| A. that B. amazing C. an D. independently E. is F. to carry G. length H. improving I. of J. began |
The world’s first ship with
The equipment on the ship is highly localized (本十化的), because the key parts have all been
2 . The sales advertisements tempt (诱惑): Blue-light-blocking glasses are supposed to protect eyes from the effects of short-wave length light emitting from our smartphones, computer screens and LED lights. Given how much time we spend on our devices, this sounds like a smart investment, right? After all, eye strain (疲劳) is a real issue and can lead to poor sleep and even eye diseases. The glasses can cost $15 all the way up to several hundred dollars. But do they work?
Elizabeth Esparaz, an ophthalmologist (眼科专家) based in Cleveland, Ohio, says the science that manufacturers share as they promote these glasses can be confusing. For starters, blue light is not just about tech devices, and it’s not always bad. “The sun emits a much higher intensity of blue light than human-made devices, which helps our mood, alertness and sleep-wake cycle,” says Dr. Esparaz.
The problem is blue light at night: It contains the release of melatonin. “Melatonin helps regulate our circadian rhythms (生理节奏) and makes us sleepy,” says Dr. Esparaz.
So, in theory, wearing blue-light-blocking glasses should help people who watch movies in bed or read from a tablet at night avoid sleeplessness. A review study from the University of Oklahoma that looked al 24 previous studies found that people affected by sleep disorders, jet lag and shift work fell asleep faster after using these glasses.
As for eye strain, a 2021 Australian study showed that those wearing the glasses did not experience less eye strain than those using clear glasses. And a 2018 review study, also by Australian researchers found insufficient evidence that they prevent certain eye diseases.
“These glasses aren’t going to be harmful,” says Dr. Esparaz, But, she adds, a lack of standardization in the industry means there’s no way to know if one pair is better than another. A more reliable solution: Turn on the blue-light-filtering function on your devices and limit screen time before bed. To help with eye strain, Dr. Esparaz suggests taking breaks and using lubricating eye drops.
1. What is Dr. Esparaz’s attitude toward business publicity?| A．Unclear. | B．Tolerant. | C．Approving. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．It can be beneficial. | B．It may improve sleep. |
| C．It actually causes health issues. | D．It merely comes from digital devices. |
| A．helps prevent eye disease | B．are not harmful to eyesight |
| C．contributes to no less eye strain | D．benefits those with sleep disorders |
| A．Blue-light-blocking Glasses: Your Best Choice | B．Blue-light-blocking Glasses: Good or Bad |
| C．Blue-light-blocking Glasses: A Good Business | D．Blue-light-blocking Glasses: Smart and Cool |
3 . Could a new treatment developed by the US company Lilly mean “the beginning of the end” of Alzheimer’s? Could we even cure it some day? These are headlines and questions swirling (流传) around after news of a new drug, called donanemab, showed promising results in phase-3 trials.
The brain science behind Alzheimer’s is complex, but CT and MRJ scans suggest that poisonous changes occur in the brain, including the abnormal build-up of proteins called amyloid plaques and tau tangles. The damage starts in the parts of the brain essential for forming memories but then spreads throughout the organ, with brain tissue shrinking significantly.
Developing treatments for Alzheimer’s has been a challenge, with almost 20 years passing with no new drugs. But in the last year, two new ones have emerged: donanemab and lecanemab. Neither are cures or magic bullets for the disease, but they do address key symptoms. They target the amyloid proteins that can accumulate in the brain and damage neurons, slowing down its progression.
While this news is exciting, there are major caveats. One is whether it will ever become available on the NHS. The cost is estimated to be about £20,000 per person per year of treatment.
Another is the serious side effects: in the study, brain swelling occurred in 24% of participants and brain bleeding occurred in 31.4% on the drug compared with 13.6% in the placebo (安慰剂) group. There were also three deaths during the trial.
