| A．\ | B．that |
| C．what | D．which |
1. 提出存在的问题;
2. 提出修改的建议。
注意:
1. 写作词数应为80左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Dear David,
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Yours,
Li Hua
4 . A high school teacher and his students have discovered that an asteroid (小行星) hit by a NASA spacecraft, in a test run for saving the Earth from an impact, is behaving unexpectedly. The find could have effects on future planetary defense missions.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a project designed to launch and crash a fridge-sized spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos, orbiting a larger asteroid Didymos. The purpose of the exercise was to see how significantly the previous path of Dimorphos could be changed by the impact. Before DART’s impact, it would take Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete a lap around Didymos. NASA was hoping the DART crash could change the cycle by about 73 seconds, but observations made in the weeks following the impact determined that the results were much more significant, reducing Dimorphos’ orbital period by some 33 minutes.
But California high school teacher Jonathan Swift and his students discovered that Dimorphos’ orbital period was a full minute longer than the time reported by NASA last year. They used the school’s observatory to track Dimorphos and Didymos for several months last fall. Swift presented his class’ findings at the American Astronomical Society conference in June. The DART team has since confirmed that Dimorphos did indeed continue slowing in its orbit up to a month after the impact.
Scientists aren’t sure exactly what is behind the slowdown of Dimorphos. But recent observations of the asteroid have revealed a vast field of large rocks were kicked up by the impact. It’s possible that some of the larger space rocks fell back onto Dimorphos within that first month, slowing its orbit further, DART team member Harrison Agrusa said.
The DART team plans to release its own report on the unexpected findings in the coming weeks. However, complete answers may have to wait until 2026, when the European Space Ageney’s Hera spacecraft is scheduled to investigate the crash site up closely.
1. What was the purpose of launching the NASA spacecraft?| A．To change Dimorphos’ orbital cycle. |
| B．To stop Dimorphos hitting the Earth. |
| C．To reduce Didymos’ path around the sun. |
| D．To make Didymos move in a bigger orbit. |
| A．1 full minute. | B．2 minutes or so. |
| C．Nearly 33 minutes. | D．About 32 minutes. |
| A．How seriously Dimorphos was damaged. |
| B．What happened to the rocks on Dimorphos. |
| C．Why Dimorphos slowed down for a month. |
| D．What Dimorphos looked like after the impact. |
| A．To crash into another asteroid nearby. |
| B．To measure the previous impact results. |
| C．To affect the motion of the twin asteroids. |
| D．To identify the asteroids threatening the Earth. |
Every time my family makes special plans, they end up getting canceled due to some incidents. Every time that happens, my parents would tell us to look on the bright side and make the best of a bad situation. However, I never managed to do that until this spring.
On a sunny morning this April, my aunt Kate invited us to the annual outdoor spring celebration on her farm. Since my family hadn't done anything different for ages, the whole family was very excited and everyone tried their best to make sure everything went well as planned. In order to add more fun to this exciting trip, my little sister Alice and my little brother Bill even joined me in making an extra-special treat-cupcakes. Full of joy and expectation, we were ready to set off.
The picnic was supposed to last from twelve to three. There was not enough time left. After checking the car again and again, my parents loaded books, a picnic blanket, and a whole big pack of foods and drinks into the car. The moment of our departure finally came at 11 o'clock.
However, everything went wrong the instant we bravely drove off. First, we had to stop and wait for Bill to find his shoes. Next, as we were driving down the road, we had to go back to the house because my mom left her wallet behind. Then, about halfway to Aunt Kate's house, we had to drive far out of our way to find a place for Alice to use a bathroom.
After that, my parents decided it'd be quicker to take one little side country road as a shortcut (捷径). But the shortcut ended up turning into a long way! We drove forever on a winding road with wildflower fields spreading endlessly out on both sides and the deep green pine trees going on and on within our sight. I had no mood to appreciate all of those. Spotting hundreds of birds flying in the sky, I was seized by a growing sense of desperation, for I entirely had no idea when we could hit our destination.
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。
However, we had to stop on the way, for we were trapped there.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________"Could we have a great time here?" I wondered.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Knitting (针织) has always been a passion of mine. A few years ago, I finished knitting a scarf and couldn’t help but burst into laughter. It was my first attempt at knitting and it hadn’t gone as planned. It was misshaped and far too short, making it only the perfect size for a kid. “I have to show this to the team at work tomorrow,” I thought.
I work at a hospital, where I perform ultrasound scans. It was a stressful job, and humor was always appreciated.
The next day, I brought my delicately knitted scarf to work, and my colleagues couldn’t help but have a good laugh at its tiny size. Then we got back to our patients. Intending to give it to one of my colleague’s children, I casually placed the scarf in a drawer.
One day, as I waited in the examination room to attend to a patient, a very young girl entered. She was about six or seven years old, with curly (卷曲的) hair and wearing a blue coat. In her arms, she held a doll (洋娃娃) that matched her appearance, also sporting curly hair and a blue dress.
The little girl seemed frightened and totally at a loss, constantly avoiding eye contact and refusing to undergo the examination. “Poor kid,” I thought. My heart filled with sympathy and tenderness for such a young patient.
I tried to approach her to offer comfort, reaching out to pa t her shoulder, but she quickly moved away. That’s when I had an idea —I could talk about her doll.
“Is this your friend?” I asked.
She nodded. And now I saw my chance. I continued, “Does she have a name?”
“Yes, she has a name — Nora. It’s from my favorite comic storybook.”
