1 . Intrigued by Maya civilization from a very young age, 15-year-old Canadian William Gadoury thought he had made an incredible discovery from his study of ancient star charts. Through comparison, he found that the locations of the 117 known Maya cities correspond to the positions of the stars. Based on this, he believed he had spotted an unknown Maya city buried deep in the jungle.     1    

It isn’t difficult to see why. Extending south from parts of what we now know as Mexico into Central America, Maya civilization has been surrounded by mystery since its rediscovery in the 19th century. The Maya built impressive palaces and temples, including their representative step pyramids. What is most extraordinary about these complex structures is how they were built without the use of wheels, metal tools or even animal power. The Maya’s understanding of mathematics and astronomy was also quite amazing.     2    

The fact that Maya society was technologically primitive makes its achievements all the more incredible and mysterious.     3     By 700 AD, Maya civilization was at its peak. Yet, within just a couple of generations, it began to mysteriously decline. The cities were left to be taken back by the jungle. When Europeans arrived in Central America in the early 16th century to claim its riches, the remaining Maya people were living in small settlements.

Why Maya civilization collapsed remains a mystery. Was it a natural disaster? A deadly disease? Conflicts between cities? Or was it a combination of several different factors?     4     They had turned wetlands into fields for growing grains, and had dug huge canal systems. As their population expanded, yet more land was needed for agriculture and more trees for construction. By changing the landscape in this way, it is possible that the Maya people unknowingly reduced their ability to deal with natural disasters.

Whatever the reasons, Maya civilization largely disappeared within the deep jungle. Its once—great cities fell into ruin, leaving various mysteries for later people to solve.

A．Research suggests that those natural disasters may have led to the decline of the Maya.

B．But the greatest mystery of all is what caused the Maya to abandon most of their great cities.

C．It turned out that the lucky boy hit the jackpot and the Maya city was eventually brought to light.

D．Some research seems to indicate that the Maya people themselves may have played a part in their downfall.

E．Although his theory has been dismissed by scholars, it shows how powerful the secrets of Ancient Maya civilization are among people.

F．They applied this understanding to the Maya calendar, which was accurate to within 30 seconds per year.

2 . At the top of a hill called Mount Lee in Los Angeles on the west coast of the USA is a very famous sign, recognizable to people around the world. My job is to look after this sign.     1     The first film was made there in 1907 and by 1912, at least 15 independent studios could be found making films around town.

In the 1940s, TV started to become popular and some Hollywood film studios closed, but then TV companies moved in and took them over. Modern Hollywood was born.     2     If one of them ever fell down I would have to put it back up at exactly the same angle. They follow the shape of Mount Lee and this is part of their fame.

I am responsible for maintaining and protecting the sign.     3     When I first arrived in 1989, security was pretty low-tech-we put up a fence around the sign to stop people messing with it. But people just jumped over the fence. The back of the sign was black with graffiti(涂鸦)there was wire across it, but they still got through. So I decided to improve the effectiveness of the security.

Now we have motion-detectors and cameras. Everything goes via the internet to a dedicated surveillance(监控)team watching various structures around the city. Even so, people still try to climb over the barrier, mostly innocent tourists surprised that you can’t walk right up to the sign. But they can get a closer look on one of my regular tours.

    4     They want to light the sign, paint it pink, or cover it in something to promote their product. You’ll get a really enthusiastic marketing executive call up, terribly excited because they think they’re the first person to think of this or that idea. They mostly get turned down. That’s because we don’t like to change the image and we hope it will have the same significance for generations to come.

A．The letters in the sign weren’t straight and still aren’t.

B．I have been working there for nearly 30 years.

C．People call up with the most ridiculous ideas.

D．It says Hollywood and that’s of course the place where films have been made for over a hundred years.

E．We used to have real problems.

F．Payment must be made for those ideas for commercial purposes.

4 . Forks trace their origins back to the ancient Greeks. Forks at that time were fairly large with two tines that aided in the carving of meat in the kitchen. The tines prevented meat from twisting or moving during carving and allowed food to slide off more easily than it would with a knife.

By the 7th century A.D., royal courts of the Middle East began to use forks at the table for dining. From the 10th through the 13th centuries, forks were fairly common among the wealthy in Byzantium. In the 11th century, a Byzantine wife brought forks to Italy; however, they were not widely adopted there until the 16th century. Then in 1533, forks were brought from Italy to France. The French were also slow to accept forks, for using them was thought to be awkward.

