1 . 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.

Reconsidering the Staycation

I’ve always been doubtful of the staycation. The newly-invented word is too cute for     1     feels like a comfort: While other people are off exploring the Blue Lagoon by camper van, you get to stay in your very own home and go to your usual supermarket     2     cookies!

So, I am fascinated to discover, thanks to my colleague Catherine Pearson, that I     3     (understand) staycation in a wrong way. Evidently, my tendency     4     (take) a break without a plan is unlikely to produce a restorative effect. Instead, one should make good preparations for that period of time. Jaime Kurtz, a psychology professor at James Madison University and the author of “The Happy Traveler: Unpacking the Secrets of Better Vacations,” advises     5     (ask) oneself, “If I were moving away soon, what would I most want to do, and who would I most want to spend time with?”

I like this saying “Live every day as if it were your last.” Any reminder that time is flying is a good one     6     it gets you to live better. This weekend, you could, for instance, seek out some vegan ice cream     7     doesn’t taste terrible. You could try running in a pool, which is easier on the joints but as effective as running on land. You could go for a walk or a drive while listening to “Slow Radio,” a very comforting BBC podcast     8     (feature) sounds of the natural world.

Whether or not you have a proper vacation     9     (plan) for the coming weeks, you could envision any coming weekend as its own two-day mini-break, programming it as you would a trip to somewhere new, with a journey     10     (exciting) than just “sleep as much as possible” and “mow the lawn”.

2 . 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.

I received an email from a reader who asked, “Why do some friendships end, no matter how much you want them to last?” She referred to     1     (see) the question in one of my articles, Mystery of Friendship. As I wrote in it, I don’t think easy answers exist as to how friendships start, why some turn into lifetime     2    , and why some end. Although I’ve tried answering the first two questions in other articles (To Have A Friend and Be A Friend), I still get surprised by friendships that endure and disillusioned by those that slip away. Even so, I’ll try to offer some insights here as to why friendships end.

My simple answer is that friendships end because the situations     3     friends are in or even the friends themselves change. First, the realities friends face may change. The decision to relocate     4     a new school or job cannot help but affect a friendship. Likewise, if a friend is in an accident, develops an illness, or loses someone close, these cannot help but affect a friendship. Does a friendship need to end because of these changes? No, but it’ll require adjustments that one or both friends     5     not be willing to make.

Second, the friends themselves may change. A significant reason why friendships often end     6    friends are apart for an     7     (extend) period of time (for summer camp, college, etc.) is that one or both of the friends change. I think it     8     (hurt) less when both friends change, because then the breakup is more often mutual and so both friends get closure by both deciding to let go and move forward in their lives without each other. What tends to hurt most is when just one friend changes. One friend might change social circles, become involved in new social organizations, start to date, get a pet, or take on some other venture that consumes more time and passion. Again, a friendship can endure these changes,     9     one or both of the friends for some reason decide not to invest the time and energy involved in the adjustment period. In this situation, breakups may not be mutual and so one or both friends feel betrayed and end up with bitter memories about     10     was a precious friendship to them.

4 . The curb cut (下斜路缘). It’s a convenience that most of us rarely, if ever, notice. Yet, without it, daily life might be a lot harder—in more ways than one. Pushing a baby stroller onto the curb, skateboarding onto a sidewalk or taking a full grocery cart from the sidewalk to your car—all these tasks are easier because of the curb cut.

But it was created with a different purpose in mind.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the 1970s, most sidewalks in the United States ended with a sharp drop-off. That was a big deal for people in wheelchairs because there were no ramps (斜坡) to help them move along city blocks without assistance. According to one disability rights leader, a six-inch curb “might as well have been Mount Everest”. So, activists from Berkeley, California, who also needed wheelchairs, organized a campaign to create tiny ramps at intersections to help people dependent on wheels move up and down curbs independently.

I think about the “curb cut effect” a lot when working on issues around health equity (公平). The first time I even heard about the curb cut was in a 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece by PolicyLink CEO Angela Blackwell. Blackwell rightly noted that many people see equity “as a zero-sum game.” Basically, that there is a “prejudiced societal suspicion that intentionally supporting one group hurts another.” What the curb cut effect shows though, Blackwell said, is that “when society creates the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully, everyone wins.”

