1 . Gratitude, which is a positive emotional state, can have a profound impact on our mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
Gratitude offers us a way of embracing (拥抱) all that makes our lives what they are.
Robert Emmons is one of the world’s leading experts on the science of gratitude.
In one study involving nearly 300 adults seeking counseling services at a university, one group wrote a gratitude letter each week for three weeks. The gratitude group reported significantly better mental health (compared to the control group), 12 weeks after the last writing exercise.
A.He defines gratitude as having two parts. |
B.A little gratitude can do wonders for your mood. |
C.Gratitude isn’t just a happy feeling for our present lives. |
D.However, many people don’t realize the power of gratitude. |
E.Another type of written gratitude practice is counting blessings. |
F.Gratitude doesn’t necessarily mean showing appreciation for the things that are around you. |
G.In other words, gratitude helps realize they wouldn’t be where they are without the help of others. |
2 . Do you believe that most people are greedy or generous? It is easy to come up with examples of stories that could support either conclusion if we are relying on our memories or on our guts (直觉).
Recently, a team of researchers sought to investigate this question in partnership with the TED organization. TED generously gave away $10,000 each to 200 lucky individuals (yes, you read that correctly), which essentially means these participants won a lottery. Besides, they were asked to spend all the money in three months rather than save it). These participants were from three low-income countries (Indonesia, Brazil, Kenya) and four high-income countries (Australia, Canada, UK, USA). Over the next three months, participants were asked to track their spending to examine how generously or selfishly this money was spent. They reported their spending to the researchers a few months later.
Of the $10,000 participants received, they spent $6,431 on other people. To be clear, this also included certain behaviors in which the participants themselves benefited personally (such as taking their friends out to dinner or paying for a family vacation). But still, people are very generous. Participants gave away $1,697 strictly to charity or nonprofit organizations.
The researchers expected that if people publicly shared how they spent their money, they would be more generous. To check if this was correct, they asked half of the participants to post on Twitter about how they spent the money. The other half were asked to keep their spending “private”.
Surprisingly, the researchers saw that “generous spending was similar” between Twitter and private groups. The mini lottery winners were no more or less generous depending on whether they posted their spending on Twitter or kept it to themselves. The authors admitted they expected the Twitter group to spend more generously, but this prediction was not supported by the data. People did not need to have their spending shown publicly to behave generously.
1. What’s the purpose of the researchers?A.To confirm a scientific theory. | B.To research into human nature. |
C.To analyze people’s economic behaviour. | D.To classify people’s spending habits. |
A.It was divided into two stages. |
B.It focused on low-income people. |
C.The participants were required to report their spending. |
D.The participants could spend the money without restriction. |
A.People’s sharing how they spent. | B.People’s keeping their spending private. |
C.People’s spending habits in private. | D.People’s being more generous in public. |
A.Humans are fundamentally generous. | B.Money that is easily got will be spent soon. |
C.Sharing spending online makes people generous. | D.People prefer to keep their spending to themselves. |
3 . I was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for my annual check-up. The doctor threw in a(n)
“So Robin, what are you going to do after high school? Why don’t you go to college to become a(n)
Go to college to become a doctor? Who was this man kidding? I thought he was
The doctor immediately looked at me straight in the eyes when he said very
Even though I wasn’t college material, what the doctor said
I began
I graduated with a master’s degree in September 2023, two decades after that
A.present | B.request | C.question | D.invitation |
A.teacher | B.expert | C.doctor | D.scientist |
A.crazy | B.boring | C.strange | D.considerate |
A.stable | B.average | C.formal | D.excellent |
A.complained | B.apologized | C.lied | D.replied |
A.smart | B.careful | C.outgoing | D.patient |
A.regretfully | B.proudly | C.gratefully | D.seriously |
A.impressed | B.disturbed | C.limited | D.discouraged |
A.pointed | B.returned | C.applied | D.adapted |
A.taking over | B.breaking down | C.setting aside | D.giving up |
A.promised | B.announced | C.agreed | D.discovered |
A.understand | B.avoid | C.control | D.achieve |
A.cooperation | B.experiment | C.conversation | D.argument |
A.wish | B.think | C.insist | D.recall |
A.purpose | B.influence | C.chance | D.choice |
1.简述此事;
2.你的看法。
注意:1.写作词数应为80个左右;
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
参考词汇:第78 届联合国大会 the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly
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Bai Tinggui, who was born in the 1990s, is
Every time she met elderly passengers
Gradually, through her work, Bai became familiar
Bai Tinggui’s story is a beacon(灯塔) of hope
6 . This year, it was harder than ever to get into Harvard University. The prestigious college announced their lowest acceptance rate ever, welcoming only 1,968 of 57,435 first-year applicants into their hallowed halls. Thanks to Abigail Mack’s moving, insightful essay, she will be one of the lucky students to matriculate this fall.
