1 . Financial trouble had distanced us from the life that was. We decided to
We called landscapers (园艺师). The news wasn’t
Over the two weeks before cutting, though, the trees
See if they’ll grow? Months? Years? I said nothing, but Daria could read our
But weeks later, I
Each day, they made us smile,
| A．build | B．sell | C．make | D．repair |
| A．priceless | B．leafless | C．overgrown | D．overvalued |
| A．important | B．convincing | C．fresh | D．good |
| A．conditions | B．designs | C．choices | D．reasons |
| A．frightened | B．brightened | C．sickened | D．softened |
| A．removal | B．protection | C．planting | D．rescue |
| A．surprised | B．troubled | C．changed | D．comforted |
| A．rough | B．straight | C．smooth | D．mature |
| A．experience | B．doubt | C．emotion | D．opinion |
| A．took over | B．gave up | C．kept off | D．glanced at |
| A．separated | B．died | C．appeared | D．came |
| A．shock | B．joy | C．success | D．reality |
| A．reminded | B．allowed | C．required | D．expected |
| A．time | B．desire | C．freedom | D．potential |
| A．awakening | B．turning | C．holding | D．contributing |
2 . Orienteering (定向越野) involves running, jogging or walking, and using a map and compass to move between places. It’s a great way to have fun outdoors with friends and family. The aim is to move between points, called controls, in a certain order in the quickest time. Events are usually held in parks, fields or forests but they can also happen in towns and cities and even school playgrounds. People can take part either as individuals or as a team.
Beginners’ events will have easier controls to find and cover less distance — perhaps a mile or two. For experienced orienteers, the length of the course could be much longer and take in hills and rough ground.
Orienteers are given a “control description sheet” to help them find each point. This sheet has details of features to look for, like paths and rivers, and a code that must match the code at each control. You will either mark your sheet at each control or check in with an electronic card.
When you start orienteering, you will learn map-reading skills. A helpful tip is to keep your thumb on the spot that shows your location on the map. Keep it the right way round: the features in front of you on the ground should be in front of you on the map.
Orienteering maps can have five or six colors. Black areas show human features, like buildings; brown shows the contour (轮廓) lines (height of the land); and blue shows water, such as lakes and rivers. White and green together show woodlands; yellow areas represent grass and open areas. On orienteering maps, a course consists of a triangle, circles, a double circle and sometimes connecting lines. The triangle is the start, the double circle is the finish, and all the circles in between are checkpoints.
As you run between points by what you hope is the quickest route, you can take in the scenery around you and have a great time choosing your path and trying to finish in a fast time.
1. What can we learn about orienteering at the beginning of the text?| A．Its route is random. | B．Its result is distance-based. |
| C．It groups orienteers by age. | D．It integrates various skills. |
| A．Tricks of saving time. | B．The use of control description sheet. |
| C．Methods of checking in. | D．The importance of codes. |
| A．To track progress. | B．To mark the finish point. |
| C．To maintain direction. | D．To highlight checkpoints. |
| A．Geographical features. | B．Difficulty levels. |
| C．Routes for competition. | D．Stages of the orienteering race. |
3 . Persuasion fatigue (疲劳) is a new term implying a situation where a person experiences a worn-out and frustrating feeling as a result of failing to persuade someone to do something or take a certain direction.
How do you react when your power of persuasion fails? You might regard the viewer as biased (有偏见的), stupid or otherwise out of touch with reality. You naturally feel your logic is right. You might decide to stop talking about that particular topic. You might even end relationships with your viewers. Indeed, these unresolved debates can contribute to social distancing and parent-child breakups.
In ongoing research, we are investigating the consequences of this experience. Our initial findings — still unpublished — suggest that persuasion fatigue is widespread. Of 600 people in the U. S. who participated in recent studies, 98 percent reported having experienced this fatigue, caused by discussions of topics such as politics, religion and health. Our work also suggests that most people believe debates hit dead ends because the other person in the conversation was at fault.
Yet we humbly suggest that sometimes it’s not them; it’s you. Fortunately, research suggests some sound approaches to saving these situations and protecting your relationships. As an initial step, label your emotional experiences, which helps you manage your feelings, including anger and sorrow. Simply acknowledging your persuasion fatigue as such may help you slow down, take a breath and ask yourself why a discussion has been stuck. Second, remember values and feelings are the basis of thinking. To reach your audience, it is essential to express your message in terms of their values, not yours. Wrapping your message in your audience’s values has been proven to increase its persuasiveness.
In our research thus far, 28 percent of participants have cited persuasion fatigue as the reason for cutting someone out of their life. Recognizing persuasion fatigue and how we contribute to it may help us pass through debatable situations without leaving those we love behind.
