The realization that colds can kill has renewed interest in finding vaccines and treatments. The trouble is that the common cold is caused not by one virus but by hundreds of different ones. This means a vaccine or drug that works a-gainst one of these viruses, or one family of viruses, is usually ineffective against all the others. What"s more, because colds are usually so mild, if treatments cause even minor side effects they can be worse than the disease. Such treatments will never get approval for general use, which is why most companies instead focus on drugs that relieve symptoms. Nevertheless, some drugs and vaccines are being developed against the cold viruses most likely to turn nasty . A vaccine against Respiratory Syncytial Virus(RSV), a virus which can cause serious illness in young children and the elderly, is going through clinical trials. It consists of a weakened strain of the virus given as a nasal spray. A treatment for RSV infections, based on RNA interference, is also in development. However, treatments for specific viruses are useless unless your cold is caused by the virus in question—and doctors have no quick way to work out which virus is to blame for a cold. Systems to do this are under development, mostly based on looking for specific DNA or RNA sequences, but none are near to reaching the market. An alternative approach would be to keep taking drugs that prevent infection throughout the cold season, such as a derivative of the anti-smallpox drug cidofovir which has been shown to combat adenoviruses, viruses that can cause upper respiratory infections. But again, as adenoviruses are only responsible for a few percent of colds, the benefits hardly justify the expense and risk of side effects from remaining on a drug permanently. Short of everyone on the planet isolating themselves for two or three weeks, so existing cold viruses run out of hosts and die out, it is hard to see how we can ever defeat the common cold. Even then, new cold viruses would evolve in time from animal viruses. Some even question whether it is desirable to try to eliminate colds. "It"s blind speculation," says Joel Weinstock of Tufts University in Boston in the US, "but the common cold may protect us from more serious viruses." An occasional sniffle might be a price worth paying if it keeps our immune defenses primed.

Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link. As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit.(The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pins.)They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so. A follow-up study with 72 Americans and 36 foreigners explored their creative negotiating skills. Pairs of students were asked to play the role of a seller of a petrol station who then needed to get a job and a buyer who would need to hire staff to run the business. The two were likely to reach a deadlock because the buyer had been told he could not afford what the seller was told was his minimum price. Nevertheless, where both negotiators had lived abroad 70% struck a deal in which the seller was offered a management job at the petrol station in return for a lower asking price. When neither of the negotiators had lived abroad, none was able to reach a deal. To check that they had not merely discovered that creative people are more likely to choose to live abroad, Dr Maddux and Dr Galinsky identified and measured personality traits, such as openness to new experiences, that are known to predict creativity. They then used statistical controls to filter out such factors. Even after that had been done, the statistical relationship between living abroad and creativity remained, indicating that it is something from the experience of living in foreign parts that helps foster creativity. Merely travelling abroad, however, was not enough. You do have to live there. Packing your beach towel and suntan lotion will not, by itself, make you Hemingway.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. Choose the most suitable one from the list A—G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. If good intentions and good ideas were all it took to save the deteriorating atmosphere, the planet"s fragile layer of air would be as good as fixed. The two great dangers threatening the blanket of gases that nurtures and protects life on earth-global warming and the thinning ozone layer—have been identified. Better yet, scientists and policymakers have come up with effective though expensive countermeasures. (41)______. CFCs-first fingered as dangerous in the 1970s by Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, two of this year"s Nobel-prizewinning chemists—have been widely used for refrigeration and other purposes. If uncontrolled, the CFC assault on the ozone layer could increase the amount of hazardous solar ultraviolet light that reaches the earth"s surface, which would, among other things, damage crops and bring disasters to environment. Thanks to a sense of urgency triggered by the 1985 detection of what has turned out to be an annual "hole" in the especially vulnerable ozone over Antarctica, the Montreal accords have spurred industry to replace dangerous CFCs with safer substances. (42)______. Nonetheless, observes British Antarctic Survey meteorologist Jonathan Shanklin: "It will be the middle of the next century before things are back to where they were in the 1970s". Even that timetable could be thrown off by international smugglers who have been bringing illegal CFCs into industrial countries to use in repairing or recharging old appliances. (43)______. Developing countries were given more time to comply with the Montreal Protocol and were promised that they would receive $250 million from richer nations to pay for the CFC phaseout. At the moment, though, only 60 % of those funds has been forthcoming. This is a critical time. It is also a critical time for warding off potentially catastrophic climate change. Waste gases such as carbon dioxide, Methane and the same CFCs that wreck the ozone layer all tend to trap sunlight and warm the earth. The predicted results: and eventual melting of polar ice caps, rises in sealevels and shifts in climate patterns. (44)______. The encouraging precedent is the Montreal Protocol for ozone protection, which showed how quickly nations can act when they finally recognize a disaster. A related lesson is that if CFCs do disappear, it will be partly because chemical manufactures discover they can make a profit by selling safer replacements. (45)______. If that happens, then all nations, from the rich to the poor, may end up working to save the atmosphere for the same reason they"ve polluted it: pure economic self-interest.A. Says Nelson Sabogal of the U.N. Environment Program: "If developed countries don"t come up with the money, the ozone layer will not recuperate".B. But that doesn"t mean these problems are anywhere close to being solved. The stratospheric ozone layer, for example, is still getting thinner, despite the 1987 international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol, which calls for a phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting chemicals by the year 2006.C. The same process may ultimately be what mitigates global warming. After long years of effort, manufacturers of solar-power cells are at last close to matching the low costs of more conventional power technologies. And a few big orders from utilities could drive the price down to competitive levels.D. Yet the CFCs already in the air are still doing their dirty work. The Antarctic ozone hole is more severe this year than ever before, and ozone levels over temperate regions are dipping as well. If the CFC phaseout proceeds on schedule, the atmosphere should start repairing itself by the year 2000, say scientists.E. Last year alone 20,000 tons of contraband CFCs entered the U.S.—mostly from India, where the compounds are less restricted.F. Until recently, laggard governments could to scientific uncertainty about whether global warming has started, but that excuse is wearing thin. A draft report circulating on the Internet has proclaimed for the first time that warming has indeed begun.G. The good news is that this gloomy scenario may galvanize the world"s governments into taking serious action. For example, though it"s now more costly to generate electricity from solar cells than from would otherwise have to be spent in the future combating the effects of global warming.

You have been invited to take part in a speech by your friend, Jerry. Unfortunately, you cannot accept the invitation. Write him a letter to express your apology. You should write about 100 words neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

InternetLoveIsIllusiveWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,andthen3)giveyourcomments.

An awkward-looking character such as Cyrano de Bergerac might sniff at the suggestion, but recent scientific research shows beauty, brains and brawn may in fact all be allied, writes Dr. Raj Persaud. (46) Psychologists have concluded that we may be drawn to the stereotypically attractive because of what their faces reveal about their intelligence and success in later life. In America, research led by Professor Leslie Zebrowitz, of Brandeis University, has shown an association between facial attractive and IQ. Strangers briefly exposed to a target"s face were able to correctly judge intelligence at levels significantly better than chance. The same team also researched how a person"s attractiveness might bear relation to their intelligence. They found that good-looking people did better in IQ tests as they aged. (47) Their research sought to prove that how a person perceived himself and was perceived by others predicted how intelligent he apparently became more accurately than his past intelligence. (48) Perhaps because the more attractive people were treated as more intelligent, they ended up having more stimulating and, therefore, intelligence-enhancing lives. Does this mean that your face really could be your destiny? Sociologists Dr. Ulrich Mueller and Dr. Allan Mazur, of the University of Marburg in Germany, recently analyzed the final-year photographs of the 1950"s graduates of West Point in the United States. Dominant facial appearances turned out to be a consistent predictor of later-rank attainment. Again, they believed there could be a self-fulfilling effect. (49) Because some men looked more authoritative, they naturally drew respect and obedience from others which, in turn, assisted their rise through the ranks. A team at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin has been investigating the sensitive subject of links between physical and mental abnormalities. Led by Doctors Robin Hennessy and John Waddington, the team used a new laser surface-scanning technique to make a 3-D analysis of how facial shape might vary with brain structure. Their findings showed that in early fetal life, brain and face development are intimately connected. From this they concluded that abnormalities in brain elaboration probably also affect face development. This, according to them, explains the striking facial features of some one with Down"s syndrome. (50) Using similar techniques, the team also demonstrated how other disorders linked to brain aberrations could be associated with facial alterations. So the very latest scientific research suggests that nobody should try to look too obviously different from average.

