1 . The Failed New Year’s Resolution: Three Tips to Get on Track

January is officially over, and many people are taking stock of their progress towards New Year’s resolutions. The fact is that you probably haven’t kept up with them as much as you hoped. But that’s not your fault.     1     . If you feel like you have already failed, here are three tips before you let go.

Practice self-compassion

Many people talk to themselves in harsh ways when struggling with new habits, believing self-criticism will help them reach their goals. Research shows, however, that the opposite is true. Self-compassion is more effective for personal improvement, especially when facing failure.     2     , try to be kind and gentle with yourself, just as you would with a loved one.

    3    

Resolutions are often phrased as definitive goals. I will exercise daily. I will kick desserts.     4     . But setting all-or-nothing goals can lead to all-or-nothing decisions that one gives up when faced with challenges. In contrast, intentions focus more on your values than specific actions. For example, the resolution “I will exercise daily” may become an intention of “I want to move my body because it feels good.” This approach allows for more flexibility when unexpected stress arises.

Solve problems by overcoming barriers

If you are struggling to maintain your desired habits, there are evidence-based techniques available to help you.     5     . This involves identifying the specific barriers that lead to your quitting something that you want to do. Perhaps you keep forgetting the new habit, or perhaps you don’t understand how to do it. Whatever it is, identify the barrier and cope with it specifically.

A．Set all-or-nothing goals

B．Change your resolutions into intentions

C．One such skill is called missing links analysis

D．Setting specific behavioral goals can be effective

E．If you’re persuaded to give up on your resolutions

F．Old habits tend to die hard, and new habits tend to die easy

G．When you are upset about yourself for not keeping resolutions

2 . Film Puts Justifiable Defense in Spotlight

The film, Article 20, directed by Zhang Yimou, draws its name from Article 20 of the Criminal Law, which focuses on the sometimes controversial legal concept of justifiable defense. Drawing inspiration from real-life cases of justifiable defense, the film gained widespread attention and struck a chord with the public during the Spring Festival holiday. The movie calls for a de tailed interpretation of legal terms and urges against compromising on unlawful conduct.

According to the Criminal Law, when a person, faced with an unlawful attack, takes action to protect his or her own rights or interests or those of others, and the attacker is thereby harmed, the defender will be considered to have acted in justifiable defense and will not bear criminal responsibility. For some time, justifiable defense has been regarded as a “dormant clause” (沉寂条款), due to the influence of misconceptions, such as “whoever is injured or killed is right”.

But the true meaning of the law should be to increase the responsibility for wrongdoers, rather than burdening good people. Recent cases have shown that, for ordinary citizens, justifiable defense is no longer a pipe dream. A high-profile case in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, in 2018 served as a wake-up call and caught the attention of authorities regarding such cases. In that case, a traffic argument led to a motorist who took a knife with him confronting another man. The motorist was killed, and police and judges determined that the defender’s actions constituted justifiable defense. Since then, the justifiable defense clause has been applied in several places across the nation. The concern over justifiable defense reflects the public’s demand for fairness, justice, security and rule of law.

Luo Xiang, a renowned professor of criminal law at China University of Political Science and Law, said in a recent comment about the film Article 20 that the public and judges should avoid taking a “godlike” perspective. Instead, they should consider the situation in which the defender was involved, empathize with the defender’s position, and stop themselves from making excessive demands on the defender, Luo said.

1. Why did the film Article 20 attract the audience’s attention?

A．It was released during the Spring Festival holiday.

B．It is named after one article in the Criminal Law.

C．It explores real-life cases of justifiable defense.

D．It was directed by Zhang Yimou.

2. According to the Criminal Law, the victim will be free from criminal responsibility when ________.

A．the victim gave up his legal rights

B．the robber kept silent about the robbery

C．the robber was hurt worse than the victim

D．the victim knifed the armed robber to stop the ongoing crime

3. What is the function of the case in Kunshan in Paragraph 3?

A．Making comparisons.	B．Listing reasons.
C．Explaining misconceptions.	D．Providing evidence.

