2023年北京卷
第二部分 阅读理解(共两节，38分)
第一节(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。
The International Olympic Committee(IOC)Young Leaders programme empowers talents to make a positive difference in their communities through sport. Twenty-five Young Leaders are being selected every two years for a four-year period. They promote the Olympic values, spreading the message of sport for good.
To be an IOC Young Leader, you need to first complete the 4-Week Learning Sprint (冲刺).
4-Week Learning Sprint
The 4-Week Learning Sprint, which will take place during November 2023, is a virtual learning programme. The sessions can be attended live or watched back after they are made available on the IOC channel. Each week, participants will be asked to complete a topic﹣specific reflection task.
The 4-Week Learning Sprint is open to anyone, with the target audience aged between 20 and 28.
After successfully completing the 4-Week Learning Sprint, you will need to submit a plan for a sport﹣based project, which you will work on if selected as an IOC Young Leader.
Requirements for the Applicants
•You have successfully completed the 4-Week Learning Sprint.
•You have completed your high school studies.
•You have at least one year of work experience.
•You have strong public speaking skills.
•You are self-motivated and committed.
•You are passionate about creating positive change in your community.
•You are open to being coached and advised by experts and peers (同伴).
•You are able to work with people from different backgrounds.
21. In the 4-Week Learning Sprint, participants will ________.
A. create change in their community B. attend a virtual learning programme
C. meet people from different backgrounds D. promote the IOC Young Leaders project
22. If selected as an IOC Young Leader, one will need to ________.
A complete a reflection task each week B. watch sports on the IOC channel
C. work on a sport-based project D. coach and advise their peers
23. Which is a requirement for the applicants?
A. Spreading the message of sport for good. B. Having at least one-year work experience.
C. Showing great passion for project planning. D. Committing themselves to becoming an expert.
答案解析：
21. B. 根据文章中"The 4-Week Learning Sprint, which will take place during November 2023, is a virtual learning programme."这句话，可以得知参与者将参加一个虚拟学习项目。选项B与文章内容相符。
22. C. 根据文章中"After successfully completing the 4-Week Learning Sprint, you will need to submit a plan for a sport-based project, which you will work on if selected as an IOC Young Leader."这句话，可以得知如果被选为IOC青年领袖，需要提交一个基于体育的项目计划，并在此项目上工作。选项C与文章内容相符。
23. B. 根据文章中"Requirements for the Applicants"部分列出的要求，"You have at least one year of work experience."是申请者必须满足的条件之一。选项B与文章内容相符。
B
Sitting in the garden for my friend’s birthday. I felt a buzz (振动) in my pocket. My heart raced when I saw the email sender’s name. The email started off: “Dear Mr Green, thank you for your interest” and “the review process took longer than expected.” It ended with “We are sorry to inform you…” and my vision blurred (模糊). The position—measuring soil quality in the Sahara desert as part of an undergraduate research programme — had felt like the answer I had spent years looking for.
I had put so much time and emotional energy into applying, and I thought the rejection meant the end of the road for my science career.
So I was shocked when, not long after the email, professor Mary Devon, who was running the programme, invited me to observe the work being done in her lab. I jumped at the chance, and a few weeks later I was equally shocked—and overjoyed—when she invited me to talk with her about potential projects I could pursue in her lab. What she proposed didn’t seem as exciting as the original project I had applied to, but I was going to give it my all.
I found myself working with a robotics professor on techniques for collecting data from the desert remotely. that project, which I could complete from my sofa instead of in the burning heat of the desert, not only survived the lockdown but worked where traditional methods didn’t. In the end, I had a new scientific interest to pursue.
When I applied to graduate school, I found three programmes promising to allow me to follow my desired research direction. And I applied with the same anxious excitement as before. When I was rejected from one that had seemed like a perfect fit, it was undoubtedly difficult. But this time I had the perspective (视角) to keep it from sending me into panic. It helped that in the end I was accepted into one of the other programmes I was also excited about.
Rather than setting plans in stone, I’ve learned that sometimes I need to take the opportunities that are offered, even if they don’t sound perfect at the time, and make the most of them.
24. How did the author feel upon seeing the email sender’s name?
A. Anxious. B. Angry. C. Surprised. D. Settled.
25. After talking with Professor Devon, the author decided to ________.
A criticise the review process B. stay longer in the Sahara Desert
C. apply to the original project again D. put his heart and soul into the lab work
26. according to the author, the project with the robotics professor was ________.
A. demanding B. inspiring C. misleading D. amusing
27. What can we learn from this passage?
A. An invitation is a reputation. B. An innovation is a resolution.
C. A rejection can be a redirection. D. A reflection can be a restriction.
答案解析：
24. A.根据文章中的"My heart raced when I saw the email sender’s name."可知，作者看到邮件发送者的名字时，心跳加速，这表明他感到焦虑。选项A与文章内容相符。
25. D. 根据文章中的"What she proposed didn’t seem as exciting as the original project I had applied to, but I was going to give it my all."可知，尽管提议的项目不如最初申请的项目令人兴奋，但作者决定全力以赴。选项D与文章内容相符。
26. B. 根据文章中的"That project, which I could complete from my sofa instead of in the burning heat of the desert, not only survived the lockdown but worked where traditional methods didn’t."可知，这个项目不仅让作者在封锁期间能够继续工作，而且在传统方法无效的情况下取得了成功，这表明该项目是鼓舞人心的。选项B与文章内容相符。
27. C. 根据文章的整体内容，作者最初被拒绝后，最终找到了新的研究方向，并且被另一个研究生项目录取。这表明，一次拒绝可以成为重新定位的机会。选项C与文章内容相符。
C
In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have agreed that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences leads to some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and more. The historian Francis Cole argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the cruelty of the instant and by the boredom of an unending now”.
