1 . The Eden Project, an educational charity in Cornwall, England, is committed to connecting people with each other and their environment. Here is the basic information about the Project.
Outside Gardens
Exploring miles of paths in the Outside Gardens, you’ll discover landscapes featuring beautiful sculptures and plants used for medicine, fuels, materials and food. These gardens are particularly child-friendly places for children to learn and play.
Rainforest BiomeFollow the path deep into the Rainforest Biome to feel the heat of the largest indoor rainforest environments in the world: Tropical Islands, Southeast Asia, West Africa and Tropical South America.
Walk across the Rope Bridge that stretches across the forest between two of the tallest trees in the 50-metre-high Biome to learn how the rainforests help regulate the climate. Travel through floating clouds on the Cloud Bridge to get a sense of how rainforests reflect sunlight and help cool the planet. Stop by the Carbon Platform to see how the growing rainforest takes in CO2 and stores it in wood, leaves, roots and soil. Visit the Biodiversity Platform to explore how plants eat, drink, reproduce and protect themselves from danger without moving.
Mediterranean Biome
Take an unforgettable journey through the landscapes of the Mediterranean Europe, South Africa and California and discover the amazing variety of plants growing in these regions.
Explore the diverse and fantastical plants in the Western Australia Garden in this biome. This garden, created in cooperation with Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, Western Australia, features the wonderful plants native to the Mediterranean region of Australia.
Annual Pass
Our Annual Pass gives you unlimited-entry for a whole year!
Adult | Senior (60+) | Student | Children (5—16) | Children (5-) |
£29.50 | £27.50 | £24.50 | £10 | Free |
| A．Enjoy rainforests. | B．Have picnics. |
| C．See beautiful artworks. | D．Carve sculptures. |
| A．The Rope Bridge. | B．The Carbon Platform. |
| C．The Cloud Bridge. | D．The Biodiversity Platform. |
| A．£60. | B．£55. | C．£29.50 | D．£24.50. |
2 . With her first song on social media in 2019 and her first Grammy win in the best African Music Performance category four years later, Tyla has become the new face of African pop.
For many listeners, Tyla’s 2023 hit song “Water” was their first taste of the sound of amapiano, which is a new musical movement that started in the towns of South Africa in the 2010s. Roughly translated from Zulu to mean “the pianos” or “piano people,” amapiano is a mix-up of a few different types of music: jazz, deep house, kwaito and log drum percussives. “Amapiano is the mainstream music of South Africa’s party scene,” says Moma, a Sudanese-American DJ. “And it has become a lifestyle there.”
Moma first heard amapiano in 2016 when he hopped in a taxi in South Africa. He tipped his driver $50 to let him download the music and took the sounds back to the US. As the music started to move around America, Tyla was perfecting her own version of it back home in South Africa.
She started singing on TikTok and dropped her first song, “Getting Late” in 2019, to show her parents that she was serious about pursuing a career in music after high school. Based on the track, they agreed to give her one year to make it happen.
It took a few months for Tyla and her team to shoot the video for “Getting Late”, with no backing, no budget. But when they finally uploaded it to TikTok in early 2021, labels noticed.
In the video, Tyla’s taken the building blocks of amapiano and added elements of pop made by stars like Rihanna (to whom critics and fans are now comparing her) and Justin Bieber. Her signature sound has been called “pop-iano”.
After publishing “Water” in July 2023 and noticing it had become a piece of trending audio on the app, Tyla and her team created a dance challenge in August. Tyla’s performance during the competition really made a splash. “It introduced me to a wider audience than I had ever imagined,” Tyla says. “It has positively changed my life.”
1. What can we say about Moma?| A．He is a famous music writer. | B．He introduced amapiano to the US. |
| C．He helped Tyla study amapiano. | D．He created a different type of music. |
| A．Unconcerned. | B．Supportive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Unclear. |
| A．African pop. | B．Jazz. | C．Deep house. | D．Kwaito. |
| A．Ended in a disaster. | B．Took plenty of time. |
| C．Was sharply criticized. | D．Attracted a lot of attention. |
3 . According to a survey, nearly a third of all adults reported that they sometimes struggle to make basic decisions.
Let go of the idea of making perfect decisions
Much of the pressure you feel comes from how much you associate your choices with your identity. For example, you are always worried about sending the wrong message about who you are and what you stand for.
Just allow yourself three to five options
The grocery store is as good a place as any to get struck by indecision. If you walk in without a shopping list, you might spend twenty minutes picking up boxes and putting them down. Sometimes, there are just too many options to process any of them meaningfully, because we can handle about three to five choices on average.
