1 . Gratitude is beneficial to both the one giving and the one receiving.
Instead of getting mad at others, show them gratitude. Make an effort to communicate more effectively instead of being critical. When you are having a hard day at work, take a break and remember some of the good days that you’ve had that month.
Research shows that people who express gratitude have a more positive outlook on life, better health and less stress: they are more likely to forgive; and they have stronger relationships.
To make a gratitude jar, find a decorative vase or fish bowl and start recording all of your happy memories and events throughout the year. Keep some decorative paper close so that you can jot (草草记下) these memories down and place them in the jar.
| A．You shouldn’t be too critical. |
| B．Don’t forget that it is only a bad day, not a bad life. |
| C．Be creative when writing down what you are grateful for. |
| D．There are many reasons for which to express your gratitude. |
| E．Don’t forget life’s surprises: unexpected events, visitors, etc. |
| F．Instead of using a gratitude journal, I started using a gratitude jar. |
| G．When you are having a bad day, you can reach into your gratitude jar. |
1. What does Sean do?
| A．A farmer. | B．A student. | C．A businessman. |
| A．He bought a land. | B．He did some research. | C．He created a website. |
| A．Six weekends. | B．Two weeks. | C．Within a week. |
| A．How to run a farm well. | B．A new type of farming. | C．Starting a farm. |
3 . The more you meditate and achieve mindfulness, the better you’ll feel. There are many free meditation apps that offer guided sessions, calming playlists.
HeadspaceThis app is simple and approachable for meditation beginners. Most of the free sessions focus on teaching the users how to meditate and easing them into the practice, while also acknowledging that meditation can be difficult. Yet to get into the really good stuff, you need to pay for the full membership.
Insight TimerThe app offers a multitude of meditation bells and calming musical notes during self-guided meditations. Featuring a variety of professional instructors and courses, Insight Timer also offers more contents for free users than other apps. Although the free option is extensive, the premium version (高级版) offers courses, downloadable meditations, night mode, and daily insights.
Meditation StudioThe app groups all its free meditations together, so it’s easy to use it without paying. These meditations run from 5 to 30 minutes and are available for download, a feature that other apps typically reserve for premium members. The number of free contents, however, is limited and included mostly basics. The design of the app is also relatively plain.
Breethe: Meditation & SleepA nice feature about Breethe is the calming background music that plays while the app is open, even without opening a meditation or music. Breethe offers a lot of sleep contents, including visualizations and bedtime stories. The app does offer a few 7-day courses for free, but the majority (1,000-plus meditations) is locked behind the paywall.
1. Which app is completely free of charge?| A．Headspace. | B．Insight Timer. |
| C．Meditation Studio. | D．Breethe: Meditation & Sleep. |
| A．Courses from professional coaches. |
| B．Advanced instructions of meditation. |
| C．Bedtime stories and calming background music. |
| D．Guidelines on how to get into meditation at the beginning. |
| A．They have a night mode set. | B．They provide contents on sleep. |
| C．They have calming background music. | D．They offer free contents of the same period. |
4 . If sales generally feel hard to resist, the sale in front of Arron Schurevich was the ultimate test: a new car just like the one he’d loved. And it was more than a 20% discount. “I figured that I would be a fool not to take advantage of that,” says Schurevich. After he drove the car off the lot, the deal turned sour. The brand-new car quickly needed repairs. Schurevich now jokes that he paid a tax for being a fool.
Why is it so hard for the human brain to resist a discount? Spotting something you’d like to buy activates your brain’s reward circuitry (奖赏回路). It gets especially heightened if it’s something you’ve been fascinated by — say, the same car you’ve enjoyed for years. Additionally, the discount itself often registers as a win, delivering its own kind of joy, says Jorge Barraza, a consumer psychologist at the University of Southern California.
“Not only are we getting the product,” Barraza says, “but we’re also getting that reward that we discovered something; we’ve earned this extra thing.”
Stores, of course, know all this and try to push our buttons. “Limited-quantity, limited-time, scarcity-marketing promotions—they get people’s blood pumping,” says Kelly Goldsmith, who studies this as a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University.
It’s really hard to always approach sales rationally. One buying strategy experts recommend is to make a shopping list in advance and then, stick to it. Another is to research items — beforehand or on the spot, checking online — to weigh whether the sale is really a good deal.
“The human brain has essentially evolved to feel first and think next, which is why you need to give yourself time to cool off from your instant reaction when in front of a sale,” says Goldsmith.
