1 . In the early days of covid-19, the tech industry was consumed by a sense of excitement. With billions of people locked down at home, work and play were shifting online. Many hoped that the new normal would spark a huge productivity boom as firms digitized and workers spent less time commuting. The excitement was most evident in stock-markets, where any firm related to this trend saw its share price surge. The tech-heavy NASDAQ rose by 88%.

The crazy has ended. Today the lockdown lunacy index(疯狂指数) — which includes Netflix, a streaming service; Peloton, a maker of fancy exercise bikes; Robin-hood, a stock-trading app; Shopify, and e-commerce platform; and Zoom, a videoconferencing firm - has fallen by more than 80% from its peak.

How worrying is this return to Earth? To be sure, some of it reflects gloomier prospects for the global economy. And it is disappointing that two years of digitization and remote work have not provided clear evidence of a productivity boom. Yet there are reasons still to be techno-optimistic. Much of the early enthusiasm may simply have been focused on the wrong types of firm. Though the pandemic darlings have fizzled, the shift towards ever greater digitization continues. The true winners are not the flashy consumer-tech firms, but the companies that provide the infrastructure to enable this shift.

Look beyond the boom and bust of consumer tech, and you see the real successes. The market for the infrastructure technology that underpins people’s daily lives, such as cloud computing, cyber-security and digital payments, is booming. The cloud-computing industry is expected to grow to almost $500bn this year, up from $243bn in 2019. Amazon’s cloud offering, the largest in the world, is still growing at 33% each year. It accounted for three-quarters of the firm’s operating income over the past 12 months, and is propping up the tech giant’s ailing e-commerce business. Its closest rivals are the cloud services of Microsoft and Google. Their annual sales are growing by 40% and 36%, respectively.

Cloudification has created new demands for cybersecurity, another tech winner. The combined revenue at the three largest listed cybersecurity firms has almost doubled since the start of the pandemic. Their market capitalisation has tripled, and has come down only a fraction since the start of the year. Digital payments are another bright spot, thanks to lockdowns and social distancing. Three-quarters of iPhone owners use Apply Pay, up from half in 2019, and nine out of ten American retailers now accept it as a payment method. Almost 200m people in India and China have used some form of digital payment for the first time since the onset of covid.

The bubble may have burst on the pandemic’s darlings, but the drumbeat of digitization continues. The less obvious technologies that provide the underlying infrastructure for the shift are the true beneficiaries of covid. Whether these will fuel a productivity boost one day remains to be seen. But there was more going on during the pandemic than lockdown crazy.

1. According to the article, which of the following statements is TRUE?

A．Tech industry predicted a productivity boom in the lockdown, which proved true.

B．The share prices of customer-tech companies sharply rocketed and then declined.

C．Robinhood is a tech company specializaing in meeting demands for cybersecurity.

D．The prospects of the tech industry are too gloomy to be optimistic.

2. What does the underlined word “fizzled” in paragraph 3 mean?

A．emerged

B．benefited

C．failed

D．sustained

3. What can be inferred from the last three paragraphs?

A．Digital payment wasn’t available to Indians at all until the start of covid.

B．In the past year, Amazon has mainly depended on its e-commerce business of profits.

C．In the shift of working online, cloudification is no longer optional!

D．The market capitalization of three largest listed cybersecurity firms has kept rising.

4. What is the best title of the article?

A．Techno-pessimists Rule the Lockdown.

B．The Lockdown Index Sounds the Alarm.

C．Economic Depression Is Arriving.

D．Tech Losers and Winners of the Pandemic.

2 . ________prices which make owning and running many electric vehicles as cheap as fossilfuel alternatives, and a new path will be________.

A．Set … opened	B．Setting … opened
C．To set … opening	D．To setting … opening

4 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use ONE word that best fits each blank.

Coping With the Sunday Scaries

A few years ago, I was in the kitchen of a friend’s house preparing a meal. When we all sat down to eat, my friend’s wife wolfed down her supper and then disappeared into another room to do some work. He smiled and said, “Sunday nights are the new Monday mornings around here.”

I was surprised at the time. Now, I find myself     1    (behave) in exactly the same manner. Every time I open up my calendar on Sunday evening, a subtle sense of dread comes over me. I feel as     2     I am behind before the week has even begun.