There are multiple examples of this principle at work. For example, investing in policies that create more living-wage jobs or increase the availability of affordable housing certainly benefits people in communities that have limited options. But, the action also empowers those people with opportunities for better health and the means to become contributing members of society—and that benefits everyone. Even the football huddle (围成一团以秘密商讨) was initially created to help deaf football players at Gallaudet College keep their game plans secret from opponents who could have read their sign language. Today, it’s used by every team to shield the opponent from learning about game-winning strategies.

So, next time you cross the street, or roll your suitcase through a crosswalk or ride your bike directly onto a sidewalk—think about how much the curb cut, that change in design that broke down walls of exclusion for one group of people at a disadvantage, has helped not just that group, but all of us.

1. By “might as well have been Mount Everest” (paragraph 3), the disability rights leader implies that a six-inch curb may become ________.

A．as famous as the world’s highest mountain

B．an almost impassable barrier

C．a connection between people

D．a most unforgettable matter

2. According to Angela Blackwell, many people believe that ________.

A．it’s fair to give the disadvantaged more help than others

B．it’s impossible to have everyone be treated equally

C．it’s necessary to go all out to help the disabled

D．it’s not worthwhile to promote health equity

3. Which of the following examples best illustrates the “curb cut effect” principle?

A．Spaceflight designs are applied to life on earth.

B．Four great inventions of China spread to the west.

C．Christopher Columbus discovered the new world.

D．Classic literature got translated into many languages.

4. What conclusion can be drawn from the passage?

A．Everyday items are originally invented for people with disabilities.

B．Everyone in a society should pursue what is in his or her interest.

C．A disability rights leader changed the life of his fellow men.

D．Caring for disadvantaged groups may finally benefit all.

5 . There is no such thing as a perfect woman, and Nothing but Thirty screenwriter Zhang Yingji wanted to convey this message in telling the stories of three different women, who have found very different ways to climb their own mountains.

Wang Manni is a woman who will climb any mountain as long as she finds it challenging. Zhong Xiaoqin is one who will only climb if she has someone to go along with her. She will not overexert herself, and she will definitely stop once she has reached a comfortable place. Gu Jia, on the other hand, has already started to think about reaching the peak before she even starts the climb, regardless of whether she is alone or has company.

In a sense, the scriptwriter purposely created Gu Jia as the perfect woman of thirty. She is married, with a successful husband and a young son. She is living the dream, but Gu Jia does not feel complete. She feels lost. She is flawed. She has episodes of succumbing to her own greed and disregard to those around her.

“She is someone who chases alter perfection.” said Tong Yao (who portrays Gu Jia). “Obviously, this is stressful for those around her. She hides things. She isn’t perfect, but in front of others, she has to stay perfect.”

Her chase for perfection and her stubbornness to maintain this image has effected many of the relationships in her life. She chases after what she believes is right for others. Because of this, she and her husband start to see and value things differently, which puts a strain on their relationship.

Gu Jia’s personal struggles give life to the character. Many viewers are able to relate to her, and, through her character, find a shadow of themselves. There’s still a lot left that we can learn from the women of Nothing but Thirty, but maybe like them, we too can find the courage in ourselves to walk on that road which is truly meant for us.

1. According to the article, which of the following best describes Zhong Xiaoqin’s personality?

A．Ambitious and goal-driven	B．Moderate and content
C．Aimless and impulsive	D．Visionary and independent

2. According to Paragraph 3, what is not true about Gu Jia’s life?

A．She has her own worries and insecurities.

B．She leads a seemingly perfect and enviable life.

C．She can be greedy and insensitive to others’ feelings.

D．She is discontented with life because of her husband.

3. According to the passage, audiences have a preference for Gu Jia mainly because she ________.

A．is a perfectionist	B．stands up to her husband
C．balances her work and life well	D．displays some identifiable traits

4. What is the main purpose of this passage?

A．To call attention to the rise of feminism.

B．To introduce the plot of Nothing but Thirty.

C．To contrast the main characters of Nothing but Thirty.

D．To encourage viewers to find inspiration in Nothing but Thirty.

6 . 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.

It’s OK Not to Be OK

Every now and then, you are probably told not to give up when things get difficult. But at what point can we feel that it’s OK to give up? Sometimes, giving up can be a thoughtful and brave decision. If you feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders and it is holding     1     down, find a way to take a break.    2     (remember) that you can always give up when you hit your limit and start over when you feel ready again.

