1 . “Pop” stands for popular, and a pop singer has to work very hard to stay popular. He must either give the public what they want, or he must find a new way of singing that will attract their attention. Even when he has succeeded, and his records are sold everywhere, he cannot relax. Then he must work harder than ever to remain popular, because there are always younger singers trying to become famous and to steal some of the popularity.
The life of a successful pop singer isn’t easy at all. He can only relax when he is alone, because everything he does is watched and reported in the special newspaper written for the fans. The fans are the most important people in the world for the singer. They buy his records, they go to his concerts, and they make him rich and famous. But they can be very annoying, too. Sometimes their enthusiasm (热情) is so hysterical (歇斯底里的) that they do anything to get a souvenir (纪念品). They steal handkerchief, they tear off buttons, and they even cut off pieces of unfortunate singer’s hair. Many singers have been forced to hide, and some who have not been so lucky as to escape have been stripped (剥) practically naked by their fans. A pop singer has to spend a lot of money on clothes because he must always look smart, or at any rate, different. He must have a luxurious (豪华的) car. And most importantly, he must always keep smiling for the benefit of his public.
1. Pop singer works very hard ___________.| A．to get attention |
| B．to stay popular |
| C．to get more money |
| D．to sell more records |
| A．lovely | B．friendly | C．boring | D．angry |
| A．smart and the same |
| B．smart and different |
| C．healthy and young |
| D．rich and strong |
| A．The Way to Become a Pop Singer |
| B．The Fans of the Pop Singer |
| C．The Pop Singers |
| D．The Success of Pop Singers |
2 . Microsoft won’t renew the contracts (合同) for dozens of news production staff working at its MSN website and plans to use AI to replace them. The roughly 50 employees were informed that their services would no longer be needed beyond June 30.
The Microsoft spokesman said in a statement, “Like all companies, we analyze and make judgments on our activities and services on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, rearrangement in others. These decisions are not the result of the pandemic.”
MSN will use AI to replace the production work its journalists had been doing. That work includes using an automated system (自动化系统) to identify trending news stories from dozens of publishing partners and to help improve the content by rewriting headlines or adding better accompanying photographs or slide shows.
“I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI are going to take all our jobs — now it’s taken mine” one of the terminated contractors said. “But with fewer human beings to monitor the technology, AI may not be fully familiar with strict editorial guidelines and could end up letting through inappropriate stories.”
MSN has experienced a number of changes since its launch as Microsoft Network in 1995. Once it offered original content and links to news, weather and sports. In 2013, it rolled back original news content and began cutting employees. By 2014, it launched are designed version that partnered with other news sites, paying them to redistribute their content. Today, the news service relies entirely on those partnerships with no original news content of its own. Selecting and editing stories rather than actually generating them made it easier for MSN to increasingly rely on an automated editing system.
1. On what basis did Microsoft make the decision to cut employees?| A．Pressure from competitors in the industry. | B．The proposal that AI engineers put forward. |
| C．Difficulties the pandemic has brought about. | D．Analysis and assessment made by the company. |
| A．Developing an automated working system. | B．Bettering the content by revising headlines. |
| C．Shooting photos to go with the news story. | D．Finding out the inappropriate news stories. |
| A．fired | B．trained | C．chosen | D．promoted |
| A．A well developed distribution strategy. | B．Money saved from cutting on employees. |
| C．Are designed version with no original news. | D．The technical cooperation with other websites. |
3 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。
Online voting has become so
In my opinion, online voting is
To be honest, voters sometimes feel annoyed,
4 . In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well underway. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified trend. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk-tuks, are rapidly replacing gas-powered ones on the streets. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.
Yet a glance under the hood (引擎盖) of these vehicles reveals a poisonous secret: each tuk-tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries, containing almost 300 pounds of lead in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leak into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated factories, is a highly profitable but deadly business.
Lead is dangerous, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an extraordinary scale. The numerous ways lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world — and the enormous damage it does to human health, wealth, and welfare — causes one of the biggest environmental crises in the world yet receives little attention.
The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5. 5 million people per year, which would make it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of the shocking deaths, the social burden of lead poisoning is extraordinary, as is its contribution to global inequality — our research on the cognitive effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.
But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that is fixable with some attention and a relatively modest financial investment. Better monitoring, research, and rules can help protect children all over the world from the dreadful effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it brings.
