北京市 上学期 期末质量检测高三英语试卷阅读汇编 CD篇汇 含答案

东城区2020-2021学年度第一学期期末统一检测
高三英语 2021.1
C
Once small farmers in Masii, a remote village in Kenya, have picked their crops, all they can do is wait until a buyer trucks through. The system works fairly well for beans and corn, but
mangoes-the area's other main crop—spoil （腐烂）more quickly. If the trader is
late, they rot.
Obadiah Kisaingu, a farmer in Masii, estimates 40 % of the village's mango
crop is lost to spoilage. But a simple coating could change that. A company,
SmartTech, has created a product that doubles the shelf life of fresh produce, enabling farmers like Kisaingu to access far-off, larger markets. More time for fresh produce on grocers' shelves also means less food waste——a $2.
6 trillion problem, according to the United Nations'Food and Agriculture Organization（FAO）.
James Rogers, CEO of SmartTech, who has a Ph. D in materials science, wanted to solve the problem for food much in the same way that oxide barriers preventing rust （锈）have achieved for steel. Fortunately, researchers have found when plants made the jump from water to land hundreds of millions of years ago, they developed cutin, a barrier which is made of fatty acids that link together to form a seal around the plant, helping keep water in.
The cutin was such a grand strategy that today you'll still find it across the plant kingdom. Not that it's exactly the same solution across the board：An orange can last longer than a strawberry not so much because of the thickness of its skin, but because of the difference in the arrangement of those cutin molecules （分子）on the surface. SmartTech5s challenge was first identifying the key components of cutin. After extensive trials, Rogers and his team developed a natural and tasteless protective coating from plant material—stems, leaves and skins. The product extends the sweet spot between ripening and rot. And best of all, the treated produce doesn't require refrigeration.
SmartTech traveled a long road to get here. It was six years from launch before products applied with the substance were in stores. SmartTech-treated fruits and vegetables are already in large grocery chains in Europe and the U.S. and the company recently gained regulatory approval in several less developed countries in South
America.
“SmartTech has huge potential to turn poor farmers in Africa into commercial farmers, says Rogers. "That means more money in pockets, and more food in stomachs.” But whether the company can c ost-effectively reach small farmers in far-off areas still remains a challenge.
27. The author mentions the small farmers in Kenya to.
A. stress their need for preserving produce
B. show their difficulty in harvesting crops
C. evaluate their loss caused by slow transport
D. help express their wish to reach larger markets
28. What can we learn about SparTech’s product?
A. It is financially supported by FAO.
B. It is intended to replace refrigeration.
C. It is designed to thicken produce's skin.
D. It is based on plants' own defense system.
29. What does James Rogers expect?
A. To profit farmers.
B. To earn more money.
C. To produce more food.
D. To expand grocery chains.
30. The main purpose of the passage is to .
A. prove a theory
B. promote a product
C. introduce a company
D. present a technology
D
Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive (认知的)psychologist at Harvard, has spent her career testing the world's most complex learning system-the mind of a baby. Babies might seem like no match for artificial intelligence (Al). They are terrible at labeling images, hopeless at mining text, and awful at video games. Then again, babies can do things beyond the reach of any AL By just a few months old, they've begun to grasp the foundations of language, such as grammar. They've started to understand how to adapt to unfamiliar situations.
Yet even experts like Spelke don't understand precisely how babies-or adults, for that matter——learn. That gap points to a puzzle at the heart of modern artificial intelligence：We're not sure what to aim for.
Consider one of the most impressive examples of Al, Alpha Zero, a programme that plays board games with superhuman skill. After playing thousands of games against itself at a super speed, and learning from winning positions, Alpha Zero independently discovered several famous chess strategies and even invented new ones. It certainly seems like a machine eclipsing human cognitive abilities. But Alpha Zero needs to play millions more games than a person during practice to learn a game. Most importantly, it cannot take what it has learned from the game and apply it to another area.
To some Al experts, that calls for a new approach. In a November research paper, Francois Chollet, a well-known Al engineer, argued that it's misguided to measure machine intelligence just according to its skills at specific tasks. "Humans don't start out with skills；they start out with a broad ability to acquire new skills," he says. "What a strong human chess player is demonstrating is not only the ability to play chess, but the potential to fulfill any task of a similar difficulty. " Chollet posed a set of problems, each of which requires an Al programme to arrange colored squares on a grid （格栅）based on just a few prior examples. It's not hard for a person. But modern machine-learning programmes-trained on huge amounts of data—cannot learn from so few examples.
Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT's Center for Brains）Minds & Machines, works closely with Spelke and uses insights from cognitive science as inspiration for his programmes. He says much of modern Al misses the bigger picture, comparing it to a cartoon about a two-dimensional world populated by simple geometrical（几何形的）people. Al programmes will need to learn in new ways—for example, by drawing causal inferences rather than simply finding patterns. "At some point-you know? if you're intelligent — you realize maybe there's something else out there,” he says.
