One reaction to all the concern about tropical deforestation（毁林） is a blank stare that asks the question, "Since I don't live there, what does it have to do with me?"
The answer is that your way of life, wherever you live in the world, is tied to the tropics in many ways. If you live in a house, wash your hair, eat fruits and vegetables, drink soda, or drive a car, you can be certain that you are affected by the loss of tropical forests.
Biologically, we are losing the richest regions on earth when, each minute, a piece of tropical forest, the size of ten city blocks, disappears. As many as five million species of plants, animals, and insects (40 to 50 percent of all living things) live there, and are being lost faster than they can be found and described. Their loss is immeasurable.
Take rubber for example. For many uses, only natural rubber from trees will do. Synthetics are not good enough. Today over half the world's commercial rubber is produced in Malaysia and Indonesia, while the Amazon's rubber industry produces much of the world's four million tons. And rubber is an important material in making gloves, balloons, footwear and many sporting goods. Thousands of other tropical plants are valuable for their industrial use.
Many scientists strongly believe that deforestation contributes to the greenhouse effect -- or heating of the earth from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As we destroy forests, we lose their ability to change carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Carbon dioxide levels could double within the next half-century, warming the earth by as much as 4.5 degrees. The result? A partial melt-down of polar ice caps, raising sea levels as much as 24 feet; even 15 feet could threaten anyone living within 35 miles of the coast. Unbelievable? Maybe. But scientists warn that by the time we realise the severe effects of tropical deforestation, it will be 20 years too late.
Can tropical deforestation affect our everyday lives? Now, you should have got the answer.The underlined word "synthetics" probably means_________.
| A．natural rubber | B．tropical materials |
| C．man-made material | D．commercial rubber |
According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true?
| A．The forests are losing their function in turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. |
| B．Many of our daily uses are related to the tropical forests. |
| C．Tropical plants can be used to make industrial products. |
| D．High carbon dioxide levels will make the earth warmer. |
The author's attitude towards the tropical deforestation is _________ .
| A．puzzling | B．cold |
| C．supporting | D．opposed |
Which of the following might be the best title for the passage?
| A．Tropical Forests | B．The Value of Tropical Forests |
| C．Tropical Forests and Our Life | D．The Greenhouse Effects |
A
In the " Mystery Spot" in California, you will be able to experience what it's like to live in a gravity-free world, without ever leaving the earth.
Discovered in 1939, the area where Mystery Spot is located was originally marked for a summer cabin. But when people tried to chart the plot, their instruments started going out of control. Investigators that were sent to look into the strange phenomenon reported feeling light-headed as though some invisible force was trying to knock them off balance. The decision to build the summer cabin was abandoned. Instead, the owners decided to build a structure that they called the Mystery Spot and open it to the public so that everyone could experience /t.
Over the years, thousands of tourists have flooded to the 150-square-foot area to see short people appear the same height as tall ones and experience leaning at impossihle angles without falling over.
So what causes these slrange things to happen? Some believe that it is because the area is an electromagnetic(电磁的) hotspot, while others are convinced that there are some unknown geological forces at work to contradict the law of gravity.
Rational scientists have thrown cold water on all these theories. In 1981, Ray Hyman, a psychology professor, conducted a study on this and other similar mystery spots that have been " discovered" in various parts of the country. His conclusion? It's because of the way the structures have been constructed.
Though they appear to be normal structures, they are like funhouses, filled with floors that are not level, corners that are not squared and walls that are not vertical.
Some experts believe that mystery spots such as the one in Santa Cruz are a product of the Great Depression, when the only industry that was growing in America was entertainment.
What can we do in the " Mystery Spot" in California?
| A．To experience what it is like to have no gravity. ' |
| B．To make preparations to leave the earth for space. |
| C．To communicate with astronauts in space. |
| D．To look for answers to many mysteries. |
What does the underlined word "it" refer to in Para. 2 ?
| A．Charting a place with advanced instruments. |
| B．Being made light-hearted and happy by some force. |
| C．What it's like to have no gravity in a place. |
| D．Seeing short people grow tall. |
What's the explanation of some rational scientists to the strange phenomenon?
| A．The Mystery Spot islocated in an electromagnetic hotspot. |
| B．There are some unknown geological forces underground. |
| C．The Mystery Spot is a normal structure like funhouses. |
| D．The Mystery Spot was built in a special way, |
After the Mystery Spot was built, it _________.
| A．has become a spot where hot movies are made |
| B．has become a tourist attraction |
| C．has been a place where short people always go |
| D．has become a scientific research center |
第四部分任务型阅读(共10小题；每小题1分，满分10分)
Man has been studying the influence of nature and nurture on human development. Nature refers to the biological factors in a human. Essentially, it’s the genetic makeup of an individual. These are the genes that we were born with and that cannot be altered with conditioning. Traits such as hair color and type, eye color and height form a part of what is called “nature”. Disorders and diseases that are inherited (遗传) genetically also form a part of this view. On the other hand, nurture refers to the environmental factors and influences, along with an individual’s personal experiences. This includes the childhood experiences, relationships with friends, families, neighbors and colleagues, events, and so on.
