1 . Check your drawer, and you may find several electronic device chargers, many of which you no longer use. The European Union proposed a new regulation that would solve this problem by requiring all small electronics (including phones and cameras) to have the one-size-fits-all charging port (端口). All such electronics sold in the EU would need to switch to the USB-C standard within two years.
Officials claim this standard not only increases convenience for consumers but also cuts down on e-waste. Critics claim the move will stifle innovation. The true impact of the new regulation, however, may not be as simple as either side suggests.
“The relative reduction in the amount of e-waste is probably going to be relatively small,” says Callie Babbitt, a professor of sustainability. “But the bigger potential is that this will require producers to think about the design that is user-friendly.”
There are two benefits of this strategy. The first is the direct benefit of no longer having to throw away a charger. The bigger benefit might be more indirect: This is potentially something that might enable a change in consumer behavior. If your charger still works, maybe that’s a sign that the product still works, and you can keep using it. And there might be some indirect benefit on consumers continuing to repair and to extend the lifespan of the products.
How can standardization have this indirect benefit? With standardized components, all the parts are the same. In my lab, we have an enormous bench full of tools of all sizes and shapes—because that’s what’s needed to access the components inside electronics. Without design standardization, a business trying to work in the reuse field has to spend more on labor and costs to do the valuable work.
No single policy can effectively address the problem of e-waste. It will take a joint effort. Policy plays a key role. Producers play a key role. But we also have to change the way products can be repaired. And we have to educate consumers on how to participate in the system.
1. What does the underlined part “one-size-fits-all” in paragraph 1 mean?| A．Ordinary. | B．Unique. | C．Common. | D．Suitable. |
| A．It might promote innovation. |
| B．It might prolong the service life of products. |
| C．It will result in a significant decrease in e-waste. |
| D．It will help charger producers reduce the costs of production. |
| A．To show how complicated their work is. |
| B．To indicate the necessity for standardization. |
| C．To demonstrate the difficulty of doing valuable work. |
| D．To provide a means for accessing electronic components. |
| A．Standardized Design Is Beneficial |
| B．The EU’s New USB-C Standard Port Is Necessary |
| C．The Problem of E-waste Is in Need of a Joint Effort |
| D．The Chargers of All Small Electronics Should Be Harmonized |
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, but with a group of people... New sports begin to thrive with great attention
Why do young people favor new sports? Apart from keeping fit as a type of exercise, many young people pick them up to socialize,
“The new sports are also suitable for taking photos and less restricted by venues”, Zou Qingling, the CEO of Lvmama,
The new sports are easier for new players to start,
Urban sports have unlocked new lifestyles in China as they reflect
3 . The topic of China’s “slash youth” has fueled heated debate on social media recently, drawing attention to the diverse pursuits of the younger generation.
The slash youth, which could also be called slashers or slash-generation — means those who refuse to be defined by just one personal identity. They are keen to present themselves as multiple and sometimes distinct identities, such as a nurse and model, a teacher and stand-up comedian, and an engineer and band player. Rather than material comforts, they look for meaningful achievement.
A diverse career can enable them to develop new experiences and talents as well as social and professional networks, leading to greater flexibility in life and work, recognition and satisfaction.
A study on “slash youth” published in the China Youth Research magazine analyzes the background of this phenomenon: with part of modern society’s structured organization and stability norms (规范) are broken, flexible labor markets and structural unemployment has appeared, eliminating the sense of job security of the young people in employment. Young people also face the dilemma of self-actualization (自我实现), including the sense of powerlessness, lost sense of value and lack of self-identity in the profession, which forces them to re-find the meaning of work.
“The ‘slash life’ shows that our society is becoming more and more diversified and inclusive, and it welcomes everyone’s self-fulfillment,” said Shi Yanrong, an associate researcher from Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences. “Young people no longer have to rely on work and money for their sense of self-worth. They tend to create their own identities.” The researcher added that against the background that people have multiple interests and are willing to pay for these interests nowadays, the “slash life” of the youth would drive the growth of a new economy, just as animation(动漫) culture affected the market.
1. What does the slash youth refer to?| A．Those liking to show off. | B．Those having different identities. |
| C．Those liking material comforts. | D．Those changing different jobs. |
| A．To prove they are talented. | B．To enable them to experience a lot. |
| C．To show others full of energy. | D．To know more from different areas. |
| A．Strengthening. | B．Increasing. | C．Forgetting. | D．Removing. |
| A．Meaningless. | B．Uncaring. | C．Favorable. | D．Naughty. |
4 . You’ve heard of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday—they’re major shopping days. Now there’s another shopping day, and it’s called Secondhand Sunday, which is the brainchild of Poshmark, a social commerce marketplace that enables users to buy and sell clothing online, mostly used.
