2026年9-10月最新时文阅读练习(GVC+ABC+六选四)第09套-2027届高考英语一轮复习专项

2026 年 9—10 月最新时文阅读练习（GVC + ABC + 六选四） · 学生版 2026 年 9—10 月最新时文阅读练习（GVC + ABC + 六选四） 学生版 　 Set 9 　 II. Grammar and Vocabulary 　 Section A　Grammar Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank. 　 Breweries produce a lot of waste. For every litre of beer, several kilograms of solid material 　　21　　(leave) over, and finding uses for them 　　22　　(become) a serious business. In a recent study, scientists 　　23　　(heat) spent malt rootlets — the small sprouts that grow from barley — at high temperatures without oxygen. The result was biochar, a material full of tiny holes that can trap bacteria. The team mixed the biochar with sand and passed water through it. The mixture removed about five times as much Escherichia coli as sand alone. Sand works like a sieve, simply 　　24　　(stop) bacteria from passing through, but biochar appears to hold on to them. Groundwater moves constantly through soil, 　　25　　 it can pick up waste from farms. A cheap, locally made filter could therefore improve water quality in places that have no treatment plant. The researchers are not claiming victory yet. The material has so far only been tested 　　26　　 the laboratory, and they now plan to try it in the field, where the conditions are much harder to control. The most important question is whether the biochar can be used more than once. If it traps bacteria only once and then has to be thrown away, it will not be 　　27　　 better than the waste it came from. Other by-products of brewing already have second lives: leftover grain 　　28　　(use) as animal feed. As the industry grows, so 　　29　　 the amount it throws away. Finding enough applications, one scientist says, is the only way to deal with a problem that is not going to get 　　30　　(small). 　 Section B　Vocabulary Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need. A. moisture　B. vehicle　C. habitat　D. active　E. feeding　F. sugary　G. temporary　H. mark　I. shade　J. nutrients　K. disappears 　 Fog changes the way a landscape looks, and scientists are discovering that it may also matter to the tiny organisms floating inside it, especially in dry regions where water is scarce. Ecologists have usually treated fog as a source of 　　31　　 for plants and animals in dry places, and as a 　　32　　 that carries minerals and microbes from one place to another. The idea that fog might itself be a 　　33　　 — a place where organisms actually live — has only recently been taken seriously. If fog itself counts as one, then such places can appear and vanish within a single morning. "The scientific community has known for a long time that there are a great many microbes in the atmosphere," says one microbiologist. "But are they really 　　34　　 up there, or is the air just transporting them?" To find out, researchers collected fog water in Pennsylvania. They found bacteria 　　35　　 on simple carbon compounds in the water, and they counted more bacteria after fog events than before them. That suggests the organisms were growing rather than simply passing through. Counting bacteria before and after each fog event gave the team a way to measure growth directly. The bacteria can also break down formaldehyde, which is far harder to process than the 　　36　　 compounds that most microbes prefer. That ability surprised the researchers, since formaldehyde is normally toxic to living cells and difficult to break down. Fog is 　　37　　, of course. It forms, it drifts, and sooner or later it 　　38　　, taking its passengers with it. A droplet does not last long, but that does not disqualify it. A puddle does not last long either. As one researcher points out, life inside a droplet has its advantages: there is 　　39　　 from the sun, there is water, and there may be other 　　40　　 as well. A single droplet may hold only a few millionths of a litre, yet for the organisms inside it, that is an entire world. 　 III. Reading Comprehension 　 Section A　Cloze Directions: For each blank in the following passage there are four words or phrases marked A, B, C and D. Fill in each blank with the word or phrase that best fits the context. 　 Ask anyone over fifty about long car journeys and you may hear the same story. The windscreen used to be covered with insects, and now it is 　　41　　. When scientists in Denmark repeated a survey from the 1990s, using the same methods, they found that the number of insects caught had fallen by between 80 and 97 per cent — a(n) 　　42　　 decline that matched studies from Germany and Puerto Rico. Not everyone is convinced. Insect populations rise and fall with the weather, and one bad year proves little. Critics also point out that measurements began only after humans had changed the landscape, so the 　　43　　 they are compared against may themselves be too low. Even with these doubts, the weight of evidence points one way. A review of long-term studies concluded that insect numbers are falling by about one to two per cent a year — a slow decline that, 　　44　　 over decades, becomes catastrophic. Because insects do work that nothing else does. Roughly three-quarters of the world's food crops depend, at least partly, on 　　45　　, and most pollinators are insects. Lose the insects and the losses multiply up the food chain: a bird that feeds its young on insects cannot simply 　　46　　 to seeds; its numbers fall, and the predators above it follow. The causes are not mysterious. The first is the loss of 　　47　　: hedges removed, meadows built over, wetlands drained. The second is chemicals: pesticides do not stay where they are sprayed but drift, accumulate and travel up the food chain, so that a field can look healthy while being almost 　　48　　 of insect life. The third is climate