You are what you eat — and what you eat may be encoded in your DNA. Studies have indicated that your genetics play a role in determining the foods you find delicious or disgusting. “Everything has a genetic component, even if it’s small,” says Joanne Cole, a geneticist and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “We know there is some genetic contribution to why we eat the foods we eat. Can we take the next step and actually show the exact position of the regions in the genome (染色体)?”
A new research led by Cole has gotten a step closer. Through a large-scale genomics analysis, her team has identified 481 genome regions that were directly linked to dietary patterns and food preferences. The findings were presented at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual flagship conference.
They were based on a 2020 Nature Communications study by Cole and her colleagues that used data from the U. K. Biobank, a public database of the genetic and health information of 500,000 participants. By scanning genomes, the new analysis was able to home in on 194 regions associated with dietary patterns and 287 linked to specific foods such as fruit, cheese, fish, tea and alcohol.
“This study had a huge number of subjects, so that’s really powerful,” says Monica Dus, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who wasn’t a part of the new research but studies the relationship between genes and nutrition. “The other thing that I thought was really great is that they have so many different characteristics that they’re measuring in respect to diet. They had cholesterol, the body, socioeconomic backgrounds.”
As the research advances, Dus says such genome analyses could possibly help health care providers — and even policymakers — address larger issues that affect food access and health. “Instead of trying to obsess over telling people to eat this or that, a more powerful intervention is to link it to making sure there aren’t ‘food deserts’ or to make sure that there’s a higher minimum wage — things that have a broader impact,” she says.
1. What is the purpose of Cole’s new research?| A．To encode the role of DNA in determining food choices. |
| B．To select genetic components tightly related to food consumption. |
| C．To figure out the relationship between genetics and food preferences. |
| D．To identify specific regions in the genome related to food preferences. |
| A．The process of the study. | B．The findings of the study. |
| C．The data-source of the study. | D．The significance of the study. |
| A．The subjects of the study are powerful. |
| B．The research team studied many aspects linking to diet. |
| C．The genome analyses have no prospect in the future. |
| D．People’s wage should be raised because of “food deserts”. |
| A．What You Eat Impacts Your Health |
| B．What You Eat Forms Your Dietary Pattern |
| C．Your Genes May Determine Your Nutritional Need |
| D．Your Genes May Influence What You Like to Eat |
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Many kids don’t drink enough water daily, according to a new study. The study’s lead author, Erica Kenney, at first planned to look into the amount of sugary drinks kids were drinking in schools. However, during her research she found that many kids were simply not drinking enough water.
Kenney and her team examined data from a group of 4,000 children, aged 6 to19. The data was taken from the National Health and Nutrition Survey, a study on the health of children in the United States done each year by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
While looking through the survey results, she noticed that more than half of the kids who took part in the study were dehydrated (脱水的). Of that group, boys were 76% more likely than girls not to have enough water in their system. Nearly one quarter of the kids in the survey reported drinking no plain water at all.
“These findings highlight (突出) a possible health issue that wasn’t given a lot of attention in the past,” Kenney said in a statement. “Even though for most of these kids this is not an immediate and great health risk, this is an issue that could really be reducing quality of life and well-being for many children and youth.”
The United States-National Agriculture Library says average kids need between 10 to 14 cups of water every day. This water can come from a mix of drinks and foods that contain high amounts of water, such as celery, melons or tomatoes. It is also suggested that fluids (液体) come from water instead of sugary drinks that are high in calories and can lead to weight problems.
1. What was Erica Kenney’s purpose in doing the study?| A．To study if kids drink enough water daily. |
| B．To prove that sugary drinks are harmful to kids |
| C．To show what kind of sugary drinks kids love. |
| D．To find out how many sugary drinks kids drink at school. |
| A．school kids cannot find drinkable water easily |
| B．boys are more likely to get dehydrated than girls |
| C．sugary drinks are very popular with school kids |
| D．most kids know the importance of drinking plain water |
| A．should drink plain water to lose weight |
| B．can try to take in water from sugary drinks |
| C．can eat celery, melons and tomatoes for water |
| D．should drink no more than 10 cups of water every day |
| A．don’t like drinking water |
| B．prefer sugary drinks to water |
| C．are at risk of health problems |
| D．don’t drink enough water daily |
【推荐2】Sweeteners(甜味剂)are consumed by millions every day in products like diet soda, partly as a way to avoid weight gain from sugar-but how healthy these substitutes are has long been controversial.
