阅读理解Which is safer-staying at home, traveling to work on public transport, or working in the office? Surprisingly, each of these carries the same risk, which is very low. However, what about flying compared to working in the chemical industry? Unfortunately, the former is 65 times riskier than the latter! In fact, the accident rate of workers in the chemical industry is less than that of almost any of human activity, and almost as safe as staying at home.The trouble with the chemical industry is that when things go wrong they often cause death to those living nearby. It is this which makes chemical accidents so newsworthy. Fortunately, they are extremely rare. The most famous ones happened at Texas City (1947), Flixborough (1974), Seveso (1976), Pemex (1984) and Bhopal (1984).Some of these are always in the minds of the people even though the loss of life was small. No one died at Seveso, and only 28 workers at Flixborough. The worst accident of all was Bhopal, where up to 3,000 were killed. The Texas City explosion of fertilizer killed 552. The Pemex fire at a storage plant for natural gas in the suburbs of Mexico City took 542 lives, just a month before the unfortunate event at Bhopal.Some experts have discussed these accidents and used each accident to illustrate a particular danger. Thus the Texas City explosion was caused by tons of ammonium nitrate (硝酸铵), which is safe unless stored in great quantity. The Flixborough fireball was the fault of management, which took risks to keep production going during essential repairs. The Seveso accident shows what happens if the local authorities lack knowledge of the danger on their doorstep. When the poisonous gas drifted over the town, local leaders were incapable of taking effective action. The Pemex fire was made worse by an overloaded site in an overcrowded suburb. The fire set off a chain reaction on exploding storage tanks. Yet, by a miracle, the two largest tanks did not explode. Had these caught fire, then 3,000 strong rescue team and fire fighters would all have died.
阅读理解Passage OneKidnapping is the cruelest crime of the 20th century. There is not the political passion behind mosthijacking; the motive is greed for money. The victims, provided their families are rich enough, arechosen at random. With the constant exposure by the media of personal fame and fortune, mostpeople are vulnerable than ever.The most notorious kidnapping began on the evening of March 1, 1932, when someone placed ahome-made ladder against the New Jersey home of Colonel Charles Lindbergh and stole his blond,blue-eyed baby son. A ransom note was left from the kidnapper. Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly soloacross the Atlantic, was the most popular man in America.When the boy was found a few miles away with his head crushed in, the whole nation was shockedand Congress passed the “Lindbergh Kidnap Law”, with the death penalty for transporting a kidnapvictim across a state line. The kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was caught two-and-a-halfyears later, when he exchanged some of the ransom money. He was executed in 1936.Kidnapping is an example of inflation: Hauptmann demanded $50,000; in 1973 the Getty family hadto pay 1,300,000 pounds and the ransom delivery in two billion Italian lire weighed a ton. In thiskidnapping, things went dreadfully wrong. When the kidnappers cut off Getty’s right ear and sent itto a newspaper, they forgot the postal strike which delayed this proof by three weeks. In the case ofMuriel McKay, the kidnappers picked the wrong woman. The Hosein brothers had developed theirplan when they saw Rupert Murdoch on a TV show in 1969 and heard him described as a millionaire,a word which stimulated their action. Yet, in tracing Murdoch’s Rolls-Royce, they failed to realizethat he had left for Australia with his wife and had loaned the car to Douglas McKay, a chairman ofone of his enterprises. Attacking the wrong home, the Hoseins kidnapped Mrs. McKay by mistake,but still demanded their million pounds.The end result of kidnapping is never clean: Lindbergh never psychologically recovered. Young PaulGetty jokes: “It was a high-priced ear!” But the scars must be internal, too. The saddest commentcame from Douglas McKay after the trial of the Hoseins: “They have got a life sentence. I, too, havea life sentence wondering just what has happened to my dear wife.”
