1. What is the probable relationship between the speakers?
A.Host and guest. | B.Husband and wife. | C.Customer and waiter. |
A.End the party. | B.Go back home. | C.Do voluntary work. |
A.Buy more drinks. | B.Play the music. | C.Shut the lights. |
1. What will the weather be like later today?
A.Rainy. | B.Cloudy. | C.Windy. |
A.10°C. | B.18° | C.C. 28°C. |
A.Take an umbrella. | B.Follow the forecast. | C.Put on more clothes. |
I am writing with information about BAC University Summer Term’s four exciting programs for high school students. These programs provide the opportunity to study at a world-renowned university, strengthen English-language skills and enjoy summer in Boston. Here is a brief overview of our programs:
High School Honors is a six-week residential or online program in which students take BAC University undergraduate courses and earn up to 8 transferable college credits. Students must be entering Grades 10-12 in fall 2024.
Academic Immersion (AIM) is a three-week non-credit residential program for students to focus intensively on a single academic topic. This summer we are offering three AIM tracks: Introduction to Experimental Psychology, Introduction to Medicine, and Creative Writing. All three tracks combine classroom work with hands-on experiential learning activities. Students must be entering Grade 11 or Grade 12 in fall 2024.
Summer Challenge is a two-week residential or online program in which students take two non-credit seminars of their choice and experience college life. Students must be entering Grade 12 in fall 2024.
Summer Preview is a one-week non-credit residential program in which students explore one subject of interest while previewing the college experience. Students must be entering Grade 9 or Grade10 in fall 2024.
Our Summer Term’s programs provide students with rigorous and collaborative college life experiences that enable them to gain a strong sense of their personal and academic potential. Every year, our students form strong friendships as they undertake challenging coursework and participate in social events.
I have enclosed a poster and a program brochure. I hope you will share this information with your students. Please feel free to contact us via email at summerhs@bac.edu if you have any questions about our programs.
Warmly,
Amanda Nelson
Associate Director
BAC University Summer Term
1. A Grade 11 student in fall 2024 who prefers online programs could choose ________.A.High School Honors | B.Academic Immersion | C.Summer Challenge | D.Summer Preview |
A.get at least 8 transferable credits in High School Honors |
B.gain both knowledge and practical experience in AIM |
C.earn credits from the courses in Summer Challenge |
D.engage in in-depth research in Summer Preview |
A.To evaluate a summer camp. | B.To promote pre-college programs. |
C.To recommend university courses. | D.To introduce college learning projects. |
1. 对他们为太空事业做出的成就感到骄傲;
2. 询问太空站上生活、工作情况;
3. 表达关心和祝愿。
注意:
1. 写作词数80左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Dear astronauts,
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yours faithfully,
Li Hua
6 . If someone asked whether you like the arts, you’d probably say you do—at least in theory. According to a survey, more than two-thirds of U.S. adults say the arts “lift me up beyond everyday experiences.” However, only 30 percent attended a concert of any type in 2017; 23 percent went to an art museum. Fewer than half actively created art of any kind.
The mismatch can boil down to the fact that we are weighed down by our day-to-day responsibilities, leaving our schedule packed. Maybe you like to play a little background music while you work or do the chores, but even before the pandemic, most of us rarely, if ever, saw a live performance, let alone visited a gallery or watched a play.
Too often, we let the dull reality of life get in the way of the arts. But this is a mistake. The arts are the opposite of an escape from reality; they might just be the most realistic glimpse we ever get into the nature and meaning of life. If you make time for consuming and producing art—the same way you make time for work and exercise and family commitments—I assure you that you’ll find your life getting fuller and happier. Think of a time when you heard a piece of music and wanted to cry. Or maybe your dizziness as you emerged from a narrow side street in an unfamiliar city and found yourself in a beautiful town square as if in a fantasy. They probably stimulated a sudden awakening, much like the shock from a lungful of pure oxygen after breathing in smoggy air.
