The air was getting cooler. The leaves were starting to fall from the trees that lined the streets. As Nicole walked from school to the small bakery shop her mother had just started, she buttoned her sweater and looked up into the blue sky. Her mother expected her to walk the three blocks from school, but she was always standing on the steps of her bakery shop, waving and waiting for Nicole.
Nicole always told about her day as her mom poured a small glass of milk. After her snack, Nicole completed her homework and then was allowed to help in the bakery. Recently, her mother taught her how to frost (给糕饼覆上糖霜) and decorate cupcakes. Nicole loved to pipe, or squeeze, the colorful frosting through the pastry tube onto the tops of miniature cakes. She loved hearing the customers’ reactions to her designs.
For as long as Nicole could remember, she loved art. She impressed her teachers every year with watercolor paintings and clay sculptures. She had won the school’s art contest two years in a row and was working on this year’s project when she began decorating cupcakes. Nicole had never considered baking to be an art form until now. She could see how her intricate and imaginative creations were inspiring to her mother’s customers.
Nicole was struggling and having a difficult time thinking of something original for this year’s art contest. The rules stated that the project simply had to be created entirely by the student, without any adult help. There were no restrictions on size or materials.
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。
As she sat and decorated a chocolate cupcake with small animal shapes for a child’s birthday party, Nicole had an incredible idea.
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On the night of the art show, Nicole’s oversized cupcake brought surprised looks from her friends, teachers, and the contest judges.
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1. What is the speaker mainly talking about?
| A．Cooling fans. | B．Air conditioning. | C．Room design. |
| A．Egypt. | B．Rome. | C．China. |
| A．Wet plants. | B．Cold water. | C．Hand fans. |
| A．A radio programme. | B．A culture magazine. | C．A history book. |
| A．He talks too much. |
| B．He has trouble in listening. |
| C．She wants to see him better. |
The Gansu Jiandu (简牍) Museum in northwest China’s Gansu Province on Sunday launched four online exhibitions related to the ancient Jiandu culture.
“Jiandu” refers to the bamboo and wooden slips on which ancient Chinese people wrote
Additionally, the exhibitions feature high-resolution
Distinguished as China’s only provincial-level museum focusing on bamboo and wooden slips, the Gansu Jiandu Museum boasts
5 . In the race to catch up with the changing time, we are forgetting how to live without the support of our phones, laptops, and tablets.
The first thing you need to do to unplug is to turn off your phone notifications. As soon as we hear a notification drop on our phones — whether it is something of importance or not — we are attracted to check it. When you’re not working and are not required to call, text, or return an email, turn off your phone (or put it on silent mode).
I know it’s hard to stay away from your phone when it keeps buzzing with incoming texts, calls, and emails.
One of the best ways that I believe can help you disconnect is being in nature.
| A．Keep track of how much time you’re spending on your phone. |
| B．This way you won’t be tempted and keep getting distracted. |
| C．Take a walk in the park near you or your garden without your phone. |
| D．When feeling bored, we often look for our phones to overcome our boredom. |
| E．Here are some simple ways you can disconnect and unplug for a more mindful living. |
| F．Therefore, setting a boundary on what to reply, and when to reply should be important. |
| G．Disconnecting from technology can be very helpful for quality time with your beloved ones. |
6 . Survivor bias (偏见，偏差), occurs when you tend to assess successful outcomes and disregard failures. This sampling bias paints a more promising or even misleading picture of reality.
Survivor bias is a sneaky problem that tends to slip into analyses unnoticed. For starters, it feels natural to emphasize success, whether it’s entrepreneurs, or survivors of a medical condition. We focus on and share these stories more than the failures.
Think about the famous college dropouts who became highly successful, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. These successful examples might make you think a college degree isn’t beneficial. However, that’s survivor bias at work! These famous individuals are at the forefront of media reports. You hear more about them because they are extraordinary. You’re not considering the millions of other college dropouts that aren’t rich and famous. You need to assess their outcomes as well.
Survivor bias has even occurred in medical studies about severe diseases. Younger, healthier, and more fit patients tend to survive a disease’s initial diagnosis more frequently. Hence, they are more likely to join medical studies. On the contrary, older, weaker patients are less likely to survive long enough to participate in studies. Consequently, these studies overestimate successful disease outcomes because they are less likely to include those who die shortly after diagnosis.
