外刊时文选读

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练 (2)Rise of the robots机器人的崛起主题语境：人与社会 主题语境内容：科学与技术【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）The word “robot” was coined（创造）in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek.In“R.U.R.”(“Rossum’s Universal robots”)Capekand sensors（传感器）, fast wireless communications and powerful, smallermuch more.than expected from the pandemic（疫情）and some people have left the workforce（劳动力）, particularly in America.Warehousing（仓储）hasnow indispensable（必不可少的）, picking items off shelves and helping peopleor food right to people’s doors. In a pandemic-ravaged world, short of workers but with lots of elderly folk to look after,having more robotsAnd yet many people fear that robots will destroy jobs. A paper in 2013 by economists at Oxford University was widely misinterpreted（曲解）as的）.The evidence suggests robots will be disruptive（扰乱的） but ultimatelyrobot penetration（渗透） but very strong workforces. A Y ale University study that looked at Japanese manufacturing（生产） between 1978 and 2017 found that an increase of one robot unit per 1,000 workers boosted a company’s employment by 2.2%.Research from the Bank of Korea found that robotisation（机器自动化）moved jobs away from manufacturing into other sectors（领域）, but that there was no decrease in overall vacancies（空位）. Another study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of T echnologyFor all that, the march of the robots will bring big changes to workplaces.Checkout staff who retrain to help customers pick items from aisles may wellday swiping（刷磁卡） barcodes in front of lasers.robots make society as a whole better off. One lesson from the freewheeling （自由放纵的） globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s is that the growth in tradepolitical backlash（反击）, because the losers felt left behind. That is one moreretraining and lifelong learning. As jobs change, workers should be helped towill increasingly be their colleagues.The potential gains from the robot revolution are huge. In Capek’s play, the robots revolt （反叛）against their human masters and cause mass unemployment and worse. The beginnings of the world’s real robots have not matched Capek’s satire（讽刺）. There is no reason to think that their future needs to either.【课标词汇】1.artificial人造的，人工的；仿造的•clothes made of artificial fibres人造纤维质地的服装•an artificial heart人造心脏•an artificial lake人工湖•artificial fur/sweeteners/flowers人造毛皮／人造甜味剂／假花2.functional 实用的 ;作用的；功能的；（能）起作用的，工作的，运转的Bathrooms don't have to be purely functional. 浴室不必完全只为了实用。

外刊时文选读外刊时文选读Text 1Weekly Address: Ensuring Hardworking Americans Retire with Dignity WASHINGTON, DC —In this week’s address, the President reiterated his commitment to middle-class economics, and to ensuring that all hard-working Americans get the secure and dignified retirement they deserve. While most financial advisers prioritize their clients’ futur es, there are some who direct their clients towards bad investments in return for backdoor payments and hidden fees. That’s why earlier this week the President announced that he is calling on the Department of Labor to update rules to protect families from conflicts of interest by requiring financial advisers to put their clients’ best interest before their own profits.The President emphasized his promise to keep fighting for this policy and for others that benefit millions of working and middle class Americans.Hi everybody. In America, we believe that a lifetime of hard work and responsibility should be rewarded with a shot at a secure, dignified retirement. It’s one of the critical components of middle-class life – and this week, I took new steps to protect it.Six years after the crisis that shook a lot of people’s faith in a secure retirement, our economy is steadily growing. Last year was the best year for job growth since the 1990s. All told, over the past five years, the private sector has added nearly 12 million new jobs. And since I took office, the stock market has more than doubled, replenishing the 401(k)s of millions of families.But while we’ve come a long way, we’ve got more work to do to make sure that our recovery reaches more Americans, not just those at the top. That’s what middle-class economics is all about—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everybody does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.That last part—making sure everyone plays by the same set of rules—is why we passed historic Wall Street Reform and a Credit Card Bill of Rights. It’s why we created a new consumer watchdog agency. And it’s why we’re taking new action to protect hardworking families’ retireme nt security. If you’re working hard and putting away money, you should have the peace of mind that the financial advice you’re getting is sound and that your investments are protected.But right now, there are no rules of the road. Many financial advisers put their clients’ interest first –but some financial advisers get backdoor payments and hidden fees in exchange for steering people into bad investments. All told, bad advice that results from these conflicts of interest costs middle-class and working families about $17 billion every year.This week, I called on the Department of Labor to change that – to update the rules and require that retirement advisers put the best interests of their clients above their own financial interests. Middle-class families cannot afford to lose their hard earned savings after a lifetime