Practice trusting yourself
It is normal to rely on friends for fit checks or for movie recommendations.
Whether it’s about choosing how often you’re going to hit the gym, or deciding when you’ll go grocery shopping for the week, sticking to your old habits or starting new ones is a great way to reduce stress.
| A．Rely on routines |
| B．Set clear boundaries |
| C．That’s a lot of burden to carry |
| D．But if you find yourself asking for advice for every little thing |
| E．Seeking opinions is something that contributes to indecisiveness |
| F．So next time you are unable to decide what shoes or clothes to wear |
| G．So when you’re indecisive next time, limit your choices to a manageable range |
4 . On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling on school districts to move start times to 08:30 or later for middle and high schools, so that students can get at least 8.5 hours of sleep a night. It notes that making middle and high schoolers start classes before 08:30 threatens their health, safety and academic performance.
“It’s a very powerful statement about the importance of sleep. But it’s horrifically challenging to move the start schedules up and back.” Dr. Judith Owens tells NPR. “Letting teenagers sleep later sets off a series of adjustments. Teachers have to change their schedules, and older children who sit younger ones might no longer get home first.”
But this is one area where the evidence is unequivocal, the statement stresses. As children become teenagers, their sleep-wake cycle shifts two hours later. So it’s difficult, if not impossible, for them to go to sleep before 22:30. As a result, the Academy has found that 59% of middle schoolers and 87% of high schoolers are getting less than the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep a night.
“There’s a price to pay for that,” the statement warns. “Studies have found that lack of sleep in teenagers increases the risk of traffic accidents, and makes them easier to get depressed and overweight. Instead, teens who get more sleep do better academically, with better standardized test scores and better quality of life.”
Drinking coffee to get through the day or sleeping more on weekends doesn’t make up for the sleep shortage, the statement notes. “It’s not simply about getting teenagers to go to bed early or removing electronics from the bedroom. Those are important things, but the biology plays a more decisive role.”
As someone who has to wake up a sleepy-eyed middle schooler at 06:20 every morning, I’m praying that our school district will adopt a later start time. I know that science doesn’t necessarily determine policy. But how about a nice increase in standardized test scores?
1. What does Dr. Judith Owens stress?| A．The inconvenience for some families. | B．The problems caused by lack of sleep. |
| C．The difficulties of changing start times. | D．The importance of getting enough sleep. |
| A．The diet. | B．The biology. | C．The sleep habit. | D．The environment. |
| A．Later start times are also good for schools. |
| B．Authorities should base their policy on science. |
| C．Children are usually tired on Monday mornings. |
| D．Schools should put students’ interest in the first place. |
| A．Worries about Teenagers’ Health |
| B．Strong Oppositions to an Old School Policy |
| C．A Review on the Current School Start Times |
| D．A Powerful Call for Later School Start Times |
5 . As home gardeners in the US page through seed catalogs (目录册) and pick out their favorite plants this week, there’s a new seed that has never been available to them before: a purple tomato. It is the first genetically engineered food crop to be directly marketed to home gardeners and the seeds went on sale Saturday.
The lending scientist behind the tomato is Cathie Martin. About 20 years ago, she set out to create a transgenic (转基因的) tomato, using DNA from a purple snapdragon, which is an unrelated eatable flower. Her goal was to develop a tomato with high levels of anthocyanins, chemicals that give blueberries, blackberries, eggplant and purple cabbage their color. Research has shown that anthocyanins also have anti-cancer and anti-aging effects.
“It’s normal for tomatoes to make these healthy chemicals. But they typically don’t make them very much in the fruit,” Martin told reporters in an interview. “They normally appear in the leaves and stems.”
So she started with, separating the DNA in the snapdragon flower that turns on and off the purple color. Next, she used a basic technique that was figured out by scientists in the 1980s to introduce it into a certain bacteria so that the tomato could then take in the foreign genetic material and express this new gene.
The result? In a paper published in Nature, Martin found that the purple tomato had, per weight, as much anthocyanin as a blueberry or eggplant, and that the mice who ate a diet mixed with purple tomatoes lived 30% longer than those who didn’t.
“Americans eat more tomatoes annually, so it makes the nutritional benefits more accessible,” Martin said.
Of course, some people have raised health concerns about eating genetically engineered foods. But these foods were introduced three decades ago and studies have not shown any harm.
“The purple potato is another great example of how the outcomes and applications of such biotechnologies can improve our life,” Martin said.
