1 . In today’s world of fast-paced games and short videos, people are spending less and less time on things. For example, research has shown that the average visitor spends just 15 seconds on a website before moving on to other things. But the Internet is a huge and busy place, with millions of sites to choose from. You might expect people to slow down a bit more when they’re in museums full of great works of art. But you’d be wrong.
Several studies have shown that the amount of time for people to spend looking at a piece of art is ten seconds. Many people may spend more time, but not much more — the average is about 28 seconds. At the Tate Modern Museum in London, it’s even worse. People there spend an average of just eight seconds on each artwork. And in that short period of time, the visitors are also managing to do another important thing — take selfies !
In recent years museums have been working to change this behavior. Today, over 170 museums around the world are celebrating “Slow Art Day”. They are asking their visitors to spend at least 5-10 minutes looking at just one work of art. Slow Art supporters believe that when visitors spend more time looking at and studying the work of art, they admire it more. Studying a work of art for more time can also help people get a better understanding of the artist’s ideas and what the artist went through to create the work.
Most of the museums taking part in Slow Art Day are choosing just a few works for their visitors to see. Some of the museums are offering chances for visitors to talk about the artworks and share their ideas.
1. Generally speaking, people spend ______ on each piece of art in a museum.| A．8 seconds | B．10 seconds | C．15 seconds | D．28 seconds |
| A．Admiring each artwork thoroughly. | B．Taking selfies in museums busily. |
| C．Celebrating “Slow Art Day” widely. | D．Looking at each artwork hurriedly. |
| A．To attract more people to visit the museums |
| B．To stop visitors from taking selfies inside |
| C．To make people spend more time on each artwork |
| D．To give visitors an opportunity to relax themselves |
| A．Museums on the Rocks: Please Advise! |
| B．Museums: Slow down to Admire more! |
| C．Slow Art Day: a Fruit of Museums! |
| D．Museums: an Escape from the Fast-paced Life! |
2 . Everyone fails from time to time. We try to learn from our mistakes and move on, leaving them behind. But one museum is doing quite the opposite. It's a suitcase (展示）for failures, both famous and forgotten.
Inspired by the museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia, Samuel West, a psychologist from Sweden, decided to make our silly mistakes public. He founded the Museum of Failure in 2017. Now the museum is hitting the road, with a traveling exhibition in Shanghai from Jan 18 to March 17. The museum will display over 100 "failed" products from big- name companies such as Nokia, Apple and Coca-Cola.
“I really hope you see that these mega-brands(大牌）that everybody respects screw up too”. West told The New York Times. “I hope that makes you feel less apprehensive（惴惴不安）about learning something new.”
West’s opinion isn't new. The famed German- American physicist Albert Einstein once said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” This idea has even been embraced by big companies in the US. Silicon Valley, for example, is the home of some of the world's most innovative tech companies. A common slogan is, “Fail fast, fail often.”
However, there are reasons for this. “The best companies are those that encourage failure, embrace out- of -the -box thinking and allow employees to make mistakes and see what happens,” wrote the Simon Casuto of Forbes.
This may lead to carelessness and a lack of effort. Some people are skeptical（存疑的）of this so-called “culture of failure”. They are worried that if failure becomes “a badge（奖章） of honor”, as Wired magazine put it, it may even be seen as “uncool” when someone tries to reduce the risk of failure.
“Sometimes people hide behind failure, when they could have prevented it,” wrote Anna Isaac of The Telegraph.
So it's important that you set apart the two kinds of failure------the kind that shows laziness or incompetence（不足）and the kind that takes you forward. The key is whether you’ve learned something from your mistakes.
1. What does the underlined phrase“ screw up ”in paragraph 3 probably mean？| A．fail. | B．reform. | C．expand. | D．cooperate. |
| A．help people avoid failure. |
| B．encourage people to try new things. |
| C．teach people how to learn from failure. |
| D．entertain people with silly products. |
| A．It will lead to lots of impractical ideas. |
| B．It will cause great waste of resources. |
| C．It may give people excuses to make less effort. |
| D．People may fear to try again after failure. |
| A．All failures deserve respect. |
| B．The best companies seldom make mistakes. |
| C．Failure shows lack of effort and ability. |
| D．Failure is good if it teaches us something. |
3 . Lack of sleep among children and teenagers in China has worsened in the past decade, with more than 80 percent getting insufficient sleep on school days, a new report has found.
