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第 1 格：it has become a normal ___ for millions of employees
考題練習
題型與計分都照真實考試。多選題採學測的部分給分：答錯 k 個選項得 (n − 2k)/n，算出負值以零分計——所以亂猜的期望值是負的。
克漏字：The Rise of Remote Work
Ten 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.
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第 2 題
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第 2 格：it was the pandemic that ___ companies to try it on a large scale
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第 3 格：they find it hard to ___ on their tasks at home
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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.
閱讀測驗：Bees in the City
When 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.
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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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What does the phrase "their rural cousins" in the second paragraph refer to?
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What is the main point of the last paragraph?
綜合測驗：The Library of Things
In 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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___1___
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___2___
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___3___
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___4___
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___5___
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.
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第 1 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 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 6 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 7 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 9 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。
閱讀測驗：Alarm Fatigue
A 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.
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According to the second paragraph, what proportion of ICU alarms require no action?
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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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The heavy rain will ___ our plan to hold the concert outdoors.
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The manager asked us to participate ___ the training program.
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The witness ___ having seen anyone near the building that night.
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The committee ___ on reviewing every application twice, even though it doubled their workload.
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Skilled negotiators rarely ___ difficult questions; they answer them head-on.
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The museum does not ___ visitors to take photographs with flash.
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Although he had doubted he could, he ___ to finish the entire report before midnight.
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I would ___ walk twenty minutes than wait for a bus that may never come.
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The report ___ three possible explanations but examines none of them in any detail.
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Few of the officials were willing to ___ that they had misread the warning signs.
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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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The consultant ___ that the deadline be moved to the following month.
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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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___ of the two proposals addresses the funding gap, which is why the board rejected both.
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The alarm went off twice ___ the night, but nobody in the building got up.
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Most readers still ___ printed books to screens when they read for more than an hour.
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The witness could ___ what she had seen, but not why the two men had started arguing.