阅读理解Have you winterized your horse yet? Even though global warming may have made our climatemilder, many animals are still hibernating. Its too bad that humans cant hibernate. In fact, as aspecies, we almost did.Apparently, at times in the past, peasants in France liked a semi-state of human hibernation. Sowrites Graham Robb, a British scholar who has studied the sleeping habits of the French peasants. Assoon as the weather turned cold people all over France shut themselves away and practiced theforgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.In line with this, Jeff Warren, a producer at CBC Radios The Current, tells us that the way we sleephas changed fundamentally since the invention of artificial lighting and the electric bulb.When historians began studying texts of the Middle Ages, they noticed something referred to as“first sleep”, which was not clarified, though. Now scientists are telling us our ancestors most likelyslept in separate periods. The business of eight hours uninterrupted sleep is a modern invention.In the past, without the artificial light of the city to bathe in, humans went to sleep when it becamedark and then woke themselves around midnight. The late night period was known as “The Watch”.It was when people actually kept watch against wild animals, although many of them simply movedaround or visited family and neighbors.According to some sleep researchers, a short period of insomnia at midnight is not a disorder. It isnormal. Humans can experience another state of consciousness around their sleeping, which occursin the brief period before we fall asleep or wake ourselves in the morning. This period can be anextraordinarily creative time for some people. The impressive inventor, Thomas Edison, used thisstate to hit upon many of his new ideas.Playing with your sleep rhythms can be adventurous, as anxiety may set in. Medical science doesnthelp much in this case. It offers us medicines for a full nights continuous sleep, which sounds natural;however, according to Warrens theory, it is really the opposite of what we need.
阅读理解It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidence of the depressing state of literacy. These figuresfrom the Department of Education are sufficient: 27 million Americans cannot read at all, and afurther 35 million read at a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society.But my own worry today is less that of the overwhelming problem of elemental literacy than it is ofthe slightly more luxurious problem of the decline in the skill even of the middle-class reader, of hisunwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time andconcentration, that surround the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested that almost80 percent of America’s literate, educated teenagers can no longer read without an accompanyingnoise (music) in the background or a television screen flickering at the corner of their field ofperception. We know very little about the brain and how it deals with simultaneous conflicting input,but every common-sense intuition suggests we should be profoundly alarmed. This violation ofconcentration, silence, solitude goes to the very heart of our notion of literacy; this new form ofpart-reading, of part-perception against background distraction, renders impossible certain essentialacts of apprehension and concentration, let alone that most important tribute any human being canpay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, byheart; the expression is vital.Under these circumstances, the question of what future there is for the arts of reading is a real one.Ahead of us lie technical, psychic, and social transformations probably much more dramatic thanthose brought about by Gutenberg, the German inventor in printing. The Gutenberg revolution, as wenow know it, took a long time; its effects are still being debated. The information revolution willtouch every fact of composition, publication, distribution, and reading. No one in the book industrycan say with any confidence what will happen to the book as we’ve known it.
阅读理解Bartenders are rarely shy about offering an opinion. But on a recent evening at the Finborough Wine Cafe, in between pours of Beaujolais, the bartender Van Badham was memorably on point about the new play “Mirror Teeth”being performed in an upstairs room: A Christopher-Durang-meets-Caryl-Churchill satire about racism, sex and control in the British family. Ms. Badham, it was later revealed, doubles as the literary manager for the Finborough Theater, which has been a tenant at the pub since 1980. Neil McPherson, the theater’s artistic director and its only salaried employee, said several company members tended bar to make ends meet, given that they are paid by the theater only if a production turns a profit. No success is too small: He once doled out £ 1.18 to each crew member after one play in the 50-seat theater did a bit better than break even. “The actors don’t get paid, either, not usually, “Mr. McPherson said, sitting on the snug stage after “Mirror Teeth”had concluded that night. “But if you’ve been stuck in ‘Phantom’for 10 years and you’re about ready to slit your wrists, and you crave doing some proper acting, you can do that here.”Like the storefront theater scene in Chicago, or the outdoor productions in parks, playgrounds and car lots across New York in the summer, pub theaters are a beloved part of the play-making tradition in England, especially London. Their lineage extends to the Restoration, when acting troupes took over empty dining rooms above pubs to perform plays of vulgar material that went well with a pint. Later the Victorian-era music halls — a wildly popular amusement for the working classes — got their start in saloon bars. Pub theaters proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s with the increase in theater companies of young artists and in-house playwrights wanting to do serious work on shoestring budgets in close proximity to audiences. “What works in our favor is the intimacy of the experience,”said Tim Roseman, who shares the job of artistic director at another pub space, Theater 503, with Paul Robinson. “You genuinely feel you are in the same room as the actors, that you breathe the characters’air, and this makes for an electrifying experience.”Mr. Robinson added: “It’s impossible to create that intensity when there are 1,000 people watching.”
