阅读理解A South Korean city designed for the future takes on a life of its own A) Getting around a city is one thing and then theres the matter of getting from one city to another

阅读理解Educatorsandbusinessleadershavemoreincommonthanitmayseem.Teacherswanttopreparestudentsforasuccessfulfuture.TechnologycompanieshaveaninterestindevelopingaworkforcewiththeSTEM(science,technology,engineeringandmath)skillsneededtogrowthecompanyandadvancetheindustry.Howcantheyworktogethertoachievethesegoals?Playmaybetheanswer.FocusingonSTEMskillsisimportant,buttherealityisthatSTEMskillsareenhancedandmorerelevantwhencombinedwithtraditional,hands-oncreativeactivities.Thiscombinationisprovingtobethebestwaytopreparetoday’schildrentobethemakersandbuildersoftomorrow.Thatiswhytechnologycompaniesarepartneringwitheducatorstobringbackgood,old-fashionedplay.Infactmanyexpertsarguethatthemostimportant21st-centuryskillsaren’trelatedtospecifictechnologiesorsubjectmatter,buttocreativity;skillslikeimagination,problem-findingandproblem-solving,teamwork,optimism,patienceandtheabilitytoexperimentandtakerisks.Theseareskillsacquiredwhenkidstinker(鼓捣小玩意).High-techindustriessuchasNASA’sJetPropulsionLaboratoryhavefoundthattheirbestoverallproblemsolversweremastertinkerersintheiryouth.Therearecognitive(培养)benefitsofdoingthingsthewaywedidaschildren—buildingsomething,tearingitdown,thenbuildingitupagain.Researchshowsthatgiven15minutesoffreeplay,four-andfive-year-oldswillspendathirdofthistimeengagedinspatial,mathematical,andarchitecturalactivities.Thistypeofplay—especiallywithbuildingblocks—helpschildrendiscoveranddevelopkeyprinciplesinmathandgeometry.Ifplayandbuildingarecriticalto21st-centuryskilldevelopment,that’sreallygoodnewsfortworeasons;Childrenarebornbuilders,makers,andcreators,sofostering(培养)21st-centuryskillsmaybeassimpleasgivingkidsroomtoplay,tinkerandtrythingsout,evenastheygrowolder.Secondly,itdoesn’ttake21st-centurytechnologytofoster21st-centuryskills.Thisisespeciallyimportantforunder-resourcedschoolsandcommunities.Takingwhatevermaterialsarehandyandtinkeringwiththemisasimplewaytoengagethoseimportantmakerskills.Andanyone,anywhere,candoit.

阅读理解Passage One Questions 21 to 25are based on the following passage

阅读理解Can you remember what you ate yesterday? If asked, most people will be able to give a vague description of their main meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner. But can you be sure you’ve noted every snack bar in your car, or every handful of nuts at your desk? Most people will have a feeling that they’ve missed something out. We originally had this suspicion back in 2016, puzzled by the fact that national statistics showed calorie consumption falling dramatically over past decades. We found reliable evidence that people were drastically under-reporting what they ate. Now the Office for National Statistics has confirmed that we are consuming 50% more calories than our national statistics claim. Why is this happening? We can point to at least three potential causes. One is the rise in obesity levels itself. Under-reporting rates are much higher for obese people, because they simply consume more food, and thus have more to remember. Another cause is that the proportion of people who are trying to lose weight has been increasing over time. People who want to lose weight are more likely to under-report their eating—regardless of whether they are overweight or not. This may be driven partly by self-deception or wishful thinking. The final potential cause is an increase in snacking and eating out over recent decades—both in terms of how often they happen and how much they contribute to our overall energy intake. Again, there is evidence that food consumed out of the home is one of the most poorly recorded categories in surveys. So, what’s the message conveyed? For statistics, we should invest in more accurate measurement options. For policy, we need to focus on options that make it easy for people to eat fewer calories. If people do not know how much they are eating, it can be really hard for them to stick to a diet. Also, we should be looking for new ways to ensure what people eat wouldn’t have much impact on their waistlines. If this works, it won’t matter if they can’t remember what they ate yesterday.

