1 . Some termite (白蚁) species have figured out how to enjoy the shelter of the huge complex nests that the insects build without contributing to their construction. They avoid the full anger of their builder hosts by being extremely easy-going.
Animals that live in the nests of another species without affecting them are known as inquilines. Inquiline termites are unique among termites in being unable to make their own nests. Instead, they live in the hallways built by another termite, Constrictotermes cyphergaster. Until now, it has been unclear how the two parties kept peaceful in such tight quarters because termites are typically very aggressive towards outsiders.
Helder Hugo at the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues collected Constrictotermes cyphergaster’s nests in the Brazilian Cerrado and brought them into the laboratory. They then placed host and tenant (房客) termites in either open or narrow areas and used video to track and record the ways in which the two species reacted to each other.
Right from the start, the inquiline’ termites moved around less than their hosts and interacted little with them, even in the much narrower area. “Many times,” says Hugo, “when two unrelated groups are put together in a limited space—such as an experimental area—the outcome is conflict with losses from both sides.” But that didn’t happen here. Despite attacks from host termites, the tenant termites were obedient. Hosts would bite or attack the inquilines with strong chemicals, but their targets never responded in the same way, choosing to flee. Some ignored the hosts completely.
“We did not expect that they would never fight back,” says Hugo, noting that the inquilines are capable of protecting their own place with mouths. “By preventing conflict going worse, inquiline termites may considerably improve their chances of living together with their host termites peacefully.”
“Passiveness does not necessarily lead to defeat, but can be a very useful strategy, saving energy and resources,” she adds. “Nature may not always be red in tooth and claw, and aggression is not any more successful a strategy than ‘cowardice’ (儒弱).”
1. What is the feature of the inquiline termites?| A．They live in another termite species’ nests. |
| B．They are aggressive towards outsiders. |
| C．They like to build their own nests. |
| D．They are communicative tenants. |
| A．The differences between the two species. |
| B．The findings of the observation. |
| C．The living habits of termites. |
| D．The process of the research. |
| A．Aggressive. | B．Unacceptable. | C．Effective. | D．Dangerous. |
| A．The Characteristics of Termites |
| B．Passiveness Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Defeat |
| C．The Relationship Between Host and Tenant Termites |
| D．Termites Use Cowardice to Avoid Their Hosts’ Anger |
2 . On Monday, I stopped my car in front of my daughter Juliet’s middle school. She jumped in the front seat, feeling down. She asked me to help her study for her science test.
“Dad, I need to memorise a unit about the Reproductive Cycle of Plants. And I can hardly make it.”
“You know memorising seems like the best way to study, but in fact you can do better in tests if you work on trying to understand the material.”
Juliet was open to my advice. It was Monday afternoon and we had two nights to study before the test on Wednesday. I suggested a plan. “Tomorrow night, you are going to teach the material to me. Tonight, read the unit. Prepare to teach.”
Asking her to teach me was an unusual idea but I was determined to do it. Studies show teaching somebody else is a very useful way to learn. Even if you don’t do the teaching, the act of preparing to teach leads to more learning than just trying your best to memorise the material.
On Tuesday afternoon, Juliet sat down with her science book facing me and said, “Okay Dad, let’s study.” I wanted her to teach me. But false starts happened. I couldn’t be too hard on her. So instead we started with me asking her some simple questions. She knew some but not others. When she didn’t know the answers, I encouraged her to check the book.
She started checking things that didn’t make sense. And she was actively seeking to test her understanding. I was happy to see it. She wasn’t memorising; she was trying to make sense of things, which was exactly what I had hoped she would do.
