1 . For nearly a decade now, Merebeth has been a self-employed pet transport specialist. Her pet transport job was born of the financial crisis(危机)in the late 2000s. The downturn hit the real estate (房地产)firm where she had worked for ten years as an office manager. The firm went broke and left her looking for a new job. One day, while driving near her home, she saw a dog wandering on the road, clearly lost. She took it home, and her sister in Denver agreed to take it. This was a loving home for sure, but 1, 600 miles away. It didn’t take long for Merebeth to decide to drive the dog there herself. It was her first road trip to her new job.
Merebeth’s pet delivery service also satisfies her wanderlust. It has taken her to every state in the US except Montana, Washington and Oregon, she says proudly. If she wants to visit a new place, she will simply find a pet with transport needs there. She travels in all weathers. She has driven through 55 mph winds in Wyoming, heavy flooding and storms in Alabama and total whiteout conditions in Kansas.
This wanderlust is inherited from her father, she says. She moved their family from Canada to California when she was one year old, because he wanted them to explore a new place together. As soon as she graduated from high school she left home to live on Catalina Island off the Californian coast, away from her parents, where she enjoyed a life of sailing and off-road biking.
It turns out that pet transporting pays quite well at about $30, 000 per year before tax. She doesn’t work in summer, as it would be unpleasantly hot for the animals in the car, even with air conditioning. As autumn comes, she gets restless—the same old wanderlust returning. It’s a call she must heed alone, though. Merebeth says, “When I am on the road, I’m just in my own world. I’ve always been independent-spirited and I just feel strongly that I must help animals.”
1. Why did Merebeth changed her job?| A．She wanted to work near her home. |
| B．She was tired of working in the office. |
| C．Her sister asked her to move to Denver. |
| D．Her former employer was out of business. |
| A．make money. | B．try various jobs. |
| C．be close to nature. | D．travel to different places. |
| A．She has chances to see rare animals. |
| B．She works hard throughout the year. |
| C．She relies on herself the whole time. |
| D．She earns a basic and tax-free salary. |
Habit formation is the process by which behaviours become automatic. People develop countless habits as they explore the world, whether they are aware of them or not. Understanding how habits take shape may be helpful in changing bad habits.
Habits are built through learning and repetition. A person is thought to develop a habit in the course of pursuing goals by beginning to associate certain cues(刺激) with behavioural responses that help meet the goal. Over time, thoughts of the behaviour and ultimately the behaviour itself are likely to be triggered(触发) by these cues.
A “habit loop(环)” is a way of describing several related elements that produce habits. These elements are called the cue, the routine, and the reward. For example, stress could serve as a cue that one responds to by eating, which produces the reward﹣the reduction of stress. While a routine involves repeated behaviour, it’s not necessarily performed in response to a deep﹣rooted urge, as a habit is.
Old habits can be difficult to shake, and healthy habits are often harder to develop. But through repetition, it’s possible to form new habits. The amount of time needed to build a habit will depend on multiple factors, including the individual and the intended behaviour. While you are able to pickup a new habit in a few weeks, it takes many months to build a healthy habit. Take some time to think about what leads to bad habits and re﹣evaluate what you get out of them (or don’t). Consider and keep in mind why you want to make a change, including how the change reflects your values.
1. How are habits built?2. In what way is a routine different from a habit?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
Picking up a new habit takes a few week, while building a healthy habit takes a shorter time.
4. What benefit(s) have you got from one of your good habits?(In about 40 words)
3 . With climate change continuing to worsen, our situation is beginning to feel increasingly serious.
Techno-optimism is one of the greatest misconceptions when it comes to solutions to ensure our future. It can be defined as a belief that future technologies will solve all of our current problems. This definition reinforces (强化) the idea that there’s no reason to panic or change our current energy-intensive lifestyle. All society needs to do is look to green technology to work its magic.
One of the best examples of this optimistic misconception is the electric car. Despite being highly regarded as an eco-friendly way to get around, electric cars are not the end for the future of transport. Batteries in electric cars use chemical elements which we could be seeing a shortage of by the midcentury.
