1 . “I don’t want to see that cat in our yard again,” my husband said as he shooed the beautiful cat back into the neighbor’s yard. “I don’t appreciate her cat ________ in our yard,” he insisted. Sighing, I sent off a quick________ to our sweet neighbor, Cheryl, informing her of my husband’s ________ of cats. “I’ll do my best,” she replied some time later, “but it’s kind of hard ________ where she goes when I let her outside.”

The following morning, John stood at the window in our bedroom. “You aren’t going to ________ this,” he said in a low voice. “Come look!” “Oh, my God!” I cried ________. Right in the center of our yard were two ________ groundhogs (土拨鼠). John raised the ________, and the two raced into the woods ________. That evening, I happened to glance out the window, only to see a big fat groundhog chewing on the flowers we’d planted. “Something’s got to be done!” John shouted. He surfed the Internet and looked up what ________ the groundhog could cause and how they could be ________. “The groundhogs do not like cats. That’s ________… in fact, they hate the ________ of soiled kitty litter. Um… why don’t you text Cheryl and let her know the cat ban has been ________?” I couldn’t help smiling to myself.

That evening, we spotted the sweet yellow cat in our yard searching mice. The groundhogs were nowhere to be ________. “It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?” My husband smiled as we sat on the sofa.

1.

A．hunting

B．appearing

C．dashing

D．rolling

2.

A．note

B．letter

C．mail

D．text

3.

A．affection

B．dislike

C．fancy

D．choice

4.

A．controlling

B．telling

C．ordering

D．persuading

5.

A．forget

B．miss

C．believe

D．catch

6.

A．in anger

B．in mess

C．in surprise

D．in caution

7.

A．enormous

B．cute

C．fierce

D．elegant

8.

A．curtain

B．glass

C．window

D．flag

9.

A．leisurely

B．quietly

C．proudly

D．directly

10.

A．damage

B．worry

C．disease

D．fault

11.

A．died off

B．taken off

C．laid off

D．driven off

12.

A．confusing

B．interesting

C．encouraging

D．disgusting

13.

A．feel

B．taste

C．smell

D．sound

14.

A．polished

B．removed

C．eased

D．resolved

15.

A．caught

B．seen

C．held

D．touched

2 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语段续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。续写的词数为150左右。

As an independent, self-reliant person who always handled everything by myself, I didn’t expect parenting to be hard. Oh, sure, it’s difficult for other people. I heard parents complaining all the time — kids are challenging; nothing is ever clean; there’s not enough time in the day to do everything. But that was “other people” and I knew I could handle it. How complicated could it be?

I’d always dreamed of adopting a child, and finally my dream came true one summer afternoon. Even though we had requested only one child, the worker asked, “Could you take another baby and his eleven-year-old brother?” Of course, we could. We had room to have all three boys together.

The first week after they moved in, I spent my days rushing from task to task, cleaning and making sure they had all they needed. I constantly organized our living room, which was suddenly full of toys, and picked up the path of destruction left in the boys’ wake. Cooking and cleaning after meals and snacks seemed to take half of my day. I hardly ever sat; something always needed to be done.

“I think we need a break,” my husband told me one evening as I was falling asleep on the couch as usual.

“No,” I refused. The idea of sending them to a stranger sickened me. However, with each passing day, I was growing more and more exhausted. Besides meeting the physical needs of the boys, there were medical and emotional needs. Both the little ones constantly clung (黏住) to me. It was never quiet in our house; I felt overwhelmed.

One night, my husband said firmly that he needed a break. Whether I “needed” one or not, we were going to take one. With tears rolling down my cheeks, I nodded, knowing it was true, although I didn’t want to admit my weakness.

I called my parents.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Asking for help is something I must keep re-learning as time goes on, but it’s getting easier.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Layue is regarded as a preparatory phase for the upcoming Spring Festival. It is the     1     (twelve) month of the traditional Chinese calendar.

