2021高考英语学科题源出处（网址、原文）

2021

06·8

2021高考英语学科题源出处

（阅读理解部分）

壹

A 篇

原文网址：

http://cncc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=the+biggest+stadium+in+the+world+people+have+been+pouring+into+stadiums+since+the+days+of+ancient+greece.&d=5051143741445003&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=4mtS743UaLb4_qMbKpCqTYe1Kfo0_QEu

原

In Pictures: the Biggest Stadiums in the World

On any given day of any given week in any given city in the U.S., there will be tens of thousands of people packed into a stadium to watch sports. And not just the U.S. In Brazil, they'll be screaming at the soccer players; in Australia, they'll be bellowing at the batsmen and bowlers; in Ireland, they'll be hollering at the hurlers.

People have been pouring into stadiums since the days of ancient Greece. Indeed, that's where the word comes from. 'The word 'stadium' or 'stadion' referred to a measurement of distance, a foot-race, and the place where the race was held and observed by spectators,' reports the Ancient History Encyclopedia. Though precise dates have been lost to time, stadiums certainly existed before Jesus Christ.

In around 80 A.D., the Romans built the Colosseum, which remains the world's best known stadium and continues to inform contemporary design. Tim Cahill, the chief design principle for Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, told SI.com that his design was modeled after a 'Roman amphitheater.' Rome's Colosseum was 157 feet tall and had 80 entrances, seating 50,000 people. However, that was small fry compared with the city's Circus Maximus, where some historians estimate around 250,000 people would gather to watch chariot racing.

These days, safety regulations—not to mention the modern sports fan's desire for a decent view and a comfortable seat—tend to keep stadium capacities slightly lower. Even soccer fans tend to have a seat each; gone are the days of thousands standing in terracing to watch the match.

For our gallery of the biggest stadiums in the world, we have used data supplied by the World Atlas list, which ranks them by their stated permanent capacity, as well updated information from official stadium websites. Our gallery does not include the sprawling sports arenas that host motorsports or horse racing.

All these stadiums are still functional, still open and still hosting the biggest events in world sport. Click through all 75, and hear the roar from the bleachers as you do...

贰

B 篇

原文网址：

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/when-will-aussies-retire-their-home-phone-20170731-gxm209.html

原

When almost everyone has a mobile phone, why are more than half of Australian homes still paying for a landline?

Since the birth of the iPhone ten years ago, more and more Australians are questioning why they're still paying for a home phone. Apple didn't invent the smartphone, but the iPhone helped transform mobile phones from a business tool – for tradies and stockbrokers – into a must-have consumer gadget.

While there's a mobile in almost every pocket, Australians are hanging onto their landlines.

While there's a mobile in almost every pocket, Australians are hanging onto their landlines.

These days you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in Australia over the age of 15 who doesn't own a mobile phone, in fact plenty of younger kids have one in their pocket. We might not all be packing the latest and greatest smartphones, but practically everyone can make and receive calls anywhere, anytime.

Despite this, 55 per cent of Australians still have a landline phone at home and only just over a quarter (29%) rely solely on their smartphones, according to a finder.com.au survey. Keep in mind that this is an online-only survey, so it's not capturing seniors who still have a home phone and don't use the internet.

Of those Australians who still have a landline, a third concede that it's not really necessary and they're keeping it as a security blanket – 19 per cent say they never use it while a further 13 per cent keep it in case of emergencies. I confess my home falls into that category.

Of course once you move to the NBN your home phone will likely die when your broadband line is down or the power goes out, making a mobile phone more practical in an emergency (assuming the local cell tower isn't flooded).

Some people will also balk at the idea of keeping their landline on the NBN when they discover that they probably need to rewire their home to connect their handsets to their broadband modem.

I know people who've unplugged their home phone because the only incoming calls are from telemarketers. These friends are on a Telstra cable bundle which gives them a home phone line whether they want it or not, so when the NBN reaches their street you can be sure they'll be quick to ditch their landline.

Despite all this, more than half of Australian homes are still choosing to stick with their home phone. Age demographics are naturally a factor – only 58 per cent of Gen Ys still use landlines occasionally, compared to 84 per cent of Baby Boomers who've perhaps had the same home number for 50 years. Age isn't the only factor, I'd say it's also to do with the makeup of your household.

Gen Xers with young families, like my wife and I, can still find it convenient to have a communal home phone rather than issuing a mobile phone to every family member, or have us fielding every call on our mobiles. The school has our mobile numbers for emergencies, but we don't need everyday calls ringing in our pockets – especially when you're travelling for work.

That said, to be honest the only people who ever ring our home phone are our Baby Boomers parents, to the point where we play a game and guess who is calling before we pick up the phone (using Caller ID would take the fun out of it). Realistically they're the only people we'd need to notify if we ditched our landline.

I tell myself the home phone is also for the benefit of our children, while my teenage son half-heartedly complains about not having his own mobile phone to the point that it's become a running joke.

