【推荐1】China is facing a reading crisis, with more than 50% of people surveyed believing they don't spend enough time reading and only 20% satisfied with their reading time, China Daily said.

According to Xu Shengguo, head of the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication, the country's reading rate last year was 78.6%, which means that percentage of people read books, periodicals or newspapers or were involved in online reading, while 21.4% read nothing at all.

The Academy launched an annual survey on the reading quantity of Chinese people in 2005 and found that each read 4.5 to 4.7 books on average per year between 2005 and 2014. Last year, Chinese people read only 4.56 books, compared with 12 in France, 11 in South Korea, 9 in Japan and about 7 in the United States. In addition, more than 40% of Chinese people read less than one book throughout the year outside of textbooks.

A training meeting on reading supported by Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television was held in Beijing last week. It was the first meeting for the Leading Reader project, a training series for teachers, officials, college students and bookstore owners to promote nationwide reading. It will be held on weekends during September and October.

In addition to factors such as the large population base in China and imbalance of regional economic development, the shortage of public libraries is widespread. Reading parties in the community are in need of greater promotion. If we want to promote the nationwide reading rate, we have to encourage more grassroots reading programs.

1. What is the reading rate of China last year?

A．20%.	B．21.4%
C．40%.	D．78.6%.

2. What's the training meeting held on weekends for?

A．For promoting nationwide reading.

B．For supporting the Beijing Municipal Bureau.

C．For training teachers and middle school students.

D．For advertising related books, films and Televisions.

3. Which is NOT the factor of the reading crisis?

A．China has a large population base.

B．Most Chinese people no longer like reading.

C．Some regions have no enough public libraries.

D．There is an imbalance in regional development.

4. What does the author want to tell us?

A．More Chinese like reading now.

B．China faces a reading crisis at present.

C．China has to promote the reading rate.

D．More grassroots should be encouraged to read.

【推荐2】Look around on your next plane trip. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but play video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim emails and news feeds. An invisible transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit(神经元回路）that underlies the brain’s ability to read is changing—a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading kids to the expert adult.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the ability to read necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6.000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism (机能)for decoding basic information, like the number of goats, to the present, complicated reading brain. My research describes how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy (共鸣): critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research conducted in many parts of the world now warns that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based reading.

This is not a simple issue of print VS digital reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err(犯错）as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we destroy or weaken while innovating. At this moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to face what is being weakened in the expert reading circuit, and what we can do about it.

We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment’s requirements—from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium advantages processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information, like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit. As UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and time will be devoted to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are necessary to learning at any age.

There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice. The story of the changing reading brain is hardly finished. We possess both the science and the technology to identify and redress the changes in how we read before they become deep-rooted. If we work to understand exactly what we will lose, alongside the extraordinary new functions that the digital world has brought us, there is as much reason for excitement as caution.

1. The first paragraph is meant to____________.

A．explain a theory related to reading brains

B．introduce a change in people’s reading habits

C．complain about people’s reading less and less

D．draw attention to the unusual environment on board

2. What can be inferred from the passage about the reading circuit?

A．It is not what we are born with.

B．It existed for longer than human beings.

C．It enables us to recognize others’ feelings.

D．It was a main contributor to the writing system.

3. According to the writer, what is the very thing that we ignore, destroy or weaken while we are innovating our way to read now?

A．How long our attention lasts.	B．Print technologies.
C．Deep reading processes.	D．Learning strategies for people of all ages.

4. Which of the following statements is the writer most likely to agree with?

A．The old rule of “use it or lose it” doesn’t apply well in today’s fast developing world.

B．Science and technology are to blame for what we have lost while entering a digital age.

C．Deep-rooted principles will prevent us identifying and redressing the changes in reading.

D．We should evaluate how we read now before moving quickly into digital-based reading.

【推荐3】Teenagers have their own TV channels， websites and magazines. So what about books？

Last year one publisher， Martins， started publishing a series called Waves. We spoke to the director Julia Smith. She explained， "Teenage fiction has been published since the 1970s but publishers have never been very successful in getting teenagers to buy and read books. Now they're realizing that teenagers are just older children， but are not adults either. They are often not interested in adult fiction. For this series we are looking for new writers who write especially for teenagers.

Athene Gorr's novel was published in the series last year and is selling well. Its title is The Purple Ring. She says， "The important thing is to encourage teenagers to pick up your book. I'm a new writer. Although I've got an unusual name which people might remember， nobody knows it yet! But my book has a fantastic cover which makes people want to look inside. Then they realize what an excellent story it is!"

And what do teenagers themselves think about the series？ We talked to Sophie Clarke， aged 15. She said？ "I've read a few books in the Waves series. They say they are for 14-19 year olds and I agree with that. We're not interested in the same things as people in their twenties and thirties. I like them and I think they look really good too. The only thing is that because bookshops put them in the children section， lots of teenagers won't find them so they may not do very well. And it's a shame there's no such series as I think lots of teenagers， especially boys， might buy."

1. What can we infer from Paragraph 2？ ______

A．The Waves series are suitable for adults.

B．It is necessary to publish books aimed at teenagers.

C．Teenagers are more interested in reading nowadays.

D．Teenagers should be encouraged to read.

2. What makes The Purple Ring catch people's eye？ ______

A．Its writer.

B．Its cover.

