阅读理解By 2003 an estimated 42 million people were infected (47)______ and more than 20 million people had died of AIDS. A United Nations report presented in 2002 (48)______ that unless prevention programs were greatly expanded, AIDS would claim an (49)______ 68 million lives by 2020. Sub-Saharan Africa has been the region hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic; more than two-thirds of all people with HIV/AIDS are in this region. In the United States, an (50)______ 900,000 people were living with HIV/AIDS in 2002. HIV is spread through contact with (51)______ body fluids such as blood and semen. Infected people may harbor the virus within their bodies for several years or even longer before developing symptoms of AIDS. Though symptomless, they can still infect others. Worldwide, most HIV (52)______ occurs during sexual relations between heterosexual partners. In the United States, the majority of transmission has been between homosexual partners. Transmission among drug addicts who (53)______ infected needles is another significant route of transmission in many countries. No cure for AIDS is known. Researchers are working on preventative AIDS (54)______ , but none are expected to be ready for market in the near future. Meanwhile, drug therapies introduced in the mid-1990''s have been extremely effective in controlling AIDS (55)______ for some patients. However, the medications are expensive, putting them beyond the reach of the (56)______ majority of the world''s HIV-positive people. A) estimated I) remarkable B) transmission J) predicted C) novel K) restore D) additional L) commit E) vast M) share F) peculiar N) progression G) infected O) worldwide H) vaccines

阅读理解Passage One Professor Kumar Bhatt, founder and head of Warwick Manufacturing Group(WMG), and Rob Meakin, a personnel director at Marconi, have developed a partnership to train engineers and managers to BEComee-literate

阅读理解What does Beall suggest the UK government should do?

阅读理解Long after the 1998 World Cup was won, disappointed fans were still cursing the disputed refereeing (裁判) decisions that denied victory to their team. A researcher was appointed to study the performance of some top referees. The researcher organized an experimental tournament (锦标赛) involving four youth teams. Each match lasted an hour, divided into three periods of 20 minutes during which different referees were in charge. Observers noted down the referees'' errors, of which there were 61 over the tournament. Converted to a standard match of 90 minutes, each referee made almost 23 mistakes, a remarkably high number. The researcher then studied the videotapes to analyze the matches in detail. Surprisingly, he found that errors were more likely when the referees were close to the incident. When the officials got it right, they were, on average, 17 meters away from the action. The average distance in the case of errors was 12 meters. The research shows the optimum (最佳的) distance is about 20 meters. There also seemed to be an optimum speed. Correct decisions came when the referees were moving at a speed of about 2 meters per second. The average speed for errors was 4 meters per second. If FIFA, football''s international ruling body, wants to improve the standard of refereeing at the next World Cup, it should encourage referees to keep their eyes on the action from a distance, rather than rushing to keep up with the ball, the researcher argues. He also says that FIFA''s insistence that referees should retire at age 45 may be misguided, ff keeping up with the action is not so important, their physical condition is less critical.

