1 . Authorities have moved to tighten oversight of the rapidly expanding semi-prepared food industry, ironing out definitions of precooked dishes and roll ng out rules on the use of additives in the sector to ensure food safety. Restaurants are also being encouraged to identify dishes on their menus that include semi-prepared ingredients, a move that experts say will help customers make informed decisions.
The reforms, led by y the State Administration for Market Regulation, which oversees product quality and consumer rights, were outlined in a circular issued on Thursday by six government agencies.
Share (股票) prices of companies involved in the semi prepared food sector fell by an average of 2 percent on the A-share market on Monday because of the strengthened oversight Industry insiders said the rules were the first to clarify the definition of semi-prepared food and set out safety and quality standards for the multibillion yuan industry.
China has more than 70, 000 companies making food items that have undergone some preparation but are not fully cooked or ready to eat, according to Xinhua News Agency. Their output value topped 500 billion yuan ($69.4 million) last year and is on track to surpass 1 trillion yuan in a few years, it said.
The new rules differentiate between semi-prepared food-also known as prepackaged meals — and other food items, such as instant noodles, frozen dumplings and salads. They say semi-prepared food must be a dish that can be consumed after simple preparations such as heating or boiling.
Experts said makers of frozen foods such as dumplings and hamburgers will no longer be regarded as being semi-prepared food businesses, and will be unable to ignore regulations in their own sector or enjoy preferential policies tailor-made for semi-prepared food makers. They said the generalization of the concept of semi prepared food had previously created regulatory difficulties.
1. Why is it necessary to oversee the semi-prepared food industry?| A．To raise people’s awareness of food safety concerns. |
| B．To ban the use of semi-prepared prepared ingredients. |
| C．To guarantee food safety through strengthened regulations. |
| D．To encourage restaurants to identify dishes on their menus. |
| A．Rules aiming to define semi-prepared food. |
| B．Great loss suffered by semi-prepared food sect on. |
| C．Safety and quality standards imposed on food industry. |
| D．Effects on semi-prepared food industry made by the new rules. |
| A．Semi-prepared food can be directly consumed. |
| B．Instant noodles are considered as semi-prepared food. |
| C．Semi prepared food makers enjoy preferential treatment. |
| D．Output value of semi-prepared food is decreasing in China. |
| A．Ambiguous. | B．Positive. | C．Objective. | D．Indifferent. |
2 . To put it simply, stress can be the father of growth, while a crisis can be the mother of innovation. The notion that great good can emerge from great adversity (逆境) is as old as the legend of the great phoenix (凤凰), who not only arises but soars to new heights from its own ashes.
In 1598, William Shakespeare penned the play As You Like It. One of the most famous lines from that play is spoken in Act 2 Scene 1 by Duke Senior, “Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad (癞蛤蟆), ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” Even 500 years ago, the potential value of adversity was recognized, not by a great healer, but by a great playwright. Can this really be the case?
Fast-forward to the great silent film star Mary Pickford. She was called the most popular actress in the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Failing to continue acting with the advent of the “talkies”(movies with recorded sound), she co-founded the film company United Artists. Shifting her talents to producing and directing, she became the most powerful woman in the entertainment industry. She once noted, “You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
Rather than fear and try to avoid adversity, perhaps we should accept the inevitability (必然) of adversity and prepare for it. Indeed, positive things can emerge from adversity.
Adversity reveals true opportunities for those preparing to take advantage. Dr. John Krumboltz’s happenstance theory states that career and life development is best fostered by preparing for opportunities that you may not know even exist in the current moment. Numerous unpredictable factors are potentially shaping the future. These include the crises adversity brings.
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s book, Behold the Man, the German philosopher writes that a person who has “turned out well” could be recognized by the ability to take advantage of and prosper from adversity, just as he wrote before, “What does not kill him makes him stronger.”
So, the next time adversity enters your life, will you run from it, or will you embrace it and use it as a step ping stone to greater happiness and success?
