1 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Complaining: The Happiness Killer

In 15th-century Germany, there was an expression: Greiner, Zanner, which can be translated as “a chronic (长期的) complainer.” Are you a bit of a Greiner, Zanner? If so, you’re not alone. Survey data show that customers today are more than twice as likely to complain about a product or service as they were in 1976. A U. K.-based survey also observed a rise in job dissatisfaction over a two-year period before autumn 2022.

Complaints can be grouped into different categories. As is reported, 45 percent of complaints concern the behavior of others. For instance, parents repeatedly criticize their children for small issues like messy bedrooms or dirty clothes. Another 29 percent focus on personal discomfort. A common complaint in this category might be about feeling too hot in a room without air conditioner. The remaining 26 percent involve unpleasant obligations like unnecessary work meetings people are forced to attend.

The problem with all of these complaints is that it can feel helpful — but it typically isn’t . Although complaining might offer temporary relief, it’s bad for your happiness in the long run. Researchers who measured people’s mood before and after they complained found that those complainers’ mood was significantly worsening. Besides, complaining can also lower the happiness of the people around you. In some relationships, the negative effect can pass like a virus to those exposed. In other words, when people see others’ complaints expressing anger, disgust and sadness, they can, in turn, feel similar emotions.

As the 20th-century Bulgarian philosopher Archimandrite Seraphim Aleksiev observed, “Complaining is like the winter frost which, when it falls, destroys all the labors of the gardeners.”

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2 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．Many people are shy in social life.

B．Most people are shy by nature.

C．Your shyness won’ t hurt others.

D．Shyness is difficult to overcome.

2.

A．By prediction.

B．By recording.

C．By observation.

D．By examination.

3.

A．The detailed records of people’s actions.

B．Public attitudes towards being shy.

C．People’s real behaviors in social settings.

D．The specific degree of shyness of every interviewee.

3 . 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.

Finding safe places to interact

“Why are young people staying away from their relatives?” Recently, this question     1     (cause) a heated discussion online. In fact, young people are not “giving up” their blood ties, but turning their focus to online socializing. According to a report     2     was released by a social app in May, about 60 percent of young people have no more than two close friends. For them, social apps have become the main way     3     (make) their circle bigger.

Many people believe     4     this change partly comes from the need for a lot of moves in modern times. Long-distance migration (移居) is now common across the country. Because of moving with their families, young people are unable to keep in touch with their relatives, and they become     5     (active) online.

Moreover, online socializing     6     (favor) by many people because it provides a more personal feeling. For those     7     are uneasy with real-life socializing, doing it online allows them to escape from “embarrassing” social scenes. With different social apps. making friends can be satisfied in a comfortable way. “As a shy person, I prefer non-face-to-face talks on social apps     8     I don’t have to worry about the things that make me unconfident,” said 18-year-old Wu Ruilin from Ya’an, Sichuan province. Through apps like Soul, Bilibili, and Zhihu, young people     9     find someone with similar interests. “have some close friends in music and programming circles.     10     (communicate) with them online always offers me a more relaxing atmosphere to explore these interests,” said Wu.

4 . The world’s population reached five billion on the day I was born. That was in Indonesia back in 1987, and my parents was shocked that there were so many people on the planet.     1     In October 2011, the seven billionth baby was born, and experts predict that there will be ten billion of us before the end of this century.

    2     If you said “hello to a different person every second, it would take you 222 years to greet everyone on the planet. If seven billion people made a human chain with their hands, the chain would go to the moon and back nine times.

The human population has never been bigger, but in some ways the planet seems to begetting unbelievably smaller. In the past, travellers from Europe to Indonesia spent months at sea. Now you just have to sit on a plane for a few hours. When you arrived in another country a hundred years ago, you saw unfamiliar styles of clothing and buildings and discovered a completely different culture. In many places today, clothing and new buildings are very similar, and people enjoy the same things.     3    

Even the languages that we use are becoming more global. There are around seven thousand languages in use today.     4     I grew up in a small village where everyone spoke Baras, one of Indonesia’s local languages. Today, like most of the youth from my village, I live in the capital, Jakarta, and speak Indonesian there. The only regular Baras speakers at present are the older people who have stayed in the country, so the language is threatened with extinction.

A．But the number is decreasing fast.

B．Although we are on different continents, we are starting to live the same lives.

C．The planet might be a lot more peaceful if that were the case.

D．However, since then the population has continued to increase at an alarming rate.

E．A number as big as seven billion is hard to imagine.

F．With only one language left, there will be no culture difference in the world.

5 . It keeps what’s inside a mystery until you open it. There are usually toys in mystery boxes; but now, food has been added to the list.

