I owe a young lady a letter. She wrote to me last week asking how I was, saying she was fine and that she was _______ the dress we sent for her birthday. She even drew a picture of herself wearing the dress. Then she wrote, “Please _______.”

I can’t _______ the last time someone asked me to write back. We don’t write letters anymore. The _______ is gone; there’s never anything good in the mail. We know what’s in the mail – advertisements and circulars (印刷信函).

When I was the same age as the young lady writing to me, my father took a new job. We only moved 200 miles, but it felt like we had been _______ from friends, extended family and all things familiar by two continents and an ocean. Long distance phone calls were _______ and expensive then, most often _______ for emergencies or bad news.

But people wrote. Both of my grandmothers, and two of my great-aunts wrote to me. It was special that someone took an interest in a _______ kid. That someone would take the time to put pen to _______ and share their lives and ________ about mine meant a lot. It would mean a lot to anybody, ________.

I spent many a Sunday evening straining (竭力) to ________ thoughtful and well-written letters. “Dear Aunt Mary, How are you? I am fine. I hope you are the same.”

My mother was a great letter writer. I looked forward to her letters when I left home, went to college and then traveled across the country working newspaper jobs. When I married, had children and moved again, still far from home, she wrote ________. Letters were a way of ________ the distance.

She was a natural storyteller. She could make a story about a ________ gathering where everyone sat on metal folding chairs and had nothing but water to drink sound like a wonderful party. Back then, letter writers were storytellers because they were ________ of the world around them.

As phone calls became affordable, then cheap, the flow of letters ________ and eventually stopped.But it is different for me today. What a ________ to get a letter! There were ________ circulars and advertisements in the mailbox. There was something truly special, which takes me to my most delightful task ________, “Dear Audrey .”

By Lori Borgman

1.A. comparing    B. taking    C. enjoying    D. considering

2.A. respond    B. react    C. relax    D. recommend

3.A. forget    B. remember    C. regret    D. resist

4.A. surprise    B. thrill    C. terror    D. disappointment

5.A. prevented    B. divided    C. deserted    D. separated

6.A. convenient    B. sensible    C. rare    D. common

7.A. reserved    B. prepared    C. provided    D. sacrificed

8.A. boring    B. homesick    C. troublesome    D. homeless

9.A. desk    B. envelope    C. paper    D. mail

10.A. doubt    B. talk    C. think    D. enquire

11.A. though    B. really    C. anyway    D. regardless

12.A. compose    B. compile    C. compromise    D. compensate

13.A. carefully    B. thankfully    C. faithfully    D. anxiously

14.A. keeping    B. putting    C. closing    D. finding

15.A. sad    B. dull    C. exciting    D. happy

16.A. creators    B. discoverers    C. admirers    D. observers

17.A. broke down    B. slowed down    C. settled down    D. fell down

18.A. coincidence    B. genius    C. pity    D. treat

19.A. more than    B. no more than    C. other than    D. rather than

20.A. by hand    B. at hand    C. on hand    D. in hand

—Your cousin is graduating from high school this year. Has she decided on a college?

— No, all her college plans are ______. She doesn’t even know what she wants to study!

A. over the moon    B. up in the air    C. out of the blue    D. on cloud nine

A new function of China’s official train ticket booking website ______to boost buyers’ chances of obtaining a ticket during the upcoming Spring Festival travel rush.

A. will be expected    B. expects    C. has been expected    D. is expected

Foreign Ministry spokesman said China had made representations to Canada, requiring it ______ the reason for the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei.

A. clarify    B. would clarify    C. clarifies    D. will clarify

Quality and customized smart appliances are _______ among urban households in China as cities are embracing the trend of an “intelligent home”.

A. catching up    B. catching on    C. catering to    D. carrying through

The delay in diagnosis often leads to worse health issues that _______ potentially preventable if they had been given the access in the country where they were working.

A. could have been    B. should have been    C. must have been    D. need have been

The college announced the students exchange program, most of ______ students having submitted their application forms.

