模擬考｜CodingWizard Academy

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The committee ___ on reviewing every application twice, even though it doubled their workload.

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The museum does not ___ visitors to take photographs with flash.

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I would ___ walk twenty minutes than wait for a bus that may never come.

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The proposal looks attractive on paper, but the city simply cannot ___ it.

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Her ___ in the international competition surprised everyone, including her own coach.

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The two sides ___ for nearly six hours without reaching any agreement.

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She apologized ___ keeping the whole team waiting for half an hour.

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Before you sign anything, you should carefully ___ what would happen if the company went out of business.

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Oil prices ___ sharply last quarter, and few analysts expect them to fall soon.

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The documents had ___ untouched in the archive for nearly forty years.

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___ had the ceremony begun when the lights went out across the entire hall.

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Residents ___ about the noise for eight months before the council finally acted.

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In an emergency, small teams tend to ___ on informal channels rather than official ones.

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The alarm went off twice ___ the night, but nobody in the building got up.

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The witness could ___ what she had seen, but not why the two men had started arguing.

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The audience grew visibly ___ long before the second act came to an end.

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___ his complete lack of formal training, he became the leading authority in the field.

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The new evidence ___ the committee reconsider a decision it had announced only a week earlier.

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克漏字：The Rise of Remote WorkTen years ago, working from home was seen as a rare privilege. Today it has become a normal 1 for millions of employees around the world. The shift did not happen overnight. Faster internet and better software made it possible, but it was the pandemic that 2 companies to try it on a large scale. Once they did, many were surprised to find that productivity did not fall. Still, remote work is not without problems. Some employees report that they find it hard to 3 on their tasks at home, where family members and household chores compete for their attention. Others miss the casual conversations that happen naturally in an office. 4 these concerns, most surveys suggest that workers do not want to go back full time. What they prefer is a hybrid model — a few days at home, a few days in the office. Companies that ignore this preference may find it difficult to keep their best people. In a competitive job market, flexibility has become 5 valuable as salary.

第 4 格：___ these concerns, most surveys suggest that workers do not want to go back full time.

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第 5 格：flexibility has become ___ valuable as salary.

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閱讀測驗：Bees in the CityWhen people imagine a beehive, they usually picture it in the countryside, surrounded by fields of flowers. Yet in recent years, beekeepers have been setting up hives on city rooftops, in school gardens, and even on the balconies of apartment buildings. At first this seems like a strange idea. Cities are crowded, noisy, and full of concrete. But researchers have found that urban bees often do surprisingly well — in some studies, better than their rural cousins. The reason has to do with what grows around them. Modern farmland is frequently planted with a single crop over vast areas. When that crop finishes blooming, the bees are left with nothing. Cities, by contrast, are full of parks, private gardens, street trees, and balcony plants, and these bloom at different times throughout the year. The result is a longer and more varied food supply. This does not mean cities are perfect for bees. Air pollution remains a concern, and a rooftop hive can overheat in summer if it is not properly shaded. Beekeepers also warn that placing too many hives in one neighborhood can leave all of them short of food. Even so, urban beekeeping has value beyond the honey it produces. Children who watch a hive at their school learn where food comes from. Neighbors who might never speak to one another start conversations about the bees on the roof. For many beekeepers, that is reason enough.

According to the passage, why do urban bees often do better than rural bees?

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What problem with urban beekeeping is mentioned in the fourth paragraph?

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綜合測驗：The Library of ThingsIn a small town in Ontario there is a library where nobody borrows books. The shelves hold tents, drills, pasta machines, and a telescope. It is called a Library of Things, and it rests on a simple 1: most of the objects we own sit unused for almost all of their lives. An electric drill, according to one often-quoted estimate, is used for a total of thirteen minutes over its entire lifetime. 2 that figure is hard to verify, the point behind it is not. Households across North America are full of tools bought for a single afternoon's work. Lending libraries for objects turn that waste into access. A member pays a small yearly fee and can then take home whatever the collection 3. The savings are obvious, but organizers say the more interesting effect is social: borrowers come back and describe what they built, and staff pass the story on to the next person who takes the same tool. Not everything works smoothly. Items that everyone wants at the same moment — snow shovels in January, camping gear in July — are 4 in short supply, and some tools come back broken. Even so, more than five hundred such libraries now operate worldwide, and the number keeps rising. Their appeal may lie less in saving money than in a change of 5: ownership stops being the obvious way to get the use of a thing.

