2 . Do I think the sky is falling? Sort of.

My husband and I were recently in Egypt, where the temperature was a bit warm for my tiny princess self. So, we left Egypt. Back home, my dearest friends struggled with health stuff, with family craziness…

The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.

I ache for the world but naturally I’m mostly watching the Me Movie, where balance and strength are beginning to fail. What can we do as the creaking elevator of age slowly arrives? The main solution is to get outside every day, ideally with friends. Old friends even thoughts of them-are my comfort.

Recently I was walking along a beach with Neshama. We go back 50 years. She is 84, short and strong. Every so often, she bent down somewhat tentatively (踌躇地) and picked up small items into a small cloth bag. “What are you doing?”

“I’m picking up micro litter. I try to help where I can.”

I reminded her of an old story. A great warhorse comes upon a tiny sparrow (麻雀) lying on its back with its feet in the air, eyes tightly shut with effort. The horse asks it what it’s doing.

“I’m trying to help hold back the darkness.”

The horse laughs loudly, “That is so funny. What do you weigh?”

And the sparrow replies, “One does what one can.”

This is what older age means. We do what we can.

We continued our walk. Neshama bent tentatively to pick up bits of litter and started to slip, but I caught her and we laughed. We are so physically weak in older age, but friendship makes it all a rowing machine for the soul. We can take it, as long as we feel and give love, and laugh gently at ourselves as we fall apart. We know by a certain age the great lies in our life—if you do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Love and service make us rich.

1. What contributes most to making the author happy at present?

A．Watching movies.	B．Meeting old friends.
C．Traveling in Egypt.	D．Walking on the beach.

2. What does the sparrow serve as in the text?

A．Neshama’s fear.	B．Neshama’s dream.
C．The author’s approval.	D．The author’s doubt.

3. Which of the following words can best describe the personality of Neshama?

A．Determined and helpful.	B．Responsible and caring.
C．Narrow-minded but friendly.	D．Bad-tempered but supportive.

4. What is the true meaning of happiness for the author?

A．Staying with families.	B．Being rich and healthy.
C．Doing what one can.	D．Living a comfortable life.

3 . Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite and quiet laugh to a great hearty laugh. Scientists are now developing an AI system to recreate different laughs in proper social contexts (环境). The team behind the laughing robot Erica said that the system could improve natural conversations between people and an AI robot. “We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy (共情),” said Dr Koji Inoue, the lead author of the research. “So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with its users is to share their laughter.”

The team have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 daily dialogues between male subjects and the robot that was initially operated by four actresses remotely. The dialogue data was grouped into social laughs (where polite or embarrassed laughter isn’t involved) and laughter of joy. Based on the audio files, the robot learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be softer, and merry laughs, with the aim of mirroring these inappropriate situations.

“Our biggest obstructor in the work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all,” said Inoue. “We had to carefully decide exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and we couldn’t just assume (认为) that any laugh can be responded to. It was really not easy work.” The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character although it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.

“One of the things we’d keep in mind is that a laughing robot will never be able to understand you or the meaning of laughter,” points out Prof. Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute. “But with their development, they might get very good at tricking you into believing they understand what’s going on.”

1. Why did Inoue’s team develop the AI system?

A．To better understand human empathy.

B．To promote the social skills of robots.

C．To explore the differences between laughs.

D．To assist robots in identifying people’s moods.

2. What can robot Erica probably do at present?

A．Repeat the details of the 80 dialogues.

B．Distinguish people by hearing their laughs

C．Recreate a scene played by the four actresses.

D．Master the features of laughs provided by data.

3. The underlined word “obstructor” in Paragraph 3 can be replaced by             .

A．potential

B．difficulty

C．choice

D．mistake

4. Which of the following can be the best title for the text?

A．Are AI systems going beyond human ability?

B．Can conversational AI really understand us?

C．Laughing robots are round the corner

D．Robots become laughing masters

4 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。
1. What does the woman probably do?

A．She is a teacher.

B．She is a scientist.

C．She is a tour guide.

2. Which are the main characteristics being used to identify each whale?

A．Color and size.

B．Skin patterns.

C．Sounds.

3. Where does the conversation take place?

A．On a boat.

B．On the beach.

C．In a science building.

4. What does the woman speak to big companies about?

A．The beauty of whales.

B．Ways to clean up beaches.

C．The danger of polluting the ocean.

5 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小題。
1. What is the woman looking at?

A．An old house.

B．Old photos.

C．A big tree.

2. What is the relationship between the speakers?

A．Brother and sister.

B．Classmates.

C．Neighbours.

3. What are the speakers mainly talking about?

A．A tree house.

B．Their dad.

C．Their mom.

6 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小題。
1. Who is probably the man speaker?

A．The woman’s father.

B．The woman’s brother.

C．The woman’s neighbour.

2. What did the man looking for the woman look like?

A．He was very fat.

B．He was very old.

C．He was of average   height.

3. What kind of face did the man looking for the woman have?

A．Round.

B．Square.

C．Long.

7 . 听下面一段短文，然后回答问题。短文和问题读两遍。
1. A ______ invited Jack and Ford to a dinner.
2. Ford advised Jack not to talk about anything he didn’t really ______.
3. At first, Jack ______ to get through the dinner successfully.
4. Jack lost control of himself because he ______ a lot by the end of evening.
5. In fact, Ford knew _______ about Shakespeare either.

8 . 你校将举办英语演讲比赛。请你以Be smart online learners为题写一篇发言稿参赛，内容包括：
1. 分析优势与不足；
2. 提出学习建议。
注意：
1. 词数100左右；
2. 题目和首句已为你写好。

Be smart online learners

Online learning has become an important way to learn recently.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

9 . 假设你是李华，你的英国朋友Jim在给你的邮件中提到他想看一个关于中国文化的展览，并请你推荐，请给他回复邮件，内容包括：
(1) 展览的时间、地点：
(2) 展览的内容；
(3) 询问对方意向。
注意：(1)词数100以上；
(2) 开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,

Knowing that you are fond of exhibitions about Chinese culture,

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Yours,

Lihua

10 . 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。

Do you have a pet?     1     you do, congratulations, you are likely to have a     2     (good) mental state than those who don’t, reported Time magazine.

       According to the report, people with pets usually have lower blood pressure, a lower heart rate and a lower risk of having     3     heart attack. These benefits may come from extra exercise of walking and playing with pets, and stress relief for having a good “friend”.

One study shows that     4     (pet) living creatures can help people with     5     (anxious), while animal toys have no effect at all.

       In a 2016 study     6     (publish) in the journal Gerontology, elderly people    7     were given five crickets (蟋蟀) in a cage became happier than before.

Other researches studied the effect of pets     8     children who have difficulty reading. When the children     9     (ask) to read aloud to a dog and     10     (it) trainer, they were less upset.