4. What does Luo Xiang suggest judges do?

A．Take a “godlike” viewpoint with the public.

B．Put oneself in the defender’s shoes.

C．Demand more from the defender.

D．Side with the attacker.

3 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。

Michael and Greg were brothers and they lived in a family with a tight budget. They both missed the field trip last year because they could not cover the extra fee. This year, Michael’s class would arrange a field trip to the city museum and he really wanted to go. So he was trying to earn some pocket money.

On this cold autumn morning, Michael gathered the last of the leaves into a small pile. There weren’t even enough to jump in. “Mom and Dad are never going to pay me for gathering this little bit of leaves.” “What are you talking about?” Greg asked, walking up behind him. “I’m trying to do some housework so I can make enough money to cover my field trip to the city museum, but there’s nothing to do around here.” Michael sighed and looked around.

“You could offer to wash Mom and Dad’s cars,” Greg said.

Michael’s face lit up. “That’s a great idea.”

“I bet some of the neighbors would pay you to wash theirs, too. It’s getting colder and no one wants to wash the cars themselves.” Greg looked his brother in the eye.

Michael nodded. The air was cold. He shivered（打寒颤）at the thought of washing cars and getting wet in this cold weather. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

Greg placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I have some golf gloves that are designed for wet, cold weather. I’ll loan you a pair, and I’ll even help you wash the cars.” “Really? You’d help me and let me keep the money?” “Sure. Golf season is over. I won’t need the extra cash for a while.” Greg disappeared inside the house.

Michael asked his parents if he could wash their cars for a small fee. When they agreed, he asked some neighbors, too. Three more agreed. Michael got a bucket, some sponges（海绵）, towels and soap. Greg came back outside with the gloves. “Here you go. They’ll keep your hands warm and dry.” “Thanks.” Michael still couldn’t believe his brother was helping him earn the money like this. He had to think of a way to repay him.

注意：
1.续写词数应为150个左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。

With these tools, Michael started to work.

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To Michael’s surprise, he found he earned more money than expected.

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4 . Is there a friend of yours who always sings out of tune (曲调) but never realizes it? Don’t be so hard on them — they may have amusia — the inability to tell the difference in tunes.

Apart from singing out of tune, people with amusia may also find it hard to recognize music they’ve heard before without the help of song lyrics. Besides, people who suffer from Amusia can have difficulty in recognizing melodies and a total inability to tell between different musical sounds, according to Live Science. However, people with amusia can recognize common environmental sounds as well as the high and lows sounds in human voices, meaning that this inability can be specially related to music.

In many cases, people who have amusia are born with it, as 46 percent of these individuals’ family members were found to have similar conditions, according to a 2017 study. Brain imaging shows that their brains receive and respond to music pitch (音高) information, but it is not reaching conscious awareness, meaning that the mind can’t understand the information.

Scientists at the University of Otago in New Zealand also think that amusia is related to people’s special processing skills. They invited people with amusia, musicians and students from non-musical backgrounds to perform a task related to spacial imagination. They were asked to decide whether pairs of images are the same object moving around or mirror images.

The result showed that the amusia group made more mistakes than the other two groups. Amusia might be related to the way brain stores information about the high and low sounds in songs, according to the study.

Although those who aren’t confident about their singing skills often say they’re “tune-deaf”, people with amusia only make up about 1.5 percent of the population, as shown in the 2017 study. “Like dyslexics (诵读困难者) can learn how to read, those with amusia should be able to better their ability to recognize tunes if they start early enough,” Isabelle Peretz, a professor of psychology from the University of Montreal in Canada, told Live Science.

1. According to the article, what is the main difficulty faced by people with amusia?

A．Recognizing tunes.	B．Identifying human voices.
C．Understanding song lyrics.	D．Noticing common sounds in nature.

