1. What is the main purpose of the speech?
| A．To get more support. | B．To get rights for the state. | C．To report on work. |
| A．Asking for help from the public. |
| B．Reducing the money on army. |
| C．Increasing taxes on wine and gas. |
| A．Banning sales of guns in stores. |
| B．Training police officers. |
| C．Making more city laws. |
2 . Being a good parent requires providing a child with the gifts of love, attention, energy, and resources unstintingly over a long period of time. It involves developing a small body, but it also involves growing a child’s soul.
Parents are an enormously powerful force in the lives of children. Whether Johnny can read, whether Johnny knows right from wrong, whether Johnny is a happy, well-adjusted kid, or sad and self-destructive, has a whole lot to do with the kind of parenting Johnny has received. If Johnny’s mom and dad have been able to come through with lasting, loving attention, the chances are that Johnny is on track to become a productive, compassionate (富有同情心的) person. If they have not, Johnny is in trouble.
Thirty years ago Chicago professor James S. Coleman showed that parental involvement mattered far more in determining school success than any quality of the formal education system. Across a wide range of subject areas, in literature, science and reading, Coleman estimated that the parent was twice as powerful as the school in determining achievement at age fourteen. Psychologist Lawrence Steinberg, who recently completed a six-year study of 20,000 teenagers in nine different communities, confirms the importance of parents. Steinberg shows that one out of three parents is “seriously disengaged” from his or her adolescent’s education, and this is the primary reason why so many American students perform below their potential and below students in other rich countries.
A weight of evidence now demonstrates obvious links between absentee parents and a wide range of behavioral and emotional problems in children. A 1997 study of 90,000 teenagers — the Add Health Project undertaken (承担) by the Carolina Population Center and the Teenage Health Program at the University of Minnesota found that youngsters are less likely to get depressed, use drugs or become involved in crime when they spent significant time with their parents. This study found that the mere physical presence of a parent in the home after school, at dinner and at bedtime significantly reduces the incidence of risky behavior among teenagers.
1. What does the underlined word “unstintingly” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．Absolutely. | B．Obviously. | C．Carefully. | D．Generously. |
| A．Children should be taught to be successful in life. |
| B．Parents’ character has a deep influence on children. |
| C．Children are affected by many factors during the growth. |
| D．Parents should be strict with their children about behaviors. |
| A．To know the importance of parents’ company. |
| B．To find out why there are so many serious crimes. |
| C．To get ways to prevent teenagers’ bad behaviors. |
| D．To find links between parents’ education and crimes. |
| A．Ambiguous. | B．Doubtful. | C．Favorable. | D．Unclear. |
3 . Good morning! I’m glad this day has arrived and I’m so glad you are here. As you set off on the grand adventure of a liberal education, I want to share with you a bit of wisdom.
Today, I want to urge you to cultivate the habit of moving purposefully, systematically, slowly, not necessarily to slow down your pace in four years’ time, but to reflect on the ideas to which you will be exposed, and to be in a position to repair what is broken in the world you will then enter.
As perhaps never before, you have come of age in a culture of hurriedness. Yours is a generation that has never known life without the instant spread of information. Social networking was born before nearly all of you. And similarly, novel technologies that were unthinkable in my generation are native to yours.
Many of the innovations on which society has come to rely are the fruit of a mantra (口号) first expressed by Mark Zuckerberg. “Move fast and break things,” he instructed his staff at Facebook around the time of its 2004 launch. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” he continued, “you are not moving fast enough.”
To be sure, this mantra was eventually phased out (淘汰) as Facebook’s motto, but it remains very much a dominant ethos (理念) in today’s tech ecosystem.
This ethos also has gone into the DNA of newer online platforms that prioritize,rather harmfully, speed over depth. The appearance of artificial intelligence has allowed us to find its potential to compound (重) these trends.
So, rather than “move fast and break things,” I suggest here doing the opposite.
I am not against technological progress. I treasure the benefits of technological advance to our lives and our relationships. But the trend we have developed for the immediate divests us of the time and space necessary for careful reflection. So, I encourage you to watch out for it.
1. The speaker worries that the audience of this speech might become too ______.| A．adventurous | B．shallow | C．technological | D．purposeless |
| A．To offer some background information for his speech. |
| B．To provide supporting evidence for his viewpoint. |
| C．To remove misunderstanding of his speech purpose. |
| D．To introduce the main problem mentioned in his speech. |
| A．reminds us of saving | B．convinces us of using |
| C．saves us from losing | D．prevents us from having |
| A．slow down college education | B．catch up with the trends |
| C．slow down and fix things | D．abandon using technology |
4 . Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, recently signed two bills into law that strictly limit children’s use of social media platforms. Under the law, which takes effect next year, social media companies have to check the ages of all users in the state, and children under age 18 have to get agreement from their parents to have accounts. Parents will also be able to use their kids’ accounts, apps won’t be allowed to show children ads, and accounts for kids won’t be able to be used between 10:30 pm and 6:30 am without parental agreement.
