【推荐1】Have you ever wondered why most store-bought tomatoes are so tasteless? Does it relate to climate change or soils? The answer has something to do with farmers’ income: Tomato farmers care about output, and the genetic variants (基因变体) associated with output are not associated with tasty tomato flavor, a new study finds.

Is it possible to bring back the rich, sweet flavor of the tomato? To find out, Denise Tieman, research assistant at the University of Florida, explored which genes are associated with tomatoes’ taste.

In an attempt to fix supermarket tomatoes, Florida researchers looked at 398 different types and identified the chemical and genetic makeup of each one. They had participants taste-test 101 varieties, cross-referencing the participants’ favorites with their research findings. They ended up with 13 genetic compositions that are most likely responsible for giving tomatoes their flavor. The researchers then measured the content of the 13 flavor compositions in each of the tomatoes, and identified about 250 genetic loci (遗传基因座) that controlled tomato flavor. And the researchers also wanted to explore why supermarket tomatoes have no taste.

It turns out that for industrial growers, it all comes down to priorities (优先性). North American consumers want year-round availability, so farmers started raising their plants for qualities like firmness, shelf life, high output and disease resistance, says Tieman. “Not to discount any of that because it’s all important. We want to have tomatoes in the grocery stores year round and be able to ship them long distances when it’s winter in the north. If they have to be shipped from Florida or Mexico, you need to have all those features.” But as growers planted tomatoes to meet those priorities, the flavor gradually disappeared.

Going back to the old varieties is not an option — at least, not for grocery stores. But the researchers believe that there is hope for a growable tomato that’s both long-lasting and flavorful in about three to five years.

1. What is the main reason for the tasteless store-bought tomatoes?

A．They get little energy from the soil.

B．Tomato farmers prioritize output over flavor.

C．They are affected by climate change.

D．Consumers demand tomatoes with a longer shelf life.

2. What did the researchers mainly do to research the taste of tomatoes?

A．They conducted a survey on tomato consumers.

B．They measured the size and firmness of tomatoes.

C．They analyzed the genetics of different tomato varieties.

D．They interviewed tomato farmers about their growing methods.

3. What’s the researchers’ attitude to developing new tasty tomato varieties?

A．Positive.

B．Reserved.

C．Objective.

D．Indifferent.

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

A．How Are Tasty Tomatoes Produced?	B．New Tomato Varieties to Be Released
C．Risks of Too Much Tomato Consumption	D．Why Do Store Tomatoes Lose Their Flavor?

【推荐2】The weather is getting hotter. You are thirsty playing basketball or riding home from school. A cold drink may be just the thing. But be careful what you are drinking. Something that looks cool may not be good for your health. There are plenty of “energy drinks” on the market. Most of them have beautiful colors and cool names. The lists on them tell you they are helpful to your health. Sounds great!
But after a careful check you may find that most energy drinks have lots of caffeine (咖啡碱) in them. These drinks are especially aimed at young people, students, busy people and sports players. Makers sometimes say their drinks make you better at sports and can keep you awake. But be careful not to drink too much. Caffeine makes your heart beat fast. Because of this, the International Olympic Committee(IOC) has limited (限制) its use. Caffeine in most energy drinks is at least as strong as that in a cup of coffee or tea. Possible health dangers have something to do with energy drinks. Just one box of energy drink can make you nervous, have difficulty sleeping and can even cause heart problems. Scientists say that teenagers should be discouraged from taking drinks with a lot of caffeine in them.
1. Many people like drinking energy drinks because of the following EXCEPT that ______.

A．they have beautiful colors and cool names

B．they can keep them awake and better at sports

C．they have lots of caffeine

D．they are said to be helpful to health

2. The underlined word “discouraged” can be replaced (替换) with ______.

A．encouraged	B．disliked
C．helped	D．stopped

3. Which of the following can be the best title of the passage? ______

A．What’s the Use of Energy Drinks?

B．What’s That in Energy Drinks?

C．Who Can Drink Energy Drinks?

D．Why Can’t We Buy Energy Drinks?

【推荐2】We humans spend about one-third of life asleep. Sleep helps us stay healthy, and it also helps our brain remember. Our brains need good sleep to remember what we do and learn during the other two thirds of our life when we are awake. Besides keeping us healthy, some new research shows that a good night’s sleep helps make us more intelligent.

Researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that sleep helps improve brain performance by shrinking synapses in the brain. A synapse is the area where cells pass messages to other cells.

