1 . Friendships can hold an exceptional place in our life stories. What is it about the s connections that make them so unique? Before we dive into the science, let’s first observe on in action.
If I could somehow design a best friend, you know, put together all the ideal qualities of my perfect match, that person would pale in comparison to Priya. She’s always there for me. Last year after I failed my important exam, it felt like my whole world was crashing down. Priya was at my door at the news. I was a wreck, but she sat there with me and listened. We were on the same page!
Early childhood, adolescent, and adult friendships are all a little different in part because the brain works in different ways at those stages of life. Adolescence is a unique time when peer relationships take focus, and thanks to the developing brain, there are changes in the way you value, understand, and connect to friends. Teenage friends can seem attached at the hip.
Scientists describe adolescence as a social re adaption as teenagers begin to spend as much or more time with their friends than with their parents. This drive to hang with pals maybe due to changes in the brain’s reward centre. Its activation makes hanging out with others enjoyable and motivates you to spend more time with them. Neuroimaging(神经成像) studies show that this region is highly reactive during your teenage years, which may explain why adolescents seem to place a higher value on social interactions than children or adults.
Teenage friendships can also feel closer than the friendships of your childhood. This deeper connection is possible thanks to improvements in what scientists call Theory-of Mind the ability to understand others’ emotions, thoughts, motivations, and points of view. Babies begin to develop Theory of Mind around 18 months or so. And scientists know that it continues to improve and mature well into your teenage years and beyond. Likewise, regions within the social brain show increased connectivity during adolescence compared with childhood.
As a result, teens can better understand their friend’s perspectives, allowing for deeper connections to develop. The ability to connect with others somewhat depends on the coordination of actions, emotions, physiology, and thoughts. This is what psychologists call interpersonal synchrony.
1. Why did the author mention the exam in paragraph 2?| A．To introduce an exam. | B．To show their close relationship. |
| C．To serve a favorable example. | D．To argue against the opinion. |
| A．Adult friends are attached at the hip. |
| B．Teenagers’ value stay the same. |
| C．The brain is inactive during teenage years. |
| D．Peer relationships play a key role in the life. |
| A．It becomes better developed in adolescence. |
| B．It refers to regions within the social brain. |
| C．Babies begin to develop it around 8 months. |
| D．It refers to the ability to understand our own emotions. |
| A．Are friendships different? |
| B．Are friendships connected with your brain? |
| C．Do friendships matter? |
| D．How do adolescent friendships develop? |
Arts and crafts have a way of reinventing themselves. Take embroidery(刺绣) for instance, it was within the last five years
Like many forms of craft, paper quilling can trace
Quilling is the art of handmaking and arranging small strips of paper into detailed designs.
Paper quilling is a decorative art and is known
3 . Asteroids (小行星) are believed to have formed early in our solar system’s history — about 4.5 billion years ago — when a cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula (太阳星云) collapsed and formed our sun and the planets. By visiting these near Earth objects to study the material that came from the solar nebula, we can look for answers to some of humankind’s most arresting questions, such as: How did the solar system form and where did the Earth’s water and other organic materials such as carbon come from? In addition to unlocking clues about our solar system, asteroids may provide clues about our Earth. By understanding more about asteroids, we may learn more about past Earth impacts and possibly find ways to reduce the threat of future impacts.
If we don’t want to go the way of the dinosaurs someday, we need to protect ourselves against the threat of being hit by a big asteroid. According to NASA, typically about once every 10,000 years, a rock y or iron asteroid the size of a football field could crash into our planet and possibly cause tidal waves big enough to flood coastal areas.
But what we really have to fear is asteroids about 328 feet across or bigger. Such an impact would cause a firestorm and fill the atmosphere with sun-blocking dust, which would wipe out forests and farm fields and starve the human and animal life that it didn’t immediately kill.
That’s why it’s vital to develop a way to neutralize such a threat to Earth. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, launched in late November 2021, was the first mission to demonstrate a technology called asteroid redirection by manmade impactor. A robotic spacecraft will be crashed into an asteroid named Didymos, in an effort to show that it’s possible to slightly change the path of an asteroid. That would enable NASA to redirect potential threats to miss Earth.
