1 . For most of my life, I didn’t like being seen. I went bright red when it was my turn to speak in a group. I hated the teacher asking me something. I even didn’t like my family all looking at me! I often tried to hide away and avoid being seen by others! So, it’s not strange that I feared speaking in front of others.
Luckily, I’ve learned to overcome my problem. Now I love helping others who have the same problem that I once had but want to speak up because they have valuable things to share. I particularly love helping entrepreneurs (企业家) to become more confident. When you help a leader, the impact is so much greater.
Over the years I’ve discovered that there are three main problems that people have when it comes to speaking in public. The first is a lack of selfbelief. They doubt themselves and question whether what they have to say is valuable. The second is a fear of being seen as arrogant (傲慢的). The third is a fear of rejection or a fear of not being liked.
All of these problems are related to mindset, specifically, a fearbased mindset, which is common. These fears stop people from stepping up as the leader and influencer they were born to be.
If you want to become a more effective influencer, it is so important to work on any fears you have of judgment or rejection. They will be a ball and chain that will hold you back from success. We need to take action despite feeling fear. We can’t wait for the fear to go away as it won’t go away itself. We have to act while we still feel it. And to overcome fears, we should practice. Confidence is attached to progress, and we only progress if we practice. If you don’t feel you’re progressing, you’ll start to lose your confidence and stay stuck in fear.
1. What does the author like doing now?| A．Giving speeches in front of people. |
| B．Sharing experiences with her followers. |
| C．Making friends with famous entrepreneurs. |
| D．Helping others gain confidence in speaking in public. |
| A．They are very difficult to overcome. |
| B．They lead to a very uncommon mindset. |
| C．They exist mainly because of people’s fears. |
| D．They are no problem for leaders or influencers. |
| A．Wait for the fear to disappear. |
| B．Avoid failure to become more confident. |
| C．Refuse judgment or rejection from others. |
| D．Practice hard to make progress in spite of fears. |
| A．Finding the Courage Inside You |
| B．Becoming a more Influential Person |
| C．Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking |
| D．Expressing Your Ideas more Effectively |
2 . Last summer, Steven Eaton received more than 200 young people on his organic farm. None of them said that they wanted to make money from farming. Some of them described it as a kind of protest against the idea that success means a big paycheck and many took it as a means to protect the environment.
Steven Eaton understands such idealists(理想主义者)and he was one of them about a decade ago. In 2010, he was in a law school in Washington, DC, but not enjoying it much. Then he applied to work on a farm in West Virginia in summer.
“I felt lost when I was in the city. It’s in the field that I found peace and harmony in my life,” recalls Eaton, who now runs an organic farm close to New York City. “So I went back to West Virginia after graduation.”
Farming—the independence and the connection to something as real as soil and food—was the one thing that he wanted to throw himself into. And he’s been doing it ever since.
But it wasn’t always a big happy folk dance.
“I had a lot of failures in the first couple of years and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he laughs.
Eventually, he learned to be realistic about farming. “It’s good to be an idealist. But if you’re going to stick with it, and expect to make a living at it, you’ve got to be realistic about the business aspects: Money, managing money, borrowing money, and all the things that a business person has to do. You have to learn to like that and be willing to be good at that. That may even mean burning a little more fossil fuel, so you can get your produce to cities, where people pay higher prices.”
That sense of farming as a practical form of idealism is probably the biggest thing the young people have to learn. When you’re farming, you have to put survival first.
1. Why did many of the young people want to become farmers?| A．To make a lot of money. | B．To apply their learning to practice. |
| C．To protect the environment. | D．To study the pollution in agriculture. |
| A．Idealistic. | B．Realistic. | C．Selfless. | D．Successful. |
| A．Put environment before profit. |
| B．Be realistic about the business aspects. |
| C．Stick to your idealism forever. |
| D．Find a much easier job than farming. |
| A．Outdated. | B．Useless. | C．Funny. | D．Valuable. |
3 . All 50 states received final approval Tuesday to begin construction on a first nationwide network of EV charging stations (电车充电站) that places one roughly every 50 miles (80 kilometers) along interstate highways, part of the Biden administration’s plan to encourage widespread use of zero-emission cars.
The Transportation Department said it had OK’d EV charger plans from a last set of 17 states, causing the release of $1. 5 billion in federal funds to all jurisdictions (权限) nationwide — or $5 billion over five years — to build or upgrade chargers along 75, 000 miles (120, 000 kilometers) of highway from coast to coast, with a goal of 500, 000 EV chargers nationwide. Plans for the other 33 states and the District of Columbia were approved earlier this month.
