1 . I decided to write the article on British Sign Language (BSL) being taught in school. This is because both of my parents are completely deaf which means they can’t hear at all and another reason I decided to do this topic is because I have realised how much of a problem it has become.
It might come to a surprise to learn that nearly all communication is non-verbal (非语言的) and only a little bit is verbal. Over half of the non-verbal communication is body language. Deaf pupils often struggle (挣扎) in school because they can’t get proper help from their teachers as they might not understand each other.
Sign Language is a language that uses hand gestures and body language. These are different ways of communication that deaf or hard of hearing people use to communicate with people. Some deaf people are what you might call “mute”, which means they use Sign Language but don’t use speech. Other deaf people may use speech, most of whom either use hearing aids or have a cochlear implant (人工耳蜗) which can help them hear.
By teaching BSL it would open doors for the deaf community and it would reduce a lot of language barriers (障碍) between deaf and hearing people. The more people learning BSL through education means that it would give deaf people more options for further education and good jobs. By teaching Sign Language in school it can help deaf awareness (意识). With young people growing up and learning it together there wouldn’t be a problem with getting jobs.
I think that deaf awareness is better than it used to be but it still isn’t good enough. In the end teaching Sign Language will be the best for everyone. There would be less language barriers, which means communication will be easier between hearing people and deaf people.
1. What made the author write the text?| A．His own hearing problem. | B．The difficulty of the deaf. |
| C．The school’s sincere invitation. | D．His parents’ encouragement. |
| A．They are too shy to ask for help. |
| B．Their classmates use body language. |
| C．Their teachers are unwilling to help them. |
| D．They have difficulty communicating with others. |
| A．We should offer deaf people good jobs. |
| B．Schools should teach British Sign Language. |
| C．Schools should provide further education for the deaf. |
| D．Young people should learn more about Sign Language. |
| A．It is nearly close to success. | B．It still needs to be improved. |
| C．It isn’t understood by hearing people. | D．It’s bad for breaking language barriers. |
2 . Every festival has its own meaning. Labor Day, for example, celebrates the value of hard work. Thanksgiving is about showing thanks to people around you. And Valentines’ Day is a time when you express love to your loved ones. But somehow it now seems that all festivals we just care about one thing — shopping. And that can be a big problem.
“In a way, over-consumption (过度消费) is the mother of all our environmental problems,” Kalle Lasn once told CNN. Lasn is the organizer of Buy Nothing Day, a day set up in Canada in 1992 to fight against unhealthy spending habits, and has now become an international event. It’s held on the day, which is known as Black Friday — a famous shopping day in the US and Canada.
You can see the irony (讽刺) here.
Even though the idea of Buy Nothing Day was brought up 26 years ago, we seem to need it now more than ever. It’s just as Lasn said, all the different kinds of pollution in our lives today — bad air quality, the reduction of forest area, endangered animal species, and plastic bags found in the ocean — seem to be the same cause: over-consumption.
The latest example is the Singles’ Day shopping craze of Nov 11, which saw a new sales record. But as Nie Li, a campaigner at Greenpeace, told Reuters, “Record-setting over-consumption means record-setting waste.” And it was reported that last year the Singles’ Day packages left more than 160,000 tons of waste, including plastic and cardboard. The Collins Dictionary has also just named “single-use” its Word of the Year, pointing out the problem that there’re too many things we tow out after only using them once.
So, Buy Nothing Day might only be here for one day a year, but it’s not just to remind us to the a break from shopping on that day, but to change our lifestyle completely, focusing on fun “with people we care about” rather than wasting money on useless things.
1. What’s the authors purpose of writing the first paragraph?| A．To express the people’s love for all festivals. |
| B．To talk about the meaning of the festivals. |
| C．To appreciate the value of the festivals. |
| D．To bring out the topic of the passage. |
| A．To help people save money. | B．To cut the cost for daily life. |
| C．To prevent over-consumption. | D．To set up a new sales record. |
| A．Opposed (反对的). | B．Supportive. |
| C．Unknown. | D．Neutral (中立的). |
| A．Creating a New Lifestyle | B．Buy Nothing Day |
| C．Festivals Around the World | D．A Change in People’s Life |
3 . Who says that being roommates with someone from a completely different generation has to be strange? Lately, more and more Americans are becoming intergenerational (代际的)roommates, and they’re changing the way people think they should be living.
Explained as those that are separated by at least one generation living together, there has been a major increase in intergenerational roommate arrangements (安排)within the United States since 1971. In fact, statistics show that this number has actually quadrupled (增长四倍)since then. In a Pew Research Center article, it shared that by March 2021, there were at least 59. 7 million Americans that had many generations living under one roof.
There are a ton of reasons that come into play for these types of arrangements. For some, it’s because of the increase in the average life-expectancy age(平均预期寿命), a decreased birth rate, a rise in college tuition, the ever rising rentals in almost every coastal city, and more. But if anything, many say that one main reason behind the rise is that older people have space to rent out and that having younger people around just makes them happier.
