1 . Asia’s centuries-long fascination with fair skin has deep roots and, even today, is influenced by Eurocentric (以欧洲为中心的) beauty standards linking paleness with charm. The questioned concept dating from colonial history is continued through media channels.
This fascination is vividly reflected in the make-up industry, leading to a multi-billion-dollar market for skin-whitening products across Asia. A striking survey conducted by WHO revealed 40% of women in countries such as China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea routinely use skin-whitening products. It was also found that 75% of men believed their partners would be beautiful with lighter skin. Such a deep-rooted relation between fairness and beauty continues to fuel the thriving skin-whitening industry. The industry’s value is estimated to reach a breathtaking $8.9 billion by 2027.
The historical preference for lighter skin in Asian culture is also closely tied to socio-economic status. Historically, having fair skin indicated higher social status, as individuals engaging in physical labor often had darker skin from being in the sun. The upper class, meanwhile, enjoyed a sheltered indoor life due to their wealth, translating into fairer skin. Consequently, those with darker skin remained in a lower status, fueling the favor for fairer faces.
Colonialism (殖民主义) has also affected the beauty standards in Asian countries. Many nations across the continent were once colonized by white powers from the US and Europe. Eventually, their fair skin symbolized the power and wealth of the colonizers. Even in Japan, never colonized, noblewomen during the Edo period adopted white makeup to copy the luxurious image related to lighter skin. These historical factors continue to shape modern beauty standards in Asia.
In recent years, such Eurocentric beauty standards have been receiving widespread criticism. A growing movement has come up, promoting the beauty of darker skin tones and advocating accepting all skin colors. While the preference for pale skin remains universal in many Asian countries, the tendency is slowly turning as new standards of beauty pop up. Hopefully, we will see a society that celebrates inclusivity and the beauty of all skin tones.
1. What’s the common beauty standards in Asian countries?| A．They include a person’s charm. |
| B．They relate to a person’s makeup. |
| C．They are measured by a person’s fair skin. |
| D．They refer to the color of a person’s skin. |
| A．European colonizers in Japan. |
| B．Exposure to the sun and physical labor. |
| C．Socio-economic status and colonialism. |
| D．The use of white makeup by noblewomen. |
| A．A growing preference for pale skin. |
| B．A rejection of Eurocentric beauty ideals. |
| C．No change in traditional beauty standards. |
| D．Increasing acceptance of diverse skin tones. |
| A．They are unique to Asian culture. |
| B．They are set to remain unchanged. |
| C．They are rooted in biological differences. |
| D．They are being questioned and changing gradually. |
2 . A certain item is being stolen more than ever in Japan. Rather than the usual luxury watches, cars, or jewelry, thieves in Japan are picking fruits as their target. There is a thriving market for quality fruits which are grown by hand to ensure they reach high standards for appearance and taste. Japanese individuals and companies often buy them as gifts for special occasions.
One softball-sized strawberry, for instance, can cost as much as ¥500,000 JPY ($3,346 USD). Several districts have recently witnessed an alarming rise in fruit theft. Yamanashi Prefecture, for instance, lost an shocking ¥8,500,000 JPY ($56,890 USD) from 40 cases of missing fruit in the last four months. It is so bad, in fact, that local firefighters and private security guards are going around and checking the area at night to ensure the safety of the fruits.
The same thing happened to another peach farm located in Fuefuki City when farmers were aware that 1,400 peaches went missing out of the blue. Another top farming company in Yamanashi City lost 1,500 peaches just two days later. Peaches were not the only luxury fruit being targeted in the past few months. Just last September 28,400 bunches of grapes went missing in the Yamanashi Prefecture. The total loss amounted to ¥350,000 ($2,343 USD).
Farm owners are now increasing their security measures to prevent this rise in theft. They are paying a fortune to employ local private security guards to patrol around the clock when fruits are ripe. Even they are about to install a monitoring system to watch over the farm at all times, which serves as a threat to thieves. If thefts do happen, they can call the police.
