1 . Edinburgh is famous for its many museums where you can learn its rich history.
Museum on the MoundLocated in the heart of Edinburgh’s city center, this appealing museum takes a fresh look at money — and much, much more. You will see coins and banknotes from over the ages, including the first Scottish banknote printed in 1727. There are also interesting interactive displays and you can even try your hand at opening a safe!
The Writers’ MuseumIt is housed in the beautiful Lady Stair’s House, a category A listed building. The collection celebrates the legacy (遗产) of Scotland’s literary contributions, with special emphasis given to Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns. The museum is home to numerous paintings, books and manuscripts (手稿), and you can also see Burns’ writing desk and Scott’s chess set.
Our Dynamic EarthIt celebrates the beauty of the earth via technology. Interactive exhibits allow visitors to experience earthquakes, the ocean floor, ice ages and mountains by the use of computer software. Particularly interesting is the “tour” around the eleven Earthscapes. It is educational fun for the whole family and can serve as a good introduction to concepts surrounding the formation of the planet and the creatures we share the earth with.
National Museum of ScotlandThe diverse collections here include the history of Scotland with exhibitions of international interest. The natural world, science and technology, discoveries, art, and world cultures are all explored. There are interactive elements and activities to suit children of all ages, including science experiments and musical instruments.
1. Which might be the most attractive to finance majors?A.Our Dynamic Earth. | B.Museum on the Mound. |
C.The Writers’ Museum. | D.National Museum of Scotland. |
A.They have an artistic atmosphere. | B.They have interactive exhibits. |
C.They provide hands-on activities. | D.They showcase world cultures. |
A.Play with your family. | B.Tour the world virtually. |
C.Design computer software. | D.Learn about ancient creatures. |
2 . Eating more plants is a great move for your health and the environment.
Not replacing meat with other protein sources. When you take something out of your diet, you take out the nutrients that food provided.
Taking too much cheese. Limit your intake of refined carbohydrates (碳水化合物), sweets and cheese. Cheese is an easy way to get meat-free protein, but too much can end up adding a lot of saturated (饱和的) animal fat in your diet. People are suggested to get most of their protein from plant-based sources and use smaller amounts of cheese to give flavor.
Not having enough vegetables. The point of eating more plant-based food is to eat more plants!
A.Making an effort to eat protein. |
B.But that doesn’t always happen. |
C.Take a look at your plate before you eat. |
D.Eating too many processed man-made meats. |
E.Meat is a rich source of protein, iron and B vitamins. |
F.But simply eating less meat doesn’t guarantee health benefits. |
G.Replace cheese with things like nut-based sauces in some dishes. |
3 . Scientists have observed a planet being swallowed by its host star for the first time. They believe this could be a preview of what could one day happen to Earth — but don’t worry, that won’t be for about another five billion years.
The US astronomers said that when the sun finally does swallow Earth, it will cause only a “tiny change” compared to the cosmic (宇宙的) explosion they just witnessed. Most planets are believed to meet their end when their host star runs out of energy, turning into a red giant that massively expands, destroying anything unlucky enough to be in its path.
Astronomers had previously seen the before-and-after effects of this process, but had never caught a planet in the act of being consumed. Lead researcher Kishalay De said the accidental discovery unfolded like a “detective story”.
“It all started about three years ago when I was looking at data from the Zwicky Transient Facility survey, which took images of the sky every night,” Dr. De said.
He came across a star that had suddenly increased in brightness by more than 100 times over a 10-day period. The star is in the Milky Way galaxy (银河系), around 12,000 light years from Earth near the Aquila constellation (天鹰座). Dr. De had been searching for binary star (双星) systems, in which the larger star takes bites out of its companion, creating incredibly bright explosions called outbursts. But data showed that this outburst was surrounded by cold gas, suggesting it was not a binary star system.
And NASA’s infra-red space telescope NEOWISE showed that dust had started to shoot out of the area months before the outburst. More puzzling still was that the outburst produced around 1,000 times less energy than previously observed mergers (合并) between stars.
