1 . Over the last seven years, most states have banned texting by drivers, and public service campaigns have tried a wide range of methods to persuade people to put down their phones when they are behind the wheel.
Yet the problem, by just about any measure, appears to be getting worse. Americans are still texting while driving, as well as using social networks and taking photos. Road accidents, which had fallen for years, are now rising sharply.
That is partly because people are driving more, but Mark Rosekind, the chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said distracted（分心）driving was "only increasing, unfortunately."
"Big change requires big ideas." he said in a speech last month, referring broadly to the need to improve road safety. So to try to change a distinctly modern behavior, lawmakers and public health experts are reaching back to an old approach: They want to treat distracted driving like drunk driving.
An idea from lawmakers in New York is to give police officers a new device called the Textalyzer. It would work like this: An officer arriving at the scene of a crash could ask for the phones of the drivers and use the Textalyzer to check in the operating system for recent activity. The technology could determine whether a driver had just texted, emailed or done anything else that is not allowed under New York's hands-free driving laws.
"We need something on the books that can change people's behavior,” said Félix W. Ortiz, who pushed for the state's 2001 ban on hand-held devices by drivers. If the Textalyzer bill becomes law, he said, "people are going to be more afraid to put their hands on the cell phone."
1. Which of the following best describes the ban on drivers' texting in the US?| A．Ineffective. | B．Unnecessary. |
| C．Inconsistent. | D．Unfair. |
| A．Where a driver came from. | B．Whether a driver used their phone. |
| C．How fast a driver was going. | D．When a driver arrived at the scene. |
| A．Advice. | B．Data. | C．Tests. | D．Laws. |
| A．To Drive or Not to Drive? Think Before You Start |
| B．Texting and Driving? Watch Out for the Textalyzer |
| C．New York Banning Hand-Held Devices by Drivers. |
| D．The Next Generation Cell Phone: The Textalyzer- |
2 . When almost everyone has a mobile phone, why are more than half of Australian homes still paying for a landline (座机)?
These days you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Australia over the age of 15 who doesn’t own a mobile phone. In fact plenty of younger kids have one in their pocket. Practically everyone can make and receive calls anywhere, anytime.
Still, 55 percent of Australians have a landline phone at home and only just over a quarter (29%) rely only on their smartphones according to a survey (调查). Of those Australians who still have a landline, a third concede that it’s not really necessary and they’re keeping it as a security blanket — 19 percent say they never use it while a further 13 percent keep it in case of emergencies. I think my home falls into that category.
More than half of Australian homes are still choosing to stick with their home phone. Age is naturally a factor (因素)— only 58 percent of Generation Ys still use landlines now and then, compared to 84 percent of Baby Boomers who’ve perhaps had the same home number for 50 years. Age isn’t the only factor; I’d say it’s also to do with the makeup of your household.
Generation Xers with young families, like my wife and I, can still find it convenient to have a home phone rather than providing a mobile phone for every family member. That said, to be honest the only people who ever ring our home phone are our Baby Boomers parents, to the point where we play a game and guess who is calling before we pick up the phone (using Caller ID would take the fun out of it).
How attached are you to your landline? How long until they go the way of gas street lamps and morning milk deliveries?
1. What does paragraph 2 mainly tell us about mobile phones?| A．Their target users. | B．Their wide popularity. |
| C．Their major functions. | D．Their complex design. |
| A．Admit. | B．Argue. |
| C．Remember. | D．Remark. |
| A．They like smartphone games. | B．They enjoy guessing callers’ identity. |
| C．They keep using landline phones. | D．They are attached to their family. |
| A．It remains a family necessity. |
| B．It will fall out of use some day. |
| C．It may increase daily expenses. |
| D．It is as important as the gas light. |
3 . I have worked as a keeper at the National Zoo, Paris for 11 years. Spot and Stripe are the first tiger cubs that have ever been born here. Globally, a third of Sumatran cubs in zoos don't make it to adulthood, so I decided to give them round-the-clock care at home.