Techno-optimism puts too much emphasis on technology and not enough on what we can do right this minute. Unfortunately, people seem to like the picture that techno-optimism paints.
| A．So where should we look for answers instead? |
| B．The modern world’s simple solution is technology. |
| C．Moreover, they are more energy intensive to produce. |
| D．Is it a trap that many people have fallen into in recent years? |
| E．Unfortunately, this is an incredibly dangerous opinion to hold. |
| F．Despite any technology, we as a whole are not living sustainably. |
| G．Nevertheless, the truth is, we need a widespread change in our lifestyles. |
4 . 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. |
5 . Discovering Your True Self Is Vital to Happiness!
Have you found focusing on yourself is at the bottom of the to-do list, because you feel everyone else in your life comes first?
This isn’t just about identifying your favorite outfit, haircut or flavor of ice cream.
There are many tools to help you develop a deeper sense of yourself, including journaling and other forms of creative expression. You can use a guided journal to explore your thoughts and feelings or just free write whatever comes to mind. It’s up to you what you want to do.
An often overlooked yet very important factor in self-discovery is having healthy boundaries in your personal life.
| A．It’s one thing to know your personality type. |
| B．It’s a great way to show that you care about others. |
| C．Taking time for ourselves has been looked down upon. |
| D．Another way is to observe your behavior in different situations. |
| E．It allows you to focus on the needs of yourself without ignoring others. |
| F．But try not to get caught up in the criticism or judgment of your writing. |
| G．It’s about understanding your inner world and how you fit into the outer world. |
6 . At a museum in Vietnam, Lena Bui’s film Where Birds Dance Their Last reflected on the beauty and vulnerability of Vietnamese feather farms after Bird Flu. During a festival in Rwanda, Ellen Reid’s audio experience Soundwalk was shared in a hopeful discussion about music, parks and mental health. These are a few of the things I have helped bring to life over the years, working at the intersection of scientific research, the arts and advocacy to support science in solving global health challenges.
Science is key to addressing these issues. But it isn’t the only key. To achieve its potential and for its advances to be implemented and reach all who could benefit, science depends on trust and good relationships. People might not always see science as relevant, trustworthy or meaningful to their lives. There are reasons why some see science as having a chequered past, from nuclear weapons to eugenics, and are therefore uninterested in, or suspicious of, what it proposes. Others feel excluded by the incomprehensibility of hyper specialist knowledge.
In its capacity to build upon and test an evidence base, science is powerful, but researchers and funders haven’t been as good at ensuring this evidence base responds to the needs and interests of diverse communities, or informs policy makers to take action. Science might be perceived as distancing itself from the personal, the poetic and the political, yet it is precisely these qualities that can be most influential when it comes to public interest in atopic or how a government prioritizes a decision.
A moving story well told can be more memorable than a list of facts. This is where the arts come in. Artists can give us different perspectives with which to consider and reimagine the world together. They can redress the proclaimed objectivity in science by bringing stories —subjectivities —into the picture, and these can help foster a sense of connection and hope.
In 2012, I set up artist residencies in medical research centres around the world. Bui was attached to the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam. The head of the research team was delighted, finding that Bui, as a Vietnamese artist, had license to be in, and to share useful insights from, villages where infectious disease researchers weren’t welcome. Six years later, I led Wellcome’s Contagious Cities program, which established artist residencies worldwide to support locally led explorations of epidemic preparedness. The recent pandemic made this work more noticeable, and has informed our Mindscapes program which is currently sharing experiences of mental health through the work of artists.
With pandemic, climate and mental health crises upon us, rising inequality and what feels like an increasingly broken world, never has there been more need to build and nurture hopeful and imaginative spaces to grow human connection and shared purpose for the common good. Science and the arts can work hand in glove to achieve this.
