Tears are good for your eyes. In fact, without them, your eyes wouldn’t even be able to move. Some people say tears help us in other ways, too. Maybe you know someone who likes to watch sad movies in order to “have a good cry”. It hasn’t been proven, but tears may be good not only for your eyes but also for your emotional health as well.
We generally only notice tears when we cry, but we have them in our eyes all the time. Tears affect how we see the world while at the same time protecting our eyes from it. Without this liquid covering them, our eyes would be at risk of infection. In addition, we need tears in order to see. The cornea (角膜) of the eye does not have a perfectly smooth surface. Tears fill in the holes in the cornea and make it smooth so that we can see clearly. Without tears, the world would look very strange to us.
There are three types of tears, and they are called basal, reflex, and emotional tears. These three types are different not only in purpose but also in composition.
Tom Lutz, the author of Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, writes, “Throughout history, and in every culture, ... everyone everywhere cries at some time.” Even men and women who say they never cry can usually remember crying as children. Most of us probably think it’s normal for men or women to cry at certain times, and at such times, we may even encourage them to cry. For example, it’s no surprise when someone cries during a sad movie, and we often expect people to cry when a family member dies. However, we don’t always take this view of tears. Sometimes adults who cry — or even children who do — lose the respect of others. For example, what would you think of an adult who cried over losing a card game? Most people are aware of the social rules about when, where, and why it’s OK to cry. These rules generally differ for children and adults, and often for men and women. They depend on things such as family, culture, and religion, and they change over time.
Some people think it’s not just OK to cry but actually healthy to let the tears flow. Doctors in Greece over 2,500 years ago thought that tears came from the brain and that everyone needed to let them out. Today, many people still believe in getting tears out. They say that through crying, we get rid of emotions we have stored up, which is good for our mental health. Some people report that they feel better after crying. This could be because of the chemicals in emotional tears. One chemical is a type of endorphin, a painkiller that the body naturally produces. Emotional tears increase the amount of endorphin that gets to the brain because tears flow from the eye into the nose and pass to the brain that way. This painkiller may make a person less aware of sad or angry feelings, and that could explain why someone feels better after “a good cry”.
1. When do we have tears in our eyes?
2. How do tears help us see clearly?
3. How many kinds of tears do we have?
4. Please list at least two things that are related to the social rules of crying.
5. In which country did doctors over 2,500 years ago believe that tears came from the brain?
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【推荐1】Yellow is usually the color of happy, joyful emotions. But according to a new study, not all people associate the color with good feelings.
To find out what factors might play a role, researchers tested a new hypothesis (假设): What if people’s physical surroundings affect their feelings about certain colors? For example, if someone lived in cold and rainy Finland, would he feel differently about the color yellow from someone who lived near the Sahara Desert?
The researchers looked at color-emotion data from an ongoing international survey of 6, 625 people in 55 countries. The survey asked participants to rate 12 colors on how closely they were associated with feelings including joy, pride, fear, and shame.
The researchers paid particular attention to the data for yellow, and analyzed how different factors — including hours of sunshine, hours of daylight, and the amount of rainfall — were associated with the emotions people reported for the color. The two best predictors of how people felt about yellow were the annual amount of rainfall, and how far they lived from the equator (赤道).
Overall, people were more likely to associate yellow with joy when they lived in rainier countries that lay farther from the equator, researchers reported in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. In Egypt, the likelihood (可能性) of yellow being associated with joy was just 5. 7%, whereas in chilly Finland it was 87. 7%. In the United States, with its mild climate and amber (琥珀色的) waves of grain, people’s yellow-joy association levels were between 60% and 70%.
The researchers also checked whether associations changed with the season — whether, for example, people in a certain country liked yellow more in the winter than they did in the summer. They found that opinions about the color remained fairly constant all year round — even when the weather changed, the data on yellow-joy associations were as good as gold.
