1 . Social media scam is a form of phishing in which cybercriminals connect with their victims through social media platforms.     1     After the victim accepts it, they soon form a conversation. They can also publish a link that sounds attractive (“put your data and win a car”). Below, see how to protect yourself from scammers on social media;

Accept friend requests with caution.

    2     You should pay attention to when the account is registered and who accepts their friend request. Also remember to check the kind of information the person publishes.

Avoid links that request personal data.

No social media platform will ask its users to click an outside link to update their personal information. Check with the official customer support if you are unsure. Internet users should apply the principle better safe than sorry.

    3    

Do not use the same password across all your online accounts. If one account gets hacked, all of them will. It is always better to have distinct login details for each platform as well.

Make sure not to reveal personal information.

Do not publish your address, phone number, or place of work on your social media account for your safety.     4     Always be cautious if someone shows too much interest in your personal affairs. Even your friends might have been backed, so be careful.

Check whether the account is verified when approached with offers.

When you get a strange message, or an offer to buy or sell something on social media, first check if the account is verified.     5    

Social media scams can be financially damaging and emotionally distressing. We hope that these tips will come in handy for you. Remember, safety first in the online world just as it is in the real world.

A．Do not send money to anyone before that.

B．It usually starts by sending a friend request.

C．Always use a strong password to improve security.

D．Create a unique login and password for each platform.

E．Also, do not give away this information to strangers in conversations.

F．Be careful of friend requests from unknown individuals, as they may have ill intent.

G．Before making friends with someone that you do not know, carefully examine the account.

2 . Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut a cake over the last 15 years. As the father of three children, he knows how hard it is to divide a birthday cake to everyone’s satisfaction. But it’s also because Procaccia’s work focuses on exploring the mathematical rules for dividing stuff up fairly. One way to do that is to think abstractly about dessert.

For decades, researchers have been asking the seemingly simple question of how to cut a cake fairly. The answer reaches far beyond birthday parties. A mathematical problem at its heart, cake cutting connects strict reasoning to real-world issues of fairness, and so attracts not only mathematicians, but also social scientists, economists and more. “It’s a very elegant model in which you can distill what fairness really is, and reason about it,” Procaccia says.

The simplest approach is called the “divider-chooser” method, where one person cuts the cake into two equal pieces in his view, and the other person picks first. Each receives a piece that they feel is as valuable as the other’s. But when personal preferences are taken into account, even the easiest rule becomes complicated. Suppose Alice and Bob are to divide a cake, and Alice knows Bob prefers chocolate, she may knowingly divide the cake unequally so the smaller piece contains more chocolate. Then Bob will choose according to his preference, and Alice will get the larger piece. Both of them are satisfied with what they get, but the meaning of fairness changes in this situation.

The cake is a symbol for any divisible good. When cake-cutting principles are employed to settle disagreements, they are potentially helping the world find solutions. Procaccia has used fair division algorithms (算法) to model food distribution. Social scientist Haris Aziz is exploring situations ranging from how to divide up daily tasks to how to best schedule doctors’ shifts in hospitals.

Even after decades of investigation, cake cutting isn’t like a simple jigsaw puzzle (拼图) with a well-defined solution. Instead, over time, it has evolved into a kind of mathematical sandbox, a constructive playground that brings together abstract proofs and easy applications. The more researchers explore it, the more there is to explore.

1. What does the underlined word “distill” in paragraph 2 mean?

A．Get the essence of.	B．Find the opposite of.
C．Keep the focus on.	D．Reduce the impact on.

2. What can we learn about fairness from the example given in paragraph 3?

A．Its standard is stable.	B．It prevents unequal division.
C．Its concept is complex.	D．It dominates personal preferences.

3. What is paragraph 4 mainly about concerning cake cutting?

A．The application of its rules.	B．The details of its process.
C．The problems it produces.	D．The harmony it symbolizes.

4. What is the best title for the text?

A．Who benefits most from fairness?

B．How has fairness changed over time?

C．What method works best in cake-cutting?

