1 . Have you ever tried reading music? If so, you probably noticed a lot of new symbols and words. Maybe you saw the word presto at the beginning. Perhaps you read piano and crescendo throughout the song.
Italian is sometimes called the language that sings.
However, it wasn’t always so. Thousands of years ago, people didn’t write music. Instead, they passed songs down orally and taught each other to play them on instruments.
Around 1000 CE, an Italian man named Guido d’ Arezzo came up with the four-lined staff (四线谱), which eventually led to the development of the five-lined staff still used in modern music today. Over the next few centuries, many of the people writing music were Italian. Of course, people in other parts of the world were writing music, too. In an effort to standardize written music, many of them used Italian terms.
| A．Many think it sounds musical. |
| B．Others wrote music in their own languages. |
| C．Still, Italian is the primary language used in music. |
| D．You probably needed to ask your teacher what these words meant. |
| E．Learning to read music is an important part of practicing those skills. |
| F．People who write music even have ways to communicate techniques. |
| G．Ancient people in Babylonia, Greece, and Rome were some of the earliest to write music. |
2 . Boston University Summer Term High School Programs
DetailsSession Start: June, July
Session Length: Two Weeks, Three Weeks, Six Weeks
Entering Grade: 9th to 12th
Minimum (最低的) Cost: $1,500-$2,999
Call: (617) 353-1378
Overview
Boston University Summer Term High School Programs invite you to experience pre-college summer study at one of the world’s top teaching and research universities.
With four programs to choose from, you can earn college credits, discover new subject areas, perform research in university labs, or improve yourself through hands-on learning. You will have the opportunity to push yourself academically while experiencing college life and making friends with other students from 87 countries.
Session Information● High School Honors — Rising seniors and outstanding rising juniors take undergraduate courses and earn up to 8 college credits. Six weeks — July 2-August 15.
● Research in Science and Engineering (RISE) — Rising seniors conduct university-level research with some of the nation’s brightest minds. Six weeks — July 2-August 11.
● Academic Immersion (AIM) — Rising juniors and seniors focus on one subject, combining classroom work with hands-on experiential learning. Three track options: Introduction to Experimental Psychology (心理学), Introduction to Medicine, or Creative Writing. Three weeks — Psychology: July 2-July 21; Medicine, or Creative Writing: July 23-August 11.
● Summer Challenge — Rising sophomores (二年级学生), juniors, and seniors explore two subjects of their choice and experience college life. Two weeks — Session 1: June 18-June 30; Session 2: July 9-July 21; Session 3: July 23-August 4.
1. What do we know about the programs?
| A．They are free of charge. | B．They run from June to July. |
| C．They prepare students for college life. | D．They are aimed at US high school students. |
| A．Rising freshmen. | B．Rising sophomores. |
| C．Rising juniors. | D．Rising seniors. |
| A．High School Honors. | B．Research in Science and Engineering. |
| C．Academic Immersion. | D．Summer Challenge. |
3 . For many Americans, home is where the heart is. However, some people are forced to leave their homes because of rising costs.
“Hawaii is everything. Of course, it’s very beautiful. The weather is beautiful, but you only get a deeper connection to a place when it’s connected to you,” said Lehua Kalima, who grew up and raised her kids in Hawaii.
Nearly three years ago, Kalima and her husband left the Hawaiian islands for Clark County, Nevada. According to United Van Lines, the US’s largest household goods mover, Clark County has about 20,000 native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. The Kalimas represent some of the 7 million Americans who move to a different state every year.
“You know, we were already working really hard to make ends meet, but with three college tuitions (学费) now to pay, it was almost impossible,” Kalima said.
United Van Lines has long tracked state-to-state migration (移居), as well as the main reasons people move. In 2018, nearly half of the people surveyed said they moved due to changes in employment. Four years later, a third of respondents said employment was the reason they moved. A rising number said they wanted to be close to family, and 8% stated a reason that three years earlier wasn’t even on the survey — the improved cost of living.
“If you have roots in a place, you have a relationship with a place, with a piece of land, only then can you really understand what it’s like to have to go away from it,” Kalima said.
