George was short-tempered (暴躁), and used to get angry at everything and everyone. This spoiled (破坏) his relations with friends and family, and made him an unhappy person.
One day, while having a conversation with his good friend Tom, George said, “I am so annoyed that I cannot shake off my anger. What do you think I should do to control it?”
Tom looked at George, thought for a moment, and said, “You like good wine (葡萄酒), right?” “Of course,” George replied. “I love wine, and drink it with great pleasure.” “I want you to buy a few bottles of good and expensive wine. Whenever you get angry, go home, break one bottle and throw all the wine into the dustbin,” Tom said.
“Are you out of your mind?” George shouted. “That’s an awful thing to do. I don’t want to throw away good money and good wine.” “You are right!” Tom replied. “It’s a waste of money and good wine, but this is what you actually do every time you get angry-you waste your energy and have a bad effect on your health.”
Tom continued, “When you are angry, you spoil your relations with friends and family, and you lose chances. You also create needless stress, hate and anger all around you. This is much more serious than breaking a few bottles of good and expensive wine.”
“Do as what I said, at least a few times,” Tom said. “Go and buy good and expensive wine, even though you know that you might break the bottles and throw away the wine. When you do so, notice how bad you feel for doing so, and tell yourself that anger also creates bad feelings, for you and for other people.”
“I get your point,” said George, who understood what Tom meant. But he had an even better idea to control his anger.
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。
George followed Tom’s suggestion and went to the shop.
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Step by step, George learned to control himself.
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2 . After my graduation from college, I was always worried about my income. I was hopeful when I got a part-time job at a library, and happier when I got a
My eyes came to rest on a tree outside. A squirrel (松鼠) was making his way down the trunk. It was
| A．similar | B．popular | C．good | D．second |
| A．deal with | B．apply for | C．depend on | D．give up |
| A．cried | B．thought | C．expected | D．explained |
| A．frightening | B．necessary | C．difficult | D．dangerous |
| A．experience | B．survive | C．change | D．manage |
| A．skillful | B．thankful | C．careful | D．useful |
| A．cleared | B．reached | C．left | D．dug |
| A．unfinished | B．disagreeable | C．incredible | D．irregular |
| A．carry | B．protect | C．package | D．hide |
| A．tree | B．road | C．window | D．squirrel |
| A．move | B．trial | C．advice | D．lead |
| A．promised | B．stopped | C．forgot | D．pretended |
| A．regularly | B．anxiously | C．safely | D．secretly |
| A．dream | B．draw | C．explore | D．arrange |
| A．competitions | B．victories | C．mistakes | D．challenges |
3 . Finland was known as a rather quiet country. Since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation (国家品牌代表团) has been looking for a national brand that would make some noise to market the country as a world-famous tourist destination. In 2010, the Delegation issued a “Country Brand Report,” which highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland’s famous educational system. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said.
Silence first appeared in scientific research as a control or baseline, against which scientists compare the effects of noise or music. Researchers have mainly studied it by accident, as physician Luciano Bernardi did in his study of the physiological (生理学) effects of music. “We didn’t think about the effect of silence,” he said. Bernardi observed two dozen test subjects while they listened to six musical tracks. He found that the impacts of music could be read directly in the bloodstream, via changes in blood pressure, carbon dioxide, and circulation in the brain. “During almost all sorts of music, there was a physiological change with a condition of arousal (兴奋),” he explained.
This effect made sense, given that active listening requires attention. But the more striking finding appeared between musical tracks. Bernardi and his colleagues discovered that randomly added stretches of silence also had a great effect, but in the opposite direction. In fact, two-minute silent pauses proved far more relaxing than either “relaxing” music or a longer silence played before the experiment started. The blank pauses that Bernardi had considered irrelevant, in other words, became the most interesting object of study. Silence seemed to be heightened by contrasts, maybe because it gave test subjects a release from careful attention. “Perhaps the arousal is something that concentrates the mind in one direction, so that when there is nothing more arousing, then you have deeper relaxation,” he said.
This finding is reinforced by neurological (神经系统的) research. Relevant research shows when our brains rest quietly, they integrate external and internal information into “a conscious (意识的) workspace.” Freedom from noise and goal-directed tasks, it appears, unites the quiet without and within, allowing our conscious workspace to do its thing to discover where we fit in.
Noora Vikman, a consultant on silence for Finland’s marketers, knows silence well. Living in a remote and quiet place in Finland, she discovers thoughts and feelings that aren’t detectable in her busy daily life. “If you want to know yourself, you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, and be able to talk with yourself.”
