1 . Plenty, an agricultural technology company in San Francisco, is reinventing farms and farming. Nater Storye, the company’s chief science officer says the future of the farms will be vertical (垂直的) and indoors, so food can be grown anywhere in the world all year round, and farms will employ robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the quality of growth for fruits and vegetables. Plenty does all those things but uses 95% less water and 99% less land.

As AI is on the rise, farmers on flat farms have been using new tools to make farming better or easier. In recent years, they have been using drones (无人机) and robots to improve efficiency. However, flat farms still use a lot of water and land, while a Plenty’s vertical farm can produce the same quantity of fruits and vegetables as a 720-acre flat farm, but on only 2 acres.

Plenty’s climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically. There are LED lights shining on them, robots moving them around, and AI managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light. The conditions are so good that the production per acre is 400 times higher than that of an outdoor farm.

Another advantage of vertical farming is that the fruits and vegetables are grown at a warehouse nearby instead of 1,000 miles away or more from a city. That means many transportation miles are saved, which can reduce millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year and the price of fruits and vegetables will also go down. Imported (进口的) fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so poor people in society are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could cope with this problem.

Also, Plenty’s farms grow organic food without using herbicides (除草剂) or pesticides. They recycle all the water used, even catching the water in the air. The best farm in San Francisco is using 100% renewable energy.

Moreover, all the packaging is 100% recyclable, made of recycled plastic and specially designed to keep the food fresh longer to reduce food waste. Ideally, the company will branch out, opening farms across the country and beyond.

1. What can we learn from the first two paragraphs?

A．Robots and AI used on vertical farms can quicken the growth of plants.

B．Fruits and vegetables grown on vertical farms are more tasty.

C．Both land and water can be saved on vertical farms.

D．Plenty is the first company to grow crops on vertical farms.

2. What docs the underlined phrase “cope with” in paragraph 4 mean?

A．Register.

B．Improve.

C．Present.

D．Solve.

3. What can we infer about Plenty’s future vertical farms from the text?

A．They will have more farms.	B．They will only be run by robots and AI.
C．They will bring about terrible problems.	D．They will completely take the place of flat farms.

4. What is the main purpose of the text?

A．To question the possibility of vertical farming

B．To show the technologies of vertical farming.

C．To discuss the potential problems of vertical farming

D．To introduce and explain the benefits of vertical farming.

2 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。

This is an unbelievable real Christmas story: one of courage, life and passing on love.

Twenty-five years ago, Ray Anderson, a single parent with a one-year-old son, was returning home after giving out gifts to the needy people on Christmas Eve when he witnessed a terrible accident which took place when the driver of a truck ran a red light and collided (碰撞)with the car of Sandra Jenkins. The influence of the collision killed Sandra instantly, but her three-month-old daughter was left trapped upside down in the burning car seemingly doomed to a fiery tomb.

While others looked on in horror, Anderson jumped out of his car and crawled (爬)into the car through the broken window to try to free the baby. Seconds later, the car was totally on fire, but Anderson was unexpectedly able to pull the baby to safety. While the child came out of the accident with no injuries, Anderson suffered third degree burns over 80 percent of his body.

Two days later, Anderson died, but his heroic act was published widely in the media. Anderson’s son was soon raised by relative, and the family moved to the East Coast.

The most unbelievable part of this story unfolded only last week. Karen and her fiance(未婚夫), Aaron, were looking through some old boxes in the basement of Karen’s home when they came across some old newspapers. “This is me when I was a newborn baby. My mother was busy with some volunteer work when the accidnet happened. I was rescued from a burning car, but my mother died in the accident,” explained Karen. Although Aaron knew Karen’s mother had died years earlier, he never fully understood the situation until he started to skim over the newspaper article. Karen continued to sort through some old books when saw Aaron absorbed in the details of the accident.

1.续写词数应为150左右;
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。

Then she noticed, to her much surprise, tears rolling down from his eyes, and he began to cry uncontrollably.

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According to the article, Aaron’s father and Karen’s mother were both on a task of helping the needy families in the area.

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4 . A leaked IPCC draft reports, “Widespread use across millions of square kilometers globally of tree-planting and bioenergy crops could have potentially serious consequences for food security and land degradation (退化).” In other words, more massive monocultures (单种栽培) and more bioenergy crops, fueled by more fertilizers, could damage the structure of the environmental soil and its capacity to absorb carbon.

Everyone knows that to help ease the increasing climate crisis, we need to plant new trees. It’s said that the earth could support an additional 9,000,000 square kilometers of forest, potentially hosting 500 billion trees capable of capturing more than 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide at maturity. It would be a serious help to the environment.

Bioenergy now holds a 50 percent share of the world’s renewables consumption—as much as hydro, wind, solar and all others combined. It’s good news, but not entirely. If we consider that increasing desertification and rising ocean levels will take away more arable (可耕种的) land, we arrive at a crucial “trilemma”(三难困境). Should we use our spare soil for agriculture, reforestation or bioenergy?

Such a question would make sense in a multilateral, harmonious world, not on a planet where the richest country cancels an environment-saving agreement, thus encouraging the most tropically-forested nation to set about cutting trees.

Last year, 36,000 square kilometers of forest was cut down. Wouldn’t it be better to start by stopping deforestation altogether? Animal farming takes up 77 percent of the world’s arable land and provides us with 18 percent of the calories. Shouldn’t we cut back on global meat consumption? Modern bioenergy is already available. Shouldn’t we get rid of first-generation biofuels, which are produced from food crops?

1. What’s the IPCC’s attitude to the widespread planting?

A．Ambiguous

B．Positive

C．Disapproving

D．Uncaring

2. What does the author intend to do in paragraph 2?

A．Add some background information.	B．Summarize the previous paragraphs.
C．Provide some advice for the readers.	D．Introduce a new topic for discussion.

3. How can we understand “but not entirely” in paragraph 3?

A．There is less sustainable energy for use.

B．No more land is available for bioenergy.

C．More trees are cut in the richest country.

D．Bioenergy can cause more climate problems.

4. What does the text mainly talk about?

A．Developing farmland as much as possible.

B．Planting trees to prevent global warming.

C．Using bioenergy to reduce environmental pollution.

D．Protecting present resources instead of developing new ones.

5 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

The impact of pandemic (流行病) on life expectancy (预期寿命), one of the most widely used standards to assess population health, was assessed by a study    1    (publish) in the Informational Journal Epidemiology. The study    2    (conduct) by the Oxford University's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic (人口的) Science.

The study revealed that women from 15 countries and men from 10 ended up    3    a lower life expectancy at birth in 2020 compared to 2015.     4    biggest drops in life expectancy, however, were witnessed in men instead of women in most countries. American men were the worst off, with 2.2 years shaved off their life expectancy at birth. Men in Lithuania faced the second    5    (large) impact on their life expectancy, with a cut of 1.7 years.

Reductions in life expectancy overall    6    (occur) in 27 of the 29 countries analyzed by the study. Only men and women in Denmark and Norway and women in Finland managed to    7    (successful) avoid drops in life expectancy, the study said. Non-pharmaceutical interventions and strong healthcare systems in these countries were cited as    8    (factor) that could help explain this.

All the countries    9    life expectancy dropped had taken an average of 5、6 years    10    (achieve). Just a one year increase in life expectancy. The pandemic wiped out of this progress, the study said.