To look inside an ant nest is to meet with an alien civilization. The boiling mass of worker ants beneath an upturned stone is both strangely reminiscent of (联想到) human society and strikingly different. There is an organization that fascinates us and a long line of myrmecophiles (or ant lovers) leads back all the way to King Solomon, who in fact advised people to “go to the ant, consider her ways and be wise”. This was exactly the inspiration behind Planet Ant, a TV program showcasing what we know about the kingdom of ants, and what ants can teach us about the human world.
Like us, ants build structures, find food, defend their societies and manage waste, and-also like us-they must be well organized. For example, the leaf-cutting ants of Planet Ant have special waste disposal areas for storing harmful waste and a team of “waste-disposal ants” dedicated to keeping the nest clean. But ants achieve this familiar final result in a very different way to humans. Human societies have centralized control. In other words, someone tells us what to do. Ants, on the other hand, have decentralized control and neither the queen nor any other ant directs work. Ant workers are the final self-starters, following specific, but potentially flexible, rules in certain situations.
Chemical trails underpin much of this self-organization. Foragers (觅食者) lay a mix of chemicals known as trail pheromone (信息素) behind them as they walk. Other ants follow the trail and if they find food they reinforce it, laying more pheromone as they return to the nest. Stronger trails are more likely to be followed, so trails leading to food become progressively reinforced, while trails with no food at the end fade away.
This combination of positive feedback and evaporation (蒸发) produces an effective foraging system that is very good at finding the quickest routes to food. This simple guiding principle, and others like it, have provided some useful solutions to the complex problems faced by engineers, computer scientists and businesses.
1. Why does the author mention King Solomon in the first paragraph?| A．To provide a background. | B．To show admiration for him. |
| C．To stress the wisdom of ants. | D．To explain an abstract theory. |
| A．They get orders from their partners. | B．They choose to do only routine tasks. |
| C．They strictly follow the queen’s orders. | D．They follow their own senses and certain rules. |
| A．Decide. | B．Support. | C．Develop. | D．Calculate. |
| A．It comes from the food resources. | B．It appears before ants’ self-organization. |
| C．It leads the following ants to food. | D．It helps ants find their way back home. |
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【推荐1】When scientists go to a forest to study monkeys and their habits and behaviors, how do they know who’s who?
In the past, scientists had to make marks on each of the animals to distinguish them. But in the future, they may have a much easier way to tell them apart thanks to facial recognition technology.
A research team from China’s Northwest University is using facial recognition technology to identify thousands of snub-nosed monkeys that live on Qinling Mountain in Shaanxi province.
Similar to human facial recognition, the technology that is used to identify monkeys uses their facial features to create a database that includes every monkey, Xinhua reported. “When the system is fully developed, we can connect it with cameras set up in the mountains. The system will automatically recognize the monkeys, name them and analyze their behavior,” said Zhang He, a member of the research team. “For each snub-nosed monkey, we have 700 to 800 image samples, and the recognition success rate is 94 percent,” Zhang added.
“We used mobile phones and portable cameras with the monkeys in tests at distances ranging from about 3 to 10 meters,” said He Gang, a member of the research team and an associate professor in the College of Life Sciences at Northwest University. “There is no need to interfere with the monkeys. Such a method of sampling is clearly non-invasive.”
Compared to humans, facial recognition technology for monkeys is more complicated because of their hairier faces. The color of their hair causes them to blend into their environment. These factors make it harder for computers to identify them.
“Monkeys do not cooperate with researchers in the same way humans do. It is difficult to take high-quality pictures and videos of them, which are needed to improve the system,” said Li Baoguo, leader of the research team.
Currently, there are about 4,000 snub-nosed monkeys living on Qinling Mountain. The team’s goal is to successfully identify every monkey that lives there.
