Part I Listening Comprehension (25 %)

Section A (7%, 1 point/per)

Directions: In this section, you will hear several news reports. At the end of each news report, you will hear two or three questions. Both the news report and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the The best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D).

News Item One

Question 1 to 2 are based on the recording you have just heard.

News Item Two

Question 3 to 4 are based on the recording you have just heard.

News Item Three

Question 5 to 7 are based on the recording you have just heard.

Section B (8%, 1 point/per)

Directions: In this section, you will hear two long conversations. At the end of the conversation, four questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A), B), C) and D), and decide which is the best answer.

Conversation One

Question 8 to 11 are based on the recording of

Conversation Two

Question 12 to 15 are based on the recording you have just heard.

Section C (10%, 1 point/per)

Directions: In this section, you will hear several short passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D).

Passage One

Question 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.

Passage Two

Question 19 to 21 are based on the recording you have just heard.

Passage Three

Question 22 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.

Part II Vocabulary and Structure (10%, 0.5 point/per)

Directions: For each of the following incomplete sentences, there are four words or expressions marked A), B), C) and D). Choose the one that best completes the sentence.

26. Because of strict time ( ), speeches will be limited to five minutes in order to ensure that all participants have an equal opportunity to speak.

27. The wind speeds made it challenging for the researchers to collect consistent data during the field experiment.

28. This online platform has greatly ( ) collaboration between students from different parts of the world.

29. Despite the pilot’s best efforts to ( ) disaster, the storm’s intensity made it nearly impossible to land the plane safely, forcing an emergency diversion to another airport.

30. The manager decided to ( ) a repair team immediately after receiving reports of the broken elevator.

31. During the debate, he spoke so ( ) that the audience felt he had already made up his mind long before the discussion began.

32. While electric cars are becoming more popular, many drivers remain hesitant to switch from ( ) gasoline-powered vehicles.

33. Streetlights were installed to ( ) the park pathways, making them safer for nighttime walks.

34. Modern computer chips amaze engineers with their ( ), packing billions of transistors into a space smaller than a fingernail.

35. A common ( ) faced by engineering students is figuring out how to reduce energy use in the lab without affecting the accuracy of experiments.

36. When the new 3D printing technique was shared online, its demonstration video went ( ) across tech communities in just two days.

37. The number of students reporting stress-related health issues has grown ( ) in the past two years.

38. The cameras were ( ) installed throughout the building to monitor activity without drawing attention.

39. The scientist set out to ( ) the popular myth that humans only use 10% of their brains.

40. The wildfire caused widespread ( ) of homes, forests, and wildlife habitats.

41. The committee launched a ( ) campaign to encourage residents to participate in neighborhood safety programs.

42. The marketing team tried to ( ) their online ads to reach a more targeted audience.

43. The company was forced to abandon its expansion plan because of several ( ) budget constraints.

44. The documentary was so ( ) that many viewers found it hard to question its biased claims.

45. She was deeply ( ) by the scientist’s theory and spent hours trying to understand its implications.

Part III Reading Comprehension (30%)

Section A Matching (10%, 1 point/per)

Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with some letters.

A. Several times a month, you can find a doctor in the aisles of Ralph’s market in Huntington Beach, California, wearing a white coat and helping people learn about food. On one recent day, this doctor was Daniel Nadeau, wandering the cereal aisle with Allison Scott, giving her some idea on how to feed kids who persistently avoid anything that is healthy. “Have you thought about trying fresh juices in the morning?” he asks her. “The frozen oranges and apples are a little cheaper, and fruits are really good for the brain. Juices are quick and easy to prepare, you can take the frozen fruit out the night before and have it ready the next morning.”

B. Scott is delighted to get food advice from a physician who is the program director of the nearby Mary and Dick Allen Diabetes Center, part of the St. Joseph Hoag Health Alliance. The center’s ‘Shop with Your Doc’ program sends doctors to the grocery store to meet with any patients who sign up for the service, plus any other shoppers who happen to be around with questions.

C. Nadeau notices the pre-made macaroni (通心粉)-and-cheese boxes in Scott’s shopping cart and suggests she switch to whole grain macaroni and real cheese. “So I’d have to make it?” she asks, her enthusiasm fading at the thought of how long that might take, just to have her kids reject it. “I’m not sure they’d eat it. They just won’t eat it.”

D. Nadeau says sugar and processed foods are big contributors to the rising diabetes rates among children. “In America, over 50 percent of our food is processed food,” Nadeau tells her. “And only 5 percent of our food is plant-based food. I think we should try to reverse that.” Scott agrees to try more fruit juices for the kids and to make real macaroni and cheese. Score one point for the doctor, zero for diabetes.