Despite missing her home, Kalima looks at the other side of things.
“The things we do in life don’t necessarily keep us in one place. Sometimes they take us to all kinds of different places, but that’s necessary because, you know, that’ll take us to where we’re eventually supposed to be,” Kalima said.
1. What was the Kalimas’ life like before moving to Nevada?| A．They had nowhere to live. | B．They lived beyond their means. |
| C．Kalima and her husband lost their jobs. | D．Kalima’s children failed to get into college. |
| A．The effects of state-to-state migration. |
| B．The change of American family connections. |
| C．The reasons for people moving to other states. |
| D．The connection between employment and migration. |
| A．Her pain of being away from home. |
| B．Her worries about her life in Nevada. |
| C．Her fear of being misunderstood by others. |
| D．Her dissatisfaction with new social relationships. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Passive. | C．Uninterested. | D．Positive. |
4 . As an epic (史诗) which brings back to life some of the most famous poets from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) , on July 2, the animated movie Chang’an held its first release in what was once called Chang’an, now known as Xi’an.
Produced by Light Chaser Animation, a Beijing-based animated studio known for its focus on tales inspired by traditional culture and mythology (神话), the film is scheduled for a nationwide release on Saturday.
With a total time of 168 minutes — the longest of any Chinese animated movie to date — Chang’an mainly chronicles the decades-long friendship of Li Bai, arguably the country’s most beloved poet, and Gao Shi, his close friend and a well-known poet.
In an interview, Zou Jing, the director of the movie, discussed the challenges faced in bringing their story to the screen. The biggest challenge we faced was deciding how to present the impressive prosperity (繁荣) of the Tang Dynasty. Before production began, our team studied historical materials, read as much as possible about Tang Dynasty culture and the poets’ lives. We invited experts from different fields to guide us to make sure the content was correct and reliable, and we also learned thoroughly about the poems in this film.
Zou Jing added that in this film, animation gave us a strong expressive means to present Chinese poetry culture in a more impressive way so that the audience could better understand the poetic mood and artistic concepts of the poets.
Chang’An is set up as the first in a series of New Culture films that Light Chaser plans to produce. Speaking with Global Times, Zou Jing explained, ”The New Culture series will be based on actual historical figures in China. This is the key of the series.”
As of Saturday, the movie had gained over 27 million yuan ($3.7 million), topping the country’s presale box office.
1. What do we know about Chang’an from the passage?| A．It was the longest movie so far. |
| B．It was a movie about mythology. |
| C．It held its nationwide release on July 2. |
| D．It involved some famous poets from the Tang Dynasty |
| A．Guides. | B．Records. | C．Creates. | D．Educates. |
| A．Displaying the splendid Tang Dynasty. |
| B．Understanding the culture of the Tang Dynasty. |
| C．Telling the whole story in limited time. |
| D．Ensuring the movie’s credible. |
| A．To explain the success of a movie. | B．To promote a new animated movie. |
| C．To introduce Chinese poetry culture. | D．To discuss the challenges of making a film. |
5 . When temperatures climb, many people reach for ice-cold beverages (饮料) to cool down. But others put the kettle on: Hot tea is a go-to beverage year-round in countries such as Bangladesh, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia. Many people find hot tea refreshing on hot days. Can hot drinks really cool you down on a hot day?
According to Peter McNaughton, a professor at King’s College London who studies thermoregulation (温度调节), hot drinks really can cool you down. “It seems totally counterintuitive (反直觉的，违反直觉的),” McNaughton said. “Drinking a hot drink really does make you drop your temperature if it’s not too humid out.”
“If a drink is warmer than your body at first, obviously, that drink makes you hotter,” McNaughton said. But humans, like all warmblooded animals, are constantly adjusting to maintain a consistent internal temperature. McNaughton found that hot drinks activate a receptor (接受器) in our nerves called TRPV1, which tells the body it needs to cool down. In response, humans sweat.