If you are among the people who feel that art is pure pleasure to experience and participate in, you might see it as a luxury item, while a preferable attitude is to treat art less like a distracting pleasure, and more like exercise or sleep, a necessity. Then draw up a schedule of your art exposure journey, and gradually weave art into your everyday life.
1. What prevents people from enjoying the arts?A.Shortage of time. | B.Avoidance of duty. |
C.Lack of interest. | D.Art space inaccessibility. |
A.It explores mysteries of life. | B.It sparks emotional responses. |
C.It enhances physical well-being. | D.It offers a getaway from daily life. |
A.Ways to integrate art into routine. | B.Barriers to combine art and life. |
C.Forms of distracting pleasures. | D.Benefits of engaging with art. |
A.Art Journey: Refreshing Soul |
B.Art Pursuit: Transforming Dull into Full |
C.Embracing Art: From Luxury to Necessity |
D.Connecting with Art: From Reality to Fantasy |
7 . Casting blame is natural: it is tempting to fault someone else for a mistake rather than taking responsibility yourself. But blame is also harmful. It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organizations can learn from them. Research published in 2015 suggests that firms whose managers pointed to external factors to explain their failings underperformed companies that blamed themselves.
Blame culture can spread like a virus. Just as children fear mom and dad’s punishment if they admit to wrongdoing, in a blaming environment, employees are afraid of criticism and punishment if they acknowledge making a mistake at work. Blame culture asks, “who dropped the ball?” instead of “where did our systems and processes fail?” The focus is on the individuals, not the processes. It’s much easier to point fingers at a person or department instead of doing the harder, but the more beneficial, exercise of fixing the root cause, in which case the problem does not happen again.
The No Blame Culture was introduced to make sure errors and deficiencies (缺陷) were highlighted by employees as early as possible. It originated in organizations where tiny errors can have catastrophic (灾难性的) consequences. These are known as high reliability organizations (HROs) and include hospitals, submarines and airlines. Because errors can be so disastrous in these organizations, it’s dangerous to operate in an environment where employees don’t feel able to report errors that have been made or raise concerns about that deficiencies may turn into future errors. The No Blame Culture maximizes accountability because all contributions to the event occurring are identified and reviewed for possible change and improvement.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which supervises air traffic across the United States, makes it clear that its role is not to assign blame or liability but to find out what went wrong and to issue recommendations to avoid a repeat. The proud record of the airline industry in reducing accidents partly reflects no-blame processes for investigating crashes and close calls. The motive to learn from errors also exist when the risks are lower. That is why software engineers and developers routinely investigate what went wrong if a website crashes or a server goes down.
There is an obvious worry about embracing blamelessness. What if the website keeps crashing and the same person is at fault? Sometimes, after all, blame is deserved. The idea of the “just culture”, a framework developed in the 1990s by James Reason, a psychologist, addresses the concern that the incompetent and the malevolent (恶意的) will be let off the hook. The line that Britain’s aviation regulator draws between honest errors and the other sort is a good starting-point. It promises a culture in which people “are not punished for actions or decisions taken by them that match with their experience and training”. That narrows room for blame but does not remove it entirely.
1. According to the research published in 2015, companies that ______ had better performance.A.blamed external factors | B.admitted their mistakes |
C.conducted investigations | D.punished the under performers |
A.It encourages the early disclosure of errors. |
B.It only exists in high reliability organizations. |
C.It enables people to shift the blame onto others. |
D.It prevents organizations from making any error. |
A.Innocent people might take the blame by admitting their failure. |
B.Being blamed for mistakes can destroy trust in employees. |
C.The line between honest errors and the other sort is not clear. |
D.People won’t learn their lessons if they aren’t blamed for failures. |
A.Why We Fail to Learn from Our Own Mistakes |
B.How to Avoid Disastrous Errors in Organizations |
C.Why We Should Stop the Blame Game at Work |
D.How to Deal with Workplace Blame Culture |
9 . Research has found that using wood for construction instead of concrete and steel can reduce emissions. But Tim Searchinger at Princeton University says many of these studies are based on the false foundation that harvesting wood is carbon neutral (碳中和). “Only a small percentage of the wood gets into a timber (木料) product, and a part of that gets into a timber product that can replace concrete and steel in a building,” he says. Efficiencies vary in different countries, but large amounts of a harvested tree are left to be divided into parts, used in short-lived products like paper or burned for energy, all of which generate emissions.
