1 . Living a healthy lifestyle is all about choosing to make healthy choices each day. Here are some tips on how to improve your physical, mental, and emotional health.
Set specific and actionable goals to improve your health. When you have specific goals you want to achieve, you’ll be more motivated to implement (实施) healthy changes in your life.
Make a conscious effort to drink enough water throughout the day. Just like nutritious foods, water is essential to keeping your body healthy.
Aim for at least 7 hours of quality sleep each night.
Find a type of physical activity that’s enjoyable for you. The benefits of physical activities are endless. Doing physical activities lowers your risk of things like stroke and high blood pressure, helps you lose weight, and improves your cognitive (认知的) function. .
| A．Consult the doctor about your physical condition. |
| B．Choose nutritious foods and create a well-balanced diet. |
| C．Identify what parts of your lifestyle you want to improve. |
| D．Choose activities that make you feel happy and confident. |
| E．Water benefits your digestion and keeps you from getting thirsty. |
| F．What’s more, being active can improve your overall mental health. |
| G．A good night’s sleep is good for your health and attention during the day. |
2 . Gorgeous Mother’s Day Gift
If you’re stuck for a Mother’s Day gift, why not try something that tugs at the heartstrings? A company that specialises in turning life stories into long-lasting books has developed a simple way to show your mother or grandmother how much they mean to you.
The company has created a full-colour book that captures all your family memories. And it’s a gift that can be enjoyed over and over again by future generations. The company sends you a set of questions by email, and these help you make a personalised book that’s unique to your parent or grandparent
This hardbound (精装的) book is a bargain compared to a private autobiography, which can cost thousands of pounds and take ages to finish.
The company was started by two siblings. After their dad died young and they saw their grandma struggle with Alzheimer’s, they wanted to find a way to save life stories before it was too late. When you buy a photo book, the company will give some money to the Alzheimer’s Society charity. They help you make the book and keep your stories safe until it’s printed.
The photo book costs £149, but you can pay £50 more to get an extra copy for your family and friends. If the person who gets the book doesn’t like it, they can get their money back in 30 days.
As a cheaper alternative, you could get an £11. 99 scrapbook from the Internet and put your own pictures in it to save money. The company also sells different kinds of photo books, like the Mini Hardback Photo Book which is now only £20. 80, down from £26.
1. What does the company create?| A．The Alzheimer’s Society charity. | B．A photo book of family memories. |
| C．Someone’s private oral biography. | D．A personal story unique to each people. |
| A．Their concern for their family. | B．The popularity of family stories. |
| C．Their grandmother’s dying wish. | D．Their desire to cure Alzheimer’s. |
| A．£149. | B．£160. 99. | C．£199. | D．£257. 79. |
3 . English businessman Richard Branson made history on July 11, 2021 as he and three other crewmates became the world’s first space tourists. The flight was made by a spacecraft named VSS Unity that was built by Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic. The flight lasted slightly more than an hour, and took Branson and crew to an altitude (海拔) of 53.5miles above the Earth, just a little above the boundary (边界) of space which lies 50 miles above the Earth.
At that height, the atmosphere turns into the black of outer space and the Earth becomes a bent ball of blue. Travelers also exhibit weightlessness as there is no gravity, the force that keeps our bodies walking on the Earth’s surface. Therefore, Branson and his fellows were able to float around in VSS Unity while enjoying the views. They were able to do that for three minutes before the spacecraft began its downward journey. It landed back at Virgin Galactic’s space port in New Mexico, United States, which is the same place from where it had taken off 90 minutes before.
On landing back, Branson said, “I have dreamt of this moment since I was a kid but honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of the Earth from space. It was just magical. I’m just taking it all in, and it’s unreal.”
July 11’s flight is the start of space tourism for one and all. In early 2022, customers who can afford a ticket for a quarter of a million dollars can line up for a seat on a trip to space. And guess what — they will have a choice of spacecraft. Jeff Bezos, who owns a famous company, is all set to launch himself into space on July 20 on board a spacecraft built by his new branch company Blue Origin. Blue Origin will also carry tourists to space.