1. Why does the author mention the Country Brand Report in Paragraph 1?| A．To present how Finland viewed silence. |
| B．To highlight the need of noise in Finland. |
| C．To explain why Finland issued the brands. |
| D．To indicate the authority of the Delegation. |
| A．It challenged the calming effect of music. |
| B．It emphasized the role of silence between sounds. |
| C．It illustrated the loss of attentiveness after silence. |
| D．It stated brains’ information processing in the quiet. |
| A．doubtful | B．supportive | C．disapproving | D．unconcerned |
| A．Silence: A Limited Resource | B．Silence: A Misunderstood Tool |
| C．Silence: The Unexpected Power | D．Silence: The Value by Contrasts |
Viewed from dry land, the river looked beautiful. The fast-flowing waters of the Snake River were crisp and clear as they crashed over the rocks below. I was 16 and my parents had hired a car to drive us children around North America and Canada in the summer holidays.
Upon our arrival, lost in the beautiful scenery, we couldn't wait to start our tour. Dad got a dinghy（橡皮艇）from somewhere. It looked a bit small for the six of us, and we didn't have safety helmets, and were wearing adult-sized life jackets. I don't think any of us had even seen rapids（急流）until we went down them that day, otherwise we'd have realized how foolhardy（莽撞的）our plan was.
The first part of the ride was pretty hair-raising and it was apparent that we had no idea what we were doing. After 20 minutes we hit a rapid and got stuck: there was a huge rock under the surface and our boat was letting in water. The bottom got stuck and we were trapped in the middle of a wide, fast-moving river. Wall after wall of freezing water hit me and the iciness took my breath away. My brother, sisters and I were screaming, Dad was shouting at us that it would all be OK, while Mum yelled at us to hold on. We had no time to come up with any plan other than to hold tight.
It felt as if we were stuck for hours, unable to think or breathe, but it was probably only a few minutes. Then, suddenly I was swept out of the dinghy. I felt a sense of horror, which was replaced by an even greater terror when I realized I was going down the rapids without a boat. I was spun around, bounced off rocks and fell into water: it's what I imagine being trapped in a washing machine is like. There's no sense of up or down; you just gasp（喘气）for air when you can. I remember thinking, "This is it. I am going to die."
注意：1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式作答。
But suddenly I felt a determination to live.
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When my family eventually found me, I was hugely emotional to realize that we'd all survived.
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Bill McDonnell was going crazy. Deer season had begun, but it was colder than usual. Up until his late 80s, Bill didn’t mind hunting in sub-zero temperature, but he had become slow in the past few years. The snow-covered mountains of the Shenandoah Valley were no place for a 92-year-old. He knew it, but still wanted to get outside.
It was about 7:30 a.m., still far below zero when the sun shone through trees. Bill had strict instructions from his wife Joanna to be out of woods by 2 p.m. and home by 3 p.m. — plenty of time before sunset, in case he missed the deadline, which he often did.
Not long into the hike, he came upon a path he didn’t remember. Maybe this was a secret route to the king of all deer. He took it.
It seemed that this path up the mountain had meandered (蜿蜒) quite a bit. After climbing to the top of a ridge (山脊), he figured that he could continue down into another valley for more hunt. But the farther he snaked down, the thinner and deeper it became. Before long, he was looking straight up from down the ravine (沟壑), which was higher than expected.
He decided to climb back up, careful with each step. He kept pushing upward until finally he could rest at the top for a while. By the time he got going again, it was nearly 2:45 p.m. This time he saw a trail (小路) with white marks. He remembered his daughter had mentioned it before, which he thought might take him back home more quickly.
He called his daughter, but she didn’t remember the trail, begging him not to try that. Still he wanted to go on the trail. “I’ve got it figured out,” he said. Then suddenly he realized he was talking to the air. His phone had died. He dug into his pants for the GPS device and pushed the “ON” button. Nothing. He had forgotten to charge it. But nothing could discourage him from going on this trail.
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。
Initially the trail seemed to be heading downward in the correct direction home.
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The following morning, Bill had woken before dawn, continued down his trail and still imagined his wife’s anxiety.
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6 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.
Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
1. What are Von Wong’s artworks intended for?| A．Beautifying the city he lives in. | B．Introducing eco-friendly products. |
| C．Drawing public attention to plastic waste. | D．Reducing garbage on the beach. |
| A．To show the difficulty of their recycling. |
| B．To explain why they are useful. |
| C．To voice his views on modern art. |
| D．To find a substitute for them. |
| A．Calming. | B．Disturbing. |
| C．Refreshing. | D．Challenging. |
| A．Artists’ Opinions on Plastic Safety |
| B．Media Interest in Contemporary Art |
| C．Responsibility Demanded of Big Companies |
| D．Ocean Plastics Transformed into Sculptures |