Part of the problem for me, as an academic, in assessing the drug is that the full results of the trial haven’t yet been shared publicly or published in a peer-review journal. We cannot access the full data or examine the trial yet, and there is always a motivation for private companies to overstate the effectiveness of new drugs. Trial results need to be assessed by an independent body of experts.
While it is unlikely to change clinical practice until at least 2025, the news of donanemab is again an indication that science is continuing to make progress when it comes to treating the major causes of illness and death, even one related to the highly complex inner workings of the brain, So, there are caveats and the need for caution, but these new drugs are indeed the grounds for that rare thing these days: hope.
1. What can we learn about Alzheimer’s from the passage?| A．There exists a new drug to cure it completely. |
| B．Most people will develop Alzheimer’s when they are old. |
| C．It is caused by the accumulation of some proteins in the brain. |
| D．It results from the loss of memories as people get older. |
| A．Warnings. | B．Discussions. | C．Debates. | D．Weaknesses. |
| A．It has serious side effects such as brain bleeding and deaths. |
| B．The effectiveness may be blown up without fair assessment. |
| C．The cost of the new drug is out of reach for ordinary people. |
| D．There is no possibility for new drugs to be admitted into the NHS. |
| A．Approving. | B．Doubtful. | C．Unclear. | D．Indifferent. |
4 . Have you ever received a gift that was so clearly, not your taste that you wondered if perhaps it had been handed to you by mistake? Worse, have you ever given a present and watched your friend look as though she had opened the wrong box? Maybe she responded with a polite “Why, thank you,” but you knew you had missed the mark. Why do presents sometimes go wrong? And what do your choices (good and bad) reflect about your personal qualities?
Choosing the right gift is an art, I believe. It calls for empathy—the ability to put yourself into someone else’s head and heart.We’re all able to do this; in fact, we’re born with a kind of natural empathy.After the earliest period of childhood, however, it needs to be reinforced (加强) —by our parents, teachers, friends. When it isn’t, we’re not able to understand other people’s feelings as sharply.This can show in the gifts we select, and so can many other emotional(情感的) qualities.
Think back to the presents you’ve given over the past year, the time and effort you put into your selection, how much you spent, your thoughts while you were shopping, and your feelings when the receiver opened the package.Keep in mind that what you choose displays your inner world.(Of course, you may express yourself differently with different friends, relatives, and other people you know.)
We live in a society where exchanging presents is an important part of communication.Ignoring the tradition won’t make it go away.If you really dislike such a tradition, tell your friends ahead of time.
1. The underlined expression “you had missed the mark” means you had failed to _______.| A．make her feel better | B．keep your friendship |
| C．get the expected effect | D．receive a present in return |
| A．Natural empathy needs to be reinforced. |
| B．Emotional changes influence one’s choice of gifts. |
| C．Selecting the right gift is an ability people are born with. |
| D．Choosing gifts requires one to understand the receivers. |
| A．the choice of gifts reflects one’s emotional qualities |
| B．one learns from what he did in the past |
| C．attention should be paid to the receivers’ responses |
| D．one should spend more time choosing gifts |
| A．Ways of Choosing Gifts | B．An Important Tradition |
| C．Exchanging Presents | D．Message in a Gift |
5 . A small study out of Skidmore College examined the advantages of morning vs, evening exercise for both women and men. Paul, professor for health at Skidmore, led the study.
“We had the groups divided into evening and morning groups,” he says. “We found women and men answered differently to different types of exercise depending on the time of the day, which surprised us.”
The study showed that for women who want to lower blood pressure (血压), the risk of heart disease or reduce fat, morning exercise works best. Those women hoping for upper body muscle (肌肉) gains or mood (心情) improvement should consider evening exercise. For the men, the findings were somewhat different: Evening exercise lowers blood pressure, the risk of heart disease, and feelings of tiredness. But similar to women, they burn more fat with morning exercise.
“For many people, the best time to exercise will depend on their chronotype,” says Heisz, author of Move the Body, Heal the Mind.
