【推荐1】How do we come to make sense of our daily lives? How can we gain a strong grasp of who we really are and how we fit in the world? And how can we naturally connect to important ones in our lives? “Life stories are one of the prime tools we have for understanding ourselves and the world around us.” says Robyn Fivush, a professor at Emory University.

Humans are natural storytellers. We use stories to understand our present, draw insights from our past, and anticipate the future. Thus, storytelling is basic to our lives. As a form of rich engagement between family members, family storytelling should be valued more. Sharing bedtime stories and talks after school, or walking through an event that left a young child crying—these are all opportunities for parents and children to become closer through warmth, understanding and support. Fivush and her colleagues have underscored the value of storytelling in parenting. The ways parents support children’s emotions and help them retell more vivid, richly detailed stories have lasting impacts on children’s cognitive(认知的)and emotional development.

Children and teenagers learn how to talk about their lives from family stories. An early example is learning how to present a detailed story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—to give it a clear structure. Further, they learn what is appropriate to talk about or avoid and what feelings are appropriate to share over dinner or out with others.

When growing up, we use our life stories to build complex and stable views of ourselves. Through stories about the traditions maintained over the years, we make connections between past successes and failures, our relationships, and the activities that hold meaning to us to develop our new identities. These identities reflect our roles as family members, community members, co-workers and so on, thus helping us have a more complete view of ourselves.

Having a lasting impact on ourselves and those around us, life stories are filled with meaning, insight, and value. By the way, what’s the story that stands out to you from a recent meal or chat?

1. Why does the writer ask three questions in the beginning?

A．To explain a general idea.

B．To give background information.

C．To introduce an argument.

D．To report the finding of a study.

2. What does the underlined word “underscored” in Paragraph 2 mean?

A．Cast doubt on.	B．Attached importance to.
C．Shown concern for.	D．Thought poorly of.

3. How can life stories help form a complete view of ourselves according to the writer?

A．By maintaining social ties.

B．By rebuilding our identities.

C．By connecting our past and future.

D．By learning from family members.

4. Where is the text most probably taken from?

A．A review on a storybook.

B．An advice letter for social life.

C．A guidebook to parenting.

D．An essay on the value of storytelling.

【推荐2】Large oceangoing vessels like oil tankers and cruise ships produce noise that travels long distances underwater. That audio pollution can disturb the sounds that marine mammals, fish and other animals use to communicate.

Emily Carter, a sensory ecologist from University of Exeter wondered whether ship noise might also be harmful to animals that don’t rely on sound for communication. For example, young shore crabs that use camouflage (伪装) to hide from predators. “So they can actually change their color to match whatever it is that they’re sitting on, basically to make it harder for predators to find them.” Carter explained.

She suspected that stress from ship noise might affect the change process. To find out, she and her colleagues collected shore crabs with dark shells and brought them back to the lab. They placed the crabs in tanks full of white small stones. An underwater speaker in each tank played quiet natural sounds at all times. One group of crabs also heard loud natural sounds every hour. But another group was subjected to hourly recordings of large ships.

Carter says shorebirds, which eat the crabs, can see UV light, so she used ultraviolet (紫外线) photography to determine how well the crabs blended into their new habitat over time.

“Through the eyes of a shorebird — so through bird’s perspective — were they camouflaged? Weren’t they camouflaged? How obvious would they be?”

After eight weeks, the crabs that heard only natural sounds had become much lighter and were well camouflaged. But the ones that were exposed to the ship noise didn’t change color as much. And then, as a result, they weren’t as camouflaged at the end of the experiment. So they’d be much more manifest to predator.

Carter says the stress caused by ship noise may affect hormones that regulate color change in crabs or destroy the energy needed to make the change efficiently. The research not only puts a spotlight on the unintended consequences of noise pollution, but is a reminder that too much stress isn’t just bad for people — it can also be deadly to wildlife that needs some peace and quiet.

1. Why is ultraviolet photography used in the experiment?

A．To scare away shorebirds.

B．To kill the bacteria in crabs’ new habitat.

C．To test the effectiveness of crab’s camouflage.

D．To monitor the shorebird population in nighttime.

2. What does the underlined word “manifest” mean in Paragraph 6?

A．Avoidable.	B．Noticeable.
C．Changeable.	D．Adjustable.

3. Which of the following is true?

A．Carter conducted the experiment on her own.

B．The crab that heard natural sound lost some weight.

C．Carter created three kinds of living environment for crabs.

D．The crab that heard ship noise slightly changed their color.

4. What did the research find?

A．Noises do harm to us people.

B．Wildlife needs a quiet environment.

C．Crabs aren’t camouflaged in new habitats.

D．Stress can change the hormones in humans.

【推荐3】After a day’s labor, Andreas Fichtner and his colleagues have spliced (绞接) together three segments of fibers, creating a 12.5-kilometer-long fiber-optic (光学的) cable. It will stay buried in the snow to spy on the activity of Grfmsvotn, a dangerous, glacier-covered volcano.

Fichtner, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, is one of the researchers using fiber optics to take the pulse of our planet. Much of their work is done in remote places, from the tops of volcanoes to the bottoms of seas, where traditional monitoring is too costly or difficult.

The technique used by Fichtner’s team is called distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. “It’s almost like radar in the fiber,” says the physicist Giuseppe Marra of the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory, in Teddington. While radar uses reflected radio waves to locate objects, DAS uses reflected light to detect events as varied as earthquake activity and moving traffic, and to determine where they occurred. Inside the cables are optical fibers. DAS involves shooting quick pulses of laser light down the fiber and detecting bits of light that scatter back to the laser source due to disturbances in the environment. When the earth’s surface vibrates and shifts, it pulls the cables, so a detector can identify these small changes.

The New York Times points out that although wireless and satellite technology are booming, good old-fashioned cables are still the most efficient way to send information across oceans. Repurposing cables could give scientists the ability to monitor high-risk zones that were previously hard to reach. They could help detect earthquakes and tsunamis a few seconds earlier than traditional warning systems.

In addition, fiber-optic cables could also help solve some of the biggest challenges for humans. In the recent years, scientists have started to use them to measure ocean waves and access fault (断层) information. It is believed that fiber-optic cables will serve to benefit us greatly in the future.

1. What is the purpose of the work of Fichtner’s team?

A．To track volcanic activities.	B．To strike oil under the sea.
C．To lengthen fiber-optic cables.	D．To keep fibers covered in the snow.

2. What can we learn about the technique of DAS?

A．It determines when and where disasters occurs.

B．It uses radio waves to locate moving objects.

C．It improves the efficiency of transmitting light.

D．It detects tiny variation of the earth’s surface.

3. What does the underlined expression “Repurposing cables” probably mean?

A．Recycling cables in new fields.	B．Adapting cables for a new function.
C．Installing cables beneath volcanoes.	D．Promoting cables into massive production.

4. What is the best title for the text?

A．DAS Is Feeling the Heartbeat of Volcanoes

B．Satellite Technology Is Booming in Our Times

C．Underground Cables Are Taking the Planet’s Pulse

D．Fiber-optic Cables Are Giving Us Insights into Earthquakes