Tai chi is a Chinese martial art often practised with the purpose of
Chen Bin, one of the
Tai chi has taught Chen Bing
1. What are the speakers?
| A．A player and a coach. | B．Football fans. | C．TV sports reporters. |
| A．Bad defense. | B．Poor passing. | C．Certain players. |
| A．The visiting team will win. |
| B．The game will end in a draw. |
| C．The home team will win by two goals. |
1. What is the main topic of the conversation?
| A．The working life. | B．College experience. | C．Hobbies. |
| A．About four months. | B．About six months. | C．About eight months. |
| A．The stress of exams. | B．The shortage of money. | C．The loads of assignments. |
| A．On weekends. | B．Right after exams. | C．During the nights after work. |
1. What is the woman doing?
| A．Conducting an interview. | B．Reporting some news. | C．Organizing an event. |
| A．That his health condition will become worse. |
| B．That his duties at home and school will be affected. |
| C．That his efforts in the community won’t be recognized. |
| A．By talking to his teacher. |
| B．By quitting the community project. |
| C．By involving his family in community work. |
5 . Antarctica has not always been a land of ice and snow. Earth’s southernmost continent once was home to rivers and forests full of life. Researchers are using satellites to look deep under the ice in Antarctica, finding a large ancient landscape buried under the continent’s ice sheet. The landscape is located in East Antarctica’s Wilkes Land area bordering the Indian Ocean, covering an area about the size of Belgium. The researchers said the landscape is estimated to have been buried beneath the ice shelf for between 14 million to 34 million years, when Antarctica entered its deep freeze.
“The landscape is like a snapshot of the past,” said Stewart Jamieson, a professor of glaciology at Durham University in England and co-leader of the study published in the journal Nature Communications, “It is difficult to know what this lost world might have looked like before the ice came along, but it was certainly warmer back then. Ancient palm tree pollen has been discovered from Antarctica, not far from our study site.”
Some earlier studies have uncovered ancient landscapes beneath Antarctica’s ice including mountains. But the landscape discovered in the new study was the first of its kind. It is estimated that such an environment would likely have been populated by wildlife. But the area’s fossil record is too incomplete to know which animals may have lived there. The ice above the ancient landscape measures about 2.2 kilometers to 3 kilometers thick.
The researchers said one way to learn more would be to drill through the ice and take a piece of the earth below. This could uncover evidence showing ancient life, as was done with samples taken in Greenland dating back two million years ago.
Right before 34 million years ago, Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife was likely similar to today’s cold temperate rainforests. That includes places like Tasmania, New Zealand and South America’s Patagonia area. When the climate cooled even more, an ice sheet grew which covered the whole continent.
1. How long ago was the landscape not buried at the latest?| A．14 million years ago. | B．34 million years ago. |
| C．20 million years ago. | D．48 million years ago. |
| A．To show it is hard to explore this lost world. |
| B．To indicate there exist some vivid remains. |
| C．To present the influence of terrible weather. |
| D．To explain the landscape was too warm to live in. |
| A．The landscape contains many hills and mountains. |
| B．Animal skeletons have been uncovered in the landscape. |
| C．There seems to have existed a mass of wild animals. |
| D．The ice above the landscape is too thick to measure. |
| A．Antarctica Once Witnessed Kinds of Wildlife. |
| B．Areas of Rainforests Found in Antarctica. |
| C．Many Landscapes under Antarctica Discovered. |
| D．Ancient Landscape Found Buried in Antarctic Ice. |
6 . The solution to any despair might be hope, experts say. It’s believing in a brighter future and acting towards it.
Brainstorm solutions. If you’ve set a goal that’s meaningful to you, but you can’t figure out a way to achieve it, you’ll probably feel pretty hopeless. People who are high in hope, meanwhile, tend to generate lots of ways.
