1 . How to Fall Back in Love with Reading
Do you remember the last time you spent time reading books for pleasure? In the age of digital distractions, it is easy to struggle to find the time and headspace to get lost in literature.
Set aside time for reading books. Whether it’s 20 minutes before bedtime or an hour on your lunch break, carving out sometime in your schedule will make it easier to sit down and read. And if you find that you don’t have much free time, try listening to audiobooks.
Keep a reading journal. In your journal, you can write down your thoughts about what you’re reading or graffiti pictures inspired by the book.
Make reading a social activity. Whether you start a book club with your friends or join an online reading group, being able to discuss what you’re reading with others can make the experience more enjoyable.
| A．Find a book that interests you. |
| B．Create a positive reading routine. |
| C．But that doesn’t mean reading books is a thing of the past! |
| D．By this way, you can easily fit reading into your busy lifestyle. |
| E．Plus, it’s a great way to get recommendations for what to read next! |
| F．The others in your book club may come from different backgrounds. |
| G．It doesn’t have to be very involved, just a couple of sentences to jog your memory. |
2 . It’s fair to say that many parents focus a lot of energy — and worry! — on protecting their small kids from risky situations. But this past weekend, reporter Ellen Barry published a piece about a growing movement in Britain: people are bringing risk into the playground experience.
Controlled risk at play time — where, after all, the children are still under close supervision (监护) — would seem a good addition to the free-range child movement. In that initiative, it’s suggested that free-range kids take walks in nature or ride public transportation on their own.
Besides, considering child development from an evolutionary (进化的) view offers more backing. Our long journey through time and nature has made us who we are today, with behaviors, thoughts and bodies shaped.
| A．Kids learn best while playing. |
| B．More exploration is expected. |
| C．It says it’s okay for kids to take some risks. |
| D．Limited-risk playgrounds begin to catch on. |
| E．The idea is to help kids become tough and strong. |
| F．Generally, they are encouraged to get outside and acquire independent skills. |
| G．It is therefore important to let kids do things that match how they naturally grow. |
3 . The HSK is a globally-run standardized test of Chinese language ability for non-native speakers. Whether you seek to ensure qualifications for scholarships or gain an advantage in the job market or a related academic field, an HSK pass will serve you well. But, of course, many learners also find an exam to be an excellent source of motivation!
Working with the Chinese Testing Centre, we are delighted to announce that our Institute will continue to offer opportunities for interested candidates to sit 2024 HSK Exams which will be in-person exams only. The next offline exam will take place on Sunday, 19 May.
Please visit HSK Exams Official Page to register. A recent passport photo is required when completing the registration form. A standard 2-inch identification photo no larger than 100kb must be sent to info@confuciusinstitute.ac.uk after you register the exam online.
Your admission ticket can be printed in the exam registration system after the registration closes. On the exam date, you MUST bring your admission ticket and the identification document, or you will not be able to sit the exam on the day.
Examination Fees:
HSK offline | HSK1 | HSK2 | HSK3 | HSK4 | HSK5 | HSK6 |
Standard | £10.00 | £20.00 | £30.00 | £40.00 | £50.00 | £60.00 |
Please note that if you want to book more than one exam level, you need to go through the booking process for each item you wish to book and pay correspondingly. For postage and packing, extra £3.00 is required for each level.
1. What benefit will an HSK pass bring?| A．Qualifying for scholarships. | B．Getting a dream job. |
| C．Having academic exchange. | D．Improving examination skills. |
| A．A recent passport photo. | B．A standard 2-inch ID photo. |
| C．A printed admission ticket. | D．An identification document. |
| A．£33.00. | B．£43.00. | C．£70.00. | D．£76.00. |
4 . Top-down processing is the process of using context or general knowledge to understand what we perceive (感知). In 1970, psychologist Richard Gregory introduced the concept. He claimed that perception is constructive.
The processing plays an important role in our interactions with our environment. Our five senses are constantly taking in information. At any given time, we are experiencing different sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and ways things feel when we touch them. If we paid attention to each one of our senses all the time, we’d never do anything else. It enables us to simplify the process by relying on context and our pre-existing knowledge to understand what we notice. If our brains didn’t employ top-down processing our senses would overwhelm us.
