1 . Tourists at the Acropolis this holiday season can walk around the ancient Greek site to see how it looked like 2,500 years ago. They will even see a collection of sculptures that were removed from the site more than 200 years ago and are now on display at the British Museum in London. All they need is a smartphone and an app called Chronos.

They can just point their phones at the Parthenon, and then the sculptures housed in London will app ear back on the temple. Other less widely known features also appear: Many of the sculptures on the Acropolis are painted in striking colors. A statue of Athena in the main hall also stands over a shallow pool of water.

“The only time I’ve seen this kind of technology before was at the dentist,” Shriya Parsotam Chitnavis, a tourist from London, said after checking out the app on a hot afternoon at the hilltop Acropolis. “I’m more of a visual person, so this app has really helped me appreciate it.”

The app employs augmented reality (AR) to place the ancient impression of the site onto the screen, matching the real-world view as you walk around the temple. The app also covers three other monuments at the Acropolis, a neighboring Roman theater and parts of the Acropolis Museum built at the foot of the hill.

Greece’s Culture Ministry is enthusiastic to adopt the AR technology. Another company, Microsoft, partnered with the ministry two years ago to launch a digital tour at ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games in southern Greece.

“The software will offer tourists a more immersive experience, allowing them to share photos and videos from museums and other sources as more content becomes digitized,” said Maria Engberg, co-author of the book Reality Media.

1. How is Shriya Parsotam Chitnavis’s reaction to the software?

A．Positive.

B．Dismissive.

C．Skeptical.

D．Scared.

2. Which attraction is unable to be seen with Chronos?

A．The ancient Roman theater.	B．The birthplace of the Olympic Games.
C．Parts of the Acropolis Museum.	D．Three other monuments at the Acropolis.

3. What does the word “immersive” underlined in the last paragraph mean?

A．Unnatural.

B．Adventurous.

C．Painful.

D．Vivid.

4. What is the text mainly about?

A．A tourist’s experience at the Acropolis.

B．A new way to restore ancient cultural sites.

C．A very helpful app to be introduced at the Acropolis.

D．The popularity of AR technologies at ancient attractions.

2 . In spring 1955, Rosalynn Carter was doing what she had been avoiding since she married Jimmy Carter: keeping house and raising children in the same tiny town where they grew up.

But her husband called for help from his family’s farm one day and said that he couldn’t manage the farm on his own. So Rosalynn Carter gathered their sons and returned to the tiny town. Soon she was managing finances and handling customers. “Finally, I got used to our new life and knew more about the business than he did, and he would take my advice about things,” Rosalynn Carter told The Associated Press in 2021.

Their marriage was almost a decade old when she went to the farm, but that was perhaps the true beginning of a partnership that helped Jimmy Carter win the Georgia governor’s office in 1970 and then the White House in 1976. Six years later, they co-founded The Carter Center and committed themselves to charity work for four decades in more than 145 countries, where many children, now adults, were named Jimmy or Rosalynn or Carter. Along that path was a small-town love story that included 77 years of marriage and two decades of family friendship before that. Their shared journey ended on November 19, 2023, with Rosalynn’s death at the age of 96.

“It’s hard to think of one of them without the other,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who saw the couple often during Rosalynn Carter’s last months. “When Jimmy was president. she even attended all White House meetings and discussed what she heard with him at home. They had nightly phone calls when they traveled separately.”

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished.” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released upon her death. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

1. How did Rosalynn Carter probably feel when she was asked to work on the farm?

A．Interested.

B．Unconcerned.

C．Proud.

D．Unwilling.

2. What did the Carters do in the early 1980s?

A．They bought a new farm in a small town.

B．They ran for the Georgia governor’s office.

C．They started to do charity work in the world.

D．They traveled in different countries as tourists.

3. What did Jill Stuckey say about the Carters?

A．Rosalynn Carter was an ambitious woman.

B．The couple were very attached to each other.

C．Jimmy Carter was not a qualified president.

D．They should not share the secret information.

