上海市宝山市行知中学2022-2023学年高二下学期英语期中...

The Real Cost of Travel

Mass tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The tourism industry (take) of Fin the middle of the last century and it's been growing ever since. In the last ten years especially, more and more people have been traveling to places we had previously only read about or seen on television. But what kind of impact does tourism have on the planet?

A voyage to the end of the earth?

A large cruise ship(邮轮)can carry as many as 6,000 passengers and there are upwards of 50 such ships currently (sail) the seas. Cruise ships dump about 90,000 tons of waste into the oceans every year. Any harmful effects of this are made even worse by the fact cruises tend to visit the same places over and over again, thus concentrating the waste in specific places.

Trash on top of the world

From remote ocean habitats to the world's highest mountain, our trash is everywhere. Though far fewer people go climbing the Himalayas than on a cruise, their impact (still feel). Tourism is vital to the economy of Nepal, it is to many non-industrial countries. But for decades, climbers have been abandoning their unwanted equipment on Everest. For the last few years, clean-up teams of local and international climbers have been organizing hiking trips just (pick) up the waste. One group has brought over eight tons of waste down from the mountain!

When more is not better

Tourism of a different kind is causing problems in Europe. Construction on the Mediterranean coast has been control for years. Beach resorts form an almost unbroken line from Gibraltar to Greece, and natural habitats have disappeared under miles of concrete. And so we pollute the sea, the land, and the air. Low-cost air travel is booming, in spite of (or perhaps (help) by) economic problems. For many Europeans, low-cost flights allow them to take several short vacations a year. Yet curiously, short flights actually have a much bigger effect on climate change than long flights. So, are there (damaging) ways of seeing the world? Traveling by train, for example, is a much greener way of getting around.

Three things that make us human

All species on Earth, including humans, are unique. Yet our intelligence and creativity go well beyond those of any other animal. Humans have long communicated through language, and invented ever more complex tools that have enabled our species to and develop.

>Our brains

Without doubt, the human trait （特征）that sets us apart the most from the animal kingdom is our extraordinary brain. Humans don't have the largest brains in the world—those belong to sperm whales. We don't even have the largest brains to body size—many birds have brains that make up more than 8% of their body weight, compared to only 2. 5% for humans. Yet the human brain, which weighs about three pounds when fully grown, gives us the ability to and think on our feet beyond the capabilities of the rest of the animal kingdom. It gave us the of Einstein, Mozart and many other geniuses.

>Language

Many species communicate with vocal sounds. But language is a special form of communication. Full language, with rules for combining sounds into words, and words into sentences, probably originated at some point about 50,000 years ago. But we will probably never know when and where language originated. Fossils, DNA evidence, comparisons with other animals, and studies of how languages change over time all provide clues, but spoken language itself leaves few . It most likely evolved from a simpler form of communication. Chimpanzees use both gestures and vocal calls to communicate status and other complex 3 information. It is possible that our ancestors also expressed themselves first with gestures or simple words, then developed rules for linking them into sentences.

A Learning from each other

Our unique brains and dexterity(灵巧)of our hands use of tools possible, but we also rely on the cultural of ideas. Culture is at the heart of being human. We put our heads together, we share ideas, and learn from each other, recognizing a past, a present, and a future. We learn from the past, on this in the present, and expect the future. Without culture, each new generation would be forced to the wheel.

One of the presents in my house this Christmas was a late 18th-century volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (大英百科全书). It is a window into the discoveries and thinking of the time. The encyclopaedia is an entertaining reminder of how1 some of our current truths are bound to be. Certainties in areas we haven't yet understood will look just as ridiculous as some of these in centuries to come. And one of those we are still remarkably 2is the effect of food and exercise on our bodies. We're surrounded by confident 3on how to eat, how to avoid or reverse obesity(肥胖)，and yet the advice seems pointless while the world gets fatter. Much of what we think we know is a pile of assumptions rather than 4.

Our confusion is the theme of Spoon-Fed, a book by one of Britain's leading nutrition researchers, Tim Spector of King's College London. Its subtitle is: "Why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong." It is a call for us to 5more.

One by one Spector offers answers to recent food 6. Coffee can save our lives, he says. Three to four cups a day reduces the risk of heart disease and may cut the risk of death by 8 per cent. Butter does not damage our hearts, Spector argues, and salt is vital. Eggs have gone "from heroes to villains and back again". Don't say no to all red meat on 7grounds; occasional small quantities of high-quality unprocessed meat provide important vitamins and iron and are "probably good for you". Exercise is so good for longevity and happiness that it should be considered our No 1 drug, but the one thing for which it's 8useless is losing weight. Vitamin pills are a multibillion-pound industry with almost no proven 9but which can cause real harm. Even vitamin D, which Spector used to study and believe in, he now 10.