C．Its price.

D．Its title.

3. What do we know about the Waves series？ ______

A．They have attractive covers.

B．They are about real facts.

C．They are popular with teenage boys.

D．They are wrongly placed in the children section.

4. What does the author intend to do with the passage？ ______

A．To compare different series of teenage fiction.

B．To give information about a new series of books.

C．To encourage more writers to create fictions for teenagers.

D．To explain why teenage fiction is easier to write than adult fiction.

【推荐1】    1     In fact, the idea of walking at least 10,000 steps a day for health goes back decades to a marketing (推销) campaign (计步器) launched in Japan to promote a pedometer. And, in subsequent years, it was adopted in the US as a goal to promote good health.    2    

“The original basis of the number was not scientifically determined,” says researcher I-Min Lee of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

She was curious to know how many steps you need to take a day to maintain good health and live a long life, so she and her colleagues designed a study that included about 17,000 older women. Their average age was 72.    3    

It turns out that women who took about 4,000 steps per day got a boost in longevity(长寿), compared with women who took fewer steps.    4    

In fact, women who took 4,400 steps per day, on average, were about 40 percent less likely to die during the follow-up period of about four years compared with women who took 2,700 steps. The findings were published Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Another surprise: The benefits of walking maxed out at about 7,500 steps.    5    

A．The women all agreed to clip on wearable devices to track their steps as they went about their day-to-day activities.

B．Walking 10,000 steps a day can make a lot of people happy.

C．It’s nothing unusual to walk 10,000 steps a day.

D．“It was sort of surprising,” Lee says.

E．In other words, women who walked more than 7,500 steps per day saw no additional boost in longevity.

F．There is no direct relationship between life span and steps.

G．It’s often the default setting on fitness trackers, but what’s it really based on?

【推荐2】Are you having difficulty falling asleep? Try drinking a glass of warm milk. If that doesn't work, listen to beautiful soft music. Still no luck? Try thinking about sheep jumping over a fence. If you are still awake, take a sleeping pill. But people who take pills often become dependent on the drugs. So you lie awake knowing that the new workday will soon arrive. If you have been in such condition for at least one month, you may have primary insomnia（失眠症）.

A new study has found that you might fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep longer if you try "cerebral hypothermia". It is not a complex medical process. It just means cooling down your brain. Eric Nofzinger and Daniel Buysse from the University of Pittsburgh Medical School led the study. They examined twelve people who had sleeping problems. Twelve others had no sleeping problems. Each of them wore a soft plastic cap on their head at bedtime.

The caps had tubes inside filled with water. The researchers moved the water through the tubes and then changed the temperature of the water. Other studies showed that people who had sleeping problems often had more chemical reactions in the front of their brains. The researchers thought cooling down the brain might help.

On the first two nights of testing, the patients wore caps with no water. On the next two nights, the caps were worn, but the water was not cooled. Then the researchers cooled the water a little for another two nights. On the final two nights of the study, the temperature of the water was made much cooler.

The researchers found that the water caps didn't help the patients until the temperature was about 14℃. Most of the patients fell asleep faster and slept better when the coolest water was moving around their heads.

Dr. Nofzinger and Dr. Buysse noted that this was only the beginning of the brain temperature study. But they believed they had discovered something important that needed more research.

1. What is the purpose of Paragraph 1?

A．To ask readers a question.	B．To tell sleeping problems.
C．To put forward the topic of the passage.	D．To offer ways to insomnia.

2. What can we know about the participants in the study?

A．They showed more chemical reactions.

B．They were required to wear plastic caps.

C．They all suffered from sleeping problems.

D．They cooled themselves by drinking water.

3. What do Dr. Nofzinger and Dr. Buysse think of their study?

A．It turns out disappointing.	B．It proves widely practical.
C．It stands out among studies	D．It still has a long way to go.

4. What's the main idea of the text?

A．It's time to cool yourself down.	B．A medical process benefits sleep
C．A new way might help with sleep.	D．Cooling down your brain matters.

【推荐3】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 (极端的) experiment of Fredrick 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 (婴儿) died before the first year. But clearly there was more than a lack of language here. What was also missing was good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously influenced.

Today no such serious lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. However, 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.

Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence (顺序) 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 utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple conmmands; 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 his parents’in style rather than grammar.

Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with the brain of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a teddy-bear with the sound pattern “teddy-bear”, and even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language for the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.

But speech has to be induced and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother   recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling (含糊不清地说) and smiling, and is sensitive 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 non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

1. As for Frederick’s experiment, we may know that _____.

A．the infants in it lived only over a year

B．there was absolutely no difference between food and language for the infants

C．the infants in it died because there was not any sound

D．the death of the infants was not merely due to an absence of language

2. The reason why some children are backward in speaking is most likely that ______.

A．they are not able to learn language rapidly

B．they are exposed to too much language at once

C．their mothers respond inadequately to their attempts to speak

D．their mothers are not intelligent enough to help them

3. The underlined words “be induced” in the last paragraph probably means ______.

A．be encouraged

B．be forced

C．be banned

D．be monitored

4. Which of the following is NOT implied in the passage?

A．The ability of speech is inborn in man.

B．A child starting to speak later than others may not necessarily be backward.

C．Most children learn their language in definite stages.

D．Children may dull their mother through interaction.