2020届盐城市第一高级中学高三英语上学期期中试卷及参考答案

2020届盐城市第一高级中学高三英语上学期期中试卷及参考答案

第一部分 阅读（共两节，满分40分）

第一节（共15小题；每小题2分，满分30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

A

A Lifelong Devotion to Keeping People Fed

Yuan Longping is a Chinese agricultural scientist and educator, known for developing the hybrid rice varieties.

Yuan graduated from the Southwest Agriculture Institute in 1953 andbegan his teaching career at an

agriculture school.

In the 1960s, when a serious food shortage sweptChina, Yuan decided to devote himself to studying how to

increase the yields of rice. He then began a lifelong connection with rice.

Yuan succeeded in growing the world’s first high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in 1973, which could reach a

yield of over 500 kg per mu (about 0.067 hectares), rising from the previous yield of only 300 kg per mu. For the

next four decades, he continued to work on research and development of hybrid rice, achieving increasingly

higher outputs. In 2020, hybrid rice developed by Yuan’s team achieved 1,500 kilograms per mu in two growing

seasons, a new world record.

InChina, where rice is the main food for the majority of the 1.4 billion people, the planting area of hybrid rice

has reached 16 million hectares, or 57 % of the total planting area of rice, helping feed an extra 80 million people

a year.

Hybrid rice has also been grown in over 40 countries, including theU.S.,Brazil,India,Vietnam,

thePhilippinesandMadagascar. The total planting area of the hybrid rice has reached 8 million hectares overseas.

Even after a great success, Yuan never held himself back from making new breakthroughs. In 2017, his team

started to grow seawater rice inQingdao. The rice was designed to grow in saline-alkaline land and survive even

after being completely in seawater. His team planned to develop a type of seawater rice that could be planted in

6.67 million hectares of saline-alkaline land acrossChinato boost the country’s rice harvest by about 20 %. In 2018,

Yuan’s team was invited to plant the saline-alkaline tolerant rice in experimental fields inDubai, which achieved

huge success. In June 2020, his team started to grow seawater rice on a farm at an altitude of 2,800 meters in

northwestChina’sQinghaiProvince. The experiment succeeded.

Yuan had two dreams — to “enjoy the cool under the rice crops taller than men” and that hybrid rice could

be grown all over the world to help solve the global food shortage. 1. What made Yuan Longping decide to study rice?

A. A serious food shortage. B. Agriculture development.

C. His interest in the rice experiment. D. His wish to plant the tallest rice in the world.

2. From the passage, we know that Yuan Longping ________.

A. developed a variety of hybrid rice

B. worked as a scientist after graduation

C. started to grow seawater rice inDubaiin 2017

D. grew the first high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in 1953

3. We can infer from the passage that Yuan Longping’s most outstanding qualities are________.

A. modest and outgoing B. honest and creative

C. generous and optimistic D. responsible and devoted

B

Why isn’t science better? Look at career incentive(激励).There are oftensubstantial gaps between the

idealized and actual versions of those people whose work involves providing a social good. Government officials

are supposed to work for their constituents. Journalists are supposed to provide unbiased reporting and

penetrating analysis. And scientists are supposed to relentlessly probe the fabric of reality with the most rigorous

and skeptical of methods.

All too often, however, what should be just isn’t so. In a number of scientific fields, published findings turn

out not toreplicate(复制), or to have smaller effects than, what was initially claimed. Plenty of science does

replicate — meaning the experiments turn out the same way when you repeat them - but the amount that

doesn’t is too much for comfort.

But there are also waysin which scientists increase their chances of getting it wrong. Running studies with

small samples, mining data for correlations and forming hypotheses to fit an experiment’s results after the fact are

just some of the ways to increase the number of false discoveries.

It’s not like we don't know how to do better. Scientists who study scientific methods have known about

feasible remedies for decades. Unfortunately, their advice often falls ondeaf ears.Why? Why aren't scientific

methods better than they are? In a word: incentives. But perhaps not in the way you think.

In the 1970s, psychologists and economists began to point out the danger in relying on quantitative measures

for social decision-making. For example, when public schools are evaluated by students’ performance on