1 . 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.

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.

“Wow ... what a beautiful girl!” you think to yourself. Today, you logged into Facebook and saw a friend request from a lovely stranger. You think that she must be a model    1     all of her photos look very professional. She doesn’t have many friends, but maybe she’s just new to Facebook. You may       2     (tempt) to accept her request and say hello, but you’d better think twice because you might get catfished!

Catfishing is an online cheat     3     someone on a social media platform pretends to be someone they’re not. The word was made popular by a 2010 documentary film with the same name. Just like in the movie, most catfishing cheats start with the catfish     4     (try) to sweet talk their victim into falling in love with them. Why? There are a variety of reasons people catfish.

Some catfish attempt     5     (charm) their victim into trusting them, and then ask them for money. Others will ask for sensitive information or private pictures     6     they can then use them to blackmail (敲诈) their victims into sending them money. But in some situations, catfish are just lonely people,     7     (dissatisfy) with their lives and using social media to live in an alternate reality.

On social media, it’s possible to remain anonymous (匿名的) even after you     8     (start) building a relationship with someone. According to the Better Business Bureau in the U.S., around 85 percent of catfishing schemes start on Facebook and the Facebook Dating service. In 2021 as the pandemic pushed many to search for love online, romance schemes, such as catfishing, rose       9     80 percent compared to 2020. These cheats cost victims around $1.3 billion in losses and left many with psychological and emotional damage.

The internet is a wonderful tool that allows users to learn new things, play games and meet interesting people. However, everyone     10     be careful of the catfish who hide in the shadows. If someone seems too good to be true, they probably are!

3 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

1.

A．disappeared

B．disintegrated

C．distributed

D．disappointed

2.

A．side

B．cause

C．feature

D．issue

3.

A．collected

B．unified

C．dropped

D．single

4.

A．discounted

B．viewed

C．accessed

D．founded

5.

A．muted

B．absorbed

C．buried

D．sunk

6.

A．technical

B．popular

C．negative

D．special

7.

A．possibly

B．reasonably

C．ordinarily

D．necessarily

8.

A．accommodated

B．combined

C．distinguished

D．enhanced

9.

A．abstract

B．repetition

C．review

D．brief

10.

A．press

B．publication

C．media

D．criticism

11.

A．opened

B．created

C．threw

D．jumped

12.

A．rules

B．harmonizes

C．impacts

D．roars

13.

A．feature

B．encourage

C．value

D．defend

14.

A．Therefore

B．However

C．Certainly

D．Surprisingly

15.

A．difference

B．truth

C．time

D．concern

6 . In summarising the state of the planet—rising population, widespread conflict, one-sixth of the planet suffering extreme poverty and hunger, global warming—Jeffrey Sachs, author of “The Common Wealth, can paint a terrible picture. However, he’s an_________ and believes that all of these problems can be overcome in relatively straightforward ways and at relatively little cost. That’s because the root causes are interconnected and _________ man-made.

Take child mortality (死亡). Perhaps surprisingly, the higher the child mortality rate is, the higher the birth rate. This leads to a _________ population which puts a greater stress on already scarce resources, so farmers have to work harder to produce enough food for all, which means children are often put to work in the fields or at home. This, _________ , stops children getting the education which will allow them to learn, among other things, about better farming techniques to increase crop yields and provide more food to eat and sell. Sachs argues that the_________ of providing every child in poverty with an anti-mosquito bed net is a major first step. Malaria(疟疾)is a huge cause of death in children and the bed nets massively _________ infections. The fewer children that die of malaria, the more secure parents feel about their children surviving. The more secure parents feel, the fewer children they have, and so on, revising the _________ trend just described.

However, it is _________ a combination of measures at the same time that truly makes a difference: free school meals improve school attendance and health; supplying fertilisers to improve soil and better seeds provides even better harvests; basic health care and clean water supplies_________ more fatal diseases.

These ideas are already being __________ implemented in over 100 African villages in underdeveloped regions. The cost of the project is just $10 per person per year, of which 50% comes from donors and the rest from a mixture of local and national governments and the villagers themselves.

So if it’s so __________ , why hasn’t it been done before? What about all the aid that has been given to Africa and the underdeveloped countries of the world? Has it been lost to corruption (腐败)? Sachs argues that the real problem is not corruption, but the fact that rich governments have __________ such a lot, but actually given so little. They agreed to give 0.7% of national income in aid, but only five countries have met that __________. He suggests current aid is $24 billion per year, which translates as just ten dollars per person—not nearly enough to implement the __________ measures.

So while Sachs sees an opportunity to end poverty forever, he also raises an __________ that this could be the last chance we have, ‘The longer we wait, the greater is the suffering and the larger the long-term costs?

1.

A．economist

B．optimist

C．expert

D．opponent

2.

A．prospectively

B．essentially

C．thoughtfully

D．refreshingly

3.

A．declining

B．global

C．booming

D．local

4.