I've got two children—the younger one, Kynan, was extremely happy about the tigers arriving - but all of us really looked forward to being part of their lives and watching them grow. I wasn't worried about bringing them into my home with my wife and kids. These were cubs. They weighed about 2.5 kg and were so small that there was absolutely no risk.
As they grew more mobile, we let them move freely around the house during the day, but when we were asleep we had to contain them in a large room, otherwise they'd get up to mischief. We'd come down in the morning to find they'd turned the room upside down, and left it looking like a zoo.
Things quickly got very intense due to the huge amount of energy required to look after them. There were some tough times and I just felt extremely tired. I was grateful that my family was there to help. We had to have a bit of a production line going, making up “tiger milk”, washing baby bottles, and cleaning the floors.
When Spot and Stripe were four months old, they were learning how to open doors and jump fences, and we knew it really was time for them to go. It was hard for us to finally part with them. For the first few days, Kynan was always a bit disappointed that the cubs weren't there.
I'm not sad about it. I'm hands-on with them every day at the zoo, and I do look back very fondly on the time that we had them.
1. Why did the author bring the tiger cubs home?| A．To ensure their survival. | B．To observe their differences. |
| C．To teach them life skills. | D．To let them play with his kids. |
| A．Behave badly. | B．Lose their way. | C．Sleep soundly. | D．Miss their mom. |
| A．Boring. | B．Tiring. | C．Costly. | D．Risky. |
| A．They frightened the children. | B．They became difficult to contain. |
| C．They annoyed the neighbours. | D．They started fighting each other. |
4 . Adapting to technological advances is a defining part of the 21st-century life. Just two months after being launched in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has already reached an audience of over 100 million people. While ChatGPT threatens to change writing and writing-related work, the Mesopotamians, who lived 4,000 years ago in a geographical area centered in modern-day Iraq, went through this kind of far-reaching change before us.
Ancient Mesopotamia was home to many of civilization’s early developments. Its people were world leaders in adapting to technological and cultural changes. They invented the wheel and agriculture, and pioneered advances in mathematics and urbanization. These breakthroughs are reflected in cuneiform(楔形文字)literature，one of the oldest known forms of writing.
In its literature, Mesopotamians don’t present cultural and technological advances as consistently beneficial.They often represent new technologies being controlled in the service of human conflict and mostly serving the interests of those with high social positions. In some ways，the representation of new technologies in its literature echoes(映现)contemporary concerns about AI: fears of increasing social inequalities and its potential use in information war.
In recent years，AI—the newest form of writing—has been used to decipher(破译)the oldest: cuneiform literature.In broader fields,the boundaries of how AI may be used haven’t been clearly explained.In January,for example, a top international AI conference banned the use of AI tools for writing scientific papers.
Humans have been struggling to invent, use and adapt to technology since our earliest civilizations. But the technology and resulting knowledge are not always evenly distributed. Knowing how we adapted to changing technology in the past helps us more fully understand the human condition and may even help us prepare for the future.
1. What does paragraph 2 mainly talk about concerning Mesopotamians?| A．Their adaptation to threats. |
| B．Their influences on writing. |
| C．Their contribution to literature. |
| D．Their achievements in civilization. |
| A．They prevent human conflict. |
| B．They bring about hidden dangers. |
| C．They take away people’s concerns. |
| D．They lower people’s social status. |
| A．Its use in literature is popular. |
| B．It is not allowed to finish papers. |
| C．Its range of application is undefined. |
| D．It is not accepted in broader fields. |
| A．How People Can Use the Latest Technology |
| B．How ChatGPT Will Threaten Writing and Work |
| C．What AI Will Do by Learning Cuneiform Literature |
| D．What History Can Teach Us About New Tech’s Impact |
5 . That dinosaurs ate the mammals (哺乳动物) that ran beneath their feet is not in doubt. Now an extraordinary fossil newly described in Scientific Reports, unearthed by a team led by Gang Han at Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology in China, shows that sometimes the tables were turned.
The fossil -dated to about 125 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period-was formed when a flow of boiling volcanic mud swallowed two animals seemingly locked in a life-and-death fight. The one on top is a mammal. This animal is a herbivorous species closely related to the Triceratops (三角恐龙). Animal interactions such as this are exceptionally cam e in the fossil record.