change, which 　　49　　 the damage: warmer, drier seasons shrink the pools where dragonflies breed. It is easy to feel helpless. Yet insects are easier to help than whales: they need small spaces and breed fast. A garden left slightly wild or a pond dug in a park can become a refuge within a season. Some cities now plant 　　50　　 flowers along roads and stop mowing while bees are active. Individual action is not enough. Insects are declining because of the way whole landscapes are managed, and no amount of backyard gardening will 　　51　　 a pesticide regime. But there is a strong argument for starting small anyway: policies appear when enough people have already seen the difference in their own 　　52　　. Long-term records kept by ordinary people — schoolchildren trapping moths, birdwatchers noting the first bee of spring — are the kind of 　　53　　 that makes a slow decline visible. Ordinary observation, taken seriously and 　　54　　 over years, is how science catches slow change. The insects will not ask for much: a little space, fewer chemicals and one change of 　　55　　 — from keeping the world tidy to keeping it alive. 　 41. A. broken B. clean C. noisy D. warm 42. A. steady B. expected C. alarming D. brief 43. A. figures B. prices C. seasons D. colours 44. A. measured B. published C. forgotten D. compounded 45. A. irrigation B. pollination C. machinery D. rainfall 46. A. switch B. return C. refuse D. promise 47. A. appetite B. income C. memory D. habitat 48. A. full B. empty C. proud D. afraid 49. A. repairs B. describes C. deepens D. ends 50. A. wild B. rare C. glass D. plastic 51. A. fund B. explain C. enjoy D. offset 52. A. dreams B. streets C. prices D. letters 53. A. noise B. theory C. profit D. data 54. A. recorded B. hidden C. sold D. refused 55. A. address B. season C. habit D. colour 　 Section B　Reading Comprehension Directions: Read the following three passages. Each passage is followed by several questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that fits best according to the information given in the passage you have just read. 　 Passage A 　 Every day, in operating theatres around the world, anaesthetists do something that philosophers cannot yet explain. They switch consciousness off and, a few hours later, switch it back on. The patient is not asleep in any ordinary sense; there is no dreaming, no sense of time passing, and afterwards nothing to remember. What takes place between the injection and the recovery is, for the person concerned, simply absent. Anaesthesia has therefore become an unexpected laboratory. If we want to know what consciousness requires, the most direct method is to remove it under controlled conditions and observe what goes with it. The results have been awkward for several comfortable assumptions. Consciousness does not, for example, appear to be a single thing that is either present or absent. Patients pass through graded states as a drug takes effect: responsiveness goes first, then the integration of information, then whatever it is that leaves no trace in memory. Anaesthetics also do not act at one site. They quieten communication between distant regions of the brain while leaving local activity largely intact — which is why a deeply unconscious brain can still show bursts of electrical activity that look, in isolation, like the signature of thought. If that is right, then the question “when is someone conscious?” has no single answer, and the familiar legal and medical tests are rougher instruments than we like to admit. A patient may be unable to respond and still be experiencing something; another may respond and be experiencing nothing. Neither of these possibilities is hypothetical. Both have been reported. This does not mean the concept should be abandoned, and it is worth noticing that anaesthetists have managed perfectly well for a century without a settled theory. It means the concept is doing several jobs at once: describing a capacity, marking a moral boundary, and licensing a set of clinical decisions. Those jobs may not need the same definition. If so, the important question is not what consciousness really is, but which question we are asking. 　 56. Why does the writer call anaesthesia an “unexpected laboratory”? A. Because the drugs were discovered by accident. B. Because it allows consciousness to be studied by removing it. C. Because operating theatres are used for research. D. Because patients can report what they experience. 　 57. What do the results suggest about consciousness? A. It is present or absent with no middle states. B. It breaks down in stages as an anaesthetic takes effect. C. It depends on local activity within one brain region. D. It can be measured reliably by asking patients. 　 58. What is the significance of the cases mentioned at the end of the fourth paragraph? A. They show that existing tests are not fully reliable. B. They prove that most patients are conscious during surgery. C. They show that anaesthetics are unsafe for some people. D. They explain why the concept should be abandoned. 　 59. What does the writer conclude? A. A single settled definition of consciousness is within reach. B. The word serves different purposes and may need different definitions. C. Clinical practice should be changed immediately. D. Philosophers should leave the question to doctors. 　 　 