A．in turn

B．by contrast

C．on end

D．with care

5.

A．truth

B．principle

C．solution

D．statement

6.

A．transmit

B．specify

C．worsen

D．reduce

7.

A．downward

B．general

C．modem

D．previous

8.

A．describing

B．reserving

C．adopting

D．protesting

9.

A．modify

B．intensify

C．prevent

D．locate

10.

A．successfully

B．hesitantly

C．personally

D．worthlessly

11.

A．popular

B．simple

C．hard

D．strange

12.

A．spent

B．promised

C．learned

D．featured

13.

A．requirement

B．condition

C．challenge

D．target

14.

A．restricted

B．standardized

C．requested

D．combined

15.

A．alarm

B．objection

C．amount

D．instance

8 . There have been countless books and television series on living with teenagers, yet parents don’t seem to have _________ how to get their children to pick up their clothes from the bedroom floor, or even clean their room occasionally. It might be difficult to accept, but a new approach to dealing with rude or difficult teenagers is for parents to look at their own _________.

“The key to getting teenagers to respect you is to respect them first,” says Penny Palmano, who has written a best-selling book on teenagers. “You can’t _________ to treat them the same way that you have been treating them for the previous 12 years: they have opinions that count. Imagine if you’d spent two hours getting ready to go out for the evening and someone said, ‘You’ve not going out looking like that, are you?’ You’d be very _________. You’d never say that to an adult, because it shows a total _________ of respect.”

Palmano, who has a daughter aged 19, has even allowed the girl to hold several teenage parties at her home. “I’ve found that if you have brought your kids up to do the right thing, and then _________ them to do it, usually they’ll behave well,” she says. “I make them sandwiches and leave them alone. But I make it clear that they have to clear up any mess. I’ve never had a(n) _________; in fact, the kitchen was sometimes cleaner than I’d left it.”

She agrees that teenagers can be annoying: enjoying a world that is free of responsibility, yet _________ for independence. She doesn’t think, however, that they are _________ to annoy you. Until recently, scientists assumed that the brain finished growing at about the age of 13 and that teenage problems were a result of rising hormones and a desire for independence. But it turns out that the region of the brain that controls judgement and emotions is not fully __________ until the early twenties.

“This would explain why many teenagers can’t make good decisions, control their emotions, priorities or concentrate on several different things at the same time. __________, they may find it difficult to make the right decision between watching television, ringing a friend, or finishing their homework. It means that they do not __________ do the wrong thing just to annoy their parents,” says Palmano.

The key to __________ for all, Palmano believes, is calm negotiation and compromise (妥协). If you want your teenagers to be home by 11 pm, explain why, but listen to their arguments as well. If it’s Saturday, you might __________ agreeing to midnight (rather than 1 am, which is what they had in mind). If they are up to 20 minutes late, don’t react angrily. __________, ask if they’ve had a problem with public transport and let it pass; they’ve almost managed what you asked.

1.

A．questioned

B．discovered

C．discussed

D．taught

2.

A．behavior

B．responsibility

C．issue

D．procedure

3.

A．continue

B．stop

C．strive

D．hesitate

4.

A．curious

B．ashamed

C．upset

D．unwise

5.

A．mark

B．feeling

C．lack

D．level

6.

A．instruct

B．require

C．forbid

D．trust

7.

A．solution

B．problem

C．opinion

D．voice

8.

A．essential

B．grateful

C．desperate

D．famous

9.

A．affording

B．failing

C．promising

D．trying

10.

A．occupied

B．mature

C．valued

D．fruitful

11.

A．In addition

B．By contrast

C．On balance

D．For example

12.

A．occasionally

B．intentionally

C．universally

D．significantly

13.

A．happiness

B．justice

C．restriction

D．courage

14.

A．consider

B．forget

C．encourage

D．forbid

15.

A．Therefore

B．Otherwise

C．Furthermore

D．Instead

9 . Looking on the Bright Side with Moon Worship

According to Cheshire psychic Claire Stone, a growing number of women are looking to the moon to increase their health, power and wealth. Daily Mail reporter Samantha Brick recently ______ a full moon ceremony hosted by Ms. Stone in a field near Hale. She joined a group of females dressed in white as they stood in a circle holding hands.

“There is drumming and chanting,” wrote Ms. Brick, “then ______ as each woman engraves her hopes and ambitions for the coming month on a white or silver candle.” They were told to ______ what they wanted to attract into their lives. “We ‘see’ it coming true in our minds,” said Ms. Stone. “The ______ is amplified by the energy of the moon and those in the circle.”

Ms. Stone said that wishing on the moon helped her move into her ______ home, a £l.4 million farmhouse, which she shares with her husband and two daughters.

Ms. Stone was initially attracted to complementary sources of ______ as a teenager suffering from anxiety. “I started looking for something to help make me happier,” she said. “I first joined a couple of local groups where women would ______ once a month on the full moon when I was in my 20s. It seemed like a natural and ______ thing to do.” The paper commented: “Claire, who drives a black Mercedes GLE coupe, was so ______ by her early experiences of moon circles that she decided to hold her own monthly ceremonies outside her home.