D．Why are researchers so interested in cake-cutting?

3 . A colleague of mine recently told me about a painful exposed nerve in his tooth. Rather than requesting a numbing option from his dentist, he used a "focus in" meditation (冥想) technique to direct all his attention to his mouth with as much calming equanimity (平和) as he could gather. Doing so transformed the pain for a few minutes. Each time the dentist touched the tooth, my colleague felt waves of joy, and this feeling lasted until the dentist interrupted by asking, "Why are you smiling?"

A fair question is why anyone would want to be fully aware of intensely negative or painful experiences. But what might sound like a punishing choice—to embrace suffering or pain—may in some instances be helpful. A stream of scientific articles suggests that there are benefits in turning toward discomfort or upsetting emotions with acceptance. It's important to first define the idea of turning toward discomfort. I'm not advocating for people to put themselves in dangerous or painful positions. But when we push ourselves into challenging situations, much like trainers who push athletes just past their comfort zone to make gains, learning often happens. "Equanimity" refers to a mental attitude of being at peace with the push and pull of experience.

To evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions (干预), we recruited 153 stressed adults in Pittsburgh and offered them a mindfulness-meditation training program with or without training in equanimity. For example, the mindfulness-only group built skills to recognize ongoing experiences, while the equanimity group practiced acceptance of those experiences in addition to the basic recognition. Our equanimity training group had much better outcomes on several measures. After just 14 days of training, the participants who learned equanimity skills had significantly lower biological stress responses when asked to deliver a difficult speech and solve math problems in front of experts in white lab coats. The equanimity skills group also had lower blood pressure and stress levels.

1. What helped the colleague in Paragraph 1 get through the tooth treatment?

A．The numbing option.	B．The calming equanimity.
C．The gentle touch from other patients.	D．The occasional interruption by the dentist.

2. What does the concept of "turning toward discomfort" in Paragraph 2 suggest?

A．It requires ignoring negative emotions.

B．It includes avoiding challenging situations.

C．It involves actively seeking out dangerous positions.

D．It means embracing suffering or pain with acceptance.

3. What can we learn from the equanimity training group?

A．They experienced higher levels of stress.

B．They achieved better results in several ways.

C．They showed no significant changes in stress levels.

D．They experienced greater difficulty delivering speeches.

4. Which is the most suitable title for the text?

A．Facing Challenges Enhances Fulfillment

B．Avoiding Suffering Is the Key to Happiness

C．Equanimity Training Takes Lots of Practice

D．Accepting Discomfort Could Help You Get Stronger

4 . Imagine living in an apartment in Manhattan. When Covid-19 hits, you have nowhere to escape. Instead, you go up to the rooftop, where, to your surprise, other renters have come, too. After some awkwardness, everyone starts meeting nightly, drinks in hand, to share stories about themselves. This is the background setting of Fourteen Days, a “collaborative novel” edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. In addition to these two, 34 authors of varied backgrounds contributed to the book. It is one of a growing number of new works, which are written together in some way.

AI services, such as ChatGPT, have started to become co-authors, too. Such models are also conversational machines, which can suggest phrases, give feedback and answer questions. “Cyborg authorship” is what MrRettberg of University of Bergen calls this. He published a book with Cyborg authorship, in which ChatGPT is tasked with generating reviews of famous works in the style of well-known authors — think Jane Austen writing about William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Writing with collaborators, be they human or artificial, will only become more common. But individual authors will still dominate creatively. That is because collectively written books rarely make for great literature. Many contributions to Fourteen Days are cleverly woven together. But the book does not work quite well. Then there is authorial ego (自我价值感). Getting all 36 authors of Fourteen Days to agree on the text was a challenge, with some writers taking issue with how their story ended up being framed and referred to by other contributors later. And AI is not yet fully accepted in literary circles. Recently KudanRie, the winner of Japan’s top prize for literature, admitted she used ChatGPT to write around 5% of her science-fiction novel Tokyo Sympathy Tower. Such honesty is rare because most would never admit using AI. A new sort of “ghost writing” may be having a moment, but many writers will never want to name ChatGPT as their co-author.