To assess the cancer risk of sweeteners, researchers analysed the data of more than 100,000 people in France who self-reported their diet, lifestyle and medical history in intervals between 2009-2021.
“The participants who consumed the largest amount of sweeteners, beyond the middle amount, had an increased cancer risk of 13 percent compared to non-consumers,” said Mathilde Touvier, research director at France’s INSERM institute.
The study said that a higher cancer risk was particularly seen with sweeteners aspartame(阿巴斯甜)and acesulfame potassium(安赛蜜), used in many soft drinks including Coke Zero. Soft drinks accounted for more than half of the artificial sweeteners consumed, while table-top sweeteners represented 29 percent.
The study found that “higher risks were observed for breast cancer and obesity-related cancers”. Touvier said “we cannot totally exclude biases linked to the lifestyle of consumers”, calling for further research to confirm the study’s results.
The US National Cancer Institute and Cancer Research UK both say that sweeteners do not cause cancer, and they have been authorised for use by the European Food Safety Authority. Michael Jones of The Institute of Cancer Research, London said that the link reported in the study was “not proof that artificial sweeteners cause cancer”.
He said the findings could suggest that “cancer risk may be raised in the type of person who uses artificial sweetener rather than the sweetener itself.”
Thursday’s findings also do not mean consumers should rush back to sugary drinks-a former study found that they were also linked to a higher risk of several cancer types.
1. Why do people prefer to choose products with sweeteners?| A．These products are cheap in price. |
| B．Sweeteners used in them are totally safe. |
| C．Sweeteners in them help people not to put on weight. |
| D．These products have better taste than those with sugar. |
| A．Scientists mainly focus on sweeteners used in soft drinks. |
| B．The findings were not supported by all scientists and institutes. |
| C．The data was collected on a large scale for no more than ten years. |
| D．The intake of sweeteners can lead to 13%participants facing cancer risk. |
| A．Artificial sweeteners shouldn’t be used cautiously. |
| B．Drinking much diet soda will bring in lower risk of cancer. |
| C．People should take in food with sugar instead of sweeteners. |
| D．Cancer risk may have much to do with the lifestyle of people. |
| A．Sweeteners increasing cancer risk: not for sure | B．The future of employing artificial sweeteners |
| C．Time to rush back to sugary drinks | D．A large-scale study on sweeteners |
【推荐3】We’ve all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that may actually be true. A study of more than 50,000 adults aged 30 and older found that breakfast eaters were more likely to lose weight than those who didn’t eat a morning meal. To have a satisfying and nutritious breakfast, these tips will help you really rise and shine:
Eat even if you’re not hungry.
Although you might not feel like eating first thing in the morning, it’s a good idea to get something into your system. Eating within 90 minutes of waking up will jump- start your body and keep you from getting hungry later.
Go boring.
Varying what you eat is a good idea in theory.
Go big.
There’s an old saying that advises “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a beggar.” It’s worth following. According to a study of 93 overweight women, those who ate a balanced 700-calorie breakfast over a 12-week period lowered their blood sugar and blood pressure two times more than people who ate a 200-calorie meal.
Always pick a protein.
A review of recent studies in the health journal Advances in Nutrition found the function of protein.
Embrace fat.
Actually, fat isn’t the main enemy to weight loss success—sugar is. Fat is digested slowly by the body and helps decrease the rate at which we digest and break down carbohydrates (碳水化合物).
| A．It can also dissolve and break down vitamins A and D. |
| B．Just a banana will do the trick. |
| C．A variety of foods are mouth-watering and full of nutrition. |
| D．The breakfast needs to be high in protein. |
| E．But you’d better stick with the same old menu for your weight. |
| F．They also lost an average of 19.2 pounds. |
| G．High level of it in breakfast can reduce hunger later in the day. |
【推荐1】Just like humans, birds rely on sound to communicate, too. Often, birds recognize their mates or young by sound rather than sight. Hungry young birds use begging calls to let their mothers know it is feeding time, and warning calls are other sounds given out frequently by the adults. In addition to all these regular calls, some male birds develop beautiful songs intended（打算）to attract the females.