阅读理解How To Get Famous in 30 Seconds Oct. 6, 2001, was the night that would make David Bernal famous, although he didn''t know it at the time. He was 21 and a senior at California State University at Long Beach, majoring in art and illustration and doing a little break dancing on the side. On the night in question he had been hired to perform at a Korean-American talent show in Los Angeles. There''s a grainy amateur video of the event in which you can see him mumble his name into the microphone and then do his thing for about 60 sec. The audience goes insane. Those watching can''t believe what''s happening. Bernal, who performs under the name David Elsewhere, describes his dance style as a mixture of " popping, waving, liquiding, breaking, roboting". What this means in practice is that, first, his body physically melts into a little puddle and then rebuilds itself bone by bone; then he becomes a giant robot; then weird energies go surging through his arms and legs; then he makes it look as though something is crawling around under his shirt; then he becomes a springy hopping creature. And then, just like that, it''s over. Except it wasn''t over. Somebody converted the grainy video from that night into a digital file and posted it on the Web. One by one, then hundreds by hundreds, people started downloading the video, emailing it, linking to it, sharing it, copying it and reuploading it. In other words, the little video went viral—it multiplied and reproduced and spread out of control on the Internet like a virus. And millions of people caught it. Bernal is famous now, in a way, but it''s a new kind of fame, courtesy of a new medium. Viral videos are only a few minutes or even a few seconds long, and they''re generally amateur in execution and wildly eclectic in subject matter. Browse one of the websites that hosts them, like YouTube or Google Video, and you''ll see drunken karaoke, babies being born, plane crashes, burping contests, freakish sports accidents and far, far stranger things. The one thing they have in common is that people can''t stop watching them. The viral video probably began with the infamous Dancing Baby, which surfaced in 1996. A strangely compelling animation of a diapered infant getting its tiny groove on, the Dancing Baby was born as a software demo, but people started sending it to one another as an e-mail attachment. Until the Baby came along, nobody realized that that kind of spontaneous In box-to-In box sharing, following the and-they''ll-tell-two-friends model, could ever add up to much, let alone scale to the level of a mass medium. " It wasn''t as though a marketing firm attempted to create the phenomenon," says Michael Girard, one of the programmers who helped create the Dancing Baby. Soon, other clips followed the same branching path the Baby did: a cheerleader apparently being flipped through a basketball hoop; Paris Hilton''s sex tape; Janet Jackson''s famous wardrobe malfunction; a 19-year-old New Jersey man (doomed to be forever known as "the Numa Numa guy" ) overenthusiastically lip synching to a Romanian pop song. Last December, Saturday Night Live''s Lazy Sunday video appeared on the Net after airing on the show. The white-boy rap about cupcakes and Narnia immediately went viral, spawning half a dozen catchphrases and endowing SNL with an aura of cool it hasn''t enjoyed since Wayne''s World. But most viral videos come from amateurs, brilliant or lucky camcorder auteurs who just put their work on the Net and watch it take off. Traffic to viral-video sites is surging, driven by ubiquitous broadband Internet access and cheap, easy -to -use digital video cameras. Since last year, visits to Yahoo! ''s Video section have gone up 148%. Traffic to iFilm. com grew 102%. YouTube, launched in December, is storming the Web. It already had 9 million unique visitors in February, compared with Google Video''s 6. 2 million and Yahoo! ''s 3. 8 million. YouTube''s traffic grew another 24% just last month, and the site shows more than 40 million videos a day. Visitors to YouTube spend an average of 15 minutes there per session—that''s an eternity in the quick-clicking world of the Web. Seriously. Don''t go to YouTube if you don''t have some time to kill, because whatever time you have, YouTube will kill it. Viral videos are powerful, but that power can be a little scary. Once something goes viral, there''s no way to get the genie back in the bottle, and some things go viral that shouldn''t. One notorious surveillance video, still at large online, shows a suspect in a San Bernardino County, Calif. , police station shooting himself in the head with a pistol. Another video shows a chubby kid waving a golf-ball retriever like a light saber. The kid, Ghyslain Raza, was 15 at the time. Three of his classmates found the footage and put it online, and it became an instant Internet classic. Soon strangers started making fun of Raza on the street. The San Francisco Giants put the video on their Jumbotron. Raza, now 18, became known as the Star Wars Kid. He also became depressed and dropped out of school. Eventually he sued (控告) the classmates who had found the video. Two weeks ago, they settled for an undisclosed sum. Corporations are running into similar problems. They want to ride the viral train for the free publicity, but it doesn''t always go where they want it to. In March Chevrolet organized an online make-your-own-commercial campaign for its Tahoe SUV. Green-minded humorists hijacked the campaign, creating widely circulated Tahoe ads with slogans like, "Nature? It''ll grow back. Drive a car that costs the earth. " Last year, Lee Ford and Dan Brooks, a London -based creative ad development team, came up with an "edgy" Volkswagen spot for a demo reel; a terrorist tries to detonate a car bomb outside a crowded cafe. But the car, a VW Polo, is too sturdy—it contains the blast, killing the terrorist but saving the caf6. Shot on a shoestring budget, the clip is shocking, tasteless, stunningly effective—and totally unauthorized. When it leaked onto the Net (it had been hidden on Ford and Brooks'' website) , they were pretty stunned too. "We went to sleep, and then America got it," says Ford, 33. "I woke in the morning and looked at our website. The hit rate was through the roof. " The duo(成对的人) had to apologize to Volkswagen. Not every video goes viral. The vast majority go nowhere—YouTube hosts millions of hours of drunken parties, tearful confessions, smiling babies, sleeping cats and screen grabs from World of Warcraft, all doomed to obscurity. Nike showed a firm grasp of the form with a popular clip, an ad stealthily designed to look like amateur footage, showing soccer deity Ronaldinho putting on a pair of sneakers and then, incredibly, nailing the crossbar with a soccer ball four times in a row. Some of the successes are accidental. For a while, one of the popular movies on Google Video was a 20-sec. clip of a kid falling off a jungle gym. Others are inexplicable: a 24-year-old Midwesterner known as Nornna has so far posted 755 movie clips to YouTube in which she laconically narrates the details of her daily life. The videos are almost excruciatingly prosaic, but they have a huge grass-roots following, and they have made her one of the medium''s homegrown celebrities. Other viral videos show genuine comic smarts. One night in January a couple of Emerson College students named Jonathan Ade and Patrick DiNicola had a brain wave and stayed up late re-editing footage from the Back to the Future trilogy to create Brokeback to the Future, the time-traveling love story of young Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and mad scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Viral gold. "A friend of ours posted it onto YouTube," says Ade, 21. "After that point it got away from us. " Brokeback to the Future has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube alone and inspired dozens of knockoffs (including Lazy Brokeback, in which SNL''s Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell find each other to be "crazy delicious" ). "Professionally I think this is going to help me out in the long run in terms of my film career," says Ade. That''s quite possible. There''s a purity to viral videos that can''t be replicated in other media, if you can use purity to refer to a medium that is at least 5% fart jokes. Nothing can force a clip to go viral. It requires an authentic response from a mass audience, and the mainstream is learning to respect that. Soon after their unsanctioned VW spot hit the Net, viral admen Ford and Brooks were hired for a series of spoof political spots for Britain''s Channel 4, and they''ve gone on to work for McDonald''s and the Sci Fi Channel Europe, among others. Says Brooks; "It put us on the map. " And what about David Bernal, a. k. a. David Elsewhere? He''s living the viral dream. Since that night in 2001, he has danced in commercials for 7-Eleven, Heineken, Pepsi and Apple''s iPod. He has shown his stuff on Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel and Steve Harvey. He did a Volkswagen ad that consists entirely of his gloriously funky reinterpretation of Gene Kelly''s classic Singin'' in the Rain routine. He even did a cameo in You Got Served. "The choreographer had seen the video and wanted me to be in the movie ," Bernal says. "That''s usually how it works. I don''t have to audition. And even if I do, they just want to see if I can still do what I used to do. "