31. Compared to an advanced Al programme, a baby might be better at.
A. labeling images
B. identifying locations
C. playing games
D. making adjustments
32. What does the underlined word “eclipsing” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?
A. Stimulating.
B. Measuring.
C. Beating.
D. Limiting.
33. Both Francois Chollet and Josh Tenenbaum may agree that.
A. Al is good at finding similar patterns
B. Al should gain abilities with less training
C. Al lacks the ability of generalizing a skill
D. Al will match humans in cognitive ability.
34. Which would be the best title for this passage?
A. What is exactly intelligence?
B. Why is modern Al advanced?
C. Where is human intelligence going?
D. How do humans tackle the challenge of Al?
西城区2020-2021学年度第一学期期末统一检测
高三英语 2021.1
C
Hundreds of people die at sea every year due to ship and airplane accidents. Emergency teams
have little time to rescue those in the water because the probability of finding a person alive fall dramatically after six hours. Beyond tides and challenging weather conditions, unsteady coastal currents often make search and rescue operations extremely difficult.
New insight into coastal flows gained by an international research team led by George Haller, Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH Zurich, promises to enhance the search and rescue techniques currently in use. Using tools from dynamical systems theory and ocean data, the team has developed an algorithm (算法) to predict where objects and people floating in water will go. “Our work has a clear potential to save lives,” says Mattia Serra, the first author of a study recently published in Nature Communications.
In today’s rescue operations at sea, complicated models of ocean dynamics and weather forecasting are used to predict the path of floating objects. For fast-changing coastal waters, however, such predictions are often inaccurate due to uncertain boundaries and missing data. As a result, a search may be launched in the wrong location, causing a loss of precious time.
Haller’s research team obtained mathematical results predicting that objects floating on the ocean’s surface should gather along a few special curves (曲线) which they call TRansient Attracting Profiles (TRAPs). These curves can’t be seen with our eyes but can be tracked from instant ocean surface current data using recent mathematical methods developed by the ETH team. This enables quick and precise planning of search paths that are less sensitive to uncertainties in the time and place of the accident.
In cooperation with a team from MIT, the ETH team tested their new, TRAP-based search algorithm in two separate ocean experiments near Martha’s Vineyard, which is on the northeastern coast of the United States. Working from the same real-time data available to the Coast Guard, the team successfully identified TRAPs in the region in real time. They found that buoys and manikins (浮标和人体模型) thrown in the water indeed quickly gathered along these emerging curves. “Of several competing approaches tested in this project, this was the only algorithm that consistently foun d the right location,” says Haller.
“Our results are rapidly obtained, easy to interpret and cheap to perform,” points out Serra. Haller stresses: “Our hope is that this method will become a standard part of the tool kit of coast guards everywhere.”
27. In a search and rescue operation, .
A. the survival rate drops to almost zero after six hours
B. the use of dynamics leads to the wrong location
C. weather conditions are a determining factor
D. changing currents present a challenge
28. What is the distinct feature of the new algorithm?
A. It relies on ocean dynamics.
B. It tracks the path of the curves.
C. It stops the uncertainties of the accident.
D. It figures out how tides change over time.
29. Paragraph 5 mainly talks about .
A. the collection of data
B. the testing of the algorithm
C. the identification of the TRAPs
D. the cooperation of two research teams
30. What is the best title for the passage?
A. Why Success Rates of Rescue Operations have Fallen
B. Why Algorithms are Popular in Rescue Operations
C. How Mathematics Can Save Lives at Sea
D. How Coastal Waters Affect Saving Lives
D
Recently the term “climate anxiety” has been used to better describe our growing concerns about climate change. While there is evidence that climate anxiety can be identified and reliably measured, what’s less clear is how it relates to mental illness. Mental health providers across the world are noting the presence of climate anxiety in their patients; however, the degree to which it is influencing
mental illness is not yet clear, though evidence addressing this question is slowly growing.
For years now, mental health clinicians have seen climate anxiety influencing presentations of mental illness in a variety of ways, some extreme. Recent studies are starting to look at links between climate anxiety and mental illness in larger samples to help better understand the directionality of their relationship. In a U.S. survey of more than 340 people published in 2018, climate concerns were associated with depressive symptoms (症状). Ecological coping, which includes
pro-environmental behaviors such as reducing energy consumption, appeared to be protective against depression, indicating that climate concerns and the poor coping skills used to address them could be causing depressive symptoms.
