阅读理解解析版 · 第 1 周 · 2026 新高考 I 卷

Not long ago, my fifth-grade son Kevin asked me about the meaning of a word in a novel. "Look it up," I responded. "But my screen time is off," he said. I looked pointedly at the bookshelf that held at least three dictionaries, and Kevin sighed (叹气) dramatically. "Can't you just use your phone?" he asked. Suddenly it occurred to me that he did not even know how to use a dictionary.24

I took down one of the dictionaries, and we read it together for a few minutes before I handed it to him. It took him a few tries to find the word in question. While going through the pages, he kept saying, wide-eyed: "How can there be this many words?"25 After a while, he looked at me and asked, "Do you know all these words, Mom?" I smiled. "I definitely do not know all these words," I said. "But that's why this is one of my favorite books."

I had my first dictionary as a gift for my 13th birthday. I decided that I wanted to learn as many words as I could and started marking every entry I looked up with a pencil to measure my progress.26 I continued to make these pencil marks for years, and when I went off to college, I packed that dictionary in my suitcase.

Kevin wanted to see the dictionary. I felt a small pain in my chest. The dictionary was stolen at the end of my freshman year of college. "That's so sad," he said, "but you still know all those words, even without the book." I realized that this was true. I still made it through the next three years of college, even without the book. And it wasn't, ultimately, the dictionary that got me there — not really.

Now I understand that although my son may be learning differently, he is still learning. It's not about the words themselves or how we learn them, but the wanting to know them, the curiosity and the appetite.27

In line with longstanding initiatives to expand the green spaces, New York City is planting tens of thousands of trees each year. They provide shade, lower surface temperatures, absorb a surprising amount of airborne carbon, remove tiny pollutants, and provide wildlife habitat along with just plain beauty.

Oaks and sweetgums, which currently account for a majority of the city's trees, produce huge amounts of a chemical substance called isoprene. Harmless by itself, isoprene interacts rapidly with polluting nitrogen oxides released by vehicles, buildings and industry to form ground-level ozone (臭氧) — a major factor in many breathing problems.28

The research… found that if the city maintains past species patterns in new plantings, isoprene production in Manhattan in coming decades will go up by about 140%, and resulting summer ozone levels as much as 30%.29 "We're all for planting more trees. They bring so many good things," said study coauthor Róisín Commane. "But if we're not careful, we could make air quality worse."29

"We're not going to go cutting down any big old oaks," and neither will the department completely stop planting new ones, said Auyeung. "You have to think about what you would lose if you do that." Oaks are keystone species, she pointed out, providing food and habitat for native insects, birds and other animals.

The Parks Department is not oblivious to the issue. A study carried out by some of its researchers several years ago concluded that city trees did release isoprene.30 "We didn't make a big deal of that," said Novem Auyeung, a Parks Department senior scientist. She said trees should not be viewed as the enemy: "We could plant any trees we want to, if we just rethink our car-centric lifestyle," she said.31

A team of Cambridge psychologists conducted an experiment to compare the cognitive (认知的) effects of merely seeing art with actively judging how beautiful it is.

In the study, 187 people were invited to visit Kettle's Yard gallery during an exhibition of handmade clay objects. Participants were randomly divided into two groups: the "beauty" group was asked to actively consider and then rate the beauty of each object they viewed, while the control group just matched a line drawing of the object with the artwork itself.32 All participants were then tested on how they process information, and whether it's in a more practical or abstract way.

Across all participants, those in the beauty group scored almost 14% higher on average than the control group in abstract thinking. While they were told the study was about cognitive processes, participants were asked about interests, with around half saying they had an artistic hobby. Among those, the effect was greater: those with an artistic hobby in the beauty group scored over 25% higher on average for abstract thinking than those with an artistic hobby in the control group.33

Emotional states of participants were also measured by asking about their feelings while completing the gallery task. Across all participants, those in the beauty group reported an average of 23% higher levels of "transformative and self-transcendent feelings" — such as feeling moved, enlightened and inspired — than the control group. Importantly, however, the beauty group did not report feeling any happier than the control group, suggesting that it was the engagement with beauty that influenced abstract thinking, rather than any overall positivity from the experience.34

"We usually think in very concrete terms when doing something on a screen," said Simone Schnall, senior author of the study. "It's becoming much rarer to zone out and just let the mind wander, but that's when we think in ways that broaden our minds. Admiring the beauty of art may be the ideal way to initiate the abstract cognitive processes."35