In 1608, forks were brought to England by Thomas Coryate, who saw them during his travels in Italy. The English first ridiculed forks as being unnecessary. “Why should a person need a fork when God had given him hands?” they asked. Slowly, however, forks came to be adopted by the wealthy as a symbol of their social status. They were prized possessions made of expensive materials intended to impress guests. By the mid-1600s, eating with forks was considered fashionable among the wealthy British.

Early table forks were modeled after kitchen forks, but small pieces of food often fell through the two tines or slipped off easily. In late 17th century France, larger forks with four curved tines were developed. The additional tines made diners less likely to drop food, and the curved tines served as a scoop so people did not have to constantly switch to a spoon while eating. By the early 19th century, four-tined forks had also been developed in Germany and England and slowly began to spread to America.

1. What is the passage mainly about?

A．The different designs of forks.

B．The spread of fork-aided cooking.

C．The history of using forks for dining.

D．The development of fork-related table manners.

2. By which route did the use of forks spread?

A．Middle EastGreeceEnglandItalyFrance

B．GreeceMiddle EastItalyFranceEngland

C．GreeceMiddle EastFranceItalyGermany

D．Middle EastFranceEnglandItalyGermany

3. How did forks become popular in England?

A．Wealthy British were impressed by the design of forks.

B．Wealthy British thought it awkward to use their hands to eat.

C．Wealthy British gave special forks to the nobles as luxurious gifts.

D．Wealthy British considered dining with forks a sign of social status.

4. Why were forks made into a curved shape?

A．They could be used to scoop food as well.

B．They looked more fashionable in this way.

C．They were designed in this way for export to the US.

D．They ensured the meat would not twist while being cut.

6 . It was one of the most destructive days in the history of our planet, and now we know how it played out. Scientists have pieced together the first day of the dinosaurs’ extinction, by drilling into the crater(火山口)that formed from the asteroid(小行星)that caused their downfall.

The asteroid, which led to the extinction of all dinosaurs that can’t fly, crashed into the Gulf of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 66 million years ago. In 2016, a scientific drilling project by the International Ocean Discovery Program got rocks from the impact site, which has been underwater for a long time. Now, scientists have analysed these rocks to travel back in time to that particular day itself.

“It’s an expanded record of events that we were able to recover from within ground zero,” said Dr Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and leader of this study. “It tells us about impact processes from an eyewitness location.”

In just 24 hours following the impact, a layer of material 130m thick was deposited. This include charcoal, which provides evidence for the intense wildfires that are thought to have been caused by the crash.

Meanwhile, the impact also led to a huge tsunami, an extremely large wave in the sea caused by an earthquake, as evidenced by layers of rocks and sand in the core samples, which appear to have been deposited by flooding waters.

One thing conspicuously missing from the samples, though, is the element of sulphur(硫磺). Although the surrounding area is full of sulphur-rich rocks, the crater is unusually sulphur-free. This supports the idea that the asteroid impact instantly vaporised sulphurous rocks, releasing the sulphur into the atmosphere, where it remained and reflected away the Sun’s light, cooling the Earth’s climate.

Although the impact had destructive effects on a regional level, it’s this large-scale global cooling that’s thought to be behind the dinosaurs’ eventual extinction, as well as that of countless other plant and animal species.

“The real killer has got to be atmospheric,” said Gulick. “The only way you get a global mass extinction like this is an atmospheric effect.”

1. Dr Sean Gulick is quoted in paragraph 3 in order to ______.

A．stress the impact of the crash

B．illustrate the significance of their study

C．explain what they did in their study

D．state the reason for dinosaurs’ death

2. The word “conspicuously”(in paragraph 6)is closest in meaning to“______”.

A．obviously

B．restlessly

C．occasionally

D．potentially

3. Which of the following is a cause of the dramatic drop in temperature mentioned in the passage?

A．The tsunami.

B．The wildfires.

C．The vapourised sulphur.

D．The deposit of rocks.

4. Which of the following might be the best title of the passage?

A．Touching on the dinosaur’s time

B．Drilling into the day the dinosaurs died

C．Why we need to study the atmospheric effect

D．What we should know about the history of our planet

8 . The statue of King Leopold II of Belgium that stands in sight of the royal palace in Brussels has been defaced dozens of times in recent years. Activists have painted its hands and eyes red as a reminder of the brutality that Leopold unleashed in the Congo Free State, a territory in central Africa, at the end of the 19th century. As many as 10 million Congolese-or half of the population-might have perished as Europeans forced entire villages to collect rubber and ivory for export.