“Sweat pooling on skin is uncomfortable, but add a breeze or a fan, and the air blowing past helps sweat evaporate (蒸发), taking heat with it,” McNaughton said. “In general, your life depends on sweating. Sweating can help humans survive in some of the highest temperatures documented on Earth, at least in dry heat. Sweat is less effective in high humidity because the air is already full of water vapor and can’t absorb as much from the skin, that’s why in high humidity, the survivable temperature is much lower.”
A 2012 study in the journal Acta Physiologica found that when sweat fully evaporates, hot drinks can help cool people off overall, at least temporarily. That study looked at cyclists biking quickly enough to create their own breeze in a climate with no humidity: ideal conditions for sweat evaporation.
In the reverse effect, cold drinks lower body temperatures and then make the brain reduce sweating in order to bring body temperature back to its baseline. A 2018 paper suggests that with less wind, more humidity, or other barriers to effective sweating—like the heavy clothing worn by firefighters—it may make more sense to cool off by drinking crushed ice.
1. What do we know about people in Bangladesh, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia?| A．They like ice-cold beverages on hot days. |
| B．They favor hot tea over cold drinks year-round. |
| C．They doubt whether hot tea can help cool them down. |
| D．They believe ice-cold beverages are harmful to their health. |
| A．TRPV1 helps adjust blood temperature. | B．Blood helps add heat to the human body. |
| C．Sweating helps increase our body temperature. | D．TRPV1 sends signals related to body temperature. |
| A．To show the danger of high humidity. | B．To reveal why some people sweat more. |
| C．To tell us about the function of sweating. | D．To display how people survive extreme heat. |
| A．Drinking enough water benefits our bodies. |
| B．We should avoid cold water in high humidity. |
| C．Hot water cools us down better than cold water. |
| D．Hot drinks help cool the body under certain conditions. |
6 . The age-old chore of dusting could soon be a thing of the past. Scientists are developing “self-cleaning” surfaces that make dust particles unable to stick to them. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin say the particles instead stick to each other and simply roll off the surfaces with nothing more than the assistance of gravity.
The scientists altered the geometry (几何构造) of flat surfaces at a level invisible to human eyes. The team made a tightly-packed nanoscale (纳米级) network of pyramid-shaped structures on the surfaces which made it difficult for dust particles to stick to the material. Instead, the particles stick to each other before rolling off the material due to gravity.
The study, funded by a grant (拨款) from NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, tested the material by piling lunar dust on their engineered surfaces before turning them on their sides. The team found that just two percent of the surface remained dusty, compared with more than 35 percent of an unaltered smooth surface. The new surface could provide a passive solution to removing dust, as opposed to more active methods like using wipers and fluid to clear dust from a car windscreen.
“What we’ve demonstrated here is a surface that can clean itself,” says lead study author Chih-Hao Chang. “Particulates aren’t able to stick to the surface, so they come off using just the force of gravity.”
Study authors hope the material provides a solution to space dust, which can be extremely harmful in such a high-risk environment and is almost impossible to clean out. Space dust has previously caused great damage to NASA’s human spaceflight Apollo missions and has even caused rovers on Mars to malfunction and fail. “There’s not much you can do about lunar dust in space—it sticks to everything and there’s no real way to wipe it off,” says Samuel Lee, a lead author of the study. “Dust on solar panels of Mars rovers can cause them to fail.”
However, the researchers also believe the discovery could prove useful on Earth, preventing solar panels from collecting dust and losing efficiency. These surfaces may even protect our screens and windows from irritating dust.
1. How did the scientists alter the flat surfaces?| A．By putting thin paint on them. | B．By creating a special network on them. |
| C．By making particles stick to each other. | D．By making them invisible to human eyes. |
| A．Over 35% of the surfaces were dusty. |
| B．Just two percent of the surfaces remained dusty. |
| C．The surfaces still needed to be cleaned with wipers and fluid. |
| D．The surfaces attracted more dust particles than common ones. |
| A．To show the material can be very helpful. | B．To prove irritating dust exists everywhere. |
| C．To show the importance of space exploration. | D．To explain why NASA supported the research. |
| A．Dust threatened missions in space. | B．Scientists developed self-cleaning surfaces. |
| C．Self-cleaning surfaces proved useful on Earth. | D．Scientists developed a material for rovers on Mars. |
7 . Even if you haven’t held a conversation with Siri or Alexa, you’ve likely encountered a chatbot online. They often appear in a chat window that pops up with a friendly greeting: Thank you for visiting our site.How can I help you today? Depending on the site, the chatbot is programmed to respond accordingly and even ask follow-up questions.