1. Who created Fourteen Days?

A．New Yorkers suffering from Covid-19.	B．Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston.
C．Renters of a Manhattan apartment building.	D．Separate writers from different walks of life.

2. What is ChatGPT’s contribution to MrRettberg’s book?

A．Generating phrases.	B．Giving feedback.
C．Writing book reviews.	D．Improving language fluency.

3. What is the main reason for the dominance of individual authors?

A．Collaborative writing is becoming less common.	B．Individual authorship makes creative literature.
C．Most authors reject to cooperate with AI.	D．Individual writing improves efficiency.

4. What is the author’s attitude towards collaborative writing?

A．Favorable.

B．Negative.

C．Cautious.

D．Optimistic.

5 . Going to a gallery can be really enriching for children, but how to get them through the door? According to a psychologist Michael Atar, there’s an art.

With digital distractions everywhere, the thought of taking your kids to an art gallery — and they actually enjoy it — seems a huge challenge. It’s commonly thought that art galleries are anything but child-friendly places — they are usually described in popular media as stuffy and serious, demanding intense and extended periods of concentration for meditation in the backstory and meaning locked within each golden frame.

That common view depressingly makes galleries the least-visited heritage attractions for British families. Research has found that trips each year to theaters and castles far outnumber those to galleries, with a survey revealing that 35 percent of families have never been there at all. This is a crying shame as being exposed to art holds profound significance for the development of young minds, both intellectually and emotionally.

Beyond simply offering aesthetics (美学), art galleries serve as invaluable educational and instructional resources, fostering creativity, critical thinking and empathy. Here, children have the opportunity to engage in diverse perspectives, cultures and moods, with each painting, sculpture or photograph telling a story, inviting young viewers to interpret and connect with the artwork, and offering them different ways of seeing the world. But how can we get them engaged?

First, dispose of the idea of galleries being old-fashioned, outdated institutions to the dustbin. Similarly, see engagement with art being far wider than a collection of dry facts about the artist and history. Rather than trying to make kids “fit in” with fixed labels of a gallery, instead make the art gallery fit in with kids, defining their encounters on their terms. Besides, what really matters is that children build a connection with art. To encourage this, you can make it into a game, either with or without a reward, with simple quizzes such as, “Who can guess the artist?” or, “Who can identify the period it was made?” Also, don’t spend too long in the gallery for children naturally have shorter attention spans than adults, limiting your visit to 45 minutes in a gallery is perfect for stopping boredom creeping in.

1. What is the author’s attitude towards the common view on art galleries?

A．Critical.

B．Supportive.

C．Tolerant.

D．Uncertain.

2. Why should a kid be exposed to art galleries?

A．They lift children’s moods.	B．They foster educational excellence.
C．They give opportunities to create artworks.	D．They offer diverse ways to perceive the world.

3. What does the author recommend parents to do?

A．To define artistic terms.	B．To emphasize tradition.
C．To link kids with art by games.	D．To make kids fit in with galleries.

4. Which of the following is the best title for the text?

A．Make Art Fun	B．Take Kids to Art Galleries
C．Art Galleries Won’t Die Easily	D．Kids Say No to Art Galleries

6 . Social media companies are often compared to tobacco companies, for they both market harmful products to children and design their products for maximum customer loyalty (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens can and do choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on non-users, at a much younger age and in a more unnoticed way.

Once a few students in any middle school open accounts at age 11 or 12, the pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who consciously knows that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the picture and excluded. In this way, social media unlocks a remarkable achievement: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study in the University of Chicago illustrated the effects of the social media trap precisely. The researchers asked more than 1,000 college students how much they would need to be paid to deactivate (停用) their accounts on Instagram for four weeks. On average, the students said they would need to be paid roughly $ 50. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to get most of their friends to do the same, and then asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero — most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Most students are on social media only because everyone else is too. This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is discouraged from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media, however, has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem.

