上海市崇明区2020届高三英语二模拟试卷

Sneakers (运动鞋) Made from Old Chewing Gum

    Dutch fashion and shoe label Explicit Wear is hoping to solve one of life's sticky situations—the annoyance of stepping in waste chewing gum on the pavement—while helping to keep Amsterdam's city streets clean. The brand has partnered with local marketing organization Iamsterdam and sustainability firm Gumdrop (create) a limited edition sneaker for adults made from recycled gum collected from the city's pavements.

    Chewing gum causes an incredibly serious ecological problem, it is made from plastics that do not biodegrade (生物降解). It's also the second (common) form of roadside litter, after cigarette ends. An incredible 3.3 million pounds of gum are incorrectly thrown away on the sidewalks each year, (cost) the city millions of dollars to clean up. Gumdrop plans to collect waste gum from the streets of Amsterdam, clean them, and turn them into Gum-Tec, the material that forms the base of the shoe.

    The waste gum will be put to good use to make stylish kicks, will also raise awareness for the anti-littering cause. (price) at around $332, the shoes will come into the market sometime next month.

    Available for preorder now, the new Gumshoe sneakers—offered in both a bubblegum pink and a black/red colorway— (feature) long-lasting rubber outsoles (鞋子外底) shaped from recyclable compounds produced by Gumdrop, 20 percent of which are made from gum.

    Nearly 2.2 pounds of gum (use) in every four pairs of shoes. A map of Amsterdam is made into the bottom of the soles to remind people of the littering problem. Even better, the sneakers actually still smell like bubblegum,   the annoying stickiness. Just as good as any sneaker with a rubber sole, the Gumshoes help get chewing gum off our streets and keep the dangerously non-biodegradable substance out of our eco-system.

    To help spread their sustainability message, Gumshoe's creators are hoping to do is to expand their project to other major cities around the world.

Former World's Fattest Man Finds Love

    He was once the world's fattest man weighing in at an incredible 980 pounds and consuming 20,000 calories (卡路里) a day. But it seems that after losing 672 pounds following a surgery, it's not just Paul Mason's health that has a more promising —his weight loss may have also promoted his love life.

    Mr. Mason has only known his new girlfriend Rebecca for a month and the pair are yet to meet, but already the 52-year old has that Rebecca is the love of his life. The pair met online last month when Rebecca saw a television about Mr. Mason's extreme fatness—the result of overeating when a previous relationship ended. She was so touched by his situation as to get in touch, keen to help Mr. Mason get the NHS (National Health Service) to pay for a second operation to him of layers of extra skin.

    Mr. Mason said: "She didn't really think of anything at the beginning. It wasn't until the second conversation that I realised there was more there than just friends. She felt the same and brought up the idea of us being boyfriend and girlfriend."

    Mr. Mason says that he doesn't go for looks and finds Rebecca's attitude particularly attractive. "It is her personality, her and passion that has made me fall for her. We share the same ideas and interests and she has made me look at life in a new way. For a long time I couldn't really see light at the end of the tunnel, but since Rebecca's been in my life I've got a whole new of worth and excitement."

    Mr. Mason to his incredible size by eating ten times the amount needed by a normal man due to a compulsive eating disorder. As his weight rose sharply he was left unable to stand or walk before finally becoming bed-ridden and being looked after full time by carers.

    Firefighters had to knock down the front wall of his home so they could use a fork lift truck to lift him out and put him into an ambulance when he needed an operation in 2002.

    High school students who take music courses score significantly better on math, science and English exams than their non-musical peers, according to a new study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

    School administrators needing to cut budgets often look first to music courses, because the general belief is that students who devote time to music rather than math, science and English, will 1 in those disciplines.

    " Our research proved this belief 2 and found the more the students engage with music, the better they do in those subjects," said UBC (University of British Columbia) education professor and the study's principal investigator, Peter Gouzouasis." The students who learned to play a musical instrument in elementary and 3 playing in high school not only score significantly higher, but were about one academic year ahead of their non-music peers with regard to  their English, mathematics and  science skills, as measured  by their exam grades,  4 their socioeconomic background, race, previous learning in mathematics and English, and gender."

