The term “metaverse” (元宇宙) is the latest buzzword (流行词) to capture the tech industry’s
2 . Working Together to Save the Sea Turtles
Florida has some of the best beaches in the world. Thousands of people visit the state to enjoy the sand. But these beaches are also home to five species of sea turtles. A major problem is facing these interesting creatures.
Some volunteers and researchers in Florida take direct action to help the turtles. They look closely at the sand to find the fin (鳍) marks the mother sea turtles left there.
These are not the only Floridians taking action to help protect these creatures. Florida’s government has passed laws to save the turtles. One of these laws is “Florida’s Marine Turtle Protection Act”. This law prohibits anyone from disturbing or destroying marine turtles, nests, or eggs.
Another way Floridians work together to save these creatures is through organizations like the Sea Turtle Conservancy. The Sea Turtle Conservancy helps people take steps that will help reduce the threats that put sea turtles in danger. For instance, bright lights on buildings near the beach can negatively impact sea turtles. Baby sea turtles usually hatch on the sandy beach and head to the ocean. When there are bright lights coming from the other side of the shore far from the ocean, the baby turtles get confused.
| A．Many of them do not make it to the ocean and die. |
| B．Some of these turtle species are in danger of going extinct. |
| C．This helps them to locate where the sea turtles laid their eggs. |
| D．It also helps make sure that sea turtles’ natural habitats are protected. |
| E．Female sea turtles come from the ocean and onto these beaches at night. |
| F．They use their fins to move back across the beach and return to the ocean. |
| G．Every Floridian can do their part to protect sea turtles and their environment. |
The musician Moby once said, “Music has no form whatsoever — all it is air moving just a little bit differently. It’s the only art form that you can’t touch.” It is true that we cannot touch music, but that does not mean that music is an invisible art form. There is, in fact, a way to “see” music.
How can we see music? Neuroscientists, people study the human brain, use MRI machines (magnetic resonance imaging machines) to look inside the brain. These tools let them see what actually happens in the brain when people are doing things. For example, the tools let them see the neurons (神经细胞), or brain cells that are in use when people are listening to music. Computer screens linked to MRIs show neurons lighting up when they are in use. And when people listen to music, neurons light up in many parts of the brain.
Neuroscientists have discovered that it isn’t necessary to hear music for the neurons to light up. Even when you just think about a song, these neurons light up. In addition, the same neural activity in the same part of the brain happens when people experience other pleasurable activities. For example, some of the same neurons light up when we eat something delicious or hug a loved one. This is because these neurons are in the areas of the brain that reward us by making us feel good. Negative feelings such as fear or anxiety make neurons in a different area light up. However, when an anxious or frightened person listens to pleasurable music, these neurons stop lighting up.
Now that neuroscientists can “see” the, effects of music on the brain, they want to know what the benefits of music are. It turns out there are many benefits. Neuroscientists have discovered that music can help memory and may keep our brain young. Recent studies show that an elderly musician often has a better visual memory than an elderly non-musician. For example, elderly musicians are better at memorizing a written list of words than their non-musician peers.
Why does music have so many benefits? The answer may be because it uses so many different parts of the brain. According to neuroscientists, using many parts of the brain at one time gives your brain a good “workout.” In fact, one of the best brain “works” is to read music and play a musical instrument at the same time. Reading music while playing an instrument is a challenging task. It uses more parts of the brain simultaneously than most other activities and requires excellent coordination (协调性). It involves both physical movement and mental activity, much like playing a sport such as soccer.
So, although Moby is completely correct that we cannot touch music, it is possible to “see” the effect of music on our brains. There is still a lot to learn about the effects of music on our brains. However, there is no doubt that scientists have shown that music is an extremely powerful art form with many positive effects.
1. How do MRIs help people “see” music?2. Why did the author mention the elderly musician in paragraph 4?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
Pleasurable activities and negative feelings activate neurons in the same part of the brain, but in a different way.
4. Now that you know the many benefits of music, how do you think, music may be able to help you solve your problems in your life? (in about 40 words)
4 . Whales are an important part of the ocean. They maintain the ocean ecosystem by providing important nutrients for phytoplankton (浮游植物), microscopic organism (微生物) in the ocean, to grow as food for fish and other animals. Phytoplankton also carry out photosynthesis (光合作用) to keep carbon dioxide level low in the atmosphere to keep the Earth cool. So, without whales, the oceans wouldn’t be healthy.
Currently, North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered. Scientists from University of South Carolina and Cornell University imagined that it is the warmer ocean waters that force whales to go to new places that don’t have rules, such as speed limits for ships, shorter fishing seasons, etc., to protect whales.