A. them    B. which    C. whose    D. its

Instead of allowing past mistakes and worries to _______ your energies, you’d better devote your energy to living your life to the fullest.

A. drain    B. involve    C. suspect    D. deposit

—And what have you got to say?

—There is one point ______ I’d like your advice.

A. which    B. what    C. where    D. that

______ you give me a trial, I will do my best to afford you every satisfaction.

A. may    B. can    C. should    D. shall

After _______ into more than 50 languages, SpongeBob SquarePants,also simply _______ as SpongeBob has earned numerous awards including four Emmy Awards.

A. translating; being referred to

B. having been translated; referring to

C. translated; referring to

D. being translated; referred to

Our students were so thrilled at the news that the teachers, together with them, would go to Suzhou for spring outing ______ they jumped with joy.

A. when    B. as    C. where    D. that

The People’s Bank of China has issued a set of “reform and opening-up” gold coins, but the coins will not be in _______.

A. recognition    B. transaction    C. circulation    D. transportation

It is a different world but one ______ offers huge challenges to ambitious young people interested in ______ our Universe works.

A. which; what    B. which; why    C. that; how    D. that; that

Beijing ranks first _______the amount of residents’ reading among all cities in China this year, as was announced in data released on Thursday.

A. in the wake of    B. in terms of    C. in recognition of    D. in spite of

The teaching of language is not _______ throughout the country. There are variations among the different districts.

A. constant    B. uniform    C. steady    D. systematic

听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。

1.What is the definition of the “wealthy” people in the survey?

A. Those with over 1 million pounds in assets to invest.

B. Those with over l million pounds in estates.

C. Those with over I million pounds in stock market.

2.How many developed countries are involved in this survey including the U.K.?

A. 19.    B. 20.    C. Not mentioned.

3.Why does Iain criticize those who never want to retire on the Daily Mail website?

A. They never get satisfied.

B. They are wasting social resources.

C. They should not live to work.

4.What does Professor Sarah Harper say about people’s unwillingness of retirement?

A. Work gives them status.

B. Work makes them earn more money.

C. Work makes them respectable in their family.

听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。

1.What's wrong with the man's book?

A. One page is missing.    B. One page is blurry.    C. One page is upside down.

2.What’s the date of today probably?

A. October 13th.    B. October 23rd.    C. October 30th.

3.What is needed to confirm the problem of the book?

A. A photo.    B. The order number.    C. The receipt.

4.What should the man do with the old book?

A. Mail it back to Amazon.

B. Keep it to himself.

C. Mail it back to the publishing company.

听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。

1.Where are the speakers probably?

A. At a cafe.    B. At the man’s home.    C. At a shopping mall.

2.What do we know about Benny?

A. He is the woman's son.

B. He will fly to London next Friday.

C. He will stay in Britain for a short time.

3.What will the woman do next?

A. Go to pick up her granddaughter.

B. Have another slice of lemon pie.

C. Go to meet Nancy.

听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。

1.Why does the woman want to go to a church?

A. She wants to do some research.    B. She is religious.    C. She wants to kill time.

2.What can we learn from the conversation?

A. The church is on the east end of the Ivy Street.

B. The man’s brother is a priest.

C. The speakers are colleagues.

听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。

1.Who is the woman probably?

A. A firewoman.    B. A hotel receptionist.    C. A mechanic.

2.What do we know about the man?

A. He is still okay for the situation.

B. He is asked to push the “Open” button for a try.

C. His wife is completely freaked out.

What will the woman do later probably?

A. Watch TV.    B. Go shopping.    C. Go to work.

What does the woman mean?

A. The man is not fully recovered yet.

B. The man can leave the hospital now.

C. She is not certain about the man’s condition.

What might the man dress up like for the coming Halloween?

A. A ghost.    B. A skeleton.    C. A witch.

What’s the probable relationship between the man and Mary?

A. Father and daughter.    B. Friends.    C. husband and wife.

What is in the study?

A. A thief.    B. A rat.    C. A dog.

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.

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.