One possibility is that the mammal was eating something already dead, other than hunting live prey. These days it is uncommon for small mammals to attack much larger animals. But it is not unheard of. And Dr. Han and his colleagues point out that those mammals which eat dead bodies typically leave tooth marks all over the bones of the animals. The dinosaur’s remains show no such marks. There is also a chance the fossil could be a fake. More and more convincing fake s have emerged, as this one did -though Dr. Han and his colleagues argue that the complexly connected nature of the skeletons (骨骼) makes that unlikely, too.
Assuming it is genuine, the discovery serves as a reminder that not all dinosaurs were enormous during the Cretaceous and not all mammals were tiny. From nose to tail, the dinosaur is just 1.2 meters long. The mammal is a bit under half a meter in length. Despite being half the size, the mammal has one paw firmly wrapped around one of its prey’s limbs, and another pulling on its jaw. It is biting down on the dinosaur’s chest, and has ripped off two of its ribs. Before they were interrupted, it seems that the mammal was winning.
1. Which idiom is closest in meaning to underlined part “the tables were turned” in paragraph 1?| A．The fittest survives. | B．The hunters become hunted. |
| C．Fortune always favors the brave. | D．The truth will always come to light. |
| A．To prove the fossil was fake. | B．To show the forming of the fossil. |
| C．To illustrate the process of hunting. | D．To suggest the dinosaur was hunted alive. |
| A．The size of the fossil. | B．The absence of fake fossils. |
| C．The complexity of the skeletons. | D．The consistency of the opinions. |
| A．It offers a cause. | B．It highlights a solution. |
| C．It justifies the conclusion. | D．It provides a new discovery. |
6 . The sperm whale is an astonishing creature. It’s longer than a semi-truck, weighs more than 90, 000 pounds and is the largest member of the toothed whale family. It’s known to dive 6, 500 feet in search of food, and to stay down there for longer than an hour at a time.
Perhaps most fantastically, the sperm whale’s brain weighs as much as 20 pounds-the biggest of any species on Earth. But when it comes to brains, is size all that matters? There’s a lot we don’t know about the sperm whale’s intelligence because it’s difficult to carry out neurological (神经的) testing on such a huge marine mammal. But some clues point to sperm whales being much smarter than we give them credit for.
A 2021 study published in Biology Letters, for example, looked back to 19th-century historical logbooks from whalers. Researchers found that sperm whales were at first easy to catch-but almost immediately, the whales learned how to evade hunters and whaling success dropped by 60 percent. The study suggests that the whales passed information to one another through soundwaves to avoid being caught.
Animals that have big brains usually have a few things in common. They usually live long lives; for example, sperm whales can live for 70 years or longer. Additionally, they’re capable of complex behaviors and they tend to be more socia1. Whales may work together to hunt or communicate in a language all their own.
What’s more, humans, whales and dolphins all have spindle neurons in their brains. These nerve cells make us capable of deeper thought, such as reasoning skills, memory, communication and adaptive thinking. And like humans, whales have emotional intelligence- meaning they＇re capable of empathy, grief and sadness. Still, in proportion to (与…成比例)our body size, the human brain is bigger than that of the sperm whale.
Yet there’s still so much we don’t know about how smart sperm whales really are. And just like the whalers of a century ago, we have likely been underestimating marine mammals, whether large or small, for as long as we’ve known of their existence.
1. Why do people know little about the sperm whale’s intelligence?| A．Sperm whales’ big size makes research difficult. |
| B．It didn’t attract scientists’ attention until recently. |
| C．Whalers didn’t keep enough records of their hunting. |
| D．Sperm whales usually stay deep down in the ocean. |
| A．Track. | B．Avoid. | C．Locate. | D．Trick. |
| A．The nerve cells distinguish humans from animals. |
| B．Sperm whales have smaller brains than humans. |
| C．Spindle neurons make higher intelligence possible. |
| D．Emotional intelligence is unique to whales and humans. |
| A．Sperm Whales Are Astonishingly Smart |
| B．Sperm Whales Have the Biggest Brain |
| C．Break the Code of Whale Language |
| D．Unlock the Mystery of Sea Mammals |
7 . GET A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE WORLD’S MOST ATTRACTIVE FEATHERED ANIMALS WITH THESE BOOKS
Flamingo (火烈鸟)
Biologist and photographer Claudio Contreras Koob spent 20 years travelling deep into the wet lands and forests of his native Mexico—and beyond—to feed his flamingo attraction. This book offers a unique window into the behavior and life of red-feathered birds, with more than 120 show-stopping shots displaying their beauty. teNeues, £35.
