1 . Barbara, 70, and me, at 71, have swum together for at least 50 years. We swim in a quiet cove (小海湾). It’s home to seagulls, a duck or two, and kayaks (独木舟) on occasion. The difficult summer drought of 2021 brought a burning sun that warmed the water. As the drought eased and the water cooled in late August, we decided to keep swimming. We have both read Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, a fine book about cold-water swimming. We challenged ourselves to swim for as long as possible through September and into October.
I have long loved swimming, though the fear of being seen as fat has dogged me. I am one of those female bodies poorly displayed in bathing suits. Cold-water swimming deepened my sense of well-being and let me use my body. It became a ritual Barbara and I embraced as swimming sisters. When she returned to the United States immediately after our Canadian Thanksgiving, I did not know how I could continue our cold-water tradition. I wasn’t prepared to freeze alone.
But, I had to swim; there were larger commitments I should stick to. In the summer, we planned to cross from the cove to an island across the lake. I had to stay fit. We also planned to host a cold-water swimming race for locals in the fall. We would make it an annual event, improving our strength and endurance (耐力) so that, in our 80s, we might swim through October and into November.
With these plans in mind, I joined my local city pool. I had not been in a public pool for about 30 years. But my body said swim, my brain said swim and my heart, could not let go. So I went anyway.
I am swimming. I am alive to my love of the water, alive to my promise for the spring and the summer that will come. I intend to step back into the lake in May, and through September and October with Barbara. We are perfectly matched in our devotion, and increasingly aware of the miracle of being able-bodied enough to share the cold-water wonder side by side.
1. Why was the book Why We Swim mentioned in the first paragraph?| A．It guided the author to learn to swim. |
| B．It analyzes the advantages of swimming. |
| C．It is the author’s favorite book about swimming. |
| D．It partly contributed to the author and Barbara’s common interest. |
| A．Promises . | B．Preparations . | C．Requirements . | D．Opportunities . |
| A．She went to a gym to improve her strength. |
| B．She became a member of the local public pool. |
| C．She swam across the lake to the island on her own. |
| D．She participated in a local cold-water swimming race. |
| A．To describe her friendship with Barbara. |
| B．To express her passion for cold-water swimming. |
| C．To recommend people to go swimming to keep fit. |
| D．To explain how she overcame her fear of swimming in public places. |
Over the empty streets—over the forum— far and wide —with
Behind every book is a man, behind the man is the race, and
Its ashy rocks,now dark,now light,told a story of past eruptions that
（1）说明你未来希望从事的职业；
（2）你选择该职业的原因；（从社会，个人等角度）
（3）你打算为之做何准备。
注意：（1）词数不少于100；
（2）可适当加入细节，使内容充实、行文连贯；
（3）开头已给出，不计入总词数。
Hello everyone,
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you.
6 . As the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Jessica Pels is responsible for managing the content of one of the world’s largest young women’s media brands. Pels has ambitiously navigated her career to the top role relatively quickly, but the path she took wasn’t traditional.
Pels learnt ballet as a child and found her way to New York City dancing for a summer, but eventually gave up dance when she knew she “wasn’t good enough to be a star”. She didn’t give up her dream of working in the big city, though. Pels attended a film school at New York University and as a sophomore (大学二年级), got her first internship at The New Yorker. After graduation in 2008, many brands were in a hiring freeze. But Pels was not affected. She got a job doing communications for a charity.
Six months into her first job, Pels got a job at Glamour Magazine to work for the Editor-in-Chief Cindy Levy. She would turn this first assistant role into her career, and finally found her way to Cosmopolitan, where she became the youngest editor-in-chief in the magazine’s history.
Reflecting on her career and the worst advice she’s ever received, Pels said it was “to say yes to everything”. It was a habit she had to learn to break. And while she acknowledges the importance of seizing opportunities, she doesn’t think that strategically saying “no” would have been a damage to her career.
