1 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s)of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
Fluido, a Texas-based analytics company, recently released its new product, called FluidoPlus for free. It connects retailers (零售商) to a cloud-based analytics service using WiFi. They then collect information about customers behaviour by monitoring the media access code (MAC) in every smart phone that enters the stores. This means that stores will be able to implement an analytics package to receive information that could help guide their marketing. With the information , store managers can measure the number of people who walk past the store and the number who come through the front door. Also, this information includes whether or not these people come in immediately or are convinced to do so by the shop front.
Fluido Plus has received a lot of criticism from consumers concerned about their privacy being invaded. But Fluido assures that the MAC data is scrambled, which means that no personally identifiable information is collected. The company also points to the fact that Fluido is a part of the group that initiated the Mobile Location Analytics code of conduct. These sets of rules require companies to receive customers’ agreement before they can collect any personal information.
Emily Carrless, a senior director at the NO Watching Please Co., believes that this technology ignores customers’ privacy. “This is a clear example of profit outweighing privacy, she said. “The use of tracking technology by shops in order to provide a better or more personal service seems totally disproportionate,” Carrless also stressed the importance of customer awareness. She said that while tracking technology was still developing, there was an obvious goal in mind to identify individuals. Companies like Fluido won’t stop at the general information like the number of customers who walk into stores. The long game is about identifying individuals, and this technologies is very close to enabling Fluido to do that.
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Neuroscientists usually define a singular memory as an engram — a physical change in brain tissue associated with a particular recollection. Recently, brain scans revealed that an engram isn’t isolated to one region of the brain and instead manifests as a colorful splattering across the neural tissue. “A memory looks more like a web in the brain than a single spot,” says neuroseientist and National Geographic Explorer Steve Ramirez of Boston University. That’s because when a memory is created, it includes all the visual, auditory, and tactile inputs that make an experience memorable , and brain cells are encoded from all of those regions.
Now, scientists are even able to track how memories move across the brain, like detectives finding footprints in the snow. While at MIT in 2013, Ramirez and his research partner Xu Liu had a breakthrough: They were able to target the cells that make up one engram in a mouse’s brain and then implant a false memory.
In their work, mice reacted in fear to a particular stimulus even when they had not been conditioned in advance. While mouse brains are less advanced than the human equivalent, Ramirez says they can still help neuroscientists understand how our memories work , too.
In their current work, Ramirez and his colleagues are investigating whether positive and negative memories are stored in different groups of brain cells, and whether negative memories can be overwritten by positive ones. To prep mice for the experiments, the team injects the animals’ brains with a virus that contains fluorescent proteins and surgically implants optic fibers. The mice are then given a diet that prevents the virus from fluorescing until the researchers are ready to tag a positive or negative experience. Positive memories are created by putting male mice in cages with female mice for an hour, and negative memories are created by putting the mice in cages that deliver brief foot shocks. Once the mice have been conditioned to associate certain triggers with each experience, they undergo a short surgical operation so the scientists can stimulate the cells associated with the positive or negative engrams.
They are finding that activating positive memories while a mouse is in a cage it associates with fear makes that mouse less fearful. Using a different technique, University of Toronto neuroscientist Sheena Josselyn was able to completely eliminate fear memories in mice.
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3 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point (s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
Is there a correlation between high IQ and creative genius? Really , the phrasing of the question contradicts very much correlation, as “creativity” is in no way measured through IQ standardized testing, and creativity is the greatest determinant of a genius as, like you say , it is a genius. Innovation upon any subject requires a drive to create.
As ones IQ increases, there is an increased probability that they are a genius because their level of creativity has a higher probability of ascending (升高) them to genius level. However if the odds are against them, there is an average probability that they are a genius since they are average percent genius. This is because genius and IQ are composed of different mental constructs as IQ measures a standard comprehension level, while creativity measures the way in which this comprehension is used. For example , if your IQ is 180, the percentage that you are a genius is subtracted by the amount of creativity necessary to become a genius. This is inductive of the influence that the brain has on awareness. The brain gains perceptive awareness upon “creating thoughts in a continuous cyclic process, and if you were very “intelligent” but could not generate thoughts, you could not be an intellectual being. However, one who is alive can never stop thinking, so the correlation of IQ and genius would objectively appear as a negative exponential function.
There are few exceptionally creative people out there, just as there are few exceptionally intelligent people, and one does not occur with the other. Possessing a high level of intelligence is a platform of understanding for the creative thinking skills to make up originality. When one bears informal thinking skills, they typically occupy heightened intuitive awareness, and vivid imaginative qualities. Critical thinking skills allow one to make sense of the resultant creative output within its surrounding context of knowledge.