of work. They deserve to be treated with fairness and respect. And that’s what this rule would do.While many financial advisers support these basic safeguards to prevent abuse, I know some special interests will fight this with everything they’ve got.But while we welcome differentp erspectives and ideas on how to move forward, what I won’t accept is the notion that there’s nothing we can do to make sure that hard-working, responsible Americans who scrimp and save can retire with security and dignity.We’re going to keep pushing for this rule, because it’s the right thing to do for our workers and for our country. The strength of our economy rests on whether hard-working families can not only share in America’s success, but can also contribute to America’s success.And that’s what I wil l never stop fighting for –an economy where everyone who works hard has the chance to get ahead.Text 2Planet of the phonesThe smartphone is ubiquitous, addictive and transformative THE dawn of the planet of the smartphones came in January 2007, when St eve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in front of a rapt audience of Apple acolytes, brandished a slab of plastic, metal and silicon not much bigger tha n a Kit Kat. “This will change everything,” he promised. For once there was no hyperbole. Just eight years later Apple’s iPhone exemplifies the early 21st century’s defining technology.Smartphones matter partly because of their ubiquity. They have become the fastest-selling gadgets in history, outstripping the growth of the simple mobile phones that preceded them. They outsell personal computers four to one. T oday about half the adult population owns a smartphone; by 2020, 80% will. Smartphones have also penetrated every aspect of daily life. The average American is buried in one for over two hours every day. Asked which media they would miss most, British teenagers pick mobile devices over TV sets, PCs and games consoles. Nearly 80%of smartphone-owners check messages, news or other services within 15 minutes of getting up. About 10% admit to having used the gadget during sex.The bedroom is just the beginning. Smartphones are more than a convenient route online, rather as cars are more than engines on wheels and clocks are not merely a means to count the hours. Much as the car and the clock did in their time, so today the smartphone is poised to enrich lives, reshape entire industries and transform societies—and in ways that Snapchatting teenagers cannot begin to imagine.Phono sapiensThe transformative power of smartphones comes from their size and connectivity. Size makes them the first truly personal computers. The phone takes the processing power of yesterday’s supercomputers—even the most basic model has access to more number-crunching capacity than NASA had when it put men on the Moon in 1969—and applies it to ordinary human interactions. Because transmitting data is cheap this power is available on the move. Since 2005 the cost of delivering one megabyte wirelessly has dropped from $8 to a few cents. It is still falling. The boring old PC sitting on your desk does not know much about you. But phones travel around with you—they know where you are, what websites you visit, whom you talk to, even how healthy you are.The combination of size and connectivity means that this knowledge can be shared and aggregated, bridging the realms of bits and atoms in ways that are both professional and personal. Uber connects available drivers to nearby fares at cheaper prices; Tinder puts people intouch with potential dates. In future, your phone mightrecommend a career c hange or book a doctor’s appointment to treat your heart murmur before you know anything is amiss.As with all technologies, this future conjures up a host of worries. Some, such as “text neck” (hunching over a smartphone stresses the spine) are surely transient. Others, such as dependency—smartphone users exhibit “nomophobia” when they happen to find themselves empty-handed—are a measure of utility as much as addiction. After all, people also hate to be without their wheels or their watch.The greater fear is over privacy. The smartphone turns the person next to you into a potential publisher of your most private or embarrassing moments. Many app vendors, who know a great deal about you, sell data without proper disclosure; mobile-privacy policies routinely rival “Hamlet” for length. And if leaked documents are correct, GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, has managed to hack a big vendor of SIM cards in order to be able to listen in to people’s calls. If spooks in democracies are doing this sort of thing, you can be sure that those in authoritarian regimes will, too. Smartphones will give dictators unprecedented scope to spy on and corral their unwilling subjects.The naked appYet three benefits weigh against these threats to privacy. For a start, the autocrats will not have it all their own way. Smartphones are the vehicle for bringing billions more people online. The cheapest of them now sell for less than $40, and prices are likely to fall even further. The same phones that allow governments to spy on their citizens also record the brutality of officials and spread information and dissenting opinions. They feed the demand for autonomy and help protest movements tocoalesce. A device that hands so much power to the individual has the potential to challenge authoritarianism.The second benefit is all those