【推荐1】Researchers say they have translated the meaning of gestures that wild chimpanzees（黑猩猩）use to communicate. They say wild chimps communicate 19 specific messages to one another with a "vocabulary" of 66 gestures. The scientists discovered this by following and filming groups of chimps in Uganda, and examining more than 5, 000 incidents of these meaningful exchanges.

Dr Catherine Hobaiter, who led the research, said that this was the only form of intentional communication to be recorded in the animal kingdom. Only humans and chimps, she said, had a system of communication where they deliberately sent a message to another group member.

"That's what's so amazing about chimp gestures, " she said. "They're the only thing that looks like human language in that respect."

Although previous research has shown that apes and monkeys can understand complex information from another animal's call, the animals do not appear to use their voices intentionally to communicate messages. This was a significant difference between calls and gestures, Dr Hobaiter said.

Chimps will check to see if they have the attention of the animal with which they wish to communicate. In one case, a mother presents her foot to her crying baby, signaling: "Climb on me." The youngster immediately jumps on to its mother's back and they travel off together. "The big message from this study is that there is another species（物种）out there that is meaningful in its communication, so that's not unique to humans, " said Dr Hobaiter.

Dr Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Manchester, said the study was praiseworthy in seeking to enrich our knowledge of the evolution of human language. But, she added, the results were "a little disappointing".

"The vagueness of the gesture meanings suggests either that the chimps have little to communicate, or we are still missing a lot of the information contained in their gestures and actions, " she said. "Moreover, the meanings seem to not go beyond what other animals convey with non-verbal communication. So, it seems the gulf remains."

What did Dr Shultz think of the study?

A．It was well designed but poorly conducted.

B．It was a good try but the findings were limited.

C．It was inspiring but the evidence was unreliable.

D．It was a failure but the methods deserved praise.

【推荐2】根据短文内容，从下框的A---F选项中选出能概括每一段主题的最佳选项。 选项中有一项为多余选项。
1. Pet-keeping is a time-honored tradition. One of the reasons for people to raise dogs or cows was usefulness. While people in the past hunted animals and kept them in their backyards, the civilised man today is less cruel towards them and is less exploitative(利用的).     1    
2. We keep animals as pets because they are attractive. We all have the urge to possess something that has aesthetic（审美的）value, and this is why we treasure paintings or fine furniture. Keeping pets is one form of this urge. A Siamese cat in the house can be a decorative object. Pets are playful animals and they amuse us. A little rabbit amuses us by its playful and lively runs.     2    
3. Many parents find it helpful to have pets in the house for their children. Having pets is an excellent way of developing in children the love of animals and responsibility. Children get the opportunity to take on full responsibility for another creature’s life. It will be an educational experience for a child to watch the natural life cycle of an animal. There are psychological benefits for children. Pets are welcome friends for children who are lonely. Pets are excellent companions. Keeping pets means giving love and being loved. We find comfort in giving care and receiving care in return. We get pleasure from their appearance and their behavior.     3    
4. As more people move into apartments, there are limitations on keeping of animals like dogs and monkeys. Therefore, caged animals have increased in popularity. Birds fall into this group. We keep them for their beautiful songs and feathers. Fish-keeping is a widespread hobby and the keeper can observe their behavior in the glass tank and study its entire life cycle. The cat is a fine house pet and it fits neatly into human habitation(居住地) without requiring its own cage. They are wonderful hunters, if there are rats around.     4    
5. Pets satisfy man’s desire to care for a bit of nature. The pet owner has the responsibility for supplying those needs that nature provides. Pets are amusing and entertaining, but we are in a way doing animals harm by making them live in a human environment. Are we not enslaving(奴役)them?     5    

A．Adults keep pets with their children.

B．Pet-keeping has a very long history.

C．Pet-keeping may do harm to animals.

D．People keeps pets for their aesthetic need.

E．Caged pets become increasingly popular.

