Recently, the idea that study can change one’s destiny became
Some netizens
Yet behind their remarkable achievements,
Anyway, no matter what happens, one should not lose confidence in themselves, nor give up studying because “opportunity always
2 . How to Develop a Good Personality
There isn’t such a thing as having an objectively good personality. Everyone likes different types of people. The key is building a personality you can feel proud of and confident in. Developing your personality will take time and consistent effort.
Figure out what “personality” means to you.
Remain happy and cheerful. Try to see the joy everywhere. Laugh with others, but not at them.
Keep an open mind. One important part of having a good personality is willing to change your worldview. Listen to others and be willing to change your mind. Don’t pass judgment on other people just because they act differently.
Develop modesty. You could be the most talented person in the world, but if you don’t have any modesty, you probably won’t have a good personality. Nobody likes a big head.
| A．Try to stay calm in tense situations |
| B．Everyone admires someone who is enjoyable and friendly. |
| C．Resolve problems quickly when you are in tense situations. |
| D．Keeping an open mind will allow you to make many new friends. |
| E．It doesn’t matter whether you are born with a good or bad personality. |
| F．Most people define personality as the collection of mental and behavioral qualities |
| G．You will need to form new beliefs and put them into action until they become habits. |
3 . Millions of us grab a coffee on our way to work. And when we do, it probably comes served in a branded cardboard coffee cup. Once the coffee is done, just throw the cup into a recycling bin and forget about it. The cup will be taken away and turned into a new one for you to use again tomorrow. The system, works, right?
There’s a hitch. In the UK, we throw away an estimated 2.5 billion coffee cups every year. Unfortunately, despite being recyclable in theory, in practice only very few of them are dealt with in a sustainable way. This makes them an obstacle. What breaks the plan is the layer of polyethylene (聚乙烯) that makes the cup waterproof, and the lid (盖子), which is most often made of polyethylene. As a result, most of the cups end up non-recyclable.
But there are efforts underway to solve this problem. One company, Biome Bioplastics, has come up with a fully recyclable cup that uses natural materials, such as potato starch, as waterproofing. Mr. Mines, its CEO, believes that this is the first time bioplastic has been used for disposable cups and lids that have to cope with hot liquid. And they’re still fully recyclable.
Another accessible solution has been proposed by Frugalpac company, who creatively used a cup with a lightly-attached plastic lining (杯内衬). “This can be easily separated during the recycling and offers a more practical solution’ than changing our current recycling habits,” says Frugalpac’s founder Martin Myerscough.
Safia Qureshi says India has provided the inspiration for her solution. She puts forward that we use returnable and reusable cups, which are tracked and collected by her company Cup Club. They will be responsible for collecting, washing and redistributing the clean cups to sellers.
One final example of thinking comes from Cupffee, a Bulgaria company who has combined cereals to form a cup which can be eaten once the drink is finished. It is apparently sweet and crisp, can hold a coffee for up to 40 minutes and will biodegrade (生物降解) within weeks.
Whether any of these innovative ideas are a perfect fit for this issue, only time will tell. It’s possible that a better solution has yet to come, though it may not be long in coming. All it may require is a little more thinking outside the box…or should that be coffee cup?
1. What does the underlined word “hitch” mean in para.2?| A．Solution. | B．Problem. | C．Devotion. | D．Exception. |
| A．Meaningless | B．Unrealistic. | C．Revolutionary. | D．Harmful. |
| A．Cupffee produced cereals that taste sweet and crisp. |
| B．Cupffee produced a cup holding a coffee for more than 40 minutes. |
| C．Frugalpac company used a new cup to change the current recycling habits. |
| D．Frugalpac company used a new lining to make recycling separation simpler. |
| A．Innovations on green coffee cups. | B．Recycling coffee cups in the UK. |
| C．Introduction on enterprises in coffee industry. | D．The significance of biodegrade of coffee cups. |
4 . Stacks of cash totaling over 11 million yuan were neatly arranged on a table in a farmyard. The money was the year-end bonuses that Ling Jihe, a rural entrepreneur in Anyi county, Jiangxi province, was going to distribute to his contract farmers on Monday. Li Laxiu and his wife Luo Qiuxiang, who cultivated 40 hectares of rice fields, received the largest share of 313,590 yuan from their employer Ling.