阅读理解There are faults which age releases us from, and there are virtues which turn to vices with the lapseof years. The worst of these is thrift, which in early and middle life is wisdom and duty to practicefor a provision against destitution. As time goes on this virtue is apt to turn into the ugliest, cruelest,shabbiest of the vices. Then the victim of it finds himself storing past all probable need of saving forhimself or those next him, to the deprivation of the remoter kin of the race. In the earlier time whengain was symbolized by gold or silver, the miser had a sensual joy in the touch of his riches, inhearing the coins clink in their fall through his fingers and in gloating upon their increase sensible tothe hand and eye. Then the miser had his place among the great figures of misdoing; he was of adramatic effect, like a murderer or a robber and something of this bad distinction clung to him evenwhen his coins had changed to paper currency, the clean, white notes of the only English bank, or thegreenbacks, of our innumerable banks of issue; but when the sense of riches had been transmuted tothe balance in his favor at his banker’s, or the bonds in his drawer at the safety-deposit vault, allsplendor had gone out of his vice. His bad eminence was gone, but he clung to the lust of gain whichhad ranked him with the picturesque wrong-doers, and which only ruin from without could save himfrom, unless he gave his remnant of strength to saving himself from it. Most aging men are sensibleof all this, but few have the frankness of that aging man who once said that he who died rich dieddisgraced, and died the other day in the comparative poverty of fifty millions.
阅读理解 Several classes of bitter citrus compounds have looked promising as anticancer agents in laboratory tests. A new study indicates that long-term consumption of orange juice, a source of such chemicals, cuts cancer risk in rats. In test-tube studies, one class of the bitter compounds—flavonoids—has inhibited the growth of breast cancer cells. Related studies showed that bitter citrus limonoids similarly ward off cancer in animals. Mulling over such data, Maurice R. Bennink of Michigan State University in East Lansing wondered whether drinking orange juice would have a beneficial effect. His team injected 60 young rats with a chemical that causes colon cancer and then raised half of the animals on a normal diet. The others received orange juice instead of drinking water—and less sugar in their food to compensate for sugars in the juice. At an American Institute for Cancer Research meeting last week in Washington, D. C., Bennink reported that after 7 months, 22 of the animals receiving a normal diet had developed colon cancers. Only 17 of the rats on the orange-juice diet showed tumors. That's 77 percent of the control group's incidence. Concludes Bennink, whose work was supported by orange-juice producer—Tropicana Products of Bradenton, Fla. 'These data show orange juice helps protect against cancer.' He says that the study might also apply to breast, prostate, and lung cancers. Bandaru S. Reddy of the American Health Foundation in Valhalla, N.Y., was not surprised by Bennink's finding of an orange juice benefit. However, he calls the reported risk reduction unimpressive. His own data show that citrus limonoids protect against chemically induced colon cancer in lab animals. Luke K. T. Lam of LKT Laboratories in St. Paul, Minn., finds Bennink's data 'quite interesting,' although he describes as 'borderline' the suppression of cancer incidence observed by Bennink. Lam has inhibited tumors in the lung, skin, and forestomach of mice with limonoids. The scientists don't know what compounds in orange juice underlie its effect. The juice is rich in one limonoid—a sugar-containing version of limonin, which suppressed tumors in Lam's experiments. It's possible, Lam speculates, that rats convert the juice's limonoid into limonin. Indeed, argues Gary D. Manners of the Agricultural Research Service in Albany, Calif, 'there is no doubt that these anticancer citrus compounds are bioavailable in animals to the site of a cancer.' The question remains whether they are similarly available in people. To find out, his team will soon begin measuring the human body's uptake of limonoids from orange juice.
阅读理解Passage Four: Questions are based on the following passage
阅读理解According to the new school of scientists technology is an overlooked force in expanding thehorizons of scientific knowledge. Science moves forward, they say, not so much through the insightsof great men of genius as because of more ordinary things like improved techniques and tools. Inshort, a leader of the new school contends, the scientific revolution, as we call it, was largely theimprovement an invention and use of a series of instruments that expanded the reach of science ininnumerable directions.Over the years, tools and technology themselves as a source of fundamental innovation have largelybeen ignored by historians and philosophers of science. The modern school that hails technologyargues that such masters as Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and inventors such as Edisonattached great importance to, and derived great benefit from, craft information and technologicaldevices of different kinds that were usable in scientific experiments.The core of the argument of a technology-yes, genius-no advocate was an analysis of Galileo’s roleat the start of the scientific revolution. The wisdom of the day was derived from Ptolemy, anastronomer of the second century, whose elaborate system often sky put Earth at the center of allheavenly motions. Galileo’s greatest glory was that in 1609 he was the first person to turn the newlyinvented telescope on the heavens to prove that the planets revolve around the sun rather than aroundthe earth. But the real hero of the story, according to the new school of scientists, was the longevolution in the improvement of machinery for making eyeglasses.Federal policy is necessarily involved in the technology vs genius dispute. Whether the Governmentshould increase the financing of pure science at the expense of technology or vice versa oftendepends on the issue of which is seen as the driving force.
