1 . 阅读下面短文，根据题目要求回答问题。
Anxiety is not deadly, because being able to feel anxious shows that our fight-or-flight system is operational, which is an indicator of brain and sensory health. Once we accept that being anxious is a normal part of life, we can use it to our benefit.
Anxiety can help build our emotional strength. If we want to build emotional strength, we need to face some degree of mental stress. Of course, unpleasant and abuse tend to cause more harm than good, but the experience of occasional anxiety, stress, and tension substantially increases our emotional courage.
Anxiety can increase your emotional connection. Clinical science has identified that sharing our anxieties with our loved ones is one of the most effective strategies to build connection. When my patients learn to open up and share their anxieties with their partners, they almost always report a greater sense of emotional connection.
Anxiety can help us rebalance. When we feel genuinely anxious because of stress, it’s our body’s way of telling us to rebalance. Nobody is truly limitless. When we pay attention to our internal cues and acknowledge our weaknesses, we emerge more focused and healthier overall and also less stressed and anxious.
Anxiety can be a healthy, helpful emotion that is a constructive aspect of human life. When it comes to occasional experience of anxiety, it can emotionally help boost our courage. It can also build up emotional connect ion when we express our sensitive feelings to others. And in the form of stress, it can serve as an internal indicator to remain balanced and healthy. Now it’s high time we started putting it to good use．
1. Why is anxiety not deadly?When we pay attention to our internal cues and acknowledge our weaknesses, we emerge more focused and healthier overall and also more stressed and anxious．
2 . Do you want to be a cognitive superager when you are old? Just as you take steps towards a future-proofing body, you can enhance your brain’s resilience to age-related disease by boosting cognitive reserve.
Andrew Sommerlad, an associate professor of psychiatry, discovers the power of cognitive reserve in studies of older people who show signs of Alzheimer’s (阿尔兹海默症) in their brains.
How do you improve it? The younger you implement things that will bolster it, the better. For example, you can do tasks that challenges your brain ability, like crosswords, reading, giving impromptu speech and critical thinking.
Cognitive reserve is developed through a lifetime of education, curiosity and persistence.
| A．Its effects are wide reaching. |
| B．Additionally, maintain regular sleep patterns. |
| C．So plan ahead to make sure you keep cognitively busy and engaged! |
| D．There are ways you can improve sleep, for both young and old people. |
| E．It suggests that developing a good cognitive reserve can be powerfully protective. |
| F．However, thinking too hard for too long may wear you out, hurting cognitive reserve. |
| G．They cope better with pathological (病理上的) changes, the higher their powers of cognitive reserve. |
3 . It is rapidly emerging as one of the most important technological, and increasingly ideological, divides of our times: should powerful generative artificial intelligence systems be open or closed?
Supporters say they broaden access to the technology, stimulate innovation and improve reliability by encouraging outside scrutiny. Far cheaper to develop and deploy, smaller open models also inject competition into a field dominated by big US companies such as Google. Microsoft and OpenAI that have invested billions developing massive, closed and closely controlled generative Al systems.
But detractors argue open models risk lifting the lid on a Pandora’s box of troubles. Bad actors can exploit them to spread personalised disinformation, while terrorists might use them to manufacture cyber or bio weapons. “The danger of open source is that it enables more crazies to do crazy things, “Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI, has warned.
The history of OpenAI, which developed the popular ChatGPT chatbot, is itself instructive. As its name suggests, the research company was founded in 2015 with a commitment to develop the technology as openly as possible. But it later abandoned that approach for both competitive and safety reasons. Once OpenAI realised that its generative AI models were going to be “unbelievably potent”, it made little sense to open source them, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist said.
Supporters of open models hit back, ridiculing the idea that open generative AI models enable people to access information they could not otherwise find from the internet or a rogue scientist. They also highlight the competitive self-interest of the big tech companies in shouting about the dangers of open models, whose intention is to establish their own market dominance strongly.
But there is an ideological dimension to this debate, too. Yann LeCun, chief scientist of Meta, has likened the arguments for controlling the technology to medieval obscurantism (蒙昧主义): the belief that only a self-selecting priesthood of experts is wise enough to handle knowledge.
In the future, all our interactions with the vast digital repository of human knowledge will be mediated through Al systems. We should not want a handful of Silicon Valley companies to control that access. Just as the internet flourished by resisting attempts to enclose it, so AI will thrive by remaining open, LeCun argues.
Wendy Hall, royal professor of computer science at Southampton university, says we do not want to live in a world where only the big companies run generative Al. Nor do we want to allow users to do anything they like with open models. “We have to find some compromise,” she suggests.
We should certainly resist the tyranny (暴政) of the binary (二进制) when it comes to thinking about AI models. Both open and closed models have their benefits and flaws. As the capabilities of these models evolve, we will constantly have to tweak the weightings between competition and control.
1. What does the underlined word “potent” in Paragraph 4 most probably mean?| A．Accessible. | B．Powerful. | C．Significant. | D．Unnoticeable. |
| A．It needs billions of dollars to develop and deploy open-source models. |
| B．The field of generative AI systems is dominated by big companies. |
| C．Only self-selecting experts can handle open models wisely. |
| D．Users can do anything they like with open models at this moment. |
| A．sympathetic | B．puzzled | C．unconcerned | D．opposed |
| A．How to Keep the Lid on the Pandora’s Box of Open AI |
| B．Divides on Open AI: technology and ideology |
| C．Where does the Debate on Open AI End |
| D．Pros and Cons of Open AI |
4 . EVs are in the middle of an obesity epidemic
Fisker, an electric vehicle, unveiled the future line-up on August 3rd. It included: a souped-up, off-road version of the Ocean. Though Fisker says sustainability is one of its founding principles, it is indulging in a trait almost universal among car firms: building bigger, stronger cars, even when they are electric.
