1 . In habitats across the planet, animals periodically drop everything to walk, fly or swim to a new place. Some animals such as whales and geese learn migration paths by following their parents. Others, including small songbirds, gain the distance and direction of their migration within their genetic code. And some animals use a combination of genetics and culture to guide their migration.
Another group of migrators does not quite fit either model, and researchers have only recently started to figure out how they find their way. The Cory’s shearwater is an oceangoing seabird that migrates over the Atlantic every year. The young do not migrate with their parents, so culture cannot explain their journeys. And the exact paths vary wildly from individual to individual, making genetics equally unlikely.
Cory’s shearwaters are long-lived, rarely producing young successfully before age nine. This leaves an opening for learning and practice to develop their migration patterns. Researchers call this the “exploration-refinement”, and until now it has been hypothetical (假设的) because of difficulties in tracking migratory animals’ movements.
But a team of researchers has done that by attaching small geolocators to more than 150 of the birds aged four to nine. They found that younger birds traveled longer distances, for longer periods, and had more diverse paths than older birds. “We finally have evidence of the ‘exploration-refinement’ for migratory birds,” says Letizia Campioni, who led the study. Younger Cory’s shearwaters are able to fly just as fast as the adults——but they do not, suggesting that the young do more exploring, which gradually fades as they mature and settle into a preferred course.
“Although it may seem less efficient than other strategies, exploration refinement could be beneficial to birds and other organisms in a rapidly changing world due to unpredictable man-made changes,” says Barbara Frei. “It might be safer to repeat a behavior that was recently successful than to rely on patterns that were perfected long ago but might no longer be safe.”
1. What is the first paragraph mainly about?| A．It describes animals’ habitats. | B．It compares different species. |
| C．It talks about migration models. | D．It introduces a tracking technology. |
| A．The opening for learning and practice. |
| B．The unique living habit of Cory’s shearwaters. |
| C．The process scientists track Cory’s shearwaters’ movements. |
| D．The way Cory’s shearwaters form their migration patterns. |
| A．They travel as much as adult birds. | B．They lower the speed for exploration. |
| C．They move in a predictable manner. | D．They look for a course with their parents. |
| A．Exploration refinement contributes to birds’ adaptability. |
| B．Man-made changes make migration easier. |
| C．Animals make a safer journey via a fixed track. |
| D．A combination of strategies assures migration success |
2 . In English it’s common to say, “I know this town like the back of my hand!” While we may know our towns really well, how well do we actually know our hands?
Matthew Longo and his team from University College London studied the left hands of 100 people. With their hands placed palms down under a board, Longo’s team gave the instruction to point to their knuckles (指关节) and fingertips with a marker pen. How did they do? Not that well.
In the experiment, according to Longo, “people think their hands are wider than they actually are.”
“It is connected to our sense of position,” explained Longo. Humans know where different parts of our bodies are, even if we can’t see them. It tells us whether a joint (关节) is straight or not.
| A．More nerves, larger a body part seems. |
| B．Let’s see how our humans know our body parts. |
| C．It’s essential to the sizes and shapes of our body. |
| D．Maybe not quite as well as we think, said a scientific study. |
| E．The same can happen with body parts having a lot of nerves. |
| F．They also thought their fingers were shorter than their true lengths. |
| G．Our brains know the body sizes and shapes from the maps they make for themselves. |
3 . In a response to the threat posed by rising sea levels, South Korea showed the world’s first model of sustainable floating city in Busan.
“Sea level rise poses a threat for some small islands and some low-lying coasts,” says a recent report. The global sea level has risen by eight to nine inches since 1880. What’s more frightening is that one-third of the rise in sea level happened in the last 25 years.
The floating city aims to provide technology for coastal cities facing severe land shortages that are combined by climatic threats. The city will serve as the “world’s first model sustainable floating city” aiming to be “a structure that rises with the sea” supplying its own food, energy and water.