Chinese youngsters snooze 7. 8 hours a night on average on school days, down 0. 3 hours from 2009, according to the report released on Monday by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Psychology.
Researchers surveyed more than 15,800 students from Henan, Hebei and Guangdong provinces from April to July, asking what time they go to bed and wake up on days they take offline classes on campus.
Only 46. 4 percent of them sleep for at least 8 hours, compared with 47. 4 percent in 2009.
According to an action plan laying out measures to be taken from 2019 to 2030 to promote the health of citizens, primary school students are recommended to get a minimum of 10 hours of sleep a night. For junior high school and senior high school students, the recommended sleep durations per night are 9 and 8 hours respectively.
By this set of standards, more than 95 percent of students from primary schools, nearly 91 percent at junior high and 84 percent at senior high, did not get enough sleep on school days, heightening the risk of them developing cognitive, mental and physical health problems, the report said.
Hou Jinqin, a researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences who co-authored the study, suggested local authorities implement measures instructed by the Ministry of Education, such as lessening academic burdens, postponing start times at school and encouraging children to be enrolled at institutions closer to home, in order to prolong sleeping hours.
In terms of the COVID - 19 outbreak's impact on sleep, she said available research overseas shows school closures forced by the COVID - 19 epidemic have added two hours of sleep to young students studying-gat home.
In China, some studies have revealed no marked differences in sleeping patterns of students before and after school reopened, she added.
1. What does the underlined word "insufficient" in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．Unconditional. | B．Inadequate. | C．Untypical. | D．Incalculable. |
| A．7 -8. | B．8 -9. | C．≥ 9. | D．≥ 10. |
| A．Reducing their course load. | B．Starting school a bit earlier. |
| C．Attending extra — curricular courses. | D．Promoting a new sleeping pattern. |
| A．To introduce a new study on sleep habits. |
| B．To advise people to lengthen their sleeping hours. |
| C．To analyse the reasons why youngsters lack sleep. |
| D．To propose measures to handle student sleep shortfall. |
4 . Artificial Intelligence (AI) advice is as influential as human’s, but positive crowd views still overpower.
In a study, researchers found that machines that make recommendations—or AI experts—were as influential as human experts when the AI experts recommended which photo users should add to their online business profiles. However, both AI and human experts failed to budge them if their feedback was negative and went against popular views among other users, said S. Shyam Sundar, a professor of Media Effects.
Because people are increasingly using social media to look for feedback, studies suggest that expert opinions and the bandwagon（从众效应）effect may be important factors in influencing decisions, according to Jinping Wang, a doctoral candidate in mass communication and first author of the study. “Nowadays, we often turn to online platforms for opinions from other people—like our peers and experts—before making a decision,” said Wang. AI experts are often less expensive than human experts and they can also work 24 hours a day, which, Wang suggests, might make them appealing to online business.
The researchers also found that the AI’s group status—in this case, national origin was pointed out—did not seem to affect a person’s acceptance of its recommendation. Among human experts, however, an expert from a similar national origin who offered a negative opinion of a photograph tended to be more influential than a human expert from an unknown country who offered a similar negative rating of a photograph.
While findings that suggest group status may not affect whether a person values the view of AI experts sound like good news, Sundar suggests that the same cultural prejudice might still be at work in AI experts for they could be hidden in the programming and training data.
“It can be both good—and bad—because it all depends on what you feed the AI,” said Sundar. “While it is good to believe in AI’s ability to transcend（超越）cultural prejudice, we have to keep in mind that if you train the AI on pictures from one culture, they could give misleading recommendations on pictures meant for use in other cultural contexts.”