“Chronotype is your body’s natural habit to sleep at a certain time—it’s what decides whether you’re a night owl or an early bird. For the 25% of the population that considers themselves a night owl, getting both enough sleep and enough exercise can be difficult,” adds Heisz.
He continues, “Sleep—which provides your body the necessary time to recover (恢复) and make gains from exercise—should always be the first choice. When it comes to exercise, regardless of research on the advantages of certain exercises at particular times of the day, your results will not be good if it doesn’t allow enough time for sleep.”
1. What can women get by doing evening exercise according to the study?| A．A fat loss. |
| B．A good mood. |
| C．A lower blood pressure. |
| D．A smaller risk of heart disease. |
| A．Give an example. | B．Tell the difference. |
| C．Do an experiment. | D．Explain a term. |
| A．Enough sleep. | B．Low-fat food. |
| C．Plenty of water. | D．Lots of exercise. |
| A．A Night Owl or An Early Bird |
| B．Why Fitness Plan Being Important |
| C．How to Change Your Exercise Time |
| D．The Best Time of a Day to Exercise |
6 . Boost your Memory
When trying to memorize new material, it’s easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform.
Although it’s known that we should pace our studies, new research suggests that we should aim for “minimal distraction” during these breaks.
The memory-boosting benefits of undisturbed rest were documented in 1900. In one experiment, the researcher first asked the participants to learn a list of syllables. Following a short period, half the group was immediately given a second list to learn, while the rest were given a six-minute break before continuing.
In the early 2000s, two other researchers led several follow-up studies. In healthy participants, they have found that short periods of rest can also improve our memory of places. More crucially, this advantage stays a week after the original learning task and it seems to benefit young and old people alike.
The exact mechanism is still unknown. It is now accepted that once memories are initially encoded, they pass through a period of consolidation (巩固) that bond them in long-term storage.
| A．Our memory is easily distracted by new information. |
| B．This was once thought to happen primarily during sleep. |
| C．We tend to avoid activities contradictory to memory tasks. |
| D．Yet doing nothing occasionally maybe exactly what you need. |
| E．So don’t check your emails, or surf the web on your smartphone. |
| F．When tested one hour later, both groups showed strikingly different patterns of recall. |
| G．They have also found similar benefits for people in the earlier stages of Alzheimer’s disease. |
7 . The “diet” in diet drinks maybe a false promise for some soda lovers. True, they deliver the taste of a soda experience, without the calories. Yet, new research shows they can also leave people with increased appetite.
A study published recently in JAMA Network open adds to the evidence that drinks made with sucralose, an artificial sweetener (甜味剂), may increase the appetite among some people. “We found females and overweight people had greater brain reward activity after consuming the artificial sweetener,” says study author Katie Page, a physician at the University of Southern California. Both groups ate more food after consuming drinks with sucralose, compared with after regular sugar-sweetened drinks. In contrast, the study found males and people of healthy weight did not have an increase in either brain reward activity or hunger response, suggesting they’re not affected in the same way.
One theory is that it’s not the artificial sweetener itself that has a direct effect on the body. The idea is that artificial sweeteners may confuse the body by tricking it into thinking sugar is coming. “You are supposed to get sugar after something tastes sweet,” explains Swithers, “Your body has been used to that.” But the sugar never arrives, which may lead to the body’s less efficiency in processing sugar that s consumed later.
Swithers’ lab has also documented that when animals with a history of consuming artificial sweeteners get real sugar, their blood sugar levels rise higher than those of animals not fed artificial sweeteners. “It’s a small effect, but overtime this could contribute to potentially significant consequences,” she says. If this is happening in some people who consume diet soda, it could add to the risk of Type 2 diabetes (糖尿病), because when blood sugar rises, the body has to release more insulin (胰岛素) to absorb the sugar. “So what you’re doing is that you are kind of pushing the system harder,” Swithers says.
