江苏省南通市2020届高三英语第二次模拟（5月）考试试卷（含...

—Absolutely not. The pianist ________ for about half an hour when we arrive.

—No, but thank you all the same.

—I'm terribly sorry. I ________ a contract almost the whole night.

—I'm afraid not. She is ________ at the moment.

    I joined the army as an infantryman(步兵) instead of as a helicopter pilot because I only had the literacy(读写) level of an 11­year­old. I had no idea that I had a reading level that1； I had just 2 words when I didn't know them, and usually ended up getting them wrong.

    It was just before I turned 19 that I 3 my very first book. I can vividly  remember the sense of 4 and achievement I felt. It was meant for primary school children but I didn't 5. I had read a whole book, and I was 6. From then on I  read anything and everything I could get. I just wanted to get as much 7 as I could.

    I learned in those days at the 8 education centre. There are always people looking forward to helping you and 9 you stuff. But you are never going to progress 10 you keep learning. The unbelievable educational 11 that the army offers make it one of the few places that can help you climb up the ladder of social classes in the UK.

    For me, improving my literacy level had another more surprising 12. When I left the army, I was asked to write a(n) 13 of the Bravo Two Zero Mission and that led to the unexpected career change of becoming a(n) 14.

I have spent quite a bit of time over the past few years 15 schools, and workplaces, as well as army bases and businesses, to talk about my past and 16 others to start reading and writing like me. The 17 I give to all the people that I chat  to is that if I can do it, anyone can. If that is a message that even one of them accepts and 18, then it has been 19. My experience shows that the best soldier out there is the one with a 20 card.

    Pleasingly, a new study supports one of my favourite insights about writing, or getting any creative work done—though I'm pretty sure that wasn't intentional, since the  researchers were actually studying traffic jams. Jonathan Boreyko, an American engineering professor, was crawling along in his car one day, observing how drivers naturally bunch up at red lights, leaving mere inches between vehicles. Their motivation isn't a mystery：the closer you are to the car ahead, you'd assume, the better your chances of squeezing through before the light goes back to red, and the sooner you'll reach your destination, even if you also increase the risk of collisions.

    But you'd assume wrong. When Boreyko and a colleague recreated the traffic­light scenario(场景) on a special test track, they found that drivers who bunched up made no swifter progress. True, they stopped slightly closer to the light. But it also took them longer to resume(继续) moving safely, and these two factors cancelled each other out. "There's no point in getting closer to the car in front of you when traffic comes to a stop," Boreyko concluded.

    This is true of writing or similar work. People never rest in urgent pursuit of their goals. Yes, it all looks impressively productive. But as the psychologist Robert Boice argues, racing to get a task completed generally brings a cost that outweighs the benefit. You tire yourself out, so you can't shine the next day. Or you neglect so many other duties that you're forced to take an extra day to catch up. Or you start damaging work you've already produced—which is why the novelist Gabriel García Márquez said he gave up writing in the afternoon: he wrote more, but he had to redo it the next morning, so the overall effect was to slow him down. That's also why Boice insists that, when you're writing on a schedule, it's as important to be disciplined about stopping as starting, even if you're on a roll.

    Clearly, this is all a convenient way to feel superior to people who put in more hours. But that doesn't mean it's untrue. Indeed, it's scary to ask what role impatience plays in your life in general：how much of each day we spend leaning into the future, trying to get tasks "out of the way", always focused on the destination, metaphorically(隐喻地) inching closer and closer to the bumper of the car ahead. None of it gets us anywhere faster. It's also no way to live.

    In the famous musical My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle, the poor daughter of a dustman who speaks with a thick Cockney accent, becomes the unwitting(不知晓的) target for a bet between two phonetics scholars. By the end of the musical, Doolittle is able to pronounce all of her words like a member of the British elite, fooling everyone at an embassy ball about her true origins.

    It's hard to imagine a version of My Fair Lady set in the U.S.because, unlike the British, Americans seem either unwilling or unable to honestly acknowledge their own  social class. But a new set of scientific studies conducted by Michael Krauss and his colleagues at Yale University show that Americans find it easy to make distinctions about other people's social class just by listening to them speak.

    In one study, the researchers asked 229 people to listen to 27 different speakers who varied in terms of their age, race, gender and social class. The participants heard each speaker say a total of seven different words. Based on just this short audio, participants were able to correctly identify which speakers were college—educated 55 percent of the time—more than what would be expected by chance. A major limitation of this study, however, was that it used college education as a criterion for social class.

    Then in another experiment, 302 participants were asked to either listen to or read transcripts(文本) from 90 seconds of recorded speech in which the speakers talked about themselves without explicitly mentioning anything about their social class. Participants were asked to judge what they thought the social classes of the speakers were by using a 10­rung ascending(上升的) ladder of increasing income, education and occupation status. They found that participants who heard the audio recordings were more accurate in judging where the speakers fell in terms of their social status.

    To show whether these inferences have real­world consequences, Kraus and his  colleagues ran another experiment. They recruited 274 participants, all of whom had past hiring experience, to either listen to the audio or read a transcript of the content. The findings showed that participants were able to accurately judge the social class of the candidates and that this effect was stronger for participants who had heard the audio recordings. In addition, participants judged the higher­class candidates as more competent, a better fit for the job and more likely to be hired.

Taken together, this research suggests that despite our discomfort about the topic, Americans are able to easily detect one another's social class from small snippets of speech. Moreover, we use this information to discriminate against people who seem to be of a lower social class. This research identifies social class as another potential way that employers may discriminate against candidates, perhaps without even realizing it.