1. What can be inferred from the second paragraph?| A．Tomatoes usually do not produce anthocyanins. |
| B．The wild purple snapdragon might be poisonous. |
| C．Many purple fruits may postpone the aging process. |
| D．The purple tomato was widely available 20 years ago. |
| A．It is a relatively old method. | B．It was invented by Cathie Martin. |
| C．It puts the DNA directly into the potato. | D．It was used to separate the DNA in the flower. |
| A．Unprofitable. | B．Safe. | C．Expensive. | D．Unreliable. |
| A．An advertisement. | B．A handbook. | C．A short story. | D．A science report. |
6 . A team in Europe are working with wood, but not in the usual ways. They are not carpenters (木匠). Instead, they are scientists exploring how wood can lead to a greener electronic device, a transistor (晶体管) made from balsa wood, whose production releases less climate-warming gas into the air.
Transistors play an important role in computers and other devices. They act like tiny switches to control the flow of electricity. Engineers use them to process and store data. Today’s laptops may host billions of them. So they must be tiny — only a little wider than a strand of DNA.
The new transistor being built by physicist Isak Engquist and his team at Sweden’s Linkoping University isn’t as small as those. Big enough to see and hold, it can stand only an electric pressure that pushes electrons along. And it controls a current using charged particles (粒子) called ions.
This new technology shows a “proof of concept” that the idea can work, even if the new device is not yet ready to put into today’s electronics. “While it seems large by today’s standards, such a transistor still might prove useful for electronics that require low electric pressures,” says Engquist.
“The new transistor suggests that future electronic devices might be made in living plants,” Daniel Simon, a physicist in the team, says. “Imagine peeling away some bark from a living tree,” he says, “and stamping electronic circuits into the living wood.”
In fact, Engquist says, “There are so many ways we can use wood and the components of wood that we would never have thought of.” For instance, he can now imagine a wood-based sensor that could monitor crop health, measure pollution or survey a forest for fire risk.
1. Which can best describe the transistor?| A．Costly. | B．Widely used. |
| C．Time-saving. | D．More environmentally friendly. |
| A．It is much bigger. | B．It can’t stand electric pressure. |
| C．It can’t be seen. | D．It is made from metal. |
| A．Uncertain. | B．Doubtful. | C．Positive. | D．Indifferent. |
| A．Wood’s surprising roles in modern electronic design |
| B．Wood-made transistors: a step toward greener electronics |
| C．Scientists are researching the history of transistors |
| D．Scientists are working as carpenters to invent transistors |
7 . Young people are spending more time in digital spaces. The Internet allows us to connect with people, share ideas, be creative, have fun and discover new things. Unfortunately, young people also face risks online. Common problems include cyberbullying (网络欺凌), receiving unwanted messages, seeing images and content you don’t want to see, or having your private information or photos shared without your permission.
Safer Internet Day (SID) is organized in the second week of February every year, and over 180 countries take part. The aim is to raise awareness of online issues and make the Internet a safer place. SID invites everyone to be part of a big conversation about online issues. This is particularly important for teenagers because they often experience unpleasant situations online, but they don’t always feel they can talk about them.
Cyberbullying is when someone uses the Internet to embarrass, threaten or hurt another person. If you experience cyberbullying, talk to an adult you trust as soon as possible. Don’t reply to any messages but save the evidence.
Going online often means spending time alone. When you feel down, social media can make you feel lonelier. Using social media might be related to higher levels of depression. So you need healthy social media use.
Whatever app you use, make sure you know who sees your posts and personal information. Limit what people can see, decide who can comment on your content and thwart other users’ comment. It may be illegal to share a photo or video of someone without their permission. The SID’s website has advice about what to do if someone shares pictures of you that you feel embarrassed about.
There is still a lot we don’t know about how time spent online affects people’s well-being. But talking about all the issues helps everyone understand common problems and know how to deal with them.
1. What can we learn from paragraph 1?| A．The Internet has both good and bad sides. |
| B．The Internet is a safe place to share photos. |
| C．Young people should avoid going online. |
| D．Young people face more risks than adults. |
| A．What we can do on SID. | B．How to take part in SID. |
| C．The time of organizing SID. | D．Some information about SID. |
| A．Use other social media. | B．Turn to adults for help. |
| C．Reply to the messages. | D．Deal with it with classmates. |
| A．Admit. | B．Replace. | C．Prevent. | D．Change. |
8 . Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Amazing numbers of people with year of schooling are in effect illiterate (不识字的). Admittedly, some people have been complaining about new media since 1492, but today’s complaints have an evidential basis, Ljubljana Reading Manifesto says, “The digital area may lead to more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many attractions to read in a shallow and scattered (碎片化的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”
Digital literacy has changed reading. When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorbing hundreds of pages to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation. And they seldom, absorb nuanced (微妙的) ideas.
