1 . 阅读下面文本，并从每段文本方框的单词或短语中选出能填入空白处的最佳选项，选项中有两项为多余选项。

A. imagination B. physical C. existence D. mental E. symphony F. challenge G. wisdom

Books are essential in various ways that go beyond enriching your mind or entertaining you. They stimulate your senses and promote good     1     health.

While the internet and television are useful in their own ways, nothing can compare to a great book. Books inspire your     2    , give you new ideas,     3     your way of thinking, provide solutions, and share     4    . At every stage of your     5    , you can find a relevant book that will add value to your personal and professional life.

2 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. politely B. deserving   C. strengthened     D. hospitalization   E. cases F. under-resourced G. unsurprising H. possibly   I. reaching     J. readopted     K. unsustainable

Too many people believe that the pandemic is over, England’s deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, warned this week: far from it. Europe is at its centre again, WHO has said, urging governments to continue with public health measures. But though Sajid Javid, England’s health secretary, predicted last month that     1     here could hit 100,000 a day, he remains unwilling to take action — even as the latest Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (React) findings, for late October, show that about one in 58 people is tested positive — more than double September’s levels.

The indifference of Mr Javid and his boss, Boris Johnson, is     2    , given the government’s record. (Last month’s news report on its response stressed that it had “lacked speed in making timely decisions”: if put less     3    , it was far too late, far too often). But their attitude is doubtlessly     4     by a drop in recorded cases over the past week. Some experts think the drop may have to do with the growing immunity caused by high infection rates.

While vaccines (疫苗) (and now treatments) are decreasing     5     rates, current infection levels and breakthrough cases remind us that vaccines do not stop people from catching or spreading Covid, and reduce but do not eliminate the possibility of serious health problems such as long Covid.

The government is counting on boosters (疫苗加强剂), though it says its “plan B” — forced masking, vaccine passports and encouragement to work from home — will be introduced if the pressure on the National Health Service (NHS) is     6    . The British Medical Association believe that point arrived weeks ago. Queues of ambulances are the most visible indication of the pressures. The NHS went into the pandemic     7     and, more obviously at the current stage, short-staffed. The overall impact has been exhausting. Any further increase in Covid patients, already     8     more than 9,500, would greatly weaken the ability to deal with the huge backlog (积压的工作).

Why take that risk? Forced masking on public transport and in places such as supermarkets must be     9    . The government should introduce Covid passports for crowded venues. Third doses (针剂) must be made more accessible. Adopting these minimal measures now would save lives and protect the NHS,     10     preventing the need for more drastic action later.

3 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. valuable     B. unrecognizable     C. unconsciously     D. reserved     E. heavily F. encounters   G. disrupted     H. confused   I. closeness   J. bunch   K. recomposed

Relationship in the Digital Age

People from our past whom we no longer directly communicate with but who are active on social networks can “occupy     1     space in your mind, and you think about them instead of about your close friends,” said Carlin Flora, the author of “Friend-fluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We are.”

“If my high school friend posts frequently about her life, it’s almost like it’s celebrity gossip, or it seems as if I am watching a reality show about her,” Ms. Flora said. “Our brains get     2     about whether we know celebrities; if we see someone a lot, our brain thinks we know them.”

Ms. Schiller, the Iowa graduate, goes out often with friends at night but also lives on a digital diet of texting     3     enough that she recently hurt her thumb, Google chat and social media. As with many young people, talking on the phone was never a big part of her routine and is now     4     for the rarest of occasions.

There are physiological benefits to face-to-face     5     however, that doesn’t belong to digital interactions or the phone. “Your blood pressure goes down, and you imitate your friends gesture     6    .” Ms. Flora said. “It’s a kind of harmony humans have developed over thousands of years, and you don’t get that when you only follow someone on social media.”

But now it’s common for the synchrony(同步性)to be     7     in person, thanks to smartphones. Imagine Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks” (below)     8     today, with the three late-night diners and counterman all gazing at screens. “If there’s a(n)     9     of guys at a bar together and they’re all on their phones,” Ms. Flora said, “they’re not doing much to stimulate the body system to create the sense of     10    .”

4 . 选词填空

A. convinced     B. probably       C. generalize     D. distinguish       E. attached       F. prominent     G. notorious       H. narrowed       I. readily        J. households       K. displays

Cats are     1     for their indifference to humans: Almost any owner will testify to how     2     these animals ignore us when we call them. But according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports, domestic cats do recognize their own names - even if they walk away when they hear them.

Atsuko Saito, a behavioral scientist at the University of Tokyo, previously showed that cats can recognize their owners’ voices. In her latest study she     3     this down, investigating whether they respond to hearing their names. The study included 78 cats from Japanese     4     and a ”cat cafe.“ (Such cafes, where patrons can interact with felines, are popular in Tokyo and have started to catch on in London and New York.)

During their experiments Saito and her colleagues used what behavioral psychologists call the habituation-dishabituation method. This involves repeatedly exposing a subject to a stimulus (in this case a spoken word) until the subject no longer     5     any reaction. Then the subject is presented with a test stimulus ( in this case, its name), and researchers observe whether it reacts. This step helps rule out responses to random stimuli.

