Passage One
Before going into camp there are many things for the camper to learn if he does not know how, and one of these things is how to make a fire. If one has matches, kindling and wood there is no trick in making a campfire, but there is a good trick in making a fire where there are no matches and the wood is green or wet.
Our own Indians get fire by rotating a hard upright stick in a cup-shaped hollow of lighter wood, in which dry charcoal or the shavings of punk were placed. Cotton and any other substances that catch a flame easily would answer as well. This is getting fire by friction.
Camps are either temporary, that is changed from day to day, or they are permanent and may be visited year after year, or they may be used for a few weeks at a time. Temporary camps are the ones we are considering, and these can be elaborate or very, very simple. I prefer the latter, and I am sure the boys will agree with me. .
During the autumn and when the weather is dry and the nights not too cool, the best way to camp is in the open, sleeping on beds of boughs, about a roaring fire, and with one blanket under and another over.
Small dog tents, like the ones our soldiers carried in the Civil War, are cheap and very convenient. Each man carried a section, and two made a tent, into which two men crawled when it rained, but in dry weather they preferred to sleep in the open, even when it was freezing.
Shelters of boughs, arranged in an A-framed fashion from a ridge pole make good temporary shelters and are first rate as windbreaks at night.
A shack built of crossed logs requires some time to build and some skill to make, but it is not beyond the reach of any boy who has seen—and who has not—an old-fashioned log shanty.
But all boys, even trained foresters, are apt to get lost in strange woods. Every one, however, should know what to do in such a circumstance. As a rule the denser growth of moss on trees is on the north side. This knowledge may help find the direction, but it is better to carry a small pocket compass.
When the sky is clear, the sun and the stars help to guide the course, and if they are followed one is saved from traveling in a circle, as the lost are pretty sure to do in a dense forest.

A.great fun for adults

B.delightful yet challenging

C.boring and dangerous

D.an expensive outdoor activity

A.cotton

B.wet wood

C.kindling

D.dry charcoal

A.permanently located

B.simply equipped

C.elaborately decorated

D.specially designed for boys

A.can ensure a sound sleep

B.are often used in dry weather

C.can hold two men

D.are only used for dogs

A.looking at the moss on trees

B.making a pocket compass

C.lighting up a big fire

D.moving in a circle

Passage Two

Now the robots are coming for our farms. The Washington Post tells us “farmworkers could be replaced by robots sooner than we think.” The Guardian paints a picture of “space bots with lasers, killing plants.” The New Yorker calls ours the “age of robot farmers," forecasting that “the future of fruit-and-vegetable farming is automation.” To illustrate that, The New Yorker writes about Berry 5.1, which has so far cost $10 million to design and would pluck strawberries more precisely than clock punching farmhands. It also highlights an indoor vertical farm in New Jersey that runs on an operating system, grows salad greens with LED lights that are “the cheapest and most efficient way of replacing the sun,” and operates like the automated Amazon fulfillment center its owner used to manage. Many of these kinds of articles end with the rather generic claim that the efficiency of “precision agriculture” will save labor and save the planet.
What boosters really mean by the robotics of “precision agriculture" is more of an A.I. approach, with cloud-enabled, network assisted, data. intensive autonomous machines, none of which are cheap, all of which will require maintenance that farmers may not be able to do themselves. Altogether, it will drive farmers deeper into the debt they already carry. They carry that debt, and indebtedness to off-farm suppliers, because we already have a robot present and past. It's here and has been for a long time, as so-called robot farming is another way to think about industrial agriculture and its ethos of labor -saving efficiencies. In 2013, Matthew Yglesias rightly noted that “the use of the word ‘robots’ as a synonym for ‘labor-saving technology’ is a rhetorical trick to make long-standing trends seem new and alarming.” This robotic farming future is not the pure good the venture capitalists would have us believe. It may, in fact, take us further down the road that got us into our agricultural problems in the first place, encouraging more monocropping and land expansion while reducing the resilience of diversified planting schemes. What's more, it perpetuates a long lineage of fashioning the future of farming without actual farmers or their knowledge.
That lineage began about a century ago. In the shadows of broader manufacturing development, tractors, harvesters, reapers, threshers, and combines (which smartly combined several of them) would give us the farm of tomorrow. The goal was to improve productivity so we could grow more food with fewer farmers. And it basically worked. By 1910, agricultural labor was 31 percent of the US population, down from 56 percent a half-century earlier. (It was 12 percent in 1950, 2 percent in 2000.) Displaced farmers found jobs in other industrial sectors, at the cost of further separating growers from eaters.