To see if climate changes can explain the loss of whales, scientists analyzed the water temperature near the Gulf of Maine, the feeding place of the whales. The temperature is affected by the position of Gulf Stream which brings warm water from the south.
They also looked at population data for the whales and their food, which is primarily small shrimps and crabs called copepods. They estimated how the whale population changed based on the number of whale sightings, whale birth and their bodies. Finally, they analyzed how the change in the water temperature related to the change in the whale population.
The result showed that since 2010, the Gulf Stream has been farther north than ever before, bringing warmer waters to the region. The population data shows a significant decrease in copepods population beginning in 2010. This means there has been less food available for the whales.
The best explanation is that global warming is causing the northward shift of the Gulf Stream, which is consistent with climate change, and making the waters near the Gulf of Maine warmer. However, copepods prefer cold water. Warmer water wakes them too early, they miss the nutritious spring phytoplankton bloom they need to grow. Besides, when the Gulf Stream is farther north, less copepods are brought into the Gulf of Maine.
With food levels too low, fewer whales are born, and fewer survive. To find enough food, some whales swim north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Therefore, there were more whale sightings there. It also explains why there were more whale deaths in the area in 2017 and 2019. By looking at the carcasses, scientists know that ships hit the whales, or they got trapped in fishing gear. So, climate change both makes the whales’ food shorter and causes them to move to new places, making it harder to protect them.
Global warming doesn’t only change the weather; it changes the ocean. To protect ocean species and keep our oceans healthy, governments need to adjust how they manage the ocean.
1. Scientists in the study collected the following types of data EXCEPT the ______.| A．temperatures of waters | B．population of whales |
| C．population of copepods | D．population of phytoplankton |
| A．Whales move to get enough copepods to eat. |
| B．Copepods need phytoplankton to grow. |
| C．Phytoplankton cause global warming. |
| D．Global warming causes the shift of Gulf Stream. |
| A．dead body | B．wounded body |
| C．trapped body | D．lost body |
| A．Governments should control ocean traffics that kill the whales. |
| B．Governments should take means to slow down global warming. |
| C．Governments should ban fishing in the area where the whales live. |
| D．Governments should keep the warm water away from the Gulf of Maine. |
5 . Even if you aren’t into artificial intelligence, it’s time to pay attention to ChatGPT, because this one is a big deal.
The tool, developed by Open AI, lets you type natural-language prompts (提示). ChatGPT then offers conversational responses. The robot remembers the information of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It draws its answers from huge volumes of information on the internet.
ChatGPT seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there’s good training data for it to learn from. It’s not omniscient (无所不知的) or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound very authoritative (权威的). A few days after its launch, more than a million people were trying out ChatGPT.
But be careful, OpenAI warns. ChatGPT has all kinds of potential disadvantages, some easy to spot and some more subtle (不明显的).“It’s a mistake to be depending on it for anything important right now,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said. “We have lots of work to do on robustness (稳定性) and truthfulness.”
As OpenAI emphasizes, ChatGPT’s answers can look authoritative but be wrong. “If you ask it a very well-structured question, with the intention that it gives you the right answer, you’ll probably get the right answer,” said Mike Krause, data science director at a different AI company, Beyond Limits. “It’ll be explained clearly and sound like it came from some professor at Harvard. But if you trick it, you’ll get nonsense.”
There have already been many students who use ChatGPT to help them cheat with their homework and essays, but as with many other technology developments, it’s not a simple black-and-white situation. Decades ago, students could copy encyclopedia (百科全书) entries and use calculators, and more recently, they’ve been able to use search engines. ChatGPT offers new abilities for everything from helping with research to doing your homework for you outright.
Many ChatGPT answers already sound like student essays, though often with an unnatural tone. High school teacher Daniel Herman concluded ChatGPT already writes better than most students today. He’s uncertain between admiring ChatGPT’s potential usefulness and fearing its harm to human learning. Dustin York, an associate professor of communication at Maryville University, hopes educators will learn to use ChatGPT as a tool and realize it can help students think critically.
