单选题Learning disabilities are very common. They affect perhaps 10 percent of all children. Four times as many boys as girls have learning disabilities. Since about 1970, new research has helped brain scientists understand these problems better. Scientists now know there are many different kinds of learning disabilities and that they are caused by many different things. There is no longer any question that all learning disabilities result from differences in the way the brain is organized. You cannot look all a child and tell if he or she has a learning disability. There is no outward sign of the disorder. So some researchers began looking at the brain itself to learn what might be wrong. In one study, researchers examined the brain of a learning-disabled person, who had died in an accident. They found two unusual things. One involved cells in the left side of the brain, which control language. These cells normally are white. In the learning-disabled person, however, these cells were gray. The researchers also found that many of the nerve cells were not in a line the way they should have been. The nerve cells were mixed together. The study was carried out under the guidance of Norman Geschwind, an early expert on learning disabilities. Doctor Geschwind proposed that learning disabilities resulted mainly from problems in the left side of the brain. He believed this side of the brain failed to develop normally. Probably, he said, nerve cells there did not connect as they should. So the brain was like an electrical device in which the wires were crossed. Other researchers did not examine brain tissue. Instead, they measured the brain's electrical activity and made a map of the electrical signals. Frank Duff), experimented with this technique at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. Doctor Duffy found large differences in the brain activity of normal children and those with reading problems. The differences appeared throughout the brain. Doctor Dully said his research is evidence that reading disabilities involve damage to a wide area of the brain, not just the left side.

单选题Imagine fishermen walking down to the seashore, ready to carry out their early morning routine of preparing their boats and net. 1 they hope for a good catch of fish. But to their 2 , a horrible sight meets their still sleepy eyes. Thousands of fish have been washed 3 dead. The cause of this mass destruction? A red tide! Red tides are a global 4 . They have been observed on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada. They have also 5 in many other places. Though relatively few people are 6 them, red tides are not new. In the Philippines, a red tide was first seen in the province of Bataan in 1908. Since then, red tides have been seen in many other 7 . A Philippines red tide expert told us that " 8 the fish kills, the Philippines has documented 1,926 cases of dead shellfish poisoning caused by red tides." The term "red tide" 9 the discoloration of water that sometimes occurs in certain areas of the ocean or sea. Although the color is often red, it may also be 10 of brown or yellow. The World Book Encyclopedia reports that "the discolored areas may range from 11 a few square yards to more than 2,600 square kilometers." What causes such discoloration? Red tides are generally caused by several 12 of single-celled organisms. These tiny organisms have hair-like projections which they use to 13 themselves in water. There are about 2,000 varieties of these organisms, 30 of which carry poisonous 14 . These minute organisms usually stay in warm waters with high content of salt. A red tide occurs when there is a sudden and rapid 15 of these organisms. The concentration of these organisms may 16 to 50,000,000 per quart of water! Although scientists do not fully understand why this happens, it is known that these organisms 17 when certain conditions simultaneously affect the water. These include abnormal weather, 18 temperatures, an oversupply of nutrients in the water, a generous 19 sunlight, and favorable water currents. When a heavy rainfall occurs, minerals and other nutrients are sometimes washed 20 the land into coastal water. These nutrients can contribute to the breeding of the organisms. The result? Red tides!

单选题Talk to any parent of a student who took an adventurous gap year (a year between school and university when some students earn money, travel, etc. ) and a misty look will come into their eyes. There are some disasters and even the most motivated, organized gap student does require family back-up, financial, emotional and physical. The parental mistiness is not just about the brilliant experience that has matured their offspring; it is vicarious living. We all wish pre-university gap years had been the fashion in our day. We can see how much tougher our kids become; how much more prepared to benefit from university or to decide positively that they are going to do something other than a degree. Gap years are fashionable, as is reflected in the huge growth in the number of charities and private companies offering them. Pictures of Prince William toiling in Chile have helped, but the trend has been gathering steam for a decade. The range of gap packages starts with backpacking, includes working with charities, building hospitals and schools and, very commonly, working as a language assistant, teaching English. With this trend, however, comes a danger. Once parents feel that a well structured year is essential to their would-be undergraduates' progress to a better university, a good degree, an impressive CV and well paid employment, as the gap companies blurbs suggest it might be, then parents will start organizing and paying for the gaps. Where there are disasters, according to Richard Oliver, director of the gap companies umbrella organization, the Year Out Group, it is usually because of poor planning. That can be the fault of the company or of the student, he says, hut the best insurance is thoughtful preparation. "When people get it wrong, it is usually medical or, especially among girls, it is that they have not been away from home before or because expectation does not match reality." The point of a gap year is that it should be the time when the school leaver gets to do the thing that he or she fancies. Kids don't mature if mum and dad decide how they are going to mature. If the 18-year-old's way of maturing is to slob out on Hampstead Heath soaking up sunshine or spending a year working with fishermen in Cornwall, then that's what will be productive for that person. The consensus, however, is that some structure is an advantage and that the prime mover needs to be the student. The 18-year-old who was dispatched by his parents at two weeks' notice to Canada to learn to be a snowboarding instructor at a cost of ￡5,800, probably came back with little more than a hangover. The 18-year-old on the same package who worked for his fare and spent the rest of his year instructing in resorts from New Zealand to Switzerland, and came back to apply for university, is the positive counterbalance.