personal data which companies are so keen on. Conventional social sciences have been hampered by the limited data sets they could collect. Smartphones are digital census-takers, creating a more detailed view of society than has ever existed before and doing so in real time. Governed by suitable regulations, anonymised personal data can be used, among many other things, to optimise traffic flows, prevent crime and fight epidemics.The third windfall is economic. Some studies find that in developing countries every ten extra mobile phones per 100 people increase the rate of growth of GDP-per-person by more than one percentage point—by, say, drawing people into the banking system. Smartphones will remake entire industries, at unheard-of speed. Uber is a household name, operating in 55 countries, but has yet to celebrate its fifth birthday. WhatsApp was founded in 2009, and already handles 10 billion more messages a day than the SMS global text-messaging system. The phone is a platform, so startups can cheaply create an app to test an idea—and then rapidly go global if people like it. That is why it will unleash creativity on a planetary scale.By their nature, seminal technologies ask hard questions of society, especially as people adapt to them. Smartphones are no different. If citizens aren’t protected from prying eyes, some will suffer and others turn their backs. Societies will have to develop new norms and companies learn how to balance privacy and profit. Governments will have to define what is acceptable. But in eight short years smartphones have changed the world—and they have hardly begun.。

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练 (11)Save the Mountain Lion拯救美洲狮主题语境：人与自然 主题语境内容：野生动植物保护【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）Los Angeles,as everyone knows,is a noodle bowl of highways.As everyone may not know, it is also one of only two cities in the world where big cats wander wild inside the city boundaries (the other is Mumbai). One even live near the Hollywood sign. But big cats and highways do not mix,which is why Los Angeles will soon be home to one of the world’s biggest wildlife corridors（走廊）.The cats are mountain lions. They live in the Santa Monica Mountains. Their numbers are stable. Their habitat is mostly wilderness（荒野）, full of deer, the lions’ food. The ecology of their range, the largest urban national park in the world, is healthy, thanks in part to their presence. Yet animals can come under threat without habitat loss. Genetic degradation（退化） can be just as deadly.Cutting through the mountains is Route 101,carrying up to 10,000 vehicles an hour.It cuts the Santa Monica range off from a larger wilderness to the north. The southern area is not big enough for all the lions,which each require hunting grounds of 60-150 square miles.The result is a population trapped on an environmental island, with inbreeding(近亲繁殖) and genetic degradation.A study in 2016 found that,given their environment,the Santa Monica mountain lions’chances of extinction in 50 years would be 15-22%;because of their genetic deterioration,the chance of extinction was more like 99.7%.Four years after that study came the first evidence that the big cats were suffering physical damage: a young male was found with a 90-degree kink(扭结) in his tail .Researchers had seen that before.In the early 1990s biologists studying the Florida panther, a closely related animal, found that many of the males had the same genetic flaws(缺陷). The Florida panther escaped extinction only thanks to the introduction of females brought from Texas to refresh the gene pool.California does not need to go that far. There are healthy mountain-lion populations north of the Santa Monica range, separated by the ribbon ofroad.Hidden cameras show the animals crouched (蹲)at the side of the highway,not daring to cross.The solution is a 165-foot-wide dirt bridge which would allow them to travel high over the traffic.Such corridors have worked elsewhere, from large spans for elk（麋鹿） over the Trans-Canada highway to a small clawbridge for migrating red crabs（红蟹） on Christmas st month the governor,Gavin Newsom,launched construction.The animals become sexually mature at 2½to 3 years and have babies every other year. So within ten years of the corridor’s completion the great-grandchildren of the first mating beyond the mountains could have cubs. Genetically,even a few matings would make a difference.“We’ll definitely save the mountain lion,”thinks Paul Edelman of the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority. “It’s just a matter of how long it takes.”【课标词汇精讲】1.boundary n.分界线；边界National boundaries are becoming increasingly meaningless in the global economy. 在全球化的经济中，国界已经变得越来越没有意义了。

