四、阅读理解
第一篇
Gross NationalHappiness
In the last century, new technologyimproved the lives of many people in many countries. However, one countryresisted these changes. High in the Himalayan mountains of Asia, the kingdom of Bhutan remained separate. Its people andBuddhist(佛教)culture had not been affected for almost a thousand years. Bhutan,however, was a poor country. People died at a young age. Most of its peoplecould not read, and they did not know much about the outside world. Then, in 1972,a new ruler named King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided to help Bhutan tobecome modern, but without losing its traditions.
King Wangchuck looked at other countriesfor ideas. He saw that most countries measured their progress by their GrossNational Product (GNP). The GNP measures products and money. When the number ofproducts sold increases, people say the country is making progress. KingWangchuck had a different idea for Bhutan. He wanted to measure hiscountry’s progress by people’s happiness. If the people’s happiness increased,the king could say that Bhutanwas making progress. To decide if people were happier, he created a measurecalled Gross National Happiness (GNH).
GNH is based on certain principles thatcreate happiness. People are happier if they have health care, education, andjobs. They are happier when they live in a healthy, protected environment. Theyare happier when they can keep their traditional culture and customs. Finally,people are happier when they have a good, stable government.
Now there is some evidence of increasedGNH in Bhutan.People are healthier and are living longer. More people are educated andemployed. Teenty-five percent of the land has become national parks, and thecountry has almost no pollution. The Bhutanese continue to wear theirtraditional clothing and follow their ancient Buddhist customs. Bhutan has alsobecome a democracy. In 2008, King Wangchuck gave his power to his son. Althoughthe country still had a king, it held its first democratic elections that year.Bhutanhad political parties and political candidates for the first time. Finally, Bhutan hasconnected to the rest of the world through television and internet.
Bhutanis a symbol for social progress. Many countries are now interested in Bhutan’s GNH.These countries are investigating their own ways to measure happiness. Theywant to create new policies that take care of their people, cultures, and land.
Brazilmay be the nest country to use the principles of GNH. Brazilian leaders see theprinciples of GNH as a source of inspiration. Brazil is a large country with adiverse population. If happiness works as a measure of progress in Brazil, perhapsthe rest of the world will follow.
31.Who was Jigme Singye Wangchuck?
A. Apresident.
B. A Buddhistpriest.
C. A king.
D. A general.
32.Apart from modernizing Bhutan,what else did Wangchuck want to do for Bhutan?
A. To make itspopulation grow.
B. To keep itseparate from the world.
C. To keep its traditions and customs.
D. To encourageits people to get rich.
33.A country shows its progress with GNP by
A. selling more products.
B. spending moremoney.
C. spending lessmoney.
D. providingmore jobs.
34.According to GNH, people are happier if they
A. have newtechnology.
B. have a good, stable government.
C. can changetheir religion.
D. have moremoney.
35.Today many countries are
A. using theprinciples of GNH to measure their progress.
B. workingtogether to develop a common scale to measure GNH.
C. taking both Bhutan and Brazil as symbols for socialprogress.
D. trying to find their own ways tomeasure happiness.
第二篇
DownloadKnowledge Directly to Your Brain
For the first time, researchers havebeen able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using inducedbrain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as aninstant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, butit’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching andrehabilitation techniques.
Future therapies could decode the brainactivity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark forteaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.
Scientists from BostonUniversity and ATR ComputationalNeuroscience Laboratories in Kyotoused functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learningprocess. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptuallearning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performanceon a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people hasbeen an ongoing debate in neuroscience.
Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe,researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate thevisual cortex. First they showed participants circles at differentorientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity.The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate thisvisual cortex activity.
The volunteers were again placed in MRImachines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants wereasked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to makea solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paidbonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anythingabout what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brainactivity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.
“Participants can be trained to control theoverall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write,“or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”
This worked even when test subjects werenot aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.
“The most surprising thing in this study isthat mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specificvisual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature,without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,”Watanabe said in a statement.
Watanabe and colleagues said this methodcan be a powerful tool.
“It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire newlearning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge thathas been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’sawareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.
36. what have researchers been ableto do with the help of the study?