1. Why does the author quote the line from Shakespeare’s play?| A．To emphasize the great wisdom of Shakespeare. |
| B．To highlight the beauty of Shakespeare’s language. |
| C．To challenge the conventional belief regarding adversity. |
| D．To show the long-standing recognition of adversity’s value. |
| A．Fame can block one’s achievements. |
| B．Strong determination overcomes adversity. |
| C．Accepting adversity results in positive outcomes. |
| D．Courage in the face of challenges leads to success. |
| A．Embracing uncertainty. | B．Managing life’s challenges. |
| C．Seizing hidden opportunities. | D．Focusing on personal growth. |
| A．Cautious. | B．Favorable. | C．Neutral. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．Finding value and opportunity in facing adversity. |
| B．Stress as the primary cause of growth and innovation. |
| C．How to avoid adversity and negative experiences in life. |
| D．Historical figures who failed to overcome adversity effectively. |
3 . When you teach a child how to solve puzzles, you can either let them figure it out through trial and error, or you can guide them with some basic rules and tips. Similarly, incorporating (合并) rules and tips into AI training—such as the laws of physics—could make them more efficient and more reflective of the real world. However, helping the AI assess the value of different rules can be a tricky task.
Researchers report that they have developed a framework for assessing the relative value of rules and data in “informed machine learning models” that incorporate both. They showed that by doing so, they could help the AI incorporate basic laws of the real world and better navigate scientific problems like solving complex mathematical problems and optimizing experimental conditions in chemistry experiments.
“Embedding human knowledge into AI models has the potential to improve their efficiency and ability to make inferences, but the question is how to balance the influence of data and knowledge,” says first author. Hao Xu of Peking University. “Our framework can be employed to evaluate different knowledge and rules to enhance the predictive capability of deep learning models.”
Generative AI models like ChatGPT and Sora are purely data-driven—the models are given training data, and they teach themselves via trial and error. However, with only data to work from, these systems have no way to learn physical laws, such as gravity or fluid dynamics, and they also struggle to perform in situations that differ from their training data. An alternative approach is informed machine learning, in which researchers provide the model with some underlying rules to help guide its training process.
“We are trying to teach AI models the laws of physics so that they can be more reflective of the real world, which would make them more useful in science and engineering. We want to make it a closed loop (闭环) by making the model into a real AI scientist,” says senior author Yuntian Chen of the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo.
1. How did the author introduce the topic of the text?| A．By assessing basic rules. | B．By comparison of similarity. |
| C．By explaining laws of physics. | D．By analysis of human learning. |
| A．Planting. | B．Stressing. | C．Employing. | D．Revealing. |
| A．They’re dependent too much on data. |
| B．They’re inflexible to carry out new tasks. |
| C．They struggle to learn new things. |
| D．It’s tough for them to deal with familiar situations. |
| A．Informed machine learning may be an alternative to generative AI. |
| B．Helping the AI assess the value of different rules can be a tricky task. |
| C．Generative AI models can be more reflective of the real world in the future. |
| D．Balancing training data and human knowledge makes AI more like a scientist. |
4 . Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut a cake over the last 15 years. As the father of three children, he knows how hard it is to divide a birthday cake to everyone’s satisfaction. But it’s also because Procaccia’s work focuses on exploring the mathematical rules for dividing stuff up fairly. One way to do that is to think abstractly about dessert.
For decades, researchers have been asking the seemingly simple question of how to cut a cake fairly. The answer reaches far beyond birthday parties. A mathematical problem at its heart, cake cutting connects strict reasoning to real-world issues of fairness, and so attracts not only mathematicians, but also social scientists, economists and more. “It’s a very elegant model in which you can distill what fairness really is, and reason about it,” Procaccia says.
The simplest approach is called the “divider-chooser” method, where one person cuts the cake into two equal pieces in his view, and the other person picks first. Each receives a piece that they feel is as valuable as the other’s. But when personal preferences are taken into account, even the easiest rule becomes complicated. Suppose Alice and Bob are to divide a cake, and Alice knows Bob prefers chocolate, she may knowingly divide the cake unequally so the smaller piece contains more chocolate. Then Bob will choose according to his preference, and Alice will get the larger piece. Both of them are satisfied with what they get, but the meaning of fairness changes in this situation.
The cake is a symbol for any divisible good. When cake-cutting principles are employed to settle disagreements, they are potentially helping the world find solutions. Procaccia has used fair division algorithms (算法) to model food distribution. Social scientist Haris Aziz is exploring situations ranging from how to divide up daily tasks to how to best schedule doctors’ shifts in hospitals.