4. What is the best title for the text?

A．Young Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter’s Love Stories

B．The World’s Responses to Rosalynn Carter’s Death

C．The Close Bond Between Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter

D．The Lasting Relationship Between the Carters’ Families

3 . Here are trips near Beijing for every age, taste, and budget.

Badachu

Badachu takes its name from the eight temples that make up the area’s main attraction. Its history as a religious site goes all the way back to the Tang Dynasty（618-907AD).   The first of the eight temples, Chang’an Si, is actually located right outside the park. The second temple, Lingguang Si, is Badachu’s main attraction and the only one that still has monks inside. Take the nearby chairlift（RMB 30）or continue exploring the other temples on foot.

Admission: RMB 10.

Longqing Gorge

Longqing Gorge is known for the Longqing Gorge Ice Sculpture Festival in winter and peaceful mountain views in summer. Often compared to the Yangtze River’s famous Three Gorges, Longqing Gorge also ranks favorably with Guilin’s mountain and water views. Besides sightseeing, tourists can go boating, rock climbing and horseback riding here. Baihua Dong is best avoided, as the only signs of “flowers” are made with plastics.

Admission: RMB 40.

Shang Fang Shan

As a national forest park, Shang Fang Shan is known for its diversity of plants and ancient trees that are over a thousand years old. There are nine caves in the mountain. The best-known one is called Yunshui Cave, meaning “the cave of clouds and water”.

Admission: RMB 40.

Huanghuacheng

If your idea of relaxation is losing yourself in hiking along the wild Great Wall, then Huanghuacheng, which is named after the yellow flowers that blanket the site in summer, is for you. Here you can explore the Great Wall at any time for free. The exploration starts at Jintang Lake and the moon-shaped Huanghuacheng Reservoir, which breaks the Great Wall into three sections. Huanghuacheng is also known as “Water Great Wall” because part of the wall is underwater.

1. How much should you pay if you visit the temples by chairlift in Badachu?

A．RMB 10

B．RMB 20

C．RMB 30

D．RMB 40

2. What are visitors recommended to do in Longqing Gorge?

A．Go for a sculpture festival in summer.	B．Visit a cave with beautiful flowers.
C．Enjoy pretty mountain and water views.	D．See various plants and ancient trees.

3. What is special about Huanghuacheng?

A．It can be visited free of charge.	B．It is best-known for its natural beauty.
C．It is famous for yellow flowers in spring.	D．It offers free access to many religious sites.

4 . Robins (知更鸟) are considered as a symbol of the festive season and are known for their lively, curious nature around humans. But even robins get road rage because they can become aggressive when there’s noise, a new study shows.

Researchers from the UK found that the sound of traffic made rural robins — not urban robins — “more aggressive”. The study was conducted by experts at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Human activity has a colossal effect on wildlife, including on their social behavior,” the team said in their paper.

For their study, the team investigated the behavior of male European robins living in urban parks and rural forests in Istanbul. They measured aggression towards another robin intruder, which wasn’t a real robin but instead a model in the shape of an adult bird. The fake robin was equipped with a speaker, through which the team could play audio, and then attached to trees at the parks and forests. The audio consisted of recordings of robin songs, while additional traffic noise was added through another separate speaker nearby.

After recording the birds’ behavior during interactions with the fake intruder, they found the urban robins typically displayed more physical aggression than rural robins. However, rural robins became more aggressive with the addition of traffic noise — possibly because they’re less used to traffic noise than urban birds, which are already living in noisier habitats. What’s more, physical displays of territoriality could increase because the traffic noise interferes with their birdsong. “In normally quiet surroundings, we found that additional traffic noise leads to rural robins becoming more aggressive,” said Dr Caglar Akcay at ARU. “We believe this is because the noise is interfering with their communication.”

Overall, by comparing urban and rural robin reactions, the study provides a valuable glimpse into how urban-living species adapt to “life in a noisy world”. “Our results show that human-produced noise can have a range of effects on robins, depending on the habitat they live in,” said Dr Akcay.

