Every week I save all the change and $1 bills I have in my purse. Then every Christmas I cash it in for as many $100 bills as the saved money gets me. I then wait for a family in need. I split the money in half and give half to the family in need and the other half to my nine-year-old son, Say’ Veon, who puts it in his savings account, to teach him about delayed satisfaction. Then he helps me get gifts or give the money to the family.
I adopted Say’ Veon after his mother, a close friend of mine, passed away from cancer before his fifth birthday. Even though Say’ Veon has dealt with great loss and sadness at such a young age, his generous spirit and loving heart shine through. He has given money to someone else who needs it more, such as his friends or classmates. Say’ Veon’s acts of kindness always blow me away and I feel blessed to have him in my life.
This week I got a call from a friend, DeeDee, who is 77 years old. She was upset because she had been cheated, and the cheaters took all the money out of her checking account which she lives on, and now she didn’t have the money to pay her rent and bills.
This morning, I took the money and showed Say’ Veon how much I saved this year. I told him what happened to DeeDee, and then asked him if he would be willing to give his half along with my half and donate it to her as our person in need this year.
He said, “Yes, of course.” This year our total was $400.
We went to visit DeeDee and my son handed her a Christmas card with the money. She opened it and said, “Thank you.” She then looked again and stared at the $100 bills.
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。
DeeDee froze there with her eyes wide open.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Suddenly, Say’ Veon said to DeeDee, “You are our family!”
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Near the end of August, I got a piece of terrible news from the doctor. “Linda, you have a brain tumor (肿瘤) on the underside of your brain. This is the worst place you could have possibly gotten a tumor. It’s growing very quickly. I’m sorry. It’s inoperable.”
I walked out of her office and went through the large medical building, not daring to glance at anyone. By the time I met my husband in the parking lot, my chest hurt. “It’s inoperable!” As I repeated the doctor’s words, I began to cry. My dream of becoming a licensed psychotherapist (心理治疗师) and helping others dissolved into my tears.
I had waited until my children were grown, with families of their own, before starting my own work on a college degree. By then I was 51. Through the years I dreamed of going back to school and becoming a psychotherapist. It had been a dream of mine for almost as long as I could remember. But so many things had gotten in my way.
Several days went by as I realized that I shouldn’t give up without a fight. So I began to do online research to see if someone else could help me. I was afraid to hope, but within a week I received a call from a doctor in Los Angeles. “I can help you,” he began. Those were the words I needed to hear.
I underwent a very risky brain surgery on a sunny fall day in October 2006. Dr. Shahinian told my husband, “It’s much larger than I thought. If I take it all, there is a possibility that she will not be able to walk or smile. She may not hear and perhaps she will be blind. If I leave half of it, she’ll be back here in five years to do this all again.”
My husband and my daughter made the hard decision to allow Dr. Shahinian to attempt to remove the entire tumor in this operation.
The recovery was horrible. My optic (视觉的) nerve was damaged. I completely lost the hearing in my left ear. I heard what sounded like the roaring (呼啸) of a waterfall in my head. My balance was terrible, and it seemed as if the floor wanted to come up. But I didn’t want to live just for the sake of remaining alive. I still wanted to help other people.
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。
So after six months of lying in bed, I decided to take action.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Finally, my dream came true.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________3 . In America, the “Big Dig”, a highway project that resulted in a mess of traffic in the centre of Boston for years, came in five times over its initial budget. Even the Germans get huge projects wrong. Conception to operation of Berlin Brandenburg Airport has taken 30 years, with seven missed opening dates. The airport ended up costing $8.2 billion. However, the original estimate was about $2.7 billion.
Huge projects like Berlin Brandenburg Airport are the subject of an amusing new book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Mr. Flyvbjerg sets up a database of over 16, 000 projects and data analysis reveals that only 8.5% of the projects meet their initial estimates on cost and time, and 0.5% of them achieve what they set out to do on cost, time and benefits.
Over-optimistic time and cost estimates originate from both psychological and political perceptions: the reliance on intuition (直觉) rather than data, and a problem that Mr. Flyvbjerg calls “strategic misrepresentation”. This is when budgets are intentionally reduced in order to get things going. And once the projects are under way, they will not be stopped, because money spent on them will thus be wasted.
Mr. Flyvbjerg speaks highly of Pixar’s methodical approach to developing and testing films in great detail before they go into production. He also tells the story of how Frank Gehry’s well-developed architectural models helped ensure the success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Narrowing down the producing window of a project before it is actually carried out reduces the probability of unexpected events.
