厦门康桥中学2025-2026学年高一下学期期末冲刺（一）英语科试卷

In the autumn of 1987, a quiet rumour began to circulate through the towns of Zhongshan, in China's southern Guangdong Province. People said that a famous American singer - a man who could spin on his toes and slide backwards across the floor - had been seen walking near the riverside. Few believed it at first. Foreign pop stars rarely came to small Chinese towns in those years, and the name "Michael Jackson" meant little to most local residents, who had only just begun to hear his music on smuggled cassette tapes.

According to several long-time residents, the visit was unplanned. Jackson, then at the height of his Bad world tour in Asia, was said to have slipped away from his schedule to see ordinary Chinese life for himself. He wandered through a wet market, watched fishermen mend their nets, and stopped to buy fruit from an elderly vendor who had no idea who he was. "He smiled a lot and spoke very softly," one shopkeeper later recalled. "We thought he was just a polite foreigner."

Whether every detail of the story is true is now impossible to prove. Over the decades the tale has grown, shaped by memory and local pride. Some insist he danced a few steps for a crowd of children; others say he simply waved and disappeared into a car. What remains certain is the affection the story carries. For a generation that grew up during China's early reform years, the idea that the world's biggest star once walked their streets became a small, shining piece of their town's history.

Today, the visit lives on mostly as folklore, retold at family dinners and in online forums. Historians caution that nostalgia can blur fact and fiction. Yet the legend endures precisely because it captures a feeling - a moment when a closed country was opening to the world, and a global icon, even briefly, felt close enough to touch.

Scroll through any social feed today and you will meet hundreds of smiling strangers, each presenting a polished, confident version of themselves. Their holidays look perfect, their meals are beautifully arranged, and their opinions arrive in neat, agreeable sentences. Yet a growing number of young people describe a strange unease: the more connected they appear, the lonelier they feel. Psychologists call this modern social alienation, and at its centre lies a curious figure - the so-called "fake person".

A "fake person" is not necessarily a liar. More often, it is someone who has learned to perform a likeable self while hiding genuine feelings. Online, this performance is rewarded. A cheerful post earns likes; an honest expression of doubt or sadness rarely does. Over time, the gap between the displayed self and the real self widens, and even close relationships can begin to feel staged.

Researchers argue that this behaviour is not simply vanity. Humans have always adjusted how they present themselves depending on their audience. What is new is the scale and permanence of the performance. Where a face-to-face conversation ends and is forgotten, an online self is recorded, measured, and compared with everyone else's. The pressure to seem effortlessly happy can quietly erode a person's sense of who they actually are.

Some experts believe the answer is not to abandon technology but to use it more honestly. Sharing small failures, asking real questions, and allowing imperfect moments to be seen can, they suggest, slowly rebuild trust. Genuine connection, they remind us, has never come from looking perfect. It comes from being known - flaws included.

Each summer, millions of visitors leave behind more than footprints on the world's beaches. Plastic bottles, cigarette ends, and tiny fragments of broken packaging sink into the sand, where they can remain for decades. Cleaning crews armed with rakes and bags make a visible difference along the surface, but much of the pollution lies just beneath it, mixed invisibly into the grains. This hidden layer is what a new initiative, known as the "Sand Surge" project, aims to address.

Launched by a coalition of marine scientists and coastal communities, Sand Surge uses a specially designed machine that gently lifts the top layer of sand, passes it through fine filters, and returns the cleaned grains to the beach. Unlike ordinary cleaning, the system can capture microplastics far smaller than a grain of rice. In its first trial season, organisers reported removing several tonnes of buried waste from beaches that had appeared, to the casual eye, almost spotless.

The project's leaders are careful, however, not to present technology as a complete answer. "A machine can clean a beach," one coordinator explained, "but it cannot stop the next bottle from being dropped." For this reason, Sand Surge pairs its filtering work with education programmes in nearby schools, teaching children how long plastic survives and how easily a single careless act adds to the problem.

Early results have encouraged other coastal towns to consider joining the scheme. Yet the organisers insist their real measure of success is not the weight of plastic collected but the change in habits it inspires. A clean beach, they argue, should eventually need no machine at all.

（D 篇短文及第 33-35 题以正式试卷为准。本篇为占位说明，正式考试时此处为一篇完整阅读材料。）