1. What is Richard Branson famous for?| A．His success in tourism. |
| B．His company of Virgin Galactic. |
| C．His spaceship named VSS Unity. |
| D．His first commercial space travel in history. |
| A．Unbelievable. | B．Adventurous. | C．Regrettable. | D．Worthless. |
| A．Take a spacecraft of Virgin Galactic. |
| B．Pay $250,000 for the rocket tour. |
| C．Pass the fitness test for astronauts. |
| D．Line up for a position in Blue Origin. |
| A．Humans will move to other livable planets. |
| B．Ordinary people will soon land on the moon. |
| C．Private rocket space travel is growing gradually. |
| D．Some companies abandon their proper business. |
4 . If you’ve ever seen a sparrow steal your dog food or a crow open a garbage bag, you get a sense of that some birds have learned to take advantage of new feeding opportunities—a clear sign of their intelligence. Scientists have long wondered why certain species of birds are more innovative than others, and whether these capacities stem from larger brains or from a greater number of neurons (神经元) in specific areas of the brain.
It turns out that it’s a bit of both, according to a recent study by an international team that included members from McGill University published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The researchers used a new technique to estimate the number of neurons in a specific part of the brain called the pallium in 111 bird species. The pallium in birds is equal to the human cerebral cortex (大脑皮层), which is involved in memory, learning, reasoning, and problem-solving, among other things. When these estimates about neuron numbers in the pallium were combined with information about over 4,000 feeding innovations, the team found that the species with the higher numbers of neurons in the pallium were also likely to be the most innovative.
“The amount of time chicks spend in the nest as their brains develop might also play a crucial role in the evolution of intelligence,” says McGill University Emeritus Professor Louis Lefebvre who spent more than 20 years gathering examples of feeding innovations. “Larger species of crows and parrots, which are known for their intelligence, spend longer in the nest, which allows more time for the brain to grow and accumulate pallial neurons.”
The results of the study help to deal with previously opposed views of the evolution and significance of brain size and show how a life-history perspective helps to understand the evolution of cognition.
1. What may a sparrow be thought of when it steals dog food?| A．It is lovely. | B．It is immoral. | C．It is heartbroken. | D．It is intelligent. |
| A．Assessed the neurons in their pallium. |
| B．Tested a new technology on their brain. |
| C．Trained them to learn to feed individually. |
| D．Compared their pallium with the human cerebral cortex. |
| A．Their large shape. |
| B．More time in their nest. |
| C．Their learning ability. |
| D．More feeding innovations. |
| A．Health. | B．Society. | C．Science. | D．Culture. |
5 . More than 400 athletes across a variety of sports, ages and levels of experience were questioned for the study by sports psychology experts from Staffordshire University and Manchester Metropolitan University. The findings reveal that athletes’ belief systems — specifically irrational (非理性) beliefs — are related to poorer self-confidence, and in turn, greater competitive anxiety and depressive symptoms.
“Phrases that reflect self-depreciating (贬低) beliefs such as ‘If I lose, I’m a failure’ or ‘If I face setbacks, it shows how stupid I am’ are warning signs,” said the authors. Paul Mansell, Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at Staffordshire University, said, “Despite the psychological benefits of physical activity, studies frequently report poor mental health in athletes, which may be exacerbated by adversities, such as injury, de-selection, and performance pressure. We investigated athletes’ beliefs, how they view stress, their levels of self-confidence and put all this data together to work out what might predict psychological well-being. We found irrational beliefs to be a core reason for symptoms of poor mental health in athletes.”
This is the first known study that has examined irrational beliefs, self-confidence, and the psychological well-being of athletes all together. Irrational beliefs are extreme, rigid, and illogical ideas that people hold. For example, a person might believe that they “must” get what they want, or that just because they have failed, they are a “complete failure”.
“We can all work to help athletes develop mindsets that help them deal with the challenges of sport and life. By encouraging rational and logical beliefs about performance, we can help athletes to stay healthy amidst the high demands of competitive sport,” said Paul Mansell.