1. What unusual item is currently being stolen more frequently in Japan?| A．Quality fruits. | B．Watches. | C．Luxury cars. | D．Jewelry. |
| A．They have unique flavors. |
| B．They are always given as gifts. |
| C．They are less expensive than other luxury items. |
| D．They are grown by hand to meet high quality standards. |
| A．To highlight the size of the stolen fruits. |
| B．To provide an example of a stolen fruit. |
| C．To emphasize the high cost of luxury fruits. |
| D．To explain the popularity of strawberries in Japan. |
| A．To stress the value of luxury fruits in Japan. |
| B．To show the rise in theft of luxury items in Japan. |
| C．To describe the efforts to fight fruit thefts in Japan. |
| D．To promote the growth of the quality fruit market in Japan. |
Live streaming (直播) has gone popular in China. Many have turned
Chinese authorities have introduced a set of updated regulations (管理) on live streaming industry
The document also calls for cooperation to carry
4 . Housing officials say that lately they are noticing something different: students seem to lack the will, and the skill, to deal with ordinary conflicts. “We have students who are mad at each other and they text each other in the same room,” says a teacher. “So many of our conflicts are because kids don’t know how to solve a problem by formal discussion.”
And as any pop psychologist will tell you, bottled emotions lead to silent discontent (不满) that can boil over into frustration and anger. At the University of Florida, emotional conflicts occur about once a week, the university’s director of housing education says, “Over the past five years, roommate conflicts have increased. The students don’t have the person-to-person discussions and they don’t know how to handle them.” The problem is most dramatic among freshmen; housing professionals say they see improvement as students move toward graduation, but some never seem to improve, and they worry about how such students will deal with conflicts after college.
Administrators guess that reliance on cell phones and the Internet may have made it easier for young people to avoid uncomfortable encounters. Why express anger in person when you can vent (发泄) in a text? “Things are posted on someone’s wall on Facebook like: Oh, my roommate kept me up all night studying,” says Dana Pysz, an assistant director at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a different way to express their conflict to each other, consequently creating even more conflicts as complaints go public.” In recent focus groups at North Carolina State University, dorm residents said they would not even deal with noisy neighbors on their floor.
Administrators point to parents who have fixed their children’s problems in their entire lives. Now in college, the children lack the skills to attend to even modest conflicts. Some parents continue to interfere (干涉) on campus.
1. What is the main reason for many roommate conflicts?| A．Students are not good at reaching an agreement about the problems. |
| B．Students are not satisfied with each other. |
| C．Housing directors are not responsible for them. |
| D．Students are not strong-willed. |
| A．Students, especially freshmen, should bottle up their dissatisfaction. |
| B．Students in Florida sit down and have a person-to-person talk once a week. |
| C．Not all students are able to handle conflicts by the time they graduate. |
| D．The number of conflicts among roommates has decreased in the past five years. |
| A．Disapproving. | B．Indifferent. | C．Supportive. | D．Unclear. |
| A．They should be involved in their children’s life on campus. |
| B．They should deal with their children’s problems in their whole lives. |
| C．They should constantly contact the administrators of the college. |
| D．They should teach their children the skills to tackle the conflicts. |
5 . Going to the Basque Country of Spain, linguistically (就语言角度来看), a Briton may feel he is entering not just another country but perhaps another continent. Familiar world languages — Spanish and French — suddenly give way to Basque, with its strange-looking words of tongue-twisting (绕口的) length. Basque is unrelated to the Indo-European family that includes almost all European languages.
Its survival has not been assured. The rule of Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975 centralised the state and he insisted that citizens speak Spanish. Public use of Basque was forbidden. When Franco died, the Basque-speaking population was mostly old and rural. For a language, this usually means extinction.
Since the 1980s the number of speakers has grown by almost 350,000, out of a regional population of 2. 1 million. In 2017 two-thirds of pupils were studying in schools where Basque was the language of instruction, up from around 14% in 1984; 87% of 10 to 14-year-olds are estimated to know the language. This is why, in the most recent big survey, the Basque-speaking population (41%) almost matched the non-Basque-speakers (44%). The other 15% are said to understand Basque but struggle to speak it.
But there is another side to the story. In the Basque Country, just 376,000 people have the language as their first, passed down to them in the home. Basque is weakest in the three provincial capitals, where the population is dominated by people from Spanish-speaking homes. Even as the knowledge and influence of the language are growing, actual usage outside schools still seems to be reducing. A similar story could be told of Irish, Welsh, and Maori.
