北京市东城区2020-2021学年高二英语上学期期末考试试题.doc

北京市东城区2020-2021学年高二英语上学期期末考试试题

北京市东城区2020-2021学年高二英语上学期期末考试试题

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11

北京市东城区2020-2021学年高二英语上学期期末考试试题（无答案）
本试卷共11页，共100分。考试时长90分钟。考生务必将答案答在答题卡上，在试卷上作答无效，考试结束后，将本试卷和答题卡一并交回。
第一部分：知识运用（共两节，30分）
第一节　完形填空（共10小题；每小题1.5分，共15分）
阅读下面短文，掌握其大意，从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中，选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。
A school bus driver returned to college to become a high school history teacher, thanks to some 1 students.
Clayton Ward is a history teacher, and as such, 2 the time he’d spend chatting with students about their history classes as he 3 them to and from school.
“After several of these discussions, some of the students would tell me they wanted me to be their 4 ,” he said. “That small mention from those kids … it 5 me and gave me the motivation to complete a goal I had started years ago.”
6 , Ward went to college after his high school graduation; but after a year, he had to leave and soon started driving buses. But he still valued 7 , and talking with the students on the bus route renewed his sense of passion for expanding and teaching young minds.
Ward enrolled (注册) at a community college in May 2019, and 8 to take his classes full time while also still driving his bus.
“It wasn’t always 9 . I would drive my route in the morning and afternoon, take classes in between shifts and take night classes,” he said. “I would think of those students and all the years I wanted to make this happen, and it helped me focus my energy.”
“You wouldn’t think that kids can do something like that, to give me the 10 and ambition to go back to school,” Ward said, “It’s kind of crazy that such a small thing can make such an impact on your life.”
1. A. energetic B. supportive C. considerate D. generous
2. A. enjoyed B. found C. saved D. missed
3. A. attended B. watched C. bussed D. trained
4. A. driver B. adviser C. friend D. teacher
5. A. aimed at B. stuck with C. occurred to D. called on
6. A. Initially B. Consequently C. Apparently D. Ultimately
7. A. success B. communication C. responsibility D. education
8. A. hesitated B. offered C. managed D. happened
9. A. suitable B. hopeful C. lucky D. easy
10. A. right B. drive C. chance D. freedom
第二节　语法填空（共10小题；每小题1.5分，共15分）
阅读下列短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写1个适当的单词，在给出提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。
A
Adolph Kiefer, a famous swimmer, 11 (die) at the age of 98 in 2017. Kiefer was America’s 12 (old) living Olympic champion. He was the first in the world to break the one-minute mark in the 100-meter backstroke (仰泳) when he was a 16-year-old student. One year later, Kiefer won the gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke competition at the Olympic Games, 13 (set) a record that would stand for 20 years.
B
About 5,000 years ago, a strange circle of blue stones were set up in Britain. The structure has 80 stones in all and each stone 14 (weigh) about three tons. No one is sure 15 built the structure. One of the most popular beliefs is that the Celts built it. Some even think creatures from another planet who visited Earth left it behind just 16 (let) us know they were here.
C
Have you ever attended a Cinco de Mayo festival? If you have not, you do not know what you are missing. 17 Spanish, the words cinco de mayo mean fifth of May. It is a day for the 18 (celebrate) of the fighting spirit of Mexican people. The festival 19 (hold) both in Mexico and in parts of the United States, especially the Southwest, 20 there is a larger Hispanic population.
第二部分：阅读理解（共两节，38分）
第一节　（共14小题；每小题2分，共28分）
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中，选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。
A
To increase your chances of landing an assignment for a travel guidebook, you need to find out what the publishers are looking for. Here are links to their submission guidelines with a few special requirements and tips.
Fonor’s
Fonor’s is a publishing company of both travel guidebooks and online content covering thousands of destinations worldwide. Visit F and near the bottom of the page you’ll find “Write for Us” with information for submitting articles. Do remember to attach a copy of one of your other works when contributing.
☆TIP: Fonor’s always hires writers who live in the destinations they cover. So, it’s good to remember: While you may want to write about a foreign destination, more than likely you’re closer to being an expert about the place where you live.