In a report for the World Resources Institute, Searchinger and his colleagues have modelled how using more wood for construction would affect emissions between 2010 and 2050, accounting for the emissions from harvesting the wood. They considered various types of forests and parts of wood going towards construction. They also factored in the emissions savings from replacing concrete and steel.
Under some circumstances, the researchers found significant emissions reductions. But each case required what they considered an unrealistically high portion of the wood going towards construction, as well as rapid growth only seen in warmer places, like Brazil. In general, they found a large increase in global demand for wood would probably lead to rising emissions for decades. Accounting for emissions in this way, the researchers reported in a related paper that increasing forest harvests between 2010 and 2050 would add emissions equal to roughly 10 percent of total annual emissions.
Ali Amiri at Aalto University in Finland says the report’s conclusions about emissions from rising demand are probably correct, but the story is different for wood we already harvest. “Boosting the efficiency of current harvests and using more wood for longer-lived purposes than paper would cut emissions,” he says. “We cannot just say we should stop using wood.”
1. What is wrong with previous researches according to Searchinger?A.They got wrong statistics. | B.They used an incorrect concept. |
C.They included too many factors. | D.They were applied in limited countries. |
A.The process of the new research. | B.The background of the new study. |
C.The challenge of the new research. | D.The achievements of the new study. |
A.When wood grows slowly. |
B.When wood is largely used to make paper. |
C.When wood is largely used in construction in countries like Brazil. |
D.When wood is largely harvested in countries like Brazil. |
A.Favorable. | B.Doubtful. | C.Critical. | D.Objective. |
10 . Teenagers who spend more time on after-school activities and less than two hours of screen time after school are more mentally (心理上) healthy, according to a study published in the journal Preventive Medicine. The new study was carried out by researchers from the University of British Columbia.
The study used information collected from more than 28, 000 seventh-grade Canadian students between 2014 and 2018. The students first answered questions about their usage of screen time after school, including how much time they spent watching TV, Netflix or something else. Then, students reported how many days they had taken part in after-school activities such as sports or arts programmes. After that, researchers asked students to describe their state of mind. For example, when given a statement such as “I start most days thinking that I will have a good day”, they could choose to what level they agreed with it on a scale (等级).
Some of the results were expected, researchers said in the study. Students with no after-school activities usually had high levels of screen time, for example. And they expected girls would score higher on negative indicators (消极指标) of mental health, as earlier research had found that they tended to have higher levels of anxiety (焦虑) compared to boys.
What was noteworthy, researchers say, is that even among students who took part in after-school activities, 46% still went beyond the recommended screen time of two hours. At the same time, 67% of students who didn’t take part in after-school activities also had more than two hours of screen time. Together, this suggests high screen time among teenagers generally.
“The findings suggest that after-school activities are valuable for the happy growing of teenagers,” the study said. “While past studies have proved the importance of after-school activities for social and academic (学业的) development, the present study shows their importance for good mental health results.”
1. Which of the following came last when students took part in the new study?A.Talking about their lifestyles. | B.Introducing their after-school activities. |
C.Reporting their mental states on a scale. | D.Answering questions about screen time use. |
A.They often have higher levels of satisfaction. |
B.Few of them take part in after-school activities. |
C.Anxiety has become a serious problem among them. |
D.Too much screen time may be more harmful to them. |
A.Earlier findings about screen time are wrong. |
B.High screen time is common among teenagers. |
C.No after-school activities mean no screen time. |
D.Screens attract teenagers more than after-school activities do. |
A.They are good for teenagers’ physical health. |
B.They help to improve teenagers’ mental health. |
C.They encourage teenagers’ social development. |
D.They allow teenagers to become better learners. |