【推荐1】Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Do note that there is one word more than you need in each passage.

A. advantageous       B. programming       C. fashion       D. fueled        AB. advanced AC. sacrifice       AD. capped       BC. habitually       BD. appetite       CD. likelihood ABC. unnecessarily

Eating a calorie-rich diet brought us humans a great advantage: time. We spent less of the day obtaining food. We saved countless hours of needless chewing. Instead, we invested time in doing the things that make us human: we started to     1     tools, erect structures, share stories, create myths and play games.

Calories made humanity possible. Calories are what     2     our big brains. Our calorie-rich diet didn’t reinforce the compulsion to eat, it released us from a food-gripped existence. Just because we require calories does not mean our basic     3     compels us to over-consume them, for the same reason that requiring oxygen does not compel us to perpetually hyperventilate. Yes, it may be     4     to carry extra calories in time of famine, but this assumes an overly simplistic view of our evolutionary past.

Out there in nature, carrying extra body weight brings serious, even deadly, disadvantages. To the evolving primate, greater body mass means slower acceleration and a(n)     5     in the ability to change speed and direction quickly. Back when we were prey—when our ancestors were     6     eaten by big cats, pythons and even eagles—our ability to nimbly start, stop and turn was crucial for survival. To a predator, a fat human was not only easier to spot and easier to catch, it made for a bigger, better meal. To the prey we hunted, a fat human was easier to evade and outrun. Carrying too much fat also increases the     7     of injury and death due to the forces and loads involved in maintaining a larger body. To put it in the simple arithmetic of evolutionary fitness, being     8     fat didn’t increases an individual’s chances of passing on their genes. It actually reduced them.

As we became more     9     there were even more reasons to refrain from overindulgence. Food had to be shared with other members of the tribe, then the village, then the town, especially with children, whose dependence on adults for resources lasts an eternity compared with other species. Otherwise, the human species would have died off long ago, if we really were slaves to a never-ceasing     10     for calories.

All of these have left us with the following paradox: Why were humans generally able to resist vastly over-consuming calories up until about fifty years ago?

Quoted from Mark Schatzker’s The End of Craving

【推荐2】Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. established       B. present        C. compared          D. light          E. annoyingly F. distinct   G. beneficial       H. well-being        I. experiences        J. devote        K. striking

Honey Bees Remember Happy and Sad Times

While the brains of honey bees are tiny, the insects are capable of some surprisingly advanced thinking. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society has now cast new     1     on the insect’s cognitive abilities.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that honey bees can remember positive and negative     2     — such as taking care of their young or fending off an enemy. These memories are stored in specific areas of their brains, according to how good or bad they are.

Scientists have long known that vertebrates — animals with tail bones — like ourselves are capable of sorting memories of pleasure and pain in     3     brain areas such as this. However, this has never been documented before in the minds of bees.

“We found that bees     4     different parts of their brain to processing social information that is either negative or positive,” Gene Robinson, an author of the study, told Newsweek. This discovery is     5    given how small their brains are; we did not expect such spatial separation of social information of different valence. Valence is a term used in psychology when discussing emotions to refer to the intrinsic (内在的) positivity or negativity of an event, object, or situation.

In the study, the researchers looked at regions of the honey bee brain that’s     6     in other invertebrates (非脊柱动物), referred to as “mushroom bodies,” which are associated with sensory processing, learning and memory. They     7     the expressions of genes following aggressive or collaborative social interactions, demonstrating that different parts of the these mushroom bodies were specially activated depending on the valence of the interaction — in other words, whether the interaction was harmful or     8    .

“These findings can help us better understand ‘biological embedding (嵌入),’ or how social information ‘gets under skin’ to affect the behavior,’ he said. “Biological embedding is an important issue in understanding health and     9     in humans.”

Furthermore, because the type of memory that the researchers documented is     10     in the brains of vertebrates, the latest findings demonstrated a link between vertebrate and invertebrate cognition despite the two animal groups diverging (分岔) in evolutionary terms around 600 million years ago.

【推荐3】Directions: Complete the following passages by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. celebrate       B. overlooked       C. circumstances       D. cast       E. incredibly F. factors       G. unspoken        H. swim       I. strongly       J. normal       K. assume

Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick

In the late 1980s, Harvard-trained psychologist Dana Jack identified a recurring theme among female patients suffering from depression: a tendency to self-silence, defined as “the tendency to engage in uncontrollable caretaking, pleasing the other, and restriction of self-expression in relationships in an attempt to achieve intimacy and meet relational needs.” He found that this learned behavior,     1     rooted in gender norms, was linked to an increased risk of depression.

Since then, considerable evidence has revealed that female self-silencing isn’t just tied to psychological issues like depression and eating disorders, but also to physical illness. Most worryingly, it has also been linked to higher risk of premature death. This was true even when     2     such as age, blood pressure, and smoking were taken into account.

When women push their feelings down and     3     their needs aside, their health suffers. But it can be difficult for women to do otherwise in cultures that     4     these self-silencing practices. Moms are praised for being painstakingly selfless to the point of self-sacrifice. These     5     standards establish a vicious (恶性的) cycle. For many women, it feels easier—beneficial, even—to silence their needs at the expense of their own health, rather than     6     against the prevailing cultural current.

In his best-selling book, The Myth of Normal, physician and author Gabor Mate writes that many of our society’s most “normalized ways of being” are, in fact,     7     toxic. “That ‘not listening to self’ in order to prioritize others’ needs is a significant source of the health-impairing roles women     8    ,” Mate explains. “It is among the medically     9     but extremely harmful ways in which our society’s ‘normal’ imposes a major health cost on women.”

To reshape the virtues of womanhood, a new “    10    ” needs to emerge—one in which we honor our emotions, prioritize our needs, and actively communicate our boundaries. Such a shift requires change on both the individual and societal level, and will by no means be easy. But it’s certainly worth it—after all, women’s lives depend on it.