1 . Jonathan Tiong came into the world with a rare disease that gradually damages muscles over time. A doctor _________ a prediction to his parents that he wouldn’t live beyond his second birthday.

Yet, Tiong not only surpassed (超出) the doctor’s _________ but also made great achievements. On the day of his 24th birthday in October, he gave a speech _________ at his graduation ceremony. What’s more, Tiong got a(n) _________ as an editorial writer at a famous wealth fund. However, all these amazing honors were not easily _________, for which Tiong went all out.

Beginning his _________ journey during the rise of remote work has also _________ the effect of his disability. Tiong finds _________ in the virtual field, stating, “Having everyone work online feels really great. Because when everyone is together online, I don’t feel like there’s actually much of a _________.”

Despite the __________ he has earned, Tiong remains a supporter for reshaping society’s opinion of success. “We must admit that living with a disability is a (n) __________ challenge in itself. Every day, countless individuals with disabilities __________ difficulties all over the world without media coverage, fighting their battles __________,” Tiong stresses.

His goal is not to lower expectations for individuals with disabilities but to __________ the traditional idea about success. “If we reconsider what it means to succeed, you’ll find that everyone out there who is doing their jobs quietly is __________.”

1.

A．required

B．organized

C．delivered

D．explored

2.

A．operation

B．prediction

C．dream

D．experience

3.

A．proudly

B．sadly

C．creatively

D．secretly

4.

A．joke

B．team

C．idea

D．position

5.

A．fought against

B．come by

C．shown off

D．figured out

6.

A．struggling

B．professional

C．unique

D．uncertain

7.

A．beat

B．meant

C．reduced

D．ended

8.

A．relief

B．fear

C．wisdom

D．anxiety

9.

A．responsibility

B．comparison

C．burden

D．difference

10.

A．loneliness

B．treatment

C．recognition

D．honesty

11.

A．unexpected

B．inspiring

C．terrible

D．amazing

12.

A．survive

B．overcome

C．observe

D．discover

13.

A．quietly

B．obviously

C．originally

D．regularly

14.

A．challenge

B．spread

C．define

D．confirm

15.

A．advancing

B．contributing

C．battling

D．succeeding

2 . From Wi-Fi-connected home security systems to smart toilets, the so-called Internet of Things (IOT) brings personalization and convenience to devices that help run homes. But with that come batteries that need to be replaced frequently. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Energy Materials have brought solar panel technology indoors to power smart devices. They show which photovoltaic (PV) (光伏) systems work best under cool white LEDs, a common type of indoor lighting.

Indoor lighting differs from sunlight. Light bulbs are dimmer than the sun, and sunlight includes ultraviolet, infrared and visible light, while indoor lights typically shine light from a narrower region of the spectrum (光谱). Scientists have found ways to harness power from sunlight, using PV solar panels, but those panels are not the best for turning indoor light into electrical energy. Some next-generation PV materials have been tested with indoor light, but it’s not clear which are the most efficient at turning non-natural light into electricity.

So, the researchers compared a range of different PV technologies under the same type of indoor lighting. The researchers obtained eight types of PV devices, ranging from traditional amorphous silicon to thin-film technologies such as dye-sensitized solar cells. They measured each material’s ability to turn light into electricity, first under simulated sunlight and then under a cool white LED light.

Gallium indium phosphide (磷化镓铟) PV cells showed the greatest efficiency under indoor light, turning nearly 40% of the light energy into electricity. As the researchers had expected, the gallium-containing material’s performance under sunlight was proper relative to the other materials tested due to its large band gap.

Gallium indium phosphide has not been used in commercially available PV cells yet, but this study points to its potential beyond solar power, the researchers say. However, they add that the gallium-containing materials are expensive and may not serve as a viable mass product to power smart home systems. Additionally, in the study, the researchers identified that part of the indoor light energy produced heat instead of electricity — information that will help improve future PVs to power indoor devices.

1. What normally goes hand in hand with home IOT?

A．Abandoned batteries.	B．A huge electricity-free device.
C．Inexpensive indoor solar panels.	D．A common type of indoor lighting.

2. Which of the following can best replace the underlined word “harness” in paragraph 2?

A．Track.