Big customized projects are particularly likely to run into trouble. However, the more a project can be divided into standardized processes, the better its prospects are. Projects run into problems for specific reasons as well as general ones: Britain’s trouble is not something that China has to worry about, for instance. But the iron law is that if you plan strictly and standardize where possible, you are less likely to dig yourself into a hole.
1. How does the author introduce the topic of the passage?| A．By making a contrast. | B．By giving an explanation. |
| C．By presenting examples. | D．By showing an experience. |
| A．Projects’ success rates can be estimated. |
| B．Projects’ desired outcome can’t be achieved. |
| C．Most projects suffer overspending and delays. |
| D．Most projects lack comprehensive data analysis. |
| A．Failures in decision-making. | B．Methods of reducing massive costs. |
| C．Strategies for getting work done. | D．Reasons behind inaccurate estimates. |
| A．Planning thoroughly in advance. |
| B．Analyzing specific and general reasons. |
| C．Focusing on efficiency of projects. |
| D．Drawing lessons from former experiences. |
4 . If you look at the dynamic “Global Temperatures” map on NASA’s website, you can see the historic temperature change over time across the planet as the timeline goes from 1880 to the modern day. By 2019, the entire planet is in red, orange, and yellow colors, indicating temperatures much higher than the historical average in every country and human inhabitance.
If the timeline went to 2023, the map would look even worse. That’s because the summer of 2023 was the hottest ever, according to ocean monitors. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Next July could be worse. Unless we do something quickly, we face dealing with more and more dangerous and expensive natural disasters in the future.
Forest fires sent smoke from Canada across the North American continent, causing New York City to have the worst air quality in its recorded history. Heavy rainstorms fell on Vermont and the Northeastern United States in just a couple of days in the middle of July, which exceeded the amount that area would usually receive in two months and caused extreme damage to homes and businesses. Around the same time, flash flooding in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — north of Philadelphia — killed nearly a dozen people.
Erich Fischer, a researcher specializing in climate studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is concerned that natural disasters could get much worse in the future—and in ways we cannot predict. He called for a “strike for climate justice,” which actually took place on Sept. 15, 2023. “The strategy needs to be twofold (双重的) . We need to decrease carbon emissions as much as realistically possible. That is already happening with people using electric cars and other green technologies. At the same time, we also need to find ways to predict the risk of natural disasters ahead of time,” said Erich Fischer.
1. Why does the writer mention the data on NASA’s website in paragraph 1?| A．To explain a concept. | B．To introduce a topic. |
| C．To provide a solution. | D．To make a prediction. |
| A．The severity of natural disasters. | B．The worst air quality in New York City. |
| C．The extreme damage by flash flooding. | D．The cause of the forests fires in Canada. |
| A．He advocated a twofold strategy. |
| B．He suggested forbidding carbon emissions. |
| C．He required people to use more electric cars. |
| D．He emphasized the awareness of climate changes. |
| A．The Hottest Month in History | B．Natural Disasters in the World |
| C．Extreme Weather Could Get Worse | D．Green Technology Would be Needed |
It is a hot sunny Saturday morning on the farm. Maya, Duksie and Doobie are helping Mama K in her vegetable garden. The children work all morning.
Mama K always gives the children a treat for helping her. Sometimes it’s cake or chocolate; sometimes it’s apples, pears or oranges. Mama K has only one rule. “Share it fair!” The children know they must share the treats equally, so they all get the same amount.
Today Mama K has baked a round strawberry cake with pink icing (糖霜) and berries from her garden. The children wait on the grass for their treat. “Here you go!” smiles Mama K. “But remember the rule. Share it fair!”
Maya has the first turn to share the cake. She uses the knife to draw lines in the icing. The others watch her. She does not cut the cake yet. The others must first agree if her way is fair. “I think I will make two cuts down like this. Now we have three slices, all the same!” Maya shows them. There is one line on the left and the other on the right.
“No way!” says Duksie. “The one in the middle is much too big!” Doobie also shakes his head. Maya laughs and tells Duksie to try.
“Pass me the knife.I’ll do it,” says Duksie First she rubs out Maya’s pattern in the icing, and then she makes one cut across and one down. “Look, I have made my three slices!” “That’s not fair!” shout Maya and Doobie together,.
“Why don’t you try, Doobie?” says Duksie. “I bet you can’t do it!”
“I wish the cake was a square, and then it would be easy!” says Doobie thoughtfully. And then! A picture comes into Doobie’s head. He sees the silver badge (标识) at the front of his father’s big red Benz truck. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I know how to do it,” shouts Doobie.
“How did you work it out?” Maya asks. Doobie smiles to himself. For now it’s his secret. Later, he will tell his dad.
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。
First Doobie uses a knife to smooth Duksie’s lines in the icing.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________With Mama K’s encouragement, Maya takes charge, expertly cutting along Doobie’s lines to make three equal slices.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________6 . Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to an AI text-to- image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image. You enter the prompt (提示词) “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead.
