Directions: Read the following passage. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.
The Podcast (播客) Boom
Do you prefer to watch TV or listen to the radio? There was a time when some people thought moving pictures would spell the end of tuning in to the radio for entertainment and information. But radio survived and boomed. 1.
Perhaps the growth in podcasting is not surprising-it offers a digital audio file that can be downloaded and stored for listening at any time. It can also be streamed from the internet and played on a computer or MP3 player. And it’s not just broadcasters, like the BBC, who are producing podcasts: now commercial broadcasters, individuals and companies with no connection to broadcasting are making them. In fact, anyone with something to say, and a few pounds to spend on the equipment, can get involved.
The digital audio files are cheap to produce and, thanks to the internet, easy to distribute. 2. Journalist Ben Hammersley told the BBC that “two changes transformed the market-one cultural and one technical.” A technical breakthrough came in 2012 when Apple produced the iPhone podcast app, which proved a popular library system for listeners. This was followed by a dramatic improvement in inexpensive recording production and editing equipment. Finally, the development of 4G mobile phone connections and widespread wi-fi meant listeners could browse, download or stream shows whenever they wanted.
3. It was a piece of investigative journalism hosted by Sarah Koenig, telling a non-fiction story over multiple episodes (集). To date, the first and second seasons of the show have had more than 340 million downloads. Advertisers soon realized the money-making potential of this and other successful podcasts. And where the audience goes, the money follows. From 2017 to 2018 advertising spending on podcasts in the UK went from $10.6m(£8.5m) to $19.7m, an 85% increase, according to Ovum.
4. In fact, as Ben Hammersley explains, podcasting has brought people into broadcasting who would normally never have seen the inside of a recording studio. “There are of course professional podcasters, but there are many more people who create quality content and do it for nothing,” he says. “And that is changing not just the way we listen to audio but the way the broadcasting industry works.”
A.The cultural breakthrough came in 2014 with a very specific podcast-Serial.
B.But if you are a celebrity, podcasts can provide a new branch of business.
C.And now, despite the growth in smartphones offering high-definition pictures, the popularity of podcasts is booming.
D.Now the boom in podcasting embraces a huge range of talent, from professional broadcasters to enthusiasts offering insights on anything and everything.
E.Podcasts offer a chance to speak to a very precise selection of people.
F.But where did this trend for making portable audio programmes begin?
There has, in recent years, been an outpouring of information about the impact of buildings on the natural environment. Information which explains and promotes green and sustainable construction design, strives to convince others of its efficacy (功效) and warns of the dangers of ignoring the issue. Seldom do these documents offer any advice to practitioners, such as those designing mechanical and electrical systems for a building, on how to use this knowledge on a practical level.
Although there are a good many advocates of “green” construction in the architectural industry, able to list enough reasons why buildings should be designed in a sustainable way, not to mention plenty of architectural firms with experience in green design, this is not enough to make green construction come into being. The driving force behind whether a building is constructed with minimal environmental impact lies with the owner of the building; that is, the person financing the project. If the owner considers green design unimportant, or of secondary importance, then more than likely, it will not be factored into the design.
The commissioning (委任) process plays a key role in ensuring the owner gets the building he wants, in terms of design, costs and risk. At the predesign stage, the owner’s objectives and expectations are discussed and documented. This gives a design team a solid foundation on which they can build their ideas. Owners who skip the commissioning process, or fail to take “green” issues into account when doing so, often come a cropper once their building is up and running. Materials and equipment are installed as planned, and, at first glance, appear to fulfil their purpose adequately. However, in time, the owner realizes that operational and maintenance costs are higher than necessary, and that the occupants are dissatisfied with the results. These factors in turn lead to higher ownership costs as well as increased environmental impact.
In some cases, an owner may be aware of the latest trends in sustainable building design. However, firms should not take it as read that the client already has an idea of how green he intends the structure to be. Indeed, this initial interaction between owner and firm is the ideal time for a designer to outline and promote the ways that green design can meet the client’s objectives, thus turning a project originally not destined for green design into a potential candidate.
Typically, when considering whether or not to adopt a green approach, an owner will ask about additional costs or return for investment. In a typical project, landscape architects, mechanical and electrical engineers do not become involved until a much later stage. However, in green design, they must be involved from the outset, since green design demands interaction between these disciplines. This increased cooperation clearly requires additional cost. However, there may be financial advantage for the client in choosing a greener design. There are examples of green designs which have demonstrated lower costs for long-term operation, ownership and even construction.