    2     (fall) on January 18 this year, Laba Festival was traditionally     3     occasion to honor their ancestors, and pray to deities, heaven, and earth for a good harvest and good luck. The last lunar month is called “la” in Chinese, and “eight’’ is pronounced “ba” in Chinese. This is     4     the name of the festival comes from. The custom     5     this day is to eat Laba porridge, cooked with a mix of eight ingredients, as eight is a     6     (fortune) number in Chinese culture.     7     (it) recipe varies across China depending on regional availability. Nowadays,     8     (boil) with sugar for at least four hours, Laba Porridge is regarded as a nutritious food. Distribution of Laba porridge at Yonghe Lamasery (雍和宫) in Beijing is one of the most famous activities. Today, waiting     9     (eager) in queues at the temples, people     10     (expect) to not just share a bowl of porridge, but be a part of the tradition and share the joys and expectations of the coming year.

4 . When I pulled out a copy of The Lost Words, my seven-year-old son stared in amazement. When I opened it up, it spread across both of our laps. He read the inner title page aloud—“The Lost Words: A Spell Book”—and then looked up doubtfully. “It’s a spell book? Like a magic spell book?”

Indeed, that’s exactly what Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to do when they made this book. They were responding to a decision by the Oxford Junior Dictionary to remove around 40 common words related to nature from its 2007 edition. They were replaced by words like blog, broadband, cut-and-paste and voicemail. The two creators saw this as a tragic loss for children.

Macfarlane wrote for The Guardian about a 2009 study from Cambridge University that found children were better at identifying Pokémon characters than common British plant and wildlife species. They had around 80% accuracy for Pokémon, but less than 50%for real-life species. The paper concluded children have the tremendous ability to learn about creatures, both natural and man-made, but are currently more inspired by made-up creatures than by “living ones”. So we need “to re-establish children’s links with nature”.

The Lost Words aims to do that. The book features 20 words, each with three-page spreads. First comes a word search, where a child can decode (破译) the letters and the name of the species, painted in gold. Next, there’s a poem based on each word, accompanied by a full-page painting. These are called “spells” rather than poems because they’re designed to be spoken out loud to bring back these words and creatures into the minds of children.

Eventually, there’s a full double-page watercolor illustration of the plant or animal in its native habitat. The book was published in 2017 and I’m sorry it’s taken me these years to discover it. But its message remains relevant. If there are young children in your life, this is a book well worth checking out of the library or adding to your collection.

1. What made Macfarlane and Morris create the book?

A．Their interest in nature.

B．The magic of the natural world.

C．The loss of many natural species.

D．Their concern about the practice of a dictionary.

2. What is the main idea of the third paragraph?

A．Kids know real species.	B．Kids have a learning talent.
C．Kids need to connect with nature.	D．Kids prefer Pokémon to real species.

3. Why are the poems in “The Lost Words” referred to as “spells”?

A．They contain magical elements.

B．They are meant to be recited aloud.

C．They help children learn new words.

D．They are accompanied by illustrations.

4. What is the text?

A．A news report.

B．A short story.

C．A book review.

D．A research article.

5 . In Japan, the new year began with disaster as a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula (能登半岛) on the country’s western edge on Monday. More than 2,000 active fault lines (断层线) lie beneath Japan, making it one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.

Many scientists have long considered earthquake forecasting to be impossible. But given recent improvements in artificial intelligence, some researchers have been studying whether that could change.

Last fall, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin increased such hopes for earthquake prediction with a seven-month trial in China. In all, the algorithm (演算法) successfully forecast 14 earthquakes, each within about 200 miles of its actual epicenter (震中). Meanwhile, it missed one quake and predicted eight that never happened. The trial was part of an international A.I.-design competition, one of a few such events held in recent years to advance earthquake prediction technologies.

Sergey Fomel, a geoscientist at UT Austin and a member of the research team, says in a statement. “We’re not yet close to making predictions for anywhere in the world, but what we achieved tells us that what we thought was an impossible problem is solvable in principle.”