2. What did the 2017 study tell us about amusia?

A．Amusia is common among children.

B．Amusia is a result of brain damage.

C．Many individuals with amusia are born with it.

D．Those who are tune-deaf often suffer from amusia.

3. What did the study by scientists at the University of Otago show?

A．People with amusia have strong spa cial imagination skills.

B．People with amusia struggle to decide the shape of images.

C．Amusia may be affected by one’s level of music education.

D．Amusia may be related to how the brain stores sound information.

4. How can people with amusia improve their musical ability, according to Peretz?

A．Go for medical treatment.	B．Sing frequently with friends.
C．Learn how to read earlier in life.	D．Start to explore and learn music early.

5 . How was your sleep last night? As is known to us all, sleep habits have a significant effect on our health.     1    

Jump scares from alarms

A young woman recently shared online that she felt dizzy and threw up after her loud alarm woke her up.     2     The body changes during sleep, making people vulnerable in the early hours, Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Center told Daily Mail. During the later part of the night, the nervous system is less active and most of the body processes slow down. When a sudden noise occurs, blood pressure, heart rate and breathing will react more rapidly.

Waking up suddenly is not desirable, but it’s difficult for most people to wake up by themselves naturally.     3     Another way can be leaving the curtains half open before sleep-the sunshine in the morning can slowly wake you up.

    4    

Although valuing the 8-hour golden rule of sleeping, some young people may go to bed late and then get up late, such as sleeping from 2 am to 10 am. However, this can be problematic since human bodies can tell the time.

“Environmental cues such as temperature and light levels tell the body what time it is,” expert Nerina Ramlakhan wrote in a book about sleep. Ramlakhan added that waking up late the next day could also lead to sleep inertia, which is a state between sleep and waking.     5    

The habit may turn into a disorder called delayed sleep phase syndrome if it is serious enough to affect a person’s study, work and other aspects of life. Special treatments have already been developed to treat the disorder, such as using light to gradually change sleeping patterns.

A．Sleep late, get up late.

B．Early to bed, early up.

C．Here are ways that can help us develop some good sleep habits.

D．This is why, after oversleeping, people may feel even more tired.

E．A more mild alarm may be helpful, giving the body some time to adjust.

F．Let’s check out some sleep habits that may accidentally harm your health.

G．It was because the blood supply to part of her brain was shortly blocked, according to her diagnosis record.

6 . “I never thought that I would beat the tumor.” says a cancer patient in Lanzhou in Northwest China’s Gansu province. The man adds that he is particularly grateful for heavy ion therapy he received, at a follow-up visit following several rounds of treatment revealing that his cancer cells had disappeared.

A research team from the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed the country’s first medical heavy ion accelerator with independent intellectual property rights, and put it into clinical application. Cancer treatments employing heavy ion accelerators can bombard a target with high-energy electrons to kill cancer cells. Compared to traditional therapy such as radiation, heavy ion treatment is considered to be more balanced, exposing healthy cells to less radiation. The treatment period is shorter and the therapy can more effectively control cancer cells.

In 1993, researchers proposed to carry out basic research on heavy ion cancer treatment during an academic conference held in Tianshui, Gansu. In 2006, China followed the United States, Japan and Germany to become the fourth country to successfully carry out heavy ion clinical treatment, when four cancer patients participated in preliminary clinical trials for heavy ion therapy. In 2015, China’s first such accelerator, with independent intellectual property rights, rolled off the production line in Wuwei, in Gansu. On March 26, 2020, the accelerator was put into operation, and by the end of June this year, more than 750 patients completed their therapy at Wuwei’s heavy ion treatment center, with remarkable curative effects. The follow-up statistics showed that the three-year local tumor control rate reached 84 percent among 46 clinical trial participants.

Heavy ion therapy is highly effective in treating a wide range of solid tumors and can be used in cases where surgery is not possible or unsuitable, when a patient is sensitive to conventional radiation therapy, or prone to relapse following such therapy. This includes tumors located in the central nervous system, head, neck, skull base, chest and abdomen. So far there have been several cases where people have recovered from cancers by the therapy.