1. Why did Juliet feel down?| A．Because she failed her science test. |
| B．Because she had trouble memorising a unit. |
| C．Because she knew nothing about planting. |
| D．Because she couldn’t follow her teacher. |
| A．Memorising. | B．Testing. |
| C．Questioning. | D．Understanding. |
| A．Making her check the book. |
| B．Using simple questions to test her. |
| C．Encouraging her to read the unit. |
| D．Asking her to teach me the unit. |
| A．A Creative Father |
| B．An Unexpected Test |
| C．Learning from Teaching |
| D．Preparing for Teaching |
3 . Binge-watching (追剧) your favorite TV series is bad for your brain. Dr. Randall Wright, based in Texas, said the need to watch episode (集) after episode has a similar influence on the brain to gambling (赌博). What’s more, it often leads to social loneliness, snacking on junk food and a shortage of exercise and sleep, which, over time, is bad for the brain.
When you let auto play start the next episode, you can find out what happens next and your brain receives good feedback, Dr. Wright wrote in an article. This right-away satisfaction is similar to gambling where even after a win, you are not satisfied and want to continue playing. With binge-watching, you are not satisfied with stopping after episode five and want to continue watching. This cycle coupled with the snacking and the long time sitting can lead to unhealthy changes in your brain and body over time.
Dr. Wright said, “Binge-watching itself is not bad. It becomes problematic when you are watching a third, fourth or fifth episode instead of doing healthy activities.” But he said it is possible to avoid the bad influence of binge-watching with four tips, including staying away from salty, fatty, calorific foods, exercising before a binge-watching, setting an alarm for sleep and balancing TV viewing with socializing.
If you add these tips to your binge-watching practice, you can create lasting healthy habits and still enjoy the now-and-then binge-watching time without hurting your brain.
1. What might “it” in paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Gambling. | B．Binge-watching. |
| C．TV series. | D．Brain. |
| A．The long time sitting. | B．The changes of feeling. |
| C．The snacking on junk food. | D．The immediate satisfaction. |
| A．The tips on how to develop a healthy lifestyle. |
| B．The reasons why binge-watching is problematic. |
| C．The ways to keep away from binge-watching. |
| D．Do’s and don’ts of binge-watching. |
| A．Ill Health: The Result of Addiction |
| B．Healthy Habits: A Must of A Better Life |
| C．Binge-watching: A Killer of Your Brain |
| D．TV-Viewing: Gradual Harm on Your Health |
4 . With summer drawing to a dose, parents are helpless.
Camp’s over. The kids’ friends have left for warmer places. A trip to the pool doesn't bring the same excitement as it did in June. And so many families have no choice but to go for a trip to the amusement park.
Whether you’re thinking of Six Flags, Sesame Place, Hersheypark or Dutch Wonderland, don't do it—you’ll be sorry. Amusement parks—especially water parks—have never been more popular. More than 26 million people went to Six Flags last year. These parks bring out the worst in kids and parents alike. What starts out as a special treat ends up in disappointment and tears.
As soon as you get to the park, you pay a couple of hundred dollars for a family of four. Already, expectations are unrealistic as parents start to do the math. How many rides will I get for the money? The answer—at least in August—is four.
That’s because of the lines. Time stops as you stand in line leading to even the least exciting ride. Over and over we count the number of people in front of us, wondering how many more rounds there’ll be before our turn. Then there are the other parents—some of whom seem to think the lines are part of the game.
At Dutch Wonderland last weekend, one father walked up to my kids and asked if they were in line. For five minutes, he had his daughter stand behind them. When I turned my head, he had her stand ahead of them. Then he did it to the kids next in line, too.
By the end of the day, you see mothers and fathers buy their kids ice cream again and again to ease the influences of the heat, disappointment and anger.
It’s like they’ve forgotten—it was all the kids’ idea in the first place.
1. Why are parents helpless?| A．Their kids are having little fun. | B．They are not good at planning trips. |
| C．Their kids depend on them too much. | D．They are too busy to play with their kids. |
| A．It is not worth it. | B．It is good for the family. |
| C．It wouldn't be so much in August. | D．It is a waste for those poor at math. |
| A．He was a polite person. | B．He couldn’t find the line. |
| C．He wanted his kid to cut in line. | D．He wanted to teach them a lesson. |
| A．Behave well, little kids! | B．Mind your manners, parents! |
| C．Make your choices carefully | D．Keep away from amusement parks |
5 . By the mid-1920s, Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. had been one of the most celebrated men .In 1957, when Pablo Picasso was in his seventh decade, he joked that x-ray technology might one day reveal a lost work underneath one of his early paintings. Today, that prediction became reality although the technology involved goes far beyond x-rays.
