| A．Some butter. | B．Some milk. | C．Some bread. |
2 . Letters to customers
Letter 1Dear Mr Johnson,
Thanks for your long-term trust. We take great pleasure in announcing that our latest product, the 1000-watt home theater system, has come onto the market.
The device comes with five speakers. It is Bluetooth-enabled and has a USB port. The sound quality and picture quality are outstanding.
Grab yours today! Contact us at 999-999-999.
Helen
Letter 2Dear Miss Turner,
We are grateful for your good review of our printer. To express our thanks, we’d like to give you a special offer. In the upcoming three months, you will get one free cartridge (墨盒) for any three that you buy. It also applies to any paper you buy.
Please show this note to us when you visit our store. It will make sure you can get the offer and a significant discount on other products.
Call us at 333-555-999 if you have any questions.
Nicholas
Letter 3Dear Mr Davis,
We’d like to congratulate you on the ownership of the new mountain bike. This bike is the first to succeed in all the standard safety tests set by the Cycling Association of America. You can get a free bike repair service within the first month of your purchase.
We also trade in old and new bikes. For more information, call us at 223-334-445.
Bob
Letter 4Dear Miss Smith,
I am delighted that you are satisfied with the washer and dryer purchased from our store.
If you experience any damage within the first six months of your purchase, we will repair them at no cost. After that, we offer competitive rates to ensure your continued satisfaction.
Please feel free to contact us at 111-222-111 for any further information.
Amy
1. What’s Helen’s purpose in writing to Mr Johnson?| A．To show her trust. |
| B．To confirm an order. |
| C．To promote a new product. |
| D．To seek opinions on their product. |
| A．Give praise for the cartridge. |
| B．Bring the note to the store. |
| C．Buy at least four cartridges. |
| D．Recommend the printer to others. ‘ |
| A．Both offer free maintenance. |
| B．Both stress the safety of products. |
| C．Both display competitive product rates. |
| D．Both involve the trade of new and old products. |
3 . “Few articles change owners more frequently than clothes. They travel downwards from grade to grade in the social scale with remarkable regularity,” wrote the journalist Adolphe Smith in 1877 as he traced a coat’s journey in the last century: cleaned, repaired and resold repeatedly; cut down into a smaller item; eventually recycled into new fabric. But with the improvement in people’s living standards, that model is mind-boggling in the era of fast fashion. The average British customer buys four items a month. And it is reported that 350,000 tonnes of used but still wearable clothes go to landfills in the UK each year.
Yet the gradual revival of the second-hand trade has gathered pace in the past few years. At fashion website Asos, sales of vintage clothes (古董衫) have risen by 92%. Clothing was once worn out of necessity, and now it is simply a way of life. Busy families sell used items on eBay, teenagers trade on Depop and some fashion people offer designer labels on Vestiaire Collective. Strikingly, it has become big enough business that mainstream retailers (零售商) want a slice of the action.
For some buyers and sellers, the switch to the second-hand is born of financial difficulties. Only a few have become worried about the impact of their shopping habit on the planet. But the shift is only a partial solution. Some people worry that some mainstream brands may “greenwash” — using second-hand goods to improve their image, rather than engaging more seriously with sustainability.
However, the biggest concern may be that people keep buying because they know they can resell goods, still chasing the pleasure of the next purchase but with an eased conscience (愧疚). Boohoo, a powerful fast fashion company, has seen sales and profits rise, despite concerns about environmental problems in its supply chain that led to an investigation last year.
A new Netflix series, Worn Stories, documents the emotional meanings that clothes can have: Each old item is full of memories. Actually, a handbag from a grandmother and a scarf passed on by a father are both valuable for us. A love of style is not a bad or an unimportant thing. But a committed relationship is better than a quick flash. Can we learn to appreciate our own old clothes as well as others’?