What would it take to get people to live with these languages, as opposed to merely acquiring them? Some Basques say sadly that in a mixed group in which just one person is uncomfortable in Basque, the rest quickly switch to Spanish. They say that in Catalonia, a similar group is more likely to insist on continuing in Catalan, which, for this and unrelated historical reasons, is far more widely spoken in its territory than Basque.
1. What confused a Briton when entering the Basque Country of Spain?| A．Basques tend to have a large vocabulary. |
| B．Spanish is much more widely used than French. |
| C．Basques speak much faster than other Europeans. |
| D．Basque differs significantly from other European languages. |
| A．The factor behind Basque’s decline. |
| B．The achievements of Francisco Franco. |
| C．The links between Basque and Spanish. |
| D．The history and development of Basque. |
| A．Population growth. | B．School education |
| C．Economic development. | D．Cultural awareness. |
| A．It leads to discomfort in Basque. | B．It will soon be replaced by Catalan. |
| C．It is decreasingly used in daily life. | D．It confuses many Spanish speakers. |
6 . The Greek historian Herodotus is said to have made one of the earliest lists of the Seven Wonders of the World. These were man-made structures, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. More recent times saw natural alternatives to these wonders of classical architecture proposed: waterfalls, mountains, canyons, reefs. Dramatic landscapes, features and wildlife, and the pleasure and excitement they offer to visitors, are staples (主要部分) of tourism.
As environmental awareness has risen, attitudes to such sightseeing have changed. Yes, it is exciting to visit remote forests or spot rare species.But travelling to very distant destinations is carbon-intensive when flights or long road journeys are involved, and conservation can be made more difficult as well as assisted by sightseers. There is a balance to be struck, and some governments and businesses around the world try to maximise the benefits while minimising the harm. Colombia, for example, recently introduced laws aimed at promoting sustainable tourism.
Most of us understand better than ever that there are costs as well as benefits associated with exploring. One of the six pledges (誓言) proposed by an environmental campaign launched last month, The Jump, is to “holiday local”, taking short flights once every three years and long flights very rarely. Fortunately, the UK’s 15 national parks, 86 areas of outstanding natural beauty (known in Scotland as national scenic areas), and countless other landscapes that are without formal status, but beloved nonetheless, mean that there is no shortage of special places for domestic nature tourists to visit--while a host of European beauty spots are accessible by rail.
One recent survey found that Windsor Great Park and Kew have become Britain’s most popular attractions, while Covid has created difficulties for indoor spaces which do not apply to outdoor ones.
As we face an environmental emergency that grows ever more dangerous, it is essential to cultivate (培养) appreciation for nature that surrounds us. In a small way, holiday outings to watch dragonflies, kingfishers or seals, or be surrounded by trees that are coming into leaf, could help us to focus on what matters.
1. Why does the author mention the Greek historian?| A．To compare historic and modern structures. |
| B．To bring natural wonders into focus. |
| C．To show the change in architectural style. |
| D．To reveal the popularity of tourism. |
| A．It stepped up efforts to conserve rare species. |
| B．It introduced laws aimed at stimulating the tourism industry. |
| C．It banned sightseers from going to remote forests. |
| D．It reduced people’s negative impacts on the environment. |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Concerned. | C．Critical. | D．Uninterested. |
| A．Nature tourism: travel lightly |
| B．Eco-friendly tourism during Covid |
| C．Discovery of European beauty spots |
| D．International tourism: wait before setting out |
7 . Nowadays, people are increasingly interacting with others in social media environments where algorithms control the flow of social information they see. People’s interactions with online algorithms may affect how they learn from others, with negative consequences including social misperceptions, conflict and the spread of misinformation.
On social media platforms, algorithms are mainly designed to amplify (放大) information that sustains engagement, meaning they keep people clicking on content and coming back to the platforms. There is evidence suggesting that a side effect of this design is that algorithms amplify information people are strongly biased (偏向的) to learn from. We call this information “PRIME”, for prestigious, in-group, moral and emotional information.
In our evolutionary past, biases to learn from PRIME information were very advantageous: Learning from prestigious individuals is efficient because these people are successful and their behavior can be copied. Paying attention to people who violate moral norms is important because punishing them helps the community maintain cooperation. But what happens when PRIME information becomes amplified by algorithms and some people exploit (利用) algorithm amplification to promote themselves? Prestige becomes a poor signal of success because people can fake prestige on social media. News become filled with negative and moral information so that there is conflict rather than cooperation.
