1．活动的时间和地点；
2．活动的内容；
3．期待参与。
注意：
1．写作词数应为80左右；
2．请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Notice
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Student Union
2 . A five-year-old dog named Kelsey has been praised as a hero for helping to save the life of her owner who slipped in the snow and broke his neck.
The man, Bob, was alone when he left his farmhouse on New Year’s Eve to collect firewood.Expecting a journey of only several meters, Bob was wearing just long johns (衬裤), a shirt and slippers when he went outside, although the temperature was around －4℃.
After the accident, he was unable to move in the snow. Fortunately, Kelsey came to his assistance.
“I was shouting for help, but my nearest neighbor is about 400 meters away, and it was 10:30 p. m.,” Bob explained. “By the next morning, my voice was gone and I couldn’t yell for help, but Kelsey didn’t stop barking.”
Kelsey’s companion kept him warm by lying on top of him. She licked his face and hands to keep him awake. “Kelsey kept barking but never left my side,” Bob recalled. “I knew I couldn’t give up and that it was my choice to stay alive.”
Bob spent 20 hours in the freezing cold. When he finally lost consciousness, his dog kept barking. Finally, hearing the barking, Bob’s neighbor discovered him at 6:30 p. m. on New Year’s Day and called the emergency services at once. When Bob arrived in hospital, his body temperature was below 21℃. However, doctors were surprised to find that he didn’t have any frostbite (冻疮). They believed it was because of Kelsey’s determination to keep him warm. Dr. Chaim Colen, the doctor who treated Bob, said, “His dog really saved him.He was very fortunate.”
Bob said he was very grateful to both Dr. Colen and his Kelsey. “They saved my life. They are truly heroes!”
1. What happened to Bob on New Year’s Eve?| A．He left his dog alone in his farmhouse. |
| B．He was praised for saving a dog owner. |
| C．He broke his neck and couldn’t move. |
| D．He heard his neighbor’s shouting for help. |
| A．To keep warm. |
| B．To stay alive. |
| C．To keep Bob awake. |
| D．To seek help from others. |
| A．Helpful. | B．Fortunate. |
| C．Grateful. | D．Friendly. |
| A．A Neckbreaking Accident |
| B．The Magic Night |
| C．Warmth on a Winter’s Night |
| D．Determination to Keep Alive |
3 . The 2024 Science Fiction Short Story Contest
The 2023 Science Fiction Short Story Contest just came to an end. Welcome to our 2024 Science Fiction Short Story Contest sponsored by Science Fiction Association in our city. The contest is to encourage amateur and semi-professional writers to reach the next level of proficiency. We will look for engaging openings, good character development, well-structured plotting, powerful imagery, humorous language, unique word or phrasing choices, and convincing endings. Come to show the world your fantasy imagination and storytelling talents!
Requirement
A qualifying story must have strong science fiction or fantasy elements and must be shorter than 7,500 words. Your entries must be original works of fiction. If you have received prizes for your fiction writing from any source or your story has been published in any paying publication, you are no longer qualified.
Past winners of our contest are no longer qualified.
No reprints, fan fiction or poetry, please.
Judge and Prize
Judges will provide feedbacks for all qualifying contest entries. First-round judges will consist of Science Fiction Association members and volunteers. The professional writers’ decision is final.
The champions, runners-up and honorable mentions will receive prizes including cash prize, a certificate of achievement, Science Fiction Association Press books, and a free membership to Science Fiction Association, All winners can select their books and either take them immediately or ask for them to be shipped later.
Deadline
The contest will be limited to the first 60 qualifying entries. While the submission deadline is September 30th, 2024, we may close off the entry for the year sooner if the response is larger than expected. The winners will be published on December 31th.
Notice
Please place your contact information for possible awards.
There is no entry fee. Please submit only one entry per author.
1. What is the activity about?| A．Story telling. | B．Story writing. |
| C．Writer training. | D．Writer recommending. |
| A．It can come as the form of a poem. | B．It should be over 7,500 words long. |
| C．It must be the author’s original one. | D．It is supposed to be published before. |
| A．Professional writers. | B．Amateur writers. |
| C．Science Fiction Association members. | D．Science Fiction Association volunteers. |
4 . I was at a new school in a new state and needed something solid to stand on: a place to feel grounded. I also needed to do laundry, so I walked to a nearby self-service laundry and stuffed a machine with my clothes. As I struggled to close the washer door, the woman working behind the counter told me to give it a good hit with my hand. The washer did its job, yet even after an hour, the dryer seemed to have barely warmed my clothes. I left, having decided to air-dry them on my car in the August heat.