However, not all “geniuses” from our subjective intelligence range necessarily have high levels of creativity. One's level of intelligence can be so high that their platform of understanding generalizes ideas where a genius with lower levels of intelligence must use creativity in order to attain a sort of qualitative equivalence. Examples of people like this throughout history include the likes of John von Neumann and Christopher Langan.
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1. 地址：国家公园内；
2. 服务项目：组织健身活动，如徒步旅行、练瑜伽(yoga)、街舞等；量身定做健康减肥食谱；二十日体能训练计划帮助养成定期锻炼的习惯；
3. 特点：环境优美，教练专业。
注意：1. 词数在120左右。
2. 可以根据要点适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
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Dealing with One Missed Workout
It’s a common dilemma (图局)for anyone on a training plan: You miss one workout and become awashed with guilt. To make up for it, you add those extra miles to your next workout. But according to the professionals, this isn’t the right way to go about it. “A single workout is not going to make or break a training plan. The key to training is consistency over time,” says John Raglin, PhD, professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Indiana University Bloomington.When you miss a workout, the temptation is to think, “Oh, I’ve got to do more tomorrow”. But when you try to catch up on your workouts, you run a couple of risks: “Certainly an injury, but also becoming over-tired, which could ruin your training after that, ” says Raglin. This is a phenomenon called ‘non-functional overreaching’, “he says. Eventually, this could lead to overtraining syndrome (综合症), which is characterized by a decrease in performance later due to a long-term increase in training load without adequate recovery.
So how do you move forward if you skipped a run or five?Well first, people download generalized training plans without understanding that they are meant to be adapted to life. There is a whole host of life stressors—job, kids, friendships, travel—and exercise is just another type of stress. Actually, when things get chaotic in your life, it may be necessary to just let go. Next, if you missed a workout, you have to ask yourself why: “Was it just because your schedule got out of hand or because you were feeling overly exhausted? ” Understanding why you missed the workout can offer some insights into how to tailor your program to suit your lifestyle.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Drawing High Schoolers to Science
A group of educators and plant scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) are connecting to reshape science classes. And this particular partnership isn’t just helping students get a better understanding of biology; it’s turning them into young scientists, even if only during class.
It doesn’t take long to see that the curriculum born from this collaboration makes for a much different experience than the traditional high school biology classes. For starters, it has a comic book for a workbook. Secondly, students are getting their hands dirty growing plants. MSU researchers are also studying the plant. The high schoolers are asking some of the same questions professional plant scientists are trying to answer.
“We’re getting them engaged with science in science practices, not just having them learn about science,” says Hildah Makori, a researcher at MSU. “They learn to look at things differently. That’s a life-time impact.”
The main characters of the comic book are a pair of young field scientists. They invite the high school students to help with plant research inspired by a real project at MSU. By growing their own plants, the students learn about genetics, evolution and how these interact with the environment.
The team has seen how this practice could keep students in the driver’s seat of their learning. To help the characters out, students set up different experiments to test their ideas.
The program is working. “This comic personally gave me a click that sparked my curiosity,” reads one student’s survey response. “The comic book put a lot of creative atmosphere into the story instead of just looking at words, instead of just listening to the teacher talk,” says another.
Teachers also had positive reviews. In a survey, one remarked how helpful it was to have the comic to refer to. The students could see the comic’s characters doing something in the lab and realize, “I’m able to do this right here at my table and I can do the same thing,” the teacher says.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________How to Be a Better Boss
Workplaces have changed dramatically over the past few years. Teams have become more isolated owing to remote work. Technology has brought great benefits but also constant interruptions, from endless Zoom calls to message flows on Slack. With each shift, the job of the manager has become harder. Many report feeling burnt-out, overloaded and confused.
Yet in real life everyone suffers when management is bad and benefits when it is good Research based on a long-running survey of management techniques has found that well-managed firms tend to be more productive, export more and spend more on research and development.
So the prize for better management is big. But how to obtain it? Read enough management books and you might conclude that managers need to change their personality thoroughly, becoming either Machiavelli’s prince or a Marvel superhero. However, study successful managers, and more practical lessons can be drawn.
One is to be clear about a firm’s processes. Managers should make clear the purpose of a team, what a meeting should achieve and who will take a decision. Meeting agendas at GSK, a British drugs firm, clearly say whether an item is for awareness, to gather participants’ input or intended to make a decision. Such clarity means that everyone knows what they are doing, and why.