While some people argue age limitation allows tech companies to collect even more data about users, let’s be real: These companies already have much private information about us. To solve this problem, we need a separate data privacy law. But until that happens, this concern shouldn’t stop us from protecting kids.
One of the key parts of the law is allowing parents to use their kids’ accounts. By doing this, the law begins to help address one of the biggest dangers kids face online: harmful content.
One huge challenge the law helps parents get over is the amount of time kids are spending on social media. A 2022 survey found that, on average, children aged 8 to 12 spend 5 hours and 33 minutes per day on social media while those aged 13 to 18 spend 8 hours and 39 minutes daily. It’s warned that lack of sleep is connected with serious harm to children — everything from injuries to depression (抑郁), fatness and diabetes. So, parents need to have a way to ensure their kids aren’t up on social media platforms all night.
Considering the experiences many kids are having on social media, this law will help Utah’s parents protect their kids. Parents in other states need the same support. Now, it’s time for the government to step up and ensure children throughout the country have the same protection as Utah’s kids.
1. Which is allowed according to the new bill?| A．Ads can be put on to children. |
| B．Children can use social media freely. |
| C．Parents can check their kids’ accounts. |
| D．Related companies protect users’ accounts. |
| A．Because children’s right to surf the Internet is limited. |
| B．Because more personal information may be given away. |
| C．Because it prevents the data privacy law from taking effect. |
| D．Because children may become too dependent on the Internet. |
| A．Higher learning efficiency. |
| B．Better personal eating habits. |
| C．Easier access to healthy media. |
| D．Improved physical and mental health. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Flexible. | D．Negative. |
5 . One of the biggest concerns about today’s tech giants is their market power. In many countries, Google, Facebook, and Amazon dominate online search, social media, and online retail respectively. And yet economists have largely failed to address these concerns in a proper way. To help regulators as they struggle to address this market concentration, we must make economics itself more relevant to the digital age.
Digital markets often become highly concentrated, with one dominant firm, because larger players enjoy significant returns. For example, data generation plays a self reinforcing (自我强化的) rule; more data improves the service, which brings more users, and then generates more data.
As several recent reports have pointed out, the digital economy poses a problem for competition policy. Competition is vital for boosting productivity and long term growth, because it drives out inefficient producers and encourages innovation. Yet how can this happen when there are such dominant players?
Today’s digital giants provide services that people want: one recent study estimated that consumers value online search alone at a level which is equal to about half of media income. Rather than assessing likely short-term trends in specific digital markets, they need to be able to estimate the potential long-term costs.
This is no easy task, because there is no standard methodology (方法) for estimating uncertain futures. Economists ever disagree on how to measure static consumer valuations of free digital goods such as online search and social media. And although the idea that competition operates dynamically through firms entering and exiting the market dates back at least to Joseph Schumpeter, the standard approach is still to look at competition among similar companies producing similar goods at a point in time.
The characteristics of digital technology pose a great challenge to the entire discipline. As I pointed out more than 20 years ago, the digital economy is “weightless”. Moreover, many digital goods are non-rival “public goods”. You can use software code without stopping others from doing so, whereas only one person can wear the same pair of shoes.
1. What makes the regulators worry about the tech giants?| A．Market dominance. | B．Market profits. | C．Digital high-tech. | D．Economic stability. |
| A．By enlarging the platform. | B．By collecting more data. |
| C．By avoiding network effects. | D．By encouraging innovation. |
①Lack of standard methodology. ②Disagreements among economists.
③Innovation from producers. ④Use of digital products at the same time.
| A．①②③ | B．②③④ | C．①③④ | D．①②④ |
| A．A business magazine. | B．A science report. |
| C．A marketing guide. | D．An IT textbook. |
6 . “Few articles change owners more frequently than clothes. They travel downwards from grade to grade in the social scale with remarkable regularity,” wrote the journalist Adolphe Smith in 1877 as he traced a coat’s journey in the last century: cleaned, repaired and resold repeatedly; cut down into a smaller item; eventually recycled into new fabric. But with the improvement in people’s living standards, that model is mind-boggling in the era of fast fashion. The average British customer buys four items a month. And it is reported that 350,000 tonnes of used but still wearable clothes go to landfills in the UK each year.
