问答题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1)The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A finny music trickled from the telescreens.
    (2)Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.
    (3)Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all day. A Eurasian (欧亚国的) army [Oceania (大洋国) was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia] was moving southward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
    (4)A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those—
    (5)He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched (打嗝) through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released him, and had regained his old colour—indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp (头皮) was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure (闲职), more highly-paid than his old job had been.
    (6)The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been over-fulfilled by 98 percent.
    (7)He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. "White to play and mate in two moves." Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
    (8)The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much graver tone: "You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!" The tinking music struck up again.
    (9)Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in some way? The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board. There was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their communications by land and sea. He felt that by willing it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath.    An extraordinary medley of feeling—but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost—struggled inside him.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1)The salt equation taught to doctors for more than 200 years is not hard to understand. The body relies on this essential mineral for a variety of functions, including blood pressure and the transmission of nerve impulses. Sodium levels in the blood must be carefully maintained. If you eat a lot of salt—sodium chloride—you will become thirsty and drink water, diluting your blood enough to maintain the proper concentration of sodium. Ultimately you will excrete much of the excess salt and water in urine. The theory is intuitive and simple. And it may be completely wrong.
    (2)The research, published recently in two dense papers in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, contradicts much of the conventional wisdom about how the body handles salt and suggests that high levels may play a role in weight loss.
    (3)The findings have stunned kidney specialists. "This is just very novel and fascinating," said Dr. Melanie Hoenig, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The work was meticulously done."
    (4)Dr. James R.Johnston, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, marked each unexpected finding in the margins of the two papers. The studies were covered with scribbles by the time he was done. "Really cool," he said, although he added that the findings need to be replicated.
    (5)The new studies are the culmination of a decades-long quest by a determined scientist, Dr. Jens Titze, now a kidney specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research in Erlangen, Germany.
    (6)In 1991, as a medical student in Berlin, he took a class on human physiology in extreme environments. The professor who taught the course worked with the European space program and presented data from a simulated 28-day mission in which a crew lived in a small capsule. The main goal was to learn how the crew members would get along. But the scientists also had collected the astronauts' urine and other physiological markers. Titze noticed something puzzling in the crew members' data: Their urine volumes went up and down in a seven-day cycle. That contradicted all he'd been taught in medical school: There should be no such temporal cycle.
    (7)In 1994, the Russian space program decided to do a 135-day simulation of life on the Mir space station. Titze arranged to go to Russia to study urine patterns among the crew members and how these were affected by salt in the diet. A striking finding emerged: a 28-day rhythm in the amount of sodium the cosmonauts' bodies retained that was not linked to the amount of urine they produced. And the sodium rhythms were much more pronounced than the urine patterns. The sodium levels should have been rising and falling with the volume of urine. Although the study wasn't perfect—the crew members' sodium intake was not precisely calibrated (校准)—Titze was convinced something other than fluid intake was influencing sodium stores in the crew's bodies. The conclusion, he realized, "was heresy."
    (8)In 2006, the Russian space program announced two more simulation studies, one lasting 105 days and the other 520 days. Titze saw a chance to figure out whether his anomalous findings were real. In the shorter simulation, the cosmonauts ate a diet containing 12 grams of salt daily, followed by 9 grams daily, and then a low-salt diet of 6 grams daily, each for a 28-day period. In the longer mission, the cosmonauts also ate an additional cycle of 12 grams of salt daily. Like most of us, the cosmonauts liked their salt. Oliver Knickel, 33, a German citizen participating in the program who is now an automotive engineer in Stuttgart, recalled that even the food that supplied 12 grams a day was not salty enough for him. When the salt level got down to 6 grams, he said, "It didn't taste good."
    (9)The real shocker came when Titze measured the amount of sodium excreted in the crew's urine, the volume of their urine, and the amount of sodium in their blood. The mysterious patterns in urine volume persisted, but everything seemed to proceed according to the textbooks. When the crew ate more salt, they excreted more salt; the amount of sodium in their blood remained constant, and their urine volume increased. "But then we had a look at fluid intake, and were more than surprised," he said. Instead of drinking more, the crew were drinking less in the long run when getting more salt. So where was the excreted water coming from? "There was only one way to explain this phenomenon," Titze said. "The body most likely had generated or produced water when salt intake was high."
    (10)To get further insight, Titze began a study of mice in the laboratory. Sure enough, the more salt he added to the animals' diet, the less water they drank. And he saw why. The animals were getting water— but not by drinking it. The increased levels of glucocorticoid hormones (糖皮质激素) broke down fat and muscle in their own bodies. This freed up water for the body to use. But that process requires energy, Titze also found, which is why the mice ate 25 percent more food on a high-salt diet. The hormones also may be a cause of the strange long-term fluctuations in urine volume.