That said, I'm not sure he'd actually think to pick up the phone even if he had one. On the weekends he tries to reach his friends via Steam Chat to see if they're free to hang out, while we keep asking 'why don't you just ring his house?' You can be sure our son won't be in a rush for pay for a landline when he moves out of home.

How attached are you to your landline? How long until they go the way of gas street lamps and morning milk deliveries?

叁

C 篇

原文网址：

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ocean-plastics-art-ben-von-wong_n_5cba2594e4b06605e3ee7ea0

原

This Artist Transforms Ocean Plastics Into Stunning Sculptures

You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter marine ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does.

Von Wong builds massive art installations out of discarded plastic trash, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use items.

At the end of January, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a stunning pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Comprised of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the installation made its debut at the Estella Place shopping mall in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

In March, Von Wong built another piece, “Plastikophobia,” an otherworldly cave built from 18,000 used plastic cups. He said that one of the most interesting experiences he had with that installation came while watching passersby interact with it. “I would watch people [stare at it] while carrying a drink with a straw and plastic cover in a plastic bag,” he noted. “It’s a really interesting paradox.”

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of Greenpeace volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped from a truck all at once.

Plastic trash makes its way into the ocean from many different routes. In the waters around the United States, much of the floating plastic is from people’s litter ― items dropped here and there ― rather than mass dumping. In places like Indonesia, where trash-collection infrastructure is not as developed as it is in the U.S., garbage often gets dumped into rivers and washes out to sea. The U.S. also ships a lot of its plastic abroad, which makes proper disposal the recipient nation’s problem.

Global plastic production has quadrupled over the past 40 years, according to a study published in 2017. A separate study published this week in the journal Nature Communications found that the amount of plastic being dumped into the oceans has skyrocketed since the 1990s.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks and McDonald’s to reduce their brands’ plastic footprint.

“Unless we [stop] plastic at the source, cleanups and recycling alone [will] never be enough,” Von Wong wrote in a blog post published alongside his “Truckload of Plastic” project.

Experts agree.

“It’s a lie that wasteful consumers cause the problem and that changing our individual habits can fix it,” Matt Wilkins, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American.

“Corporations should pay for the damage they cause,” British politician Geraint Davies wrote for The Guardian. “Only then will they be forced to create environmentally friendly alternatives.”

For their part, big corporations do seem to be in an exploratory phase of finding solutions to the plastic crisis. For instance, dozens have signed on with Loop, a new service that sends people goods in recyclable packaging that can be sent back to be cleaned and reused.

This article has been updated to correct the year that the “Truckload of Plastic” installation was completed, which was incorrectly given initially as 2016.

This story is part of a series on plastic waste, funded by SC Johnson. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the company.

肆

D 篇

原文网址：

https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-you-can-focus-in-a-coffee-shop-but-not-in-your-open-office

原

A few years ago, during a media interview for one of my books, my interviewer said something I still ponder often. Ranting about the level of distraction in his open office, he said, “That’s why I have a membership at the coworking space across the street — so I can focus.”

While I fully support the backlash against open offices, the comment struck me as odd. After all, coworking spaces also typically use an open office layout.

But I recently came across a series of studies examining the effect of sound on the brain that reveals why his strategy works.

From previous research, we know that workers’ primary problem with open or cubicle-filled offices is the unwanted noise.

But new research shows that it may not be the sound itself that distracts us…it may be who is making it. In fact, some level of office banter in the background might actually benefit our ability to do creative tasks, provided we don’t get drawn into the conversation. Instead of total silence, the ideal work environment for creative work has a little bit of background noise. That’s why you might focus really well in a noisy coffee shop, but barely be able to concentrate in a noisy office.

One study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that the right level of ambient noise triggers our minds to think more creatively. The researchers, led by Ravi Mehta of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, examined various levels of noise on participants as they completed tests of creative thinking.

Participants were randomized into four groups and everyone was asked to complete a Remote Associates Test (a commonly used measurement that judges creative thinking by asking test-takers to find the relationship between a series of words that, as first glance, appear unrelated). Depending on the group, participants were exposed to various noise levels in the background, from total silence to 50 decibels, 70 decibels, and 85 decibels. The differences between most of the groups were statistically insignificant; however, the participants in the 70 decibels group (those exposed to a level of noise similar to background chatter in a coffee shop) significantly outperformed the other groups. Since the effects were small, this may suggest that our creative thinking doesn’t differ that much in response to total silence and 85 decibels of background noise — the equivalent of a loud garbage disposal or a quiet motorcycle. Since none of us presumably want to work next to a garbage disposal or motorcycle, I found this surprising.

But since the results at 70 decibels were significant, the study also suggests that the right level of background noise — not too loud and not total silence — may actually boost one’s creative thinking ability. The right level of background noise may disrupt our normal patterns of thinking just enough to allow our imaginations to wander, without making it impossible to focus. This type of “distracted focus” appears to be the optimal state for working on creative tasks. As the authors write, “Getting into a relatively noisy environment may trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas.”

