the two tests, separated by at least 48 hours. All the dolphins got it right in choosing the correct spot on the “where” experiments, and seven achieved success on the “who” experiments.

Kelly Jaakkola, a psychologist, says that based on their cognitive skills, dolphins are a good candidate for having episodic-like memory, and this study goes really far in showing that. She also says, “The more we look for such capabilities in non-human animals, the more species we’ll likely find them in.” She adds, “An exciting question is therefore ‘Where do we draw that line? Which animals do have it, which animals don’t, and what sort of cognitive or neurological or social characteristics do those animals share? ’ That’s going to be the fun part of the game.”

1. What does the underlined word “retrieve” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?

A．Fetch.

B．Move.

C．Throw.

D．Play.

2. What does Paragraph 2 mainly talk about?

A．The locations of the people involved in the tests.

B．The memory tasks that dolphins need to perform.

C．The ability of dolphins to communicate with humans.

D．The dolphins’ characteristics related to their memory processing.

3. What can be inferred from the passage?

A．Dolphins pass the tests as a result of training.

B．It is very likely that dolphins are affected by people during the tests.

C．Scientists will probably find episodic memory in all non-human animals.

D．The influence of dolphins’ familiarity with a location or a person is avoided.

4. Which would be the best title for the passage?

A．Dolphins Are the Most Intelligent Animals

B．Dolphins May Remember Personal Experiences

C．Episodic Memory Is Important for Humans and Animals

D．A Scientific Method Is Used to Study Dolphins’ Memory

5 . Coastal cities worldwide are squeezed by two opposing forces: urban sprawl (扩张) and the rising sea. This struggle is intensely visible in the flatlands where expanding neighborhoods routinely flood and saltwater flooding damages the river mouths that protect communities from the worst of our climate crisis.

Massive resources are being put into environmental restoration projects, and development is subject to many layers of approvals. Yet in 2022 the commissioners of a coastal city voted to expand a legal boundary that contains sprawl to allow a 400-acre warehouse project. They are failing to see the value of this land in the greater ecosystem.

Wetlands, coastal plains and forests do cheaply (or even for free) what seawalls and pumps do at a cost of billions of dollars. They are vital infrastructure (基础设施) that makes us more resilient against climate change, and the cost of destroying them or weakening their ability to function must be factored into the decisions we make to build and grow.

To do so, the economic incentives to develop any natural landscape should be weighed against the protective economic value that land already provides. Economists call this an “avoided damage” valuation. Local planning boards might consider the value of a sand dune or swamp in flood protection versus the expense of replacing it with a seawall and water pump system. Maintaining and restoring natural infrastructure to support healthy functioning saves money, time and lives.

The concept of “natural capital”, or the idea that ecosystem services should be valued in a similar manner as any form of wealth, dates back to the 1970s. Markets have always valued wood as a commodity (商品), for example, but not the services that came along with producing it, such as soil maintenance, carbon storage, and nutrient cycling. We didn’t need a market for resources that industrialists saw as abundant (丰富的) and endlessly renewable. This exploitative (开发资源的) assumption turned out to be very wrong. Failing to measure the benefits of ecosystem services in policy and management decisions is a major reason many of those ecosystems disappeared.

It also seems crass to place a dollar amount on ecosystems that we’d rather view as priceless, existing for their own sake and valuable to humans in ways that are beyond capitalism. This preciousness is ethically sound. But developers have long confused pricelessness with worthlessness, allowing them to profit without paying for the consequences of destroying the environment.

Economic value is never the only reason nature is worth preserving; it is simply a powerful, underused tool to help us make decisions about how to live more sustainably in a climate-changed world. If policy makers considered natural infrastructure in the language of economics, they might recognize just how deeply we rely on it.

1. What are the first two paragraphs mainly about?

A．The consequences of the saltwater flooding.

B．The cause of the urban sprawl and the rising sea.

C．An approval to an environmental restoration project.

D．The problem caused by the expansion of coastal cities

2. What can we learn from the passage?

A．The idea of natural capital can enhance the profit of commodity.

B．The economic growth boosts the protection of natural landscape.

C．The abundance of resources is not the reason for devaluing them.

D．The exploitation of nature reflects the “avoided damage” valuation.

3. What does the underlined word “crass” in Paragraph 6 probably mean?

A．Inadvisable.	B．Beneficial.
C．Relevant.	D．Unrealistic.

4. What is the purpose of the passage?

A．To appeal for stricter control over city scale.

B．To propose the use of nature as infrastructure.

C．To stress the importance of ecosystem services.

D．To promote public awareness of nature protection.

6 . We humans are comparison creatures.     1     This quality may have evolved as a means of helping us fit into the social hierarchy (等级) of the cultures we inhabited. Regardless of the reasons, social comparison plays a significant role in how we view and evaluate ourselves, and how we interact with our world.

It used to be that our primary reference of comparison was our local communities, primarily neighbors and co-workers. Because we tend to gather around those similar to ourselves in terms of educational level, work income, and shared interests, the range of differences when we compared ourselves to others was fairly small. Unfortunately, with the emergence of the Internet, we can now compare ourselves to literally anyone in the world.     2     What had in previous generations been a small gap in our comparisons has now become so large and unattainable.

    3     When so many people that are easily discoverable on the Internet seem to be so successful. famous, influential and beautiful, given our preference to compare, it is difficult not to have it influence how we view ourselves. Sadly, these comparisons usually result in our feeling inadequate and “less than”.

