The man was kind of small, but to a five-year-old, he was a giant. Cherry-scented smoke from Grandpa’s pipe kept the hungry mosquitoes at bay. Now and again, he blew a smoke ring and laughed as I tried to target the hole with my finger.
We sat side by side on the old wooden stairs that hot summer evening, watching the traffic, counting cars and trying to guess the color of the next one to turn the corner. We watched the sun go down behind the old Texaco service station across the busy street, which I was never allowed to cross unless accompanied by an adult.
My grandfather was baby-sitting while my mother, father and grandmother went out. While my two baby brothers slept inside the house, my three older siblings (兄弟姐妹) played with friends around the corner, where I was not allowed to go. I stayed with Grandpa, and that was okay with me. “Thirsty?” Grandpa asked, never removing the pipe from his mouth. “Yes,” was my reply. “How would you like to run over to the gas station there and get yourself a bottle of Coke?” I couldn’t believe my ears. On my family’s modest income, Coke was not a part of our budget or diet. “Okay,” I replied shyly, already wondering how I would get across the street.
He stretched his long leg out straight and reached his huge hand deep into the pocket. Opening his fist, he exposed several silver coins. He instructed me to pick out one. After he deposited the rest of the change back into his pocket, he stood up. “Okay,” he said, helping me down the stairs and to the curb (马路沿儿).
“I’m going to stay here and keep an ear out for the babies. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to cross. You go over to the Coke machine, get your Coke out and come back. Wait for me to tell you when it’s safe to cross back.” My heart pounded. Excitement took my breath away.
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。
Grandpa held my hand tightly.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________My heart pounded wildly as I approached the Coke machine.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Learning motivation only accompanied by interest can last long. My grandfather used to be the director of a local museum. So since I was young, I had the opportunity to visit various museums with him. After entering high school, I became interested in history, and I constantly collected information related to museums.
When I was 17, I read a magazine article about a museum called the McNay, once the home of a watercolourist named Marian McNay. She had requested the community to turn it into a museum upon her death.
Do not miss your chance to see Texas’ first modern art museum—the McNay Art Museum. There are more than 20,000 different and significant works. With beautiful Spanish gardens and the amazing architecture of the building, the art within the walls isn’t the only wonder to see.
On a sunny Saturday, Sally and I drove over to the museum. She asked, “Do you have the address?” “No, but I’ll recognize it, there was a picture in the magazine.”
“Oh, stop. There it is!”
The museum was free. We entered, excited. A group of people sitting in the hall stopped talking and stared at us.
“May I help you?” a man asked. “No,” I said. “We’re fine.” Tour guides got on my nerves. What if they talked a long time about a painting you weren’t that interested in? Sally had gone upstairs. The people in the hall seemed very nosy (爱管闲事的), keeping their eyes on me with curiosity. What was their problem? I saw some nice sculptures in one room. Suddenly I sensed a man standing behind me. “Where do you think you are?” he asked. I turned sharply. “The McNay Art Museum!” He smiled, shaking his head. “Sorry, the McNay is on New Braunfels Street.” “What’s this place?” I asked, still confused. “Well, it’s our home.” My heart jolted (震颤). I raced to the staircase.
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。
I called out, “Sally! Come down immediately!”
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Thirty years later, a woman approached me in a public place.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________3 . Researchers have developed a new soft robot design that conducts itself with three behaviours at the same time: rolling (翻滚) forward. turning like a record and following a path that goes around a central point. The equipment, which operates without human or computer control, holds promise for developing soft robots that can be used to AA-head and map unknown environments.
The new soft robots are called twisted ring-bots (扭曲环机器人) . They are made of something like the ribbon (缎带) and then joined together at the end to form a ring.
