1. Why is it very dirty there?
| A．The dustmen are not careful enough. |
| B．The dustmen are having a holiday. |
| C．The dustmen refuse to work. |
| A．Good. | B．Poor. | C．It is not told. |
| A．Important and necessary. |
| B．Important but unnecessary. |
| C．Unimportant but necessary. |
2 . Back in the early 2000s, lots of people couldn’t imagine life without alarm clocks, CD players, calendars, cameras, or lots of other devices. But along came the iPhone and other smartphones, and they took over the functions of many things that we used to think were completely necessary.
The success of smartphones can be a model for dealing with climate change because they represent a different approach to design, which is to focus on function rather than form. This approach requires concentrating on understanding the problems, and then engineering a wide range of potential solutions. By adopting this mindset, we can completely change our thinking about energy efficiency (效率).
Traditionally, improvements in energy efficiency have mostly been centered on individual devices, which can be quite fruitful. But focusing on individual devices is like if Apple had spent effort inventing a better alarm clock, a better CD player, a better calendar, and a better camera. Now with an iPhone, we don’t need the standalone (独立运行的) devices at all, because it can function as all of them.
So when it comes to energy efficiency, instead of only installing more efficient heaters, we should focus on the desired function: warmth. Through creative designs like coating (给……涂层) our house, we can get rid of the need for heaters, significantly saving nearly 99% energy.
Similarly, rather than merely focusing on making cars more efficient, we should consider the desired function — transportation. By developing an efficient transportation system that reduces the need for private cars, we can achieve greater energy savings.
The most energy-efficient car or heater is no car, or no heater, while still being able to get around and stay warm. In other words, it’s not thinking efficiently, but thinking differently.
1. What makes the iPhone a good example of environmental protection?| A．Choosing a simplest design. |
| B．Combining possible functions. |
| C．Perfecting individual instruments. |
| D．Reducing the energy consumption. |
| A．Improving technologies. |
| B．Using recyclable materials. |
| C．Figuring out various solutions. |
| D．Concentrating on the necessary needs. |
| A．Inefficient. | B．Classical. | C．Useless. | D．Perfect. |
| A．Think out of the box | B．Differences make it unique |
| C．Be economical with energy | D．Step out of the comfort zone |
Nowadays, one of the common
4 . As the weather shifts, many teenagers search for and purchase fashionable seasonal clothes, often from fast fashion sites. The potential effects of fast fashion are well-known, with the fashion supply chain ranking as the third-largest polluter in the world according to a 2021 report by the World Economic Forum.
Companies like Shein are accused of art theft and unfair treatment of employees. The modern fashion industry heavily relies on labor and treat workers not that well in underdeveloped countries due to globalization. The issue of ethical (合乎伦理的) consumption is complex, particularly among students who put affordability and accessibility in the first place over longevity when choosing clothes. Many think sustainable ethical brands are classist (有阶级偏见的) and that these companies often cater only to wealthy individuals, ignoring many others.
Even if teens don’t throw away their clothes as soon as trends end, there is still a sense of guilt associated with unintentionally supporting the growth of these companies for something as unimportant as fashion or beauty. However, those who buy from fast fashion brands out of necessity are not the ones causing the problem to continue. The concept of sustainability in fashion has been distorted (曲解) by those who use it to make the non-wealthy feel guilty for not participating in ethical consumption. Even purchasing from moral brands becomes unsustainable and fuels consumerism when overdone.
According to Forbes, teenagers are major consumers of TikTok, finding excitement in the platform’s ever-changing trends. Microtrends and fast-paced fashion cycles have transformed clothing into a single-use product. In the past, teens relied on celebrities and magazines for fashion inspiration; but with the rise of influencers and apps like TikTok, access to these previously exclusive fashion cycles has expanded. This accessibility and affordability require transformative change and accountability from appropriate institutions.
A re-examination of business and culture is necessary, and we should encourage small steps toward more intentional, reasonable shopping instead of punishing and policing those who shop for fast fashion out of necessity.
1. Why does the author mention Shein in paragraph 2?| A．To highlight the growing influence of fashin industry. |
| B．To accuse the company of causing pollution. |
| C．To show fast fashion companies' unethical practices. |
| D．To discuss the impact of globalization on fast fashion. |
| A．Sustainability. | B．Brand popularity. |
| C．Design and quality. | D．Price and approachability. |
| A．The influence of celebrities. |
| B．Microtrends and rapidly changing styles. |
| C．The easy access to fashion magazines. |
| D．The unintentional support of consumerism. |
| A．Supporting gradual actions toward reasonable shopping. |
| B．Carrying out strict regulations on all fashion brands. |
| C．Punishing those who throw away old-fashion clothes. |
| D．Promoting fast fashion as a sustainable alternative. |
5 . Digital reading (数字阅读) appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in fact illiterate (文盲). This month’s Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: “The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many attractions to read in a casual and scattered (零散的) manner— or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”
That’s frightening, because “higher-level reading” has been necessary to civilization. It made the understanding and an international increase in empathy (共鸣). Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, “as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills.” More than one-fifth of adults in the US “fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category”. Separately, post-pandemic (后疫情时期) reading scores for American13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy (读写能力) in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.
Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of thoughtful reading, slow reading and long-form reading.” When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to catch the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning and scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old boy told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from websites. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine opinions.
In short, as professors from Northwestern University predicted in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) “reading class” reads long texts, which is worrying.
1. What can we learn about digital reading from paragraph 1?| A．Digital reading has weakened the practice of deep reading. |
| B．Digital reading has solved the problem of illiteracy. |
| C．Digital reading has made deep reading accessible to wider readers. |
| D．Digital reading has caused a greater appreciation for deep reading. |
| A．Digital reading’s great popularity. | B．The importance of deep reading. |
| C．American students’ reading skills. | D．The lowering of the level of literacy. |
| A．Functions. | B．Depths. | C．Shortcomings. | D．Features. |
| A．Advantages of digital reading. | B．Measures to practice deep reading. |
| C．Ways to encourage digital reading. | D．Benefits of lower-level reading. |
6 . In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well occurring. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality (道德) and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified trend. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk-tuks, are rapidly replacing gas-powered ones on the streets. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.
Yet a glance under the hood (引擎盖) of these vehicles shows a poisonous secret: each tuk-tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries (铅酸电池), containing almost 300 pounds of lead (铅) in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leaks into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated factories, is a highly profitable (高利润的) but deadly business.
Lead is dangerous, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an unexpected scale. The numerous ways lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world and the enormous damage it does to human health, wealth, and welfare cause one of the biggest environmental problems in the world yet receives little attention.
The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5.5 million people per year, making it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of the shocking deaths, the social burden of lead poisoning is heavy, as is its contribution to global inequality — our research on the cognitive (认知的) effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.
But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that can be resolved through financial investment (财政投入). Better monitoring, research, and rules can help protect children all over the world from the unpleasant effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it brings.
1. How does the author describe the lead problem in paragraph 2?| A．By listing some numbers. | B．By analyzing hidden causes. |
| C．By making an interesting comparison. | D．By explaining its working principle. |
| A．Lead enters poor countries in one way. |
| B．Lead leaking has been avoided in all the countries. |
| C．Lead will definitely not harm anymore. |
| D．Lead poisoning may make poor societies poorer. |
| A．Fixing these used batteries. | B．Reducing the cost of recycling lead. |
| C．Ignoring the illegal use of lead. | D．Putting certain effort and money. |
| A．The Impacts of Lead Poisoning on Man. |
| B．The Global Lead Poisoning Problem. |
| C．The Ways to Solve Lead Problem. |
| D．The Benefits of Using Electric Vehicles. |
7 . If a traditional sport bores you, it’s time to try something new! Cycling, but outdoors on city roads; surfing, but on the land; playing frisbee (飞盘), but with a group of people... New sports have been refreshing our minds, bringing more joy to physical exercise.
National fitness has been part of the national strategy for many years, aiming to improve people’s overall physical health. With great attention paid in support of national fitness, new sports begin to develop. According to a study by Houlang Research Institute which attracted more than 1,200 young people to participate, more than 93 percent of people born after 2000are interested in urban (城市的) sports.
Why do young people favor new sports? Houlang’s report claims that apart from keeping fit as a type of exercise, many young people pick them up to socialize—allowing them to build up their social circles. “Players tend to have online group chats announcing their usual activities and simply sharing their lives. The new sports are also suitable for taking photos and are less limited by venues (场地),” the CEO of a tourism website in China told China News Service. Gathered together through social media, people can enjoy new sports at many places in the city, from parks to spacious sidewalks.
Qianjiang Evening News also comments that the new sport are easier for new players to start, unlike other traditional sports, such as soccer and basketball, which usually require strict and complex rules. Thus, the new sports are less competitive but could bring more fun. According to a website, people may opt for sports that are less challenging and can take place at local venues.
Urban sports have unlocked new lifestyles in China and prove that more people arc exposed to and willing to enjoy sports, according to China News Service.