Cirelli is a leading scientist at the school’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness. She found that sleep is when the human brain mixes information it has learned while awake into its general collection of knowledge. However, the brain forgets unimportant details. This forgetting is important. It makes space for new learning and new memories.

Cirelli said that the Center’s research began with this hypothesis: We sleep so that our brain can repair and refresh itself. She said the idea seems simple and reasonable. However, testing and discovering how it works has been extremely difficult. Cirelli and Center director Giulio Tononi have been trying to prove the connection between sleep and the brain’s synapses since 2003. Cirelli said the researchers knew that “stronger synapses are also bigger.” So, they began their study by “measuring the size of the synapses” in the brain.

They also knew that during sleep, the brain checks on all its synapses and resets itself for the next day. The team wanted to see if the synapses of the brain are bigger after being awake all day and smaller after a good night’s sleep. Synapses are only about 20-40 nanometers wide. So, the team looked for changes in these already tiny spaces between nerve cells. The team had lo wail until improvements in laboratory technology made it possible to see these tiny changes.

Cirelli says they found that synapse size and strength are upset by being awake and restored by sleeping. She says our synapses shrink as our brains clean themselves during sleep. We wake up refreshed and ready to fill those synapses with new information.

1. Which of the following statements is true according to the passage?

A．Sleep can only keep us healthy.

B．Sleep can help our brain function better.

C．Sleep can mix all the information.

D．Sleep can take up two-thirds of our life.

2. What does it refer to in Paragraph 4?

A．The measuring the size of the synapses.

B．The space for new learning and new memories.

C．The way our brain can repair and refresh itself.

D．The connection between sleep and the brain’s synapses.

【推荐3】An audience of patients with Alzheimer’s(老年痴呆症) disease listens with concentrated attention as a young woman sings the French song “Beau Soir”. Despite his failing mind, one of the men in the crowd, Les Dean, translates the words into English for a friend.

Dean, 76, once taught music at Chicago’s Senn High School, invented and sold his own music education system and sang with the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Now, like many patients with Alzheimer’s, he is, to some extent, lost in the past, a stranger to the present. But when the music plays, he smiles and is transported to a place of beauty, where everything still makes sense.

In recent years, music therapy(疗法) has grown in popularity for its seeming ability to help calm people with dementia(痴呆) and reconnect them with their memories. Now a Northwestern University researcher is testing whether music played for residents of a suburban nursing home can be therapeutic, whether it can improve cognition（认知）, conversation and relationships.

A person with dementia can recede(倒退) so far that he or she is no longer responsive, suggesting personality and consciousness（意识）have been lost. But in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the well-known neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote that he’d seen such patients shake or weep while listening to music. “Once one has seen such responses,” he wrote, “one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling.”

For some people with dementia, music therapy has been shown to enhance attention and cognition to improve behavior while reducing the use of drugs and to reduce anxiety and depression. Singing songs can help refresh specific memories that otherwise might have been forgotten completely, experts say. Also, some patients are so nonresponsive, they may need music wake them up and get them moving.

Attracted by the potential benefits, Dr. Borna Bonakdarpour, a neurologist with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, put together a music therapy study at Silverado Orchard Park Memory Care Community.

Each week for 12 weeks, the nonprofit Institute for Therapy Through the Arts held concerts for 10 Silverado residents. The musicians are specially trained to apply their skills to therapy, often by interacting with patients during performances and getting them to beat on drums, sing and dance.

A similar group of residents in another nursing home went without the therapy to compare results. Since finishing the initial study period, researchers are analyzing the results and hope to try the same treatment for the opposite group in the future.

“Music therapy is gaining more confidence now as an intervention(介入), so this is a very exciting time,” Bonakdarpour said. “We thought when people get Alzheimer’s, they’re done because there’s no medicine to cure it. But there's so much we can do to have an impact and improve their quality of life.”

1. Why is Les Dean mentioned at the beginning?

A．To present his amazing life before he got the Alzheimer’s disease.

B．To inspire the people who also suffered from the disease.

C．To tell the readers that he was a music lover.

D．To show the surprising function of music.

2. Which of the following statement is true according to the passage?

A．Dr. Oliver Sacks believed music could call upon a self in Alzheimer’s patients.

B．When patients are nonresponsive, music could hardly have any effect on them.

C．Northwestern University has tested music can improve the patients’ conversation.

D．It is obvious that singing can make the patients’ memories back to normal.

3. From Bonakdarpour’s research, we can learn that __________.

A．the music therapy study has been successfully completed.

B．the patients show no interest in music therapy.

C．music therapy can help to improve the patients’ life quality.

