1 . PAUL HEMINGTON, 57, is the Assistant Operations Manager at Cheddar Gorge（切达峡谷） and Caves cheddargorge.co.uk

I moved to SOMERSET mainly for my family. My daughter was getting married and I didn’t want to live six hours away, so we made the move. Once we moved, we were made unneeded and it was a mad race to get work. I ended up at here at Cheddar Gorge and Caves.

Cheddar Gorge is like nothing else in the UK. It’s a unique phenomenon, because although there are other caves in the country, you don’t have the gorge elsewhere. This is a major geological feature, it’s three miles long and there’s just this natural, raw beauty. I can sit at my desk in guest services and look out at part of the gorge. It’s amazing.

The Cheddar Gorge spirit is strong. You know, not having worked here or heard about the area, you come here and it gets under your skin in the right way. You become part of it, it becomes part of you. I’m very passionate about it. And there’s the amazing wildlife, the geology, the prehistory — Cheddar Man is still one of the greatest finds in the UK.

Every day at Cheddar Gorge and Caves is different. You’ve got the rock sports side of things, the climbing, the caving. We take people through the caves on tours and we have pre-history, which we do with the museum, whereby we have schools come in and do demonstrations with them. We will dress up as genuinely as we can to reproduce the time period of the Cheddar Man, which is the Mesolithic period, so 10,000 years ago. We do fire lighting, for example, and hopefully it’s inspiring to the young people! It’s really cool to be in the museum garden and have part of the gorge as the background while you’re doing it, so you can really submerge yourself in that moment.

My favourite spot is when you go past the peak on the walk and you can look back down into the gorge or across to the reservoir. The view is amazing. Yes, you can see pictures of it, but honestly you have to be there to fully appreciate it. You might hear some buzzards or see some sheep or goats while you’re up there, just to enhance the experience!

1. PAUL HEMINGTON originally moved to Cheddar Gorge to __________.

A．settle down in the countryside	B．be closer to his daughter
C．land a job as a tour guide	D．take part in a competitive race

2. The underlined phrase “gets under your skin” is closest in meaning to _________.

A．affects you deeply	B．bothers you greatly
C．increases your strength	D．improves your skin condition

3. Which of the following falls into Paul’s job descriptions?

A．He goes to the school to give lectures on pre-history.

B．He demonstrates to young people how to climb rocks.

C．He participates in recreating the scenes in the Mesolithic period.

D．He decorates the museum garden to make it look like the gorge.

4. What does PAUL HEMINGTON talk about in this article?

A．How he adapts to the local way of life.

B．What major local attractions are worth seeing.

C．Why Cheddar Gorge ranks first as a natural wonder.

D．What makes Cheddar Gorge so special to him.

2 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point (s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Have You Got Success Amnesia?

Have you heard yourself say “it was nothing really” when someone congratulates you on a job well done? Or have you drawn a blank when you are asked to make a list of what you have achieved? If so, you have suffered success amnesia. Failing to acknowledge your hard work is often a sign of success amnesia. It signals that there might be a gap between how others view your achievements and how you see them.

People who have success amnesia often have a strong track record at work or get it sorted for family members. They are people who others would describe as successful and yet they find it difficult to acknowledge and own their results. They don’t hold their achievements in their memory bank.

This particular type of memory loss robs them of the satisfaction and pleasure that can follow in achieving a goal. And, perhaps more importantly, it robs them of confidence. Confidence does not guarantee success, but it does increase the chance of success. Why not try some practical methods?     

Ask for feedback about the impact you’ve had and then listen carefully. Watch out for anything that you begin to tell yourself “It wasn’t that big a deal.” Try to absorb what you hear. You can also look back over the past 6 or12 months, capture every success you can think of, whether large or small, and write them down clearly. Purposefully acknowledging and admitting your achievements can help to bring them into more realistic focus. Besides, be mindful that you have a tendency to forget or minimize your achievements. A sticky note on your laptop screen might help: my strengths and achievements are bigger than they appear to me.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3 . Miriam Glassman, a top image consultant, is standing in front of her client, Lucy. ‘Can you give me an idea of what you are looking for?’ she asks. ‘Something cool,’ says nine-year-old Lucy. Glassman gets some jackets and marches off to the changing room with Lucy. This is a growing trend and the _________ for it are obvious: we encourage our youth to be successful and success, as everyone knows, is partly down to having the right _________. But when nine-year-olds hi re image consultants, you have to wonder: could things have gone too far?