It has been proved that people have a bias (偏向) towards the present, focusing on loud attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves or community. In business, this bias surfaces as short-sighted decisions. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it translates into the unwillingness to make small sacrifices (牺牲) today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, or satisfying some other near-term desires.
These biased perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. People’s hesitancy to delay satisfaction is the most obvious example, but there are others. One of them is about how the most accessible information in the present affects decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming.”Another is that loud and urgent matters are given too much importance, making people ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when a pop star draws far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.
As a psychologist once joked, if aliens (外星人) wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships; they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective “poor memory”, and each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with insect-covered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect population has dropped dramatically.
28. The author quotes Francis Cole mainly to ________.
A. draw a comparison B. introduce a topic C. evaluate a statement D. highlight a problem
29. What can be inferred from the last paragraph?
A. Climate change has been forgotten.
B. Lessons of history are highly valued.
C. The human mind is bad at noting slow change.
D. Humans are unwilling to admit their shortcomings.
30. What does the author intend to tell us?
A. Far-sighted thinking matters to humans.
B. Humans tend to make long-term sacrifices.
C. current policies facilitate future decision-making.
D. Bias towards the present helps reduce near-term desires.
答案解析：
28. D.作者引用Francis Cole的话是为了强调短期主义导致的问题，即“现在唯一存在，现在的特点是瞬间的残酷和无尽的现在的无聊”。这与文章主题相符，即短期主义是工业化社会的一个严重问题。因此，作者引用Francis Cole的话是为了突出这个问题，答案为D。
29. C. 根据最后一段的内容，作者讨论了人类对于环境变化的“集体健忘”，以及每一代人可能认为他们所遇到的情况是正常的。这表明人类的大脑不擅长注意到缓慢的变化。选项C与文章内容相符。
30. A. 文章整体讨论了短期主义的问题，以及人们如何因为对当下的偏向而忽视了长期的影响。作者通过这些讨论意在告诉我们，具有远见的思考对人类来说很重要。选项A与文章内容相符。
D
What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason is simple: we know of just one type of life and it’s challenging to do science with a sample size of one. The field of artificial life-called ALife for short — is the systematic attempt to spell out life’s fundamental principles. Many of these practitioners, so-called ALifers, think that somehow making life is the surest way to really understand what life is.
So far no one has convincingly made artificial life. This track record makes ALife a ripe target for criticism, such as declarations of the field’s doubtful scientific value. Alan Smith, a complexity scientist, is tired of such complaints. Asking about “the point” of ALife might be, well, missing the point entirely, he says. “The existence of a living system is not about the use of anything.” Alan says. “Some people ask me, ‘So what’s the worth of artificial life?’ Do you ever think, ‘What is the worth of your grandmother?’”
As much as many ALifers hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered ALife’s cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.
Compared with the developments of Al, advances in ALife are harder to recognize. One reason is that ALife is a field in which the central concept — life itself — is undefined. The lack of agreement among ALifers doesn’t help either. The result is a diverse line of projects that each advance along their unique paths. For better or worse, ALife mirrors the very subject it studies. Its muddled (混乱) progression is a striking parallel (平行线) to the evolutionary struggles that have shaped Earth biosphere.
Undefined and uncontrolled, ALife drives its followers to repurpose old ideas and generated novelty. It may be, of course, that these characteristics aren’t in any way surprising or singular. They may apply universally to all acts of evolution. Ultimately ALife may be nothing special. But even this dismissal suggests something：perhaps, just like life itself throughout the universe, the rise of ALife will prove unavoidable.
31. Regarding Alan Smith’s defence of ALife, the author is .
A. supportive B. puzzled C. unconcerned D. doubtful
32. What does the word “enamored” underlined in paragraph 3 most probably mean?
A. Shocked. B. Protected. C. Attracted. D. Challenged.
33. What can we learn from this passage?
A. ALife holds the key to human future. B. ALife and AI share a common feature.
C. AI mirrors the developments of ALife. D. AI speeds up the process of human evolution.
34. Which would be the best title for the passage?
A. Life Is Undefined. Can AI Be a Way Out?
B. Life Evolves. Can AI Help ALife Evolve, Too?
C. Life Is Undefined. Can ALife Be Defined One Day?
D. Life Evolves. Can Attempts to Create ALife Evolve, Too?
答案解析：
31. A. 作者在文中引用了Alan Smith对ALife领域的辩护，并且没有提出任何批评或质疑，这表明作者对Alan Smith的观点是支持的。选项A与文章内容相符。
32. C. 根据上下文，"enamored"这个词用来描述研究人员对开放性演化的概念感兴趣和着迷。选项C "Attracted"与这种情感状态相符。
33. B. 根据第三段的内容，ALife和人工智能都被开放性演化的概念所吸引，这表明两者有共同的特征。选项B与文章内容相符。
34. D. 文章讨论了ALife领域的尝试和挑战，以及它如何模仿生命的演化过程。选项D作为标题，最能概括文章的主题和讨论内容。
