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• 1、 填空题

  Part III Reading Comprehension (40 minutes) Section A Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once. A) discouraging B) dividend C) emotional D) fragments E) impaired F) imprisoned G) incentives H) inherently I) initially J) instrumental K) merging L) predict M) probably N) pump O) swelling The idea of taxing things that are bad for society has a powerful allure. It offers the possibility of a double benefit— ___ harmful activities, while also providing the government with revenue. Take sin taxes. Taxes on alcohol make it more expensive to get drunk, which reduces excessive drinking and ___ driving. At the same time, they provide state and local governments with billions of dollars of revenue. Tobacco taxes, which generate more than twice as much, have proven ___ in the decline of smoking, which has saved millions of lives. Taxes can also be an important tool for environmental protection, and many economists say taxing carbon would be the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Economic theory says that unlike income or sales taxes, carbon taxes can actually increase economic efficiency; because companies that _____ _ carbon dioxide into the sky don’t pay the costs of the climate change they cause, carbon taxes would restore the proper ___ to the market. In reality, carbon taxes alone won’t be enough to halt global warming, but they would be a useful part of any climate plan. What’s more, the revenue from this tax, which would ___ be hundreds of billions of dollars per year, could be handed out to citizens as a ___ or used to fund green infrastructure projects. Similarly, a wealth tax has been put forward as a way to reduce inequality while raising revenue. The revenue from this tax, which some experts ___ will be over $4 trillion per decade, would be designated for housing, child care, health care and other government benefits. If you believe, as many do, that wealth inequality is ___ bad, then these taxes improve society while also ___ government coffers (金库).

