阅读理解Passage A The scene: A business meeting between Chinese and Spanish company representatives

阅读理解Famed singer Stevie Wonder can’t see his fans dancing at his concerts. He can’t see the hands of hisaudience as they applaud wildly at the end of his superstition.Blind from birth, Wonder has waited his whole life for a chance to see. Recently, Wonder visitedMark Humayan, a vision specialist. He thought that a new device currently being studied byHumayan might offer him that chance.The device, a retinal prosthesis, is a tiny computer chip implanted inside a patient’s eye. The chipsends images to the brain and allows some sightless people to see shapes and colors. Wonder hopedthe retinal prosthesis might work for him. “I’ve always said that if ever there’s possibility of myseeing,” said Wonder, “then I would take the challenge.”Unfortunately for Wonder, that challenge will have to wait. Humayan explained that the device isn’tready for people who have been blind since birth. Their brains may not be able to handle signalsfrom a retinal prosthesis because their brains have never handled signals from a healthy eye.The retinal prosthesis and other devices, however, show great promise in helping many othersightless people who once had vision see again. Perhaps one day soon, some formerly sightlesspeople may be in Wonder’s audience looking up—and seeing him—for the very first time.Wonder’s willingness to take part in retinal prosthesis studies and the results of those studies aregiving new hope to people who thought they would be blind for the rest of their lives. More than onemillion people in the United States are considered legally blind, meaning that their eyesight isseverely impaired. Another one million are totally blind.Two types of specialized cells in the retina—rods and cones—are critical for proper vision. Lightenters the eye and falls on the rods and cones in the retina. Those cells convert the light to electricalsignals which travel through the optic nerve to the brain. The brain interprets those signals as visualimages. Rods detect light at low levels of illumination. For instance, rods allow you to see faintshadows in dim moonlight. Cones, on the other hand, are most sensitive to color. Some diseases candamage cells in the retina. For instance, macular degeneration causes blindness and other visionproblems in 700,000 people in the United States each year. The condition is caused by a lack ofadequate blood supply to the central part of the retina. Without blood, the rods, cones, and other cellsin the retina die.Devices such as the retinal prostheses won’t prevent or cure our eye diseases, but they may helppatients who have eye disorders regain some of their vision. Different forms of retinal prostheses arecurrently being developed. On one type, a tiny computer chip is embedded in the eye. The chip has agrid of about 2,500 light-sensing elements called pixels.Light entering the eye strikes the pixels, which convert the light into electrical signals. The pixelsthen send the electrical signals to nerve cells behind the retina. Those cells send signals via the opticnerve to the brain for interpretation.Many people who have had a retinal prosthesis implanted say they can see shapes, colors, andmovements that they couldn’t see before. “It was great,” said Harold Churchey, who received hisretinal prosthesis 15 years after he became totally blind. “To see light after so long—it was justwonderful. It was just like switching a light on.”

阅读理解【C1】 The battle that will decide the future of the English is going on all round us

阅读理解 In 1956, when the cold war was at its peak, America deployed a 'secret sonic weapon', as a newspaper headline put it at the time. That weapon was Dizzy Gillespie, a famed jazz musician, who was given the task of changing the world's view of American culture through rhythm and beat. Crowds poured into the street to dance. Cultural diplomacy died down after the cold war ended. But the attacks of September 11th 2001 convinced the State Department to send out America's musicians once again to woo hearts and minds with melody. Rhythm Road, a program run by the State Department and a non-profit organization, Jazz at Lincoln Centre, has made informal diplomats out of both musicians and audiences. Since it began in 2005, musicians have travelled to 96 countries. One band went to Mauritania, a country in northwestern Africa, after last year's coup; many depart for countries that have strained relationships with America. The musicians travel to places where some people have never seen an American. Jazz, so participants in the program, is well-suited to diplomacy. It is collaborative, allowing individuals both to harmonize and play solo—much like a democracy, says Ari Roland, who plays bass for a band that left New York to tour the Middle East on March 31st. Jazz is also a reminder of music's power. It helped break down racial barriers, as enthusiasts of all colors gathered to listen to jazz when segregation was still the law of the land. The State Department spent 10 million U.S. dollars on cultural diplomacy programs in the year to September 30th 2008. But most expect funding for the initiative to increase under Barack Obama, who pledged his support for cultural diplomacy during his campaign. Rhythm Road now sends out hip-hop and bluegrass bands as well. There are some dissenters. Nick Cull, the director of the Public Diplomacy Program at the University of Southern California, thinks that these diplomatic projects would be more productive if they were not administered by the same agency that oversees the country's foreign-policy agenda. And there is also clamor for Mr. Obama to appoint a secretary of culture in his cabinet. What good, they ask, is sending American culture abroad, when the country is not giving it proper attention at home?

