1 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. addressed        B. boast        C. approach        D. sense        E. wealthy F. glimpse        G. revealed        H. pushy        I. statistics        J. peers        K. motivation

College Rankings Are Something, but Not Everything

I am always confused when reading statements like “Princeton University is the number one college in the United States.” Are those who attend Princeton inherently brighter than their     1    ? Is Princeton able to produce more geniuses upon graduation?

High-ranking colleges in global education leagues attract greater talent in staff and students, and     2     better facilities, therefore generating more profits. In the United States, however, this virtuous cycle can turn vicious when financially-challenged parents end up spending their life savings on their children’s education, while     3     individuals can simply buy their way in. Besides, these rankings face criticism for potentially influencing colleges to make minor adjustments in     4     to improve their position on the table.

I didn’t care about college rankings for years until I recently saw something different. This past October, Shanghai Ranking Consultancy     5     the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2023, which assesses universities worldwide across 55 subjects in five disciplines. It is said to employ a more in-depth     6     to evaluate the performance of universities. And this makes it easier for prospective students to choose the best college for their specific subject. But how much weight should you give to these rankings?

In my opinion, college rankings can serve as a reference, offering a     7     into the reputation and strengths of institutions. However, they should not be the only determining factor for you. There are many aspects to a university education that can only be     8     when you are clear about your goals.

I once taught a three-month program to prepare university students for overseas exchange programs in England. But some of them displayed low     9    . It wasn’t merely due to a language barrier. These individuals seemed to lack communication skills, critical thinking and, more importantly, a     10     of purpose, which might help determine their future academic quality. After all, what lies in the heart of education is “U” .

2 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. numerous            B. regulations        C. compared   D. elaborate     E. advantage       F. adopted G. previously       H. additionally             I. estimated             J. ranging     K. innovation

Live Shows are back, and so are street stalls

With the revival of live music gigs in China this year, stalls outside of concert venues have become increasingly popular again across the country.

Vendors offer goods     1     from essentials like water and raincoats to fan merchandise such as bracelets (手镯) and tattoo stickers. They aim to attract the large groups of fans going to the concerts.

The China Association of Performing Arts (CAPA, 中国演出行业协会) reported that in the first half of 2023, the country hosted over 190,000 performances. The number increased by 400.86%     2     with the previous year. These performances have attracted over 60 million music enthusiasts. Another report     3     that China’s performance market would reach 90.3 billion yuan by the end of this year.

“Where there are business opportunities, there is potential for stalls,” said Hu Xiaowu, an expert on urban science. “As more concerts are organized in different cities, many young people have found the chance to sell goods related to the events.“

Zeng Dexiong, a professor of social sciences, believed more people would take     4     of this new wave. This, he said, would probably bring about fierce competition, which in turn would lead to more creativity and     5    .

Sun Ximin,25, set up a stall as a side hustle when a large venue near her home in Guangzhou hosted its first concert in April. There weren’t many stalls back then, and she sold simple hair accessories (配饰).When more vendors gathered outside, Sun had to offer more     6     services, like braiding (编发), to stand out. To attract more customers, she styled her own hair in complex braids.    7    , she offered free Polaroid photos.

For Li Zhenzhen, a 23-year-old citizen of Xi’an in Shaanxi province, success lies in seeking the best location. She found it was more beneficial to locate her stall near a subway station rather than the concert venue’s entrance. She explained that concertgoers are likely to buy the goods on impulse (一时冲动) as they get out of the station. However, as they walk past     8     stalls on the way to the entrance, their desire to purchase wanes.

The rapid development of the street stall economy offers young people flexible opportunities to earn money, Hu noted.

Recognizing this, local governments are now easing     9     to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit. Cities like Beijing and Shenzhen have already     10     policies to support stall operations, setting aside specific areas for vendors.

3 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

The term “killjoy parents” has been trending on Chinese social media platforms as many young people complain that their parents would rather criticize than     1     (praise) them for their accomplishments. One poster, for example, remarked that his parents said his high score in math wasn’t good enough because several other students had scored higher. Another complained that, after getting accepted into a “second-tier (二流的)” university, the response he got from his father was “Congratulations. You got admitted to a garbage university.”