    (11)Scientists knew that a starving body will burn its own fat and muscle for sustenance. But the realization that something similar happens on a salty diet has come as a revelation.
    (12)People do what camels do, noted Dr. Mark Zeidel, a nephrologist at Harvard Medical School who wrote an editorial accompanying Titze's studies. A camel traveling through the desert that has no water to drink gets water instead by breaking down the fat in its hump.
    (13)One of the many implications of this finding is that salt may be involved in weight loss. Generally, scientists have assumed that a high-salt diet encourages a greater intake of fluids, which increases weight. But if balancing a higher salt intake requires the body to break down tissue, it may also increase energy expenditure.
    (14)Still, Titze said he would not advise eating a lot of salt to lose weight. If his results are correct, more salt will make you hungrier in the long run, so you would have to be sure you did not eat more food to make up for the extra calories burned. And, Titze said, high glucocorticoid levels are linked to such conditions as osteoporosis (骨质疏松症), muscle loss, Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic (新陈代谢的) problems.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)Oakville, Ontario—Janet Barber doesn't dwell too much on the view from her driveway.
    (2)Many of her longtime neighbors up and down the block have cashed in on the area's soaring house prices and moved away. Where their modest wood homes once stood, much larger architect-designed houses of stone, steel and glass fill the lots. Across the street, a big sign plastered with "Sold" stickers means that one is probably next to go.
    (3)But no matter how much Ms. Barber and her husband, Michael, might now be able to get for their own three-bedroom bungalow, they are not about to join the rush.
    (4)Why? Though they are old enough to be empty-nesters, their nest isn't empty. Their 29-year-old daughter, Sarah, has been living with them since she finished a graduate degree in 2013, because she can not yet afford a place of her own. Her older sister, Jennifer, did the same for six years.
    (5)The more house prices rise, the longer it will take Sarah to save up enough to move out. But the longer she and thousands like her stay with their parents, the fewer houses are put up for sale—and that scarcity is a big reason prices are soaring.
    (6)It is a paradox of the red-hot real estate market around Toronto: Some owners are not selling because prices are too high.
    (7)Oakville, the affluent commuter town where the Barbers live, has been transformed by the property boom in the Toronto area. Last month, the average sale price in Oakville hit 1.4 million Canadian dollars ($1 million), 30 percent higher than a year ago. Prices are climbing into seven figures across the region, and rentals are expensive and difficult to find.
    (8)Those daunting figures have driven thousands of young adults back into their childhood bedrooms. An unusually high 56.5 percent of people in their 20s in the Toronto area still live with their parents, compared with 42 percent nationwide. Like Sarah Barber, many of them appear to be trading some independence for the chance to turn what otherwise would have been rent money into savings for a down payment.
    (9)It can make sense financially for them, but it also makes the affordability problem worse. Basic economics says that high prices ought to entice more owners to sell, with the added supply helping to relieve some of the upward pressure. But that is not happening in Toronto, where, despite intense demand, the rate of new listings has been stagnant for several years, and even fell 12 percent last month.
    (10)There may be several reasons more Toronto-area homeowners are not doing what the economics textbooks predict. Some analysts believe that parents who might otherwise sell, but are staying put to accommodate their adult children, are a significant factor.
    (11)"It's the only gift we can give them," Janet Barber said as her daughters tried to persuade the family's golden retriever puppy not to lick every face in the living room. "We can't give them a 200,000 dollar down payment on a house. So what can we do? We can house them."
    (12)Prices are stable or rising slowly in most other Canadian cities, but Toronto is booming, fueled by rapid population growth, and builders cannot hope to meet all the demand. A similar frenzy took hold in Vancouver, British Columbia, for a while, but a series of measures, including a tax on foreign buyers, seems to have cooled it off for now.
    (13)Dana Senagama, the principal market analyst for the Toronto area at the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, a federal agency, said experts were just as taken aback by the price explosion as the general public.
    (14)"I think it's crazy," Ms. Senagama said. "We all, as an industry, just need to be careful and make sure we're not getting in over our heads."
    (15)She said low interest rates, Toronto's status as the top destination for affluent immigrants and foreign investment in Canadian property all played a role in heating up the market. But so does the relative reluctance of homeowners to list their houses in a city where existing homes account for 80 percent of sales.
    (16)Murtaza Haider, a professor of real estate management at Ryerson University in Toronto who specializes in data analysis, said the large number of adults still living with parents was an important factor. In parts of the area, the rate is as high as 78 percent, according to Statistics Canada, the federal census agency.
    (17)Some of that comes from social traditions among certain immigrant groups, but Professor Haider and others say the trend is driven more by high house prices and an increasingly unstable job market for young adults.
    (18)"There's been a big demographic shift," Professor Haider said. "The logical system of housing tenure, which has served us well, has been seriously impacted."1.  What can be inferred from Para. 2? ______ (PASSAGE ONE)