Passage B 　 PROOF POSITIVE　　Newsletter, weekly, free A short newsletter devoted to mathematics and the strangeness of the physical world: why a ball cannot be combed flat, what a four-dimensional object looks like from the inside, how the geometry of a rose petal breaks the rules that govern other flowers. Each issue takes one idea and stays with it for eight hundred words. No mathematical training is assumed, but the writing does not talk down. THE GREAT NEUROGENESIS DEBATE　　Long-form series, six parts, free A careful examination of a question that has divided neuroscientists for thirty years: whether the adult human brain produces new nerve cells. The series interviews researchers on both sides, explains why the same tissue samples have produced opposite results, and refuses to declare a winner. Best read in order. SPACE QUICKLY　　Podcast, twice weekly, free A short round-up of what has happened in astronomy and space science, plus one longer interview each week with a working researcher. Recent episodes have covered the private power systems being built for data centres, the search for dark matter, and what a telescope sees when it looks at the same patch of sky for ten years. THE ARCHIVE HOUR　　Monthly, subscribers only Each episode takes a single document from a public archive — a weather diary, a shipping register, an excavation notebook — and reconstructs the world it came from. The programme is unusually good at showing how historians actually work, including the parts that go nowhere. Subscriptions support the transcription of further archive material. 　 Publication Format Frequency Cost Proof Positive newsletter weekly free The Great Neurogenesis Debate long-form series six parts free; best read in order Space Quickly podcast twice weekly free The Archive Hour audio programme monthly subscribers only 　 60. Which publication is intended to be read from beginning to end? A. Proof Positive. B. The Great Neurogenesis Debate. C. Space Quickly. D. The Archive Hour. 　 61. What is said about Proof Positive? A. It expects readers to have studied mathematics. B. It treats one idea at length in each issue. C. It is published only for subscribers. D. It deals mainly with plant biology. 　 62. How does The Archive Hour differ from the other three? A. It is the only one that costs money. B. It is the only one that interviews researchers. C. It is the only one published weekly. D. It is the only one aimed at professionals. 　 　 Passage C 　 In 1861 a young American painter, Frederic Edwin Church, travelled north to Newfoundland to see ice. What he brought back was not a record of a place but an enormous canvas: a wall of polar icebergs under a low sun, painted on a scale that had rarely been attempted for a landscape. Exhibited in New York and then in London, it was admired by crowds and praised by critics, and then, as taste changed, it disappeared from public view. For most of the twentieth century the painting was assumed to have been lost, or to be hanging unrecognised in some private collection. Art historians had photographs of it, and a reputation to reconstruct from, but no object. The trail, when it was finally found, ran through an unlikely place: a boys' home in the north of England. The administrator of the home had bought the painting for the building. It had hung there for years, in a room where nobody knew what it was, and where the scale of it must have seemed simply odd. When the institution's affairs were eventually wound up, the picture was sold, and specialists who examined it recognised both the composition and the hand. Conservators who cleaned the surface found that the canvas had been treated more than once and that the varnish had darkened, flattening the contrast between the ice and the sky. Removing it revealed details that had been invisible for over a century, including small figures in the foreground that change the scale of everything above them. The painting is now shown beside the sketches Church made on the voyage. The comparison is instructive. The sketches are quick, uncertain and full of corrections; the finished work is confident and almost theatrical. Between them lies the distance between seeing something and deciding what it means — which is, on the evidence of this canvas, the real subject of the painting. 　 63. What happened to the painting after it was first exhibited? A. It was immediately bought by a museum. B. It gradually ceased to be publicly shown. C. It was damaged and repaired several times. D. It was sent back to Newfoundland. 　 64. Where was the painting eventually found? A. In the collection of a New York gallery. B. In a building where it had hung unrecognised. C. In the studio the artist had used. D. In a store belonging to the artist's family. 　 65. What was discovered when the surface was cleaned? A. The painting had been cut down to a smaller size. B. Earlier details became visible again. C. The artist had painted over another work. D. The canvas was not the one described in the records. 　 66. What does the writer suggest by comparing the sketches with the finished painting? A. The sketches are artistically superior to the painting. B. The painting owes little to what the artist observed. C. The finished work involves interpretation, not only observation. D. The sketches were made after the painting was completed. 　 　 Section C Directions: Read the following passage. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need. 　 Animals have been talking to one another for hundreds of millions of years, and we have been guessing at what they say for most of recorded history. What has changed recently is not the animals but the instruments. Machine learning can search for patterns in far more recordings than a person could ever listen to, and that has produced a run of results nobody predicted. 　　