For the new study, the scientists first had cat owners repeatedly say four words that were similar to their cats’ names, until the cats habituated to those words. Next the owners said the actual names, and the researchers looked at whether individual cats (when living among other cats) appeared able to distinguish their monikers. The cats had more pronounced responses to their own names - moving their ears, heads or tails, or meowing - than to similar words or other cats’ names.

Then the researchers had people unfamiliar to the cats speak the names, to test whether the cats still recognized them. Although their responses were less     6     than when their owners called them, they still appeared to recognize their names after being habituated to other words.

”This new study clearly shows that many cats react to their own names when spoken by their owners,“ says biologist John Bradshaw, who studies human-animal interactions at the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute and was not involved in the new study. But Bradshaw says he is less     7     cats can recognize their names when spoken by someone unfamiliar. ” I think that it’s entirely possible that some cats are able to     8     between one human voice and another, but I’d like to see more trials before I’d say that the evidence is compelling,“ he says.

Saito says she thinks feline pets learn to recognize their names because of what is in it for them. ”I think cats associated their names with some rewards or punishments,“ she says - adding that she thinks it is unlikely the cats understand their names are     9     to them. ”There is no evidence that cats have the ability to recognize themselves, like us,“ she explains. ”So, the recognition about their name is different from ours.“ Still, she says, it may be possible to teach cats to recognize other words. Whether that could allow humans to train cats to respond to commands - as dogs readily do -- is another matter.

”Cats are just as good as dogs at learning,“ Bradshaw says. ”They’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learned.“ Most cat owners would     10     agree.

5 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. primarily B. beneficial C. set   D. luxury   E. virtually F. fetch   G. crown   H. diplomacy I. touch   J. appealing   K. fascinating

Kweichow Moutai, the company that makes the eponymous (同名的) liquor, is China’s most valuable firm outside of technology. Globally, its market cap has surpassed Coca-Cola, which had long held the     1     as the world’s largest beverage maker.

Apart from the Chinese diaspora (移民社区), however, Moutai is still     2     unknown overseas. Almost all — about 97% — of its sales come from China alone, according to its financial reports.

So how is a company that sells its products     3     in just one country now worth more than some longstanding global corporations? And can Kweichow Moutai succeed in     4     to non-Chinese consumers?

Moutai is named after Maotai, a picturesque small town in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou. This is where the company says its baijiu — distilled (蒸馏) from fermented (发酵的) sorghum and rice — gets the magic     5    .

According to the Moutai Museum, environmental factors, such as the town’s climate and seasonal changes in the water of the local river, help give the liquor its unique taste and is     6     to the production process.

Known as the favorite tipple of Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China, and as the ‘drink of     7    ,’ it was famously used to welcome former US President Richard Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972, and again in 2013 when Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his US counterpart, Barack Obama, in California.

Being part of so many major public events in China ‘has really     8     the brand in the national consciousness,’ said Cavender, the managing director of China Market Research Group.

Today, the brand is seen more as a     9     status symbol. Some customers buy it not to drink, but to keep as investments. Limited-edition cases are collected and showcased by international auction houses, like Christie’s, which says that some bottles can     10     more than $40,000 each.

“It’s also been a tremendous advantage during an economically tough year: wealthy consumers who are spending less on travel may splurge more on liquor,” Cavender said.

6 . 根据句意，选择单词并以其适当形式填空。

1. Destruction of the environment is one of the most serious ______ we face.
2. Usually a child’s behavior is a ______ of his family environment.
3. The price of wine varies ______ depending on where it comes from.
4. With the exam ______, I find myself working harder than ever before.
5. He spent the evening ______ up Christmas presents.
6. Students should establish an ______ of environmental protection.
7. They ignored the ______ time and were late for the meeting.
8. The shop is small, but it offers a ______ of nice goods.
9. I ______ her to think twice before she makes a decision.
10. Betty ______ to Steve that Sara never gave her a chance to talk.

7 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. precisely       B. statistical       C. gender       D. enrolled       E. restriction       F. spotted G. frank       H. execute       I. identified       J. confidence       K. dramatically

Female Grandmaster—Hou Yifan

Even by the standard of chess geniuses, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game     1     with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mentioned two big hairpins that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt     2     or limitations,” she told me recently from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen university’s Faculty of Physical Education.

“My parents never told me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days her hair falls to her shoulders and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and     3    . She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the     4     of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete versus the number of men who do: around sixteen percent of tournament players are     5     as female and most of them are children. As a purely     6     matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extreme of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the inequality at the top of the game, about which Hou is     7    . “You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen,” she told me, of the absence of women from chess highest echelon(梯队). For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child she     8     a chess set in a shop window and liked the shapes of the pieces. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher and showed enough talent that her parents     9     her a year early in the local school which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings on a sheet of paper. Then they would set up their boards, dutifully     10     their copied instructions and launch their wild attacks.

She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team and won the girls under ten championship in 2003. In the next year, she finished boys under ten tournament tied for first.