“Li, how does it feel to be the top bonus receiver?” asked the other farmers. “Absolutely thrilled. This is all thanks to Ling’s efforts and leading from the front,” said Li. This year marks the 13th consecutive year that Ling has handed out year-end bonuses to the farmers managing his fields and the total distributed bonuses have accumulated to 54 million yuan.
Since returning to his hometown to start agriculture business, he has not only built entrepreneurial success, but also brought sizable fortune to the local farmers. In 2010, Ling set up an agricultural company and rented land from local farmers, employing them for land cultivation. To enhance productivity and profitability, he has adopted modern agricultural management practices and integrated advanced technologies into field production.
Motivating his employees, Ling divided the contracted land into sections and assigned each farmer couple the responsibility for cultivating and managing a designated area. While receiving a monthly salary of 5,000 yuan during regular months, they were rewarded with bonuses at the year-end based on how much the yields surpassed production targets. In 2018, he formed a specialized agricultural service team to mechanize tasks such as seeding, planting, pest control, harvest, and drying. This shift allowed farmers to focus on field management. Among them is a drone team consisting of 44 members. “In the past, my parents spent entire days laboring with heavy pesticide sprayers, covering just one or two mu. Now, I use drones for fertilizing and spraying pesticides, covering three to five hundred mu in a single day,” said Wang Yesheng, a post-2000s drone flyer.
Over the years, Ling has also introduced high-quality seeds, upgraded agricultural facilities, collaborated with research institutions, built high-standard fields and trained professional farmers. According to Ling, through pursuing modern agricultural practices and innovative management, rural revitalization holds promising prospects, ensuring food security and boosting income for farmers. “This year, I aim to expand rice field by over 400 hectares and engage more farmers in my modern agriculture business,” said Ling. Until now, Ling’s company has contracted 4000 hectares of farmland and hired over300 farmers with one hundred more expressing interest in joining.
1. What is the focus of the article?| A．The celebration of the local village. |
| B．The declining profits in the agriculture industry. |
| C．The challenges of modern agricultural practices. |
| D．The success of an entrepreneur and his bonus distribution. |
| A．Distributing 11 million yuan year-end bonuses to farmers. |
| B．Building high-standard fields and engaging in rural revitalization. |
| C．Deploying 44-member drone teams and introducing high-quality seeds. |
| D．Contracting land and integrating advanced technologies into field production. |
| A．A fixed monthly salary. |
| B．Expanded rice field and hiring more farmers. |
| C．Year-end bonuses based on exceeding production targets |
| D．The use of advanced technology in seeding and planting |
| A．Drones make farming easier and more entertaining. |
| B．There is a concern about the environmental impact of drones. |
| C．The use of drones has been ineffective and has led to lower yields. |
| D．The use of drones has significantly improved the efficiency of farming. |
5 . British office workers are spending a total of 12 hours a day glued to a screen —putting their eyes at risk. According to a new research, eight in 10 office workers believe their eyesight is suffering as a direct result of too much screen time, with 88%experiencing tired eyes. More than a quarter of office workers have to enlarge the word size on their mobile phone so they can read it clearly and half of them admit they’re forced to amplify the images to see them clearly. Meanwhile, 28 percent regularly squint at the screen —all of which are apparent signs of presbyopia(老花眼).
“Our eyes are not designed to be fixed on a single object for a long period of time, especially smaller format laptops, tablets or smart devices. They may feel uncomfortable, sore, tired and even start to itch or burn. In rare cases, dry eyes syndrome can lead to more serious eye issues,” says Giles Edmonds, clinical services director at Specsavers.
Dry eye syndrome is a condition where the eyes do not make enough tears, or the tears evaporate too quickly. If appropriate measures aren’t taken, this may lead to conjunctivitis or inflammation of the cornea.
The good news is that there are some simple solutions to prevent eye strain and stimulation, and preserve your eye health overall.
Rest your eyes: Follow the 20:20:20 rule, looking up from your screen every 20 minutes and look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.