67　　 The clearest example concerns elephants. African savanna elephants produce low rumbles, some below the range of human hearing, that travel long distances through the air and the ground. They often rumble together, in what researchers call choruses. A study published in Scientific Reports analysed 902 recordings made over more than thirty years in Kenya and found that the algorithm could tell what the animals were doing better than chance — though it still made plenty of mistakes. 　　68　　 The more intriguing finding concerned how the calls changed inside a chorus. In certain situations the individual rumbles became more acoustically similar to one another, a phenomenon known as vocal convergence. It is rather like the way people begin to adopt the speech patterns of whoever they are talking to. 　　69　　 Similar techniques are being applied elsewhere. Researchers have used them to identify the species, sex and feeding status of mosquitoes from their wingbeats, to find a phonetic structure in sperm-whale clicks, and to show that marmoset monkeys address one another by name. 　　70　　 As one behavioural biologist put it, used responsibly, these methods can transform what we are able to do with the data we collect. The qualification, used responsibly, is doing a good deal of work in that sentence. 　 A. Convergence occurred only in a few call types, which suggests it may help families coordinate what they do next. B. The findings suggest that a chorus carries information about who is calling and what they are doing, not merely that several animals are calling at once. C. Elephants are among the most social of all large mammals. D. In each case the animal had been studied for decades before anyone thought to apply the method. E. The recordings, in other words, already existed; it was the analysis that was new. F. Sperm whales, for example, dive to great depths to hunt squid. 2026 年 9—10 月最新时文阅读练习（GVC + ABC + 六选四） · 学生版 　 Page 1 学科网（北京）股份有限公司 Page 1 学科网（北京）股份有限公司 $2026 年 9—10 月最新时文阅读练习（GVC + ABC + 六选四） · 教师版 2026 年 9—10 月最新时文阅读练习（GVC + ABC + 六选四） 教师版 · 含答案与解析 　 Set 9 　 II. Grammar and Vocabulary 　 Section A　Grammar 出处：Scientific American · Mary Randolph · 2026年10月10日 ·《This Beer-Making Waste May Offer Cleaner Water》 Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank. 　 Breweries produce a lot of waste. For every litre of beer, several kilograms of solid material 　　21　　(leave) over, and finding uses for them 　　22　　(become) a serious business. In a recent study, scientists 　　23　　(heat) spent malt rootlets — the small sprouts that grow from barley — at high temperatures without oxygen. The result was biochar, a material full of tiny holes that can trap bacteria. The team mixed the biochar with sand and passed water through it. The mixture removed about five times as much Escherichia coli as sand alone. Sand works like a sieve, simply 　　24　　(stop) bacteria from passing through, but biochar appears to hold on to them. Groundwater moves constantly through soil, 　　25　　 it can pick up waste from farms. A cheap, locally made filter could therefore improve water quality in places that have no treatment plant. The researchers are not claiming victory yet. The material has so far only been tested 　　26　　 the laboratory, and they now plan to try it in the field, where the conditions are much harder to control. The most important question is whether the biochar can be used more than once. If it traps bacteria only once and then has to be thrown away, it will not be 　　27　　 better than the waste it came from. Other by-products of brewing already have second lives: leftover grain 　　28　　(use) as animal feed. As the industry grows, so 　　29　　 the amount it throws away. Finding enough applications, one scientist says, is the only way to deal with a problem that is not going to get 　　30　　(small). 　 Section B　Vocabulary 出处：Scientific American · Meghan Bartels · 2026年9月9日 ·《Fog May Be Hiding Secret Ecosystems》 Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need. A. moisture　B. vehicle　C. habitat　D. active　E. feeding　F. sugary　G. temporary　H. mark　I. shade　J. nutrients　K. disappears 　 Fog changes the way a landscape looks, and scientists are discovering that it may also matter to the tiny organisms floating inside it, especially in dry regions where water is scarce. Ecologists have usually treated fog as a source of 　　31　　 for plants and animals in dry places, and as a 　　32　　 that carries minerals and microbes from one place to another. The idea that fog might itself be a 　　33　　 — a place where organisms actually live — has only recently been taken seriously. If fog itself counts as one, then such places can appear and vanish within a single morning. "The scientific community has known for a long time that there are a great many microbes in the atmosphere," says one microbiologist. "But are they really 　　34　　 up there, or is the air just transporting them?" To find out, researchers collected fog water in Pennsylvania. They found bacteria 　　35　　 on simple carbon compounds in the water, and they counted more bacteria after fog events than before them. That suggests the organisms were growing rather than simply passing through. Counting bacteria before and after each fog event gave the team a way to measure growth directly. The bacteria can also break down formaldehyde, which is far harder to process than the 　　36　　 compounds that most microbes prefer. That ability surprised the researchers, since formaldehyde is normally toxic to living cells and difficult to break down. Fog is 　　37　　, of course. It forms, it drifts, and sooner or later it 　　38　　, taking its passengers with it. A droplet does not last long, but that does not disqualify it. A puddle does not last long either. As one researcher points out, life inside a droplet has its advantages: there is 　　39　　 from the sun, there is water, and there may be other 　　40　　 as well. A single droplet may hold only a few millionths of a litre, yet for the organisms inside it, that is an entire world. 　 