The Massachusetts high school senior used TikTok to share a part of the essay that made her one of the 4 percent of applicants who made the cut. Her essay focused on an unusual theme: the letter “S.”
“I hate the letter ‘S’,” she read aloud on TikTok. “Of the 164,777 words with ‘S’, I only struggle with one. To condemn an entire letter because of its use 0.0006 percent of the time sounds statistically unreasonable, but that one case changed 100 percent of my life. I used to have two parents, but now I have one, and the ‘S’ in ‘parents’ isn’t going anywhere.”
“‘S’ follows me,” she continued. “I can’t get through a day without being reminded that while my friends went out to dinner with their parents, I ate with my parent. As I write this essay, there is a blue line under the word ‘parent’ telling me to check my grammar; even Grammarly assumes that I should have parents, but cancer doesn’t listen to edit suggestions.”
She went on to explain that she fled that dreaded letter by throwing herself into school activities. She joined clubs, sports, and performed in theatrical productions, all in an effort to lessen the pain of losing her mom. Eventually, she realized she was hiding from her pain and decided to face it head-on. She took over the “S” for her own purposes. Now, instead of thinking about the “S” in parents, she concentrates on the double “S” in passion.
Abigail’s essay earned her a spot at several top colleges and she has officially been accepted into the class of 2025 in Harvard. In the meantime, her essay has gone viral (走红) with over 16 million views!
1. What did the letter “S” mean to Abigail Mack?A.A terrible failure. | B.An unfortunate fact. |
C.A special challenge. | D.A meaningful experience. |
A.She isn’t good at spelling. | B.She has poor grammar. |
C.She has been struggling with cancer. | D.She has lost one of her parents. |
A.By writing more and more essays. | B.By reading all kinds of books. |
C.By participating in various activities. | D.By competing with others secretly. |
A.Teen’s Special Feeling for the Letter “S” | B.Teen’s Essay Won Great Popularity Online |
C.Teen’s Secret to Achieving Academic Success | D.Teen Got Admitted to Harvard for Her Essay |
7 . Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Standford University, excelled in the lab, where he created the Bose-Einstein condensate (玻色—爱因斯坦凝聚态). However, his mastery in the lab did not extend to the classroom. For years, he wrestled with what seemed to be a straightforward task: making undergraduates comprehend physics as he did. Laying it out for them — explaining, even demonstrating the core concepts of the discipline—was not working. Despite his clear explanations, his students’ capacity to solve the problems he posed to them remained inadequate.
It was in an unexpected place that he found the key to the problem: not in his classrooms but among the graduate students(研究生) who came to work in his lab. When his PH.D. candidates entered the lab, Wieman noticed, their habits of thought were no less narrow and rigid than the undergraduates. Within a year or two, however, these same graduate students transformed into the flexible thinkers he was trying so earnestly, and unsuccessfully, to cultivate. “Some kind of intellectual process must have been missing from the traditional education,” Wieman recounts.
A major factor in the graduate students’ transformation, Wieman concluded, was their experience of intense social engagement around a body of knowledge — the hours they spent advising, debating with, and recounting anecdotes to one another. In 2019, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences backed this idea. Tracking the intellectual advancement of several hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years, its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generating hypotheses (假设), designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to the students’ engagement with their peers in the lab, rather than the guidance they received from their faculty mentors (导师).
Wieman is one of a growing number of Stanford professors who are bringing this “active learning” approach to their courses. His aspiration is to move science education away from the lecture format, toward a model that is more active and more engaged.
1. What problem did Carl Wieman have with his undergraduates?A.Making them excel in the lab. | B.Demonstrating lab experiments. |
C.Facilitating their all-round development. | D.Enhancing their physics problem-solving. |
A.Limited in thinking. | B.Resistant to new ideas. |
C.Flexible and earnest. | D.Experienced and cooperative. |
A.Intense lab work. | B.Peer pressure and evaluation. |
C.Academic interaction with fellows. | D.Engagement with external society. |
A.Transforming Graduates’ Habits | B.Carl Wieman’s Nobel Prize Journey |
C.The Nobel-Prize Winner’s Struggles | D.Carl Wieman’s Education Innovation |
8 . “There’s a little black woman walking, spraying (喷洒) stuff on the sidewalks and trees on Elizabeth and Florence...” he told the police. Her neighbor saw her spraying something on the sidewalks and trees and this made him worried. In the call to 911, he described the child as “a little black woman”.
Well, the “little black woman” was actually 9-year-old Bobbi Wilson, a young scientist. The fourth-grader had created her own insecticide (杀虫剂) to fight spotted lanternflies (斑衣蜡蝉). She came across the recipe on TikTok and had recently learned that the harmful species damages trees because they feed on their sap (树液). Bobbi was simply testing out her invention in her neighborhood when the police call was made.
“That’s her thing,” her mother Monique Joseph said. “She’s going to kill the lanternflies, especially if they’re on a tree. That’s what she’s going to do.” Bobbi’s 13-year-old sister, Hayden Wilson, also defended her, noting that Bobbi “was not only doing something amazing for our environment, but she was also doing something that made her feel like a hero”. Luckily, what happened didn’t influence Bobbi’s spirit and has led to some positive experiences for her.