Even after decades of investigation, cake cutting isn’t like a simple jigsaw puzzle (拼图) with a well-defined solution. Instead, over time, it has evolved into a kind of mathematical sandbox, a constructive playground that brings together abstract proofs and easy applications. The more researchers explore it, the more there is to explore.
1. What does the underlined word “distill” in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Get the essence of. | B．Find the opposite of. |
| C．Keep the focus on. | D．Reduce the impact on. |
| A．Its standard is stable. | B．It prevents unequal division. |
| C．Its concept is complex. | D．It dominates personal preferences. |
| A．The application of its rules. | B．The details of its process. |
| C．The problems it produces. | D．The harmony it symbolizes. |
| A．Who benefits most from fairness? |
| B．How has fairness changed over time? |
| C．What method works best in cake-cutting? |
| D．Why are researchers so interested in cake-cutting? |
5 . Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.
Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.
To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.
In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.
Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”
1. What have some students done since ChatGPT was released?| A．They have built language models from ChatGPT. |
| B．They have copied AI-written text from ChatGPT |
| C．They have accessed their assignments through ChatGPT. |
| D．They have passed their writing exams through ChatGPT. |
| A．The more uniform the text is, the more likely it is to be AI-generated. |
| B．The less complex the text is, the more likely it is to be human-written. |
| C．GPTZero sometimes confuses human-written texts with AI-generated texts. |
| D．GPTZero is more familiar with human-written texts than with AI-generated texts. |
| A．User-friendly. | B．Time-efficient. |
| C．Perfectly legal. | D．Completely reliable. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Disapproving. | C．Objective. | D．Ambiguous. |
6 . I’m in a coffee shop in Manhattan and I’m about to become the most disliked person in the room. First, I’m going to interrupt the man reading quietly near the window and ask for a drink of his latte. Next, I’m going to ask the line of people waiting to pay if I can cut to the front of the queue. This is how I chose to spend my last vacation. Here’s why.
Growing up, all I ever heard about was “EQ.” It was the mid-1990s, and psychologist Daniel Goleman had just popularized the concept of emotional intelligence. Unlike IQ, which tracked conventional measures of intelligence like reasoning and recall, EQ measured the ability to understand other people — to listen, to empathize (共情), and to appreciate.
My mother, an elementary school principal, prized brains and hard work, but she placed a special emphasis on Goleman’s new idea. To her, EQ was the elixir (万能药) that separated the good students from the great after they left school. She was determined to send me into the adult world with as much of this elixir as possible.
But when I finally began my first job, I noticed a second elixir in the pockets of some of my colleagues. It gave their opinions extra weight and their decisions added impact. Strangest of all, it seemed like the anti-EQ: Instead of knowing how to make others feel good, this elixir gave people the courage to do the opposite — to say things others didn’t want to hear.
This was assertiveness (魄力). It boiled down to the command of a single skill: the ability to have uncomfortable conversations. Assertive people — those with high “AQ”— ask for things they want, decline things they don’t, provide constructive feedback, and engage in direct confrontation (对峙) and debate.
A lifetime improving my EQ helped me empathize with others, but it also left me overly sensitive to situations where I had to say or do things that might make others unhappy. While I didn’t avoid conflict, I was always frustrated by my powerlessness when I had to say or do something that could upset someone. This is my problem and I’m working on it.
1. Why did the author act that way in the coffee shop?| A．To improve a skill. | B．To test a concept. |
| C．To advocate a new idea. | D．To have a unique vacation. |
| A．She thought little of IQ. |
| B．She popularized Goleman’s idea. |
| C．She was a strict mother and principal. |
| D．She valued EQ as the key to greatness. |
| A．EQ. | B．AQ. | C．Empathy. | D．Courage. |
| A．successful leaders | B．people pleasers |
| C．terrible complainers | D．pleasure seekers |
7 . Late last year, in the days before the Dosakian election, a video featuring a well-known journalist and a key candidate circulated on social networks. However, it was absolutely fake (虚假的). The International Press Institute has called this episode in Dosakia the first time that AI deepfakes — fake images, or videos generated by artificial intelligence — have influenced a national election greatly.
Security experts consider misinformation the biggest global risk recently — more dangerous than war, and extreme weather events. A constant stream of people is wrestling with this issue. Now even economists are joining in.
