【推荐1】Making day-to-day activities more intense for a few minutes — such as briefly stepping up the pace of a walk — could offer people who don’t exercise some of the health benefits that exercisers enjoy, according to a new study of roughly 25, 000 adults who reported no exercise in their free time.

Those who include three one- to two-minute bursts of intense activity per day saw a nearly a 40 percent drop in the risk of death from any cause compared with those without such activity. The risk of death from cancer also fell by nearly 40 percent, and the risk of death from cardiovascular (心血管的) disease dropped almost 50 percent, researchers report online December 8 in Nature Medicine.

“This study adds to other literature showing that even short amounts of activity are beneficial,” says Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, a physical activity epidemiologist (流行病学家) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So many people are daunted by feeling that they don’t have the time, money, motivation, transportation, etc. togo to a gym regularly or work out for long periods of time,” she says. “The message we can take is that it is absolutely worth doing what you can.”

The researchers were looking for bursts of intense activity that met a definition determined in a laboratory study, like reaching at least 77 percent of maximum heart rate and at least 64 percent of maximum oxygen consumption. In real life, the signs that someone has reached the needed intensity level are “an increase in heart rate and feeling out of breath” in the first 15 to 30 seconds of an activity, Stamatakis says.

Regular daily activities offer several opportunities for these bursts, he says. “The simplest one is maximizing walking pace for a minute or two during any regular walk.” Other options, he says, include carrying grocery bags to the car or taking the stairs. “The largest population health gains will be realized by finding ways to get the least physically active people to move a little more.”

What might be a suitable title for the text?

A．The Simplest Daily Exercise Activities

B．Brief Intense Activities Can Be Helpful

C．The Guidance on Brief Intense Activities

D．Regular Exercise Is Necessary for Everyone

【推荐3】What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason is simple: we know of just one type of life and it’s challenging to do science with a sample size of one. The field of artificial life-called ALife for short — is the systematic attempt to spell out life’s fundamental principles. Many of these practitioners, so-called ALifers, think that somehow making life is the surest way to really understand what life is.

So far no one has convincingly made artificial life. This track record makes ALife a ripe target for criticism, such as declarations of the field’s doubtful scientific value. Alan Smith, a complexity scientist, is tired of such complaints. Asking about “the point” of ALife might be, well, missing the point entirely, he says. “The existence of a living system is not about the use of anything.” Alan says. “Some people ask me, ‘So what’s the worth of artificial life?’ Do you ever think, ‘What is the worth of your grandmother?’”

As much as many ALifers hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered ALife’s cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.

Compared with the developments of Al, advances in ALife are harder to recognize. One reason is that ALife is a field in which the central concept — life itself — is undefined. The lack of agreement among ALifers doesn’t help either. The result is a diverse line of projects that each advance along their unique paths. For better or worse, ALife mirrors the very subject it studies. Its muddled (混乱的) progression is a striking parallel (平行线) to the evolutionary struggles that have shaped Earth biosphere.

Undefined and uncontrolled, ALife drives its followers to repurpose old ideas and generated novelty. It may be, of course, that these characteristics aren’t in any way surprising or singular. They may apply universally to all acts of evolution. Ultimately ALife may be nothing special. But even this dismissal suggests something：perhaps, just like life itself throughout the universe, the rise of ALife will prove unavoidable.

Which would be the best title for the passage?

A．Life Is Undefined. Can AI Be a Way Out?

B．Life Evolves. Can AI Help ALife Evolve, Too?

C．Life Is Undefined. Can ALife Be Defined One Day?

D．Life Evolves. Can Attempts to Create ALife Evolve, Too?

【推荐1】Monkeys seem to have a way with numbers.

A team of researchers trained three Rhesus monkeys to associate 26 clearly different symbols consisting of numbers and selective letters with 0-25 drops of water or juice as a reward. The researchers then tested how the monkeys combined—or added—the symbols to get the reward.

Here’s how Harvard Medical School scientist Margaret Livingstone, who led the team, described the experiment: In their cages the monkeys were provided with touch screens. On one part of the screen, a symbol would appear, and on the other side two symbols inside a circle were shown. For example, the number 7 would flash on one side of the screen and the other end would have 9 and 8. If the monkeys touched the left side of the screen they would be rewarded with seven drops of water or juice; if they went for the circle, they would be rewarded with the sum of the numbers—17 in this example.

After running hundreds of tests, the researchers noted that the monkeys would go for the higher values more than half the time, indicating that they were performing a calculation, not just memorizing the value of each combination.

When the team examined the results of the experiment more closely, they noticed that the monkeys tended to underestimate(低估) a sum compared with a single symbol when the two were close in value—sometimes choosing, for example, a 13 over the sum of 8 and 6. The underestimation was systematic: When adding two numbers, the monkeys always paid attention to the larger of the two, and then added only a fraction(小部分) of the smaller number to it.

“This indicates that there is a certain way quantity is represented in their brains, ”Dr. Livingstone says. “But in this experiment what they’re doing is paying more attention to the big number than the little one.”

How did the monkeys get their reward in the experiment?

A．By drawing a circle.

B．By touching a screen.

C．By watching videos.

D．By mixing two drinks.

【推荐1】The scientist’s job is to figure out how the world works, to “torture (拷问)” Nature to reveal her secrets, as the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon described it. But who are these people in the lab coats (or sports jackets, or T-shirts and jeans) and how do they work? It turns out that there is a good deal of mystery surrounding the mystery-solvers.

“One of the greatest mysteries is the question of what it is about human beings — brains, education, culture etc. that makes them capable of doing science at all,” said Colin Allen, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University.

Two vital ingredients seem to be necessary to make a scientist: the curiosity to seek out mysteries and the creativity to solve them. “Scientists exhibit a heightened level of curiosity,” reads a 2007 report on scientific creativity. “They go further and deeper into basic questions showing a passion for knowledge for its own sake.” Max Planck, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once said, the scientist “must have a vivid and intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction (推论), but by an artistically creative imagination.”

......

As long as our best technology for seeing inside the brain requires subjects to lie nearly motionless while surrounded by a giant magnet, we’re only going to make limited pro gress on these questions,” Allen said.

What is a suitable title for the text?

A．Who Are The Mystery-solvers

B．Scientists Are Not Born But Made

C．Great Mystery: What Makes A Scientist

D．Solving Mysteries: Inside A Scientist’s Mind

【推荐3】请根据以下信息，介绍一位传奇人物。
姓 名：Marie Curie (Madame Curie)
出生日期：1867年11月7日
出身：波兰一个知识分子家庭
兴趣爱好：自幼对物理及阅读兴趣很浓
性格特征：意志坚强，有决心
教育经历：当时波兰不允许女子上大学，她去法国深造并获得物理学位
主要成就：发现镭，获得诺贝尔奖
评价：对科学界做出巨大贡献，被认为是最伟大的女性科学家
注意：词数80左右。
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