1. How does the author describe the lead problem in paragraph 2?| A．By making a comparison. | B．By analyzing hidden causes. |
| C．By listing convincing numbers. | D．By explaining its working principle. |
| A．Lead enters rich countries in various ways. |
| B．Lead poisoning may make poor societies poorer. |
| C．Exposure to lead doesn’t necessarily harm someone. |
| D．Lead leaking has caused great panic in both countries. |
| A．Fixing these used batteries. | B．Putting certain effort and money. |
| C．Prohibiting the illegal use of lead. | D．Reducing the cost of recycling lead. |
| A．The Impacts of Lead Poisoning on Human Health |
| B．The Outcomes of Using Electric Vehicles |
| C．The Ways to Solve Lead Problem |
| D．The Global Lead Poisoning Crisis |
5 . There’s a song in your head. You keep hearing it repeatedly. You can’t make it stop, and it’s driving you crazy! Has this happened to you? Maybe you have suffered from an earworm, which is a memory of a song.
Earworms are common. A study showed that 90 percent of people experience them. Why do we get earworms? According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, music affects us whether we pay attention to it or not. We’re surrounded by music all the time in our everyday lives. Sacks wonders if there is a higher incidence of earworms today because of all this music in our environment.
Research on the primary auditory cortex supports Sack’s ideas. The auditory cortex is the part of the brain that processes sound. It’s a short-term storage system for small amounts of auditory information. Some of this auditory information is forgotten, and some of it goes into long-term memory. However, songs appear to stay in the auditory cortex for a long time.
James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, thinks that only certain types of songs become earworms. These songs are repetitive, simple, and incongruous — something unexpected such as uneven rhythm. Your brain pays a lot of attention to a song like this, Kellaris says. Because it is repetitive and unusual, it stays longer in the auditory cortex. At that point, Kellaris believes, it becomes an annoying earworm.
Advertisers often use jingles — short songs that are easy to remember to promote sales. Advertisers want jingles to stick in people’s minds to keep them thinking about their products. It seems that advertisers have learned what Kellaris has found out in his research.
Is there any way to get rid of an earworm? Here are some tips Kellaris collected: replace the earworm song with another song, try to distract yourself by doing an intense activity such as exercising, or tell someone about your earworm. What if none of these strategies work? Then perhaps you should just sit back and try to enjoy the music in your head!
1. How does the author lead to the topic?| A．By giving a definition. | B．By describing a phenomenon. |
| C．By drawing a conclusion. | D．By clarifying a question. |
| A．The mechanism of earworms. | B．The lasting effect of memory. |
| C．The necessity of the research. | D．The significance of music. |
| A．Paragraph 2. | B．Paragraph 3. | C．Paragraph 4. | D．Paragraph 5. |
| A．Earworms — the Songs in Your Head | B．Jingles — the Typical Earworms |
| C．How Do Earworms Change Our Life? | D．How Do We Live with Earworms? |
1. 支持者的观点；
2. 反对者的观点；
3. 你的观点。
注意：
1. 写作词数应为80左右；
2. 不要出现真实的姓名和校名。
Whether to Study at Home or Abroad
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7 . ChatGPT has quickly become popular around the world because of its advanced conversational abilities. It can answer questions, do translations, give the main idea of articles and even write codes (代码) for a computer program. It is as good as a human inside a computer.
ChatGPT is making life very convenient. A time might come when people hand it some articles and it makes a well-made report. That could, however, mean job losses. After all, if a computer program can write codes, then it would make a programmer lose his job.
That may be a worry, but it is still too early to worry about that. ChatGPT has more advanced learning features, but it still follows the same technological way. Its biggest advantage lies in the ability to turn words into a language from an ocean of data, but it's still not that creative. AI can quickly draw a picture, but that picture will be based on pictures that it has seen. It can also write books about the future, but the books will be based on articles about the future that it has read.
In comparison, a human brain imagines the future and then tries hard to realize it. AI can imagine a future with faster spaceships, but it can't imagine a world of space as humans can.
So there is no need to worry too much. By being creative there will be plenty of chances for humans to win over AI.
