上海市南模中学2022-2023学年高三上学期开学考英语试题

Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Quantum computer chips demonstrated at the highest temperatures ever

Quantum computing is heating up. For the first time, quantum computer chips (operate) at a temperature above -272℃, or 1 kelvin. That may still seem frigid, but it is just warm enough to potentially enable a huge leap in the capabilities.

Quantum computers are made of quantum bits, or qubits(量子比特), can be made in several different ways. One that (receive) attention from some of the field's big players consists of electrons on a silicon chip.

These systems only function at extremely low temperatures-below 100 millikelvin, or -273.05℃ -so the qubits have to be stored in powerful refrigerators. The electronics that power them won't run at such low temperatures, and also emit heat that could disrupt the qubits, so are generally stored outside the refrigerators with each qubit is connected by a wire to its electronic controller.

"Eventually, for useful quantum computing, we will need to go to something like a million qubits, and this sort of brute force method, with one wire per qubit, won't work any more," says Menno Veldhorst at QuTech in the Netherlands. "It works for two qubits, but not for a million."

Veldhorst and his colleagues, another team led by researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, have how demonstrated that these qubits can be operated at (high) temperatures. The latter team showed they were able to control the state of two qubits on a chip at temperatures up to 1.5 kelvin, and Veldhorst's group used two qubits at 1. I kelvin in is called a logic gate, which performs the basic operations that make up more complex calculations.

we know the qubits themselves can function at higher temperatures, the next step is incorporating the electronics onto the same chip. "I hope that we have that circuit, it won't be too hard to scale to something with practical applications," says Veldhorst.

Those quantum circuits will be similar in many ways to the circuits we use of traditional computers, so they can be scaled up relatively easily (compare) with other kinds of quantum computers, he says.

Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

Wildfires rage as China's Chongqing suffers unrelenting record heat wave

From: CNN    August 23, 2022

Thousands of emergency responders are battling to fast-spreading wildfires in China's southwestern city of Chongqing amid a weeks-long, record heat wave in the region.

The fires, which have been visible at night from parts of the downtown area, have forests and mountains around the mega city in recent days. On social media, residents in downtown Chongqing complained of smelling smoke inside their apartments, while others posted pictures of burning embers from the fires reaching their balconies.

Municipal authorities have not yet reported any casualties and said the fires are being kept under control, according to an update on Tuesday morning. More than 1,500 residents have been to safe zones, while 5,000 firefighters, police, local officers and volunteers, and seen firefighting helicopters have been dispatched to help combat the blazes, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The fires in Chongqing were the result of "spontaneous combustion" mainly caused by high temperatures, Bai Ye, a professor at China's Forest and Grassland Fire Prevention and Extinguishing Research Center told state-run Beijing Daily.

The wildfires are another knock-on effect of a crippling heat wave China's worst since 1961 -that has swept through southwestern, central and eastern parts of the country in recent weeks, with temperatures crossing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in more than 100 cities.

They are also part of a global trend of wildfires that have ravaged areas from Australia to California, with scientists saying global temperatures due to human-driven climate change increase the risk of these events.

China's heat wave has also brought demand for air conditioning and reductions in hydropower capacity due to drought conditions that have the country's critical Yangtze River and connected waterways.

Earlier this week, Sichuan province, neighboring Chongqing, extended temporary power outages at factories in 19 of the region's 21 cities. The power cuts will now run until at least Thursday, in a move the local government says will ensure residential power supplies. Last week, the province's capital city Chengdu began lights in subway stations in a bid to save electricity. Chongqing enacted an order for factories to suspend operations for seven days starting last Wednesday, according to state media.

On Tuesday morning, China issued a red alert heat warning, the highest of four color-coded levels, to at least 165 cities and counties across the country. Chinese authorities have said more than 900 million people across the country have been affected by the heat wave this summer.

Directions: For each blank in the following passage, there are four words or phrases marked A, B, C and D. Fill in each blank with the word or phrase that best fits the context.

Mind-reading AI turns thoughts into words using a brain implant

An artificial intelligence can accurately translate thoughts into sentences, at least for a limited vocabulary of 250 words. The system may bring us a step closer to1speech to people who have lost the ability because of paralysis.

