1. Why is Paul surprised?
| A．The café is busy. |
| B．He missed the notice. |
| C．A conference was canceled. |
| A．Two. | B．Three. | C．Four. |
| A．Cheese. | B．Ham. | C．Vegetables. |
| A．Butter some bread. |
| B．Cut some cheese. |
| C．Prepare the vegetables. |
1. How long has Andy worked in his present company?
| A．Several years. | B．Several months. | C．Several weeks. |
| A．The production department. |
| B．The marketing department. |
| C．The design department. |
| A．Friends. | B．Co-workers. | C．Boss and employee. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Doubtful. | C．Unsatisfied. |
1. What was George R. R. Martin like when he was young?
| A．He was popular with his classmates. |
| B．He didn’t have many friends. |
| C．He loved to play sports. |
| A．Turtles. | B．Dragons. | C．Spiders. |
| A．A famous actor. | B．A comic book writer. | C．A si-fi movie director. |
| A．What its final season is about. |
| B．How actors play in the final season. |
| C．Why the shows of the final season become less. |
4 . Years ago, when I was working as a sales manager, there were people on my team who were always the top-performing employees. We all knew how to get the job done, but there were a few who had interpersonal (人际的) skill s and persuasive abilities to land the sales.
To get hired, you obviously need to have the necessary skills to complete the required tasks. For example, you’re not going to be interviewed for a position in IT if you don’t know how to work a computer. These kinds of skills are called hard skills. However, many employers are looking for applicants who possess certain soft skills that relate to one’s personality, such as leadership qualities, time management abilities, and communication skills.
The biggest difference between hard and soft skills is how each type of skill is got. While hard skills are abilities learned through education or training, soft skills are more subjective personality qualities that you’re either born with or you develop through life experiences. Hard skills are the technical knowledge you gain through training that get you in the door, and soft skills are the personality qualities that make you a good employee and keep you there.
It’s easy to quantify hard skills because they’re specific and often define the basic requirements of a job. Soft skills are more difficult to measure. But they’re transferable (可转移的) across all industries.
So in addition to hiring people who know what they’re doing, employers look for applicants with a specific set of soft skills that can’t be taught as easily as hard skills. These innate (先天的) personality qualities can be developed, but it takes time, and employers would rather hi re someone who’s already there.
1. Why did the author mention her experience of being a sales manager?| A．To praise her colleagues’wonderful skills. |
| B．To introduce the topic of two kinds of skills. |
| C．To stress the importance of interpersonal skills |
| D．To prove that she has much experience in managing. |
| A．The ability to get knowledge. |
| B．The ability to interview a leader. |
| C．The ability to play a computer game. |
| D．The ability to communicate with others. |
| A．How they are got in our life. | B．When they are needed in our work. |
| C．Which is easier to develop in us. | D．Which is more important in daily life. |
| A．Soft skills are as important as hard skills |
| B．Hard skills can be changed into soft skills |
| C．Applicants need more soft skills than hard skills |
| D．Employers put more stress on hard skills than soft skills |
1. Why did Jim change his job?
| A．He disliked working at night. |
| B．He wanted more time to read. |
| C．He hoped to earn more money. |
| A．In a shop. | B．In a library. | C．In a bank. |
6 . A man recently connected with me on LinkedIn and sent me this note: “Let me know if you ever need a writer. ”I guess he’s a writer? I don’t know. But I do know this phrase “Let me know if you ever need a…” shows up a lot, in my inbox and surely yours, too. I’ve come to think of it as the eight most deadly words in selling oneself because that phrase is the death of opportunity.
Let’s consider the approach. These people are being standoffish. Rather than selling themselves, they’re shifting the burden onto someone else to make the sale. If I need a writer, I should reach out to them. If I need a story, I should ask them for an interview. If I need a customer service solution, I should ask them for details. “Let me know if you ever need a…” sounds like an invitation, but it’s really a shrug.
Imagine the situation where I’d assign a story to the writer who used the nine words, “Let me know if you ever need a writer. ”Just anyone who can string words together. I would have needed to be in a panic, so desperate for someone to contribute to our magazine that I’d stopped thinking about great writers or good writers, or even serviceable writers and simply settled for: a writer. This isn’t a situation that exists. The world is full of good options! We are not living in times of shortage. If we need a job done, there are plenty of qualified people to do it. Our question is: Who’s the best?
If you want to create opportunity for yourself, answer that question convincingly. The first thing to do is show someone you are the opportunity. Hiring you can help them. We also need to stop hiding behind ourselves. Get out in front! Sell yourself and your amazing abilities. Understand someone’s problem, and explain exactly why you are the solution. Avoid saying “Let me know if you ever need a…”. Instead, start with: “Let me explain how I can help you.”
1. What do we know from the author’s experience?| A．We’d better start our own careers as early as possible. |
| B．The author prefers to hire his employees on LinkedIn. |
| C．The phrase “Let me know if you ever need a…” is useful. |
| D．Many people use the wrong opening sentence to sell themselves. |
| A．Frank and open. | B．Unfriendly and proud. |
| C．Unsure and sensitive. | D．Concerned and confident. |
| A．The author is in desperate need of a writer’s help. |
| B．There are very few great writers available nowadays. |
| C．Anyone who can string words together is a good writer. |
| D．The author isn’t interested in the writer using the nine words. |
| A．Ways of selling oneself. | B．Tips for job interviews. |
| C．Preparations for landing a job. | D．Requirements for common jobs. |
7 . When the pandemic hit, I told my editors I’d go wherever they needed me-Italy, China, New York, any of the hot spots. Their response was, essentially, easy, tiger. It’s not going to work like that anymore. Nobody was going anywhere. So I had to figure out what to do to contribute responsibly to a story that has affected everybody in the world. I soon realized it meant working in my own backyard, which for me means the Midwest. I started driving all over, sleep some nights in my truck. I was looking for what the virus meant to people in “flyover country”, a part of county that is often ignored.