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閱讀測驗：Alarm FatigueA modern hospital room can produce more than three hundred alarms per patient per day. Infusion pumps beep when a line is nearly empty. Monitors sound when a heart rate crosses a threshold. Beds announce that a patient has shifted their weight. Each of these sounds was added by a manufacturer with good intentions, and each was tested on its own. The trouble is that nobody tested them together. Studies in intensive care units have repeatedly found that between 85 and 99 percent of alarms require no action at all. A nurse who responded to every one of them would do almost nothing else. So nurses learn, without ever deciding to, that most alarms mean nothing — and the rare alarm that does mean something must compete with all the rest for attention. Hospitals have tried two broad approaches. The first is to make alarms smarter: delaying a signal by a few seconds to see whether the reading corrects itself, or requiring two sensors to agree before anything sounds. One Boston hospital reported a 70 percent drop in audible alarms after such changes, with no increase in adverse events. The second approach is stranger and, to some staff, more unsettling: make the ward quieter by routing alarms to a nurse's phone instead of a loudspeaker. Patients sleep better and recover faster. But experienced nurses report a loss they find hard to name. In an open ward, an alarm was information available to everyone; a colleague two beds away could glance up and go. Sent to a single device, it becomes one person's problem. Neither approach removes the underlying design failure. Alarms were built to protect manufacturers from blame as much as to protect patients, and a device that stays silent when it should sound carries a legal risk that a device crying wolf does not.

Why do nurses stop responding to most alarms?

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What do experienced nurses dislike about sending alarms to phones?

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What does the last paragraph suggest about why alarms are so sensitive?

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綜合測驗：The Quiet HourAt 8 a.m. on Tuesdays, a supermarket in Manchester turns off its music, dims half its lights, and asks staff not to stack shelves. The scanners are set to their lowest volume. For sixty minutes the store is, by ordinary retail standards, almost 1. The practice began as an accommodation for autistic shoppers, for whom a normal supermarket — fluorescent glare, overlapping announcements, the constant clatter of trolleys — can be genuinely painful. A parent who had given up shopping with her son wrote to the manager describing what a weekly trip cost the family. The manager, 2 of any policy from head office, simply tried it. What surprised everyone was who else showed up. People recovering from concussion came. So did shift workers, migraine sufferers, and older customers who had quietly stopped going out. Within a year, the quiet hour had the highest customer-satisfaction score of any hour in the week, and other branches began to 3 it. The lesson is one that designers call the curb-cut effect. Ramps cut into sidewalks were fought for by wheelchair users, but they are now used by anyone pushing a stroller or pulling a suitcase. A change made for a group at the margin turns out to serve a much 4 population than anyone predicted. None of this makes the quiet hour easy to sell. It reduces impulse purchases, and music in stores exists precisely because it raises them. Managers who keep the practice tend to justify it in terms of loyalty rather than 5 takings — a harder argument to make to a spreadsheet, and one that only works if head office is willing to wait.

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閱讀測驗：Every Map LiesTake an orange, peel it, and try to flatten the peel on a table. It tears. No amount of care will make a curved surface lie flat, and this small kitchen failure is the entire problem of cartography. Every map of the world is a compromise, and every compromise loses something. The projection most of us grew up with was published by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was designed for sailors: on a Mercator map, a straight line is a line of constant compass bearing, so a captain could rule a course and follow it. That single property made it indispensable for four hundred years. The price is size. Because the projection stretches the map east–west near the poles, it must stretch north–south by the same amount to keep angles true. Greenland ends up looking as large as Africa. Africa is fourteen times larger. In 1973 the historian Arno Peters presented an alternative and argued, loudly, that Mercator's distortions had shaped how Europeans saw the rest of the world. His projection preserves relative area: Africa appears as vast as it is. Geographers were unimpressed, partly because the projection was not new — it had been described by James Gall a century earlier — and partly because preserving area badly distorts shape. On a Gall–Peters map, continents look stretched, as though seen in a warped mirror. The dispute is often reported as a fight about politics, but cartographers see something narrower. A projection cannot preserve area, shape, distance, and direction at once; this is not a technical limitation but a mathematical certainty, proved by Gauss in 1827. The only question is which property you need. A pilot, an ecologist counting habitat, and a teacher explaining colonial history need different maps, and no single one of them is the honest map. What has changed is that we no longer have to choose once and for all. A digital globe can be rotated, and a phone can switch projections in the time it takes to zoom. The generation now in school may be the first for whom the world does not have a single default shape.

What is the purpose of the orange peel example in the first paragraph?

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Why were geographers unimpressed by the Peters projection?

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What does the author suggest by saying "no single one of them is the honest map"?