阅读理解Science of setbacks : How failure can improve career prospectsA) How do early career setbacks affect our long-term success? Failures can help us learn and overcome our fears. But disasters can still wound us. They can screw us up and set us back. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was genuine, scientifically documented truth to the expression what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger ?B) One way social scientists have probed the effects of career setbacks is to look at scientists of very similar qualifications. These scientists, for reasons that are mostly arbitrary, either just missed getting a research grant or just barely made it. In social sciences, this is known as examining near misses and narrow wins in areas where merit is subjective. That allows researchers to measure only the effects of being chosen or not. Studies in this area have found conflicting results. In the competitive game of biomedical science, research has been done on scientists who narrowly lost or won grant money. It suggests that narrow winners become even bigger winners down the line. In other words, the rich get richer.C) A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, followed researchers in the Netherlands. Researchers concluded that those who just barely qualified for a grant were able to get twice as much money within the next eight years as those who just missed out. And the narrow winners were 50 percent more likely to be given a professorship.D) Others in the US have found similar effects with National Institutes of Health early-career fellowships launching narrow winners far ahead of close losers. The phenomenon is often referred to as the Matthew effect, inspired by the Bible’s wisdom that to those who have, more will be given. There’s a good explanation for the phenomenon in the book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert Laszlo Barabasi. According to Barabasi, it’s easier and less risky for those in positions of power to choose to hand awards and funding to those who’ve already been so recognized.E) This is bad news for the losers. Small early career setbacks seem to have a disproportionate effect down the line. What didn’t kill them made them weaker. But other studies using the same technique have shown there’s sometimes no penalty to a near miss. Students who just miss getting into top high schools or universities do just as well later in life as those who just manage to get accepted. In this case, what didn’t kill them simply didn’t matter. So is there any evidence that setbacks might actually improve our career prospects? There is now.F) In a study published in Nature Communications, Northwestern University sociologist Dashun Wang tracked more than 1,100 scientists who were on the border between getting a grant and missing out between 1990 and 2005. He followed various measures of performance over the next decade. These included how many papers they authored and how influential those papers were, as measured by the number of subsequent citations. As expected, there was a much higher rate of attrition (减员) among scientists who didn’t get grants. But among those who stayed on, the close losers performed even better than the narrow winners. To make sure this wasn’t by chance, Wang conducted additional tests using different performance measures. He examined how many times people were first authors on influential studies, and the like.G) One straightforward reason close losers might outperform narrow winners is that the two groups have comparable ability. In Wang’s study, he selected the most determined, passionate scientists from the loser group and culled (剔除) what he deemed the weakest members of the winner group. Yet the persevering losers still came out on top. He thinks that being a close loser might give people a psychological boost, or the proverbial kick in the pants.H) Utrecht University sociologist Arnout van de Rijt was the lead author on the 2018 paper showing the rich get richer. He said the new finding is apparently reasonable and worth some attention. His own work showed that although the narrow winners did get much more money in the near future, the actual performance of the close losers was just as good.I) He said the people who should be paying regard to the Wang paper are the funding agents who distribute government grant money. After all, by continuing to pile riches on the narrow winners, the taxpayers are not getting the maximum bang for their buck if the close losers are performing just as well or even better. There’s a huge amount of time and effort that goes into the process of selecting who gets grants, he said, and the latest research shows that the scientific establishment is not very good at distributing money. Maybe we should spend less money trying to figure out who is better than who,he said, suggesting that some more equal dividing up of money might be more productive and more efficient. Van de Rijt said he’s not convinced that losing out gives people a psychological boost. It may yet be a selection effect. Even though Wang tried to account for this by culling the weakest winners, it’s impossible to know which of the winners would have quit had they found themselves on the losing side.J) For his part, Wang said that in his own experience, losing did light a motivating fire. He recalled a recent paper he submitted to a journal, which accepted it only to request extensive editing, and then reversed course and rejected it. He submitted the unedited version to a more respected journal and got accepted.K) In sports and many areas of life, we think of failures as evidence of something we could have done better. We regard these disappointments as a fate we could have avoided with more careful preparation, different training, a better strategy, or more focus. And there it makes sense that failures show us the road to success. These papers deal with a kind of failure people have little control over—rejection. Others determine who wins and who loses. But at the very least, the research is starting to show that early setbacks don’t have to be fatal. They might even make us better at our jobs. Getting paid like a winner, though? That’s a different matter.

阅读理解Being an information technology, or IT, worker is not a job I envy. They are the ones who, right in the middle of a critical meeting, are expected to instantly fix the projector that’s no longer working. They have to tolerate the bad tempers of colleagues frustrated at the number of times they’ve had to call the help desk for the same issue. They are also the ones who know there are systems that are more powerful, reliable and faster, but their employer simply will not put up the funds to buy them. According to a recent survey, employees who have a job reliant on IT support consider IT a major source of job dissatisfaction. Through no fault of their own, they can suddenly find their productivity deteriorating or quality control non-existent. And there’s little they can do about it. The experience of using IT penetrates almost the entire work field. It has become a crucial part of employees’ overall work experience. When IT is operating as it should, employee self-confidence swells. Their job satisfaction, too, can surge when well-functioning machines relieve them of dull tasks or repetitive processes. But if there’s one thing that triggers widespread employee frustration, it’s an IT transformation project gone wrong, where swollen expectations have been popped and a long list of promised efficiencies have been reversed. This occurs when business leaders implement IT initiatives with little consideration of how those changes will impact the end user. Which is why managers should appreciate just how influential the IT user experience is to their employees, and exert substantial effort in ensuring their IT team eliminates programming errors and application crashes. Adequate and timely IT support should also be available to enable users to cope with technological issues at work. More importantly, IT practitioners need to understand what employees experience mentally when they use IT. Therefore, businesses need to set up their IT infrastructure so that it is designed to fit in with their employees’ work, rather than adjust their work to fit in with the company’s IT limitations.