阅读理解Even with her eyesight failing, Lucy Parsons was active in the fight against (47)______ until her death. Continuing to (48)______ crowds, she spoke at the International Harvester Conference in February 1941, one of her last major appearances. An accidental fire killed her on March 7, 1942 at the age of 89. Her lover George Markstall died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. To add to this (49)______ , Lucy''s library of 1,500 books on sex, socialism and anarchy (无政府主义) were mysteriously stolen, along with all of her personal manuscripts. Neither the FBI nor the Chicago police told Irving Abrams, who had come to rescue the library, that the FBI had already confiscated (没收) all of her books. The struggle for fundamental freedom of speech, in which Lucy had (50)______ throughout her life, continued through her death as authorities still tried to silence this radical woman by (51)______ her of the work of her lifetime. Though she joined many different groups throughout her lifetime, Lucy Parsons'' strong politics and beliefs (52)______ distinctly individual and uncompromising. She never sought less than (53)______ to change the oppressive capitalist system surrounding her. Working with a clear focus from a perspective of class consciousness, Lucy fought with the workers first, seeing (54)______ of sex and race originated in the larger struggle. Because she was a woman of action and strong words, the government and church tried to repress her individual voice, often assigning her to the group of deprived widows (55)______ for misery of life. Yet the legacy of her seventy years of fighting stays with us to inspire our (56)______ struggles today. Word Bank A) remained B) issues C) opinion D) oppression E) complaining F) deal G) robbing H) revolution I) engaged J) combine K) tragedy L) similar M) disguise N) significant O) inspire

阅读理解Domestic Pets in New Urban Areas The role of urban design in successful pet ownership. This paper summarizes the findings of an investigation into the role of urban design in successful pet ownership. There are several reasons why planners should consider pets in decision about residential and open space development. People are not generally aware of the popularity pet ownership in Australia. The Morgan Research surveys estimate that in 1992, 37% of Australian households owned one or more dogs, and 30% owned one or more cats. Fifty-three percent of all households owned either a dog or a cat. Pet-owning households are clearly a substantial group within the community. Research shows that pets play an important role in teaching children about sharing, caring, communication and responsibility. They also act as companions and protectors, stress relievers and in some cases help to foster family cohesion. While pets are traditionally associated with family-type households, they are just as important to households without children in childless families. This applies particularly to the elderly, who usually form very close associations with their pets. In an era when the population is aging and more people are living alone, pets can provide valuable relief from loneliness. Urban pet management has been the subject of extensive debate among veterinarians (兽医) and those involved in local government for some time. Part of the reason is that people complain more readily about other people''s pets than ever before. Emphasis on urban consolidation has meant that smaller homes and back gardens and multi-dwelling developments. Not only discourage people from owning pets abut also place greater demands on scarce public open space. Pet owners may face tougher restrictions from either their local council or resident management committee. The term socially responsible pit ownership has emerged to describe a set of responsibilities to which pet owners are now expected to adhere. In meeting their responsibilities pet owners need to consider: —Providing an enriching environment to reduce unwanted behavior; e.g. excessive barking. —Confining dogs to their premises (前提). The advantages of this include protection from catching disease, being run over and fighting. Ideally cats should be confined to the house at night for their own protection where practicable. —Training pets to alter unacceptable behavior. —Exercising dogs, especially if they spend long periods on their own. It might be tempting to prescribe different pets for different types of housing. Some people already have firm views about pets and housing type, mostly in relation to dogs, e.g. that the only environment for a dog is in conventional detached housing or that a "big" dog is only suitable in the country. However, suitability is as much dependent on the quality of space as it is on the quantity. A dwelling that overlooks areas of activity is ideal for pets because it increases the amount of stimulation that can be received from the property, e.g. dwellings that overlooks a park or are close to a busy street. This is one way to release boredom and the negative behaviors that sometimes result. Preferably a dog should have access to some outdoor space. Open space is not essential for a cat provided an enriching environment is maintained indoors, e.g. a bay window or internal fernery (簇生的蕨). Ideally dog''s behavior is likely to be better if he or she can see the street. Although the dog may bark at passers-by in the street, there will be less likelihood of excessive barking that might arise through boredom. Providing a dog with surveillance (监视) of the street also enhances public security — a very positive benefit. With adequate fencing, a dog will be confined to the property. Cats are less easily constrained and are discussed below. The standard paling fence (木栅栏): will restrict almost all dogs. They are recommended for side and rear boundaries. Solid front fences limit the view of the outside world and are not recommended. The dog will tend to be less roused by sound stimuli if he or she can see passers-by or activities in the street. However, it is important to ensure that the dog cannot get through the fence. Furthermore, all gates should be fitted with a return spring self-closing device. Cats are not as easily restrained as dogs as they are more agile and have quite different notions of territoriality. Mostly this does not create a problem, although difficulties may arise in environmentally sensitive areas where cats may prey on wildlife. It is recommended that cats be confined to the house at night for their own protection. The pleasure and benefits of pet ownership should be available to everyone. However, owning a pet brings with it responsibilities to which we are increasingly being called to adhere. It is hoped that the guidelines will encourage people to think about pets in decisions about residential and community development. If they do, pet ownership will not be prejudiced by the push for urban consolidation.

