1 . I'm sure that stricter rules to control cigarette smoking            very soon.

A．made

B．will make

C．were made

D．will be made

2 . A Way Out of Social Anxiety: Volunteering and Acts of Kindness

As a socially anxious introvert, I can attest(证明)to the benefits of serving others through volunteering in my community.

A volunteer job doesn’t need to require stepping into a busy room full of 100 people at a school or hospital.     1     This kind of work is much more suitable and agreeable for introverts.

    2     When I help elders or people with disabilities who are more isolated and lonelier than I am, I feel my nervousness and self-consciousness disappear. My social awkwardness loses its grip on me when I’m focused on helping someone else rather than myself or my social performance. Unlike showing up at a job interview, business meeting, or speaking engagement, working as a volunteer with people in need takes the spotlight away from being measured or judged.     3    

Social scientists have an apt name for stressful social situations where we need to perform and would likely be judged or evaluated. The “social-evaluative threat” is particularly threatening for people with social anxiety as stress hormones rapidly increase. Any time we are in evaluative situations where we are judged by others, we face this social-evaluative threat and endure a sudden rush of stress hormones that increase anxiety.     4     Yet when we are in situations where we are offering casual acts of kindness or nurturing others we tend to feel less threatened or judged by others. Helping others and sharing simple acts of kindness does not pose such a social-evaluative threat, but instead, calms and soothes us. Neuroscientists have studied the warm glow of doing good that makes us feel good.

“Kindness may help socially anxious people,” says Dr. Lynn Alden, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.     5     She found that acts of kindness may help to counter the socially anxious person’s fear of negative evaluation by promoting more positive perceptions and expectations of how other people will respond.

A．Some people are naturally reserved while others are rather outgoing.

B．In social anxiety disorder, fear and anxiety lead to avoidance which can disrupt our life.

C．Indeed, my own act of kindness has always been a sure bet to bring me out of my shell.

D．Instead, my volunteer service consists of quiet one-on-one visits with isolated older adults.

E．When I am giving my free time to help others, I feel truly liberated in my mission to serve.

F．High-performance events such as public speaking or job interviews can be really unbearable.

G．She and her colleagues conducted a study with 115 undergraduate students who had reported high levels of social anxiety.

3 . Stargazing Festivals in 2023

As more areas grow brighter with light pollution, national parks across the country have become dark-sky havens. Over the years, they are making a push to get certified as havens for sky-watching by the International Dark Sky Association, and they even host events like stargazing festivals to get travelers excited about astronomy.

·Bryce Canyon National Park—June 14-17

Situated in southern Utah, Bryce Canyon earned its dark-sky title in 2019. The 35,835-acre park is an ideal place to stay up late. This year, its annual astronomy festival includes guided stargazing sessions, lectures and “star stories” presentations, family-friendly activities, and even a performance by strings musicians in the northern Arizona-based Dark Sky Quartet.

·Shenandoah National Park—August 11-13

Conveniently located within a day’s drive from two-thirds of Americans, Shenandoah National Park’s night sky festival is a low-lift way to dabble in astronomy. The nearly 200,000-acre park will host ranger talks, public stargazing sessions, lectures, presentations, and activities for kids. Staffers are still working on this year’s full schedule, but past events have covered topics ranging from space weather to nocturnal(夜间的) creatures.

·Great Basin National Park—September 14-16

Great Basin is one of the least crowded national parks, making it the perfect place to quietly appreciate the mysteries of the cosmos. Its annual astronomy festival is scheduled for this fall and includes guest speakers, constellation talks, observatory tours, and a photography workshop. During the festival’s unique “Art in the Dark” program, participants will get to paint in low-light conditions and experiment with how their eyes perceive color.

·Joshua Tree National Park—October 13-14

Joshua Tree National Park, as the International Dark Sky Association notes, is the “nearest convenient place to go stargazing under a relatively dark sky” for the 18 million people who live in the Los Angeles area. It became an official dark sky park in 2017, and each year, it hosts a night sky festival in the fall. As luck would have it, this year’s dates overlap with an annular “ring of fire” solar eclipse. From Joshua Tree, the moon will appear to obscure between 70 and 80 percent of the sun.

1. What is the purpose of Stargazing Festivals?

A．To raise public interest in astronomy.

B．To call for action against light pollution.

C．To provide a platform to observe stars.

D．To collect money for more observatories.

2. Where should you go if you want to experience working in low-light conditions?

A．Bryce Canyon National Park.	B．Shenandoah National Park.
C．Great Basin National Park.	D．Joshua Tree National Park.

