1. What does the speaker think of his first marathon?
| A．Boring. | B．Satisfying. | C．Difficult. |
| A．He was too nervous. |
| B．He lacked training beforehand. |
| C．He didn’t take his running shoes. |
| A．He got the third place. |
| B．He completed his challenge. |
| C．It took place in hot weather. |
1. What was the speaker’s feeling this morning?
| A．Excited. | B．Tired. | C．Nervous. |
| A．100-meter freestyle. | B．150-meter freestyle. | C．200-meter freestyle. |
| A．The result of her competition. |
| B．Other swimmers’behaviors. |
| C．The judge’s instructions. |
| A．47 points. | B．50 points. | C．53 points. |
1. What’s the speaker?
| A．A journalist. | B．A host. | C．A house owner. |
| A．12. | B．20. | C．28. |
| A．Language. | B．History. | C．Art. |
| A．Peter Smith. | B．Jack Brown. | C．Tom Anderson. |
Jumping Over Boundaries
When I was in elementary school, we had an annual sports day. Girls could do many things like hopscotch, jump rope, tetherball, and dodgeball, except high jumping. Only boys could do high jumping.
That’s what I wanted to do — high jumping. So I went to the coach.
“Girls don’t do high jumping,” the coach said. “Girls have all these other things they can do.” He excitedly described how much fun it would be.
I’d been high jumping in the backyard with my five brothers for years. Although I am a girl, I did high jumping pretty well. My brothers could rarely beat me. Whenever my back crossed the bar, that feeling is extremely wonderful. I went home and told my mother what the coach had said. My mother, a small, thin woman only four feet eleven inches tall, said, “I think we should go visit him.”
“Visit who?” I asked confusedly.
“The headmaster.”
“Visit the headmaster?” I was terrified. Would I get in trouble? Would my mother and I be crossing boundaries we shouldn’t cross?
My mom and I went to Mr. White’s office. “Linda wants to do the high jump,” my mother said.
“Mrs. Martinez, you don’t understand. This is the tradition of our Annual Sports Day,” he said.
“But Mr. White, I don’t know where it says that girls cannot do this.”
The headmaster couldn’t find any rules that said girls couldn’t do the high jump. “I have to think about this,” he said at last.
When we got home, my mom told me something I would always remember: this wasn’t just about me. “Maybe other girls want to do this, too,” she said.
My mother waited a week, but still didn’t get the headmaster’s reply. So she walked over to the school again. “Mr. White, please. I ask you this not for me and not for Linda, but let’s just see how it works.” In the end, Mr. White agreed.
I stood on the field of the high jumping competition.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________To my surprise, some of the cheers I got were from boys!
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________5 . A team of three students won $700,000 this week for using artificial intelligence (AI) to read passages from an ancient papyrus scroll (纸草卷轴). The document is one of the more than 800 scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Researchers discovered the passages in the 18th century, but attempts to read them proved in vain: Unfolding them by hand only caused them to fall apart.
That’s where the Vesuvius Challenge comes in. Brent Seales, a computer scientist, and two businessmen, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, launched the Vesuvius Challenge in March 2023, offering more than $1 million in prize money for reaching a series of milestones using “computer vision, machine learning and hard work”. For the biggest prize, the organizers released high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls and explained the contest’s rules: Participants would need to decipher (破译) at least 85 percent of four passages. A series of smaller prizes were also awarded throughout the year.
The winning team consists of Nader (an Egyptian PhD student in Germany), Julian Schilliger (a robotics student in Switzerland) and Luke Farritor (a computer science student in Nebraska). Their submission was “met with widespread amazement” by the review team of papyrologists. Farritor also won the challenge’s $40,000 “First Letters” prize in October, when he deciphered the scroll’s first word “porphyras”, which means “purple” in ancient Greek. Nader and Farritor began working together the following month and were joined by Schilliger shortly before the December 31 deadline.
The team ultimately trained machine-learning algorithms (算法) to decipher more than 2,000 characters—more than what was needed to win the Grand Prize. These passages appear to be a philosophical discussion of life’s pleasures, including music and food, though the papyrology team is still studying the results. “It seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2,000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life,” write the organizers.
1. Which statement fits the papyrus scroll in paragraph 1?| A．Its 800-word texts were well-known. | B．It was successfully unfolded. |
| C．It was discovered in 79 AD. | D．Its text contents were unavailable. |
| A．Explain language rules. |
| B．Decipher four passages word by word. |
| C．Develop a type of CT scanner of the scrolls. |
| D．Translate most characters of the given passages. |
| A．To introduce some background information. |
| B．To summarize the above paragraphs. |
| C．To lead to a philosophical conclusion. |
| D．To put forward a scientific theory. |
| A．It is under discussion. | B．It is beyond expectation. |
| C．It is familiar to philosophers. | D．It is uncovered by the organizers. |
| A．He breaks a rule. | B．He wins the game. | C．He gets three points. |
The Olympics play
The 2008 Beijing Olympics appealed
1. What does the grand prize include?
| A．A job opportunity. |
| B．A large sum of money. |
| C．A chance to study abroad. |
| A．Sand. | B．Boxes. | C．Rice. |
| A．Find three boxes. |
| B．Solve math questions. |
| C．Stand on a piece of wood. |
| A．At the seaside. | B．In a building. | C．In a wood. |
1. Why does John come to Professor Smith?
| A．To ask for her help. | B．To hand in his design | C．To apply for a competition. |
| A．Energy conservation. | B．Conventional wisdom. | C．Innovative thinking |
| A．Its unique look. | B．Its market value. | C．Its convenience. |
| A．Beaches. | B．Rock pools. | C．Glass. |
| A．Boring. | B．Tense. | C．One-sided. |