By year’s end, drivers could start seeing expansions and upgrades to existing highway EV stations in states such as California, Colorado, Florida and Pennsylvania that now have at least four fast-charger ports, enabling EVs to fully recharge in about an hour.
“America led the original car revolution in the last century, and . . . we’re prepared to lead in the 21st century with electric vehicles,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He said the plans will “help ensure that Americans in every part of the country can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles.”
The approval is a major step toward building widespread acceptance and use of electric vehicles among consumers, who most often express unwillingness over EVs’ shorter range and limited use of public chargers. President Joe Biden has set a goal that 50% of new U. S. car sales be electric by 2030, and his administration touts (推销) new tax credits next year of up to $7, 500 as making electric vehicles accessible for everyday Americans. Still, the five-year plans suggest a potentially long and rough road ahead for a highway EV network, with states saying risks such as a lack of electricity grid capacity (电网容量), supply chain shortages and equal rights concerns.
1. What’s the real purpose of the EV network plan?| A．To unlock the advantages of EVs. |
| B．To enable the spread of EV chargers. |
| C．To make the government funds available to all states. |
| D．To encourage the spread of environment-friendly EVs. |
| A．the number of chargers to be built | B．the miles of EV chargers to cover |
| C．the approval of the charger plans | D．the introduction of the whole plans |
| A．examples of successful building | B．the bright future of EV market |
| C．possible problems in some states | D．the impressive progress of the plan. |
| A．All 50 states can use EV chargers now |
| B．States get final OK to highway EV chargers |
| C．Advantages and disadvantages of EVs. |
| D．A 5-year plan to promote EVs in the USA. |
4 . Most farms are located in rural areas and are irrigated by freshwater. Now, a startup in Scotland is farming near the coast and using seawater to grow crops. Using the water of the ocean for irrigation can be a game changer for a hungry world.
Food production needs to increase by 70 percent in the next 30 years to keep up with population increases. Freshwater only makes up two percent of all the water of the planet, and it is growing scarcer in many places like Scotland due to climate change.
Now, Seawater Solutions, a Glasgow-based non-governmental organization founded in 2017, is using saltwater instead of freshwater to grow crops. Co-founder and CEO Yanik Nyberg lived and worked in areas of Africa and Asia that have been negatively impacted by water scarcity and global warming. Seawater Solutions was created to address the issues of coastal communities that face the urgent concern of land salinization (盐渍化), according to the organization’s website.
In an interview, Nyberg told The Nation that he came up with the idea of redeveloping degraded farmland and turning it into artificial wetland ecosystems that use seawater and grow plants that can tolerate the salt, “It’s a relatively simple concept,” he said. “Seawater is introduced to coastal farmland, where naturally salt-tolerant crops are grown. These crops store massive amounts of carbon and are extremely nutritious, being called ‘superfoods’ across the world.”
The new farmland consists of artificial saltwater marshes (沼泽) that have seawater pumped over them. Then the ecosystem will be used for saline plants, which can be used for food, biofuels, sea-plant animal foods, and as raw materials for cosmetics.
Downhill Farm in Ayrshire, Scotland uses water from the Atlantic Ocean to grow crops. Seawater Solutions also has projects in Ghana, Malawi, Namibia and Spain, with more in the planning stage. While growing crops in seawater is a hard sell, it is an environmentally sound way to meet the food demands of a growing world population.
1. What’s the function of paragraph 2?| A．Pointing out serious food problems in Scotland. |
| B．Warning farmers of the decrease of the farmland. |
| C．Analyzing the consequences of population increases. |
| D．Showing the necessity of growing crops with seawater. |
| A．To serve the local government. | B．To deal with land salinization. |
| C．To remove coastal communities. | D．To purify seawater in some areas. |
| A．They have a wide range of uses. | B．They are nutritious but expensive. |
| C．They prove unpopular in the world. | D．They are salt-free and healthy foods. |
| A．It deserves certain recognition. | B．It disturbs the wetland ecosystem. |
| C．It is inapplicable to other places. | D．It is easily acceptable and adoptable. |
5 . Strategies for Getting Kids off Screens
It’s time to keep kids off the screens! Parents should use the winter vacation to remind their children of what it’s like to play freely, offline for hours on end.
