Food is extremely important to us human beings and rice is one of the main food in the world. Australian researchers have discovered a way to genetically engineer rice which would provide significant health benefits to more than half the world’s population.
A study undertaken at the University of Tasmania, published in a respected journal of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered a method to increase the resistant starch (抗性淀粉）content in rice, making it more digestible and leading to lower rate of diabetes (糖尿病）and overweight.
Steven Smith, the lead author of the study and a foreign expert for the Chinese government who has been appointed to work on crop improvement projects by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said increasing the higher resistant starch content gave this “designer” rice many added health benefits. “We have discovered that we can increase the amount of resistant starch in cooked rice, which could provide health benefits for a large number of people in Asia and beyond,” Smith said in a media release on Friday. “The same approach can be adapted for use in other cereals, including wheat. Not only can it have benefits for diabetes and obesity, but also for disorders of the bowel(肠）including cancer.”
Rice is the main food for more than half the world’s population, providing much of the world with most of their calories. Smith said that as the rate of diabetes and obesity in Asian countries continued to grow, his “designer” rice could provide a way to limit health problems.
“Not only does resistant starch reduce the possibility of a ‘sugar hit’ but it also reduces the appetite and promotes the growth of the healthy germs.” Smith said.
Smith divides his time between the University of Tasmania and his research lab in Beijing where he hopes to make significant advance in sustainable (可持续的）living.
1. What do we know about the study?| A．It is part of Chinese crop improvement projects. |
| B．It will have a significant effect on crop researches. |
| C．It was jointly（联合地）carried out by Australia and China. |
| D．It helps solve the food problem for over half of the world’s population. |
| A．exists in large amounts in cooked rice |
| B．decreases the possibility of a “sugar hit” and provides more calories |
| C．is helpful in digestion and lowers the rate of overweight and diabetes |
| D．increases people’s appetite and improves the growth of healthy germs |
| A．resistant starch | B．cooked rice |
| C．the approach | D．media release |
| A．An environmental report. | B．A medical journal. |
| C．An engineering textbook. | D．An agricultural magazine. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Here’s a familiar version of the boy-meets-girl situation. A young man has at last plucked up courage to invite a dazzling young lady out to dinner. She has accepted his invitation and he is overjoyed.
He is determined to take her to the best restaurant in town, even if it means that he will have to live on memories and hopes during the month to come. When they get to the restaurant, he discovers that this beautiful creature is on a diet. She mustn’t eat this and she mustn’t that.
Oh, but of course, she don’t want to spoil his enjoyment. Let him by all means eat as much fattening food as he wants: it’s the surest way to an early grave (坟墓). They spend a truly memorable evening together and never see each other again.
What a miserable lot dieters are! You can always recognize them from the sour expression on their faces. They spend most of their time turning their noses up at food.
They are forever consulting calorie charts; gazing at themselves in mirrors; and leaping on to weighing-machines in the bathroom. They spend a lifetime fighting a losing battle against spreading hips, bigger tummies (肚子) and double chins.
Some declare all-out war on FAT. Mere dieting is not enough. They exhaust themselves doing exercises, sweating in sauna (桑拿) baths, being pummeled (击打) and massaged by weird machines. The really wealthy dieters pay vast sums for health cures’. For two weeks they can enter a nature clinic and be starved to death for a hundred dollars a week. Don’t think it’s only the middle-aged who go in for these fads (时尚) either. Many of these bright young things you see are suffering from chronic malnutrition: they are living on nothing but air, water and the goodwill of God.
Dieters undertake to starve themselves of their own free will; so why are they so miserable? Well, for one thing, they’re always hungry. You can’t be hungry and happy at the same time. All the horrible mixtures they eat instead of food leave them permanently dissatisfied. “Wonderfood is a complete food”, the advertisement says, “Just dissolve (溶解) a teaspoonful in water…”. A complete food it may be, but not quite as complete as a juicy steak. And, of course, they’re always miserable because they feel so guilty. Hunger just proves too much for them and in the end they may run out and swallow five huge guilt-inducing cream cakes at a sitting. And who can blame them? At least three times a day they are exposed to temptation. What torture (折磨) it is always watching others eating piles of mouth-watering food while you have a water biscuit and sip bitter lemon juice!