Joseph Makin at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues used deep learning algorithms to study the brain 2of four women as they spoke. The women, who all have epilepsy, already had electrodes attached to their brains to 3 seizures. Each woman was asked to read aloud from a set of sentences as the team measured brain activity. The largest group of sentences 4 250 unique words.

The team fed this brain activity to a neural network algorithm, training it to identify regularly 5 patterns that could be linked to repeated aspects of speech, such as vowels or consonants. These patterns were then fed to a second neural network, which tried to turn them into words to 6 a sentence.

Each woman repeated the sentences at least twice, and the final repetition didn't form part of the training data, 7 the researchers to test the system. Each time a person speaks the same sentence, the brain activity associated will be similar but not identical. "Memorising the brain activity of the these sentences wouldn't help, so the network instead has to learn what's similar about them so that it can generalise to this final example," says Makin. Across the four women, the AI's best 8 was an average translation error rate of 3 per cent.

Makin says that using a small number of sentences made it easier for the AI to learn which words tend to follow others. For example, the AI was able to decode that the word "Turner" was always likely to follow the word "Tina" in this set of sentences, from brain 9 alone.

The team tried decoding the brain signal data into 10 words at time, rather than whole sentences, but this increased the error rate to 38 per cent even for the best performance. "So the network clearly is learning facts about which words go together, and not just which neural activity11 to which words," says Makin. This will make it hard to 12 the system to a larger vocabulary because each new word increases the number of possible sentences, reducing 13.

Making says 250 words could still be useful for people who can't talk. "We want to deploy this in a patient with an actual speech disability," he says, although it is possible their brain activity may be different from that of the women in this study, making this more 14.

Sophie Scott at University College London says we are a long way from being able to translate brain signal data comprehensively. "You probably know around 250, 000 words, so it's still an incredibly 15 set of speech that they're using," she says.

阅读理解

Of all the components of a good night's sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears; by the late 1970s, neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just "mental noise"-the random byproducts of the neural repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind's emotional thermostat, regulating moods while the brain is "off line." And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but actually brought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better. "It's your dream," says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago's Medical Center, "if you don't like it, change it."

The link between dreams and emotions shows up among the patients in Cartwright's clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily life we don't always think about the emotional significance of the day's events-until, it appears, we begin to dream.

And this process need not be left to the unconscious. Cartwright believes one can exercise conscious control over recurring bad dreams. As soon as you awaken, identify what is upsetting about the dream. Visualize how you would like it to end instead; the next time it occurs, try to wake up just enough to control its course. With much practice people can learn to, literally, do it in their sleep.

At the end of the day, there's probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep up from sleeping or "we wake up in panic," Cartwright says. Terrorism, economic uncertainties and general feelings of insecurity have increased people's anxiety. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep-or rather dream-on it and you'll feel better in the morning.

阅读理解

People have been painting pictures for at least 30, 000 years. The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals. They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill. Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain. No one knows why they were painted there. Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals. Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures.

About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet. The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was buried. Some of these pictures are like modern comic strip stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it.

By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world.

These days, we can write down a story, or record information, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawing, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting.

阅读理解

I live in the land of Disney, Hollywood and year-round sun. You may think people in such a glamorous, fun-filled place are happier than others. If so, you have some mistaken ideas about the nature of happiness.

Many intelligent people still equate happiness with fun. The truth is that fun and happiness have little or nothing in common. Fun is what we experience during an act. Happiness is what we experience after an act. It is a deeper, more abiding emotion.

Going to an amusement park or ball game, watching a movie or television, are fun activities that help us relax, temporarily forget our problems and maybe even laugh. But they do not bring happiness, because their positive effects end when the fun ends.

I have often thought that if Hollywood stars have a role to play, it is to teach us that happiness has nothing to do with fun. These rich, beautiful individuals have constant access to glamorous parties, fancy cars, expensive homes, everything that spells "happiness". But in memoir after memoir, celebrities reveal the unhappiness hidden beneath all their fun: depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, broken marriages, troubled children and profound loneliness.

Ask a bachelor why he resists marriage even though he finds dating to be less and less satisfying. If he's honest, he will tell you that he is afraid of making a commitment. For commitment is in fact quite painful. The single life is filled with fun, adventure and excitement. Marriage has such moments, but they are not its most distinguishing features.

