It’s 5:00 in the morning when the alarm rings in my ears. I roll out of bed and walk blindly through the dark into the bathroom. I turn on the light and put on my glasses. The house is still as I walk downstairs while my husband and three kids sleep peacefully. Usually I go for a long run, but today I choose my favorite exercise DVD，Insanity. Sweat pours down my face and into my eyes. My heart races as I force my body to finish each movement. As I near the end of the exercise, I feel extremely tired, but a smile is on my face. It’s not a smile because the DVD is over, but a smile of success from pushing my body to its extreme limit.
Some people enjoy shopping, smoking, food, work, or even chocolate. But I need exercise to get through each day. Some shake heads when they see me run through the town. Others get hurt when I refuse to try just one bite of their grandmother’s chocolate cake. They raise their eyebrows, surprised by my “no，thank you,” or by my choice to have a salad. Over the years, I have learned it’s okay to just say “no.” I shouldn’t feel sorry for refusing food that I don’t want to eat.
So what drives me to roll out of bed at 5:00 a.m.? What gives me the reason to just say no to ice cream? Commitment. A commitment to change my life with a way that reduces daily anxiety, increases self-confidence and energy, extends life and above all improves my body shape. This is the point where a smile appears on my face as I look at myself in the mirror or try on my favorite pair of jeans that now fit just right. It’s through commitment and sweat that I can make a difference within myself inside and out.
1.Why is there a smile on the author’s face in the morning?
A. Because she sees her family sleeping peacefully.
B. Because she finishes her favorite exercise.
C. Because she enjoys the interesting DVD.
D. Because she feels a sense of achievement.
2.Which of the following is true according to Paragraph 2?
A. She doesn’t treat others politely.
B. She likes to make others surprised.
C. Others don’t understand what she does.
D. Others try to help her by offering her food.
3.What does the underlined word “commitment” in the last paragraph mean?
A. Good health. B. Willingness.
C. A promise. D. A regular habit.
4.What can we learn about the author from the text?
A. She acts in a strange way.
B. She wants to look different from others.
C. She aims to develop a good body shape.
D. She has difficulty getting along with others.
Valerian capsules (缬草胶囊)
A traditional herbal medicinal product used for the temporary relief of symptoms of mild anxiety and to aid sleep.
Active Ingredients:
Each capsule contains 337mg of extract (as dry extract) from Valerian root (Valerian officinalis L) (equivalent to 1683mg-2020mg of Valerian root).
Dosage（剂量）:
For oral use only.
For adults and elderly.
Mild anxiety — Take 1 capsule 3 times daily.
To aid sleep — Take 1 capsule 30 minutes to 1 hour before bedtime with an earlier dose during the evening if necessary.
Swallow the capsule with water. As the effects of this product may not occur immediately, the capsule should be taken continuously for 2-4 weeks.
Duration of use: If symptoms worsen or do not improve after 4 weeks, a doctor or a qualified healthcare practitioner should be consulted.
Warnings:
Do not exceed (超过) the stated dose.
Do not take this product if you are:
Under 18 years of age
Pregnant or breastfeeding
Allergic to Valerian or any of the excipients in this product
Already taking a medicine for sleep or anxiety
Storage:
Store the capsules below 25C.
Keep the bottle tightly closed.
Keep out of sight and reach of children.
Registration Holder:
NBTY Europe Limited, Samuel Ryder House, Barling Way, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 7RH, United Kingdom
1.Which of the following can this product be intended for?
A. A mother with a child to breastfeed. B. A junior high school student.
C. An elder allergic to Valerian. D. An adult with no other dose.
2.How many capsules can you take at most to aid your night sleep each day?
A. 1. B. 2.
C. 3. D. 4.
3.How long can the capsule be taken continuously at most before it works?
A. 4 weeks. B. Half a month.
C. 1 hour. D. 30 minutes.
请阅读下面文字，并按照要求用英语写一篇150词左右的文章。
More than 100，000 volunteers in 132 cities spent a weekend picking up plastic and other waste across the country, in a joint worldwide effort to clean up the planet.