III. Reading Comprehension 　 Section A　Cloze 出处：素材依据：Science · 2020年 van Klink 等全球昆虫数量趋势研究、丹麦“挡风玻璃”重复调查（2019）与《卫报》昆虫减少系列报道 · 原创议论文编写（2026年10月） Directions: For each blank in the following passage there are four words or phrases marked A, B, C and D. Fill in each blank with the word or phrase that best fits the context. 　 Ask anyone over fifty about long car journeys and you may hear the same story. The windscreen used to be covered with insects, and now it is 　　41　　. When scientists in Denmark repeated a survey from the 1990s, using the same methods, they found that the number of insects caught had fallen by between 80 and 97 per cent — a(n) 　　42　　 decline that matched studies from Germany and Puerto Rico. Not everyone is convinced. Insect populations rise and fall with the weather, and one bad year proves little. Critics also point out that measurements began only after humans had changed the landscape, so the 　　43　　 they are compared against may themselves be too low. Even with these doubts, the weight of evidence points one way. A review of long-term studies concluded that insect numbers are falling by about one to two per cent a year — a slow decline that, 　　44　　 over decades, becomes catastrophic. Because insects do work that nothing else does. Roughly three-quarters of the world's food crops depend, at least partly, on 　　45　　, and most pollinators are insects. Lose the insects and the losses multiply up the food chain: a bird that feeds its young on insects cannot simply 　　46　　 to seeds; its numbers fall, and the predators above it follow. The causes are not mysterious. The first is the loss of 　　47　　: hedges removed, meadows built over, wetlands drained. The second is chemicals: pesticides do not stay where they are sprayed but drift, accumulate and travel up the food chain, so that a field can look healthy while being almost 　　48　　 of insect life. The third is climate change, which 　　49　　 the damage: warmer, drier seasons shrink the pools where dragonflies breed. It is easy to feel helpless. Yet insects are easier to help than whales: they need small spaces and breed fast. A garden left slightly wild or a pond dug in a park can become a refuge within a season. Some cities now plant 　　50　　 flowers along roads and stop mowing while bees are active. Individual action is not enough. Insects are declining because of the way whole landscapes are managed, and no amount of backyard gardening will 　　51　　 a pesticide regime. But there is a strong argument for starting small anyway: policies appear when enough people have already seen the difference in their own 　　52　　. Long-term records kept by ordinary people — schoolchildren trapping moths, birdwatchers noting the first bee of spring — are the kind of 　　53　　 that makes a slow decline visible. Ordinary observation, taken seriously and 　　54　　 over years, is how science catches slow change. The insects will not ask for much: a little space, fewer chemicals and one change of 　　55　　 — from keeping the world tidy to keeping it alive. 　 41. A. broken B. clean C. noisy D. warm 42. A. steady B. expected C. alarming D. brief 43. A. figures B. prices C. seasons D. colours 44. A. measured B. published C. forgotten D. compounded 45. A. irrigation B. pollination C. machinery D. rainfall 46. A. switch B. return C. refuse D. promise 47. A. appetite B. income C. memory D. habitat 48. A. full B. empty C. proud D. afraid 49. A. repairs B. describes C. deepens D. ends 50. A. wild B. rare C. glass D. plastic 51. A. fund B. explain C. enjoy D. offset 52. A. dreams B. streets C. prices D. letters 53. A. noise B. theory C. profit D. data 54. A. recorded B. hidden C. sold D. refused 55. A. address B. season C. habit D. colour 　 Section B　Reading Comprehension Directions: Read the following three passages. Each passage is followed by several questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that fits best according to the information given in the passage you have just read. 　 Passage A Source: Scientific American, October 2026 　 Every day, in operating theatres around the world, anaesthetists do something that philosophers cannot yet explain. They switch consciousness off and, a few hours later, switch it back on. The patient is not asleep in any ordinary sense; there is no dreaming, no sense of time passing, and afterwards nothing to remember. What takes place between the injection and the recovery is, for the person concerned, simply absent. Anaesthesia has therefore become an unexpected laboratory. If we want to know what consciousness requires, the most direct method is to remove it under controlled conditions and observe what goes with it. The results have been awkward for several comfortable assumptions. Consciousness does not, for example, appear to be a single thing that is either present or absent. Patients pass through graded states as a drug takes effect: responsiveness goes first, then the integration of information, then whatever it is that leaves no trace in memory. Anaesthetics also do not act at one site. They quieten communication between distant regions of the brain while leaving local activity largely intact — which is why a deeply unconscious brain can still show bursts of electrical activity that look, in isolation, like the signature of thought. If that is right, then the question “when is someone conscious?” has no single answer, and the familiar legal and medical tests are rougher instruments than we like to admit. A patient may be unable to respond and still be experiencing something; another may respond and be experiencing nothing. Neither of these possibilities is hypothetical. Both have been reported. This does not mean the concept should be abandoned, and it is worth noticing that anaesthetists have managed perfectly well for a century without a settled theory. It means the concept is doing several jobs at once: describing a capacity, marking a moral boundary, and licensing a set of clinical decisions. Those jobs may not need the same definition. If so, the important question is not what consciousness really is, but which question we are asking. 　 