1 . After the death of her mother, Margaret Renkl gently placed in an antique jar the “soft white hair” left behind in her mother’s hairbrush. Years passed. When it no longer carried the smell she cherished, Renkl laid the hair across a tree branch in her yard. This act was meant as a direct invitation to the birds in her yard, and it was accepted: A chickadee flew off with the hair for the nest she was building.
Renkl devotes only a half-page to this story, but it conveys the beautiful theme of human and other-animal lives at the heart of her new book The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. Renkl brings alive in 52 chapters her love for the animals in her half-acre yard in Tennessee. Equally moving, she expresses her great sadness about the human-caused crises the natural world faces, and her determination to take action.
She makes good on her promise. She treats an injured fox, with the help of a trap, a bit of bacon, and advice from a veterinarian (兽医); she also ensures that leaves from the trees in her yard are left uncleaned so that insects and birds overwinter can dine there; she fills a garden with milkweed in support of butterflies, and creates a shelter for tree frogs in the form of a 40-gallon tank filled with water and frog-friendly plants.
Compared to the tone of her earlier collections of essays, Late Migrations and Graceland, there’s a touch of extra sadness in Renkl’s new book. That’s not only owing to what’s happening to the natural world. Renkl’s parents have died and her three sons have all left home, “they all packed off to their own lives”; Renkl is “a little bit lost and a little bit tired.”
In these days of climate crisis, the phenomenon of ecological sadness is real. In order to seize opportunities to help, we do require fuel to restore our spirits. It’s easy to find that fuel in Renkl’s chapters like “The Bobcat Next Door,” “Praise Song for the First Red Leaf of the Black Gum Tree,” and “Loving the Unloved Animals.”
1. Why does Renkl mention her mother’s hair in her book?| A．To remember her departed mother. | B．To invite birds to nest in her yard. |
| C．To develop the theme of her book. | D．To draw public attention to her book. |
| A．What Renkl does for wildlife. | B．Renkl’s boring daily routines. |
| C．How Renkl tackles her mental stress. | D．Renkl’s promise to her mother. |
| A．It is full of worry and surprise. | B．It is affected by changes in her family. |
| C．It mainly features natural world. | D．It focuses on the climate change. |
| A．Showing ecological sadness. | B．Reading Renkl’s new book. |
| C．Protecting animals and plants. | D．Fighting against ecological crisis. |
2 . Science is increasingly central to our lives — from its role in creating day-to-day objects such as the smartphones in our pockets, to the big challenges of tackling disease, addressing climate change and focusing on biodiversity loss.
Many of the changes that the discipline brings are hugely beneficial, but they often come with potential downsides that demand public debate. Will artificial intelligence take people’s jobs or destroy elections with false news? How fast can we practically achieve a net zero economy?
For the crucial public debate that is needed on all this to take place, we must have a scientifically literate population. But there is a divide between the scientifically minded and those who choose not to engage with science.
It saddens me that our culture now views science as difficult, which discourages many from taking an interest in it. A British Science Association (BSA) survey recently suggested that only around a third of 14- to 18-year-olds find scientists inspirational or consider the subject to be relevant to their lives.
In fact, science is interlinked with every aspect of our existence and people from all walks of life and of all ages should be able to access it easily. The invention of the printing press was crucial to the Enlightenment because it democratised (普及) knowledge. So, in this increasingly science-centred world, the same attention should be given to popular science writing as is given to other forms of literature.
The Royal Society Science Book Prize is the only one in the world to promote popular science writing. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which was shortlisted (把……列入入围名单) for the prize in 1989, was written for readers who had no prior knowledge of physics and has since become a universally recognised text on the universe.
Democratising science has never been more important. There are so many scientific stories to be told that can help us better understand ourselves. A society equipped with a solid understanding of the issues of the day is a society more able to respond to them in a better way.
1. What does the underlined part “all this” in paragraph 3 refer to?| A．Beneficial scientific advancements. |
| B．Challenges facing human beings. |
| C．Potential downsides of science. |
| D．Disagreements between scientists and the public. |
| A．They have great respect for scientists. |
| B．They feel disconnected from science. |
| C．They know little about the Enlightenment. |
| D．They wish to land a career in the scientific field. |
| A．It won an international book prize. |
| B．It focused on important life issues. |
| C．It was written by a highly-honoured author. |
| D．It democratised knowledge about the universe. |
| A．The crisis of science in our modern life |
| B．We must rely on science to tackle our problems |
| C．Popular science books have never been more important |
| D．Public debate about science could never be more necessary |
3 . Fluency is the rate at which the child reads. Fluent readers take note of things like question marks and adjust their voice. Their expression sounds natural, and their voice is not as flat as they read. Children who are fluent readers make their reading sound like talking.