阅读理解Welcome Teachers and Youth Program Coordinators! Your students are about to embark on an exciting adventure! In a game-like learning environment, ScholarShop''s Options for Kids can help your students build academic and life skills while at the same time strengthen the awareness and value of their personal qualities. With Garfield as their guide, the activities on this journey will promote positive youth development and instill life-long skills as your students gather information regarding careers, postsecondary educational opportunities, and the relevance of school as it relates to future goals. To learn more about what young people need for positive development to occur, visit the National Youth Development Information Center at www.nydic.org. If you have Internet access, this unique program can easily be integrated into a regular classroom situation. The activities promote study skills, vocabulary development, reading comprehension, writing, listening, speaking, simple math application, and higher level thinking. Many of the activities will help you meet the academic, career, and personal / social standards recommended by the American School Counselor Association. If you would like to track your students as they progress through the various activities and have access to lesson plans and evaluation forms, you can subscribe to our "teaching tools" for only $50. For more information or to subscribe, send an e-mail to cgerber@scholarshipamerica.org or call 800-537-4180, ext. 656. The activities in ScholarShop''s Options for Kids were adapted from ScholarShop Jr., an activity-based curriculum and multi-media resource library that is a component of ScholarShop. ScholarShop was recently described by the Pathways to College Network as a "promising research-based practice" for its work helping students and their parents develop the skills, and access critical resources, necessary to pursue a postsecondary education. For information on ScholarShop and all its components, visit our web site at www.scholarshop.org. Because of the individualized nature of the activities, ScholarShop''s Options for Kids is also ideal for use in community centers as well as after-school and enrichment programs in any setting including Boys & Girls Clubs and YMCAs. The activities were designed for young people in grades 4-6 but students both younger and older may find them valuable too. This web site is divided into four modules: Module (模块)One: You Are 100% Smart Young people fly through the brain to discover that they are 100% Smart. They explore their unique interests, talents, and abilities utilizing the concept of Howard Gardner''s Multiple Intelligences. The activities are designed to facilitate young people''s thinking about their future, to assist students in the discovery of their unique personal qualities, and to enhance feelings of confidence. This module emphasizes three important points: 1. People possess different types of "smarts" or intelligences. 2. All of these intelligences contribute to present and future success. 3. People can develop or increase any of these intelligences. Module Two: Exploring Careers Young people tour a city as Module Two focuses on the general Notion of the world of careers. The activities provide information about jobs and preparation for the world of work. They demonstrate how unique interests, talents, and abilities can be indicators of possible career directions or areas of further career exploration. The activities also introduce young people to the concept of a "career path" and guide them in thinking about the necessity of long- and short-term planning to achieve potential career goals. They are asked to look at "the big picture" in terms of where they are now in the educational realm and where they need to go to fulfill their career goals. Module Three: Educational Opportunities To overcome misconceptions and obstacles to accessing postsecondary education, in Module Three students go exploring through a mysterious cave and see that preparing for college is Not as scary as it may sound. The activities provide young people with basic information about the nature and purposes of education after high school. Activities also link educational requirements to possible career choices and reinforce how performance in school impacts what happens in the future. Module Four: Back to Basics While it is too early for young people to commit to a specific career choice, it is not too early to reinforce the idea that present school success, behavior, and performance influence future career options. While engaging young people in a treasure hunt, the activities in Module Four emphasize the importance of education and link school performance with job performance. Through motivational activities, students are invited to inventory their school work habits, improve study skills, and have fun enhancing basic academic skills including reading, writing and math. In the end, young people will see that the treasure they seek is Not only within them, but the treasure is them. Students can then print off a certificate signed by Garfield the Cut certifying that he or she is 100% Smart and is prepared to succeed in school and in life. You are encouraged to share with your students your personal hopes and dreams, career goals and future plans as examples to help them progress through the various modules and activities. Parents and mentors should also be encouraged to join the students on this journey. Have fun!