1. What do the underlined words “budge them” in Paragraph 2 mean?| A．Change users’ ideas. | B．Satisfy users’ needs. |
| C．Raise users’ spirits. | D．Fire users’ imagination. |
| A．Because AI experts are more knowledgeable. |
| B．Because AI experts are less influenced by feelings. |
| C．Because AI experts are always available and cost less. |
| D．Because AI experts are so new as to be more attractive. |
| A．An expert who has great achievements in arts. |
| B．An expert from countries with similar cultures. |
| C．An expert with better personality and attitude. |
| D．A foreign expert who is very popular worldwide. |
| A．People should have a mind of their own. |
| B．People should be able to tell good from bad. |
| C．People should be trained how to use AI properly. |
| D．People should know AI’s hidden cultural prejudice. |
内容包括:1. 取得的成绩； 2. 成功脱贫的原因。
注意:
1. 词数100左右；
2. 短文题目和首句已为你写好。
A Miracle in China
China, as a responsible major country, has been steadily marching towards its goal of ending extreme poverty.
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6 . Food safety is a problem in all places around the world and people in different areas of the world prepare foods in different ways. The WHO released five simple rules for preparing food in a safe way.
Key 1:Keep clean
The first key tells about the importance of washing. People should wash their hands often—before touching food, while they are preparing food, and any time after they go to the toilet People should wash all surfaces and equipment used for preparing food.
Key 2:Separate raw and cooked
People should separate raw, or uncooked food from foods that are already cooked and foods that will not be cooked. People should store raw meat, chicken, and fish in containers, or in separate areas Raw foods should not touch prepared foods.
Key 3:Cook completely.
People should cook eggs and meat, like birds, seafood, and animals, especially carefully. These foods may carry more micro-organisms than other foods.
Key 4:
When people are finished with eating, they should keep the leftover(吃剩的食物)in a refrigerator below 5℃ and shouldn't store it for too long. At room temperature, about 20℃, the amount of micro-organisms can increase very quickly. But temperatures above 60℃ or below 5℃ control the growth of micro-organisms.
Key 5:Use safe water and raw materials.
People should use safe water and choose fresh foods. Damaged or old food may develop harmful chemicals as it gets older.
| A．Keep food at safe temperatures. |
| B．Eat cooked food immediately, while it is still hot. |
| C．They call these rules the “Five Keys to Safer Food. ” |
| D．Keeping everything clean helps people to avoid micro-organisms. |
| E．They cannot grow so quickly in a very hot or very cold environment. |
| F．People should also protect cooking areas and food from insects and animals. |
| G．Food like soup must be boiled for at least a minute to make it be cooked completely. |
7 . Who cares if people think wrongly that the internet has had more important influences than the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?
It would not matter if these misjudgments were just a matter of people’s opinions. However, they have real impacts, as they result in misguided use of scarce resources.
The fascination with the ICT(Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the internet, has made some rich countries wrongly conclude that making things is so “yesterday” that they should try to live on ideas. This belief in “post-industrial society” has led those countries to neglect their manufacturing sector(制造业), with negative consequences for their economies.
Even more worryingly, the fascination with the internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the “digital divide” between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity networks and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people’s lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up internet centres in rural villages, I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donators have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.
In yet another example, a fascination with the new has led people to believe that the recent changes in the technologies of communications and transportation are so revolutionary that now we live in a “borderless world”. As a result, in the last twenty years or so, many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of great technological progress, going against which will be like trying to turn the clock back. Believing in such a world, many governments have put an end to some of the very necessary regulations on cross-border flows of capital, labour and goods, with poor results.
Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels, and for making the right career choices at the individual level. However, our fascination with the latest, and our under valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.
1. Misjudgments on the influences of new technology can lead to ________.| A．a lack of confidence in technology |
| B．a slow progress in technology |
| C．a conflict of public opinions |
| D．a waste of limited resources |
| A．take people’s essential needs into account |
| B．make their programmes attractive to people |
| C．ensure that each child gets financial support |
| D．provide more affordable internet facilities |
| A．Neglecting the impacts of technological advances. |
| B．Believing that the world has become borderless. |
| C．Ignoring the power of economic development. |
| D．Over-emphasizing the role of international communication. |
| A．People should be encouraged to make more donations. |
| B．Traditional technology still has a place nowadays. |
| C．Making right career choices is crucial to personal success. |
| D．Economic policies should follow technological trends. |