It’s a terrible feeling to have someone “burst your bubble” when you think they should be sharing your Joy. And your parents, after all, are probably the people     2     you most want to share the best moments in your life. But why do some parents seem to be so hard to please?

I think a lot of it has to do with Chinese society. Parents know that life can be full of hardship and difficulties, and they want their children to be hardened“ to these realities. Another reason     3     probably be found deep in Chinese culture.

When I asked a Chinese friend     4     Chinese parents don’t praise their children, he said it’s because they don’t want to bring their children bad luck. He told me the story of two women sitting in a park and watching their children play. One of the mothers said to the other, “Your boy is so handsome and healthy.” That other mother replied, “No, he’s very ugly and he’s a very sickly child.” The mother, my friend explained, didn’t want her son praised     5     the “gods” heard and punished him. It’s an old superstition (迷信), but it does have some basis in fact.

American parents, at the other extreme,     6     (teach) to never criticize their children because it may hurt their feelings their self-esteem (自尊). Instead, they are told to always praise their children, even for failure. Psychologists (心理学家) now believe this is a bad idea. According to one study, too much praise can result in negative effects.     7     kids with low self-esteem felt even worse about themselves, kids with high self-esteem became narcissistic (自恋的) or self-centered. Moreover, children who got too much praise were     8     (likely) to take risks, were unable to deal with failure, and tended to give up when     9     (face) with challenges.

Having “killjoy parents “ may not be enjoyable,     10     it’ s important to recognize that their seemingly critical nature doesn’t negate (否定) the love they have for you. In their hearts, they genuinely (真诚地) share in your joy.

4 . In modern cities, it is now time as much as space that separates urban functions, as people’s lives are lived not only to different timetables, but also at wildly different rates. The mass timetable of the industrial city, with 9-5 office hours and silent Sundays, has gone. In its ______ is flexi-time, part-time working, Sunday shopping and the 24-hour city.

European cities are ______ these changes perhaps faster than British cities. In at least half a dozen cities in Italy, ______, you will find the Uffici Tempi--the Offices of Time. What they do is try to reorganise time more flexibly in the city, in order to meet new needs. This is particularly relevant for Italian women, an increasing number of whom have to ______ two timetables: work and home. Usually located in the Mayor’s office, the Uffici Tempi bring together transport providers, shop-owners, employers, trade unions, the police and other services to see how their efforts might be better ______. The main aim in all this is to increase the efficiency and productivity of the city. This can mean delaying the starting tunes in schools, offices and factories to avoid rush hours, or having shops opening later in the day but closing later too. One further ______ is that there can be more police about in the evening, patrolling the streets when people most need them.

In a number of German cities, people have been ______ whether the timetable of the future city should be 6x6 or 4x9--working hours, that is. Apparently male workers favour a four-day week, while women workers, on the other hand, favour ______ shorter working days. This would give employees more time in the afternoon to be with children or to get the shopping.

The ______ for public services to adapt to our changing lifestyles has been quite difficult for some of the staff involved. ______, who likes working evenings or Sundays? Nevertheless, many city centres are now open for shopping seven days a week, and a number of them now promote themselves as ‘24-hour cities’, where those with money can drink, eat, dance and even shop the whole ______.

Time is flexible, but buildings aren’t. The ______ between the structure of the city and its uses, over time, is a serious architectural and planning problem. ______ has become the key skill. We are slowly ______ the terms of dormitory suburbs and industrial districts, in favour of mixed- use areas, out-of-town retailing and working from home. There is no doubt that planning theory is being ______ by the changing nature of time in the modern city.

1.

A．report

B．side

C．place

D．way

2.

A．sticking to

B．responding to

C．objecting to

D．turning to

3.

A．for example

B．on the other hand

C．by contrast

D．in the meanwhile

4.

A．alter

B．discuss

C．understand

D．balance

5.

A．spared

B．harmonized

C．directed

D．appreciated

6.

A．method

B．issue

C．benefit

D．excuse

7.

A．debating

B．asking

C．doubting

D．revealing

8.

A．four

B．six

C．seven

D．nine

9.

A．need

B．ambition

C．pity

D．reason

10.

A．Above all

B．On the contrary

C．After all

D．By all means

11.

A．night

B．day

C．city

D．area

12.