阅读理解In 1750 BC, the Code of Hammurabi made it a crime punishable by death to sell any thing to a child without first obtaining a power of attorney. In 2001, selling products to children has become business as usual. The average American child may view as many as 40,000 commercials annually. And commercials clearly have an effect on children and adults: otherwise, businesses would not have paid the networks $ 7.3 billion this year for advertising time. Many critics now feel that commercial American television programming exists for the sole purpose of delivering a certain demographic audience to a specific group of advertisers. In other words, the programs exist for the sake of the commercials, not the other way around. Beginning in the 1960s, advertisers began to target children specifically with advertisements, reaping great financial rewards in return. By 1998, the advertising industry was spending $2 billion on advertisements targeting children, a 20-fold increase from 1990. Advertisers recognize that children and teenagers not only influence their parents'' spending habits, but also have their own money to spend. But many are starting to question whether or not it is wrong for young children to be targeted by advertisers. Young children are cognitively and psychologically defenseless against television advertising. Numerous studies have documented that young children under the age of''6 to 8 years are unable to understand the intent of advertisements and, in fact, frequently accept advertising claims as being largely true. Advertising may also contribute to the development of skepticism among children and adolescents as they compare what they see advertised with the real item. In the late 1980s, Consumer Reports made three superb videotapes in their "Buy Me That" series, which documented how deceptive many ads for children''s toys can be. For example, the disclaimers are spoken rapidly or shown in small print and are not understood by small children. Children represent a captive audience to broadcasters and advertisers. They learn from what they view on television, in movies, in video games, and in music videos. It is now time for parents, educators, and the government to acknowledge this crucial fact and move on and to protect young people from unhealthy media influences such as overexposure to television advertising.

阅读理解Women and Fashion If women are mercilessly exploited year after year, they have only themselves to (47)______ . Because they (48)______ at the thought of being seen in public in clothes that are out of fashion, they are always taken (49)______ of by the designers and the big stores. Clothes which have been worn only a few times have to be put aside because of the change of fashion. When you come to think of it, only a woman is capable of standing in front of a wardrobe packed full of clothes and (50)______ sadly that she has nothing to wear. Changing fashions are nothing more than the (51)______ creation of waste. Many women spend vast sums of money each year to (52)______ clothes that have hardly been worn. Women who cannot afford to throw away clothing in this way, waste hours of their time altering the dresses they have. Skirts are lengthened or shortened; necklines are lowered or raised, and so on. No one can claim that the fashion industry (53)______ anything really important to society. Fashion designers are rarely concerned with vital things like warmth, comfort and durability. They are only interested in (54)______ appearance and they take advantage of the fact that women will put up with any amount of (55)______ , as long as they look right. There can hardly be a man who hasn''t at some time in his life smiled at the sight of a woman shaking in a thin dress on a winter day, or delicately picking her way through deep snow in high-heeled shoes. When comparing men and women in the matter of fashion, the conclusions to be drawn are (56)______ . Do the constantly changing fashions of women''s clothes, one wonders, reflect basic qualities of inconstancy and instability? Men are too clever to let themselves be cheated by fashion designers. Do their unchanging styles of dress reflect basic qualities of stability and reliability? That is for you to decide. Word Bank A) fashion I) evidence B) announcing J) casually C) introduced K) discomfort D) advantage L) burden E) contributes M) outward F) tremble N) intentional G) blame O) replace H) obvious

阅读理解What can we infer from the last paragraph?

