If a woman has an extra piece of cake, don't blame it on greed, blame it on her brain.
Scientists have found that women’s brains react to food very differently- and much more strongly - than men's. Academics found that decades of dieting pressure on women and advertising have programmed certain parts of the female brain to react strongly when faced with any kind of food.
Dr. Rudolf Uher and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry in King's College London used brain scanning technology, known as functional magnetic resonance imaging(FMRI), to look at the brains of eighteen men and women.
The same reaction did not happen when they were shown non-food images. The team believed this means women think more about food than men tend to.
Dr. Uher said, ''This could be related to biological differences between men and women.
Professor Carey Cooper, psychology and health professor at Lancaster University, said, ''For centuries women have had a providing role - preparing and cooking food for their families. And it is part of that role to make sure the food is safe. They will therefore be much more sensitive to food than men are, and I would not be surprised if that was now built into their DNA. If the female brain react to food because it historically has developed neural (神经的)pathways to do this, then food will be the way they express their stress.
But other experts have said that more research must be done before the results can be proved. American scientist Angelo del Parigi of the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut, said, ''Looking at an FMRI alone cannot make sure whether the stronger reaction in women is due to innate (天生的) differences or a learned process. ''
| A．Men, on the other hand, are not usually as obsessive about what they eat. |
| B．And experts are exploring how these biological differences can contribute to human health. |
| C．The volunteers were given images of food to look at, as well as food to taste. |
| D．But the more likely explanation is that women have a more complicated reaction to food because of social pressure. |
| E．Food actually, is a comfort for women. |
| F．If a woman is always asking whether she's fat, it's because her food thoughts are mostly related to dieting. |
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【推荐1】As with every World Cup, at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar the players will be using a new ball. The last thing competitors want is for the most important piece of equipment to behave in unexpected ways in the most important tournament of the world’s most popular sport, so a lot of work goes into making sure that every new World Cup ball feels familiar to players.
Between shots on goal, free kicks and long passes, many important moments of a soccer game happen when the ball is in the air. So one of the most important characteristics of a soccer ball is how it travels through air.
As a ball moves through air, a thin layer of mostly still air called the boundary layer (边界层)surrounds some part of the ball. At low speeds this boundary layer will only cover the front half of the ball before flowing air peels (划过) away from the surface. In this case, the wake of air behind the ball is somewhat regular and is called laminar flow. When a ball is moving quickly, though, the boundary layer wraps much farther around the ball. When the flow air does eventually separate from the ball’s surface, it does so in a series of chaotic swirls (不规则气旋). This process is called turbulent flow.
When calculating how much force moving air imparts on a moving object — called drag — physicists use a term called the drag coefficient (系数). For a given speed, the higher the drag coefficient is, the more drag an object feels.
It turns out that a soccer ball’s drag coefficient is approximately 2.5 times larger for laminar flow than for turbulent flow. Though it may seem counterintuitive, roughening a ball’s surface delays the separation of the boundary layer and keeps a ball in turbulent flow longer. This fact of physics that — rougher balls feel less drag — is the reason why dimpled (坑坑洼洼的) golf balls fly much farther than they would if the balls were smooth.
1. What can be inferred from the passage about footballs in the World Cup?| A．Unexpected ways of playing them will come into view. |
| B．They make sure of long passes to be performed by players. |
| C．They’ll be judged by their quality when kicked off in the air. |
| D．Their importance explains why the World Cup is famous globally. |
| A．Changes of the football surface. | B．A wide variety of airflows. |
| C．Formation of the boundary layers. | D．A broad range of football's speed. |
| A．the result seems unlikely at first sight | B．the prediction lacks explanation |
| C．the research requires further investigation | D．the method of study isn’t proper enough |
| A．To compare the speed of different golf balls. |
| B．To encourage more footballs to be made as such. |
| C．To apply the research result to explain another phenomenon. |
| D．To explain clearer the function of separating boundary layers. |
【推荐2】Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick I in the thirteenth century, it may be hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick I. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than in grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern “toy bear”. And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
But speech has to be induced(激发), and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling(咿呀声), grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s nonverbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.
1. Frederick I did the experiment to _____.| A．find out nursing is essential to a child’s language development |
| B．to confirm that good mothering ensures the survival of a child |
| C．to find out what a child would speak if raised in a no-human speech context |
| D．to confirm that many children would not grow up without learning to speak |
| A．he will certainly be stupid in adult years |
| B．he will not necessarily be less intelligent |
| C．his language development will be limited to babbling |
| D．he will be insensitive to verbal signals |
| A．Efficient nursing contributes to a child’s speech ability. |
| B．A child may never learn to speak if the sensitive periods are neglected. |
| C．Like a child, a monkeys’ brain can connect the sight and feel of an object. |
| D．A child can choose words and phrases that interest him and make new sentences |
| A．when it comes to language, a child’s brain is highly selective |
| B．nonverbal signals affect a child’s language development as much as verbal ones |
| C．A child has his language ability developed randomly and irregardless of age as well |
| D．A mother’s brain is programmed to instruct language efficiently |
【推荐3】E-cigarettes can damage vital immune system cells and may be more harmful than previously thought, a study suggests. Researchers found e-cigarette vapour disabled important immune cells in the lung and boosted inflammation (炎症).
The researchers caution against the widely held opinion that e-cigarettes are safe. However, Public Health England advises they are much less harmful than smoking and people should not hesitate to use them as an aid to giving up cigarettes.
The small experimental study, led by Prof David Thickett, at the University of Birmingham, is published online in the journal Thorax. Previous studies have focused on the chemical elements of e-cigarette liquid before it is vaped.
In this study, the researchers designed a mechanical process to mimic (模拟) vaping in the laboratory, using lung tissue samples provided by eight non-smokers. They found vapour caused inflammation and impaired the activity of alveolar macrophages cells (肺泡世噬细胞) that removed potentially damaging dust particles, bacteria and allergens. They sail some of the effects were similar to those seen in regular smokers and people with chronic lung disease.
They caution that the results are only in laboratory conditions and they are planning to do more research to better understand the long-term health impact the changes recorded took place only 48 hours.
Prof Thicket said while e-cigarettes were safer than traditional cigarettes in terms of cancer risk, they may still be harmful in the long-term. If you vape for 20 or 30 years, you can suffer from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), then that’s something we need to know about.
1. What’s the widely held opinion about e-cigarettes?| A．They’re more harmful. | B．They’re less harmful. |
| C．They’re unknown to people. | D．They’re harmless. |
| A．It’s believable. | B．It’s conducted narrowly. |
| C．It’s accepted by most people. | D．It’ s carried out in America. |
| A．They are safer in terms of mental problems. |
| B．They may be little harm in the long run. |
| C．They are safer with regard to cancer risk. |
| D．They can completely replace traditional ones. |
| A．Can e-cigarettes damage vital brain system cells? |
| B．Can e-cigarettes become popular among people? |
| C．Can e-cigarettes be recommended to smokers ? |
| D．Can c-cigarettes damage vital immune system cells ? |