Additionally, machine learning could help detect hidden patterns in data or collect more data to better inform earthquake forecasting, Hutchison writes for MIT Technology Review. For example, some researchers are showing how A. I. might use recordings from a specific seismic site to anticipate an earthquake’s magnitude. One team has built and trained neural networks to predict where aftershocks may occur after an initial strike. And others are using machine learning to identify and extract seismic waves—the vibrations that spread through the earth during tectonic activity (构造活动)—from other noises in the ground.

1. What’s the function of the first paragraph?

A．To explain a concept.	B．To introduce a new topic.
C．To supply a summary.	D．To provide an example.

2. What made some researchers optimistic about the earthquake forecasting?

A．The recent progress in theories.	B．The use of traditional methods.
C．The increasing number of earthquakes.	D．The advancements in artificial intelligence.

3. What do we know from the third paragraph?

A．The trial was conducted by Chinese.	B．The algorithm was totally successful.
C．A. I. shows promise in earthquake prediction.	D．The A. I. competition only focused on earthquakes.

4. What is the best title for the passage?

A．Japan’s Vulnerability to Earthquakes	B．Helper in Predicting Earthquakes—A.I.
C．The Impossibility of Earthquake Prediction	D．International Efforts to Predict Earthquakes

6 . The law of supply and demand determines that an overabundance of anything will lead to a decrease in price. This rule applies not only to goods and services, but also to lifestyle and fashion trends.

In the 19th century, the primitive paintings of Picasso and Matisse shook up the positive image of the French bourgeoisie (中产阶级). In the 1970s, talented musicians with tailored costumes and egos were overshadowed by a band of punk rockers who sang about the harsh realities of ordinary life in poor urban areas.

I predict that this will also happen with beauty standards. The idealized version of life portrayed in fashion magazines will reach a turning point, as people become tired of unattainable perfection.

During my time in Washington D.C. in the 1990s, I had the opportunity to interact with numerous political celebrities. While chatting with former presidents or bumping into TV pundits (名嘴) in elevators, I also assisted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was my boss’s boss. What struck me was how ordinary these people appeared in real life despite their public characters. Like everyone else, they grappled with insecurities and mood swings, even though they were constantly under the spotlight.

Yes, it was great to drop names on the phone to my friends. My father, of course, couldn’t understand why I would ever want to leave. “Because you’re not me and I’m not impressed,” I told him. We do not need to lead a luxurious life or make groundbreaking achievements to be content. Happiness can be found in living out the ordinary moments of an authentic life.

Most of us end up being ordinary people without doing anything that changes the world, but that does not mean our lives are meaningless. In fact, it is precisely this realization that leads to sustainable happiness because, when all is said and done, no one’s lifestyle is essentially better than any other’s.

1. Which of the following phrase can best replace the underline phrase in paragraph 4?

A．struggled with

B．put up with

C．came up with

D．fought with

2. What’s the author’s father’s attitude towards his decision to leave Washington D.C.?

A．supportive

B． indifferent

C．opposed

D．unimpressed

3. What does the author’s observation about political celebrities suggest?

A．They are just like ordinary people.

B．They lack the ability to lead a normal life.

C．They are not as successful as they claim to be.

D．They are not as intelligent as they appear on TV.

4. What does the author want to imply in the last paragraph?

A．People should strive for a better lifestyle.

B．No one’s lifestyle is inherently superior to others’.

C．People should be content with their own lifestyles.

D．People should critically evaluate other people’s lifestyles.

7 . A new outdoor fabric (织物) stores energy by day and then lights up at night. Being tested in a city park, this totally “cool” fabric has attracted interest for its many urban uses.

This is the invention of Anai Green, an industrial and product designer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She designed a fabric that includes organic and solar photovoltaic cells (光伏电池). The cells capture sunlight and store the energy in strips with LEDs. This allows the fabric to shade public space by day. When night falls, these strips light up. Green said, “We use LumiWeave to light public space without carbon emissions, making the lighting all-natural. And we spread light in the area we want to light only.”

