阅读理解Text 2 A report consistently brought back by visitors to the US is how friendly, courteous and helpful most Americans were to them

阅读理解Directions: For this rusk, you are to read a short passage with 5 questions. Read the passage carefully Then answer the questions in the fewest possible words on the Answer Sheet.Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets and newsletters. “The coffee houses particularly are very roomy for a free conversation, and for reading at an easier rate all manner of printed news, ” noted one observer. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, The New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news flora a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social and diverse, reviving the discursive characteristics of the era before the mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics. In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005and 2009. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries.Over the past decade, throughout the Western world, people have been giving tip newspapers and TV news and keeping up with events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and disturbing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classified documents are published in their thousands online. Mobile phone footage of Arab uprisings and American tornadoes is posted on social networking sites and shown on television newscasts. Social networking sites help people find discuss and share news with their friends.And it is not just readers who are challenging the media elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important conduits of news. Celebrities and world leaders publish updates directly via social networks: many countries now make raw data available through “open government” initiatives. The internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world. The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to sites, to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practiced by Wikileaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets.In principle, every, liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. The transformation of the news business is unstoppable, and attempts to reverse it are doomed to failure. As producers of new journalism, individuals can be scrupulous with facts and transparent with their sources. As consumers, they can be general in their tastes and demanding in their standards. And although this transformation does raise concerns, there is much to celebrate in the noisy, diverse, vociferous, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the age of the Internet. The coffee house is back. Enjoy it.

阅读理解Questions 81 to 90 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Have you winterized your horse yet? Even though global warming may have made our climatemilder, many animals are still hibernating. Its too bad that humans cant hibernate. In fact, as aspecies, we almost did.Apparently, at times in the past, peasants in France liked a semi-state of human hibernation. Sowrites Graham Robb, a British scholar who has studied the sleeping habits of the French peasants. Assoon as the weather turned cold people all over France shut themselves away and practiced theforgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.In line with this, Jeff Warren, a producer at CBC Radios The Current, tells us that the way we sleephas changed fundamentally since the invention of artificial lighting and the electric bulb.When historians began studying texts of the Middle Ages, they noticed something referred to as“first sleep”, which was not clarified, though. Now scientists are telling us our ancestors most likelyslept in separate periods. The business of eight hours uninterrupted sleep is a modern invention.In the past, without the artificial light of the city to bathe in, humans went to sleep when it becamedark and then woke themselves around midnight. The late night period was known as “The Watch”.It was when people actually kept watch against wild animals, although many of them simply movedaround or visited family and neighbors.According to some sleep researchers, a short period of insomnia at midnight is not a disorder. It isnormal. Humans can experience another state of consciousness around their sleeping, which occursin the brief period before we fall asleep or wake ourselves in the morning. This period can be anextraordinarily creative time for some people. The impressive inventor, Thomas Edison, used thisstate to hit upon many of his new ideas.Playing with your sleep rhythms can be adventurous, as anxiety may set in. Medical science doesnthelp much in this case. It offers us medicines for a full nights continuous sleep, which sounds natural;however, according to Warrens theory, it is really the opposite of what we need.

阅读理解 America doesn't have a worker shortage; it has a work shortage. The unemployment rate is at a 15-year low, but only 55% of American adults 18 to 64 have fulltime jobs. Nearly 95 million people have removed themselves entirely from the job market. According to demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, the labor-force participation rate for men ages 25 to 54 is lower now than it was at the end of the Great Depression. The welfare state is largely to blame. More than 20% of American men of prime working age are on Medicaid. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 60% of nonworking men receive federal disability benefits. The good news is that the 1996 welfare reform taught us how to reduce government dependency and get idle Americans back to work. Attaching work requirements to social benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income would make what these pages have called 'America's growing labor shortage' a nonissue. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 41% of nondisabled adults on Medicaid don't have jobs. Thirteen million Americans ages 18 to 54 currently receive SSDI or SSI benefits. Conservatively, work requirements could add 25% of that population (3.3 million workers) back to the labor force. Work requirements for people on food stamps would increase the worker rolls by 1.9 million if only 10% who aren't engaged in work rejoined. There's no question that insisting on work in exchange for social benefits would succeed in reducing dependency. We have the data: Within 10 years of the 1996 reform, the number of Americans in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program fell 60%. But no reform is permanent. Under President Obama, federal poverty programs ballooned. A better long-term solution to the work shortage would be to eliminate all forms of public support except for those who are unable to work, and eliminate all poverty programs, since they haven't reduced poverty since they were established in 1965. The money being spent on these programs should be redirected to job creation—preferably for private-sector jobs, but public-sector jobs will do in a pinch. A trillion-dollar federal infrastructure program, such as the one President Trump has said he will propose, could absorb a large number of the unemployed and underemployed. There are other avenues to pursue. For young men who aren't working, a mandatory two-year public-service requirement with an off-ramp for those who snag a job could motivate them to get off—and stay off—the couch. Too many Americans who could be available to help fuel robust economic growth are instead sitting on the sidelines. It's time to get them in the game. It's time to solve the work shortage.

