一、单选题
根据以下材料，回答1-20题
Even if families don’t sit down to eat together as frequently as before, millions of Britons will nonetheless have got a share this weekend of one of the nation’s great traditions: the Sunday roast.
1 a cold winter’s day, few culinary pleasures can 2 it. Yet as we report now, the food police are determined that this 3 should be rendered yet another guilty pleasure 4 to damage our health.
The Food Standards Authority (FSA) has 5 a public warning about the risks of a compound called acrylamide that forms in some foods cooked 6 high temperatures. This means that people should 7 crisping their roast potatoes, reject thin-crust pizzas and only 8 toast their bread. But where is the evidence to support such alarmist advice? 9 studies have shown that acrylamide can cause neurological damage in mice, there is no 10 evidence that it causes cancer in humans.
Scientists say the compound is 11 to cause cancer but have no hard scientific proof. 12 the precautionary principle, it could be argued that it is 13 to follow the FSA advice. 14 , it was rumoured that smoking caused cancer for years before the evidence was found to prove a 15 .
Doubtless a piece of boiled beef can always be 16 up on Sunday alongside some steamed vegetables, without the Yorkshire pudding and no wine. But would life be worth living? 17 , the FSA says it is not telling people to cut out roast foods 18 , but to reduce their lifetime intake. However, its 19 risks coming across as being pushy and overprotective. Constant health scares just 20 with no one listening.
1、第1题答案是
A、In
B、Towards
C、On
D、Till
解析：
：考查介词辨析，句子中的关键词是“在一个寒冷的冬日”，需要用介词来表示时间的具体点，而选项C中的介词“on”表示在具体某一天，符合句意。其他选项的含义与句子不符。
根据以下材料，回答21-25题
A group of labour MPs, among them Yvette Cooper, are bringing in the new year with a call to institute a UK “town of culture” award. The proposal is that it should sit alongside the existing city of culture title, which was held by Hull in 2017 and has been awarded to Coventry for 2021. Cooper and her colleagues argue that the success of the crown for Hull, where it brought in $220m of investment and an avalanche of arts, ought not to be confined to cities. Britain’s towns, it is true, are not prevented from applying, but they generally lack the resources to put together a bid to beat their bigger competitors. A town of culture award could, it is argued, become an annual event, attracting funding and creating jobs.
Some might see the proposal as a booby prize for the fact that Britain is no longer able to apply for the much more prestigious title of European capital of culture, a sought-after award bagged by Glasgow in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008. A cynic might speculate that the UK is on the verge of disappearing into an endless fever of self-celebration in its desperation to reinvent itself for the post-Brex it world: after town of culture, who knows what will follow—village of culture? Suburb of culture? Hamlet of culture?
It is also wise to recall that such titles are not a cure-all. A badly run “year of culture” washes in and out of a place like the tide, bringing prominence for a spell but leaving no lasting benefits to the community. The really successful holders of such titles are those that do a great deal more than fill hotel bedrooms and bring in high-profile arts events and good press for a year. They transform the aspirations of the people who live there; they nudge the self-image of the city into a bolder and more optimistic light. It is hard to get right, and requires a remarkable degree of vision, as well as cooperation between city authorities, the private sector, community groups and cultural organisations. But it can be done: Glasgow’s year as European capital of culture can certainly be seen as one of a complex series of factors that have turned the city into the powerhouse of art, music and theatre that it remains today.
A “town of culture” could be not just about the arts but about honoring a town’s peculiarities—helping sustain its high street, supporting local facilities and above all celebrating its people. Jeremy Wright, the culture secretary, should welcome this positive, hope-filled proposal, and turn it into action.
2、Cooper and her colleagues argue that a “town of culture” award could .
A、consolidate the town-city ties in Britain.
B、promote cooperation among Britain’s towns.
C、increase the economic strength of Britain’s towns.
D、focus Britain’s limited resources on cultural events.
解析：
：细节题。根据题干关键信息Cooper and her colleagues argue和“town of culture” award可以定位在第一段。该段提到Cooper和她的同事们认为，“文化之城”的成功不仅限于城市，它能带来投资和艺术，有助于提升英国城镇的经济实力。因此，选项C“增加英国城镇的经济实力”与Cooper的观点一致，是正确答案。而选项A、B和D在原文中都没有明确提到，故排除。
根据以下材料，回答26-30题
Scientific publishing has long been a licence to print money.Scientists need journals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other scientists perform the specialised work of peer review also for free, because it is a central element in the acquisition of status and the production of scientific knowledge.
With the content of papers secured for free, the publisher needs only to find a market for its journal. Until this century, university libraries were not very price sensitive. Scientific publishers routinely report profit margins approaching 40% on their operations, at a time when the rest of the publishing industry is in an existential crisis.