单选题Ellen Pao spent the last few years spotlighting the technology industry"s lack of diversity, in court and beyond. Erica Baker caused a stir at Google when she started a spreadsheet last year for employees to share their salaries, highlighting the pay disparities between those of different genders doing the same job. Laura I. Gómez founded a start-up focused on improving diversity in the hiring process. Now the three are starting an effort to collect and share data to help diversify the rank-and-file employees who make up tech companies. The nonprofit venture, called Project Include, was unveiled on Tuesday. As part of Project Include, the group plans to extract commitments from tech companies to track the diversity of their work forces over time and eventually share that data with other start-ups. The effort will focus on start-ups that employ 25 to 1,000 workers, in the hope of spurring the companies to think about equality sooner rather than later. The project will also ask for participation from venture capital firms that advise and mentor the start-ups. Project Include aims to have 18 companies as part of its first cohort; a few have already signed up. The group will meet regularly for seven months to define and track specific metrics. At the end of that period, the group will publish an anonymized set of results to show the progress—or lack thereof—that the start-ups have made around diversity. The group"s push is intended to cut through tech"s slow pace of change on diversity. Large companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have openly admitted their failings in creating diverse work forces, and some have started programs to move the needle . But that has not seemed to spur much movement in views on the issue. In December, for instance, Michael Moritz, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, made headlines when he said in an interview that his firm—which had no female investment partners in the United States—would focus on hiring women but would not "lower its standards" to do so. He also said the firm was blind to gender and race. "It is this incredibly self-serving mythology that we are the best and the brightest, and that the best ideas rise to the top and will get funded," said Ms. Kapor Klein, noting there is plenty of data to show that minority access to tech programs and networks is worse than that of white males. "Despite an avalanche of rigorous data to the contrary, the belief in pure meritocracy persists."

单选题 Learning disabilities are very common. They affect perhaps 10 percent of all children. Four times as many boys as girls have learning disabilities. Since about 1970, new research has helped brain scientists understand these problems better. Scientists now know there are many different kinds of learning disabilities and that they are caused by many different things. There is no longer any question that all learning disabilities result from differences in the way the brain is organized. You cannot look at a child and tell if he or she has a learning disability. There is no outward sign of the disorder. So some researchers began looking at the brain itself to learn what might be wrong. In one study, researchers examined the brain of a learning-disabled person, who had died in an accident. They found two unusual things. One involved ceils in the left side of the brain, which control language. These cells normally are white. In the learning-disabled person, however, these cells were gray. The researchers also found that many of the nerve cells were not in a line the way they should have been. The nerve cells were mixed together. The study was carried out under the guidance of Norman Geschwind, an early expert on learning disabilities. Doctor Geschwind proposed that learning disabilities resulted mainly from problems in the left side of the brain. He believed this side of the brain failed to develop normally. Probably, he said, nerve cells there did not connect as they should. So the brain was like an electrical device in which the wires were crossed. Other researchers did not examine brain tissue. Instead, they measured the brain's electrical activity and made a map of the electrical signals. Frank Duffy experimented with this technique at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. Doctor Duffy found large differences in the brain activity of normal children and those with reading problems. The differences appeared throughout the brain. Doctor Dully said his research is evidence that reading disabilities involve damage to a wide area of the brain, not just the left side.

