Mrs. Moore was an old artist. Her husband passed away years ago and she lived alone with her cat Taffy. She did three things every day—painting, baking and petting her beloved cat, among which baking was the part my sister Jennifer and I liked best. Whenever the mouth-watering smell got over the fence, we could expect a paper bag containing delicious cookies to be passed over the fence. To return this favor, Dad would cut the grass in her front yard and help repair the water pipes.
One day, Dad eventually put his idea of building a tree house for us in our back yard into action. Dad got everything in place within two weeks. It was a yellow tree house with a beautiful red roof. It was a great place for Jennifer and me to get out of the sight of Mom and Dad to have fun and talk about our girlish matters.
One morning, we went there only to find Taffy messing up everything there. Both of us were unwilling to talk about such a problem to our nice neighbor, but we had no other choice. So we begged Dad to talk about the issue with Mrs. Moore.
After the talk, Mrs. Moore immediately went to the tree house. She was shocked to see the mess. She said she had never expected Taffy could be so fascinated with a tree house and promised to deal with the problem immediately. But to our disappointment, the cat could still find ways to climb over the fence and get into our tree house.
In despair, Mrs. Moore bought a ready-made tree house from an on-line store and had it fixed up in her garden. The tree house was bigger than ours. It was in the shape of a bird nest with bright colors of purple and orange. Mrs. Moore put Taffy’s toys and food in it to make sure the cat would be happy to move in and return our tree house to us.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150个左右；2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
However, what happened next was totally out of the expectation of all of us.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Mrs. Moore thought very hard and finally worked out a plan.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________I used to be very shy and often felt lonely. Although I did well in all academic subjects, I was afraid of physical education. Even kids in the neighborhood would laugh at me that my feet couldn’t leave the ground when I ran. Their words embarrassed me. At school, whenever the teacher organized some competitive games, no one in the class would choose me as their partner or teammate. As a result, I often ended up looking at others enjoy their games.
Things would go on like that if it was not for a sports meet in my middle school. By mistake, my name was put on the list of women’s 1,500 meters race. By the time I knew it, it was too late to change.
In despair, I asked Mary, my deskmate who just moved to our neighborhood with her parents and was assigned to our class, whether she could help me. She declined, “Sorry, I couldn’t run that race in your place. I have already signed up for the same event.”
I nearly broke down. 1,500 meters! Running against the best runners in front of the whole school! It would be the worst thing I’d ever dreamed of!
“Don’t worry,” Mary said, patting me on my shoulder. “You still have time to catch up because there is about one month before the sports meet starts. Besides, it is cool to run for our class!”
I knew this was not just for myself, but for my class. But to me, running 1,500 meters was like climbing Mount Everest for an inexperienced climber. I even had no idea how to start my preparation.
“I have an idea,” she said as if she could read my mind. “We can do training together each afternoon after class.”
During the training, whenever I wanted to give up, I would see Mary running right beside me or cheering for me by the tracks. Her kindness never failed to give me the strength to go ahead.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150个左右；2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Time flew by and the big day arrived.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Just then, I heard Mary calling my name.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________1. Why did Carla change the way she worked?
| A．She didn’t enjoy the work she did. |
| B．She had health problems. |
| C．She spent very little time at home. |
| A．She does a new kind of exercise now. |
| B．She exercises at a different time of day. |
| C．She does more exercise than she used to. |
| A．Making a to-do list. |
| B．Having a lot of similar clothes. |
| C．Checking emails on the way to work. |
4 . How long does it take to become an elite (精英) in your field?
For decades, Hayes has been investigating the role of effort, practice and knowledge in top performers.
Let’s talk about what Hayes has discovered about world-class-performers. And more importantly, let’s discuss how you can use these insights to achieve your goals and become your best.
text, Hayes mapped out the timeline of each composers career.
In follow-up studies, Hayes found similar patterns among famous painters and popular poets. These findings have been further confirmed by research from professors like K. Anders Ericsson, who produced research that revealed that you needed to put in “10, 000 hours” to become an elite or expert in your field.
| A．It takes time to achieve your goals. |
| B．And what do people like doing in their spare time? |
| C．He has studied the most talented creators in history. |
| D．Hayes started his research by examining successful composers |
| E．Professor Hayes began to refer to this period as the “ten years of silence”. |
| F．And what do the successful people do differently than the rest of us? |
| G．And then he calculated how long they had been working before they created their popular works. |
5 . A few years ago, the scientists Claudia Townsend at the University of Miami and Suzanne Shu at UCLA Anderson School of Management conducted a simple investigation into how aesthetics (美学) influence our investment decisions.