56. Why does the writer call anaesthesia an “unexpected laboratory”? A. Because the drugs were discovered by accident. B. Because it allows consciousness to be studied by removing it. C. Because operating theatres are used for research. D. Because patients can report what they experience. 　 57. What do the results suggest about consciousness? A. It is present or absent with no middle states. B. It breaks down in stages as an anaesthetic takes effect. C. It depends on local activity within one brain region. D. It can be measured reliably by asking patients. 　 58. What is the significance of the cases mentioned at the end of the fourth paragraph? A. They show that existing tests are not fully reliable. B. They prove that most patients are conscious during surgery. C. They show that anaesthetics are unsafe for some people. D. They explain why the concept should be abandoned. 　 59. What does the writer conclude? A. A single settled definition of consciousness is within reach. B. The word serves different purposes and may need different definitions. C. Clinical practice should be changed immediately. D. Philosophers should leave the question to doctors. 　 　 Passage B Source: compiled from publication guides, October 2026 　 PROOF POSITIVE　　Newsletter, weekly, free A short newsletter devoted to mathematics and the strangeness of the physical world: why a ball cannot be combed flat, what a four-dimensional object looks like from the inside, how the geometry of a rose petal breaks the rules that govern other flowers. Each issue takes one idea and stays with it for eight hundred words. No mathematical training is assumed, but the writing does not talk down. THE GREAT NEUROGENESIS DEBATE　　Long-form series, six parts, free A careful examination of a question that has divided neuroscientists for thirty years: whether the adult human brain produces new nerve cells. The series interviews researchers on both sides, explains why the same tissue samples have produced opposite results, and refuses to declare a winner. Best read in order. SPACE QUICKLY　　Podcast, twice weekly, free A short round-up of what has happened in astronomy and space science, plus one longer interview each week with a working researcher. Recent episodes have covered the private power systems being built for data centres, the search for dark matter, and what a telescope sees when it looks at the same patch of sky for ten years. THE ARCHIVE HOUR　　Monthly, subscribers only Each episode takes a single document from a public archive — a weather diary, a shipping register, an excavation notebook — and reconstructs the world it came from. The programme is unusually good at showing how historians actually work, including the parts that go nowhere. Subscriptions support the transcription of further archive material. 　 Publication Format Frequency Cost Proof Positive newsletter weekly free The Great Neurogenesis Debate long-form series six parts free; best read in order Space Quickly podcast twice weekly free The Archive Hour audio programme monthly subscribers only 　 60. Which publication is intended to be read from beginning to end? A. Proof Positive. B. The Great Neurogenesis Debate. C. Space Quickly. D. The Archive Hour. 　 61. What is said about Proof Positive? A. It expects readers to have studied mathematics. B. It treats one idea at length in each issue. C. It is published only for subscribers. D. It deals mainly with plant biology. 　 62. How does The Archive Hour differ from the other three? A. It is the only one that costs money. B. It is the only one that interviews researchers. C. It is the only one published weekly. D. It is the only one aimed at professionals. 　 　 Passage C Source: Smithsonian Magazine, October 2026 　 In 1861 a young American painter, Frederic Edwin Church, travelled north to Newfoundland to see ice. What he brought back was not a record of a place but an enormous canvas: a wall of polar icebergs under a low sun, painted on a scale that had rarely been attempted for a landscape. Exhibited in New York and then in London, it was admired by crowds and praised by critics, and then, as taste changed, it disappeared from public view. For most of the twentieth century the painting was assumed to have been lost, or to be hanging unrecognised in some private collection. Art historians had photographs of it, and a reputation to reconstruct from, but no object. The trail, when it was finally found, ran through an unlikely place: a boys' home in the north of England. The administrator of the home had bought the painting for the building. It had hung there for years, in a room where nobody knew what it was, and where the scale of it must have seemed simply odd. When the institution's affairs were eventually wound up, the picture was sold, and specialists who examined it recognised both the composition and the hand. Conservators who cleaned the surface found that the canvas had been treated more than once and that the varnish had darkened, flattening the contrast between the ice and the sky. Removing it revealed details that had been invisible for over a century, including small figures in the foreground that change the scale of everything above them. The painting is now shown beside the sketches Church made on the voyage. The comparison is instructive. The sketches are quick, uncertain and full of corrections; the finished work is confident and almost theatrical. Between them lies the distance between seeing something and deciding what it means — which is, on the evidence of this canvas, the real subject of the painting. 　 