1. What problem do scientists face while studying monkeys according to the text?| A．How to mark them. | B．How to tell them apart. |
| C．How to understand their behavior. | D．How to observe them clearly |
| A．It is now widely adopted in China. |
| B．It works better than human facial recognition. |
| C．It will use monkeys’ behavior to create a database. |
| D．It can help scientists study monkeys without disturbing them. |
a. Image samples. b. Hairy faces. c. Hair color. d. The environment.
| A．ab | B．ac | C．bc | D．bd |
| A．To introduce a new way to identify monkeys. |
| B．To show the importance of studying monkeys. |
| C．To compare different ways to identify monkeys. |
| D．To explain difficulties in developing a new system. |
【推荐2】Dr. Sylvia Earle wants you to stop eating fish. It’s not because fish are endangered, though wild fish stocks in many oceans are very low. It’s not because they’re bad for you, though fish in many areas are exposed to poisonous substances in the water. It’s because they’re smart.
“Fish are sensitive, and they have personalities,” says the marine (海洋) biologist. For Earle, eating a fish would be like eating a dog or a cat. “Personally, I would never eat anyone I know.”
There’s a lot more about fish: they talk to each other, they like to be touched, and they engage in behavior that can seem very human. They can remember things and learn from experience. Earle and a growing number of animal rights activists see these as strong arguments against eating fish altogether.
The activists also point out that fish feel pain and fish suffer horribly on their way from the sea to the supermarket. “While it may seem obvious that fish are able to feel pain, like every other animal, some people think of fish as swimming vegetables,” says Dr. Lynne Sneddon. “Really, ifs kind of a moral question. Is the enjoyment you get from fishing or eating fish more important than the pain of the fish?”
Fishermen and fish lovers are doubtful. “I’ve never seen a smart fish,” says Marie Swaringen as she finishes off a plate of fish at a Seattle seafood restaurant. “If they were very smart, they wouldn’t get caught.”
“For years, everyone’s been telling us to eat fish because it’s so good for us,” says another diner. “Now I’ve got to feel guilty while I’m eating my fish? What are they going to think of next? Don’t eat salad because cucumbers have feelings?”
1. What does Dr. Sylvia think of fish?| A．Clever. | B．Endangered. |
| C．Poisonous. | D．Low. |
| A．Dr. Sylvia. | B．Marie Swaringen. |
| C．Dr. Lynne Sneddon. | D．Earle. |
| A．Is Fish Feeling Painful? | B．Dr. Sylvia Earle and Fish |
| C．A Fish’s Adventure | D．Eat Fish or Not? |
We lived on the edge of a wood, and every evening at dusk the mockingbirds would come and rest in the trees and sing. No musician can sing more beautiful than the birds. I decided that I would catch a young bird and keep it in a cage and in that way would have my own private musician.
I finally succeeded in catching one and put it in a cage. At first, the bird flied about the cage, but eventually it settled down in its new home. I felt very pleased with myself and looked forward to some beautiful singing from my tiny musician.
I had left the cage out, and on the second day my new pet’s mother flew to the cage with food in her mouth. The baby bird ate everything she brought to it. I was pleased to see this. Certainly the mother knew better than I how to feed her baby.
The following morning when I went to see how my bird was doing, I discovered it on the floor of the cage, dead. I was shocked! What had happened! I had taken good care of my little bird.
Arthur Wayne, the famous ornithologist, happened to be visiting my father at the time, hearing me crying over the death of my bird, explained what had occurred. “A mother mockingbird, finding her young in a cage, will sometimes bring it poison berries. She thinks it better for her young to die than to live in cage.”
Never since then have I caught any living creature and put it in a cage. All living creatures have a right to live free.
1. Why did the writer catch a mockingbird when he was a boy of 12?
| A．He had just got a new cage. |
| B．He liked its beautiful feather. |
| C．He wanted a pet for a companion. |
| D．He wanted it to sing for him. |
| A．drank the poisonous water by mistake |
| B．was frightened to death |
| C．refused to eat anything |
| D．ate the poisonous food its mother gave it |
| A．a religious person | B．a kind person |
| C．an expert in birds | D．a schoolmaster |
| A．Freedom is very valuable to all living things. |
| B．All birds put in a cage won’t live long. |
| C．You should keep the birds from their mother. |
| D．Be careful about food you give to baby birds. |
【推荐1】Earth is lighted up by bioluminescence but, for many of us, seeing the natural phenomenon is a rare treat: Catching the glow of a firefly or witnessing a dolphin swimming through electric blue waters is a thrill.