They have been a(n) ______ success: at various times more than 3,000 women have come along. Her circles —priced at £22.00 for a two-hour session—______ for up to 100 women at a time online, and 50 at a time in person. Several famous and powerful women have announced their interest in moon worship. Friends actor Jennifer Aniston is said to ______ moon circles where women sit and share their experiences and dreams. Lady Carole Bamford, described in the press as a “billionaire eco entrepreneur” explains on her website. “Our bodies are made up of 70 per cent water, so it’s no wonder that the moon, which controls the ______, has the power to affect us all in different ways as well.”

The report ended with veterinary nurse Victoria Twist, who ______ the moon for her return to full health after spinal surgery. Ms. Twist is also convinced that ______ attending moon circles, she was also able to manifest her dream home.

1.

A．witnessed

B．covered

C．attended

D．broadcast

2.

A．discussion

B．silence

C．dance

D．ceremony

3.

A．convince

B．share

C．visualize

D．pray

4.

A．imagination

B．intention

C．impression

D．illustration

5.

A．country

B．holiday

C．family

D．dream

6.

A．researching

B．studying

C．disturbing

D．healing

7.

A．call up

B．build up

C．meet up

D．line up

8.

A．normal

B．pleasant

C．magical

D．attractive

9.

A．obsessed

B．inspired

C．fascinated

D．affected

10.

A．astonishing

B．progressive

C．immediate

D．puzzling

11.

A．appeal

B．attempt

C．call

D．cater

12.

A．host

B．participate

C．favor

D．attend

13.

A．winds

B．nights

C．tides

D．temperatures

14.

A．celebrates

B．claims

C．concerns

D．credits

15.

A．apart from

B．regardless of

C．thanks to

D．instead of

10 . Genetic testing companies have a long history of creative attempts to reach the mainstream. An early example was the sequencing of rock star Ozzy Osbourne’s genes in 2010, with accompanying guess about how they might have influenced his drug habits.

Lately, such projects have taken on a new, highly commercialized tendency. In 2017, we got the “Marmite (马麦酱) gene project,” run by London-based genetic testing start-up DNAfit. It claims to show that love or hate for Marmite was in our genes. The project turned into a full-blown marketing campaign, and even sold Marmite-branded DNA testing tools.

DNAfit is now working with Mercedes-Benz to find out whether specific genetic traits are associated with business wisdom. AncestryDNA, the world’s largest consumer genetic testing company, last year teamed up with Spotify to promote “music tailored to your DNA.” Just a few weeks ago, 23andMe, the second largest, announced a partnership with Airbnb to provide genetically tailored travel experiences, also inspired by ancestral DNA.

I have skin in this game. I run a genetic-testing start-up that connects people who want their genome sequenced with researchers who want data to improve their understanding of genetic disease. I believe that broadening access to DNA testing can be a powerful force for good, providing safer, more effective medicines and giving people more power over their healthcare. But these campaigns risk discrediting the industry, by giving a misleading impression of what genetics can and can't say and its role in determining behaviours and personal preferences.

Take the Marmite study. It covered 261 people — tiny, by the standards of the field. It was published not in a journal, but online on bioRxiv, a server where scientists typically put results before peer-review. Shortly after, researchers looked at the genetic data of more than 500 times as many people in the UK Biobank and found no such correlation. A large peer-reviewed study in 2013 found no significant link between genes and business common sense.

We need to inform the public about what this is all about: that is, the gathering of large amounts of genetic data. We need better regulation to ensure that consumers are clear that this may happen with this sensitive personal information. A checkbox on a 20-page web document full of legal terms should not be enough.

Scientists too, need to start asking hard questions about whether the information they are using has been sourced ethically. DNA testing has a great future, but we can't build this future with data acquired by any means.

1. The author mentions DNAfit, AncestryDNA and 23andMe in order to __________.

A．highlight the problems facing genetic testing

B．illustrate the commercial applications of DNA

C．compare what progress the companies have made

D．reveal the link between DNA and a person's character

2. We can learn from “I have skin in this game” in Para. 4 that the author __________.

A．is challenging the available treatment for skin disease

B．has a personal investment in the genetic-testing business

C．hopes to remove people's misunderstanding of the game rules

D．believes that every individual should have access to DNA testing

3. What do the last two paragraphs mainly talk about?

A．The disadvantages of genetic testing.	B．The scientific value of genetic testing.
C．The legal system genetic testing needs.	D．The essentials for proper genetic testing.

4. Which of the following might be the best title for the passage?

A．DNA Is Anything but a Marketing Tool	B．Genetic Testing Campaigns Aren't Legal
C．Creative Marketing Is Key to Genetic Testing	D．DNA Testing Has Become a Booming Industry