The interaction of human psychology and algorithm amplification leads to disfunction because social learning supports cooperation and problem-solving, but social media algorithms are designed to increase engagement. We call it functional mismatch. One of the key outcomes of functional mismatch is that people start to form incorrect perceptions of their social world, which often occurs in the field of politics. Recent research suggests that when algorithms selectively amplify more extreme political views, people begin to think that their political in-group and out-group are more sharply divided than they really are. Such “false polarization” might be an important source of greater political conflict.
So what’s next? A key question is what can be done to make algorithms facilitate accurate human social learning rather than exploit social learning biases. Some research team is working on new algorithm designs that increase engagement while also punishing PRIME information. This may maintain user activity that social media platforms seek, but also make people’s social perceptions more accurate.
1. What are social media algorithms targeted at?| A．Improving social environment. | B．Generating PRIME information. |
| C．Avoiding side effects of social media. | D．Raising the media platform click rate. |
| A．To make an assumption. | B．To illustrate a conclusion. |
| C．To explain a political issue. | D．To present an extreme case. |
| A．boost engagement and regulate amplification |
| B．strengthen social learning and delete biases |
| C．identify biases and punish PRIME information |
| D．monitor media platforms and guarantee users’ privacy |
| A．PRIME information meets with misperceptions |
| B．Algorithms control the flow of social information |
| C．Social media algorithms twist human social learning |
| D．Online algorithm designs face unexpected challenges |
8 . Children should spend at least one hour playing and spending time in nature each day, according to the Wildlife Trusts.
The children showed a great increase in personal health.
| A．This UK organization speaks for 46 groups and 2,300 nature protection areas. |
| B．However, parents aren’t giving their kids enough nature time. |
| C．The call comes from a study by University College London. |
| D．81 percent said they had better relationships with their teachers. |
| E．The students are asked to study in University College London for one day. |
| F．Parents care much about their kids’ nature time. |
| G．And they also showed a sense of connection with the natural world and high levels of amusement. |
9 . If you’ve ever travelled with other people, the chances are you’ve had to make compromises. When you want to get up early to watch the sunrise, for example, your friends may argue that getting enough sleep is more important. And when you want to try the different food, your friends might say it looks strange and push you to a Chinese restaurant instead.
This is probably why more people these days are choosing to travel alone. According to reports on holiday habits from the Association of British Travel Agents, the percentage of people in the UK who take trips alone has been increasing, from 6 percent in 2011, to 12 percent in 2017, and to 15 percent in 2018. Most of these people said they choose to travel alone because this allows them to “do what they want”.
In fact, travelling alone is only a part of a recent trend (趋势) of people wanting to take more time alone—or what’s called “me time”. “Imagine yourself as a full pot of water and everything else that asks for your attention is an empty glass. When you provide what is needed for them you are using up your own water supply,” Editor Nicole Lyons wrote for the mental health social network Psych Central. “But how are you refilling your pot? This is where your ‘me time’ comes in.”
However, it’s still quite a common belief that those who do things alone are losers and that they’re alone simply because they don’t have anybody to be with. But why can’t people just be enough for themselves?
The now Duchess of Sussex Rachel Meghan Markle once wrote on her blog in 2016 about how she enjoyed taking herself out to dinner and travelling alone. ”It’s not easy. But it’s important,“ she wrote. You should face everything and encourage yourself to move forward when the feeling of loneliness and boredom sweeps through your body and mind, according to Markle.
1. What does the underlined phrase “make compromises” probably mean in Paragraph 1?| A．Turn up. | B．Work hard. | C．Give in. | D．Take care. |
| A．To save more money. | B．To enjoy their freedom. |
| C．To calm themselves down. | D．To avoid troubling someone. |
| A．A new way of travelling abroad | B．Me time: enjoy yourself alone |
| C．The disadvantages of travelling alone | D．How to find a proper partner in trips |
Lockdown Love
The cost of a typical Saudi wedding is enough to prevent the most passionate lover. Even a simple party involves renting an impressive ballroom. Then there are the cheerleaders and musicians. Men and women gather in separate halls,
Therefore, many couples have welcomed these
