You’ve heard the old advice that skipping meals is a sure-fire way to ruin a weight loss plan, but a new study presented this week at the annual Obesity Society Meeting in New Orleans suggests that perhaps we've overlooked the benefits of selective fasting. According to the research, eating during a smaller window of time each day and skipping your evening meal could have a positive health effect.
The study concluded that overweight individuals who ate during the day and fasted during the evening reported fewer hunger swings and burned more fat at night, WebMD reported. However, although this diet plan results in more fat burned in the evenings, it did not seem to increase fat burning overall. Due to this, at this moment it’s still unclear as to how this eating schedule can affect general weight loss.
“At this point, we are not sure whether or not total fat burning is increased,” study lead author Courtney Peterson told Medical Daily in a recent email. “We will need to do a larger study to find out for certain whether or not time-restricted feeding improves fat burning.”
Still, although the results do not indicate a clear association between nighttime fasting and weight loss, they are still important for the world of nutrition. For example, Peterson told Medical Daily that she was surprised to find that participants did not report being hungrier than average, or have above-average swings in hunger levels, despite fasting daily for 18 hours.
“So we overturned the belief that fasting for longer period each day when the same number of total calories are eaten makes a person hungrier,”wrote Peterson.
While the effects of fasting and time-restricted feeding have been studied and proven to work in a rodent(贴齿动物)model，research on human subjects is still in its early stages. For this reason，Peterson explained that it is far too early to say，with factual evidence as backing，that time-restricted feeding will improve weight loss in humans. Still，Peterson explained that practicing this eating behavior does have obvious benefits，such as reducing overall food intake，and suggested that practicing time restricted eating a few times a week could be both practicable and healthy.
“It could be used for short-term goals or longer-term goals，"concluded Peterson." As far as we know，it is safe for adults，although pregnant women and children should not try it.”
1. The underlined word in Paragraph l may mean ________.| A．skip meals | B．eat food in a hurry | C．eat less | D．be particular about food |
| A．The benefits of fasting | B．A sure-way weight loss plan |
| C．A seemingly practicable weight-loss plan | D．The pros and cons of fasting |
| A．Critical. | B．Disapproving. | C．Enthusiastic. | D．Objective. |
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【推荐1】The bad health effects of sleep loss during the week can’t be repaid by longer weekend sleep, according to a new study.
Researchers have long known that sleep deprivation (剥夺) can cause weight gain and increase other health risks. But for those who force themselves out of bed every weekday after too few hours of shut-eye, they hope turning off the alarm on Saturday and Sunday will repay the weekly sleep debt and remove any ill effects.
The research, published in Current Biology, crushes those hopes. Despite complete freedom to sleep during a weekend recovery period, people in a sleep lab who were limited to five hours of sleep on weekdays gained nearly three pounds over two weeks and experienced disorders that would increase their risk for diabetes over the long term. While weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of sleep loss, those gains were wiped out when people fell right back into their same sleep-deprived schedule the next Monday.
“If there are benefits of catch-up sleep, they’re gone when you go back to your daily schedule. It’s very short-lived,” said Kenneth Wright, director of the sleep and chronobiology lab at the University of Colorado at boulder. “These health effects are long-term. It’s kind of like smoking once was—people would smoke and wouldn’t see an immediate effect on their health, but people will say now that smoking is not a healthy lifestyle choice. I think sleep is in the early stage of where smoking used to be.”
Wright said that the study suggests people should put sleep in the first place—cutting out the “sleep stealers” such as watching television shows or spending time on their phones. Even when people don’t have a choice about losing sleep because of child-care responsibilities or job schedules, they should think about getting sleep in the same way they would get a healthy diet or exercise.