Which one plays a more important role in an individual’s development, nature or nurture? Actually, they interact together in our developmental process and we can’t ignore the existence of one in favor of the other. Our genetic makeup gives us our physical characteristics. Along with it, certain underlying traits are also heritable. For example, behavioral traits like what language we speak, how we interact with others, and how we respond to certain situations are all molded by “nurture”—this is obvious because the environment we’re brought up in shapes these factors over time. But it’s also noted that some of these traits are partially heritable. For instance, aggressive behavior is something partially received from genes. But if the person grew up in an aggressive family environment, or had friends who displayed aggressive behavior, then he / she will eventually become very aggressive.
In the case of intelligence, there are studies which show environmental factors have a bigger hand in molding childhood IQ. But by adulthood, this correlation (关联) is almost absent. They reveal that by adulthood, the difference in IQ among adoptive siblings (兄弟姐妹) may make them seem like strangers, despite the shared environment they grew up in. In natural siblings on the other hand, there is a correlation of about 0.6. In the twin studies, it is showed that identical twin has a higher correlation (about 0.86). This seems to suggest that nature plays a bigger role in shaping intelligence.
But we cannot rule out nurture entirely. For example, nutrition plays an important role in shaping intelligence. If a child isn’t put on a proper diet from the beginning, then his / her neural (神经的) connections get disrupted, which leaves him / her mentally challenged. If a child often feels stressed and is exposed to poisonous things, his / her intellectual growth will also be affected. A person may have natural talents, but if he / she wasn’t brought up in the right surroundings, his / her potential may never be realized. On the contrary, even someone with lower genetic inheritance of intellect may be nurtured in a rich educational environment and may be able to develop their original potentials.
| Nature vs. nurture: which decides your behavior? |
|
| Concept of nature |
● Nature refers to a person’s inherent genes that always remain ● One’s |
| Concept of nurture |
● Nurture refers to the environment one is brought up in. ● Childhood experiences, interpersonal relationships and events all are |
| Effects of nature and nurture |
● Nature and nurture are both important for a person’s ● Though some behavioral traits are inherited genetically, they can be changed by the environment the person grows up in. ● For example, aggressive behavior, partially inherited, will become more |
| Effects of nature on intelligence |
● According to studies, the effects of nature on intelligence ● However, this doesn’t mean that nature has no effects on intelligence; instead, it plays a bigger part in the |
| Effects of nurture on intelligence |
● An ● Stress and ● Sometimes whether one’s potentials can be realized is partly |
D
For 23 years, Barbara Bentree had been making Los Angeles her home, thriving on the bustle of city life.
She said, “As a singer who studied music education in college, I moved to California in my early 20s with stars in my eyes.” She found work — teaching in private schools, and in her spare time she performed in one-woman shows, sang for various studio recordings and even appeared as a singer in several episodes of TV shows, including Ally McBeal, Days of Our Lives and Wings. Through teaching, she began to make connections with people in the production world and was soon being referred to work with children in the entertainment industry.
“I was young and single and really excited about being in a big city,” Bentree said about those early years in Los Angeles. “To participate in movies and television was very, very exciting.”
Eventually, Bentree was recruited to work on The Mickey Mouse Club TV show as a music producer, helping to train Mouseketeers, including famous alumnae Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. She worked in various production and music director roles for big networks like Disney, and eventually met and fell in love with her husband, John Rangel, a pianist and composer, who moved to Los Angeles from Florida in the early 1990s to be closer to her. They married two years ago, after decades together.
The couple lived along the city’s striking coastline, in beachfront areas such as Pacific Palisades and Malibu. “They were wonderful and beautiful,” Bentree said, “but very expensive.” To keep up with the cost of their rented apartment, Bentree worked on several projects that were lucrative but not artistically satisfying.
At one point she looked at her life and realized she was spending 10 hours a week in the car, commuting (通勤) back and forth to work on a particular project.