1.What is the main reason for the lack of green buildings being designed according to the passage?
A.Few firms have enough experience in designing and constructing green buildings.
B.Construction companies are unaware of the benefits of sustainable designs.
C.Firms do not get to decide whether a building is to be constructed sustainably.
D.Firms tend to convince clients that other factors are more important than sustainability.
2.The phrase “come a cropper” probably means ________.
A.experience misfortune B.change one’s mind
C.notice the benefits D.make a start
3.Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
A.Most clients have a clear idea of whether they want a green building at the beginning.
B.Green buildings are most likely to cost more money than conventional buildings.
C.The commissioning process offers a good opportunity to bring up the subject of green design.
D.Firms should avoid working with clients who reject green designs in their buildings.
4.The writer’s main purpose is to ________.
A.explain the importance of communication when a building is commissioned
B.emphasize the importance of green building design in protecting the environment
C.explain to building owners why ignoring green issues is costly and dangerous
D.inform professionals how they can influence clients to choose greener designs
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1.According to the passage, The Writer magazine __________.
A.provides practical suggestions on a writing career
B.responds to all the query letters from the readers
C.introduces successful writers and their works only
D.prefers handwritten queries to electronic ones
2.When sending a query letter, a contributor must ________.
A.answer the three questions first B.attach a printed version of the story
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A.Magazine recommendations. B.Submission guidelines.
C.Published stories. D.Subscription information.
Aristotle thought the face was a window onto a person’s mind. Cicero agreed. Two thousand years passed, and facial expressions are still commonly thought to be a universally valid way to judge other people’s feelings, irrespective of age, sex and culture. A raised eyebrow suggests confusion. A smile indicates happiness.
Or do they? An analysis of hundreds of research papers that examined the relationship between facial expressions and underlying emotions has uncovered a surprising conclusion: there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that there are such things as recognizable facial expressions for basic emotions which are universal across cultures. Just because a person is not smiling, the researchers found, does not mean that person is unhappy.
This may raise questions about the efforts of information-technology companies to develop artificial-intelligence algorithms (算法) which can recognize facial expressions and work out a person’s underlying emotional state. Microsoft, for example, claims its “Emotion API” is able to detect what people are feeling by examining video footage of them. Another of the study’s authors, however, expressed scepticism. Aleix Martinez, a computer engineer at Ohio State University, said that companies attempting to obtain emotions from images of faces have failed to understand the importance of context.
For a start, facial expression is but one of a number of non-verbal ways，such as body posture, that people use to communicate with each other. Machine recognition of emotion needs to take account of these as well. But context can reach further than that. Dr Martinez mentioned an experiment in which participants were shown a close-up picture of a man’s face, which was bright red with his mouth open in a scream. Based on this alone, most participants said the man was extremely angry. Then the whole picture was shown. It was a football player with his arms outstretched, celebrating a goal. His angry-looking face was, in fact, a show of pure joy.
Given that people cannot guess each other’s emotional states most of the time, Dr Martinez sees no reason computers would be able to. “There are companies right now claiming to be able to do that and apply this to places I find really scary and dangerous, for example, in hiring people,” he says. “Some companies require you to present a video resume, which is analyzed by a machine-learning system. And depending on your facial expressions, they hire you or not, which I find really shocking.”
1.We can learn from the second paragraph that __________.
A.facial expressions are universal across cultures
B.it is hard to recognize some facial expressions
C.emotions and facial expressions may not be related
D.common facial expressions convey similar meanings
2.In the passage, the word “scepticism” (paragraph 3) is closest in meaning to “__________”.
A.similar interest B.fierce anger C.strong support D.great doubt
3.The experiment mentioned by Dr Martinez may prove that ___________.
A.facial expression is an important way to communicate
B.machine recognition of emotion is not reliable at all
C.facial expression is not the only way to detect feelings
D.people may misread facial expressions for lack of context
4.What does this passage mainly tell us?
A.Facial expressions are among the most universal forms of body language.
B.Computers can detect people’s mind by analyzing their facial expressions.
C.Facial expressions may not be the reliable reflection of a person’s emotions.
D.Companies can depend on machine recognition of emotion to hire people.