1. What does the word “mind-boggling” underlined in paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Unbelievable. | B．Popular. | C．Reasonable. | D．Influential. |
| A．old clothes are more popular than new pieces |
| B．the online second-hand markets are booming |
| C．the fashion world begins to favor vintage clothes |
| D．many clothing brands are innovative in their new products |
| A．It makes people feel free to pursue fast fashion. |
| B．It makes people more cautious about their budgets. |
| C．It encourages people to choose eco-friendly clothes. |
| D．It pushes people to be more engaged with sustainability. |
| A．Old items have lost favor with the public. |
| B．Old items are worthy of being long cherished. |
| C．Older generations attach great importance to old items. |
| D．Older generations care about the quality of their clothes. |
With access to the Internet come some truly life-changing advantages. One of the greatest benefits is that the Internet has brought with
Dr. Miller and her colleagues
| A．In a bank. | B．At a restaurant. | C．In a cinema. |
1. How much does the woman give the man again?
| A．￡5.5. | B．￡5.0. | C．￡0.5. |
| A．In a supermarket. | B．In a restaurant. | C．In a bar. |
7 . Sending a package back is not easy. Repacking, printing labels and shipping it back up to the seller is an increasingly familiar experience for online shoppers. In America 21%of online orders, worth some $218bn, were returned in 2021, according to the National Retail Federation, up from 18%in 2020. For clothing and shoes it can reach around 40%.
The problem has its roots in the birth of e-commerce. To compete with bricks-and-mortar (实体的) sellers and make consumers comfortable with ordering online, e-commerce firms offered free returns. Consumers came to expect it.
Each step of the process is costly. Retailers have to pay for goods to be picked up or posted. Processing returns is labor-intensive (劳动密集型), explains Zac Rogers who worked as a returns manager at Amazon. A return must be opened and someone has to decide what to do with it. “A worker in an Amazon warehouse can pick 30 items in a minute, but a return can take ten minutes to process, ” says Mr. Rogers.
Once processed, only 5% of the returned goods can be resold immediately by retailers. Most go to liquidators at the lowest prices or are thrown away.
One solution involves adding friction (阻力). Last year, a Japanese fashion brand became one of the first retailers to charge a small fee for posted returns. Other firms are selling more refurbished (翻新的) goods as a way to cut losses.
Startups are getting in on the action. Using artificial intelligence to help retailers decide what to do with the returned goods is the brainchild of them. Happy Returns, another startup, helps with logistics (物流). It has 5, 000 drop-off points for returns across America, mostly in chain stores. The returns are collected and sent back to retailers all at once, saving up to 40% of postage costs.
Some are experimenting with virtual reality (VR). Over half of the items are returned because they are the wrong size. In June Walmart said it would buy Memomi, an augmented-reality (AR) startup that lets shoppers virtually try on glasses in real-time for a seamless, easy and fun omnichannel experience. Walmart also offers ways to try on clothes and arrange furniture in rooms using AR.
1. Why did e-commerce firms offer free returns at first?| A．To cut costs. | B．To develop logistics service. |
| C．To compete with physical stores. | D．To show the advantage of shopping online. |
| A．Efficient. | B．Automatic |
| C．Expensive. | D．Time-consuming. |
| A．By charging a fee. | B．By raising the price of goods. |
| C．By selling more returned goods. | D．By using advanced technologies. |
| A．Walmart has pioneered the use of AR. |
| B．Technology plays a role in reducing returns. |
| C．VR and AR will be used in more industries. |
| D．Cooperation among companies is important. |
8 . Danone Portugal introduced a new yogurt named Juntos. For every pack of yogurt that a person bought, he would donate yogurt to a family in need. Danone had done its research. Increasingly, people say they want to buy from brands that give them a sense of purpose. Surely a yogurt that helped the needy would be appealing. But Juntos was a failure. Despite sinking millions into a marketing campaign, Danone pulled Juntos from the market only months after it was launched. Now the same product is simply marketed as a tasty yogurt.