8 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. benefit   B. displayed   C. documentation   D. elegantly   E. improbable   F. intrusive G. label       H. lessen     I. massive            J. positively   K. promotional

Norway’s new law on edited photos

A new law in Norway makes it illegal for advertisers and social media influencers to share     1     photos online without disclosing whether the images were altered.It modifies the 2009 Marketing and Control Act and sets to go into effect when the King of Norway decides it should.

The law concerns advertisers and people who receive “payment or other     2    ” in exchange for their posts. It will impact “brands, companies, and influencers’ sponsored posts,” and concerns posts on all social media sites.

The new law requires disclosures for edits made after the image was taken and before, such as Snapchat and Instagram filters that modify one’s appearance. Examples of edits that people who are being paid for pictures are required to     3    include “enlarged lips, narrowed waists, and exaggerated muscles,” among other things.

Body pressure, or “kroppspress” in Norway, is a major topic of conversation in the country, the Ministry of Children and Family Affairs said in its report. “Young people are exposed to a(n)    4     pressure to look good through advertising and social media, and the models     5     are often digitally retouched, which exposes young people to an ideal of beauty that is impossible to achieve.”

By prohibiting advertisers and influencers from posting such photos without proper     6     with a government-authorized stamp, the Ministry said it hopes to    7     the negative impacts of body pressure on young people. “It is especially important to prevent the desire to make more     8     and long-lasting changes in one’s own look,” the Ministry said.

Some of Norway’s top influencers have already thought     9     about the new law, “Young people today are growing up to a completely     10     beauty ideal,” Husebye, who was awarded “Influencer of the Year”,said “I feel that the new law can only help them to understand that this is not how you look, but it has been edited.”

9 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. stillness       B. refuge   C. thundering   D. withered   E. oppressive F. unattended G. gripped       H. creaked   I. approaching J. somewhere   K. hastily

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: ‘What was it that I was worrying about when I went to bed last night? Oh, yes the fighting. There was a battle,     1    ,yesterday! Oh, who won?’ She sat up    2    , rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was    3     even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent. No wagons    4     by. No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had sought    5    in Macon. And she could hear nothing from their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.

The     6    that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of the mornings of the queer quiet week preceding it. She rose quickly, without her usual preliminary burrows and stretches, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, some heartening sight. But the road was empty. She noted how the leaves on the trees were still dark green but dry and heavily coated with red dust, and how     7    and sad the untended flowers in the front yard looked.

As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullen as the first distant thunder of a(n)    8    storm.

‘Rain,’ she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, ‘We certainly need it.’ But, in a split instant: ‘Rain? No! Not rain! Cannon!’

Her heart racing she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying to discover from which direction it came. But the dim     9    was so distant that, for a moment, she could not tell. ‘Make it from Marietta,’ she prayed. ‘Or Decatur. But not from the south! Not from the south!’ She    10    the windowstill tighter and strained her ears and the far-away booming seemed louder. And it was coming from the south.

10 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. advocate   B. commercially   C. diversify     D. analyst   E. projected     F. due G. accordingly   H. collective       I. sponsored       J. launches       K. contribute

Inspiration 4: Amateur astronauts set for orbital spaceflight

Four “amateur astronauts” are about to launch into orbit in another landmark mission for space tourism. It’s the latest flight to help open up access to space for paying customers, following on from       1     by Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.

The trip has been paid for by Us billionaire businessman Jared Isaac-man, who will travel with three crew-mates. A healthcare worker, a science educator and a data     2     will circle the Earth with Mr Isaac-man for three days.

They hope to inspire others with their adventure and to raise money for children’s cancer medicine. The mission has been named Inspiration 4     3    .

The crew’s Dragon vehicle, manufactured by Elon Musk’s company Space X, will ride atop a Falcon-9 rocket. It is     4     to launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 20:02 EDT on Wednesday (01:02 BST, Thursday), or very shortly after.

The mission follows hot on the heels of Sir Richard Branson’s flight aboard his Virgin Galactic rocket plane on 11 July, and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezo’s trip to space nine days later in the New Shepard vehicle.

Some commentators have voiced concern about the     5     impact on the Earth’s climate of spaceflights like this one.

Space X’s Falcon-9 rocket uses highly-refined kerosene(煤油)fuel which produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), along with nitrogen oxides, which also help     6     to warming. The emissions from rocket launches remain tiny compared with the aviation industry, though they are     7     to grow.

In the 60 years since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first went into space, fewer than 600 people have followed in his footsteps; and most of those have been military-trained personnel flying on government-     8     missions. Inspiration 4 is different. It’ll be a fully     9     purchased and operated orbital flight.

California-based Space X intends to sell many more orbital flights to interests beyond traditional space agencies. Nasa helped fund the development of a lot of the technology used by Elon Musk’s company, and did so to try to     10     the economy in low-Earth orbit. This approach is beginning to pay dividends(产生效益). Already, the Texas start-up Axiom Space has purchased four Dragon flights to take tourists to the ISS.