1. Why is the man in para.1 mentioned?

A．To celebrate a successful treatment.	B．To bring up a new kind of therapy.
C．To show his cancer cells had disappeared.	D．To show the man is brave and lucky.

2. What can we learn about the heavy ion treatment according to paragraph 2?

A．China is the first country to carry out heavy ion clinical treatment.

B．In 2006, the United States, Japan and Germany successfully carried out heavy io n clinical treatment.

C．Heavy ion cancer treatment is more beneficial to patients than traditional therapies such as radiation.

D．Heavy ion cancer treatment is of great help in treating a certain kind of tumor.

3. What is the author talking about in paragraph.3?

A．The time of the heavy ion cancer treatment.

B．The reason why researchers develop heavy ion cancer treatment.

C．Persons benefiting from heavy ion cancer treatment.

D．The development of heavy ion cancer treatment in China.

4. What will the author probably do in the following paragraph?

A．To give some successful examples of the new treatment

B．To explain the process of the new treatment.

C．To show the difficulty of the new treatment.

D．To conclude the value of the new treatment.

7 . Whenever we are planning to buy something online, most of us prefer to look at the reviews first. We imagine that they have been left by shoppers like us who want to share their knowledge with others, so the reviews would be of great value to us.     1     Some of them are writing positive review s in return for a payment or gifts from the maker. How do we know this?

A careful study of thousands of reviews on a popular shopping website showed that a surprisingly large number of reviewers gave either four-or five-star ratings to the product. Two-or three-star ratings both accounted for less than ten percent of the total, which looked suspicious (可疑的).     2     Not everything being sold on the shopping website could be first class! We all know that some false information is provided. Some products that you buy on shopping website can be terrible. You would expect therefore to see a variety of scores.     3    

It seems that anyone who writes a large number of good review s is given a special treat by the shopping website.     4     How should a shopper reply to all these “wonderful” reviews? The best thing to do is to have access to a website run by some organizations such as Which in the UK. The Which product evaluation is based on strict tests carried out by experts and then on reviews by trusted shoppers who are Which members. They are not allowed to take free gifts from makers.

    5     So, a good and responsible organization seems to be the best answer.

A．So why are most reviews positive?

B．Reviews differ from person to person.

C．However, not all reviewers are like this.

D．So how can we tell true review s from false ones?

E．These “top” reviewers are then given free products.

F．Shoppers need protection from misleading reviews.

G．If those reviews were true, a broader spread of ratings would be given.

8 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。
1. Whose house is the girl going to on Sunday?

A．Susie’s.

B．Mary’s.

C．Jenny’s.

2. What will the girl probably do on Friday?

A．See a movie.

B．Go shopping.

C．Watch a basketball game.

3. Why does the girl want her father to buy a new backpack for her?

A．Her backpack is lost.

B．Her backpack is broken.

C．Her backpack is full of books.

9 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。
1. Who use camels in their sports?

A．Americans.

B．The Arabs.

C．Chinese people.

2. Which sport listed below has the longest history?

A．Baseball.

B．Basketball.

C．Running.

3. How old is volleyball sport?

A．Below 200 years.

B．About 300 years.

C．Over 1, 000 years.

4. What often comes out of a game in the speaker’s opinion?

A．War.

B．Pride.

C．Friendship.

10 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。
1. In which place did Lisa find the wallet?

A．A park.

B．A parking lot.

C．A shopping mall.

2. What is inside the wallet?

A．A photo of a person.

B．Some paper and an ID card.

C．Some money and business cards.

3. Who does the wallet probably belong to?

A．A businessman.

B．An old lady.

C．A school boy.

4. How will Lisa get in touch with the wallet’s owner?

A．By making a telephone call.

B．By asking the police for help.

C．By waiting where she found the wallet.