A new study carried out by an American university shows that songbirds practice their songs even in their sleep. The research team discovered that the electrical brain activity of the birds that were asleep was similar to the brain activity produced when the birds were awake and singing. Clearly the bird stores a song after hearing it, then practices it later in its sleep. Scientists now believe the birds dream of songs to help them master the fine art of singing and that sleep plays a key role in the learning process！
It is commonly known that many songbirds learn to sing by listening to adult birds of the same species. If taught the song of an adult of another bird species, the chick grows up singing the new song and passes on the foreign song to its chicks. For instance, researchers carried out an experiment in which a male bullfinch（红腹灰雀）was raised by a female canary（金丝雀）. The bullfinch soon learned the canary's songs and when it was later mated to a female bullfinch, Mr. Bullfinch taught his children the canary's songs.
Early last year, a British survey of London's songbirds showed that the city's birds are losing their melodies. Birds could hardly hear one another over the traffic noise；as a result they had difficulty in learning songs and communicating with potential mates. And instead of copying the sweet notes of the adults, chicks were copying sounds, which they heard most often—namely car horns（喇叭）and mobile phones！
1. What can we learn according to Paragraph 2？| A．Sleep helps songbirds master new songs. |
| B．Songbirds can even hear songs in their dreams. |
| C．The study was carried out by Australian scientists. |
| D．The brain activity of songbirds would stop in their sleep. |
| A．Because he wants to help them learn a foreign language. |
| B．Because he can't sing bulfinches' songs. |
| C．Because he wants to make them get along well with other birds. |
| D．Because the canary's songs are more attractive. |
| A．They have lost their voices. |
| B．They are losing their habitats. |
| C．They are bothered by the city's noises. |
| D．They tend to refuse to learn songs from adults. |
| A．The city's birds can learn more songs. |
| B．All birds learn foreign songs during their life. |
| C．It may be difficult for the city's birds to find their mates. |
| D．Young birds can tell the difference between songs and noises. |
Is it possible to improve your brain function? The answer is “yes”.
Information in your brain is collected, stored and recalled by neural pathways. These pathways are responsible for your abilities to solve problems, remember familiar faces and tasks, without paying a ton of efforts. Millions of these neural pathways begin developing from the time when you are growing into a baby. To keep our memory healthy, we need to create new pathways continually.
As we age, our lifestyles often change, stopping those pathways from being developed. Two frequent changes are a decrease in exercise and less attention to our diet, which have a negative effect on our brain and memory. Our brain requires consistent stimulation, regardless of our age, and looking for ways to excite the production of new pathways is critical. Just like your physical muscles need to be used in different ways to make them stronger, our brain needs change to help challenge its abilities.
One simple way to stimulate the production of new pathways is trying something new.
Challenge your brain with puzzles, a new language or learning how to play an instrument. Anything different and new can stimulate your brain and memory. The best activities are the ones outside of your comfort zone. They push you as you develop new neural pathways. The effort involved in learning and committing to memory a new skill, with new terms and language, is a great way to exercise your brain.
Another way to stimulate the production of new pathways is doing exercise. When you exercise your body, you are also working out your mind, because regular activity helps to improve the chemicals in your brain and to protect brain cells.
1. According to the passage, what can negatively affect our brain and memory?2. Why are the best activities the ones outside of your comfort zone?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
The two ways mentioned in the passage to help create new pathways are trying something new and exercising your brain by challenging your brain with different tasks.
4. What else can you do to improve your brain function? (In about 40 words)
【推荐3】WHAT’S FOR dinner? The answer matters, at every level. Globally, food prices have risen in 13 of the past 15 months and are close to their peak of 2011, owing to poor weather and the outbreak of a swine-flu in2018. In reality, agriculture uses half the world’s habitable land and accounts for more than 30% of global emissions. When one such factory in Teesside, in northern England, recently threatened to shut down because of high natural gas prices, the government had to step in to prevent food supply chains from collapsing.
Fortunately, technologies are emerging that promise to produce food in new ways. These range from bioreactors that grow meat to indoor“vertical” farms and new ways of producing fish. So it is easy to see how steaks made from plant-based protein, or grown in vats (桶) from cells, could greatly reduce factory farming and land and water use, and produce fewer emissions.
That does not mean people will be willing to eat it, however. Given food’s cultural importance, people don’t respond actively to new foodstuffs and production processes, because they feared it caused something harmful.