单选题At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science history might contribute to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck and Mark Gertz, for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in the Untied States by using firearms to defend themselves and their property. If |heir survey respondents are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in self-defense—a preposterous number. Lott claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed firearms to deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining his analysis to the year between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had peaked and varied little from year to year. He reports only regression models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models find a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment. Contrary to Kleck and Lott, Bellesiles insists that guns and America's "gun culture" are responsible for America's high rate Of murder. In Belleville's opinion, relatively few Americans owned guns before the 1850s or know how to use, maintain, or repair them. As a result, he says, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, especially among Whites, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed gun and murder went hand in hand. According to Bellesiles, these patterns changed dramatically after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides that never truly abated. To this day, the United States has the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesiles' low estimates of gun ownership in early America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously studied the subject and has thus far proven irreproducible. Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or wrong. Given the influence of Kleck, Lott, Bellesiles and other partisan scholars on the debate over gun control and gun rights, we felt a need to pull together what social scientists and historians have learned to date about the history of gun ownership and gun violence in America, and to consider what research methods and projects might increase our knowledge in the near future.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D. In theory, annual performance review are constructive and positive interactions between managers and employees working together to attain {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}performance and strengthen the organization. In reality, they often create division, {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}morale (士气) , and spark anger and jealousy. {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}, although the object of the annual performance review is to improve performance, it often has the {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}result. A programmer at a brokerage (经济) finn was {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}to learn at her annual performance review that she was denied a promotion {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}she wasn't a "team player" . What were the data used to make this {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}? She didn't smile in the company photo. {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}this story might sound as if it came straight out of a comic strip , it is a true {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}of one woman's experience. By {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}a few tips and guidelines (准则) from industry analysis, this kind of ordeal (厄运) can be avoided. To end the year {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}a positive and useful performance review, managers and employees must start the year by working together to {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}clear goals and expectations. It may be helpful to allow employees to submit a list of people {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}with the company who will be in a good position to {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}their performance at the end of the year is out. These people may be coworkers, suppliers, or even customers. By checking {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}progress at about nine months, managers can give them a chance to correct mistakes and provide {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}to those who need it before the year is out. When conducting the review, managers should {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}strengths and weaknesses during the past year and discuss future responsibilities, avoiding punishment or blame. {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}, when employees leave their performance reviews, they should be focusing on {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}they can do in the year {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}, not worrying about what went into their files about the past.

单选题Using Facebook makes people sadder, at least according to some research. But just what is it about the social network that takes a hit on our mood? A study of the different ways of interacting with the site now offers an answer: Grazing on the content of other people"s idealized lives may make reality painful. Scientists have long debated Facebook"s impact on users" in-the-moment mood as well as their deeper satisfaction with life. Some studies have found that the site makes us happier; others, sadder. One of the problems is that most studies were cross-sectional, taking a snapshot of people at one point of time. But that makes it difficult to separate our use of Facebook from the many other factors known to affect well-being, from overwork to romantic meltdowns. A 2013 study led by Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, sidestepped this problem by studying people"s use of Facebook over time, surveying them about their well-being five times per day for 2 weeks. The conclusion was that the more you use Facebook, the sadder you get. That study generated an enormous amount of attention. But the results offered no clue to what it is about the social network, or how people are using it, that might have this negative effect. Since then, a collaboration of labs including Kross"s has tried to tease apart the mechanisms. The researchers performed an "intervention," using subjects" personal Facebook accounts in specific ways. After all, interaction with Facebook consists of a whole set of activities, from browsing photos and "liking" websites to directly interacting with others through messages and comments. Last week, Kross shared a sneak preview of his team"s results. Their findings suggest that there is no effect on well-being if one "actively" uses Facebook. When subjects directly interacted with the social network by posting status updates, sharing content, and messaging others, their mood stayed the same over the course of a day. But the negative impact on well-being that Kross discovered in his 2013 study reappeared for individuals who were made to "passively" use the site—just browsing through photographs of other people"s happy moments, reading people"s conversations, and not contributing anything. "Using Facebook is not bad for well-being per se," Kross concluded, but "grazing" its content is. Possible reasons for this were bounced around by the audience of psychologists. For example, one theory holds that people post idealized versions of themselves on Facebook, and comparing those to your own real-world life is toxic if you don"t take part in the online theater.