Simone Biles, with a     3     (combine) total of 32 Olympic and World Championship medals, got a case of the “twisties” at the Olympics in Tokyo last year. This means that when doing flips (空翻) or twists, the world’s greatest gymnast had a hard time figuring out     4     the ground was. So, she told the world she wasn’t going to compete     5     she knew her limits. If she had pushed herself at all costs, she might have ended up with a lifelong injury. Instead, she knew when     6     (tell) people she wasn’t OK.

As a four-time Grand Slam winner at the age of 23, the Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka     7     (drop) out of the 2021 French Open. She announced that she needed a break     8     the spotlight to work on her mental health. In a TIME magazine interview before the Olympics, she said, “I do hope that people     9     relate and understand it’s OK to not be OK, and it’s OK to talk about it. There are people     10     experiences are inspiring, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.”

8 . Lessons from Commencement Speeches

As a business owner, you probably don’t look to college commencement speeches as a source of inspiration when you’re feeling frustrated or defeated — but you should. Here are three university commencement speeches delivered by successful individuals from a variety of fields.     1    

.1. Get comfortable with change / Jimmy Iovine, USC, 2014

Music mogul (大亨) Jimmy Iovine’s main advice is to get comfortable with change and the fear that comes with it. In his speech, Iovine explains that he learned his greatest life lesson when he realized the successful record company, he built couldn’t compete with the new industry model of downloading free music. He had a choice: get on board or get left behind.     2    

.2. Build businesses that do good / Bill Gates, Harvard University, 2007

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, uses this speech to pose a question he asks himself: How can you do the most good for the greatest amount of people with the resources you have?

For years, Gates was unaware of the millions of people around the world living in poverty and battling diseases. Once he realized he could help, he changed his approach to business. Pursuing innovation and advancement is important.     3     Gates tells Harvard, “Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries—but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.”

.3. Spend less time dreaming and more time doing / Shonda Rhimes, Dartmouth, 2014

If you feel beaten by the dreams you have for your business, this speech will set you straight.

Author and TV show producer Shonda Rhimes tells the Dartmouth graduates, “While some are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.”     4     You don’t even need to know exactly what you want to do. Rhimes says the most important thing is to stay open to possibilities and just start somewhere.

A．Dreaming is only effective if you follow it up with action, whether you’re brainstorming a new business model or imagining how to grow your company.

B．Failure can be a driving force: one that frees you from fear and encourages you to pursue what you want most.

C．In today’s fast-moving world, one with great technological advancements and cultural shifts still needs to be prepared to learn, adapt, and start over if necessary.

D．It’s more important to develop creative business models that turn profits and solve problems.

E．The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

F．Their words are guaranteed to motivate you to think critically about your business.

9 . Take Heart, and Take Risks

Recently, we carried out an interesting social experiment. The participants were asked to choose between two _______: throw a coin to win one billion dollars if the coin happens to land on heads, or get a 10-million-dollar cheque without even throwing the coin.

Our purpose was not to measure the participants’ craze for money but to _______ their risk appetite. It _______ that a clear majority chose to take home the 10 million dollars. Only 31% of the subjects were _______ enough to test the depths of the river. Another study, conducted by psychology professor Keith Simonton at the University of California Davis, shows that most famous scientific _______ are risk-takers. Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton all dared to chase ideas that were _______ the mainstream ideas of their times.

The willingness to take risks without fear of failure is what _______ individuals towards achieving their ambitions. It forms a very important part of the stories of many successful businessmen globally.

The journey of Mark Zuckerberg is a classic example of this. In his second year in college, Zuckerberg decided to quit Harvard University to manage his social application company. In the years that followed, quite a few tech giants expressed early interest in purchasing the company. Their offers were _______. At the time, the young CEO and his team were widely criticized and publicly laughed at.

Today, Zuckerberg is one of the richest men on earth. His company still owns the most widely used social networking site in the world, _______ together over 2.8 billion users globally.

The lesson from Zuckerberg’s story is his risk-taking ________. He’s exactly the kind of person who’s willing to ________ interests for more rewarding future gains.

Generally, ________ achievements are often realized once a person decides to get out of their comfort zone. People’s ability to ________ from their comfort zone is closely tied to their risk-taking strength. It is like the case of a person who wishes to get a piece of fruit from the tree but is not willing to risk climbing up the branches of the tree in order to do so. “If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to ________ the ordinary,” said the American author Jim Rohn.