According to a 25-year-old robotics student living in Massachusetts, Nadia Abdullah, who moved in with her 64-year-old roommate Judith in 2019, “It was perfect——Judith has become like my family.”
Their arrangement was $700 a month from Nadia, plus the promise of her doing some help around the house. This also allowed Nadia to live just 6 miles from Boston and 30 minutes from her robotics job located in Beverly Mass. Nadia was matched with Judith through website, a renting center specifically created to find intergenerational roommates.
Another young renting center reviewer, Kaplan, also gave some opinions on the service and why it’s so special, saying, “Through this, I lived with Sarah while attending Harvard. She provided the type of knowledge you just can’t Google——showing me how to garden, how to cook fish, and add French Romanticism to life.”
1. What is the increasing housing trend mentioned in the text.| A．More people are living together as roommates. |
| B．Strangers of a generation are living together like a family. |
| C．Different generations are living under the same roof. |
| D．Family members of different generations are living together. |
| A．The types of the arrangements. | B．The reasons for the arrangements. |
| C．The solutions to the arrangements. | D．The problems with the arrangements. |
| A．How to google special knowledge. | B．How to build a garden. |
| C．How to fish. | D．How to live a romantic life |
| A．The website is popular with university students. |
| B．The intergenerational roommates should help each other. |
| C．The intergenerational roommate arrangements work well. |
| D．The elderly benefit more than the young from the arrangements. |
It’s reported that about 10% of the global population do not have clean water. The water crisis has serious effects on people’s health, education, and
Water
Children who spend a lot of time collecting water are less likely
Low standards of education make
Water is often a source of argument and even wars. The stability of a whole region or even a country can be in danger because of a shortage of clean water. To decrease the influence of the water crisis, the United Nations has a Sustainable Development Goal
5 . Every year thousands of people come to the city of Pamplona, in north-eastern Spain, for the opportunity to run for their lives as six fighting bulls are released to charge through the town. There are injuries and deaths every year, but the event is of interest to many people. A paper just published in Science describes the insight the event offers into the psychology of panicked crowds.
That is a useful topic to explore. Arehitects, civil engineers and urban planners must try to work out how people will behave in the event of a disaster like a fire, a flood or a terrorist attack so they can design their creations to avoid potentially deadly collisions (碰撞). Unfortunately, solid information is hard to come by. Daniel Parisi, the paper’s lead author, realised that the Pamplona bull-runs offered the perfect natural experiment.
Dr Parisi and his team went to two different rooftop locations in Pamplona in July 2019, and filmed the runners as the animals were released, Later in the lab, they calculated the speed of the runners, the density (密度) of the crowd, the probability of a runner tripping and falling and the relationship between runner-group density and speed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that runners picked up speed when the bulls drew near. Less expected was the finding that the speed of individual runners increased with the density of the crowd, which was contrary to a long-held assumption in architectural and urban-design circles that people will slow their pace as group density goes up, in order to lower the risk of a collision, which could lead to a fall and, perhaps, injury or death.
Yet it seems that, in the heat of the moment, people pay little attention to the danger of colliding with each other, and do not slow down. The responsibility therefore falls upon urban designers to work out how best to plan the construction of future tunnels, bridges and other passages that restrict flow. The only option may well be to make them wider.
1. What did Dr Parisi and his team do in Pamplona?| A．They proved his theory. |
| B．They recorded a bull-run. |
| C．They watched a thrilling bull-fight. |
| D．They designed a psychological experiment. |
| A．People slowed down in crowded areas. |
| B．Tripping posed a danger to bull-runners. |
| C．Bulls coming near made people running faster. |
| D．People tended to speed up in high-density crowds. |
| A．People lose their mind in disasters. |
| B．Future tunnels and bridges may be wider. |
| C．Panicked crowds are aware of the danger of collision. |
| D．Restricting flow helps to prevent people colliding each other. |
| A．How crowds react to panic |
| B．Bull-runs caught on in Spain |
| C．Dr Parisi’s finding shocks the world |
| D．What architects can learn from bull-running |
6 . Why Can’t People Stop Touching Museum Exhibits (展品)?
When visiting the British Museum, you can see visitors touch ancient bowls even though the museum rules say no touching is allowed. Museum guards say it’s impossible to stop people from breaking the no-touch rule.
Most museum-going is still a mainly visual (视觉的) experience for visitors to admire the artworks.
But as museums grew, the spirit no longer existed. When you’ve got 4 million visitors a year, you can hardly have every body touching something. People are awkward and likely to damage the artworks. So the rule against touching artworks makes great sense. Smaller museums still sometimes encourage visitors to touch their objects.
Why are we so unwilling to keep our hands to ourselves? Some people just want to make sure the artworks are real. But there’s a larger truth.
| A．Touch was allowed in museums at first. |
| B．It helps to show respect for the ancient artists. |
| C．You stop 100 people touching and there are 200 more. |
| D．Visitors learn more about objects from reading signs around. |
| E．You can’t really learn more about objects unless you touch them. |
| F．But the bigger ones prefer to advertise themselves as no touching. |
| G．Museums have come a long way since the time of the curiosity room. |