Leopold’s exploitation of Congo was a scandal. In 1908, after years of campaigning by journalists, the Belgian state stripped the king of his private possession. The Belgian Congo joined other European colonies in Africa where wanton（恶意的）extraction was to be replaced by a supposedly civilising mission. Yet though less transparently murderous, the “benign” colonialism of elsewhere was often not that different from what happened under Leopold. A new book, “In the Forest of No Joy”, by J. P. Daughton, an American historian, exposes how forced labour in the French Congo（now the Republic of Congo）, on the other side of the river from Leopold’s possession（now the Democratic Republic）, led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Africans.

The book is a masterful, if relentlessly bleak, account of the construction of the Congo-Ocean Railway, a route designed to connect the central African interior to the Atlantic. What makes it so compelling is the divide it exposes between the often admirable intentions of colonial bureaucrats, who did genuinely think they were lifting Africans out of poverty, and the grim reality that they enabled. The application of “modern” government to conquered people could be almost as savage as plunder（掠夺）, Mr Daughton shows.

The railway was the idea of Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazza, an Italian-born French explorer who conquered much of central Africa for France “by exclusively peaceful means”. The French state imagined itself as a bringer of civilisation to Africa, and the railway was to provide a way for the Congolese to take part in world trade. Yet Mr Daughton shows how the colonial administration in Congo had little capacity to build a railway without violence: it claimed to be recruiting paid volunteers while its agents forced Africans to work at gunpoint. Many were marched hundreds of kilometres to the tracks chained at the neck, as slaves had been a century before. Whatever work had to be done, reported Albert Londres, a French journalist, “it’s captives who do it.”

Surprisingly, the French state documented these abuses diligently（the archives provide the source of much of Mr Daughton’s information）. In 1926 one inspector, Jean-Noel-Paul Pegourier, compared the treatment of workers on the railway to the German genocide of the Herero in Namibia before the first world war. Yet unlike the reports of Leopold’s abuses, these observations had little effect, not least because orders issued from Paris or even Brazzaville were simply ignored. Raphael Antonetti, the colonial governor, fought back with an avalanche of legalese.

The railway was a masterpiece of engineering, as Mr Daughton readily admits. For decades it provided the only means of transporting goods within Congo. The wealth of Brazzaville, still so named, was built on it. In Britain and France, the infrastructure bequeathed to former colonies is often cited as an argument for its benefits. But to build it, a weak and stingy state had to rely on brutality. As Mr Daughton reports, “the Congo-Ocean provides an all too-useful case in point for how the language of humanity could be invoked to explain the deaths of thousands.”

1. According to the passage, King Leopold was infamous for ________.

A．taking possession of the private belongings of 10 million Congolese by killing them

B．reviving slavery by illegally transporting the native Congo villagers to Europe

C．being physically handicapped by people in the Congo Free State for his cruel governance

D．his tyrannical and exploitative behaviors imposing forced labor on the Congolese

2. Which of the following statements will Mr Daughton probably disagree with?

A．European bureaucrats’ intention to bring prosperity to the Africans led to unintended consequences.

B．The African workers involved in the railway construction were enslaved and ill-treated.

C．Despite being crowned as a masterpiece of engineering, the railway is of little benefit to local people.

D．Some colonists led no better lives when governed by civilized leaders than by tyrants.

3. Why did the documents made by the French state about the construction workers’ being abused barely contribute to improving the condition?

A．Because the local governor turned a blind eye to the instructions given by higher officials.

B．Because some of the descriptions were groundless and denied by the inspector on the site.

C．Because the local agents fought back by filing a lawsuit against the alleged documents.

D．Because the workers on the railway were contracted volunteers though being treated cruelly.

4. Which of the following can be the best title for the passage?

A．A Brief History of Forced Labor	B．Blood on the Tracks
C．Treasure of Colonialism	D．The Vanishing Humanity

