3 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。

I begged my mom to let me make cookies by myself. Even though I had never attempted baking before, I was nine years old and my friend Emmie had been baking cupcakes by herself for a year. I was determined to prove that I could make it.

My brother, Caleb, laughed at the idea of me cooking alone, calling it a disaster. Having a big brother can be annoying. Despite his laughing, my mom agreed to let me try. She reminded me to take my time and be careful because I’d had some messy spills before I was nine.

I raced to the kitchen and went to work. I cracked eggs and put a cold stick of butter into the bowl. I turned on the mixer at medium speed—and whoa. Whoa. Whoa! What a disaster! I had to wipe butter off my face, then off the table and floor.

Caleb made fun of me again, calling me a mess. I chased him away with a spoon and turned back to the mixing bowl. I started again with softer butter. Referring to the recipe, I poured everything needed into the bowl and mixed it. After that, I put round batter (面糊) onto the cookie sheet and put it into the oven (烤箱). Within a minute, a fantastic smell filled the kitchen—the smell of cookie success!

I was going to prove that I was responsible. No more eye-rolling from my brother. No more “You’re too young” from my parents. I was grown up and in control.

I stared into the oven, and my heart sank. The neat, little balls had melted (融化) and overflowed to the edges of the cookie sheet. I pulled the pan out just as Caleb wandered back into the kitchen.

“What in the world?” He started to laugh. “Cookie soup?”

“You just be quiet,” I whispered, trying not to cry. “Just leave me alone.”

“How’s it going in there?” Dad called from the living room.

Caleb raised his eyebrows and bit his lip. I responded that everything was fine, pouring the melted batter into the bowl quickly.

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。
Paragraph 1: I picked up the directions, wondering what had gone wrong．
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Paragraph 2: I brought a plate of cookies into the living room for my parents．
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5 . You may have already seen robot waiters in restaurants: waist-high machines that can greet guests, lead them to their tables, deliver food and drinks and carry dirty dishes to the kitchen. But are they the future?

Many think they are the solution to the industry’s labor shortages. Sales of them have been growing rapidly in recent years, with tens of thousands now working in dining rooms. But others say they have a long way to go before they can replace humans. They can’t take orders, and many restaurants have steps and other physical challenges they can’t adapt to.

Still, the robots are increasing. Redwood City, Califomia-based Bear Robotics, introduced its service robot in 2021 and expects to have 10,000 used by the end of this year worldwide. The lack of labor sped up the adoption of robots globally. In the US, the restaurant industry employed 15 million people in 2022, but that was still 400,000 fewer than before the pandemic. In a recent survey, 62% of restaurant operators told the National Restaurant Association they don’t have enough employees to meet customer demand.

Public recognition of robot servers is already high in Asia. The US was slower to adopt robots, but some chains are now testing them. But not all chains have had success with robots. Chili’s introduced a robot server named Rita in 2020 and expanded the test to 61 US restaurants before abruptly stopping it last August. The chain found that Rita moved too slowly and got in the way of human servers. And 58% of guests surveyed said Rita didn’t improve their overall experience.

It’s expected that about 30% of restaurants will continue to have human servers and be considered more luxurious (豪华的), while the rest will rely on robots in the kitchen and in dining rooms. Economics are on the side of robots; the cost of human labor will continue to rise, but technology costs will fall. But that’s not a future everyone wants to see. “Humans don’t go to a full-service restaurant to be served by technology,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage. “They go for the experience of themselves and the people they care about being served by a human.”

1. What can we learn about the numbers in paragraph 3?

A．Robot waiters are a solution to labor shortages.

B．Robots play a more important role in restaurants.

C．Human beings are more likely to be out of work.

D．Restaurant owners prefer robot waiters to human waiters.

2. Why was Rita abandoned by restaurants?

A．It could not finish the task correctly.	B．It disturbed the dinners in the restaurant.
C．It added to the expense of the restaurant.	D．It caused trouble for its human colleagues.

3. What might Saru Jayaraman probably agree with?

A．Robot waiters have become a scenic spot in the restaurants.

B．Human waiters can’t be actually replaced by robot waiters.

C．The duties of robot and human waiters should be made clear.

D．Restaurants should balance the cost of robot and human labor.

4. What can be a suitable title for the text?

A．Are robot waiters the future?	B．What can a robot do for you?
C．Where can you find robot waiters?	D．Do robots bring convenience to us?