They randomly assigned 255 students to receive an annual corporate report. One of these reports was aesthetically pleasing —
If investors were rational agents, then the look of the report shouldn’t have mattered —they should be responding only to its content.
| A．But it is not true. |
| B．it had high-quality images and a clear layout. |
| C．And this pattern doesn’t apply to other aspects. |
| D．a phenomenon often referred to as “the halo effect”. (光环效应) |
| E．When it comes to user assessments of design, function follow s form. |
| F．While Townsend and Shu looked at paper reports, the same logic applies to Web sites. |
| G．Actually, they are required to value the company based on the information in the annual report |
1. What does the speaker mainly talk about at first?
| A．The type of rock climbing. |
| B．The requirements for rock climbing. |
| C．The popularity of rock climbing. |
| A．Its safety factor is higher than people think. |
| B．It’s the most popular outdoor sport in the world. |
| C．It has very high requirements for participants. |
| A．Free Soloing. |
| B．Traditional climbing. |
| C．Sports climbing. |
| A．The equipment it needs is environmentally friendly. |
| B．It will not do harm to the natural rock wall. |
| C．The climbers don’t use any equipment at all. |
1. What do the speakers mainly talk about?
| A．Energy production. | B．Information safety. | C．Smart cities. |
| A．Traffic release. | B．Equality promotion. | C．Data management. |
| A．Personal information can be secured. |
| B．Data leakage will never happen. |
| C．Greater security can be achieved. |
| A．A professor. | B．A journalist. | C．A scientist. |
8 . The human voice is delicate. The vocal cords (声带) can easily get damaged by stress, infections, or overuse. According to a 2005 study, 30%of the population will experience a voice disorder at some point in their life.
In a study published in the journal Nature Communications this week, a group of bioengineering researchers from the University of California have put forward an attractive solution. They have designed and tested a soft patch (贴片) that can be stuck onto a person’s neck, where it will pick up muscle movements when speaking, process the signals and translate them into speech.
Even though the team’s device is an early prototype, it has the potential to offer a great improvement on current alternatives. When a person loses their voice today, the easiest fix is to type, text, or write notes to communicate. Typing can be slow and inconvenient, says Jun Chen, the paper’s lead author, and writing is only possible in good lighting. A patch would theoretically clear all these hurdles.
When the throat muscles move under the silicone (硅酮) patch, the resulting magnetic-field variations can be converted into electrical signals. In a test with eight participants, the researchers captured the signals arising as the subjects spoke and lip-sounded five different sentences. They then trained a machine-learning model to recognize the distinct shapes of the electrical signals associated with each sentence. This device then predicted which of the five sentences the participants spoke with more than 90%accuracy, whether aloud or in silence.
In addition to stretchiness, the patch remains sticky on sweaty skin, and can be used continuously for 40 minutes without heating up.
For now the device can only recognize the five phrases it was trained on. Plus, individual difference in vocal cords means the algorithm has to be personalized to each user. To make it practical at scale, the researchers will need to collect a lot more data.
1. What is the attractive solution to voice disorder?| A．Transplanting a patch into the human throat. |
| B．Strengthening the muscle through exercise. |
| C．Sticking a patch on the neck to produce sounds. |
| D．Reproducing sound through an artificial throat. |
| A．Barriers. |
| B．Conveniences. |
| C．Devices. |
| D．Memories. |
| A．To turn the words on the patch into sound. |
| B．To predict the meaning of the sentences. |
| C．To produce an answer from its word banks. |
| D．To predict the sentences from electric signals. |
| A．To improve its work efficiency. |
| B．To get it to work automatically. |
| C．To expand its scale of coverage. |
| D．To seek its possible alternatives. |
1. Why does the speaker give this talk?
| A．To discuss English learning methods. |
| B．To give examples for English learning. |
| C．To share something about accents. |
| A．Around 3%. | B．Around 5%. | C．Around 40%. |
| A．Incomprehension of different accents. |
| B．Fewer opportunities to live in another country. |
| C．Uncertainty of mastering a foreign language. |
| A．A specific request for English learners. |
| B．A useful solution to a problem. |
| C．More support for the previous point. |
Javon was the shortest kid in the class. He’d had to ask to get his gym locker changed so that he didn’t have to strain (拉紧) so much to reach it. But he didn’t care about his height? Either he would grow or he wouldn’t — there was nothing he could do about it, so why let it bother him?
That was Javon’s attitude about most things. He didn’t like to get all worked up about stuff, especially stuff he had no control over.
The one exception was school work. Javon had worked hard. He was one of the top kids in the class. He was still the shortest, but now he also got called one of the smartest.
For Javon, math used to be easy. He figured that since he had ten fingers, he could do most of it. However, when Mr. T started a new unit and threw letters into his math problem, Javon could not wrap his mind around using these letters. Although Mr. T explained over and over again, he still didn’t understand. Soon the day when the class had to take the chapter test arrived. The test was brutal (残酷的).
Hard as Javon tried, he hadn’t finished all of the problems: The day came when the class finally got their papers back. D. 64%. Written in red ink on the corner of Javon’s paper. The worst grade he had ever got. In the seat next to him, Tyler got a red 72% on Tyler’s paper. Javon was surprised that Tyler, who is dyslexic (阅读障碍), got a higher grade than him.
“How did you get such a grade?” asked Javon. “I get extra time on tests. Because of my —” Tyler said. “You got extra time?” Javon cried out.
At this point, Mr. T appeared at the corner. Javon walked up to him and said, “Mr. T, why Tyler could get extra time for this test? Plenty of people didn’t finish, including me. It’s unfair!”
注意：1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Paragraph 1: Mr. T was astonished, and then started to explain.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Paragraph 2: “You asked for a different locker in the gym.” said Mr. T.
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