B．Hide.

C．Employ.

D．Prevent.

3. What can we learn about gallium indium phosphide PV cells?

A．They are accessible and affordable for the public.

B．They actually produce heat instead of electricity.

C．They show little efficiency under indoor light.

D．They are not perfect enough to be popularized.

4. What is a suitable title for the text?

A．Solar Panel Technology Is Losing Its Dominant Place

B．Gallium-containing Materials Are Running Out Rapidly

C．Internet of Things Are Greatly Influencing Our Daily Life

D．PV Systems Are Stepping Indoors to Power Smart Devices

3 . Artificial intelligence is almost twice as accurate as a biopsy (活组织检查) at judging the aggressiveness of some cancers, experts say. Cancer kills 10 million people globally every year, according to the WHO. But for patients the disease can be prevented if detected instantly and dealt with quickly.

A recent study suggested an AI algorithm (算法) was far better than a biopsy at correctly grading the aggressiveness of sarcomas (肉瘤), a rare form of cancer. Researchers hope AI will improve outcomes for patients by giving doctors a more accurate way of grading tumours (肿瘤). Because high-grade tumours can indicate aggressive disease, the tool could help ensure those high-risk patients are identified more quickly and treated instantly. Low-risk patients could also be spared unnecessary treatments, follow-up scans and hospital visits.

Researchers say the algorithm could be applied to other types of cancer in future. The team specifically looked at retroperitoneal sarcomas, which develop at the back of the abdomen and are difficult to diagnose (诊断) and treat due to their location. They used CT scans from 170 patients with the two most common forms of retroperitoneal sarcoma — leiomyosarcoma and liposarcoma. Using data from these scans they created an AI algorithm, which was then tested on 89 patients in other countries. In grading how aggressive the tumour was, the technology was accurate in 82% of the cases, while biopsies were 44%.

AI could also recognize leiomyosarcoma and liposarcoma in 84% of sarcomas tested, while radiologists were able to identify them in 65% of the cases. Christina Messiou, the study leader, said: “We’re incredibly excited by the potential of this state-of-the-art technology, which could lead to patients having better outcomes through faster diagnosis. As patients with retroperitoneal sarcoma are routinely scanned with CT, we hope this tool will eventually be used globally, ensuring that not just specialist centres can reliably identify and grade the disease.”

Richard Davison, chief executive of Sarcoma UK, said the results looked “very promising”. He added: “People are more likely to survive sarcoma if diagnosed early. One in six people with sarcoma cancer wait more than a year to receive an accurate diagnosis, so any research that helps patients receive better treatment and support is welcome.”

1. According to the passage, AI is capable of        .

A．grading the risk of sarcomas

B．measuring the scale of sarcomas

C．providing cancer treatment for clinicians

D．classifying cancers with its advanced algorithm

2. What can be inferred from this passage?

A．More sarcomas can be detected with the help of AI.

B．Biopsies will be replaced by AI algorithm in identifying cancers.

C．More patients suffering from cancers will benefit from AI algorithm.

D．AI algorithm has been applied in hospitals for detecting most cancers.

3. What is the passage mainly about?

A．AI has a profound market in curing cancers.

B．New treatments for sarcomas are well underway.

C．AI helps identify high-risk and low-risk patients.

D．AI does better in assessing some types of sarcomas.

4 . Last year, my friend, Kydee Williams, and I started a non-profit project because we wanted to do charity work differently. Thus, The Pop-Up Care Shop was _________.

TPUCS is a traveling shop of _________ donated goods for people in need. During the holidays, we _________ clothing drives and then went to women’s shelters. Our main goal was to help inspire women who were _________ with hope as well as bring a little holiday cheer to our local communities. _________ any project or movement wasn’t easy. Brainstorming and coming up with cool ideas was the _________ part, but actually bringing those ideas to life can seem almost _________ at times. However, there were lessons about _________ that we didn’t fully realize until we started this journey.

From our experience, we learned smaller shelters, especially those in less-commercialized areas were often _________ when it came to getting community support. Actually, they were typically more __________ to new and creative ideas and would greatly welcome __________ who offered help. Under our inspiration, many __________ people devoted themselves to non-profit work. Many shelters are understaffed and the staff overworked. Working directly with them helped us __________ the specific needs of the shelter.