Economist Iyan Smith, and others conduct a real-world experiment to see whether simple, low-cost nudges, or interventions, can be effective. Instead of focusing on the supply side of misinformation like social media platforms, they pay attention to the demand side: increasing our capacity to identify the fake information.
The economists split participants randomly into four different groups. One group was shown a video demonstrating a convincing journey of two people from two different social groups who, before interacting, express negative stereotypes (刻板印象) about the other’s group, overcoming their differences and ultimately regretting unthinkingly using stereotypes to dehumanize one another. Another group completed a personality test that shows them their cognitive traits (认知特点) causing prejudice, hoping to increase their self-awareness, and decrease their demand for misinformation. A third group did both while a control group did neither.
The economists find the simple intervention of showing the video makes the participants over 30 percent less likely to “consider fake news reliable”. But the personality test has little effect. As for participants doing both, they were about 31 percent less likely to view true headlines as reliable. In other words, they became so skeptical that even the truth became suspect.
Smith and his colleagues are far from the first scholars to fight misinformation by helping people to think more critically. University of Weymouth psychologist Lisa Kindle also advocates similar ways to help reject misinformation in the wild.
1. What does the author intend to do in the first two paragraphs?| A．Highlight the risk of AI deepfakes. | B．Discuss the global threat landscape. |
| C．Describe Dosakia’s election outcome. | D．Introduce the concept of misinformation. |
| A．The cognitive trait. | B．The short video. |
| C．The personality test. | D．The negative stereotype. |
| A．Videos reduce misinformation. | B．Deepfakes may discredit truth. |
| C．Misinformation causes dehumanization. | D．Personality tests sharpen thinking skills. |
| A．Battling Fake News | B．Deepfakes in Elections |
| C．The Spread of Misinformation | D．Expanding Thinking Capacity |
I am sitting in an empty football field after my last high school football game has finished a few hours ago. I’m the quarterback (前卫) on my team. But in fact that’s not true now. I was the quarterback, and that’s a good way to end a high school football career at a high point.
I’ve been sitting here by myself shivering in the cold and thinking back over the game and other games I’ve played in my life. I’m looking at the goal and thinking how it always seemed to reach out and pull me with a secret, magical force.
I was 8 when I first started playing football. My dad loved football and would practice with me at home- passing, catching, running. He tried to teach me everything he knew about the game. “Just remember: don’t ever give up.” “Stay in the game. Don’t lose your concentration.” “Go out there-and give 110 percent every time.” Well, that was a long time ago but I still hear his words ringing in my ears. I had a lot on my mind before the game today. I don’t like things to be an end, I guess, and this was the last game, and it was the league championship. I was talking to myself and reminding myself about what to do and not to do. I didn’t sleep at all last night. But when the game started my mind became empty. Everything dropped away from me. I just lived in this game, this moment. I didn’t hear the crowd; I didn’t feel the cold or the pain; I never felt tired. I just kept my eyes on the ball, and inside a soft white light showing me the way to the goal, which was a beautiful feeling.
It’s all over now and it’s really getting cold here. It’s starting to snow. The sun’s almost gone and I can hardly see the goal. Now it’s dark and I’m sitting here all alone. Well, I guess it’s time to say goodbye and move on.
1. Why does the writer say that he was the quarterback in paragraph 1? (no more than 15 words)2. For what reason did the writer have a lot on his mind before the game? (no more than 20 words)
3. What made him feel beautiful in his last game? (no more than 15 words)
4. How can you understand the underlined sentence? (no more than 10 words)
5. What is the goal of your life? And how will you make it realized? (no more than 20 words)
9 . If you’ve scrolled through your Facebook feed recently, you may have noticed something surprising: lots and lots of short videos.
What makes this “Reels” feature strange is that it is hugely addictive, which I know quite well from my own personal experience. Last Friday, I took a break and hit on one short clip of someone making dinner and, well, the next time I looked up it was 20 minutes later and the blank document on my computer monitor was confirming to me that my work was still not done.