A．difference

B．mismatch

C．communication

D．relationship

13.

A．Regulation

B．Availability

C．Adaptability

D．Observation

14.

A．varying

B．coming

C．accepting

D．abandoning

15.

A．presented

B．proved

C．established

D．challenged

5 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

1.

A．disappeared

B．disintegrated

C．distributed

D．disappointed

2.

A．side

B．cause

C．feature

D．issue

3.

A．collected

B．unified

C．dropped

D．single

4.

A．discounted

B．viewed

C．accessed

D．founded

5.

A．muted

B．absorbed

C．buried

D．sunk

6.

A．technical

B．popular

C．negative

D．special

7.

A．possibly

B．reasonably

C．ordinarily

D．necessarily

8.

A．accommodated

B．combined

C．distinguished

D．enhanced

9.

A．abstract

B．repetition

C．review

D．brief

10.

A．press

B．publication

C．media

D．criticism

11.

A．opened

B．created

C．threw

D．jumped

12.

A．rules

B．harmonizes

C．impacts

D．roars

13.

A．feature

B．encourage

C．value

D．defend

14.

A．Therefore

B．However

C．Certainly

D．Surprisingly

15.

A．difference

B．truth

C．time

D．concern

7 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. brake            B. victims        C. issued       D. confirmed       E. pace        F. typically G. multiple       H. seriously       I. slippery     J. canceled          K. visibility

NINE people died and 43 were injured in two rear-end crashes on Shanghai’s S32 Expressway that occurred during heavy fog yesterday morning.

Two were       1       dead at the scene in one of the accidents, and five were found dead in the other. Two more people died in hospital, police said.

Police first received a report at 5:54 am that     2     vehicles had crashed on the S32, near a ramp of S2. The S32 links Shanghai with Zhejinag Province’s Jiaxing and Huzhou.

Two people were killed after getting out of their vehicle to see what was causing congestion ahead. They were hit by an out of control tanker, police said.

When police arrived at that scene, they found a further five people had been killed when a construction vehicle was crushed by two large vehicles from both front and back. The crash was about three kilometers away from the accident that killed the two people on the expressway. The injured were sent to local hospitals.

Some drivers reported that the road was very     3     and braking had led to vehicles losing control.

“The fog was very heavy,” an unidentified driver told Shanghai Television Station. “When I saw the accident ahead, I wanted to slow down and       4     . But once I hit the brake, the vehicle went out of control.”

Zhoupu Hospital treated 12 people. “One of the     5     died on the road to the hospital,” Ding Fuhao, a doctor with the hospital, told the television station. “Three were     6     injured.”

The city’s meteorological authority     7     an orange alert on heavy fog at 6:06 am, meaning     8    would be lower than 200 meters in some areas.

The dense fog hit coastal areas in particular, including Chongming Island, Pudong New Area, Baoshan and Fengxian districts. The alert was    9    at 9:44am. This was Shanghai’s first orange alert of heavy fog since the arrival of autumn.

Several expressways in the city were closed or subject to speed limits yesterday morning.

Pudong International Airport was also affected by the bad weather. The airport’s traffic was about 60 percent less than normal in the morning but picked up the    10     after the orange alert was canceled, the city’s television station said.

8 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each with the proper form of the given word: for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
       Accidents happen almost everywhere every day. Some accidents are not serious and some really are. We read about such accidents nearly every day in the newspapers. And people usually think that accidents take place only on the roads or highways    1     they themselves come across accidents in their homes or even at work places. As a matter of fact, home accidents are just as common as those we see and hear on the roads, some of    2    cause even much more serious consequences. Because very few home accidents are reported, people come to think that there are few accidents that happen in homes.
       There    3    (be) many serious cases where people fall to their deaths from high-rise flats so far. In most cases, children and women often fall over while     4    (step) down the stairs. Old people may slip on wet floors, getting badly hurt or even killed, if they are not careful.

Nowadays there are a lot of modern electrical appliances at home    5    rice cookers, micro waves and washing machines, which make life easy for the modern housewives. These appliances can kill people    6    they are used in the proper way. Gas stoves used for cooking are also dangerous if they are not properly used. They may cause burns or, in more serious cases, even fires.