Poshmark asked global research firm Morning Consult to assess the secondhand market. It found over 90% of American adults say they would be willing to receive a secondhand or resold gift this season, but that only 34% are likely to buy them for others. This suggests a massive opportunity to close the gap—a task that Poshmark has undertaken with enthusiasm. Thus, Secondhand Sunday was born.
Poshmark is a platform on which individual sellers run their own shops and make extra cash. Secondhand Sunday has become a hit among them. While sellers have varying motivations for doing business, most are driven by the belief that buying secondhand items is important for the environment.
One such seller is Ashley Wheeler. Her husband worked as a truck driver at a landfill (垃圾填埋) site. They were both shocked at the amount of secondhand items that were getting dumped (倾倒), just because they were considered old or useless. Even when her husband asked to bring home items that still had value, he was rejected, because companies had paid the landfill site to deal with their garbage.
Wheeler said, “For us, that was a wake-up call. We realized it wasn’t just about us bringing our pre-owned items back into the market but finding other used items that companies were ready to deal with and help recycle back into use. That’s when we started to learn about Goodwill Outlets and other similar stores, where we source a majority of items. She now buys cast-off items from Goodwill’s “last chance” bins and resells them on Secondhand Sunday.
Amber McCasland, vice-president of Global Brand and Communications, said, “Secondhand Sunday is our first joint effort to change how people shop and gift during the holidays. The hope is that, instead of running out to buy new items as gifts, people will realize that it’s acceptable and even preferable to source used items instead.”
1. What drove Poshmark to start Secondhand Sunday?| A．The findings of an assessment. |
| B．The increasing shopping waste. |
| C．Booming gift-exchange seasons. |
| D．Buyers’ strong desire for old items. |
| A．The great demand for more shopping days. |
| B．Some local landfill sites’ generous donation. |
| C．Shoppers’ curiosity about running businesses. |
| D．The improved public environmental awareness. |
| A．Working as a truck driver at a landfill site. |
| B．Being rejected by some brand companies. |
| C．Seeing valuable used items dumped and landfilled. |
| D．Looking for secondhand items to resell. |
| A．Buy used items as gifts on holidays. |
| B．Be cautious of online shopping. |
| C．Donate used items to companies. |
| D．Form the habit of recycling waste. |
5 . Linda Brown is a softly-spoken realtor (房地产经纪人) with a passion for helping the homeless. She’s moving mountains by combining her understanding of real estate (房地产) with her kindness-fueled determination to create beautiful permanent homes for disabled homeless people in her community.
In 2020, Mrs. Brown was awarded the Good Neighbor Award. This honor is initiated by The National Association of Realtors in the US. As its website details, working alongside her husband, Dr. David Brown, she has been transforming abandoned mobile homes into villages of tiny homes that offer permanent housing for homeless people who’re disabled.
The wish to help homeless people, and restore their dignity and self-worth, as Mrs. Brown explains, had been a joint mission for some years. As local blogger Aaron Nichols shares, the couple ran a local evening drop-in center for local homeless people called Gardening Tree, for almost a decade. This functioned as a shelter where people experiencing homelessness could grab a bite, shower, do laundry and relax.
But they wanted to do more than that. With local individual organizations’ help, the couple succeeded in raising almost $5 million, which enabled them to transform unused mobile homes and a deserted trailer park into a small village of tiny homes that opened in 2018. They named the shelter “Eden Village”.
As Mrs. Brown revealed in her award acceptance speech about her journey to creating Eden Village, helping homeless people is something personal, “I watched as my homeless friends walked off into the darkness to a hidden, wet and cold camp while we went home to a warm bed. I had to do something.”
Today, Eden Village includes a 4,000-square-foot community center offering cooking and laundry facilities, as well as a medical center and community gardens. Additionally, more sites are being developed thanks to the land donated to the nonprofit founded by the Browns. Eden Village 2 and 3 are at the planning stage. In the next six years, Mrs. Brown hopes to create five similar villages housing up to 200 people experiencing homelessness.