1. What do the researchers find about weekend recovery sleep?| A．It is common among people. |
| B．It will make people healthier. |
| C．It can make people put on weight. |
| D．It’s able to make up for the sleep loss. |
| A．Arouses. | B．Guarantees. |
| C．Deepens. | D．Ruins. |
| A．It takes long for people to see the effects of sleep loss. |
| B．Smoking and sleep loss have the same bad effects. |
| C．Weekend recovery sleep has many benefits. |
| D．Smoking is more harmful than sleep loss. |
| A．Sleep as long as possible during weekdays. |
| B．Watch some TV shows before bedtime. |
| C．Reduce the screen time before sleep. |
| D．Take regular exercise every day. |
【推荐2】As much as 80 percent of premature (早期的) heart disease is preventable by making specific lifestyle choices. Some strategies, such as exercising and managing weight, are well known.
Get eight hours of sleep. “When you're not rested, everything that happens in your life is a lot more stressful,” says Dr. Arya Sharma, founder of the Canadian Obesity Network. If we lack sleep, our bodies also have more difficulty controlling blood pressure, inflammation and glucose levels.
Avoid polluted air.
Treat depression. “Depression can affect the way we behave,” says Dr. Arya Sharma. Not only are we more likely to drink too much alcohol and to avoid exercise,
| A．Avoid loneliness. |
| B．Engage in volunteer work. |
| C．But others may not have crossed your mind. |
| D．These factors can all have an impact on heart health. |
| E．there are also physiologic effects of this condition on the body. |
| F．Here are four other ways which can improve your heart disease. |
| G．Exposure to this kind of pollution over time raises your risk of heart disease. |
【推荐3】When you turn on the tap and hot water comes out, do you know the development of the facilities? One of the earliest known baths dates back to around 2500- 1700BC.
Yes — a bath washes the mind and body.
No — showers are quick and cheap.
| A．What do you think? |
| B．Showers are faster. |
| C．Even babies like baths. |
| D．Are baths better than showers? |
| E．Showers were invented a lot later. |
| F．Baths are about so much more than cleanliness. |
| G．The cost of baths is higher than that of showers. |
【推荐1】Many robots track objects by “sight’’ as they work with them, but optical (光学的) sensors can’t take in an item’s entire shape when it’s in the dark or partially blocked from view. Now a new low-cost technique lets a robotic hand “feel” an unfamiliar object’s form and skillfully handle it based on this information alone.
University of California, San Diego, roboticist Xiaolong Wang and his team wanted to find out whether complex actions could be achieved in robotics using only simple touch data.
The researchers attached 16 contact sensors, each costing about $12, to the palm and fingers of a four-fingered robot hand. These sensors simply indicate if an object is touching the hand or not. “While one sensor doesn’t catch much, a lot of them can help you capture different aspects of the object,” Wang says. In this case, the robot’s task was to rotate (旋转) items placed in its palm.
They first ran simulations (模拟) to collect enough touch data as a virtual robot hand practiced rotating objects, including balls and other irregular objects. Using information from each sensor, the team built a computer model that determines an object’s position at every step of the handling process and moves the fingers to rotate it smoothly and stably.
Next they transferred this capability to operate a real robot hand, which successfully control previously unfamiliar objects such as apples, tomatoes, soup cans and rubber ducks. Transferring the computer model to the real world was relatively easy because the sensor data were so simple. However, New York University’s Lerrel Pinto, who studies robots’ interactions, wonders whether the system would fail at more complicated tasks.
So in future work, Wang’s group aims to tackle more complex movements as well as to add sensors in places such as the sides of the fingers. “This means that there will be more accurate information from touching that allows reconstructing the object shape,” Wang says. The researchers will also try adding vision to complement touch data for handling complicated shape.
1. What was the intention of the research conducted by Xiaolong Wang’s group?| A．To develop a robot with advanced optical sensors. |
| B．To create a robotic hand to grasp familiar objects. |
| C．To explore the use of touch data in complex robotic actions. |
| D．To investigate the impact of lighting on robotic recognition. |
| A．The working principle of robot hands in Wang’s research. |
| B．The type of contact sensors attached to the robot hand. |
| C．The way that robot hands capture different objects. |
| D．The function of robot hands in Wang’s research. |
| A．They used real-world objects. |
| B．They used complex optical sensors. |
| C．They relied on vision-based technology. |
| D．They conducted simulations with the robot hand. |
| A．Doubtful | B．Positive | C．Unclear | D．Dismissive |
【推荐2】Humans are not the animal kingdom's only fashionistas. Tits ( ill雀) can be fashion followers, too, apparently. A latest study shows that, given the chance, they decorate their nests with this season's must-have colour.
Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin were following up on a study published in 1934 by Henry Smith Williams, an American naturalist. He noticed that when he put various coloured balls of yarn (纱) out in his garden, almost always one and only one became popular that season for being included into local birds' nests. But which particular color was favoured varied from season to season. This suggested that the colour chosen by one of the early birds was spotted and copied by others.
Williams's work was, however, forgotten until they came across it while following up on a different study, published by a team at the University of Toulouse, suggesting fashion-following, too. Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin therefore set out to re-run Williams's experiment, but this time to collect some actual numbers.
The birds they followed were part of a well-monitored population of blue tits in a wood near the institute. Most birds in this wood carried tracking devices fitted to them after their capture in mist nets. That allowed the institute's researchers to keep track of a vast number of individuals by recording their arrival at food containers throughout the wood. Instead of food, these containers were loaded with wool of different colors. Interestingly, researchers soon found that most nests of blue tits included only the color of the wool first chosen by a nestbuildcr.
Tits, then, do seem to be “on trend”, when it comes to nest-building materials. Why that should happen remains obscure. Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin suspect the fashion leaders are older birds, and that evolution favours younger ones copying their elders since those elders have evidently survived what fortune has to throw at a tit. Williams’s original work, though, suggests such initial choices are at random-a bit like those of the leaders of human fashions.
1. What can we learn from Paragraph 2?| A．Dr. Wild and Dr. Aplin contributed to William's work. |
| B．Early birds' color preference was copied by their fellows. |
| C．The yam was the most popular material to decorate local birds' nests. |
| D．The color of the yam favored by local birds was fixed throughout the year. |
| A．They observed the blue tits. |
| B．They studied the habits of blue tits. |
| C．They adopted the data-collecting method. |
| D．They fitted tracking devices to food containers. |
| A．Hidden. | B．Evident. | C．Complicated. | D．Shallow. |
| A．Birds favor certain colors in decoration. |
| B．Young birds follow their elders in fashion. |
| C．Young birds are just as intelligent as people. |
| D．Birds are just as fashion-conscious as people. |
【推荐3】Generations of children grew up reading comic(漫画) books secretly, hiding out from parents and teachers who saw them as a waste of time and a risk to young minds. Comics are now gaining a new respectability at school. That is thanks to an increasingly popular and creative programme, often aimed at struggling readers, that encourages children to plot, write and draw comic books, in many cases using themes from their own lives.
The Comic Book Project was started in 2001 by Michael Bitz at an elementary school in Queens. Since its creation, the programme, which is mainly conducted after school, has spread to more than 850 schools across the country. It has gotten a big push from the craze(狂热) among adolescents for comic book clubs and for Manga, a widely popular variety of comic originating in Japan.
The point is not to drop a comic book on a child’s desk and say “read this”. Rather, the workshops give groups of students the opportunity to collaborate(合著) on often complex stories and characters that they then revise, publish and share with others in their communities.
Teachers are finding it easier to teach writing, grammar and punctuation with material that students are fully invested in(投入). And it turns out that comic books have other built-in advantages. The pairing of visual and written plotlines that they rely on appear to be especially helpful to struggling readers. No one is suggesting that comic books should substitute for traditional books or for standard reading and composition lessons. Teachers who would once have dismissed comics out of hand are learning to exploit(利用) a style that clearly has a powerful hold on young minds. They are using what works.
