Are you single or married? Are you a cat or a dog owner? Do you exercise, or are you a “couch potato”? These questions and many others are about your lifestyle.
People in the United States feel that they can choose their lifestyles and even shape their own identities. In newspapers, lifestyle issues are discussed in the features or style section. In the Chicago Tribune this section is called “Tempo”. People turn to this section for lively discussion on lifestyle choices they face with regard to their personal identities, their families, and their social lives.
Many American people believe that they can make their lives happy and satisfying despite their problems. If they lack confidence or tend to feel anxious, shy, angry, or depressed, they believe that they can change themselves. Self-help books, magazines, and feature articles are filled with advice from experts about steps to take to become a happier or more satisfied person and to improve one’s self-respect. Part of this research for self-improvement is a belief that even one’s own appearance can be controlled.
Lifestyle choices also involve moral and social issues. How should children be raised? How should people behave on a date? How should elderly people be treated? How can people stay happily married? All these kinds of issues are constantly discussed and are constantly changing.
Not only are experts such as psychologists consulted, but stars from the political and entertainment worlds are held up as lifestyle leaders as well. In the newspaper, some articles discuss in detail the personal lives or public work of famous movie stars, authors and artists. The lifestyle choices these people make contribute to the public discussion of all the issues that people think about.
A well-known advertising slogan is “Just do it.” In the culture of the United States, people believe that they can take action and become the kind of people they want to be and live the way they want to live.The section “Tempo” in the Chicago Tribune mainly discusses ______.
| A．current affairs |
| B．lifestyle choices |
| C．experts’ opinions on life |
| D．one’s self-respect |
According to the author, Americans are pretty sure that they can ______.
| A．control their own appearance |
| B．solve all the problems in their life |
| C．live a happy life in spite of their problems |
| D．improve their life by following the elders’ advice |
According to the passage, people’s opinions on moral or social issues can be influenced by ______.
| A．their teachers |
| B．family members |
| C．experts and famous people |
| D．friends and colleagues |
What does the passage mainly talk about?
| A．Lifestyles in the United States |
| B．Americans’ opinions on happiness. |
| C．Advice on shaping Americans’ identities |
| D．A famous advertising slogan —“Just do it.” |
On a hill 600 feet above the surrounding land, we watch the lines of rain move across the scene, the moon rise over the hills, and the stars appear in the sky. The views invite a long look from a comfortable chair in front of the wooden house.
Every window in our wooden house has a view, and the forest and lakes seldom look the same as the hour before. Each look reminds us where we are.There is space for our three boys to play outside, to shoot arrows, collect tree seeds, build earth houses and climb trees.
Our kids have learned the names of the trees, and with the names have come familiarity and appreciation. As they tell all who show even a passing interest, maple（枫树）makes the best fighting sticks and white pines are the best climbing trees.
The air is clean and fresh. The water from the well has a pleasant taste, and it is perhaps the healthiest water our kids will ever drink. Though they have one glass a day of juice and the rest is water, they never say anything against that.
The seasons change just outside the door. We watch the maples turn every shade of yellow and red in the fall and note the poplars'（杨树）putting out the first green leaves of spring. The rainbow smelt fills the local steam as the ice gradually disappears, and the wood frogs start to sing in pools after being frozen for the winter. A family of birds rules our skies and flies over the lake.
| 1． |
What can be learned from Paragraph 2?
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| 2． |
By mentioning the names of the trees, the author aims to show that.
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| 3． |
What does the underlined sentence in the last paragraph mean?
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| 4． |
What is the main purpose of the author writing the text?
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请认真阅读下列短文,并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意:请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。每个空格只填一个单词。
“Happiness Advantage” Effect
In July 2010 Burt’s Bees, a personal-care products company, was going through enormous change as it began a global expansion into 19 new countries. In this kind of high-pressure situation, many leaders bother their assistants with frequent meetings or flood their in-boxes with urgent demands. In doing so, managers lift everyone’s anxiety level, which activates the part of the brain that processes threats and steals resources from the prefrontal cortex ( 大脑皮层), which is responsible for effective problem solving.