1. The author lists two works in Paragraph 1 mainly to ______.| A．reveal the gap between science and art | B．prove his competence in both science and art |
| C．introduce successful science-related artworks | D．show that science can be promoted in art forms |
| A．Recent and remote. | B．Good and bad. |
| C．Usual and unusual. | D．Peaceful and scary. |
| A．Policy-makers base their decisions on science. | B．Researchers popularize science effectively. |
| C．Science is well received among the public. | D．The arts help people build connections. |
| A．The Value of the Arts to Science | B．Where Do Science and the Arts Meet? |
| C．A New Way to Fight Pandemic—the Arts | D．Which Matters More, Science or the Arts? |
7 . Want to explore new cultures, meet new people and do something worthwhile at the same time? You can do all the three with Global Development Association(GDA). Whatever stage of life you’re at, wherever you go and whatever project you do in GDA, you’ll create positive changes in a poor and remote community(社区).
We work with volunteers of all ages and backgrounds. Most of our volunteers are aged 17-24. Now we need volunteer managers aged 25-75. They are extremely important in the safe and effective running of our programmes. We have such roles as project managers, mountain leaders, and communication officers.
Depending on which role you choose, you could help to increase a community’s access to safe drinking water, or help to protect valuable local cultures. You might also design an adventure challenge to train young volunteers.
Not only will you help our young volunteers to develop personally, you’ll also learn new skills and increase your cultural awareness. You may have chances to meet new people who’ll become your lifelong friends.
This summer we have both 4-week and 7-week programmes:
Country | Schedule | |
4-week programmes | 7-week programmes | |
Algeria | 5 Jul. — 1 Aug. | 20 Jun. — 7 Aug. |
Egypt | 24 Jul. — 20 Aug. | 19 Jun. — 6 Aug. |
Kenya | 20 Jul. — 16 Aug. | 18 Jun. — 5 Aug. |
South Africa | 2 Aug. — 29 Aug. | 15 Jun. — 2 Aug. |
GDA ensures that volunteers work with community members and local project partners where our help is needed. All our projects aim to promote the development of poor and remote communities.
There is no other chance like a GDA programme. Join us as a volunteer manager to develop your own skills while bringing benefits to the communities.
Find out more about joining a GDA programme:
Website:www.glodeve.org
Email:humanresources@glodeve.org
1. What is the main responsibility of volunteer managers?| A．To seek local partners. | B．To take in young volunteers. |
| C．To carry out programmes. | D．To foster cultural awareness. |
| A．Egypt | B．Algeria | C．Kenya | D．South Africa |
| A．explore new cultures | B．protect the environment |
| C．gain corporate benefit | D．help communities in need |
8 . Adults are often embarrassed about asking for aid. It’s an act that can make people feel emotionally unsafe.
New research suggests young children don’t seek help in school, even when they need it, for the same reason. Until recently, psychologists assumed that children did not start to care about their reputation and their friends’ thoughts about them until around age nine.
But our research suggests that as early as age seven, children begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others. At some point, every child struggles in the classroom.
To learn more about how children think about reputation, we created simple stories and then asked children questions about these situations to allow kids to showcase their thinking.
Across several studies, we asked 576 children, ages four to nine, to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the characters genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others. In one study, we told children that both kids did poorly on a test.
| A．Kids could be afraid to ask their parents for help. |
| B．Seeking help could even be taught as socially desirable. |
| C．In another study we told them that only one kid did poorly. |
| D．Such reputational barriers likely require reputation-based solutions. |
| E．The moment you ask for directions, after all, you reveal that you are lost. |
| F．But if they are afraid to ask for help because their classmates are watching, learning will suffer. |
| G．We then asked which of these characters would be more likely to raise their hand in front of their class to ask the teacher for help. |
9 . Arguably, the biggest science development of the year to date has been the images of the very depths of the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Those images beg a comparison between the external and internal universes that science is bent on observing and understanding.
Decades ago, astrophysicist Carl Sagan famously said, “The universe is also within is. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. ” He was commenting then on the reality that our internal universe was as complex and as fantastic as the outer space.
