阅读理解Passage 2 Sex prejudices are based on and justified by the ideology(观念) that biology is fate

阅读理解A massive pool of warm ocean water is causing changes in the atmosphere that could produce unusual weather around the world in the next few months, the US National Weather Service reported on Monday. As a result of this phenomenon, known as El Nino, more rainfall than normal is likely this winter across some areas ofthe United States, with unusually warm or cold weather in other parts ofthe country.Currently the phenomenon is marked by a warm pool ofwater along the equator extending from the International Date Line nearly to the coast of South America. “That water is nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal”, explained Vernon Kousky ofthe climate center.This warm water “spreads almost a quarter of the way around the globe. So it’s massive and it has an impact on our weather. It has a global influence... because it disturbs the atmosphere”, said Dave Rodenhuis, director ofthe climate center. “El Nino is probably the most important climate event beyond the annual cycle ofseasons”, he added.Because the changes tended to be first noticed around Christmas, the phenomenon was given the name El Nino, which is Spanish for child, a term often used to refer to the baby Jesus. The phenomenon occurs every three to five years, sometimes in a mild form and sometimes strongly affecting weather patterns worldwide. Details of its cause are not fully understood, but when it occurs, unusually warm air can be pumped into Canada, Alaska and the northern United States. At the same time, conditions tend to be wetter than normal along the US Southeast Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. And the Atlantic and Caribbean hurricane season tends to be milder than usual.The strong El Nino of 1982-1983 was blamed for worsening the devastating drought in Africa, causing a series or severe winter storms to come ashore in California, spawning the first typhoon to strike French Polynesia in 75 years — followed by five more in five months — deluging Peru and Ecuador with torrential rains and promoting the worst drought in two centuries in Australia.Overall damage was estimated at between $2 billion and $8 billion by a United Nations analysis and the death toll topped l,500 worldwide.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage twoThey’re still kids, and although there’s a lot that the experts don’t yet know about them, one thing they do agree on is that what kids use and expect from their world has changed rapidly. And it’s all because of technology.To the psychologists, sociologists, and generational and media experts who study them, their digital gear sets this new group apart, even from their tech-savvy (懂技术的) Millennial elders. They want to be constantly connected and available in a way even their older siblings don’t quite get. These differences may appear slight, but they signal an all-encompassing sensibility that some say marks the dawning of a new generation.The contrast between Millennials and this younger group was so evident to psychologist Larry Rosen of California State University that he has declared the birth of a new generation in a new book, Rewired: Understanding the ingeneration and the Way They Learn, out next month. Rosen says the tech-dominated life experience of those born since the early 1990s is so different from the Millennials he wrote about in his 2007 book, Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation, that they warrant the distinction of a new generation, which he has dubbed the “ingeneration”.“The technology is the easiest way to see it, but it’s also a mind-set, and the mind-set goes with the little ‘I’, which I’m talking to stand for ‘individualized’,” Rosen says. “Everything is defined and individualized to ‘me’. My music choices are defined to ‘me’. What I watch on TV any instant is defined to ‘me’.” He says the iGeneration includes today’s teens and middle-school teenagers, but it’s too soon to tell about elementary-school ages and younger.Rosen says the iGeneration believes anything is possible. “If they can think of it, somebody probably has or will invent it,” he says. “They expect innovation.”They have high expectations that whatever they want or can use “will be able to be tailored to their own needs and wishes and desires.”Rosen says portability is key. They are inseparable from their wireless devices, which allow them to text as well as talk, so they can be constantly connected-even in class, where cell phones are supposedly banned.Many researchers are trying to determine whether technology somehow causes the brains of young people to be wired differently. “They should be distracted and should perform more poorly than they do,” Rosen says. “But findings show teens survive distractions much better than we would predict by their age and their brain development.”Because these kids are more immersed and at younger ages, Rosen says, the educational system has to change significantly.“The growth curve on the use of technology with children is exponential(指数的), and we run the risk of being out of step with this generation as far as how they learn and how they think,” Rosen says.“We have to give them options because they want their world individualized.”