Burt’s Bees’s then-CEO, John Wolfgang, took a different approach. Each day, he’d send out an e-mail praising a team member for work related to global marketing. He’d interrupt his own presentations to remind his managers to talk with their teams about the company’s values. He asked me to further a three-hour session with employees on happiness in the course of the expansion effort. As one member of the senior team told me a year later, Wolfgang’s emphasis on developing positive leadership kept his managers actively involved and loyal as they successfully transformed the company into a global one.
That outcome shouldn’t surprise us. Research shows that when people work with a positive mind-set (思维模式), performance on nearly every level—productivity, creativity, involvement— improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most people believe that success comes before happiness. “Once I get a promotion, I’ll be happy,” they think. Or, “Once I hit my sales target, I’ll feel great. ”But because success is a moving target—as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again—the happiness that results from success does not last long.
In fact, it works the other way around: People who have a positive mind-set perform better in the face of challenge. I call this the “ happiness advantage”—every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. I’ve observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success. And I’m not alone: In an analysis of 225 academic studies, researchers found strong evidence of cause-and-effect relationship between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes.
Another common misunderstanding is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of the two determines how happy we are. To be sure, both factors have an impact. But one’s general sense of well-being is surprisingly unstable. The habits you form, the way you interact with colleagues, how you think about stress—all these can be managed to increase your happiness and your chances of success.
Franz Kafka wrote that “a book must be the ax (斧子) for the frozen sea inside us. ”I once shared this sentence with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.
We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she got out of her chair to take a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with imprisoned parents, abusive parents, irresponsible parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless; kids who grew up in violent neighborhoods. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic—the giving way of dreams to fate (命运).
For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my headmaster after learning that a former excellent student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school—one that often attracts the literary-minded children of Manhattan’s upper classes—into a less competitive setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in prison, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital” could help students like her develop better in high school, where they would unavoidably meet, perhaps for the first time, students who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned Ph. D.’s.
Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read: Sounder, The Red Pony, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The students didn’t always read from the expected point of view. About The Red Pony, one student said, “it’s about being a man, it’s about manliness. ”I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies (独白) read as raps (说唱), but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read The Grapes of Wrath and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical view was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, former students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their first year in college as a result of the classes.
Year after year, however, we are increasing the number of practice tests. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, not for emotional punch (碰撞) but for text complexity. Yet, we cannot enrich (充实) the minds of our students by testing them on texts that ignore their hearts. We are teaching them that words do not amaze but confuse. We may succeed in raising test scores, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.The underlined words in Paragraph 1 probably mean that a book helps to __________.
| A．realize our dreams | B．give support to our life |
| C．smooth away difficulties | D．awake our emotions |
Why were the students able to understand the novel Of Mice and Men?
| A．Because they spent much time reading it. |
| B．Because they had read the novel before. |
| C．Because they came from a public school. |
| D．Because they had similar life experiences. |
The girl left the selective high school possibly because__________.
| A．she was a literary-minded girl | B．her parents were immigrants |
| C．she couldn’t fit in with her class | D．her father was then in prison |
To the author’s surprise, the students read the novels__________.
| A．creatively | B．passively | C．repeatedly | D．carelessly |
The author writes the passage mainly to__________.
| A．introduce classic works of literature |
| B．advocate teaching literature to touch the heart |
| C．argue for equality among high school students |
| D．defend the current testing system |
Medical drugs sometimes cause more damage than they cure. One solution to this problem is to put the drugs inside a capsule, protecting them from the body-and the body from them-until they can be released at just the right spot. There are lots of ways to trigger (引发) this release, including changing temperature, acidity, and so on. But triggers can come with their own risks-burns, for example. Now, researchers in California have designed what could be a harmless trigger to date: shining near-infrared light (NIR, 近红外线) on the drug in the capsule.
The idea of using light to liberate the drug in the capsule isn't new. Researchers around the globe have developed polymers (聚合物) and other materials that begin to break down when they absorb either ultraviolet (UV, 紫外线) or visible light. But tissues also readily absorb UV and visible light, which means the drug release can be triggered only near the skin, where the light can reach the capsule. NIR light largely passes through tissues, so researchers have tried to use it as a trigger. But few compounds (化合物) absorb NIR well and go through chemical changes.