The author s propose Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) as an effective tool for protecting self-confidence. REBT helps athletes to challenge these self-depreciating beliefs and develop beliefs that are more helpful and healthy. For example, rather than believe “I am a failure if I fail”, this might be countered with “Failing is not ideal, but it does not mean that I am a failure”.
1. What did the study centre on?| A．Physical health of athletes. |
| B．The competition state of athletes. |
| C．Psychological health of athletes. |
| D．Competition habits of athletes. |
| A．Worsened. | B．Examined. | C．Promoted. | D．Recognized. |
| A．Setbacks won’t stop me. |
| B．If I fail, I will lose everything. |
| C．It is a world full of competition. |
| D．What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. |
| A．Psychological benefits of physical activity |
| B．Effective tools for protecting self-confidence |
| C．Rational and logical beliefs about performance |
| D．Warning signs of poor mental health in athletes |
6 . “It is like nothing I’ve ever tried. Gentle, elegant and comforting,” said Max Falkowitz, digital editor of the food and wine magazine Saveur, after he tasted one of the most sought-after teas in the world: pu’er, a fermented (发酵的) dark tea sourced from ancient trees in the Yunnan Province in southwest China. “Pu’er is a ‘slow’ drink. It has to be boiled in hot water from 15 to 60 seconds again and again until the drinker arrives at the desired taste. To be considered true pu’er, the leaves must be grown in certain villages and allowed to ferment over weeks, months, years or even decades. That fermentation can produce a variety of complex flavors — from the most unpleasant one to the most desirable one that lasts for hours in the mouth.”
The price of pu’er varies greatly. Some pu’er can be had for just a few dollars a kilogram, while a few of the most prized producing villages sell maocha (the raw material used to make pu’er) for around $725 per kilogram. In 2005, a mere 500 gram of a 64-year-old pu’er from Lao Banzhang sold for nearly $150,000.
“Not surprisingly, the astonishing profits led to a crash in 2007, when widespread counterfeit (假冒的) pu’er was discovered, and prices then stabilized,” Max laughed.
Part of the attraction of pu’er is its presentation: It is routinely pressed into cakes, and wrapped in paper printed with the name of the tea. This method was developed centuries ago for the long journey along the famous Teahorse Road, which went all the way north into Russia and south into Thailand. For the convenience of transportation, several cakes were wrapped in bamboo, and then tied to either side of a mule or horse. Indeed, pu’er might be invented by luck, when tea being transported was exposed to rain and sun, and began to ferment.
“Pu’er is more than a drink,” said Jinghong Zhang, author of Pu’er Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic. “For example, it is given as a gift during local wedding negotiations, and offered to ancestors during religious ceremonies.”
1. What can be inferred about pu’er from the first paragraph?| A．Its flavors are always good. | B．It takes little time to boil the tea. |
| C．The fermentation is a key step. | D．The best tea comes from younger trees. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Tolerant. | C．Approving. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．To make it easier to transport. | B．To show the name of the tea maker. |
| C．To shelter it from sun and rain. | D．To let it ferment along the Teahorse Road. |
| A．Certain aspects of Chinese culture. | B．The role of pu’er in local society. |
| C．The high costs of local weddings. | D．The long history of pu’er in China. |
7 . The first wave of excitement about generative artificial intelligence (AI) has cooled a little. But an entirely new industry centred on generative AI models is taking shape. Three forces will determine what it eventually looks like.
The first factor is computing power, the cost of which is forcing model-builders to become more efficient. Faced with the eye-watering costs of training and running more powerful models, for instance, OpenAI is not yet training its next big model, GPT-5, but GPT-4.5 instead, a more powerful version than its current model, GPT-4. That could give deep-pocketed competitors such as Google a chance to catch up. Its soon-to-be-released cutting-edge model, Gemini, is thought to be more powerful than OpenAI’s current version.
High computing costs have also encouraged the development of much smaller models, which are trained on specific data to do specific things. Replit, a startup, has trained a model to help developers write programs, for instance.