The system was designed to adapt to all weather conditions and can continue to provide lighting even after three days without sunlight. In addition, you simply put LumiWeave up and the sun will do the work. This in itself saves 50 percent of the cost of building standard lighting, and it saves 100 percent on the electricity bills. This is great news for cities. Tel Aviv, Green’s hometown, is trying out LumiWeave in AtidimPark.

The mayor of Tel Aviv, Ron Huldai, is making efforts to address climate change. “LumiWeave will turn out to be a groundbreaking project,” Huldai said. The mayor added that LumiWeave is especially important as it solves the issue of shading urban areas and uses clean energy.

The new fabric can be fixed atop bike paths, in children’s parks and in walking areas. Many big cities in Israel are planning on adopting LumiWeave. As there is also use for the fabric in outdoor sitting areas of restaurants and hotels, Green has developed a LumiWeave parasol (大遮阳伞). “We are now developing the possibility of controlling it from the phone — we’re creating an application,” Green said. LumiWeave provides an ideal solution for urban parks and gardens. We hope that it will soon be lighting up night skies around the world.

1. How does the new outdoor fabric work?

A．By turning household waste into clean energy.

B．By using photovoltaic cells to promote plant growth.

C．By providing shade and energy in an eco-friendly way.

D．By changing its temperatures according to the weather.

2. Which of the following can be the feature of LumiWeave?

A．It’s functional and cost-effective.

B．It takes up a lot of public space.

C．It’s equipped with self-repair materials.

D．It can broadcast weather conditions more quickly.

3. What’s Ron Huldai’s attitude towards LumiWeave?

A．Worried.

B．Doubtful.

C．Unclear.

D．Supportive.

4. What can we infer about LumiWeave from Paragraph 5?

A．It may cause safety concerns.

B．It will be further developed for wider use.

C．It will be replaced by more intelligent devices.

D．It can reduce the waiting time in some places.

8 . Imagine you need milk, so you go to the grocery store to pick some up, only to find there are dozens of options. These days, you have to make a decision on not only the percentage of fat you want, but also what source you want your milk to be coming from: cows, soybeans... You have no idea what milk to pick. There are so many choices that you are confused.

This phenomenon is known as the paradox (悖论) of choice and it is becoming a concern in the modern world, where more and more options are becoming easily available to us. While we might believe that being presented with multiple options actually makes it easier to choose one that we are happy with, and thus increases consumer satisfaction, having too many options actually requires more effort to make a decision and can leave us feeling unsatisfied with our choice.

The idea was popularized by American psychologist Barry Schwartz when he published his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Schwartz, who has long studied the ways in which economics and psychology intersect (交叉), became interested in seeing the way that choices were affecting the happiness of citizens in Western societies. He identified that the range of choices that we have available to us these days is far greater than that people had in the past; however, consumer satisfaction has not increased as much as traditional economics theories might expect.

Schwartz identified that the paradox of choice carries the most consequence for people that are maximizers. Maximizers, unlike satisficers, are concerned with making the best choice instead of simply making a choice that they are happy with. When there are many options available to maximizers, it becomes harder for them to determine which is the best, which can cause them to feel a great deal of regret after they have made a choice.

Instead of believing that freedom of choice is unlimited, Schwartz advocates that the role of psychology and behavioral economics should be to find the kind of limitations on freedom that can lead to the greatest level of happiness within society.

1. What’s the author’s purpose in mentioning buying milk in paragraph 1?

A．To lead in the topic.

B．To draw a conclusion.

C．To show that we have more choices when shopping.

D．To indicate that people pay greater attention to health when shopping.

2. What does the paradox of choice suggest?

A．More options mean less satisfaction.

B．Consumer satisfaction has greatly increased.

C．People are happy with more choices.

D．Modern people are happier than their ancestors.

3. What can be learned about satisficers?

A．They aim for the very best.	B．They tend to follow their feelings.
C．They often regret their decisions.	D．They have trouble making a decision.

4. What does Schwartz suggest people do?

A．Hold on to their beliefs.	B．Accept their own behavior.
C．Give up freedom.	D．Limit their own choices.