1. What is the purpose of telling Arron Schurevich’s story?| A．To explain the way to promote sale. | B．To inform readers of an important test. |
| C．To introduce the topic of the passage. | D．To show the advantage of products on sale. |
| A．Brain’s reward circuitry needs activating. | B．It’s hard to resist a discount for some reasons. |
| C．Buying discounted products has consequences. | D．It’s worthwhile to approach sales rationally. |
| A．Stores are good at pushing buttons. | B．Stores tend to affect people’s health. |
| C．Stores help consumers earn extra things. | D．Stores know how to attract consumers with sales. |
| A．Calm down in front of a sale. | B．Make a shopping list ahead of time. |
| C．Research items on the spot or online. | D．Avoid buying any discounted items. |
1. What’s wrong with the man’s sweater?
| A．The sweater lost color. | B．The sweater became smaller. | C．The sweater became longer. |
| A．To buy another one. |
| B．To talk with the manager of the shop. |
| C．To get his money back. |
| A．She asks the manager for help. |
| B．She decides to write to the factory. |
| C．She lets the man choose another one. |
6 . Few people realize it, but glaciers (冰川) are full of tiny air bubbles (气泡). They form as snow, accumulating over thousands of years, slowly packs into ice under its own weight — squishing the air that was trapped between snowflakes into tiny holes. Erin Pettit, a scientist, and her colleagues had suspected that bubbles could be important. To test this idea, they undertook a series of laboratory experiments.
They find that as the ice melted, the resulting fresh water rose, because it was less dense than the surrounding sea water. This created a rising current along the vertical face of the ice — a proof of what occurs at the front of a real tidewater glacier. When the glacial ice melted, the current that it produced was six times faster than what was seen with the bubble-free ice because the rising bubbles pulled the water up more quickly. The glacial ice melted 2.25 times more quickly than the bubble-free ice. “That’s a very powerful effect. If that’s the reality in nature, then it’s quite serious.”
The newly discovered bubble effect could explain some of that extra melting, says Mathieu Morlighem, a scientist. “It’s improving our understanding, but it’s not painting a darker picture of what’s happening today,” he says.
Pettit notes that in Alaska, many bays with tidewater glaciers have large populations of harbor seals. The animals shelter there while molting and raising babies. But in Glacier Bay, where the tidewater glaciers retreated (后退) many miles inland, the seal populations have declined. Pettit now suspects that the roaring rhythm of exploding bubbles provides a hiding place where seals can avoid detection by killer whale, which often find their victim by listening. The bubbles may mask the seals’ sounds — at least until the ice retreats out of hearing. This may turn out to be yet another way in which these tiny bubbles have surprisingly large-scale effects.
1. What does the underlined word “squishing” in paragraph I mean?| A．Absorbing. | B．Pressing. | C．Adding. | D．Reducing. |
| A．They produce a warm current of water. |
| B．They result in releasing more fresh water. |
| C．They have formed for thousands of years slowly. |
| D．They cause the ice in glaciers to melt more quickly. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Favorable. | C．Disapproving. | D．Cautious. |
| A．The frog effect. | B．The bucket effect. |
| C．The butterfly effect. | D．The broken windows effect. |
7 . This was an unforgettable experience and I would highly recommend traveling with Oyster program. It was completely stress-free as everyone was helpful and events were explained clearly.
Knowing that my work was helping the bears gave me a great sense of accomplishment and opened my eyes to how these animals were mistreated in the past, and still are being mistreated in other countries. The bears at the sanctuary (保护区) are happy, healthy, and well fed — the feeding tour was incredible and gave plenty of opportunities to take some fantastic photographs. My main portion of time working at the sanctuary was spent making the bear ice cream: mixing up dairy products and bread. I found this fun, but should prepare to get messy!
The town of Brașov has some wonderful views, plenty of nice walking routes, and many restaurants to try. I would highly recommend walking up the hill/mountain near the apartment toward the Braşov sign as the views over the town make for some great photos.
In terms of money, I would say that it is absolutely worth it. You seem to be able to get the most in-depth tour of the sanctuary available, the work is very rewarding, and the accommodation was of a very high standard. As a disclaimer, I recommend not paying extra for the Time Tunnel if you do the Bran Castle excursion at the weekend, as it was disappointing (it was just a lift that went down to a corridor with some illuminated portraits), but I do suggest paying extra for the Medieval Torture exhibition as this was fascinating to learn about.
I was only in Romania for one week and wish I had done longer. I will definitely consider doing this again, as it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.
1. What can we know about Oyster program?| A．It gives a big discount. | B．It has great views and accommodation. |
| C．It organizes many types of cycle routes. | D．It offers free Medieval Torture exhibition. |
| A．Be aware of the habits of bears. | B．Get the sense of amusement. |
| C．Prepare for making the ice cream. | D．Pre-know the danger from the bears. |
| A．Powerfully. | B．Dizzily. | C．Rewardingly. | D．Amazingly. |
| A．To describe feelings. | B．To explain reasons. |
| C．To state an experience. | D．To commend the traveling. |
8 . Recently, as a journalist, I have published many stories about social media, privacy and artificial intelligence (AI), among other things. So when ChatGPT told me that my output may have influenced its responses to other people’s prompts (提示), I rushed to wipe my data from its memory. As I quickly discovered, however, there is no delete button. AI-powered chatbots never forget what they have learned, because they are trained on data sets including vast numbers of websites and online articles. As long as they exist on the Internet, they get to be remembered.