       But all such accidents    7    be stopped if we are careful and follow simple rules of safety. For example, it is unwise for people to try repairing their own electrical appliances if they do not know how to repair them. Therefore, it is safer and more reliable    8    people get them repaired by an electrician.

9 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. distributed     B. localize       C. broadcast     D. briefing       E. attached       F. existing       G. boost H. emerging       I. involved       J. crack            K. response

Chip flow interrupted

A stable global supply chain of chips had been maintained before disruptive moves by the US.

Two of the US’ top chipmakers—NVIDIA and AMD-were ordered to stop exports of two high-end chips to China on Aug 31. The ban     1     sophisticated (精密的) chips for graphics processing units (GPUs); which have been widely used in applications including AI and creative production.

This came after US President Joe Biden signed an order to pass the $52.7 billion (about 369.5 billion yuan) semiconductor chip manufacturing subsidy (补贴) and research law on Aug 25.

It aims to     2     efforts to “make the United States more competitive with China’s science and technology efforts”, Reuters noted.

Biden also signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 into law on Aug 9. According to the act, chip makers that shift their factories to the US can receive subsidies and tax benefits with     3     conditions that restrict US companies from increasing investments in China for 10 years.

“The US and its allies,” Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and a financier for the Bill Clinton, Obama and Biden presidential campaigns, said in March, “should utilize targeted export controls on high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment... to protect     4     technical advantages and slow the advancement of China’s semiconductor industry”.

In     5     to the US latest act, Woo Jin-hoon, a guest professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, wrote for China Daily, this is “a move that can be profitable for the US in the short term, but harmful in the long run”.

The design, manufacturing and even raw materials of a complete and complex product like semiconductors (especially chips) are usually     6     across many different countries and regions, forming a huge trade network.

No matter how hard countries or regions try to support their own manufacturing bases and     7     their production, a certain degree of interdependence among countries and regions is unavoidable, China Daily commented.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Sept 1 at a press     8     that the US move is typical “sci-tech hegemony (霸权)”.

“With its technological advantages, the US has abused the concept of national security and its state power to     9     down on the development of     10     economies and developing countries,” said Wang. “The move violates market economy principles, harms international economic and trade orders and disrupts the stability of global industrial and supply chains.”

10 . By now, it is pretty well understood that we regularly pay for things in ways other than using money. Sometimes we pay sill with cash. But we also pay for things with data, and more often, with our time and attention. We effectively hand over access to our minds in exchange for something “fee”， like email, streaming video or online shopping pages. As opposed to “paying” attention, we actually “spend attention”， agreeing to the view ads in exchange for something we really want.

The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it unacceptable that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without permission at all-otherwise known as “attention theft”.

Attention theft happens anywhere you find your time and attention taken without permission, like the new, targeted advertising screens in hospital waiting rooms, the airlines that play full-volume advertising from a screen right in front of your face, or the advertising - screens in office elevators. These are just few examples in what is a growing category. Combined, they threaten to make us live life in a screen-lined cocoon(茧)，shrunken and incapable of independent thought.

Then, what makes it “theft”?Advances in neuroscience over the last several decades make it clear that our brain’s resources are unconsciously triggered(触发)by sound and movement;therefore the screens seize rare mental resources. Meanwhile, in the law, theft is typically defined as the taking control of a resource “under such circumstances as to acquire the major part of its economic value or benefit. ” Given the established market value of time and attention, when taken without permission or compensation, it really is not much different from someone taking money out of your pocket. Thus, when the firms selling public-screen advertising to target audiences brag of rapid growth and billions in profit, those are actually earnings made by stealing from us.

1. What phenomenon is described in Paragraph 1?

A．Preference for cash.	B．Consumption of attention.
C．Payments in shopping.	D．Addiction to mass media.

2. How does the writer show the wide spread of “attention theft”?

A．By making a definition.	B．By analyzing causes.
C．By giving examples.	D．By predicting results.

3. Why is “attention theft” considered as a theft?

A．It brings a fortune to the thief.

B．It lays heavy burden on the brain.

C．It takes up mental resources secretly.

D．It brings about economic loss constantly.

4. What could be the best title for the text?

A．The Crisis of Attention Theft

B．The Price of Attention Theft

C．Ads：Source or Theft of Information

D．“Paying” Instead of “Spending” Attention