1. What drives teenagers to start using social media?

A．The longing to stand out.

B．The fear of being left out.

C．The wish to impress others.

D．The pressure from non-users.

2. What can we learn about the college students in the study?

A．They are happy to interact online.

B．They are fed up with social media.

C．They choose Instagram over friends.

D．They use social media to make money.

3. Which of the following is a collective-action problem?

A．Athletes changing strategies to win a race.

B．Students taking exercise for better health.

C．Fishermen limiting their catch to protect fish.

D．Companies investing more for bigger profits.

4. What is the purpose of the text?

A．To present new findings of a research.

B．To introduce a branch of social science.

C．To explore a reason for social media addiction.

D．To argue against the benefits of social media.

7 . Imagine if you could look into the future and see yourself 50 years from now. You could see the wrinkles on your face, how your hair would gray, and how the very shape of your face would change after decades of life. You would be able to see how you might look to your future grandchildren.

It sounds like something out of a fairytale. But a viral “Aged” filter (滤镜) on TikTok is allowing users to look into the face of their future selves.

The new filter uses AI to estimate what your face will look like as you age, and dermatologists (皮肤学家) on TikTok are calling it “very accurate”. But the response, especially among young people using the filter, shows a deep fear within Gen Z of getting, and more importantly, looking old.

What does the filter do?

The filter, which has over 9 million videos on TikTok, provides a picture of users’ faces with realistic aging, including wrinkles, crow’s feet and often gray hair. The filter looks different for each person and uses AI to enhance existing facial features, like under-eye bags or wrinkles, to estimate how their face will age.

TikTok is not the first app to release an aging filter. Snapchat released a similar filter back in 2019, and users similarly used FaceApp to age themselves.

Even Kylie Jenner immediately joined in the trend saying simply “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

Others disagree about how much the filter ages them, comparing their aged face to other users. Some have used the filter on old photos of their parents or celebrities and compared the filter’s results to how they look today.

Others, however, have taken a more loving approach to their future selves. Many users express shock at how similar they look to relatives and others express excitement for the years ahead.

1. What is the function of the first paragraph?

A．To supply a scientific fact.	B．To arouse the reader’s interest.
C．To provide a good example.	D．To share the theory of the filter.

2. Why does the writer say “looking old” instead of “getting old” at the end of paragraph 3?

A．Their ages don’t really change.

B．There’s no real difference between them.

C．“Looking old” sounds more polite.

D．“Getting old” sounds a little more boring.

3. Why is Kylie Jenner mentioned in the text?

A．To introduce another opinion.	B．To try to please her true fans.
C．To emphasize the wide use.	D．To prove the truth of the technique.

4. How do people react to how much the filter ages them?

A．Angrily.

B．Similarly.

C．Excitedly.

D．Differently.

8 . Ancient humans were hunter-gatherers. They followed herds of animals on the hunt and gathered eatable plants as well. Starting around 10,000 years ago, humans in a handful of regions around the world discovered agriculture. People discovered that certain seeds could be planted and crops could be reliably grown. It is impossible to overstate how important the change was. Some time after that, people in the same regions began to domesticate animals, keeping cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats in controlled conditions, eating them and using their hides.

Even fairly primitive agriculture can produce fifty times more caloric energy than hunting and gathering does. The very basis of human life is how much energy we can gain from food; with agriculture and animal domestication, it was possible for families to grow much larger and overall population levels to rise dramatically.

One of the noteworthy aspects of this change is that hunter-gatherers actually had much more leisure time than farmers did. Archaeologists (考古学家) have determined that hunter-gatherers generally only“worked”for a few hours a day, and spent the rest of their time in leisure activities. Meanwhile, farmers always worked incredibly hard for very long hours. In many places in the ancient world, there were groups of people who remained hunter-gatherers despite knowing about agriculture, and it was quite possible they did that because they saw no particular advantage in adopting agriculture. There were also many areas that practiced both—right up until the modern time, many farmers tried to forage in wild areas near their farms.