She remembers the conversation with her boss Kate Lewis that changed her perspective on over-committing. “I had just started at Marie Claire as the digital director, and she said, ‘I worry you’re going to burn out because you’re saying yes to everything and you are acting in such an aggressive way, and you need to take a step back and prioritize.’ And that really changed my life. I thought that was an incredible career moment.”
1. Why did Jessica Pels give up dancing?| A．She wasn’t eager to be a star. |
| B．She didn’t want to practice hard. |
| C．She didn’t think she was a gifted dancer. |
| D．She wanted to take an untraditional career. |
| A．She lost confidence in her future. |
| B．She gave up her hobby of dancing. |
| C．She was employed at The New Yorker. |
| D．She succeeded in landing herself a job. |
| A．She always refused to help others. |
| B．She didn’t seize opportunities in time. |
| C．She didn’t know how to ask for advice. |
| D．She seldom refused others’ requests. |
| A．Creative and generous. | B．Ambitious and determined. |
| C．Humorous and confident. | D．Considerate and energetic. |
7 . Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in medicine.
“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand (承受) as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable (可注射的) material strong enough for the job," says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.
The team, led by Professor Luc Mongeau and Assistant Professor Jianyu Li, developed a new injectable hydrogel (水凝胶) for wound repair, which is a type of biomaterial that provides room for cells to live and grow. Once injected into the body, the biomaterial forms a stable structure allowing live cells to grow or pass through to repair the injured organs.
“The results are promising, and we hope that one day the new hydrogel will be used to restore the voice of people with damaged vocal cords," says Guangyu Bao.
The scientists tested the durability of their hydrogel in a machine they developed to copy the extreme biomechanics of human vocal cords. Vibrating (振动) at 120 times a second for over 6 million cycles, the new biomaterial remained undamaged while other standard hydrogels broken into pieces, unable to deal with the stress of the load.
“We were incredibly excited to see it worked perfectly in our test. Before our work, no injectable hydrogels possessed both high porosity and toughness at the same time. To solve this issue, we introduced a pore-forming polymer to our formula (配方),”says Guangyu Bao.
The innovation opens new ways of making progress for other applications like tissue engineering. The team is also looking to use the hydrogel technology to create lungs to test COVID-19 drugs.
1. Why did the researchers develop the new biomaterial?| A．To experience a journey. | B．To repair wound. |
| C．To represent an advance. | D．To replace organs. |
| A．It is heavier. | B．It is more breakable. |
| C．It is changeable. | D．It is more injectable. |
| A．Make artificial organs for drug test. |
| B．Try hard to increase its toughness. |
| C．Apply it to the cure of COVID-19. |
| D．Adjust their formula to improve it. |
| A．To show his respect to the researchers. |
| B．To stress the importance of innovation. |
| C．To promote the sales of a new hydrogel. |
| D．To introduce a newly- developed material. |
8 . American Express Gold: Best "non-travel" travel card
Why it's great in one sentence: The American Express Gold card earns tons of valuable Amex travel points on practically all the food-related purchases you're making even when you' re not traveling, and the credits available on the card nearly offset (抵消) its annual fee.
This card is right for: People who can use all of the card's various credits and who spend significant money at restaurants, on food delivery services or at U.S. supermarkets while they' re not on the road.
Highlights:
First, with the Amex Gold, you'll earn 4 points for every dollar you spend on restaurants worldwide, and on up to $25,000 in annual purchases at U.S. supermarkets (1 point per dollar afterwards). Most food delivery services count as “restaurants" on this card, so that means the vast majority of your food purchases will earn 4x points, regardless of how you're eating.
You'll also earn 3 points per dollar when you book airfare directly with an airline, so if you're looking to jump on any sales for flights later in the year, you can pay for them with the Amex Gold and earn extra points on those as well.
The points earned on this card are American Express Membership Rewards points, which are extremely useful. You can redeem (兑取现金) them directly for flights via Amex Travel at 1 cent each, but if you put in some extra effort and research, you can potentially get much more value from them by transferring them to any of Amex's 21 airline and hotel partners, which include Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, Marriott and many more.