1. What is a probable consequence of persuasion fatigue?| A．Reducing prejudice against viewers. | B．Breaking up with your viewer. |
| C．Continuing to explore the issue. | D．Questioning your own speech logic. |
| A．It’s common to experience persuasion fatigue. |
| B．Persuasion fatigue always clouds our judgment. |
| C．It is easy for people to acknowledge their fault. |
| D．People are sensitive to topics concerning money. |
| A．Give in to your own feelings. |
| B．Identify the audience’s emotions. |
| C．Shift your point of view immediately. |
| D．Take the audience’s values into account. |
| A．Persuasion Fatigue: Who to Blame? |
| B．Persuasion Fatigue: How to Assess It? |
| C．Persuasion Fatigue: A New Frustration |
| D．Persuasion Fatigue: A Cause for Poor Relations |
4 . Something You Should Know About Balance Exercises
You need balance to perform just about any task, from walking, standing, sitting down in your chair, to every workout. Good balance helps prevent falls and therefore injuries, and simply makes daily activities easier and safer to perform. How steady you are on your feet can indicate how likely you are to live a longer, healthy life.
·What exercises should you take?
·How often should you perform balance exercises?
Balance exercises are often low-impact, controlled movements, so there’s not really any risk of over-training. Older adults who are at risk of falls should try to do balance training at least three times a week to reduce risk.
·
Training your balance three to six times each week should start to show results in 11 to 12 weeks. So, if you perform these exercises multiple times a week, you should see improvements in your balance in as few as three months.
·How long should you hold balance exercise positions?
The key to successful balance exercises is control and form. Move slowly with intention, focusing on bracing your core (稳住重心).
| A．What effects can balance exercises have on life |
| B．If you’d like to maintain quality of life and avoid pain |
| C．When the balance system as a whole starts to get worn |
| D．How long does it take to see results from balance exercises |
| E．Moving quickly will actually be less effective for these exercises |
| F．Young adults can do balance exercises every day or as often as they like |
| G．Pilates, dance and t’ai chi are all good exercises to maintain good balance |
5 . Plants are of greater importance in our lives than we think whether or not we are keen gardeners.
Large, leafy plants placed indoors provide some shade and reduce heat from sunlight inside a room when we don’t necessarily always want to keep curtains shut. Indoor plants will also cool the air around them slightly as they transpire (水分蒸发). This can help to keep humidity (湿度) within the human comfort zone of around 30% to 60%.
While placing plants indoors is not going to solve all air quality issues, certain plants are known to be effective in improving air quality within a home.
It has been shown in numerous studies that being around greenery and plants helps us to feel calmer and reduce stress. We feel calmer in natural environments.
| A．Interestingly, climbing plants can also serve a function. |
| B．In winter especially, dry air can cause many health issues. |
| C．Here are different ways plants can help keep us comfortable. |
| D．Improved air quality can keep us healthier in our living spaces. |
| E．It is outdoors, however, that plants can make the biggest difference. |
| F．Another factor that can determine how comfortable we feel is sound. |
| G．So surrounding ourselves with plants can help us to feel safe and at peace. |
6 . A few inspiring clues kept the rescuers going: the remains of fruit with bitemarks made by small human teeth, a pair of scissors and nappies (尿布) in the rainforest mud. All offered hope that four children, who come from the Huitoto Indigenous tribe, had miraculously survived a plane crash on May I in southern Colombia. The oldest of them was 13 and the youngest was only 11 months old. They were alive with tigers, poisonous snakes, storms and other threats under the dense green canopy of trees and vegetation.
The remains of the Cessna light aircraft were found two weeks later, with the bodies of three adults still inside. But there was no sign of the children. A long search through the forest began. Helicopters hovered over the area around the crash, broadcasting message s from the children’s grandmother, telling them they hadn’t been forgotten, urging them to stay in one place, and dropping packets of food that may have helped them survive.
“This isn’t a search for a needle in a haystack (干草堆), but a tiny flea (跳蚤) in a vast carpet, as they keep moving,” the captain of the search team told Colombian journalists. “Their bodies haven’t appeared, and I’m sure that we would have already found them if they were dead.”
Then on a Friday in June, army radios sounded. “Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle”. It was the army code for a child found alive; repeated four times meant all four had survived.
Although malnourished, and covered in insect bites, none were in a serious condition. The military posted pictures of a group of soldiers and volunteers posing with the children, who were wrapped in blankets. The education of survival skills the children got from their grandmother, a respected elder in the Araracuara indigenous territory, was almost certainly vital to their survival.
“They’ve given us an example of total survival that will go down in history,” said Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, calling it “a joy for the whole country”.