Undeniably, successful cases are usually more visible and easier to contact than unsuccessful cases. However, focusing on the high-performing successes and disregarding other cases introduces survivor bias. After all, you’re leaving out a significant part of the picture as it’s harder to collect data from the less successful members of a population. Incomplete data can affect your decision-making process. Put simply, survivor bias produces an inaccurate sample, causing you to jump to incorrect conclusions.
To minimize the impact of survivor bias, you should find ways to draw a representative sample from the population, not just a few of successful samples. That process might call for more expense and effort, but you’ll get better results.
1. What writing technique is used in Paragraphs 3 and 4?| A．Making comparisons. | B．Giving examples. |
| C．Describing facts. | D．Analyzing data. |
| A．You will take all factors into account before making a final analysis. |
| B．You will overestimate the failure rate so you may quit your project. |
| C．You will only have partial data and reach an incorrect conclusion. |
| D．You will be more likely to survive in unfavorable circumstances. |
| A．People tend to lose sight of the overall statistics. |
| B．People are unwilling to read unsuccessful stories. |
| C．Doctors don’t have enough expense to collect abundant samples. |
| D．The media should be responsible for kids’ dropping out of school. |
| A．Leave out the famous historic cases. |
| B．Collect a wide enough range of samples. |
| C．Focus on those most mentioned examples. |
| D．Select some successful and inspiring tales. |
7 . The most beloved bird in history may very well have been a 29-year-old pigeon by the name of Martha. It was the early 1900s, and Martha was at the height of her fame. Perched on her humble roost at the Cincinnati Zoo, she was an object of fascination to the thousands of visitors who lined up just to catch a glimpse. Martha may not have looked the part of an animal celebrity, but she was hardly average—in fact, she was the very definition of one of a kind. After the death of her companion George in 1910, Martha had become the world’s last-living passenger pigeon.
There was a time not long before when her kind accounted for more than a quarter of the birds in North America and may have been the most abundant bird species on the planet. Passenger pigeons used to travel at 60 miles an hour in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles long. Witnesses compared them to a train rumbling through a tunnel.
Ironically, the passenger pigeons’ very abundance may have spelled their doom. An agricultural pest and reliable source of protein, they became easy targets for hunters who killed them in the tens of thousands. In a matter of decades, a bird that once numbered in the billions was reduced to a few, and then, eventually, to one.
Martha, who’d grown up in captivity, had no offspring of her own. At 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, Martha fell from her perch, never to rise again—one of the rare occasions in which historians could identify the exact moment of a species’ extinction.
Of course, the real tragedy was that the loss of the passenger pigeon was neither surprising nor unique. For as long as the Earth has sustained life, it has also seen the permanent disappearance of life forms, the dinosaurs being a particularly extreme example. But Martha’s high-profile death trained national attention on an alarming new trend. Close to a thousand animal species alone have died off in the last 500 years, and the trend is only getting worse.
1. What caused the extinction of passenger pigeons?| A．The loss of their habitats. | B．The worsening of global warming. |
| C．The burning of fossil fuels. | D．Their nutritional value and threat to farming. |
| A．To illustrate we can do nothing to stop species extinction. |
| B．To show the extinction of a certain species is not a rare case. |
| C．To explain human activities are to blame for species extinction. |
| D．To stress immediate measures should be taken before it is too late. |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Confused. | C．Relieved. | D．Concerned. |
| A．The most beloved bird George died. |
| B．Birds are the best friends of human beings. |
| C．The tragic loss of the last passenger pigeon. |
| D．The most abundant bird species are endangered. |
8 . A brilliant theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer was tapped to head up a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as part of U.S. efforts to develop nuclear weapons. He succeeded — but would go on to advocate against developing even more powerful bombs.
Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer studied theoretical physics at both Cambridge University and the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he gained his doctorate at age 23. Soon the young physicist “Oppie” rubbed shoulders with the greatest scientific figures of his age, and his academic work advanced quantum theory and predicted everything from the neutron to the black hole.
After the United States joined the Allies in 1941, Oppenheimer was asked to participate in the top-secret Manhattan Project, whose aim was to develop an atomic weapon.