    Grab an ice cube from the freezer and place it on a table. Watch closely enough and you will see, well, not much at all. The ice cube is absorbing heat, but it is still an ice cube. Before it melts, it will draw heat from the environment to change from solid to liquid. Only then will it begin to slip and slide in a puddle of its own making.

    And so to A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack, retired professor of geophysics at  the University of Michigan and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) that shared the 2007 Nobel peace prize with Al Gore.

    The book gets off to a slow start. You may have to work a little before being rewarded. But given time, Pollack's account warms up and really takes off. The story he has to tell is fascinating, frightening and important.

    Despite the title, this is not a book about the world without ice. Much is given over to the impact of ice in Earth's long history, as an important force that shaped our planet's landscape, controlled migrations and influenced cultures.Pollack takes us through Antarctic and Arctic explorations, the natural cycles that bring us ice ages and milder periods without extremes of heat or cold, and the rise of climate science which, among other achievements, can recreate a history of the temperature on Earth from kilometres of ice core drilled from the polar caps.

    Pollack's intellectual power and clarity of phrase are invaluable in describing the scientific evidence for global warming, the ways in which it will affect the world, and the all­too­probable consequences. Pollack is not one to brush awkward issues under the carpet. There is serious discussion about uncertainties in climate science, and in particular, the computer models used to forecast future warming. For its forensic analysis(取证分析) and strong destruction of climate sceptic(怀疑论者) arguments alone, A World Without Ice is worth keeping on a nearby shelf.

    Some readers may find Pollack's US­centric approach occasionally grating(刺耳的). He tells of intense irrigation in southwestern Kansas, IPCC reports as big as several New York City phone directories and school­day stories from Omaha. But this is forgivable. The US is uniquely placed to act on climate change but faces a significant barrier in the shape of the outdated, influential, oil­funded anti­climate change lobby(游说议员的团体).

    Thoughtful throughout, Pollack occasionally delivers paragraphs that stay with you long after closing the book. On the subject of the book itself, he writes："Nature's best thermometer(温度计), perhaps its most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change, is ice. When ice gets sufficiently warm, it melts. Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold(门槛) from solid to liquid. It just melts."

    A World Without Ice is a call to arms. Debates about which mitigation(减缓) strategies might give us the best chances of reducing our emissions miss the point, Pollack says. If we want to avoid the worst that climate change may bring, we need "every horse in the stable pulling together, and as hard and as fast as possible"．

    Pollack's argument is attractive, persuasive and deeply upsetting, no matter the climate change tiredness that unavoidably sets in as a consequence of endless media coverage of global warming. The author's final warning comes from Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher: "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."

    Pollack leaves us in no doubt as to where that is.

    It's taken a long time, but people have finally discovered how much information companies like Google and Facebook have on them. We cannot keep sacrificing our privacy and dignity to continue using the Internet. However, at the same time, new digital innovations that millions love and enjoy require our data. So what are we to do?

    The biggest issue with the software industry's data collection is the span of time for which it stores information. The industry simply does not believe in a delete button. For instance, Google has records of all my locations for the last six years, and Facebook has my deleted messages from nearly 10 years ago. This kind of long­term data storage may seem harmless to some. To others, it may even be useful to know what exactly they were doing on a specific day many years ago, or recover messages from a loved one, or see how much their searching and browsing habits have changed over time.

    However, as government surveillance(监视) is emerging as a growing concern—especially in surveillance states—the long­term data storage enacted(实施) by all of the top tech companies is a dream come true for any current or future arbitrary government. A 2013 study surveying US writers found that after they learned of the NSA's mass surveillance programs, one in six avoided writing on a topic they thought that would subject them to any kind of surveillance, and a further one in six seriously considered avoiding controversial topics.

    This is why we need online privacy：we have the right to be curious or conduct digital actions without constantly being tracked, or fearing future reprisals(报复). As Edward Snowden has put it: "Ask yourself：at every point in history, who suffers the most from unjustified surveillance？It is not the privileged, but the vulnerable(弱势群体). Surveillance is not about safety. It's about control."

    The world is constantly changing. It may be too difficult or even impossible to stop some agencies from monitoring your internet activity, but we can at least take a first step and protect ourselves from any potential or future surveillance. They will not have access to your life's diary at the click of a button, or see everywhere you have been for 10 years, or use searching or browsing history from when you were a teenager to question your character.

    This Digital Expiry Date offers companies the benefits of getting your data, personalizing results and still making profits, while putting some control in the user's hands. You will not have to worry about governments or companies in the future mishandling years' worth of information—which would limit the damage they could do. A Digital Expiry Date would maintain online innovation and profitability, while helping to prevent any future privacy disasters.

    In a recent survey of 300 Chinese born after 1990, 54 percent of the respondents said they had hair loss, 51 percent had poorer eyesight, 45 percent gained weight and 35 percent had weakened immunity. At the same time, about 65 percent said they always stayed up late. Meanwhile, 56.7 percent of interviewees said they didn't know how to live a healthy life.

    Wu Feng, who works at a private company in Beijing, was warned in this year's physical examination report about hyperlipemia, a condition which he ascribed(归因于) to his diet and the fast pace of his life and work.

    "At work, I usually sit in the office for hours without moving my body. And when I eat at the canteen, the food is quite oily. What's more, I like to order fast food, such as fried chicken, at night when I work extra hours," Wu said.

    A post­90s programmer Wang Ke has been seeing abnormal parameters in his medical report in the past few years. He knew he had some bad habits, but it was not easy for him to change. "I know drinking too much milk tea is unhealthy, but I couldn't stop myself，" he said.

【写作内容】 1）用约30个单词概述上述信息的主要内容；2）结合上述信息，简要分析不健康的生活方式的危害；3）根据你的实际情况，谈谈如何拥有健康的生活方式。

【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。

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