阅读理解READING PASSAGE 1 Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time The nineteenth century was a period of great technological development in Britain, and for shipping the major changes were from wind to steam power, and from wood to iron and steel

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 2 How baby talk gives infant brains a boost AThe typical way of talking to a baby 一 high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious 一 is a source of fascination for linguists who hope to understand how baby talk impacts on learning

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 1 A spark

阅读理解Read the following text and answer the following questions Is Your Child at School Today? School Attendance Information for Parents/Carers Introduction Receiving a good Ml-time education will give your child the best possible start in life

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions Flu: the facts A Flu (influenza) is an acute viral respiratory infection

阅读理解Open source''s local heroes Software: If the commercial sort does not speak your language, open-source software may well do so instead Its popularity is growing around the world, but open-source software has particular appeal in developing countries. In China, South Korea, India, Brazil and other countries, governments are promoting the use of such software which, unlike the proprietary kind, allows users to inspect, modify and freely redistribute its underlying programming instructions. The open-source approach has a number of attractions. Adopting open-source software can reduce costs, allay security concerns and ensure there is no danger of becoming too dependent on a foreign supplier. But there is another benefit, too; because it can be freely modified, open-source software is also easier to translate, or localise, for use in a particular language. This involves translating the menus, dialogue boxes, help files, templates and message strings to create a new version of the software. Large software vendors have little incentive to support any but the most widely spoken languages. Microsoft, for example, provides its Windows 2000 operating system in 24 languages, and Windows XP in 33. The company also supports over 20 languages in the latest version of its Office software suite. Yet for many languages, commercial vendors conclude that producing a localised product is not economically viable. The programmers who produce open-source software operate by different rules, however. The leading desktop interfaces for the open-source Linux operating system — KDE and GNOME-are, between them, available in more than twice as many languages as Windows. KDE has already been localised for 42 languages, with a further 46 in the pipeline. Similarly, Mozilla, an open-source web browser, now speaks 65 languages, with 34 more to follow. Open Office, the leading open-source office suite, is available in 31 languages, including Slovenian, Basque and Galician, and Indian languages such as Gujarati, Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam. And another 44 languages including Icelandic, Lao, Latvian, Welsh and Yiddish are on the way. Localising software is a tedious job, but some people are passionate enough about it to resort to unusual measures. The Hungarian translation of Open Office was going too slowly for Janos Noll, founder of the Hungarian Foundation for Free Software. So he built some web-based tools to distribute the workload and threw a pizza party in the computer room at the Technical University of Budapest. Over a dozen people worked locally, with about 100 Hungarians submitting work remotely over the web. Most of the work — translating over 21,000 text strings — was completed in three days. Dwayne Bailey of translate, org. za, an open-source translation project based in South Africa, says localising open-source programs into Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Sesotho and other African languages makes computers more accessible. With translated software, "these languages are suddenly players in the modern world." Neville Alexander, a former South African freedom-fighter, agrees. "An English-only or even an English-mainly policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity, since people are unable to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they cannot use their first language," he says. A similar approach is being taken in India, where there are 18 official languages and over 1,000 regional dialects. Shikha Pillai is one of the leaders of a team in Bangalore that is translating open-source software, including Open Office, into ten Indian dialects. She, too, feels that introducing Indian languages will help to foster a far deeper penetration of information technology. "Localisation makes IT accessible to common people," she says. "And Indian-language enabled software could revolutionise the way our communications work; even the way computers are used in India." In May, Thailand''s government launched a subsidised "people''s PC" that runs LinuxTLE, a Thai-language version of Linux. In September, Japan said it would join a project established by China and South Korea to develop localised, open-source alternatives to Microsoft''s software. Computer users around the world are discovering that open-source software speaks their language.

阅读理解The Zebras long walk across Africa James Gifford investigates some interesting new research into migration patterns of zebras living in Botswana in southern Africa A For any animal to travel over 270 km in Botswana partly across the sand and low bush terrain of the Kalahari Desert is a remarkable achievement

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 2 There are six questions below

阅读理解USE OF UNIVERSITY GROUNDS BY VEHICULAR TRAFFIC The University grounds are private. The University authorities only allow authorized members of the University, visitors and drivers of vehicles servicing the University to enter the grounds. Members of staff who have paid the requisite fee and display the appropriate permit may bring a vehicle into the grounds. A University permit does not entitle them to park in Hall car parks however, unless authorized by the Warden of the Hall concerned. Students may not bring vehicles into the grounds during the working day unless they have been given special permission by the Security Officer and have paid for and are displaying an appropriate entry permit. Students living in Halls of Residence must obtain permission from the Warden to keep a motor vehicle at their residence. Students are reminded that if they park a motor vehicle on University premises without a valid permit, they will be fined ￡20.

