1. What is the urgent update about?
| A．Changes on train tracks. |
| B．Late arrival of trains. |
| C．Train maintenance. |
| A．Railway engineers. | B．Station managers. | C．Safety officers |
| A．That tickets are sold out quickly. |
| B．That trains break down on the way. |
| C．That many passengers miss their trains. |
| A．Be aware of bad phone signals. |
| B．Buy food before boarding the train. |
| C．Set online payment methods in advance. |
2 . More than half a trillion dollars. That's the estimated value of all the stuff that U. S. shoppers bought last year only to return it—more than the economy of Israel or Austria. We tried new brands with unfamiliar sizes after seeing them on TikTok. We overbought for the holidays, and we shopped overly online, where returns are between two and five times more likely than that from stores.
Where does it all go? Take the blanket I bought on holiday sale for example. I opened the package, only to discover it was just too small for my new sofa. So I returned it. Sorry, blanket! What will happen to it?
“Your blanket is very likely to be in a landfill,” says Hitendra Chaturvedi, a supply chain management professor at Arizona State University. “That is what consumers don't realize—the life of a return is a very, very sad path.” Value is the big threshold (门槛): Is the product worth the cost of shipping back and paying someone to inspect, clean, repair or test? Experts estimate that retailers (零售商) throw away about 25％ of their returns. Every year, U. S. returns create almost 6 billion pounds of landfill waste.
Many others get resold in discount and outlet stores. Some go to sellers on websites. Some get donated to charity or recycled. “These options have increased over the past decade, allowing more and more returns to find a new home”, says Marcus Shen, chief operating officer of B-Stock, a platform where retailers can resell their returns, often to smaller stores.
As companies compete on flexible return policies, technology is also slowly playing a part: helping shoppers buy the right-size sweater or picture a new blanket inside their room. Most importantly, She says, shoppers themselves are getting more and more comfortable with buying stuff that's not exactly brand-new.
“The idea of that is no longer scary for us, right?” he says. On his holiday-returns agenda is an electric, self-heating coffee mug that he has never opened, and he feels confident it will find a happy new buyer.
1. What is paragraph 1 mainly about?| A．The challenge facing the American economy. | B．The urgency to cut down on online shopping. |
| C．The returning problem caused by overbuying online. | D．The cost of finding new homes for returned goods. |
| A．It's required by the return policies. | B．It saves retailers 6 billion pounds a year. |
| C．It's impossible to put returns to other uses. | D．It's more economically efficient for retailers. |
| A．By helping shoppers make better decisions. | B．By restoring the newness in returned goods. |
| C．By improving the return policy-making process. | D．By drawing pictures of the goods for the shoppers. |
| A．TikTok items. | B．The coffee mug. | C．The blanket. | D．A right-size sweater. |
3 . A shortage of semiconductors (半导体) has helped firms such as Nvidia, whose chips (芯片) power everything from video gaming to machine learning and data centres. But boom time for sellers means misery for buyers. Carmakers, whose products have become computers on wheels, are among the victims. Analysts say the industry might build around 5 million fewer cars this year, all for want of the chips. Apple and Microsoft have also warned that they will be affected.
The shortage is the result of a sudden rise in demand. Chipmaking has been enjoying strong growth for decades as computers have stepped into every corner of society. But there was a strong upward trend during the pandemic. Locked-down consumers shopped online, had meetings remotely, and killed time with video-streaming and videogaming.
The crisis has had three consequences, two encouraging and one less so.
The first is an investment boom. Big producers such as Intel, Samsung and TSMC are planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on extra capacity (产能) over the next few years. As in many markets, high prices are the best cure for high prices.
The second is that the chip industry’s customers are adapting. too. When demand fell early in the pandemic, carmakers cut their orders with chipmakers. Following Tesla, Volkswagen has announced plans to develop driver-assistance chips in-house.
Unwelcome effect has been a sudden rise of techno-nationalism. America is planning to hand out billions of dollars to attract chipmakers back from East Asia. Europe wants to double its share of global production, to 20%，by 2030. Even Britain has declared the fate of a small chip factory in Wales to be a matter of national security.
Chips have come to occupy what used to be called the “commanding heights” of an economy, in the way that car factories did in the 20th century. But as last century’s governments discovered, subsidies (补贴) lend 10 oversupply. Personally, the chip shortage is mostly a self-solving problem. Governments should resist the temptation to scc themselves as saviours (救星).