The floating city has six combined systems: zero waste and circular systems, closed-loop water systems, food, net-zero energy, innovative movement, and coastal habitat regeneration. These interconnected systems will generate 100 percent of the required energy through floating and rooftop photovoltaic panels(光伏板).
Each neighborhood will treat and refill its own water, process and recycle resources, and provide innovative urban agriculture. The floating city is the world’s first model of a sustainable floating community. The interconnected neighborhoods spread across 6.3 hectares that can hold a community of12,000 people. Starting from a community of 3 platforms with 12,000 residents and visitors, it has the potential to expand to more than 20 platforms. The floating platforms have dozens of productive stations with photovoltaic panels and greenhouses that can expand and contract(收缩) over time based on the city’s needs.
“I take seriously our commitment ‘ The First to the Future’. Our common future is at risk in the face of sea level rise and its impact on coastal cities,” said Busan Mayor Park Heong-joon, who has set a schedule, including turning Busan into a green smart city and compete for World Expo 2030.
This is as frightening as it is exciting to reach such an achievement, but living in a city that is like the communities where people try to survive in the movie Water World is kind of unhappy.
1. Why does South Korea build the floating city?| A．To deal with the sea level rise. | B．To develop the sustainable energy. |
| C．To increase the land to grow plants. | D．To help reduce the global temperature. |
| A．It doesn’t need agriculture. | B．It has six separate systems. |
| C．It produces energy by rooftop. | D．It can provide almost everything by itself. |
| A．How the floating city will operate in its way. |
| B．How many people the floating city will hold. |
| C．How the floating city will produce its energy. |
| D．How the floating city will recycle its resources. |
| A．Busan witnesses sea level rise. | B．Rising sea level threatens Busan. |
| C．Living in a floating city is exciting. | D．The first floating city is on the way. |
4 . Endangered polar bears are breeding (繁殖) with grizzly bears (灰熊), creating “pizzly” bears, which is being driven by climate change, scientists say.
As the world warms and Arctic sea ice thins, starving polar bears are being forced ever further south, where they meet grizzlies, whose ranges are expanding northwards. And with that growing contact between the two come increasing hybrids (杂交种).
With characteristics that could give the hybrids an advantage in warming northern habitats, some scientists guess that they could be here to stay. “Usually, hybrids aren’t better suited to their environments than their parents, but these hybrids are able to search for a broader range of food sources,” Larisa DeSantis, an associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, told Live Science.
The rise of “pizzly” bears appears with polar bears’ decline: their numbers are estimated to decrease by more than 30% in the next 30 years. This sudden fall is linked partly to “pizzly” bears taking up polar bears’ ranges, where they outcompete them, but also to polar bears’ highly specialized diets.
“Polar bears mainly consumed soft foods even during the Medieval Warm Period, a previous period of rapid warming,” DeSantis said, referring to fat meals such as seals. “Although all of these starving polar bears are trying to find alternative food sources, like seabird eggs, it could be a tipping point for their survival.” Actually, the calories they gain from these sources do not balance out those they burn from searching for them. This could result in a habitat ready for the hybrids to move in and take over, leading to a loss in biodiversity if polar bears are replaced.
“We’re having massive impacts with climate change on species,” DeSantis said. “The polar bear is telling us how bad things are. In some sense, “pizzly” bears could be a sad but necessary compromise given current warming trends.”
1. Why do polar bears move further south?| A．To create hybrids. | B．To expand territory. |
| C．To relieve hunger. | D．To contact grizzlies. |
| A．Broader habitats. | B．More food options. |
| C．Climate preference. | D．Improved breeding ability. |
| A．A rare chance. | B．A critical stage. |
| C．A positive factor. | D．A constant change. |
| A．Polar bears are changing diets for climate change. |
| B．Polar bears have already adjusted to climate change. |
| C．“Pizzly” bears are on the rise because of global warming. |
| D．“Pizzly”bears have replaced polar bears for global warming. |
July 2023 was the world’s warmest month on record, with heat waves spreading across North America, Asia and Europe. How to cool the planet
According to Euro news, a European television news network, one idea
However, following the report,
6 . “I was not exceptional at all,” Claudia Goldin once told me of her time as an economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. But as the course progressed, she said, “I felt like lightbulbs were going on in my head.” On October 9 the brightness of those lights was confirmed, as she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.