What’s all this self-inflicted (自己造成的) torture for? Saintly people deprive themselves of food to attain a state of grace. Unsaintly people do so to attain a state of misery. It will be a great day when all the dieters in the world abandon their slimming courses; when they hold out their plates and demand second helpings!
1. The underlined sentence “…he will have to live on memories and hopes during the month to come” indicates the boy .| A．will not have the chance to see the girl again during the month to come |
| B．will have little money to sustain life during the month to come |
| C．will miss the girl very much during the month to come |
| D．will hope to see the girl again during the month to come |
| A．Doing exercises. | B．Not eating sugar. |
| C．Not eating fat. | D．Taking sauna baths. |
| A．Persuasive. | B．Critical. |
| C．Indifferent. | D．Objective. |
| A．On Fat. |
| B．We Should All Grow Fat and Be Happy. |
| C．Many Diseases Are Connected with Fat. |
| D．Diet Deprives People of Normal Life. |
【推荐2】Part drama, part dark comedy, new film To the Bone talks about a young woman’s struggle with anorexia (厌食症). Though the film already got generally positive reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it has caused a hot Twitter debate around whether it could be harmful for those with eating disorders.
Critics of the film have focused on the leading role Ellen: a young, thin, white woman with anorexia. They think there’re some plots that have made eating disorders look like trends instead of life-threatening illnesses. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anorexia has the highest mortality rate (死亡率) of any mental illness. Thirty million Americans struggle with eating disorders at some point in their lives.
Director Marti Noxon based the film on her own battle with anorexia. She was aware of the film’s potential to trigger harmful effects and then tried to be really careful in the way she showed how Ellen looked. “You want to help other people understand something that they’ve never experienced, but you also want people who have experienced it to feel understood and seen and to give people hope,” she added. “We were balancing a lot. I want to avoid the idea that the perfectionist quality of anorexics is their most obvious character.”
The film caught the attention of Liana Rosenman, who founded Project Heal, an organization that helps eating disorder sufferers afford treatment. “I thought it was very powerful,” Rosenman said. “There is a sense of humor and wittiness in it as well as just understanding what it’s like to have an eating disorder.” Project Heal recently played To the Bone in New York and Los Angeles, but it has faced sharp criticism from members of their community on social media.
1. What do we know about the film To the Bone from Paragraph 1?| A．It tells the growth story about a girl. |
| B．It has received mixed comments. |
| C．It is popular among young people. |
| D．Twitter users have no interest in it. |
| A．She admitted the film is harmful to people. |
| B．She tried hard to make the film benefit people. |
| C．All those suffering from anorexia want to be perfect. |
| D．People who haven’t experienced anorexia can’t understand it. |
| A．Supportive | B．Negative |
| C．Uncertain | D．Unconcerned |
| A．Medical magazine. |
| B．Healthy Life Style magazine. |
| C．A film review. |
| D．A newspaper report. |
【推荐3】A new study shows that rising levels of planet-warming gases may reduce important nutrients in food crops.
Researchers studied the effects of one such gas—carbon dioxide—on rice. The researchers grew rice plants in a controlled environment. They set carbon dioxide levels to what scientists are predicting for our planet by the end of the century. They found that the resulting rice crops had lower than normal levels of vitamins, minerals and protein. The researchers said the effects of planet-warming gases would be most severe for the poorest citizens in some of the least developed countries. These people generally eat the most rice and have the least complex diets, they noted.
In the experiment, scientists grew 18 kinds of rice in fields in China and Japan. They pumped carbon dioxide gas over the plants in an effort to create the atmosphere of the future. Rice grown under high carbon dioxide conditions had, on average, 13 to 30 percent lower levels of four B vitamins and 10 percent less protein. The crops also had 8 percent less iron and 5 percent less zinc（锌）an rice grown under normal conditions. However, vitamin E levels increased by about 13 percent on average.
The results are bad news, “especially for the nutrition of the poorer population in less-developed countries,” said the University of Tokyo’s Kazuhiko Kobayashi, who helped to write the report. That includes about 600 million people in Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Laos and other nations, mainly in Southeast Asia, the report said.
