1 . What is better for you? Exercising in the great outdoors, or signing up for a gym?To try and find out, the Guardian was invited to spend a month working withfitness and sports psychology experts at Bath University and the National Trust. The concept was that participants— including me — would spend alternate weeks exercising in a gym and on National Trust land.
The first week was spent on the exercise bikes, rowing machines and treadmills (跑步机) in a gym at Bath.Getting started at the gym was easy. There was a nice community too. People are gently teasing and encouraging each other.
On the downside, it was hard to ignore the background noise ofdance and pop music. And all the machines faced screens showing music videos, rolling news and sports channels. Not a place to get away from it all.
So it was a relief in week two to head for the hills of Dyrham, a National Trust parkland full of birds and deer.
Weeks three and four followed the same pattern. The diaries I had kept, questionnaires I had filled in, and heart monitors I had worn, were then analysed by scientists from Bath University.
The findings surprise me a bit. The heart monitors showed I had consumed a similar amount of energy whether exercising in the gym or outdoors. But fitness expert Martyn Standagewas most interested in the fact that on the days when my exercise had been done outside, I used more energy through the rest of the day.Standage said this fitted with studies that suggest working out in the outdoors leads to a greater feeling of vitality (活力).
Jo Barton, who specialises in studying outdoor exercise, suggested that working out in the fresh air could be “life-changing”.“Exercising in nature lifts your mood and increases your self-respect,” she said.
My verdict? It was more fun outside but sometimes more convenient to get to the gym. A bit of both may be the way forward.
1. Which shows the author’s exercisepattern in the four weeks?| A．in the outdoors→in the outdoors→in the gym→in the gym |
| B．in the gym→in the gym→in the outdoors→in the outdoors |
| C．in the outdoors→in the gym→in the outdoors→in the gym |
| D．in the gym→in the outdoors→in the gym→in the outdoors |
| A．He used more energy when exercising indoors. |
| B．He felt more energetic after exercising outdoors. |
| C．He was very tired after finishing daily exercise. |
| D．He summarized the findings after the experiment. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Doubtful. |
| C．Tolerant. | D．Uncaring. |
| A．concern | B．opinion |
| C．chance | D．challenge |
2 . Running is a popular form of exercise that provides great health benefits (益处) for everyone. It helps with weight control, slows down aging and keeps the heart healthy.
There are other benefits besides those related to health.
If you want to run, how can you get started?
What’s next?
If you’re ready to start, why not join the next “Let’s Run”? The event benefits children and families in need. It’s a great way to experience the joy of running while helping others.
| A．Run for fitness. |
| B．You can run almost anywhere. |
| C．Choose a good pair of runnign shoes. |
| D．Don’t wear headphones while runnign outside. |
| E．As we age, we seem to lose the enjoyment of running. |
| F．If you can’t find a friend who enjoys running, take your dog along. |
| G．If you haven’t exercised for a while, you should check with your doctor. |
3 . Physical education, or gym class, isn’t required for all high school students. In some schools, it isn’t offered for some different reasons. But should high school students have physical education? The answer is certainly “yes”.
Today many people don’t do sports. But as is known to all, doing sports is very important for an adult. Teaching teens the importance of a healthy lifestyle and making fitness plans now can help teens put exercise in the first place as an adult.
High school isn’t that easy. Many students are under a lot of stress. Stress can be harmful to a student’s studies and life. Doing sports can help them deal with stress better, helping them live a happier life at school.
The American Heart Association says that 10 million kids and teens suffer from obesity (肥胖症). Teens should get 60 minutes of physical activity per day to control their weight and to help their bones get stronger. However, some activities such as video games and computer activities, don’t get teens to move around. The increase in such activities means that many teens don’t get their required exercise. Physical education classes act as a public health measure to encourage activity and help teens have healthy weights.
Inactivity increases teens’ risk of developing many diseases. An active lifestyle offers a good way of protection from these health problems. As much as 75 percent of health-care spending goes toward treating medical conditions that can be hindered by lifestyle changes, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.
According to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition (PCFSN), students who performed five hours of physical activity each week improved their academic (学业的) performance. Students from programs with no physical activity, who used the extra time for classroom study, did not perform better on tests than those who gave up some study time in support of physical education.
