1 . What a day! I started my new school this morning and had the best time. I made lots of new friends and really liked my teachers. I was nervous the night before, but I had no reason to be. Everyone was so friendly and polite. They made me feel at ease. It was like I’d been at the school for a hundred years!
The day started very early at 7:00 am. I had my breakfast downstairs with my mom. She could tell that I was very nervous. Mom kept asking me what was wrong. She told me I had nothing to worry about and that everyone was going to love me. If they didn’t love me, mom said to have a good talk with them. I couldn’t stop laughing.
My mom dropped me off at the school gate about five minutes before the bell rang. A little blonde girl got dropped off at the same time and started waving (招手) at me. She ran over and told me her name was Abigail. She was very nice and we became close straight away. We spent all morning together and began to talk to another girl called Stacey. The three of us sat together in class all day and we even made our way home together! It went so quickly. Our teacher told us that tomorrow we would really start learning and developing new skills.
I cannot wait until tomorrow and feel as though I am really going to enjoy my time at my new school. I only hope that my new friends feel the same way, too.
1. How did the author feel the night before her new school?| A．Tired. | B．Excited. | C．Happy. | D．Worried. |
| A．Clear. | B．Funny. | C．Reasonable. | D．Excellent. |
| A．She met many nice people. | B．She had a hurried breakfast. |
| C．She learned some new skills. | D．She arrived at school very early. |
| A．She disliked Stacey. | B．She was shy and quiet. |
| C．She got on well with the author. | D．She was an old friend of the author. |
When Beethoven was only four, his father decided to make him a musician. Beethoven was made to practice
However, this didn’t stop Beethoven. During his life, he composed about 30 pieces of music. It is
4 . Painting
The art of creating pictures using colors, shapes and lines is called painting. Museums and galleries show the paintings of professional artists. But painting is also a popular form of entertainment and creative expression.
Painters can use their art to express devotion to a religion, to tell a story, to express feelings and ideas, or simply to present a pleasing picture. Religious paintings often show a god or a scene from a sacred text. Other common subjects have been famous legends and events in history, as well as scenes from daily life. Artists also paint portraits (肖像), or pictures of people.
Some kinds of paintings do not focus on people. In landscape (风景) paintings, the focus is on scenes from nature. Artists also paint still objects such as fruit and vegetables.
| A．These works are called still lives. |
| B．These works can communicate a special feeling. |
| C．Humans have been making paintings for thousands of years. |
| D．People of all ages create pictures using a variety of materials. |
| E．Cave paintings generally show animals that early humans hunted. |
| F．The design of a painting is the plan of its lines, shapes and colors. |
| G．Sometimes artists make portraits of themselves, which are called self-portraits. |
5 . A new APP uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tell you what your pet is thinking. It’s called Happy Pets and it analyses an animal’s facial features, tells you what breed(血统) it is and indicates which of the five most common animal emotions—happy, angry, neutral, sad and scared.
The Happy Pets app uses AI, or machine learning. It’s a technology that’s used for vision in robotics and self-driving cars and it works by taking in images and assigning importance to them. One common use for AI is in facial recognition technology. Many of us can unlock our mobile phones with an image of our face and it’s important part of security processes in, for instance, airports.
But this is the first time this kind of technology has been used for animals. It then had to learn to recognize facial features. This is sophisticated because photos can be taken in so many different ways: from the side, above, below, in bright light. And different animals can have such different facial features. Think about how different the noses of a border collie(边境牧羊犬) and bulldog are, for instance. Once the AI behind Happy Pets had learned all this, it then had to be able to detect emotions based on specific facial features that are associated with each emotion, which it has learned from thousands of examples. For instance, if a dog tightens its eyes and mouth while changing the position of its ears in a particular way, it’s a sign of being scared.
In an online article for Melbourne University’s Pursuit, the researchers write they’re happy with how the app performs. The researchers would love feedback about how they could develop the app further.
