【推荐2】We all know that listening to music can soothe emotional pain, but Taylor Swift, Jay-Z and Alicia Keys can also ease physical pain, according to a study of children and teenagers who had major surgery.

The research was carried out because of a very personal experience. Sunitha Suresh was a college student when her grandmother had major surgery and was put in intensive care (重症监护). This meant her family couldn’t always be with her. They decided to put her favorite music on an iPod so she could listen around the clock.

It was very calming, Suresh says. “She knew that someone who loved her had left that music for her and she was in a familiar place.”

Suresh could see that the music relaxed her grandmother and made her feel less anxious, but she wondered if she also felt less pain. That would make sense, because anxiety can make people more sensitive to pain. At the time Suresh was majoring in biomedical engineering with a minor (兼修) in music cognition (认知) at Northwestern University where her father, Santhanam Suresh, is a professor of pediatrics (儿科).

So the father and daughter decided to do a study. And since Dr Suresh works with children, they decided to look at how music chosen by the children themselves might affect their tolerance for pain.

It was a small study, involving 60 patients between 9 and 14 years old. All the patients were undergoing big operations that required them to stay in the hospital for at least a couple of days. Right after surgery, patients received narcotics (麻醉药) to control pain. The next day they were divided into three groups. One group heard 30 minutes of music of their choice, one heard 30 minutes of stories of their choice and one listened to 30 minutes of silence via noise canceling headphones.

After a 30-minute session, the children who listened to music or books reduced their pain burden by 1 point on a 10-point scale. Sunitha Suresh says it’s equal to taking an over-the-counter pain medication like Advil or Tylenol.

The findings suggest that doctors may be able to use less pain medication for their pediatric patients. And that’s a good thing, says Santhanam Suresh, as children are smaller and are more likely to suffer side effects. So the less pain medication, he says, the better.

1. What does the underlined word “soothe” in Paragraph 1 mean?

A．reduce	B．influence
C．stop	D．ignore

2. What inspired Sunitha Suresh to do the research on the effects of music?

A．Her father’s study into music cognition.

B．Her grandmother’s experience of recovery.

C．A book that claims anxiety can reduce pain.

D．Her desire to find a way to help patients relieve pain.

3. During the research, all the participants ________.

A．were under twelve years old

B．received narcotics to control pain after big operations

C．were required to stay in the hospital for a couple of months

D．were divided into 3 groups to listen to the same music

4. What did Suresh and her father find out from their research?

A．Listening to books didn’t reduce the children’s pain burden at all.

B．Music was even more effective than pain medication for the children.

C．Listening to music did reduce the children’s pain burden to a great extent.

D．The longer the children listened to music, the less pain they felt.

5. The findings are especially important for children because ________.

A．they are more sensitive to music than adults

B．they can easily get addicted to pain medication

C．they usually don’t like taking pain medication

D．they are more likely to suffer side effects of pain medication

【推荐3】It’s a typical morning you wake up, take a shower, brush your teeth, and then stick your arm with a tiny needle. Wait, what? Unless you have a serious disease such as diabetes, you probably haven't ever tested your own blood. But in the future, that might change.

The company Cor already sells a system for home blood testing. You stick your arm using a supposedly painless, throwaway, blood-drawing cartridges (针筒) about the size of a lipstick. Then you stick the cartridge into a device that looks like the base for an electric toothbrush. A few minutes later, an app on your phone buzzes with updated information, including your current health state and tips on what to eat and how to exercise during the day. “Health is the most important thing we have. So why nottrack it as often, and as well as possible?” says Cor’s company website.

It's true that blood contains a wealth of information about a person's health. Specific test can reveal if a person is infected with a disease or at risk for a variety of problems, including a heart attack or a stroke. But most people don’t test their own blood until a doctor says it’s time. Healthy young adults get routine blood tests about every five years. These tests happen at a lab, where a technician or a nurse jabs a long needle into the arm to draw out several tubes full of blood.

Cor and similar companies, such as Wellness FX, are trying to change all that. They think people deserve access to more information about their own health.