At the same time traditional foods and farming model are adored. Many Western consumers are willing to pay extra for food, because it avoids“chemicals”. Yet supposedly timeless food traditions are often shallower than they seem. Potatoes were eventually widely adopted in Europe (the invention of French fries helped). Coffee from Arabia and tea from China were unknown in Europe before the 17th century.
The new foods and processes on offer today present opportunities to create delicious and sustainable new traditions. Western consumers should put aside their reservations about eating crickets and give plant-based burgers and 3D-printed steaks a try. Regulators should be more open to gene-editing crops, and speed up approval of eatable insects for animal feed and human consumption.
1. What does the author aim to stress in paragraph 1?| A．Food system faces pressure from some factors. | B．Food production causes more serious pollution. |
| C．Agriculture plays important roles in the world. | D．Food safety is vitally significant for people |
| A．Livestock tends to decline in the future |
| B．Plant-based protein will be more popular. |
| C．Technology will make a huge difference. |
| D．Agricultural land should be well protected |
| A．Favorable. | B．Skeptical. | C．Indifferent. | D．Unclear. |
| A．To eat or not to eat: that’s a question that you have. |
| B．What you eat: a diverse food culture appealing to you |
| C．New ways to make food are coming-but will you bite? |
| D．A new era in technology is approaching-but are you ready? |
【推荐1】Like it or love it, social media is a major part of life. Clicking on a thumbs-up or a heart icon (图标) is an easy way to stay in touch. Whether you’re on Facebook, what’s App or Twitter, the way, of keeping in touch is no longer face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature — but what impact is this having on us?
Lauren Sherman and her team, who study the brain at Temple University in Philadeiphia, mixed 20 teens’ photos with 10 other pictures from public Instagram accounts. Then they randomly gave half of the images many likes (between 23 and 45; most had more than 30). They gave the other half no more than 22 likes (most had fewer than 15).
The researchers wanted to find out how the participants’ brains were responding to the different images. While the teens were in a machine, researchers asked them to either like an image or skip to the next one. Teens were much more likely to like images that seemed popular — those that had more than 23 likes, Sherman’s team found. The kids tended to skip pictures with few likes.
As part of the experiment, participants were also shown a range of “neutral” photos showing things like food and friends, and “risky” photos concerning cigarettes and alcohol. When looking at photos showing risky behaviors, such as smoking or drinking — no matter how many likes they had — the brain region linked to cognitive (认知的) control tended to become less active. These kinds of pictures can lower the viewer’s self-control. That means what you like online has the power to influence not just what others like, but even what they do. Viewing pictures like these could make teens let down their guard when it comes to experimenting with drugs and alcohol, Sherman worries.
1. What does the text focus on?| A．The behaviors of teens. |
| B．The self-control of teens. |
| C．The influence of social media. |
| D．The popularity of social media. |
| A．Seventeen images are given 20 likes. |
| B．Fifteen images are given 25 likes. |
| C．Fifteen images are given 42 likes. |
| D．Eight images are given 40 likes. |
| A．More likes may be given. |
| B．Misbehaviors may be encouraged. |
| C．More risky pictures may be posted. |
| D．Cognitive control may become less active. |
| A．To condemn immoral social behaviors. |
| B．To promote modern social media. |
| C．To explain the brain system. |
| D．To introduce a new research. |
【推荐2】In 2019 air travel accounted for 2.5 percent of global carbon emissions, a number that could be more than doubled by 2050. While some airlines have started making up for their contributions to atmospheric carbon, significant cutbacks are still needed. Electric airplanes could provide the scale of transformation required, and many companies are racing to develop them. Not only would electric propulsion (推进) motors eliminate direct carbon emissions, they could reduce fuel costs by up to 90 percent, maintenance by up to 50 percent and noise by nearly 70 percent.
Cape Air, one of the largest regional airlines, expects to be among the first customers, with plans to buy the nine-passenger electric aircraft from Eviation. Cape Air’s CEO Dan Wolf has said he is interested not only in the environmental benefits but also in potential savings on operation costs. Electric motors generally have longer life spans than the hydrocarbon-fueled engines in his current aircraft; they need repairs at 20,000 hours versus 2,000.