To celebrate the 10th World Cleanup Day on Sept 15，some 700 nonprofit NGOs (nongovernmental originations) and social groups held activities aimed at cleaning up the environment and tackling the waste crisis throughout China, mobilizing an estimated 1 millionplus people.
From snowcapped mountains to vast oceans, people united in taking action to remove waste from the environment to raise awareness of the severity of the crisis.
“Where there is a will, every day can be and should be ‘Cleanup Day’， says Ma Yongjian, a volunteer from Beijing who recently did “plogging”—jogging while picking up trash—with his friends in Yudong Park in the northwest of the city.
“We must change the way of living we are used to, to reduce waste from its source，” says Joe Harvey, a British national and promoter of “zero waste” lifestyles in China. He and his girlfriend Carrie Yu created The Bulk House, a brand that provides zerowaste solutions for daily living. They are urging people to reduce or eliminate the use of plastic and singleuse disposables, such as plastic utensils，bags and beverage bottles.
Sounding a note of caution, Mao Da, a specialist in environmental history at Beijing Normal University, says: “In recent years, the massive consumption and materialistic craze have worsened the waste situation as trash has been produced at a faster pace and in greater quantities.”
（写作内容）
1. 以约30个词概括文章大意；
2. 以约120个词就“世界清理日”这个主题发表你的看法，内容要包括如下要点:
(1) 你对于“世界清理日”及类似活动有哪些看法？
(2) 你觉得要采取哪些措施来保持环境整洁？
（写作要求）
1. 可以使用实例或其他论述方法支持你的论点，也可以参照阅读材料的内容，但不得直接照抄原文；2. 标题自定。
（评分标准） 概括准确、语言规范、内容合适、篇章连贯。
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请认真阅读下面短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意:每个空格只填1个单词。
Pretending you're someone else can make you creative
One great irony(讽刺) about our collective fascination with creativity is that we tend to frame it in uncreative ways. That is to say, most of us marry creativity to our concept of self: We are either “creative” people or we aren't，without much of a middle ground.
Pillay, a tech businessman and Harvard professor has spent a good part of his career destroying these ideas. Pillay believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to dismiss the conventional advice that urges you to “believe in yourself”. In fact, you should do the exact opposite: believe you are someone else.
In a recent column for Harvard Business Review, Pillay pointed to a 2016 study showing the impact of stereotypes(刻板印象)on one's behavior. The authors, education psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their collegestudent subjects into three categories, instructing the members of one group to think of themselves as “eccentric(古怪的) poets” and the members of another to imagine they were “rigid librarians”(people in the third category, the control group, were left alone for this part). The researchers then presented participants with 10 ordinary objects，including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as “eccentric poets” came up with the widest range of ideas for the objects, while those in the “rigid librarian” group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors—in fact, the physics majors inhabiting(寄生) the personas(伪装的外表) of “eccentric poets” came up with more ideas than the art majors did.
These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual quality, but a “malleable(可塑的) product of context and perspective.” Everyone can be creative, as long as they feel like creative people.
Pillay's work takes this a step further: He argues that identifying yourself with creativity is less powerful than the creative act of imagining you're somebody else. This exercise, which he calls “psychological halloweenism”， refers to the conscious action of inhabiting another persona—an inner costuming of the self. It works because it is an act of “conscious unfocus”， a way of positively stimulating the default mode(默认模式) network, a collection of brain regions that spring into action when you're not focused on a specific task or thought.
Most of us spend too much time worrying about two things: How successful/unsuccessful we are, and how little we're focusing on the task at hand. The former feeds the latter—an unfocused person is an unsuccessful one, we believe. Thus, we force ourselves into quiet areas, buy noisecanceling headphones, and hate ourselves for taking breaks.