Some of those caring most about image are _________. They know that everything — clothes, posture, voice—influences what people think of you and _________ , has to be carefully managed. In the 1960 US presidential debate, those listening on the radio believed that Nixon won, while those watching on TV believed Kennedy was the _________. The difference was that Kennedy was wearing make-up but Nixon wasn’t, and the viewers were _________ by his appearance.

Celebrities seek help from wardrobe, hair stylists, make-up artists and more just to manage their profile, and these professionals don’t come _________. Mari a Moriati, stylist to some of Hollywood’s A-listers, is said to be paid $10,000-20,000 a time to choose the clothes for a celebrity on a press tour. She will pack each outfit including detailed _________(‘roll up the sleeves twice and undo the top button of the shirt’).

It’s not just them that need an image boost. The cities, too, try to give themselves the marketing _________ of a style makeover. They know that most of the tourists don’t have the time to think in detail about where they want to go on holiday and instead __________ a few simple preconceptions of what a place is like. Those preconceptions are easy to __________ on people with an advertising campaign or a catchy slogan.

So, perhaps we should step back from our __________ in image and focus on what is important. Ignore the gossip and the websites telling us to manage our online profile and instead depend on __________ rather than image to reach decisions. All these suggestions sound sensible, but are they __________? How much research will we really do before deciding which celebrity we like or where to go on our next holiday?

And going back to our image consultant, surely Glassman must have reservations about taking on such young clients? Apparently not. ‘I get so many calls from teens,’ she says. ‘School is a(n) __________ place and image is important. Lucy is just taking control of hers.’

1.

A．challenges

B．results

C．advantages

D．reasons

2.

A．consultant

B．goal

C．attitude

D．image

3.

A．stars

B．politicians

C．managers

D．designers

4.

A．therefore

B．otherwise

C．nevertheless

D．besides

5.

A．guide

B．winner

C．lecturer

D．officer

6.

A．left over

B．looked over

C．put off

D．taken on

7.

A．true

B．easy

C．cheap

D．plain

8.

A．instructions

B．budgets

C．comparisons

D．plans

9.

A．business

B．strategy

C．agency

D．equivalent

10.

A．rely on

B．approve of

C．complain of

D．work on

11.

A．blame

B．impose

C．congratulate

D．feed

12.

A．criticism

B．belief

C．suspicion

D．desire

13.

A．opinions

B．facts

C．advertisements

D．policies

14.

A．suitable

B．popular

C．realistic

D．appealing

15.

A．competitive

B．peaceful

C．inspiring

D．delightful

4 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

The Impact of Visual Cues on Behavior

During the energy crisis in the 1970s, Dutch researchers began to pay close attention to the country’s energy usage. In one suburb near Amsterdam, they found that some homeowners used 30 percent less energy than their neighbors     1     the homes being of similar size and getting electricity for the same price.

It turned out that the houses in this neighborhood were nearly identical except for one feature: the location of the electrical meter. Some had one in the basement.     2     had the electrical meter upstairs in the main hallway.     3     you may guess, the homes with the meters located in the main hallway used less electricity. When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.

Every habit     4     (initiate) by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out. Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy not to do certain actions     5    there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior. When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy     6     (ignore).

By comparison, creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward a    7     (desire) habit. I’ve experienced the power of obvious cues in my own life. I used to buy apples from the store, put them in the crisper (储藏格) in the bottom of the refrigerator, and forget all about them. By the time I remembered, the apples     8     (go) bad. I never saw them, so I never ate them.

Eventually, I took my own advice and redesigned my environment. I bought a large display bowl and placed it in the middle of the kitchen counter. The next time I bought apples, that was     9     they went. Almost like magic, I began eating a few apples each day simply because they were obvious,     10     (facilitate) the formation of a healthy eating habit rather than keeping them out of sight.

5 . Man’s Existential Dilemma

We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals.     1     For ages, when philosophers talked about the the core of man they referred to it as his “essence”, something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found and man’s peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm (艾瑞克·弗洛姆，精神分析心理学家和人本主义哲学家) put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical(悖论的)nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude (有限性). Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history.     2     He can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immerse expansion, this competence, this self-consciousness gives to man almost the status a small god in nature.