阅读理解We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a persons knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that, after all these years, educationists have still failed to device anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations text what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a persons true ability and aptitude.As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success of failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesnt matter that you werent feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that dont count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of drop-outs: young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students?A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judges decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiners. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a persons true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire.”
阅读理解The statistics I’ve cited and the living examples are all too familiar to you. But what may not be so familiar will be the increasing number of women who are looking actively for advancement of for a new job in your offices. This woman may be equipped with professional skills and perhaps valuable experience. She will not be content to be Executive Assistant to Mr. Seldom Seen of the Assistant Vice President’s Girl Friday, who is the only one who comes in on Saturday.She is the symbol of what I call the Second Wave of Feminism. She is the modern woman who is determined to be.Her forerunner was the radical feminist who interpreted her trapped position as a female as oppression by the master class of men. Men, she believed, had created a domestic, servile role for women in order that men could have the career and the opportunity to participate in making the great decisions of society. Thus the radical feminist held that women through history had been oppressed and dehumanized, mainly because man chose to exploit his wife and the mother of his children. Sometimes it was deliberate exploitation and sometimes it was the innocence of never looking beneath the pretensions of life.The radical feminists found strength in banding together. Coming to recognize each other for the first time, they could explore their own identities, realize their own power, and view the male and his system as the common enemy. The first phases of feminism in the last five years often took on this militant, class-warfare tone. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and many others hammered home their ideas with a persistence that aroused and intrigued many of the brightest and most able women in the country. Consciousness-raising groups allowed women to explore both their identities and their dreams—and the two were often found in direct conflict.What is the stereotyped role of American women? Marriage. A son. Two daughters. Breakfast. Ironing. Lunch. Bowling, maybe a garden club of for the very daring, non-credit courses in ceramics. Perhaps an occasional cocktail party. Dinner. Football or baseball on TV. Each day the same. Never any growth in expectations — unless it is growth because the husband has succeeded. The inevitable question: “Is that all there is to life?” The rapid growth of many feminist organizations attests to the fact that these radical feminists had touched some vital nerves. The magazine “Ms.” was born in the year of the death of the magazine “Life.” But too often the consciousness-raising sessions became ends in themselves. Too often sexism reversed itself and man-hating was encouraged. Many had been with the male chauvinist.It is not difficult, therefore, to detect a trend toward moderation. Consciousness-raising increasingly is regarded as a means to independence and fulfillment, rather than a ceremony of fulfillment itself. Genuine independence can be realized through competence, through finding a career, through the use of education. Remember that for many decades the education of women was not supposed to be useful.
阅读理解Passage Three: Questions are based on the following passage
阅读理解In a recent study, neuroscientists found that playing fast-paced video games could help improve dyslexic children’s reading speed, and the improvements did not fade with time. Researchers tested the reading ability of two groups of 10-year-old dyslexic children after one group had played action video games and the other played non-action video games. Each group was composed of 10 children who played 80 minutes of video games a day for nine days, equaling 12 hours of play per child. Their reading skills were measured on a number of factors, including howfast they read words and how accurately they read them. Results showed that improvements in reading speed achieved from playing fast-paced video games could even exceed improvements gained from a year’s intense, traditional therapies. Scientists aimed to prove that there’s a correlation between a dyslexic child’s visual attention span and their ability to read. Action video games are distinguished from non-action video games by such characteristics as game speed, a high sensory-motor load, and presentation of multiple, peripheral stimuli. Action video game players constantly receive both external and internal feedback on their performance, producing learning. It turned out that the assumptions of researchers were correct. Action video game players defeated their non-action peers in improvements. Only action game kids showed general reading improvements, up to 40 percent, while non-action readers showed no improvement. The action gamers also improved their basic text reading by as much as 60 percent, while non-action gamers showed a more modest 5 percent-10 percent gain. Though more research is needed to nail down the specific role that action games play in the improvements, the researchers claimed their data is the start. They believe their findings show that attention can be studied and efficiently trained during infancy. This can pave the way for low-resource-demanding early prevention programs that could drastically reduce the incident of reading disorders.