1. According to Paragraph 3, what does physical education in high school mean?| A．Helping teens learn to make good plans. |
| B．Getting teens to encourage adults to exercise. |
| C．Removing the stress faced by teens at school. |
| D．Making teens pay more attention to exercise later. |
| A．Applied. | B．Prevented. |
| C．Designed. | D．Preferred. |
| A．helps students do better in their studies |
| B．helps students keep fit |
| C．helps students make good use of all their time |
| D．makes students choose between sports and studies |
| A．How high school students can live a better life. |
| B．How schools can help students love doing studies. |
| C．Why some schools consider physical education important. |
| D．Why high school students should receive physical education. |
4 . Exercise helps to keep us in good health. Doctors at the American Heart Association suggest getting at least 150 minutes of proper physical activity every week. Many people exercise for a few minutes every day or every other day. So, getting 150 minutes every week is easy.
But what about those times when you are sick? If you do not feel well, should you keep following your exercise habit? Following are the answers from health experts.
Edward R. Laskowski is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. He and other experts have a general rule about exercising when you are sick. It is usually fine to exercise properly (not hard), he explains, if your symptoms are all “above the neck”. These signs may include a runny nose, sneezing or a sore throat.
Geralyn Coopersmith, a physical fitness trainer who has written several books on exercise offers similar advice. However, both Coopersmith and Dr. Laskowski suggest taking a break from exercising if signs of your illness appears “below the neck”. Pay special attention to symptoms such as chest congestion, bad cough or pain in the stomach.
There are other symptoms that can tell you to avoid exercise. They include a higher than normal body temperature, a sense of feeling very tired, and widespread muscle pain.
Both Coopersmith and Dr. Laskowski suggest listening to your body. If you feel really bad, take a break and let your body rest. If you don’t feel too bad, these experts both suggest cutting down the amount of exercise. For example, if you usually run, take a quick walk instead.
1. How long should people do exercise according to doctors?| A．No less than two and a half hours a week. | B．One hundred and fifty minutes each day. |
| C．At least a few minutes every day. | D．About 150 minutes every other day. |
| A．stop exercise | B．walk instead of run |
| C．ignore the symptoms | D．do less exercise |
| A．Taking good care of yourself. |
| B．Learning to take advice of your body. |
| C．Making decisions according to your physical condition. |
| D．Listening to music when exercising to keep healthy. |
| A．Warnings against exercise when you are ill. |
| B．Harmful results of exercise when you are ill. |
| C．Time for exercise when you are ill. |
| D．Professional suggestions on exercise when you are ill. |
Organized by Beijing Normal University, an important forum (论坛) on the spirit of the Chinese women’s volleyball team
Cheng Jianping, the Party chief of Beijing Normal University, said in
Lang Ping and Mchael Jordan are famous masters shaking up the sports world.
Lang Ping led
Michael Jordan,
7 . Why Is Exercise Cool?
•Exercise Strengthens Muscles
Did you ever do a push-up or swing across the monkey bars at the playground?
•
Can you touch your toes easily without yelling ouch? Most kids are pretty flexible, which means that they can bend and stretch their bodies without much trouble. Being flexible is having “full range of motion”, which means you can move your arms and legs freely without feeling tightness or pain.
•Exercise Keeps the Balance
•Exercise Makes You Feel good
It feels good to have a strong, flexible body that can do all the activities you enjoy—like running, jumping and playing with your friends. It’s also fun to be good at something, like scoring a basket, hitting a home run, or perfecting a dive.
But you may not know that exercising can actually put you in a better mood.
| A．Exercise Makes You Flexible |
| B．Exercise Makes Your Heart Happy |
| C．Those are exercises that can build strength. |
| D．So you want to do some aerobic (有氧的) exercise right now? |
| E．But if you’re active, your body needs an extra measure of calories or energy. |
| F．Food gives your body fuel in the form of calories, which are a kind of energy. |
| G．When you exercise, your brain releases a chemical which may make you feel happier. |
8 . If you're out for a run, what difference does it make if you're able to tough it out for another 50 seconds? If you're less than a minute from the top of the hill, that extra time can make the difference between having reached your goal and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
How do you get those extra seconds of energy? A research team at the Texes Tech University developed a study to measure what effect listening to music would have on exercise tolerance. The researchers based the study on a stress testing. As part of the testing, they noted any changes in heart rate and blood pressure as participants underwent physically stressful exercise.
The tests were done on treadmills (跑步机), which increased in both speed and incline (坡度) through three stages. In the final stage, the treadmills moved at 10 miles per hour at a 14-percent grade. Most of these tests were designed to last up to 40 minutes. The average gym-goers lasted 30 minutes. For this study, they divided 127 participants into two groups. One listened to upbeat(快节奏) music, while the other group had earbuds in but did not listen to music.