“It was a little crazy, and there was a lot of running around,” Bentree said. “When I turned 50, I started to have the feeling that Los Angeles is not the place for me to grow old. The things that were important to me when I was young — all that excitement, the sense of accomplishment and ambition — have changed,” she continued. “Now, what I find interesting is time, and being close to nature and my community. I am less interested in feeling like I’m living in the center of the universe.”
Around 2004, the couple decided not to renew the lease on their apartment. Towards the end of the year, Bentree visited a friend who had a guest house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and after two weeks, she told her husband she knew she was not going back to Los Angeles. In 2005, she made the move to Santa Fe permanently. It took a bit longer for Rangel to come round to the idea, commuting back and forth to Los Angeles weekly via two-hour-long plane rides for the first year, but eventually, he settled in as well.
As it happened, leaving the center of the entertainment world was the spark the couple needed to really get in touch with their own creativity.
The couple bought a home together there, which, according to Bentree, cost her probably twice as much as in Los Angeles, and began saving on major expenses, including car insurance and taxes. The lower cost of living also allowed Bentree to fundamentally restructure her days. Now she generally teaches two days a week and spends the remaining five working on creative pursuits, including a screenplay, a book of poetry and children’s books. “There is something comforting about being a medium or small fish in a relatively small pond as opposed to a microscopic fish in a huge pond,” she said.
Perhaps the biggest change for Bentree has been the connection to nature she feels day in and day out in her new home. Nature, according to her, is her “healing place”, her “inspiration place” and her “church”. Though the landscape around Los Angeles is lovely, in her current home she can be up in the mountains, walking through a forest by a stream, within five minutes. She recently released a new nature-inspired CD, Green, which explores various environmental issues, and is donating 100 percent of the profits to support the related causes.
“I used to say I was a ‘jazz artist’ but now I say I’m a ‘jazz activist’,” Bentree said. “I’m using music to promote my political causes and points of view.”
At no point, however, has Bentree regretted waiting so long to leave Los Angeles and her past life. Her wants and needs have changed gradually over time.
“I loved every part of living in Los Angeles for the first 10 years. The next five years were great, too. It was really only during the last few years that I started to consider leaving,” she said. “Now, I’m in a new chapter. It was scary to make that big change, but life is an adventure.”
What can we conclude from Paragraph 2?
| A．Bentree disliked teaching in the schools. |
| B．Bentree did a lot to pursue her dreams. |
| C．Bentree found it hard to live in the new city. |
| D．Bentree intended to contact famous people. |
When Bentree met her husband for the first time, .
| A．she was the director of The Mickey Mouse Club |
| B．he had lived in Los Angeles for so many years |
| C．she was seeking a job in the music industry |
| D．he worked somewhere far away from Los Angeles |
What does the underlined word “lucrative” in Paragraph 5 mean?
| A．Profitable. | B．Voluntary. |
| C．Terrible. | D．Legal. |
Which of the following is typical of Bentree’s life in Los Angeles?
| A．Living a comfortable life full of free time and artistic creativity. |
| B．Most of the time being on the way to hunt for a new teaching job. |
| C．Leading a very costly life lacking in artistical satisfaction. |
| D．Always being ready to move from one apartment to another. |
By the underlined part, Bentree means .
| A．a small pond is the equal of a big one as far as comfort is concerned |
| B．she actually prefers living in a relatively big city as an ordinary person |
| C．a relatively small pond is a good place for a fish to live comfortably |
| D．she prefers to live in a relatively small city rather than in a big one |
How does Bentree feel about living in the new home?
| A．She feels busy and exhausted. |
| B．It is colorful and meaningful. |
| C．She feels relaxed but lonely. |
| D．It is hopeful but stressful. |
C
A fly with an extremely unusual ability to hear is the model for what may be the future of new and improved hearing aids. The insect behaves like a parasite—an organism that lives on or in another organism called a host. This exceptional fly places larvae—young flies onto a cricket (蟋蟀) host. The larvae dig into the cricket and eat the insect from the inside out.
The tiny yellow fly lives in Central America and the Southern United States. It finds its host by listening out for the cricket’s high chirping voice. The fly can easily find a cricket from as far away as 91 meters.
Neal Hall is a sound engineer who worked on the new hearing aid model. According to him, the fly’s behavior is very strange. Mr. Hall and his team at the University of Texas made a copy of the fly’s hearing structure. “They discovered that the fly has a clever mechanism and instead of using two independent ears like a human does, the fly’s ears are actually coupled,” said Hall.