阅读理解Passage 3 The history of the rabbit in Australia demonstrates that people can be really silly

阅读理解Text C For an increasing number of students at American universities, Old is suddenly in

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage OnePerhaps the most obvious way artistic creation reflects how people live is by mirroring the environment-the materials and technologies available to a culture. Stone, wood, tree bark, clay, and sand are generally available materials. In addition, depending on the locality, other resources may be accessible: shells, horns, gold, copper, and silver. The different uses to which societies put these materials are of interest to anthropologists who may ask, for example, why people choose to use clay and not copper when both items are available. Although there are no conclusive answers yet, the way in which a society views its environment is sometimes apparent in its choice and use of artistic materials. The use of certain metals, for example, may be reserved for ceremonial objects of special importance. Or the belief in thesupernatural powers of a stone or treemay cause a sculptor to be sensitive to that material.What is particularly meaningful to anthropologist is the realization that although the materials available to a society may to some extent limit or influence whatitcan do artistically, the materials by no means determine what is done. Why do the artists in Japanese society rake sand into patterns; and the artists in Roman society melt sand to form glass? Moreover, even when the same material is used in the same way by members of different societies, the form or style of the work varies enormously from culture to culture. A society may simply choose to represent objects or phenomena that are important to its population. An examination of the art of the Middle Ages tells us something about the medieval preoccupation with theological doctrine. In addition to revealing the primary concerns of a society, the content of that society’s art may also reflect the culture’s social stratification.

阅读理解Passage OneUnless we spend money to spot and prevent asteroids （小行星）now, one might crash into Earth and destroy life as wc know it, say some scientists.Asteroids are bigger versions of the meteoroids （流星）that race across the night sky. Most orbit the sun far frern Earth and dont threaten us. But there are also thousands of asteroids whose orbits put them on a collision course with Earth.Buy $50 million worth of new telescopes right now. Then spend $10 million a year for the next 25 years to locale most of the space rocks. By the time we spot a fatal one, the scientists say, well have a way to change its course. Some scientists favor pushing asteroids off course with nuclear weapons. But the cost wouldnt be cheap.Is it worthwhile? Two things experts consider when judging any risk are: 1） How likely the event is; and 2） How bad the consequences if the event occurs. Experts think an asteroid big enough to destroy lots of life might strike Earth once every 500, 000 years. Sounds pretty rare but if one did fall, it would be the end of the world. 44Ifwe dont take care of these big asteroids, theyll take care of us, says one scientist. Its that simple.The cure, though, might be worse than the disease. Do we really want fleets of nuclear weapons sitting around on Earth? The world has less to fear from doomsday （毁灭性白勺）ocks than from a great nuclear fleet set against them, said a New York Times article.

阅读理解Passage 4 Every year thousands of people are arrested and taken to court for shoplifting

阅读理解Passage 3 Researchers have established that when people are mentally engaged, biochemical changes occur in the brain that allow it to act more effectively in cognitive (认知的) areas such as attention and memory

阅读理解The health-care economy is filled with unusual and even unique economic relationships. One of the least understanding involves the peculiar roles of producer or “provider” and purchaser or “consumer” in the typical doctor-patient relationship. In most sectors of the economy, it is the seller who attempts to attract a potential buyer with various inducements of price, quality, and utility, and it is the buyer who makes the decision. Such condition, however, does not prevail in most ofthe health-care industry.In the health-care industry, the doctor-patient relationship is the mirror image of the ordinary relationship between producer and consumer. Once an individual has chosen to see a physician — and even then there may be no real choice — it is the physician who usually makes all significant purchasing decisions: whether the patient should return “next Wednesday”, whether X-rays are needed, whether drugs should be prescribed, etc. It is a rare and sophisticated patient who will challenge such professional decisions or raise in advance questions about price, especially when the disease is regarded as serious.This is particularly significant in relation to hospital care. The physician must certify the need for hospitalization, determine what procedures will be performed, and announce when the patient may be discharged. The patient may be consulted about some of these decisions, but in the main it is the doctor’s judgments that are final. Little wonder then that in the eye of the hospital it is the physician who is the real “consumer”. As a consequence, the medical staff represents the “power center” in hospital policy and decision-making, not the administration.Although usually there are in this situation four identifiable participants — the physician,the hospital, the patient, and the payer (generally an insurance carrier or government) — the physician makes the essential decisions for all of them. The hospital becomes an extension of the physician; the payer generally meets most of the bills generated by the physician/hospital, and for the most part the patient plays a passive role. We estimate that about 75-80 percent of health-care expenditures are determined by physicians, not patients. For this reason, the economy directed at patients or the general is relatively ineffective.