Yet the gradual revival of the second-hand trade has gathered pace in the past few years. At fashion website Asos, sales of vintage clothes (古董衫) have risen by 92%. Clothing was once worn out of necessity, and now it is simply a way of life. Busy families sell used items on eBay, teenagers trade on Depop and some fashion people offer designer labels on Vestiaire Collective. Strikingly, it has become big enough business that mainstream retailers (零售商) want a slice of the action.
For some buyers and sellers, the switch to the second-hand is born of financial difficulties. Only a few have become worried about the impact of their shopping habit on the planet. But the shift is only a partial solution. Some people worry that some mainstream brands may “greenwash” — using second-hand goods to improve their image, rather than engaging more seriously with sustainability.
However, the biggest concern may be that people keep buying because they know they can resell goods, still chasing the pleasure of the next purchase but with an eased conscience (愧疚). Boohoo, a powerful fast fashion company, has seen sales and profits rise, despite concerns about environmental problems in its supply chain that led to an investigation last year.
A new Netflix series, Worn Stories, documents the emotional meanings that clothes can have: Each old item is full of memories. Actually, a handbag from a grandmother and a scarf passed on by a father are both valuable for us. A love of style is not a bad or an unimportant thing. But a committed relationship is better than a quick flash. Can we learn to appreciate our own old clothes as well as others’?
1. What does the word “mind-boggling” underlined in paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Unbelievable. | B．Popular. | C．Reasonable. | D．Influential. |
| A．old clothes are more popular than new pieces |
| B．the online second-hand markets are booming |
| C．the fashion world begins to favor vintage clothes |
| D．many clothing brands are innovative in their new products |
| A．It makes people feel free to pursue fast fashion. |
| B．It makes people more cautious about their budgets. |
| C．It encourages people to choose eco-friendly clothes. |
| D．It pushes people to be more engaged with sustainability. |
| A．Old items have lost favor with the public. |
| B．Old items are worthy of being long cherished. |
| C．Older generations attach great importance to old items. |
| D．Older generations care about the quality of their clothes. |
7 . One by one, prejudices are disappearing in the West. People may harbor private suspicions that other people’s race or sex makes them inferior—but to say so openly is totally taboo. One old prejudice remains respectable, though. Just ask a childless person.
They are not charged to special taxes, as they were in Soviet Russia; nor are they driven from their homes, as they still are in some poor countries. The childless nonetheless come in for a lot of criticism. Some point out that non-parents are failing to produce the future workers who will pay for their pensions. Childless politicians are charged with not having a proper stake in society. “He talks to us about the future, but he doesn’t have children!” complained Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front party, of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the French presidency. Similar attacks on Theresa May and Angela Merkel also failed but researchers find that many voters quietly agree.
The charges against the childless should be thrown out, along with other social prejudice. In many rich countries, between 15% and 20% of women, and a slightly higher proportion of men, will not have children. The share is rising. Some have medical problems; others do not meet the right person in time; still others decide they do not want them. Whatever the cause, the attacks on the childless are baseless.
If non-breeders are selfish, they have a strange way of showing it. They are more likely to set up charitable foundations than people with children, and much more likely to donate money to good causes. According to one American estimate, the mere fact of not having children raises the amount a person leaves to charity by a little over $10,000. The childless are thus a small but useful counterweight to the world’s parents, who stop social immobility by passing on their social and economic advantages to their children.
The fact that so many senior politicians lack offspring ought to put to rest the idea that they do not care for society. Five of the G7 countries are led by childless men and women. Mr. Macron, Mrs. May, Mrs. Merkel, Shinzo Abe and Paolo Gentiloni have their faults, but they are not notably less able than Justin Trudeau (who has three children) let alone Donald Trump (who has five). Their opportunities for nepotism are limited. And they spare their countries dynastic politics.
The charge that childless people fail to pull their weight in population is correct, but is less serious than it appears. Those who do not have children do put pressure on public pension systems. Governments have to do unpopular things like making pensions less generous, as Japan has done, or accepting more immigrants, as some Western countries have done. But to sustain public pensions in the long term, countries do not actually need more parents. What they need instead is more babies. It is possible to combine a high rate of childlessness with a high birth rate, provided people who become parents have more than one or two children. That was the pattern in many Western countries a century ago. Ireland, yet another country with a childless leader, still manages it today.