Goldin found men relatively dull, at least as a topic of study. Their labour was uniform compared to that of women, who might switch between caring for children, toiling (辛苦工作) in the family businesses or sweating somewhere else. But this complexity was harder to measure. According to America’s historical statistics, for example, their occupation was often unhelpfully listed as “wife”. So Goldin set out to measure their work properly.
The standard pattern of development was once that as countries got richer, women were pulled into the labour market. But by painstakingly stitching together different data sets, Goldin established that America’s path was more complicated, and that growth in the 1800s coincided with women moving away from work other than domestic labour.
Why? For a start, factory jobs were harder to combine with childcare than, say, sewing at home. And richer families could afford to spare women the indignity of toil. Goldin argued that stigma (污名) reinforced this, or the idea that “only a husband who is lazy and neglectful of his family would allow his wife to do such labour.” Later the stigma faded — the office clerk job of the 20th century was easier, and consistent with the impression of a supportive spouse. With the arrival of tight labour markets in the 1950s, discriminatory policies against hiring married women were virtually abandoned.
Today, women still work and earn less than men. As social norms have shifted and real barriers have fallen, Goldin says that most of the remaining gender gaps facing college-educated women are due to something else. So-called “greedy jobs” reward round-the-clock work and are conflicting with being on call for children. Perhaps men should also share the family burden and allow their partners to be more professionally involved instead.
1. How does Claudia Goldin find women’s domestic labour?| A．Complicated to understand. | B．Tricky to assess. |
| C．Less changeable than men’s work. | D．More valuable than men’s career. |
| A．They took an active part in workforce. |
| B．They were comfortable enough not to work. |
| C．They stood a good chance in office jobs. |
| D．They were still stuck in household chores. |
| A．To explain the current gender gaps. |
| B．To introduce the employee reward system. |
| C．To call on men to stay at home. |
| D．To expose the greedy nature of capitalists. |
| A．Gender Pay Gap Research Wins the Nobel Prize in Economics |
| B．How Goldin Transformed Our Understanding of Women’s Work |
| C．Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equality |
| D．Do Greedy Jobs Cause the Gender Pay Inequality |
7 . The commonly held belief that it takes 21 days to form a new habit can be traced back to a 1960 book by plastic surgeon Maxwel Maltz called Psycho-Cybernetics. In his work treating patients who had gone through facial reconstruction surgery, Maltz noticed that it typically took around three weeks for them to adjust to seeing their new faces in the mirror. He also found that individuals who had lost a limb still sensed “phantom(幻觉的)”pains in the missing arm or leg for about 21 days.
Based on these perceptions(认知) of recovery time after significant physical changes, Maltz theorized in his book that it likely takes a minimum of 21 days for the neurological path ways in our brains associated with old behaviors and habits to go away, and for new mental images and routines to take firm root. This idea of a standardized 21-day formation period for habits soon became widely accepted.
However, Maltz was drawing causal inferences rather than conducting strict scientific research. It wasn’t until 2010 that health psychologist Phillippa Lally at University College London decided to properly study habit formation timelines. She designed a year-long experiment that tracked 96participants as they each established a single new habit of their choosing. Every day, subjects reported on whether they successfully performed their intended behavior that day as well as how automatic the action felt.
Lally’ findings revealed that on average, it took 66 days before a habit became a normal part of a routine and felt automatic. But results varied widely, with habits forming anywhere from 18 days up to 254 days between individuals. Consistency (连 贯 性) was the key factor in successfully making a behavior habitual, with sometimes missing days not stopping overall progress.