What makes Pillay's argument stand out is its healthy, forgiving realism: According to him, most people spend nearly half of their days in a state of “unfocus”. This doesn't make us lazy people—it makes us human. The idea behind psychological halloweenism is: What if we stopped judging ourselves for our mental down time, and instead started using it? Putting this new idea on daydreaming means addressing two problems at once: You're making yourself more creative, and you're giving yourself permission to do something you'd otherwise feel guilty about. Imagining yourself in a new situation, or an entirely new identity, never felt so productive.
Title: Pretending you're someone else can make you creative
Some misleading ideasabout creativity | ●Most of us are 1. with the idea that we are either creative or we are not: there doesn't exist a middle ground in between.●2. to popular belief，Pillay's suggestion is that you should believe you are someone else. |
Dumas and Dunbar's study | ●One group were asked to think of themselves as “eccentric poets”，another “rigid librarians” and a third 3. as the control group.●The former two groups were required to come up with as many different uses as possible for each 4. object. ●The level of students' 5. is not always in direct proportion to the type of academic majors. ●Therefore, creativity is probably a product of context and perspective rather than something 6.. |
Pillay's further study | ●The exercise of “psychological halloweenism” refers to the conscious action of being others by 7. stimulating the default mode network.●Pillay 8. firmly to the idea of imaging you're someone else and advises us not to worry about how successful/unsuccessful we are. |
The 9.significance of the exercise | ●We should start using it instead of stopping judging ourselves for our mental down time.●We have every right to 10. ourselves for being unfocused because it is not only human but also makes us more creative and productive. |
To learn to think is to learn to question. Those who don't question never truly think for themselves. These are simple rules that have governed the advancement of science and human thought since the beginning of time. Advancements are made when thinkers question theories and introduce new ones. Unfortunately, it is often the great and respected thinkers who end up slowing the progress of human thought. Aristotle was a brilliant philosopher whose theories explained much of the natural world, often incorrectly. He was so esteemed by the scientific community that even 1，200 years after his death, scientists were still trying to build upon his mistakes rather than correct them!
Brilliant minds can intimidate upandcoming thinkers who are not confident of their abilities. They often believe they are inferior to the minds of giants such as Aristotle, leading many to accept current paradigms instead of questioning them.
I, like many thinkers of the past, once believed in my mental inferiority. I was certain that my parents, my teachers—adults in general—were always right. They were like a textbook to me; I didn't question what was written on those pages. I respected them, and accepted whatever they told me. But that attitude soon changed. My mind's independence was first stimulated in the classroom.
A stern, 65yearold elementaryschool science teacher once told me that light is a type of wave. I confidently went through years of school believing that light is a wave. One day，however I heard the German exchange student mention that light could be made up of particles. As the others laughed at his statement, I started to question my beliefs.
Maybe the teachers and textbooks hadn't given me the whole story. I went to the library, did some research and learned of the lightasawave versus lightasaparticle debate. I read about Einstein's discovery of the dual nature of light and learned the facts of a paradox(悖论) that puzzles the world's greatest thinkers to this day. Light behaves as both a particle and a wave, it is both at once. I realized I had gone through life accepting only half of the story as the whole truth.
Each new year brought more new facts, and I formulated even more questions. I found myself in the library after school, trying to find my own answers to gain a more complete understanding of what I thought I already knew. I discovered that my parents and teachers are incredible tools in my quest for knowledge, but they are never the final word. Even textbooks can be challenged. I learned to question my sources, I learned to be a thinker. I once believed that everything I learned at home and at school was certain, but I have now discovered to reexamine when necessary.
Questions are said to be the path to knowledge and truth, and I plan to continue questioning. How many things do we know for sure today that we will question in the future? At this moment, I know that our sun will burn for another five billion years, and I know nothing can escape the gravity of a black hole. This knowledge, however, may change in the next 20 years—maybe even in the next two. The one thing we can control now is our openness to discovery. Questions are the tools of open minds, and open minds are the key to intellectual advancement.
1.In the first paragraph, Aristotle is taken as an example to show that ________.
