1 . Authentic Is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023
The Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.” Authentic food. Authentic voice. Authentic self Look ups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary eampany’s site but were put to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press.
“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said before the announcement of this year’s word on November 27. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
Sokolowski said that this year interest in the word authentic did not increase suddenly at any particular time, but that the word was a constant object of interest. This was the year of Al, and also of a moment when ChatGIPT-maker Open AI suffered a leadership crisis. Taylor Swift and Prince Harry looked for authenticity in their words and deeds. Elon Musk, at February’s World Government Summit in Dubai, requested the heads of companies, politicians and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by running their own accounts(账号).
“Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”
Merriam-Webster’s entry for authentic provides several definitions. There is “not false or imitation(模仿): real, actual.” There’s “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.” There’s “worthy of acceptance or belief as based on fact.” And there is “made or done the same way as an original(原版).”
1. Which of the following is the reason why authentic is chosen the word of the year?A.A good many significant events are related to the word. |
B.The word is looked up on the online dictionary routinely. |
C.The word was voted out by many netizens questioning it. |
D.The searches of the word reached a high level this year. |
A.To introduce those who have lost authenticity. |
B.To emphasize continued attention to the word. |
C.To highlight the importance of being authentic. |
D.To prove the sudden popularity of the word. |
A.Few people are trustworthy nowadays. |
B.Students are expert at cheating with AI. |
C.Authenticity can be created on purpose. |
D.People are more likely to be tricked by eyes. |
A.He is a man of authentic charm. |
B.I don’t know if the painting is authentic. |
C.This is an authentic description of the situation. |
D.This is an authentic model of the ancient town. |
3 . Recently, economist Francisca Antman makes a convincing case that the explosion of tea as an everyman’s drink in late 1700s England saved many lives. This would not have been because of any beneficial substances of the leaf. Instead, the simple practice of boiling water for tea, in an era before people understood that illness could be caused by water-borne pathogens (病原体), may have been enough to keep many from an early grave.
Between 1761 and 1834, the annual death rate decreased considerably, but wages didn’t seem to have risen much and standards of living arguably didn’t increase. Actually, with the rise of the industrial revolution, many people crowded into towns whose sanitation (卫生条件) left much to be desired. Some historians suggested that boiling water for tea might have played a role in this decrease.
“With people coming into cities to work, given the level of sanitation they have, the big killer is water.” says Antman. Using data from over 400 English districts, relating water sources and quality with death rates, she found the key date is 1785 when tea suddenly became affordable for the majority of Britons. There were many things to recommend tea as a drink of the common people: you could make a satisfying drink with just a few leaves, which could be reused for multiple pots, and tea was potentially cheaper than beer, which became expensive both by the complex making process and by a tax on malt (麦芽). She found that deaths dropped in all districts, but those with bad water saw death rates drop 18% more than those with good water.
Interestingly,while there wasn’t a noticeable decrease in deaths among children aged two to five — who typically didn’t consume much tea — there was a slight fall in infant deaths, perhaps reflecting the fact that if tea-drinking parents had less diarrheal (腹泻) disease, their very young children might have been protected a bit as well.
1. What might contribute to decreased death rates according to some historians?A.Desirable sanitation. | B.Less water-related disease. |
C.Industrial revolution. | D.Beneficial substances in tea. |
A.Because it tasted better than beer. | B.Because it was less costly and reusable. |
C.Because people needn’t pay any tax on it. | D.Because people enjoyed its making process. |
A.Drinking tea has tittle influence on young children. |
B.Children can also drink tea to protect themselves from diarrheal disease. |
C.Parents’ tea-drinking habits may have a positive effect on their children. |
D.Death rates of children didn’t drop due to their lack of tea-drinking habits. |
A.Why people need to boil water to make tea. |
B.Why British develop a love for drinking tea. |
C.How tea gains increasing popularity in Britain. |
D.How Britain’s taste for tea may have saved lives. |
Lantern festivals add magic to
“The older I grow, the more
“For this lantern fair, we derived inspiration from ancient Chinese poems,” Wan says, adding that Tianshang Gongque (the moon palace), a centerpiece as well as one of 21 core lantern installations ( 装 置) at the fair,
The eight-day holiday attracted over 210,000 visitors from around China to Zigong, a city which is
5 . Some ants have figured out how to avoid getting lost: build taller anthills, according to a recent study.
