1 . Coming upon a clear - cut in an old forest is a shocking experience. Tees large and small are collapsed one above the other in pile, and the ground is covered with the tracks of heavy machinery. Such was the scene when forest activist Zack Porter and I hiked a newly built logging (伐木) road in Green Mountain National Forest.
Clear - cutting in the American forests has long been widespread. But now, the Forest Habitat Creation Project represents new reasoning which is hotly debated - that clear - cutting benefits native creatures. The thinking is that clear - cutting done wisely can mimic natural disturbances, for example, from insect invasions or from storms overturning older trees that produce what ecologists call Early Successional Habitats - places where young trees and bushes get the upper hand and animals that depend on such habitat thrive.
The project also states that forests “can only be saved by being destroyed” - by keeping them young. Timber (木材) interests are enthusiastic about the approach because it lets them profit from cutting trees while claiming the significance of conservation. Hunting groups favor it because a younger, less thick forest makes it easier to find the game and birds they're tracking.
Nevertheless, Porter says, “Allowing some of the oldest standing trees in New England to be removed is equal to dereliction of duty on the part of the government, who sees the forests as commodities (商品).” “Forests can produce clean water, clean air, carbon storage, and biodiversity that we need,” he continues as we walk among lovely mixed hardwoods and evergreens that are cut down for logging. “We shouldn't be removing them for short - term gain.”
In this sense, Zack Porter's description of logging for wildlife for short - term gain - the short - term gain of favoring habitat for species people today want to see and hunt - is reasonable.
1. How does the author start the text?| A．By presenting some ideas. | B．By listing some evidence. |
| C．By comparing different views. | D．By stating his own experience. |
| A．Profits can be made from logging. |
| B．Clear - cutting is beneficial to the wildlife. |
| C．The conservation of forest is of significance. |
| D．Clear - cutting can cause natural disturbances. |
| A．Fulfillment. | B．Promise. | C．Misconduct. | D．Exposure. |
| A．A New Approach to Forest Protection |
| B．A Hiking Experience in the Logging Road |
| C．How to Build Early Successional Habitats? |
| D．Is Clear - cutting Forests Good for Wildlife? |
2 . According to a new US study, couples who expect their children to look after them in old age should hope they have daughters because daughters are twice as loving as sons generally.
The research by Angelina Grigoryeva, from Princeton University, found that, while women provide as much care for their elderly parents as they can manage, men do as little as they can get away with and often leave it to female family members.
Her analysis of the family networks of 26, 000 old Americans concluded that gender （性别）is one of the most important things that decide whether or not people will actively care for their elderly parents.
In a paper presented at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, she concludes that simply having a sister makes men likely provide less care. Using data from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study, a study which has been recording those people over 50s for the last decade, she analyzed that women provide an average of 12. 3 hours a month of care for elderly parents while men offer only 5. 6 hours.
“Sons reduce their relative caregiving efforts when they have a sister, while daughters increase theirs when they have a brother.”
“This suggests that sons pass on parent caregiving responsibilities to their sisters.”
In the UK, the 2011 Census showed that there are now around 6.5 million people with caring responsibilities, a figure which has risen by a tenth in a decade.
But many are doing so at the risk of their health. The census showed that those who provide 50 hours or more of care a week while trying to hold down a fulltime job are three times more likely to be struggling with ill health than their working counterparts who are not carers.
1. According to the passage, what’s the key factor to decide if people will actively care for the old?| A．Education. | B．Gender. | C．Career. | D．Income. |
| A．having a sister makes men less likely to look after their parents |
| B．sons are twice as likely as daughters to care for parents in old age |
| C．sons are unwilling to leave caregiving responsibilities to their sisters |
| D．sons and daughters seem to give equal care to their parents |
| A．People should give up their jobs to care for the elderly. |
| B．Many care providers work longer hours than others. |
| C．Many care providers have potential health problems. |
| D．People shouldn’t pass on caring responsibilities to others. |
| A．explaining social networks of careers |
| B．describing people’s experiences |
| C．analyzing various researches and data |
| D．comparing different gender |
3 . In recent years, scientists have found a surprising phenomenon: In many cultures around the world, parents don’t struggle to raise helpful, kind kids. From ages 2 to 18, kids want to help their families. They wake up in the morning, voluntarily do the dishes, hop off their bikes to help their dad carry groceries into the house and when somebody hands them a cake, they share it with a younger sister or brother before taking a bite themselves. You can find these charitable kids among farmers, hunters and fishermen,
During the past four years, I’ve been interested in learning what are these parents doing to nurture such helpfulness in their kids? While doing the research, I traveled to three of the world’s most honored cultures — the Maya, Inuit and Hadzabe, and describe what I found in my new book—Hunt, Gather, Parent.