Recently, the trend of “leftover mystery boxes” has become popular in many Chinese cities such as Beijing, Nanjing and Chengdu. Stores pack boxes full of unsold food or food nearing its expiration date at low prices.

“We make the leftover mystery boxes available to buy at the end of the day,” Wu Tian, a staff member at a convenience chain store in Beijing, told China Daily. The food, such as milk, bread and sandwiches, is sold at about half the original price and is usually sold out quickly. Many bakeries have also joined the “mystery box club”.

Due to their low price, leftover mystery boxes “are very promising as a new business mode” and can attract more consumers, Hong Yong, an expert at the Ministry of Commerce, told China Daily. “In addition, they follow the concept of zero-waste and environmental protection.”

In 2021, the total amount of food waste in China reached 160 million tons, with an average of 93 grams per meal per person, China Food Newspaper reported. Since the passage of China’s Anti-Food Waste Law in April 2021, people’s awareness of food waste reduction has increased. Leftover mystery boxes can be an effective way for people to deal with food waste.

However, some people have raised food security concerns. If consumers buy a food mystery box for their breakfast the next morning, even if the food looks fine at the moment, it may have gone bad overnight. Moreover, food made in the store, such as bread, isn’t labeled with the production date in many cases, according to China Consumer News. If a consumer unpacks a mystery box and discovers that the food tastes bad or has already passed the last date, then it will be difficult for them to protect their rights, such as getting money back.

Only by considering both food safety and consumer rights can mystery blind boxes achieve a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers, commented China Youth Daily.

1. What leads to the rise of the trend of “leftover mystery boxes”?

A．Stores make the leftover mystery boxes available at night.

B．People feel like such food as milk and bread more attractive.

C．It offers customers lower prices for those unsold food.

D．It goes against the concept of zero-waste and environmental protection.

2. The underlined word “expiration” in the 2nd paragraph is closest in meaning to        .

A．ending

B．producing

C．purchasing

D．selling

3. Why are some people worried about customers buying a food mystery box?

A．Because the food has gone bad when it’s bought.

B．Because customers’ rights are hard to protect.

C．Because the production dates are not clear enough.

D．Because customers cannot get a refund in many cases.

4. What’s the most suitable title for this passage?

A．Concerns Over Food Security	B．Mystery Boxes of Leftover
C．A Solution to Food Waste	D．A Win-win Situation

6 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

How to Be a Better Boss

Workplaces have changed dramatically over the past few years. Teams have become more isolated owing to remote work. Technology has brought great benefits but also constant interruptions, from endless Zoom calls to message flows on Slack. With each shift, the job of the manager has become harder. Many report feeling burnt-out, overloaded and confused.

Yet in real life everyone suffers when management is bad and benefits when it is good Research based on a long-running survey of management techniques has found that well-managed firms tend to be more productive, export more and spend more on research and development.

So the prize for better management is big. But how to obtain it? Read enough management books and you might conclude that managers need to change their personality thoroughly, becoming either Machiavelli’s prince or a Marvel superhero. However, study successful managers, and more practical lessons can be drawn.

One is to be clear about a firm’s processes. Managers should make clear the purpose of a team, what a meeting should achieve and who will take a decision. Meeting agendas at GSK, a British drugs firm, clearly say whether an item is for awareness, to gather participants’ input or intended to make a decision. Such clarity means that everyone knows what they are doing, and why.

Management isn’t all about piling up tasks, meetings or processes. A second lesson is that managers can add value by deleting. Sparing workers from pointless meetings, emails and projects frees them to concentrate on the work that fattens the bottom line. At the start of the year, Shopify, an e-commerce firm, deleted 12,000 repeated meetings from its employees’ calendars. The useful ones were eventually added back. But the firm says that meetings are down by 14% since the mass deletion while productivity has gone up by a similar amount.

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8 . False medical news can lead to patients’ experiencing greater side effects through the “nocebo effect (反安慰剂效果)”. Sometimes patients benefit from an intervention simply because they believe they will- -that’s the placebo effect. The nocebo effect is the opposite: Patients can experience negative effects just because they expect them. This is very true of statins. In blinded trials, patients who get statins are no more likely to report feeling muscle aches than patients who get a placebo. Yet, in clinical practice, according to one study, almost a fifth of patients taking statins report side effects, leading many to discontinue the drugs.

What else is on the fake news hit list? As always, vaccines. False concerns that the vaccine for the virus called human papilloma virus causes seizures (癫痫) and other side effects reduced coverage rates in Japan from 10 percent to less than 1 percent in recent years.

Cancer is another big target for pushers of medical misinformation — many of whom are making money off alternative therapies. “Though most people think cancer tumors are bad, they’re actually the way your body attempts to contain the harmful cells,” one fake news story reads. It suggests that surgery increases the risk of spreading harmful cells.