The Dutch giant Elsevier, which claims to publish 25% of the scientific papers produced in the world, made profits of more than $900m last year, while UK universities alone spent more than $210m in 2016 to enable researchers to access their own publicly funded research; both figures seem to rise unstoppably despite increasingly desperate efforts to change them.
The most drastic, and thoroughly illegal, reaction has been the emergence of Sci-Hub, a kind of global photocopier for scientific papers, set up in 2012, which now claims to offer access to every paywalled article published since 2015. The success of Sci-Hub, which relies on researchers passing on copies they have themselves legally accessed, shows the legal ecosystem has lost legitimacy among its users and must be transformed so that it works for all participants.
In Britain the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or pay walled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.
Yet the new system has not worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around $500 to $5,000. A report last year pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” had been steadily rising at a rate above inflation. In someways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power.
3、Scientific publishing is seen as “a license to print money” partly because .
A、its funding has enjoyed a steady increase
B、its marketing strategy has been successful
C、its payment for peer review is reduced
D、its content acquisition costs nothing
解析：
科学出版被视为“印刷金钱的许可”部分是因为其内容获取成本为零。科学家需要在期刊上发表他们的研究，因此他们会免费提供文章，其他科学家也免费进行同行评审的专门工作，因为这是获得地位和科学知识的核心要素。因此，选项D正确，其他选项在文中未提及或者与原文内容不符。
根据以下材料，回答31-35题
Progressives often support diversity mandates as a path to equality and a way to level the playing field. But all too often such policies are an insincere form of virtue-signaling that benefits only the most privileged and does little to help average people.
A pair of bills sponsored by Massachusetts state Senator Jason Lewis and House Speaker Pro Tempore Patricia Haddad, to ensure “gender parity” on boards and commissions, provide a case in point.
Haddad and Lewis are concerned that more than half the state-government boards are less than 40 percent female. In order to ensure that elite women have more such opportunities, they have proposed imposing government quotas. If the bills become law, state boards and commissions will be required to set aside 50 percent of boards seats for women by 2022.
The bills are similar to a measure recently adopted in California, which last year became the first state to require gender quotas for private companies. In signing the measure, California Governor Jerry Brown admitted that the law, which expressly classifies people on the basis of sex, is probably unconstitutional.
The US Supreme Court frowns on sex-based classifications unless they are designed to address an “important” policy interest. Because the California law applies to all boards, even where there is no history of prior discrimination, courts are likely to rule that the law violates the constitutional guarantee of “equal protection.”
But are such government mandates even necessary? Female participation on corporate boards may not currently mirror the percentage of women in the general population, but so what?
The number of women on corporate boards has been steadily increasing without government interference. According to a study by Catalyst, between 2010 and 2015 the share of women on the boards of global corporations increased by 54 percent.
Requiring companies to make gender the primary qualification for board membership will inevitably lead to less experienced private sector boards. That is exactly what happened when Norway adopted a nationwide corporate gender quota.
Writing in The New Republic, Alice Lee notes that increasing the number of opportunities for board membership without increasing the pool of qualified women to serve on such boards has led to a “golden skirt” phenomenon, where the same elite women scoop up multiple seats on a variety of boards.
Next time somebody pushes corporate quotas as a way to promote gender equity, remember that such policies are largely self-serving measures that make their sponsors feel good but do little to help average women.
4、The author believes that the bills sponsored by Lewis and Haddad will .
A、help little to reduce gender bias
B、pose a threat to the state government
C、raise women’s position in politics
D、greatly broaden career options
解析：
根据文章内容，作者对于Lewis和Haddad提出的法案持否定态度，认为这种法案只是一种形式主义的表示，实际上对减少性别偏见没有太大的帮助。因此，正确答案是A，即这种法案对减少性别偏见帮助甚微。
根据以下材料，回答36-40题
Last Thursday, the French Senate passed a digital services tax, which would impose an entirely new tax on large multinationals that provide digital services to consumers or users in France. Digital services include everything from providing a platform for selling goods and services online to targeting advertising based on user data, and the tax applies to gross revenue from such services. Many French politicians and media outlets have referred to this as a “GAFA tax,” meaning that it is designed to apply primarily to companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon—in other words, multinational tech companies based in the United States.
The digital services tax now awaits the signature of President Emmanuel Macron, who has expressed support for the measure, and it could go into effect within the next few weeks. But it has already sparked significant controversy, with the Unite Sates trade representative opening an investigation into whether the tax discriminates against American companies, which in turn could lead to trade sanctions against France.
The French tax is not just a unilateral move by one country in need of revenue.