1. What can we learn about the robins according to the text?

A．They like larger habitats.

B．They cannot stand other intruders.

C．They prefer villages to urban areas.

D．They can remind people of joyous seasons.

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

A．Positive.

B．Mutual.

C．Weak.

D．Dramatic.

3. Why did the rural robins become more aggressive when facing traffic noise?

A．It affected their communication.

B．It severely damaged their hearing.

C．It prevented them from finding food.

D．It made it hard for them to return to their habitats.

4. What is the purpose of this text?

A．To persuade people to protect the robins.

B．To compare the differences between robins.

C．To show man-made noise’s effect on robins.

D．To prove that human and birds are connected.

5 . How to Be Funny?

Humor can help you connect with other people and make unpleasant situations a little more bearable.     1     But it’s not that hard once you tap into your inner sense of humor. Even if you don’t think you’re naturally funny, there are things you can do to make yourself and other people laugh.

Learn from funny people. You can expand your reach a good deal by listening to other funny people. Whether they’re professional comedians, your parents, your kids, or your boss, learning from the funny people in your life is a key step towards being a funny person.     2     Look for what you admire most in these people.

Broaden your factual knowledge for joke material.     3     They may be your amazing knowledge of 17th-century poetry, your familiarity with fishing trips that went wrong, etc. Whatever the material is, it needs to resonate(引起共鸣)with your audience.

    4     Being funny doesn’t come in a one-size-fits-all package. What makes you funny is unique to you and the way you observe the world. Trust that you do have a funny bone; as babies, we laugh from four months of age, and all children express humor naturally from the kindergarten age, using humor to entertain themselves and others. It’s already in you. You just need to bring it out!

Read, read, read. Get your hands on everything that is funny, and consume it like your mom told you not to. Chemists become chemists by reading and practicing chemistry. Sports writers become sports writers by reading and writing about sports.     5    

A．Strike while the iron is hot.

B．Trust in your inner sense of humor.

C．Observe the funnier things these people say or do.

D．Being funny might seem to take a great deal of work.

E．It’s much easier to find funny moments in familiar material.

F．You’ll become a humorous person by reading and practicing jokes.

G．The better you know someone, the easier it will be to make them laugh.

6 . A sugar replacement called erythritol (赤藓糖醇) has been linked to blood clotting (血液凝固), stroke, heart attack and death, according to a new study.

“The degree of risk was not modest,” said lead study author Dr. Stanley Hazen. People with existing risk factors for heart disease will be twice as likely to experience the risk if they have the highest levels of erythritol in their blood. Erythritol appears to be causing blood platelets (血小板) to clot more readily. Clots can break off and travel to the heart or the brain, causing a heart attack or a stroke.

Erythritol is a sugar alcohol, a carb found naturally in many fruits and vegetables. However, artificially manufactured in massive quantities, erythritol has become an extremely popular additive to low-carb products.

The discovery of the connection between erythritol and cardiovascular issues was purely accidental. Hazen’s research had a simple goal: find unknown chemicals or compounds in a person’s blood. To do so, the team analyzed 1,157 blood samples. “We found this substance that seemed to play a big role, but we didn’t know it was erythritol, a sweetener until later,” said Hazen. To confirm the findings, the team tested another two batches of blood samples and found that higher levels of erythritol were connected to a greater risk of heart attack, stroke or death within three years.

“This certainly sounds an alarm,” said Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of a hospital inDenver. “Science needs to take a deeper div e into erythritol and in a hurry, because this substance is widely available right now. If it’s harmful, we should know about it.”

Hazen agreed,“I normally don’t get up on a pedestal (崇高地位) and sound the alarm, but this is something that I think we need to be looking at carefully.”

1. About the risk, what does Hazen’s word in paragraph 2 mean?

A．It is not worth considering.	B．It is removed by erythritol.
C．It should not be underestimated.	D．It is just present in people with disease.

2. What do we know about erythritol?

A．Its quality is uncertain.	B．It has been used widely in food.
C．It is manufactured by artists.	D．It mainly exists in fruits.