First, it’s important to choose “just right” books. They will struggle to read books that are too difficult, spending their time trying to figure out unfamiliar words.
Children can improve their fluency through whispering phones. They are like pretend telephones that children read into. When children read into such phones, they can hear themselves well and use that feedback to think about their expression and reading rate.
Use choral reading (合唱式阅读). This occurs when a group of children reads something together, saying the words at the same time. You might read the text out loud by yourself first.
| A．This causes fluency to break down. |
| B．Give your children materials to listen to. |
| C．Many children also find choral reading useful. |
| D．Model for children how reading should sound. |
| E．Children can hear how the reading should sound. |
| F．Many children find it’s quite interesting to use them. |
| G．Their reading sounds effortless, much like carrying on a conversation. |
4 . Many of us would probably say that lying is a matter of moral choice. But in his philosophy book A History of Lying, Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel takes us in a different direction, which he calls “non-moral”.
He takes several persuasive steps to redirect us. First, he asks us to take into account how we represent reality to ourselves, and how we see it in relation to the self. This requires us to employ awareness of not just the world but also the concepts to describe it to ourselves and others. Moreover, “the reality” we believe we see and know might be an illusion (幻觉). So how do we even know when we’re telling the truth, and when we’re lying about it?
His second step is to say that our sense of personal identity should be treated with doubt, since we’re frequently wrong about our own experiences. If continuing personal identity might be an illusion, then the reality we see might be an illusion as well. But we choose to take part like actors in this illusion.
From here Muñoz-Rengel takes a third step towards what he calls “evolutionary epistemology (认识论)”, which shows everything we claim to know should be evaluated through an evolutionary angle. For instance, to stay safe from natural enemies or hunt for food, some animals evolve into being capable of mixing with the surroundings to delude others. The thing is, the species continues through natural selection processes. Equally, we grow myths to explain the natural world and our place in it… As individuals and as societies, various forms of lies are built into our DNA.
The arguments in this book are strongly made, but more than a few of Muñoz-Rengel’s viewpoints need far more evidence as support. But anyhow, in separating the discussion from conventional morality-based studies of lying, he has produced a lively and distinctive work. But still, there is one thing to remember — we perhaps will be liars, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask ourselves when it is acceptable to lie and when it isn’t.
1. What can be implied about Muñoz-Rengel’s first persuasive step?| A．We can hardly control what we do in real life. |
| B．We are able to tell illusions from reality. |
| C．We choose to lie or not in different cases. |
| D．We tend to see reality in a subjective way. |
| A．To make a comparison. | B．To clarify a concept. |
| C．To raise a problem. | D．To change a topic. |
| A．Surprise. | B．Trick. | C．Amuse. | D．Protect. |
| A．One-sided but convincing. | B．Conventional but impressive. |
| C．Poorly-based but novel. | D．Serious but understandable. |
5 . Family plays an important part in much fiction, of course, but sometimes the short story form has offered us an insight into family life that the longer novel does not. Here are some for you to taste.
Prelude, by Katherine MansfieldPrelude is one of Katherine Mansfield's longest and finest short stories. Because Prelude is a modernist short story, the emphasis is on characters rather than plots. Mansfield is using the Burnells’ house-move, and the period when they are busy settling into their new home, as a situation to observe family, women and class.
He, by Katherine Anne PorterKatherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) wrote just one novel and fewer than thirty short stories, yet she is regarded as an important twentieth-century American writer, with He among her most celebrated and critically praised works. An important theme of Porter’s work is the search for meaning in a modern and increasingly materialist world.
Signs and Symbols, by Vladimir NabokovIt is a short story by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), originally published in the New Yorker in 1948. The story centers on an elderly married Russian couple who move to the United States; their son is suffering from paranoid delusions (妄想症) and has been limited to a care center. Signs and Symbols focuses on the couple’s attempt to visit their son and its result.
Down at the Dinghy, by J. D. SalingerThis short story was originally published in 1949. It involves an adult speaking to a child. It is about a young boy who runs from home and goes down to the nearby lake, where he gets into a boat and refuses to speak to his mother. The story ends with the mother bonding with her son.