1. What does the underlined word “It” in Paragraph 1 refer to?| A．The world. | B．ChatGPT. | C．A computer. | D．A program. |
| A．By telling stories. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By listing numbers. | D．By making comparisons. |
| A．It has its own creativity. |
| B．It has conversational abilities. |
| C．It has more advanced learning features. |
| D．It has the ability to turn words into a language. |
| A．Sports. | B．Science. | C．Education. | D．Business. |
“Radish knives” have become a hot-sale product in shops near schools. They are also a hot-sale product online. So far more than 400, 000 “radish knives”
The rising popularity of these toys has raised worries among parents about their possibility to lead
A radish knife is a colorful plastic toy that looks just like a radish. It is made of plastic, and usually 5 centimeters in
“Playing with a toy knife may have
9 . Gather together a couple of good friends and take a leisurely stroll through the streets — this is what many youngsters in China enjoy doing when they visit a new city.
To them, Citywalk means “roaming around the city” on foot. Participants can follow a distinctive urban route, soaking up the atmosphere, exploring old buildings, browsing boutique shops, sipping a cup of coffee, or indulging in authentic local snacks.
Citywalk can be a special guided trip for a small group of people, or simply a leisurely stroll for one or two to explore new areas, sticking to the key point: avoiding famous scenic spots and big crowds to gain a more inclusive experience of the places you visit. Besides interacting with a city, Citywalk provides young people with a new social scene, where they who share the same interests and ideas can easily make friends.
In China, the Citywalk trend is spreading from first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai to second and third-tier cities, encouraging more participants and event organizers to get involved. Some organizers invite folk culture researchers and enthusiasts to act as tour guides. Xiao Yiyi, a young entrepreneur in Changsha, recently launched six Citywalk routes in different cities on her social media account, with the aim of providing experiences for visitors to “walk in open-air museums”. Her Changsha route features more offbeat sights like historical architecture from the 19th century, artsy old alleys, and even a stop-off to sample the local spicy crayfish specialty.
Even though Citywalk is a relatively new phenomenon, it is offering a positive change to urban travelers as they can better choose the experiences based on their interests and needs. At the same time, Citywalk represents an opportunity for tour guides and travel service providers to offer a more tailored, professional service to meet with ever-changing market demands.
1. Why do young people choose Citywalk?| A．To enjoy a guided tour. |
| B．To cut down expenses. |
| C．To dig deeper into a city. |
| D．To make new friends. |
| A．Doing sightseeing on foot. | B．Avoiding hot scenic spots. |
| C．Taking a local tour guide. | D．Keeping a fixed urban route. |
| A．A tour guide | B．A culture researcher. |
| C．A Citywalk enthusiast. | D．An event organizer. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Dismissive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Unclear. |
10 . “The new normal” is one of those phrases that can accurately apply to a wide variety of life situations, including a medical diagnosis, death or change in life and work. The phrase implies both the newness of each of those circumstances, as well as the necessity that they will need to be normalized, integrated into the reality of our daily lives. Once we’ve settled into new routines and emotional patterns, our “normal” won’t be quite so new anymore, will it? The question is a subject of debate.
There is a large middle ground between the event that increases the need for “the new normal” and its final acceptance. Some people think it can’t handle tragedies. But the phrase keeps coming up in conversation, and it has made me realize that“normal”is the last word I would use to describe the fragile place I currently occupy. I find myself there as I mourn the loss of my grandfather, who died in September. For example, the new normal is to have Thanksgiving without Grandfather, then to remember him on what would have been his 75th birthday just a few days later. In other words, during this year of firsts, the new normal is a time of transition, not of arrival.
It strikes me that this is something to be celebrated, not worried over. Part of living positively is meeting ourselves wherever we are. And as I continue to navigate this in-between time, this period of slowly accepting my father’s absence from the Earth, I recognize that each step along the way is a worthwhile part of a healthy grieving process.
The same idea would apply to more positive changes, like a new home or job, as well as the challenges of the end of a relationship or a difficult medical reality. The new normal isn’t something any of us step into all at once. It’s something we become, move toward, and, eventually, accept. Let’s not be in a rush to reach that destination. The journey has much to teach us.
1. Which occasion should “the new normal” be applied to?| A．A person’s illness outbreak. | B．A person’s routine working. |
| C．A person’s constantly normal life. | D．A person’s annual birthday celebration. |
| A．The fear of it. | B．The attitude to it. |
| C．The reason for accepting it. | D．The difficulty in describing it. |
| A．Forget the dead. | B．Live optimistically. |
| C．Treasure the process over the result. | D．Mourn over a family member’s absence. |
| A．To tell us to value our past challenges. | B．To tell us some meaningful life stories. |
| C．To teach us how to handle our tragedies. | D．To teach us how to cope with life changes. |