3. What can be concluded from the last two paragraphs?

A．Erythritol is not available to people.

B．Hazen likes warning people about potential dangers.

C．People have realized that erythritol is dangerous.

D．Further research should be done on erythritol.

4. What can be the best title for the text?

A．The Accidental Discovery of a New Sweetener

B．The Potential Health Risks of Erythritol Uncovered

C．The Rise of Erythritol as a Popular Sugar Substitute

D．The Surprising Benefits of Erythritol in Diet Products

7 . Climate change is causing more areas to turn into deserts. This issue is affecting the lives of 250 million people as land that used to be good for farming becomes dry and unproductive. Around one-third of the world’s land is impacted, including regions in Africa, southern Europe, Asia and America.

Sand to Green is a Moroccan company that can transform a patch of desert into a sustainable (可持续的) and profitable plantation in five years, according to Wissal Ben Moussa, its co-founder and chief agricultural officer. The solution is using agroforestry (农林业)to create a new kind of agriculture that is sustainable and that can be resilient (有适应力的) in front of climate change.

The system can be set up close to any source of salty water, which Sand to Green cleans using energy from the sun. It then grows different types of fruit trees and plants together in the same area—a method called mixed planting—and waters the plants’ roots directly with the cleaned water, to reduce water loss to the air. The soil is regenerated using what Sand to Green calls “green manure”, a mixture that includes compost, biochar(生物炭)and microorganisms that help the soil “wake up”. Biochar is a form of charcoal that can help dry soil hold on to water.

In a five-hectare trial in southern Morocco that’s been running since 2017, Sand to Green has tried out a variety of plants in search of the best performers. Among the intercropping herbs (草本植物) that have been successfully trialed are rosemary, geranium, vetiver and citronella, which Ben Moussa describes as “very low-maintenance and very high-profit”.

Sand to Green is now working to scale up to a 20-hectare commercial site, also in southern Morocco. It says a site of that size would cost around $475,000 to set up and would start bringing financial returns in about five years.

According to Ben Moussa, with this system they create biodiversity, which means better soil, healthier crops and a bigger yield. The plantation can generate 1.5 times more yield, thus making more money than a farm that grows only one type of crop in the same space.

1. What phenomenon does the author describe in paragraph 1?

A．Deforestation.	B．Desertification.
C．Global warming.	D．Urbanization.

2. Why did Sand to Green use agroforestry?

A．To preserve the crop’s survival rate.

B．To protect water from pollution.

C．To make a new type of soil.

D．To help people adapt to climate change.

3. What can we learn about Sand to Green?

A．It aims to plant more trees.

B．It earns a good reputation.

C．It develops new plants.

D．It produces good results.

4. What does the underlined phrase “scale up” mean in paragraph 5?

A．Expand.

B．Object.

C．Refer.

D．Prefer.

8 . Imagine taking a flying taxi to the airport, or hopping over crowded city streets at rush hour, getting where you want to go far faster than you could in a car. Believe it or not, you might be able to do these things in an electric air taxi sooner than you think.

An air taxi is a small aircraft that can carry people from place to place. Air taxis don’t need a long runway like planes do. They can go straight up and down, like a helicopter.

In June, the FAA—the government group in charge of America’s skies—agreed to allow a company called Joby Aviation to start testing their new air taxi.

Joby has been making and testing flying taxis since 2017. But this is the first time that they’re testing a taxi that’s been built in a factory. Before that, all their taxis were made by hand.

By 2025, Joby hopes to start carrying passengers for money. They’ve teamed up with Delta Air Lines to create a program to fly people from their homes to the airport. Joby also expects their air taxis to provide a ride-sharing service in the air. Just like you might use an app to order a car to pick you up, you could use an app to order an air taxi.

Compared with helicopters, Joby claims their taxis are cheaper. The company expects to charge about $3 a mile (1.6 kilometers) at first. But over time, they hope to bring the price down to less than $1 per mile.