阅读理解Directions: There are three passages in (his section. Eachpassage is followed by some questions or unfinishedstatements. For each of them there are four choices markedA, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice andthen blacken the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet.Passage OneIn the first year or so of Web business, most of theaction revolved around efforts to tap the consumer market.More recently, as the Web proved to be more than afashion, companies have started to buy and sell productsand services with one another. Such business-to-businesssales make sense because business people typically knowwhat product they’re looking for.Nonetheless, many companies still hesitate to use the Webbecause of doubts about its reliability. “Businesses needto feel they can trust the pathway between them and thesupplier, ” says senior analyst Blanc Erwin of ForresterResearch. Some companies are limiting the risk byconducting online transactions only with establishedbusiness partners who are given access to the company’ sprivate intranet.Another major shift in the model for Internet commerceconcerns the technology available for marketing. Untilrecently, internet marketing activities have focused onstrategies to “pull” customers into sites. In the pastyear, however, software companies have developed toolsthat allow companies to “push” information directly outto consumers, transmitting marketing messages directly totargeted customers. Most notably, the Pointcast Networkuses a screen saver to deliver a continually updatedstream of news and advertisements to subscribers’computer monitors. Subscribers can customize theinformation they want to receive and proceed directly to acompany’ s Web site. Companies such as Virtual Vineyardsare already starting to use similar technologies to pushmessages to customers about special sales, productoffering, or other events, But push technology has earnedthe contempt of many Web users, online culture thinkshighly of the notion that the information flowing onto thescreen comes there by specific request. Once commercialpromotion begins to fill the screen uninvited, thedistinction between the Web and television fades. That’ sa prospect that horrifies Net purists.But it is hardly inevitable that companies on the Web willneed to resort to push strategies to make money. Theexamples of Virtual Vineyards, Amazon. com, and otherpioneers show that a Web site selling the right kind ofproducts with the right mix of interactivity, hospitality,and security will attract online customers. And the costof computing power continues to free fall, which is a goodsign for any enterprise setting up shop in silicon. Peoplelooking back 5 or 10 years from now may well wonder why sofew companies took the online plunge.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage OneThe history of clinical nutrition, or the study of the relationship between health and how the body takes in and utilizes food substances, can be divided into four distinct eras: the first began in the nineteenth century and extended into the early twentieth century when it was recognized for the first time that food contained constituents that were essential for human function and that different foods provided different amounts of these essential agents. Near the end of this era, research studies demonstrated that rapid weight loss was associated with nitrogen imbalance and could only be rectified by providing adequate dietary protein associated with certain foods.The second era was initiated in the early decades of the twentieth century and might be called “the vitamin period.” Vitamins came to be recognized in foods, and deficiency syndromes were described. As vitamins became recognized as essential food constituents necessary for health, it became tempting to suggest that every disease and condition for which there had been no previous effective treatment might be responsive to vitamin therapy. At that point in time, medical schools started to become more interested in having their curricula integrate nutritional concepts into the basic sciences. Much of the focus of this education was on the recognition of vitamin deficiency symptoms. Herein lay the beginning of what ultimately turned from ignorance to denial of the value of nutritional therapies in medicine. Reckless claims were made for effects of vitamins that went far beyond what could actually be achieved from the use of them.In the third era of nutritional history in the early 1950’s to mid-1960s, vitamin therapy began to fall into disrepute.Concomitant withthis, nutrition education in medical schools also became less popular. It was just a decade before this that many drug companies had found their vitamin sales skyrocketing and were quick to supply practicing physicians with generous samples of vitamins and literature extolling the virtue of supplementation for a variety of health-related conditions. Expectations as to the success of vitamins in disease control were exaggerated. As is known in retrospect, vitamin and mineral therapies are much less effective when applied to health-crisis conditions than when applied to long-term problems of under-nutrition that lead to chronic health problems.

阅读理解Passage 3 We sometimes think humans are uniquely vulnerable to anxiety, but stress seems to affect the immune defenses of lower animals too

阅读理解Text A Long after the 1998 World Cup was won, disappointed fans were still cursing the disputed refereeing decisions that denied victory to their team

阅读理解Passage B Richard, King of England from 1189 to 1199, with all his characteristic virtues and faults cast in a heroic mould, is one of the most fascinating medieval figures