1. What is special about Prelude?| A．It’s about scientific observation. | B．It’s the longest of the four. |
| C．It involves moving to a new place. | D．It focuses more on figures than plots. |
| A．They are contemporary writers. | B．Their works center on critical thinking. |
| C．They both seek for meaning in modern life. | D．Their works were published in the New Yorker. |
| A．Science fiction fans. | B．Family-based short story lovers. |
| C．Those who plan to be writers. | D．People trying to have a family. |
6 . Digital reading (数字阅读) appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in fact illiterate (文盲). This month’s Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: “The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many attractions to read in a casual and scattered (零散的) manner— or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”
That’s frightening, because “higher-level reading” has been necessary to civilization. It made the understanding and an international increase in empathy (共鸣). Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, “as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills.” More than one-fifth of adults in the US “fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category”. Separately, post-pandemic (后疫情时期) reading scores for American13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy (读写能力) in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.
Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of thoughtful reading, slow reading and long-form reading.” When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to catch the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning and scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old boy told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from websites. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine opinions.
In short, as professors from Northwestern University predicted in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) “reading class” reads long texts, which is worrying.
1. What can we learn about digital reading from paragraph 1?| A．Digital reading has weakened the practice of deep reading. |
| B．Digital reading has solved the problem of illiteracy. |
| C．Digital reading has made deep reading accessible to wider readers. |
| D．Digital reading has caused a greater appreciation for deep reading. |
| A．Digital reading’s great popularity. | B．The importance of deep reading. |
| C．American students’ reading skills. | D．The lowering of the level of literacy. |
| A．Functions. | B．Depths. | C．Shortcomings. | D．Features. |
| A．Advantages of digital reading. | B．Measures to practice deep reading. |
| C．Ways to encourage digital reading. | D．Benefits of lower-level reading. |
7 . Technology seems to discourage slow, careful reading. Reading on a screen tires your eyes and makes it harder for you to keep your place. Online writing tends to be more skimmable (易略读的) and list-like than print. The neuroscientist Mary Walt argued recently that this new standard of skim reading is producing“an invisible, game-changing transformation”in how readers process words. The neuronal circuit (神经回路) that maintains and supports the brain’s ability to read now prefers the rapid absorption of information.
We shouldn’t overplay this danger. All readers skim. From about the age of nine, our eyes start to skim quickly across the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gap s by inference. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans (持续时间). So far, the anxieties have proved to be false alarms. “Quite a few critics have been worried about attention spans lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline,” the American author Selvin Brown wrote. “No one ever said that poems were evidence of short attention spans.”
And yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. And digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. This mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun. But often it treats other people’s words as something to be quickly taken as materials to say something else. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, eager to be heard.
Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a source of personal achievement. But this argument often emphasizes “enthusiastic” “passionate” or “eager” reading, non e of which words suggest slow, quiet absorption. To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in the words and their slow understanding of a line of thought.
The human need for this kind of deep reading is too tenacious for any new technology to destroy. We often assume that technological change can’t be stopped and happens in one direction, so that older media like “dead-tree” books are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycle. We still want to enjoy slowly-formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.
1. Which statement would Selvin Brown probably agree?| A．Online writing harms careful reading. | B．Fears of attention spans are unnecessary. |
| C．The situation of cultural decline is serious. | D．Poetry reading helps lengthen attention spans. |
| A．It demands writers to abandon traditional writing modes. |
| B．It depends heavily on frequent interaction with the readers. |
| C．It leads to too much talking and not enough deep reflection. |
| D．It prepares readers for enthusiastic, passionate or eager reading. |
| A．Deep-rooted. | B．Widely-acknowledged. | C．Slowly-changed. | D．Rarely-noticed. |
| A．Slow Reading is Here to Stay | B．The Wonder of Deep Reading |
| C．The Internet is Changing the Way We Read | D．Digital vs Print: A Life-and-Death Struggle |
8 . Three grade 11 students from Harbour View High School, Canada, wanted to convey their message of fighting climate change to a younger audience. So, they wrote a children’s book named Keeping It Cool as part of a project.
Upon receiving their first order of 12 copies, Claire Malco, the illustrator of the book, vividly recalls the moment when the realization struck. “I just sat there with my mouth open and was like, wow, this is actually happening,” Malco told CBC News.