3. What might be a bonus to visitors to Joshua Tree National Park during the festivals?

A．An observatory tour.	B．A photography workshop.
C．A stargazing tour.	D．A solar eclipse.

4 . With the help of the new technology, you            e-mail your friends by mobile phone.

A．can

B．must

C．need

D．should

5 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Beijing residents woke up to yellow sky on Sunday morning as northern China       1     (hit) by the largest sandstorm of the decade.

Air pollution readings rose to the upper limit of 500 at 8 a.m., according to data from the city's environmental monitory center, as visibility was reduced to     2     (little) than 1,000 meters in parts of the city.

The city's weather bureau advised residents to stay indoors as much as possible, while experts are working to find out     3     the sandstorm came into being.

6 . The Turnaround

Anxiously, I looked through the roster (花名册) posted on the wall. My body _____ as I saw all my friends’ names but did not find mine. I could feel the tears building in my eyes. I felt _____ inside, like nothing mattered.

When I got back home, my father noticed my sullen walk and gloomy face, and asked me what was wrong.

“All my friends _____ the school team. Everyone! Except me…” I stammered.

“Well, what are you going to do about it? Are you just going to sit there?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say, just shaking my head. I thought hard for thirty minutes about what my dad said, and it started making _____. Nobody was going to give me a _____ on that team. I would have to earn it.

_____, there was a gym near my school, so as soon as school was over, I biked to the gym and trained hard. I ran, dribbled, and shot until I _____ on the floor every single day. There were moments when I didn’t think I could keep on going, but I _____ through it. After all, I thought, hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.

After almost a year, I tried out for my seventh-grade team with great confidence. Regardless of the outcome, I knew that I had worked hard and learned something about mental _____. The next day, seeing my name printed in large bold letters, I realized I made it. The greater the effort, the ______ the reward, and I officially made a turnaround.

1.

A．froze

B．changed

C．shook

D．expanded

2.

A．calm

B．lonely

C．nervous

D．dead

3.

A．made

B．supported

C．accepted

D．celebrated

4.

A．history

B．trouble

C．sense

D．way

5.

A．task

B．spot

C．hand

D．reward

6.

A．Accidentally

B．Conveniently

C．Temporarily

D．Honestly

7.

A．rolled

B．moved

C．struggled

D．collapsed

8.

A．saw

B．walked

C．powered

D．looked

9.

A．toughness

B．flexibility

C．well-being

D．suffering

10.

A．purer

B．funnier

C．sweeter

D．quicker

7 . —Can we play on the football field now?

—No, the grass __________.

A．will be cut

B．is being cut

C．was cut

D．has been cut

8 . Endless studies show the physical, mental and longevity-based benefits of working out, while plenty suggest that avoiding activity is bad. But headlines about someone collapsing after a row always stick in the mind. So, how risky is training too hard?     1    

The NHS recommends that healthy adults aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity — but doesn’t suggest where to stop. This is because the ability to handle excess exertion (过度努力) depends on many varied factors.

The exact cause of “overtraining”, in the sense of doing too much over an extended period, is still being debated.     2     Others suggest the intestinal microbiota (肠道菌群) are involved. Whatever the case, it can hurt the rest of your life, making you moody, tired, or injury-prone.

The best advice is to pay attention when you lack energy or feel unwell and back off a bit. If you are a runner, this can also help with the common complaint of shin splints (胫骨骨膜炎), or more serious stress fractures, which are tiny cracks in the bone itself. The latter, which can be due to a sudden increase in training intensity, won’t heal until you ease off.     3    

“The obvious risk factors are linked to impact and exertion,” says Steve Hoyles, a personal trainer and gym owner. “Running is a high-impact activity and analysis shows that inexperienced runners suffer an average of 17.8 injuries per 1,000 hours, whereas in gym users the average is 5.3 injuries per 1,000 hours.     4     Combining these with a form of resistance training would be helpful. Strong muscles, bones, and connective tissues are more resistant to injury than weaker tissues, so prioritise some form of strength training, regardless of your exercise of choice.”

    5     By easing in and increasing the difficulty gradually, you will learn to listen to your body, which can help to warn you if something does go wrong. By not thrashing yourself from the start, you will learn to love exercise — and do it for the long haul.

A．The story is similar for men and women at risk of stroke.

B．So do your best to avoid them by not pushing too hard, or too fast.

C．Some experts theorise that it’s all about the central nervous system.

D．Swimming and cycling are low-impact but offer limited strength benefits.

E．And is there a way to make sure you never cross that red line into dangerous territory?