Spector also offers more than a set of currently 11tips. The science of nutrition has not been solved by him, as he would be the first to admit. His most 12point is that there is no one size that fits all. Our bodies are complex, and our reactions are 13: yet nobody wants to pay for the research that might explain why.

Some combination of food choices, genes, environment and the chemical reactions generated by our microbiome—the unique microbe （微生物的）combinations in our body― yes different 14for each of us, leaving some lean and two thirds of us too fat. This is the territory Spector wants to explore further and which might just allow us to 15the global trend to obesity, with all the risks we've witnessed this year.

The last time the horse seriously competed with man-made transport for speed was 1830, when a stagecoach won a race against America's first domestically manufactured steam locomotive(蒸汽机车).

Now horsekind has emerged victorious over what is in theory a far more powerful opponent— the broadband internet connection.

The contest over the gently rolling hills of the Sauerland, a pretty district in western Germany, started as a joke.

Klaus-Peter Kappest, a photographer from Oberkirchen, had been frustrated for years by the slow pace of his uploads. At 15 megabits (比特,一种信息量单位)per second, it sometimes takes him several hours to send a batch of high-resolution images to his clients. One day Mr Kappest, 52, was chatting to his colleagues at Woll, a local magazine. He suggested that he would be better off delivering his photographs by horse. "That was the most reliable communications technology in the Middle Ages," he said. "And the editor said, 'Well let's do it then, let's see which is truly faster. "

Mr Kappest turned to Jakob Schutte, a rider who lives in the same village, and Favo, his horse. The photographer burnt 4. 2GB of images on to a DVD, packed it into a bag and sent it off with Favo and Mr Schutte on the 10km ride to the printer's office in Schmallenberg.

At the same time he uploaded the data through WeTransfer, a popular file-sharing service. The computer had a 20-minute head start while Mr Schutte started off down the road, past Wilzenberg mountain. Favo made the journey in 104 minutes. The file transfer, however, was not finished until the horse had returned to Oberkirchen more than two hours later. In total it took five hours.

There was a serious point behind the story. Germany has long been known for its poor broadband and mobile internet coverage, particularly in the countryside. Two years ago a report by a network regulator found that 29 per cent of internet users received less than half the speed to which they were contractually entitled. While things have improved, a global survey carried out this year found that it took on average 16 minutes and eight seconds to download a 5GB film through a German internet connection—a little better than the UK but worse than Puerto Rico and Barbados.

In the Sauerland, Mr Kappest's area, millions of euros have been spent on a new network but the connections have yet to be switched on in dozens of towns and villages, including Oberkirchen. The horse race did its job: Mr Kappest has since been assured that his broadband will be up and running next month.

A Chinese coin found in a Hampshire field suggests that medieval (中世纪)trade     between England and the Far East was more extensive than previously thought, a historian has said.

The coin of the Northern Song dynasty dates from 1008-1016, but is of a type that remained in wide use in China for several hundred years.

It is the second Chinese coin found in a medieval context in England and experts said that its discovery added weight to the idea that the two coins were genuine medieval losses and not dropped by modem collectors.

The coin was found by a detectorist near Petersfield and about 20 miles from the only other Chinese work of art from medieval England: a piece of blue and white porcelain (瓷器)from a small cup or bowl, which could be placed in Winchester in the 14th century.

Caitlin Green, a historian at the University of Cambridge, suggested in a blog that the coin might have been brought to England at about the same time as the porcelain.

She said the finds of this coin and another Northern Song dynasty coin of 1066-77, unearthed in Cheshire, suggest the Winchester porcelain may have been part of the objects from the Far East in the 14th century rather than a one-off. This was centuries before imports of Chinese goods became widespread in the 1600s, but about the same time as Chinese pottery is known to have been owned by royals in France and Italy.

The history of Chinese goods in Britain goes back further, however, with rich Roman Britons known to have bought Chinese silk.

Dr Green said that goods from China would have reached England over several stages by way of the Middle East and Italy.

Our lives are made up of human-machine interactions一with smartphones, televisions, computers—that have the power to delight and, often, frustrate. Into this area has stepped a new class of professional: the user-experience, or UX, designer, whose job is to see a product not from an engineer's, marketer's, or legal department's perspective but from the viewpoint of the user alone. And to insist that the customer should not have to learn to speak the company's internal language. The company should learn to speak the customer's.

According to a recent survey, the role of UX designers has become a fixture on those year-end "hottest job" lists. If you want to study UX, you now have the option at some three dozen institutions in the United States, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Washington. But Ford is one of the few major industrial companies in the U. S. to put a UX expert, Jim Hackett, in charge.