The group that listened to music was able to outlast the non-music group by an average of 50.6 seconds. Again, being able to go an extra minute may seem like a no-brainer ,but “after 30 minutes, you feel like you are running up a mountain, so even being able to go 50 seconds longer means a lot," said the study's lead author, Waseem Shami, MD.
The study has confirmed something runners and gym-goers have suspected for years: Listening to music during workout can be beneficial to your endurance. "Our findings reinforce the idea that upbeat music can help you exercise longer and stick with a daily exercise routine," said Shami. When doctors are recommending exercise, they might suggest listening to music, too."
1. Why did Shami’s team conduct the research?| A．To test the effect of music on health. | B．To know the cause of failure in sports. |
| C．To improve runners' exercise tolerance. | D．To record the body change of participants |
| A．They ran much faster than average runners. | B．They created a new record of indoor sports. |
| C．They could run a little longer with music on. | D．They all enjoyed extreme physical challenge |
| A．A dull activity. | B．A foolish action. |
| C．A demanding task. | D．An easy practice |
| A．Developing a daily exercise routine. | B．Listening to music while working out |
| C．Participating in physical stress testing. | D．Taking exercise as doctors recommend. |
9 . Researcher Ramon Llopis of the University of Valencia is a member of the international group behind Football Research in an Enlarged Europe (FREE), the aim of which is to develop a better understanding of football as a social and cultural phenomenon in Europe. The starting point is the “strong belief that football has important things to say about Europe and its citizens”.
Llopis tells us that the research points to football as “an important presence in the daily lives of many Europeans. Even people who are not particularly interested in the sport cannot avoid the discussions it creates, regardless of age, class and region.” He adds that “football is more than an activity which is done for enjoyment. It increases a sense of collective identity (集体认同).”
Football is a topic of exchange and conversation between Europeans of different ages and social classes. Based on the surveys carried out in the early stages of the project, 63.3%of people who call themselves football fans have chatted about football with someone from another European country in the past twelve months, 70%of football fans watch matches and summaries from leagues (联赛) outside of their country of origin, and 53.4% habitually follow the results and news from other European leagues on the Internet and social media.
So, rather than consider professional football as an economic activity or a healthy activity for both players and fans, public authorities should be aware of its huge socio-cultural impact. They should also pay attention to the increasing bad feeling surrounding football as a result of its commercialization (商业化), since it is causing many to turn away from the game.
1. What can we learn about FREE from Paragraph 1?| A．It studies the impact of football on world culture. |
| B．It educates the public about the history of football. |
| C．It brings together researchers from several countries. |
| D．It is a project carried out by the University of Valencia. |
| A．The history of football. | B．The power of football. |
| C．The growth of football. | D．The standard of football. |
| A．By using research findings. |
| B．By providing examples |
| C．By telling true stories. |
| D．By following the order of time. |
| A．Hopeful. | B．Uncertain. | C．Satisfied. | D．Worried. |
10 . There are many ways to travel within a city. We can walk, cycle, or take a bus. But no matter which way we travel, we have to stick to the route(线路) the city planners laid down for us.
Parkour practitioners (跑酷爱好者), however, see the city in a completely different way. To them, there are no fixed routes. There are no walls and no stairs—since they jump, climb, roll and crawl to move across, through, over and under anything that they find in their path. The city is their playground.
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has noticed that this activity is drawing more and more people to it—there are 100,000 people taking part in parkour today in the UK alone, according to the Guardian—and how it is helpful for people to be much stronger: It trains coordination and balance. So the organization is thinking about recognizing parkour as a new sport and adding it to the Olympics by 2024.
But parkour practitioners themselves don’t seem to be happy with the idea. They see parkour as “a lifestyle”, wrote the website NextSportStar. “It’s a competition against the conditions rather than just a sport.”
Indeed, many do parkour just to “escape the daily routine and experience the city in different ways”, wrote reporter Oli Mould on The Conversation. They see parkour as a way to express themselves through relaxing moves and creative routes while freeing themselves from the pressure.
It’s great that the FIG wants to develop new sport and stay close to a new cultural form. But it would be greater if they knew that not everything in life is a competition.
1. How do the parkour practitioners do parkour?| A．They move on as they wish. | B．They plan the way themselves. |
| C．They run faster than others. | D．They stick to certain routes. |
| A．It’s a special way of life. | B．It draws their attention. |
| C．It’s good for people to keep healthy. | D．It needs some rules and instructions. |
| A．It is more formal than other sports. | B．It helps people to be creative. |
| C．It’s worth adding to the sporting event. | D．It calls on people to work as a team. |
| A．A new sports competition | B．Parkour practitioners |
| C．Training in a different way | D．Making the city their own |