Desert ants living in the hot, flat salt pans of Tunisia spend their days looking for food and reach as far as 1.1 kilometers from their nests. To find their way home, desert ants use a navigation system, relying on the sun’s position and counting their steps to track their location relative to their nest.
But this system becomes increasingly unreliable as the distance from the nest increases. “We realized that, whenever the ants in salt pans came closer to their nest, they suddenly pinpointed the nest hill from several meters distance,” says Markus Knaden, a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “This made us think that the hill serves as a nest-defining landmark.”
So Knaden and colleagues captured ants from nests in the middle of salt pans and from along their shorelines. Only salt-pan nests had distinct hills, up to 40 centimeters tall, whereas the hills on shoreline nests were lower or barely noticeable. Next, the team removed any hills and placed the captured insects some distance away from their nests. Salt-pan ants struggled more than shore ants to find homes. Shore ants relied on the shoreline for guidance and weren’t affected by the hill removal, the researchers concluded.
The team further conducted another study to see if desert ants were deliberately building a taller hill when their surroundings lacked any visible landmarks. So, the researchers removed the hills of 16 salt-pan nests and installed (安装) two 50-centimeter-tall blocks near eight of them. The other eight nests were left without any artificial visual aid. After three days, the researchers found that seven ants from the unaided nests had rebuilt their hills. But only two ants from the nests with man-made blocks nearby had bothered to rebuild.
“It implies that ants regularly assess the complexity of their environment and change their decisions based on their conclusion,” says ecologist Judith Bronstein of the University of Arizona.
1. What aspect of ants is the recent study mainly about?A.Challenges of survival. | B.Landmarks of habitats. |
C.Intelligence of navigation. | D.Comparison of varieties. |
A.Explored. | B.Recognized. | C.Climbed. | D.Crossed. |
A.To observe different ants’ reactions. | B.To prove impacts of various habitats. |
C.To disturb desert ants’ navigation system. | D.To test anthills’ functions and significance. |
A.Evaluate and make changes. | B.Visual aid is a must. |
C.Cooperation brings victory. | D.No man-made blocks are used. |
6 . It’s been 50 years since the beginning of bar codes. Scanning an item at checkout is something we take for granted in this age of convenience.
On March 31, 1971, a historic meeting took place in New York City. The meeting agreed to create a system to uniquely identify every single product, calling it the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) the core of bar codes, according to El Mudo, a Spanish newspaper.
In the past five decades, bar codes have provided many conveniences for commerce. “The next generation of bar codes, such as QR codes can hold vastly more information. Their use, for example, can tell consumers if a product contains allergens (过敏原) or if it is organic.
A.Time has proved it a great decision. |
B.It gives consumers a greater level of trust. |
C.What information does a bar code contain? |
D.When do we scan a bar code on the product? |
E.We can thank the game-changing technology for that. |
F.The numbers can indicate where that product is identified, |
G.It allows the first digitization in the control of the goods for sale. |
A.what | B.where | C.which | D.whether |
8 . Human responses to moral dilemmas (道德困境) can be influenced by statements written by the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The findings indicate that users may undervalue the extent to which their own moral judgments can be influenced by the chatbot.
Sebastian Krigel and colleagues asked ChatGPT multiple times whether it is right to sacrifice (牺牲) the life of one person in order to save the lives of five others. They found that ChatGPT wrote random statements arguing both for and against sacrificing one life, indicating that it is not biased towards a certain moral stance (立场).
The authors then presented 767 U.S. participants, who were on average 39 years old, with a dilemma whether to sacrifice one person’s life to save five others. Before answering, participants read a statement provided by ChatGPT arguing either for or against sacrificing one life to save five. Statements were from either a moral advisor or ChatGPT. After answering, participants were asked whether the statement they read influenced their answers.