“Your friend Nora is lovely and beautiful, just like you. But honey, it’s getting cold now, and you should probably find her a new coat to keep her warm.”
The little girl listened intently, showing more interest.
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。
Suddenly, I remembered the small and misshaped scarf in my drawer.
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After the examination, the girl’s mother was so surprised at the scarf the doll wore.
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| A．know | B．known | C．to know | D．knowing |
| A．that; whose | B．as; which | C．which; where | D．as; whose |
9 . Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images of Vikings, or German soldiers from 1943 produced surprising results: hardly any of the people depicted were white. Other image-generation tools have been criticized because they tend to show white men when asked for images of entrepreneurs or doctors. Google wanted Gemini to avoid this trap; instead, it fell into another one, depicting George Washington as black. Now attention has moved on to the chatbot’s text responses, which turned out to be just as surprising.
Gemini happily provided arguments in favor of positive action in higher education, but refused to provide arguments against. It declined to write a job ad for a fossil-fuel lobby group (游说团体), because fossil fuels are bad and lobby groups prioritize “the interests of corporations over public well-being”. Asked if Hamas is a terrorist organization, it replied that the conflict in Gaza is “complex”; asked if Elon Musk’s tweeting of memes had done more harm than Hitler, it said it was “difficult to say”. You do not have to be a critic to perceive its progressive bias.
Inadequate testing may be partly to blame. Google lags behind OpenAI, maker of the better-known ChatGPT. As it races to catch up, Google may have cut corners. Other chatbots have also had controversial launches. Releasing chatbots and letting users uncover odd behaviors, which can be swiftly addressed, lets firms move faster, provided they are prepared to weather (经受住) the potential risks and bad publicity, observes Eth an Mollick, a professor at Wharton Business School.
But Gemini has clearly been deliberately adjusted, or “fine-tuned”, to produce these responses. This raises questions about Google’s culture. Is the firm so financially secure, with vast profits from internet advertising, that it feels free to try its hand at social engineering? Do some employees think it has not just an opportunity, but a responsibility, to use its reach and power to promote a particular agenda? All eyes are now on Google’s boss, Sundar Pichai. He says Gemini is being fixed. But does Google need fixing too?
1. What do the words “this trap” underlined in the first paragraph refer to?| A．Having a racial bias. | B．Responding to wrong texts. |
| C．Criticizing political figures. | D．Going against historical facts. |
| A．Gemini’s refusal to make progress. | B．Gemini’s failure to give definite answers. |
| C．Gemini’s prejudice in text responses. | D．Gemini’s avoidance of political conflicts. |
| A．Creative. | B．Promising. | C．Illegal. | D．Controversial. |
| A．Its security is doubted. | B．It lacks financial support. |
| C．It needs further improvement. | D．Its employees are irresponsible. |
10 . The curb cut (下斜路缘) is a convenience that most of us rarely, if ever, notice. Yet, without it, daily life might be a lot harder — in more ways than one. Pushing a baby stroller (婴儿推车) onto the curb, skateboarding onto a sidewalk or taking a full grocery cart from the sidewalk to your car — all these tasks are easier because of the curb cut.
But it was created with a different purpose in mind.
It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the 1970s, most sidewalks in the United States ended with a sharp drop-off. That was a big deal for people in wheelchairs because there were no ramps (斜坡) to help them move along city blocks without assistance. According to one disability rights leader, a six-inch curb “might as well have been Mount Everest”. So, activists from Berkeley, California, who also needed wheelchairs, organized a campaign to create tiny ramps to help people dependent on wheels move up and down curbs independently.
I think about the “curb cut effect” a lot when working on issues around health equity (公平). The first time I even heard about the curb cut was in a 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece by PolicyLink CEO Angela Blackwell. Blackwell rightly noted that many people see equity “as a zero-sum game.” Basically, there is “a prejudice that intentionally supporting one group hurts another.” What the curb cut effect shows, Blackwell said, is that “when society creates the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully, everyone wins.”
There are multiple examples of this principle at work. For example, investing in policies that create more living-wage jobs or increase the availability of affordable housing certainly benefits people in communities that have limited options. But the action also provides those people with opportunities for better health and the moans to become contributing members of society — and those benefits everyone. Even the football huddle (围成一团以秘密商讨) was initially created to help deaf football players at Gallaudet College keep their game plans secret from opponents who could have read their sign language. Today, it’s used by every team to prevent the opponent from learning about game-winning strategies.
So, next time you cross the street, or roll your suitcase through a crosswalk or ride your bike directly onto a sidewalk, think about how much the curb cut, the design that benefits one group of people at a disadvantage, has helped not just that group, but all of us.
1. By “might as well have been Mount Everest” (paragraph 3), the disability rights leader implies that a six-inch curb may become ______.| A．as famous as the world’s highest mountain | B．an almost impassable barrier |
| C．a connection between people | D．a most unforgettable matter |
| A．it’s fair to give the disadvantaged more help than others |
| B．it’s impossible to have everyone be treated equally |
| C．it’s necessary to go all out to help the disabled |
| D．it’s not worthwhile to promote health equity |
| A．Reading machines for blind people helped build the navigation system in the car. |
| B．The four great inventions of ancient China spread to the west. |
| C．Your reaching out to the disadvantaged contributes to more people doing it. |
| D．A butterfly flapping its wings in one country leads to a Tornado in another country. |
| A．Everyday items are originally invented for people with disabilities. |
| B．Everyone in a society should pursue what is in his or her interest. |
| C．A disability rights leader changed the life of his fellow men. |
| D．Caring for disadvantaged groups may finally benefit all. |