6 . Starting in the mid-2010s, the success of streaming services like Spotify, Tencent and Apple Music led the music industry into a period of steady income growth. But the rise of streaming hasn’t just transformed the business of music; it has changed the music as well.

In 1972, the Temptations hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, winning three Grammys, with a seven-minute version of the song “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”. Before the Temptations sing a word, an instrumental introduction plays for more than four minutes. If the group were in the studio today, the title chorus (副歌) would most likely have been featured much earlier in the song. That’s because music streaming services pay artists based on the number of plays each month, and to count as a play, a user must listen to the song past the 30-second mark. If a song you’ve never heard before takes a long time to get to the hook (旋律最好的部分), there is a good chance that you may simply hit the button to go to the next song. To keep the “skip rate (跳过率)” as low as possible, musical artists are increasingly moving a song’s hook to that initial 30-second sweet spot.

Every track that is listened to for more than 30 seconds counts as a play, but whether a listener makes it all the way through a song helps to determine whether a streaming service like Spotify will recommend similar songs in the future. For a musician, getting a song on Spotify’s popular Today’s Top Hits playlist means real money. A study by researchers at the University of Minnesota and the European Joint Research Centre found that songs on the list gained an average of 20 million streams, worth up to $163,000 in royalties (版税).

As a result, according to an analysis by blogger Michael Tauberg, the average length of hit songs has dropped by more than 30 seconds since 2000, when it was over four minutes. Nearly two-thirds of the songs that achieved the number one spot in the first half of 2021 were under three minutes long.

1. Why is the Temptations mentioned in paragraph 2?

A．To explain what made a song special in the past.

B．To show admiration for their musical achievements.

C．To illustrate the structure of popular songs in the past.

D．To introduce the changes in song structure brought about by streaming.

2. What is the result of a song taking a long time to get to the hook?

A．The artists will receive higher royalties.

B．The listeners are more likely to skip it.

C．It will be recommended to more users.

D．It will be more popular among listeners.

3. What contributes to the decreasing average length of hit songs?

A．Advance in music production technology.

B．The change in listeners’ musical preference.

C．The desire for higher streaming-based income.

D．Increased competition among streaming platforms.

4. What does the text mainly talk about?

A．How streaming changes the length of music.

B．How streaming services produce hit songs.

C．How streaming promotes the development of music.

D．How streaming influences our preference for music.

8 . Never Think You’re Too Old to Become a Beginner

As we head into a new year, there is one thing from the outgoing disastrous year we should carry forward and even deepen: the spirit of the beginner.

Many people, in the face of such disorder, decided that they wanted to learn new things. But there’s a warning: The older you are, the harder you’re going to have to work. There’s a happy twist (扭转), however:     1    , the faster they seem to learn — the more they become like younger adults.

How, then, to prepare ourselves to become better beginners? We can draw crucial guidance from a group of research subjects:     2    .

For adults, the lessons are clear.     3    . Babies spend roughly a third of their day for six solid months practicing walking. So don’t worry if you’re still terrible at tennis after a few months.

Babies also remind us that progress is often not a straight process. Babies seem to learn best when operating near the limits of their current skill level. In other words:     4    .

    5    . If it feels easy, you’re not learning. If you don’t learn to fail, you’ll fail to learn. So let “beginner” be your watchword for 2024. But watch for overreach in your resolutions.

A．None of this is easy

B．Babies learning to walk

C．One problem is that skills take time

D．Adults who have great achievements

E．The more older adults have experienced

F．The more learning that older adults take on

G．Always be at the edge of what you can’t currently do

9 . Caviar (鱼子酱) is typically associated with sturgeons swimming in the Caspian Sea, but the Mexican version is made from the tiny eggs of ahuautle, an insect also known as “bird fly”. For Juan, a farmer, cultivating and collecting the tiny insect eggs known as ahuautle is a way of life. “It means tradition,” said Juan, one of the only six people known to still harvest ahuautle. They fear they may be the last.

The painstaking collection of “Mexican caviar” is threatened by the drying out of Lake Texcoco, development around the lakeshore and decreasing interest in the ingredient among younger generations. The dish’s survival is seen as an example of “community resistance”, similar to the way in which inhabitants around Lake Texcoco have managed to preserve other traditions, festivals and ceremonies.