1. Why does the author think ChatGPT is a big deal?| A．Because it’s artificial intelligence that offers conversational responses. |
| B．Because it’s knowledgeable in areas with good training data to learn from. |
| C．Because it has all kinds of potential disadvantages, easy to spot or more subtle. |
| D．Because it helped students with their homework essays and wrote even better. |
| A．ChatGPT was not able to form indirect answers naturally. |
| B．ChatGPT was not able to answer indirect questions correctly. |
| C．ChatGPT was not able to reply to indirect questions quickly. |
| D．ChatGPT was not able to explain indirect answers properly. |
| A．To show that ChatGPT is a tool that can be as helpful. |
| B．To show that ChatGPT is an invention that will be accepted. |
| C．To show that students should be allowed to use ChatGPT to write essays. |
| D．To show that students should be banned to use ChatGPT to write essays. |
| A．potential and knowledgeable | B．robust and truthful |
| C．imperfect yet promising | D．authoritative yet misleading |
The owner of a house in Sonoma County, California called pest (害虫) control when they spotted worms coming from one of their bedroom walls. Those worms turned out to be meal worms, feeding on an unbelievable amount of acorns (橡树子), believed to be collected by a pair of woodpeckers.
“It was really strange. I had never really seen worms with acorns before,” Castro from the pest control said. But the strangeness was just beginning.
After making a small 4-inch-square hole in the wall, Castro said the acorns began spilling out. That alone wouldn’t be terribly unusual, but they “just kept coming,” he said.
“It was very unbelievable to see the amount,” said Castro. He guesses there were at least 700 pounds of acorns, likely collected over the past two to five years.
Often woodpeckers store acorns on the outside of homes, but hardly do they get them inside. In this case, Castro discovered the birds dropped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to eat.
As they dropped from the attic, tens of thousands of acorns gathered from several nearby oak trees filled the hole of the walls, Castro explained.
But this odd find took unusual to a whole new level for the man who has been working in the pest control industry for more than 20 years.
“On a scale from 1 to 10, this is a 10. It’s a one in a million chance to find something this unusual,” said Castro. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like this.”
It took creating another three holes in the home’s walls to remove all the acorns, which piled and reached about 20 feet high, Castro believed.
Castro and his crew of three spent a full day collecting the nuts.
“We filled eight big black garbage bags. They were so heavy we could hardly pick them up,” said Castro. “They had to have weighed at least a hundred pounds each.”
The acorns were thrown away as they were covered in droppings and bits of fiberglass from the wall’s insulation.
1. Why did the owner called pest control?| A．He had too many acorns. | B．He was fed up with woodpeckers. |
| C．He saw worm coming out his wall. | D．He spotted holes on his wall. |
| A．worms hardly comes out from walls | B．acorns hardly get worms |
| C．woodpeckers doesn’t store acorns | D．acorns are hardly stored in walls |
| A．The acorns had seriously damaged the house. |
| B．The acorns were sold because there were lots of them. |
| C．Woodpeckers store acorns to get worms to eat. |
| D．Woodpeckers keep acorns often on the outside of a wall |
7 . Visitor Guidelines of The Metropolitan Museum
We look forward to welcoming you to The Met! Please review our visitor guidelines outlined below prior to your visit. By visiting in person, you agree to obey the rules, and The Met reserves the right to ask visitors who do not follow these guidelines to leave the Museum.
Health and Safety
The health and safety of all is the first. The Met will continue to monitor and follow guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), New York State, and New York City for health and safety procedures that inform our operations. Masks are strongly recommended. We cannot make sure that you will not be exposed to COVID-19 during your visit to The Met. Those visiting The Met do so at their own risk of such exposure.
Museum Admission
Entrance into the Museum’s galleries requires a ticket or Membership card. New York State residents and New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, the amount you pay for tickets is up to you.
If you wish to pay less than the general admission ticket prices, you may purchase your ticket at a Met ticket desk with a valid New York State driver’s license, New York State identification card, student ID, or New York library card.
General Admission
For visitors who are not New York State residents or NY, NJ, or CT students:
General admission is $30 for adults, $22 for seniors, and $17 for students
Admission is free for Members, Patrons, and children under 12
Admission is free for a caregiver accompanying a visitor with a disability.
Members
When you enter the Museum, have your Membership card ready. We’ll scan your card, and you can head right into the galleries without a ticket.
Photography and Video Rule
The Met permits photography and video for private, non-commercial use only at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters.
Hand-Held Cameras and video on personal cellular devices may be used, without a flash (闪光), to photograph and film the galleries unless designated (标明的).
Photographs and video cannot be published, sold, reproduced, transferred, distributed, or otherwise commercially used in any manner.
1. According to the health and safety terms. ______.| A．visitors are required to wear a mask |
| B．visitors are recommended to wear a mask |
| C．the Met checks visitors’ vaccination and test results |
| D．the Met is responsible for COVID exposure |
| A．$ 60 | B．$ 90 |
| C．$ 107 | D．$ 77 |
| A．Shooting items labelled no photo with a hand-held camera. |
| B．Taking photos with your mobile phone’s flash on. |
| C．Printing out your photo and sharing it with your friends. |
| D．Putting your video online and charge money for viewing. |
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