Instead, the digital services tax is part of a much larger trend, with countries over the past few years proposing or putting in place an alphabet soup of new international tax provisions. They have included Britain’s DPT (diverted profits tax), Australia’s MAAL (multinational anti-avoidance law), and India’s SEP (significant economic presence) test, to name but a few. At the same time, the European Union, Spain, Britain and several other countries have all seriously contemplated digital services taxes.
These unilateral developments differ in their specifics, but they are all designed to tax multinationals on income and revenue that countries believe they should have a right to tax, even if international tax rules do not grant them that right. In other words, they all share a view that the international tax system has failed to keep up with the current economy.
In response to these many unilateral measures, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently working with 131 countries to reach a consensus by the end of 2020 on an international solution. Both France and the United States are involved in the organization’s work, but France’s digital services tax and the American response raise questions about what the future holds for the international tax system.
France’s planned tax is a clear warning: Unless a broad consensus can be reached on reforming the international tax system, other nations are likely to follow suit, and American companies will face a cascade of different taxes from dozens of nations that will prove burdensome and costly.
5、The French Senate has passed a bill to .
A、regulate digital services platforms
B、protect French companies’ interests
C、impose a levy on tech multinationals
D、curb the influence of advertising
解析：
根据题干信息可以定位到文章第一段，该段提到法国参议院通过了一项数字服务税，该税法将针对为法国消费者或用户提供数字服务的大型跨国公司征收一项全新的税收。因此，正确答案是C，即法国参议院通过了一项法案，对科技跨国公司征收税款。
根据以下材料，回答41-45题
A. Eye fixations are brief.
B. Too much eye contact is instinctively felt to be rude.
C. Eye contact can be a friendly social signal.
D. Personality can affect how a person reacts to eye contact.
E. Biological factors behind eye contact are being investigated.
F. Most people are not comfortable holding eye contact with strangers.
G. Eye contact can also be aggressive.
In a social situation, eye contact with another person can show that you are paying attention in a friendly way. But it can also be antagonistic, such as when a political candidate turns toward their competitor during a debate and makes eye contact that signals hostility. Here’s what hard science reveals about eye contact:
We know that a typical infant will instinctively gaze into its mother’s eyes, and she will look back. This mutual gaze is a major part of the attachment between mother and child. In adulthood, looking at someone else in a pleasant way can be a complimentary sign of paying attention. It can catch someone’s attention in a crowded room. “Eye contact and smile” can signal availability and confidence, a common-sense notion supported in studies by psychologist Monica Moore.
Neuroscientist Bonnie Auyeung found that the hormone oxytocin increased the amount of eye contact from men toward the interviewer during a brief interview when the direction of their gaze was recorded. This was also found in high-functioning men with some autistic spectrum symptoms, who may tend to avoid eye contact. Specific brain regions that respond during direct gaze are being explored by other researchers, using advanced methods of brain scanning.
With the use of eye-tracking technology, Julia Minson of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government concluded that eye contact can signal very different kinds of messages, depending on the situation. While eye contact may be a sign of connection or trust in friendly situations, it’s more likely to be associated with dominance or intimidation in adversarial situations. “Whether you’re a politician or a parent, it might be helpful to keep in mind that trying to maintain eye contact may backfire if you’re trying to convince someone who has a different set of beliefs than you,” said Minson.
When we look at a face or a picture, our eyes pause on one spot at a time, often on the eyes or mouth. These pauses typically occur at about three per second, and the eyes then jump to another spot, until several important points in the image are registered like a series of snapshots. How the whole image is then assembled and perceived is still a mystery although it is the subject of current research.
In people who score high in a test of neuroticism, a personality dimension associated with self-consciousness and anxiety, eye contact triggered more activity associated with avoidance, according to the Finnish researcher Jari Hietanen and colleagues. “Our findings indicate that people do not only feel different when they are the centre of attention but that their brain reactions also differ.” A more direct finding is that people who scored highly for negative emotions like anxiety looked at others for shorter periods of time and reported more comfortable feelings when others did not look directly at them.
6、第41题答案是
A、Eye fixations are brief.
B、Too much eye contact is instinctively felt to be rude.
C、Eye contact can be a friendly social signal.
D、Personality can affect how a person reacts to eye contact.
E、Biological factors behind eye contact are being investigated.
F、Most people are not comfortable holding eye contact with strangers.
G、Eye contact can also be aggressive.
解析：
：根据文章内容，眼神交流可以是友善的社交信号。这一点在文章中得到了明确的说明，例如在社交场合中，与他人进行眼神交流可以展示你的关注并以友善的方式表达。因此，选项C“眼神交流可以是友善的社交信号”是正确的。
二、简答题
请将材料中划线的句子翻译成46-50中文。
Following the explosion of creativity in Florence during the 14th
century known as the Renaissance, the modern world saw a departure from what it
had once known. It turned from God and the authority of the Roman Catholic
Church and instead favoured a more humanistic approach to being. Renaissance
ideas had spread throughout Europe well into the 17th century, with the arts
and sciences flourishing extraordinarily among those with a more logical
disposition. (46) With the Church’s teachings and ways of thinking
being eclipsed by the Renaissance, the gap between the Medieval and modern
periods had been bridged, leading to new and unexplored intellectual
territories.