One of the scientists is Sam Myers of Harvard University in the American state of Massachusetts. He said that findings like this are an example of the surprises climate change create. “My concern is there are many more surprises to come,” he said.
Myers noted that pollution, loss of some species, destruction of forests, and other human activities are likely to produce unexpected problems. He said that you cannot completely change all the natural systems that living organisms have grown to depend on over millions of years without having effects come back to affect our own health.
The new study suggests a way to lower the nutritional harm of climate change. One way, Kobayashi said, is grow different forms of rice that have shown to be more resistant to higher carbon dioxide levels.
1. Which county would be influenced most by planet-warming gases according to the text?| A．China | B．Britain | C．America | D．Myanmar |
| A．By comparison. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By analyzing causes. | D．By describing a process. |
| A．Climate change will be difficult to predict. |
| B．Climate change will lead to more good effects. |
| C．Climate change will be harmful to environment. |
| D．Climate change will cause more unexpected problems. |
| A．Myers said we could change all the natural systems for the sake of our health. |
| B．The poorest people in all the least developed countries would be influenced most. |
| C．The researchers grew 18 kinds of rice in China and Japan in a controlled environment. |
| D．Protein in rice grown under high carbon dioxide conditions is increased by 10 percent. |
【推荐1】Recently coined words such as "selfie" and "hangry" reflect humans' evolving language. The communication patterns of other social animals, including whales also vary over time. The songs adult male humpback whales produce during the breeding season, for example, are constantly changing.
But in a new study, researchers investigated the permanence of non-song whale vocalizations (发声) known as calls and found that the majority have remained stable over multiple decades. This surprising result suggests that calls may function as important tools for conveying information about foraging (觅食), social behaviors and whale identity.
"The running hypothesis is that any time the whales are talking about something other than breeding, they're using calls, " explains Michelle Fournet, a marine ecologist now at Cornell University and lead author of the new study. These vocalizations, which typically last only a few seconds, are extremely diverse. They can be heard by other whales several kilometers away.
Fournet and her collaborators amassed nearly 115 hours of archival recordings collected in southeastern Alaska between 1976 and 2012. By analyzing the duration and frequency of the calls, the researchers grouped them into 16 types. Fournet and her team detected 12 of them in both the earliest and most recent recordings -and each of the 16 call types recurred over at least three decades, the scientists reported last September in Scientific Reports. This finding led Fournet to conclude that these particular vocalizations most likely are essential to the whales' survival ensuring foraging success and social contact. "For calls to stay in the [collective] conversation for so long is an indication that these call types are vital to the life histories of humpback whales, " she says.
Next summer Fournet plans to travel to Southeastern Alaska to play back recordings of calls humpbacks there. The goal is to test theories about the functions of different calls, she says, adding "We're going to go and start the conversation. "
1. The first paragraph is intended to draw readers' attention to ______.| A．whales' good gift in singing songs |
| B．humans' creative invention of words |
| C．the wide use of language in the world today |
| D．social animals' changing way of communication |
| A．They often last several minutes. | B．They can still be heard from a distance. |
| C．They are divided into 12 types. | D．They help whales sleep very well. |
| A．Repeated. | B．Changed. |
| C．Suffered. | D．Disappeared. |
| A．record the real-life calls of humpbacks |
| B．advance new theories of humpbacks' calls |
| C．find out the specific meanings of humpbacks' calls |
| D．travel all over the world to collect more calls of whales |
How to raise a sweet boy in an era of anger
Hours after I gave birth to my first child,my husband held our five-pound boy in his arms and said,gently,"Hi,Sweet pea."Not“＂Buddy”or"Little Man."Sweet pea.The word filled me with unexpected comfort.Like most parents,we knew what we'd name our son but never discussed how we'd speak to him.I was witnessing my husband's commitment to raising a sweet boy.
Because this is what the world needs now,urgently:sweet boys and people who grow them.
There are so many angry men among us.There are angry women,too,but they're only beginning to claim this emotion that has long been denied them.Women 's public anger is the kind of anger that gives girls voices,such as MeToo.But men 's anger tries to shut down the voices of others.Today's angriest women encourage people to solve a problem;today's angriest men murder.