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 1 Case Study: Tourism New Zealand website New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 3 Preface to fiHow the other half thinks: Adventures in mathematicalreasoning A Occasionally, in some difficult musical compositions, there are beautiful, but easy parts - parts so simple a beginner could play them

阅读理解Stumped Rawalpindi He has a normal head, but nestling between his massive shoulders it seems small. He is Shoaib Akhtar, "the Rawalpindi Express", the fastest recorded bowler of a cricket ball in history. And right now, before a small but baying crowd at the Rawalpindi Cricket Ground, he is steaming towards this correspondent. From 22 yards, Mr. Akhtar launches into the weirdly beautiful contortion that fast bowlers perform to hurl a six-ounce lump of cork and leather at up to 100mph. Half a second later, the ball demolishes the stumps. For over two centuries, cricket has been played according to a largely unwritten code of honour for the practical reason that its laws are too complicated for officials to enforce to the reality. But technology has been rewriting the old etiquette. And according to some recent research, one of cricket''s most basic laws is untenable, and now the game is in turmoil. According to law 24. 3, bowlers may not straighten their arm in the final act of delivering the ball. This leads to Mr. Akhtar''s brutal run-up and elaborate action as alternative means of generating pace on the ball. The centrality of law 24.3 to cricket — and the virtual impossibility of policing it — is reflected in the game''s etiquette. To accuse a bowler of throwing the ball is one of the gravest insults in the game; yet now such accusations are flying thick and fast. Mr. Akhtar, the first man to bowl a delivery timed at 100mph, is one of a number of modern stars recently reported with "suspect actions". These rulings followed research into biomechanics that match officials had hoped would vindicate their decision. The University of Western Australia''s School of Human Movement has been investigating cricket biomechanics. In 2003, a study by Marc Portus, at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, filmed a number of fast bowlers in action using a dozen cameras recording 250 frames per second. They showed that virtually all bowlers straighten their arm, or throw, to some extent. Mr. Akhtar flexes his arm more than most only because he is extremely double-jointed. And to confuse matters further, a brilliant Sri Lankan spin bowler, Muttiah Muralitharan bowls with a crooked arm only because a congenital condition prevents him straightening it fully. In an effort to restore sanity to matters, bowlers are now allowed a varying margin for error depending on the pace at which they bowl. Thus, fast bowlers are legally allowed to straighten their arm by 10°, medium pacers by 7.5° and slow bowlers by 5°. But even this innovation has been rapidly undone. Last month, for the third time in his illustrious career, and even though poised to break the all-time wicket-taking record, Mr. Muralitharan was reported with a suspect action. Though Mr. Muralitharan was previously cleared by biomechanics, an English match official questioned the legality of a wicked addition to his armoury of top-spinners, off-spinners and leg-spinners. It is nicknamed the "doosra", which in Hindi or Urdu means "second" or "other". Here the ball is delivered with a huge flick of Mr. Muralitharan''s rubbery wrists and, according to many observers, a flexing of his elbow. Subsequent testing showed that Mr. Muralitharan flexes his arm by more than 10° when bowling the doosra, and the delivery could be banned. Sri Lanka, where Mr. Muralitharan is revered, is now seething while many Australians, who have long reviled him as a "chucker", are crowing. Should they pause for air, they would hear their own scientists cry foul. Last week, the scientists who tested Mr. Muralitharan admitted that they actually did not know much about the mechanics of spin bowling, and that he should receive no censure. When it comes to cricket, science may be stumped.

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 2 Zoo conservation programmes One of London Zoos recent advertisements caused me some irritation, so patently did it distort reality

