阅读下面的材料，然后按要求写一篇 150 词左右的英语短文。
A gap year is a period of time during which students take a break from studying after they finished school and before they start college or university. Gap years are popular with Americans. A survey by the American Gap Association（AGA）found that the number of students who took a gap year climbed 27 percent from 2017 to 2018.
Although well received in the West, the concept of gap year has yet to take off in China. In 2018, Peking University(PKU) hosted an activity to encourage students to go on a “Gap Year”, but only few Chinese students entered for it.
Many Chinese educators have realized the importance of gap year and spread the idea by setting up the China Gap Year Foundation on March 19, 2018, which is the first domestic fund specially providing financial support for 18- to 28-year-old students all over Chinese universities to attend domestic and international activities lasting from three months to one year.
（写作内容）
1、用约 30 个单词概括上述信息的主要内容；
2、结合上述信息，简要分析“间隔年”现象在中国学生间鲜见的原因（两点）；
3、你是支持还是反对“间隔年”？用 2-3 个理由或论据支撑你的观点。
（写作要求）
1、写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句；
2、作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
3、不必写标题。
（评分标准）
内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当
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请认真阅读下列短文, 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。
Extreme sports are becoming increasingly popular. In fact, activities such as mountain biking, snowboarding and skateboarding continue to attract larger numbers of people every year. At the same time, a decline has been noted, for years on end, in other outside activities that are considered to be more traditional, including basketball. This is most likely linked to several factors, ranging from the increased adrenaline（肾上腺素） all the way to the positive mental and physical health aspects of participating in an extreme sport.
Extreme sports can push you to your physical and mental limits. Individuals who regularly perform feats （超群的技艺） such as going bungee jumping actually change the chemical makeup of their mind. When this happens, you become more capable of staying calm and centered in stressful situations. In other words, extreme sports can make the rest of your life easy to manage. Besides, those who participate in extreme sports are able to turn their fears into positive experiences. There probably aren’t too many people in the world who won’t feel fearful the first time they go bungee jumping. But seeing that you manage to do them will help you reduce your fear response.
We all do certain movements during the day; however, you’ve probably felt sore after doing something that isn’t on your typical daily schedule. This is because you have asked your muscles to move in an unusual way when you are working out. Although this can cause soreness, it can also be good for your overall physical fitness. When you embrace an extreme sport, you will build up different muscles of your body, and this will be a positive thing for your health.
Extreme sports task you with overcoming difficult physical challenges. If you can complete these challenges, your rewards will be much more than merely physical. Studies have found a strong link between extreme sports and a higher level of self-confidence. This makes sense when you consider the fact that accomplishing a task so physically daunting（使人畏缩的） is something that you should feel proud of. The self-confidence increase can have a positive impact on every aspect of your life, which makes extreme sports a good idea for everyone who is physically capable of meeting the great challenges.
However, before you begin any extreme sport, ensure you’re physically and mentally capable of performing the necessary tasks. Once you’re ready to begin, you’ll be able to choose from a long list of adventurous sports that are certain to get your adrenaline flowing.
Extreme sports | |
Introduction | Every year 1. a growing increase in extreme sports and a 2. decline in traditional outside activities. |
Reasons for enjoying 3. |
You’ll find inner 4. and focus on your task in a stressful situation. You will 5. respond to your fears after succeeding in doing extreme sports. You can 6. different muscles of your body and change your health for the 7.. Overcoming physical challenges 8. you to gain self-confidence , thus appealing to those who can 9.on challenges. |
Suggestion | Make sure that you are well 10. physically and mentally for an extreme sport. |
It is that time of the year again. Up and down the country, thousands of students stay in the library, attempting to cram（ 死记硬背） the information necessary to get through finals. I am one of them — a Cambridge finalist, attempting to deal with the Oxbridge stress in the only way I know: caffeine hits and reclusion（隐遁生活）. Whether you love or hate Oxbridge, the fact that these two universities provide unique learning environments is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, students have access to some of the best education in the world; on the other hand, the pressure that comes with this can prove damaging to them and can’t be swept under the carpet for they have to face it eventually.
Many Cambridge students find themselves trapped in a pressure of expectation, whether this comes from their supervisors or tutors, their director of studies or even from themselves. The drive towards achievement is either the key to success or to possible serious personal issues, as Mark Phippen, head of the University of Cambridge’s Counseling Service said, “There are plenty of perfectionists in Cambridge, but it can work two ways: it can push them to accomplish and to achieve, or it can get out of hand, disabling them.”
Many students say that they can’t handle it any more while working in certain libraries which are filled with other students hard at work. The competition and paranoia（ 多 疑 ） are more common than what we realize or question: you can feel as if you are being judged for how much time you spend on Facebook or YouTube, or how little time you spend reading.