63. What happened to the painting after it was first exhibited? A. It was immediately bought by a museum. B. It gradually ceased to be publicly shown. C. It was damaged and repaired several times. D. It was sent back to Newfoundland. 　 64. Where was the painting eventually found? A. In the collection of a New York gallery. B. In a building where it had hung unrecognised. C. In the studio the artist had used. D. In a store belonging to the artist's family. 　 65. What was discovered when the surface was cleaned? A. The painting had been cut down to a smaller size. B. Earlier details became visible again. C. The artist had painted over another work. D. The canvas was not the one described in the records. 　 66. What does the writer suggest by comparing the sketches with the finished painting? A. The sketches are artistically superior to the painting. B. The painting owes little to what the artist observed. C. The finished work involves interpretation, not only observation. D. The sketches were made after the painting was completed. 　 　 Section C Source: Scientific American, October 2026 Directions: Read the following passage. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need. 　 Animals have been talking to one another for hundreds of millions of years, and we have been guessing at what they say for most of recorded history. What has changed recently is not the animals but the instruments. Machine learning can search for patterns in far more recordings than a person could ever listen to, and that has produced a run of results nobody predicted. 　　67　　 The clearest example concerns elephants. African savanna elephants produce low rumbles, some below the range of human hearing, that travel long distances through the air and the ground. They often rumble together, in what researchers call choruses. A study published in Scientific Reports analysed 902 recordings made over more than thirty years in Kenya and found that the algorithm could tell what the animals were doing better than chance — though it still made plenty of mistakes. 　　68　　 The more intriguing finding concerned how the calls changed inside a chorus. In certain situations the individual rumbles became more acoustically similar to one another, a phenomenon known as vocal convergence. It is rather like the way people begin to adopt the speech patterns of whoever they are talking to. 　　69　　 Similar techniques are being applied elsewhere. Researchers have used them to identify the species, sex and feeding status of mosquitoes from their wingbeats, to find a phonetic structure in sperm-whale clicks, and to show that marmoset monkeys address one another by name. 　　70　　 As one behavioural biologist put it, used responsibly, these methods can transform what we are able to do with the data we collect. The qualification, used responsibly, is doing a good deal of work in that sentence. 　 A. Convergence occurred only in a few call types, which suggests it may help families coordinate what they do next. B. The findings suggest that a chorus carries information about who is calling and what they are doing, not merely that several animals are calling at once. C. Elephants are among the most social of all large mammals. D. In each case the animal had been studied for decades before anyone thought to apply the method. E. The recordings, in other words, already existed; it was the analysis that was new. F. Sperm whales, for example, dive to great depths to hunt squid. 　 ANSWERS AND EXPLANATIONS 　 Section A　Grammar 21. are left　【一般现在时被动 + 主谓一致】主语 several kilograms 为复数，material 与 leave over 被动。 22. has become　【现在完成时】主语为 finding uses 动名词短语（表单数），'已成严肃生意'强调对现今的影响。【易错】勿用 have become——主语是 finding 而非 uses。 23. heated　【一般过去时】in a recent study 提示过去时间，描述研究已完成的动作。 24. stopping　【现在分词作状语】sand 与 stop 主动关系，表方式。 25. where　【定语从句关系副词】先行词 soil，从句缺地点状语。 26. in　【介词】tested ___ the laboratory，与后文 in the field 形成“实验室 vs 实地”对照。 27. much　【比较级修饰语】much better than 表“比…好得多”。【易错】very 不能修饰比较级。 28. is used　【一般现在时被动】grain 与 use 被动，表述常态事实。 29. does　【so 引导的倒装】so + 助动词 + 主语 表“…也一样”；主语 the amount 为单数，用 does。 30. smaller　【比较级】get ___ 表“不会变小”，与前文 as the industry grows 对照。 速查：21. are left　22. has become　23. heated　24. stopping　25. where　26. in　27. much　28. is used　29. does　30. smaller 　 Section B　Vocabulary 31. A（moisture）　【名词】a source of ___ 表“水分来源”，与 dry places 呼应。 32. B（vehicle）　【名词】as a ___ that carries…；vehicle 此处表“载体、媒介”。 33. C（habitat）　【名词】might itself be a ___ ，后文 a place where organisms actually live 即释义。 34. D（active）　【形容词】are they really ___ up there，与 transporting them 形成“主动活动 vs 被动运输”对照。 35. E（feeding）　【现在分词】found bacteria ___ on…；feed on 表“以…为食”。 36. F（sugary）　【形容词】the ___ compounds 指“含糖化合物”，与 formaldehyde 对比。 37. G（temporary）　【形容词】Fog is ___，后文 it forms…and disappears 即释义。 38. K（disappears）　【动词第三人称单数】sooner or later it ___，需第三人称单数形式。 39. I（shade）　【名词】there is ___ from the sun 表“有遮荫”。 40. J（nutrients）　【名词复数】there may be other ___ as well，与 shade、water 并列列举雾滴内的生存资源。 【多余词】H. mark —— 语篇无“标记”语境。 速查：31-40: A B C D E F G K I J　　多余词: H 　 Section A　Cloze 41. B（clean）　【句组·对照】the windscreen used to be covered with insects, and now it is ___ 是“过去满是虫子／如今干净”的今昔对照，为下文“重复调查”的结果作铺垫。broken、noisy 与“挡风玻璃上的虫迹”无关。 42. C（alarming）　【句组·复现】between 80 and 97 per cent 是触目惊心的幅度，matched studies from Germany and Puerto Rico 说明多地一致，故为 alarming。