9 . If you’ve spent any time online in the first few weeks of 2023, you may have already picked up on the buzz surrounding ChatGPT. But what exactly is it?     1    

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI. It enables users to “converse” with it in a way that’s meant to copy natural conversation.     2     The easy-to-understand, easy-to-use, and free tool has already gained popularity as both an alternative to traditional search engines and as a tool for Al writing, among other things.

What does GPT stand for?

    3     While older AI chatbots could answer questions with detailed responses, ChatGPT uses a dialog format, which allows it to answer follow-up and clarifying questions, as well as recognize and reject inappropriate or dangerous requests (such as questions about illegal activity).

How to use ChatGPT to increase your work?

    4     Knowing how to effectively communicate with ChatGPT, or any generative AI model, is called prompt engineering. You can either include ChatGPT in your day-to-day work to conduct a research or to help you get started on a writing project while staring at a blank page.

    5    

ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP), an AI technology that deals with understanding, analyzing, and generating human-like language. It analyzes sample texts from the internet and conversations provided by real humans, and then ranks outputs based on the quality of the response. Providing occasional feedback from humans is a technique that can help fine-tune the output by improving both safety and reliability.

A．As a user, you can ask questions or make requests, and ChatGPT will respond.

B．ChatGPT has become a powerful tool to save time and energy.

C．In this article, you can find all you need to know about ChatGPT.

D．ChatGPT represents the future of all chatbots without doubt.

E．The “GPT” in ChatGPT is short for generative pre-trained transformer.

F．How does ChatGPT work?

G．The technique to apply when using ChatGPT.

10 . Despite heavy illegal hunting of rhinos, South Africa’s Kruger National Park is still a natural paradise. One of the largest remaining lion populations in Africa lives there. Yet there is something the local animals fear even more than the big cats.

Liana Zanette of Western University in Ontario and her colleagues were able to show that animals react most strongly to human voices and flee in response. For their experiment, the team placed camera traps and loudspeakers at water holes in the national park, which allowed the researchers to influence and record the behavior of a total of 19 mammal species. They played the animals sounds of normal conversations of humans in four South African languages, dogs barking, gunshots and lion sounds.

The study group found that animals were twice as likely to flee and yacated an area faster when they heard human voices than when they heard lions or gunshots. This was true for 95 percent of the animal species observed, including giraffes, leopards, hyenas, zebras, kudu, warthogs, impalas and rhinos. Only elephants were significantly more likely to run from lions than from humans.

The same was true of the time that animals spent at water holes: they usually stayed longer when lion sounds were played to them than when human voices were heard. Wild dogs, leopards and buffalo were the only animals who stayed at water holes longer when they heard humans, and the difference was not statistically significant for these species. “There is a notion that animals get used to humans when they are not being hunted. But we’ve shown that’s not the case,” Clinchy says. “Fear of humans is deeply rooted and common, so we need to seriously address it for conservation reasons.”

The team is now investigating whether its customized sound systems can be used to help endangered species, such as the southern white rhino, away from known poaching(偷猎) areas in South Africa. Initial tests of keeping rhinos away from such areas through the use of human voices have been successful.

1. What can we know about South Africa’s Kruger National Park?

A．Rhinos are effectively protected in the park.

B．Lions are the biggest threat for local animals.

C．Human voices cause fear in the local wildlife.

D．It is a natural paradise without illegal hunting.

2. What does the underlined word “vacated” in paragraph 3 probably mean?

A．Occupied.

B．Left.

C．Encountered.

D．Filled.

3. What did researchers find about animals’ reaction to different sounds?

A．Elephants are more afraid of humans than lions.

B．Giraffes react most strongly to lions or gunshots.

C．Rhinos were more likely to run from lions than gunshots

D．Wild dogs stayed at water holes longer when hearing humans

4. What is the best title for the text?

A．Human Voices: a surprising deep-rooted fear in wildlife

B．Lions: the primary source of threat for the local animals

C．Lion Sounds: the potential use for wildlife protection

D．Humans: the impact on decreasing rhino population