All these models are now fighting for data—the second force shaping the generative AI industry. The biggest, such as OpenAI’s and Google’s, are always hungry: They are trained on more than one trillion words, which amount to more than 250 English-language Wikipedias. As they grow bigger, they will get hungrier.
Generative AI’s hunger for data and computing power makes a third factor more important still: money. Many model-makers are already turning away from generative AI models for the general public, and looking instead to fee-paying businesses. OpenAI, which started life in 2015 as a non-profit venture, has been especially energetic in this regard. It has not just licensed its models to Microsoft, but is setting up tools for companies including Morgan Stanley and Salesforce.
Who will emerge victorious? Firms like OpenAI, with its vast number of users, and Google, with its deep pockets, have a clear early competitive edge. But for as long as computing power and data remain limited, the model-builder with the smartest method to process data could yet steal the lead. So, the AI craze may have cooled, but the drama is just beginning.
1. Gemini is probably more powerful than __________.| A．GPT-4 | B．GPT-4.5 | C．GPT-5 | D．GPT-5.5 |
| A．By buying the latest technologies abroad. | B．By designing specialized smaller models. |
| C．By building bigger and smarter models. | D．By partnering with other AI companies. |
| A．The number of users. | B．The depth of pockets. |
| C．The computing power. | D．The data-processing methods. |
| A．What Are the Disadvantages of Big AI Models? |
| B．Who Will Have the Last Laugh, OpenAI or Google? |
| C．What Are the Determining Factors in the AI Drama? |
| D．How Can Startups Reduce the AI Model Training Costs? |
8 . Having just finished a show in Times Square, Italian rocker Maneskin and his band learned that their Madison Square Garden show scheduled for the week was a sellout. Pleasantly surprised, Maneskin called the news very special, because it’s one of the most important places where every musician can ever dream to perform.
In an era when rock bands seem endangered and most of the top rockers came from the last century, Maneskin and his band seem to be an anomaly. Coming to public attention in 2021 after an unexpected win at the Eurovision Song Contest with their high-energy song, Zitti E Buoni, the Italian band seems to be reviving (复兴) rock music, or at least, providing a breath of hope.
“The band was born out of pure passion between four friends who met in high school,” Maneskin told reporters. “We never had the ambition to make a breakthrough in the music business as a rock band.”
Maneskin thinks that their success has something to do with the band’s experience on the streets of Rome as teenagers. “We had to get the attention of the people. So, we saw that interacting and getting close was something that really worked,” he admitted.
That is carried over to their live show, as they always break away from the main stage for a few songs to get closer to the audience. They also have brought fans onstage. The relationship between the artists and audience was intensified during their South America tours where the band was exposed to some of the most energetic audiences.
“People went crazy. They really screamed at the top of their lungs,” Maneskin laughed.
While they can easily be mistaken for rockers of a new era with their distinctive style and songs like I Wanna Be Your Slave or Supermodel, their music is strongly influenced by the rock of the 1970s and 1980s.
“We grew up listening to the rock music our parents played. When we started playing our instruments, our teachers introduced us to all the classic rock music bands of the past. It’s something that really shaped us into who we are today,” he said.
1. What does the word “anomaly” underlined in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Great success. | B．Classic combination. | C．Unusual thing. | D．Normal phenomenon. |
| A．The interaction with audience. | B．The innovative music. |
| C．The high energy of the songs. | D．The special performance venues. |
| A．Good rock bands are very rare nowadays. | B．A totally new era of rock music is coming. |
| C．The 70’s and 80’s are the rock’s best time. | D．The band has not made a big breakthrough. |
| A．A music review. | B．A news report. | C．An advertisement. | D．A biography. |
9 . Did you know many adults sit down for more than nine hours a day? Maybe you’re one of them! Whether it’s working at a desk, sitting motionless in a car, bus or train or lounging on the sofa watching TV, we have a much more sedentary lifestyle than our parents and grandparents did. The question that this raises is just what it is doing to our bodies.