At present, the question facing the car industry is basically whether high-tech giants such as Tesla and Google can learn car-making technology trains faster than Ford, GM, and other carmakers can learn software and algorithms. But Hackett reflects Ford's bet that the winner won't be the best chassis (底盘)maker or software maker, but the company that nails the interaction between man and machine. "One of the things that drew me to Jim was his commitment to design thinking, which puts the human being at the center of the equation/5 explained Bill Ford, the company's executive chairman.

Hackett retired from Steelcase, a furniture maker, in 2014 and in 2016, Bill Ford hired him to run the automaker's Smart Mobility subsidiary, which was tasked with rethinking from the ground up how cars would be driven, powered, and owned. "This is what we call the design gap," said Hackett in an interview, pointing to the space between two lines on a graph he'd drawn on a whiteboard. One line climbs up—this is a company's skill at making things, which goes up over time. Below it is a downward line, representing a company's understanding of the customer's experience. This, he said, can decline over time, as a company loses sight of the problems it's in the business of solving. The design gap may be noticeable when the job is, say, building a marginally better tailgate for the Ford F-150. But it becomes positively yawning when your industry is so thoroughly turned on its head that you're forced to ask some basic questions: Do people want to own their cars or share them? Drive them or have them driven? The flood of new technologies makes everything possible.

'The Cube has his own voice'

I arrive at the Szepilona Bisztro, on a leafy road on the "Buda" side of Budapest, holding a Rubik's Cube and searching for the man who had created it almost 50 years ago. I feel unworthy to have lunch with Emo Rubik, not the least reason of which is because the Cube I am holding has never been solved.

Rubik arrives punctually. He's been coming to this restaurant since the late 1960s, when he was a graduate student, before he had invented one of the world's most successful puzzles-a cube with 43 quintillion combinations, only one of which is correct.

At that time, Rubik was living in his family's apartment on a grand avenue on the "Pest" side of the city. He was a professor of architecture, but his room was "like a child's pocket, full of marbles and treasures".

In an attempt to help students understand three-dimensional problems, he tried to build a set of cubes that stayed together but could also move independently. He painted each side a different colour. But after he had twisted it, he realised that he could not easily return it to its original state.

"It was a more difficult task to find a system to solve it than it had been to create the thing itself/' he says. In the end, it took him a month. And solving it gave him a "happy feeling of freedom'', he said at the time. The Rubik's Cube was born, and to date more than 450 million have been sold, the craze reaching its peak in the early 1980s.

Rubik was 29 when he "discovered" the Cube in 1974. By 1979, Rubik had sold 300,000. From there, it spread across the world, with some 100 Rubik's Cubes being sold in only three years.

"I can't imagine there being a higher type for it than there had been in the '80s," he says. He motions to my Cube. Rubik comforts me with a Japanese slogan from the 1980s, coined for a game: "a minute to learn and a lifetime to master".

Small talk

Small talk is often thought of as unimportant, or perhaps worse, a substitute for real speech and thought in common opinion. Nevertheless, research suggests they will benefit.

One reason for small talk's bad reputation is that it tends, for obvious reasons, to aim for the lowest common denominator (分母). In ritualised dialogue, little information is exchanged. "Hello" signals nothing at all. "How are you?" rarely gets a fully honest answer.

However, linguists call that crucial 4€ hello, talk phatic (交流情感的)Bronislaw Malinowski, who coined the term in the 1920s; explained that in phatic talk "ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words. " If you know literally nothing about someone you can still safely presume they prefer sun to rain, and begin to establish a connection on that basis. If your bus or train is suddenly stuck, an even better opportunity arises. You can be sure your fellow passengers are not happy about it, and a shared grousing session makes them—and you—feel less alone with your inconvenience.

At work, small talk may seem a distraction from what employees are paid to do. But there is a spectrum between empty talk ("Hello"), social talk ("How was your holiday?"), social talk relevant to work ("Is Sarah still on holiday?") and pure business talk ("Has Sarah finished that report?"). A study of government departments in New Zealand by Janet Holmes shows how frequently people switch between those modes, even in brief conversations. That suggests a function beyond filling awkward gaps. Among other things, such chatter can bond equals together in a shared task. She also finds that bosses are more likely to initiate small talks with subordinates than the other round (as well as to cut it off). This is because, even without being told, a good manager realises that it can soften a following instruction.

假设你是明启中学高三学生李明，最近收到英国笔友Mike的邮件。在邮件中，他提 到自己因为刚来上海读大学，生活（如饮食和同学交流）和学习（如中文授课）上都不太 习惯。回复一封邮件，内容须包括：

1）你的建议；

2）你的理由。