But not everyone is convinced that regular blood testing for healthy people is a great idea. Cor’s system is expensive and may not offer much benefit. “The best-case situation here is you lose your money and then you're reminded to get more sleep and to eat more fruits, vegetables, and fish,” Pieter Cohen of Harvard Medical School told the reporter. “The worst case of situation is that you end up getting alarmed by supposedly abnormal results that are actually completely normal for you.”

Plus, the results of a home blood test might be wrong. It's hard to get accurate results from a tiny amount of blood. One company, Theranos, said it could perform medical blood tests on a finger-prick's worth of blood. But the company was soon stuck in a debate and accused of cheat because its technology didn't seem to work as promised.

What do you think? Is monitoring your own health by pinpricks (针刺) the way of the future? Or is it better to leave blood testing to medical professionals?

1. What is Paragraph 2 mainly about?

A．Why the home blood testing system should be applied.

B．What can be done with the home blood testing system.

C．Who might use the home blood testing system.

D．How the home blood testing system works.

2. Some doubt regular home blood testing mainly because it might ________.

A．provide people with misleading information

B．lead people to a risk for various problems

C．track people’s private information online

D．cost people a large amount of money

3. What can we infer from the passage?

A．It’s possible to have home blood test every day in the future.

B．Home blood test can provide accurate result to cure diseases.

C．Healthy young people needn’t have home blood test very often.

D．The company Cor often misleads people by giving false results.

4. What is author’s attitude towards home blood tests?

A．Supportive.

B．Negative.

C．Doubtful.

D．Objective.

【推荐3】Nowadays the U.S. students are sleepy in school because they spend too much time texting, playing video games, watching TV, and using the media in other ways.

"Heavy media use interferes with sleep by reducing sleep duration, making it harder to fall asleep, and lowering sleep quality," Meilan Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at E1 Paso, wrote in her research review in the journal, Sleep Medicine.

But the relationship between youth's media use and sleep is not so simple, said Michael Gradisar, who authored both that review and the Sleep Medicine meta-analysis. "Technology use is the new evidence when we are trying to answer 'Why are school-age children sleeping less?" said Mr. Gradisar, an associate professor of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

There may be safe limits to technology use, Mr. Gradisar stated. For instance, recent research results indicate that using a bright screen for an hour before bed or even playing violent video games for less than that will not necessarily interfere with teenagers' sleep, he wrote.

But longer periods of usage can be harmful to sleep, Mr. Gradisar added. Rather than delaying school start times, he said, the first step should be educating parents about limiting the hours that their children are using technology before bed, and enforcing a consistent bedtime.

Early school start times are also commonly blamed for students' sleepiness, especially for adolescents. Secondary schools around the nation and the world have been delaying start times, often with positive results.

Mr. Minnich of the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center hesitated to put blame to any particular factor. But he did think that cost-saving measures to consolidate (合并) bus routes might help explain U.S. students' sleepiness.

"For those children who board the bus first, they must get up earlier, may end up sleeping on the way to school, and may end up arriving at school sleepy." he said.

1. Which of the following may be the best title for the text?

A．Kids benefit a lot from technology

B．Some tips can help kids sleep well

C．Several factors affect kids' sleep

D．Several sleep troubles appear at school

2. According to Meilan Zhang, ________.

A．students are good at using the media

B．students' sleep is affected by the media

C．students use the media during sleeping

D．students suffer from technology badly

3. Which of the following may be the good way to help kids sleep better?

A．Their playing time must be limited.

B．Technology is forbidden at home.

C．They are allowed to go to school early.

D．Parents should be well educated.

4. Who are most likely to be interested in the text?

A．The officials.	B．The teachers.
C．The parents.	D．The researchers

【推荐2】Can a fish be depressed? This question has been on my head ever since I spent a night in a hotel across from a sad-looking fish. His name was Bruce Lee.

The pleasant woman at the front desk assured me that he was well taken care of. Was I incorrectly assuming his laziness was a sign of being upset?