1. Why do the young prefer urban sports?| A．To help socialize. | B．To compete better. |
| C．To have online chats. | D．To desert traditional sports. |
| A．They are only suitable for the young. | B．They are easy to have access to. |
| C．They are more competitive than traditional sports. | D．They need more strict rules. |
| A．Spot. | B．Decide. | C．Support. | D．Choose. |
| A．The entertainment activities in modern cities | B．A promising exercise for the young |
| C．The rise of urban sports in China | D．The development of urban sports |
8 . Technology seems to discourage slow, careful reading. Reading on a screen tires your eyes and makes it harder for you to keep your place. Online writing tends to be more skimmable (易略读的) and list-like than print. The neuroscientist Mary Walt argued recently that this new standard of skim reading is producing“an invisible, game-changing transformation”in how readers process words. The neuronal circuit (神经回路) that maintains and supports the brain’s ability to read now prefers the rapid absorption of information.
We shouldn’t overplay this danger. All readers skim. From about the age of nine, our eyes start to skim quickly across the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gap s by inference. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans (持续时间). So far, the anxieties have proved to be false alarms. “Quite a few critics have been worried about attention spans lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline,” the American author Selvin Brown wrote. “No one ever said that poems were evidence of short attention spans.”
And yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. And digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. This mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun. But often it treats other people’s words as something to be quickly taken as materials to say something else. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, eager to be heard.
Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a source of personal achievement. But this argument often emphasizes “enthusiastic” “passionate” or “eager” reading, non e of which words suggest slow, quiet absorption. To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in the words and their slow understanding of a line of thought.
The human need for this kind of deep reading is too tenacious for any new technology to destroy. We often assume that technological change can’t be stopped and happens in one direction, so that older media like “dead-tree” books are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycle. We still want to enjoy slowly-formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.
1. Which statement would Selvin Brown probably agree?| A．Online writing harms careful reading. | B．Fears of attention spans are unnecessary. |
| C．The situation of cultural decline is serious. | D．Poetry reading helps lengthen attention spans. |
| A．It demands writers to abandon traditional writing modes. |
| B．It depends heavily on frequent interaction with the readers. |
| C．It leads to too much talking and not enough deep reflection. |
| D．It prepares readers for enthusiastic, passionate or eager reading. |
| A．Deep-rooted. | B．Widely-acknowledged. | C．Slowly-changed. | D．Rarely-noticed. |
| A．Slow Reading is Here to Stay | B．The Wonder of Deep Reading |
| C．The Internet is Changing the Way We Read | D．Digital vs Print: A Life-and-Death Struggle |
China has seen new growth opportunities brought about by an aging population. Its latest decision to promote the “silver economy”
10 . The Giving Voice Chorus (合唱团) was created in 2014 by Mary Lenard, a former director of the Alzheimer’s Association of Minnesota-North Dakota. With co-worker Marge Ostroushko, who has taken care of a parent with Alzheimer’s disease(AD), a brain disorder that gets worse over time, Lenard set out to create an environment where people with AD and their caregivers felt supported and comfortable.
“People with AD sometimes withdraw and often are not included in the community,” she says. “Marge and I recognized that music and singing are ways for people with AD to still be included and join in life.”
In the beginning, the chorus was made up of 30 people, including volunteers from the community who helped with small tasks during chorus practice, such as helping singers find the printed music in their binders (活页夹) if they lost their place. Since then, the Giving Voice Chorus has grown to two additional choruses, with more than 180 members overall.
“We don’t do auditions, and we don’t care what AD cases you have or the stage of your disease,” says Lenard. “As long as you enjoy the experience, anyone can be part of the group. It’s a place where everyone belongs.”
Lenard says, “When we first started out, Marge and I didn’t know if people with AD were going to move away from the place where they ought to be or get upset.” But the opposite has happened. “There’s a positive change we see in people when they’re singing songs they love. They’re smiling, and there’s joy and laughter. It’s really special.”
“People with AD might have difficulty learning a new song or coming up with words on their own,” says Dr. Caselli, AD specialist at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. “But if they hear a song they’ve known all their lives, they tend to remember the words and are able to sing along. And because speech and long-term memory aren’t usually affected until late in the disease, members of the Giving Voice Chorus are likely to stay active until the last few months of life.”
1. What’s the purpose of the Giving Voice Chorus?| A．To enrich the young men’s life. | B．To raise money for the poor. |
| C．To ask people to tend to the old. | D．To help people with AD. |
| A．Stop social activities. | B．Be looked down upon. |
| C．Be cheated. | D．Get lost. |
| A．Confident. | B．Worried. | C．Curious. | D．Unwilling. |
| A．They can express themselves freely. |
| B．They can learn a song quickly. |
| C．They fail to sing a familiar song. |
| D．They can be active near the end of life. |