What’s going on? The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”. What does this mean? Text-to-image generators work by being trained on large datasets that include millions or billions of images. Some of the generators have been trained by indiscriminately scraping online images, many of which may be under copyright. This has led to many copyright infringement (侵害) cases where artists have accused big tech companies of stealing and profiting from their work.
This is also where the idea of “poison” comes in. Researchers who want to empower individual artists have recently created a tool named “Nightshade” to fight back against unauthorised image scraping. The tool works by slightly altering an image’s pixels (像素) in a way that confuses the computer vision system but leaves the image unaltered to a human’s eyes. If an organization then scrapes one of these images to train a future AI model, its data pool becomes “poisoned”. This can result in mistaken learning, which makes the generator return unintended results. As in our earlier example, a balloon might become an egg.
The higher the number of “poisoned” images in the training data, the greater the impact. Because of how generative AI works, the damage from “poisoned” images also affects related prompt keywords. For example, if a “poisoned” image of a Picasso work is used in training data, prompt results for masterpieces from other artists can also be affected.
Possibly, tools like Nightshade can be abused by some users to intentionally upload “poisoned” images in order to confuse AI generators. But the Nightshade’s developer hopes the tool will make big tech companies more respectful of copyright. It does challenge a common belief among computer scientists that data found online can be used for any purpose they see fit.
Human rights activists, for example, have been concerned for some time about the indiscriminate use of machine vision in wider society. This concern is particularly serious concerning facial recognition. There is a clear connection between facial recognition cases and data poisoning, as both relate to larger questions around technological governance. It may be better to see data poisoning as an innovative solution to the denial of some fundamental human rights.
1. The underlined word “scraping” (para. 2) is closest in meaning to ____.| A．facilitating | B．collecting | C．damaging | D．polishing |
| A．increase the accuracy of returned information |
| B．cause users to forget the prompt key words |
| C．interfere with the training of generative AI |
| D．discriminate against great masterpieces |
| A．Data poisoning is somehow justified to direct attention to human rights. |
| B．Computer scientists has learned to respect the copyright of most artists. |
| C．Nightshade is being abused by human rights activists to recognize faces. |
| D．The issue of technological governance has aroused the lawyers’ interest. |
| A．Data Poisoning: Government Empowering Citizens to Protect Themselves |
| B．Data Poisoning: Addressing Facial Recognition Issues Among Artists |
| C．Data Poisoning: Risks and Rewards of Generative AI Data Training |
| D．Data Poisoning: Restricting Innovation or Empowering Artists |
7 . 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 |
Brit works full time as a fourth-grade teacher at Kula Elementary School. It was there that she met Seth Snyder, a student who had flown under the radar with previous teachers. Every year, Brit is given a nine-month window in which to connect with a group of new students. And with each batch of new students, she hopes to have a positive impact on their lives. But Seth was a tough cookie to crack. For the first few months of the school year, she struggled to connect with her student, who was shy but nevertheless a pleasure to have in the classroom.
One day, Brit showed her students a clip of skateboarders going all out at Tony Hawk’s ramp in California. Brit glanced over and watched Seth’s face light up; she found their connection. She went one step further to connect with Seth by inviting him to join her at the skate park after school one day. Instead of excitement, Seth shut down. He politely declined his teacher’s offer and withdrew once more. In spite of that, Brit wouldn’t give up so easily. She asked again a few weeks later, the day Seth and his fellow students were cut loose for spring break.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Are you going to skate?”
“No,” he mumbled, almost embarrassed. “I don’t have a skateboard.”
Brit’s heart sank into her stomach. Kula Elementary comprises mostly underprivileged (缺少机遇的) students who come from low-income families. Teachers like Brit have to tread (行事) carefully when it comes to even the smallest conversations or assignments, because a question as innocent as “What are your plans for spring break?” can be hurtful, sometimes embarrassing, for students who have so little.
Brit said to the reporter, “If your parents are working three jobs to be able to pay rent, of course they’re not going to have time to take you to skate park or, you know, take you surfing, or let alone buy you that $400 surfboard or $ 200 skateboard.”
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。
Brit shared the story with her best friend, Zach, a professional skateboarder.
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What began as two people coming together to do a good deed for one young boy quickly blossomed (发展) into a grassroots effort.
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仿写：做好了充分的准备，他既兴奋又紧张地期待着比赛的来临。
1.表达哀思；
2.对娃哈哈集团的希望和建议。
condolences—慰问；吊唁
Dear Ms. Zong,
I’m Li Hua from Hangzhou Foreign Language High School.
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