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练 (9)World in a dish: The garden path盘中知世界：花园小径主题语境：人与自我 主题语境内容：健康的生活方式【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）IMAGINE A plate holding two strawberries, identical in appearance. One came out of a supermarket box, meaning it was probably harvested when it was still not ripe, immediately placed in a forced-air cooling unit, loaded onto a truck and driven hundreds of miles. By the time it reached the plate it may have been picked for two weeks. The other strawberry was picked from a garden minutes before being eaten.The first one will probably taste like a slightly mushy(软踏踏的) cucumber withstrong sour flavors. The second is likely to be sweet; the flavour will linger in the mouth, as the scent(香味) will on thehands.Supermarket strawberries are not entirely without advantages: they are convenient and available in the northern hemisphere(半球) in February. But the two berries differ from each other in the same way that hearing Bach’s Mass in B Minor in a concert hall differs from listening to it ona cassette(磁带). The home-grown fruit is an eatable case for cultivating a home garden.Your columnist argued gardening a twee(矫揉造作的) waste of time. Planting cool-weather greens, as gardeners across the north-east of America are now doing, can seem make no sense. Convenient, continuous well-stocked supermarket shelves are available all week, in manyplaces supplemented on weekends by farmers’ markets. But the same could be said of cooking: cheap and good restaurants around, so why bother to make your own meals?That attitude misunderstands the ultimate appeal of gardening: it mistakes the product for the purpose. It is true that a garden can yield peas that taste like the vibrant(生机勃勃的), greenspring; tomatoes and carrots of incomparable sweetness; lettuces and herbs that taste like themselves rather than the plastic they are usually packaged in; and potatoes with richness of earth itself. Growing your own vegetable ensuresa reliable supply.On the other hand ,a garden, especially in the early years, can also yield little but frustration. Beginners may plant the wrong crops for their soil. Squirrels have a habit of taking single bites of cucumbers, beans and tomatoes, then leaving the rest on the vine to rot(腐烂). And even expert gardeners can lose a season’s harvest to un co operative weather.No matter. The real joy of gardening is the time spent doing it. Thedeepest pleasure—as with cooking, writing, bringing up children or almost anything worthwhile—is in the work itself. Agardener’s memories revolve not around the food produced, but around long summer afternoons with hands in the dirt, surrounded by family, if the garden is at home, or deepening acquaintances with friends and neighbours in acommunity garden. To garden is to patiently, lovinglyand diligently help life flourish, in the ground and above it.【课标词汇】1.identical完全相同的；极为相似的I've got three identical blue suits.我有三套完全相同的蓝色西装。

高考英语外刊时文精读专题：2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练 (8)Perception: A rose by any other name文化认知：情人眼里出西施主题语境：人与社会主题语境内容：社会与文化【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）TO THE SWEDES, there are few smells more pleasant than that of surströmming(鲱鱼罐头). To most non-Swedes there are probably few smells more disgusting. In determining which scents(气味) people find pleasant and which they do not,surströmming suggests culture must play a large part. New research, however, suggests that might not be the case. Artin Arshamian, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Asifa Majid, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, began with the expectation that culture would play an important role in determining pleasant smells. They had noticed from their own previous work that people from different cultures described smells differently. They also knew from past experiments by other researchers that culture was important in determining which sorts of faces people found beautiful. Thus, they expected to see a similar phenomenon with smells. To study how scent and culture relate, Dr Arshamian and Dr Majid presented nine different groups of people with ten smell s. The cultures doing the smelling varied widely . They included hunter-gathere r communitiesalong the coast of Mexico, farmers living in the highlands ofEcuador, shoreline foragers, gardeners living in the tropical rainforests of Malaysia, and city folk from Thailand and Mexico City. All 235 participants were asked to rank smells according to pleasantness. The team compared their results to earlier work on New Yorkers who had been exposed to the same scents.Writing in Current Biology this week, the researchers noted that pleasantness rankings ofthe smells were remarkably consistent regardless of where people came from. The smell of isovaleric acid(异戊酸)was disliked by the vast majority of the participants, only eight giving it a score of 1 to 3 on thepleasantness scale (where 1 was very pleasant and 10 was very unpleasant). On the other hand, more than 190 people gave vanilla extract (香草精) a score of 1 to 3 and a tiny minority, only 12 people, found it disgusting enough to rate 8 to 10. Overall, the chemical composition of the smells that the researchers presented explained 41% of the reactions that participants had.In contrast, cultural factors accounted for just 6% of the results. Dr Arshamian and Dr Majid point out that this is very different from how visual perception of faces works—in that case a person’s culture accounts for up to 50% of the e xplanation for which faces they find beautiful.Even so, while culture did not shape perceptions of smells in the way that it is known to shape perceptions of faces, the researchers did find an “eye of the beholder” effect. Randomness, which Dr Arshamian and Dr Majid suggest has to be coming from personal preferences learned from outside individual culture, accounted for 54% of the difference in which smells people liked. “eye of the beholder” effectdoes not slip off the tongue so easily but it too appears to be a real phenomenon.【课标词汇】1.Disgusting令人反感的；令人愤慨的He had the most disgusting rotten teeth.他长着非常恶心的一嘴烂牙。

