1 . A new trend called “praise groups” or “in-need-of-praise” chat groups has become popular on Chinese social media. In Chinese culture, where modesty (谦逊) is valued, openly seeking and giving praise is uncommon. These chat groups provide a platform for people to receive compliments (赞扬) and encouragement, which are often lacking in their daily lives.
To join a praise group, users can pay a fee on e-commerce sites, starting at 50 yuan for five minutes of compliments. The group members will then show the person with praises and kind words. The compliments can be designed for a friend or loved one as well. Participants have found that being praised by strangers can help lift their spirits and improve their self-confidence.
For example, Meng Zha, a student at Shanghai’s Tongji University, tried the service and found it amusing and uplifting. She received compliments on her appearance and even quotes (引用) from popular songs. Ms Meng couldn’t help but laugh at the compliments and expressed her desire to post such high-quality praises in the future.
Praise groups have appeared as a way for people in China to seek and receive compliments and encouragement that may be lacking in their daily lives. It provides a positive and uplifting experience for participants, improving a sense of happiness and self-worth.
Those who support the groups, see them as an antidote to extremely bad moods (情绪) which are often associated with things happening on the Internet. “At first, the purpose of this group is to make us learn to praise others and accept others’ praises confidently. Here we can drop everything, and use our heart to praise and support others,” one member said. But the life journey is long and there are some unexpected situations that we can only count on ourselves to face when there is no one out there to offer help.
1. What is the purpose of praise groups?| A．To make praise popular. | B．To have everyone supported. |
| C．To share common interests. | D．To give people hope and happiness. |
| A．She was not strong enough. | B．She was under working stress. |
| C．She was satisfied with the service. | D．She was a gifted singer in her area. |
| A．A way of making new friends. | B．A kind of medicine. |
| C．A method of being confident. | D．The wisdom of solving problems. |
| A．Objective. | B．Critical. | C．Supportive. | D．Unclear. |
2 . In modern society there is a great deal of argument about competition. Some value it highly, believing that it is responsible for social progress and prosperity. Others say that competition is bad; that it sets one person against another; that it leads to unfriendly relationship between people.
I have taught many children who held the belief that their self-worth relied on how well they performed at tennis and other skills. For them, playing well and winning are often life-or-death matters. In their single-minded pursuit (追求) of success, the development of many other human qualities is sadly forgotten.
However, while some seem to be lost in the desire to succeed, others take an opposite attitude. In a culture which values only the winner and pays no attention to the ordinary players, they strongly blame competition. Among the most vocal are youngsters who have suffered under competitive pressures from their parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by not trying to win or achieve success. By not trying, they always have an excuse: “I may have lost, but it doesn’t matter because I really didn’t try.” What is not usually admitted by them is the belief that if they had really tried and lost, that would mean a lot. Such a loss would be a measure of their worth. Clearly, this belief is the same as that of the true competitors who try to prove themselves. Both are based on the mistaken belief that one’s self-respect relies on how well one performs in comparison with others. Both are afraid of not being valued. Only as this basic and often troublesome fear begins to dissolve can we discover (缓解) can new meaning in competition.
1. What does this passage mainly talk about?| A．Competition helps to set up self-respect. |
| B．Success is a necessary experience in competition. |
| C．Opinions about competition are different among people. |
| D．Competition is harmful to personal quality development. |
| A．Those who try their best to win | B．Those who value competition most highly |
| C．Those who rely on others most for success | D．Those who are against competition most strongly |
| A．One’s success in competition needs great efforts. |
| B．One’s success is based on how hard he has tried. |
| C．One’s achievement is determined by his particular skills. |
| D．One’s worth lies in his performance compared with others’. |
| A．In competition, every effort should pay off. |
| B．Competition should be encouraged by schools. |
| C．There should not be fear of failure in competition. |
| D．Winning should be a life-or-death matter at school. |
3 . Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small, tightly knit(联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.
Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialisation, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.
At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number(中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world’s languages are spoken by fewer people than that. Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction(消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left.
1. What can we infer about languages in hunter-gatherer times?| A．They developed very fast. | B．They were large in number. |
| C．They had similar patterns | D．They were closely connected. |
| A．Difficult. | B．Confusing. | C．Powerful. | D．Modern. |
| A．About 6,800 | B．About 3,400 | C．About 2,400 | D．About 1,200 |
| A．New languages will be created. |
| B．People’s lifestyles are reflected in languages. |
| C．Human development leads to fewer languages. |
| D．Geography determines language evolution. |
4 . The food delivery industry (外卖行业) now is a hotly competitive business, attracting the world’s biggest moneybags such as Alibaba and SoftBank. Balancing the needs of diners, cooks and couriers (专递公司) is complicated. Most new companies lose money. Yet they have received more than $30bn (十亿) from venture capitalists (资本家) in the past five years. And they are likely to get more.