During the Renaissance, the great minds of
Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei demonstrated the power
of scientific study and discovery. (47) Before each of their
revelations, many thinkers at the time had sustained more ancient ways of
thinking, including the geocentric view that the Earth was at the centre of our
universe. Copernicus theorized in 1543 that in actual
fact, all of the planets that we knew of revolved not around the Earth, but the
Sun, a system that was later upheld by Galileo at his own expense. Offering up
such a theory during a time of high tension between scientific and religious
minds was branded as heresy, and any such heretics that continued to spread
these lies were to be punished by imprisonment or even death. Galileo was
excommunicated by the Church and imprisoned for life for his astronomical
observations and his support of the heliocentric priciple.
(48) Despite attempts by the Church to
suppress this new generation of logicians and rationalists, more explanations
for how the universe functioned were being made at a rate that the people could
no longer ignore. It was with these great revelations that a
new kind of philosophy founded in reason was born.
The Church’s long-standing dogma was losing the
great battle for truth to rationalists and scientists. This very fact embodied
the new ways of thinking that swept through Europe during most of the 17th
century. (49) As many took on the duty of trying to integrate
reasoning and scientific philosophies into the world, the Renaissance was over
and it was time for a new era——the Age of Reason.
The 17th and 18th centuries were times of radical
change and curiosity. Scientific method, reductionism and the questioning of
Church ideals was to be encouraged, as were ideas of liberty, tolerance and
progress. (50) Such actions to seek knowledge and to understand what
information we already knew were captured by the Latin phrase “sapere aude” or “dare
to know”, after Immanuel Kant used it in his essay “An
Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”. It was the purpose and
responsibility of great minds to go forth and seek out the truth, which they
believed to be founded in knowledge.
第（46）
7、题答案
解析：
这句话描述了文艺复兴对中世纪教会教义和思维方式的影响，以及其对现代知识领域发展的推动作用。由于文艺复兴的兴起，教会的教义和思维方式逐渐失去影响力，人们开始探索新的知识和思维方式，从而架起了中世纪和现代之间的桥梁，并进入了全新且未被探索过的知识领域。
8、Directions:
The student union of your university has assigned you to inform the international students about an upcoming singing contest. Write a notice in about 100 words.
Write your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.
Do not use your own name in the notice. (10 points)
解析：
通知需要简洁明了，按照题目要求，通知内容应包括以下几点：
1. 通知的标题居中显示“Notice”。
2. 通知的日期为“Dec. 31, 2019”。
3. 告知国际学生，学生会正在筹备一场即将到来的歌唱比赛。
4. 比赛将于2019年12月31日晚在学校礼堂举行。
5. 目前正在招募参赛者，欢迎热爱唱歌或对比赛感兴趣的学生报名参加。
6. 报名方式是通过电子邮件将申请发送至students’union@sohu.com，并在下周三之前完成。
7. 为感谢参与，将颁发丰厚的奖品。
8. 如有任何关于歌唱比赛的问题，请随时联系。
9. 该活动急需志愿者协助组织相关事务。
10. 期待大家的参与。
最后，通知的结尾部分应显示发布通知的机构，即“学生会”。
9、Directions:
Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the pictures below.In your essay, you should
1) describe the pictures briefly,
2) interpret the implied meaning, and
3) give your comments.
Write your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.(20 points)
解析：
根据题目要求，我们需要基于提供的图片写一篇短文，具体要描述图片内容，解读其中的深层含义，并给出个人评论。图片展示了一个勤奋的女孩和一个懒散男孩的对比场景，我们可以围绕时间管理这一核心展开论述。
首先，描述图片内容。女孩认真学习，展现出了良好的时间管理习惯；而男孩则懒散地躺在沙发上，没有认真阅读。通过对比，突出了良好习惯对生活的重要性。
其次，解读深层含义。良好的时间管理习惯对于个人和社会的发展都具有重要意义。在现代社会，时间就是金钱，效率是关键。良好的时间管理习惯能够帮助我们更好地应对繁忙的生活和工作，提高学习效率和工作效率，为个人和社会的发展做出贡献。
最后，给出个人评论。我们应该重视时间管理，养成良好的时间管理习惯。这不仅有助于个人的成功，也有助于社会的进步和繁荣。媒体和社会应该加强对时间管理重要性的宣传，引导公众认识到良好习惯的力量。只有这样，我们才能拥有更美好的未来。
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