Coauthored by Joanna Jackson and Olivia Jordan, the book employs age-appropriate analogies (类比), coupled with vibrant illustrations, to promote actions kids can take against climate change. To explain the concept of the atmosphere, for example, the young authors drew a bubble(气泡) around Earth throughout the story. They also call for actions, such as planting trees and vegetable gardens – explaining how plants absorb CO2 from the “bubble” atmosphere just like a vacuum cleaner (真空吸尘器). The book also tells kids how they can avoid polluting the bubble by trying to walk, bike or scoot instead of taking a car or bus.
“The entire second half of the book is just things kids can do without needing their parents’ support … We wanted it to be something that every kid could finish,” Jordan explained to CBC News.
On Earth Day, the students visited a local elementary school where they read their stories and facilitated discussions about the text with every grade 5 class. They spread awareness that, regardless of age, anybody can help make a positive impact on Earth’s climate.“Educating students was the intention when writing this book. Having the opportunity to present to 10 different classes helped us gain insight on how to better our presentation and content, as well as see the impact this book will have on students,” the students told Our Canada Project.
1. Why did the three students write Keeping It Cool ?| A．To change a younger audience. | B．To show their talent for illustrating. |
| C．To describe environmental problems. | D．To inform kids of handling climate change. |
| A．Vivid. | B．Ordinary. | C．Complex. | D．Abstract. |
| A．They discussed the text with 5 classes. | B．They wrote the book with the students. |
| C．They did a presentation in every class. | D．They inspired discussions about the text. |
| A．A news report. | B．A book review. | C．A children’s book. | D．A diary. |
9 . Searching for the perfect gift can be difficult, especially age-appropriate material for teenagers. Look no further. We have a list of the best teen magazines. Give the gift of reading to your teens today!
| Muse For teens up to age 14, Muse teaches, challenges, and excites readers of both genders. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, this magazine features award-winning authors and focuses on science, history, and the arts. Whether your teen is interested in genetics, video games, outer space, beekeeping, robots, or mythology, this magazine has it all! |
| Sports Illustrated Kids Perfect for sports fans aged 8 to 14, SI Kids supplies readers with interesting sports news they won’t want to miss. Articles on favorite athletes feature incredible photography and illustrations. Girls and boys alike will enjoy the advice from athletes, coaches, and experts in the field: they’ll find tips on nutrition, performance, morale, and more. |
| Girls’ Life Magazine Designed for 10 to 15-year-olds, Girls’ Life provides inspiration and entertainment for every reader. She’ll find tips for dealing with stress, navigating high school, achieving academic success, and beauty and fashion advice. This print magazine delivers fun—quizzes, reader submissions, and more—helping guide young women through their teen years while still allowing them to be young. |
| National Geographic Kids While designed for kids aged six and up, this magazine features a lot of important, fun information about the world around us. Discover great stories about wildlife, current events, pop culture, science, technology, other kids’ adventures, and more! They’ll feel like they’re exploring the places themselves, with stunning photography, lively stories, and exciting facts. |
1. Which of the following can you learn from Girls’ Life?
| A．News about award-winning authors. | B．Information about interesting events. |
| C．Suggestions from coaches about nutrition. | D．Advice on dealing with pressure. |
| A．Girls’ Life. | B．Muse. |
| C．Sports Illustrated Kids. | D．National Geographic Kids. |
| A．Parents. | B．Teenage boys. |
| C．Kids. | D．Teenage girls. |
There are two important teachers in this world. One is the nature. It was considered to be the best teacher in the old days, because man learned a lot from nature like lighting the fire and growing rice. It also provides man with many necessary things for life, such as water, food and so on.
Hu, 31, is a pioneer in nature education. He set up an organization five years ago. It offers nature-based programs to children under 12 years old, including many outdoor activities, such as planting trees and watching birds.
“Nature is friendly to us if we protect her. And don’t forget that we all are part of nature,” He said. The purpose of nature education is to teach people how to understand, respect (尊重) and get on well with nature.
Here comes the other important teacher — a book. The experiences people learned from nature were written down in the form of a book. This was a step forward because man could record their experiences and thoughts.
Books play an important role in our lives. Su Mingjuan, a girl from a poor family in a small village, has finished college and become a good bank clerk. She volunteers to encourage people to read more. She said, “Without reading books, I can’t have such a wonderful life.” Besides Su, millions of people learn from books and have better lives. Some people ever said, “A book is like a garden carried in the pocket (口袋).”
1. The passage mainly talks about2. According to Paragraph 1, nature teaches us some skills like
3. Hu works on nature education to help people
4. How did people record their experiences and thoughts in Paragraph 4? (10个词以内)
5. What can you learn from Su Mingjuan’s story? (20个词以内)