1. Which of the following is probably the best title of the passage?| A．Japanese Comic Books. |
| B．Comic Books in the Classroom. |
| C．Reading Efficiently. |
| D．A Current Craze. |
| A．develop the cooperation among adolescents |
| B．make sure that students live a rich and colourful life after school |
| C．help students who have some difficulty in reading |
| D．popularize a new method of teaching |
| A．comic books were first used in Japanese schools |
| B．parents have different opinions about their children reading comic books |
| C．more and more teachers will realize the advantages of comic books |
| D．comic books will be allowed to enter all the schools in the country |
“A very disruptive(扰乱型的) six-year old child kicked my legs and clawed at my hand，”said one teacher. “I broke up a fight and was kicked between my legs，” said another. Many people have heard stories like this. But the situation is more worrying still and it involves parents.
Every child, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born，has the right to achieve their potential，regardless of their parents’ wealth and class. And we recognize that, as a nation，it is a long way to achieve this goal. But rights come with responsibilities and what worries people is that we are in danger of neglecting the latter.
Far too many children are behaving badly at school，even to the point of being violent to staff. This is terrible enough，but it is hard to be surprised since many children are just mirroring the behavior of their parents. Too many are starting school unable to hold a knife and fork, unused to eating at a table，and unable to use the lavatory properly.
We are in danger of becoming a nation of families living separate lives under one roof. The bedroom, once a place to sleep，has become the living space for the young. Spending hours in front of computer screens, on social networking sites or being immersed in computer games, children and young people spend little time with their parents. Parents are unable to monitor just what their children are watching.
Schools cannot right the wrongs of society and teachers cannot become substitute parents. Both parties need to work together. Parents must be helped and given confidence to take back control. They are responsible for setting boundaries for their children’s behavior and sticking to those boundaries when the going gets tough. They are responsible for setting a good example to their children and for devoting that most precious of resources—time—so that children come to school ready and are willing to learn.
1. In the opinion of the writer, what problem do people ignore?
| A．The school violence. |
| B．The pressure of students’ learning. |
| C．The right to achieve students potential. |
| D．The responsibilities of the students. |
| A．dissatisfied | B．unconcern | C．understanding | D．tolerance |
| A．parents and children live in their separate rooms |
| B．parents care little about children’s life at home |
| C．children don’t live with their parents in the same room |
| D．at home children live a different life from that of parents |
| A．Children’s behavior at school is worrying people |
| B．Parents expect schools to correct their children’s bad habits |
| C．There is no point in parents’ teaching children at home |
| D．Don’t blame teachers when it’s parents who are failing |
【推荐2】The UK government has promised to cut the country's greenhouse gas emissions (排放) by at least 68% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, marking a significant increase from its current goal.
The new goal comes nine days ahead of the UK hosting a“climate action summit (峰会)”to encourage other countries to declare tougher climate plans, known as Nationally Deter-mined Contributions (NDCs), under the Paris Agreement. Current NDCs will raise temperatures by 3℃. And stronger plans are needed to meet the Paris deal's goal of limiting global warming to 1. 5℃.
"This is the most significant NDCs announcement so far from any major economy," said Richard Black at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK-based think tank, in a statement.
The new goal is exactly in line with what the government's official climate adviser, the Climate Change Committee, called for in a letter published earlier today. The group said 68% would be "“world-leading" compared with existing plans of governments.
The UK had previously promised a 53% cut in emissions as part of a joint (共同的) effort with the rest of the European Union, but the UK is determined to produce a new NDCs. Separately, the UK had also promised a 57% cut by 2032 domestically.
It is clear that far more action will be needed if the UK is to meet the new goal. The government's own analysis last week showed that recent major methods, such as banning newoil-fueled car sales by 2030，had failed to do enough to put the UK on track even for the old goal of 57% by 2032. The new goal obviously widens that gap further.