These harmful comparisons also damage our emotional lives. When we feel lacking, we experience a variety of unpleasant and unhealthy emotions. We feel jealousy and envy for what others have and what we lack.     4    

It’s one thing to realize that you compare yourself to others. It’s another thing to recognize that social comparison is often corrosive (逐步侵蚀的) to you in so many ways psychologically and emotionally. It’s an entirely other thing to stop yourself from comparing yourself to others.     5    

A．We are constantly measuring ourselves against other people.

B．Yet it is possible, and it is worth the effort for your mental health.

C．Thus, we are now exposed to groups that are quite different from us.

D．We believe that there is something wrong with us compared to others.

E．We can even feel bitterness and anger at others for the unfairness of it all.

F．Comparing ourselves to others has the potential to increase our life experience.

G．This new level of comparison has huge implications for our psychological lives.

7 . We’re happy you will be joining us at UW-Stout! Your next step is to attend First-Year Registration and Orientation (FYRO) (迎新会) running from 7:45 a. m. to 4:40 p. m. Students should select a date that allows them to be present for the entire day. Invitations will be sent by email starting February 20.

Recommended On-Campus Dates
·June 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9
·June 12, 13, 14 or 16
·June 19, 20, 21 or 23
Make-Up Dates
Email us to request one of these make-up dates.
·July 20 or 21
What to Expect

Students and their guests will be separated for most of the day.

Students will:	Guests will:
·Connect with peers. ·Meet their first-year advisor. ·Understand their academic plan and expectations of college. ·Understand their financial responsibilities and how to pay for school. ·Understand the importance of involvement and how to get involved with student organizations. ·Be familiar with campus resources. ·Be excited about starting their time at Stout!	·Understand their role in their student’s success. ·Understand their student’s financial responsibilities and paying for school. ·Feel comfortable with their student living on campus. ·Know that their student will be supported to live a healthy lifestyle. ·Know that their student will be safe on campus.

Before Your Attendance

Complete the placement tests at least one week prior to your scheduled registration date. Testing information will be sent to students' email on or after March 15.

Download these apps, which will help you to be successful in college life.

·Canvas Student: our online classroom.
·Navigate: to help schedule appointments with your advisor, view to-do items and more!
·Multi-Factor Authentication: to enhance the security of your account by checking on your identity when logging into many of our UW-Stout accounts.
1. Students are advised to attend FYRO on ______.

A．February 20

B．June 19

C．July 21

D．March 15

2. Attending FYRO, both students and their guests will ______.

A．meet first-year advisor

B．know students’ academic plan

C．have an idea of students' education cost

D．be clear about how to participate in organizations

3. What are students required to do before attending FYRO?

A．Complete the placement tests 5 days ahead.

B．Take some online classes on Canvas Student.

C．Schedule first-year college life with apps on the phone.

D．Download Multi-Factor Authentication for account security.

8 . Exploring Psychology

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior. Gaining a richer and deeper understanding of psychology can help people achieve insights into their own actions as well as a better understanding of other people.     1    

One important benefit from a psychology major is that it teaches the student about the human mind and why people act in various manners. Not all psychology majors will become psychologists.     2     All people must interact with others whether it is at home or at a workplace. People respond to these interactions in a wide number of ways. For instance, the person may not know why he or she is bothered by a specific action at work. However, the person who has studied psychology has an obvious advantage in this area.

Psychology also offers the individual insight into himself or herself. As the person learns about the human mind, how it works and why people behave in specific manners, the person may also begin to recognize both harmful and helpful thought patterns in himself or herself.

This may lead the person to an increased level of self-awareness.     3     It also shows the person where he or she possesses strength and crucial skills for the modern world. Individuals who are more self-aware are more likely to accomplish their goals and dreams.

    4     A person may enter a vast field where psychologists and those trained in psychology work. These areas include industrial psychology, school psychology, private practice, organizational behavioral fields, law enforcement and virtually every other field.

    5     As stated, there are a number of career opportunities from which a psychology major may choose.

A．Self-awareness is a vital skill for any person to have.

B．It shows the individual what areas the person needs to strengthen.

C．As a result, psychology becomes an incredibly popular college major.

D．A psychology major examines the science of human behavior and mental processes.

E．All fields have the opportunity to benefit from the guidance that psychology can offer.

F．The third reason why psychology is a useful major is that it opens up a wide range of career opportunities.

G．However, all psychology majors will develop an increased awareness about human behavior and thought patterns.

9 . 阅读下面短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写1个恰当的单词，在给出提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。

Usually, stress is seen as being bad, but this is not always true. Eustress(积极压力)is the positive term for stress. It     1    (relate) to well-being and positive attitudes. Eustress occurs when the gap between what one has and what one wants is     2    (slight) pushed. Eustress creates a better environment for people, which     3    (make) them perform better and cost less. Therefore, Eustress is necessary     4     achievement.

10 . 阅读下面短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写1个恰当的单词，在给出提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。

Research shows that individuals who sit all day, even if they go to the gym for an hour, are at     1    (great) disease risk than those who are more active during the day. Informal activity such as     2    (walk) is beneficial to overall health. While there is no     3    (publish) recommendation for “safe” sitting time yet, a good rule of thumb is to move for at least 1 to 2 minutes each hour of sitting.