When the robots are placed on a surface that is at least 55 degrees Celsius, which is hotter than the surrounding air, one part of the ribbon touching the surface becomes smaller, while one part in the air does not. This induces a rolling movement: the warmer the surface, the faster the robot rolls. “The ribbon rolls on its horizontal axis (横轴) , giving the ring forward strength,” says Jie Yin, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
The twisted ring-bot also turns along its central axis. And as the twisted ring-bot moves forward it travels in a path around a central point, basically moving in a large circle. However, if the twisted ring-bot meets a boundary- like the wall of a box-it will travel along the boundary.
The twisted ring-bots are examples of equipment whose behaviour is governed by physical intelligence, meaning their actions are determined by their structural design and the materials they are made of, rather than being directed by a computer or human.
“Soft robotics is still a relatively new field.” Yin says. “Finding new ways to control the movement of soft robots in a repeatable and engineered way moves the field forward. And advancing our understanding of what is possible is exciting.”
1. What makes the robot roll faster and faster?| A．The ribbon. | B．The central axis. |
| C．The shape and material. | D．The higher surface temperature. |
| A．By explaining the robot’s working ways. | B．By quoting experts’ opinions. |
| C．By making some comparisons. | D．By offering reasons and results. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Favourable. | C．Negative. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．The New Soft Robots | B．Ribbons and Their Rolling |
| C．Three Creative Movements | D．Twisted Rings and the Axis |
1. What does CyberEdit aim to do?
| A．Edit documents for the magazine Wired. |
| B．Offer students computer editing services |
| C．Provide technical support for businessmen. |
| A．Four. |
| B．Five. |
| C．Ten. |
| A．When they have the idea |
| B．After they graduate from college. |
| C．After they have rich social experience. |
Amy’s youngest child, 2-year-old Jenna, wouldn’t go to sleep until Amy read her a story while rocking her. Rocking and reading became their favorite nighttime routine.
Jenna awoke one night screaming in pain. Hospital tests later revealed that she had cancer, but luckily she had a successful operation.
During Jenna’s first week in the hospital, Amy stayed with her day and night. The nurses put a rocking chair in her room so they could continue their nighttime routine. After Jenna was asleep, Amy got some rest in the hard armchair by Jenna’s bed. Jenna was doing well, and Amy began sparing time to help her husband Joe take care of their little boys. She would go home in the evening, have dinner with the boys, and then return to the hospital until Jenna was asleep. Then Amy would come home for the remainder of the night.
It was pouring rain one evening as Amy hurried home to make dinner. By the time the meal was done, the roads were dangerous. Joe stood nearby as she looked out of the kitchen window. He firmly stopped Amy from going out in such weather.
“Joe,” Amy cried, “I have to read Jenna a story and rock her. She won’t be able to sleep if I don’t.” “Honey,” he said, “be reasonable. What if you have a bad car accident? The roads will be better tomorrow. Then, you can go.”
Amy finally nodded and called Sally, a middle-aged nurse who worked a twelve-hour shift from 8 am to 8 pm. In tears she told Sally that it was the first time since Jenna was born that she hadn’t rocked her at bedtime.
Sally comforted Amy in a calm voice. She promised that she would go in to see Jenna before she left and tell her that when she woke up her mommy would be with her. “Thank you, Sally,” Amy said.
When it was time to go to bed, Jenna couldn’t find her mom and got panic.
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。
Just when her tears welled up, Sally came in.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The next morning Amy opened the door, finding Jenna was sleeping peacefully in Sally’s arms.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Little free libraries have been dotting communities around the globe since the first one was set up in Hudson, Wisconsin in 2009. During the pandemic (疫情), many people turned these libraries into little free stores to help neighbors in need. The stores were filled with canned food, peanut butter, and toilet paper. In Australia, a mother and her daughter decided to open a free plant stand to share flowers and joy with her community.
Because of the pandemic, people were enclosed and lonely. This was certainly true of Vicky Robinson and her daughter Rachel, who live in Redan, a suburb of Ballarat in Victoria.