This landmark study proved the assumed 21-day standard to be false and showed that a wide range of timelines are normal.
1. What is Maltz’s assumption based on?| A．A strict scientific research. | B．Psychological work. |
| C．His personal observations. | D．Carefully designed surveys. |
| A．To support Maltz’s theory on habit formation. |
| B．To explore the factors in affecting habit formation. |
| C．To identify the timelines for establishing new habits. |
| D．To explain advantages of developing good behaviors. |
| A．It is harder to form a new habit than to stick to an old one. |
| B．There are large individual differences in forming habits. |
| C．Most participants took 66 days to make a behavior habitual. |
| D．Occasional stops have a big effect on the process of habit formation. |
| A．Does It Really Take 21 Days to Build a New Habit? |
| B．How Do We Develop Some Positive Daily Routines? |
| C．What Are the Key Aspects to Establish a New Habit? |
| D．When Is the Best Time to Start Positive Daily Routines? |
8 . Recently researchers are discovering that learning is easier, quicker and more long-lasting if it involves the body. To some extent, the discovery should come as no surprise. Consider that many of us probably began to understand basic arithmetic (算术) by counting on our fingers before learning to count in our head.
Conventional thinking had it that as we grew, we became more able to think abstractly (抽象地), which might suggest teachers should help wean children off body gestures to prepare them for the adult world. But in truth, the physical world never really leaves our thinking. For example, when we process verbs such as lick, kick and pick, medical scanners show that the parts of our brain that control the muscles in our face, legs and hands become more active.
This theory is called embodied cognition (体验认知), and it suggests that what goes on in our minds comes from our actions and interactions with the world around us. It means that encouraging children to think and learn in a completely abstract way might actually make lessons harder for them to understand and remember.
Science is beginning to support the idea that actions really might speak louder than words in the classroom. Spencer Kelly, a psychologist at Colgate University in New York, has found that people spend three times as much time making gestures when the message they convey is particularly important. Kelly has also found evidence that students like a teacher better when that teacher uses arm and hand movements to emphasize points. Meanwhile, Susan Wagner Cook, a psychologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has found that children pick up new concepts more effectively if they are taught to mirror and repeat the gestures their teacher uses, and that lessons involving words and gestures live longer in a student’s memory than lessons using words alone.
1. The underlined phrase “wean children off body gestures” in paragraph 2 means“ ”?| A．let children be aware of body gestures. |
| B．encourage children to use body gestures. |
| C．give children an account of body gestures. |
| D．make children stop using body gestures. |
| A．Our minds can decide our actions. |
| B．It encourages students to study in an abstract way. |
| C．Interacting with the surroundings is important for one’s cognition. |
| D．Interacting with the world makes lessons harder for us to learn. |
| A．Young students like to mirror their teacher’s gestures. |
| B．Body movements can raise a teacher’s popularity. |
| C．Body language is more powerful than spoken language. |
| D．Teachers use few body gestures when the message is important . |
| A．A new finding about learning. | B．Disadvantages of thinking abstractly. |
| C．The function of body language. | D．A study on classroom teaching. |
9 . In the movie “The Wrong Trousers”, a pair of futuristic trousers lets people walk on walls and ceilings. Inspired by the movie, researchers in England created “The Right Trousers”, a set of trousers embedded(嵌入) with electrical pumps to force air into tiny tubes that expand and can help elderly or disabled people with issues like getting up or improving blood flow. Now, material scientists, computer programmers and fabric designers are working to advance robotic clothing.
In June, researchers in Australia created robotic fibers, which can make fabric move automatically. Last year, scientists at MIT built fiber batteries that could be embedded into clothes and power robotic clothing. In recent years, Google partnered with brands like Levi’s and Adidas to put sensors in jackets, backpacks and shoes, letting users access their phones instantly. Researchers said they could soon unlock an era where clothing will act more like a computer, sensing how your body feels and telling your clothes how to help.