1. What is the first paragraph mainly about?| A．How solar system came into being. |
| B．How long asteroids have existed. |
| C．Why asteroids are to be explored. |
| D．When asteroids will impact Earth. |
| A．To make the text more interesting. |
| B．To introduce the topic of the text. |
| C．To grab readers’ attention to asteroids. |
| D．To show the disaster from an asteroid impact. |
| A．strengthen | B．avoid | C．beautify | D．realize |
| A．Dinosaurs may live on some of them. |
| B．They were formed earlier than Earth. |
| C．Exploring them helps us know Earth. |
| D．NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test failed. |
4 . When you think of how much you do with your hands all day, from making yourself fried eggs in the morning to folding laundry in the evening, it becomes clear how vital skillfulness is to daily life.
For some specific tips on improving skillfulness, we turned to a personal trainer Abdias Rojas. He said, “there are so many movements you can do to actually improve not just the strength of your hands but also flexibility in your hands.”
Put rubber bands on your fingers, then expand and contract them. This will contribute to myofascial (肌筋膜的) release and getting your hands to feel more comfortable.
To get a better sense of how much pressure you should apply when touching things, do hand exercise in sand.
Finally, try seated eccentric (偏心的) wrist extension. Sit upright with an arm on a table, holding a dumbbell with your hand hanging off the edge and your palm facing down. Use your other hand to curl your wrist up, lower it, and repeat.
Don’t overlook the value of overall body health when it comes to improving skillfulness, either. Rojas pointed out that without the optimal gross (最佳的粗肌) and fine motor skills, which make up the skillfulness of our hands, we would be unable to perform daily tasks.
| A．It sounds strange. |
| B．Moreover, it helps you have fun, too. |
| C．Here are the ones that he recommended. |
| D．To strengthen your wrists, do wrist mobility drills. |
| E．Do this in sets of two with 20 repetitions each, every day. |
| F．To strengthen your sensation of touch, avoid working out with gloves. |
| G．To start with the basics, flexibility is the skill of performing tasks, particularly with your hands. |
5 . You probably get your eyes tested to protect your sight, maybe have a yearly hearing test to check your ears—but, protecting your nose... eh? Recent research has discovered more than 600 genes in the human body associated with the sense of smell and that it’s actually important to the human body.
Smell can help keep us alive by warning us of dangers such as food that might make us sick or the threat of fire, and it does this within only 100-150 milliseconds of breathing. “Smell also helps create the flavour of food and plays a role in controlling the variety of our diet and the nutrients we consume,” says Jeanne Hort, a professor at News Zealand’s Massey University.
In fact, each of us has a unique sense of smell and the strength of our unique smell is related to the genes you inherit (遗传) from your parents which determine which smell receptors (感受器) are expressed in the nose. Other factors further determine how sensitive your sense of smell is. Women generally have a stronger sense of smell than men, while damage from air pollution means people who live in highly polluted cities have a less sensitive sense of smell than those in rural areas. “We also know the sense of smell declines with age,” says Professor Hort. “And if you’ve damaged your nose through head injury, illness or breathing in something that causes pain and discomfort, your sense of smell can also be negatively affected.”
Protecting your nose from such damage is therefore the first step in activating your sense of smell. Avoid breathing in strong scents like chemicals. Then, keep your nose busy. For example, sniff (唉) vegetables and fruit as part of determining ripeness before you buy them and sniff more different smells exposed to your nose. “The sense of smell is a bit like a muscle, you can train it to become stronger by exercising it,” says sensory expert Eugeni Roura.
1. Why does the author mention eye and ear protection in paragraph 1?| A．To compare different human senses. | B．To call attention to the sense of smell. |
| C．To clarify the concept of good health. | D．To show the importance of medical exams. |
| A．The advice on healthy eating. | B．The basic functions of the nose. |
| C．The important role of smell in life. | D．The ways to avoid hidden dangers. |
| A．There is sex difference in terms of smell. | B．The sense of smell doesn’t change with age. |
| C．Smell receptors decide the strength of smell. | D．Air pollution is very likely to cause loss of smell. |
| A．It is essential to protect your nose from damage. |
| B．Different parts of your body sometimes work the same. |
| C．Sniffing different smells helps to build up your strength. |
| D．The more you use the sense of smell, the more you sharpen it. |
6 . Working from home has become common, during the course of the pandemic(疫情), leaving many with a newfound appreciation of the freedom and flexibility of working remotely. However, while the traditional idea of an office—a place away from home, typically owned or rented by the business—may have changed, the need for specific office space hasn’t.