The willingness to take risks is the oxygen that drives success in every field. If a risk-taker succeeds, he can lead others. If he fails, he may ________ others to success.

1.

A．games

B．faces

C．options

D．perspectives

2.

A．access

B．evaluate

C．lose

D．satisfy

3.

A．ran out

B．set out

C．gave out

D．turned out

4.

A．courageous

B．risky

C．confident

D．mature

5.

A．contestants

B．cooperators

C．figures

D．partners

6.

A．subject to

B．contrary to

C．agreeable to

D．relevant to

7.

A．provides

B．puzzles

C．leans

D．drives

8.

A．scaled

B．declined

C．considered

D．weighed

9.

A．visualizing

B．pursuing

C．connecting

D．announcing

10.

A．tendency

B．investment

C．currency

D．proposal

11.

A．deposit

B．capture

C．separate

D．sacrifice

12.

A．eye-catching

B．groundbreaking

C．risk-taking

D．trustworthy

13.

A．depart

B．benefit

C．emerge

D．suffer

14.

A．send for

B．apply for

C．account for

D．settle for

15.

A．warn

B．force

C．guide

D．retire

10 . For a start, we’re not sure what artificial intelligence (AI) is, which complicates our every conversation about what effect it will have on our lives. We can’t even really ______ what intelligence is in humans, where the conversation inevitably goes away from science and into philosophy.

As neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but with decades of personal experience on the front lines of both human and machine cognition (认知), I prefer to focus on the ______. AI will be the greatest technological advance since the Internet turned the world into a living stream of data. It will eventually be more ______ than the Internet, changing every part of our lives in seen and unseen ways. And it’s already ______.

From medical diagnosis to investment banking, from hiring staff to educating our children, these increasingly ______ systems are changing the world. Whether you find this terrifying or wonderful is important, because public ______ drives education, investment, and regulation, making the outcome a type of self-fulfilling promise. ______, if people find the rapid advance of intelligent machines terrifying instead of wonderful, it won’t stop it, but it could make the outcome much worse. Powerful new technology nearly always causes distress before producing broad benefits. By slowing down our progress out of unreasoning ______, we lengthen the distress stage by delaying the next waves of breakthroughs needed to produce the broader benefits.

There are real and immediate ______ about the increase in intelligent machines, especially autonomous ones. Rising inequality if automation hits lower-income people harder, personal data being used improperly by companies… None of these issues come anywhere close to an existential threat – the killer robots of Hollywood or the super-intelligent AI that sees no reason to ______. It’s as if everyone were curious about how we might all one day be killed by robots.

As a member of the executive board of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and as a security ambassador for Avast Software, I’ve become all too ______ the real threats we may be faced with due to these AI-enhanced machines. And I’m glad that great minds like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are voicing their concerns, and that top AI authorities like Nick Bostrom are mapping out the ______ possibilities. After all, we live with nuclear power that could literally destroy the planet, and we certainly want it to be monitored and used ______.

But like all our inventions, AI is capable of being used for good or evil. ______ matters, and so making better humans will always be more important than making smarter machines. Above all, we must keep ______, because the only solution for the problems caused by today’s technology is tomorrow’s.

1.

A．tell apart

B．disapprove of

C．glance at

D．agree on

2.

A．theoretical

B．practical

C．physical

D．mental

3.

A．specialized

B．transformative

C．predictable

D．irrelevant

4.

A．happening

B．misleading

C．worsening

D．changing

5.

A．intense

B．annoying

C．capable

D．simple

6.

A．health

B．image

C．service

D．opinion

7.

A．In short

B．What’s more

C．That is

D．As a result

8.

A．fear

B．deed

C．manner

D．passion

9.

A．rumors

B．remarks

C．mysteries

D．concerns

10.

A．take humans in

B．keep humans around

C．give humans up

D．put humans away

11.

A．familiar with

B．ignorant of

C．superior to

D．unhappy about

12.

A．newest

B．best

C．oldest

D．worst

13.

A．occasionally

B．responsibly

C．immediately

D．genuinely

14.

A．Technology

B．Morality

C．Intelligence

D．Automation

15.

A．moving forward

B．looking upon

C．calming down

D．running away