Seek out success stories. It’s said that people cultivate hope by seeking support from their parents and specific teachers. But they also got a lot out of learning about other people who have done well for themselves. Hellman says, “
Tap into your imagination. Hellman thinks of imagination as “the instrument of hope”. Let’s say you set a goal for the week. Spend a few minutes reflecting on or talking about what would happen if you achieved it. “How does it impact you, or how would it benefit others?” he says. “
| A．Do something meaningful. |
| B．It can be taught and nurtured. |
| C．Think in a goal-oriented way. |
| D．With these good examples, people are bound to be successful. |
| E．So, if one doesn’t work out, they have an alternative at the ready. |
| F．By seeing other people succeed, they feel like they could succeed. |
| G．You and I have this wonderful capacity to play a movie in our head. |
7 . In a world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away. Yet, the live performance lives on. People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and gilded concert halls to hear their favourite musicians play. And now neuroscientists might know why—live music engages the brain’s emotion centres more than its recorded counterpart.
Concerts are immersive (沉浸式的) social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together through crescendos, key changes and rhythmic drops. Moreover, they are dynamic — artists can adapt their playing according to the crowd’s reaction.
It was this last difference that led neuroscientists, based at the Universities of Zurich and Oslo, to study the brain responses of people listening to music. In the “live” experiment, participants lay in an MRI scanner listening to the music through earphones, while a pianist was positioned outside the room. The pianist was shown the participant’s real-time brain activity as a form of feedback. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.
The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly the amygdala, an area deep inside the brain. The results, just published in the journal PNAS, revealed that live music had a significantly greater emotional impact. Whether the music conveyed happiness or sadness, dynamic live performances led to increased activity not only in the amygdala but also other parts of the brain’s emotion processing network. The researchers also found that participants’ brain activity tracked the acoustic (声学的) features of the music, like tempo and pitch, far more closely when it was played live.
While the study didn’t fully recreate the live concert experience, the findings suggest that artists’ ability to adjust their performance in real time contributes to the emotional resonance (共鸣) of live music. Some musical acts now attempt to recreate live concerts, such as ABBA Voyage, an immersive pre-recorded VR concert, but without artists’ capacity to read audience’s mood and respond accordingly, it will never quite match the real thing.
1. Why do people attend live shows despite music streaming services?| A．Because they prefer being with friends at a concert. |
| B．Because they enjoy the process of finding popular music. |
| C．Because they intend to meet their favorite musicians in person. |
| D．Because they value the emotional connection live music brings. |
| A．observe the participants’ brain activity as feedback |
| B．compare the effectiveness of live performances and recorded ones |
| C．provide live accompaniment to participants inside the MRI scanner |
| D．demonstrate their ability to read and respond to the audience’s mood |
| A．Live music affected only the amygdala of the brain. |
| B．The brain responded more intensely to acoustic features of live music. |
| C．Live music had a reduced emotional impact compared to recorded music. |
| D．The participants’ brain activity was especially sensitive to dynamic music. |
| A．It fails to create a perfect performing atmosphere. |
| B．It matches the sound quality of live performances. |
| C．It greatly stirs up the audience’s emotional response. |
| D．It lacks artists’ response based on audience’s feedback. |
1.介绍活动；
2.你的看法；
3.欢迎他参加。
注意：
1. 词数 80 词左右；
2. 开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数；
3. 可适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Dear Alan,
I’m excited to tell you about the campus activities to celebrate the second National Ecology Day on August 15, 2024.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Best regards,
Li Hua
Beautiful Birthmarks: The Power of Acceptance
Whenever you hear the word “birthmark (胎记)”, you probably think of one of those black or brown spots you have somewhere on your body. However, for me, it’s completely different — I have them both on my lips and inside my mouth, which make them quite visible and, to me, ugly. When
I was young, these birthmarks kept making me feel extremely awkward and self-conscious (难为情的). As these birthmarks always drew a lot of attention, people often asked me, “What are those black marks on your lips?” When I told people that they were birthmarks, they usually said, “How strange！”
In pictures, I used to hide my birthmarks by pursing (噘起) my lips, so I would not have to deal with people’s questions. As I was growing up, the situation didn’t get any better. In the school, my classmates would always tease me, making me feel hurt and helpless. In society, I often encountered individuals who would inquire about my birthmarks even before they knew my name.