That changed last year when Adah Almutairi, a chemist at the University of California, San Diego, reported that she and her colleagues had designed a polymer that breaks down when it absorbs NIR light. Their polymer used a commercially available NIR-absorbing group called o-nitrobenzyl (ONB). When they catch the light, ONB groups fall off the polymer, leading to its breakdown. But ONB is only a so-so NIR absorber, and it could be poisonous to cells when it separates from the polymer.
So Almutairi and her colleagues reported creating a new material for capsules that's even better.This one consists of a long chain of compounds called cresol groups linked in a polymer. Cresol contains reactive(易反应的) components that make it highly unstable in its polymeric form, a feature Almutairi and her colleagues use to their advantage. After polymerizing the cresols, they cap each reactive component with a light-absorbing compound called Bhc. When the Bhcs absorb NIR light, the reactive groups are exposed and break the long polymer into two short chains. Shining additional light continues this breakdown, potentially releasing any drugs in the capsule. What's more, Almutairi says, Bhc is 10 times better at absorbing NIR than is ONB and is not poisonous to cells.
| 1． |
According to the passage, which of the following could be the best trigger?
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| 2． |
Why is ONB unsatisfactory?
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| 3． |
Which word can be used to complete the following process of changes?
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Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan sees an epidemic (流行病) sweeping across America’s farmland. It has little to do with the usual challenges, such as flood, rising fuel prices and crop-eating insects. The country’s farmers are getting older, and there are fewer people standing in line to take their place. National agricultural census (普查) figures show that the fastest-growing group of farmers is the part over 65. Merrigan is afraid the average age will be even higher when the 2012 statistics are completed.
Merrigan, a former college professor, is making stops at universities across the country in hopes of encouraging more students to think about careers in agriculture. Aside from trying to stop the graying of America’s farmers, her work is made tougher by a recent blog posting that put agriculture at No. 1 on a list of “useless” college degrees. Top federal agriculture officials are talking about the posting, and it has the attention of agricultural organizations across the country.
“There couldn’t be anything that’s more incorrect,” Merrigan said. “We know that there aren’t enough qualified graduates to fill the jobs that are out there in American agriculture.”
In addition, a growing world population that some experts predict will require 70% more food production by 2050, she said.
“I truly believe we’re at a golden age of agriculture. Global demand is at an all-time record high, and global supplies are at all-time record lows,” said Matt Rush, director of the Texas Farm Bureau. “Production costs are going to be valuable enough that younger people are going to have the opportunity to be involved in agriculture.”
The Department of Agriculture has programs aimed at developing more farmers and at increasing interest in locally grown food. The National Young Farmers’ Coalition has also been pushing for state and federal policy changes to make it easier for new farmers.
Ryan Best, president of Future Farmers of America, has been living out of a suitcase, traveling the country and visiting with high school students about careers in agriculture. The 21-year-old Best hopes his message—that this is a new time in agriculture—will motivate the next generation to turn around the statistics. “Never before have we had the innovations (创新) in technology which have led to agriculture in this country being the most efficient it has ever been,” he said. “There’s really a place for everybody to fit in.”What is the new challenge to American agriculture?
| A．Fewer and older farmers. | B．Higher fuel prices. |
| C．More natural disasters. | D．Lower agricultural output. |
Why is Merrigan visiting universities across the country?
| A．To draw federal agriculture officials’ attention. |
| B．To select qualified agriculture graduates. |
| C．To clarify a recent blog posting. |
| D．To talk more students into farming careers. |
According to Matt Rush, American agriculture will provide opportunities for younger people
because__________..
| A．the government will cover production costs |
| B．global food supplies will be even lower |
| C．investment in agriculture will be profitable |
| D．America will increase its food export |
What do the underlined words “to turn around the statistics” in the last paragraph mean?
| A．To re-analyze the result of the national census. |
| B．To increase agricultural production. |
| C．To bring down the average age of farmers. |
| D．To invest more in agriculture. |
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