The food-delivery business can be divided into two camps: mostly profitable veterans (老手) and loss-making newcomers. The veterans, founded at the start of the century, are led by Grubhub in America, and Just Eat and Takeaway in Europe. They account for the largest share (份额) of the market, offering customers online access to restaurants. Their relatively simple business model, in which they take a cut of the bill from the restaurants, has enabled Grubhub and Just Eat to turn a profit for years. Takeaway makes money in its home market (本土市场) of the Netherlands.
The newbies, born more recently, have turned a once-tidy business into a food fight (食物大战). They include listed firms such as Meituan of China and Delivery Hero of Germany, Uber Eats (part of Uber), Ele.me (owned by China’s Alibaba), and privately held DoorDash, based in San Francisco, and Deliveroo, from London.For most of them, delivery is their core business, so they share their cut of the bill with riders as well as restaurants. This substantially broadens the market to restaurants. But profit suffers.
The only attractive aspect of the delivery business is its potential size. According to Bernstein, almost a third of the global restaurant industry is made up of home delivery, takeaways and drive-throughs, which could be worth $1trn (万亿) by 2023. In 2018 delivery amounted to $161bn, leaving plenty of room for online firms to expand.
Yet it is by no means clear if anyone can make money by delivering meals. In fact, the economics may be even worse. Delivery businesses have ways to cut their losses. One is to diversify further, by delivering groceries, flowers, booze, and even people, as well as meals. Another is to provide cheaper meals by centrally supplying ingredients to restaurants. In the dog-eat-dog world of food delivery, it will still be hard.
1. How can the veterans make a profit?| A．They get lots of support from capitalists. |
| B．They offer customers great convenience. |
| C．They draw a part of profit from restaurants. |
| D．They balance the complicated needs successfully. |
| A．Massive profits. | B．Satisfying service. |
| C．Efficient management. | D．Development prospects (前景). |
| A．Positive. | B．Definite (确定的). |
| C．Uncertain. | D．Confident. |
| A．Delivery businesses balance some complicated needs |
| B．Meal delivery attracts the world’s biggest moneybags |
| C．The two camps of delivery businesses compete fiercely |
| D．The food-delivery business is far from tasty business |
5 . It seemed like any other day when fitness instructor Chantelle Lister set off to work at 7 am. It was the school holidays, so her daughters Loren and Mollie, 17 and 6, and 11-year-old son Charlie were still
But within an hour, the family home in Kettering, England, went up in flames. The fire started downstairs, and deadly smoke started
Loren opened the
After successfully raising the
“The firemen pulled Bailey out and tried to save him, but he was dead,” Chantelle said. “They put a blanket over him and I kept
| A．sleepy | B．asleep | C．awake | D．silent |
| A．filling | B．flowing | C．leaving | D．escaping |
| A．Finally | B．Thankfully | C．Naturally | D．Obviously |
| A．yard | B．kitchen | C．danger | D．rescue |
| A．started | B．failed | C．happened | D．stopped |
| A．out | B．through | C．upstairs | D．downstairs |
| A．eyes | B．mouth | C．door | D．window |
| A．breathe | B．walk | C．speak | D．stand |
| A．angry | B．curious | C．frightened | D．confused |
| A．alarm | B．voice | C．sound | D．child |
| A．shining | B．exploding | C．broken | D．burning |
| A．apologizing | B．thinking | C．explaining | D．expecting |
| A．interesting | B．loving | C．strange | D．flexible |
| A．beyond | B．besides | C．without | D．despite |
| A．loyal | B．convenient | C．available | D．grateful |
1. What happened to the woman?
| A．She left her handbag on the bus. |
| B．She missed the No. 22 bus yesterday. |
| C．She didn’t find City Bus Company. |
| A．They didn’t find anything like that. |
| B．Someone found it and gave it to them. |
| C．It was certain that someone took it away. |
7 . Who says that being roommates with someone from a completely different generation has to be strange? Lately, more and more Americans are becoming intergenerational (代际的)roommates, and they’re changing the way people think they should be living.