E. Nadeau is part of a small revolution developing across California. The food-as-medicine movement has been around for decades, but it’s making progress as physicians and medical institutions make food a formal part of treatment, rather than relying solely on medications (药物). By prescribing nutritional changes or launching programs such as ‘Shop with your Doc’, they are trying to prevent, limit, or even reverse disease by changing what patients eat. “There’s no question people can take things a long way toward reversing diabetes, reversing high blood pressure, even preventing cancer by food choices,” Nadeau says.

F. In the big picture, says Dr. Richard Afable, CEO and president of ST. Joseph Hoag Health, medical institutions across the state are starting to make a philosophical switch to becoming a health organization, not just a health care organization. That feeling echoes the beliefs of the Therapeutic Food Pantry program at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which completed its pilot phase and is about to expand on an ongoing basis to five clinic sites throughout the city. The program will offer patients several bags of food prescribed for their condition, along with intensive training in how to cook it. “We really want to link food and medicine, and not just give away food,” says Dr. Rita Nguyen, the hospital’s medical director of Healthy Food Initiatives. “We want people to understand what they’re eating, how to prepare it, the role food plays in their lives.”

G. In Southern California, Loma Linda University School of Medicine is offering specialized training for its resident physicians in Lifestyle Medicine — that is a formal specialty in using food to treat disease. Research findings increasingly show the power of food to treat or reverse diseases, but that does not mean that diet alone is always the solution, or that every illness can benefit substantially from dietary changes. Nonetheless, physicians say that they look at the collective data and a clear picture emerges: that the salt, sugar, fat and processed foods in the American diet contribute to the nation’s high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. According to the World Health Organization, 80 percent of deaths from heart disease and stroke are caused by high blood pressure, tobacco use, elevated cholesterol and low consumption of fruits and vegetables.

H. “It’s a different paradigm (范式) of how to treat disease,” says Dr. Brenda Rea, who helps run the family and preventive medicine residency program at Loma Linda University School of Medicine. The lifestyle medicine specialty is designed to train doctors in how to prevent and treat disease, in part, by changing patients’ nutritional habits. The medical center and school at Loma Linda also have a food cupboard and kitchen for patients. This way, patients not only learn about which foods to buy, but also how to prepare them at home.

I. Many people don’t know how to cook, Rea says, and they only know how to heat things up. That means depending on packaged food with high salt and sugar content. So teaching people about which foods are healthy and how to prepare them, she says, can actually transform a patient’s life. And beyond that, it might transform the health and lives of that patient’s family. “What people eat can be medicine or poison,” Rea says. “As a physician, nutrition is one of the most powerful things you can change to reverse the effects of long-term disease.”

J. Studies have explored evidence that dietary changes can slow inflammation (炎症), for example, or make the body inhospitable to cancer cells. In general, many lifestyle medicine physicians recommend a plant-based diet — particularly for people with diabetes or other inflammatory conditions.

K. “As what happened with tobacco, this will require a cultural shift, but that can happen,” says Nguyen. “In the same way physicians used to smoke, and then stopped smoking and were able to talk to patients about it, I think physicians can have a bigger voice in it.”

46. More than half of the food Americans eat is factory-produced. 【暂无答案】

47. There is a special program that assigns doctors to give advice to shoppers in food stores. 【暂无答案】

48. There is growing evidence from research that food helps patients recover from various illnesses. 【暂无答案】

49. A healthy breakfast can be prepared quickly and easily. 【暂无答案】

50. Training a patient to prepare healthy food can change their life. 【暂无答案】

51. One food-as-medicine program not only prescribes food for treatment but teaches patients how to cook it. 【暂无答案】

52. Scott is not keen on cooking food herself, thinking it would simply be a waste of time. 【暂无答案】

53. Diabetes patients are advised to eat more plant-based food. 【暂无答案】

54. Using food as medicine is no novel idea, but the movement is making headway these days. 【暂无答案】

55. Americans’ high rates of various illnesses result from the way they eat. 【暂无答案】

Section B Close Reading (20%, 2 points/per)

Passage 1

Picture this: You’re at a movie theater food stand loading up on snacks. You have a choice of a small, medium, or large soda. The small is $3.50 and the large is$5.50. It’s a tough decision: The small size may not last you through the whole movie, but $5.50 for some sugary drink seems ridiculous. But there's a third option, a medium soda for$5.25. Medium may be the perfect amount of soda for you, but the large is only a quarter more. If you’re like most people, you end up buying the large (and taking a bathroom break midshow).

If you’re wondering who would buy the medium soda, the answer is almost no one. In fact, there’s a good chance the marketing department purposely priced the medium soda as a decoy (诱饵), making you more likely to buy the large soda rather than the small.