1. How many people were on board the plane that crashed?| A．4. | B．5. | C．6. | D．7. |
| A．There was no timely rescue. |
| B．They were constantly in motion. |
| C．The accident left them badly injured. |
| D．Wild animals became a great threat for the search. |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Doubtful. | C．Subjective. | D．Concerned. |
| A．The pictures taken by the soldiers. | B．The messages sent by the army. |
| C．The tips from their grandmother. | D．The encouragement of the president. |
7 . Some ultra-processed foods increase the risk of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, but others are good for you, new research suggests. A major new international study has found that regular consumption of meat products, such as sausages and sugary drinks make it more likely that someone will get those diseases. But bread and cereals actually reduce someone’s risk of them, because they contain fibre despite also being ultra-processed foods (UPF), the same researchers also concluded in findings published in The Lancet.
Similarly, sauces, spreads and condiments are also bad for human health, but not as much as animal products and soft drinks. However, several other major types of UPF previously seen as harmful: sweets and desserts, ready meals, savoury snacks and plant-based alternatives to meat products also got the all-clear. They are “not associated with risk of multi-morbidity (多重病症)”, said the authors.
Experts said the findings showed that regarding all UPF products as bad for health is unwise and unwarranted. Like several other recent research projects, the new study did conclude that UPF harms human health and makes it more likely that someone who consumes a lot of it would suffer a potentially fatal event, such as a heart attack or stroke. However, it also gives a more detailed picture of exactly which UPF products do and do not heighten that risk.
The authors said, “We found that higher consumption of UPF was associated with a higher risk of multi-morbidity of cancer and cardio-metabolic diseases.” People keen to lower their risk should replace some but not all UPF in their diet with “similar but less processed foods for the prevention of cancer and cardio-metabolic multi-morbidity” or follow the Mediterranean diet. Multi-morbidity is when someone has at least two life-shortening diseases at the same time, such as cancer and heart disease.
Heinz Freisling, a co-author of the paper and expert at the World Health Organization said, “Our study emphasises that it is not necessary to completely avoid ultra-processed foods; rather, their consumption should be limited, and preference be given to fresh or minimally processed foods.”
1. What ultra-processed foods did the researchers find to be good for health according to the new research?| A．Bread and cereals. | B．Sweets and desserts. |
| C．Sausages and sugary drinks. | D．Sauces, spreads, and condiments. |
| A．Illegal. | B．Unavoidable. | C．Misleading. | D．Unreasonable. |
| A．It consists of less processed foods. |
| B．It encourages the consumption of UPF. |
| C．It increases the risk of developing multi-morbidity. |
| D．It proves effective in treating cancer and heart disease. |
| A．To warn people of the danger of eating UPF. |
| B．To promote the consumption of processed foods. |
| C．To deepen the insight into ultra-processed foods. |
| D．To encourage people to follow a Mediterranean diet. |
8 . Human history is full of horse stories. Cowboys told epic tales of trusty horses guiding them home on dark, foggy nights. Legendary horses transported wounded soldiers through battle zones. Such horses were intelligent and highly trained. And they made Eakta Jain think of robots. In fact, horses have become her muse for autonomous robots.
For a horse that can take a rider home on its own, “you can trust it with your life,” says Jain, a computer scientist and roboticist. Jain was drawn to learning how that trust develops. She wondered if it could help improve human-robot interactions. She was especially interested in how such relationships form. For a year, Jain immersed herself in the horse world. She watched classes in horse training at her university. She also talked with students, instructors, trainers and horse owners.
Horses learn cues from their trainers on how to comfortably interact with people. People, too, must learn their part. Riders must learn what cues to use to direct horses to perform in desired ways or to correct an animal when it doesn’t do what was expected. Jain found some similarities, here, to working with robots.
People must learn how to direct robots to do specific tasks. They also must learn what to do when robots don’t perform as planned. Jain’s goal is to program robots that will respond predictably to inputs from people. But like many horses, autonomous robots also should be able to respond on their own as conditions change. For example, a self-driving car must stop to avoid hitting something — even if some human mistakenly tells it to keep going.
In human-horse partnerships, horses mostly communicate through actions, not sounds. For instance, their ears tend to point toward whatever they’re paying attention to. “Perhaps the same unspoken expressions used in human-horse communications can be used to communicate that the robot respects a human,” Jain says. That might build a sense of trust. It might also make someone more open to working with a robot. What would it mean for robots and people to respect and trust each other? For now, she adds, this is largely uncharted territory. But she’s looking to build a path.