The childless also do everyone else a favour by creating wonderful works of art. British novelists have been especially likely to have no offspring: think of Hilary Mantel, P.G Wodehouse and the Bronte sisters. In September last year Britain put Jane Austen on its ten-pound note. That decision was controversial, though it was hard to see why. Few people have written as shrewdly about money or about families even though Austen did not marry, and had no children.
1. What is the main idea of Paragraph 2?| A．The childless often get punished in society. | B．The childless often come under sharp criticism. |
| C．Most successful politicians have no children | D．Childlessness affects the result of an election. |
| A．have a strange way to show selfishness | B．set a bad example for young people |
| C．are not as able as those with children | D．are the government’s financial burden |
| A．Accepting more immigrants. | B．Reducing the pensions for the aged. |
| C．Encouraging parents to have more children. | D．Supporting the political leaders with no children. |
| A．Understanding | B．Skeptical | C．Disappointed | D．Reserved |
| A．In defence of the childless. | B．In hope of having a child or not. |
| C．Reasons for not having children. | D．Measures to address aging problems. |
8 . After Alexander Pushkin was shot in a duel (决斗) in 1837, crowds of mourners formed in Saint Petersburg. When the wagon carrying the much loved poet’s body reached Pskov province, where he was to be buried, admirers tried to pull the vehicle themselves.
Today’s celebrity funerals tend to involve the public largely digitally rather than in person. But people are passionate all the same. In the past few months, grief has coursed around the Internet for Milan Kundera, and most recently, Michael Gambon. If you stop to think about it, such expressions of strong feelings for writers and actors are odd, even irrational.
Unlike other kinds of grief, this one is not rooted in personal intimacy (亲密关系). If you ever interacted with a cherished author, it was probably during a book tour when she signed your copy of her novel. Maybe you once locked eyes with a musician during a live concert and he smiled at you, but actually he did not even know you.
Objectively, sorrow makes sense when a star dies young or violently. Had she not died at 27, who knows what music Amy Winehouse would have added to her already impressive collections of work? The death of a long-lived and fulfilled artist, however, is far from the saddest item in an average day’s headlines. And while most ordinary people sink into oblivion, these celebrities live on in their output. Why, then, are these losses felt so widely and keenly?
One interpretation is that departed celebrities are merely the messengers. Part of your past —the years in which the musician was the soundtrack, the writer your ally (盟友) — can seem to fade away with them. The grief can be seen as a form of gratitude for the harmony and joy they supplied.
More importantly, the passing of an artist is an occasion for exchanges of ideas. In an atomized age, in which the default (默认) tone is critical, a beloved figure’s death is a chance to share positive feelings and memories with fellow admirers. These sad occasions are the parting gifts of these artists.
1. Why does the author mention Milan Kundera and Michael Gambon in paragraph 2?| A．To prove that celebrities’ funerals tend to attract wider public attention. |
| B．To illustrate why people express their sadness at the loss of those celebrities. |
| C．To demonstrate that people’s mourning for celebrities seems strange and unreasonable. |
| D．To show that people’s grief over celebrities’ death is ridiculous and impractical. |
| A．are upset | B．are desperate | C．are helpless | D．are forgotten |
| A．People won’t mourn for celebrities unless they have intimate relationships with celebrities. |
| B．It’s natural that people mourn for celebrities dying young but not for those long-lived ones. |
| C．People feel sad for the passing of celebrities because of the mental nourishment received. |
| D．People attend celebrities’ funerals, either in person or on the Internet, to express their loyalty. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Disapproving. | C．Skeptical. | D．Concerned. |
9 . How to Build a Natural Swimming Pool
Whether you like to practice your dolphin dives or idle away the day on a raft, swimming is one of summer’s perfect pleasures. With a minimum of materials, you can create a cooling summer retreat in your backyard.
Though common in Europe, natural swimming pools, are in their early stage in the United States. You can ask most American swimming-pool contractors (承包商) to build a backyard pool.
But in recent years, a few builders and a growing number of homeowners have learned how to build pools.
Natural swimming pools require no harmful chemicals, are fairly low-tech.
| A．The plants enrich the pool with oxygen. |
| B．Chances are that they will roll out a long list of goods. |
| C．You can make your pool as shallow or as deep as you want. |
| D．And once established, they call for only a bit of management. |
| E．It is the most ecological and economic way to build a conventional pool. |
| F．They don’t rely on a mass of manufactured materials and chemical additives. |
| G．The result is an ecological system that is relatively inexpensive to construct. |
In the coming era of budget cuts to education, distance learning could become the norm.
The temptation for those in charge of education budgets to trade teachers
Those policy-makers are often fascinated by the latest technology in education and its potential to transform education overnight.