When I sought answers from scientists, I assumed that they would find the question ridiculous. But they did not. New research has been totally shifting the way that scientists think about fish cognition (认知)，building a case that pet and owner are not nearly as different as many assume. The neurochemistry (神经化学）is so similar that it’s scary, said Julian Pittman，a professor. We tend to think of them as simple living things, but there is a lot we don't give fish credit for.

Dr. Pittman likes working with fish, in part, because they are so obvious about their depression. A zebrafish gets dropped in a new tank. If after five minutes it is hanging out in the lower half, it’s depressed. If it’s swimming up top, then it’s not.

Is depression the right word? There's the obvious issue that we cannot ask animals how they feel, says Dr. Diego A. Pizzagali . Neither fish nor rats can catch the entire range of depression as we know it.

There is a heated debate about whether anxious or depressed is a more appropriate term. But what has convinced Dr. Pittman, and others, over the past ten years is watching the way the zebrafish lose interest in just about everything: food, toys, exploration, just like clinically depressed people who are withdrawn. The same is true of fish.

One of the things we're finding is that fish are naturally curious and seek novel things out, said Dr. Braithwaite. In other words, your goldfish is probably bored. To help get rid of depression, she urges introducing new objects to the tank or switching up the location of items.

1. What is Paragraph 3 mainly about?

A．Fish are considered simple living things.

B．Pet and owner are always assumed the same.

C．Scientists have learnt a lot about fish cognition.

D．Fish and human beings have something in common.

2. What does the underlined word “withdrawn” in Paragraph 6 probably mean?

A．Quiet and shy.

B．Happy and excited.

C．Interested and careful.

D．Disappointed and surprised.

3. Why can fish become bored according to the text?

A．They need oxygen from the air.

B．They are not born to be curious.

C．They lack new things to explore.

D．They can’t locate the positions of items.

4. What might be the best title for the text?

A．Fish Depression Is not a Joke.

B．Fish Can Be a Boring Pet.

C．Fish Need Better Care More.

D．Fish Cognition Does not Exist.

【推荐3】Science fiction pioneer and writer Wu Yan won this year's National Outstanding Children's Literature Award for his latest work China Orbit. The book focuses on the development of the Chinese aerospace(航空航天) industry, and it was inspired by the planning and preparation for China's first but canceled manned spacecraft, “Shuguang 1”, also known as Project 714, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“I collected many historical documents and stories and started writing decades ago,” Wu remembered. Partly based on Wu's own experiences in the 1970s, the book is a combination of reality and fiction, and in some ways his own memoir(回忆录) was added into the science fiction. This innovative and unique writing method makes the book stand out and has even stirred up a debate on how to categorize it. Is it science fiction, popular science, children's literature, or aerospace literature?

His fellow science fiction writer Liu Cixin, author of The Three- Body Problem, sees it more deeply, and believes China Orbit is not really children's science fiction or popular science. He thinks it is too complicated to be classed under a single category. He speaks highly of China Orbit as a unique science fiction novel that vividly shows a child’s real-life experience in a military camp of a specific era.

In Wu's opinion, China is a big market for children's science fiction, but it still lacks extraordinary works. He warned people not to try to earn quick money from it after The Three Body Problem frenzy and movie blockbuster The Wandering Earth because Chinese science fiction still has a long way to go. “We need to build Chinese science fiction step by step, with an accumulation(积累)of really great works. We need to innovate, and treat it as part of building China's new culture, ” Wu said.

1. What is the book China Orbit mainly about?

A．The space industry in China.

B．The introduction to Project 714.

C．Stories about Chinese outstanding astronauts.

D．Preparations for China's first manned spacecraft.

2. What is Wu’s approach to writing China Orbit?

A．He organizes the writing by time.

B．He tells the story in the form of debate.

C．He focuses on creating the role of children.

D．He combines his personal experiences with fiction.

3. What is Liu Cixin's attitude to China Orbit?

A．Doubtful.

B．Unclear.

C．Favorable.

D．Unconcerned.

4. What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A．China Orbit has great commercial value.

B．Innovation is crucial to Chinese science fiction.

C．Chinese science movies are of poor qualty.

D．Wu Yan is disappointed at the Chinese film market.