Workman
Workman publishes unique and unexpected travel guides such as 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris. Consider them if you’re interested in writing a nontraditional travel guide. You can find their submission guidelines at They require a typical nonfiction book proposal with a suggested table of contents and author information. A chapter of your other books is also required. Send your submissions to submissions@.
☆TIP: If they don’t accept your article, you might be lucky enough to get feedback about why.
Lonely Planet
Writers can get in touch with Lonely Planet by visiting their “Become a Contributor” page at LonelyP At that page you’ll find a form asking for a resume (简历) and links to your other writing, but there’s also space for more travel-related information such as geographical knowledge and level of fluency in relevant languages.
☆TIP: You’ll find they also accept articles for “Travel News.” If they say yes, you may get another chance for a bigger job such as a guidebook.
For more information on publishers, please visit ContributorsD.
21. This passage is mainly for ________.
A. guides B. writers C. travelers D. publishers
22. Who may provide advice on how to improve articles?
A. Fonor’s. B. Workman. C. Lonely Planet. D. Contributor’s Digest.
23. What is required by all the companies?
A. Geographical knowledge. B. Nontraditional ideas.
C. Overseas experience. D. Previous writing.
B
Craig Foster, bare-chested, was diving in bitterly cold waters off the southern-most tip of Africa when he saw her—an octopus hiding under a coat of shells and stones.
Deeply attracted, he began following this incredibly shy creature. He kept coming back every day to the same place where he first met her, trying to stay very still in her presence. For weeks she refused him: hiding in her home, or pushing her liquid body into the nearest crack to escape. And then, after Foster’s dogged persistence for 26 days, she reached out and touched him.
In the documentary “My octopus Teacher”, this tender moment moves you in a way you never thought an octopus tentacle (触手) wrapped around a human hand could. The nature documentary won Best Feature at the EarthxFilm Festival 2020.
“If you gain the trust of that animal over a period of months, it will actually ignore you to a certain degree and carry on with its normal life, and allow you to step inside its secret world,” Foster says in his documentary.
We see her outsmarting a shark by riding on its back, growing a new tentacle after surviving a shark attack, and finally wasting away after laying her eggs. “The octopus showed me many behaviors that were completely new to science,” Foster says.
After years of filming some of the planet’s most dangerous animals, Foster was berm out, depressed, and disconnected. “I was struggling. My only way to heal felt like I needed to be in the ocean, my go-to happy place as a child,” he says.
Completely involving himself in the underwater world has calmed his mind. Over the years other animals have reached out to make contact, including dolphins, whales and even sharks. “But nothing has compared to this ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ bond with the octopus,” Foster says.
The octopus changed Foster’s life forever. Foster says the octopus taught him that humans are part of the natural world, and not simply visitors. “Your own role and place in the natural world is the most precious gift we humans have received,” he says.
24. Foster followed the octopus with ________.
A. great patience B. a professional goal C. scientific curiosity D. an adventurous spirit
25. According to “My Octopus Teacher”, the octopus ________.
A. enjoyed Foster’s attention B. taught Foster surviving skills
C. placed trust in Foster gradually D. benefited from Foster’s company
26. What did Foster learn from the experience?
A. The natural world offers many gifts. B. Humans belong to the natural world.
C. The natural world never fails to impress.D. Humans should protect the natural world.
C
Once small formers in Masii, a remote village in Kenya, have picked their crops, all they can do is wait until a buyer trucks through. The system works fairly well for beans and corn, but mangoes—the area’s other main crop—spoil (腐烂) more quickly. If the trader is late, they rot.
Obadiah Kisaingu, a farmer in Masii, estimates 40% of the village’s mango crop is lost to spoilage. But a simple coating could change that. A company, SmartTech, has created a product that doubles the shelf life of fresh produce, enabling farmers like Kisaingu to access far-off, larger markets. More time for fresh produce on grocers’ shelves also means less food waste—a $2.6 trillion problem, according to the United Nations’ food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
James Rogers, CEO of SmartTech, who has a Ph. D in materials science, wanted to solve the problem for food much in the same way that oxide barriers preventing rust (锈) have achieved for steel. Fortunately, researchers have found when plants made the jump from water to land hundreds of millions of years ago, they developed cutin, a barrier which is made of fatty adds that link together to form a seal around the plant, helping keep water in.