F．If you don’t have existing problems, the chances of something going wrong are very low.

G．Exercise will improve your quality of life and almost certainly your chances of living longer.

9 . Will chatbots that can generate fascinating articles destroy education as we know it?

New York City’s Department of Education recently banned (禁止) the use of ChatGPT. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions,” says the official statement, “it does not build critical-thinking skills, which are necessary for academic and lifelong success.”

Banning such use of technology from the classroom is a nearsighted response. Instead, we must find a way forward in which such technologies combine well with, rather than replace, student thinking.

Banning ChatGPT is impossible in practice. Students will find ways around the ban, which will cause a further defensive response from teachers and administrators, and so on. It’s hard to believe that a close race between those digital natives and their educators will end in a decisive victory for the latter. In fact, chatbots may well speed up a trend (趋向) toward valuing critical thinking. In a world where computers can fluently answer any question, students need to get much better at deciding what questions to ask and how to fact-check the answers the program generates.

So how do we encourage young people to use their minds when real thinking is so hard to tell apart from its simulacrum (假象)? Teachers, of course, will still want to watch students taking old-fashioned, in-person, no-chatbot-allowed exams to check that they do not cheat.

But we must also figure out how to do something new: how to use tools like GPT to inspire deeper thinking. GPT often generates text that is fluent and “reasonable” — but wrong. So using it requires the same mental heavy lifting that writing does: forming an opinion, creating an outline, picking which points to explain and which to drop, and looking for supporting facts. GPT can help with those tasks, but it can’t put them all together. Writing a good essay still requires lots of human thought and work. Indeed, writing is thinking, and good writing is good thinking.

One approach is to focus on the process as much as the result. For instance, teachers might require four drafts of an essay. After all, as John McPhee, the famous writer, said, “the central nature of the process is revision.” Each draft gets feedback from the teacher, from peers or even from a chatbot. Then the students produce the next draft, and so on.

Will AI one day outperform human beings in thinking? Maybe, but for now, we must think for ourselves. Like any tool, GPT is an enemy of thinking only if we fail to find ways to make it our partner.

1. How does the author feel about the ban?

A．Understandable.

B．Irresponsible.

C．Unwise.

D．Necessary.

2. Why is it impossible to ban ChatGPT in practice?

A．Because students are digitally fluent.	B．Because schools will defend the ban.
C．Because ChatGPT will keep developing.	D．Because people treasure critical thinking.

3. How does the author explain his idea in Paragraph 6?

A．By quoting others.

B．By presenting facts.

C．By giving examples.

D．By showing similarities.

4. What is the passage mainly about?

A．Is GPT a process or a result?	B．Will GPT outperform students?
C．Why Chatbots become a new trend?	D．How can Chatbots serve education?

10 . Yes Day

My friends and I were having breakfast at a Mexican holiday resort (旅游胜地) while enjoying the cool sea breeze. It promised to be another ______ day, as we embraced the break from our busy routine.

We were looking over the list of the resort’s activities. After we ______to convince (说服) each other of what would be best to do, I said, “Let’s have a YES DAY and say yes to EVERY activity, even if it’s not in our comfort zone. Let’s ______ and enjoy ourselves in unexpected ways.”

I hate ______ , but the zipline over the resort was at the top of our list. I was scared when I climbed into position. I wanted to back out, but my friends cheered me on. So, I jumped off the platform and screamed the whole way down. But I was glad I ______ it. Besides the ______, I also appreciated the amazing views. Thankfully, I didn’t say no, otherwise I would have missed this wonderful experience.

My friend Katie, who didn’t want to do karaoke, also had to face her _____ of being the center of attention. We danced and sang, laughing all night long. We were _____ brave enough to attend a wedding party and danced on a glass topper over a swimming pool.

We still talk about our magical Yes Day! When we see the photos from that magical time, we are so happy. In fact, we may miss so much if we only ______ what we are comfortable doing. I believe we all______ Yes Days.

1.

A．interesting

B．relaxing

C．inspiring

D．rewarding

2.

A．failed

B．agreed

C．managed

D．decided

3.

A．help

B．relieve

C．challenge

D．appreciate

4.

A．sports

B．changes

C．surprises

D．heights

5.

A．did

B．had

C．got

D．won

6.

A．pride

B．pain

C．anxiety

D．excitement

7.

A．shame

B．fear

C．regret

D．loneliness

8.

A．even

B．just

C．almost

D．still

9.

A．put off

B．give up

C．stick to

D．turn to

10.

A．want

B．need

C．enjoy

D．remember