1 . Adding to the achievements of a remarkable year, Taylor Swift has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2023.

Already a superstar before 2023, Swift’s career has reached new heights thanks to the beginning of her Eras Tour that brought her 3.5-hour performance to 66 shows in 23 cities across North America, Argentina and Brazil. Promoted by her tour, Swift has been named the most-streamed female artist in the history of Spotify and Apple Music. According to Billboard, the tour made about $900 million (about 6.4 billion yuan) in 2023. In addition, the tour’s movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became the biggest concert movie of all time, taking more than $250

As she was declare a billionaire by Bloomberg in November, a hidden “Taylor Swift economy” also promoted sales for business owners across the US. From soaps to a cruise inspired by her different “eras”, interest in Swift-related products went way up.

Apart from her financial contributions, Swift made a significant cultural impact by taking back control of her music. In 2019, her old record label, Big Machine, sold the master tapes of her first six albums (专辑) to Scoot er Braun. The sale meant that she didn’t have the rights to the albums. In response to this, Swift began re-recording her first six albums, tagging (加标签于) them “Taylor’s Version”. This move stressed her belief that artists deserve to own their work. “It’s all in how you deal with loss,” she told Time. “I respond to extreme pain by resisting.”

Heading into 2024, Swift will start the Eras Tour again in Japan and Australia. As USA Today noted, “Her current top has been a long time coming, but it may also be just beginning.”

2 . Ciudad Perdida, Colombia’s “Lost City” is older than Machu Picchu. There are no trains or buses allowing of _________ travels to reach its ruins. The remote place is only _________ on foot: a tiring multi-day hike.

Despite this, I couldn’t _________ the opportunity to visit Ciudad Perdida. 12 other hikers and I went there in _________ with a licensed guide. The dirt path, which _________ through towering palms and dangling vines (藤蔓), proved _________ right from the start. Along the way we also met the _________. They have been left _________ for centuries and there’s a deep bond between them and the land.

The next morning, we were off early to _________ the heat, but high temperatures and muscle pain had already set in by the time we reached the final stage—1,200 stone steps to __________. After finally lifting my painful body up the long flight of stairs, my eyes __________ the scene that had __________ the backbreaking journey: Ciudad Perdida.

I looked down and wondered at the beautiful site below. While the return trip included __________ the mental hurdle (障碍) of having already accomplished our goal, the experience is the one I would do __________. It is the difficulty that makes the journey a more __________ one. Earned views are always better.

3 . In 1868 six-year-old Laura Jernegan, her parents, and her baby brother, Prescott, set sail from New Bedford, Massachusetts. This was no vacation cruise. Laura’s father, captain of the whaleship Roman, was hunting the mightiest animal on earth.

Unwilling to be separated from his family for three to four years while he made ocean voyages thousands of miles from home, Captain Jernegan took them with him to share in the adventure—and the danger-of life at sea. In the mid-1800s, as many as one in six American whaling, captains took their families on voyages.

What was it like to live on a whaleship? The diary Laura kept while she was at sea offers a look into her unusual childhood. She was fascinated by her father’s job. When the ship’s lookout spotted a whale, Laura recorded it in her diary. “I hope we shall get him,” she wrote.

She watched as the men rushed to their whaleboats and chased the whales. As soon as a whale was caught, the crew began to process it. First the crew “cut in” the whale by removing its thick blanket of blubber (鲸脂).

After throwing pieces of blubber into large pots, two men would “get in the pots and squish (挤) out the blubber,” Laura wrote. It must have been a strange sight because the sailors were “way up to their knees” in the greasy fat, she reported.

Now came the hot, smoky, and smelly par. A brick furnace (火炉) was fired up, and the blubber was tried out, or boiled into oil. One huge whale produced enough oil to fill seventy-five barrels, she noted in disbelief. When the Jernegans returned home, the oil would be sold for the best price possible. Whale oil was important during most of the nineteenth century. It was used to light lamps and to make candles.

Whaling was both exciting and exhausting. Yet it also had its slow moments, Weeks could go by without so much as a glimpse of a whale. Then Laura filled her days with school lessons and sewing.

When Laura was grown, she never went whaling again. By then, petrol had already replaced whale oil. This era, called the golden age of whaling, was over. So was the era of entire families going to sea. Yet Laura’s diary has helped to ensure that this chapter in America’s seafaring history won’t be forgotten.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Effects that scientists had long predicted would result     1     global climate change are now occurring. Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously     2    (assess). In fact, modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, some of     3     are so serious that they are unable to recover over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists are     4     (high) confident that global temperatures will rise continuously for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases    5     (produce) by human activities. It     6     (report) that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have warmed the climate by nearly 1.1 ℃ since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900). To make matters     7     (bad), half of the world’s population are likely to be exposed to extreme weather events by 2030.

The     8     (severe) of effects caused by climate change will depend on     9     path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet.     10     we reduce emissions, we may not avoid some of their worst effects.