9 . WALLS OF FAME

Famous fortificatlons around the world

THE GREAT WALL CHINA Stretching from the shores of the Yellow Sea at Laolongtou in the east, curving around the top of Beijing and snaking across 5,500 miles of land to Lop Nur, the Great Wall of China, whose story began over 2,400 years ago is undeniably an historic achlevement of engineering and human effort to preserve political control over the population and keep out the invaders.
		HADRIAN's WALL ENGLAND Stretching 73 miles, coast-to-coast across northern England, this wall was built in six years (AD 122-28) during the rule of Emperor Hadrian, and marked the northern limit of the Roman Emplre. Although commonly thought to have been a line of defence to keep Anclent Britons, many historians belleve it may have been designed more to stop the stealing and illegal transportation of cattle.
WALIS OF BABYLON IRAQ The legendarily beautiful city of Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates River was a major city in ancient Mesopotamia, which was famously protected from invading enemies by richly decorated walls, reputed to be strong and thick enough for chariot (二轮战车) races to be held on top of them. Sadly, the walls did not prove unaffected by time, neglect and conflict.			THE BERLIN WALL GERMANY A concrete barrier swiftly erected by the German Democratic Republic in 1961, the Berlin Wall physically divided the city, cutting off West Berlin from communist East Germany for 28 years, until being torn down in 1989 — an event that marked the end of the Cold War.
	THE WALL OF JERICHO PALESTINE Featured apocryphally (虚构地) In the Bible (In which it collapses when the Israelites march around the city, blowing trumpets), the Wall of Jericho did exist. Dating to 8,000 BC, the remains make up the oldest city wall ever discovered.

1. The underline word “fortifications” in the subtitle is closest in meaning to ________.

A．battlefields rich in impressive legends

B．protective forces stationed around cities

C．walls built to defend a place against attack

D．works of engineering to honour emperors

2. Which of the following best fits in the timeline from 1 to 4?

1                                        2                                      4

Past                                                                                                                               Present

Walls of Babylon                         3

A．Walls of Jericho→ the Great wall→ Hadrian's Wall→ the Berlin Wall

B．the Berlin Wail → Hadrian's Wall →the Great wall→Walls of Jericho

C．the Great wall →Walls of Jericho→ Hadrian's Wall → the Berlin Wall

D．Hadrian's Wall →Walls of Jericho →the Great wall→Walls of Babylon

3. Which of the following is true about the features of the walls?

A．The five walls were built over long periods of time.

B．Some walls stretch nationwide while others city wide.

C．The walls were strong since they were made of concrete.

D．Time, neglect and conflict caused the ruin of the five walls

10 . The Native American of northern California were highly skilled at basketry, using the reeds, graeses, barks, and roots they found around them to fashion articles of all sorts and sizes-not only trays, containers, and cooking pots, but hats, boats, fish traps, baby carriers, and ceremonial objects.

Of all these experts, none excelled the Pomo-a group who lived on or near the coast during the 1800's, and whose descendants continue to live in parts of the same region to this day. They made baskets three feet in diameter and others no bigger than a thimble (顶针). The Pomo people were masters of decoration. Some of their baskets were completely covered with shell pendants；others with feathers that made the baskets’ surfaces as soft as the breasts of birds. Moreover, the Pomo people made use of more weaving techniques than did their neighbors. Most groups made al their basketwork by twining--the twisting of a flexible horizontal material, called a weft, around stiffer vertical strands of material, the warp. Others depended primarily on coiling-a process in which a continuous coil of stiff material is held in the desired shape with tight wrapping of flexible strands. Only the Pomo people used both processes with equal ease and frequency. In addition, they made use of four distinct variations on the basic twining process, often employing more than one of them in a single article.

Although a wide variety of materials was available, the Pomo people used only a few. The warp was always made of willow, and the most commonly used weft was sedge root, a woody fiber that could easily be separated into strands no thicker than a thread. For color, the Pomo people used the bark of red-bud for their twined work and dyed bullrush root for black in coiled work. Though other materials were sometimes used, these four were the staples in their finest basketry.

If the basketry materials used by the Pomo people were limited, the designs were amazingly varied. Every Pomo basket maker knew how to produce from fifteen to twenty distinct patterns that could be combined in a number of different.

1. The word “fashion” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to ______.

A．maintain

B．organize

C．trade

D．create

2. What is the author's main point in paragraph 2?

A．The neighbors of the Pomo people tried to improve on the Pomo basket weaving techniques.

B．The Pomo people were the most skilled basket weavers in their region.

C．The Pomo people learned their basket weaving techniques from other Native Americans.

D．The Pomo baskets have been handed down for generations.

3. According to the passage, the relationship between red-bud and twining is most similar to the relationship between ______.

A．bullrush and coiling	B．weft and warp
C．willow and feathers	D．sedge and weaving

4. Which of the following statements about Pomo baskets can be best inferred from the passage?

A．Baskets produced by other Native Americans were less varied in design than those of the Pomo.

B．Baskets produced by Pomo weaves were primarily for ceremonial and religious purposes.

C．There were a very limited number of basket-making materials available to the Pomo people.

D．The basket-making production of the Pomo people has been increasing over the years.