A month later, I learned her name was Sandy, which she told me after I’d helped her stop a washing machine from moving across the floor. I was grading poems at a table when one of the washers broke loose and skipped an inch into the air. I jumped to the machine and held on while she unplugged it. The next week, Sandy told me dryer No. 8 was the fastest.
It went on like this. I’d do laundry once a week, usually Thursday or Friday. Sandy worked Tuesday through Saturday and we’d talk small while I folded clothes. She told me about her son and his grades, as well as the new dog they’d just adopted. She was fascinated that I was studying poetry. She teased (开玩笑) that it was harder making a living as a poet than as a laundry attendant. Even then I knew she was probably right.
I began to recognize others there: workers taking breaks by the door, a mother and her baby, and even some delivery drivers. But Sandy was the center of my community. For nearly three years and almost every week, I’d do laundry and talk with her. We checked on each other, expecting the other to be there. We asked where the other had gone when we missed a week. There was a note of concern for the other’s absence, a note of joy at their return.
I’d found a place to stand on solid ground.
1. Why did the author leave with his wet clothes?| A．He liked the August heat better. | B．He had to go back to the meeting. |
| C．He wanted to show off his new car. | D．He didn’t think the dryer worked well. |
| A．She was warm-hearted. | B．She needed a volunteer. |
| C．She wanted to thank him. | D．She was sorry for the mess. |
| A．It was harder to fulfill. | B．It was really fascinating. |
| C．It was badly-paid work. | D．It needed a lot of effort. |
| A．He formed a close friendship with Sandy. |
| B．He made a lot of friends in college. |
| C．He expected Sandy to do laundry for him. |
| D．He often wrote to Sandy after graduation. |
5 . Parents often believe that they have a good relationship with their teenagers. But last summer, Joanna and Henry noticed a change in their older son. Suddenly he seemed to be talking far more to his friends than to his parents. “The door to his room is always shut,” Joanna noted.
Tina and Mark noticed similar changes in their 14-year-old daughter. “She used to cuddle up (依偎) against me on the sofa and talk,” said Mark. “Now we joke that she does this only when she wants something. Sometimes she wants to be treated like a little girl and sometimes like a young lady. The problem is understanding which time is which.”
Before age 11, children like to tell their parents what’s on their mind. “In fact, parents are first on the list,” said Michael Riera, author of Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers. “This completely changes during the teen years,” Riera explained. “They talk to their friends first, then maybe their teachers, and their parents last.”
Parents who know what’s going on in their teenagers’ lives are in the best position to help them. To break down the wall of silence, parents should create chances to understand what their children want to say, and try to find ways to talk and write to them. And they must give their children a mental (思想的) break, for children also need freedom, though young. Another thing parents should remember is that to be a friend, not a manager, with their children is a better way to know them.
1. “The door to his room is always shut” suggests that the son ________.| A．keeps himself away from his parents | B．begins to dislike his parents |
| C．is always busy with his study | D．doesn’t want to be ignored |
| A．Their daughter isn’t as lovely as before. |
| B．They can’t read their daughter’s mind exactly. |
| C．They don’t know what to say to their daughter. |
| D．Their daughter talks with them only when she needs help. |
| A．Teenagers talk a lot with their friends. | B．Teenagers do not understand their parents. |
| C．Teenagers talk little about their own lives. | D．Teenagers do not talk much with their parents. |
| A．Parents shouldn’t be angry with teenagers. |
| B．Parents have to talk with children face to face. |
| C．Parents are unhappy with their growing children. |
| D．Parents should try to understand their teenagers. |
Music is all around us. Music plays
Music
Why do so many people like music? Music can be a part of our identity — the set of qualities and
7 . High schools used to teach shop classes, in which students learned skills like woodworking. Nowadays, most schools have traded in shop class in favor of academic subjects. However, the National Science Foundation STEM Guitar Project thinks that academic subjects and carpentry (木匠活) can be combined. This organization aims to get students excited about science, math, and arts all at once, by teaching students how to make a guitar.