For Juan, it’s hard. Dressed in shorts and rubber boots, Juan walks with an effort through the calf-high waters to collect pine branches he has pushed into the muddy lakebed the week before. The branches serve as an anchor for the bird-fly bugs to deposit their eggs. After about two hours, Juan has gathered a pile of sticks covered with thousands of bird-fly eggs. He returns to the edge of the lake to lay the sticks out to dry in the sun, which can take several hours or days, depending on the weather.

“Eating this is like revisiting the past,” said restaurant owner Guerrero, 61. He says the flavor of the ahuautle reminds him of his childhood. But Guerrero acknowledges that “Mexican caviar” is at risk of disappearing because younger generations aren’t familiar with the dish, and ever-fewer people harvest it in the scarce remaining lakes where it is found.

Edday, an entomologist (昆虫学家), said there are more than 430 species of eatable insects in Mexico. He said native people living around the lakes adopted the insect eggs as a source of protein because prior to the Spanish conquest of 1521, they had few domesticated (驯养的) animals. But now, Edday said, the dish “is associated with the countryside, perhaps with poverty, as if it were an undesirable protein.”

1. What is a cause of the decline of the dish in Mexico?

A．Expansion of the lakeshore.	B．Difficulty in cooking the dish.
C．Young diners’ lack of interest.	D．Overexploitation of the ingredient.

2. Why did Juan push pine branches into the muddy lakebed?

A．To help collect ahuautle.	B．To help dry sticks in the sun.
C．To protect the edge of the lake.	D．To be an anchor for farmers working there.

3. What did Edday try to explain in the last paragraph?

A．Why ahuautle is a good source of protein.

B．Why Mexicans should give up eating insects.

C．Why ahuautle was popular in the past but not now.

D．Why Mexicans prefer to eat insects rather than animals.

4. What is the text mainly about?

A．A popular traditional pet in Mexico.	B．A way of harvesting ahuautle easily.
C．A current social phenomenon in Mexico.	D．An attempt to preserve Mexican tradition.

10 . When someone nearby yawns, we often feel as if we’ve lost bodily control. Then we start to yawn as well. It certainly seems that the behavior is contagious (有传染力的). Merely thinking about yawning can cause you to yawn.

So, why do we yawn in response to another person? It could be an evolutionary adaptation to display the same group behavior. Imagine a band of prehistoric humans, keeping watch through the night against enemies. If one of them starts to get sleepy, it’s likely the rest are getting sleepy as well. When the first person yawns, that signal makes everybody else do the same, raising the group’s overall vigilance (警戒) and safety.

Some research also points to a link between contagious yawning and the ability to understand and share the emotions of another person. In support of this link, a 2020 study found that people are more likely to catch the contagion among family and friends. The deeper the bonds, the deeper the yawns, the study suggested.

Others note, however, that a yawn doesn’t necessarily transmit the emotion that inspired it, perhaps undercutting the emotion-sharing theory. As psychologists Jorg Massen and Andrew Gallup wrote in a paper from 2017, “it seems rather unlikely that people suddenly become bored when they see someone yawn as a result of uninteresting stimuli (刺激物).”

Studies also show that the yawning contagion is limited to the most intelligent and social creatures. It seems natural to connect it to their well-developed mental architecture.

Beyond these theories, it’s worth noting that some researchers question whether yawns really are contagious. Psychologists Rohan Kapitány and Mark Nielsen have suggested that even if they aren’t, our ability in pattern recognition and confirmation bias could lead us to the wrong conclusions—we notice the few cases where yawns seem contagious and miss the far more numerous cases where yawns occur automatically.

According to Kapitány and Nielsen, additional research is needed to determine how contagious yawning really is and if it is contagious at all. As for how many yawns are spread in the course of that research, well, that’s something only time will tell.

1. Why does the author mention the prehistoric humans in paragraph 2?

A．To make a prediction.	B．To give supporting evidence.
C．To add background information.	D．To introduce an interesting topic.

2. What can we learn from the 2020 study?

A．Yawning can help to improve emotional health.

B．Yawning at the same time can boost relationships.

C．Yawns are more contagious between closer friends.

D．People like sharing emotions with family and friends.

3. What does the underlined word “undercutting” in paragraph 4 mean?

A．Weakening.

B．Advancing.

C．Confirming.

D．Explaining.

4. What is Kapitány and Nielsen’s attitude to the yawning contagion?

A．Unclear.

B．Positive.

C．Negative.

D．Objective.