She has since been recognized by several organizations for her environmental efforts. She has also been invited on special tours. One took place at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Another was given by the United States Department of Agriculture of New Jersey at a plant where they discussed lanternflies. But that’s not where her recognition ends! The Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions (ANJEC) honored Bobbi with their Sustainability Award for her work to save trees and fight lanternflies.
“We were excited that she was doing that,” Ann Marchioni of the ANJEC said. Ann added that the organization praises volunteers for being “hands-on” in their community. In addition to the award, she and her family got to visit with a group of black female scientists at Yale University. They showed her various labs and even invited her to donate lanternfly specimens (标本) for the university’s work.
1. What made the neighbor call the police?A.A girl climbing trees. | B.A girl spraying something. |
C.A girl littering the sidewalks. | D.A girl testing something dangerous. |
A.Ashamed. | B.Proud. | C.Shocked. | D.Relieved. |
A.Those whose donations help ANJEC. |
B.Those who can do something creative in their university. |
C.Those whose environmental awareness is quite impressive. |
D.Those who can do something practical in their community. |
A.Creative and determined. | B.Watchful and serious. |
C.Friendly and generous. | D.Talkative and strict. |
9 . Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest—at area about the size of Iceland — because of cutting down trees. At that rate, some scientists predict the world’s forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years. To handle it, now researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have pioneered a technique to generate wood-like plant materials sin a lab. This makes it possible to “grow” a wooden product without cutting down trees.
In the lab, the researchers first take cells from the leaves of a young plant. These cells are cultured in liquid medium for two days, then moved to another medium which contains nutrients and two different hormones (激素). By adjusting the bormone levels, the researchers can tune the physical and mechanical qualities of the cells: New the researchers use a 3D printer to shape the cell-based material, and let the shaped material grow in the dark for three months. Finally, the researchers dehydrate (使脱水) the material, and then evaluate its qualities.
They found that lower bormone levels lead to plant materials with more rounded, open cells of lower density (密度), while higher hormone levels contribute to the growth of plant materials with smaller but denser cell structures. Lower or higher density of cell structures makes the plant materials softer or more rigid, helping the materials grow with different wood-like characteristics. What’s more, it’s to be noted that the research process is about 100 times faster than the time it takes for a tree to grow to maturity!
Research of this kind is ground-breaking. “This work demonstrates the great power of a technology,” says lead researcher, Jeffrey Berenstab. “The real opportunity here is to be at its best with what you use and how you use it. This technology can be tuned to meet the requirements you give about shapes, sizes, rigidity, and forms. It enables us to grow’ any wooden product in a way that traditional agricultural methods can’t achieve.”
1. Why do researchers at MIT perform the research?A.To grow more trees. | B.To reduce tree losses. |
C.To protect plant diversity. | D.To predict forest disappearance. |
A.Its scientific origins. | B.Its theoretical basis |
C.Its usual difficulties. | D.Its main processes |
A.They are better than naturally grown plants. |
B.Their growth speed determines their characteristics. |
C.The hormone levels affect their rigidity. |
D.Their cells’ shapes mainly rely on their density. |
A.It uses new biological materials in lab experiments. |
B.It has a significant impact on worldwide plant growth. |
C.It revolutionizes the way to make wooden products. |
D.It challenges traditional scientific theories in forestry. |
I had just a very wonderful day. Although all my days are always wonderful to me, the day was completely different. There was a bulletin board saying that they would need to find volleyball players for the girls and I was so happy! I have been loving playing volleyball since my mother taught me how to play. I was so excited that I couldn’t wait to play! Then I read more what was on that bulletin board, which said that there would be an audition (面试) after three weeks! “Three weeks?” I thought about it. I did know how to play volleyball but I was not much of an expert in doing it but I still wanted to try.
After that I was determined to practice volleyball every day. I practiced hard again and again each day and I never got tired of doing the same practice through all the days, and finally, the day came. I was so prepared for this and hurried to the gym to audition. When I had reached the gym, I was surprised to see that 12 or 14 girls were lining up and I guessed I was the last one to arrive. Then our audition began. Some of the girls failed to pass the audition and some passed.
There was only 1 slot left to complete the 6 girls to join the volleyball team and suddenly I felt nervous because the person in front of me was going to take her serve (发球). Then the girl hit the ball and then… the ball didn’t pass over the net. The girl slapped her forehead and left, leaving me standing in the middle of the court.
Then the coach spoke, “Okay, you, serve! ” She handed me the ball and I caught it with my hands. As the ball was in my hands, my hands were suddenly sweating and so was I!
注意:续写词数应为150左右。I then suddenly became nervous about this. “Maybe I should be back of,” I told myself.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Then I began. I came to a pause, taking a deep breath.
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