Experis forecast that technical skills like this one could be in great demand in the future. Unfortunately, many high schools don’t offer students access to mechanical design skills, due to the fact that they are not on the list of standardized subjects and the schools can’t scientifically assess students’ performance. But, is STEM really needed in order to build a guitar? Actually, it’s impossible to make a guitar without knowing science and math.
Joshua Cruz, a design teacher, said that building a guitar also teaches troubleshooting and problemsolving skills. He thinks the STEM Guitar Project provides opportunities to challenge students to apply their own creativity to STEM problems. “I’m still figuring out how we can apply it,” Cruz explained. “I think we’re going to use a lot of the same theories behind how strings and stringed instruments work and try and get them to make stringed instruments of their own, and thus improve their academic performance.”
Because of its effectiveness and creativity, the guitar initiative was offered the Gerhard Salinger award, which recognizes outstanding STEM school programs. “Through this project, we have become part of this community of businessmen, engineers and artisans,” said Mark French, one of the six people who received the award for his work with STEM guitar. “It’s a great group and I’m pleased to be part of it. I get to combine something I love doing with an activity that really makes the world a little bit better place. It really does help people.”
Thanks to people like Mark French, and to the STEM Guitar Project, the world is a little bit of a better, more educated, and more musical place.
1. Why are mechanical design skills unavailable to high school students?| A．Students are not excited about these skills. |
| B．Students’ performance can’t be properly evaluated. |
| C．They are not necessary for the students’ growth. |
| D．They are of no help to students’ academic performance. |
| A．The ability to find faults with others. |
| B．The skills of making a guitar independently. |
| C．The opportunity to challenge scientific theories. |
| D．The improvement of creativity and learning ability |
| A．It is offered to businessmen and engineers. |
| B．It is a part of the community of businessmen. |
| C．It recognizes outstanding STEM school programs. |
| D．It encourages people to make their own instruments. |
| A．The Combination of Skills |
| B．The Award for the STEM Guitar Project. |
| C．The STEM Guitar Project Benefits Students |
| D．The STEM Guitar Project Promotes Music Education. |
8 . By now, most people know they should be eating more vegetables. But are there ways to get more from the vegetables you already eat? A research shows that when it comes to vegetables, it’s not only how much we eat, but also how we prepare them, that decides the vitamins and other nutrients that enter our body.
Many studies show that people who eat lots of vegetables have less heart disease, and eye problems and even cancer. But raw vegetables are not always best. The researchers found that 198 Germans who eat raw food were short of lycopene, the matter found in tomatoes and other red vegetables. “There is an idea that raw foods are always going to be better,” says Steven K. Clinton, a professor at Ohi o State University. “For fruits and vegetables, sometimes a little bit of cooking can be helpful.”
A number of factors decide how the vegetables do good to people’s health before they reach the table, including where and how they were grown and stored before being bought. No single cooking way is best. Some nutrients are easily lost in cooking if they are cooked in different ways.
Vitamins C and B are often lost. In January, another report said that boiling was better for carrots than frying or serving them raw. Frying was the worst way to cook.
What cooked with the vegetables can also be important? When the vegetables were cooked with fat, the diners can get more nutrients. Fat can also make the taste of vegetables better, meaning that people will eat more of them. Putting on some other things that make it taste better—a little salt—can make the food taste better.
1. The writer mainly wants to tell us that ________.| A．people should eat more vegetables |
| B．the way people eat vegetables is important |
| C．eating vegetables is good for us |
| D．how much vegetables one should eat |
| A．have the eyes problems | B．have heart disease |
| C．be in need of lycopene | D．hate eating tomatoes |
| A．the place where the vegetables are grown |
| B．the way how the vegetables are stored |
| C．the way how the vegetables are prepared |
| D．the price at which the vegetable are sold |
| A．It’s better to cook vegetables with fat |
| B．the more fat in the cooking, the fewer vegetables people will eat |
| C．It’s better to cook the vegetables without salt |
| D．the fat will increase the nutrition of the vegetables |
9 . There was a time when the solar industry was considered dead money. It was too expensive, too inefficient, and too inconsistent to be a good alternative energy source for anything, let alone your home or office.