In fact, this period of working from home has highlighted just how important it is to have a place of work, which is separate from daily family life. Without that, many have noted concerns over a worsened work-life balance.
Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the office of the future will be its hybrid solution. It should marry the beneficial parts of a physical company-owned workspace with the benefits of working from home.
As teams have proven their ability to efficiently get their jobs done remotely, employers will be much more open to the flexible approach moving forward. The positive impacts of a physical office on things like company culture, communication, team spirit and shared knowledge should not be ignored, which is why tangible space is still very much a necessity.
The solution for the future will enable employees to come into the company’s workplace in order not to miss out on these valuable office benefits, but also work from home when required for a better work-life balance. Both large and smaller companies have already started to adopt this new approach, allowing teams to create schedules for when they will be working from home, or even use an online booking system to secure a desk space in the shared facility. This way, the company can manage the number of people in the office at one time, meaning spaces can be downsized to save costs, and social distancing and thorough cleaning procedures can be maintained.
1. What is the potential problem with working from home?| A．Imbalance between work and life. | B．Change of the idea of an office. |
| C．Lack of working space at home. | D．Too much freedom in remote work. |
| A．Empty. | B．Separate. | C．Physical. | D．Flexible. |
| A．It is well received by companies. | B．It limits the number of employees. |
| C．It makes thorough cleaning unnecessary. | D．It is helpful for workers to design schedules. |
| A．Social Distance: A Pressing Need | B．Working Remotely: A Growing Trend |
| C．Traditional Office: To Leave or to Stay | D．Hybrid Workplace: Office of the Future |
Aging Wisely Life from Fifty to Seventy-five Years Viola B. Mecke, Ph.D., ABPP With retirement, life is expected to be easier. Four stages of retirement are described, showing how pleasures and contentment mix with complexities of bring fears, problems that may loneliness, and sorrows. www.xlibris.com Hardback | Paperback | E-book $28.99 | $16.99 | $3.99 | Cosmic Quest C. Argon Cosmic Visitors were high-energy carriers from the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. They needed to rent abandoned earth bodies for their planets’ DNA diversity and Cosmic Quest. www.authorhouse.com Hardback | Paperback | E-book $31.99 | $20.99 | $3.99 |
The Black Three Gene Skipworth Grayville never had a black basketball player. Now it has three. A block doctor just moved to the town whose three sons took Weston to the Ohio State basketball championship. www.authorhouse.com Hardback | Paperback | E-book |Audiobook $23.99 | $13.99 | $3.99 | $9.99 | Jazzy and Rhumbì Dorl Seider This heartwarming and adventurous tale is told from the perspective of two smart kitties, Jazzy Girl Muffin and Rhumbi Boy, who secretly influence their humans Boy, who secretly influence their humans to love and rescue more animals. www.xllbris.com Hardback | Paperback | E-book $40.99 | $32.99 | $3.99 |
Tackle Box Troubles Fish Tale #1: Sammy Spinner Susan Duke Sammy Spinner is the newest fishing lure to join Tackle Box Troubles. Can Sammy learn fishing tips to catch really big fish, or will he find himself in trouble? www.xlibris.com Hardback | Paperback | E-book $22.99 | $14.99 | $5.99 | The Origin and Future of Mankind Shaun Dowling Shaun Dowling describes in detail how the universe was formed, how our planet developed, when life appeared, and how it has evolved over time. www.authorhouse.com Paperback | E-book $21.55 | $4.99 |
| A．Cosmic Quest. | B．Jazzy and Rhumbi. |
| C．Tackle Box Troubles. | D．The Origin and Future of Mankind. |
| A．They are all intended for kids. | B．They each have a digital version. |
| C．They all have three different prices. | D．They can be downloaded from the same website. |
| A．A book review. | B．A library poster. | C．An academic column. | D．A book advertisement. |
8 . Risks at Your Table
Some of the “everyday foods” we eat hide some unhealthy features, which most people ignore. We take a look at some of the health risks being served to you!
Energy Drinks
You’re tired and you still have to face a physical or mental stress, so what a better friend than an energy drink to overcome the effort? However, most energy drinks contain chemicals that are harmful if taken in quantities, with effects that are similar to the ones from several other illegal drugs, smoking and alcohol consumption.