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练(14)Climate change and coral reefs气候变化与珊瑚礁主题语境：人与自然主题语境内容：自然生态【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）Human beings have been altering habitats—sometimes deliberately andsometimes accidentall y—at least since the end of the last Ice Age. Now, though, that change is happening on a grand scale. Global warming is a growing factor. Fortunately, the human wisdom that is destroying nature can also be brought to bear on trying to save it.Some interventions to save ecosystems are hard to imagine andsucceed. Consider a project to reintroducesomething similar to a mammoth(猛犸象)to Siberiaby gene-editing Asian elephants. Their feeding habits could restore the grassland habitat that was around before mammoths died out, increasing the sunlight reflected into space and helping keep carbon compounds(碳化合物)trapped in the soil. But other projects have a bigger chance of making an impact quickly. As we report, one example involves coral reefs.These are the rainforests of the ocean. They exist on vast scales: half a trillion corals line the Pacific from Indonesia to French Polynesia, roughly the same as the number of trees that fill the Amazon. They are equally important harbor of biodiversity. Rainforests cover18% of the land’s surface and offer a home to more than half its vertebrate(脊椎动物的)species. Reefs occupy0.1% of the oceans and host a quarter of marine(海洋的)species.And corals are useful to people, too. Without the protection which reefs afford from crashing waves, low-lying islands such as the Maldives would have flooded long ago, and a billion people would lose food or income. One team of economists has estimated that coral’s global ecosystem services are worth up to $10trn a year. reefs are, however, under threat from rising sea temperatures. Heat causesthe algae（海藻） with which corals co-exist, and on which they depend for food and colour, to generate toxins（毒素）that lead to those algae’s expulsion（排出）. This is known as “bleaching（白化）”, and can cause a coral’s death. As temperatures continue to rise, research groups around the world are coming up with plansof action. Their ideas include identifying naturally heat-resistant（耐热的）corals and moving themaround the world; crossbreeding（杂交）such corals to create strains that are yet-more heat-resistant; employing genetic editing to add heat resistance artificially; transplantingheat-resistant symbiotic（共生的）algae; and even repairing with the bacteria and other micro-organismswith which corals co-exist—to see if that will help.The assisted evolution of corals does not meet with universal enthusiasm. Without carbon reduction and decline in coral-killing pollution, even resistant corals will not survive the century. Some doubt whetherhumans will get its act together in time to make much difference. Few of these techniques are ready for action in the wild. Some, such as gene editing, are so controversial that it is doubtful they will be approved any time soon. scale is also an issue.But there are grounds for optimism. Carbon targets are being set and ocean pollution is being dealt with. Countries that share responsibilities for reefs are starting to act together. Scientific methods can also be found. Natural currents can be used to facilitate mass breeding. Sites of the greatest ecological and economical importance can be identified to maximise benefits.This mix of natural activity and human intervention could serve as a blueprint （蓝图）for other ecosystems. Those who think that all habitats should be kept original may not approve. But when entire ecosystems are facing destruction, the cost of doing nothing is too great to bear. For coral reefs, at least, if any are to survive at all, it will be those that humans have re-engineered to handle the future.【课标词汇精讲】1.alter （通常指轻微地）改动，修改；改变，（使）变化We've had to alter some of our plans.我们不得不对一些计划作出改动。

专题03中国探险队登顶珠峰【原文·外刊阅读】China's Peak Mission expedition reaches Mt. Qomolangma summit（文章来源：CGTN）China's Peak Mission expedition reached thesummit of Mount Qomolangma, the world's highestpeak at a height of 8,848.86 meters, on Tuesday andwill continue to collect snow and ice samples. The11-member team set off from the expedition's camp atan altitude of 8,300 meters for the summit at 3:03 a.m.Beijing Time.Four of them first reached the world's highest automatic weather station at an altitude of 8,830 meters above sea level, which was set up by China in last May.Powered by solar panels, the station is designed to last for two years under harsh weather conditions and is equipped with a satellite communications system for data transmission every 12 minutes.The technological upgrade work of the station started at around 11 a.m., and was completed in roughly half an hour. Signals from the automatic weather station have been well received by the base camp at an altitude of 5,200 meters.Lunar power supply technology appliedPower supply for instruments and equipment is always a challenge in this extreme high-altitude area. This time, the scientific research team collaborated with the researchers responsible for the power supply system in China's lunar exploration project, and successfully applied the technology on the moon to Mount Qomolangma, overcoming the power supply obstacles when facing extremely low temperatures, extremely low pressure and instruments' self-starting power protection in an extremely high altitude area. Compared to last year when they had to collect