阅读理解Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage oneWhen I was six or seven, I was taken out of school and put to bed for several months for an ailment the doctor described as “fast=beating heart.” I felt all right—perhaps I felt too good. It was the feeling of suspense. At any rate, I was allowed to occupy all day my parents’ double bed in the front upstairs bedroom.I was supposed to rest, and the little children didn’t get to run in and excite me often. Davis School was as close as across the street. I could keep up with it from the window beside me, hear the principal ring her bell, see which children were tardy, watch my classmates eat together at recess: I knew their sandwiches. I was homesick for school; my mother made time for teaching me arithmetic and hearing my spelling.But I never dreamed I could learn as long as I was away from the schoolroom. After they’d told me goodnight and tucked me in—although I knew that after I’d finally fallen asleep they’d pick me up and carry me away —my parents draped the lampshade with a sheet of the daily paper, which was tilted, like a hat brim, so that they could sit in their rockers in a lighted part of the room and I could supposedly go to sleep in the protected dark of the bed. They sat talking. What was thus dramatically made a present of to me was the secure sense of the hidden observer. As long as I could make myself keep awake, I was free to listen to every word my parents said between them.I don’t remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn’t supposed to—perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one. I was conscious of this secret and of my fast- beating heart in step together, as I lay in the slant-shaded light of the room with a brown, pear-shaped scorch in the newspaper shade where it had become overheated once.What they talked about I have no idea, and the subject was not what mattered to me. It was no doubt whatever a young married couple spending their first time privately in each other’s company in the long, probably harried day would talk about. It was the murmur of their voices, the back- and-forth, the unnoticed stretching away of time between my bedtime and theirs that made me back there at my distance. What I felt was not that I was excluded from them but that I was included, in—and because of—what I could hear of their voices and what I could see of their faces in the cone of yellow light under the brown-scorched shade.I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer; and owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind.A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began to write stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade, all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.I have always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go. As time and my imagination led me on, I did plunge.

阅读理解Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage 2Everyone is interested in whether different foods or nutrients affect our odds of getting diseases like cancer or of developing risk factors for those diseases, such as too much weight or high blood pressure. But there are many barriers to studying dietary change, which is why we still have no easy answers to the question of what, exactly, we should eat to be at our healthiest. It’s also why you can be forgiven for often feeling whipsawed by headlines: Is coffee good or bad? What about alcohol, garlic, or chocolate?This week researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that breast cancer survivors who cram their diets with fruits and vegetables are no more likely to escape a recurrence than women who stick to the usual five-a-day recommendation. Does that mean fruits and vegetables don’t protect against cancer? No—just that in this specific group of women with breast cancer, the extra greens and additional apples didn’t seem to help.We asked researchers to explain why studies involving dietary changes are so hard to do—and what consumers should keep in mind when they read about them. Here’s what the experts said:Most diet studies take place in the real world. That means study subjects are keeping diaries of what they eat as they go rather than having their intake strictly controlled by someone else. You can give them meal advice, counseling, and how-to books up to their ears, but at the end of the day, they are on their own when it comes to what they put in their mouths. It’s easier to get people to add something—like garlic, in the form of tasty sandwich spreads, or dark chocolate—than to take something away; no wonder a recent study comparing low-fat and low-carb diet plans found that almost no one was sticking to them by the end.In studies focusing on diet, including the recent study on breast cancer recurrence, the amount of calories subjects reported eating would have caused them to lose far more weight than they actually did lose. The misreporting isn’t necessarily vicious, but the inaccuracies add up. Say you’re phoned about your daily intake on a day when it was someone’s birthday at work and you had a slice of cake. You may not report it, thinking that a typical day wouldn’t include the cake forgetting yesterday’s “special occasion” piece of pizza, and the Big Gulp of the day before. Or, despite the portion size guides you get, you characterize your bagel from the deli as a 4- ounce standard serving when a 4-ounce bagel hasn’t been sighted in any major city for a decade.“You can’t put a camera in everyone’s belly and see exactly what they ate,” says Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center who has recently published research on garlic and diet plans. You can get around this in some studies by taking objective measurements. Weight, for example, or if you’re assessing intake of fruits and veggies, you can measure the level of pigments called carotenoids in the blood. In the breast cancer study, blood tests showed that the study subjects actually did eat more fruits and veggies (carotenoid concentration was 73 percent higher in those women after one year and 43 percent higher after four years). But objective measures can’t definitively nail down whether someone is eating nutrients in certain proportions.

阅读理解Passage 4 Once they‟ve discovered that moon rhymes with June, poets throughout the ages have seemingly forgotten everything else about our neighboring heavenly body and proceeded to write countless lines about the moonwithout checking the facts

阅读理解Passage B The tourist trade is booming

阅读理解Questions 41-45 are based on the following passage: Habits are a funny thing