The fly’s ears are two millimeters apart. That distance is so small that sound reaches one ear just four millionths of a second before arriving at the other. Experts held that it should be impossible for the fly to identify where a sound is coming from. In fact, however, inside this fly’s each ear is a 1.5-millimeter-long structure similar to a see-saw — a piece of children’s playing equipment. Like the see-saw, the fly’s ear structure goes up and down from a central point. Pressure waves against the structure increase the time it takes for sound to travel and permit the fly to find its host.
Mr. Hall and his team used the chemical element silicon to copy the fly’s ear structure. They also used the special electric materials that enabled them to measure its movements at the same time. Hall said that the hearing aid device could be used in two ways. One way would be to help the military on the battlefield, where sensors could find where shots are coming from. The other would be to remove unwanted noise from a person’s surroundings.
“It is a feature that is incredibly useful for hearing aids, for example, here and now, if you turn up the gain of a hearing aid or turn the volume up to hear someone across from you, it also amplifies (放大) everything else in the room,” said Hall.
Hall said that the next test in marketing the hearing aid device was to make it usable. He said the device must be handled carefully because it is so small. He noted that the fly does not have this concern.
Neal Hall is trying to .
| A．model his new hearing aid on a kind of fly |
| B．help crickets to prevent themselves from parasites |
| C．kill the insects in a host with a new machine |
| D．make powerful killers with the help of a kind of fly |
What is the key message of Paragraph 4?
| A．The distance between the fly’s two ears. |
| B．The special structure of the fly’s ears. |
| C．The comparison between the fly’s ears and see-saws. |
| D．Pressure waves against the structure of the fly’s ears. |
With the help of the new hearing aid, people would be able to .
| A．find out where the flies come from |
| B．fall asleep when they want to |
| C．protect the peaceful environment better |
| D．choose to hear what they want to |
What is the author’s attitude towards Neal Hall and his team mentioned in the passage?
| A．Objective. | B．Tolerant. |
| C．Doubtful. | D．Pessimistic. |
B
I love my job. I’m trying to understand how plants build themselves out of thin air. It’s exciting, and it’s creative. I like working with other people with different views and I like the sharing of ideas and the piece-by-piece building of understanding by careful observations, experiments and analyses. Then there are those rare moments when suddenly something that is understood clearly makes sense and unconnected ideas fit together to make a satisfying whole.
All these motivations for life as a researcher are evident in the results of a survey to examine the culture of scientific research in the U.K. But the survey has also uncovered threats to the vibrancy (活跃) of this intellectual melting pot. With the expansion of the scientific enterprise, the current squeeze on resources and the drive towards more assessment, researchers are spending increasing amounts of time competing for funding and jobs.
Some aspects of research assessment are reasonably objective: Have these experiments been designed carefully? Does this researcher use the techniques? However, many aspects are fundamentally subjective: Are these projects exciting? Will this person revolutionize the field? All these judgments take time and carefulness, and all of them require the judges to accept the subjectivity of the exercise.
Researchers are now assessed almost entirely on the research papers that they have published in peer-reviewed journals. These are easier to assess than important but less-definite qualities such as public engagement and training, and support provided for colleagues. Publishing in important journals is still thought to be the most important element in determining whether researchers gain funding, jobs and promotions or not. It can lead to a wide range of non-ideal practices, such as over-claiming the significance of research findings, sticking to very fashionable areas of science and leaving important but confirmatory results unpublished due to lack of encouragement to spend time writing them up.
If research stops researchers finding out how the world works for the benefit of society, and makes them compete to get their work published in a particular journal, then the most creative and brilliant people will go and do something else. The people who stay in research will be those mostly encouraged by wanting to look good according to some semi-arbitrary standard. This is causing widespread unease in the research community.
We hope the findings of the survey will stimulate the debate about how to shift the culture back to its roots in creativity and invention, coupled with strictness and openness. If left unchallenged, the current trends will certainly influence what science gets done and therefore what we learn about the world. This is not just some mysterious academic debate, and it matters to everyone.
The results of a survey prove that .
| A．all the researchers can work together |
| B．some research scientists have done makes no sense |
| C．all the aspects of research assessment are reasonably subjective |
| D．researchers are spending amounts of time competing for kinds of motivations |
What most affects researchers’ gaining funding?
| A．How many papers they have published in important journals. |
| B．How much support they have given to their colleagues. |
| C．How many people have quoted from their papers. |
| D．How much they are engaged in research. |
What can we learn from the passage?
| A．The quality of research needn’t be valued. |
| B．The current assessment on research must be used. |
| C．It’s necessary to build a scientific research culture. |
| D．Researchers should spend their funding as soon as possible. |
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