Apparently, my Sunday-night anxieties and Monday-morning blues are not unique to me alone. A new study led by Ilke Inceoglu from the University of Exeter found that this phenomenon often takes the form of mental concerns about the week ahead, as well as feelings of nervousness and difficulty with sleeping. “It’s as if your mind moves away from     3     has been experienced over the weekend as the general sense of relaxation or enjoyment, and quickly shifts towards whatever worries you have about everything you’ve got to do in the work week ahead,” said one of Inceoglu’s respondents.

Inceoglu found that these Sunday scaries were particularly pronounced     4     people who frequently checked their emails during the weekend, had tasks left over from the previous week, and had unreasonably high expectations of themselves. These matters seem     5    (make) worse as a result of the pandemic, where the rise of working from home     6    (blur) the boundaries between work and leisure.

What should we do about the “Sunday scaries”? Researchers have offered some useful suggestions that     7     help us make Monday less depressing. One is to change     8     you think about the weekend. One U.S. study found that when participants were asked to treat their weekend as a mini-vacation, they tended to do more cheerful activities and returned to work on Monday satisfied with their jobs.     9     second way is to redesign our Monday so that it has some of the features that make us feel good during the weekend. Introducing simple changes, such as starting the day with something you are good at, setting aside a little unstructured time where you are able to do what you want, or setting up a lunchtime date with     10     you find enjoyable to be around, could make all the difference.

5 . Technology is connecting us in ways never seen before in human history. How will that change our societies, our relationships, ourselves?

That’s the question that ________ Michael Wesch. The last time communications technology had such a wide-ranging impact was 500 years ago with the invention of the printing press. Being able to print texts instead of writing them by hand ________ the world. It changed the way people could communicate with each other. Suddenly, multiple copies of books could be made quickly and easily. As more books became ________, ideas spread much more rapidly. But what will be the impact of digital technology, the most powerful ________ tool we have ever seen?

Michael Wesch argues that communication is ________ to our relationships, so it follows that a change in the way we communicate will change those relationships. Wesch, a university professor, explores digital communication in his work. ________, Wesch and his students look at social networking and other interactive Internet tools like YouTube. When people create and share personal videos on YouTube, anyone anywhere can watch them. Wesch says that this ________ some people feeling a sort of deep connection with the entire world. But it’s not a ________ relationship; it’s not the same as the connection you feel with a member of your family. In fact, as Wesch says, it’s a relationship without any real ________ that you can turn off at any moment. So does it make sense to talk about a YouTube “community”?

Wesch himself ________ the impact of digital media when he created and posted his own short video on YouTube. It attracted immediate attention and has been viewed millions of times. In his video, he tells us that webpages get 100 billion hits a day and that a new blog is started every half second. He asks us to ________ the power of this technology and how we use it. What could we do with it? What is its potential?

________ the university, in the real world, Wesch believes it’s crucial for people to be able to use the new environment of digital media for the greatest possible impact. “It’s the ________ of our times that we are now so connected we fail to see it. I want to believe that technology can help us see relationships and global connections in ________ new ways. It’s pretty amazing that I have this little box sitting on my desk through which I can talk to any one of a billion people. And yet do any of us really ________ all the potential that’s there?

1.

A．awakens

B．interests

C．dominates

D．terrifies

2.

A．separated

B．oppressed

C．overestimated

D．transformed

3.

A．outdated

B．original

C．cheap

D．available

4.

A．connecting

B．designing

C．printing

D．copying

5.

A．opposed

B．attached

C．possible

D．fundamental

6.

A．In addition

B．In particular

C．In summary

D．In detail

7.

A．leads to

B．sorts out

C．takes down

D．makes for

8.

A．healthy

B．virtual

C．real

D．working

9.

A．choice

B．reference

C．responsibility

D．downside

10.

A．experienced

B．avoided

C．underrated

D．disliked

11.

A．turn to

B．think about

C．make up

D．set aside

12.

A．Outside

B．Opposite

C．Against

D．Inside

13.

A．debate

B．end

C．tragedy

D．achievement

14.

A．pointless

B．positive

C．personal

D．peaceful

15.

A．damage

B．affect

C．use

D．forget

6 . In the past three years, the homeroom teacher has witnessed many cases of her students ______ by failures.

A．to be frustrated	B．having been frustrated
C．be frustrated	D．frustrated

7 . About two thousand five hundred years ago the first houses appeared on the fat tops of the hills in ________ is now northern New Mexico.

A．where

B．which

C．what

D．that

10 . —Why am I so slow at doing the cloze test?
—I guess you didn’t realize the use       the contexts.

A．you should have made of	B．you must have made from
C．from which you could have made	D．out of which you need make