While material things like food, clothes, money, and shelter can help people survive, what __________ helps people live is the intangible (无形) necessities like love, presence, patience. Even though we can’t help every single person in the world, we can __________ a world of difference for at least one person.

1.

A．found

B．donated

C．born

D．purchased

2.

A．cheap

B．free

C．value

D．messy

3.

A．quit

B．chose

C．forbade

D．held

4.

A．homeless

B．fearless

C．guiltless

D．restless

5.

A．Ceasing

B．Highlighting

C．Starting

D．Monitoring

6.

A．hard

B．fun

C．odd

D．core

7.

A．crucial

B．unnecessary

C．impossible

D．logical

8.

A．breaking down

B．giving back

C．keeping up

D．pulling through

9.

A．ignored

B．emphasized

C．mentioned

D．estimated

10.

A．harmful

B．relevant

C．opposed

D．open

11.

A．shoppers

B．pioneers

C．officers

D．volunteers

12.

A．reliable

B．selfless

C．creative

D．courageous

13.

A．understand

B．satisfy

C．anticipate

D．illustrate

14.

A．originally

B．slightly

C．truly

D．barely

15.

A．identify

B．detect

C．reveal

D．make

5 . How to Find a Great Gift for Someone You Know

It is not easy to find a great gift for someone, even if the recipient is someone you know. Finding a gift that the recipient will enjoy takes a bit of forward thinking and an understanding of the recipient’s personality and tastes. Fortunately, here are some practical tips for you.

    1     If you have a close relationship with the recipient, you may select a gift that is more personal. If you are not close to the recipient, you may choose a gift that is more useful or accessible.

Make a list of the recipient’s interests and preferences. Personalize the gift by sitting down and making a list of the recipient’s interests and likes.     2     Whether they are video games or Thai food, they should be what the recipient has told you that he or she likes or is known to be enjoyed.

Identify items the recipient may need.     3     Or consider a big purchase that the recipient needs to do but has been putting off. This could be a new kitchen appliance the recipient has been eyeing or a new backpack the recipient needs for a new year of school.

Arrange an experience as a gift. Often, giving the gift of an experience can be more impactful than giving a recipient an item. This could be a massage, a sky diving date, or dinner at the person’s favorite restaurant.     4    

Make a homemade gift. Homemade gifts can be the best gifts, as they are often thoughtful and detailed.     5     And he or she will surely appreciate that.

A．Consider how close you are to the recipient.

B．Try to write down as many specific items as possible.

C．Ask people who are close to the recipient for gift advice.

D．The experience of making a homemade gift is what the recipient needs.

E．Think about any items the recipient may need in his or her day-to-day life.

F．They can also show the recipient that you spent lots of time and effort on the gift.

G．Think of experiences that will surprise the recipient, as these will often make a lasting impression.

6 . Researchers have long known that the brain links kinds of new facts, related or not, when they are learned about the same time. For the first time, scientists have recorded routes in the brain of that kind of contextual memory, the frequent change of thoughts and emotions that surrounds every piece of newly learned information.

The recordings, taken from the brains of people awaiting surgery for epilepsy (癫痫), suggest that new memories of even abstract facts are encoded (编码) in a brain-cell order that also contains information about what else was happening during and just before the memory was formed.

In the new study, doctors from the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University took recordings from a small piece of metal implanted in the brains of 69 people with severe epilepsy. The implants allow doctors to pinpoint the location of the flash floods of brain activity that cause epileptic happening. The patients performed a simple memory task. They watched a series of nouns appear on a computer screen, and after a brief disturbance recalled as many of the words as they could, in any order. Repeated trials, with different lists of words, showed a predictable effect: The participants tended to remember the words in groups, beginning with one and recalling those that were just before or after.

This pattern, which scientists call the contiguity effect, is similar to what often happens in the card game concentration, in which players try to identify pairs in a row of cards lying face-down. Pairs overturned close are often remembered together. The way the process works, the researchers say, is something like reconstructing a night’s activities after a hangover: remembering a fact (a broken table) recalls a scene (dancing), which in turn brings to mind more facts, like the other people who were there.