Top-down processing helps us understand what our senses are perceiving in our daily lives. For example, suppose you receive an important letter but a few drops of water have ruined part of the text. A few letters in different words are now just smudges (污迹). Yet, you’re still able to read the letter in its entirety using top-down processing. You use the context of the words and sentences in which the smudges appear and your knowledge of reading to comprehend the meaning of the letter’s message. See a word LO*E, with one letter knocked down, yet you are still able to quickly recognize the word as LOVE.
On the one hand, top-down processing serves a positive function by simplifying the way we comprehend our sensory perceptions. It enables us to shortcut the cognitive path between our perceptions and their meaning. On the other hand, patterns can also prevent us from perceiving things in unique ways. So we may understand the pattern of how to use a mobile phone, but if the manufacturer comes out with a new phone that employs completely unique interaction patterns, we may not be able to figure out how to use it. Besides, as our knowledge is limited and biased (片面的) in certain ways, it can lead to perceptual errors.
1. What is the author’s purpose in writing paragraph 2?| A．To explain main reasons. | B．To give practical examples. |
| C．To draw specific conclusions. | D．To analyse theoretical frameworks. |
| A．Pre-existing knowledge. | B．Active interactions. |
| C．Five physical senses. | D．Lessons from mistakes |
| A．Seeing is believing. | B．Practice makes perfect. |
| C．Every coin has two sides. | D．Experience is the best teacher. |
| A．Introduce a reading method. | B．Deepen underlying meanings. |
| C．Illustrate a cognitive strategy. | D．Clarify a producing process. |
5 . Several times a month, you can find Doctor Daniel Nadeau in the Ralph’s market in Huntington Beach, California, wearing a white coat and helping people learn about food. He notices the pre-made macaroni (通心粉) and cheese boxes in am other’s shopping cart and suggests she switch to wholegrain macaroni and real cheese.
Nadeau says sugar and processed foods are big contributors to the rising diabetes (糖尿病) rates among children. “In America, over 50 percent of our food is processed food,” Nadeau tells her. “And only 5 percent of our food is plant-based food. I think we should try to reverse that.” This mother agrees to try more fruit juices for the kids and to make real macaroni and cheese. Score one point for the doctor, zero for diabetes.
Research findings increasingly show the power of food to treat or reverse diseases, but that does not mean that diet alone is always the solution, or that every illness can benefit substantially from dietary changes. Nevertheless, physicians say that they look at the collective data and a clear picture emerges: that the salt, sugar, fat and processed foods in the American diet contribute to the nation’s high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
By prescribing (开处方) nutritional changes or launching programs such as “Shop with your Doc”, they are trying to prevent, limit or even reverse disease by changing what patients eat. The program will offer patients several bags of food prescribed for their condition, along with intensive training in how to cook it. They believe teaching people about which foods are healthy and how to prepare them can actually transform a patient’s life. And beyond that, it might transform the health and lives of that patient’s family.
1. Why does Doctor Nadeau advise buying wholegrain macaroni and real cheese?| A．They’re easy to make. | B．They’re plant-based. |
| C．They’re delicious to eat. | D．They’re processed food. |
| A．Try out. | B．Pick up. | C．Take in. | D．Turn around. |
| A．Neutral. | B．Dismissive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Positive. |
| A．A good cure for diabetes. | B．A new attempt on cooking. |
| C．A food-as-medicine program. | D．A simple tip on doing shopping. |
6 . Science is always seen as hard-core and hard to understand. But could you imagine hundreds of people being attracted by the cover of a science magazine?
The achievement was completed after Wang Yixi and his team made the cover of an October issue of Structure, a US-based Cell Press journal. The cover shows a Chinese ink painting that vividly shows the process in which a special enzyme (酶) involved in the biosynthesis (生物合成) of an important organic compound is activated―the latest breakthrough by a Chinese scientific research team. Another one of his popular works that carries distinctive Chinese elements is a composite image, describing a scientist as the folk goddess Nyuwa, carrying her newly discovered compound to fill a crack in the sky.