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• 2、 填空题

  Section B Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer sheet 2. The Price of Oil and the Price of Carbon A) A group of corn farmers stands huddled around an agronomist (农学家)and his computer on the side of an irrigation machine in central South Africa. The agronomist has just flown over the field with a hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that takes off and lands using propellers yet maintains distance and speed for scanning vast hectares of land through the use of its fixed wings. B) The UAV is fitted with a four spectral band precision sensor that conducts onboard processing immediately after the flight, allowing farmers and field staff to address, almost immediately, any crop abnormalities that the sensor may have recorded, making the data collection truly real-time. C) In this instance, the farmers and agronomist are looking to specialized software to give them an accurate plant population count. It’s been 10 days since the corn emerged and the farmer wants to determine if there are any parts of the field that require replanting due to a lack of emergence or wind damage, which can be severe in the early stages of the summer rainy season. D) At this growth stage of the plant’s development, the farmer has another 10 days to conduct any replanting before the majority of his fertilizer and chemical applications need to occur. Once these have been applied, it becomes economically unviable to take corrective action, making any further collected data historical and useful only to inform future practices for the season to come. E) The software completes its processing in under 15 minutes producing a plant population count map. It’s difficult to grasp just how impressive this is, without understanding that just over a year ago it would have taken three to five days to process the exact same data set, illustrating the advancements that have been achieved in precision agriculture and remote sensing in recent years. With the software having been developed in the United States on the same variety of crops in seemingly similar conditions, the agronomist feels confident that the software will produce a near accurate result. F) As the map appears on the screen, the agronomist’s face begins to drop. Having walked through the planted rows before the flight to gain a physical understanding of the situation on the ground, he knows the instant he sees the data on his screen that the plant count is not correct, and so do the farmers, even with their limited understanding of how to read remote sensing maps. G) Hypothetically, it is possible for machines to learn to solve any problem on earth relating to the physical interaction of all things within a defined or contained environment by using artificial intelligence and machine learning. H) Remote sensors enable algorithms (算法)to interpret a field’s environment as statistical data that can be understood and useful to farmers for decision-making. Algorithms process the data, adapting and learning based on the data received. The more inputs and statistical information collected, the better the algorithm will be at predicting a range of outcomes. And the aim is that farmers can use this artificial intelligence to achieve their goal of a better harvest through making better decisions in the field. I) In 2011, IBM, through its R&D Headquarters in Haifa, Israel, launched an agricultural cloud-computing project. The project, in collaboration with a number of specialized IT and agricultural partners, had one goal in mind—to take a variety of academic and physical data sources from an agricultural environment and turn these into automatic predictive solutions for farmers that would assist them in making real-time decisions in the field. J) Interviews with some of the IBM project team members at the time revealed that the team believed it was entirely possible to “algorithm” agriculture, meaning that algorithms could solve any problem in the world. Earlier that year, IBM’s cognitive learning system, Watson, competed in the game Jeopardy against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings with astonishing results. Several years later, Watson went on to produce ground-breaking achievements in the field of medicine. K) So why did the project have such success in medicine but not agriculture? Because it is one of the most difficult fields to contain for the purpose of statistical quantification. Even within a single field, conditions are always changing from one section to the next. There’s unpredictable weather, changes in soil quality, and the ever-present possibility that pests and diseases may pay a visit. Growers may feel their prospects are good for an upcoming harvest, but until that day arrives, the outcome will always be uncertain. L) By comparison, our bodies are a contained environment. Agriculture takes place in nature, among ecosystems of interacting organisms and activity, and crop production takes place within that ecosystem environment. But these ecosystems are not contained. They are subject to climatic occurrences such as weather systems, which impact upon hemispheres as a whole, and from continent to continent. Therefore, understanding how to manage an agricultural environment means taking literally many hundreds if not thousands of factors into account. M) What may occur with the same seed and fertilizer program in the United States’ Midwest region is almost certainly unrelated to what may occur with the same seed and fertilizer program in Australia or South Africa. A few factors that could impact on variation would typically include the measurement of rain per unit of a crop planted, soil type, patterns of soil degradation, daylight hours, temperature and so forth. N) So the problem with deploying machine learning and artificial intelligence in agriculture is not that scientists lack the capacity to develop programs and protocols to begin to address the biggest of growers’ concerns; the problem is that in most cases, no two environments will be exactly alike, which makes the testing, validation and successful rollout of such technologies much more laborious than in most other industries. O) Practically, to say that AI and Machine Learning can be developed to solve all problems related to our physical environment is to basically say that we have a complete understanding of all aspects of the interaction of physical or material activity on the planet. After all, it is only through our understanding of “the nature of things” that protocols and processes are designed for the rational capabilities of cognitive systems to take place. And, although AI and Machine Learning are teaching us many things about how to understand our environment, we are still far from being able to predict critical outcomes in fields like agriculture purely through the cognitive ability of machines. P) Backed by the venture capital community, which is now investing billions of dollars in the sector, most agricultural technology startups today are pushed to complete development as quickly as possible and then encouraged to flood the market as quickly as possible with their products. Q) This usually results in a failure of a product, which leads to skepticism from the market and delivers a blow to the integrity of Machine Learning technology. In most cases, the problem is not that the technology does not work, the problem is that industry has not taken the time to respect that agriculture is one of the most uncontained environments to manage. For technology to truly make an impact on agriculture, more effort, skills, and funding is needed to test these technologies in farmers’ fields. R) There is huge potential for artificial intelligence and machine learning to revolutionize agriculture by integrating these technologies into critical markets on a global scale. Only then can it make a difference to the grower, where it really counts. ___ Farmers will not profit from replanting once they have applied most of the fertilizer and other chemicals to their fields. ___ Agriculture differs from the medical science of the human body in that its environment is not a contained one. ___ The agronomist is sure that he will obtain a near accurate count of plant population with his software. ___ The application of artificial intelligence to agriculture is much more challenging than to most other industries. ___ Even the farmers know the data provided by the UAV is not correct. ___ The pressure for quick results leads to product failure, which, in turn, arouses doubts about the applicability of AI technology to agriculture. ___ Remote sensors are aimed to help farmers improve decision-making to increase yields. ___ The farmer expects the software to tell him whether he will have to replant any parts of his farm fields. ___ Agriculture proves very difficult to quantify because of the constantly changing conditions involved. ___ The same seed and fertilizer program may yield completely different outcomes in different places.

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• 3、 问答题

  Part I Writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on why students should be encouraged to develop creativity.You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

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• 4、 问答题

  Part IV Translation (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English. You should write your answer on Answer Sheet 2. 青藏铁路是世界上最高最长的高原铁路，全长1 956公里，其中有960公里在海拔4 000多 米之上，是连接西藏和中国其他地区的第一条铁路。由于铁路穿越世界上最脆弱的生态系统， 在建设期间和建成后都采取了生态保护措施，以确保其成为一条“绿色铁路”。青藏铁路大大 缩短了中国内地与西藏之间的旅行时间。更重要的是，它极大地促进了西藏的经济发展，改善 了当地居民的生活。铁路开通后，愈来愈多的人选择乘火车前往西藏，这样还有机会欣赏沿线 的美景。

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• 5、 复合题

  Part II Listening Comprehension (30 minutes) Section A Directions: In this section, you will hear two long conversations. At the end of each conversation, you will hear four questions. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.