阅读理解What is the tone of this passage?
阅读理解 High-speed living has become a fact of life, and the frantic pace is taking its toll, according to science writer James Gleick. It's as if the old 'Type A' behaviour of a few has expanded into the 'hurry sickness' of the many. 'We do feel that we're more time-driven and time-obsessed and generally rushed than ever before,, writes Gleick in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, a survey of fast-moving culture and its consequences. We may also be acting more hastily, losing control, and thinking superficially because we live faster. Technology has conditioned us to expect instant results. Internet purchases arrive by next-day delivery and the microwave delivers a hot meal in minutes. Faxes, e-mails, and cell phones make it possible—and increasingly obligatory—for people to work faster. Gleick cites numerous examples of fast-forward changes in our lives: Stock trading and news cycles are shorter; sound bites of presidential candidates on network newscasts dropped from 40 seconds in 1968 to 10 seconds in 1988; and some fast-food restaurants have added express lanes. High expectations for instant service make even the brief wait for an elevator seem interminable (漫长的). 'A good waiting time is in the neighborhood of 15 seconds. Sometime around 40 seconds, people start to get visibly upset,' writes Gleick. We're dependent on systems that promise speed but often deliver frustration. Like rush-hour drivers fuming when a single accident halts the evening commute, people surfing the Internet squirm if a Web page is slow to load or when access itself is not instantaneous. And the concept of 'customer service' can become an oxymoron (逆喻) for consumers waiting on hold for a telephone representative. Up-tempo living has turned people into multitaskers—eating while driving, writing an e-mail while talking on the phone, or skimming dozens of television programs on split screen. Gleick suggests that human beings may be capable of adjusting to these new levels of stimuli as high-speed culture challenges our brains 'in a way they were not challenged in the past, except perhaps in times of war'. We may gain the flexibility to do several things at once but lose some of our capacity to focus in depth on a single task.
阅读理解Directions: In this part for the test, there will be 5 passages for you to read. Each passage is followed by 4 questions or unfinished statement, and each question or unfinished statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. You are to decide on the best choice by blackening the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.Passage FourThe weight of plastic waste clogging the world’s oceans threatens to exceed all fish by 2050 if the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the material continues at the current explosive rate, warned a new report presented on Tuesday.In fact, according to the study by the Ellen MeaArthur Foundation along with the World Economic Forum, “plastics production has surged over the past 50 years, from 15 million tonnes in 1964 to 311 million tonnes in 2014, and is expected to double again over the next 20 years. ”The study—The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking The Future of Plastics—introduced at the opening day of the WEF’s annual summit in Davos, Switzerland is the first of its kind to comprehensively assess global plastic packaging flows. The report makes an economic case for what it calls the “New Plastics Economy”,described as “a new approach based on creating effective after-use pathways for plastics; drastically reducing leakage of plastics into natural systems, in particular oceans; and decoupling plastics from fossil feedstocks”.Among the findings, which are based on interviews with over 180 experts and on analysis of over 200 reports, the study estimates that roughly 8 million tonnes of plastics leak into the ocean each year— “ which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into ocean every minuten , This amount is expected to double by 2030.“In a business-asusual scenario, the ocean is expected to contain/tonne of plastic for every 3 tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight) ” the report continues.What’s more, the report estimates that only 14 percent of plastic packaging is collected for recycling and even less for plastics in general. After sorting, only 5 percent is ultimately retained for subsequent use, which is far below global recycling rates for paper (58 per cent) and iron and steel (70-90 percent).Further, the report examines the carbon impact of plastics production, given that over 90 percent are derived from “virgin fossil feedstocks”. Plastics production represents roughly 6 percent of global oil consumption and “If the current strong growth of plastics usage continues as expected, the plastics sector will account for 20% of total oil consumption and 15% of the global annual carbon budget by 2050.”The report argues that single-use plastics, and plastic packaging specifically, represents a net loss for the economy, as its limited value is outweighed by these negative impacts. It states:After a short first-use cycle, 95% of plastic packaging material value, or USD 80-120 billion annually,is lost to the economy. A staggering 32% of plastic packaging escapes collection systems, generating significant economic costs by reducing urban infrastructure. The cost of such after-use externalities for plastic packaging, plus the cost associated with greenhouse gas emissions from its production,is exceeding the plastic packaging industry fs profit pool.“Linear models of production and consumption are increasingly challenged by the context within which they operate, and this is particularly true for high-volume, low-value materials such as plastic packaging, ” said Ellen MacArthur, an accomplished British yachtswoman turned foundation chair.The researchers conclude that in order to get closer to the goal of a “circular economy n 一where “consumption happens only in effective bio-cycles;elsewhere use replaces consumption ”一both the public and private sector must work towards the goal of creating plastics that can be both recycled and composted.