1. What is the main cause of the sudden shortage of chips according to the passage?| A．Economic crisis | B．The outbreak of the pandemic. |
| C．Governments’ control. | D．Great demand in online products. |
| A．Hot investment in chips. | B．Carmakers’ adaptation to the market. |
| C．Arise of techno-nationalism. | D．Realization of technological globalization. |
| A．Markets are the cure for the chip shortage. |
| B．Government subsidies will lead to waste. |
| C．The government should rescue the market. |
| D．Car factories in the 20th century were on the rise. |
| A．Chip Shortage—A Self-solving Problem |
| B．Techno-nationalism—A War without Smoke |
| C．Challenges—Promises of New Opportunities |
| D．High Prices—the Best Cure for High Prices |
4 . Working from home has been a long-held dream for many employees craving more flexible work arrangements and comfort. With the fantasy coming true because of the outbreak of COVID-19, however, quite a few people find it less romantic than expected. Amid the ongoing epidemic, a large number of Chinese companies have ordered employees to work from home, looking to control the spread of the virus as staff members return from the Spring Festival travel rush.
Allowing employees to work from home-even if they are not symptomatic-and enabling virtual meetings could help limit the spread of the virus and assuage employees’ fears about exposure.
But there’s another side to the coin. As millions of people started to work at home, people found video communication difficult. Many telecommuting platforms, including DingTalk, an all-in-one mobile workplace from Alibaba, went through temporary outages due to surging demand.
Fu Yangang, a product manager at a house trading company in Beijing, found he couldn’t receive any messages from colleagues during an online meeting at home on Tuesday, and neither could they. Similar problems arose when they switched to Zoom, a California-based video communication app which provides remote conferencing services.
Residences filled with distractions such as spouses, parents, kids or pets set up another obstacle for many employees working from home. Xia Baigi, who works for an Internet company in Beijing, was required to stay at home in Jilin Province until Feb.10, but has found what was an oft-wished for working style a hindrance to productivity. Her parents, who don’t have much to do, suddenly became concerned about her job and asked many questions. “I love my mom and dad, but their current behavior just adds stress and strain,” she said. “Sometimes I have to lock myself in my own room to avoid their enthusiasm.”
For people who are able to stay as productive as they would in an office environment, they came across a different problem： “surprisingly” longer working time at home. Working for an investment company in Shanghai, Zhang Fei felt he could never escape from his job working at home in Shandong Province, which makes time management a whole lot messier. “There is no longer a’ work’ and’ no work’ time. My work comes calling at all hours, which can keep me at a frenetic pace,” he said. With the return date drawing closer, he said, he never felt so excited about being back at the office.
1. Why many people can work from home in China?| A．Because many employees think it is a fantasy idea. |
| B．Because the employers think more highly of working from home than traditional working. |
| C．Because the COVID-19 occurred. |
| D．Because large number of Chinese companies want to avoid the Spring Festival travel rush. |
| A．Increase. | B．Ease. | C．Give up. | D．Find. |
| A．After Fu Yangang and his partners switched to Zoom, their problem was solved. |
| B．Xia Baiqi’s parents could give her more constructive advice. |
| C．Xia Baiqi locked herself in her own room to avoid distractions. |
| D．By saying “There is no longer a ‘work’ and ‘no work’ time.”, Zhang Fei meant he can work less time when at home. |
| A．Working from home has unexpected challenges |
| B．Working from home can save you a lot of trouble |
| C．How to avoid distractions when working from home |
| D．More flexible, less work time |
5 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.
Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
1. What are Von Wong’s artworks intended for?| A．Beautifying the city he lives in. | B．Introducing eco-friendly products. |
| C．Drawing public attention to plastic waste. | D．Reducing garbage on the beach. |
| A．To show the difficulty of their recycling. |
| B．To explain why they are useful. |
| C．To voice his views on modern art. |
| D．To find a substitute for them. |
| A．Calming. | B．Disturbing. |
| C．Refreshing. | D．Challenging. |
| A．Artists’ Opinions on Plastic Safety |
| B．Media Interest in Contemporary Art |
| C．Responsibility Demanded of Big Companies |
| D．Ocean Plastics Transformed into Sculptures |