1. What can we learn from Katie page’s study?| A．Females enjoying diet drinks consume more food. |
| B．Artificial sweeteners help males with better appetite. |
| C．Diet drinks increase hunger response of healthy people. |
| D．people consuming sucralose have greater brain reward activity. |
| A．The effect of sugar. | B．Response to sweetness. |
| C．Artificial sweetener. | D．The absence of sweetness. |
| A．More insulin release helps sugar level rise. |
| B．people drinking diet soda hardly absorb sugar. |
| C．Type 2 diabetes mainly results from artificial sweeteners. |
| D．Consuming artificial sweeteners might cause health problems. |
| A．The potential of artificially-sweetened drinks. |
| B．The wisdom of choosing healthy sweet drinks. |
| C．The underlying link between diet drinks and health. |
| D．The differences among artificially-sweetened drinks. |
8 . Artificial intelligence (AI ) has been increasingly good at fooling people. A series of photos showing former US president Donald Trump being aggressively arrested by police have caught people’s attention. They were fake but very convincing.
Created by the AI program Midjourney, the photos were highly realistic, from the characters’ movements to the surroundings. However, many details can give away the fact that they are made by AI. The Washington Post’s technology writer Shira Ovide shared her tips. The main idea is to spot the problems anything that would look strange in a photo.
AI software has a history of generating human hands incorrectly. It sometimes can create hands with more than five fingers. This is because AI isn’t sure what a “hand” exactly is, according to Popular Science. The data AI uses to learn often show hands and fingers in various gestures, which can be very confusing for AI.
AI-generated images also usually contain details that are against reality. To spot this, focus on items like accessories. For example, people in an image may be missing earrings or one part of their sunglasses. If there’s text in an image, such as a newspaper or poster, it’s usually garbled (篡改), even though the text may look realistic from a distance.
Another thing AI is terrible at handling is the background. If there’s a crowd in the image, people’s faces in the background are usually blurry - or they don’t have faces at all!
The development of AI-generated art also raises alarm bells about how these fake images could be used to spread misinformation. “I think misinformation is going to hit an all-time high,” Jamie Cohen, a digital culture and AI expert in the US, told New York Post. Generating an AI artwork is to “create reality”, Cohen argued, adding that, being able to tell whether the work is real or not requires high media literacy(素养) skills. “The world may not be ready for how realistic the images have become,” Shane Kittelson, a US researcher, told The Washington Post.
1. Why are Donald Trump’s photos mentioned in the first paragraph?| A．To draw more people’s attention. |
| B．To make people convinced of the news. |
| C．To show the AI-generated images were fake. |
| D．To prove that it’s easy for AI to cheat people. |
| A．It is unable to recognize human hands. |
| B．The data it uses to learn contain errors. |
| C．It doesn’t fully understand human hands. |
| D．It has insufficient data about human hands. |
| A．AI artworks may not be reflective of true creativity. |
| B．It’s high time to address the risks posed by AI works. |
| C．AI artworks will replace traditional art forms in the future. |
| D．Detecting real art demands strong media literacy competence. |
| A．A news report. | B．A diary. |
| C．A research paper. | D．A science fiction. |
9 . If you had boarded a passenger plane in 1950, you would have seen five people in the cockpit (驾驶舱): two pilots, a radio operator, a navigator and a flight engineer. Over the years, technical advances have gradually removed the need for the last three, leaving just two pilots. That has been the norm (标准) in commercial aviation for decades.
However, things could be simplified further — one of the two remaining pilots could soon go. Many military aircraft are already manned by a single pilot, and for commercial aviation this would mean stepping into a brave new world.
But how will airlines make this brave innovation come true? One way is to greatly increase automation in the cockpit, devoting more tasks to computers. Another is to shift the same tasks from the cockpit to the ground. “The latter approach seems to be more workable, at least in the short term, because much of what is required already exists,” says Patrick Smith, an airline pilot flying Boeing 767 aircraft. “A trained ground operator could observe a number of flights at once and even fully control the plane remotely if needed.”