Joby isn’t the only company to develop air taxis. Companies around the world are working on similar vehicles. France even plans to use a few air taxis in Paris during next summer’s Olympic Games.

But there’s still a lot to do before air taxis become common. For one thing, governments need to make rules about where, when, and how these taxis can fly.

Still, it seems likely that air taxis will be part of the future of travel. The FAA says, “We could see air taxis in the skies by 2024 or 2025.”

1. What do the underlined words “hopping over” in paragraph 1 mean?

A．Moving below.

B．Walking across.

C．Jumping into.

D．Flying over.

2. What can we know about Joby’s air taxis?

A．They are factory-made from the start.

B．They were developed several years ago.

C．They will offer service to passengers through the FAA.

D．They will be used during the next Olympic Games in Paris.

3. What does paragraph 5 mainly talk about?

A．Joby’s plan about air taxis.	B．The history of Joby Aviation.
C．Air taxi team’s service promises.	D．Instructions for using a new app.

4. In what way are air taxis better than helicopters?

A．They are more comfortable.	B．They are more intelligent.
C．They are cheaper.	D．They are faster.

9 . 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。

The “Three Mountains (Fragrant Hills, Jade Spring Hill and Longevity Hill) and Five Gardens (Jingming Garden, Jingyi Garden, The Summer Palace, Changchun Garden and Yuanmingyuan)” are important landmarks in Beijing that represent its rich cultural and historical heritage.     1     (original) used as leisure retreats for the imperial family, these sites are now treasured for their     2     (nature) beauty and cultural significance.

Unfortunately, many valuable cultural items     3     (house) in these locations were lost due to damage caused by Western colonialist forces. However, a recent project has recreated 69 long-lost cultural relics in digital form,     4     are now being displayed to the public. This achievement is the result of cooperative efforts involving many volunteers from both home     5     abroad. Scholars and artists     6     (study) in France, as well as overseas students,     7     (contribute) valuable information about these scattered (分散的) relics.

The project has created a digital museum that showcases these cultural relics in seven different     8     (category). With technologies like virtual reality, visitors can have     9     unique and up-close experience of appreciating these items.     10     (reach) a wider audience, the digital museum team is also organizing offline touring exhibitions.

10 . Here are some free apps you’ll want to consider downloading.

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts is an app worth checking out if you listen to podcasts(播客)and want to discover great podcasts and easily manage your library. Browse(浏览)podcasts by charts, networks, and categories, and then add the ones you like to play episodes on the fly and create your own playback queue.

Duolingo

Duolingo offers a variety of interactive courses in over 30 languages, from Spanish to Chinese. The app personalizes your learning experience, adjusts to your skill level, and provides exercises across speaking, listening, reading, and writing. With Duolingo, you can track your progress, set daily goals, and join a community of learners. It’s ideal for anyone looking to pick up a new language or improve their skills.

Zedge

Zedge is the app you’ll want to use to personalize your device’s ringtones, notifications, and alarm sounds. The app offers thousands of high-quality sounds that are free and easy to download. Browse through the categories or use the search function to look for a specific sound. You can set a custom(定制的)ringtone for each person in your contact list, so you always know who’s calling.

Remindee

Ever find yourself browsing through an app, only to see something you need to remind yourself of later? Remindee is a simple app that lets you create reminders from anywhere within your device, no matter what app you’re currently browsing. Just ta p the share button and then tap the Remind Me option to create a reminder. Set the date and time you want for your reminder, and you’re finished.

1. What can you do with Duolingo?

A．Learn a new language with diverse exercises.

B．Order food from international restaurants.

C．Play video games in multiple languages.

D．Translate documents professionally.

2. Who may be interested in Zedge?

A．Chefs looking for new recipes.

B．People wanting to learn new languages.

C．Users seeking to customize device sounds.

D．Travelers searching for their own reminders.

3. If you want to look back at what you’ve browsed, which app is best for you?

A．Pocket Casts.	B．Duolingo.
C．Zedge.	D．Remindee.