阅读理解Boredom has become trendy. Studies point to how boredom is good for creativity and innovation, as well as mental health. It is found that people are more creative following the completion of a tedious task. When people are bored, they have an increase in associative thought—the process of making new connections between ideas, which is linked to innovative thinking. These studies are impressive, but in reality, the benefits of boredom may be related to having time to clear your mind, be quiet, or daydream. In our stimulation-rich world, it seems unrealistic that boredom could occur at all. Yet, there are valid reasons boredom may feel so painful. As it turns out, boredom might signal the fact that you have a need that isn’t being met. Our always-on world of social media may result in more connections, but they are superficial and can get in the way of building a real sense of belonging. Feeling bored may signal the desire for a greater sense of community and the feeling that you fit in with others around you. So take the step of joining an organization to build face-to-face relationships. You’ll find depth that you won’t get from your screen no matter how many likes you get on your post. Similar to the need for belonging, bored people often report that they feel a limited sense of meaning. It’s a fundamental human need to have a larger purpose and to feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. When people are bored, they’re more likely to feel less meaning in their lives. If you want to reduce boredom and increase your sense of meaning, seek work where you can make a unique contribution, or find a cause you can support with your time and talent. If your definition of boredom is being quiet, mindful, and reflective, keep it up. But if you’re struggling with real boredom and the emptiness it provokes, consider whether you might seek new connections and more significant challenges. These are the things that will genuinely relieve boredom and make you more effective in the process.

阅读理解Sugar shocked. That describes the reaction of many Americans this week following revelations that, 50 years ago, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists for research that shifted the focus away

阅读理解What happens when a language has no words for numbers?A) Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers in Amazonia, living along branches of the world’s largest

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听力题Questions 22 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard

阅读理解Success was once defined as being able to stay at a company for a long time and move up the corporate ladder. The goal was to reach the top, accumulate wealth and retire to a life of ease. My fathe

作文题For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay titled "Are people becoming addicted to technology ? ".You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.