Sure enough, the people in the study whose neural (神经) updating signals were strongest showed the most striking pattern of remembering words in groups. “When you activate one memory, you are reactivating a little bit of what was happening around the time the memory was formed, and this process is what gives you that feeling of time travel,” said Dr Michael J. Kahana.

1. What does “contextual memory” refer to according to the text?

A．Memories about the past facts.

B．Unrelated facts linked together.

C．Ideas and feelings around new facts.

D．New facts encoded into brain alone.

2. What is the purpose of studying patients with epilepsy?

A．To track the brain activity of contextual memory.

B．To find the brain activity causing epilepsy.

C．To show the formation of memory.

D．To test the new cure for epilepsy.

3. What do the underlined words “contiguity” mean in paragraph 4?

A．Implication.

B．Similarity.

C．Contrast.

D．Neighborhood.

4. What is paragraph 5 mainly about?

A．The feature of the research method.	B．The category of the research subjects.
C．A brief summary of the research process.	D．A further explanation of the research results.

7 . Find and underline the past participles in the sentences below. What function do the past participles have? Answer the questions below.
1. Most people just use the shortened name: “the United Kingdom” or “the UK”.
2. They use the same flag, known as the Union Jack, as well as share the same currency and military defence.
3. They had castles built all around England, and made changes to the legal system.
4. 小结：shortened在句1中位置在名词 ______，known在句2中位置在名词 ______。 1、2句中分词都用来修饰 ______，作定语；句子3中名词castles 是had的宾语，所以built是对名词castles进行补充说明，作_______。

8 . Look at some pictures and appreciate the past participle by answering the functions of it.

1.a broken vase	2.an injured player
3.a bridge built in 1937	4.make themselves heard

1. ________
2. ________
3. ________
4. ________

9 . Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.

So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.

Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what’s acceptable without facing the consequences of “real life.”

1. What can we know about new communication tools?

A．Destroying our life totally.	B．Posing more dangers than good.
C．Helping us to hide our faults.	D．Replacing traditional letters.

2. What is the potential threat caused by the novel communication tools?

A．Sheltering us from virtual life.	B．Removing face-to-face interaction.
C．Leading to false mental perception.	D．Making us rely more on hi-tech media.

3. What can be inferred from the last two paragraphs?

A．Technologies have changed our relationships.

B．The digital world is a recipe for pushing limits.

C．Love can be better conveyed by text message.

D．The digital self need not take responsibility.

4. Which of the following is a suitable title for the text?

A．Addiction to the Virtual World	B．Cost of Falling into Digital Life
C．Interpersonal Skills on the Net	D．The Future of Social Media

10 . It's a great idea to reread novels.     1     For a while, I saw little point in rereading. Why reread a favorite when there are other books waiting for you? Most book lovers have long books waiting to be read. It seems a waste of time to reread a novel. The aspect of time is a crucial point for readers — a novel simply is not a poem, short story or movie.

    2     For one, the purpose of reading changes. You are no longer familiarizing yourself with the plot, characters or setting. These points were made clear in the first read. Rather, the second and third reading allows greater focus on the theme, literary references, style and the more subtle (细微的) aspects of the novel. This makes for a more enjoyable read. In many ways, a novel is like an endless treasure chest.    3    .

Another pleasant part of rereading is the lack of need to “understand” a novel. You've already read it and can now determine the extent of your enjoyment. However, there's a possibility of disliking a novel at second glance (再看一眼). There's   nothing wrong with this!     4     It's through rereading that we develop an understanding of our tastes.

I'm not suggesting that rereading is superior to (优于) reading novels for the first time. Yet, it's worth arranging time for two or three novels a year. You shouldn't reread any book. Rather pick a favorite to start with, preferably a story you read over a year ago.     5     It's entirely possible not to enjoy a novel at first but appreciate it at a different stage in your life.

A．However, it wasn't something I often did.

B．Yet plots, characters and setting still matter.

C．Still, I must mention the benefits of rereading.

D．That's because our tastes and preferences change.

E．I prefer the latter even though the enjoyment is less.

F．Or, pick a novel you are having second thoughts about.

G．You'll always find something previously undiscovered.