Chatbots are a form of conversational AI designed to simplify human interaction with computers. They are programmed to simulate human conversation and exhibit intelligent behavior that is equivalent to that of a human.
Chatbots communicate through speech or text. Both rely on artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), which is a branch of artificial intelligence that teaches machines to read, analyze and interpret human language. This technology gives chatbots a baseline for understanding language structure and meaning. NLP, in essence, allows the computer to understand what you are asking and how to appropriately respond.
With developments in deep learning and reinforcement learning, chatbots can interpret more complexities in language and improve the dynamic nature of conversation between human and machine. Essentially, a chatbot tries to match what you’ve asked to an intent that it understands. The more a chatbot communicates with you, the more it understands and the more it learns to communicate like you and others with similar questions. Your positive responses reinforce its answers, and then it uses those answers again.
From customer service chatbots online to personal assistants in our homes,chatbots have started to enter our lives. In almost every industry, companies are using chatbots to help customers easily navigate their websites, answer simple questions and direct people to the relevant points of contact. Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa are designed to respond to a wide range of scenarios and queries, from current weather and news updates to personal calendars, music selections and random questions.
1. Why does the author mention Siri and Alexa in Paragraph 1?| A．To explain how a chatbot works. | B．To show where to find a chatbot. |
| C．To give examples of chatbots. | D．To compare different chatbots. |
| A．Language study. | B．Data transmission. |
| C．Social interaction. | D．Natural language processing. |
| A．Inspire. | B．Strengthen. | C．Organize. | D．Match. |
| A．The future trend of chatbots. | B．The author’s predictions. |
| C．The effects of chatbots. | D．The applications of chatbots. |
8 . Common water plant could provide a green energy source. Scientists have figured out how to get large amounts of oil from duckweed, one of nature’s fastest-growing water plants. Transferring such plant oil into biodiesel (生物柴油) for transportation and heating could be a big part of a more sustainable future.
For a new study, researchers genetically engineered duckweed plants to produce seven times more oil per acre than soybeans. John Shanklin, a biochemist says further research could double the engineered duckweed’s oil output in the next few years.
Unlike fossil fuels, which form underground, biofuels can be refreshed faster than they are used. Fuels made from new and used vegetable oils, animal fat and seaweed can have a lower carbon footprint than fossil fuels do, but there has been a recent negative view against them. This is partly because so many crops now go into energy production rather than food; biofuels take up more than 100 million acres of the world’s agricultural land.
Duckweed, common on every continent but Antarctica, is among the world’s most productive plants, and the researchers suggest it could be a game-changing renewable energy source for three key reasons. First, it grows readily in water, so it wouldn’t compete with food crops for agricultural land. Second, duckweed can grow fast in agricultural pollution released into the water. Third, Shanklin and his team found a way to avoid a major biotechnological barrier: For the new study, Shanklin says, the researchers added an oil-producing gene, “turning it on like a light switch”by introducing a particular molecule (分子) only when the plant had finished growing. Shanklin says, “If it replicates (复制) in other species-and there’s no reason to think that it would not — this can solve one of our biggest issues, which is how we can make more oil in more plants without negatively affecting growth.”
To expand production to industrial levels, scientists will need to design and produce large-scale bases for growing engineered plants and obtaining oil — a challenge, Shanklin says, because duckweed is a non-mainstream crop without much existing infrastructure (基础设施).