The true purpose of a business, Peter Drucker said, is to create and keep customers. “Customer value” has several definitions. I use the ______ to mean the total lifetime value of a company’s customer base. Companies can increase this value by ______ more customers, earning more business from existing ones, keeping them longer, making their experience simpler through digital improvements and so on. ______ leaders have long understood the importance of concentrating on customer value rather than pursuing short-term profits or quarterly earnings, and they’ve become enduring customer loyalty leaders in the process. It’s worth noting that a number of loyalty-leading companies are able to ______ shareholder pressure, or avoid it altogether, because they are founder-led, customer-owned, or not publicly traded.
Companies can ______ customer value in a variety of ways: To increase ______, enterprise software companies sometimes charge corporate customers change fees that can raise the total cost of ownership to as much as three times the original price. To reduce operating costs, restaurant chains sometimes ______ frozen and precooked ingredients in place of fresh and made-to-order food. The resulting profits may look good on the income statement. Such strategies may even lead to short-term earnings growth. But they also ______ potential customers and encourage disloyalty.
Given the importance of customer value, leaders should track it as much as they track other key assets (资产), such as buildings, machinery, and marketable securities. They also should reveal it in their quarterly and annual earnings releases so that investors can make ______ judgments about company performance and how it compares with that of industry peers. But most companies ________believe that measuring customer value is too difficult or costly. They continue to rely on a centuries-old accounting tradition that emphasizes physical and financial assets, and neither income statements nor balance sheets offer much ______ into the value of a company’s customers.
As investors wake up to the importance of customer value, however, many growth-stage companies now direct investors’ attention to ______ in growing the value of their customer base. Some public companies increasingly report various types of customer value metrics (指标). One of the UK’s top energy suppliers E.ON, ______, reports year-over-year customer counts in its financial report. “As a customer-focused company,” E.ON noted, “we see customer value as crucial to our success.”
This is a start, but because there are no customer-value reporting standards or requirements, investors still have a(n) ______ picture. The minority of companies that do provide customer value information decide for themselves what to disclose. ______, firms may calculate customer metrics differently or change them to tell a desired story, or simply stop reporting them if they fail to go with the company’s preferred narrative.
1.A.item B.version C.term D.definition
2.A.persuading B.consulting C.acquiring D.inspecting
3.A.Considerate B.Visionary C.Determined D.Powerful
4.A.resist B.relieve C.intensify D.maintain
5.A.raise B.adopt C.calculate D.destroy
6.A.income B.experience C.productivity D.demand
7.A.separate B.substitute C.forbid D.combine
8.A.appeal to B.rely on C.put down D.scare off
9.A.informed B.subjective C.definitive D.independent
10.A.fully B.hardly C.readily D.wrongly
11.A.suspicion B.extension C.literacy D.visibility
12.A.sacrifice B.success C.prejudice D.expense
13.A.as a result B.for example C.on the contrary D.in general
14.A.incomplete B.depressing C.convincing D.vivid
15.A.Instead B.Further C.Otherwise D.Therefore
Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
Discovering a Lost Brother
Kieron Graham always knew he had an elder brother named Vincent. His adoption papers, 1. (sign) when he was three months old, listed a brother named Vincent but no last name. Though Kieron spent years thinking about Vincent, he could never track him down.
That changed in December 2017, when Kieron’s adoptive parents gave him an DNA test as a Christmas gift. When his results came back, he was surprised 2. (find) he had a lot of DNA matches for relatives who had also taken the test. Most were distant connections, but one match was so strong that it 3. (label) “close family.” His name was Vincent Ghant. Kieron looked for him on Facebook and soon made a possible connection.
When they connected, it was 4. they had known each other their whole lives. As they talked, the brothers realized they lived about 20 minutes from each other. 5.(surprisingly), they attended the same university and majored and minored in the same subjects.
Vincent was nine when Kieron was born and remembers caring for his baby brother. But times were tough, and Shawn, who worked 15-plus hours a day as a nurse, decided that 6.(place) Kieron for adoption would give him the best chance to succeed.
“She was very emotional about that time, to the point 7. it was hard for her to put into words anything about what happened,” Vincent says.
Now the brothers had the chance to make up for lost time. They decided to meet at a local tea shop that week. One of Vincent’s concerns was that Kieron 8. hate his birth family for placing him for adoption. He was relieved Kieron didn’t, and 9. he’d grown up in a loving family. After that first meeting, the brothers played football together and celebrated Christmas with their families. “We’ll keep growing our relationship 10. it’s time to leave this planet,” says Vincent. That shouldn’t be hard. As Kieron says, “We’ve got years and years to catch up on.”