It’s true that single-pilot operations could help airlines save money, but there is another reason which makes them quicken their pace for this crucial breakthrough. Boeing predicts a need for 600,000 new pilots in the next two decades, but by some estimates, there will be a deficit (赤字) of at least 34,000 pilots globally by 2025. Reducing the number of pilots on some crews or aircraft could lessen the impact of this.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to a single pilot will be selling the idea to passengers. In 2019, Don Hairis, a professor at Coventry University, conducted a survey on the prospect of flying on an airliner with just one pilot. Just a minority of participants said they’d be willing to take that flight, and the general idea was that removing a pilot increased the possibility of accidents. In the study, Harris concluded that the single-crew airliner would be still probably 20 years away.
1. What is the potential trend in commercial aviation according to the text?| A．It will make air travel eco-friendly. |
| B．It will switch to single-pilot operations. |
| C．It will tighten its flight control for safety concerns. |
| D．It will bring in many military aircraft to the industry. |
| A．Raising the standards in admitting new pilots. | B．Making pilots adaptable to different situations. |
| C．Using computers to automate the flight process. | D．Gaining piloting support from ground operators. |
| A．The shortage of pilots. | B．The need for new airlines. |
| C．The airlines’ brave innovation. | D．The financial problem airlines face. |
| A．The prospect of single-crew airliners is bright. |
| B．It's urgent that airlines reduce airplane accidents. |
| C．Passengers are willing to try new types of airplanes. |
| D．Airlines have a long way to go before the innovation occurs. |
10 . When the company OpenAI developed its new artificial intelligence (AI) program, ChatGPT, in late 2022, educators began to worry. ChatGPT could create text that seemed like a human wrote it. How could teachers discover whether students were using language created by an AI chatbot to cheat on a writing task?
As a linguist who studies the effects of technology on how people read, write and think, I believe there are other more pressing concerns besides cheating. These include whether AI, more generally, threatens student writing skills, the value of writing as a process, and the importance of regarding writing as a tool for thinking.
As part of my research on the effects of AI on human writing, I surveyed young adults in the U.S. about some issues related to those effects. One participant said that at some point if you depend on predictive text, you’re going to lose your spelling abilities. Enter “Was Rom” into a Google search and you’re given a list of choices like “Was Rome built in a day”. Type “ple” into a text message and you’re offered “please” and “plenty”. These tools complete our sentences automatically, giving us little chance to think about our spelling, and continuously asking us to follow their suggestions.
Evan Selinger, a philosopher, worried that predictive texting reduces the power of writing as a form of mental activity and personal expression. “By encouraging us not to think too deeply about our words, predictive technology may change how we deal with each other,” Selinger wrote. “We give others more algorithms (算法) and less of ourselves. Automation can stop us thinking and the resulting text didn’t feel like mine anymore.”
I asked ChatGPT whether it was a threat to humans’ motivation to write. The bot responded: “There will always be a demand for creative, original content that requires the unique viewpoint of a human writer.” It continued: “Writing serves many purposes beyond just the creation of content, such as self-expression, communication, and personal growth, which can continue to encourage people to write even if certain types of writing can be automated.”
I was glad to find the program had seemingly admitted its limitations.
1. What is the author’s main concern about ChatGPT?| A．Whether it will lead to students’ cheating. |
| B．Whether it will shape students’ writing style. |
| C．How students will make use of it at school. |
| D．What effects it will have on students’ writing. |
| A．Give us more creative ideas. | B．Make us write like a machine. |
| C．Encourage us to think more deeply. | D．Make us tend to ignore grammatical mistakes. |
| A．Writing will become completely automated. | B．Robots will work with humans in writing. |
| C．Robot writing will become more creative. | D．Human writing will still matter a lot. |
| A．What impact will AI bring to writing? | B．What is the future of modern literature? |
| C．How to improve writing with AI’s help? | D．How to apply AI technology to education? |