Explained as those that are separated by at least one generation living together, there has been a major increase in intergenerational roommate arrangements (安排)within the United States since 1971. In fact, statistics show that this number has actually quadrupled (增长四倍)since then. In a Pew Research Center article, it shared that by March 2021, there were at least 59. 7 million Americans that had many generations living under one roof.
There are a ton of reasons that come into play for these types of arrangements. For some, it’s because of the increase in the average life-expectancy age(平均预期寿命), a decreased birth rate, a rise in college tuition, the ever rising rentals in almost every coastal city, and more. But if anything, many say that one main reason behind the rise is that older people have space to rent out and that having younger people around just makes them happier.
According to a 25-year-old robotics student living in Massachusetts, Nadia Abdullah, who moved in with her 64-year-old roommate Judith in 2019, “It was perfect——Judith has become like my family.”
Their arrangement was $700 a month from Nadia, plus the promise of her doing some help around the house. This also allowed Nadia to live just 6 miles from Boston and 30 minutes from her robotics job located in Beverly Mass. Nadia was matched with Judith through website, a renting center specifically created to find intergenerational roommates.
Another young renting center reviewer, Kaplan, also gave some opinions on the service and why it’s so special, saying, “Through this, I lived with Sarah while attending Harvard. She provided the type of knowledge you just can’t Google——showing me how to garden, how to cook fish, and add French Romanticism to life.”
1. What is the increasing housing trend mentioned in the text.| A．More people are living together as roommates. |
| B．Strangers of a generation are living together like a family. |
| C．Different generations are living under the same roof. |
| D．Family members of different generations are living together. |
| A．The types of the arrangements. | B．The reasons for the arrangements. |
| C．The solutions to the arrangements. | D．The problems with the arrangements. |
| A．How to google special knowledge. | B．How to build a garden. |
| C．How to fish. | D．How to live a romantic life |
| A．The website is popular with university students. |
| B．The intergenerational roommates should help each other. |
| C．The intergenerational roommate arrangements work well. |
| D．The elderly benefit more than the young from the arrangements. |
1. Who is the speaker?
| A．A worker. | B．A news reporter. | C．A tourist. |
| A．A Russian rocket was sent up． |
| B．A tour bus slid off a highway． |
| C．Three aid workers were killed． |
| A．Over 40. | B．About 30. | C．At least 4. |
9 . The idea that humans are facing a global extinction of experience of nature is popular, but is it true? To give more light on this issue, the scientists measured how the average distance from an individual’s home to the nearest area with low human impact changed in the last decade.
The scientists found that humans currently live 9.7 kilometers away from a natural area on average, which is 7% further away than in the year 2000. Europe and East Asia have the highest average distance to natural areas, such as 22 kilometers in Germany and 16 kilometers in France. The scientists also showed that tree cover within cities has declined worldwide since 2000, suggesting that the possibility for the urban population to access green spaces is reducing as well.
The scientists also systematically searched for scientific publications assessing a trend in experiences of nature, finding that the number of studies assessing these trends was very low (the number is 18), most of which are about the US, Europe and Japan. This shows that more studies should investigate the claim about the extinction of nature experience, especially in Africa and Latin America. The 18 studies found by the scientists show a decline in visits to nature parks in the US and Japan, a decrease in camping activities in the US, and a decrease in the number of flower species observed by Japanese children. They also find signs of decline in the use of natural elements in novels, songs and cartoons.
Despite these examples of decline, other interactions are increasing. Watching wildlife documentaries or interacting with wild animals in videogames is, for example, more common than a few years ago. “New ways of digitally interacting with nature have certainly emerged or increased in recent years,” says Dr Gladys Barragan-Jason. “But several former studies show that these vicarious interactions have a lesser effect on our sense of connection with nature than exposure to nature, such as visiting nature parks.”
1. How does the author mainly develop the text?| A．By giving examples and making contrast. |
| B．By listing data and classifying them. |
| C．By giving examples and definitions. |
| D．By analyzing data and making comparison. |
| A．the distance between humans and nature |
| B．the connection between humans and wild animals |
| C．reading novels, singing songs and watching cartoons |
| D．tree cover, visits to nature parks and nature presence in the arts |
| A．Positive. | B．Novel. | C．Indirect. | D．Complex. |
| A．Global Extinction of Green Spaces. | B．Decline in Experiences of Nature. |
| C．The Lost Joy in the Natural World. | D．A New Way of Connecting With Nature. |
| A．A fireman. | B．A building. | C．A fire. |