1. What is paragraph 2 mainly about?A.US astronomers are concerned about the future of Earth. |
B.The harm the cosmic explosion may bring. |
C.A prediction made by US astronomers about Earth. |
D.Harmony between the Earth and the Sun is of great importance. |
A.He loves detective stories. | B.His efforts paid off at last. |
C.The survey made him suffer. | D.He took pride in his discovery. |
A.It is near the Aquila constellation. | B.It has the strongest brightness. |
C.It can swallow other host stars. | D.It causes explosions constantly. |
A.Science. | B.Literature. | C.Documentary. | D.Education. |
4 . A great skill to have is the ability to solve problems effectively, specifically interpersonal and behavioral problems. In order to achieve this, you need to follow a few key requirements.
First, you should understand “why” the problem exists.
Once you have clearly identified the problem, you need to understand what you have control over and what don’t.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Once you have all of your information, analyze it carefully and look at it from various viewpoints. Be as objective as possible and don’t be quick to judge.
A.Now determine your options for solutions. |
B.Remain judgment-free as much as possible. |
C.Ask yourself questions about what options you have. |
D.That means figuring out the actual root cause of the problem. |
E.Read on to find how to become a more effective problem solver. |
F.The strategies in problem-solving are good lifelong skills to have. |
G.Your efforts must be within the areas where you are in the driver’s seat. |
5 . Writer Andrew Leland started losing his sight 20 years ago, when he was in high school, as a result of a progressive eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa (色素性视网膜炎). His first experience of loss of sight happened temporarily at night, in which he was confused that everyone else seemed to see in the dark so much better than he did. Over the years, his disease has progressed gradually. He’s now legally blind, although he still has a narrow field of vision, which allows him to see about 6% of what a fully sighted person sees.
Leland analogized his vision to the view you might get by looking through a toilet paper tube or a keyhole. He said, “Imagine having that toilet paper tube tied to your head and trying to walk down the street; there’s a whole bunch of things you don’t see but that you really ought to, like dogs.”
In his new book, The Country of the Blind, Leland writes about losing his vision and preparing for blindness, how his condition impacts his identity, how the world sees him and his marriage, and something valuable he has learned.
He said he was not going to try to tell people that having vision was not an unbelievably useful thing for a human being for many reasons. When talking about the experience of being alive and being conscious, he referred to James Joyce — Joyce believed that he was only losing one world among many, and that vision was only a tiny part of experiences when he was going blind.
He thought if you looked at the things that blind people were capable of imagining, like John Milton writing Paradise Lost as a blind person, there was this unbelievable richness in humans’ consciousness that vision had nothing to do with. Other realms (领域) such as the mental and emotional realms were all so rich that they could also help unfold things on earth before you.
1. What do we know about Leland?A.He went totally blind in high school. |
B.He experienced night blindness at first. |
C.He was born with a narrow field of vision. |
D.He was aware of his condition throughout. |
A.Connected. | B.Reduced. | C.Compared. | D.Exposed. |
A.To help explain an opinion. |
B.To stress the value of good vision. |
C.To state his considerable influence. |
D.To show the inconvenience of blindness. |
A.Practice is the best teacher. |
B.The blind have more vivid imagination. |
C.Things are not set in concrete. |
D.Vision is not the only window in the world. |
6 . A Canadian addicted to Chinese ink wash painting
Canadian Brandon Collins-Green calls himself a Chinese culture “addict”. He has lived in China for over six years, spending his time in painting in the Chinese ink wash style and translating Chinese classics into English.
Collins-Green, 37, is a doctoral candidate in classical Chinese literature at Jiangxi Normal University in Nanchang. About 15 years ago, his first encounter with a stage adaption of the classic Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber in Singapore inspired him to study Chinese in the following years. Learning Chinese as a second language, Collins-Green found it was not easy to understand a novel written in Chinese. “Besides the stories, I am interested in the poems, dialogues and lantern riddles in the book,” he said, “Because of The Dream of the Red Chamber, I wanted to get a closer look at China.”
His strong curiosity about China and Chinese culture prompted Collins-Green to travel to the city of Nanchang in 2015, in the hope of learning what the real China was like. During a visit to Badashanren Memorial Hall in Nanchang, where paintings of a famous Chinese artist were on exhibition, Collins-Green was interested in how a tiny brush could depict (描画) the curves of hills, shade and light on paper.
In his years spent translating The Dream of the Red Chamber into English, he has gradually found his way of combining Chinese and foreign cultures into his paintings, writing poems in English as the backdrops of his figures. As of this year, Collins-Green has completed over 2,500 works, including translations of The Dream of the Red Chamber, landscape paintings and portraits.