阅读理解Section B Some of the worlds most famous musiciansrecently gathered in Paris and New Orleans to celebrate the first annualInternational Jazz Day

阅读理解Text 2 Every year for more than a decade Ive gone with some good male friends to the music festival

阅读理解Archaeology as a profession faces two major problems

阅读理解 In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that 'social epidemics' are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well connected. The idea is intuitively compelling--we think we see it happening all the time--but it doesn't explain how ideas actually spread. The supposed importance of influentials derives from a plausible-sounding but largely untested theory called the 'two-step flow of communication': Information flows from the media to the influentials and from them to everyone else. Marketers have embraced the two-step flow because it suggests that if they can just find and influence the influentials, those select people will do most of the work for them. The theory also seems to explain the sudden and unexpected popularity of certain looks, brands, or neighborhoods. In many such cases, a cursory search for causes finds that some small group of people was wearing, promoting or developing whatever it is before anyone else paid attention. Anecdotal evidence of this kind fits nicely with the idea that only certain special people can drive trends. In their recent work, however, some researchers have come up with the finding that influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don't seem to be required at all. The researchers' argument stems from a simple observation about social influence, with the exception of a few celebrities like Oprah Winfrey--whose outside presence is primarily a function of media, not interpersonal influence--even the most influential members of a population simply don't interact with that many others. Yet it is precisely these non-celebrity influentials who, according to the two-step-flow theory, are supposed to drive social epidemics, by influencing their friends and colleagues directly. For a social epidemic to occur, however, each person so affected must then influence his or her own acquaintances, who must in turn influence theirs, and so on; and just how many others pay attention to each of these people has little to do with the initial influential. If people in the network just two degrees removed from the initial influential prove resistant, for example, the cascade of change won't propagate very far or affect many people. Building on the basic truth about interpersonal influence, the researchers studied the dynamics of populations, manipulating a number of variables relating to people's ability to influence others and their tendency to be influenced.

阅读理解The first ancient Olympics were held in 776 B.C.. The games got their name from Olympia, the Greek city where they took place. Like the Summer Olympics of today, the ancient Olympics were held every four years. Thousands of people from all over the Greek world came to watch. The main stadium held about 45,000 people. "We have accounts of visitors and pilgrims setting up tents all around the site," Lisa Cerrato of Tufts University said. During the first Olympics, there was only one competition — a 200-meter race. But over time the games grew to include wrestling, chariot racing boxing, and other sports. Women were not allowed to compete, but they had their own separate games. "The ancient athletes became celebrities (名人) , just like today. They often lived the rest of their lives being treated to free dinners." Cerrato said. "City-states even tried to steal away each other''s athletes by offering them various awards." The ancient Olympics existed until 393 AD. But the modern Olympics are still going strong.

阅读理解What can we learn about their first shop?

阅读理解 Add CO2 to the atmosphere and the climate will get warmer—that much is well established. But climate change and carbon aren't in a one-to-one relationship. If they were, climate modeling would be a cinch. How much the globe will warm if we put a certain amount of CO2 into the air depends on the sensitivity of the climate. How vulnerable is the polar sea ice; how rapidly might the Amazon dry up; how fast could the Greenland ice cap disintegrate? That's why models like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spit out a range of predictions for future warming, rather than a single neat number. One of the biggest questions in climate sensitivity has been the role of low-level cloud cover. Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It's not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down. But a new study published in the July 24 issue of Science is clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms—which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. 'That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate,' says Amy Clement, the leading author of the Science study. The data showed that as the Pacific Ocean has warmed over the past several decades—part of the gradual process of global warming—low-level cloud cover has lessened. That might be due to the fact that as the earth's surface warms, the atmosphere becomes more unstable and draws up water vapor from low altitudes to form deep clouds high in the sky. (Those types of high-altitude clouds don't have the same cooling effect.) The Science study also found that as the oceans warmed, the trade winds—the easterly surface winds that blow near the equator—weakened, which further dissipated the low clouds. The question now is whether this process will continue in the future, as the world keeps warming.

阅读理解 If you have £0.5, what drink can you buy?

