阅读理解Text 3 American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years now

阅读理解Part A Directions: Read the following four texts

阅读理解Text 3 There are many reasons for the sorry state of commercial aviation in America

阅读理解Part B Directions: Read the following text and match each of the numbered items in the left column to its corresponding information in the right column. There are two extra choices in the right column. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points) A busy brain can mean a hungry body. We often seek food after focused mental activity, like preparing for an exam or poring over spreadsheets. Researchers speculate that heavy bouts of thinking drain energy from the brain, whose capacity to store fuel is very limited. So the brain, sensing that it may soon require more calories to keep going, apparently stimulates bodily hunger, and even though there has been little in the way of physical movement or caloric expenditure, we eat. This process may partly account for the weight gain so commonly seen in college students. Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and another institution recently experimented with exercise to counter such post-study food binges. Gary Hunter, an exercise physiologist at U.A.B., oversaw the study, which was published this month in the journal Medicine Science in Sports Exercise. Hunter notes that strenuous activity both increases the amount of blood sugar and lactatea byproduct of intense muscle contractionscirculating in the blood and augments blood flow to the head. Because the brain uses sugar and lactate as fuel, researchers wondered if the increased flow of fuel-rich blood during exercise could feed an exhausted brain and reduce the urge to overeat. Thirty-eight healthy college students were invited to U.A.B.s exercise lab to determine their fitness and metabolic ratesand to report what their favorite pizza was. Afterward, they sat quietly for 35 minutes before being given as much of their favorite pizza as they wanted, which established a baseline measure of self-indulgence. At a later date, the volunteers returned and spent 20 minutes tackling selections from college and graduate-school entrance exams. Hunter says this work has been used in other studies to induce mental fatigue and hunger. Next, half the students sat quietly for 15 minutes, before being given pizza. The rest of the volunteers spent those 15 minutes doing intervals on a treadmill: two minutes of hard running followed by about one minute of walking, repeated five times. This is the sort of brief but intensive routine, Hunter says, that should prompt the release of sugar and lactate into the bloodstream. These students were then allowed to gorge on pizza, too. But by and large, they did not overeat. In fact, the researchers calculated that the exercisers consumed about 25 fewer calories than they did during their baseline session. The non-exercisers, however, consumed about 100 calories more. When the researchers factored in the calories expended on running, they determined that those students actually consumed 200 fewer total calories after their brain workouts than the resting students. The study has limitations, of course. We only looked at lunch, Hunter says; the researchers do not know if the runners consumed extra calories at dinner. They also cannot tell whether other types of exercise would have the same effect as running, although Hunter says they suspect that if an activity causes someone to break into a sweat, it should also increase blood sugar and lactate, feed- ing the brain and weakening hungers call.

阅读理解Text 4 Were fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to a five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive

阅读理解Text 1 Reskilling is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind

阅读理解Five ways to make conversation with anyone In choosing a new home, Camille McClains kids have a single demand: a backyard

阅读理解Text 1 Rats and other animals need to be highly at tuned to social signals from others so that can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid

阅读理解Text 3 When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015, it picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley

阅读理解Text 2 With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double to keep pace, food security is increasingly making headlines

阅读理解Text 2 Psychologists have known for a century that individuals vary in their cognitive ability

阅读理解Text 2 Forests give us shade, quiet and one of the harder callenges in the fight against climate change

阅读理解Text4 Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring- -the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year- -the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks

阅读理解Part A Directions: Read the following four texts

阅读理解[A]Give compliments, just not too many

阅读理解Text 2 It is true that CEO pay has gone up-top ones may make 300 times the pay of typical workers on average, and since the mid-1970s CEO pay for large publicly traded American corporations has, by varying estimates, gone up by about 500% The typical CEO of a top American corporation now makes about S18

阅读理解 Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring-the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year—the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. Gen Zs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that's tighter than it's been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U.S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them. If 'entitled' is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and 1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren't interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U. S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good. That's a big change from the previous generation. 'Millennials wanted more flexibility in their lives,' notes Tanya Michelsem, Associate Director of YouthSight, a UK-based brand manager that conducts regular 60-day surveys of British youth, in findings that might just as well apply to American youth. 'Generation Zs are looking for more certainty and stability, because of the rise of the gig economy. They have trouble seeing a financial future and they are quite risk averse.'