单选题Directions: Read the following four passages. Answer the questions below by choosing A, B, C or D. The standardized educational or psychological tests, which are widely used to aid in selecting, assigning or promoting students, employees and military personnel, have been the target of recent attacks in books, magazines, the daily press, and even in Congress. The target is wrong, for, in attacking the tests, critics divert attention from the fault that lies with ill-informed or incompetent users. The tests themselves are merely tools. Whether the results will be valuable, meaningless, or even misleading depends partly upon the tool itself but largely upon the user. All informed predictions of future performance are based upon some knowledge of relevant past performance. How well the predictions will he validated by later performance depends upon the amount, reliability and appropriateness of the information used and on the skill and wisdom with which it is interpreted. Anyone who keeps careful score knows that the information available is always incomplete and that the predictions are always subject to error. Standardized tests should be considered in this context: they provide a quick, objective method of getting some kind of information about what a person has learned, the skills he has developed, or the kind of person he is. The information so obtained has, qualitatively, the same advantages and shortcomings as other kinds of information. Whether to use tests, other kinds of information, or both in a particular situation depends, therefore, upon the empirical evidence concerning comparative validity and upon such factors as cost and availability. In general, the tests work most effectively when the traits or qualities to be measured can be most precisely defined (for example, ability to do well in a particular course of training program) and least effectively when what is to be measured or predicted cannot be well defined, for example, personality or creativity. Properly used, they provide a rapid means of getting comparable information about many people. Sometimes they identify students whose high potential has not been previously recognized.

单选题Research on animal intelligence always makes me wonder just how smart humans are. (1) the fruit-fly experiments described in Carl Zimmer's piece in the Science Times on Tuesday. Fruit flies who were taught to be smarter than the average fruit fly (2) to live shorter lives. This suggests that (3) bulbs burn longer, that there is an (4) in not being too terrifically bright. Intelligence, it (5) , is a high-priced option. It takes more upkeep, burns more fuel and is slow (6) the starting line because it depends on learning—a (7) process—instead of instinct. Plenty of other species are able to learn, and one of the things they've apparently learned is when to (8) Is there an adaptive value to (9) intelligence? That's the question behind this new research. I like it. Instead of casting a wistful glance (10) at all the species we've left in the dust I. Q. wise, it implicitly asks what the real (11) of our own intelligence might be. This is (12) the mind of every animal I've ever met. Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would (13) on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, (14) , is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. We believe that (15) animals ran the labs, they would test us to (16) the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really (17) , not merely how much of it there is. (18) , they would hope to study a (19) question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? (20) the results are inconclusive.

单选题In 1924 American's National Research Council sent to engineers to supervise a series of industrial experiments at a large telephone-parts factory called the Hawthorne Plant near Chicago. It hoped they would learn how stop-floor lighting (1) workers productivity. Instead, the studies ended (2) giving their name to the "Hawthorne effect", the extremely influential idea that the very (3) to being experimented upon changed subjects' behavior. The idea arose because of the (4) behavior of the women in the Hawthorne plant. According to (5) of the experiments, their hourly output rose when lighting was increased, but also when it was dimmed. It did not (6) what was done in the experiment; (7) something was changed, productivity rose. A (n) (8) that they were being experimented upon seemed to be (9) to alter workers' behavior (10) itself. After several decades, the same data were (11) to econometric the analysis. Hawthorne experiments has another surprise store (12) the descriptions on record, no systematic (13) was found that levels of productivity were related to changes in lighting. It turns out that peculiar way of conducting the experiments may be have let to (14) interpretation of what happened. (15) , lighting was always changed on a Sunday. When work started again on Monday, output (16) rose compared with the previous Saturday and (17) to rise for the next couple of days. (18) , a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Monday, workers (19) to be diligent for the first few days of the working week in any case, before (20) a plateau and then slackening off. This suggests that the alleged "Hawthorne effect" is hard to pin down.