But those days are long gone. Today, solar energy represents the future of our planet’s energy needs because it’s cheap, efficient, consistent, and most importantly, clean.
Solar energy costs have dropped by more than 70% over the past 10 years, and solar energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the United States. Let that sink in for a moment.
Better yet, the drivers of these cost declines—economies of scale and technological improvements powered by Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law-are lasting, and therefore, solar energy is going to get even cheaper. Indeed, these forces are so powerful in the solar industry that they have their own law-Swanson’s Law-which states that the price of solar modules (组件) decreases by about 20%for every doubling in global solar capacity.
For what it’s worth, the US Department of Energy believes solar costs can and will fall by another 60% in 2030. So, solar energy is the cheapest way to power things today.
Meanwhile, solar panels have become very efficient at turning light from the sun into usable energy. Back in 1992, researchers at the University of South Florida created a thin-film solar cell with 15.9% efficiency—and that was considered a breakthrough at the time. These days, though, your average silicon (硅) solar cells sport efficiency rates above 20%. That’s standard. And manufacturers have created prototypes (原型机) that are getting 30% efficiency, while some research efforts have even managed to achieve near 50% efficiency in certain lab tests.
At the same time, these solar systems have become dramatically more consistent. One of the biggest disadvantages for solar energy in the early 2000s was its intermittency (间歇性) —the sun doesn’t shine every day, so what do you do when it’s cloudy? Well, that’s why big batteries exist.
1. What can we learn from paragraph 4?| A．The worldwide popularity of solar energy. |
| B．The rapid increase in global solar capacity. |
| C．The contents of Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law. |
| D．The contributors to the decline in solar energy costs. |
| A．To indicate the variety of solar cells. |
| B．To prove the wide use of solar cells. |
| C．To show the improvement of solar cells. |
| D．To compare the size of different solar cells. |
| A．Positive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Uncaring. | D．Worried. |
| A．The wide use of solar power. | B．The alternative to solar power. |
| C．The disadvantage of solar power. | D．The storage of solar power. |
10 . In the past decade, the use of social media has grown in a way that no one could have guessed. It has turned some teenagers into celebrities and turned the famous into the infamous, overnight.
A key feature of social media, however, is its volatility. Trends come and go, disappearing almost as quickly as they appeared.
Short video apps such as TikTok and its Chinese equivalent (等同物) Douyin, took the world by storm. The Telegraph reported that TikTok was ranked 8th on Apple’s App Store in April. And Douyin had more than 300 million domestic monthly active users in June, CNBC said.
Why are these short videos — which are rarely longer than a few minutes — so popular? Jiang Yige, Singapore-based analyst at FengHe Fund Management, has a theory. “Short videos are just right to fill in the little gaps in our busy schedules,” he told CNBC.
These videos — apart from being very convenient — are important to teenagers because they allow them to express themselves, according to Teen Vogue.
Liza Koshy, a user of the US app Musical, who has over 2 million followers, said, “The sense of community that users of short video apps get is another appealing feature.”
Live streaming (直播) is a feature of our social media life that now seems as natural as sunrise. It’s a pretty neat idea: You can watch anyone, anywhere, live. However, China has taken live streaming to a whole new level. In China, more than 100 million viewers monthly watch a live streaming video. Forbes thought that a number of factors had led to the popularity of the live streaming. Among them is viewers’ ability to interact with unknown names.
However, the quick development of social media may be having side effects too. Fake news is one serious problem it causes. Materials shared on these platforms are often not checked for accuracy. The most basic content can be false and can mislead users one way or another. We use social media all the time, which doesn’t mean that we understand the influence it is having on us. We should be mindful of both the time we spend on it and its impact on our minds.
1. What does the underlined word “volatility” in Paragraph 2 possibly mean?| A．Being changeable. | B．Being steady. |
| C．Being promising. | D．Being violent. |
| A．They are very convenient. | B．They help people kill time. |
| C．They provide a sense of community. | D．They allow people to express themselves. |
| A．The information from social media is totally reliable. |
| B．When it comes to social media, people only know short videos. |
| C．People can’t communicate with each other without social media. |
| D．There is still much room for social media to make improvement. |
| A．Objective. | B．Subjective. |
| C．Favourable. | D．Disapproving. |