Too many students feel almost frustrated by the pressure to achieve but feel unable to speak about it. As everyone seems to be coping, they must also pretend to cope too. The only thing students have: tutors and supervisors regularly encourage students to avoid extracurricular activities, urging them to focus on their studies to such an extent that many find it hard to handle it. One current Cambridge tutor has been known for checking up on the activities of students involved in extracurricular theatre by searching for them on the camdram.net website, which details who is involved in certain plays each term — just in case it affects the student’s work output.
Problems arise when the pressure produces mental health issues. Problems have been brought to attention in articles primarily from Oxford’s Cherwell and Cambridge’s The Tab. The attention has made the Cambridge University Student Union set up Students Deserve Better — a campaign to handle complaints about supervisors and tutors lacking the ability to provide proper spiritual support. “When I told my supervisor about my problems with anxiety and therefore about my worries surrounding the workload she was suggesting, she said that I would probably feel less anxious once the work was done,” a finalist student called Jane said. “It shouldn’t be an accepted response in one of the world’s best universities. Their responses only worsened any feelings I had concerning my final year.”
Phippen said, “At this point the exams seem like the most important thing in the world. However, two years down the line you’ll realize that the exams you did at university aren’t very important at all, as what then becomes more important is what you have done within those two years afterwards. Finalist exams can become depressing for students studying at any university. All you must remember is that you are not alone and you are good enough, and that a few years down the line, your ability to recount the plots of Euripides’ nineteen plays will no longer matter. So why worry?”
1.The underlined part “be swept under the carpet” in Paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to “ ”.
A. be covered up B. be dealt with
C. be given up D. be figured out
2.What’s Mark Phippen’s attitude towards the pressure put on the students at Oxbridge?
A. Critical. B. Doubtful.
C. Objective. D. Ambiguous.
3.What can we know from Paragraph 4?
A. Extracurricular activities fail to appeal to most students.
B. Some tutors and supervisors push their students too hard.
C. There is a lack of communication between students and their supervisors.
D. Some students don’t speak about the pressure because they think they can handle it.
4.What Jane said in Paragraph 5 suggests that she .
A. didn’t get her problems across to her supervisor
B. had expected better spiritual guidance from her tutors
C. was dissatisfied with her supervisor’s delayed responses
D. was glad that Students Deserve Better was set up to help students like her
5.In the last paragraph, Mark Phippen aims to.
A. guarantee the equality of exams
B. stress the importance of exams
C. ease students’ pressure from exams
D. encourage students to perform better in exams
6.Which of the following would be the best title for this passage?
A. Oxbridge pressure: the key to students’ achievements
B. Oxbridge finals: the toughest exams in the country
C. Oxbridge graduates: the strongest competitors in the job market
D. Oxbridge success: the result of teacher-student interaction
Until recently, voice cloning — or voice banking, as it was then known — was a customized industry which served those at risk of losing the power of speech to cancer or surgery. Synthesizing（合成） a voice was a long and expensive process. It meant recording many phrases, each spoken many times, with different the history of the KidPass blog emotional emphase（s重音）and in different contexts (statement, question, command and so forth), in order to the tips on writing good articles online cover all possible pronunciations.
Not any more. Software exists that can store pieces of recorded speech which is merely five milliseconds long, each marked with a precise pitch（音高）. These can be put together to make new words, and adjusted individually so that they fit harmoniously into their new sonic homes. This is much cheaper than conventional voice banking, and permits novel uses to be developed.
This year Vivo Text plans to release an app that lets users select the emphasis, speed and level of happiness or sadness with which individual words and phrases are produced. Mr. Silbert refers to the emotive quality of the human voice as “the ultimate instrument”. Yet this power also troubles him. Vivo Text licenses its software to Hasbro, an American toymaker keen to sell increasingly interactive playthings. Hasbro is aware, Mr. Silbert notes, that without safeguards a naughty child might, for example, type impolite words on his mother’s smartphone in order to see a younger sibling burst into tears on hearing them spoken by a toy using mum’s voice.
More troubling, when tested against voice-biometrics software like that used by many banks to block unauthorized access to accounts, more than 80% of the fake voices tricked the computer. Alan Black, one of Festvox’s developers, thinks systems that rely on voice-ID software are now “deeply, fundamentally insecure”.
Dr. Saxena and his colleagues asked volunteers if a voice sample belonged to a person whose real speech they had just listened to for about 90 seconds. The volunteers recognized cloned speech as such only half the time (ie, no better than chance). The outcome, according to George Papcun, an expert witness paid to detect fake recordings produced as evidence in court, is the appearance of a technology with “enormous potential value for disinformation”.
As might be expected, countermeasures to recognize such deception （ 欺 骗 ） are being developed.