The pair watched people walking by who looked sad and decided to come up with a way to cheer them up. “So we thought, ‘what can we create through our home education that can put a smile on people’s faces?’” the mother and daughter said.
Vicky looked at her front grassland and flowering rose bushes and suddenly had a bright idea. Understanding that gardening was a natural treatment that helped her relax, she came up with the idea for a plant exhibition stand that was like a little free plant library.
Her husband is a cupboard maker so he built a two-storied stand on their property line and filled it with young plants and succulents (多肉植物) reproduced from their own plants. In bold letters, there is a sign that reads, “Need a plant? Take a plant. Have a plant? Leave a plant.”
Despite having lived in Redan for 30 years, Vicky said that she never felt connected with her community before. There is little cost involved in setting up the little free plant library. “It’s all worth it just to see their smiles. We have developed trust with the community,” she said. “It leaves a legacy. It creates a bond in a circle, from generation to generation.”
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。
On the first day, all their plants were taken away.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The next day a wonder happened.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________A woman remarried a man from Mexico. She already had a 16-year-old daughter named Bethany, while her husband had a 14-year-old daughter named Maria. Maria and Bethany had been in each other’s lives since they were children. Their relationship as stepsisters was good until recently.
The entire family was busy planning Maria’s Quinceanera (成人礼). The woman’s husband and his ex-wife joined forces to get her a beautiful dress to celebrate the occasion. In total, the dress cost $3,000.
Bethany made it clear that she was jealous (嫉妒的) of the party. Her mom had to make her understand that in Mexican culture, a Quinceanera was a great deal, just like how she had a sweet sixteen party. However, Bethany kept comparing her party to that of Maria’s. It was a massive issue for her, and it reflected in the way she behaved around everyone at home.
Knowing how it made Bethany feel, the mom tried to spend more time with her daughter to assure her that she wasn’t being disregarded. They even got her a lovely dress for the Quinceanera, but much cheaper than Maria’s dress.
Two weeks before the big day, Maria and Bethany got into an argument regarding the TV. Bethany retaliated (报复) against her stepsister by tearing off the back part of her Quinceanera dress. After finding out what Bethany did, everyone was angry. The mom couldn’t believe what her daughter did and quickly gave her husband and his ex-wife money to get a new dress.
The mom told Bethany that she needed to get a job to pay back the total price of the dress. It was her punishment for such an unreasonable act against her stepsister. However, Bethany claimed her mom was unfair by choosing Maria over her. This made the mom question whether she was in the wrong for giving her daughter no choice but to find a job. She wrote about the story online, hoping to get opinions from others on whether what she did was wrong.
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。
To her surprise, she got everybody’s support.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Finally, the mom was determined to teach her 16-year-old a lesson.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________8 . Phonetic (语音) information—the smallest sound elements of speech - is considered by researchers to be the basis of language. Babies are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. But a new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic (有韵律的) speech helps babies learn language and is effective even in the first few months of life.
Researchers from the Trinity College Dublin investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year. Their study, published in the journal Nature Communications. found that phonetic information wasn’t successfully encoded (编码) until seven months old, and did not occur very often at 11 months old when babies began to say their first words. From then individual speech sounds are still added in very slowly—too slowly to form the basis of language.
The researchers recorded patterns of brain activity in 50 babies at four, seven, and eleven months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes (童谣) to a baby. They found that phonetic encoding in babies appeared inchmeal over the first year of life, beginning with labial sounds (e.g. “d” for “daddy”) and nasal sounds (e.g. “m” for “mummy”), with the “read out” progressively looking more like that of adults.
“The reason why we use nursery rhymes is because that is the best way for babies to discover and connect sounds with language, so we are teaching them how to speak,” said Giovanni Di Liberto, lead author of the study at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. “Parents should talk and sing to their babies as much as possible or use baby-directed speech because it will make a difference to language outcome,” she added.