Set clear screen time limits
Establish how many minutes or hours you’re OK with them each week, and make it something that can never be changed. For example, you could say they’re allowed to watch for an hour on Sunday morning, or for 15 minutes in the evening while dinner is being made, or none at all for the rest of the winter—and then stick to it.
Get kids cooking
Involve them in meal preparation by assigning recipes that you’d like them to make each day.
There are numerous half- and full-day camp options and lessons that can occupy a child’s time, such as swimming, art classes, tennis, dinosaur camp and sports camp. Look around your community for activities that can get them out of the house for a few hours each day.
Establish a reading routine (习惯)
| A．Sign up for lessons |
| B．Assign household work |
| C．That helps stop arguments of screen time |
| D．Of course, this is easier said than done |
| E．Master some basic tricks, using a homemade tool |
| F．They’ll develop new skills at cutting, cooking and baking |
| G．Go to the library once a week to store up fresh reading material |
6 . Do you want to find out how you can learn a new language quickly? There are really no secrets. You just need to be willing to work hard and not be afraid to make mistakes.
Connect with a native speaker.
The best way to learn a new language is to speak it. Too often, people spend all of their time studying grammar and memorizing lists of words.
People often have claimed to have studied a language “for five years” and still not be fluent. But when they say five years, they probably mean that they studied the language for only a couple of hours a week over that entire time period. Let’s get one thing clear: if you want to learn a new language successfully, you’re going to have to study the language every day.
Carry a dictionary at all times.
Carrying a dictionary with you will save you a lot of time.
Watch, listen, read and write in your chosen language.
Possibly the easiest thing you can do is watch television shows or movies in the language you are trying to learn. You should also attempt to read and write in your new language. Besides, download podcasts (播客) or tunes in to radio stations in your new language.
| A．Learn the language daily. |
| B．So get one as soon as possible! |
| C．The following tips may help you. |
| D．Speaking with a real, live person will help you. |
| E．Reading is of great importance in language learning. |
| F．A big dictionary may be inconvenient for you to use at any time. |
| G．This is a great way to immerse (使沉浸于) yourself in the language while you’re on the go. |
7 . According to a study done by University of Michigan researchers, shopping to relieve stress was up to 40 times more effective at giving people a sense of control and shoppers were three times less sad compared to those that only looked around for items.
More than half of the 1,000 respondents said they have impulsively shopped to deal with feelings of stress, anxiety or depression.
In order not to be overwhelmed by retail therapy, you might refer to the following tips.
.
Whether you’re purchasing Christmas presents or buying groceries, having the items you need written down will provide you with clarity and order while you’re shopping. Reward yourself for sticking to your list and you’ll be more likely to commit to it: buy a cup of coffee while shopping or plan a. fun activity for when you return home.
·Think about what you struggle with most financially.
Do you spend too much money at the mall? Eating out? Vacations?
·Give up the need to keep up with your neighbors, co-workers, and friends.
Everyone’s financial situation is different and it’s dependent upon a variety of factors, least of all being one’s self worth.
| A．Prepare a list prior to shopping. |
| B．This may encourage consumerism and impulse buying. |
| C．However, the side effect of retail therapy cannot be overlooked. |
| D．More men tended to purchase alcohol when stressed than women. |
| E．23％ said they’ve maxed out (刷爆) a credit card in the past year． |
| F．Comparison leads to debt and dissatisfaction with what you already have. |
| G．Track down where your money is going and then try to avoid temptations. |
8 . It is that time of the year, when a handful of world’s leading scholars, social activists and researchers are rewarded with what is often cited as the most prestigious acknowledgement of human effort-the Nobel Prize. Here’s a look at who has won the prize and for what.
Physiology or Medicine
Swedish geneticist Svante Peabo won the first Nobel of the year, for starting the field of ancient DNA studies. He is well-known for extracting, sequencing, and analyzing ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones.
Physics
Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger’s work in quantum (量子) technology landed them the second Nobel Prize announced in 2022. Although Aspect is from France, Clauser from the U.S, and Zeilinger from Austria, the three separately performed “groundbreaking experiments” as one team. “Their results have cleared the way for new technology,” the committee stated.
Chemistry
The Nobel Prize for chemistry went to another trio, Carolyn R. Bertozzi from the U.S., Morten Meldal from Denmark and K. Barry Sharpless from the U.S. “for the development of click chemistry and biorthogonal chemistry,” the committee stated. Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman chemist to be awarded the prize, while Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be awarded two Nobel Prizes.