There are two reasons for this. The first is profit. As with conventional cars, bigger EVs generate higher margins. The second is consumer preference. For decades, drivers have been opting for SUVs and pickup trucks rather than smaller cars, and this now applies to battery-charged ones. EV drivers, who worry about the availability of charging infrastructure, want more range, hence bigger batteries. That may help make for a more reassuring ride. But eventually the supersizing trend will prove to be unsustainable and unsafe.
For now, carmakers can argue that however big the electric rigs, they have a positive impact on the planet. Though manufacturing EVs—including sourcing the metals and minerals that go into them—generates more greenhouse gases than a conventional car, they quickly compensate for that through the absence of tallpipe emissions.
But in the long run the trend for bigger butteries may backfire, for economic and environmental reasons. First, the bigger the battery, the more pressure there will be on the supply chain. If battery sizes increase there are likely to be looming seareitles of lithium and nickel. That will push up the cost of lithium-ion batteries, undermining carmakers’ profitability. Second, to charge bigger batteries in a carbon-neutral way requires more low-carbon electricity. That may create bottlenecks on the grid. Third, the more pressure on scarce resources vital for EV production, the harder it will be to make affordable electric cars critical for electrifying the mass market. That will slow the overall decarbonisation of transport. Finally, there is safety. Not only is a battle tank that does zero to 100 kilometres per hour in the blink of an eye a liability for anyone that happens to be in its way.
Governments have ways to encourage EVs to shrink. The most important is to support the expansion of charging infrastructure, which would reduce range anxiety and promote smaller cars. Taxes could punish heavier vehicles and subsidies could promote lighter ones.
Ultimately, the industry is almost sure to realise the folly of pursuing size for its own sake. The penny is starting to drop. Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, recently said carmakers could not make money with the longest-range batteries. His opposite number at General Motors, Mary Barra, has taken the unexpected step of reversing a plan to retire the affordable Chevy Bolt EV. In Europe, carmakers like Volkswagen are building smaller, cheaper EVs. Tesla is said to be planning a compact model made in Mexico.
1. Consumers want EVs with more range and bigger batteries because ______.| A．they can bring more profits |
| B．they can reduce tailpipe emissions |
| C．they are more secure |
| D．there are insufficient charging facilities for them |
| A．Rising cost of batteries will increase profitability |
| B．Conventional cars produce more greenhouse gases than EVs in production |
| C．Bigger batteries may create more pressure on the supply chain |
| D．The demand on scarce resources in EVs makes electric cars more affordable |
| A．Lighter electric vehicles should be encouraged. |
| B．Bigger, stronger cars are safer and more sustainable. |
| C．Supersizing electric vehicles have a positive impact on the planet. |
| D．EVs with bigger batteries may help make for a more comfortable ride. |
5 . Living beyond limits
Growing up in the hot Las Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed.
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated from high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I found my dream job. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. That is, until my life took a detour (转折点) . I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a 2% chance of living.
Over the course of two and a half months I lost the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee. I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new artificial legs for the first time. They were so painful that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? And how was I going to snowboard again?
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Self and learn to embrace the new Self. And that is when it dawned on me that if I snowboarded again, my feet aren’t going to get cold.
Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn’t go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn’t bend. But I knew that I would be able to do this again if I could find the right pair of feet.
I did a year of research, still couldn’t figure out what kind of legs to use. So I decided to make a pair myself. My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in. Then in 2005 I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports.
Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no. Because my legs haven’t disabled me. They’ve forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities.
1. How did the author feel when she saw her new legs for the first time?| A．Astonished. | B．Hopeful. | C．Desperate. | D．Delighted. |
| A．Her positive attitude. |
| B．Inspiration from research. |
| C．Her love for snowboard. |
| D．Help from a nonprofit organization. |
| A．travel around the world |
| B．take part in action sports |
| C．bend their knees and ankles |
| D．recover from their disabilities |
| A．Practice makes perfect. |
| B．Actions speak louder than words. |
| C．You can’t judge a book by its cover. |
| D．Nothing is impossible to a willing heart |
6 . 阅读下列短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写1个适当的单词，在给出提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。
Shenzhou XVII crew members completed their first spacewalk on 22nd December, 2023, completing a host of tasks outside the Tiangong space station. It was the 14th spacewalk
7 . We live in a town, about half a mile from the banks of the Ahr River. It had been raining buckets that week and there were
As a precaution, I’d
As I fell asleep, I was
With the water now up to my waist, in bare feet I started to paddle to my only
The experience made me grateful and determined to live each day to its fullest. I will remember what my mother told me: “Don’t remember the day when you
| A．flood | B．earthquake | C．drought | D．sandstorm |
| A．cleaned | B．lifted | C．recovered | D．placed |
| A．threatened | B．awakened | C．weakened | D．tightened |
| A．excited | B．shocked | C．depressed | D．exhausted |
| A．showed up | B．looked up | C．turned on | D．went on |
| A．carefully | B．gradually | C．violently | D．constantly |
| A．escape | B．mind | C．problem | D．stage |
| A．gap | B．depth | C．height | D．cut |
| A．pretended | B．promised | C．imagined | D．realised |
| A．lacked | B．found | C．lost | D．gained |
While playing truant, little boy, Jim, travelled 1600 miles. He hitch-hiked to Dover and, towards evening, went into a boat, sleeping. When he woke up next morning, he discovered that the boat
Low-Hanging Fruit
If you are the first person to arrive at an apple tree during harvest time, you can easily find some low-hanging fruit. These are the apples that