Researchers are currently engineering glowing flowers and decorative plants that can cast a green light onto our living rooms. Observing a plant’s health via its glow can be a way to instantly measure its health, and the side-effect is anybody who wants a healthy glowing plant in their living room can have one.
A study published on Monday in Nature Biotechnology shows that this goal is well on its way to being a reality. The study authors announce they’ve created a method that causes plants to glow much brighter, and for a longer period of time, than previous efforts. Plants adapted by this method should be available for purchase within a few years.
The research was conducted through a teamwork between three scientific institutions and Planta, a biotech startup in Moscow. When this team examined a poisonous mushroom, they discovered that caffeic acid is responsible for its bioluminescence. In this new study, the team employed that information and inserted enzymes — which are specific to the mushroom — into the DNA of tobacco plants. In turn, the enzymes were able to interact with the caffeic acid in the tobacco plants, and cause them to glow both in the dark and in the daylight.
This method, the scientists claimed, made the plants 10 times brighter than previous efforts and the continuous light production didn’t harm the health of the plants. Interestingly, the light decreased as the leaves aged — but it also increased when the leaves were damaged. In turn, the team suggested this method could also help other researchers monitor plant responses to various pressures and changes in the environment. If a plant is short of water or a hungry sheep is harming a plant, bioluminescence could warn of this damage before it’s too late.
1. How can people quickly identify a decorative flower’s health condition?| A．By making it greener. | B．By monitoring its glow. |
| C．By testing the chemicals in it. | D．By putting it in the living room. |
| A．They will appear on the market. | B．They may take the place of lamps. |
| C．They can light up a whole living room. | D．They glow less bright than previous efforts. |
| A．They inserted caffeic acid into it. |
| B．They made it give out brighter light. |
| C．They grew it on the tobacco plant farm. |
| D．They put its enzymes into the tobacco plants. |
| A．Warning of potential damage from glowing plants. |
| B．Warning of the light production’s harm to plants. |
| C．Effects of continuous light production on the glowing plants. |
| D．Benefits of combining specific enzymes with caffeic acid in plants. |
【推荐2】Humans evolved from apes. This is what we learned in biology class. But what came before apes? Chinese scientists have discovered fossils that could enrich the evolutionary story of how humans evolved from fish.
According to four articles published in the journal Nature in late September, Chinese researchers found fish fossils that provide the “missing link” about the origin of the jaw (下颌), a key trait that 99.8 percent of vertebrate species (脊椎动物) have.
Zhu Min, a lead researcher of the studies from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily that the findings drew a large amount of interest in the science world due to the importance of jaws in animal evolution. However, the rise of the jaw had been a mystery due to a lack of sufficient fossil evidence to support that jawed vertebrates lived 450 million years ago.
The latest findings made by Zhu’s team presented a set of five surprisingly well-preserved fish fossils that included three whole-bodied fish, helping scientists paint a more accurate evolutionary picture of the origin of the jaw. The fish fossils were discovered at two sites in Chongqing and Guizhou, whose strata (地层) date back to the Silurian Period (志留纪) that began around 440 million years ago.
These fossils show that jawed fish were already thriving in the world’s ancient oceans at that time. Later on, more diverse and larger jawed fish evolved and began to spread around the world, paving the way for some fish to eventually go on land and evolve into other animals—including humans.
“These fossils provide an unprecedented opportunity to peek into the ‘dawn of fish’ and help scientists trace many human body structures back to these ancient fish, thus filling some key gaps in the evolutionary history of how fish evolved into humans,” Zhu said.