While studying chemistry at university, Wang Yixi often came across an experimental preparation process that he had to explain, but the amount of text was too large and abstract. A she had been interested in drawing, and related software like Photoshop, he decided to turn his graphics into a fine art. He went on to study 3D graphics software in order to better display the microscopic structures in his field and improve the presentation of his papers.
It didn’t take long before his classmates and professors noticed his talents and asked him to help them with their papers. By word of mouth, more people beat a path to Wang’s door and were willing to pay for his service. Over the past four years, Wang and his team have come up with more than 10,000 visual works for academic papers across a variety of fields, many of which have made their way to the world’s top academic journals, including Nature, Science and Cell.
“Every scientific paper is innovative, and graphics are an essential part of scientific papers,” Wang says, adding that what he tries to achieve is an explanation of models or methods, to showcase experimental results, visually process data or compare differences among experiments.
1. What play a special role in Wang’s works?| A．Fairytales. | B．Chinese elements. | C．Rich colors. | D．Complex structures. |
| A．He preferred painting to Chemistry. | B．He developed useful mapping software. |
| C．He had an active mind to solve problem. | D．He had trouble conducting his experiment. |
| A．By visualizing them vividly. | B．By showing them accurately. |
| C．By explaining them in detail. | D．By constructing them uniquely |
| A．The power of art | B．Dilemmas of science |
| C．Mysteries of Chemistry | D．Inspiration from science |
7 . The relationship between Jeffrey Pang and his son, Kevin Pang, was like hot-and-sour soup. It boiled over easily. The Pangs, who moved to the United States in 1988, wanted their son and daughter to know Chinese culture. As a video game-playing American teen, Kevin wasn’t interested.
But when Kevin became a food writer for the Chicago Tribune, he realized he had a valuable resource: his cook-laving dad. “My father and I shared, for the first time, a common interest. I would call to ask about recipes and cooking techniques. He would school me on the world of Chinese food,” Kevin writes in the introduction to the cookbook he has just published.
When it comes to cooking Chinese food, he points out that there is no one definition of Chinese food. “Chinese cooking is not hidebound. For example, consider baked pork chop rice, popularized in Hong Kong. It is a pork chop with egg-fried rice. And then you top it with this thick tomato sauce,” explains Kevin. “And then you top that with some cheese. It’s a very interesting combined dish that has some Western British influences, and it’s altogether very Chinese as well.”
By the time Kevin joined America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) staff in 2020 as its editorial director for digital content, his dad had become an Internet celebrity demonstrating the family’s recipes. Kevin recognized an opportunity not only to share his own family’s food stories but also to apply the ATK method of breaking down recipes into simple steps for the home cook.
“I think this cookbook can teach fathers and sons how to connect, how to find a common interest and improve their relationship, ” Kevin says. That feeling has found an enthusiastic fan base, generating nearly 3 million views, for their online cooking series “Hunger Pangs”, where viewers speak highly of their father-son bond as much as they do of their attractive dishes. Today the Pangs’ relationship is rarely sour or hot.
1. Why would Kevin phone his father after becoming a food writer?| A．To publish his Chinese cookbook. | B．To inquire about hot-and-sour soup. |
| C．To seek permission for video games. | D．To ask about cooking Chinese food. |
| A．Inflexible. | B．Inclusive. | C．Unpleasant. | D．Uncertain. |
| A．Their relationship has improved. | B．They run America’s. Test Kitchen. |
| C．They do dishes to attract followers. | D．Their cookbook is about low-fat food. |
| A．Cooking at home helps you cook well for less. | B．Father and son jointly teach Chinese cooking. |
| C．Chinese culture is becoming popular in the us. | D．Recipes and cooking techniques are really easy. |
8 . Waking up at the crack of dawn and going for a run might feel awful when you start trying to make it a habit. Weaving a significant new activity such as this into your regular routine obviously takes determination and time.
One popular idea suggests that it takes 21 days to solidify a habit. People tend to feel extra motivated to start a new habit or kick an old one.
Everyone has a unique habit-building timeline.