阅读理解It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidence of the depressing state of literacy. These figuresfrom the Department of Education are sufficient: 27 million Americans cannot read at all, and afurther 35 million read at a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society.But my own worry today is less that of the overwhelming problem of elemental literacy than it is ofthe slightly more luxurious problem of the decline in the skill even of the middle-class reader, of hisunwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time andconcentration, that surround the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested that almost80 percent of America’s literate, educated teenagers can no longer read without an accompanyingnoise (music) in the background or a television screen flickering at the corner of their field ofperception. We know very little about the brain and how it deals with simultaneous conflicting input,but every common-sense intuition suggests we should be profoundly alarmed. This violation ofconcentration, silence, solitude goes to the very heart of our notion of literacy; this new form ofpart-reading, of part-perception against background distraction, renders impossible certain essentialacts of apprehension and concentration, let alone that most important tribute any human being canpay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, byheart; the expression is vital.Under these circumstances, the question of what future there is for the arts of reading is a real one.Ahead of us lie technical, psychic, and social transformations probably much more dramatic thanthose brought about by Gutenberg, the German inventor in printing. The Gutenberg revolution, as wenow know it, took a long time; its effects are still being debated. The information revolution willtouch every fact of composition, publication, distribution, and reading. No one in the book industrycan say with any confidence what will happen to the book as we’ve known it.

阅读理解[A]Youarenotalone　　[B]Experiencehelpsyougrow　　[C]Paveyourownuniquepath　　[D]Mostofyourfearsareunreal　　[E]Thinkaboutthepresentmoment　　[F]Don’tfearresponsibilityforyourlife　　[G]Therearemanythingstobegratefulfor　　SomeOldTruthstoHelpYouOvercomeToughTimes　　Unfortunately,lifeisnotabedofroses.Wearegoingthroughlifefacingsadexperiences.Moreover,wearegrievingvariouskindsofloss:afriendship,romanticrelationshiporahouse.Hardtimesmayholdyoudownatwhatusuallyseemslikethemostinopportunetime,butyoushouldrememberthattheywon’tlastforever.　　Whenourtimeofmourningisover,wepressforward,strongerwithagreaterunderstandingandrespectforlife.Furthermore,theselossesmakeusmatureandeventuallymoveustowardfutureopportunitiesforgrowthandhappiness.IwanttosharetheseoldtruthsI’velearnedalongtheway.　　41.________________________　　Fearisbothusefulandharmful.Thisnormalhumanreactionisusedtoprotectusbysignalingdangerandpreparingustodealwithit.Unfortunately,peoplecreateinnerbarrierswithahelpofexaggeratingfears.MyfavoriteactorWillSmithoncesaid,“Fearisnotreal.Itisaproductofthoughtsyoucreate.Donotmisunderstandme.Dangerisveryreal.Butfearisachoice.”Idocompletelyagreethatfearsarejusttheproductofourluxuriantimagination.　　42._________________________　　Ifyouaresurroundedbyproblemsandcannotstopthinkingaboutthepast,trytofocusonthepresentmoment.Manyofusareweigheddownbythepastoranxiousaboutthefuture.Youmayfeelguiltoveryourpast,butyouarepoisoningthepresentwiththethingsandcircumstancesyoucannotchange.Valuethepresentmomentandrememberhowfortunateyouaretobealive.Enjoythebeautyoftheworldaroundandkeeptheeyesopentoseethepossibilitiesbeforeyou.Happinessisnotapointoffutureandnotamomentfromthepast,butamindsetthatcanbedesignedintothepresent.　　43._________________________　　Sometimesitiseasytofeelbadbecauseyouaregoingthroughtoughtimes.Youcanbeeasilycaughtupbylifeproblemsthatyouforgettopauseandappreciatethethingsyouhave.Onlystrongpeopleprefertosmileandvaluetheirlifeinsteadofcryingandcomplainingaboutsomething.　　44._________________________　　Nomatterhowisolatedyoumightfeelandhowseriousthesituationis,youshouldalwaysrememberthatyouarenotalone.Trytokeepinmindthatalmosteveryonerespectsandwantstohelpyouifyouaretryingtomakeagoodchangeinyourlife,especiallyyourdearestandnearestpeople.Youmayhaveacircleoffriendswhoprovideconstantgoodhumor,helpandcompanionship.Ifyouhavenofriendsorrelatives,trytoparticipateinseveralonlinecommunities,fullofpeoplewhoarealwayswillingtoshareadviceandencouragement.　　45.________________________　　Todaymanypeoplefinditdifficulttotrusttheirownopinionandseekbalancebygainingobjectivityfromexternalsources.Thiswayyoudevalueyouropinionandshowthatyouareincapableofmanagingyourownlife.Whenyouarestrugglingtoachievesomethingimportantyoushouldbelieveinyourselfandbesurethatyourdecisionisthebest.Youliveinyourskin,thinkyourownthoughts,haveyourownvaluesandmakeyourownchoices.

阅读理解Which of the following would be the best for the text?

阅读理解Format 1 Passages 1 To hear most recent research tell it, coffee is a miracle drink

阅读理解If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems

阅读理解Text Three Efforts to educate people about the risks of substance abuse seem to deter some people from using dangeroussubstances, if such efforts are realistic about what is genuinely dangerous and what is not

阅读理解Passage 1 Scientists claim that air pollution causes a decline in the worlds average air temperature