Silicon Valley needs to own this problem. When human health is at risk, perhaps search engines, social media platforms and websites should be held responsible for promoting or hosting fake information. The scientific community needs to do its part to educate the public about key concepts in research, such as the difference between observational studies and higher quality randomized trials.

Finally, journalists can do a better job of spreading accurate information. News sites are more likely to cover catchy observational studies than randomized controlled trials, perhaps because the latter are less likely to produce surprising results. Such coverage can overstate benefits, claiming for example, that statins could cure cancer; it can unduly emphasize potential risks, such as suggesting a misleading connection with dementia, a serious mental disorder.

1. What does the writer imply about the side effects of statins?

A．They are common in certain patients.

B．They aren’t like those of placebos.

C．They don’t really exist.

D．They disappear very soon.

2. Which statement is the writer most likely to agree with?

A．The public should put more trust in news coverage.

B．Silicon Valley ought to take the blame for the fake medicine.

C．The scientific community ought to involve the public in research.

D．Journalists should be objective while reporting medical news.

3. The word “unduly” in the last paragraph most probably means       .

A．on a small scale

B．overly

C．as likely as not

D．universally

4. What is the main purpose of the passage?

A．To warn readers against fake medical news on the Internet.

B．To encourage journalists to report more positive news events.

C．To tell readers what role the “nocebo effect” plays in treating disease.

D．To teach readers how to distinguish truths from fake news.

9 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. monitors       B. risen       C. nonprofit       D. mostly E. alarms       F. recovered       G. nonexistent       H. amazingly I. corresponding       J. responded       K. remote

US schools struggle to deal with hoax (恶作剧) shootings

More and more US schools are confiscating (没收) guns from students and having to deal with calls falsely reporting school shootings.

The number of guns found on students in schools during the first two months of this school year has    1     compared with the same time in the past two years, says the nonprofit group Gun Violence Archive, which     2     gun activity.

At least 220 guns were seized last month and in August in 35 states, compared with 128 at the same time last year. In the     3     period in 2019, 132 guns were confiscated. The number of guns found in 2020 is likely to have been lower because it was amid the pandemic, when classes were     4    .

At least 15 guns were    5     from schools in Baltimore, Maryland, last year, said Sergeant Clyde Boatwright of the Baltimore City School Police Force. It was higher than in any recent year. This school year the department has recovered two guns. One was used when a high-school student was shot dead outside a school.

The increasing prevalence of guns comes with an increase in what has come to be known as swatting. This is a hoax in which someone calls emergency services and reports a    6     crime to get law enforcement officials, generally a SWAT team, to go to an address.

On Wednesday many San Francisco Bay Area high schools received active shooter hoax calls, a day after police in Florida     7     to swatting calls at several high schools.

Since early last month about 117 hoaxes have been reported at schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia, said the National Association of School Resource Officers, a     8     group for school-based law enforcement professionals.

“These false     9     are far from harmless,” said Mo Canady, the associations’ executive director. “They also distract limited public safety resources from other community needs and increase anxiety among students and others.”

The calls have been made     10     from high schools, but also middle and elementary schools, according to local news reports. Some of the calls are hard to trace because they are made from internet phone numbers, law enforcement experts said.

10 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. serve       B. shape       C. sharing     D. released   E. spread F. willingly   G. questioned   H. separately   I. practice   J. preparing K.creating

Communal Eating?

In China, communal eating (合餐共食) is considered very important for forming a close relationship. In the memories of most Chinese, one of the happiest moments in their lives was seated around a table with families or friends,     1     dishes and chatting over wine.

In the campaign against the COVID-19 outbreak, this dining tradition has been greatly     2    . Since each diner picks food out of the communal plates on a bite-by-bite basis with their chopsticks, the virus can be transferred from saliva (唾液) to chopsticks to the dish. What’s worse, diners often     3     others with their own utensils, such as chopsticks or spoons, to express friendliness and care. Several cases of coronavirus are thought to have     4     through families when sharing food during the Chinese New Year period.

Communal eating has thus become a target of both governments and restaurants. Posters have been     5     by local governments to encourage people to use serving utensils. Concerned about customers being very careful about returning to restaurants, the catering industry (餐饮业) has     6     joined the campaign. For example, many restaurants, once allowed to reopen, have immediately sprung into action, particularly offering set meals for one single person.

These changes are likely to continue and could be encouraged by local regulations, as eating together     7     can always protect the public health. The measures will     8     the traditional mealtime manners.

The move away from a traditional cultural     9     is ongoing. But as an expert said, “In modern times to eat individually may lose some tradition, but it can also mean more opportunities for     10     something new in Chinese food and eating habits.”