1. What is the significance of the newly discovered fossils?| A．They gave new clues to the origins of fish. |
| B．They provided new evidence on human evolution. |
| C．They are a newly discovered species of jawed fish. |
| D．They defined the time vertebrate species appeared. |
| A．They were discovered in Chongqing. |
| B．They include five whole-bodied ancient fish. |
| C．They can be traced back to the Silurian Period. |
| D．They proved fish were the earliest vertebrate species. |
| A．Booming. | B．Surviving. | C．Arriving. | D．Depriving. |
| A．A travel brochure. | B．Newspaper. | C．A biology textbook. | D．A biography. |
【推荐3】Recent research shows that listening to music improves our health in surprising ways. If we take a music lesson or two, that musical training can help raise our IQs and even keep us sharp in old age.
As Bob Marely once put it: “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” Research at Drexel University found that music reduced pain more than standard treatments in cancer patients. Other research showed that music can ease pain in patients.
A study with healthy older adults found that those with ten or more years of musical experience scored higher on cognitive (认知的) tests than musicians with one to nine years of musical study.
A study showed that students who listened to relaxing classical music for 45 minutes before turning in slept much better than students who listened to an audiobook or did nothing different from their normal routine. If you’re having trouble sleeping, try listening to a little Mozart before bedtime.
Music Raises IQ and Academic Performance| A．Music Relaxes People |
| B．Music Helps You Sleep Better |
| C．The non-musicians scored the lowest. |
| D．Here are some amazing benefits of music. |
| E．Therefore, standard treatments are strongly advised by doctors. |
| F．But the selection needed to be either classical pieces or their choices. |
| G．Research shows that learning music predicts higher scores in children. |
【推荐1】Each day, 10-year-old Seth asked his mom for more and more lunch money. Yet he seemed skinnier than ever and came home from school hungry. It turned out that Seth was handing his lunch money to fifth-grader, who was threatening to beat him up if he didn’t pay.
Most kids have been teased by a brother or a friend at some point. And it’s not usually harmful when done in a playful and friendly way, and both kids find it funny. But when teasing becomes hurtful, unkind, and constant, it crosses the line into bullying and needs to stop.
Bullying is intentional tormenting（折磨）in physical or psychological ways. It can range from hitting, name-calling, threats, and mocking (嘲弄) to blackmailing money and possessions. Some kids bully others by deliberately separating them and spreading rumors about them. Others use social media or electronic messaging to tease others or hurt their feelings.
It’s important to take bullying seriously and not just brush it off as something that kids have to tolerate. The effects can be serious and affect kids’ sense of safety and self-worth. In severe cases, bullying has contributed to tragedies, such as suicides and school shootings.
Kids bully for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they pick on kids because they need a victim—someone who seems emotionally or physically weaker, or just acts or appears different in some way—to feel more important, popular, or in control. Although some bullies are bigger or stronger than their victims, that’s not always the case.
Sometimes kids torment others because that’s the way they’ve been treated. They may think their behavior is normal because they come from families or other settings where everyone regularly gets angry and shouts or calls each other names. Some popular TV shows even seem to promote meanness—people are “voted off”, ignored, or ridiculed for their appearance or lack of talent.
Unless your child tells you about bullying—or has visible injuries—it can be difficult to figure out if it’s happening.
1. What is the author’s purpose of telling Seth’s story?| A．To introduce the topic. | B．To raise public concern. |
| C．To analyse the cause. | D．To display harmful effects. |
| A．removing bullying | B．ignoring bullying |
| C．avoiding bullying | D．stressing bullying |
| A．Bullies consider school bullying interesting and rewarding. |
| B．Bullies want to dominate everyone physically and mentally. |
| C．Bullies have taken the behavior from their original families. |
| D．Bullies are intentionally taught by some popular TV shows. |
| A．Signs of bullying. | B．Love for kids. |
| C．Problems of bullying. | D．Advice for kids. |
【推荐2】You've likely encountered the humblebrag before-boasting （吹嘘）disguised as a complaint, such as： "I'm having such a stressful day. I got two job offers and I don't know what to do.”