1. Why did the UK declare its new goal before “climate action summit”?| A．To show its former plans are based on facts. |
| B．To blame other countries for their low goals. |
| C．To call on other countries to take bigger steps. |
| D．To take the lead in controlling greenhouse gas emissions. |
| A．15%. | B．68%. | C．57%. | D．53%. |
| A．Disapproval. | B．Doubtful. | C．Unconcerned. | D．Subjective. |
| A．A new goal will be put forward on“climate action summit" |
| B．UK came up with a common goal under the Paris Agreement |
| C．UK's recent major policies are far from its predetermined goal |
| D．UK sets an ambitious climate goal of 68% emissions cut by 2030 |
【推荐3】I became a magician by accident. When I was nine years old, I learned how to make a coin disappear. I’d read The Lord of the Rings and risked coming into the adult section of the library to search for a book of spells (魔法) — nine being that curious age at which you’re old enough to work through more than 1, 200 pages of mysterious fantasy literature but young enough to still hold out hope that you might find a book of real, actual magic in the library. The book I found instead taught basic sleight-of-hand (戏法) technique, and I devoted the next months to practice.
Initially, the magic wasn’t any good. At first it wasn’t even magic; it was just a trick — a bad trick. I spent hours each day in the bathroom running through the secret moves in front of the mirror. I dropped the coin over and over, a thousand times in a day, and after two weeks of this my mom got a carpet sample from the store and placed it under the mirror to eradicate the sound of the coin falling again and again.
I had heard my dad work through passages of new music on the piano, so I knew how to practice — slowly, deliberately, going for precision rather than speed. And then I tried the illusion (错觉) in the mirror and an unbelievable scene took place. It did not look like a magic trick. It looked like a miracle. I knew that I had got what I wanted.
One day I made the performance on the playground. We had been playing football and were standing by the backstop in the field behind the school. A dozen people were watching. I showed the coin to everyone. Then it disappeared. The kids screamed. They yelled, laughed, scrambled away. Everyone went crazy. This was brilliant.
1. What did the author enter the adult section of the library to do?| A．To kill his time. | B．To find a book of magic. |
| C．To read The Lord of the Rings. | D．To learn knowledge of literature. |
| A．Get rid of. | B．Give out. |
| C．Imitate. | D．Distinguish. |
| A．His mother’s help. | B．The secret of quick moves. |
| C．The inspiration from his father. | D．His repeated hard practice. |
| A．It’s fantastic. | B．It’s funny. |
| C．It’s awkward. | D．It’s disappointing. |
【推荐1】While quite complicated at times, coding is a way of communicating with a machine ——in many ways similar to a human writing script and virtually anyone can learn it. It's made up of a set of rules and commands, and once you master them all, you can control a machine in any way you want!
Now, in the brave new world we live in, coding has become a new form of literacy, and the way of technology is progressing, understanding how machines work and how to "communicate" with them is going to be the new norm in future education.
So, what is coding in the first place? Responsible for bringing machines, websites, and applications to life, coding represents the act of issuing commands written in a programming language to achieve a specific result・ Most of everything you've seen on your desktop screen, a laptop or on an iPhone has been programmed by writing code sheets.
Why should kids learn how to code? On one hand, coding develops problem-solving skills. Writing code into a platform to make something "come to life" is a fairly high-precision craft. Through trial and error, a child will learn how to make something work and then even fix it if it fails along the way! On the other hand, coding gives them better job opportunities in the future. For all intents and purposes, programming is becoming increasingly popular and will be even more so in the future!
Learning how to code doesn't happen overnight. So, considering that the future has plenty of programming and technology for our children and us, having them get acquainted with this subject matters while they're still young. It is possibly the best way to give them an upper hand in education and find a well-paying job!
