【推荐1】Gone are the days when a mother’s place was in the home: in Britain women with children are now as likely to be in paid work as their unburdened sisters. Many put their little darlings in day care long before they start school. Mindful that a poor start can spoil a person’s chances of success later in life, the state has intervened ever more closely in how babies and toddlers are looked after. Inspectors call not only at nurseries but also at homes where youngsters are minded; three-year-olds follow the national curriculum. Child care has increasingly become a profession.

For years after the government first began in 2001 to twist the arms of anyone who looked after an unrelated child to register with the schools, the numbers so doing fell. Kind but clueless neighbours stopped looking after little ones, who were instead herded into formal nurseries or handed over to one of the ever-fewer registered child-minders. The decline in the number of people taking in children now appears to have halted. According to data released by the Office for Standards in Education on October 27th, the number of registered child-minders reached its lowest point in September 2010 and has since recovered slightly.

The new lot are certainly better qualified. In 2010 fully 82% of nursery workers held diplomas notionally equivalent to A-levels, the university-entrance exams taken mostly by 18-year-olds, up from 56% seven years earlier, says Anand Shukla of the Daycare Trust, a charity. Nurseries staffed by university graduates tend to be rated highest by inspectors, increasing their appeal to the pickiest parents. As a result, more graduates are being recruited.

But professionalization has also pushed up the price of child care, defying even the economic depression. A survey by the Daycare Trust finds that a full-time nursery place in England for a child aged under two, who must be intensively supervised, costs £194 ($310) per week, on average. Prices in London and the south-east are far higher. Parents in Britain spend more on child care than anywhere else in the world, according to the OECD, a think-tank. Some 68% of a typical second earner's net income is spent on freeing her to work, compared with an OECD average of 52%.

The price of child care is not only eye-watering, but has also become a barrier to work. Soon after it took power the coalition government pledged to ensure that people are better off in work than on benefits, but a recent survey by Save the Children, a charity, found that the high cost of day care prevented a quarter of low-paid workers from returning to their jobs once they had started a family. The government pays for free part-time nursery places for three-and four-year-olds, and contributes towards day-care costs for younger children from poor areas. Alas, extending such an aid during stressful economic times would appear to be anything but child’s play.

1. Which of the following is true according to the first paragraph?

A．Nursery education plays a leading role in one’s personal growth.

B．Pregnant women have to work to lighten families’ economic burden.

C．Children in nursery have to take uniform nation courses.

D．The supervision of the state makes child care professional.

2. It can be learned from Paragraph 2 and 3 that ________.

A．the registered child-minders are required to take the university-entrance exams

B．the number of registered child-minders has been declining since 2001

C．anyone who looks after children at home must register with the schools

D．the growing recognition encourages more graduates to work as child-minders

3. The high price of child care ________.

A．prevents mothers from getting employed

B．may further depress the national economy

C．makes many families live on benefits

D．is far more than parents can afford

4. Which of the following would be the subject of the text?

A．The professionalization of child care has pushed up its price.

B．The high cost of child nursing makes many mothers give up their jobs.

C．The employment of more graduates makes nurseries more popular.

D．Parents in Britain pay most for child nursing throughout the world.

【推荐2】Climate change will bring and has already brought a wide variety of threatening destruction to human existence. Some of these are well-known and already operative, like the wildfires racing along California’s freeways or the permanent droughts that have been upsetting Mediterranean farmers. But are these all terrible disasters we can come up with that are brought about by climate change?

Absolutely not. None of the challenges posed by our warming climate has appeared larger in the popular imagination than sea-level rise, as global populations and wealth are heavily concentrated in low-lying coastal cities. The best available models suggest that 37 million people currently live in places that will be below high tide by 2050-in an optimistic low-carbon-emissions scenario (设想).

Or rather, that’s what such models suggested before this week. On Tuesday, a new study revealed that those alarming statistics were wildly inaccurate. The actual impacts of sea-level rise are going to be much, much worse.

Previous estimates of the impact that rising tides would have on coastal cities relied on essentially a three-dimensional map of Earth obtained from satellite readings. But those readings were fundamentally unreliable because they often measured the planet’s upper surfaces — such as treetops and tall buildings — rather than its ground level. These mistakes led scientists to overestimate the elevation (海拔) of many regions of Earth.

In a new study published by the journal Nature Communications, scientists from Princeton, University detail this methodological problem, then use artificial intelligence to determine the previous literature’s error rate. Their research yields some amazing updates to our conventional understanding of what the next century has in store for our coastlines.