阅读理解Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as" all too human", with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well. The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males. Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan''s and Dr. de Waal''s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different. In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (without an actual monkey to eat it) was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin. The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous ndignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.

阅读理解Passage Four Email has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the resulting spread of bad English does more harm than good

阅读理解I have known very few writers, but those whom I have known, and whom I respected, confess at once that they have little idea where they are going when they first set pen to paper. They have a character, perhaps two; they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration; all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun; one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands. I never heard of anyone making a “skeleton”, as we were taught at school. In the breaking and remaking, in the timing, interweaving, beginning afresh, the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began.This organic process, often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination. A blurred image appears, he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone; but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books, like adolescents they stand before the mirror, and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them. For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their own books, winkling out hidden meanings, superimposing new ones, begging response from those around them.Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair. He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore. This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing: he has begun to write to please.A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow. For this reason also the writer, like any other artist, has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort, no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within. A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart; he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of, and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself, from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.

阅读理解Passage 3 For me, scientific knowledge is divided into mathematical sciences, natural sciences or sciences dealing with the natural world (physical and biological sciences), and sciences dealing with mankind (psychology, sociology, all the sciences of cultural achievements, every kind of historical knowledge)

阅读理解If possible, you are advised to _______.

阅读理解 In the longest-term study of its kind, researchers pitted two popular diets head to head—a low-fat American Heart Association-style diet and a carb-controlled Mediterranean diet, each combined with regular physical activity—in a population of overweight patients who had Type 2 diabetes. Researchers found that over the four-year study, patients who adhered to the Mediterranean-style eating plan maintained lower blood-sugar levels for a longer time than those in the low-fat-diet group. The Mediterranean dieters were also able to maintain slightly more weight loss than the low-fat group and showed small improvements in triglyceride and HDL cholesterol levels, both risk factors for heart disease. On the basis of their finding, the study's authors suggest that some diabetes patients may be able to substitute diet and exercise for blood-sugar-lowering medications. 'A Mediterranean-style diet is a very important part in the treatment of diabetes. We knew that, ' says Dr. Loren Greene, a New York University Medical Center endocrinologist, who was not involved in the study. 'But there just hasn't been a good study to confirm this before.' The current study does not make clear, however, whether diet alone can reduce blood sugar enough to eliminate the use of diabetes medication or whether it is even advisable to forgo medication at all. Participants in the new study were kept off drugs when their AIC levels—a measurement that indicates a patient's blood-sugar levels over the previous three months—were below 7%, the standard cutoff for what is considered controlled blood sugar. But 'we don't know for sure if people with AIC levels under 7% still need to be on drugs, ' says Greene. 'The research just hasn't answered that question yet.' Recent studies suggest that using blood-sugar-controlling medication even among the 57 million Americans who have pre-diabetes—meaning they have elevated, but not dangerously high blood sugar and are at very high risk of developing diabetes— may prevent the development of heart disease an stroke. While diabetes doctors generally agree that the first line of defense against Type 2 diabetes should always be exercise and diet, many recommend also using drugs. For its part, the American Diabetes Association advises patients with Type 2 diabetes to make appropriate lifestyle changes and to start a drug regimen immediately upon diagnosis. Still, many doctors acknowledge patients' aversion to chronic drug-taking.' Almost universally, people don't want to take medicine if they can avoid it, ' says Greene. And physicians point out that the direct and indirect costs associated with taking a drug—even one as widely prescribed as the generic diabetes medication metformin(二甲双胍，一种抗糖尿病和降血糖药)—can serve as a barrier for many patients, especially among disadvantaged populations and those without health insurance. Whether avoidance of medication in certain cases proves to be reasonable, for now it can at least be used as an effective incentive to improve lifestyle habits, says Greene: 'If you are told, 'If you don't want to go on medicine, stick to this diet, ' then that's a pretty valuable tool at least for patient compliance.'