A.an indoor vertical farm

B.a BlackBerry smartphone

C.a strawberry picking robot

D.a clock-punching farmhand

A.right

B.request

C.allegation

D.statement

A.easy for farmers to handle

B.labor- consuming for farming

C.far beyond what farmers can afford

D.data-based technology that farmers like to use

A.not a new phenomenon

B.a debt for off-farm suppliers

C.anything but a labor-saving technology

D.a rhetorical trick in the sense of giving alarm

A.neutral

B.critical

C.ambivalent

D.sympathetic

Passage Three

China’s carmakers are speeding up their expansion into overseas markets, especially in the Belt and Road economies, which is expected to boost their sales and more importantly help improve the local automotive industry.
Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, owner of Volvo Cars, purchased a 49.9 percent stake in Malaysian carmaker Proton in June 2017. Within two years, the brand has shown encouraging signs of fast recovery. In May, Proton sold 10,711 vehicles, a 46 month high. From January to May, its sales totaled 36,157 units, up 70 percent year-on-year. By the end of April, it had become the second
best- selling brand in Malaysia.
Daniel Donghui Li, chief financial officer of Geely, said one reason why Proton singled out Geely from others was that the Chinese carmaker had a unique vision for Proton's future development. “We set a goal to help it to become the No.1 brand in Malaysia and a top three brand in the ASEAN region. The results so far are showing that we are on the right path,” said Li, who is also a Proton board member, in late April. Proton's excellent performance was mainly thanks to its model X70 launched in December. Made at one of Geely's plants in Zhejiang province, the model was built based on its popular Boyue sport utility vehicle but tweaked to meet Malaysian customer demands. Geely said the model is just part of the story. In fact, it has introduced for Proton a comprehensive strategy covering aspects from personnel, product quality and cost control to research and development and plant renovation.
Proton engineers are also joining Geely's research teams in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, and the two sides are working to find solutions that will enable Proton to benefit most from Geely's proven system. Ahmad Muzaimi Zainol, a Proton project manager, said after two years of cooperation, they have seen encouraging progress.
Geely is helping Proton to improve its plants as well. The facility in Tanjung Malim is now ready to produce the X70 SUV later this year, as local assembly trials had started on June 12. Proton Chairman Syed Faisal Albar said that the two companies’ partnership has proved to be a shining example of cooperation between both countries. He also suggested that Chinese companies use Malaysia as a gateway to the ASEAN market, which has a population of 650 million. China's Industry and Information Technology Minister Miao Wei said during the plant's opening ceremony that Geely and Proton should seize the opportunities provided by the Belt and Road Initiative, and urged them to deepen cooperation to offer globally competitive products.
Besides Malaysia, Geely has built plants in countries like Belarus, the UK and Sweden and is selling its models in more than 20 countries and regions.