There are many similarities between the progress we’ve made in understanding the universe and in piecing together life’s inner workings. Like the technological developments that took us from Galileo’s telescope to the Hubble to the JWST, life science tools have also improved rapidly. From early light microscopes to modern super-resolution ones, these developments have afforded researchers a deep look into biology’s infinitesimal (无限小的) landscape. Learning that living things were composed of cells was, not a terribly long time ago, a revolutionary observation. Since then, scientists have been able to dive ever deeper into the components of life.
Going beyond merely observing the complicated makeup of organisms, life scientists can now discover the workings of molecules (分子). And that is where scanning the universe differs from peering into biology. Understanding the universe, especially from a functional standpoint, is not necessarily an immediate urgency. Understanding biology on that level is. Simply observing the amazing internal structure of cells is not enough. Biologists must also characterize how all those parts interact and change in different environments and when faced with various challenges. Being able to image a virus or bacterium is nice at the level of basic science. But knowing how viruses gain entry into cells and spread, infect, and disable can literally save lives. Through time, biology has risen to this mechanistic challenge. Not only can life science tools produce images of cell components, even more importantly, they can help predict the effects of drugs on receptors, of immune cells on foreign invaders (入侵者), and of genetic perturbations (基因干扰) on development and aging.
This is not to belittle the work of scientists researching into universe. They should rightly be praised for delivering views of impossibly distant, impossibly massive phenomena. My aim is to celebrate these accomplishments while at the same time recognizing that science’s inward search for detail and insight is equally impressive and, in my view, more urgent. The output of both the outward and inward explorations should stimulate wonder in everyone. After all, it’s all star-stuff.
1. Why does the author quote Carl Sagan’s comment in Paragraph 2?| A．To introduce the background. | B．To prove an assumption. |
| C．To make a comparison. | D．To present an idea. |
| A．study approaches | B．system management |
| C．research facilities | D．technology integration |
| A．practical | B．risky | C．flexible | D．popular |
| A．It has received universal recognition. | B．It should enjoy priority in development. |
| C．It can be applied in the majority of areas. | D．It is more complicated than space science. |
10 . Humans have long tried to conquer water. We’ve straightened once-winding rivers for shipping purposes. We’ve constructed levees (防洪堤) along rivers and lakes to protect people from flooding—We’ve erected entire cities on drained and filled-in wetlands. We’ve built dams on rivers to store water for later use.
Levees, which narrow channels causing water to flow higher and faster, nearly always break. Cities on former wetlands flood regularly—often disastrously. Dams starve downstream areas of sediment (沉积物) needed to protect coasts against rising seas. Straightened streams move faster than winding ones, giving water less time to flow downward. And they wash away riverbed ecosystems.
In addition to laying out this damage done by supposed water control, Gies takes readers on a hopeful global tour of solutions to these problems. Along the way, she introduces “water detectives” —scientists,engineers,urban planners, and many others.
These water detectives have found ways to give the slippery substance the time and space it needs to flow slowly underground. Around Seattle’s Thornton Creek, for instance, reclaimed land now allows for regular flooding, which has renewed riverbed habitat and created an urban oasis. In California’s Central Valley, scientists want to find ways to move unpolluted storm water into subsurface valleys that make ideal aquifers (含水层).
While some people are exploring new ways to manage water, others are leaning on ancient knowledge. Researchers in Peru are now studying old-style methods of water storage, which don’t require dams, in hopes of ensuring a steady flow of water to Lima—Peru’s populous capital that’s periodically affected by water shortage.
Understanding how to work with, not against, water will help humankind weather this age of drought and flood that’s being worsened by climate change.
| A．Controlling water, Gies convincingly argues, is a false belief. |
| B．Instead of trying to control water, they ask: What does water want? |
| C．It seems that water is cooperative and willing to flow where we direct it. |
| D．These old-style underwater concrete techniques pave the way for the construction of dams. |
| E．To further understand the whole ecosystem, they believe effective water control requires effort. |
| F．The study may help convince those who favor concrete-centric solutions to try something new. |
| G．Feeding groundwater supplies will in turn sustain rivers from below, which helps to maintain water levels and ecosystems. |