    3     This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he is dual, up in the stars’ and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most unpleasant way being that is aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb beings. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue gazing while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over.     4    

Quoted from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death

A．But to live a life with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams makes a huge difference.

B．He is a creator with a mind that soars out the speculate about atoms and infinity.

C．Man’s body was a curse of fate and culture was built upon repression not because he was a seeker of pleasure, but because he was primarily an avoider of death.

D．Yet at the same time, man is a worm and food for worms.

E．Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

F．It was something that had to go right to his core, something that made him suffer his peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape.

6 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

You know what they say, marriage is like a box of chocolates and you never know what you are gonna get. My wife and I had a “ferocious” argument the other night     1     we were watching one episode of the latest season of a reality show called See You Again. Basically, the show was about three couples     2     (embark) on an 18-day vacation to try to work out their marital issues in the hope of saving their marriages. For them, it was really a make-it-or-break-it vacation.

    3     we both agreed on most men’s incompetence in expressing their true feelings in any intimate relationship, my still beloved wife and I failed miserably to see eye to eye on reasons for that. She blamed it on men’s upbringing while I thought it had more to do with the influence of outdated social norms and stereotypes on men.

Our society     4     (discourage) emotional expression in men for ages, telling them they can’t shed a tear or show any vulnerability. These outdated ideas about what it means to be a man have messed them up big time. To me, it is no wonder that in the marriage market, the most common type available       5     women is the silent but dominant type of men with the whole breadwinner and homemaker roles still       6     (stick) in their heads. So when things don’t go that way, of course, they will feel lost.

“Intimidated” by my rigorous logic, my wife purposefully shifted the focus of her argument to     7     we two should raise our son and what I could have done better if I had taken her advice seriously.

However, things started to get much     8     (personal) when both of us seemed to run out of witty arguments. Realizing this disagreement would lead us nowhere, I wasted no time apologizing to her for my ill-considered words with dignity and offered to clean the plates piling up in the sink     9     I cooked dinner that night! Faced with an offer she couldn’t refuse, my wife kindly reminded me     10     (not forget) to dry the towel when I was done. Apology accepted, hence case closed.

At the end of the day, I exhibited my vulnerability as requested and she showed her mercy as expected. We just agreed to disagree and lived happily ever after.

7 . 假如你是明启中学的高中学生李华，你在报纸上读到这样一则新闻：一个景区为解决游客爬山累的问题，在山石之间架起了一条条自动扶梯(见右图), 游客可实现“无痛爬山”。请以李华的口吻给该报纸编辑写一封邮件，要求：
1. 介绍一下你在报纸上看到的内容；
2. 自己针对此事的态度以及理由。
注，自动扶梯escalator

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8 . I’m pretty good at sticking with things even when they get hard. Bad relationships, unpleasant workplaces, ______ sports — I’ve hung on for months and even years longer than I should have, convinced the situation would ______ if I refused to give up.

After all, isn’t every success story littered with ______? Didn’t Beyoncé lose Star Search, and didn’t Oprah get fired from her first TV job? Quitting is a sign that you lack patience and strong will, or so I was raised to believe.

______, if I look back on all the things I eventually quit, my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. I’ve wasted immeasurable time and energy dragging my heels, determined that I could ______ everyone if I just kept going.

All of us are constantly making tricky choices between going further into familiar territory and ______ to expand our horizons. This is known as the exploration-exploitation trade-off. When we are younger, it’s advantageous to go far on the side of exploration, trying lots of new things because we have plenty of time to ______ later. But as we age, it’s often smarter to double down.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t quit something just because you’ve put a lot of time into it. Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy (谬误): People are more likely to ______ something if they’ve invested a lot of money or effort into it, even when it’s clear that they should ______ their losses and jump ship. This practice is normal and ______, but it’s also unreasonable. If an activity or relationship is making you miserable, that’s important information you shouldn’t ignore.

If you don’t get energy out of doing something, it can be a(n) ______ that this is not for you or that there’s something better you could be doing. Or it could be a sign that you should ______ your goals. Maybe your yogurt startup might not win over investors, but you could still make and sell yogurt at the farmers’ market on weekends.

In fact, dogged persistence in the face of energy-sucking disappointment can ______ depression, and then make you suffer from diseases in the long run.