In its optimistic scenario, the Princeton study projects that lands currently occupied by 150 million people will lie below high tide in 2050. But as warming destroys many of the world’s agricultural regions, climate change could accelerate migration from rural areas to coastal cities.

The new study does include one piece of slightly encouraging news. While previous models suggested that 28 million humans currently live in places that already lie below high tide, the actual number is closer to 110 million — which means seawalls and other barriers have proven sufficient to keep many cities dry even as sea levels have risen around them. Still, the scale of barrier construction necessary to save low-lying cities from collapse is now, apparently, far greater than previously understood when the task already looked terribly expensive, particularly for developing countries.

If the Princeton researchers’ projections are correct, avoiding mass death and suffering in the coming decades will require not only rapidly reducing carbon emissions and strengthening construction of seawalls but also furthering mass migrations away from low-lying cities and islands and toward higher ground.

1. The first paragraph is mainly intended to ________.

A．lay emphasis on the seriousness of climate change	B．show various disasters caused by climate change
C．call on people to fix attention on climate change	D．introduce the topic of this passage

2. All the following statements are true EXCEPT ________.

A．the three-dimensional map produced by satellite is not accurate

B．the Princeton study reveals an optimistic picture of sea rising

C．some measures are mentioned by the writer to deal with sea rising

D．more people are likely to live in coastal cities in the coming years

3. We can see something encouraging from the Princeton study that ________.

A．it’s cheap to construct seawalls as well as other barriers

B．the scale of barrier construction is much greater than before

C．seawalls do have the function to prevent coastal cities being drowned

D．developed countries have less trouble in dealing with rising sea levels

4. What is the warning that the passage is sending out?

A．How to protect cities from rising seas.	B．Climate change is endangering human existence.
C．Rising seas are going to drown more cities.	D．Less emission of carbon, fewer fires and droughts.

【推荐3】If you could change your child's DNA in the future to protect them against diseases, would you? It could be possible because of technology known as CRISPR- Cas, or just CRISPR.

CRISPR involves a piece of RNA, a chemical messenger, designed to work on one part of DNA； it also uses an enzyme (If) that can take unwanted genes out and put new ones in, according to The Economist. There are other ways of editing DNA, but CRISPR will do it very simply, quickly, and exactly.

The uses of CRISPR could mean that cures are developed for everything from Alzheimer's to cancer to HIV. By allowing doctors to put just the right cancer-killing genes into a patient's immune system, the technology could help greatly.

In April scientists in China said they had tried using CRISPR to edit the genomes (基因组)of human embryos. Though the embryos would never turn into humans, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to edit DNA from human beings. With this in mind, the US' National Academy of Sciences plans to discuss questions about CRISPR s ethics(伦理问题).For example_? CRISPR doesn't work properly yet. As well as cutting the DNA it is looking for, it often cuts other DNA, too. In addition, we currently seem to have too little understanding of what DNA gives people what qualities.

There are also moral questions around playing God”. Of course, medicine already stops natural things from happening-for example, it saves people from infections. The opportunities to treat diseases make it hard to say we shouldn't keep going.

A harder question is whether it is ever right to edit human germ-line(种系)cells and make changes that are passed on to children. This is banned in 40 countries and restricted in many others. However, CRISPR means that if genes can be edited out, they can also be edited back in. It may be up to us as a society to decide when and where editing the genome is wrong.

Also, according to The Economist, gene editing may mean that parents make choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children: “Deaf parents may prefer their children to be deaf too； parents might want to make their children more intelligent at all costs.

In the end, more research is still needed to see what we can and can't do with CRISPR. “It's still a huge mystery how we work,” Craig Mello_? a UMass Medical School biologist and Nobel Prize winner, told The Boston Globe, "We're just trying to figure out this amazingly complicated thing we call life.

1. What is the passage mainly about?

A．What we can and can't do with CRISPR.

B．How CRISPR was developed by scientists.

C．The advantages of CRISPR and arguments about its ethics.

D．Scientists' experiments of using CRISPR to edit human embryos.

2. According to the passage, the technology of CRISPR .

A．is very safe because it only cuts the DNA it is looking for

B．is banned in most countries and restricted in many others

C．could cause parents to make unwise choices for their children

D．could help us discover the link between DNA and the qualities it gives people

3. It can be inferred from the passage that .

A．all diseases could probably be cured through the uses of CRISPR

B．scientists had never edited genomes before CRISPR was invented

C．CRISPR is a technology that uses an enzyme to work on RNA and DNA

D．CRISPR has proven to be the most effective way to protect children against diseases

4. What is the author's attitude towards CRISPR?

A．Supportive.

B．Worried.

C．Negative.

D．Objective.