阅读理解Take me out to the ballgame It is a strange coincidence that many popular sports played today with a ball, big or small, were first played in the latter half of the 19th century. Only cricket set its rules earlier, in 1788. Basketball was invented in 1891. Other sports had antecedents: soccer, rugby and American football were all formalised in the 1860s and 1870s from what appears to be a common origin, while baseball was standardised around that time, as was golf — though many Scots claim earlier origins. Tennis as we know it today was devised by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, a British army officer, for the entertainment of guests at his country estate in 1873. Tennis, though, is an exception in that the indoor form of the game was played with formal rules in England and France at least as far back as 1600. But even this is recent compared with ulama, a game once played all over Mesoamerica, from the American Southwest to Peru. The oldest ulama court, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was built around 1500BC, while latex balls used by the Olmecs, farther west, have been carbon-dated to 300 — 500 years earlier. This is not to say the rules of ulama have not changed over the years-ritual sacrifice of the losers is thought to have died out in the 1300s. But, says Manuel Aguilar, a professor at California State University, in Los Angeles, who studies the game, it is unique in having a continual recorded history stretching back almost 4 ,000 years. Dr. Aguilar and his colleague James Brady have been directing a group of students in Sinaloa, a state in western Mexico. They have started a comprehensive study of ulama de cadera, one of three forms of ulama surviving in Sinaloa, which is perhaps the only place where the once-widespread game is still played. Dr Aguilar speculates that this is because Sinaloa was a frontier during the time of the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, when ulama was largely eliminated by the intervention of Catholic missionaries who decried its pagan associations. Ulama is played on a long, narrow court, called a taste, which is 60 metres long and only four metres wide. The opposing sides, of five players each, take turns serving the four kilogram rubber ball and thereafter trying to move the ball up the field, hitting it only with the hip or upper thigh, which are protected by special garments. Points are scored if one team fails to return the other''s serve across the halfway point of the taste, or if the serving team succeeds in getting the ball past the opponent''s end line. The first team to score eight points wins. However, as Dr Aguilar and his colleagues point out in a series of papers forthcoming in the May issue of Estudios Jaliscienses, a Mexican journal, the rules of ulama are still today in flux, and often not even understood by the participants. This is why in a match each team brings a veedor, an elder who is meant to settle disputes over the rules. Dr. Aguilar, though, is less concerned with the details of the rules of the game, but with its social implications, both in Sinaloa today, and in Mesoamerica generally over the course of ulama''s history. While Dr Brady is, by training, an anthropologist, and so directs the team''s efforts to compile an ethnography of the present-day game, Dr Aguilar is an art historian. While this may seem an unorthodox pairing, it has allowed them to make some novel insights. For example, until their recent work, it was believed in academia that ulama was only played by men. However, in their detailed questioning of current players, they found that women play the game today, albeit as an exception, because female players are often stigmatized as being too macho. One of their informants is 94 years old and remembers female players from his youth, so the researchers are fairly certain that women have played throughout the 20th century. And Dr Aguilar''s analysis of clay figurines, he says, indicates that women played routinely in pre-Columbian times, indeed as far back as 1200BC. This leads Dr Aguilar to speculate that women stopped playing only because of Spanish intervention, and resumed 100-200 years ago. Another concern of Dr Aguilar''s is the balls used to play the game. He says synthetic rubber cannot be used, as there is a strong tradition of using natural rubber. Because natural rubber is now scarce in Mexico, and the process of making a ball takes about 30 hours, the supply of balls is constraining the spread of the game. Indeed, to understand the process better, Dr Brady tried to make several balls together with his students. The process involved smearing hot latex on his hands and arms, allowing it to dry, and then peeling the strips off and wrapping them around the core of the ball until it reaches the requisite size and weight. The traditional process, says Dr Brady, is necessary to give the ball sufficient bounce. First-hand experience has caused Dr Brady to revise his understanding of the significance of tributes paid in the 16th century to the Aztec empire, when ulama balls were used as a de facto currency. Dr Brady thinks that the growing of rubber in the Aztec empire was probably much more extensive than had previously been thought, as was the production of balls, which may have served as the store of value for an entire economic system. Both Dr Brady and Dr Aguilar have tried to play ulama themselves, but Dr Aguilar says that, although some of his graduate students persevered for longer, the bruises he sustained from the heavy ball caused him quickly to abandon playing the game. The same, it seems, cannot be said of the inhabitants of Sinaloa.

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 1 Bringing cinnamon to Europe Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the genus Cinnamomum, which is native to the Indian sub-continent