Using hyper-modern tools to peer into one of his Blue Period paintings, researchers have not only shown a hidden piece of art history in astonishing new detail, they have revealed a striking amount of insight into Picasso's creative process and style.
The investigation focused on"La Miséreuse accroupie, "or" Crouching Woman, "painted in 1902 and currently owned by the Art Gallery. The painting, an oil on canvas (画布) piece drawing a crouching (蜷坐的) woman who wears a long coat, shows Picasso’s typical Blue Period colors: grey, green, blue and white. It shows that the innovative modernist was inspired by the lines of an underlying landscape painted by an unknown artist.
The analysis also exposes several changes to the woman described in the painting,many of which Picasso ultimately abandoned. Researchers released their findings on Saturday’s press conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas. “We think now it's a landscape painted by someone enrolled at the fine arts academy in Barcelona, someone in Picasso’s orbit but not in his close circle, ”says Kenneth Brummel, assistant curator of modern art for the Art Gallery of Ontario.
As to why Picasso would have “recycled” another artist’s canvas(油画布), reasons could range from economic necessity, as a young artist still establishing himself, to deep inspiration driven by the lines of the image already laid down there. Picasso often re-used canvases for this reason."
“He didn't shave off the canvas or put a preparatory layer over it,” Brummel says.“ Picasso saw this landscape, found inspiration, and decided he was going to paint it immediately."
1. According to the text ,the most likely process of Picasso's painting?①Picasso reused another artist's canvas.
②Inspired by a landscape painting, Picasso decided to paint one too.
③Picasso painted a woman on the landscape painting.
④Not happy with the landscape, Picasso covered it totally.
⑤Picasso made changes to the woman
| A．②③④ | B．④②③ |
| C．①③⑤ | D．②①④ |
| A．He reused it because he hated wasting anything. |
| B．He hid his own paintings beneath the landscape. |
| C．He took the advantage of it and created a new one. |
| D．He kept it to himself with the permission of its owner. |
| A．People often celebrated Picasso’s success. |
| B．Picasso was not well-off when he started his career. |
| C．Picasso became successful overnight. |
| D．Picasso was good at imitating other artists’ works. |
| A．Picasso's predication turned out to be joke. |
| B．High technology uncovered art mysteries. |
| C．Seeing is not always believing. |
| D．Lost Artwork Found Under Famous Picasso Painting. |
6 . If maths is the language of the universe, bees may have just uttered their first words. New research suggests these busybodies of the insect world are capable of addition and subtraction (减法) — using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols.
In the animal kingdom, the ability to count — or at least distinguish between differing quantities — isn’t unusual: It has been seen in frogs, spiders, and even fish. But solving equations (方程式) using symbols is rare, so far only achieved by famously brainy animals such as chimpanzees and African grey parrots.
Building on previous research that says the social insects can count to four and understand the concept of zero, researchers wanted to test the limits of what their tiny brains can do.
Scientists trained 14 bees to link the colors blue and yellow to addition and subtraction, respectively. They placed the bees at the entrance of a Y-shaped maze (迷宫), where they were shown several shapes in either yellow or blue. If the shapes were blue, bees got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one more blue shape (the other end had one less blue shape); if the shapes were yellow, they got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one less yellow shape.
The testing worked the same way: Bees that “subtracted” one shape when they saw yellow, or “added” one shape when they saw blue were considered to have aced the test. The bees got the right answer 63% to 72% of the time, depending on the type of equation and the direction of the right answer — much better than random guesses would allow—the researchers report today in Science Advances.