1. What is the key to learning how to code?| A．Being expert at communicating. | B．Mastering the rules and commands. |
| C．Possessing essential skills of writing. | D．Having interest in playing computer. |
| A．Principles of coding. | B．Importance of coding. |
| C．Explanation of coding. | D．Devices that need coding. |
| A．Advantage. | B．Pride. | C．Chance. | D．Permission. |
| A．Rules and Commands for Coding |
| B．Various Ways for Kids to Learn Coding |
| C．Benefits of Learning Coding at a Young Age |
| D．The Importance of Coding in Real Life |
【推荐2】Why elephants rarely get cancer is a mystery that has confused scientists for decades. A study was led by researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah and Arizona State University, including researchers from the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation may have found the answer. According to the results, elephants have 38 additional modified copies of a gene (基因) that encodes p53, a well-defined tumor (肿瘤) suppressor, as compared to humans, who have only two. Further, elephants may have a more powerful mechanism for killing damaged cells that are at risk for becoming cancerous. In isolated elephant cells, this activity is doubled compared to healthy human cells, and five times that of cells from patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, who have only one working copy of p53 and more than a 90 percent lifetime cancer risk in children and adults. The results suggest extra p53 could explain elephants’ increased resistance to cancer.
“Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer. It’s up to us to learn how different animals overcome the problem so we can adapt those strategies to prevent cancer in people,” says co-senior author Joshua Schiffman, M.D., pediatric oncologist (肿瘤学家) at Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah School of Medicine, and Primary Children’s Hospital.
According to Schiffman, elephants have long been considered a walking problem. Because they have 100 times as many cells as people, they should be 100 times more likely to have a cell slip into a cancerous state and cause the disease over their long life span of 50 to 70 years. And yet it’s believed that elephants get cancer less often, a theory confirmed in this study. Analysis of a large database of elephant deaths estimates a cancer death rate of less than 5 percent compared to 11 to 25 percent in people.
1. Why do humans often get cancer compared to elephants according to the passage?| A．Elephants are bigger than humans. |
| B．Elephants have more p53 than humans. |
| C．Elephants are not as clever as humans. |
| D．Elephants eat more than humans. |
| A．Some damaged cells may be dangerous. |
| B．Some damaged cells are not dangerous. |
| C．Some damaged cells can’t be cancerous. |
| D．Some damaged cells in elephants’ bodies are more dangerous than those in humans’ bodies. |
| A．Elephants have more cells than people. | B．Elephants can get cancer easily. |
| C．Elephants seldom die from cancer. | D．Elephants often die from cancer. |
| A．Elephants help us | B．Learn from Nature |
| C．How to deal with cancer | D．Nature helps us prevent cancer |
【推荐3】The bed should be used as a place for sleep, but more and more people like to read an iPad a lot in bed before they go to sleep.
Charles Czeisler, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and his coworkers got a small group of people for an experiment. For five days in a row, these people read either a paper book or an iPad for four hours before sleep. Their sleep patterns were monitored all night. Before and after each trial period, they took hourly blood tests to paint a day-long picture of just how much melatonin(褪黑激素) was in their blood at any time.
When the people read the iPad as compared to the paper books, they felt less sleepy at night and less active the following morning. People also took longer to fall asleep on the iPad nights, and the blood tests showed that their melatonin secretion(分泌) was delayed by an hour and a half.
The researchers concluded that because of the rise of e-readers and the widespread use of e-things among children and teenagers, more research into the "long-term influence of these e-things on health and safety is urgently needed." Czeisler and coworkers went on, in the research paper, to point out that reading an iPad in bed may increase cancer risk.
However, software has been developed that can reduce some of the blue light from the screens of phones and computers, and there are also glasses that are made to reduce short wavelengths. While they seem like a logic solution for the nighttime tech users, it needs more research.
1. In Charles Czeisler's experiment, the group of people were asked to_______.| A．sit in a row and receive the strict tests |
| B．have their sleep patterns observed all night |
| C．read a paper book and an iPad before sleep |
| D．have their blood tested per hour during the trial |
| A．feel less sleepy and tired in the day |
| B．fall asleep more easily after reading |
| C．become less energetic the next morning |
| D．have a lot more melatonin secretion |
| A．reduce the blue light from the screens completely |
| B．help prevent eyes being harmed by short wavelengths |
| C．reduce the harm caused by doing nighttime e-reading |
| D．be used in all the e-things widely and safely |
| A．No e-reading in bed before sleep |
| B．New software for night e-readers |
| C．Wrong things to do before bedtime |
| D．No games on iPad in bed |