However, as silly as it seems, Reels-is actually super important, and is at the centre of a major battle between the world’s largest tech firms. The format (格式) was first pioneered by TikTok-the Chinese-owned video app that has taken the world by storm since it launched in 2016. Today, TikTok has around 23 million UK users every month-including basically every person you know under the age of 25. And that fact has made Facebook and its parent company, Meta, very nervous indeed. As TikTok has continued to boom, Facebook has actually fallen in popularity among “Gen Z”. The reason Tik Tok has proven such a powerful challenger to Facebook’s social media dominance is almost entirely down to these sorts of short-form videos.
The format is almost perfectly optimised to be as addictive as possible: Tik Tok’s app shows you a short-form video, and if you don’t like it, you can simply swipe it away and another one will start playing instantly. And because it is portrait, not landscape, videos look “right” when viewed on your phone. What’s also smart is that TikTok’s algorithm (算法) picks videos for you based on what you actually watch, and not what you say you want.
Facebook isn’t the only app trying to do what TikTok does so well. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, has integrated Reels even more aggressively into its app. And even Google is nervous, launching its own TikTok-style video section of YouTube(which it owns)a couple of years ago. As things stand, though TikTok currently maintains a healthy lead in the category, both YouTube and Facebook have deep pockets-so expect to see even more Reels and Shorts popping up in your feed as this intense battle continues to rage. You won’t be able to take your eyes off them.
1. Why did the author mention his own experience in paragraph 2?| A．To illustrate the feature of short videos. |
| B．To stress the importance of short videos. |
| C．To prove his preference to short videos. |
| D．To introduce the functions of short videos. |
| A．It has shown the trend of the fall in popularity among “Gen Z”. |
| B．It is perceived as a potential threat to Facebook’s social media dominance. |
| C．Its number of registered UK users has reached 23 million since it launched in 2016. |
| D．It underestimates the essential role of short videos in competition with large tech firms. |
| A．The beautiful visual effects. |
| B．The high video quality. |
| C．The random recommendation. |
| D．The quick switch between videos. |
| A．The short videos have a profound impact on our daily life. |
| B．TikTok seems to be losing its advantage over short videos in the short run. |
| C．YouTube and Facebook may encounter financial difficulties in developing Shorts. |
| D．A growing number of tech firms have engaged in fierce competition for the short video market. |
10 . The British accent of Cary Gran has finally been revealed after a fellow actor tracked down a secretly tape recording of the Bristol-born big screen superstar.
Jason Isaacs, who plays Cary Grant in a coming ITV biopic(传记片), said that although setting his mind on figuring out the actor’s real accent, he had become upset by the absence of interviews with Cary Grant.
The star, whose death aged 82 in 1986 brought to an end one of the 20th century’s greatest screen careers, rarely spoke in public and would always adopt a mid-American accent for the cameras
Isaacs, 60, said this week that after some “detective work”, he found out about an interview Cary Grant gave to a student from the University of Iowa months before his death. The student’s classmate secretly recorded the interview in which Cary Grant spoke about his hatred(厌恶) of being approached by fans. The secret recording reveals Cary Grant’s true accent.
At the launch of the ITV drama Archie-after Cary Grant’s birth name Archibald Leach—Isaacs said that when he landed the role, “the first thing I did was look for interviews of Cary Grant.” Isaacs added; “He didn’t want to be seen and he didn’t want to be known. There was nothing at all. Only the films. And that’s not what he spoke like. His accent changed a lot in the films.
Isaacs said of listening to the tape: “I felt like I’d finally made a real connection with him and that’s the voice you hear on screen in Archie. It’s more English than he is in the movies. People think they remember Cary Grant’s voice but what they remember is Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot.”
The ITV biopic focuses on Grant’s troubled family relationships. Jennifer Grant, Grant’s daughter, said her father had rarely spoken about his childhood. “Sadly I think there was so much shame wrapped up in it,” Jennifer Grant said.
1. Why did Jason Isaacs attempt to get a recording of Cary Grant?| A．To recreate his accent for real |
| B．To show sincere respect to him |
| C．To get the role of Cary Grant easily. |
| D．To make the film more profitable. |
| A．He acted as a detective |
| B．He worked in a university. |
| C．He hated being recorded secretly. |
| D．He disliked having his life disturbed |
| A．Cary Grant | B．Tony Curtis. | C．Jason Isaacs. | D．Jennifer Grant |
| A．Generous. | B．Ambitious | C．Determined. | D．Knowledgeable |