Such experiences left me feeling disheartened. I felt like people judged me by my appearance without considering my personality.
My birthmarks are caused by a genetic condition from my mom’s side of the family. My mom’s mom has birthmarks on her lips, and my mom’s uncle and my uncle have some on their bodies. I used to try to cover them up with makeup, but it never looked good. I even consulted a doctor, wanting to have surgery to remove them. But when imagining the process, I would get nervous and eventually give up.
Whenever I cried to my mom about them, she would always comfort me and say, “Learn to accept them and see them as beautiful birthmarks.” However, it wasn’t easy for me to accept my own birthmarks. Every time I showed my birthmarks, people would look at me with strange eyes. I began to regret why I had given up on the surgery and chosen to accept my birthmarks.
注意：1. 续写词数应为 150 词左右。2. 请按如下格式在相应位置作答。
Paragraph 1:
One day, I met my cousin, who also had a large birthmark on his arm._
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Paragraph 2:
From then on, when I met people, I began to change myself.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________10 . Recently, after I gave a virtual presentation on my book Indistractable, a listener wrote something in the Zoom chat that drove me crazy, “This is great but wouldn’t work for me. I’m a Gemini (双子星座的人).”
Ironically, the Zoom listener is right. If she thinks she’s incapable, she’ll prove it correct — whether it has anything to do with the stars and moon or not. Her inflexible self-identification denies her the chance to improve her life. It’s incredibly self-limiting.
That’s why we should stop defining ourselves as fixed identities and nouns, and instead start describing ourselves using verbs.
Words are powerful. Linguistic research shows that language shapes people and culture; it can also give us insight into ourselves and our behavior. In a well-known study, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen had all students in the same elementary school take a standard IQ test. Then they randomly selected a group of students, regardless of their test results, and told teachers the group would show “dramatic intellectual growth”. Eight months later, those students scored significantly higher on an IQ test. The study concluded that teachers’ positive perception of students correlated to those students’ high performance on intellectual and academic tests. The labels the children received became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (预言).
That’s because language shapes expectations, which shape our reality. If we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves with specific nouns during our life, then we are likely to stick with those labels and the behaviors that go with them.
Using verbs to identify ourselves is an effective method for releasing “trapped priors”—a term in psychology for a perception of reality that’s affected or trapped by past experiences. Verbs are action words well suited to describing short-lived behaviors that can and do change. They don’t lay claim to our entire identity, but they acknowledge that we are people first and foremost, not whatever a singular noun may say we are. So, instead of saying, “I am a procrastinator (拖拉者)”, you should say, “I am a person who often procrastinates.”
By focusing on our behaviors, not fixed characteristics, we can release harmful perceptions of ourselves that hold us back from trying methods that might improve our lives — like those that can help us achieve the critical skill of being indistractable.
1. What does the author want to show through the example of the Zoom listener?| A．The concept of flexible self-identification. |
| B．His confusion about the way to self-identify. |
| C．His understanding of proper self-identification. |
| D．The negative effects of using nouns to define oneself. |
| A．Self-fulfilling prophecies change over time. |
| B．Encouragement promotes students’ improvement. |
| C．Language usage will have an impact on teaching. |
| D．IQ has little to do with students’ academic performance. |
| A．By highlighting their behaviors. |
| B．By focusing on their advantages. |
| C．By analyzing their typical characteristics. |
| D．By assessing their academic performance. |
| A．Nouns are more powerful than verbs |
| B．Your words can determine your future |
| C．How we define ourselves really counts |
| D．Our option of words reflects our identity |