1. What inspired Eakta Jain to explore the relationship between horses and robots?| A．The intelligence and training of legendary horses. |
| B．The need to improve human-robot interactions. |
| C．The trust between horses and humans. |
| D．The widely-spread cowboy stories. |
| A．Both require verbal commands. |
| B．Both learn how to interact with people. |
| C．Both are directed to perform specific tasks. |
| D．Both are able to respond on their own accordingly. |
| A．Leading to a more efficient transport system. |
| B．Getting rid of the need for human involvement. |
| C．Revolutionizing the field of computer science. |
| D．Enhancing trust and cooperation between them. |
| A．The Similarities Between Horses and Robots |
| B．Learn from Horses to Improve Robot Partnerships |
| C．The Uncharted Territory of Human-Robot Interactions |
| D．Understand Communication in Human-Horse-Robot Relationships |
9 . Scientists have just shown how to 3-D print flat wood so that it later changes into a desired complex shape. They relied on what could have been a disadvantage -- the tendency of damp wood to warp (变形) as it dries. The researchers first had to figure out how to make wood fibers line up in desired ways. To do this, they turned to ground-up wood, known as wood “flour”. They changed it into a paste (糊状物) to make the ink for their 3-D printer.
The team printed their shapes at different speeds and using different patterns to lay down the ink. After each test, Kam, who works at the Hebrew University, says, “We look to see how it dries.” Along the way, they learned how to 3-D print a structure. They described their technique in the February 2022 issue of Polymers. They offered even more minutiae about how to control the shapeshifting (变形) of wood ink.
This technology is still in progress. Kam hopes it could change the way people build things. “Most makers try to make things — ‘like a brick’ — that last as long as possible” he says. But that’s not how nature works. Organisms grow, die and rot. This allows their building blocks to be reused to make new organisms.
His team’s materials also are reusable. “You can ‘take any old wood’. Perhaps an old chair or a bedroom dresser. Rather than trash it, grind (磨碎) its wood and reuse the sawdust — flour — to make something new.” says Kam. Kam also hopes that one day, we won’t carve up our trees to make new chairs but instead just 3-D print a new one. “You sit on it for three or four years,” he says. “When you are tired of it, just grind it up and print something new. No trees are harmed to 3-D print this piece of wood.”
1. What can we know about the 3-D printer in the text?| A．It can produce flour. |
| B．Its ink is made of wood paste. |
| C．It prints a desired shape directly. |
| D．Its principle is based on dry wood. |
| A．Details. | B．Tasks. | C．Opportunities. | D．Analyses. |
| A．3-D printing technology is against natural law. |
| B．3-D printing technology is still on the way. |
| C．People prefer natural building materials. |
| D．People have changed the way they build. |
| A．It wastes materials. | B．It develops quite fast. |
| C．It lowers the wood’s price. | D．It benefits the environment. |
10 . Yin Ruins Museum is made up of buildings that stand in a park-like setting in Anyang, Henan Province. The park marks the location of Yin Xu, the ancient capital of the Shang Dynasty. The museum’s buildings have been given the appearance of ancient structures. That makes them fit in tastefully with the surrounding landscape and provides a suitable setting for the cultural relies it displays. These were all unearthed through archaeological digs at the site itself as far back as the 1920s.
Exploration is still ongoing and new archaeological treasures are periodically discovered. The buried relics of Yin Xu form the biggest archaeological site in all of China. Yin Xu once covered an area of about 24 square kilometers and was divided into several different districts, including a palace district, a civil residence district, a workshop district and a tomb district.
Many of the cultural relics that were unearthed during archaeological digs such as bronzes, carved jade objects, pottery, lacquerware and oracle bones are now on display at the museum. A four-legged bronze cauldron (大锅) that was discovered at the site in 1939 is perhaps the single most famous relic that was unearthed from Yin Xu. It was at first known as the Simuwu Ding but is now known as the Houmuwu Ding. It is now on display at the National Museum of China in Beijing but you can see a replica (复制品) of it at Yin Ruins Museum.
Most people that have heard of Yin Xu across the world, however, connect the site with the discovery of the oracle bones with mysterious ancient inscriptions on them. It is believed that farmers in the area had periodically discovered such bones as far back as the Han Dynasty.
1. What is the purpose of giving the museum’s buildings the appearance of ancient structures?| A．To attract more tourists. |
| B．To be in harmony with the surroundings. |
| C．To make the cultural relics look more valuable. |
| D．To provide a suitable setting for archaeological digs. |
| A．A bronze cauldron. | B．A carved jade object. |
| C．An ancient pottery. | D．An oracle bone. |
| A．During the Shang Dynasty. | B．During the Han Dynasty. |
| C．In the 1920s. | D．In the 1930s. |