In the white paper that underlies the Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, experts catalogue the passive parts of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of... critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading.” In the 2021 international PISA survey, 49 percent of students agreed that “I read only if I have to”, 13 percentage points higher than in 2000.
As professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英的) “reading class” consumes long texts — despite more people spending longer in education and book sales remaining robust.
People who lose higher-level reading skills also lose thinking skills. That’s horrible, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilization. It enabled the Enlightenment, and an international rise in sympathy for people who aren’t like us.
1. What is the advantage of the digital reading?| A．It makes more people start to read widely. |
| B．It makes more people begin to think deeper. |
| C．It helps the young to make use of the Internet. |
| D．It helps people take advantage of their spare time. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Opposed. | C．Objective. | D．Unconcerned. |
| A．Teens should change the critical and conscious reading. |
| B．Nearly half of the teens never read at all. |
| C．They don’t believe what the experts indicate. |
| D．The trend of reading books is increasingly declining. |
| A．More and more books are purchased. |
| B．It’s unnecessary for people to buy books. |
| C．More and more people like to visit the bookstores. |
| D．The sales of books keep still for a really long time. |
9 . Do you believe that a baby can only have one parent? It is widely understood that animals have two parents, each contributing essential DNA. However, a female shark became pregnant and gave birth to a baby shark at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, US,
This is a phenomenon called parthenogenesis (孤雌生殖), which means “virgin creation” in Greek. For most animals, an egg cell and a sperm (精子) cell are essential to create offspring (后代).
As the female generates an egg cell, small cells called polar bodies are produced in the process. In the case of parthenogenesis, an egg merges with one of its polar bodies, which replaces a sperm cell.
Parthenogenesis may occur in “lower animals” like some species of insects, fish, reptiles and even birds.
| A．It is not the best way to reproduce |
| B．without the involvement of a male |
| C．with the application of a new technology |
| D．They each provide one-half of the genetic information for the new life |
| E．During this process, the mother’s genes get shuffled (打乱顺序) slightly |
| F．Although seemingly magical, parthenogenesis is not as rare as you might think |
| G．However, for mammals, including human beings, an egg can not provide all the genes required to form a viable (可存活的) offspring |
10 . Birds do it. Bees do it. People do it, though often less than they would like to. Owls do it in the daytime. Sleep is an ancient, universal experience.
But partly because it is the order of the day, for a long time sleep was a subject that scientists had not woken up to. It is only in the past half-century or so that it has attracted the attention of dedicated researchers. A new book from Kenneth Miller, a science journalist, sets out to record the field’s short but fascinating history.
Its contents range from the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and circadian rhythms (昼夜节律) — the biological clocks that govern humanity’s days — to the effects of sleep deprivation(which can be deadly, at least in lab animals). It also explores the purpose, if any, of dreams.
Sleep is a state of lowered consciousness and reduced metabolism (新陈代谢) which takes up about one third of a person’s life. Two distinct types of sleep have been recognized: REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM(non-rapid eye movement). The latter, which accounts for the major part of sleep, starts with drowsiness (困倦); brain waves become increasingly deeper and slower until brain activity and metabolism fall to their lowest level. In REM sleep, the brain suddenly becomes more electrically active, its blood flow increases, the eyes move rapidly and dreaming occurs.
Discoveries often lead to new questions in turn. That is why neat, tidy endings are hard to achieve in most science books; this one is no different. Despite all the progress of the past 50 years, scientists are still unsure what sleep is for. The fact that it is so widespread suggests it is vital.
But why evolution would see fit to produce animals that must spend large amounts of their time unconscious and unable to respond to threats is still a mystery researchers are trying to solve. For anyone curious about asking the right questions, however, Mr Miller’s book is a good place to start.
1. Part of why scientists failed to explore sleep was because ______.| A．it was so commonplace as to be taken for granted. |
| B．ancient people had done thorough research into it. |
| C．there was no high-tech research facility. |
| D．they regarded sleep as too complicated a phenomenon to explain. |
| A．About 12 hours. | B．About 10 hours. | C．About 8 hours. | D．About 6 hours. |
| A．It is well received by readers. | B．It presents a better ending than most science books. |
| C．It has little to recommend it. | D．It is instructive despite its limitation. |
| A．Entertainment. | B．Culture. | C．Finance. | D．Sports. |