On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and others gathered at the Trinity test site south of Los Alamos for the world’s first attempted nuclear blast. Conducted in secret, the test worked. On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped two of the bombs Oppenheimer had helped develop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the night of the Hiroshima bombing, Oppenheimer was cheered by a crowd of fellow scientists at Los Alamos, and declared that his only regret was that the bomb hadn’t been finished in time to use against Germany.
Twenty years after the attacks on both cities in Japan, Oppenheimer appeared in a 1965 NBC News documentary called The Decision to Drop the Bomb. “We knew the world would not be the same,” he said onscreen. “A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture (印度梵经), ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
However, Oppenheimer opposed America’s attempts to develop a more powerful hydrogen bomb. Did he really live to regret helping develop the atomic bomb? No one knows. He doesn’t come into easy categories of pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or anything like that. He’s a complicated figure.
1. What does the underlined phrase “rubbed shoulders with” in Paragraph 2 mean?| A．Thought highly of. | B．Spent time with. |
| C．Taken the place of. | D．Made trouble with. |
| A．He got his doctor’s degree in the year 1930. |
| B．The atomic bomb he developed first struck Nagasaki. |
| C．He felt guilty when the bomb caused numerous deaths. |
| D．He was firmly against developing the hydrogen bomb. |
| A．News. | B．Fiction. |
| C．Biography. | D．Journal. |
| A．The Controversial Man behind the Atomic Bomb |
| B．The Most Brilliant Physicist in the 20th Century |
| C．How Oppenheimer Rewrote the History of WWII |
| D．How Oppenheimer Developed the Atomic Bomb |
9 . The time invested in kids learning how to cook is time well spent! From mixing and baking cookies to making and cooking fresh pasta, kids will be led by a professional chef throughout the entire class. With safety at the forefront, your chef will turn the kitchen into the classroom as kids learn valuable life skills, such as critical thinking, creativity and cooperation.
Classic Pasta for Kids $119 PER PERSONIn this interactive cooking class designed for kids, Chef Jordan will teach fundamental kitchen skills, including the art of pasta making, while creating a classic spaghetti dinner. This class is recommended for ages 5-15.
Kids’ Pasta-Making 101 $99 PER PERSONExplore the art of pasta-making in this hands-on cooking class for kids. Chef ShaSha will guide you by using fresh ingredients and authentic techniques to make a handful of kids’ favorite dishes. This class is recommended for ages 8-18.
Sushi Making for Kids $85 PER PERSONIn this hands-on cooking class intended for kids, Chef Christmas will guide you in making non-traditional sushi. The rolls you make will have the authentic taste and texture of traditional sushi, but with a unique shape! This class is recommended for ages 5-15.
Kids’ Baking Party $75 PER PERSONIn this hands-on baking class with Chef Adolf, your kids will be on their way to feeling like the finest of chefs. Chef Adolf will show them how to mix, beat and fold ingredients into eats that everyone will love at a kid’s birthday party. This class is recommended for ages 8-15.
1. Which class is suitable for a 17-year-old kid?| A．Classic Pasta for Kids. | B．Kids’ Baking Party. |
| C．Sushi Making for Kids. | D．Kids’ Pasta-Making 101. |
| A．Sushi made in this class has different shapes from traditional sushi. |
| B．Students can create personalized tastes from traditional sushi. |
| C．The class is offered for free if you sign for it with a friend. |
| D．The chef who teaches this class is just a kid of 15. |
| A．To educate kids to learn some basic cooking skills. |
| B．To inspire cooks to develop innovative cuisines for kids. |
| C．To advertise some fun cooking classes tailored for kids. |
| D．To inform readers of the arrangements of cooking classes. |
2、词数约110词。开头已给出，不计入总词数。
| Dear Li Hua, My friend Daisy’s birthday is coming. I am thinking about giving her some paper cut because she is interested in Chinese arts and crafts. I wonder if these two kinds of paper cut are suitable as her birthday gift. They are beautiful but I don’t know their meanings. If they’re not suitable, do you have any good suggestions? Besides, I’m afraid I can’t cut them well. Can you give me some help? Looking forward to your reply.  |
I’m glad your friend likes Chinese culture.
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Yours,
Li Hua