1. What can we know about the American Express Gold card?| A．It requires very little annual fee. |
| B．It has a link with food purchases. |
| C．It is targeted at delivery services. |
| D．It is right for restaurant managers. |
| A．100,000. | B．100,800. | C．103,200. | D．400,000. |
| A．Change them into money to buy food. |
| B．Transfer guests from airlines to hotels. |
| C．Purchase services in suggested airlines. |
| D．Make some extra effort and do research. |
9 . Artificial intelligence is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, which influences education, criminal justice, hiring and welfare, But so far the industry has escapedregulation (管理), despite affecting the lives of billions of people, even when its products are potentially harmful.
The COVID-19 pandemic has sped this up. Many Al companies are now promoting emotion recognition tools (ERTs) for monitoring remote workers. These systems map the “micro-expressions”in people’s faces from their video cameras. Then they predict internal emotional states drawn from a list of supposedly universal categories: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. However, there is scientific doubt whether emotional states are accurately detected at all. “It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, or sadness from a frown,” a 2019 review stated.
Resistance to this highly controversial (有争议的) technology is growing; the influential.
Brookings Institute suggested ERTs be banned completely from use by law. The European Union becomes the first to attempt a proposal to regulate AI, but the draft AI act has its problems. It would ban most “real-time” biometric ID (生物识别) systems — but fails to define what exactly real-time means.
Clearly, we need far stronger protections and controls that address such harmful effects on society. However, too many policymakers fall into the trap of “enchanted determinism”: the belief that AI systems are magical and superhuman — beyond what we can understand or regulate, yet decisive and reliable enough to make predictions about life-changing decisions. This effect drives a kind of techno-optimism that can directly endanger people’s lives. For example, a review in the British Medical Journal looked at 232 machine-learning algorithms (算法) for predicting outcomes for COVID-19 patients. It found that none of them were fit for clinical use. “I fear that they may have harmed patients,” said one of the authors.
Many countries have strict regulations and thorough testing when developing medicines and vaccines. The same should be true for AI systems, especially those having a direct impact on people’s lives.
1. What can be inferred from paragraph 2?| A．The COVTD-19 pandemic has sped up the regulation of AI. |
| B．The internal emotional states are only limited to six basic categories. |
| C．There is no reliable link between facial expressions and true feelings. |
| D．People’s micro-expressions accurately reveal their internal emotions. |
| A．To show EU’s resistance to AI technology. |
| B．To show the difficulty in regulating AI. |
| C．To prove AI technology should be banned. |
| D．To prove the act is completely ineffective. |
| A．It shakes people’s confidence in technology. |
| B．It enables people to correctly predict future. |
| C．It misleads policymakers in making decisions. |
| D．It helps predict outcomes for COVID-19 patients. |
| A．AI: Products in Demand |
| B．AI: Strict Rules in Place |
| C．AI: Tight Control in Need |
| D．AI: Technology in Danger |
10 . A family visited the public elementary school where I taught students with a listening defect(缺点，缺陷). They said they would
After a few weeks with Katherine, I found her a very
One day Katherine got off the bus and stood in front of the school
That day Katherine discovered the
| A．look into | B．refer to | C．move to | D．travel around |
| A．thankful | B．upset | C．afraid | D．pleased |
| A．opinions | B．values | C．worries | D．hopes |
| A．sound | B．wish | C．face | D．speech |
| A．dull | B．naughty | C．rude | D．bright |
| A．success | B．struggle | C．hobby | D．reason |
| A．introduce | B．command | C．interest | D．amaze |
| A．sweets | B．towels | C．pencils | D．toys |
| A．refuse | B．expect | C．manage | D．decide |
| A．hearing | B．waiting | C．reading | D．crying |
| A．common sense | B．sign language | C．oral English | D．science knowledge |
| A．street | B．bus | C．office | D．house |
| A．read | B．wrote | C．shouted | D．learned |
| A．Strangely | B．Unexpectedly | C．Immediately | D．Unluckily |
| A．power | B．future | C．nature | D．style |