BPart B/B

Millions of families sat down in their living rooms one evening last August to watch a live Madonna Concert from France, telecast on the cable network Home Box Office. Because Madonna is such a huge international star—and because the telecast was heavily promoted and aired in prime time on a weekend—millions of children certainly watched with their parents. What happened on all those screens was that Madonna repeatedly used the one obscene word that has been routinely barred from the public airwaves. We live in an anything-goes age, so the show"s witless and purposely vulgar content was not surprising. The language itself was nothing that has not been heard in movies or on cable-TV comedy specials. The surprising thing was that so few parents called HBO to object. A spokesperson for the network said the complaints" were not by any stretch of the imagination overwhelming"—and that the Madonna con cert was the highest-rated original entertainment program in the network"s history. Apparently, America"s parents have totally given up hope that they can control what their children are exposed to on TV. My point isn"t, really, about Madonna. Though I don"t happen to find her calculated outrage particularly interesting she is free to make her money anyway she chooses. Marginally talented singers have been packaging rebellion for decades, and it always seems to sell, especially to young people. Madonna has done a very good job marketing her product. What is most troubling is that her product appeared in America"s homes during prime time on a Sunday, and people seemed to think it was no big deal. Television, in a way that now seems quaint, was once considered almost sacred ground when it came to certain material-precisely because children were watching. But the country has been so beaten down by a lessening of public standards that obscenities can be telecast to millions of families without causing even a ripple of protest. What of the argument (that parents should just turn off the TV if they don"t like the programming)? It"s valid—but there was no warning before Madonna launched into her first rapid-fire round of obscenities. Although the telecast was promoted as being live, it actually was taped hours before. The network knew what it was sending out. Yet it did so without deletions or an advisory notice at the beginning of the show. This was "a creative decision," HBO says. Those children will hear worse in their lifetimes—they probably already have. To telecast a concert like Madonna"s is no longer considered particularly controversial. But to wonder publicly about the wisdom of it—to say that delivering such a performance to the nation"s children is wrong—that is considered controversial. To say it is wrong is to seem out of step with the rest of the world. But it is wrong. It is dead wrong.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list (A、B、C、D、E、F、G……) to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are several extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points) In France, as in many European countries, friends generally are of the same sex, and friendship is seen as basically a relationship between men. (41)______. And many French people doubt the possibility of a friendship between a man and a woman. There is also the kind of relationship within a group—men and women who have worked together for a long time, who may be very close, sharing great loyalty and warmth of feeling. They may call one another—copains—a word that in English becomes "friends" but has more the feeling of "pals" or "buddies". In French eyes this is not friendship, although two members of such a group may well be friends. For the French, friendship is one-to-one relationship that demands a keen awareness of the other person"s intellect, temperament and particular interests. (42)______. Your political philosophy assumes more depth, appreciation of a play becomes sharper, taste in food or wine is enhanced, enjoyment of a sport is intensified. And French friendships are divided into categories. A man may play chess with a friend for thirty years without knowing his political opinion, or he may talk politics with him for a long time without knowing about his personal life. Different friends fill different niches in each person"s life. (43)______. These duties, also serious and required, are primarily for relatives. Men who are friends may meet in a café. Intellectual friends may meet in large groups for evenings of conversation. Working people may meet at the little bistro where they drink and talk, far from the family. (44)______. In the past in France, friendships of this kind seldom were open to any but intellectual women. (45)______. The special relationship of friendship is based on what the French value most on the mind, on having the same outlook, on vivid a awareness of some chosen area of life.A. These friendships are not made part of family life. A friend is not expected to spend evenings being nice to children or courteous to a deaf grandmother.B. A Frenchman explains, "If I were to say to you in France, "This is my good friend", that person would not be as close to me as someone about whom I said only, "This is my friend." Anyone about whom I have to say more is really less."C. Since most women"s lives centered on their homes, their warmest relations with other women often went back to their girlhood.D. Marriage does not affect such friendship; wives don"t have to be taken into account.E. Frenchwomen laugh at the idea that "women can"t be friends", but they also admit sometimes that for women "it is a different thing".F. Between French friends, who have chosen each other for the similarity of their point of view, lively disagreement and sharpness of argument are the breath of life.G. A friend is someone who draws out your own best qualities, with whom you sparkle and become more of whatever the friendship draws upon.

BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./B

After being involved in an accident, you were looked after by another person. Write a letter of thanks: 1) mentioning what happened in the accident, 2) telling the person about your recovery, and 3) expressing your thanks. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address. (10 points)

Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. In a broader【C1】______, Expressionism is one of the main【C2】______of art in the late 19th and the 20th centuries. Its【C3】______subjective, personal self-expression is typical【C4】______a wide range of modern artists and art movements. More【C5】______Expressionism as a【C6】______style or movement refers to a number of German artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian ones, who became active in the years before World War I and remained so throughout【C7】______of the War period. The roots of the German Expressionist school【C8】______the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of【C9】______in the period 1885-1900【C10】______a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of color and line to【C11】______dramatic and emotion themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, etc. They【C12】______from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or【C13】______of mind. The【C14】______of Expressionism was brought about by the vagueness of its longing【C15】______a better world, by its use of highly poetic language, and【C16】______the intensely personal and【C17】______nature of its mode of presentation. The partial re-establishment of stability in Germany after 1924 and the growth of more【C18】______political styles of social realism【C19】______the movement"s decline in the late 1920s. Expressionism was【C20】______killed by the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

(1)_____ exactly a year ago, in a small village in Northern India, Andrea Milliner was bitten on the leg by a dog. "It must have (2)_____ your nice white flesh", joked the doctor (3)_____ he dressed the wound. Andrea and her husband Nigel were determined not to let it (4)_____ their holiday, and thought no more about the dog, which had meanwhile (5)_____ disappeared from the village. "We didn"t (6)_____ there was anything wrong with it," says Nigel. "It was such a small, (7)_____ dog that rabies didn"t (8)_____ my mind". But, six weeks later, 23-year-old Andrea was dead. The dog had been rabid. No one had thought it necessary to (9)_____ her antirabies treatment. When, back home in England, she began to show the classic (10)_____ unable to drink, catching her breath her own doctor put it (11)_____ to hysteria. Even when she was (12)_____ into an (13)_____, hallucinating, recoiling in terror at the sight of water, she was directed (14)_____ the nearest mental hospital. But if her symptoms (15)_____ little attention in life, in death they achieved a publicity close to hysteria. Cases like Andrea are (16)_____, but rabies is still one of the most feared diseases known to man. The disease is (17)_____ by a bite of a lick from an (18)_____ animal. It can, in very (19)_____ circumstances, be inhaled—two scientists died of it after (20)_____ bat dung in a cave in Texas.

Floating on water, a ship displaces an amount of water equal to the weight of the ship.