At the University of New South Wales in Australia, researchers are creating fabrics that can shape-shift. Thanh Nho Do, a senior lecturer at the school, said his team has created tiny tubes that can weave into sheets of fabric. These tubes can make fabric take various preprogrammed shapes. But challenges still remain for Do’s team, notably around making these robotic tubes smaller so they can weave easily with other fabrics.
Rebecca Kramer Bottiglio from Yale University agreed that many challenges remain before smart clothing “reaches their full potential.” It will be challenging to make these clothes, equipped with fibers and technology, strong enough to go through multiple cycles in the laundry, she said. Despite that, she says researchers will figure out a way forward. “Recent breakthroughs point toward a not-so-distant future where smart clothing will be a part of our everyday life.” she said.
1. What inspired the researchers to come up with “The Right Trousers”?| A．A film. |
| B．A blood issue. |
| C．The way electrical pumps work. |
| D．The way the elderly and disabled move. |
| A．They put sensors in clothes. |
| B．They created movable robotic fibers. |
| C．They made batteries for robotic clothing. |
| D．They released smart clothing connected to cellphones. |
| A．Making robotic tubes smaller. |
| B．Keeping robotic tubes properly shaped. |
| C．Producing stronger robotic tubes. |
| D．Programming the shape of robotic tubes. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Indifferent. | C．Worried. | D．Hopeful. |
10 . Running is often tiring and a lot of hard work, but nothing beats the feeling you get after finishing a long workout around the track.
But while it’s long been believed that endorphins (内啡肽) —chemicals in the body that cause happiness—are behind the so-called “runner’s high”, a study suggested that there may be more to this phenomenon than we previously knew.
According to a recent study published by a group of scientists from several German universities, a group of chemicals called endocannabinoids (内源性大麻素) may actually be responsible for this familiar great feeling.
To test this theory, the scientists turned to mice. Both mice and humans release high levels of endorphins and endocannabinoids after exercise. After exercising on running wheels, the mice seemed happy and relaxed and displayed no signs of anxiety. But after being given a drug to block their endorphins, the mice’s behavior didn’t seem to change. However, when their endocannabinoids were blocked with a different drug, their runners’ high symptoms seemed to fade.
“The long-held notion of endorphins being responsible for the runner’s high is false. Endorphins are effective pain relievers, but only when it comes to the pain in your body and muscles you feel after working out,” Patrick Lucas Austin wrote on science blog Lifchacker.
Similar studies are yet to be carried out on humans, but it’s already known that exercise is a highly effective way to get rid of stress or anxiety. The UK’s National Health Service even prescribes (开药 方) exercise to patients who are suffering from depression. “Being depressed can leave you feeling low in energy, which might put you off being more active. Regular exercise can improve your mood if you have depression, and its especially useful for people with mild to moderate (中等的) depression,” it wrote on its website.
It seems like nothing can beat that feeling we get after a good workout, even if we don’t fully understand where it comes from. At least if we’re feeling down, we know that all we have to do is to put on our running shoes.
1. What did scientists from German universities recently discover?| A．Working out is a highly effective way to treat depression. |
| B．The runner’s high could be caused by endocannabinoids. |
| C．Endorphins may contribute to one’s high spirits after running. |
| D．The level of endorphins and endocannabinoids could affect one’s mood. |
| A．To find what reduces the runner’s high symptoms. |
| B．To see the specific symptoms of the runner’s high. |
| C．To identify what is responsible for the runner’s high. |
| D．To test what influences the level of endocannabinoids released. |
| A．Effect. | B．Goal. | C．Opinion. | D．Question |
| A．They can help ease depression symptoms. |
| B．They are the best way to treat depression. |
| C．They only work for those with serious depression. |
| D．They can help people completely recover from depression. |