The cutin was such a grand strategy that today you’ll still find it across the plant kingdom. Not that it’s exactly the same solution across the board: An orange can last longer than a strawberry not so much because of the thickness of its skin, but because of the difference in the arrangement of those cutin molecules (分子) on the surface. SmartTech’s challenge was first identifying the key components of cutin. After extensive trials, Rogers and his team developed a natural and tasteless protective coating from plant material—stems, leaves and skins. The product extends the sweet spot between ripening and rot. And best of all, the treated produce doesn’t require refrigeration.
SmartTech traveled a long road to get here. It was six years from launch before products applied with the substance were in stores. SmartTech-treated fruits and vegetables are already in large grocery chains in Europe and the U. S. and the company recently gained regulatory approval in several less developed countries in South America.
“SmartTech has huge potential to turn poor farmers in Africa into commercial farmers,” says Rogers. “That means more money in pockets, and more food in stomachs.” But whether the company can cost-effectively reach small farmers in far-off areas still remains a challenge.
27. The author mentions the small farmers in Kenya to ________.
A. stress their need for preserving produce
B. show their difficulty in harvesting crops
C. evaluate their loss caused by slow transport
D. help express their wish to reach larger markets
28. What can we learn about SmartTech’s product?
A. It is financially supported by FAO.
B. It is intended to replace refrigeration.
C. It is designed to thicken produce’s skin.
D. It is based on plants’ own defence system.
29. What does James Rogers expect?
A. To profit farmers. B. To earn more money.
C. To produce more food. D. To expand grocery chains.
30. The main purpose of the passage is to ________.
A. prove a theory B. promote a product
C. introduce a company D. present a technology
D
Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive (认知的) psychologist at Harvard, has spent her career testing the world’s most complex learning system—the mind of a baby. Babies might seem like no match for artificial intelligence (AI). They are terrible at labeling images, hopeless at raining text, and awful at-video games. Then again, babies can do things beyond the reach of any AI. By just a few months old, they’ve begun to grasp the foundations of language, such as grammar. They’ve started to understand how to adapt to unfamiliar situations.
Yet even experts like Spelke don’t understand precisely how babies—or adults, for that matter—learn. That gap points to a puzzle at the heart of modern artificial intelligence: We’re not sure what to aim for.
Consider one of the most impressive examples of AI, Alpha Zero, a programme that plays board games with superhuman skill. After playing thousands of games against itself at a super speed, and learning from winning positions. Alpha Zero independently discovered several famous chess strategies and even invented new ones. It certainly seems like a machine eclipsing human cognitive abilities. But Alpha Zero needs to play millions more games than a person during practice to learn a game. Most importantly, it cannot take what it has learned from the game and apply it to another area.
To some AI experts, that calls for a new approach. In a November research paper, Francois Chollet, a well-known AI engineer, argued that it’s misguided to measure machine intelligence just according to its skills at specific tasks. “Humans don’t start out with skills: they start out with a broad ability to acquire new skills,” he says. “What a strong human chess player is demonstrating is not only the ability to play chess, but the potential to fulfill any task of a similar difficulty.” Chollet posed a set of problems, each of which requires an AI programme to arrange colored squares on a grid (格栅) based on just a few prior examples. It’s not bard for a person. But modern—machine learning programmes—trained on huge amounts of data—cannot learn from so few examples.
Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds & Machines, works closely with Spelke and uses insights from cognitive science as inspiration for his programmes. He says much of modern AI misses the bigger picture, comparing it to a cartoon about a two—dimensional world populated by simple geometrical (几何形的) people. AI programmes will need to learn in new ways—for example, by drawing causal inferences rather than simply finding patterns. “At some point—you know, if you’re intelligent—you realize maybe there’s something else out there,” he says.
31. Compared to an advanced AI programme, a baby might be better at ________.
A. labeling images B. identifying locations C. playing games D. making adjustments
32. What does the underlined word “eclipsing” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?
A. Stimulating. B. Measuring. C. Beating. D. Limiting.
33. Both Francois Chollet and Josh Tenenbaum may agree that ________.
A. AI is good at finding similar patterns
B. AI should gain abilities with le