An awkward-looking character such as Cyrano de Bergerac might sniff at the suggestion, but recent scientific research shows beauty, brains and brawn may in fact all be allied, writes Dr. Raj Persaud. (46) Psychologists have concluded that we may be drawn to the stereotypically attractive because of what their faces reveal about their intelligence and success in later life. In American, research led by Professor Leslie Zebrowitz, of Brandeis University, has shown an association between facial attractive and IQ. Strangers briefly exposed to a target"s face were able to correctly judge intelligence at levels significantly better than chance. The same team also researched how a person"s attractiveness might bear relation to their intelligence. They found that good-looking people did better in IQ tests as they aged. (47) Their research sought to prove that how a person perceived himself and was perceived by others predicted how intelligent he apparently became more accurately than his past intelligence. (48) Perhaps because the more attractive people were treated as more intelligent, they ended up having more stimulating and, therefore, intelligence-enhancing lives. Does this mean that your face really could be your destiny? Sociologists Dr Ulrich Mueller and Dr. Allan Mazur, of the University of Marburg in Germany, recently analyzed the final-year photographs of the 1950 graduates of West Point in the United States. Dominant facial appearances turned out to be a consistent predictor of later rank attainment. Again, they believed there could be a self fulfilling effect. (49) Because some men looked more authoritative, they naturally drew respect and obedience from others which, in turn, assisted their rise through the ranks. A team at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin has been investigating the sensitive subject of links between physical and mental abnormalities. Led by Doctors Robin Hennessy and John Waddington, the team used a new laser surface-scanning technique to make a 3-D analysis of how facial shape might vary with brain structure. Their findings showed that in early fetal life, brain and face development are intimately connected. From this they concluded that abnormalities in D rain elaboration probably also affect face development. This, according to them, explains the striking facial features of some one with Down"s syndrome. (50) Using similar techniques, the team also demonstrated how other disorders linked to brain aberrations could be associated with facial alterations. So the very latest scientific research suggests that nobody should try to look too obviously different from average.

Walt Disney could have built his biggest theme park anywhere. He chose Florida. The weather is balmy, and when it gets too hot there are lots of pools to cool off in, says. Meg Crofton, Walt Disney World"s CEO". Florida also offers plenty of space to expand. Disney World, which was first carved out of wild woodland in 1971, has swollen to four parks covering 40 square miles (104 sq km) and employing 60,000 "cast members". Contrary to the stereotype of rapid flow in the service sector, the average full-time employee sticks around for nine years. Florida"s business climate is sunny, too. The Milken Institute, a think-tank in California, compiles an index of "best-performing cities" in America, a composite measure of such things as job creation, wage growth and whether businesses are thriving. In the most recent index, six of the top ten metropolitan areas are in Florida. (Orlando-Kissimmee is sixth.) And 18 of the top 30 are in the South. For a long time the South"s weather got in the way of its development. Richard Pillsbury, a geography professor at Georgia State University, describes traditional life in the lowland South, a region stretching from northern Virginia down to the Gulf coast of Texas: "Smallish barren farms almost lost in the white heat of a hot and humid summer sun as the owners and their help fought swarms of mosquitoes to plant, cultivate and harvest the meagre cotton crop for market". Then air-conditioning came. As it spread after the World War Ⅱ, the South became suddenly more comfortable to live and work in. From the 1940s until the 1980s the region boomed. In his book Old South, New South, Gavin Wright lists four reasons why Federal defence spending stimulated growth. Sunshine attracted skilled professionals. The South, having developed so little in the past, was a "clean slate", without strong labour unions, entrenched bureaucracies, restrictive laws or outdated machinery. Lastly, given how much catching up the South had to do, the potential returns were higher than in the north. Southerners have prospered in part by playing to their traditional strengths. The fame of southern hospitality has bolstered the region"s hotel chains, such as Holiday Inn. That of southern cuisine helps local restaurants, such as Waffle House, Cracker Barrel and KFC. Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, the world"s largest retailer, has kept costs low by refusing to recognize unions. And Coca-Cola owes at least some of its success to its southern origins.

It is acknowledged that the modern musical show is America"s most original and dynamic contribution toward theater. In the last quarter of a century, America has produced large【C1】______of musical plays that have been popular abroad【C2】______at home. 【C3】______, it is very difficult to explain【C4】______is new or【C5】______American about them, for the 【C6】______are centuries old. Perhaps the uniqueness of America" s contribution to the【C7】______can best be characterized through brief descriptions of several of the most important and best-known musicals. One of these is surely Oklahoma by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hamerstein. It burst 【C8】______popularity in 1943. Broadway audience and critics were【C9】______by its 【C10】______, vitality and excitement. This "new" type of musical was【C11】______as kind of 【C12】______theater in which the play, the music and lyrics, the dancing, and the scenic background were assembled not merely to provide entertainment and【C13】______, but to【C14】______in a single unifying whole to contribute to its unique feature. 【C15】______, it meant that the songs and dances should 【C16】______naturally out of the situations of the story and play an important part in carrying the action【C17】______. In Oklahoma, an American folk-dance style was organically combined with classical ballet and modern dance. It is right to say that the musical was a brilliantly integrated performance by the talented dancers and singing actors. Oklahoma also marked a new 【C18】______ in the choice of story on which a musical is based. Writers and composers began to abandon the sentimentally picturesque or aristocratic setting【C19】______more realistic stories in authentic social and cultural 【C20】______. Oklahoma was based on a "folk" whose story dealt not only with young love but also with the opening of the American West.