Eighty percent of participants reported that their answers were not influenced by the statements they read. However, the authors found that the answers participants believed they would have provided without reading the statements were still more likely to agree with the moral stance of the statement they did read than with the opposite stance. This indicates that participants may have underestimated the influence of ChatGPT’s statements on their own moral judgments.
The authors suggest that the possibility for chatbots to influence human moral judgments highlights the need for education to help humans better understand artificial intelligence. They propose that future research should design chatbots that either decline to answer questions requiring a moral judgment or answer these questions by providing multiple arguments and warnings.
1. What are ChatGPT’s answers to a certain moral stance?A.changeable. | B.valuable. | C.creative. | D.simple. |
A.They admitted the power of ChatGPT. |
B.They were interviewed by a moral advisor. |
C.They were affected by ChatGPT unknowingly. |
D.They were presented with different moral dilemmas. |
A.Different findings of the study. | B.Future possibility for chatbots. |
C.Major focuses of future education. | D.Solutions to the impact of chatbots. |
A.ChatGPT Tends to Cause Moral Panics. |
B.ChatGPT: Is It Likely to Affect Our Life? |
C.ChatGPT:Why Is It Making Us So Nervous? |
D.ChatGPT Can Influence Human Moral Judgments. |
9 . Addiction and recovery are the two sides of the same coin. In many cases, addiction starts off at a relatively low level — misuse.
One of the most dramatic recovery pathways available to substance users is called “cold turkey” (突然戒毒方法).
Nearly all forms of addiction have a negative impact on the loved ones of addicted people.
A.Addiction is not a single state of being. |
B.If left unchecked, it may then progress to abuse. |
C.What recovery pathways are there for behavioural issues? |
D.There are many others they might try if they do not succeed the first time. |
E.This will take a lifelong commitment, but the results often speak for themselves. |
F.This means that they completely stop their usage and avoid such behaviour in the future. |
G.Supporting someone who is overcoming an addiction often requires a long-term commitment. |
10 . The needs of plus size consumers have long been the elephant in the room of the fashion industry until body positivity and fat acceptance movements promoted the slogan (口号) that large-bodied people are not those who are left behind. This size-inclusive (尺码包容) trend has become so popular that it is influencing mainstream culture. As a result, fashion brands have finally decided to extend their size ranges. In 2022, the plus-size market grew twice as fast as the standard size market in both North America and the UK.
Yet, many consumers say fashion brands broadening their ranges are not truly inclusive. “Inclusive sizing means that all bodies are included in fashion, not just the ones who fit in standard sizes,” says Marie Southard Ospina, a UK-based journalist who covers body-image issues. “However, what many designers do right now is pick a number that they think is big enough to include plus sizes and stop. This is even more disrespectful.”
Researchers also criticize that some brands are just taking advantage of the trend. “Brands that used to promote so-called perfect bodies in their advertisements are now trying to get in on the trend by adding a few sizes. It doesn’t feel like they really care about plus-size people,” says Tom Burgess, analyst in fashion industry. “If brands cared about large-bodied consumers, then it wouldn’t have taken until now to acknowledge that they exist,” he says. “It gives the impression that companies are just trying to gain a share of the market without a real commitment to the community.”
The fashion industry must go beyond merely producing clothing in a range of sizes if they hope to succeed with a body -diverse world. The whole industry has to connect on a personal level with consumers. That involves showing shoppers that they are seen, understood and important to brands. “Consumers care about values, and so they want to buy from brands that reflect the values they believe in. Everyone should enjoy the same range of fashion options,” says Ludovica Cesareo, professor of marketing at the College of Business in the US.
1. What do the underlined words “the elephant in the room” mean in the first paragraph?A.The hot issue that is valued. |
B.The obvious truth that is ignored. |
C.The important principle that is recognized. |
D.The common phenomenon that is criticized. |
A.They pick sizes randomly. | B.They offer limited plus sizes. |
C.They treat designers disrespectfully. | D.They haven’t broadened standard sizes. |
A.Their designs. | B.Their quality. |
C.Their motivations. | D.Their advertisements. |
A.Buyers may deserve fashion that fits their figure. |
B.Consumers prefer brands with personalized values. |
C.Brands should catch up with the size-inclusive trend. |
D.A good brand image is critical in the fashion industry. |