F．Pet-keeping is helpful for children’s growth.

【推荐1】In 1916, two girls of wealthy families, best friends from Auburn, N. Y.—Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood—traveled to a settlement in the Rocky Mountains to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. The girls had gone to Smith College. They wore expensive clothes. So for them to move to Elkhead, Colo. to instruct the children whose shoes were held together with string was a surprise. Their stay in Elkhead is the subject of Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden, who is a magazine editor and Dorothy Woodruff’s granddaughter.

Why did they go then? Well, they wanted to do something useful. Soon, however, they realized what they had undertaken.

They moved in with a local family, the Harrisons, and, like them, had little privacy, rare baths, and a blanket of snow on their quilt when they woke up in the morning. Some mornings, Rosamond and Dorothy would arrive at the schoolhouse to find the children weeping from the cold. In spring, the snow was replaced by mud over ice.

In Wickenden’s book, she expanded on the history of the West and also on feminism, which of course influenced the girls’ decision to go to Elkhead. A hair-raising section concerns the building of the railroads, which entailed (牵涉) drilling through the Rockies, often in blinding snowstorms. The book ends with Rosamond and Dorothy’s return to Auburn.

Wickenden is a very good storyteller. The sweep of the land and the stoicism (坚忍) of the people move her to some beautiful writing. Here is a picture of Dorothy Woodruff, on her horse, looking down from a hill top: “When the sun slipped behind the mountains, it shed a rosy glow all around them. Then a full moon rose. The snow was marked only by small animals: foxes, coyotes, mice, and varying hares, which turned white in the winter.”

What is the text?

A．A news report.	B．A book review.
C．A children’s story.	D．A diary entry.

【推荐2】          A build-it-yourself solar still (蒸馏器) is one of the best ways to obtain drinking water in areas where the liquid is not readily available. Developed by two doctors in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it’s an excellent water collector. Unfortunately, you must carry the necessary equipment with you, since it’s all but impossible to find natural substitutes. The only components required, though, are a 5’×5’sheet of clear or slightly milky plastic, six feet of plastic tube, and a container — perhaps just a drinking cup — to catch the water. These pieces can be folded into a neat little pack and fastened on your belt.

To construct a working still, use a sharp stick or rock to dig a hole four feet across and three feet deep. Try to make the hole in a damp area to increase the water catcher’s productivity. Place your cup in the deepest part of the hole. Then lay the tube in place so that one end rests all the way in the cup and the rest of the line runs up — and out — the side of the hole.

Next, cover the hole with the plastic sheet, securing the edges of the plastic with dirt and weighting the sheet’s center down with a rock. The plastic should now form a cone (圆锥体) with 45-degree-angled sides. The low point of the sheet must be centered directly over, and no more than three inches above, the cup.

The solar still works by creating a greenhouse under the plastic. Ground water evaporates (蒸发) and collects on the sheet until small drops of water form, run down the material and fall off into the cup. When the container is full, you can suck the refreshment out through the tube, and won’t have to break down the still every time you need a drink.

What does the underlined phrase “the water catcher” in paragraph 2 refer to?

A．The tube.	B．The still.
C．The hole.	D．The cup.

【推荐3】A machine can now not only beat you at chess, it can also outperform you in debate. Last week, in a public debate in San Francisco, a software program called Project Debater beat its human opponents, including Noa Ovadia, Israel’s former national debating champion.

Brilliant though it is, Project Debater has some weaknesses. It takes sentences from its library of documents and prebuilt arguments and strings them together. This can lead to the kinds of errors no human would make. Such wrinkles will no doubt be ironed out, yet they also point to a fundamental problem. As Kristian Hammond, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, put it: “There’s never a stage at which the system knows what it’s talking about.”