阅读理解 Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon last November when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone, a first step toward its possible demise. Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida made opposition to the zone, a centrepiece of his election campaign, despite its success in improving air quality. A judge has now overruled the city's decision to stop levying fines, ordering them reinstated. But with legal battles ahead, the zone's future looks uncertain at best. Madrid's back and forth on clean air is a pointed reminder of the limits to the patchwork, city-by-city approach that characterized efforts on air pollution across Europe, Britain very much included. Among other weaknesses, the measures cities must employ when left to tackle dirty air on their own are politically contentious, and therefore vulnerable. That's because they inevitably put the costs of cleaning the air on to individual drivers—who must pay fees or buy better vehicles—rather than on to the car manufacturers whose cheating is the real cause of our toxic pollution. It's not hard to imagine a similar reversal happening in London. The new ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) is likely to be a big issue in next year's mayoral election. And if Sadiq Khan wins and extends it to the North and South Circular roads in 2021 as he intends, it is sure to spark intense opposition from the far larger number of motorists who will then be affected. It's not that measures such as London's ULEZ are useless. Far from it, local officials are using the levers that are available to them to safeguard residents' health in the face of a serious threat. The zones do deliver some improvements to air quality, and the science tells us that means real health benefits—fewer heart attacks, strokes and premature births, less cancer, dementia and asthma, fewer untimely deaths. But mayors and councillors can only do so much about a problem that is far bigger than any one city or town. They are acting because national governments—Britain's and others across Europe—have failed to do so. Restrictions that keep highly polluting cars out of certain areas—city centres, 'school streets', even individual roads—are a response to the absence of a larger effort to properly enforce existing regulations and require auto companies to bring their vehicles into compliance. Wales has introduced special low speed limits to minimise pollution. We're doing everything but insist that manufacturers clean up their cars.

阅读理解Part B Directions: Reading the following text and match each of the numbered items in the left column to its corre- sponding information in the right column. There are two extra choices in the right column. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. The typical picture of a corporate highflier is someone who survives on very little sleep. He or she rises when it is still dark, works late and is still answering emails at two oclock in the morning. Such people do exist, of course. The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, was famous for operating on a few hours sleep. Some entrepreneurs and Wall Street traders seem to follow suit. But if you think you need to do the same thing to get ahead, think again. A growing body of re- search is finding that, on the contrary, those who get a good nights sleep are usually more produc- tive at work. Thats because sleep doesnt just rest the brain, say medical specialists. It allows the brain to perform vital maintenance and restoration tasks. Brains that get too little sleep simply can- not perform as well as those that are rested. Theres no doubt that sleep deprivation affects job per- formance, says the Detroit Medical Centers Safwan Badr. The evidence is compelling that when you do not get enough sleep ... you are not as productive. Investors should also take heed: Numerous studies have found that those running on too little sleep tend to make poorer investment decisions and take needless risks as well. Charles Czeisler, a sleep specialist at Brigham Womens Hospital in Boston, agrees. Missing a nights sleep de- grades our neurobehavioral performancethat is, our mental acuityby the equivalent to being legally drunk, he says. And, he warns, this doesnt only apply if you miss one nights sleep com- pletely;youll see similar effects if you simply sleep too little each night over time. For the first time, new research has attempted to put some numbers on the link between more Zzzs and more Benjamins. Matthew Gibson, graduate researcher in the economics department of the University of California, San Diego, compared wage data with sleep times recorded in the U.S. Cen- sus Bureaus American Time Use Survey. His conclusion: For those who are sleeping too little, a onehour increase in longrun average sleep increases wages by 16%, equivalent to more than a year of schooling. Adults need eight hours of sleep on average, experts say. There is some variation between indi- viduals. But when we are tired, we find it much harder to think innovatively and to make creative leaps, say researchers. We find it harder to adapt our thinking to new information or to learn new lessons. Consider: At Englands Loughborough University in 1999, researchers Yvonne Harrison tested the effects of sleep deprivation on a small group of healthy young participants. They were giv- en complex business-situation tasks in the form of a game, as well as some critical reading tasks. Those who went short on sleep were able to keep up with the reading, they found. But when it came to the complex game, their play collapsed, they Reported.

阅读理解 Rats and other animals need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so they can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Loleh Quinn at the University of' California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats. They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat—one social and one asocial—for four days. The robot rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels to move around and colorful markings. During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened cage doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side. Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave the rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a lever. Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 percent more likely on average to set the social robot free than the asocial one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being. They may have bonded more with the social robot because it displayed behaviours like communal exploring and playing. This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it, earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped, says Quinn. 'Rats have been shown to engage in multiple forms of reciprocal help and cooperation, including what is referred to as direct reciprocity where a rat will help another rat that has previously helped them,' says Quinn. The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design. The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. 'We'd assumed we'd have to give it a moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scent on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn't necessary,' says Janet Wiles at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research. The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals. 'We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and turns out other animals are too,' says Wiles.