1 . 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
2 . My first year of teaching was an emotionally(情感上) exhausting job with few payoffs. I was young, inexperienced, and had class after class of twenty kids just waiting for me to make a mistake.
After a particularly long night of marking papers and thinking about how many weeks I had left until I could breathe, I had some of those mornings when I began to question my job choice. I'd become a teacher to help kids. Instead, I felt like I couldn't even help myself anymore. It was just Mother's Day, and as I sat at my desk surrounded by lesson plans, I wondered how I'd ever have enough energy to have children of my own, much less continue teaching.
That was when I heard a knock at my door. One of my students came in-the country boy who was no great shakes at school. He handed me a large flower that probably came from his family's farm. He had stuck a bird feather in it.
“I got you a Mother's Day gift,” he said. Most middle school and high school teachers don't receive presents. Lots of festivals had already come and gone with any gifts. I was so shocked that I just stared. Embarrassed by my silence, he said, “You know…since you're like a mother to us and all that, I thought you should get a present, too.”
I smiled and told him he was the sweetest person in the whole world, and I just loved it. Based on his smile, I knew I'd done enough work of making him feel quite proud of himself. What drove that twelve-year-old to bring me a homemade present? I'll never know. Once he left the room, I locked the door. And I cried. From then on, I knew what this job meant to me.
1. What do we know about the author from Paragraph1?| A．She was short of confidence. | B．She was hard on her kids. |
| C．She was eager for a high pay. | D．She was skilled at teaching. |
| A．Shameful. | B．Regretful. | C．Puzzled. | D．Lonely. |
| A．To express thanks to her. | B．To show off his flowers. |
| C．To say sorry for his behaviors. | D．To draw her attention. |
| A．Say goodbye to her students. | B．Praise the boy in front of the class. |
| C．Raise her own children patiently. | D．Devote herself to teaching positively. |
3 . Sometimes it’s hard to let go. For many British people, that can apply to institutions and objects that represent their country’s past-age-old castles, splendid homes… and red phone boxes.
Beaten first by the march of technology and lately by the terrible weather in junkyards (废品场), the phone boxes representative of an age are now making something of a comeback. Adapted in imaginative ways, many have reappeared on city streets and village greens housing tiny cafes, cellphone repair shops or even defibrillator machines (除颤器).
The original iron boxes with the round roofs first appeared in 1926. They were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of the Battersea Power Station in London. After becoming an important part of many British streets, the phone boxes began disappearing in the 1980s, with the rise of the mobile phone sending most of them away to the junkyards.
About that time, Tony Inglis’ engineering and transport company got the job to remove phone boxes from the streets and sell them out. But Inglis ended up buying hundreds of them himself, with the idea of repairing and selling them. He said that he had heard the calls to preserve the boxes and had seen how some of them were listed as historic buildings.
As Inglis and, later other businessmen, got to work, repurposed phone boxes began reappearing in cities and villages as people found new uses for them. Today, they are once again a familiar sight, playing roles that are often just as important for the community as their original purpose.
In rural areas, where ambulances can take a relatively long time to arrive, the phone boxes have taken on a lifesaving role. Local organizations can adopt them for l pound, and install defibrillators to help in emergencies.
Others also looked at the phone boxes and saw business opportunities. LoveFone, a company that advocates repairing cellphones rather than abandoning them, opened a mini workshop in a London phone box in 2016.
The tiny shops made economic sense, according to Robert Kerr, a founder of LoveFone. He said that one of the boxes generated around $13,500 in revenue a month and cost only about $400 to rent.
Inglis said phone boxes called to mind an age when things were built to last. “I like what they are to people, and I enjoy bringing things back,” he said.
1. The phone boxes are making a comeback ______.| A．to form a beautiful sight of the city |
| B．to improve telecommunications services |
| C．to remind people of a historical period |
| D．to meet the requirement of green economy |
| A．They were not well-designed. | B．They provided bad services. |
| C．They had too short a history. | D．They lost to new technologies. |
| A．their new appearance and lower prices | B．the push of the local organizations |
| C．their changed roles and functions | D．the big funding of the businessmen |