    Gouzouasis and his team  5  data from all students in public schools in British Columbia who finished Grade 12 between 2012 and 2015. The data  6 , made up of more than 112,000 students, included those who completed at least one standardized exam for math, science and English. Students who studied at least one instrumental music course in the regular curriculum counted as students  7  music.

    The researchers found the  8  relationships between music education and academic achievement were more pronounced for those who took instrumental music rather than vocal (发声的) music. The findings suggest skills learned in instrumental music 9 very broadly to the students' learning in school.

    " Learning to play a musical instrument and playing in a band is very 10 ,"  said the study's co-investigator Martin Guhn, an assistant professor in UBC's school of population and public health. " A student has to learn to read musical notes, develop eye-hand-mind coordination (协调), develop keen listening skills, develop 11 skills for playing in a band and develop discipline to practice. All those learning experiences, and more, play a role in 12 the learner's cognitive capacities (认知能力), executive functions, and motivation to learn in school."

    The researchers hope that their findings will be brought to the 13of students, parents, teachers and administrative decision-makers in education, as many school districts over the years have emphasized mathematics and literacy 14 other areas of learning, particularly music." However, the amusing aspect is that 15 education can be the very thing that improves all-around academic achievement," said Gouzouasis.

    A growing number of American states are requiring schools to teach students "media literacy" skills. California is the latest state to pass such a requirement. Media literacy, also known as news literacy, is the ability to use critical thinking skills to recognize differences between real and "fake" news.

    The new law requires California's Department of Education to provide materials related to media literacy on its website. Its goal is to give students a set of effective tools to "enable them to make informed decisions".

    The media literacy efforts were based on a Stanford University study from 2016. It found that 80 percent of U.S. middle school students failed to recognize an advertisement that looked like a real news story. The researchers also found that high school students had trouble telling the difference between a real and a fake news website.

    The study called for more efforts to help students recognize false information on the internet. It said that young people also need the skills to find out where news stories come from, and to be able to judge the trustworthiness of sources and writers.

    Carolyn Edy is a professor of communication at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. She said she has seen a clear change in her students' abilities to judge news sources. Edy said that when students used to read printed newspapers, it was easier for them to recognize fact from opinion. Now, it's necessary to teach students how to fully examine websites.

    One of Edy's goals is to teach students how to research the news organizations responsible for the stories they are reading. One way to do this is for students to ask a series of questions. One example is, "What is the overall mission of the organization?"

    Edy said young people also need to judge whether news organizations identify any possible conflicts of interest. Another question to ask is, "What do they do when they get a story wrong?" Responsible and trustworthy news organizations issue corrections if something is falsely reported, she said.

    Edy added that one good thing to come out of the rise of misinformation and fake news is that it has made many people seek out good reporting.

    Today's artificial intelligence may not be that clever, but it just got much quicker in understanding. A learning program designed by three researchers can now recognize and draw handwritten characters after seeing them only a few times, just as a human can. And the program can do it so well that people can't tell the difference.

    The findings, published in the journal Science, represent a major step forward in developing more powerful computer programs that learn in the ways that humans do.

    Although computers are excellent at storing and processing data, they're less-than-stellar students. Your average 3-year-olds could pick up basic concepts faster than the most advanced program.

    In short, "You can generalize," said coauthor Joshua Tenenbaum. But there's something else humans can do with just a little exposure—they can break an object down into its key parts and dream up something new. "To scientists like me who study the mind, the gap between machine-learning and human-learning capacities remains vast," Tenenbaum said. "We want to close that gap, and that's our long-term goal."

    Now, Tenenbaum and his colleagues have managed to build a different kind of machine learning algorithm (算法)—one that, like humans, can learn a simple concept from very few examples and can even apply it in new ways. The researchers tested the model on human handwriting, which can vary sharply from person to person, even when each produces the exact same character.