单选题Not too many decades ago it seemed "obvious" both to the general public and to sociologists that modern society has changed people"s natural relations, loosened their responsibilities to kin and neighbors, and substituted in their place superficial relationships with passing acquaintances. However, in recent years a growing body of research has revealed that the "obvious" is not true. It seems that if you are a city resident, you typically know a smaller proportion of your neighbors than you do if you are a resident of a smaller community. But, for the most part, this fact has few significant consequences. It does not necessarily follow that if you know few of your neighbors you will know no one else. Even in very large cities, people maintain close social ties within small, private social worlds. Indeed, the number and quality of meaningful relationships do not differ between more and less urban people. Small-town residents are more involved with kin than are big-city residents. Yet city dwellers compensate by developing friendships with people who share similar interests and activities. Urbanism may produce a different stifle of life, but the quality of life does not differ between town and city. Nor are residents of large communities any likelier to display psychological symptoms of stress or alienation, a feeling of not belonging, than are residents of smaller communities. However, city dwellers do worry more about crime, and this leads them to a distrust of strangers. These findings do not imply that urbanism makes little or no difference. If neighbors are strangers to one another, they are less likely to sweep the sidewalk of an elderly couple living next door or keep an eye out for young trouble makers. Moreover, there may be a link between a community"s population size and its social heterogeneity. For instance, sociologists have found much evidence that the size of a community is associated with bad behavior including gambling, drugs, etc. Large-city urbanites are also more likely than their small-town counterparts to have a cosmopolitan outlook, to display less responsibility to traditional kinship roles, to vote for leftist political candidates, and to be tolerant of nontraditional religious groups, unpopular political groups, and so-called undesirables. Everything considered, heterogeneity and unusual behavior seem to be outcomes of large population size.

单选题 Natural disasters strike rich countries as well as needy ones, but the trail of devastation they leave behind is usually far greater in poor places. Worse, insurance payouts cover a much larger chunk of the costs of recovery in rich countries than in poor ones, where few individuals or companies take out disaster cover. Most of the burden of financing reconstruction falls on foreign governments and multilateral agencies. It will be no different in Haiti after the earthquake that struck this month. Developing countries have some options to help them manage the fallout from natural disasters. The World Bank helped the Mexican government raise $290m in October by placing "catastrophe bonds", which pay investors generous yields against the loss of their principal in the event that disaster strikes. {{U}}Until now such bonds have largely been the preserve of rich-country issuers{{/U}}: in 2009 Munich Re estimates that 80% of issuance was to cover risks in America. But Francis Ghesquiere of the World Bank doubts that a country as poor as Haiti, with no experience on international bond markets, will start issuing catastrophe bonds. Risk-sharing mechanisms can enable the poorest nations to pool their insurance-buying power. Haiti is getting a payout of around $8m from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), which came into being in 2007. The CCRIF has a fund made up of contributions from donors and member countries, which allows it to cover payouts of up to $10m itself and has additional capacity of $110m obtained through international reinsurance markets. Payouts are based simply on the severity of the disaster (in Haiti's case, the magnitude of the earthquake), and the amount of coverage purchased, and are paid out in two weeks. The money is intended to ensure that lack of cash does not hamper basic government functions. But Pamela Cox, the World Bank's vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean, points out that it is sometimes politically difficult for the government of a poor country to explain why it is spending scarce money on insurance premiums rather than things that may seem more pressing in normal times. Not every disaster triggers a payout: Haiti purchased significantly more hurricane insurance than earthquake insurance through the CCRIF. And purchasing enough cover to meet the need for funds after something like the Haitian quake would prove prohibitively expensive. Countries as poor as Haiti are far more likely to have their premiums paid by donors, who funded its CCRIF premium of $385,000.

单选题What might driving on an automated highway be like? The answer depends on what kind of system is ultimately adopted. Two distinct types are on the drawing board. The first is a special purpose lane system, in which certain lanes are reserved for automated vehicles. The second is a mixed traffic system: fully automated vehicles would share the road with partially automated or manual driven cars. A special purpose lane system would require more extensive physical modifications to existing highways, but it promises the greatest gains in freeway (高速公路) capacity. Under either scheme, the driver would specify the desired destination, furnishing this information to a computer in the car at the beginning of the trip or perhaps just before reaching the automated highway. If a mixed traffic system way was in place, automated driving could begin whenever the driver was on suitably equipped roads. If special purpose lanes were available, the car could enter them and join existing traffic in two different ways. One method would use a special onramp (入口引道). As the driver approached the point of entry for the highway, devices installed on the roadside would electronically check the vehicle to determine its destination and to ascertain that it had the proper automation equipment in good working order. Assuming it passed such tests, the driver would then be guided through a gate and toward an automated lane. In this case, the transition from manual to automated control would take place on the entrance ramp. An alternative technique could employ conventional lanes, which would be shared by automated and regular vehicles. The driver would steer onto the highway and move in normal fashion to a "transition" lane. The vehicle would then shift under computer control onto a lane reserved for automated traffic. (The limitation of these lanes to automated traffic would, presumably, be well respected, because all trespassers (非法进入者) could be swiftly identified by authorities. ) Either approach to joining a lane of automated traffic would harmonize the movement of newly entering vehicles with those already traveling. Automatic control here should allow for smooth merging without the usual uncertainties and potential for accidents. And once a vehicle had settled into automated travel, the driver would be free to release the wheel, open the morning paper or just relax.