He lives a life greatly influenced by The Dream of the Red Chamber, renting a loft of about 9 square meters beside his university as a studio. Since this March, his paintings have been exhibited at art festivals in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Xi’an, bringing him a group of fans. Some have sent him emails, asking about the meanings of the poems in his paintings.
“We can see from Collins-Green that traditional Chinese culture is becoming more attractive to people in other countries,” said Li Shunchen, Collins-Green’s mentor at Jiangxi Normal University. “I really recommend that more people come to China to see how fast it is changing and to enjoy the charm of its culture,” Collins-Green said.
1. What first inspired Collins-Green to study Chinese according to the passage?A.His love for Chinese paintings. | B.The stage version of a classic Chinese novel. |
C.The need of his translation work. | D.His second language learning. |
A.amazed. | B.disappointed. | C.relaxed. | D.frightened. |
A.His strong curiosity about China gradually faded away. |
B.He studied Chinese well in China. |
C.He made great achievements as an addict to Chinese culture. |
D.His works produced some negative reactions in viewers. |
7 . About 12% of the total global energy demand comes from heating and cooling homes and businesses. A new study suggests that using underground water to maintain comfortable temperatures could reduce consumption of natural gas and electricity in this section by 40% in the US. The approach is called ATES, short for aquifer thermal energy storage (含水层热能储存).
“We need storage to absorb energy from the sun and wind. It’s crucial to creating affordable, reliable, and deeply environmental-friendly electricity systems. Most people are interested in batteries and other kinds of electrical storage. But we were wondering whether there was any opportunity to use geothermal (地热的) energy storage,” said first author A.T.D Perera. “With ATES, energy can be stored for a long period of time, without adding an additional burden to the grid (输电网).”
ATES is a pleasantly simple concept that takes advantage of the heat-absorbing property of water and the natural geological features of the planet. You simply pull existing underground water up and heat it at the surface in the summer with environmental heat or energy. Then you send it back down. It stays fairly hot because the Earth is a good insulator (绝热体).
“Unlike above-ground tank-based water or ice storage systems, ATES will not need space. It’s also more efficient and can support larger communities in cooling or heating than traditional geothermal heat pump systems that rely on heat moving with the underground soil,” added co-author Hong Tianzhen.
A major beneft of ATES is that it will become more efficient as weather becomes more extreme in the coming years due to climate change. The hotter summers and severer winters could increase the amount of free thermal energy that can be stored with ATES. “It’s very much a realistic thing to do and this work is really about showing its value,” said Perera. “This technology is ready to go, so to speak. We just need to do it.”
1. What do we know about ATES?A.It is technologically demanding. |
B.It is aimed at replacing natural energy. |
C.It mainly relies on batteries to function. |
D.It helps achieve an environmentally friendly society |
A.By giving examples. | B.By discussing results. |
C.By making comparisons. | D.By analyzing principles. |
A.Temperature variations. | B.Insulated materials. |
C.The duration of storage. | D.The category of energy. |
A.A Turning Point in Energy Usage |
B.A Solution to Green Cooling and Heating |
C.A Transformation in the US Electricity System |
D.A Discovery About Geothermal Energy Storage |
8 . The Sequoia National Park in California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains is best known for the Giant Forest, a collection of 2,000 trees that includes half of the Earth’s largest and longest-living trees. This past weekend, the ancient wonders came dangerously close to being burned by the KNP Complex Fire. But thanks to resourceful firefighters, the precious treasure has been saved.
The firefighters had taken the standard measures of clearing brush and setting controlled fires long before the fire began heading toward the Giant Forest. But they knew more needed to be done. On September 17, 2021, they took the unusual step of covering the base of some of the oldest trees with protective aluminum “blankets”. High on the list was General Sherman, the world’s largest tree by volume. The park officials believed the specialized foil(锡纸)would help block some of the heat from the fires and enhance the natural insulation(隔热)provided by the ancient trees’ thick bark. They were right!
On Sunday, September 19, 2021, the officials reported that the extra prevention measures, which also included 24-hour timed sprinklers(洒水装置)on General Sherman and the nearby park buildings, had worked. Jack Owen, a spokesman for the KNP Complex Fire Information Office, said, “There are no trees that have been burned yet, as far as in the Giant Forest. Firefighters are pouring everything they can into it as long as it’s safe. That area is looking good.”