White Bread
White bread is poorer in fiber and protein than other bread alternatives. Fiber helps our body to understand when it has eaten enough. The sense of fullness is important if we don’t want an extra-consumption of calories.
Breakfast Cereals
Breakfast cereals(麦片) fill out lots of shelves in every supermarket you get inside. They’re one of the favorite foods for our first meal of the day, because they’re simply delicious. What many people are not aware of is that these products are loaded with GM(转基因) organisms which affect our immune system. If you really can’t separate yourselves from breakfast cereals, maybe you could start considering some organic breakfast cereal alternatives.
Fat-Free Foods
Fat-free foods may look like the gold mine for a perfectly balanced and satisfying diet, but the reality is widely different. Fats are essential for many body functions and for its healthy development. A fat-cut is not advisable, especially when your workouts are regular. Plus, fat-free foods are usually high in processed sugar.
1. Which is particularly improper for a man going to the gym regularly?| A．Energy drinks. | B．White bread. |
| C．Breakfast cereals. | D．Fat-free foods. |
| A．They are delicious and healthy. | B．They contain harmful chemicals. |
| C．They hide some harmful features. | D．They lack some essential nutrients. |
| A．Health. | B．Education. | C．Economy. | D．Science. |
9 . Music streaming platforms (平台) such as Spotify and Apple Music have completely changed how people listen to music nowadays. By paying very affordable prices, people can access music very easily. However, while these platforms may provide benefits for some artists, up-and-coming artists are being left behind because they only focus on big names and creating profits.
Because of COVID-19, musicians have not been able to tour or perform live in many countries, which contributes to a large part of their income. In a YouTube interview, up-and-coming Texas artist Mobey mentioned that “The majority of my income comes from playing live shows. Usually that means around 50% — 70% of what we expect to make in a year”. With these factors, small artists are finding it increasingly difficult to make it in the industry due to the lack of investment (投资) into new talent.
Small artists on Spotify and Apple Music can expect to make little to nothing. An artist on Spotify can expect to earn an average of $0.003 per stream or around $3 per 1,000 streams for one of their songs. On Apple Music, artists can expect to make a little more with an average of $0.01 per stream, or around $10 with 1,000 streams. Even if they could hit around 1,000 streams, they have to pay music distribution (分发) platforms needed for their music to be shown on the streaming platforms such as DistroKid, whose cheapest plan is $20.
A new artist would find it very difficult to promote their music outside of their social media accounts which may not even have a large amount of followers. They probably cannot get large amounts of streams on their music since it is not being promoted due to the lack of exposure (宣传) they have on social media.
With the takeover of music streaming platforms, many artists are finding it increasingly difficult to make a sustainable (可持续的) living from their love for music. A simple way these platforms can enable new artists to keep making music is to increase their payouts per stream for their music. Hopefully the music streaming industry will make similar changes to improve the situation of their artists.
1. What is the problem with music streaming platforms?| A．They ignore small artists. | B．They are not user-friendly. |
| C．They are very difficult to manage. | D．They limit the number of small artists’ songs. |
| A．His lack of investment. | B．His total income in a year. |
| C．The main source of his income. | D．The reason for his fewer live shows. |
| A．How a music streaming platform works. |
| B．Small artists’ hope for music streaming platforms. |
| C．Small artists’ dislike for music streaming platforms. |
| D．Why small artists earn little on music streaming platforms. |
| A．Music streaming platforms: Do they really put profits first? |
| B．Music streaming platforms: Are they a chance or challenge to artists? |
| C．Music streaming platforms: Have they harmed the industry for artists? |
| D．Music streaming platforms: Could they offer music lovers better services? |
10 . In some ways, it is surprising that languages change. After all, they are passed down through the generations reliably enough for parents and children to communicate with each other.
Languages change for a variety of reasons. Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic, and political pressures, as there are many examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization, and migration.
| A．Changes in sound are somewhat harder to document but just as interesting. |
| B．Yet linguists find that all living languages change over time — at different rates though. |
| C．As long as people are using a language, that language will undergo some change. |
| D．All natural languages change, and language change affects all areas of language use. |
| E．The three main areas of language that change over time are vocabulary, sentence structure, and pronunciation. |
| F．Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if enough users adopt a new way of speaking. |
| G．The vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their age, education level, social status and other factors. |