In another study, researchers used frontal lobe electroencephalographic (EEG) machines to study the brain waves of participants as they completed tests of creativity while exposed to various sound environments. The researchers found statistically significant changes in creativity scores and a connection between those scores and certain brain waves. As in the previous study, a certain level of white noise proved the ideal background sound for creative tasks.

So why do so many of us hate our open offices? The quiet chatter of colleagues and the gentle thrum of the HVAC should help us focus. The problem may be that, in our offices, we can’t stop ourselves from getting drawn into others’ conversations or from being interrupted while we’re trying to focus. Indeed, the EEG researchers found that face-to-face interactions, conversations, and other disruptions negatively affect the creative process. By contrast, a coworking space or a coffee shop provides a certain level of ambient noise while also providing freedom from interruptions.

Taken together, the lesson here is that the ideal space for focused work is not about freedom from noise, but about freedom from interruption. Finding a space you can hide away in, regardless of how noisy it is, may be the best strategy for making sure you get the important work done.

Summary 

Surveys have shown that workers’ primary complaint with open or cubicle-filled offices is the unwanted noise. However, recent research suggests it’s not the noise itself that’s the problem. Two recent studies have found that the right level of ambient noise triggers our minds to think more creatively. And one of those studies found no difference between people working in a very noisy environment (the equivalent of a motorcycle engine revving) and people working in total silence. Taken together, the lesson here is that the ideal space for focused work is not about freedom from noise, but about freedom from interruption. Finding a space you can hide away in, regardless of how noisy it is, may be the best strategy for making sure you get the important work done.

伍

任务型阅读

原文网址：

https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2013/06/28/how-to-be-interesting-at-a-dinner-party

原

I recently found myself invited to a dinner party. Between work and the kids, it had been one of those really long weeks. By Friday night at 7 p.m., I had nothing left. I arrived at the party exhausted with a bad case of dinner-party performance anxiety. I managed to muddle through, but that got me thinking about what it really takes to be interesting in a situation like that -- I can't be the only one.

I went straight to an expert, the woman who literally wrote the book on how to be interesting: Jessica Hagy, author of How to be Interesting. Her work appears on Indexed and Forbes.

'I think the dinner party is a great stage to showcase interesting in a lot of different ways,' Hagy says. 'You can show up basically as an observer of other interesting people and let that be a learning experience for you, or you can show up and be a little bit more of the life of the party. But the main thing is to show up.

'The first step is to go exploring -- if you're out of your comfort zone, if you're wandering into somebody's house for the first time -- that's one step in and of itself.'

Hagy doesn't mean rummaging through your host’s medicine cabinet, closet or drawers. She means be adventurous, try different foods, engage strangers in conversation.

'Be prepared to have awkward conversations with strangers, because good conversation is a little bit like coaxing a feral cat out of a drain pipe,' she says. 'You need bait, you need something to talk about, you need to be perceived as non-threatening, and you need to prepare yourself to be hissed or clawed at.

'People love to talk about themselves. If you can start the conversation with a question other than 'How do you know the host?' and 'What do you do for a living?', you'll be able to get a lot more interesting conversation out of whomever it is you're talking to.

Here's an example:

'Usually it's, 'How did you get here?'' Hagy says. 'That brings in, 'I have this old, broken-down vehicle' or 'I rode the bus with these crazy people who were doing witchcraft in the back.' It just opens up conversation.'

There are extroverts who can keep an entire room rapt with their amazing stories or joke-telling abilities, and then there are the introverts.

'Listening is a key way to not only take interesting information that you can share later, but to make other people feel interesting themselves,' Hagy says. 'To coax people out of that shyness, just keep asking them questions.'

So what about that person who has had too much to drink or won't stop talking?

'If you can't take their wine away, you should definitely try to take away their soapbox,' Hagy says. 'If you're the host, you can ask them to help you in the kitchen with something and just remove them from the situation. Or turn the conversation into a topic where they have no expertise and hope they won't be able to weasel in and take that over so quickly.

'The domineering people are obstacles to good conversation with everyone. Once everyone realizes who that character is -- for lack of a better term, the bore at the party -- everyone becomes in cahoots with derailing him.'

And what about that other dinner-party killer: awkward silence?

'If you're faced with an awkward silence at a dinner party, the only thing that always gets everyone murmuring and talking again is to give the host a compliment,' Hagy says. 'He or she is the person who is feeling the weight of that awkwardness the most. Just quickly turn around and say, 'This souffle is magnificent and you have to tell me all about it.''

So being interesting at a dinner party isn't that hard. It really boils down to just a few simple steps.

'I'd say there are three things you should always have in your pocket when you show up at a dinner party,' Hagy says. 'Be ready to be a good listener, bring a gift for the hostess or the host, and offer to clean up at the end of it. Nothing says you're really invested and paying attention like the willingness to help.'