上海市松江区2020届高三英语二模拟试题（含听力音频）

    After graduation, Susan was asked to become the executive director of the Floating Hospital. She hesitated at first, as it was a demanding job and she wondered whether she could handle it. But on second thoughts, she agreed to take the job. this job turned out rewarding. she soon got tired of it. (seat) at her desk one day, she wanted to go down to the New School for Social Research all of a sudden. Since she always believed instinct was an advantage she trust, she decided to have a go.

    Without any plan, she titled the course 'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway', Susan was nervous as she faced the first session of the twelve-week course. The two hours went on smoothly, but she then (challenge) with a new fear, for she didn't know what to present the next week. But surprisingly, every week she found she had more to say. Her confidence level growing, she realized. she had equipped so much over the years about getting over fear and her students were drinking it up. At the end of the course. they were amazed at shifting their thinking really changed their lives.

    Susan eventually decided to write a book based on the course she had taught. She faced many obstacles. And after (reject) by four agents and various publishers. she unwillingly put the proposal in a drawer.

    One day after three years of writing. she went through the drawer she held her much-rejected book proposal. Picking it up. she had a sharp sense that she held something in her hands many people needed to read. She set out with much determination, therefore. (find) a publisher who believed in her book the same way she did. This time, she succeeded. She succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

    She was so happy that she followed her heart and never gave up overcoming fears which stood her way.

    From the early 1950s until 2009, a department in the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MoD) documented and investigated reports of UFOs. Now, more than a decade after the program ended, many of those classified files about UFO will be made available to the public for the first time.

    Previously, some MoD files about UFOs had been published online at the U.K. National Archives (国家档案馆) website. The Telegraph reported. However, all of the agency's UFO reports will be this year on "a dedicated gov.uk web page."" spokesperson for the British Royal Air Force (RAF) told The Telegraph.

    The decision came after PA Media, a British news agency, filed a request for the UFO files under a/an on information, according to The Telegraph. MoD officials decided "it would be better to publish these records, rather than continue documents to the National Archives." the RAF spokesperson said.

    The U.K.'s with UFOs began around 1950. urging the MoD to form the Flying Saucer Working Party to the phenomenon. according to the UK. National Archives. UFOs in the early 1950s even captured the attention of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent a memo to his air minister in 1952 " What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?"

    The flying saucer group concluded that UFOs were delusions (错觉) or  objects recommending "that no further investigation of reported mysterious phenomenon in the air be ."Nevertheless, other Mod divisions continued the work of official UFO investigation in the U.K

    After MoD enacted a policy change on Dec.1st, 2009, the agency no longer recorded or investigated any UFO , according to the report. But what they did find-including many recent UFO reports that were previously available only as hard copies-will be published online within the nest few months. said Nick Pope. a former UFO investigator for the MoD.

    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.

    Joseph Makin at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues used deep learning algorithms (算法) to study the brain2of four women as they spoke. The women, who all suffer from a certain kind of brain disorder, already had electrodes attached to their brains to monitor disease attacks.

    Each woman was asked to read aloud from a set of sentences as the team 3brain activity. The largest group of sentences4250 unique words. The team fed this brain activity to a network algorithm related to nerves, training it to5regularly occurring patterns that could be linked to repeated aspects of speech. These patterns were then fed to a second network, which tried to turn them into words to6a sentence.

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

    Makin says that using a small number of sentences made it9for the AI to learn which words tend to follow others. For example, the AI was able to10that the word "Bear" was always likely to follow the word "Teddy" in a certain set of sentences, from brain activity alone.

    The team tried transforming the brain signal data into11words at a time, rather than whole sentences, but this12the 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 brain activity13with which words," says Makin.

    This will make it hard to scale up the system to a/an14vocabulary because each new word increases the number of possible sentences, reducing15. Sophie Scott at University College London says we are a long way from being able to translate brain signal data comprehensively.

    Have you ever heard of Nollywood? Nollywood is the name of the Nigerian (尼日利亚的) film industry: Nigeria is one of the largest film industries in the world based on the quantity of films produced. placing them right below India's Bollywood and above USA's Hollwood!

    Born in around 1992. Nollywood is the youngest compared with the other two "woods", and uses new forms of financing and production, Now it's in adulthood. and bigger productions have become more regular. However. this was not always the case. Although movie theaters were rare in Nigeria during earlier period. original stories were not. Despite lack of funds and experience. self-made directors began to use commercial video cameras to shoot their movies and sold them for home viewing. Even though this resulted in movies with low production value, the original stories instantly made them a hit. Today, the film industry is the largest employer after agriculture and makes up 5% of Nigeria's GDP.

    Nigeria is a big player in the industry and it is constantly improving its craft, taking on new challenges. Nollywood is known mainly for its comedies and dramas. but we are increasingly seeing horror movies and musicals.

    Although sometimes heavily criticized for low production values. Nollywood continues to grow fans worldwide. Nigerian movies now make up 11% of Nigeria's non-oil exports! The average movie is produced in 7-10 days on a budget between ￡7,000-12,000 (Hollywood's average is around ￡60 million per movie with one year production time).This is changing. however, as more filmmakers are receiving proper training and are aiming to make films up to the international standard.

    Here's the bad news: Men are hurting, and, according to many researchers. masculinity (男子气) is what is hurting them and making it hard for them to maintain friendships. Society tells men to hide their feelings and expects them to be aggressive, so many men lose their friendship when growing up. The good news is that those skills can be recovered!