That means the likes of ChatGPT are possible to let out sensitive personal information, if it has appeared online, and that the companies behind these AIs will struggle to make good on “right-to-be-forgotten” regulations, which force organizations to remove personal data on request. It also means we are powerless to stop hackers (黑客) controlling AI outputs by planting misinformation or ill instructions in training data. All of these explain why many computer scientists are busy to teach AIs to forget. While they are finding that it is extremely difficult, “machine unlearning” solutions are beginning to appear. And the work could prove vital beyond addressing concerns over privacy and misinformation.
The new generation of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, which produce text in response to our prompts, are underpinned by large language models. These are trained on mountains of data, most of which is scraped from the Internet. From this, they learn to spot statistical patterns, which means they can predict the likeliest next word in a sentence, producing fluent answers to our every question.
The trouble is that the way AI chatbots work means that when they learn something, it can’t be unlearned. This creates a significant problem when it comes to privacy, as Dr. Zhang made clear in recent research. He highlighted how difficult it will be for AI companies to obey the “right to be forgotten”, which the European Union declared a human right back in 2014.
1. Why can chatbots store what it has learned forever?| A．Lack of a delete button. | B．Manual code entry. |
| C．Strong review ability. | D．The way they are trained. |
| A．Because AI has many security risks. | B．Because AI stores limited information. |
| C．Because AI needs to be updated regularly. | D．Because AI imitates humans completely. |
| A．Chatbots can answer 90% of the questions. |
| B．Chatbots’ data comes from the designer’s software. |
| C．Chatbots produce the answers based on the prompts. |
| D．Chatbots can predict your problems in advance. |
| A．Controlled. | B．Adjusted. | C．Boosted. | D．Supported. |
9 . Christianna Alexander, a high school girl, is the founder of Sweet Christi’s, a company that makes all-natural, plant-based soaps looking like delicate desserts. At 12, Christianna decided she wanted to start a business. Her three business ideas were baking, arts and crafts (手工艺品), and soap. Baking turned out to be more of a challenge than she expected, and her paintings and drawings didn’t sell as she hoped. Not one to give up easily, Christianna turned her passion into purpose by creating Sweet Christi’s.
Meanwhile, Christianna also started a nonprofit focused on the education of girls through STEM. But that’s not all this teen CEO does: she is involved in many practical things, and she’s a speaker at several youth conferences and also the author of the children’s book Stay Sweet and Never Miss a Beat.
Recently, Richard Cuff, founder of NASEMBA Business Alliance, announced the 15-year-old would serve as Youth Ambassador for the Operation ECLIPSE campaign which advocates for the positive representation of local entrepreneurs (企业家) and stresses the economic impact that the entrepreneurs are having on the local economy. Through Operation ECLIPSE, NASEMBA Business Alliance’s goal is to raise funds to back local programmes to benefit small businesses while helping political leaders better understand the historical and social significance of local entrepreneurial families. “We will work with our political leaders who want to close the wealth gap by shaping policies that will direct financial aid to young entrepreneurs,” said Richard.
“Having an instructor is important and I can’t put into words how important it is to be able to talk to successful entrepreneurs,” said Christianna. “The campaign also encourages business owners and managers to give advice or guidance to young entrepreneurs while supporting plans that provide direction to benefit our at-risk youth. I believe entrepreneurs can help address many social issues with love. The campaign would shine a bright light on the young entrepreneurs, and enable us to become better.”
1. Why did Christianna start the soap business?| A．To avoid failure. | B．To meet a challenge. |
| C．To realize her ambition. | D．To fun d the nonprofit. |
| A．Caring and active. | B．Visionary and independent. |
| C．Academically-minded and brave. | D．Strong-willed and industrious. |
| A．Bridge the gap between rich and poor. | B．Raise money for campaigns. |
| C．Explore entrepreneurial families’ impacts. | D．Support local small businesses. |
| A．It solves many social problems. | B．It provides new insights into leadership. |
| C．It helps protect the youth from potential risks. | D．It advocates the experienced assisting the young. |
1. What does the man want to do this summer?
| A．Sit around. | B．Earn some money. | C．Take a vacation. |
| A．The man’s sister. | B．Mr Smith’s neighbor. | C．The woman’s classmate. |
| A．Take care of the pets. | B．Get rid of the houseplants. | C．Empty the house. |
| A．The man took care of kids last summer. |
| B．The woman called the student employment office. |
| C．The man doesn’t have a lot of friends. |