D．music therapy have a negative effect on the patients as an intervention.

4. What does the author mainly want to tell us in the passage?

A．The terrible disease can be cured by music therapy.

B．Music is beneficial to the people lost in Alzheimer’s darkness.

C．People gradually realize the benefits of music.

D．Everyone should fall in love with music.

【推荐2】In the West, people are taught to wear masks only when they get sick. Masks are seen as a tool to protect sick people and prevent the disease from spreading, so healthy people don’t need to wear them. Therefore, during the novel coronavirus outbreak, overseas Chinese students said that they would be “stared at like a virus spreader” if they go out with a mask. According to a survey done by Global Times among some European and American people, wearing a mask in public can make them feel “worried”, “shy”, and “afraid of being looked at differently.”

But as the number of COVID-19 cases continues to grow around the world, many people in the West are changing their attitudes. In the US, for example, the need for masks is very high now. The US surgeon general (卫生局局长) has been asking people to avoid hoarding too many masks, as they are more needed in hospitals than by the general public.

However, in Asian countries like China and Japan, there has been a long tradition of mask-wearing. In China, for example, when doctor Wu Liande invented the modern medical mask during the pneumonic plague (肺鼠疫) in 1910, the mask became a symbol of China’s position as a modern, scientific nation, according to Scottish medical anthropologist (人类学家) Christos Lynteris. The 2003 SARS epidemic led to the wide use of masks as a form of anti-viral (抗病毒的) protection in China and elsewhere in East Asia.

In Japan, wearing masks has long been seen as a manner to reassure (使安心) others when one catches a cold or flu. Some Japanese also turn masks into fashion accessories (配饰), with different colors and patterns to match their clothes. Wearing masks is also a way to “hide” for young women when they don’t have their makeup (化妆) on.

In more collectivist (集体主义的) cultures in Asia, wearing masks might also be a symbol of solidarity (团结) during the outbreak, according to Lynteris. People wear masks “to show that they want to stick together” in the face of danger, Lynteris wrote.

1. Why don’t healthy people in the West wear masks?

A．They don’t think masks can prevent disease.

B．Only medical workers need to wear masks.

C．They think masks are for sick people to wear.

D．Wearing a mask looks funny.

2. What does the underlined word “hoarding” in paragraph 2 mean?

A．wearing

B．making

C．throwing

D．keeping

3. Masks have been widely used in China since _____.

A．the outbreak of SARS in 2003

B．the pneumonic plague in 1910

C．Christos Lynteris wore one publicly

D．the invention of the modern medical mask

4. The main idea of the passage is_________.

A．proving the importance of wearing masks during an epidemic

B．showing opinions about masks between different countries

C．explaining why Westerners don’t wear masks

D．introducing the history of wearing masks

【推荐3】When you enter a supermarket, you see shelves full of food. You walk between the shelves. You carry a shopping basket and your food is in it.
You probably hear soft, slow music as you walk between the shelves. If you hear fast music, you walk quickly. The supermarket plays slow music. You walk slowly and have more time to buy things.
Maybe you go to the meat department first. There is some meat on sale, and you want to find it. The manager of the supermarket knows where customers enter the meat department. The cheaper meat is at the other end of the meat department, away from where the customers enter. You have to walk by all the expensive meat before you find the cheaper meat. Maybe you will buy some of the expensive meat instead of the meat on sale.
The department selling milk and milk products such as butter and milk powder is called the dairy department. Many customers like milk that has only a little butterfat in it. One store has three different jars of low fat milk. One says“1 percent fat”on the jar. The second says “99 percent fat free”. The third says “LOW FAT” in big letters and“1%”in small letters. As you can see, all the milk has the same amount of fat. The milk is all the same. However，in this store the three jars of milk cost three different amounts of money. Maybe the customers will buy the milk that costs the most.
Most of the food in supermarkets is very pleasing. It all says “Buy me！” to the customers. The expensive meat says “Buy me！”as you walk by. The expensive milk jar says “Buy me! I have less fat.”
1. There are three different jars of low fat milk, and ________.

A．one has more fat than the other two

B．they all cost the same amount of money

C．one has less fat than the others

D．they all have the same amount of fat

2. Supermarket managers make the food pleasing so that ________.

A．there will be more buyers	B．buyers will be proud
C．it is good and expensive	D．they can raise the prices

3. Low fat milk is in the ________.

A．meat department	B．fruit and vegetable department
C．sweets department	D．dairy department

4. The best title of this passage may be ________.

A．Cheap Food	B．Buy Me
C．Low Fat Milk	D．Supermarket Management