Economics
The Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to three American economists, Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises,” the Nobel Prize committee announced on Monday. By studying the history of American economics, particularly the Great Depression of the 1930s,they improved how we understand the role of banks during times of hardship and the bank’s impact on societal functions.
1. What prize is related to the research with bones?| A．Physiology. | B．Chemistry. | C．Physics. | D．Economics. |
| A．About societal functions. | B．About the history of America. |
| C．About banks and financial crises. | D．About the Great Depression of the 1930s. |
| A．Their winners are from different countries. | B．They have three winners. |
| C．They improve new technology. | D．They help people understand hardship. |
9 . Four Most Famous Paintings in the World
The Starry NightArtist: Vincent Willem van Gogh
Where to see it: the Museum of Modern Art (New York, US)
Being treated for mental illness in hospital and inspired by the view from the window of his room, Van Gogh painted The Starry Night. The painting is famous for Van Gogh’s creative use of thick brushstrokes (笔画). The painting’s striking blues and yellows and the dreamy atmosphere have attracted art lovers for decades.
The ScreamArtist: Edvard Munch
Where to see it: the National Museum and the Munch Museum (Oslo, Norway)
The Scream is not a single work of art. According to a British museum’s blog, there are two paintings, two pastels (彩粉画) and a number of prints, The paintings are in the National Museum and the Munch Museum, and in 2012, one of the pastels was sold for almost 120 million.
Mona LisaArtist: Leonardo da Vinci
Where to see it: the Louvre Museum (Paris. France)
It should come as no surprise that one of the most famous paintings in the world is a woman with a mysterious smile. It is the earliest known Italian painting to focus closely on the sitter in a half-length portrait (像) , according to the Louvre, where it was first exhibited in 1804.
The Last SupperArtist: Leonardo da Vinci
Where to see it: Santa Maria delle Grazie (Milan, Italy)
Leonardo is the only artist to appear on this list twice. The Last Supper is about the last time Jesus had dinner with his followers. The painting is actually a huge wall painting-4. 6 meters high and 8. 8 meters wide, which makes for a memorable viewing experience.
1. Where is The Starry Night exhibited?| A．In the Louvre Museum. |
| B．In the Munch Museum. |
| C．In the Museum of Modern Art. |
| D．In Santa Maria delle Grazie. |
| A．It is exhibited in three museums. |
| B．It includes a series of works of art. |
| C．It is famous for a smile in the painting. |
| D．It was painted in a mental hospital. |
| A．They feature religious figures. |
| B．They both belong to wall paintings. |
| C．They are exhibited in the National Museum. |
| D．They were painted by Leonardo da Vinci. |
10 . Young Writers Awards
About the Contest
Bennington College has a unique literary tradition. We’ve had twelve Pulitzer Prize winners, three US poet laureates, four MacArthur Geniuses, and two of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. In celebration of this, Bennington launched the Young Writers Awards to promote excellence in writing at the high school level. Students are invited to enter with the following work:
•Poetry: A group of three poems
•Fiction: A short story (1,500 words or fewer) or one-act play
•Nonfiction: A personal or academic essay (1,500 words or fewer)
A first-, second-, and third-place winner is selected in each category. We welcome participation of both US and international students.
Awards & Rules
First-place winners in each category are awarded a prize of $1,000; second-place winners receive $500; third-place winners receive $250.
•No charge for entrance. Fees for accidents caused by participants are required.
•All entries must be original work reviewed, approved and guided by a teacher. We will use your teacher as a contact for the competition should we have any questions. For homeschooled students, please contact one to assist in your writing even if you have experience in such competitions.
Young Writers Awards finalists and winners are also qualified for undergraduate scholarships at Bennington. Young Writers Awards finalists who apply and gain admission to Bennington will receive a $10,000 scholarship every year for four years, for a total of $40,000. Young Writers Awards winners reaching the standard will receive $15,000 every year, for a total of $60,000.
1. What can be learned about the Young Writers Awards?| A．It rewards three winners at last. |
| B．It’s a tradition of Bennington College. |
| C．It accepts participants worldwide. |
| D．It offers scholarships to undergraduates. |
| A．Hand in a personal essay. | B．Have related writing experience. |
| C．Pay an entry fee on time. | D．Find a teacher to help with the entry. |
| A．$10,500. | B．$15,500. |
| C．$40,500. | D．$60,500. |