A man uses his car to murder an anti-Nazi protester.A man shoots a congressman at his baseball practice.A man commits mass murder at a Vegas concert.A man kills a large number of worshipers in their church...
The world has turned so upside down that it is impossible for a man to display his vulnerability(脆弱）。Walk into any baby store,and you can see clothes for newborns declare, ＂TOUGH LIKE DADDY”＂。They don't receive explicit encouragement to fully access their emotions.Boys have always known they could do anything;all they had to do was look around at their presidents,religious leaders,professional athletes,at the statues that stand erect in big cities and small.Girls have always known they were allowed to feel anything- except anger.Now girls,led by women,are being told they can own righteous anger.Now they can feel what they want and be what they want.
What about boys?The boy taught from infancy to be tough still seems emotionally doomed.It's time to change.
We don't need to raise kids with gender neutrality or deny natural differences between boys and girls.We do need to recognize that children,regardless of gender,have natural sweetness that we,as a society,would do well to develop and preserve.
Sweet boys grow up to be men who recognize the strength in being vulnerable and sympathetic.Sweet boys are children who've been given,by their parents and wider society, the permission to feel everything and to express those emotions without shame.
At a young age,this should be done explicitly,in organized discussions at school.It must be done all the time in our family homes.Parents must invite their sons to be sad, afraid,hurt,silly and affectionate,and must embrace them as often as they hug and kiss their daughters.Sweet boys learn early on that they can defend themselves against loneliness by reaching out and asking for support rather than turning into people who, literally,grab for power.Sweet boys evolve into open-hearted men who aren't confused about consent and sexual boundaries,because they experience women as equals.Boys will not be merely boys.If we let them,boys will be human.
How to raise a sweet boy in an era of anger
Introduction | Calling my first son"sweet pea",my husband is |
The | 1. Our world is a world filled with anger. ● 2.Our world is a world where a man can't display his vulnerability. ●Boys are ●Boys are encouraged to |
The ways to raise a sweet boy | ●Raise public ●Schools and families should give boys Parents should create a relaxed environment where sons and daughters are treated as ●Encourage boys to |
【推荐3】Stroke(中风) patients are more likely to regain their cognitive(认知的) functions if they speak more than one language, new research has discovered. A study of more than 600 stroke victims found 40.5% of those who are multilingual had normal mental functions afterwards, compared to 19.6% of patients who only speak one language.
The study was carried out by a team from the University of Edinburgh together with the Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad—with the Indian city chosen as the location for the study because its multicultural nature means many languages are commonly spoken. Researchers took into account other factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and age to ensure results could not result from having a healthier lifestyle. The study found the results support the notion of a protective role of bilingualism(双语) in the development of poststroke cognitive impairment.
It is the first time a study has been done looking at the relationship between the number of languages spoken and a patient’s cognitive outcome after stroke. “The percentage of poststroke patients with undamaged cognitive functions in bilinguals was more than twice as high as in monolinguals，” the paper said. “In contrast, patients with cognitive impairment were more common in monolinguals.”
Researchers believe the study suggests the mental challenge of speaking multiple languages can build cognitive reserve, which is an improved ability of the brain to cope with damaging influences such as stroke.
Coauthor Thomas Bak of the University of Edinburgh’s school of philosophy, psychology and language sciences said, “Bilingualism makes people switch from one language to another, so while they inhibit(抑制) one language, they have to activate another to communicate. This switching offers practically constant brain training, which may be a factor in helping stroke patients recover.”
1. What kind of people are more likely to be chosen for the study?| A．Smokers in the multicultural area. |
| B．People who have an unhealthy lifestyle. |
| C．Stroke patients with high blood pressure. |
| D．People who are the same age and multilingual. |
| A．They get protected. |
| B．They can be easily harmed. |
| C．They can’t be damaged at all. |
| D．They are a challenge to brain functions. |
| A．People speaking only one language. |
| B．People speaking more than one language. |
| C．People under damaging influences of stroke. |
| D．People with undamaged cognitive functions. |
| A．The significance of the study. |
| B．The reason behind the conclusion. |
| C．The significance of the conclusion. |
| D．The reason for carrying out the study. |