Supported by psychologists, my research result shows that parents raising helpful children welcome young children and babies into family chores and work — even if the child will make a bit of a mess or slow down the work, just opposite to many of American parents. What they say is that, “I know they are not going to do a good job, but to create more work for me.” In fact, turning down help from kids can have a bad influence, destroying their desire to help and possibly stop their desire to take care of their families.
“Given request at an early age, the children would start to act on what’s needed, and then the less likely parents need to be telling them what to do later,” Lew-Levy, a psychologist in Harvard University, says “You can pull back on the teaching, and kids just do it on their own.” But how does a parent let a young baby help with a task they can’t actually do yet — especially a task that may be too dangerous for them? You can find specific instructions in the following chapter.
1. What does the underlined word “charitable” mean in paragraph 1?| A．Selfish. | B．Dependent. | C．Helpful. | D．Curious. |
| A．Patient and serious. | B．Open-minded and thoughtful. |
| C．Influential and risky. | D．Hardworking and adventurous. |
| A．Children just act on what their parents tell them to do. |
| B．Parents should allow kids to do whatever they want. |
| C．Parents are unlikely to tell children what to do at an early age. |
| D．Children are more voluntary when given requests at a young age. |
| A．How can We Parent Caring Kids? |
| B．How to Be Kind Parents? |
| C．The Helpful Children in Some Cultures |
| D．The Growing Experiences of Helpful Children |
4 . At the foot of the Tianmu Mountain in Zhejiang, a homestay (民宿) is attracting travelers from far and wide, which has won architectural medal at the 2021 German iF Design Awards.
The owners of the homestay are a couple in their late 30s who decided to return to their hometown three years ago. Li Xiumei used to be in charge of a division at a company in Hangzhou, and her husband was a sales director. It was an ordinary situation where Li’s husband was on business trips a lot and Li still worked on weekends. City life sometimes is not easy.
In 2018, they quit jobs and went back to Dongtianmu village, which lies in a forest of bamboo. The first time they drove into the village was one late afternoon. The cooking smoke was rising from the foot of the mountain, which gave them a very different feeling from the city.
The homestay was built beside her husband’s old countryside house. The old house is preserved (保留), while a brand-new building was built on its side and the whole site is made up of four courtyards. It has been updated to have a hall, a tea room, a kitchen, a dining room. Japanese cherry trees are planted in the east courtyard. A swimming pool is placed in the west courtyard, with a bar located on one side.
Li and her husband love gardening and music, and their new home gives them enough space to continue their interests and relax in the heart of nature. Li wants to share the quiet country life, so she makes her new home a homestay. In 2019, the homestay became an online hit after guests shared their experiences on social media. “The longer I stay here, the more I feel it was the right choice to come back, and this is more meaningful than making money,” Li says.
1. How did Li feel about city life?| A．Satisfied. | B．Noisy. | C．Attractive. | D．Tired |
| A．The forest of bamboo. | B．The smoke of cooking. |
| C．The fresh air in the village. | D．The feeling of loneliness. |
| A．It is ancient and broken. | B．It can hold many guests. |
| C．It must have been carefully designed. | D．It has been rebuilt by the couple. |
| A．Continuing their music dream. | B．Living in the countryside. |
| C．Staying at the old house. | D．Developing a city. |
5 . Habits can be slow to form.
It is now ten months since many employees have made a regular commute(通勤) into the office. New routines have taken root and those will be much harder to break.
Research suggests that managers may spend 23 hours a week in meetings.
Handling a combination of remote workers will require managers to acquire new habits. Ms Moschini says the key will be to develop "empathic(共情) leadership" that understands the varied working conditions of team members.
| A．This bad news has a silver lining. |
| B．But not all new habits are welcome. |
| C．This might involve sending small gifts. |
| D．But when they do, they can become rooted. |
| E．Permitting this flexibility makes perfect sense. |
| F．The best habit developed during the pandemic is becoming flexible. |
| G．Cut that time in half and think of how much more might be achieved. |
“Many focus on the benefits of digital devices（设备）in education but ignore the costs”, said Patricia Greenfield from the University of California, “losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people is one of the costs.” Greenfield and her research team did an experiment. They worked with 105 children who spend about 4.5 hours in front of screens on a school day. The students were asked to describe the emotions towards the pictures of people who were happy, sad, angry or scared. Then, half of them attended a five-day nature and science camp. There they had no smart phones, TV, or computers. The other half stayed in school and spent the five days as usual. Five days later, all the children took the test again.