So who might be more at risk of mental illness secondary to the uncertainties around climate change? Unsurprisingly, climate anxiety appears higher in individuals with more concern about environmental issues at baseline and those already experiencing direct effects of climate change. Climatologists also face increased risk given their in-depth knowledge on the issue coupled with the upsetting task of trying to convey it to individuals and governments that often deny or downplay it. People with high levels of neuroticism, a personality trait that increases susceptibility to mental illness, are also likely to be at high risk.
Some individuals report adaptive responses to climate anxiety like adopting pro-environmental behaviors and participating in collective action, while others are unable to respond behaviorally at all. It’s not yet clear how these varying reactions manifest (呈现) on a population level and how they’re influencing humanity’s response to climate change. H owever, a recent survey of nearly 200 people found that, while climate anxiety was associated with an emotional response to climate change, it was not correlated with a behavioral response.
If this is true for humanity as a whole, we must urgently help motivate the anxious among us. Doing so successfully will require many approaches, such as delivering cognitive-behavioral therapy (认知行为疗法) to the most severely affected and demonstrating to entire populations that change is possible by better publicizing productive efforts by organizations to reduce their carbon footprints. We can’t let climate anxiety stop us from responding to climate change, because now, more than ever, we need action, not inaction.
31. What can be learned from the first two paragraphs?
A. Mental illness may increase the risk of climate anxiety.
B. Reducing energy consumption can help treat depression.
C. Failure to handle climate anxiety may cause depressive symptoms.
D. The influence of climate anxiety on mental illness can be measured.
32. The underlined phrase “secondary to” in Paragraph 3 probably means .
A. as a result of
B. less important than
C. as serious as
D. regardless of
33. Which of the following might be effective in helping the anxious overcome climate anxiety?
A. Publicizing the latest research on climate anxiety.
B. Funding studies into cognitive-behavioral therapies.
C. Delivering speeches to anxious people on a regular basis.
D. Informing the public of practical ways to live a greener life.
34. What is the purpose of this passage?
A. To reveal consequences of climate anxiety.
B. To show new findings about climate anxiety.
C. To compare climate anxiety and mental illness.
D. To demand care for those experiencing climate anxiety.
海淀区2020-2021学年度第一学期期末统一检测
高三英语 2021.1
C
What does it mean to live a good life? This question has been debated for centuries. In the field of
psychology, two main concepts of the good life have been quite popular: A happy life full of pleasure and positive emotions, and a meaningful life full of purpose and sacrifice. But what if these aren't the only options?
In recent years, a long-neglected version of the good life has been receiving greater attention: the
psychologically rich life. It is full of complex mental engagement, a wide range of intense and deep emotions, and diverse, novel, surprising and interesting experiences. Sometimes they are neither pleasant nor meaningful. However, they are rarely boring or monotonous.
After all, both happy and meaningful lives can become monotonous and repetitive. A person with a steady office job, married with children, may be satisfied and find his or her life meaningful and still be bored. Also the psychologically rich life doesn't necessarily involve economic richness. For instance, consider Hesse's character Goldmund, who has no money but pursues the life of a free spirit.
Research has found psychological richness is related to, but partially distinct from, both happy and meaningful lives. Psychological richness is related with openness to experience and experiencing both positive and negative emotions more intensely. But is the psychologically rich life one that people actually want?
In a new study, Oishi and his colleagues asked people in nine countries the degree to which they value a psychologically rich life, a happy life and a meaningful life. They found many people's self-described ideal lives involve psychological richness. When forced to choose a life, however, the majority chose a happy life and a
meaningful life. Even so, a minority of people still favored the psychological rich life, ranging from 6.7%o in Singapore to 16.8% in Germany.
These numbers went up when the desire for a psychologically rich life was measured indirectly. To understand what a person wishes their lives might have been, it is important to explore what people wish they had avoided in their lives. When asked what they regret most and whether undoing this event would have made their lives happier, more meaningful or psychologically richer, about 28 of Americans said undoing the regrettable event would have made their lives psychologically richer.
These findings suggest that while most people strive to be happy and have meaning in their lives, a sizable number of people are content merely living a psychologically rich existence.
As Oishi and his colleagues conclude,“We believe that taking the psychologic ally rich life seriously will deepen and enrich our understanding of well-being.”.At the end of the day, there is no one singularly acceptable path to the good life. You have to find a path that works best for you.
27. According to the passage, the psychologically rich life
A. means living a luxurious life
B. involves various intense emotions
C. combines pleasure with purpose
D. emphasizes openness and repetition
28. What does Oishi’s research indicate?
A. The Germans prefer psychological richness to a happy life
B. Undoing regrettable events has enriched many peoples lives
C. A hidden desire for psychological richness exists among some people
D. People with psychological richness tend to describe their lives as ideal.
29. We can learn from the passage that
A. purpose outweighs pleasure in terms of significance
B. the choice of a good life differs from person to person。