    There are a lot of experts who can help. and here's what they recommend:

    ⒈Accept your own desire and normalize it for the people in your life. Way, an expert, recommends sharing articles about masculinity and friendship so that you can start these conversations! Concentrate on them and don't forget you have the entire Internet at your fingertips, friend!

    ⒉Model vulnerability. Say the thing that frightens or worries you. like "I'm afraid nobody will go to my party," or "I miss my grandma every day." Doing so will make it easier for other people to follow your lead. We are all on the elevator to a society where emotional availability is normalized, and I want you to press "door open".

    ⒊Ask more questions. People sometimes feel they might be prying (爱打听的) if they ask someone about themselves-especially when their friend is sharing something tough. But if you get curious in moments of vulnerability you will open the door to all kinds of growth in your relationship. Take the opportunity to really see your friend and show them they matter by following up.

    ⒋Get close with the children in your life. Way's research says that the top priority that helps children (especially boys) grow up to have enriching friendships is to be close with an adult relative who was not afraid to express emotions. So. if you are a father. stepfather. or thinking about becoming one. or if you have nieces or nephews, take the opportunity to be close to them and help them grow up to be good friends, too.

    No student of a foreign language needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs (助动词) ,we are able to communicate variations in meaning. We can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform other word tricks to convey delicate differences in meaning. Besides. grammar is universal and plays a part in every language. no matter how widespread it is. So the question which has confused many linguists is: who created grammar?

    At first, this question would appear impossible to answer. To find out how grammar is created. someone needs to be present at the time of a language's creation, documenting its emergence. Some linguists are able to trace modern complex languages back to earlier languages, but to know the forming of complex languages, the researcher needs to observe how languages are startedfrom scratch. Amazingly, however, this is possible.

    Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. At that time. slaves from different nations were forced to work together. Since they could not learn each other's languages. they developed a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. Little grammar is found in them. and in many cases it is difficult or a listener to infer when an event happened, and who did what to whom. Speakers need to use circumlocution (迁回曲折的说法) in order to make themselves understood. Interestingly. however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it. Slave children did not simply copy words from their elders, they adapted them to create a language. It included new word orders and grammatical markers. Complex grammar systems merging from pidgins are termed creoles, which are invented by children.

    Some linguists believe that many of the world's most established languages were creoles at first. The -ed ending in English past tense may have evolved from "did", "It ended", which was first used by kids, may once have been "It end-did". Therefore. it would appear that even the most widespread languages were partly created by children. Children appear to have been born with grammatical machinery in their brains. which can serve to create logical, complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

    A period of important agricultural development began in the early 1700s in Great Britain and the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg. and the Netherlands, which lie below sea level).

    One of the most important of these developments was an improved horse-drawn seed drill invented by Jethro Tull in England. Until that time. farmers sowed seeds by hand. Tull's drill made rows of holes for the seeds. By the end of the 18th century, seed drilling was widely practiced in Europe. Many other machines were developed in the United States. At about the same time. John and Hiram Pitts introduced a horse-powered thresher (脱粒机) that shortened the process of separating grain and seed from straw. John Deere's steel plow (犁), introduced in 1837,made it possible to work the tough soil with much less horsepower.

    Along with new machines. there were several important advances in selective farming. By selectively breeding animals (breeding those with desirable traits), farmers increased the size and productivity of their livestock. Plants could also be selectively bred for certain qualities. In 1866, Gregor Mendel's studies in heredity (遗传) were published in Austria. His work paved the way for improving crops through genetics.

    New crop planting methods also evolved during this time. Many of these were adopted over the next century or so throughout Europe. For example. the Norfolk four-field system, developed in England. proved quite successful. It

involved the yearly rotation (轮作) of several crops, including wheat, turnips, barley, clover, and ryegrass. Moreover, this method enabled farmers to grow enough to sell some of their harvest without having to leave any land unplanted.

    Not all parts of the world benefited from these developments instantly. however. Farmers in other parts such as Australia and Africa continued to use old ways of agriculture for a long time.

    Now, it may seem strange to learn from someone who writes about pretty dresses every day, but: you don't have to be pretty and you don't have to spare no effort to be pretty just to please others. You don't have to feel bothered for your plain looking that makes you unnoticed. After all, every one of us, whether charming or not, is a drop in the ocean and you don't owe prettiness to anyone.

    Admittedly, I'm not saying that you shouldn't be pretty if you want to. Being pretty is pleasant, fun, refreshing and satisfying. making people feel delighted and smile at you unconsciously. But in terms of importance, prettiness stands several steps down from happiness, is way below health, and if done as an obligation, can be far away from independence.

    But what does you-don't-have-to-be-pretty mean in everyday terms? It means you don't have to blame your parents for not giving you the world-desired appearance and that you don't have to apologize for wearing things that arc held to be "unflattering" or "unfashionable"-especially if, in fact, they make you happy on some level deeper than just being pretty does. As long as you are clean, covered enough, and have bandaged any open wounds. you can wear any color or style you please, holding your heads high.  if it makes you happy.

    Prettiness, it's sad to say, can have a shelf life. It's so tied up with youth that, at some point (if you're lucky), you're going to have to graduate from prettiness, sometimes before you know it. But you won't even get there if you think you have to follow all the signs that say "this way to prettiness". You get there by travelling the route you find most interesting.

你是李明，你在读高一的表弟张丰依旧在进行居家学习。他在学习时容易分心，总是忍不住打网络游戏或看网络小说，于是发电子邮件向你求助，请你结合自己的经验回复他一封电子邮件，谈谈你是如何集中精力开展居家学习(homeschool yourself during the COVID-19 outbreak)的。