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• 6、 复合题

  Section C Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. Passage One Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage. What is the place of art in a culture of inattention? Recent visitors to the Louvre report that tourists can now spend only a minute in front of the Mona Lisa before being asked to move on. Much of that time, for some of them, is spent taking photographs not even of the painting but of themselves with the painting in the background. One view is that we have democratised tourism and gallery-going so much that we have made it effectively impossible to appreciate what we’ve travelled to see. In this oversubscribed society, experience becomes a commodity like any other. There are queues to climb Mt. Jolmo Lungma as well as to see famous paintings. Leisure, thus conceived, is hard labour, and returning to work becomes a well-earned break from the ordeal. What gets lost in this industrialised haste is the quality of looking. Consider an extreme example, the late philosopher Richard Wollheim. When he visited the Louvre he could spent as much as four hours sitting before a painting. The first hour, he claimed, was necessary for misperceptions to be eliminated. It was only then that the picture would begin to disclose itself. This seems unthinkable today, but it is still possible to organise. Even in the busiest museums there are many rooms and many pictures worth hours of contemplation which the crowds largely ignore. Sometimes the largest crowds are partly the products of bad management; the Mona Lisa is such a hurried experience today partly because the museum is being reorganised. The Uffizi in Florence, another site of cultural pilgrimage, has cut its entry queues down to seven minutes by clever management. And there are some forms of art, those designed to be spectacles as well as objects of contemplation, which can work perfectly well in the face of huge crowds. Olafur Eliasson’s current Tate Modern show, for instance, might seem nothing more than an entertainment, overrun as it is with kids romping (喧闹地玩耍)in fog rooms and spray mist installations. But it’s more than that: where Eliasson is at his most entertaining, he is at his most serious too, and his disorienting installations bring home the reality of the destructive effects we are having on the planet — not least what we are doing to the glaciers of Eliasson’s beloved Iceland. Marcel Proust, another lover of the Louvre, wrote: “ It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees the universe, whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any on the moon.”If any art remains worth seeing, it must lead us to such escapes. But a minute in front of a painting in a hurried crowd won’t do that.

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• 7、 复合题

  Passage Two Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage. Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bellies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It’s all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are annoyed that new dietary recommendations of the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact. Broadly, the 2016 - 2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: More vegetables, leaner meats and far less sugar. But Americans consume more calories per capita than almost any other country in the world. So the things Americans eat have a huge impact on climate change. Soil tilling releases carbon dioxide, and delivery vehicles emit exhaust. The government’s dietary guidelines could have done a lot to lower that climate cost. Not just because of their position of authority: The guidelines drive billions of dollars of food production through federal programs like school lunches and nutrition assistance for the needy. On its own, plant and animal agriculture contributes 9 percent of all the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s not counting the fuel burned in transportation, processing, refrigeration, and other waypoints between farm and belly. Red meats are among the biggest and most notorious emitters, but trucking a salad from California to Minnesota in January also carries a significant burden. And greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the whole story. Food production is the largest user of fresh water, largest contributor to the loss of biodiversity, and a major contributor to using up natural resources. All of these points and more showed up in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s scientific report, released last February. Miriam Nelson chaired the subcommittee in charge of sustainability for the report, and is disappointed that eating less meat and buying local food aren’t in the final product. “Especially if you consider that eating less meat, especially red and processed, has health benefits,” she says. So what happened? The official response is that sustainability falls too far outside the guidelines’ official scope, which is to provide “nutritional and dietary information.” Possibly the agencies in charge of drafting the decisions are too close to the industries they are supposed to regulate. On one hand, the USDA is compiling dietary advice. On the other, their clients are US agriculture companies. The line about keeping the guidelines’ scope to nutrition and diet doesn’t ring quite right with researchers. David Wallinga, for example, says, “ In previous guidelines, they’ve always been concerned with things like food security — which is presumably the mission of the USDA. You absolutely need to be worried about climate impacts and future sustainability if you want secure food in the future.”