阅读理解Passage Four Greece, economically, is in the black

阅读理解Twentieth century literature can be broadly divided into two stylistic periods: Modernism, and Postmodernism, These periods roughly correspond to literature written before the Second World War (1939-1945) and literature written after it

阅读理解Any apples today? Effie asked cheerfully at my window

阅读理解Passage 2 [Scientists have long debated how the ancestors of birds evolved the ability fly

阅读理解The point of the restorationist critique of preservationism is the claim that it rests on an unhealthy dualism that conceives nature and humankind as radically distinct and opposed to each other. Dissatisfaction with dualism has for some time figured prominently in the unhappiness of environmentalists with mainstream industrial society. However, the writings of the restorationists themselves―particularly, William Jordan and Frederick Turner―offer little evidence to support this accusation. In their view, preservationists are filled with the same basic mind-set as the industrial mainstream, the only difference being that the latter ranks humans over nature while the former elevates nature over humans. While it is perhaps puzzling that Jordan and Turner do not see that there is no logic that requires dualism as a philosophical basis for preservation, more puzzling is the sharpness and ruthlessness of their attack on preservationists, reinforced by the fact that they offer little, if any, criticism of those who have robbed the natural world. 　　The crucial question, however, about the restorationist outlook has to do with the degree to which the restorationist program is itself faithful to the first principle of restoration: that nature and humanity are fundamentally united rather than separate. Rejecting the old domination model, which sees humans as over nature, restoration theory supports a model of community participation. Yet some of the descriptions that Jordan and Turner give of what restorationists are actually up to--for example , Turner''s description of humans as "the lords of creation", or Jordan''s statement that "the fate and well being of the biosphere depend ultimately on us and our relationship with it"--are not consistent well with the community-participation model. 　　Another holistic model―namely, that of nature as an organism―might be more serviceable to the restorationists. As with the community model, the "organic" model pictures nature as a system of interconnected parts. A fundamental difference, however, is that in an organism the parts are wholly useful to the life of the organism. If we could think of the biosphere as a single living organism and could identify humans with the brain (or the DNA), or control center, we would have a model that more closely fits the restorationists'' view. 　　However, to consider humans as the control center of the living earth is to attribute to them a dominating role in nature. Is this significantly different from the old-fashioned domination model? In both systems humans hold the place of highest authority and power in the world. Also neither view recognizes any limits to the scope and range of reasonable human manipulation in the world. This does not mean that there are no restrictions, only beneficial manipulation should be undertaken. But it does not mean that nothing is off-limits. A further parallel is that, because the fate of the world rests on humans, they must have a clear idea of what needs to be done. There are also important differences between the two theories. For example, restorationists no longer view the world in the old dominationist way as a passive object. And though both assign to humans a controlling role in the world, dominationists conceive this in terms of conquest while restorationists conceive it in terms of healing. Also, restorationists insist that the ideas which must serve to guide our work in the world are drawn not solely from a consideration of human needs and purposes but from an understanding of the biosphere; as a result, they are more conscious than dominationists of our capacity to human nature.

阅读理解Why the inductive and mathematical sciences, after their first rapid development at the culmination of Greek civilization, advanced so slowly for two thousand yearsand why in the following two hundred years a knowledge of natural and mathematical science has accumulated, which so vastly exceeds all that was previously known that these sciences may be justly regarded as the products of our own timesare questions which have interested the modern philosopher not less than the objects with which the

阅读理解To respond forcefully to animal rights advocates, whose arguments are confusing the public and thereby threatening advances in health knowledge and care

阅读理解What do the underlined words “Safe! Safe! Safe!” probably mean? 

阅读理解Passage A They poison the mind and corrupt the morals of the young, who waste their time sitting on sofas immersed in dangerous fantasy worlds

阅读理解Passage Four Third culture kid is a term in English that is used to describe children who have grown up in a different culture to that of their parents