Similarly, couples that choose not to have children are deciding in favor of painless fun over painful happiness. They can dine out ever they want and sleep as late as they want. Couples with infant children are lucky to get a whole night's sleep or a three-day vacation. I don't know any parent who would choose the word fun to describe raising children.

Understanding and accepting that true happiness has nothing to do with fun is one of the most liberating realizations we can ever come to. It liberates time: now we can devote more hours to activities that can genuinely increase our happiness. It liberates money: buying that new car or those fancy clothes that will do nothing to increase our happiness now seems pointless. And it liberates us from envy: we now understand that all those rich and glamorous people we were so sure are happy because they are always having so much fun actually may not be happy at all.

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.

A. With this modified method, we show variation in honey bee immunity in response to different classes of pathogens. B. Together, they collected about 150 nurse bees and divided them among six queenless mini hives equipped with broods of larvae to look after. C. Indeed, they actually possess fewer immune-related genes than most solitary bees. D. Over the years, scientists have uncovered how insect immunity relates to behavior, mating success, ability to find food, nutrition, energy cost, etc. E. These act as antigens which trigger the development of a protective immune response in the developing young. F. But it may still come as a surprise that human beings are not alone in having invented vaccination.

Swarm Immunity

Honeybees run vaccination programmes, too. An old saw has it that there is nothing new under the sun. Work just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Gyan Harwood of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, confirms that honeybees got there first. It also suggest that they run what look like the equivalent of prime-boost childhood vaccination programmes.

Being gregarious, honeybees are at constant risk of diseases sweeping through their hives. Most animals which live in crowded conditions have particularly robust immune systems, so it long puzzled entomologists that honeybees do not.

Part of the answer, discovered in 2015, is that queen bees vaccinate their eggs by transferring into them, before they are laid, fragments of proteins from disease-causing pathogens. But that observation raise the question of how the queen receives her antigen supply in the first place, for she subsists purely on royal jelly, a substance secreted by worked bees which are at the stage of their lives (which precedes the period that they spend flying around foraging for nectar and pollen) when they act as nurses to larvae. Dr Harwood therefore wondered if the nurses were incorporating into the royal jelly they were producing, fragments from pathogens they had consumed while eating the victuals brought to the hive by the foragers.

To test this idea, he teamed up with a group at the University of Helsinki, in Finland, led by Heli Salmela. Instead of nectar, they fed the nurses on sugar-water, and for these of the hives they laced this syrup with Paenibacillus larvae, a bacterium that causes a hive-killing disease called American foulbrood.

Directions: Read the following three passages. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Why Mindset Mastery Is Vital to Your Success

The single most important factor influencing a person's success, whether personal or professional, is mindset. What you think about has a direct impact on your behavior, and not the other way around. A seemingly small thing that makes a huge difference, mindset accounts for the primary distinction between those who succeed and those who do not. And, if you are serious about achieving success in any area of your life, you must learn to master yours.

To successfully accomplish any worthwhile feat, a person must first feel capable of achieving it. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. Mindset is essential to developing healthy self-esteem. It is an important tool that affects our daily self-dialogue and strengthen our beliefs, attitudes and feelings about ourselves. So, become the gatekeeper of your mind and plant seeds of positivity rather than criticism and doubt.

Besides, mindset is critical to drive. Drive is the constant determination to achieve an important objective. It includes the process of developing a vision for success and engaging in sustained effort over time. Without drive, achieving most goals would be difficult at best. With the power to direct focus and encourage commitment to higher purpose, mindset can easily urge someone to push past comfort zones. People with drive are self-motivated and strive to accomplish more.

No matter what goal you seek to achieve, the path to your success is sure to include some challenges. When facing an extreme hardship, a person may feel justified in bowing to defeat. For them, it can feel like an easy road. If you want to get through them, however, you will need to develop thick skin and learn to face each challenge head on. Yet, this is where mindset plays a critical role. The capacity to move through the fire, to get knocked down and not knocked out, is the proof to the power of a strong mindset.

Are you ready to command your results? If so, make a conscious decision to master your mindset and reach for greater success in the new year and beyond.

博物馆展览的展品见证了埃及的农业文明. (witness n.)

和人们认为的不一样的是，很多发达国家也搞应试教育。 (contrary)