1. What should babies learn in the first few months of life according to the new study?| A．Small sound elements | B．Rhythmic information. |
| C．Phonetic information. | D．Individual words. |
| A．The poor phonetic encoding in babies. | B．The advantages of phonetic information. |
| C．The babies’ great ability to learn language. | D．The babies’ growing process in the first year. |
| A．Gradually. | B．Suddenly. | C．Successfully. | D．Occasionally. |
| A．When Babies Are Able to Say Their First Words |
| B．How Phonetic Information Changes Over Time |
| C．Why Phonetic Is Better Than Rhythmic for Babies |
| D．Why Babies Need Nursery Rhymes for Language Mastery |
9 . AI agents are prediction engines using the web as their memory. They do no more than predict which words are more likely to follow any other word or group of words in a given language. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it analyzes it into words and their sequence, returning answers that match those sequences opposite. It might sound like a simple trick, and it is, yet the secret sauce is the size of the database the AIs use to perform it.
Of the very various mix of content used to train ChatGPT, 60 percent was information collected from websites, blogs or social media. Another 20 percent was content shared on Reddit and evaluated relatively highly by the users. The rest was books typically found in the public field (mostly older and general purpose), with a bit of Wikipedia (3 percent) mixed in for good measure.
AI’s store for each word the probability that any other word will follow it. The quality and value of these predictions depend very much on how often and on how many circum- stances the software encounters any two (or more words) in the neighborhood, how long a sentence goes, and which sentence might follow another. When put together, these predictions favour the most influential texts of a given culture, which shaped generations upon generations of English language teachers and the students they educated.
ChatGPT speaks like a parrot because its delivery is not automatically adjusted. More re- search and engineering are needed to adjust the tool to each request’s real-life intentions and consequences. In academic learning, these situations should be the pre- and post-stages of the research process: finding arguments and packaging them for public consumption.
In their current forms, ChatGPT and its siblings (姐弟) are like those three-year-olds who can recite entire stories read to them only once. But turning a three-year-old into a learned Person takes 20 years of labour—some, structured education. It is time to stop reading Al agents stories and send them to a real school.
1. Which determines the accuracy of AI predictions?| A．Words. | B．Network. | C．Database. | D．Questions. |
| A．By listing data. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By making comparisons. | D．By quoting experts’ arguments. |
| A．Users of AI. | B．Words’ frequency. |
| C．AI’s cultural nature. | D．The length of a sentence. |
| A．How a ChatGPT works | B．Where a ChatGPT is found |
| C．A ChatGPT needs packaging | D．A ChatGPT has a long way to go |
My Amazing Brother
Mark was the most popular boy in his class. He had top grades, was a star athlete and was everyone's friend. He was so perfect. He also happened to be my little brother.
My brother and I had always been close, yet I had long felt inferior(自惭形秽) to him. He just seemed to have everything, I, on the other hand, was shy with relatively few close friends, I was sure 95 percent of the class had no idea I even existed,
High school started. Mark and I were at the same school; he was a freshman, and I was a senior, We got closer than ever that year, I didn't know whether it was the rides to school when we sang along to the songs on the radio, or the fact that we were both on the swim team,
I helped him with his math problems, and he read my papers and made sure that they were A+ quality, We listened to CDs every night and danced on the floor. We joked about our parents. We even hung out with each other at the movies.
One night, my brother and I were discussing the upcoming semi-formal dance, Mark, of course, would attend it, I hadn't even planned on going. I never had a friend for anything and I accepted that nothing was likely to change that. When Mark asked who I wanted to go with, I was shocked.
"What do you mean you're not going? You have to go, It's your senior year!" Mark didn't understand why I wasn't going.
"Well, there's not one person who would want to go with me, " I told him, using the reasoning I'd repeated to myself over and over.
"You're joking, Care.There isn't anyone in the whole school that would turn you down. ""How do you know?" I asked, wondering where my brother got such silly ideas.
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。
"Because you're the coolest girl in the world, " Mark answered.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The rest of the year went by in excitement.
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