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閱讀測驗：The Return of the Night TrainFor most of the 2000s, the night train looked like a museum piece. Budget airlines could move a passenger from Vienna to Brussels for less than the price of a bunk, and European operators closed sleeper routes one after another. Between 2001 and 2015 the number of overnight services in Western Europe fell by roughly two-thirds. The carriages were sold, scrapped, or left to rust in sidings. Then, quietly, the direction reversed. Austria's national operator bought a batch of second-hand sleeper cars that Germany was discarding and rebuilt the network around them. Ten years later it runs the largest night-train fleet in Europe and, unusually for the sector, does not lose money on it. The reasons for the revival are not what most reports assume. Climate concern is real, and a night train from Zurich to Amsterdam emits a small fraction of what the equivalent flight does. But surveys of passengers put something else first: the trip does not cost a working day. Boarding at ten at night and arriving at seven in the morning converts travel time into sleeping time, which is time nobody was going to use anyway. The train competes not with the two-hour flight but with the hotel night plus the airport morning. That logic explains where night trains work and where they do not. The sweet spot is a journey of roughly nine to fourteen hours: shorter, and passengers arrive uncomfortably early; longer, and a second night is needed and the economics collapse. It also explains the awkward fact that sleeper travel is not especially cheap. A private compartment can cost more than a flight and a hotel combined, and the operators who have tried to compete on price have generally failed. Whether the revival lasts will depend less on passengers than on track access charges, which are set by national governments and which currently treat a train carrying thirty sleeping passengers much like a freight train carrying containers. Change that, operators argue, and the map of European night travel would redraw itself within a decade.

What does the author mean by "The train competes not with the two-hour flight but with the hotel night plus the airport morning"?

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綜合測驗：The Repair CaféOn the second Saturday of every month, a community hall in Rotterdam fills with broken things. People arrive carrying toasters, lamps, bicycle wheels, and jackets with failed zippers. Volunteers with tools sit at long tables. Nothing is sold, and nothing is thrown away without first being 1. The rule that makes a repair café different from a repair shop is that owners must stay and watch. They are not customers dropping something off; they are apprentices for an afternoon. A volunteer will open the toaster, point to the broken contact, and hand over the screwdriver. The 2 is not efficiency but transfer: the next time something fails, one more person has some idea where to look. Roughly two-thirds of the items that arrive leave working. The rest are 3 beyond repair, usually for the same reason — the manufacturer glued the case shut, or the replacement part is no longer made, or a chip inside refuses to work with anything but its original charger. Volunteers keep records of these failures, and the records have turned out to be politically useful. 4 thousands of such reports, campaigners in Europe were able to show that unrepairable design was a pattern rather than an accident. That evidence contributed to legislation. Manufacturers of certain appliances must now make spare parts available for years after a model is discontinued. The change is modest, and it was 5 hard: an industry built on replacement has little reason to welcome a movement built on repair.

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綜合測驗：Why Deadlines MoveAsk a group of students when they will finish a term paper, and their answers will cluster around a date they will almost all miss. Ask the same students when they finished their last three papers, and they can tell you 1 — usually a week later than they had planned. The information needed to make a better prediction is already in their heads. They just do not use it. Psychologists call this the planning fallacy, and its most striking feature is how 2 it is to experience. Being reminded of past delays barely helps. Neither does being told about the fallacy itself. In one study, students who were explicitly asked to recall similar past assignments still produced estimates that were far too optimistic, though their memories of the delays were accurate. The explanation seems to lie in what we attend to when we plan. Planning is naturally forward-looking and specific: we imagine the steps, and each step, 3, looks manageable. What we do not imagine is the ordinary interference — a broken laptop, a sick child, a request from a supervisor — because interference has no shape until it arrives. One method does work, and it works by refusing to use imagination at all. Instead of asking how long this project will take, ask how long 4 projects took. Construction firms that adopted this approach cut their overruns substantially. It feels wrong to planners, because it ignores everything they know about the specific job in front of them, and that is exactly 5 it succeeds.

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閱讀測驗：The Ghost FleetA fishing net does not stop working when it is lost. Cut loose in a storm or abandoned when it snags, it drifts on, catching fish that no one collects. The catch dies, attracts scavengers, and catches them too. Fisheries scientists call the process ghost fishing, and a single lost net can continue it for years. Estimates of the scale vary widely, which is itself part of the problem. Nobody is required to report a lost net. The most cited figure — that abandoned gear makes up a tenth of ocean plastic by weight — comes from a study whose authors described it as a rough first attempt, yet it now appears in policy documents without that warning attached. What is not in doubt is that the gear is unusually harmful for its weight. A plastic bottle is inert. A net is engineered to catch things and keeps doing so with no one operating it. In one survey off the coast of Washington, a single recovered net was found to have trapped more than a thousand animals, including seabirds and a young seal. Solutions divide into two kinds, and the difference matters. The first is technical: biodegradable panels that fail after a few months, or transponders that let a boat find its own gear again. These work, and they cost money that no individual skipper has a reason to spend, since a net that is already lost is somebody else's problem. The second kind is structural. Norway has run a system since the 1980s in which lost gear can be reported without penalty and a government vessel retrieves it each summer. Reporting is free, retrieval is public, and the incentive to stay quiet disappears. The scheme recovers hundreds of nets a year. Its cost is a rounding error beside the value of the fish those nets would have killed — which is the argument, and also the reason it took forty years for anyone else to copy it.