单选题We often tend to associate smiling as the result of a positive event or mood. But research demonstrates that the act of smiling, in and 1 itself, can be the catalyst for joy. Wonderful things, ranging from an 2 mood to a better relationship, can be the result of the 3 act of smiling. Even better, it is a tool that is free, easy and always available. Even when you aren"t feeling happy, smile can help 4 your mood. Darwin hypothesized, back in 1872, that making changes in our 5 expressions can influence our 6 experience, something he called facial feedback response theory. Psychological research has 7 Darwin"s assertion that expressions do not just result from moods, but actually influence them. Smiling more may actually 8 your lifespan. Research indicates that smiling may improve heart health by 9 heart rate after stressful events. So, 10 smiling to your health regime of eating well, getting enough sleep and exercising may just add 11 years to your life. People who smile more tend to be more 12 , joyful and emotionally stable which lends itself to healthier relationships, and thus have longer and more successful 13 . An interesting study published in 2009 found a correlation between smiles in photographs and divorce rates. The larger the smile, the 14 likely divorce was later in life. 15 , those with the smallest smiles or no smiles, were five times more likely to be divorced. When Mother Teresa said "Every time you smile at someone, it is ... a 16 to that person, a beautiful thing", she was right. One study 17 by Hewlett Packard found that seeing another"s smile stimulated the heart and 18 more so than eating chocolate or receiving money. This was particularly true 19 viewing the smile of a child. Additionally, research has demonstrated smiling may actually be easily diffused. Research published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology examined mimicry, the tendency to mimic the emotional expressions of those around us, and found that it is actually hard to 20 when someone else is smiling.

单选题Anyone who has searched for a job fresh out of college knows how difficult it is to get that first job. Sending out hundreds of resumes, only to get a few interviews in the end—if you"re lucky!—and if you"re very lucky, eventually there"s a job offer on the table. Should you grasp it, or wait for something better to come along the way? It depends on whether you are a "maximizer" or a "satisficer". Maximizers want to explore every possible option before choosing a job. They gather every stick of information in the hope of making the best possible decision. If you are a satisficer, however, you make decisions based on the evidence at hand. Simply put, satisficers are more likely to cut their job search short and take the first job offer. Maximizers are more likely to continue searching until a better job offer comes along. Which type of approach yields the better payoff?. A maximizer. Specifically, quoting the results of a study of the job search of 548 members of the Class of 2002 by Sheena Iyengar, Rachael Wells, and Barry Schwartz, the maximizers put themselves through more contortions in the job hunt. They applied to twenty jobs, on average, while satisficers applied to only ten, and they were significantly more likely to make use of outside sources of information and support. But it turned out to be worth it: the job offers they got were significantly better, in terms of salary, than what the satisficers got. Satisficers were offered jobs with an average starting salary of $37,085; the average starting salary offered to maximizers was $44,515, more than 20 percent higher. The trouble is, however, that higher pay doesn"t make maximizers a happier group than satisficers. In fact, maximizers were significantly more likely than satisficers to be unhappy with the offers they accepted. Evidently, being a maximizer can help you earn more income, but that income doesn"t buy more happiness, as the maximizer"s likely to agonize over the prospect of a better job offer out there he or she missed. Maximizers may have objectively superior outcomes, but they"re so busy obsessing about all the things that they could have had, they tend to be less happy with the outcomes they do get.