Management isn’t all about piling up tasks, meetings or processes. A second lesson is that managers can add value by deleting. Sparing workers from pointless meetings, emails and projects frees them to concentrate on the work that fattens the bottom line. At the start of the year, Shopify, an e-commerce firm, deleted 12,000 repeated meetings from its employees’ calendars. The useful ones were eventually added back. But the firm says that meetings are down by 14% since the mass deletion while productivity has gone up by a similar amount.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Ignoring Your Biggest Regrets
Regrets, people often feel, are to be avoided. Mistakes may be unavoidable, but they should be kept to a minimum. And when they do occur, the best course of action is to ignore them as inevitable steps on our journey. That seems logical, at least until you consider that one of the criteria for mental illness is an inability to feel regret. As author Kathryn Schulz argues, “If you want to be fully functional, and fully human, and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live not without regret, but with it.” Counterintuitively, she and other experts argue feeling regret is essential for living your best life. No one is saying, of course, that getting trapped in your past mistakes is a good idea. But neither is a “no regrets and never look back” mentality.
Regret forces us to engage in a reflective analysis to understand why we thought or acted the way we did and makes us try things differently in the future. If you keep telling yourself “no regrets,” then learning isn’t going to happen. Besides, hiding from regret doesn’t make it hurt less. Action does. Action, recent research shows, is the best way to make regret hurt less. So if you’re troubled by your failure to travel when you were young, science suggests you consciously plan an adventurous trip now that you’re older and wiser. Upset about a broken friendship? Act to try to repair it.
Acknowledging our mistakes, rather than ignoring them, reminds us that we are valuable and worthy despite our faults. That sort of acceptance is the basis both of real self-confidence and of true kindness. As Schulz sums up in her talk: “Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly. It reminds us we know we can do better.”
Why Should We Read Literary Classics?
Many have grown up on a healthy diet of literary classics. Some literary classics have been inspiring readers in many ways. In this age of fast-turners, how does investing our time in a timeless literary classic change us for the better?
Many literary classics from yesteryear, which got little or no success when published, are considered invaluable. These books offer a window through which we can experience histories rooted in different cultures. One can always ask, “But we can do so by reading our history books too. Why do we need to read classics?” The simple answer is that these literary classics are not just a retelling of history. They allow us to have a more individualized experience, where they show us other ways to look at history.
It is common knowledge that reading as a habit helps us improve our command of the language. But literary classics have an edge: the enriching writing style is something that sets them apart. Fascinated with the amazing wording and phrasing, we’ll surely pause and wonder about what we read. For instance, when we read Shakespeare, we naturally begin to consider how to better express our ideas just like his far-reaching “Have more than you show; speak less than you know.”
One more benefit is that after reading classics, we won’t see non-classics as just other stories: we’ll become interested in them. Maybe we’ll realize that some details we ignored last time are actually worth appreciating, or we’ll discover literary devices that bring a whole new meaning to the story. Literary classics offer us more perspectives to dig deep and enhance our ability to think and reason, which will inevitably spill over into our reading of other works. We finally fall in love with non-classics as well.
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10 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
Will Plant-based Protein Continue to be an Appetizer in Food World?
A good vegan milk needs to look like milk and taste like milk, whether it’s a fatty version, preferred by bakers, or a skimmed one, favored by the health-conscious. For years, manufacturers of plant-based protein have had trouble hacking this delicate imitation game and it seems that they are winning back a bit. The global revenues (收益) from alternative proteins could reach $290 billion by 2035 and that is a cautious estimate. However, can it last?
Unlike those early products, which were neither terribly tasty nor particularly nutritious, cleaver (剁肉刀) processing improves textures, additives boost taste and a pinch of specially engineered peas and beans adds nutrient in the latest products. Still, ultra-processed substitutes seldom match animal proteins in nutritional value. Animal products, including milk, are better for children’s bone development, though lab- grown versions of meat or dairy are becoming more nutritious. Meanwhile, green-minded consumers are realizing that plant-based does not necessarily mean sustainable in that it still takes a lot to obtain raw materials. Farming almonds (杏仁) to make a milk-like drink, for example, uses huge quantities of water.
Plant-based proteins are also a tough sell in giant markets like India, where diets are already rich in plants and vegetables, or Nigera, where meat-eating is a sign of wealth. That limits their global appeal.
All these suggests that alternative proteins have far to go to replace the animal kind. The limitations may be weighing on the firms involved. Oatly’s market value has fallen by about 80% since its listing, partly because of production difficulties. That of Beyond Meat, whose burgers feature in McDonald’s latest menu, is down by 90% from its peak. Plant-based foods may no longer be only an appetizer in diets, but their maker remain one in food business.
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