This is a typical example of humblebragging, a term coined by comedic writer Harris Wittels referring to “ a specific type of boast that allows the offender to broadcast their achievements without the necessary shame and guilt that should normally accompany such claims.” In simpler terms, it's a way to disguise a boast with some humility. Humblebragging comes in two different forms. The first is humility-based, an example being, "can't believe I got the highest grade in my class”. The second type comes mixed with a bit of complaint, for example, " I can't believe that shopkeeper asked me for ID. I'm 25 !”
People don't like when others humblebrag because they find they are lacking in sincerity. Sincerity is a critical dimension of social evaluation, which is viewed as fundamental to people's identity. In fact, people prize sincerity even above competence and warmth in others, according to Dr. Sezer.
If humblebragging doesn't work, and no one likes it, why do we still do it? We all want to highlight our positive qualities without seeming proud. By speaking in a complaint or an expression of humility, we hope we'll somehow land on the “ sweet spot" of self-presentation ： promoting ourselves while also conveying likability. In addition, research suggests that people may experience positive emotions while humblebragging.
Considering that we're all likely to feel the urge to humblebrag, at least to some extent, the proper response when we hear a friend doing it may be to simply let it go-because ultimately we're going to do it ourselves, and who really wants to be called out on it?
1. Which of the following remarks is an example of humblebragging?| A．How I hate hearing my voice on TV! |
| B．I'm thrilled to be awarded the first prize. |
| C．I'm the only person to get promoted in the firm. |
| D．How I dislike doing the same thing every day! |
| A．Honest. | B．Humble. |
| C．Insincere. | D．Incapable. |
| A．To lift up their spirits. |
| B．To express their complaints. |
| C．To improve their moral qualities. |
| D．To show off without bringing annoyance. |
| A．Follow it up. | B．Leave it alone. |
| C．Turn against it. | D．Get to the root of it. |
【推荐3】With 1,500 square miles to explore, from its romantic attractions to its wild landscapes and the easy rural lifestyle, there are no decent public facilities but certainly no shortage of beautiful places to stay with the Lake District. See below our hand-picked selection.
Ulverston
Lined with charming cobbled(铺鹅卵石的) streets, Ulverston is a pretty historic market town located just South of the Lake District. It is a delightful escape from the crowd-filled attractions in the Southern Lakes, yet is just a stone’s throw away from them.
Grasmere
Grasmere is forever linked to the world-renowned Lakeland poets, most notably William Wordsworth. Each year, many make the travel to Dove Cottage in Grasmere, where some of Wordsworth’s most famous works were written. From towering peaks to tasty treats,a holiday in Grasmere would also not be complete without a taste of the famous Grasmere Gingerbread that’s been made here since the mid-19th century.
Cartmel
Home to many traditional stone buildings and charming scenery, Cartmel is a primitive village in South Cumbria. Appreciating the colorful glass windows and sculptures makes it a memorable visit. Cartmel’s sticky pudding,a traditional English dessert from this Lake District village, is a must-try. Cartmel’s restaurants and pubs provide a wide range of food and drink to recharge the batteries after an exhausting hike.
Kendal
Known as the gateway to the Lakes, Kendal is a busy town hosting a selection of restaurants and shops, which makes it an excellent touring base. You can also enjoy the surrounding views of landscapes and lakes from the hilltop. Both Windermere and the Cumbrian coast are easy to reach, making it a fine location for lovers of both coast and countryside.
1. What attract the travelers to the Lake District?| A．Luxurious facilities. |
| B．Mysterious adventures. |
| C．Leisurely countryside sights. |
| D．Convenient transportation systems. |
| A．Ulverston. | B．Grasmere. | C．Cartmel. | D．Kendal. |
| A．Charge the battery for free. |
| B．Taste a unique local snack. |
| C．Bicycle in the old village. |
| D．Admire modern architectures. |