Students who had been to the camp got about 5 percent more answers correct than they had done before the camp. But the other group of students didn't show much improvement. The study is not perfect in some ways, said the researchers. But scientists say that the study is still a warning for us.
“Emotional skills develop in practice and the brain develops through real interaction.” said Professor Taylor, a professor at the University of San Francisco.
Researchers talked to 2,000 parents of children aged 2-16 in the UK about what activities their children could do confidently. The results were surprising: Their children could use a tablet(平板电脑)(59%)and work a mobile phone(57%)more confidently than they could tie their shoe laces(鞋带)(53%)! So, spend more time away from mobile phones and computers if you want to be an understanding friend, and not a member of what the Daily Mail called “Generation Helpless”.
1. According to Professor Greenfield，using digital media in education leads to ______.| A．being in bad terms with family members |
| B．making more mistakes when taking exams |
| C．falling far behind others in all schoolwork |
| D．failing to relate to other people's emotions |
| A．are alarming for people | B．are far from perfect |
| C．are quite surprising | D．need to be improved |
| A．Too much play with digital devices raised some worries． |
| B．Students learned how to describe emotions in the experiment． |
| C．Students living without screens did much better in studies． |
| D．Most of the UK children couldn't tie their shoe laces． |
| A．Stay away from the Internet | B．Here comes a digital world! |
| C．Screens do harm to emotions | D．How people become addicted？ |
7 . Growing up, we are constantly reminded that young people are heavily affected by technology. We are the “antisocial club”, those who prefer to text our friends in the same room rather than make eye contact with them. And even though never-ending studies reveal to us the extent of our social media addiction, we should at least consider that it’s not only our young people’s problem any more.
There’s the rise of the Instagram mums, who like to post an abundance of cute baby pictures, share their mom feelings along the way and show their wonderful lifestyles. They are the so-called “Facebook mum generation”, a growing group of parents that like to overshare.
While all of this might be fine, and even a little humorous, new research suggests that parents’ technology addiction is negatively affecting their children’s behavior. According to the study, 40% of mothers and 32% of fathers have admitted having some sort of phone addiction. This has led to a significant fall in verbal interactions within families and even a decline in mothers’ encouraging their children.
There is no denying that I get annoyed when receiving the words “I’ll be with you soon” from a parent, when all I want to do is ask one question. But, at the same time, every day leaving the room to wait until my father is finished with his “serious business” (Farmville), has now become the norm. Whether you want to escape your disturbing children for a bit, or want to stay up late flicking through Twitter, know that wanting to do all of these is normal. We, your children, know how addictive it can be and how difficult it is to switch off. But before telling us to put our phones away at the table or even worse, listing statistics of how damaging social media can be for us, maybe lead by example, considering how much time you spend on the phone and how this is impacting your children and your relationship with us. Maybe in this way we can work on our addiction together.
1. From Paragraph 1, we can know that teenagers nowadays ________.| A．enjoy socializing with their friends | B．send messages to their friends every day |
| C．hate to make eye contact with their friends | D．are heavily addicted to their mobile phones |
| A．Boring. | B．Selfish. | C．Funny. | D．Meaningful. |
| A．security | B．standard | C．routine | D．custom |
| A．To share the author’s own experience with the readers. |
| B．To call on parents to get rid of their own media addiction. |
| C．To reveal that parents are always addicted to mobile phones. |
| D．To show the author’s dissatisfaction with parents’ phone use. |
8 . The biggest and the smallest of the world’s animals are most at risk of dying out, according to a new analysis, with vertebrates (脊椎动物) in the so-called “Goldilocks zone”—not too big and not too small—winning out. Action is needed to protect animals at both ends of the scale, they say. The research adds to evidence that animals are dying out on such a scale that a sixth extinction is considered under way.
One clue is body size. Research on birds and mammals has shown that those with larger bodies are more likely to go extinct. Yet, when the researchers made a database of thousands of birds, mammals, fish, amphibians (两栖动物) and reptiles (爬行动物) at risk of extinction, they found disproportionate (不成比例的) losses at the large and small ends of the scale.