1. Which of the following may go beyond Happy Pets’ function?| A．Learning the kinds of pets. |
| B．Showing pets’ main feelings. |
| C．Teaching pets’ facial recognition. |
| D．Analyzing the pets’ facial features. |
| A．The robot’s eye. | B．A security system. |
| C．The vision of self driving. | D．A machine learning system. |
| A．Typical. | B．Complex. | C．Scientific. | D．Traditional. |
| A．Because faces can definitely show animals feelings. |
| B．Because it wants to have emotions of humans. |
| C．Because it enables Happy Pets to detect emotions based on specific facial features. |
| D．Because the types of animals are based on the looks. |
6 . Becca was 6 when she was told she had cancer on Sept. 8, 2014. She clearly remembers the bad days of her 26 months of non -stop treatment. Luckily, Becca celebrated her final treatment on Nov. 13, 2016, and she has been cancer-free ever since. But she was thinking about what her life was like while experiencing the treatment.
“I was never able to do much, and that’s what the kids lying in their hospital beds right now experience, asking their mom and dad, ‘When are we leaving? When can I play with my friends?’ So I decided I have to help them.”
In February, 2017, Becca came up with the idea for Knots and Arrows, a company that makes bracelets (手镯) out of swimsuit materials (泳衣布料). Part of the money made from each bracelet goes to the organizations that help people with cancer.
Becca created the company with her father, Gerhard Salmins. Gerhard Salmins once had cancer and already recovered from it. “I would be in the hospital sitting there crying and then my dad would come in and he would play games with me,” she said. “It made me forget about what I was going through” Becca said the name of the organization shows the motto (座右铭) she stuck to through her personal cancer journey.
Her organization has already given thousands of dollars to research organizations and families in need. Becca said she hoped her bracelets would make people remember that great things can result from small changes. “No matter what age you are, what you look like, and how you act, you can make a difference!”she said.
1. What happened to Becca at the end of 2016?| A．She recovered from cancer. | B．She created an organization. |
| C．She raised a lot of money. | D．She was helped by a company. |
| A．He showed Becca a famous motto. | B．He fought off cancer successfully. |
| C．He advised Becca to forget her pain. | D．He named the company Knots and Arrows. |
| A．Negative. | B．Creative. | C．Caring. | D．Clever. |
| A．To tell us having a motto is important. |
| B．To prove cancer can be got over successfully. |
| C．To show there’s always someone who needs help. |
| D．To make us realize everyone can make a difference. |
9 . I came to the United States ten years ago. I would always say that I was trying to study, but there were always things like work and my kids that would not allow me to start.
Now I realized that those were only excuses. What stopped me was that I was afraid to start studying again. I always believed I would learn by myself.
One day, however, my son told me that he was sad because his friends would come over and I didn’t understand them because I didn’t speak English. He was also sad because I could never help him with his homework. That same day, I told myself, “Rocio, you have to start believing in yourself and you will see you can make it.”
The next day, I went downtown to look for a big banner (横幅) in front of the school which said that they offered classes for adults. I came in to see if I could join, but the classes were closed already. That night I took the kids to the movies, and on the way back, I told them we would take a new route. I ended up getting lost. That’s the way I found Chaffey College. The following Monday, I went to ask for information. They told me that summer school was starting that week.
That’s how I started studying English last summer. It is difficult, but I have had great rewards. My daughter had written a story for school. It was about the female they most admired and why. She wrote that I was the person she most admired because I had started going to college. I will never forget this.
1. According to the passage, the author probably is a ________.| A．teacher | B．doctor | C．father | D．mother |
| A．What her son said. |
| B．What her daughter said. |
| C．Thinking about herself. |
| D．Thinking about her daughter. |
| A．On the way to the movies. |
| B．They took a new route and got lost. |
| C．Ask a stranger for information. |
| D．According to the banner. |
| A．The author came to the United States from another country. |
| B．The author had two children including one daughter. |
| C．What really changed the author’s life was that she believed in herself. |
| D．The author wrote that she was the person her son most admired. |