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• 8、 填空题

  A) credentials I) scale B) credited J) strangle C) cumulative K) subtle D) disruptions L) summoned E) federal F) foreseeable G) predictions O) wedge H) preference M) survive N) vacancy Part III Reading Comprehension (40 minutes) Section A Virtually every activity that entails or facilitates in-person human interaction seems to be in the midst of a total meltdown as the coronavirus (冠状病毒)outbreak erases Americans’ desire to travel. Amtrak says bookings are down 50 percent and cancelations are up300 percent. Hotels in San Francisco are experiencing ___ rates between 70 and 80 percent. Broadway goes dark on Thursday night. Universities, now emptying their campuses, have never tried online learning on this ___ _. White-collar companies like Amazon, Apple, and the New York Times are asking employees to work from home for the ___ future. But what happens after the coronavirus? In some ways, the answer is: All the old normal stuff. The pandemic(大流行病)will take lives, ___ economies and destroy routines, but it will pass. Americans will never stop going to basketball games. They won’t stop going on vacation. They’ll meet to do business. No decentralizing technology so far — not telephones, not television, and not the internet — has dented that human desire to shake hands, despite technologists’ ___ to the contrary. Yet there are real reasons to think that things will not return to the way they were last week. Small ___ create small societal shifts; big ones change things for good. The New York transit strike of 1980 is ___ with prompting several long-term changes in the city, including bus and bike lanes, and women wearing sports shoes to work. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 prompted the development of national health care in Europe. Here and now, this might not even be a question of ___ . It’s not clear that the cruise industry will ___ . Or that public transit won’t go broke without ___ assistance. The infrastructure might not even be in place to do what we were doing in 2019.