A. he is the greatest and respected philosopher of all time
B. huge influence of great thinkers may block human thought
C. advancements are made when thinkers question theories
D. great thinkers often make mistakes and then correct them
2.What does the underlined word “intimidate” in Paragraph 2 mean?
A. Frighten. B. Encourage. C. Strength. D. Persuade.
3.The author began to question his previous beliefs because ________.
A. what he learned from textbooks before turned out to be wrong
B. he was inspired by the different ideas from an exchange student
C. he was laughed at by other students for his unacceptable statement
D. he was not satisfied with his life and desperate to achieve success
4.According to the passage, the author ________.
A. looks down upon great thinkers all the time
B. never doubts what he has learned in the textbook
C. always throws himself into the laboratory
D. determines to be a thinker and questioner
5.We can conclude from the last paragraph that ________.
A. the author is not quite sure about his future
B. we human beings don't dare to predict future
C. questioning is necessary to promote advancement
D. the theory of black holes will change in two years
6.What does the passage mainly talk about?
A. Following rules. B. Challenging yourself.
C. Questioning giants. D. Predicting future.
Chemists have sped up evolution, harnessing a process that can take millions of years in the natural world and using it—in months or weeks—to make unusual molecules that today are used for everything from “green” biofuels(生物燃料) to cancer drugs. Today that speed and efficiency was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Frances H. Arnold won half of the 2018 prize for directing evolution in a test tube, speeding up the natural selection of the most productive enzymes(酶) to drive chemical reactions. The other half of the prize went to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter.
All three scientists took Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection, in which molecules(分子) or organisms accumulate mutations(突变) in a slow, random process, and figured out ways to identify and select specific mutations that improve the ability of molecules such as proteins and enzymes. By picking and choosing enzymes with improved abilities and repeatedly refining them, Arnold ended up with one that performed 256 times better than the original.
“This was a revolution based on evolution，” says Claes Gustafsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “Now you can use these enzymes to speed up reaction and to replace poisonous chemicals.”
Arnold began her line of research in the early 1990s. In a speech several years ago she said the notion of improving on the natural course of evolution was an idea that needed to come from an outsider. “Twentyfive years ago it was considered the lunatic fringe(狂热者，极端分子)，” Arnold said in 2014. “Scientists didn't do that. Gentlemen didn't do that. But since I’m an engineer and_not_a_gentleman._I_had_no_problem_with_that.”
Smith's research, begun in the 1980s，used a bacteriophage(噬菌体). Genes code for proteins, and Smith got his phages to display those proteins on their outer coats. He then used antibodies to fish out the proteins he was interested in. This process is called phage display. The ability to select specific proteins, cycle their genes back through the phage, and again fish out the best ones sped up natural selection.
Winter put the genes for antibodies inside phages，got the phages to produce antibodies on their coats, and used a small molecule to fish out only antibodies that had a particular kind of binding site(结合部位), so Winter had developed a way of producing highly efficient antibodies in a short period of time. Because of this, Claes says, “Now we can use antibody drugs with greater efficiency and fewer side effects.” Of the 15 mostsold drugs on the planet, she says, 11 are now made by processes based on this method.
1.Why does the Nobel Prize in Chemistry go to Frances H. Arnold?
A. She followed Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection.
B. She found ways to use viruses to produce powerful proteins.
C. She developed a way of producing highly efficient antibodies.
D. She directed evolution and accelerated the natural selection of enzymes.
2.What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 5 imply?
A. She was regarded as a lunatic fringe.
B. She dared to break through conventional idea.
C. She took advantage of her gender(性别).
D. She was supported by other scientists.
3.What attitude does Claes Gustafsson hold towards the use of antibody drugs?
A. Critical. B. Ambiguous. C. Casual. D. Favorable.
4.What's the best title for the passage?
A. Revolution in Evolution Wins 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
B. Three Scientists Speeding up the Natural Selection of the World
C. Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection becoming outdated
D. Scientists Finding a New Method for Wresting with Cancer