1. How does the author introduce the couple’s devotion to helping the homeless?| A．By mentioning local realtors’ praise. |
| B．By referring to related online descriptions. |
| C．By recording homeless people’s evaluations. |
| D．By detailing their interaction with the homeless. |
| A．Homeless people’s requests. |
| B．Official favorable policies. |
| C．The support from the society. |
| D．The prize from many associations. |
| A．To express her sympathy for her friends. |
| B．To highlight the influence of the village. |
| C．To show her sincere gratitude for the award. |
| D．To give her reason for setting up the village. |
| A．It is still a concept. | B．It keeps expanding. |
| C．It is carried out globally. | D．It lacks future plans. |
6 . New York City public schools will ban students and teachers from using ChatGPT, a powerful new AI chatbot (聊天机器人) tool, on the district’s networks and devices, an official confirmed to CNN on Thursday.
The move comes amid educators’ growing concerns that the tool, which generates frighteningly convincing responses and even essays in response to user prompts (提示), could make it easier for students to cheat on assignments. Some also worry that ChatGPT could be used to spread incorrect information.
“Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices,” Jenna Lyle, the deputy press secretary for the New York public schools, said in a statement. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”
OpenAI opened up access to ChatGPT in late November. It is able to provide lengthy, thoughtful and thorough responses to questions and prompts, ranging from factual questions like “Who was the president of the United States in 1955” to more open-ended questions such as “What’s the meaning of life?”
ChatGPT went viral just days after its launch. But many educators fear students will use the tool to cheat on assignments. One user, for example, fed ChatGPT an AP English exam question; it responded with a 5-paragraph essay about Wuthering Heights. Another user asked the chatbot to write an essay about the life of William Shakespeare four times; he received a unique version with the same prompt each time.
Darren Hicks, assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, told CNN it will be harder to prove when a student misuses ChatGPT than with other forms of cheating.
1. What do educators fear about ChatGPT?| A．It will affect students’ studies. |
| B．It will lead to students cheating. |
| C．It will result in students’ long screen time. |
| D．It will offer unhealthy contents to students. |
| A．It provides incorrect answers. | B．It serves no practical purpose. |
| C．It offers inaccurate information. | D．It fails to improve students’ skills. |
| A．It can’t write Chinese essays. |
| B．It can’t answer open-ended questions. |
| C．It makes no mistakes when answering questions. |
| D．It can offer different essays for the same prompt. |
| A．ChatGPT Makes Cheating More Difficult to Find |
| B．ChatGPT Surprises the Public with Its Intelligence |
| C．ChatGPT Banned in New York City Public Schools |
| D．ChatGPT Has Negative Effects on Students Learning |
7 . The idea of a four-day workweek used to be a pipedream for most workers and firms. But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies around the world have given it a go — and gathered promising results.
In the US and Ireland, a six-month trial among 33 volunteer companies in 2022 showed a positive impact on company performance, productivity and employee wellbeing. Employees working the shortened week reported less stress and fatigue, plus improved work-life balance and satisfaction. The 27 companies that submitted a final survey rated the trial a nine out of 10. In a 2022 UK trial of 70 firms, 86% of companies said the four-day week was a great success. They cited benefits such as increased productivity and significant financial savings for employees on transport and childcare.
Yet despite the overwhelmingly positive data, a four-day workweek still seems out of reach for many workers. Tech workers in flexible, forward-thinking small companies might hope for such a benefit in the near future, but it is harder to expect the same change for schoolteachers or office workers in more traditional companies.
“In practice, what we see is more small and medium companies trialling the four-day workweek,” says Pedro Gomes, author of Friday is the new Saturday. Other organizations for which four-day workweeks are likely off the table are hourly-and service-based — like restaurants, retail and healthcare — where a shorter workweek and subsequently fewer shifts eventually means pay cuts. Creating a pathway to less labour may be impossible in these industries, if it means losing out on pay.
Even facing resistance from some leaders, experts say it is likely the four-day week will become more mainstream. In sectors that are already welcoming the shift, the 32-hour week is emerging as “a tool for competitive advantage in terms of talent, attraction and retention”, says Joe O’Connor, director of the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence. “In tech companies, not offering a four-day week will be almost a competitive disadvantage.”
1. What is the second paragraph mainly about?| A．The popularity of a four-day workweek. |
| B．Why a four-day workweek is necessary. |
| C．How a four-day workweek is carried out. |
| D．The problems with a four-day workweek. |
| A．Government officers. | B．Schools and hospitals. |
| C．Small tech companies. | D．Traditional big companies. |
| A．Reduced stress. | B．Lower incomes. |
| C．Better performance. | D．Increased productivity. |
| A．It will be the future trend. | B．It will face great challenge. |
| C．It will have negative effects. | D．It will improve productivity. |