What happened? To find the reason behind Juntos’ failure, Lawrence Williams and his colleagues did an experiment where they showed people some products and asked these people to pick one option. They reminded some to focus on the “purposeful and valuable” aspect while others were told to “enjoy themselves” and focus on “delight and pleasure.” They found that participants who prioritized meaning preferred the less expensive product when compared with people who put pleasure in the first place.
So why were meaning-seekers cheaping out? Lawrence Williams asked participants to explain their decision-making to find out. He learned that meaning-oriented people were not thinking about how the product they might buy could bring meaning to their lives. Instead, they were occupied with what else they could do with their money.
I am all for people making wise and strategic financial choices. But cheap products can create many problems. Inexpensive options often do not last as long as the higher-end ones. As a result, we shop more often, which is ultimately worse for our wallets. Plus, that spending pattern can do a greater damage to the environment. Thanks in part to fast fashion, people buy 60 percent more clothing today than they did 15 years ago. The fashion industry alone emits more greenhouse gases than international flights and maritime (海洋的) shipping combined.
So before you dive into your wallet for some deals, try not to fix only on what you are spending or saving. Think carefully about what you are buying, too.
1. What is the main reason for the failure of Juntos?| A．It ignored marketing strategies. | B．It priced itself relatively high. |
| C．It lacked a particularly good taste. | D．It focused on delight and pleasure. |
| A．They frequent high-end stores. | B．They think products extend their lives. |
| C．They hesitate to make decisions. | D．They make more purchases with money. |
| A．By giving some examples. | B．By listing numbers and data. |
| C．By explaining reasons. | D．By making some comparisons. |
| A．Innovation: a Product’s Life | B．To Buy or not to Buy |
| C．Meaning seekers or Quality-pursuers | D．Fast Fashion: a Hit to Your Wallet |
9 . A study from 2010 said that raising prices by 1% without losing sales can increase profits by 8.7% on average. Getting the prices right can be difficult. Set them too high and you lose customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table.
To make more money, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimization (优化) systems that predict how customers will respond to price changes. These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI). While older systems used historical sales data to estimate (估计) price sensitivity for individual goods, the latest AI-powered systems can find relationships between multiple goods. These AI-powered systems use big data to estimate price sensitivity — how much demand increases as the price falls or how much demand decreases as the price goes up-for thousands of products. Price-sensitive (价格敏感的) goods can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up.
All this makes pricing systems “much more three-dimensional”, observes Chad Yoes, the pricing official at Walmart, a supermarket. In February, Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, expressed pride in its use of AI to price products “on an ongoing basis”. US Foods, a food company, says its pricing system can promote sales and profits.
Price-optimization may make prices change more. “Shopkeepers are pricing faster today than they ever have before,” says Matt Pavich of Revionics, a pricing-software firm. That is especially true in the fast-moving world of e-commerce. But even Walmart changes the prices of many items in its stores 2-4 times a year, says Mr Yoes. up from once or twice a few years ago.
Sysco, a food company, says the AI-powered system allows it to lower prices on “key value items” and raise prices on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining profits. That keeps investors content and shoppers sweet.
1. What can be learned from the first paragraph?| A．It is sometimes difficult to set the right prices. |
| B．Getting the prices right can make you lose customers. |
| C．Raising prices by 1% always leads to an 8.7% increase in profits. |
| D．The study from 2010 suggests that you leave money on the table. |
| A．They are more price-sensitive. |
| B．They make prices change more. |
| C．They can predict price sensitivity for individual goods. |
| D．They are able to identify links between various products. |
| A．Starbucks coffee. | B．Price-insensitive goods. |
| C．Walmart’s online goods. | D．Sysco’s “key value items”. |
| A．Apply AI to Set Prices | B．Raise Prices to Increase Profits |
| C．Reduce Prices to Promote Sales | D．Use AI to Predict Customer Response |
1. Who is the woman speaking to?
| A．Her son. | B．Her husband. | C．A salesman. |
| A．On the 5th floor. | B．On the 4th floor. | C．On the 3rd floor. |