Forward-propulsion engines are not the only ones going electric. NASA’s X-57 Maxwell electric plane, under development, replaces current wings with shorter ones that feature a set of distributed electric propellers (螺旋桨). On traditional jets, wings must be large enough to provide lift when a craft is traveling at a low speed, but the large surface area adds drag at higher speeds. Electric propellers increase lift during takeoff, allowing for smaller wings and overall higher efficiency.
For the foreseeable future, electric planes will be limited in how far they can travel. Today’s best batteries put out far less power by weight than traditional fuels: an energy density of 250 watt-hours per kilogram versus 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram for jet fuel. The batteries required for a given flight are therefore far heavier than standard fuel and take up more space. Approximately half of all flights globally are fewer than 800 kilometers, which is expected to be within the range of battery-powered electric aircraft by 2025.
Electric aviation faces cost and regulatory obstacles, but investors, corporations and governments excited by the progress of this technology are investing significantly in its development: some $250 million flowed to electric aviation start-ups between 2017 and 2019. Currently roughly 170 electric airplane projects are underway. Most electric airplanes are designed for private, corporate and commuter travel, but Airbus says it plans to have 100-passenger versions ready to fly by 2030.
1. What can be inferred from the underlined sentence in paragraph one?| A．Airline’s current efforts to reduce carbon emissions are far from enough. |
| B．Airline companies haven’t invested enough in their technological development. |
| C．Only by promoting electric planes can airlines balance their carbon emission impact. |
| D．Airline companies alone cannot realize the global goal of carbon emission reduction. |
| A．After frequent maintenance, they last longer and produce less noise. |
| B．Electric propellers enable them to fly at low speed with great lift. |
| C．They are designed to accommodate a large number of passengers. |
| D．They can fly at lower speed with less drag with the help of bigger wings. |
| A．the cost of energy per kilogram is higher for electric planes |
| B．existing batteries are too large and heavy to be placed inside the planes |
| C．the same weight of batteries holds less power than that of traditional fuel |
| D．half of the batteries have not been designed to sustain long distance flight |
| A．How Electric Aircraft Green Air Can Travel |
| B．World’s Electric Aircrafts Set for First Flight |
| C．How Electric Flights Will Change Our Future |
| D．Electric Flights Could Be Closer Than You Think |
【推荐3】You improve your robot’s software by improving its software. Agrim Gupta of Stanford University, however, begs to differ. He thinks you can also improve a robot’s software by improving its hardware. He and his colleagues have invented a way of testing this idea.
They brought to their robots, unimals, the principles of evolution (进化) by natural selection. Unimals, with globes for heads and sticks for arms and legs, are software beings interacting with a virtual environment. The environments where they wandered were in three varieties: flat grounds, grounds with hills and steps, and ones that had the complexities of the second sort, but with added objects.
To begin with, the unimals were randomly assigned various shapes, but with identical software— derl. Newly created unimals learned to face the challenges in a virtual bootcamp. They were then entered into tournaments in groups. Each group winner was awarded one mutation (变异) —one extra arm or leg, or one extra turning in a joint. The new replaced the oldest unimal and then was assigned to a new group, and the process repeated. About 4,000 varieties of them underwent training.
The team were surprised by the diversity of shapes that evolved. Crucially, though, the researchers found the most successful unimals learned tasks in half the time their oldest ancestors had taken, and that those evolving in the toughest grounds were the most successful.
In this evolution of unimals’ morphology (形态) to promote the ability to learn, Dr Gupta sees a version of something called the Baldwin effect. In 1896 James Baldwin, a psychologist, argued that minds evolve to make the best use of the morphologies of the bodies. What Dr Gupta has shown, though in software, is that the opposite can also be true — changes in body morphology can improve the way minds work. Even though he held the software constant, it became more efficient at learning as the unimals’ bodies evolved.
Whether that discovery can be turned to account in the way robots are developed remains to be seen. But the way of testing is certainly an out-of-the-box idea.
1. How was the test conducted?| A．By promoting Unimals’ learning. | B．By adjusting the environments. |
| C．By proving the evolution theory. | D．By stimulating unimals’ mutation. |
| A．The number of trained unimals. | B．The decline in time for learning tasks. |
| C．The variety of evolved shapes. | D．The replacement of old unimals. |
| A．Mind evolution affects body shaping. |
| B．Body changes better mind work. |
| C．Hardware changes do not impact software. |
| D．The discovery is useful in robot development. |
| A．Negative. | B．Objective. |
| C．Indifferent. | D．Approving. |