1. What can people get from duckweed firsthand?| A．Plant oil. | B．Stable biodiesel. |
| C．Sustainable water. | D．Natural heat. |
| A．Options for renewable energy. |
| B．Reasons for engineering genes. |
| C．The potential of revolutionary energy source. |
| D．The approach to avoiding agricultural pollution. |
| A．Industrial levels. | B．Unique design. |
| C．Academic research. | D．Basic facilities. |
| A．Duckweed Power | B．Duckweed Production |
| C．Genetic Engineering | D．Genetic Testing |
9 . Beijing People’s Art Theater, arguably the most famous professional theater company in China, will present Teahouse by Lao She, which is the cornerstone of its repertory (剧目), as its New York City(NYC) appearance.
Teahouse will play at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts in NYC from 27 Nov. 1 Dec. this year. The production will be performed in Mandarin Chinese with simultaneous (同时的) English translation through headphones.
Teahouse is set in a typical, old Beijing teahouse and follows the lives of the owner and his customers through three stages in modern Chinese history, from approximately 1898 to 1948. It brings a cast of over sixty actors delivering their characteristic performance. Together, they reflected the changes in the then Chinese society through the Yutai Teahouse, a place where people from all walks of life came together.
The production in NYC will be the final stop of a U. S. tour that has also included performances in Houston and Los Angeles. As a well-received classic in its homeland. Teahouse is a must-see for everyone interested in contemporary Chinese literature, and anyone interested in catching a glimpse of the remarkable changes in modern China within two hours and thirty minutes.
Tickets are now available to purchase for the price of just $100 apiece (每人) at the booking office. You will enjoy a 5% discount off the price if you purchase through our website or app. For our local theatergoers who have bought our yearly plan, an extra 5% discount will also come your way.
1. What can the audience enjoy while watching Teahouse?| A．Classical Chinese music. | B．Distinctive group performance. |
| C．Grand stage sets. | D．Translation on the screen. |
| A．Devoted theatergoers. | B．Literary critics. |
| C．China enthusiasts. | D．English speakers. |
| A．180 dollars. | B．190 dollars. | C．195 dollars. | D．200 dollars. |
10 . If you live on this planet, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen the classic Star TrekEpisode, in which captain Kirk and several members find themselves in what appears to be another universe.
These days, it seems the idea of the multiverse—many worlds—is having its Hollywood moment. Its appeal as a storytelling device is obvious—characters explore a multi-world with varying degrees of similarity to our own, as well as different versions of themselves. Hence, it has been fully established in mainstream pop culture.
While Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of the multiverse, it remains deeply controversial (有争议的) among scientists. Advocates on the two sides show no mercy toward each other in their books, on their blogs. But physicists didn’t pull the idea out of thin air—rather, several distinct lines of reasoning seem to point to the multiverse’s existence. However, critics warn that making the multiverse legal could make it harder for the public to distinguish speculative (推测性的) theories from established fact, making it more difficult to keep pseudo-science (伪科学) at bay. Giving credit to such speculation risks “turning fundamental physics into pseudo-science”.
The multiverse controversy is rooted in the idea of test ability. If we can’t interact with these other universes, or detect them in any way, some experts insist that reduces them to mere philosophical speculation. But Carroll, an advocate for “many worlds”, argues that mathematics is the language describing our physical theories. Since Schrdinger’s equation (方程), on which Quanturr (量子) mechanic rests, predicts the existence of many worlds, so be it.
Could a more expansive view of the universe itself be the next breakthrough? As Siegfried puts it: “Every time in the past that we’ve thought, ‘We’ve got it; this is what the whole universe is’—the people who’ve said, ‘Maybe there’s more than one of those’ have always turned out to be right.”
1. Why is Hollywood so occupied with the multiverse?| A．It makes for engaging plots. |
| B．It is a much-talked-about topic. |
| C．It is helpful to popularize science. |
| D．It dominates the mainstream pop culture. |
| A．Out of date. | B．Out of place. | C．Out of nowhere. | D．Out of question. |
| A．it can be detected somehow |
| B．it can be reasoned logically |
| C．it can be interpreted philosophically |
| D．it can be predicted by mathematics equation |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Dismissive. | C．Unclear. | D．Approving. |