Around the World in 80 Birds
Inspiring secrets, national pride or scientific discoveries, every bird has a story to tell, from the weaver bird building multi-nest “apartment blocks” in Namibia to the bar-headed goose taking on a twice-yearly trans-Himalayan journey at an extreme altitude. Mike Unwin’s tour is accompanied by beautiful illustrations from Ryuto Miyake. Laurence King Publishing, £22.
A World on the Wing
Pulitzer-shortlisted Weidensaul, who’s at the forefront of research into bird migration, here tracks some of nature’s most remarkable journeys. He sails through the stormy Bering Sea, encounters trappers in the Mediterranean and visits former headhunters in northeast India, where a bird migration crisis has become a conservation success story. Pan Macmillan, £9.99.
Galapagos Crusoes: A Year Alone with the Birds
Explore this updated version of the 1968 title, Galapagos: Islands of Birds, by late bird expert Bryan Nelson, with previously unpublished material from his wife, June. The couple spent a year living on two Galapagos islands, studying birds, including the Galapagos albatross (信天翁). This is their clever and amusing account. Bradt Guides, £11.99.
1. By whom is the second costliest book illustrated?| A．Claudio Contreras Koob. | B．Mike Unwin. |
| C．Ryuto Miyake. | D．Weidensaul. |
| A．Flamingo. | B．Around the World in 80 Birds. |
| C．A World on the Wing. | D．Galapagos: Island of Birds. |
| A．Its humorous description. | B．Its romantic style. |
| C．Its vivid imagination. | D．Its moving plot. |
8 . The topic “slash youth”, referring to those refusing to be defined or bound by just one personal identity and choosing to undertake multiple careers, has fueled heated debate on social media. On Douban, a Chinese social networking platform, the topic has attracted about 11,000posts and has been viewed over 400 million times. China’s young people are keen to share their slash youth stories online, presenting themselves as multiple and sometimes distinct identities, such as a nurse and model, a teacher and stand-up comedian, and an engineer and musician.
Xing Eryang, a 31-year-old female resident in Beijing, founded the Douban topic in 2021.While staying diligent about her daytime work, she is developing her hobbies, including stand-up comedy and vlogging, into secondary careers during her spare time. And she is amazed to find her “slash life” philosophy followed by so many of her peers.
Weiheng, a 26-year-old woman in Guangzhou, and Tang Yuhan, a 27-year-old man in Xuancheng city, Anhui province, are both participants in the topic, with their stories earning thousands of likes so far. The two are both musicians in their spare time, even though they are thousands of miles apart and have different jobs in media and finance. Their passion for music has grown since college and they didn’t abandon their enthusiasm, even after entering the workplace.
Their reaction showed the gap between the young and former generations. “My parents used to say, ‘music cannot earn you money’, so the band thing was regarded as a waste of time. However, we want to pursue whatever we love and are willing to pay for it.” says Weiheng.
“The ‘slash life’ mania(狂热)shows that, along with China’s economic development, our society is becoming more and more diversified and inclusive, and it welcomes everyone’s self-fulfillment,” says Shi Yanrong, an associate researcher from Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences. “Young people no longer have to rely on work and money for their sense of self-worth. They tend to practice a carpe diem(活在当下)philosophy and create their own identities.”