the samples by manually drilling, this time the members are powered by electric tools, which saves energy and is also an innovation in the scientific expedition.A slew of scientific researchDubbed the "roof of the world" and "water tower of Asia," the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau is an important ecological security barrier in China. It is also a natural laboratory for conducting research on the evolution of the Earth and life, the interaction among spheres, and the relationship between man and Earth.Yao Tandong, commander of the Qomolangma expedition, said the 2023 Qomolangma scientific expedition will focus on major scientific issues such as how the extremely high-altitude environment of the mountain changes under the influence of global warming, how the environmental changes interact with the westerly winds and monsoons, and how the environment in the area will affect the "water tower of Asia" in the future. The research team also carried out a comprehensive observation of the glacier on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, home to the world's largest glacier besides the North and South Poles, and the source of over ten rivers in Asia as well.At a height of about 5,300 meters, where there is a lake formed by the meltwater from the Rongbuk Glacier, the researchers have observed several indicators, including water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, carbon dioxide exchange rate at the water-air interface, etc.Wu Guangjian, a researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the carbon dioxide exchange rate is high, which suggests the carbon dioxide exchange process is strong. "It is of great significance to understand how the melting glacier affects the climate environment," Wu said. To acquire more accurate data, the researchers have set up an additional hydrographic survey ship on the meltwater of the Rongbuk Glacier to measure and map the flow and velocity of the river. The expedition is part of the second comprehensive scientific expedition to the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau which was initiated in 2017.A total of 179 researchers from 13 teams have participated in it, targeting research on water, ecology and human activities at the region. It will be of great significance to study the impact of climate and environment change in the Qomolangma region on the rest of the world. So far, a series of scientific results have been achieved during the expedition, including the synergy and influence of westerly winds and monsoons, the special physiological response of the human body in the Mt. Qomolangma region and the ecological process of the greening of the region.【原创·语法填空】The Qinghai Tibet Plateau is known 1 the "Roof of the World" and the "Water Tower of Asia", and is 2 important ecological security barrier for China. It is also a natural laboratory used to study the evolution of Earth and life, the interactions between spheres, and 3 relationship between humans andEarth. On Tuesday, China's peak mission 4 (explore) team arrived at the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, at an altitude of 8848.86 meters, and will continue 5 (collect) ice and snow samples. The exploration team 6 (consist) of 11 people departed from the 8300 meter high exploration camp at 3:03 am Beijing time and headed to the summit.At a height of 7 (approximate) 5300 meters, there is a lake formed by the melting water of the Rongbu Glacier. Researchers observed several indicators, including water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and carbon dioxide exchange rate at the water air interface.179 researchers from 13 teams participated in this study, targeting water, ecology, and human activities in the region. 8 (study) the impact of climate and environmental changes in the Mount Everest region on other parts of the world will be of great significance. So far, a series of scientific achievements 9 (achieve) during the exploration period, including the synergistic effect and influence of westerly and monsoon winds, the special physiological reactions of the human body in the Mount Everest area,10 the ecological process of greening in the area.【答案】1. as2. an3. the4. exploration5. to collect6. consisting7. approximately8. Studying9. have been achieved 10. and【原创·阅读理解】1. What do we know about this expedition?A. The team members were all participating for the first time.B. Collecting samples was one of their tasks.C. They climbed directly to the top from the foot of the mountain.D. Moving into a weather station was also their goal.【答案】B【解析】根据文章第一段可知答案。

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练 (3)Carbon emissions碳排放Seeing footprints in the air看到空中的碳足迹主题语境：人与自然主题语境内容：环境保护【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）Chris Jones of the University of California, Berkeley, was on a river in the Amazon rainforest when he put th e finishing touches on the world’s first online household carbon calculator(计算器). That was in 2005. He hoped that, if he could show people how much greenhouse gas was associated with daily activities—driving the car, heating the house—they might change their behaviour and contribute in some small measure to saving the Amazon. Seventeen years later, trackers are providing a wealth of often-neglect ed information about the carbon emissions of everyday life. They provide local and micro data which usefully supplement the global findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Trackers work by asking users to answer questions such as: how many miles a year do you drive; how much is your annual household electricity bill; how often do you eat meat? They then calculate a personal or household estimate of emissions of carbon-dioxide equivalent (CO2e，二氧化碳当量排放量) per year. Alex Beale, a climate blogger in Atlanta who has studied them, reckons there are dozens of household carbon trackers and hundreds of specialist ones, including those which calculate emissions from food or other industries, such as a new one from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) to track emissions from shipping. For individuals, reckons Mr Beale, the most comprehensive are the Cool Climate tracker run by Dr Jones at Berkeley and the calculator set up by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and SEI. What do they tell us?Dr Jones describes the main household polluting activities as “cars, coal, cows and consumption,roughly in that order”.By far the largest single source of emissions is the family vehicle. One car of average fuel efficiency driven 14,000 miles (22,500km) spews out 7 tonnes of carbon, according to Dr Jones’s tracker. Swapping it for an electric vehicle would save over 6 tonnes, or an eighth of the average American household’s yearly emissions.No other change would generate that much saving, though electricity in the homeis responsible for over 5 tonnes of carbon emissions a year, so generating it with solar panels（太阳能电池板） would come close . Like electric vehicles, a roof full of solar panels is not cheap. Changing diets costs less, and American households consume meat worth 2.7 tonnes of CO2e a year, far more than most people. If Americans went vegetarian（素食者）, that would be like half an average solar roof.These household averages, however,disguise what may be the most important thing carbon trackers reveal: that apparently similar households produce very different emissions. By combining their tracker’s results with postal（邮政的）code data, the University of California team worked out average emissions by area. Places with high emissions—mostly suburbs（郊区）—produce four or five times as much carbon as inner cities or rural areas, a much larger multiple than might have been ex pected. Chicago’s households produce37 tonnes of CO2e a year; suburban Eola’s, some35 miles (56km) from the Windy City, emit96 tonnes. This is not only because of commuting（通勤）. Trips to and from work account for less than a fifth of miles driven; the rest are to shops, schools and so on.Even more striking is the difference air travel makes. The average household contribution from flying is 1.5 tonnes, less than a car. But half of Americans never fly. According to Cool Climate, flying 100,000 miles a yearproduces a stunning（惊人的）43 extra tonnes of CO2. If jet-set households were to cut their travel sharply, they would have a disproportionate（不成比例的）effect on emissions. They might even do something for the Amazon.Over the next 30 years, many countries are promising to move to net-zero carbon, imply ing that household emissions will have to be cut to close to nothing. Stephanie Roe, WWF’s lead climate scientist, reckons that, at best, half the reduction might be achieved through demand-side measures, such as behavioural changes by individuals and households. And even that would require companies and governments to provide more incentives（激励）to change through supply-side investments to make low-carbon options cheaper and more widely available.Trackers, it seems, have daunting（令人怯步的）lessons for public bodies and private households alike.【课标词汇】1.associate将…（与…）联系起来，把…联系在一起Most people associate this brand with good quality.大多数人把这个品牌和优良品质联系在一起。

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练(4)Floods and fires洪水和火灾Extreme no more极端天气不再罕见主题语境：人与自然主题语境内容：自然灾害与防范【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）The Wilsons river broke its banks on the night of February 27th while Lismore, a town of around 30,000 in New South Wales, was sleeping. Its residents snoozed（打盹儿） through early-hours emergency warnings that “risk to life was imminent（迫在眉睫）”. Within hours the town was submerged（淹没的）. Residents scrambled into their attics（阁楼）. Mothers carried children onto rooftops. An army of locals launched tin boats into the floods to save them. Four people died.Eastern Australia has been hammered by what politicians call “once-in-1,000-year” flooding. It has already had a soggy（浸水的）summer because of La Niña, a phenomenon which triggers downpours there. Then on February 23rd, meteorologists warned that an area of low pressure was forming over southern Queensland. It sucked moisture （水分）from the sea, forming an “atmospheric river（大气层河流）” over the east coast. It has dumped quantities of water ever since.Brisbane, Queensland’s capital, received almost 80% of its annual rainfall in less than a week in February, flooding 15,000 homes. As the rain edged i nto northern New South Wales, it ripped up roads and drowned herds of cattle. Storms lashed Sydney on March 8th, causing a dam t o spill over. Some 50,000 people in the state have been forced to evacuate（撤离）.Scientists are wary（小心的）of blaming floods on global warming because everything from rainfall to urban development contributes to them. They disagree, too, about whether climate change is a factor in this kind of never-ending downpour（倾盆大雨）. No matter the cause, extreme weather is now a