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• 9、 填空题

  Section B Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer sheet 2. Slow Hope A) Our world is full of—mostly untold—stories of slow hope, driven by the idea that change is possible. They are ‘slow’ in their unfolding, and they are slow because they come with setbacks. B) At the beginning of time—so goes the myth—humans suffered, shivering in the cold and dark until the titan (巨人)Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Just as in the myth, technology—first fire and stone tools, and later farming, the steam engine and industry, fossil fuels, chemicals and nuclear power—has allowed us to alter and control the natural world. The myth also reminds us that these advances have come at a price: as a punishment for Prometheus’ crime, the gods created Pandora, and they gave her a box filled with evils and curses. When Pandora’s box was opened, it unleashed swarms of diseases and disasters upon humankind. C) Today we can no longer ignore the ecological curses that we have released in our search for warmth and comfort. In engineering and exploiting and transforming our habitat, we have opened tens of thousands of Pandora’s boxes. In recent decades, environmental threats have expanded beyond regional boundaries to have global reach and, most hauntingly, are multiplying at a dizzying rate. On a regular basis, we are reminded that we are running out of time. Year after year, faster and faster, consumption outpaces the biological capacity of our planet. Stories of accelerated catastrophe multiply. We fear the breakdown of the electric grid, the end of non-renewable resources, the expansion of deserts, the loss of islands, and the pollution of our air and water. D) Acceleration is the signature of our time. Populations and economic activity grew slowly for much of human history. For thousands of years and well into early modern times, world economies saw no growth at all, but from around the mid-19th century and again, in particular, since the mid-20th, the real GDP has increased at an enormous speed, and so has human consumption. In the Middle Ages, households in Central Europe might have owned fewer than 30 objects on average; in 1900, this number had increased to 400, and in 2020 to 15,000. The acceleration of human production, consumption and travel has changed the animate and inanimate spheres. It has echoed through natural processes on which humans depend. Species extinction, deforestation, damming of rivers, occurrence of floods, the depletion of ozone, the degradation of ocean systems and many other areas are all experiencing acceleration. If represented graphically, the curve for all these changes looks rather like that well-known hockey stick: with little change over millennia (数千年) and a dramatic upswing over the past decades. E) Some of today’s narratives about the future seem to suggest that we too, like Prometheus, will be saved by a new Hercules, a divine engineer, someone who will mastermind, manoeuvre and manipulate our planet. They suggest that geoengineering, cold fusion or faster-than-light spaceships might transcend once and for all the terrestrial constraints of rising temperatures, lack of energy, scarcity of food, lack of space, mountains of waste, polluted water—you name it. F) Yet, if we envisage our salvation to come from a deus ex machina (解围之神)，from a divine engineer or a tech solutionist who will miraculously conjure up a new source of energy or another cure-all with revolutionary potency, we might be looking in the wrong place. The fact that we now imagine our planet as a whole does not mean that the ‘rescue’ of our planet will come with one big global stroke of genius and technology. It will more likely come by many small acts. Global heating and environmental degradation are not technological problems. They are highly political issues that are informed by powerful interests. Moreover, if history is a guide, then we can assume that any major transformations will once again be followed by a huge set of unintended consequences. So what do we do? G) This much is clear: we need to find ways that help us flatten the hockey-stick curves that reflect our ever-faster pace of ecological destruction and social acceleration. If we acknowledge that human manipulation of the Earth has been a destructive force, we can also imagine that human endeavours can help us build a less destructive world in the centuries to come. We might keep making mistakes. But we will also keep learning from our mistakes. H) To counter the fears of disaster, we need to identify stories, visions and actions that work quietly towards a more hopeful future. Instead of one big narrative, a story of unexpected rescue by a larger-than-life hero, we need multiple stories: we need stories, not only of what Rob Nixon of Princeton University has called the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation (that is, the damage that is often invisible at first and develops slowly and gradually), but also stories of what I call ‘slow hope’. I) We need an acknowledgement of our present ecological plight but also a language of positive change, visions of a better future. In The Principle of Hope (1954-1959), Ernst Bloch, one of the leading philosophers of the future, wrote that ‘the most tragic form of loss...is the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different’. We need to identify visions and paths that will help us imagine a different, more just and more ecological world. Hope, for Bloch, has its starting point in fear, in uncertainty, and in crisis: it is a creative force that goes hand in hand with utopian (乌托邦的)‘wishful images’. It can be found in cultural products of the past — in fairy tales, in fiction, in architecture, in music, in the movie — in products of the human mind that contain ‘the outlines of a better world’. What makes us ‘authentic’ as humans are visions of our ‘potential’. In other words: living in hope makes us human. J) The power of small, grassroots movements to make changes that spread beyond their place of origin can be seen with the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy in the 1980s. The rise of fast-food restaurants after the Second World War produced a society full of cheap, industrially made foodstuffs. Under the leadership of Carlo Petrini, the Slow Food movement began in Piedmont, a region of Italy with a long history of poverty, violence and resistance to oppression. The movement transformed it into a region hospitable to traditional food cultures — based on native plants and breeds of animals. Today, Slow Food operates in more than 160 countries, poor and rich. It has given rise to thousands of projects around the globe, representing democratic politics, food sovereignty, biodiversity and sustainable agriculture. K) The unscrupulous (无所顾忌的)commodification of food and the destruction of foodstuffs will continue to devastate soils, livelihoods and ecologies. Slow Food cannot undo the irresistible developments of the global food economy, but it can upset its theorists, it can‘speak differently’, and it can allow people and their local food traditions and environments to flourish. Even in the United States—the fast-food nation—small farms and urban gardens are on the rise. The US Department of Agriculture provides an Urban Agriculture Toolkit and, according to a recent report, American millennials (千禧一代)are changing their diets. In 2017, 6 per cent of US consumers claimed to be strictly vegetarian, up from 1 per cent in 2014. As more people realise that ‘eating is an agricultural act’, as the US poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry put it in 1989, slow hope advances. ___ It seems some people today dream that a cutting-edge new technology might save them from the present ecological disaster. ___ According to one great thinker, it is most unfortunate if we lose the ability to think differently. ___ Urgent attention should be paid to the ecological problems we have created in our pursuit of a comfortable life. ___ Even in the fast-food nation America, the number of vegetarians is on the rise. ___ The deterioration of the ecological system is accelerating because of the dramatic increase of human production and consumption. ___ It is obvious that solutions must be found to curb the fast worsening environment and social acceleration. ___ Many people believe changing the world is possible, though it may take time and involve setbacks. ___ It might be wrong to expect that our world would be saved at one stroke with some miraculous technology. ___ It is human nature to cherish hopes for a better world. ___ Technology has given us humans the power to change the natural world, but we have paid a price for the change.

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• 10、 问答题

  Part I Writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on why students should be encouraged to effective communication skills. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

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