1. What was the main focus of the researchers’ study on color-emotion associations?| A．The preferences of people from different countries for certain colors. |
| B．The influence of physical surroundings on people’s feelings about colors. |
| C．The popular color choices for feelings like joy, pride, fear, and shame. |
| D．The impact of hours of sunshine on color-emotion associations. |
| A．Annual amount of sunshine and distance from the equator. |
| B．Hours of daylight and temperature variations. |
| C．Rainfall levels and distance from the equator. |
| D．Environmental pollution levels and urban vs. rural living. |
| A．Finland | B．Egypt | C．United States | D．China |
| A．People in winter season preferred yellow less than in summer. |
| B．People in winter season associated yellow more with joy than in summer. |
| C．The study did not find any significant changes in yellow-joy associations with the season. |
| D．People’s preferences for the color yellow varied widely between different seasons. |
【推荐2】Like space exploration, deep sea exploration requires new instruments and technology. The ocean depths are cold and dark and are under high pressure.
Finding the Bottom
In the 8th century, lead weights which were attached to ropes are dropped to measure water depth. Beginning in the19th century, researchers used wire rather than rope to take sounding measurements. In the modern era, acoustic (声学的) depth measurement devices are widely used.
Human Exploration
Once people knew where the sea floor was,
Robotic Exploration
While humans have visited the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are controlled by researchers on a ship. ROVs typically carry cameras, manipulator (操作) arms, sonar equipment, and sample containers.
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operate without human control.
| A．But diving deep never ends |
| B．Humans are curious about the sea |
| C．they have made a lot of discoveries |
| D．they wanted to visit and examine it |
| E．the trips only allowed limited exploration |
| F．Basically, they produce a loud sound and listen for echoes to measure distance |
| G．They generate maps, measure temperature and chemicals, and take photographs |
【推荐3】I love my gas stove. There’s nothing quite like cooking over that beautiful blue flame, so quickly adjusted with a flick of a dial. But in recent years environmentalists have been warning that gas stoves are bad for the climate and also not great for our health. A new study this year has heightened health worries about noxious fumes (有毒烟尘) in our kitchens.
Broadly speaking, there are two categories of concern regarding gas stove emissions. First, there is the unburned natural gas that can escape before the flame ignites or leak from a gas hook-up. This gas is more than 90 percent methane (甲烷). Second, there are the pollutants created by combustion (燃烧) when a burner is on, most notably nitrogen oxides (氧化氮), which can upset the lungs.
The big surprise in the new study, conducted by environmental scientists at Stanford University, was the amount of unburned gas that leaks into kitchens when a stove is off. They found that more than three quarters of methane that escapes from a stove does so when it is not in use, most likely through imperfect pipe fittings. Only one out of 53 stoves measured for the study did not leak when turned off, says Rob Jackson, senior author of the study. Methane is not toxic, but it is a powerful greenhouse gas. With 40 million gas stoves across the country, Jackson and his co-authors estimate that the heat-trapping potential of the methane they discharge annually is equal to the carbon dioxide released by half a million gas-powered cars.
The Stanford study also looked at the amount of nitrogen oxides produced when using the stoves. In a matter of minutes, families who do not use their exhaust hoods(排气罩)and who have small, poorly aired kitchens can go beyond the Environmental Protection Agency’s outdoor exposure limit for nitrogen dioxide of 100 parts per billion(ppb)per hour. Even short exposures to excess nitrogen dioxide can worsen symptoms in people with respiratory conditions (呼吸系统疾病). And there is considerable evidence that long-term exposure raises the risk of developing asthma (哮喘).
What is the average home cook to make of all this? They might take an idea from Michanowicz, a senior scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, who bought an induction burner and does much of his cooking on that $100 item. Jackson, for his part, is putting his money where his research is: “I’m replacing a perfectly good gas stove” with an induction stove. He would like governments to provide motivations for people to switch to electric ranges. As for me, I’ve switched to an electric kettle for boiling water.
1. According to the first paragraph, gas stove worries include___________.| A．the challenge of changing our cooking habits |
| B．the diseases brought by cooking on a gas stove |
| C．the environmental impact of cooking on a gas stove |
| D．the risk of catching fire while people are cooking on a gas stove |
| A．Gas may leak into kitchens with a stove on or off. |
| B．Nitrogen oxides may cause people to develop lung cancer. |
| C．Methane can escape into kitchens through wrong operation. |
| D．Kitchens can do harm to people without proper pipe fittings. |
| A．Colorful. | B．Useful. | C．Harmful. | D．Fruitful. |
| A．doubtful | B．disapproving | C．unconcerned | D．supportive |