Adjust your workstation: Change your screen settings to ensure that the brightness and contrast are balanced correctly. Also, be mindful of how your workstation is positioned. Adjust your screen so it is15-20 degrees below eye level and around 50-70 cm away from the eyes and make sure your room is properly lit to avoid squinting.
Reduce glare: Reflections on your computer screen can cause glare and lead to eye strain. Try reducing this by attaching an anti-glare screen to your laptop to avoid external light shining onto the screen.
1. What can be inferred from the data in paragraph 1?| A．The phone screen should be enlarged in order to be seen clearly. |
| B．The signs of presbyopia among British office workers are common. |
| C．The word size and image on the phone are too small to be seen clearly. |
| D．Many British office workers have eyesight problems caused by long screen time. |
| A．Disapproving | B．Supportive. | C．Objective. | D．Indifferent. |
| A．To follow the 20:20:20 rule. | B．To reduce a glare screen. |
| C．To adjust the screen setting correctly. | D．To make the workstation well-placed. |
| A．To give suggestions about how to protect eyes. |
| B．To explain a reason why protecting eyes is important. |
| C．To warn people not to stare at the screen for a long time. |
| D．To state a fact that a long period of screen time does harm to eyes. |
6 . Many of us have entertained the idea of learning a foreign language. Here are a few examples, ranked in order of the number of hours it takes the average English speakers to master them from lowest to highest:
●Easiest（about 600 hours of study）
Want to have no trouble fitting in on the streets of Paris? You will make it after just 600 hours of study. The popular Latin languages —Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese —require about 600 hours of study to achieve “general professional proficiency” in speaking and reading. They share many words with English, but differ significantly in meanings.
●German（750 hours）
Interested in reading Karl May’s “Wild West” series in its original language? You’ll need to spend750 hours mastering German first. With nouns that are masculine, feminine and neutral, verbs that are given various different forms and an extremely strict sentence arrangement, German may appear impossible to start with. But pronunciation and spelling is straightforward and once you learn the —admittedly many —rules, that’s it. German teachers used to joke that it takes you a year to say, “I’m travelling on the bus,” but once you’re on that bus,it’s plain sailing.
●Greek（1,100 hours）
Modern Greek is maybe the easiest language to learn that uses a different alphabet. Because Greek is also a language that’s contributed numerous words to English. Indeed, in 1957,Xenophon Zolotas, the then governor of the Bank of Greece, gave two speeches to the IMF that contained just Greek loanwords apart from the unavoidable basic English.
●Arabic（2,200 hours）
There’s an interesting story about a pharmaceutical（制药）company that advertised painkiller with three pictures. The left picture depicted a woman with a headache. The middle one showed hers wallowing the pill and the right one had her smiling after the pain had disappeared. It worked everywhere except in the Arab world, which read it from right to left.
It takes the average native English speaker a whopping 2,200 hours to become proficient in Arabic. But who can resist a language with eleven words for love, five degrees of swearing and close to 100words describing a camel?
1. Who is this passage intended for?| A．German speakers. | B．Greek speakers. | C．English speakers. | D．Arabic speakers |
| A．Greek. | B．German | C．Spanish. | D．French. |
| A．The way it advertises. | B．The habit of reading. |
| C．The time to master it. | D．The expressions to say love. |
1. What is Instagram probably?
| A．A restaurant free of charge. |
| B．A campaign of “Food for Life”. |
| C．A social network platform for sharing photos. |
| A．Opposed | B．Interested. | C．Confused. |
| A．To attract more customers. |
| B．To reward the regular customers. |
| C．To create a new social media trend. |
| A．Passion for photography. |
| B．Ways of payment |
| C．Healthy eating habits. |
1. What do we know about the woman’s mother?
| A．She is hard to please. | B．She is good at cooking. | C．She has almost everything. |
| A．Chinese tea. | B．Wine glasses | C．Some eggs |
| A．A teapot | B．A frying pan | C．A pair of glasses. |
| A．$10.45． | B．$24． | C．$45． |
1. What does the man mainly do in his spare time?
| A．He learns a language. | B．He plays the piano. | C．He does some sports. |
| A．Lack of time. | B．Loss of interest. | C．A leg injury |
| A．She will prepare the food. |
| B．She dislikes going on a picnic. |
| C．She is worried about the weather. |