A.started its innovation

B.given poor performance

C.taken the lead in selling cars

D.successfully made its acquisition

A.develop a unique vision

B.go on the right path

C.increase its sales overseas

D.become the best seller in the world

A.was slightly changed

B.was manufactured locally

C.was duplicated

D.was displayed

A.design and plant renovation

B.quality and environment protection

C.model, renovation and employment

D.personnel, renovation and cost control

A.Geely helps Proton enhance its image

B.Geely is ready to sell X70 SUV this year

C.Geely shares its technology with other car makers

D.Geely and Proton both benefit from their cooperation

Passage Four

About 725 million internet users in China, or 87.5 percent of the total online population, watched online videos in 2018, while more than 230 million users have paid for membership of Chinese online video platforms, according to a report released on June 11 at the Internet Summit in Shanghai. “The online audio visual industry is flourishing in the country, with more and more audio visual products of increasingly high quality being created,” said Cui Chenghao, deputy Party secretary of the research center of the National Radio and Television Administration, during the summit.
Cui, who is also the deputy editor of the report, points out that major online video platforms in China, including Tencent platform iQiyi, have been pouring capital into the production of original content and the quality of most works have reached a level that is comparable to those produced by broadcasting companies. “For instance, most original online shows no longer depend solely on the star factor of famous personalities. More and more new actors are appearing in these programs,” he says. Cui also claims that technological advancements have been driving growth in the online media market since 2018 when technology such as 4K (ultra-high definition) and 8K resolution as well as virtual reality started becoming more prevalent in the industry.
According to a joint survey conducted by the research center at the administration, the Center of Shanghai International Film and TV Festival and the audiovisual communication research center at Peking University, about 1,500 films were screened exclusively online in 2018, a drop from 2,400 in 2016. The drop is partly a result of the rising budgets for online movies, which as the survey also shows, have grown a hundredfold, surging from several hundred thousand yuan in 2015 to tens of millions of yuan in 2018.
“We hope to see the quality of films continue to improve as more budget is allocated to such projects," says Lu Di, director of the research center at Peking University. Ma Zhongjun, founder of Shanghai-based Ciwen Media and a Chinese playwright, stated at the summit that some key elements of quality online works are innovation, either in characters or plots, and a smooth and rigorous film production process ranging from the choice of scripts to the completion of a film. Ye Ning, vice-president of Huayi Brothers Media Group, says an excellent film should resonate with the audience, evoke emotions and create a new world in the viewer's mind.

A.over half of the internet users are paid members on video platforms

B.China is expecting a prosperous online audio visual industry

C.the world online audio visual industry is flourishing

D.more high quality films are being produced

A.the first platform to invest in the production of original content

B.a video platform unmatched by other broadcasting companies

C.one of the broadcasting companies to produce adaptations

D.one of the major online video platforms in China

A.use new actors

B.depend on famous actors

C.rely on traditional technology

D.put forward 8K resolution

A.more movies were screened in 2016

B.fewer movies were produced in 2015

C.less money was invested in film making in 2018

D.more viewers were attracted to the cinema in 2016

A.enable the viewers to become more imaginative

B.make the audience laugh and cry all the time

C.awaken the emotions of the audience

D.lead the viewers into a wonderland

It was a great shock to me to discover that I had motor neuron disease. I had never been very well co-coordinated physically as a child. I was not good at ball games, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers. Maybe for this reason, I didn't care much for sport or physical activities. But things seemed to change when I went to Oxford, at the age of 17. I took up coxing and rowing. I was not boat race standard, but I got by at the level of inter-college competition.
In my third year at Oxford, however, I noticed that I seemed to be getting clumsier, and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason. But it was not until I was at Cambridge, in the following year, that my father noticed, and took me to the family doctor. He referred me to a specialist, and shortly after my 215t birthday, I went into hospital for tests. I was in for two weeks, during which I had a wide variety of tests. They took a muscle sample from my arm, stuck electrodes into me, and injected some radio opaque fluid into my spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays, as they tilted the bed. After all that, they didn't tell me what I had, except that it was not multiple sclerosis, and that I was an atypical case. I gathered, however, that they expected it to continue to get worse, and that there was nothing they could do, except give me vitamins. I could see that they didn't expect them to have much effect. I didn't feel like asking for more details, because they were obviously bad.
The realization that I had an incurable disease, that was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock. How could something like that happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this? However, while I had been in hospital, I had seen a boy I vaguely knew die of leukemia, in the bed opposite me. It had not been a pretty sight. Clearly there were people who were worse off than me. At least my condition didn't make me feel sick. Whenever I feel inclined to be sorry for myself I remember that boy.