With Airbus"s giant A380 airliner about to take to the skies, you might think planes could not get much bigger and you would be right. For a given design, it turns (1)_____, there comes a point where the wings become too heavy to generate (2)_____ lift to carry their own weight. (3)_____ a new way of designing and making materials could (4)_____ that problem. Two engineers (5)_____ University College London have devised an innovative way to customise and control the (6)_____ of a material throughout its three dimension al structure. In the (7)_____ of a wing, this would make possible a material that is dense, strong and load-bearing at one end, close to the fuselage, (8)_____ the extremities could be made less dense, lighter and more (9)_____. It is like making bespoke materials, (10)_____ you can customise the physical properties of every cubic millimetre of a structure. The new technique combines existing technologies in a(n) (11)_____ way. It starts by using finite-element-analysis software, of the type commonly used by engineers, (12)_____ a virtual prototype of the object. The software models the stresses and strains that the object will need to (13)_____ throughout its structure. Using this information it is then (14)_____ to calculate the precise forces acting on millions of smaller subsections of the structure. (15)_____ of these subsections is (16)_____ treated as a separate object with its own set of forces acting on it—and each subsection (17)_____ for a different microstructure to absorb those local forces. Designing so many microstructures manually (18)_____ be a huge task, so the researchers apply an optimisation program, called a genetic algorithm, (19)_____. This uses a process of randomisation and trial-and-error to search the vast number of possible microstructures to find the most (20)_____ design for each subsection.

Parents of children who happily eat what"s put in front of them might assume their kids are well nourished. But two new studies drive home the importance of varying that diet. Deficiencies of vitamin D, omega-3 fats, and other healthful compounds are common; it turns out—and consequential. Growing evidence links vitamin D deficiency not only to weak bones but also to impaired immunity, asthma, and diabetes among other problems. And some of the latest research finds that rates of asthma and related respiratory problems climb in kids who are short on other commonly missing essentials, including vitamins C and E and omega-3 fatty acids. A team at the Harvard School of Public Health evaluated the diet and respiratory(relating to the process of breathing)health of some 2,000 North American high school seniors and found that teens who lack of fruit, vegetables, and other healthful foods were most likely to have problems such as coughing, panting, episodes of bronchitis, and asthma. Vitamins C and E, which are abundant in fruit and dark-green vegetables, may "protect the lung from stress," says Harvard research fellow and study leader Jane Burns. Omega-3 reduces inflammation, a key feature of asthma, in which airways swell and make breathing difficult. Oily fish like salmon, mackerel, and tuna—as well as cod-liver oil—are rich in both omega-3 and vitamin D. Vitamin D can also be obtained from multivitamin milk and sunshine—and many kids should be getting more of both. In another new study, researchers found that 55 percent of outwardly healthy children and teenagers they tested didn"t have enough vitamin D to grow healthy bones. Dark-skinned children were particularly likely to be short of the bone-building vitamin, according to Babette Zemel, an author of the study and director of the Nutrition and Growth Laboratory at Children"s Hospital of Philadelphia. The melanin(a natural dark brown colour in human skin, hair, and eyes)that makes their skin dark also blocks ultraviolet rays, which the body uses to make vitamin D. In winter, when the sun was weakest, more than 90 percent of blacks in the study were vitamin D deficient. Researchers suggest pointing kids outside, and waiting a few minutes before putting on sun block; 10 minutes of midday summer sun provides 10,000 international units of the vitamin—more than enough for a day. Like melanin, sunblock prevents the skin from making vitamin D, so a bit of lotion-free exposure is necessary to grab the benefit.