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the rest of the national park. The KNP Complex Fire has burned through 21,777 acres. Meanwhile, the Windy Fire, which started further south on the Sierra slopes on the same night, has burned over21, 598 acres. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate and allow firefighters to gain control of the massive fires, which are now beginning to threaten nearby communities.
1. What did the firefighters first do to protect the Giant Forest from fire?A.Cover it with specialized foil. |
B.Put it on the list of protective steps. |
C.Set up a fire prevention belt around it. |
D.find out the features of the complex fire. |
A.To stop some heat from the fire from developing. |
B.To stop the fire from spreading. |
C.To keep tree roots from losing water. |
D.To test the survival ability of the trees. |
A.Firefighters are ready to leave the area. |
B.General Sherman is relatively safe. |
C.Nearby buildings have been abandoned. |
D.Some trees in the Giant Forest have been cut down. |
A.Worried. | B.Optimistic. | C.Discouraged. | D.Unconcerned. |
9 . In Birmingham, one school is offering its students an education that will change their lives. The unique program is called Build UP, which enables students to earn a high school certificate while working as paid apprentices (学徒) in construction work. As part of their training, they remodel (改造) old and abandoned houses in their neighborhood!
At any school, the burden on students can be heavy, and for those in poor areas, it is much heavier. “The kids that I’ve worked with during my entire career are all from disadvantaged groups with all the challenges that come with poverty,” said educator Mark Martin. So he founded Build UP in 2018 to offer students a different kind of education: real-world training.
As far as real-world issues are concerned, for low-income communities, one of the biggest needs is housing. That’s why Build UP made construction their main focus, offering a combination of regular and specialized classes. That way, instead of hearing the age-old question “When am I ever going to use this?” in a geometry class, their teachers are able to redirect students to a shop class (工艺课). There, students can connect the math theory to the building of a house.
The program hopes to draw in students who are likely to quit school by offering wages for their apprenticeships. Students receive $125 every two weeks when they start out as apprentices and can eventually work up to getting $200 every two weeks. Upon graduation, they have the opportunity to get an interest-free loan to purchase the remodeled homes.
So far, they have been doing a pretty amazing job. And now with the help of a loan company, the program has the opportunity to bring their model to communities everywhere! They plan to first add similar programs in nearby neighborhoods. After that, they hope to train others to start similar schools and expand their network of partners — particularly construction companies that can offer jobs to their students.
1. Why did Mark Martin found Build UP?A.To help students from poor areas. |
B.To lighten students’ academic burden. |
C.To reconstruct and reuse unwanted houses. |
D.To train students to build homes. |
A.They teach knowledge of the bank loan. |
B.They combine theory and practice. |
C.They center on age-old unsolved questions. |
D.They explain math principles in simple words. |
A.Reach out to more students. |
B.Offer students more job opportunities. |
C.Found more similar schools themselves. |
D.Get more funds from construction companies. |
A.Build UP: A Solution to the Housing Problem |
B.Build UP: A Breakthrough in the Construction Industry |
C.Build UP: Changing Community Education for the Better |
D.Build UP: Giving Students Power Through Home Building |
10 . When you look at yourself in the mirror, do you focus on something you wish were different, and hear a critical inside voice?
1. Start with Mindful Awareness
Being aware of how you are treating yourself is really the first step.
Then, instead of criticizing yourself, be curious about what you did and the reasons behind it. Remind yourself that you are doing the best with what you have. And pay your attention to the positive side of the situation.
2.
We all are worthy of love and we need to show loving kindness to ourselves. That might seem awkward at first, but with a little practice, the process will become easier. Soon the positive feeling you receive from self-kindness will provide you with a sense of happiness.
One of the best practices to build up your self-kindness is called “Note to a Dear Friend”. When you are facing a challenge or difficulty, write a note to a friend as if they were facing the same problem.
3. Recognize That You Aren’t Alone
Not one of us lives a perfect life. Everyone faces challenges and makes mistakes.
A.Practice Kindness |
B.Show Others Kindness |
C.It is important to face them |
D.Simply name your feeling and inside voice |
E.Write down what you think would help your friend |
F.When we recognize that, valuable things will happen |
G.If so, you may have the tendency to criticize yourself |