阅读理解Passage One: Questions are based on the following passage
阅读理解Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage:
Eight times within the past million years, something in the Earths climatic equation haschanged, allowing snow in the mountains and the northern latitudes to accumulate from oneseason to the next instead of melting away
阅读理解Directions: In this part for the test, there will be 5 passages for you to read. Each passage is followed by 4 questions or unfinished statement, and each question or unfinished statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. You are to decide on the best choice by blackening the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.Passage Five Advances in campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq are forcing the extremists to abandon territory there, generating concerns that they are carving out a new stronghold in oil-rich Libya, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Tuesday.“As everybody here knows, that country has resources,” Kerry said at a conference of 23 foreign ministers from nations that form the core of a coalition fighting the Islamic State. “The last thing in the world you’d want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars in oil revenue. ”In a joint statement, both Kerry and Italian foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni expressed concern over the “growing influence” of Islamic State in Libya. They vowed to “continue to National Accord in its efforts to establish peace and security for the Libyan people.”Kerry ruled out military intervention in Libya by the United States in near future. But he said that could change if there were some turn of events, like weapons of mass destruction ending up in the hands of the wrong people”Libya has been in a state of chaos since 2011 when Moammar Gaddafi was ousted. Two rival governments subsequently emerged, and continuing conflict has foiled efforts to establish a united Libyan government.Though the emerging threat in Libya commanded much of the diplomats’ attention, the situation in Syria remains troublesome. Success in pushing Islamic State fighters out of an estimated 40 percent of territory they controlled in Iraq and 20 percent to 30 percent of the land they held in Syria has created its own set of urgent problems.Fleeing fighters often booby-trap homes and demolish buildings, which then need to be cleared and rebuilt before residents can return. Kerry urged his fellow foreign ministers to donate more money to a stabilization fund for rebuilding and restoring services in those areas.Now that U. N. -backed Syria peace talks aimed at ending the war have started in Geneva, Kerry called on Russia to stop bombing opposition fighters and the Syrian government to grant humanitarian access to besieged towns.With the onset of peace talks, a cease-fire should follow shortly, he said.“We are at the table, and we expect a cease-fire,” he said. “And we expect adherence to the cease-fire, and we expect full humanitarian access. ”In Geneva, where U. N. envoy Staffan de Mistura on Monday declared the official opening of talks between the Syrian government and opposition, both sides said that as far as they were concerned, negotiations had not yet begun.In a statement, the opposition delegation said Syrian rebels are facing “ a massive acceleration of Russian and regime military aggression... including attacks on hospitals and critical infrastructurev near the cities of Aleppo and Homs over the past two days.The Syrian government delegation accused the opposition of acting like “ amateurs and not professional politicians”. Syria’s United Nations ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, representing Syrian President Basher al-Assad,said his side challenged the participation of two “terrorist” groups in the opposition delegation, according to the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency.The Obama administration is eager for the peace talks to begin and has pressured the opposition to participate. Opposition representatives have said the agreed-upon rules for the negotiations,in a U. N. resolution, call for an end to bombardments and government sieges of civilian areas, as well as the release of prisoners.Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters there that his government considered members of Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham to be participating in the opposition delegation in their “personal capacity” rather than as official representatives. Lavrov also said that he considers it the responsibility of the United States, as leader of the coalition against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, to prevent conflict among the various participants operating strike aircraft over those countries.
阅读理解Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage:
If you smoke and you still dont believe that theres a definite between smoking and bronchial troubles, heart disease and lung cancer, then you are certainly deceiving yourself