    The scientists built an algorithm with an approach called Bayesian program learning, or BPL, a probability-based program. This algorithm is actually able to build concepts as it goes.

    In a set of experiments, the scientists tested the program using many examples of 1,623 handwritten characters from 50 different writing systems from around the world. In a one-shot classification challenge, people were quite good at it, with an average error rate of 4.5 percent. But BPL, slightly edged them out, with a comparable error rate of 3.3 percent. The scientists also challenged the program and some human participants to draw new versions of various characters they presented. They then had human judges determine which ones were made by man and which were made by machine. As it turned out, the humans were barely as good as chance at figuring out which set of characters was machine-produced and which was created by humans.

    The findings could be used to improve a variety of technologies in the near term, including for other symbol-based systems such as gestures, dance moves and spoken and signed language. But the research could also shed fresh light on how learning happens in young humans, the scientists pointed out.

Warm Waters Caused Many Sea Creatures to Move Far North

    A study has found that warmer waters off North America's West Coast caused many kinds of sea life to move farther north than ever before. The study was a project of scientists from the University of California, Davis.

    They identified a total of 67 species between 2014 and 2016, during what was described as a "marine heatwave". The researchers reported that 37 of the 67 species they studied had never before been observed so far north as California. These creatures are native to an area hundreds of kilometers to the south.

    Some species were discovered outside a marine laboratory belonging to the University of California, Davis. A few were even found north of California. The scientists involved in the study believe the findings can provide valuable information for predicting future sea life reactions to warming oceans.

There is also evidence suggesting that warming waters in the Atlantic Ocean have caused some sea creatures to move northward. A 2017 report in Yale University's online magazine Environment 360 explores this subject. The report notes that for many years, the ocean has served as our best defense against climate change. This has led to warmer oceans, with experts predicting continuing rising temperatures.

    Warmer waters along the U.S. East Coast have affected a black sea fish. Researchers from Rutgers University reported the fish once was mainly found off the coast of North Carolina. But they discovered the species had traveled more than 700 kilometers northward, to waters off the coast of New Jersey.

     Using climate models, researchers predicted that some species along the U.S. and Canadian Pacific coasts will move as far as 1,400 kilometers north from their current habitats. Such movement is expected to cause major difficulties for fisheries both in the U.S. and Canada, the study found.

The Role of Humility at Work

    There are many qualities that leaders must develop if they wish to have a meaningful impact in the workplace. But among these many important qualities, the value of humility seems to be frequently overlooked. Part of this is due to common misconceptions about what it means to be humble.

    Humility tends to be overlooked in the workplace because it is frequently misinterpreted as a "weak" quality. We have been led to believe that people who are humble are easily bulldozed (欺负) by others and aren't willing to stick up for themselves. Many define humility as having a low opinion of oneself. While this may be one widely accepted view of humility today, it is actually a far cry from the true meaning of the word—and the way it should be applied in leadership. Humility isn't about being passive and weak. It's about showing respect to others and recognizing truth in all situations, including in the workplace.

    A humble professional sounds like the type of person that most of us would prefer to interact with on a daily basis. It is the type of person that can become a truly effective leader. "Humble leaders must be willing to evaluate criticism to determine if it's valid or not," said Christopher Ferry, founder of Boca Recovery Center. "The best leaders are willing to admit when they are wrong and view mistakes as learning opportunities so they can turn them into something transformative. In all my work developing the leadership skills of managers, if I could give them any quality with a magic stick, it would be humility."

    Though humility is often underrated by world at large, it's essential if you want to be successful as a leader, not just at work but in life. Reject your idea to boast or lift yourself above anyone and decide to be at the service of others.

在新冠病毒疫情期间，各校都在通过网络进行线上教学。中华中学在学校网站的贴吧里，就如何提高线上学习的有效性开展了大讨论。假设你是该校学生王平，有意在贴吧中发表你的观点，你所写的内容应包括：

1）学生该怎么做及其理由；

2）你期望老师怎么做及其理由。

注：文中不得提及你的真实姓名或学校。