Agriculture was developed in a few different places completely independently. According to archaeological evidence, agriculture did not start in one place and then spread; it started in a few distinct areas and then spread from those areas, sometimes meeting in the middle. For example, agriculture developed independently in China by 5000 BCE, and of course agriculture in the Americas (starting in western South America) had nothing to do with its earlier invention in the Fertile Crescent.

1. What’s the great change of early humans?

A．Increasing population.	B．Keeping pet animals.
C．Learning to plant.	D．Using the hides.

2. What’s the disadvantage of agriculture compared with hunting and gathering?

A．It employed more time and efforts.

B．It was less productive than hunting.

C．It rewarded people with fewer gains.

D．It needed more skills and techniques.

3. What does the underlined word “forage” in paragraph 3 refer to?

A．Grow plants.	B．Exchange goods.
C．Gather together.	D．Hunt for food.

4. What does the last paragraph show?

A．Agriculture spread from one place to another.

B．China made great contributions to agriculture.

C．Agriculture developed separately in the world.

D．Earlier inventions had something in common with agriculture.

9 . A recent survey of British parents found that in all, 7% of respondents give their baby a made-up name and 65% are at least willing to consider such a move in new age.

A few examples of these new age baby names include Jaspin, Elisobelle, Wrenlow, and Maevery. Don’t see any names you like? How about Evabeth? Even if they themselves aren’t willing to choose such a name, a surprising 94% of respondents admit that made-up baby names are very much “in” these days.

Apparently, these parents believe they are helping their kids by selecting a rarer name. The survey noted that 72% of all respondents believe a unique name will help their child stand out from the crowd. Another 2% choose a made-up name for their baby with social media in mind, thinking a more unique name means their child’s social media account will be much easier for potential followers to find. But 16% also believe that a strange name may reflect poorly on the parents.

A popular strategy for parents to decide on a name is taking two names that both parents like, and combining them into one name（10%）. Another 9% combine the names of older relatives as a way to honor family. Similarly, many parents（30%） are drawing inspiration from popular movies and books.

However, the majority of surveyed parents（92%） at least admitted that giving their child an odd name is bound to result in a few drawbacks. For example, two-thirds worry that an odd name will be hard to spell and pronounce, and a third worry that their child’s teachers will judge them based on their unusual name. Of course, for those parents who are confident they’ve picked a winning made-up name, 13% actually worry about other parents stealing their child’s name.

1. How does the author illustrate the new trend?

A．By making comparisons.	B．By asking questions.
C．By listing statistics.	D．By stating opinions.

2. Why do most parents give their newborns odd names?

A．To make their children feel less special.	B．To reflect their higher social status.
C．To draw others’ attention more easily.	D．To attract more followers online.

3. What is most people’s attitude towards the new trend of naming babies?

A．It will be advised by teachers.	B．It can actually be double-edged.
C．It should be protected carefully.	D．It surely makes parents confident.

4. What’s the best title for the text?

A．Ordinary Names Are Parents’ New Pursuit	B．An Odd Name Can Influence One’s Life
C．Trendy Names Appear on Social Media	D．Newborns’ Unique Names Are Coming

10 . Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.

To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”

1. What have some students done since ChatGPT was released?

A．They have built language models from ChatGPT.

B．They have copied AI-written text from ChatGPT

C．They have accessed their assignments through ChatGPT.

D．They have passed their writing exams through ChatGPT.

2. What can be inferred about the two indicators of GPTZero?

A．The more uniform the text is, the more likely it is to be AI-generated.

B．The less complex the text is, the more likely it is to be human-written.

C．GPTZero sometimes confuses human-written texts with AI-generated texts.

D．GPTZero is more familiar with human-written texts than with AI-generated texts.

3. What does the underlined word “foolproof” mean in the fourth paragraph?

A．User-friendly.	B．Time-efficient.
C．Perfectly legal.	D．Completely reliable.

4. What maybe Tian’s attitude to the use of AI tools?

A．Favorable.

B．Disapproving.

C．Objective.

D．Ambiguous.