阅读理解Computing is driving the philosophical understanding of quantum theory For evidence of the power of simplicity, you need look no further than a computer. Everything it does is based on the manipulation of binary digits, or bits-units of information that can be either 0 or 1. Using logical operations to combine those 0s and Is allows computers to add, multiply and divide, and from there go on to achieve all the feats of the digital age. But at each step of the complex operations involved, each bit has a definite value. The same cannot be said of many properties in quantum physics, such as the spin of an atomic nucleus or the position of an electron orbiting such a nucleus. At a small scale, such properties can have more than one value at once. In 1994, Peter Shor, a mathematician then at AT&T''s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, realised that a computer that used such quantum properties to represent information could factorise large numbers extremely quickly. This is an important problem, because much of modern cryptography is based on the difficulty of factorising large numbers -- so being able to do so quickly would render many modern codes easily breakable. Then, in 1996, a colleague of Dr Shor''s at Bell Labs, Lov Grover, showed that such a quantum computer would be able to search through an unsorted database much faster than an ordinary computer -- another important application. With these insights, quantum computing, which had first been thought of as a possibility in the early 1980s, became a hot topic of research. It was clear to many physicists that using "qubits" -- which, unlike ordinary bits, can exist in a "superposition" of the values 0 and 1 simultaneously -- might yield an exponential improvement in computing power. This is because a pair of qubits could be in four different states at once, three qubits in eight, and so forth. What Dr Shor and Dr Grover showed was that the improvement, if the technological hurdles could be overcome, would be not hypothetical, but real, and useful for important problems. The technology necessary to manipulate qubits, in their various incarnations, is challenging. So far, nobody has managed to get a quantum computer to perform anything other than the most basic operations. But the field has been gathering pace, and is the topic of much discussion among the scientists gathered in Montreal for the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society, the largest physics conference in the world. There are currently several different approaches to quantum computing, all of which rely on fundamentally different technologies, including ultra-cold ions that are cooled by lasers, pulses of laser light, nuclear-magnetic resonance and solid-state devices such as superconducting junctions or quantum dots (which are confined clouds of electrons). What all these technologies have in common is that they can be used to invoke and exploit the bizarre phenomenon of superposition. Superposition is not simple. Though a qubit may, for a while, be in a state of superposition between 0 and 1, it must eventually choose between the two. And in even the best quantum computers, that choice, or "decoherence", happens in a fraction of a millisecond. Just how the choice is made, and how to prolong the preceding period of "coherence" that allows quantum computations to be made, constitute a long-unexplained gap at the heart of modern physics. For nearly 80 years, since the inception of quantum theory in the 1920s, most physicists were content to gloss over the process. What is perhaps surprising is that the technological challenge of quantum computing is now a driving force behind efforts to understand the most abstract and philosophical underpinnings of quantum mechanics.

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions Summer activities at London s Kew Gardens A Climb up to the walkway among the trees, 18 metres above the ground, for a spectacular experience

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions HOW TO ORGANISE SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS CONFERENCE To start with Advance planning is the key to a hassle-free conference

阅读理解PATIENT INFORMATION LEAFLET The name of your medicine is Borodine tablets WHAT ARE Borodine TABLETS USED FOR? Borodine tablets are used to help relieve hay fever and conditions due to allergies, in particular skin reactions and a runny nose. It is not recommended that Borodine tablets are given to children under 12 years of age or pregnant or breastfeeding women. BEFORE YOU TAKE Borodine TABLETS In some circumstances it is very important not to take Borodine tablets. If you ignore these instructions, this medicine could affect your heart rhythm. Are you taking oral medicines for fungal infections? Have you suffered a reaction to medicines containing Borodine before? Do you suffer from any liver, kidney or heart disease? If the answer to any of these questions is YES, do not take Borodine tablets before consulting your doctor. AFTER TAKING Borodine TABLETS Borodine tablets, like many other medicines, may cause side-effects in some people. If you faint, stop taking Borodine tablets and tell your doctor immediately. In addition Borodine tablets may cause problems with your vision, hair loss, depression or confusion, yellowing of your skin or your eyes. If you have these effects whilst taking Borodine tablets, tell your doctor immediately . Other side-effects are dizziness or headaches, and indigestion or stomachache. However, these effects are often mild and usually wear off after a few days, tell your doctor. Possible Endings A. Children under 12 years of age B. A headache C. An uncomfortable feeling in your stomach D. Symptoms similar to a cold E. A change in your skin colour F. Anything treated by a prescription medicine G. A kidney complaint H. A whitening of the eyes I. Sore or broken skin J. A fungal infection K. A feeling of sadness L. Shortness of breath M. A woman expecting a child

阅读理解Reading Passage 1 Title: Developmental Tasks of Normal Adolescence Question types: True/False/Not Given(4); 选择(3); matching(6) 文章内容回顾 青春期发展的不同阶段以及特点。 题型难度分析 Matching题又占据了半壁江山，这个题型出得简单就是送分，出得难了就是一个个地雷。这次考试整体难度也因为matching和段落信息包含而上升。 题型技巧分析 Matching的做法基本没有什么方法可言。答案和原文肯定是比较彻底的同意替换，这对学生的词汇要求比较高。Matching有两种出题方式：1. 题目简短，选项长；2. 选项简短，题目长。挑选简短的一方做定位词，甚至可以把这些定位词写在文章边上。