regular occurrence in Australia. New South Wales was buffeted（重创） by its last “once-in-100-year”floods, which submerged Western Sydney, just a year ago. In 2019 and 2020 vast lands of the country were torched in bushfireswhich destroyed more than 3,000 homes and killed 33 people. Unlucky towns such as Lismore have in recent years been hit by both fire and floods.It does not help that the state and federal governments’response has been bungled(失败). When disaster strikes, official aid is often slow to come. In 2019 the federal government set aside almost A$4bn ($2.9bn) for a fund that would help it respond to crises(危险)and lessen future ones. But it has spent hardly any of that money. It has now deployed(部署) the army and is dishing out cash to victims, but locals fume（愤怒地说）that they were left for days without power or fuel as supplies of food and water dwindled（减少）.A university is putting up the homeless. “Isn’t somebody meant to write a plan for this?”wonders Ella Buckland, a resident of Lismore.A debate now rages about how or even whether places like Lismore should rebuild. Analysts think the floods might trigger insurance claims worth more than A$3bn.Some politicians would like the government to pay companies to insure houses that will inevitably be struck by future fires or floods. “If we are going to start thinking every time there’s a natural disaster that we have to give up and leave because it’s too hard, then where are we going to live?” asks Lismore’s mayor, Steve Krieg. That is becoming a question for ever more Australians.【课标词汇】1.emergency紧急情况；不测事件；突发事件How would disabled people escape in an emergency?如果发生紧急情况，伤残人士如何逃离？Is the emergency exit suitable for wheelchairs?安全出口适合轮椅通行吗？2.scramble（急速而艰难地）移动；爬；攀登She scrambled up the steep hillside and over the rocks.她爬上了陡峭的山坡，翻过岩石。

2023年高考英语外刊时文精读精练 (12)Travel after covid-19 疫情下的出行模式主题语境：人与自我主题语境内容：个人生活【外刊原文】（斜体单词为超纲词汇，认识即可；下划线单词为课标词汇，需熟记。

）In Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, public-transport fares have been cut in half. In London politicians leave notes on civil servants’ desks telling them to turn up for work and beg people to start going back to the office. Eric Adams, the mayor（市长）of New York, has asked bank bosses to set an exampleby riding the subway.None of it seems to be working. The subway is only two-thirds as busy as it was before covid-19. A uckland’s bus system was half as busy in April as it was three years earlier. Despite fears of “carmageddon”, people have not swapped public transport for the private kind. They are simply moving around less.Although travel is likely to recover a little further, a return to the pre-pandemic pattern seems impossible. One reason is that not all journeys have declined. Parisians made more shopping trips last summer than they did before covid appeared. In New York Sunday travel has held up better than weekday travel. What has collapsed is rush-hour commuting（通勤）, particularly among well-paid workers in the knowledge economy. That suggests the change in behaviour is caused not by fear of infection—which might be expected to reduce over time—but by a fundamental change of work habits. Rich countries should accept this new reality, and start building transport systems to match.Infrastructure（基础设施）projects that just add capacity to conventional suburb-to-city-centre routes nowseem pointless, especially in the biggest cities. They are rooted in the idea that urban travel is like an asterisk（星号）, with people squeezing onto radial roads and railway lines. Travel is now more like a spiderweb. People take fewer, often shorter journeys along thinner routes; they move to the side, as well as in and out. That explains why buses, which are often used for short journeys, have emptied out less than commuter trains.Now that people travel less predictably, there is a stronger casefor innovations such as on-demand buses and “mobility as a service”, which weaves together public transport and personal modes such as taxis and hired bikes. These make better use of the existing infrastructure, and come closer to the convenience of cars. Antwerp, Genoa and Helsinki lead in this area. British cities need to do something more basic, by integrating their public-transport networks. Outside London, they tend to have some bus companies, some railway lines and perhaps a tram system, all doing their own thing. The result is confusion and often greater cost for the public.Countries should not give up tools on public-transport projects. Their populations are growing, and they will need to cut congestion and carbon emissions. But instead of building more radii（半径交通线）, along the lines of London’s new Elizabeth line or the tunnel being dug at huge expense under the East river in New York, they should make it easier to travel around cities, or from one satellite town to another.The transition from asterisks to spiderwebs will be difficult. Everybody from motorists to transport unions will complain. But at least a couple of things have become easier. Because so many people have learned to work from home, engineers should not fear to work on roads or railways between Monday and Friday, rather than disturbing a string of weekends. And any transport union that threatens to strike is welcome to try. The days when unions could paralyse(使瘫痪) cities by shutting down public transport are over. Along with much else.【课标词汇精讲】1.turn up出现，到来，露面Richard had turned up on Christmas Eve with Tony...理查德和托尼在圣诞夜一道露面了。