阅读理解Thestartofhighschooldoesn’thavetobestressfulA)Thismonth,morethan4millionstudentsacrossthenationwillbeginhighschool.Manywilldowell.Butmanywillnot.Considerthatnearlytwo-thirdsofstudentswillexperiencetheninth-gradeshock,whichreferstoadramaticdropinastudent’sacademicperformance.Somestudentscopewiththisshockbyavoidingchallenges.Forinstance,theymaydropdifficultcoursework.Othersmayexperienceahopelessnessthatresultsinfailingtheircoreclasses,suchasEnglish,scienceandmath.B)Thisshouldmatteragreatdealtoparents,teachersandpolicymakers.Ultimatelyitshouldmattertothestudentsthemselvesandsocietyatlarge,becausestudents’experienceoftransitioning(过渡)totheninthgradecanhavelong-termconsequencesnotonlyforthestudentsthemselvesbutfortheirhomecommunities.Wemaketheseobservationsasresearchpsychologistswhohavestudiedhowschoolsandfamiliescanhelpyoungpeoplethrive.C)Inthenewglobaleconomy,studentswhofailtofinishtheninthgradewithpassinggradesincollegepreparatorycourseworkareveryunlikelytograduateontimeandgoontogetjobs.Onestudyhascalculatedthatthelifetimebenefittothelocaleconomyforasingleadditionalstudentwhocompleteshighschoolishalfamilliondollarsormore.Thisisbasedonhigherearningsandavoidedcostsinhealthcare,crime,welfaredependenceandotherthings.D)Theconsequencesofdoingpoorlyintheninthgradecanimpactmorethanstudents’abilitytofindagoodjob.Itcanalsoimpacttheextenttowhichtheyenjoylife.Studentslosemanyofthefriendstheyturnedtoforsupportwhentheymovefromtheeighthtotheninthgrade.Onestudyofninth-gradestudentsfoundthat50percentoffriendshipsamongninthgraderschangedfromonemonthtothenext,signalingstrikinginstabilityinfriendships.E)Inaddition,studiesfindthefirstyearofhighschooltypicallyshowsoneofthegreatestincreasesindepressionofanyyearoverthelifespan.Researchersthinkthatoneexplanationisthattiestofriendsarebrokenwhileacademicdemandsarerising.Furthermore,mostadultcasesofclinicaldepressionfirstemergeinadolescence(青春期).TheWorldHealthOrganizationreportsthatdepressionhasthegreatestburdenofdiseaseworldwide,intermsofthetotalcostoftreatmentandthelossofproductivity.F)Givenallthat’sridingonhavingasuccessfulninthgradeexperience,itpaystoexplorewhatcanbedonetomeettheacademic,socialandemotionalchallengesofthetransitiontohighschool.Sofar,ourstudieshaveyieldedonemaininsight:Students’beliefsaboutchange—theirbeliefsaboutwhetherpeoplearestuckonewayforever,orwhetherpeoplecanchangetheirpersonalitiesandabilities—arerelatedtotheirabilitytocope,succeedacademicallyandmaintaingoodmentalhealth.Pastresearchhascalledthesebeliefsmindsets(思维模式),withafixedmindsetreferringtothebeliefthatpeoplecannotchangeandagrowthmindsetreferringtothebeliefthatpeoplecanchange.G)Inonerecentstudy,weexamined360adolescents’beliefsaboutthenatureofsmartness—thatis,theirfixedmindsetsaboutintelligence.Wethenassessedbiologicalstressresponsesforstudentswhosegradesweredroppingbyexaminingtheirstresshormones(荷尔蒙).Studentswhobelievedthatintelligenceisfixed—thatyouarestuckbeingnotsmartifyoustruggleinschool—showedhigherlevelsofstresshormoneswhentheirgradesweredecliningatthebeginningoftheninthgrade.Ifstudentsbelievedthatintelligencecouldimprove—thatistosay,whentheyheldmoreofagrowthmindsetofintelligence—theyshowedlowerlevelsofstresshormoneswhentheirgradesweredeclining.Thiswasanexcitingresultbecauseitshowedthatthebody’sstressresponsesarenotdeterminedsolelybyone’sgrades.Instead,declininggradesonlypredictedworsestresshormonesamongstudentswhobelievedthatworseninggradeswereapermanentandhopelessstateofaffairs.H)Wealsoinvestigatedthesocialsideofthehighschooltransition.Inthisstudy,insteadofteachingstudentsthattheirsmartnesscanchange,wetaughtthemthattheirsocialstanding—thatis,whethertheyarebulliedorexcludedorleftout—canchangeovertime.Wethenlookedathighschoolstudents’stressresponsestodailysocialdifficulties.Thatis,wetaughtthemagrowthmindsetabouttheirsociallives.Inthisstudy,studentscameintothelaboratoryandwereaskedtogiveapublicspeechinfrontofupper-yearstudents.Thetopicofthespeechwaswhatmakesonepopularinhighschool.Followingthis,studentshadtocompleteadifficultmentalmathtaskinfrontofthesameupper-yearstudents.I)Experimentresultsshowedthatstudentswhowerenottaughtthatpeoplecanchangeshowedpoorstressresponses.Whenthesestudentsgavethespeech,theirbloodvesselscontractedandtheirheartspumpedlessbloodthroughthebody—bothresponsesthatthebodyshowswhenitispreparingfordamageordefeatafteraphysicalthreat.Thentheygaveworsespeechesandmademoremistakesinmath.Butwhenstudentsweretaughtthatpeoplecanchange,theyhadbetterresponsestostress,inpartbecausetheyfeltliketheyhadtheresourcestodealwiththedemandingsituation.Studentswhogotthegrowthmindsetintervention(干预)showedless-contractedbloodvesselsandtheirheartspumpedmoreblood—bothofwhichcontributedtomoreoxygengettingtothebrain,and,ultimately,betterperformanceonthespeechandmentalmathtasks.J)Thesefindingsleadtoseveralpossibilitiesthatweareinvestigatingfurther.First,weareworkingtoreplicate(复制)thesefindingsinmorediverseschoolcommunities.Wewanttoknowinwhichtypesofschoolsandforwhichkindsofstudentsthesegrowthmindsetideashelpyoungpeopleadapttothechallengesofhighschool.Wealsohopetolearnhowteachers,parentsorschoolcounselorscanhelpstudentskeeptheirongoingacademicorsocialdifficultiesinperspective.Wewonderwhatwouldhappenifschoolshelpedtomakebeliefsaboutthepotentialforchangeandimprovementalargerfeatureoftheoverallschoolculture,especiallyforstudentsstartingtheninthgrade.

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作文题For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay titled "Do violent video games lead to violence? " You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.

听力题Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard

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