1. What are “slash youth” more likely to do?| A．Create a topic on Douban. |
| B．Take diverse occupations. |
| C．Become a stand-up comedian. |
| D．Share their own stories online. |
| A．Other young people’s positive response. |
| B．Hobbies developed while working. |
| C．The growing social networking platform. |
| D．Thousands of likes earned on Douban. |
| A．They sent their stories online to gain more funds. |
| B．They shared similar interests in both their hobbies and jobs. |
| C．They never lost passion for music even if they had to quit college. |
| D．They stuck with their dream despite the older generation’s opinion. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Supportive. |
| C．Unfavorable. | D．Indifferent. |
9 . In 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford conducted a famous study of creativity known as the nine-dot puzzle (九点谜题). He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. All the participants limited the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the confinement (束缚) and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.
The fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford to jump to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral. Overnight, it seemed that creativity experts everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. The concept enjoyed such strong popularity that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams-Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg-ran another experiment.
Both teams followed the same way of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box. Guess what? Only 25 percent solved the puzzle. In statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement is insignificant as this could be called sampling error.
Let’s look a little more closely at the surprising result. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and clear instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless should effectively have killed off the much widely spread — and therefore, much more dangerous — metaphor (比喻) that out-of-the-box thinking boosts creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a misunderstanding.
1. What did the nine-dot puzzle study focus on?| A．Visual perception. |
| B．Thinking patterns. |
| C．Practical experience. |
| D．Theoretical knowledge. |
| A．To test the catchy concept. |
| B．To contradict the initial idea. |
| C．To collect supporting evidence |
| D．To identify the underlying logic. |
| A．Groundless. | B．Inspiring. | C．Fruitless. | D．Revealing. |
| A．Puzzle Solving: A Key To Creativity |
| B．Thinking Outside the Box: A Misguided Idea |
| C．Nine-Dot Puzzle: A Magic Test |
| D．Creative Thinking: We Fell For The Trap |
10 . The motivation for his invention came to Aarrav Anil last year when he saw his uncle Arjun, who has Parkinson’s disease, struggle to eat. Some food spilled (溢出) out of his mouth, the rest splattered (溅) on his clothes. Arjun attempted to keep his dignity but the frustration forced him to give up and call his helper to feed him.
The sight of his uncle’s shaking the spoon so violently inspired Aarrav, 17, from Bengaluru, south India, to turn to robotics. He locked himself in his room with microcontrollers, sensors, motors, and a 3D printer. What emerged was a prototype (原型) of a smart spoon that is now undergoing trials at the RV College of Physiotherapy in Bengaluru.
The sensors in the battery-operated spoon detect shaking on one side and activate movement on the other, effectively cancelling out shaking to keep the spoon stable.
“I’ve been fine tuning the design based on the college’s feedback-that it needs to be waterproof so that it can be washed without damaging all the electronics inside; that it must be removable so it can be cleaned and replaced by a fork, ” Aarrav says.
For Aarrav it is the peak of a 10-year interest in mechanics that began when his mother bought him a Lego set. He has now represented India at more than 20 robotics competitions across the world.
When the blueprint for the smart spoon won first prize in the future innovators category at last year’s World Robot Olympiad in Germany, Aarrav felt encouraged to make the prototype.
More than 7 million people in India are estimated to have Parkinson’s disease, a condition in which parts of the brain become progressively damaged and which mainly affects people over the age of 50. Symptoms (症状) include involuntary shaking and stiff muscles. As the disease progresses, eating can become more difficult, forcing people to rely on help from others.
Aarrav’s ambition is that every family that has someone with Parkinson’s will have the smart spoon. He says his uncle Arjun’s words keep echoing (回响) in his mind: “Who would have thought such a small thing could mean the difference between dignity and indignity?”
1. What can Aarrav’s invention help people with Parkinson’s do?| A．Control their physical balance. | B．Boost their mood and relieve stress. |
| C．Maintain a good range of movement. | D．Feed themselves more independently. |
| A．Overturning. | B．Reconsidering. |
| C．Conducting a study of. | D．Making minor changes to. |
| A．To show prospects of Aarrav’s invention. |
| B．To reveal the nation’s poor health situation. |
| C．To popularize general knowledge of the disease. |
| D．To convince people to volunteer for social causes. |
| A．He enjoys being alone. | B．He has an innovative mind. |
| C．He used to be a health worker. | D．He longed to be a businessman. |