steady 只强调稳定性，与“惊人降幅”的评价不符。 43. A（figures）　【句组·让步】Critics point out 引出质疑，后文说明“基线”问题：测量的起始时间太晚，因此今天数据所比对的“数字”本身可能偏低。prices、colours 与生态监测数据无关。 44. D（compounded）　【句组·因果】每年 1–2% 的缓慢下降，若“累积”数十年即成灾难，compounded（叠加、累积）与 becomes catastrophic 构成因果递进。measured、forgotten 与“累积效应”的因果不符。 45. B（pollination）　【句组·复现】后文 most pollinators are insects 直接复现“授粉”，并解释“四分之三的粮食作物依赖”的原因。irrigation、machinery 与“传粉者”无关。 46. A（switch）　【句组·因果】以食虫育雏的鸟类“不能简单地改吃种子”，因而数量下降，并牵连上层捕食者。switch to 表“转向”。return、refuse 与“被迫改变食性”的因果链不符。 47. D（habitat）　【句组·例证】冒号后篱笆被清除、草甸被建筑覆盖、湿地被排干，三项并列都是“栖息地”流失的具体形式。appetite、income 与生态语境无关。 48. B（empty）　【句组·对照】a field can look healthy while being almost ___ of insect life 是“看上去健康／实际上几乎空无一虫”的表里对照。full 与 while 的转折逻辑相反。 49. C（deepens）　【句组·递进】在栖息地丧失、农药两项原因之后，气候变化“加深”了破坏，deepens 表“加重、加剧”。repairs、ends 与第三重打击的递进关系相反。 50. A（wild）　【句组·复现】上文 A garden left slightly wild 与 stopped mowing 都指向“减少修剪、让它野生”，故城市种的是“野花”。rare、glass 与“为蜂类留出食源”的措施不符。 51. D（offset）　【句组·让步】Individual action is not enough 是让步前提，故后院园艺无法“抵消”农药使用体系，offset 表“抵销”。fund、explain 与“个体行动有限”的论述不符。 52. B（streets）　【语篇·因果】policies appear when enough people have already seen the difference 说明政策源于切身体验；in their own ___ 应指身边的生活场所（自己的街区）。dreams、letters 与“亲眼看到变化”的成因不符。 53. D（data）　【句组·复现】Long-term records kept by ordinary people 与 schoolchildren trapping moths 等例证都在说明“长期数据”，data 是 records 的上义词。noise、profit 与科学记录无关。 54. A（recorded）　【语篇·复现】上句 Long-term records kept by ordinary people 复现“记录”；taken seriously and ___ over years 强调“被认真对待并长期记录”，才使缓慢变化可见。hidden、refused 与“让变化可见”的方向相反。 55. C（habit）　【语篇·对照】破折号后 from keeping the world tidy to keeping it alive 是“整洁／有生命”的观念对照，需“习惯／观念”的转变。address、colour 与全文主张不符。 速查：41-55: B C A D B A D B C A D B D A C 　 逻辑覆盖：转折/对照 5 · 因果/递进 4 · 复现/例证 4 · 语篇统摄 2（共 15 题，四类齐全） 　 Section B　Passage A 56. B　Detail. Para 2: anaesthesia is a laboratory because the most direct way to learn what consciousness requires is to remove it under controlled conditions. A, C and D are not the reasons given. 57. B　Detail. Para 3: patients pass through graded states as the drug takes effect. A contradicts that directly; C reverses the finding about distant and local activity; D contradicts Para 4. 58. A　Inference. Para 4 states that the familiar tests are rougher instruments than we like to admit, and that both mismatches — no response with experience, and response without experience — have been reported. B overstates; C is not the point; D contradicts the last paragraph. 59. B　Inference. The final paragraph argues that the concept is doing several jobs at once and that they may not need the same definition, so the useful question is which question we are asking. A makes a prediction the writer avoids; C and D misread the passage's restraint and its respect for philosophy. 　 Section B　Passage B 60. B　Detail. The neurogenesis series is marked 'best read in order'. Proof Positive is a weekly sequence of self-contained pieces; Space Quickly is a round-up; The Archive Hour takes a different document each month. 61. B　Detail. Proof Positive is described as taking one idea and staying with it for eight hundred words. A contradicts 'no mathematical training is assumed'; C describes another publication; D gives one example as if it were the subject. 62. A　Inference. The Archive Hour is 'subscribers only', while the other three are free. B applies also to the neurogenesis series and the podcast; C misstates the frequencies; D is untrue of all four. 　 Section B　Passage C 63. B　Detail. Para 1: exhibited in New York and London, admired and praised, and then — 'as taste changed' — it disappeared from public view. A contradicts the later search; C and D are not stated. 64. B　Detail. Paras 2–3: the trail led to a boys' home in the north of England, where the painting had hung unrecognised for years. A contradicts the belief that it was lost; C and D are invented. 65. B　Detail. Para 4: cleaning revealed details invisible for over a century, including small figures that change the scale of the scene. A, C and D are not reported. 66. C　Inference. The last paragraph contrasts the uncertain sketches with the confident finished work and calls the distance between them 'the distance between seeing something and deciding what it means'. A is not the writer's judgement; B contradicts the comparison; D reverses the order. 　 Section C　六选四 67. E　Gap 67, end of para 1 (restating the point). The paragraph describes the change of scene — more information than ever, and yet more loneliness. E makes the comparison explicit: the recordings already existed, and it was the analysis that was new. C and F are background facts that cannot carry this contrast. 68. B　Gap 68, end of para 2 (the finding stated). The paragraph reports that the algorithm predicted behaviour better than chance; B states what the study concludes about what a chorus carries, and the next paragraph deepens it. C and F do not follow from the finding. 69. A　Gap 69, end of para 3 (interpreting the phenomenon). The paragraph describes vocal convergence and compares it with the way people adopt each other's speech patterns. A reports the restriction to certain call types and the function this suggests, completing the interpretation. C and F are irrelevant. 70. D　Gap 70, mid para 4 (summing up the examples). The paragraph lists four studies across very different animals; D draws the common feature — in each case the animal had been studied for decades before anyone thought to apply the method — and the closing quotation follows. C and F add nothing. Answers: 67-E　68-B　69-A　70-D 2026 年 9—10 月最新时文阅读练习（GVC + ABC + 六选四） · 教师版 Distractors (not used): C and F Page 1 学科网（北京）股份有限公司 Page 1 学科网（北京）股份有限公司 $