What Hammond is referring to is the question of meaning, and meaning is central to what distinguishes the least intelligent of humans from the most intelligent of machines. A computer works with symbols. Its program specifies a set of rules to transform one string of symbols into another. But it does not specify what those symbols mean. Indeed, to a computer, meaning is irrelevant. Humans, in thinking, talking, reading and writing, also work with symbols. But for humans, meaning is everything. When we communicate, we communicate meaning. What matters is not just the outside of a string of symbols, but the inside too, not just how they are arranged but what they mean.

Meaning emerges through a process of social interaction, not of computation, interaction that shapes the content of the symbols in our heads. The rules that assign meaning lie not just inside our heads, but also outside, in society, in social memory, social conventions and social relations. It is this that distinguishes humans from machines. And that’s why, however astonishing Project Debater may seem, the tradition that began with Socrates and Confucius will not end with artificial intelligence.

What does the underlined word “wrinkles” in paragraph 2 refer to?

A．Arguments.

B．Doubts.

C．Errors.

D．Differences.

【推荐1】As we all know, insects can be remarkably agile (灵活的) in flight. This is really hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has developed an insect-sized drone (无人机) that approaches insects’ agility.

Typically, drones require wide open spaces. “If we look at most drones today, they’re usually quite big,” says Chen. “Most of their applications involve flying outdoors. The question is: Can you create an insect-sized drone that can move around in very crowded and complex spaces?”

According to Chen, he overcame many problems when building the drone. The insect-sized drone requires a fundamentally different construction from a larger one. The large drone is usually powered by a motor, but the motor loses efficiency as you shrink it. So, Chen says, “For an insect-sized drone, you need to look for alternatives.” The principal alternative until now has been employing a small, rigid actuator (执行器) built from new materials. Chen designed a more agile tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard ones.

......

1. What can we know about the actuator designed by Chen?

A．It weighs about six grams.

B．It drives the insect-sized drone.

C．It loses efficiency too much.

D．It employs conventional materials.

【推荐2】The physical memory dump error is a big problem that affects even the most advanced computer systems．Although it's quite a rare error, it's one of the most stopping what you're doing and restarting your computer—making you lose all your unsaved data．This is a big problem, but there is actually a very easy way to fix it．
There are two reasons why the physical memory dump happens．The first is pretty simple and is to do with the "hardware", and if any of these pieces are not fit for your system, it will cause the physical memory dump．So, if you've recently added any hardware to your PC, then take that out and see if it works．
The other reason is your system, the "registry"．The registry is a big database that operates in the background of Windows, storing all sorts of settings and information about your PC．The problem with the registry is that since it has so many important files inside, it's constantly got hundreds of files open every time you use your PC．And because there are so many files to open at once, Windows is constantly getting confused, leading it to save many of these files in the wrong way．These files go wrong when saved wrongly, making them difficult for your computer to read．However, if it can't read the files at all, it has no choice but to stop everything it's doing and restart your PC．This is why the physical memory dump error appears so easily—because when a registry file is so wrong that it can't be read, your computer needs to refresh itself immediately．
This latter reason for causing the physical memory dump is actually extremely common and the likelihood is that your PC is suffering from it, if you're seeing this error．Luckily, it's also incredibly easy to fix—you just need to use a software tool called a "registry cleaner" to go through the registry and fix all the problems in there．
1. From the text we can infer that ________．

A．the dump error often happens to your PC

B．the dump can be dealt with easily

C．only the advanced computers suffers from the error

D．the dump error can cause the data in your PC to be lost

2. The reason that your PC has the dump error is that ___________．
A．the hardware loses its memory
B．your Windows needs to be upgraded
C．you have saved wrong files in the PC
D．you have stored too many files in the PC．
3. What’s problem with the registry when your PC goes wrong?
A．The register can’t read the files correctly．
B．It must open 100 files every time you use your PC．
C．The register doesn’t agree with the database．
D．The register must save many important files inside．
4. What does a registry cleaner means?

A．A software which can help you save time．

B．A software which can remove unnecessary files

C．A software which can repair the machine．

D．a software which makes your PC down．