I have written about this peculiarity in human nature before with my friend Dan Ariely, who studied this phenomenon extensively after noticing pricing for subscriptions (订阅) to The Economist. The digital subscription was $59, the print subscription was$125, and the print plus digital subscription was also $125. No one in their right mind would buy the print subscription when you could get digital as well for the same price, so why was it even an option? Ariely ran an experiment and found that when only the two “real” choices were offered, more people chose the less-expensive digital subscription. But the addition of the bad option made people much more likely to choose the more expensive print plus digital option.

Brain scientists call this effect “asymmetric dominance” and it means that people gravitate toward the choice nearest a clearly inferior option. Marketing professors call it the decoy effect, which is certainly easier to remember. Lucky for consumers, almost no one in the business community understands it.

The decoy effect works because of the way our brains assign value when making choices. Value is almost never absolute; rather, we decide an object’s value relative to our other choices. If more options are introduced, the value equation changes.

56. Why does the author ask us to imagine buying food in the movie theater?

57. Why is the medium soda priced the way it is?

58. What do we learn from Dan Ariely’s experiment?

59. For what purpose is “the bad options” (Para. 3) added?

60. How do we assess the value of a commodity, according to the passage?

Passage 2

Through a series of experiments an American scientist has obtained an understanding of the social structure of the most complex of ant societies. The ants examined are the only creatures other than man to have given up hunting and collecting for a completely agricultural way of life. In their underground nests they cultivate gardens on soil made from finely chopped leaves. This is a complex operation requiring considerable division of labor. The workers of this type of ant can be divided into four groups according to size. Each of the groups performs a particular set of jobs.

The making and care of the gardens and the nursing of the young ants are done by the smallest workers. Slightly larger workers are responsible for chopping up leaves to make them suitable for use in the gardens and for cleaning the nest. A third group of still larger ants do the construction work and collect fresh leaves from outside the nest. The largest are the soldier ants, responsible for defending the nest.

To find out how good the various-sized groups are at different tasks, the scientist measured the amount of work done by the ants against the amount of energy they used. He examined first the gathering and carrying of leaves. He selected one of the size groups, and then measured how efficiently these ants could find leaves and run back to the nest. Then he repeated the experiment for each of the other size groups. In this way he could see whether any group could do the job more efficiently than the group normally undertaking it.

The intermediate-sized ants that normally perform this task proved to be the most efficient for their energy costs, but when the scientist examined the whole set of jobs performed by each group of ants it appeared that some sizes of worker ants were not ideally suited to the particular jobs they performed.

61. In what way are the ants different from other non-human societiews?

62. It seems that smaller ants perform more of the ( ).

63. “Good” (Sentence 1, Paragraph 3) refers to ants’ ( ).

64. The scientist’s work was based on ( ).

65. The organization of the ants has the effect of ( ).

Part IV Word Bank (10%, 1 point/per)

A. estimated

B. reduce

C. advance

D. invest

E. emission

F. threatened

G. prototype

H. reasonable

I. civilization

J. protect

K. stakes

L. sustained

M. deploy

N. inhospitable

O. progress

For years, scientists have been working to stabilize the Thwaites Glacier, which is (66) by increasingly warm seawater. This warm water is seeping under the glacier’s ice shelf, causing it to melt from below. One possible solution is to (67) an 80-kilometer-long undersea barrier that is attached to the seabed near the glacier. The goal of the project is to limit the amount of warmer water reaching the ice. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have begun testing a small (68) of this barrier. “We must find a way to protect the glacier while we work on reducing greenhouse gas (69),” says one of the lead scientists.

However, carrying out such a massive engineering project in one of the most (70) areas on Earth won’t be cheap. The cost of the sea curtain is (71) to be between 40 billion and 80 billion dollars. Still, compared with the billions of dollars that cities like New York are spending on flood defenses, the cost seems (72) for the potential global protection it offers. Even so, the (73) are so high that these ambitious ideas deserve serious consideration. Scientists also worry about the long-term effects of the project on marine life, and whether it could effectively (74) other environmental issues. “Without the West Antarctic ice sheet, (75) could not survive”, says a leader of the research team.

Part V Translation (10%)

Directions: Please translate the following passage into English.

中国政府高度重视全球变暖这一关乎人类生存发展的关键问题。其应对气候变化的举措绝非空谈理论，而是植根于气候危机日益紧迫的现实。近年来，中国在减排温室气体、推动低碳经济转型上成效显著。通过加强国际合作、推广清洁能源技术，中国促进了工业生产和交通运输方式的绿色转型，并逐步提高可再生能源在能源消费中的比重。

Part VI Writing (15%)

Directions: You are going to write an essay about the potential impact of using robots in workplaces. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.