I had to change the way I work. How do you photograph people from a distance? How do you enter people’s intimate spaces responsibly?
I began using a drone. I would call out to people and say, Hey, do you mind if I use my coronavirus social-distance flying camera to take your picture? Being Midwesterners, the response was usually, Do what you got to do. The drone, which I flew relatively low to the ground, allowed me to take pictures from a distance. But it also amplified the dystopian(反乌托邦), surreal mood that we’re all grappling with now.
After I took photos, I’d leave a note with my contact information on the person’s car, on the front step or in the mailbox. I’d say, contact me if you want to tell me more about what’s going on in your life, and I’ll send you a picture. I was moved by the responses I received, long emails from people who wanted to have their story told or just needed someone to talk to. I saw two people chatting in a front yard, one sitting on the steps, the other in a chair six feet away. It looked like an ordinary thing, but then I received emails from them. One worked in an ICU; they’d been close friends their whole lives, and now they were both really struggling.
Everybody’s got an important story to tell. To meet people and photograph them, I decided for myself that I was an essential worker. I felt so grateful that I had photography, because I could be out in the world, I could see things for myself. I had a sense of purpose.
1. Which of the following best explains “ easy ,tiger” underlined in paragraph 1?| A．Talk to people. | B．Go to the zoo. |
| C．Calm down. | D．Give up your job. |
| A．Anxious. | B．Embarrassed. | C．Sensitive. | D．Approving. |
| A．Photos and stories help to reveal the truth of life. |
| B．People wrote notes to the writer. |
| C．The two people in a picture were talking happily. |
| D．The need to communicate is a key characteristic of human society. |
| A．People desired to talk with each other. |
| B．Photography is an aid to understanding the world. |
| C．The writer took photos with a drone. |
| D．A drone plays a vital role in aerial photography. |
1. What did the man study in university?
| A．Law. | B．Medicine. | C．Economics. |
| A．Apples. | B．Bananas. | C．Grapes. |
| A．Melting it correctly. | B．Cooling it in time. | C．Testing it regularly. |
| A．Growing high-quality cocoa beans. |
| B．Keeping a diary of his experiments. |
| C．Trying to test various chocolate. |
1. What does Alison dislike doing?
| A．Meeting people. | B．Typing. | C．Answering the phone. |
| A．Go into business. | B．Practice typing. | C．Get more education. |
| A．Help with her study. |
| B．Introduce a job to her. |
| C．Find some information for her. |
10 . A walk around the workplace is also a trip back in time. The office is where colleagues meet, work and bond. But it is also a time capsule, a place where the traces of historic patterns of working are visible everywhere. The pandemic has heightened this sense of office as a dig site for corporate archaeologists.
The most obvious object is the landline phone(固定电话), a reminder of the days when mobility meant being able to stand up and keep talking. Long after people have junked them in their personal lives - less than 15% of Americans aged between 25 and 34 had one at home in the second half of 2021- landline phones survive in offices.
There might be good reasons for its persistence: they offer a more secure and stable connection than mobile phones, and no one worries that they are about to run out of battery. In practice, the habit of using them was definitely lost during the pandemic. Now they sit on desk after desk, rows of buttons unpressed, ring tones unheard.
Landline phones were already well on their way out before covid-19 struck. Whiteboard charts have suffered a swifter reverse. These objects signal a particular type of pain- people physically crowded together into a room while a manager sketches a graph with a marker pen and points meaningfully to the top-right-hand corner, giving requirements never to be satisfied. This manager is still making graphs but is now much more likely to use a PowerPoint. The crowd is still being tortured but is now much more likely to be watching on the screen. The office still has whiteboards, but they are left in corners and the charts on them are slowly yellowing.
Real archaeologists need tools and time to do their painstaking work: brushes, shovels and picks. Corporate archaeology is easier: you just need eyes and a memory of how things used to be. But you also need to be quick as more and more work places are revamped for the post-pandemic era. Now its time to take a careful look around the office: you may see something that will soon seem outdated.
1. Why does the author refer to the office as a time capsule?| A．You can travel back in time in the office. |
| B．You can dig out what has been buried for years in the office. |
| C．You can easily find some old-fashioned practices in the office. |
| D．You can work with archaeologists to study the history in the office. |
| A．Whiteboard charts went useless due to new technologies. |
| B．More employees prefer online meetings to physical gatherings. |
| C．Landline phones still exist in offices because they don’t need batteries. |
| D．Many employees show a negative attitude to some routine work in companies. |
| A．Transformed. | B．Abandoned. |
| C．Discovered. | D．Reserved. |
| A．The Impact of Pandemic on Workplace | B．The Archaeology of the Office |
| C．Why Landline Phones Went Outdated? | D．The History of Old-fashioned Objects |