Nuance Communications, a maker of voice-activated software, is working on algorithms（算法） that detect tiny skips in frequency at the points where slices of speech are stuck together. Adobe, best known as the marker of Photoshop, an image-editing software suite, says that it may add digital watermarks to speech synthesized by a voice-cloning software called VoCo it is developing. Such technology may help computers recognize suspicious speech. Even so, it is easy to imagine the chaos that might be created in a world which makes it easy to put authentic-sounding words into the mouths of opponents — be they colleagues or heads of state.
1.Paragraphs 1 and 2 are mainly about .
A. significant elements influencing voice cloning
B. possible applications of voice cloning in reality
C. complexities of creating a synthetic copy of a voice
D. differences between traditional and existing voice banking
2.What’s Hasbro’s attitude towards Vivo Test’s new app?
A. Optimistic. B. Conservative.
C. Unconcerned. D. Subjective.
3.The experiment carried out by Dr. Saxena and his colleagues shows that volunteers .
A. identified cloned speech in about 45 seconds
B. preferred a real speech to a voice sample
C. proved only a little harder to fool than software
D. found it hard to use the software to record their voices
4.What can we infer from the last paragraph?
A. Investments should be increased to advance voice cloning.
B. Long-term measures should be taken to popularize the idea of voice cloning.
C. Disagreements among firms about the way to treat voice cloning are getting serious.
D. Problems of voice cloning are unavoidable despite the efforts that have been made.
Police around the world have for almost 100 years relied on lie detectors to help spot criminals. But there has long been much skepticism in the scientific and legal communities about the lie detector’s reliability. Hopefully, it could soon be no longer in use.
Researchers in Britain and the Netherlands have made a breakthrough, developing a more reliable method to help conduct interviews. Rather than just record changes in pulse, blood pressure, sweating and breathing, the new system involves monitoring full-body motions to provide an indicator of signs of guilty feelings.
There is a basic fact that liars tend to keep moving their hands and feet and so an all-body motion suit will pick this up. The suit contains 17 sensors that record movement in 23 joints up to 120 times per second.
“The lie detector has been around since the 1920s and by measuring physiological stress caused by anxiety, you can only get a success rate of about 60%.”, said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University.
He said the new method, by contrast, achieved a reliability rating of over 70% and he was quite sure that they would be able to do better. In one of their experiments, the team has already achieved more than 80%.
The experiment involved 180 students and employees at Lancaster University, of which half were told to tell the truth and half to lie. They were each paid ￡7.50 for their participation in the 70-minute experiment, involving two test.
Some were interviewed about a computer game “Never End” that they played for seven minutes, while others lied about playing it having only been shown notes about it.
The second test involved a lost wallet containing ￡ 5. Some were asked to bring the wallet to a lost-and-found box while others hid it and lied about it.
“Overall, we correctly classified 82.2% of the interviewees as either being truthful or dishonest.”, the report said.
But the use of all-body suits is expensive — they cost about ￡30,000 — and can be uncomfortable, so Anderson and his colleagues are now looking at low-cost alternatives.
1.The researchers used the all-body motion suit to .
A. discover people’s joint problems
B. record people’s changes in their health
C. help find out interviewees’ mental activities
D. prevent liars from moving their hands and feet
2.What is the main disadvantage of the lie detector?
A. It has a low success rate B. It is very uncomfortable
C. It is too complex to use D. It costs a lot of money
3.How does Anderson feel about the new method?
A. Confused B. Confident
C. Doubtful D. Disappointed
New York City. Freelance
The KidPass blog is created by contributions from awesome freelance writers who work from home, and are excited to share their experiences and recommendations for kids’ activities around New York City! KidPass is flexible, so it allows parents like us to spend more time with their kids and work from home or anywhere they like, while building a great resource of recommendations for other parents.
We are hiring freelance writers who can contribute articles to our blog. We pay you for each article that we accept or approve starting at $20 for short articles and $100+ for longer articles with original research, photos, and videos.
If you enjoy being a parent “in the know”, researching new kids’ activities online, or going around your neighborhood to visit new kids’ centres, indoor play spaces, events, or classes, then KidPass could be great for you!
About you:
*Possess a friendly, confident writing style.
*Work from wherever you want.
*Able to explore kid classes and activities in your neighborhood.
*Take photos and videos if you are interested in writing longer research pieces for us.
*Prompt in communication, responsible and able to meet deadlines.
To apply, submit the following:
*Two writing samples that have not been published elsewhere and not been copied.
*For one sample, please include a list/ round-up of five local kids’ classes for a certain age group in your neighborhood.
*For the second sample, please include a single review of one of the kids’ classes/activities and include pictures.
*Submit these by email and include a brief introduction to yourself.
1.What do we know about the KidPass blog?
A. It has a lot to do with children’s activities.
B. It offers much advice on how to raise kids.
C. It teaches parents to design kids’ games online.
D. It encourages parents to accompany their kids more.
2.The passage mainly informs us of .
A. the history of the KidPass blog
B. the tips on writing good articles online
C. the importance of communicating with kids
D. the requirements of working as a freelance writer