A. Discover aperson’s learning process in the brain.
B. Make a person know how to do something without learning.
C. Set up different learning patterns for different people.
D. Enable people to learn kung fu instantly.
37. what helps aperson to do a particular task better in visual perceptual learning?
A. Testing
B. Encouragement
C. Self- assessment
D. Repetition
38. which of thefollowing statements is true of the experiment participants?
A.They learned how to control MRL machines in the experiment
B. They werenot told what to be learned in the experiment
C.They were paid to take part in the experiment
D.They were not cooperative in the experiment
39. the findingof the study is most significant in that learning
A. is full offun
B. is visualized
C. happens unconsciously
D. becomes unnecessary
40. who are mostlikely to benefit from the study?
A. Teenagers
B. Musicians
C. Senior people
D. Athletes
第三篇
Small But Wise
On December 14, NASA1 blasted a smallbut mighty telescope into space. The telescope is called WISE and is about aswide around as a trashcan. Don't let its small size fool you: WISE has apowerful digital camera, and it will be taking pictures of some the wildestobjects2 in the known universe,including asteroids, faint stars, blazing galaxies3 and giant clouds of dustwhere planets and stars are born.
“I'mvery excited because we're going to be seeing parts of the universe that wehaven't seen before, ” said Ned Wright, a scientist who directs the WISEproject.
Since arriving in space, the WISEtelescope has been circling the Earth, held by gravity in a polar orbit4( thismeans it crosses close to the north and south poles with each lap5). Its camerais pointed outward, away from the Earth, and WISE will snap a picture of adifferent part of the sky every 11 minutes. After six months it will have takenpictures across the entire sky.
The pictures taken by WISE won't be likeeveryday digital photographs, however. WISE stands for “Wide-field InfraredSurvey Explorer. ” As its name suggests, the WISE camera takes pictures offeatures that give off infrared radiation6.
Radiation is energy that travels as awave. Visible light, including the familiar spectrum of light7 that becomesvisible in a rainbow, is an example of radiation. When an ordinary digitalcamera takes a picture of a tree, for example, it receives the waves of visiblelight that are reflected off the tree. When these waves enter the camerathrough the lens, they're processed by the camera, which then puts the imagetogether.
Waves of infrared radiation are longerthan waves of visible light, so ordinary digital cameras don't see them, andneither do the eyes of human beings. Although invisible to the eye, longerinfrared radiation can be detected as warmth by the skin.
That's a key idea to why WISE will beable to see things other telescopes can't. Not everything in the universe showsup in visible light. Asteroids, for example, are giant rocks that float throughspace — but they absorb most of the light that reaches them. They don't reflectlight, so they're difficult to see. But they do give off infrared radiation, soan infrared telescope like WISE will be able to produce images of them. Duringits mission WISE will take pictures of hundreds of thousands of asteroids.
Brown dwarfs8 are another kind ofdeep-space object that will show up in WISE's pictures. These objects are“failed” stars — which means they are not massive enough to jump start9 thesame kind of reactions that power stars such as the sun. Instead, brown dwarfssimply shrink and cool down. They're so dim that they're almost impossible tosee with visible light, but in the infrared spectrum they glow.
41. What is sospecial about WISE?
A It is as small as a trashcan.
B It is small in size but carries a large camera.
C Its digital camera can helpastronomers to see the unknown space.
D Never before has a telescope carried a digital camera in space.
42. The cameraon WISE
A is equipped with expensive computers.
B produces images of objects givingoff infrared radiation.
C reflects light visible to the human eyes.
D is similar to an ordinary digital camera.
43. It is truethat infrared radiation.
A is not detectable to humans.
B looks brighter than visible light.
C is visible light reflected off an object.
D has longer waves than thoseof visible light.
44. Which of thefollowing statements about asteroids is NOT ture?
A The WISE telescope can catch and take pictures of them.
B They do not reflect light that reaches them.
C They float through spacegiving off visible light.
D They are invisible to ordinary cameras.
45. It can beinferred from the last paragraph that brown dwarfs.
A give off infrared radiation.
B are power stars like the sun.
C become massive and active
D are invisible to the WISE telescope.