阅读理解What''s Happening While Sleeping? Sleep is very important to humans. The average person spends 220,000 hours of a lifetime sleeping. Until about thirty years ago, no one knew much about sleep. Then doctors and scientists began doing research in sleep laboratories. They have learned a great deal by studying people as they sleep, but there is still much they don''t understand. Scientists study the body characteristics that change during sleep, such as body temperature, brain waves, blood pressure, breathing, and heartbeat. They also study rapid eye movement (REM). These scientists have learned that there is a kind of sleep with REM and another kind with no rapid eye movement (NREM). NREM is divided into three stages. In stage one, when you start to go to sleep, you have a pleasant floating feeling. A sudden noise can wake you up. In stage two, you sleep more deeply, and a noise will probably not wake you. In stage three, which you reach in less than thirty minutes, the brain waves are less active and stretched out. Then, within another half hour, you reach REM sleep. This stage might last an hour and a half and is the time when you dream. For the rest of the night, REM and NREM alternate. Body movement during sleep occurs just before the REM stage. The average person moves about thirty times during sleep each night. Sleep is a biological need, but your brain never really sleeps. It is never actually blank. The things that were on your mind during the day are still there at night. They appear as dreams, which people have been discussing for centuries. At times people believed that dreams had magical powers or that they could tell the future. Sometimes dreams are terrifying, but they are usually a collection of scattered, confused thoughts. If you dream about something that is worrying you, you may wake up exhausted, sweating, and with a rapid heartbeat. Dreams have positive effects on our lives. During a dream, the brain may concentrate on a problem and look for different solutions. Also, people who dream during a good night'' s sleep are more likely to remember newly learned skills. In other words, you learn better if you dream. Researchers say that normal people may have four or five REM periods of dreaming a night. The first one may begin only a half hour after falling asleep. Each period of dreaming is a little longer, the last one lasting up to an hour. Dreams also become more intense as the night continues. Nightmares usually occur toward dawn. People dream in color, but many don''t remember the colors. Certain people can control some of their dreams. They make sure they have a happy ending. Some people get relief from bad dreams by writing them down and then changing the negative stories or thoughts into positive ones on the written paper. Then they study the paper before they go to sleep again. Many people talk in their sleep, but it is usually just confusing half sentences. They might feel embarrassed when someone tells them they were talking in their sleep, but they probably didn''t tell any secrets. Sleepwalking is most common among children. They usually grow out of it by the time they become adolescents. Children don'' t remember that they were walking in their sleep, and they don'' t usually wake up if the parent leads them back to bed. Some people have the habit of grinding their teeth while they sleep. They wake up with a sore jaw or a headache, and they can also damage their teeth. Researchers don'' t know why people talk, walk, or grind their teeth while they are asleep. There are lots of jokes about snoring, but it isn'' t really funny. People snore because they have trouble breathing while asleep. Some snorers have a condition called sleep apnea (呼吸暂停). They stop breathing up to thirty or forty times an hour because the throat muscles relax too much and block the airway. Then they breathe in some air and start snoring. This is a dangerous condition because, if the brain is without oxygen for 4 minutes, there will be permanent brain damage. Sleep apnea can also cause irregular heartbeat, a general lack of energy, and high blood pressure. Most people need 7.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep a night, but this varies with individuals. Babies sleep eighteen hours, and old people need less sleep than younger people. If someone continually sleeps longer than normal for no apparent reason, there must be something physically or psychologically wrong. You cannot save hours of sleep the way you save money in the bank. If you have only 5 hours of sleep for three nights, you don'' t need to sleep an extra 9 hours on the weekend. And it doesn'' t do any good to sleep extra hours ahead of time when you know you will have to stay up late. What should you do if you have trouble sleeping? Lots of people take sleeping pills, but these are dangerous because they are habit-forming. If you take them for several weeks, it is hard to stop taking them. Doctors say the best thing is to try to relax and to avoid bad habits. If you always go to bed and get up at about the same time, this sets a good and healthy rhythm in your life. Caffeine keeps people awake, so don'' t drink caffeine drinks in the evening. Smoking and alcohol can also keep you awake. You may have trouble sleeping if you have a heavy meal just before you go to bed. Eat earlier in the evening. You may also have trouble steeping if you have a problem or something else on your mind. This is when you need to relax. As you lie in bed, tense the muscles in your feet and then relax them. Continue up the body, tensing and relaxing the muscles until you reach the head. Start with the feet again if you are still tense. Then remember some pleasant experience you had and relive it. If you are thinking about a problem or about something exciting that is going to happen the next day, get up and write about it. That will help take it off your mind. You can also get up and read or watch television. Be sure to choose a book or show that is not too exciting, or you may get so interested that you won'' t want to go to sleep even when you feel sleepy.

阅读理解In 1993, New York State ordered stores to charge a deposit on beverage (饮料) containers. Within a year, consumers had returned millions of aluminum cans and glass and plastic bottles. Plenty of companies were eager to accept the aluminum and glass as raw materials for new products, but because few could figure out what to do with the plastic, much of it wound up buried in landfills (垃圾填埋场). The problem was not limited to New York. Unfortunately, there were too few uses for second-hand plastic. Today, one out of five plastic soda bottles is recycled (回收利用) in the United States. The reason for the change is that now there are dozens of companies across the country buying discarded plastic soda bottles and turning them into fence posts, paint brushes, etc. As the New York experience shows, recycling involves more than simply separating valuable materials from the rest of the rubbish. A discard remains a discard until somebody figures out how to give it a second life -- and until economic arrangements exist to give that second life value. Without adequate markets to absorb materials collected for recycling, throwaways actually depress prices for used materials. Shrinking landfill space, and rising costs for burying and burning rubbish are forcing local governments to look more closely at recycling. In many areas, the East Coast especially, recycling is already the least expensive waste-management option. For every ton of waste recycled, a city avoids paying for its disposal, which, in parts of New York, amounts to savings of more than $100 per ton. Recycling also stimulates the local economy by creating jobs and trims the pollution control and energy costs of industries that make recycled products By giving them a more refined raw material.