单选题At the Kyoto conference on global warming in December 1997, it became abundantly clear how complex it has become to work out international agreements relating to the environment because of economic concerns unique to each country. It is no longer enough to try to forbid certain activities or to reduce emissions of certain substances. The global challenges of the interlink between the environment and development increasingly bring us to the core of the economic life of the states. During the late 1980s we were able, through international agreements, to make deep cuts in emissions harmful to the ozone layer. These reductions were made possible because substitutions had been found for many of the harmful chemicals and, more important, because the harmful substances could be replaced without negative effects on employment and the economies of states. Although the threat of global warming has been known to the world for decades and all countries and leaders agree that we need to deal with the problem, we also know that the effects of the measures, especially harsh measures taken in some countries, would be nullified if other countries do not control their emissions. Whereas the UN team on climate change has found that the emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut globally by 60% to stabilize the content of CO 2 in the atmosphere, this path is not feasible for several reasons. Such deep cuts would cause a breakdown of the world economy. Important and populous low-or medium-income countries are not yet willing to undertake legal commitments about their energy uses. In addition, the state of world technology would not yet permit us to make such a big leap. We must, however, find a solution to the threat of global warming early in the 21st century. Such a commitment would require a degree of shared vision and common responsibilities new to humanity. Success lies in the force of imaginations, in imagining what would happen if we fail to act. Although many living in cold regions would welcome the global-warming effect of a warmer winter, few would cheer the arrival of the subsequent tropical diseases, especially where there had been none.

单选题That some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even been given a name: synaesthesia . Odd as it may seem to those not so gifted, synaesthetes insist that spoken sounds and the symbols which represent them give rise to specific colours or that individual musical notes have their own hues. Yet there may be a little of this cross-modal association in everyone. Most people agree that loud sounds are brighter than soft ones. Likewise, low-pitched sounds are reminiscent of large objects and high-pitched ones evoke smallness. Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University think something similar is true between sound and smell. Ms. Crisinel and Dr. Spence wanted to know whether an odour sniffed from a bottle could be linked to a specific pitch. To find out, they asked 30 people to inhale 20 smells. After giving each sample a good sniff, volunteers had to click their way through 52 sounds of varying pitches, and identify which best matched the smell. The results of this study are intriguing. The researchers" first finding was that the volunteers did not think their request utterly ridiculous. It rather made sense, they told them afterwards. The second was that there was significant agreement between volunteers. Sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched. It is not immediately clear why people employ their musical senses in this way to help their assessment of a smell. But gone are the days when science assumed each sense worked in isolation. People live, say Dr. Spence and Ms. Crisinel, in a multisensory world and their brains tirelessly combine information from all sources to make sense, as it were, of what is going on around them. Taste, too, seems linked to hearing. Ms. Crisinel and Dr. Spence have previously established that sweet and sour tastes, like smells, are linked to high pitch, while bitter tastes bring lower pitches to mind. Now they have gone further. In a study that will be published later this year they and their colleagues show how altering the pitch and instruments used in background music can alter the way food tastes. Volunteers rated the toffee eaten during low-pitched music as more bitter than that consumed during the high-pitched performance. The toffee was, of course, identical. It was the sound that tasted different.

单选题An important factor of leadership is attraction. This does not mean attractiveness in the ordinary sense, for that is a born quality 1 our control. The leader has, nevertheless, to be a magnet; a central figure towards whom people are 2 . Magnetism in that sense depends, first of all, 3 being seen. There is a type of authority which can be 4 from behind closed doors, but that is not leadership. 5 there is movement and action, the true leaders is in the forefront and may seem, indeed, to be everywhere at once. He has to become a legend; the 6 for anecdotes, whether true or 7 ; character. One of the simplest devices is to be absent 8 the occasion when the leader might be 9 to be there, enough in itself to start a rumor about the vital business 10 has detained him. To 11 up for this, he can appear when least expected, giving rise to another story about the interest he can display 12 things which other folks might 13 as trivial. With this gift for 14 curiosity the leader always combines a reluctance to talk about himself. His interest is 15 in other people, he questions them and encourages them to talk and then remembers all 16 is relevant. He never leaves a party 17 he has mentally filed a minimum dossier (档案) on 18 present, ensuring that he knows 19 to say when he meets them again. He is not artificially extrovert but he would usually rather listen 20 talk. Others realize gradually that his importance needs no proof.

单选题For years, studies have found that first-generation college students—those who do not have a parent with a college degree—lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created "a paradox" in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has "continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close" an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science . But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting thatan approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students. The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree. Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree. Their thesis—that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact—was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but inpractical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap. Many first-generation students "struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the "rules of the game," and take advantage of college resources," they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don"t talk about the class advantages and disadvantages of different groups of students. "Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students" educational experiences, many first-generation students lack insight about why they are struggling and do notunderstand how students "like them" can improve."