“Surprisingly, we found that not only the largest of all vertebrate animal species are most threatened, but the very tiniest ones are also highly threatened with extinction,” Prof. Ripple told BBC News.
Large animals, such as elephants, rhinos (犀牛) and lions have long been the target of protection efforts. However, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians that are the giants of their kind, such as the whale shark, Somali ostrich (鸵鸟) and the Chinese giant salamander (蝾螈), tend to be overlooked. Meanwhile, small species at risk--such as frogs and shrews (鼩鼱)--receive very little attention.
“I think, for the smallest species, first of all we need to bring higher awareness to them, because the larger ones get a lot of attention, but the smaller ones get very little,” said Prof. Ripple.
In the study, vertebrates with the smallest and the largest bodies were found to be most at risk of disappearing, whether they were on land or living in oceans, streams or rivers.
Heavyweights are threatened mainly by hunting, while featherweights are losing out to pollution and cutting down forests. “Ultimately, reducing global consumption of wild meat is a key step to reduce negative impacts of hunting, fishing, and trapping on the world’s vertebrates,” they write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
1. What made the researchers feel surprised?| A．A sixth of animals are dying out. |
| B．Small animals are in great danger. |
| C．Great losses of birds and mammals. |
| D．Big animals are at risk of disappearing. |
| A．Transform our habits. | B．Change our concepts. |
| C．Find ways to save small animals. | D．Take measures to stop pollution. |
| A．Loss of forests. | B．Climate change. |
| C．Human activities. | D．Environmental pollution. |
| A．Size Matters When It Comes to Extinction Risk |
| B．Large Animals Are Badly in Need of Protection |
| C．Why a Great Number of Animals Are Dying out |
| D．What We Should Do to Protect Endangered Species |
9 . Health and Social Care Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that the UK will host the first ever Global Ministerial Mental Health Summit(峰会) in London this October.This global summit aims to put mental-health care on an equal footing with the physical kind.
But there is a long way to go. One in four people will experience a mental-health problem at some point in life. In rich countries mental illnesses account for more suffering and premature death than heart disease, strokes(中风) or cancer. Meanwhile the central-African countries have just one mental-health professional per 100,000 people, a fiftieth as many as Europe has. (Less than 1% of foreign aid for health care goes towards mental health.)
As developing countries handle infectious diseases, mental health will consume a greater share of budgets and attention there. By 2020 mental-health conditions may account for 15% of the global burden of disease, but even in rich countries many people with common problems still go without treatment.
It is clear that mental illness is fast becoming one of the global health challenges of the 21st century. Until recently, this hasn’t had the profile it deserves on a global stage. The ministers gathering in London must produce new money and focus—and not just another declaration. The summit is also expected to help countries learn from each other to find the best ways to deal with increased rates of depression and anxiety among young people.
1. Which of the following best explains “on an equal footing” underlined in paragraph 1?| A．Standing up for. | B．Being as important as. |
| C．Standing in one’s shoes. | D．Having an advantage over. |
| A．To find more foreign aid for health care. |
| B．To make a declaration on mental illnesses. |
| C．To solve the physical problems of the youth. |
| D．To stress the importance of mental health. |
| A．Heart disease. | B．Cancer. |
| C．Mental illness. | D．Stroke. |
| A．Effective measures should be taken on mental health. |
| B．The problem of mental illness has drawn enough attention. |
| C．People in developed countries suffer less mental illnesses. |
| D．Mental-health diseases have taken up about 15% of the global illness cases. |
10 . Before you throw that old cell phone in the trash, or hide it away in a drawer, think again. There are actually many ways to dispose(处理) of a mobile phone that you are no longer using. First, you should be aware that in many places, throwing away cell phones is actually illegal because the batteries - especially in very old phones - can contain poisonous metals.
You certainly don't need to pay to recycle an old cell phone.
You might also want to hang onto any accessories( 配件) that you have.
| A．In fact, most companies that recycle them get paid to do so. |
| B．There are better places to get rid of them than your trash can. |
| C．Many schools and local charities now have recycling programs. |
| D．Local charities have contributed a lot in repairing unwanted phones. |
| E．Things like chargers or covers can often be used with your new phone. |
| F．The saying that one man's trash is another man's treasure certainly applies. |
| G．Check first, since so many schools have gotten the jump on recycling them already. |