The researchers also suggested that habit formation depends on the effort that a person puts into practicing an activity and on the presence of environmental cues that would remind them to carry out the behavior.
| A．The type of activity is also a factor. |
| B．The strategies of activity impact the way. |
| C．People want to form a habit of exercising regularly. |
| D．But how much time is really needed to make that habit stick? |
| E．It might sound easily reachable to make a resolution on New Year’s Day. |
| F．By comparison, it took half a year for people to develop an exercise habit. |
| G．However long it is for any individual, repetition is the key to making it work. |
9 . Bill Bryson’s phenomenally popular books are a great success of amateur enthusiasm over scholarly expertise. In the highly reviewed Shakespeare (2007), he raced us through the playwright’s life and works in 222 pages; A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) was his 624-page analysis of “everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation” — and it remains the best-selling science book of the 21st century so far. Can he make it again with A Really Short Journey Through the Body, which promises us a “head to toe” tour in 138 pages?
In his books for adult readers, Bryson’s success has lain in an ability to turn vast, complex subjects into an easy and pleasant narrative, filled with tiny facts and odd stories. His latest book, which follows his adult title The Body (2020), is aimed at children as young as eight, for whom this proven writing style works well.
“No doubt about it, the human body is a truly remarkable thing,” Bryson writes, and it’s the remarkable facts that interest him the most. Did you know that you bl ink 14,000 times a day? Or that it takes seven billion billion billion atoms to make you? And that if you formed all your DNA into a single line, it would reach 10 billion miles across the solar system?
Fresh doctors might find some of the entries frustratingly brief. The tongue, for example, receives only a paragraph, while, a chapter, entitled ‘Poo and Farts’, is relatively detailed: “In your life, you’ll probably po o the weight of 5 cars but you’ll have eaten the weight of 60. So that’s not a terrible result.”
Biology books can be heavy weather, but Bryson’s skill, as ever, is to turn the story of the human body into a thoroughly digestible read.
1. What do Bryson’s latest book and The Body (2020) have in common?| A．They are easy to read. | B．They are both about physics. |
| C．They are intended for adults. | D．They are both best-selling books. |
| A．To analyze the structure of the book. | B．To illustrate the attraction of the book. |
| C．To show the scientific value of the book. | D．To display the main contents of the book. |
| A．Packed with facts. | B．Weather-related. |
| C．Hard to understand. | D．Popular and readable. |
| A．An introduction to a book. | B．An essay on biology. |
| C．A news report on science. | D．A biography of a writer. |
10 . Is nearby neighbor better than a faraway cousin? An American lady, Anna Lane, believes it’s true. Her kind neighbors once helped her out when she was in a big trouble.
Mrs. Lane was living alone in a city in Texas, US. The woman is 75 and still could do a lot of housework herself. However, she was too old to cut the grass in her garden. Then a big trouble found her. The grass in her garden grew more than 18 inches high and it broke the law in her city. As a result, she was in danger of paying lots of money!
Luckily, her neighbors, the Adams brothers, heard the news about her on TV. They decided to do something to help her. “We haven’t met her yet, but she’s 75 years old and she needs some help,” said Sam Adams, one of the boys. “That’s the least we could do.”
The Adams brothers took their machines and came to Mrs. Lane’s house to help cut the grass without telling her. Once they got started, other neighbors saw what was going on and joined them.
Together they worked hard in the sun and finished cutting all the grass in about two hours. When Mrs. Lane saw what her neighbors did for her, she was surprised and moved to tears. “I cannot believe this,” she said “They were so kind to spend two hours helping me and I didn’t even know their names.” As for the Adams brothers, they said they would always be ready to help her.
1. What can we know about Mrs. Lane?| A．She was 70 years old. | B．She could do little housework. |
| C．She was living with her children. | D．She could not cut her grass by herself. |
| A．She broke the education law in her city. |
| B．The grass in her garden was more than 18 inches high. |
| C．The news about her on TV was made by her. |
| D．She didn’t pay enough money to her neighbors. |
| A．The Adams brothers. | B．Sam Adams and Mrs. Lane. |
| C．The Adams brothers and Mrs. Lane. | D．The Adams brothers and other neighbors. |
| A．For about two hours. | B．For about 18 hours. | C．For about 70 hours. | D．For about 75 hours. |
| A．Warm-hearted. | B．Cold-blooded. | C．Well-educated. | D．Bad-tempered. |