The news isn’t good. A study carried out in the 1950s compared bus drivers with the conductors, who walked around the bus selling tickets. It showed that drivers, who spent many hours sitting at the wheel, were twice as likely to have heart attacks than the more active conductors. In fact, prolonged sitting has been associated with a number of different conditions, even in people who otherwise take regular exercise. If you sit down all day, you burn far fewer calories than someone with a more active job. There are suggestions that its lows your metabolism (新陈代谢) and makes it harder for your body to regulate blood sugar levels increasing the risk of diabetes.
One possible answer to this problem is for desk workers to use standing desks, to spend at least part of their day on their feet. One small study showed that office workers who stood for three hours after lunch had a much smaller increase in blood sugar levels, while another suggested that by standing for three or four hours a day over the period of a year, people would burn as many calories as if they had run ten marathons.
Other experts question this figure and point out that standing all day can also have negative impacts, such as leg or back pain, recommending that if people do want to use standing desks, they should gradually increase the amount of time that they spend on their feet. Crucially, they also point out that there are many alternatives to sitting, and that their impact is unlikely to be the same; walking, for example, burns far more calories than standing.
1. What is the text mainly talk about?| A．The dangers of long sitting. | B．Measures to burn more calories. |
| C．Disadvantages of standing at work. | D．Suggestions from the experts on health. |
| A．Walking burns far more calories than standing. |
| B．We are more active than our previous generations. |
| C．Leg or back pain could be a negative effect of standing all day. |
| D．Not being able to regulate blood sugar levels can lead to diabetes. |
| A．A bus conductor. | B．A marathon runner. |
| C．A sitting desk worker. | D．A standing office worker. |
| A．Ambiguous | B．Approving. | C．Skeptical. | D．Dismissive. |
10 . Think of a caveman, and maybe you imagine someone tearing at the flesh of an animal they’ve just hunted. But this picture may be false—analysis of prehistoric remains suggests that Stone Age people were skilled in processing and cooking different kinds of seeds, even experimenting with different flavours. Seeds are still an important part of our diets, so maybe food choices haven’t changed as much as we think.
In botanical terms, seeds are what new plants grow from. Strictly speaking, edible seeds include nuts, pulses and grains, and area significant source of protein and calories world-wide. Between them, rice and bread are staple foods in most of the world. Many cuisines use beans, whether cooked in stews or curries, or mashed into pastes, like hummus from the Middle East. This definition of seeds also includes coffee beans and the cocoa beans used to make chocolate.
Added to these are culinary (烹饪的) seeds. These are what we more often think of as seeds-we often buy them unprocessed and use them whole in cooking, whether as a seasoning, as part of a salad or as a topping for bread. This includes chia seeds (奇亚籽), sesame seeds (芝麻籽) and flaxseed (亚麻籽).
There are clear health benefits to including these seeds in our diet. They are high in dietary fibre, which is good for digestion and helps fight illnesses such as diabetes and bowel cancer. They are also a good source of unsaturated fat (不饱和脂肪). Experts believe that using this to replace saturated fats, such as those from meat and dairy products, can lower cholesterol and help keep our heart healthy. The minerals contained in many culinary seeds, such as zinc, copper, and folate, can be beneficial for the immune system.
However, it’s not all good news. Seeds can cause an allergic reaction, especially sesame seeds. Sesame is one of the top ten causes of food allergies in the UK. Different types of seeds can share allergy-causing proteins, and other seeds that can cause allergies include sunflower seeds and poppy seeds.
1. Which of the following might the author disagree with?| A．Cavemen made a living merely by hunting. |
| B．Stone Age people could try different flavors. |
| C．Stone Age people were good at processing seeds. |
| D．Seeds might be an important part of cavemen’s diets. |
| A．Rare. | B．Main. | C．Costly. | D．Undiscovered. |
| A．It can help defeat cancer. |
| B．It can help us digest cholesterol. |
| C．It can help keep our spirits high. |
| D．It can assist in keeping our hearts fit. |
| A．The British can note at sesame seeds. |
| B．We should eat less seeds but more meat. |
| C．Not all seeds are beneficial for everyone’s health. |
| D．We shouldn’t produce seeds causing allergic reactions. |