阅读理解In the 1960s, medical researchers Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe developed a checklist of stressful events. They appreciated the tricky point that any major change can be stressful. Negative events like "serious illness of a family member" were high on the list, but so were some positive life-changing events, like marriage. When you take the Holmes-Rahe test you must remember that the score does not reflect how you deal with stress it only shows how much you have to deal with. And we now know that the way you handle these events dramatically affects your chances of staying healthy. By the early 1970s, hundreds of similar studies had followed Holmes and Rahe. And millions of Americans who work and live under stress worried over the reports. Somehow, the research got boiled down to a memorable message. Women''s magazines ran headlines like "Stress causes illness!" If you want to stay physically and mentally healthy, the articles said, avoid stressful events. But such simplistic advice is impossible to follow. Even if stressful events are dangerous, many -- like the death of a loved one--are impossible to avoid. Moreover, any warning to avoid all stressful events is a prescription (处方) for staying away from opportunities as well as trouble. Since any change can be stressful, a person who wanted to be completely free of stress would never marry, have a child, take a new job or move. The notion that all stress makes you sick also ignores a lot of what we know about people. It assumes we''re all vulnerable (脆弱的) and passive in the face of adversity (逆境). But what about human initiative and creativity ? Many come through periods of stress with more physical and mental vigor than they had before. We also know that a long time without change or challenge can lead to boredom, and physical and mental strain.

阅读理解Research has shown that attachment is important to later (47)______ development. The securely attached child is more independent, more cooperative, less rigid, and basically happier than other children. This is contrary to earlier beliefs that the parent must "push the child out of the nest" to encourage independence. Research supports the need for parents to provide a (48)______ base; only there will the child feel confident enough to (49)______ out alone. Independent exploration is essential to a child''s emotional and (50)______ growth. Today, when more than 50 percent of mothers with children under the age of five work outside the home, the issue of attachment has become (51)______ to the argument over whether day care is harmful to children. Some psychologists (52)______ that day care for children under one year of age is detrimental to their secure attachment and will (53)______ affect their emotional development. Others have found that the quality of day care is the key to determining possible harm. For example, a child with one steady caregiver can (54)______ a secure attachment. In contrast, a child placed in a large group with many different caregivers may never feel secure. Still other psychologists maintain that group day care can be beneficial, (55)______ to older children, who have shown greater socialization skills than those not in day care. It is clear that parent must carefully consider their day-care choices. (56)______ research needs to be done to understand fully the effects of day care. Word Bank A) verify I) particularly B) emotional J) restriction C) central K) physical D) secure L) venture E) negatively M) shelter F) form N) maintain G) intellectual O) further H) vivid

阅读理解Is there enough oil beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (保护区) (ANWR) to help secure America''s energy future? President Bush certainly thinks so. He has argued that tapping ANWR''s oil would help ease California''s electricity crisis and provide a major boost to the country''s energy independence. But no one knows for sure how much crude oil lies buried beneath the frozen earth, with the last government survey, conducted in 1998, projecting output anywhere from 3 billion to 16 billion barrels. The oil industry goes with the high end of the range, which could equal as much as 10% of U.S. consumption for as long as six years. By pumping more than 1 million barrels a day from the reserve for the next two to three decades, lobbyists claim, the nation could cut back on imports equivalent to all shipments to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia. Sounds good. An oil boom would also mean a multibillion-dollar windfall (意外之财) in tax revenues, royalties (开采权使用费) and leasing fees for Alaska and the Federal Government. Best of all, advocates of drilling say, damage to the environment would be insignificant. "We''ve never had a documented case of an oil rig chasing deer out onto the pack ice," says Alaska State Representative Scott Ogan. Not so fast, say environmentalists. Sticking to the low end of government estimates, the National Resources Defense Council says there may be no more than 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil in the coastal plain of ANWR, a drop in the bucket that would do virtually nothing to ease America''s energy problems. And consumers would wait up to a decade to gain any benefits, because drilling could begin only after much bargaining over leases, environmental permits and regulatory review. As for ANWR''s impact on the California power crisis, environmentalists point out that oil is responsible for only 1 % of the Golden State''s electricity output—and just 3% of the nation''s.