But the good news is that people can learn to pay better attention to these moments when they’re happening and make ______. The art of quitting isn’t about just letting go whenever there’s an obstacle. It’s about being able to let go when there’s no ______ to success anymore.

1.

A．engaging

B．demanding

C．inevitable

D．leisure

2.

A．worsen

B．occur

C．improve

D．continue

3.

A．frustrations

B．determinations

C．attempts

D．inspirations

4.

A．Therefore

B．Additionally

C．For example

D．However

5.

A．amaze

B．scare

C．distress

D．compliment

6.

A．breaking up

B．looking up

C．standing up

D．backing up

7.

A．venture

B．specialize

C．explore

D．relax

8.

A．benefit from

B．approve of

C．stick with

D．withdraw from

9.

A．evaluate

B．avoid

C．overlook

D．cut

10.

A．human

B．crazy

C．sensible

D．tricky

11.

A．indication

B．desire

C．occasion

D．recognition

12.

A．accomplish

B．upgrade

C．modify

D．maintain

13.

A．prevent

B．trigger

C．relieve

D．contract

14.

A．researches

B．choices

C．changes

D．resolutions

15.

A．shortcut

B．barrier

C．guarantee

D．pathway

9 . Directions: Read the following passage. Fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word. For the other blanks, fill in each blank with one proper word. Make sure that your answers are grammatically correct.

Love from the Apple Tree

Once upon a time, there used to be a tall and big apple tree. A little boy, every day to the tree down, climbed up     1     (pick) apples to eat, and slept in the shade of the tree. He loved the apple tree, and it loved to play with him. The little boy gradually grew up and stopped     2     (come) to play every day. One day he came to the tree, picked all the apples and left happily. Another day, the boy came again, and cut off all the branches, happily away to build a house himself. One summer, the boy came back, cut down her tree trunk, built a boat,     3     (sail) away, and did not come back for a long time. After years, the boy returned at last. He was old and wanted     4     more than a place to rest. “Old root is     5     (suitable) to sit down and rest, come on, sit down and rest with me!” The boy sat down, and the apple tree was so happy that it shed tears.

This is a story of everyone. The tree is like our parent.     6     we are young, we love to play with Mom and Dad. Having grown up, we leave them, and only come to them when we need something or when we are in trouble. No matter what, parents will always be there and give everything they     7     to make you happy.

    8     your parents can give you is not necessarily the best in the world, but they will try their best to give you all, and they are afraid that it is not enough; maybe they never said “I love you”, but love you in their own way for a lifetime,     9     is how most parents around the world show their love. For example, a tired father was watching his two daughters eat fried chicken, but he didn’t order anything, telling his daughters that he was not hungry,     10     more money in his pocket. We grow up to know that the world’s most affectionate lie is what the father and mother said: I do not love to cat it and I am not hungry.

10 . Defining Success on Your Own Terms

“You go to college right out of high school. That’s the rule, right?” says Nikki Ivey, a sales trainer and consultant outside Jacksonville, Fla, However, it’s not the case for her. Actually, she got her undergraduate degree at 28.     1    

One by one, she missed the milestones she’d envisioned in some imaginary dream life: earning six figures by 30, buying a house by 35. Then she hit one- attaining a high-level executive position in a company. She didn’t love the job. She did love sitting around the dinner table laughing with her kids. “    2    ” she asked herself. She ended up leaving the job, and started to wonder about all those milestones.

Danielle Ponder had a career as a lawyer before dedicating herself to singing full time. Working as a public defender in Rochester, NY, Danielle Ponder would frequently Google,“Did anyone make it after the age of 35? At one point, she quit her day job, only to return a year and a half later, due to the pandemic and disappointing bookings. On the last day of 2021, five days before her 40 birthday, she tried again.     3     “I don’t know if I could survive this happening to me at 19,“ she says. She thinks her insecure teen self wouldn’t have handled the stress of the public eye well.

It can be hard to make a transition later in life.    4    

A．Do I even want them? On whose clock?

B．Why should you challenge that secret timeline of milestones in your head?

C．This time, quitting her job led to her first album, television appearances and sold-out shows.

D．Instead of feeling pressure to hit life events on someone else’s timeline, maybe it’s fine to make our own.

E．People are felling like they’re falling behind, when in fact they’re probably doing exactly what they should.

F．She spent years feeling like an outsider and failure as she watched her peers rise in school and work, figuring she’d never catch up.