What makes ghost fishing self-sustaining, according to the first paragraph?

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Why does the author mention how the "most cited figure" was produced?

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What does the author suggest by the final sentence?

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閱讀測驗：The Price of Free ReturnsOnline clothing retailers discovered early that a generous returns policy sells clothes. If a shopper can send back anything that does not fit, at no cost, the decision to buy stops feeling like a decision at all. Conversion rates rise. So, inevitably, do returns. In several European markets, more than a third of clothing bought online now comes back. For some categories — women's dresses, formal shoes — the figure passes half. A practice has emerged that the industry calls bracketing: ordering the same item in three sizes, keeping one, returning two. From the shopper's side this is entirely rational. The retailer has said the returns are free, and for the shopper they are. They are not free for the retailer, and the arithmetic is worse than most people assume. A returned garment must be shipped back, opened, inspected, steamed, repackaged, and relisted, and by the time all of that is done it has often missed the season it was made for. Handling a return typically costs more than the margin on the sale, which means the item must be sold at a discount or not sold at all. A widely reported estimate suggests that a meaningful share of returned clothing is never resold. The exact fraction is disputed, and companies have little reason to publish it. Some retailers have responded by charging for returns. The results are consistent and unwelcome: returns fall, and so do sales, usually by more than the savings. Shoppers who are charged do not order more carefully; they order somewhere else. The interventions that do work are less visible. Better size charts help. So do photographs of the same garment on bodies of different shapes, and reviews that state the reviewer's measurements. One retailer reported that adding a single line — the height and usual size of the model in each photograph — cut returns by several percentage points. None of this is glamorous, and none of it makes a headline. It just means fewer parcels going back.

According to the first paragraph, why do free returns increase sales?

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What does the author mean by saying bracketing is "entirely rational" from the shopper's side?

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What do the effective interventions in the last paragraph have in common?

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文意選填：Reading the Dark字庫（每個字只能用一次） (A) abandoned (B) confuse (C) declining (D) evidence (E) habitats (F) intensity (G) resemble (H) restore (I) signals (J) vanished On a summer night in the mountains of central Taiwan, the slope below the trail fills with small green lights. They are not decorations. They are 1 — flashes produced by male fireflies looking for a mate, each species using its own rhythm the way a ship uses a code. That code only works in darkness. When a streetlamp or a parking lot floods the hillside, the flashes lose their contrast and females can no longer read them. Bright artificial lights do not merely annoy fireflies; they 2 them. Firefly populations have been 3 across East Asia for decades. The reasons are not mysterious. Larvae grow in damp soil beside slow streams, and those 4 are exactly what gets drained, paved, or straightened when a valley is developed. At several sites where researchers counted thousands of insects in the 1980s, the fireflies have simply 5. There is, however, 6 that the loss can be undone. A community in Nantou replaced its trail lamps with shielded red fixtures and cut their 7 by half. Two seasons later, counts along the trail had tripled. Elsewhere, volunteers have taken 8 rice terraces and let water return to them, and fireflies have followed within three years. None of this requires technology that does not yet exist. To 9 a firefly population, a village mainly has to stop doing a few things — draining, paving, and lighting. Conservation projects rarely 10 one another closely, but the successful firefly ones share that unusual feature: their main action is subtraction.

第 2 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 3 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 4 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 5 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 8 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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文意選填：The Words That Count字庫（每個字只能用一次） (A) abstract (B) acquire (C) assumed (D) capacity (E) exact (F) figures (G) inherited (H) limited (I) puzzled (J) reveal For most of the twentieth century, linguists 1 that every human language had words for numbers. Counting seemed as basic as naming colors — a 2 that came with being human. Then fieldwork in the Amazon complicated the picture. Some languages, it turned out, have only a 3 set of quantity words: something like "one," "two," and "many." Speakers of these languages are not bad at practical reasoning; they simply have no words for 4 quantities above two. The obvious question is whether that changes how they think. Careful experiments 5 something more interesting than either side of the debate expected. Asked to match a row of five nuts with a row of the same length, speakers performed as well as anyone. Asked to remember five nuts after the row had been hidden, they did not. What number words seem to support is not counting itself but holding an 6 quantity in mind once the objects are gone. This 7 many researchers, because number words had long been treated as labels for concepts we already possess. The Amazonian evidence points closer to the reverse: the words are tools, and children who 8 them gain an ability they did not have before. None of this is 9 from a parent, in the way eye color is. Children in every society learn to count from other people, slowly and with a great deal of correction. The 10 look ordinary enough — one, two, three — but each of them is a small piece of technology.

第 2 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 4 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 5 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 8 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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第 10 格：從上方字庫選一個，填代號 (A)–(J) 或直接寫出該字。

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