阅读理解How to Guess Your Age It seems to me that they are building staircases steeper than they used to. The risers are higher, or there are more of them, or something. Maybe this is because it is so much farther today from the first to the second floor, but I''ve noticed it is getting harder to make two steps at a time any more. Nowadays it is all I can do to make one step at a time. Another thing I''ve noticed is the small print they''re using lately. Newspapers are getting farther and farther away when I have them, and I have to squint to make them out. The other day I had to back halfway out of a telephone booth in order to read the number on the coin box. It is obviously ridiculous to suggest that a person my age needs glasses, but the only other way I can find out what''s going on is to have somebody read aloud to me, and that''s not too satisfactory because people speak in such low voices these days that I can''t hear them very well. Everything is farther than it used to be. It''s twice the distance from my house to the station now, and they''ve added a fair-sized hill that I never noticed before. The trains leave sooner too. I''ve given up running for them, because they start faster these days when I try to catch them. You can''t depend on timetables any more, and it''s no us asking the conductor. I ask him a dozen times a trip if the next station is where I get off, and he always says it isn''t. How can you trust a conductor like that? Usually I gather up my bundles and put on my hat and coat and stand in the aisle a couple of stops away, just to make sure I don''t go past my destination. Sometimes I make doubly sure by getting off at the station ahead. A lot of other things are different lately. Barbers no longer hold up a mirror behind me when they''ve finished, so I can see the back of my head, and my wife has been taking care of the tickets lately when we go to the theater. They don'' t use the same material in clothes any more, either. I''ve noticed that all my suits have a tendency to shrink, especially in certain places such as around the waist or in the seat of the pants, and the laces they put in shoes nowadays are harder to reach. Revolving doors revolve much faster than they used to. I have to let a couple of openings go past me before I jump in, and by the time I get up nerve enough to jump out again I''m right back in the street where I started. It'' s the same with golf. I''m giving it up because these modern golf balls they sell arc so hard to pick up when I stoop over. I''ve had to quite driving, too; the restrooms in filling stations are getting farther and farther apart. Usually I just stay home at night and read the papers, particularly the obituary columns. It''s funny how much more interesting the obituary columns have been getting lately. Even the weather is changing. It''s colder in winter and the summers are hotter than they used to be. I''d go away, if it wasn''t so far. Snow is heavier when I try to shovel it, and I have to put on rubbers whenever I go out, because rain today is wetter than the rain we used to get. Draughts are more severe too. It must be the way they build windows now. People are changing too. For one thing, they'' re younger than they used to be when I was their age. I went back recently to an alumni reunion at the college I graduated from in 1943--that is, 1933--1 mean, 1923--and I was shocked to see the mere tots they''re admitting as students these days. The average age of the freshman class couldn''t have been more than seven. They seem to be more polite than in my time, though; several undergraduates called me "Sir," anti one of them asked me if he could help me across the street. On the other hand, people my own age. are so much older than I am. I realize that my generation is approaching middle age (I define middle age roughly as the period between 21 and 110) but there is no excuse for my classmates tottering into a state of advanced senility. I ran into my old roommate at the bar, and he'' d changed so much that he didn''t recognize me. "You''ve put on a little weight, George," I said "It''s this modern food," George said," It seems to be more fattening." "How about another martini?" I said. "Have you noticed how much weaker the martinis are these days?" "Everything is different," said George. "Even the food you get. It''s more fattening." "How long since I''ve seen you, George?" I said. "It must be several years." "I think the last time was right after the election," said George. "What election was that?" George thought for a moment. "Harding." I ordered a couple more martinis. "Have you noticed these martinis are weaker than they used to be? I said. "It isn''t like the good old days," George said. "Remember when we''d go down to the speak, and order some Orange Blossoms, and maybe pick up a couple of flappers? Boy, could they neck? Hot diggety !" "You used to be quite a cake-eater, George," I said. "Do you still do the Black Bottom?" "I put on too much weight," said George. "This food nowadays seems to be more fattening." "I know," I said, "You mentioned that just a minute age." "Did I7" said George. "How about another martini?" I said. "Have you noticed the martinis aren''t as strong as they used to be?" "Yes," said George, "You said that twice before." "Oh," I said... I got to thinking about poor old George while I was shaving this morning, and I stopped for a moment and looked at my own reflection in the mirror. They don'' t seem to use the same kind of glass in mirrors any more.

阅读理解Under proper conditions, sound waves will be reflected from a hillside or other such obstruction. Sound travels at the rate of about one-fifth of a mile per second. If the hill is eleven hundred feet away, it takes two seconds for the sound to travel to the hill and back. Thus, by timing the interval between a sound and its reflection (the echo), you can estimate the distance to an obstruction. During World War I1 the British used a practical application of this principle to detect German planes on their way to bomb London before the enemy was near the target. They used radio waves instead of sound waves, since radio waves can penetrate fog and clouds. The outnumbered Royal Air Force (RAF) always seemed to the puzzled Germans to be lying in wait at the right time and never to be surprised (袭击). It was radio echoes more than anything else that won the Battle of Britain. Since the radio waves were used to tell the direction in which to send the RAF planes and distance to send them ( their range of flight, in other words), the device was called radio directing and ranging, and from the initials the word radar was coined.

阅读理解Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it

阅读理解How are business transactions done in big modern stores?