Though the results came from just 14 bees, researchers say the advance is exciting. If a brain about 20,000 times smaller than ours can perform maths using symbols, it could pave the way to novel approaches in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Just don’t ask the bees to do your homework anytime soon.
1. Why do the scientists conduct the research?| A．To teach them maths. | B．To test the power of tiny brains. |
| C．To explain the meaning of colors. | D．To get access to machine learning. |
| A．Given up. | B．Entered for. |
| C．Got through. | D．Checked over. |
| A．Language acquisition. | B．Arithmetic learning. |
| C．Protection of animals. | D．Development of AI. |
| A．Bees “Like” Counting |
| B．Bees “Tell” Colors Apart |
| C．Bees “Perform” Maths Using Shapes |
| D．Bees “Get” Addition and Subtraction |
Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers. But now that information is being spread and monitored(监控) in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By tracking people’s e-mails and online posts, scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.
“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media,” says Jonah Berger, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”
Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative(消极的), but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’ website. He and a Penn colleague analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months. One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles. He found that science amazed Times’ readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others.
Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative feelings like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused(激发) one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”
1. What do the classic rules mentioned in the text apply to?
| A．News reports. | B．Research papers. |
| C．Private e-mails. | D．Daily conversations． |
| A．They’re socially inactive. |
| B．They’re good at telling stories. |
| C．They’re inconsiderate of others. |
| D．They’re careful with their words. |
| A．Sports new. | B．Science articles. |
| C．Personal accounts. | D．Financial reviews. |
| A．Sad Stories Travel Far and Wide |
| B．Online News Attracts More People |
| C．Reading Habits Change with the Times |
| D．Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks |
8 . Most people agree that honesty is a good thing. But does Mother Nature agree? Animals can’t talk, but can they lie in other ways? Can they lie with their bodies and behavior? Animal experts may not call it lying, but they do agree that many animals, from birds to chimpanzees, behave dishonestly to fool other animals. Why? Dishonesty often helps them survive.
Many kinds of birds are very successful at fooling other animals. For example, a bird called the plover sometimes pretends to be hurt in order to protect its young. When a predator(猎食动物) gets close to its nest, the plover leads the predator away from the nest. How? It pretends to have a broken wing. The predator follows the “hurt” adult, leaving the baby birds safe in the nest.
Another kind of bird, the scrub jay, buries its food so it always has something to eat. Scrub jays are also thieves. They watch where others bury their food and steal it. But clever scrub jays seem to know when a thief is watching them. So they go back later, unbury the food, and bury it again somewhere else.
Birds called cuckoos have found a way to have babies without doing much work. How? They don’t make nests. Instead, they get into other birds’ nests secretly. Then they lay their eggs and fly away. When the baby birds come out, their adoptive parents feed them.
Chimpanzees, or chimps, can also be sneaky. After a fight, the losing chimp will give its hand to the other. When the winning chimp puts out its hand, too, the chimps are friendly again. But an animal expert once saw a losing chimp take the winner’s hand and start fighting again.
Chimps are sneaky in other ways, too. When chimps find food that they love, such as bananas, it is natural for them to cry out. Then other chimps come running. But some clever chimps learn to cry very softly when they find food. That way, other chimps don’t hear them, and they don’t need to share their food.
As children, many of us learn the saying “You can’t fool Mother Nature.” But maybe you can’t trust her, either.
1. A plover protects its young from a predator by ________.| A．getting closer to its young | B．driving away the adult predator |
| C．leaving its young in another nest | D．pretending to be injured |
| A．chimps are ready to attack others |
| B．chimps are sometimes dishonest |
| C．chimps are jealous of the winners |
| D．chimps can be selfish too |
| A．Some chimps lower their cry to keep food away from others. |
| B．The losing chimp won the fight by taking the winner's hand. |
| C．Cuckoos fool their adoptive parents by making no nests. |
| D．Some clever scrub jays often steal their food back. |
| A．Do animals lie? |
| B．Does Mother Nature fool animals? |
| C．How do animals learn to lie? |
| D．How does honesty help animals survive? |
