1 . According to a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research, both the size and consumption habits of our eating companions can influence our food intake. And contrary to existing research that says you should avoid eating with heavier people who order large portions(份), it's the beanpoles with big appetites you really need to avoid.
To test the effect of social influence on eating habits, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 95 undergraduate women were individually invited into a lab to ostensibly(表面上)participate in a study about movie viewership. Before the film began, each woman was asked to help herself to a snack. An actor hired by the researchers grabbed her food first. In her natural state, the actor weighed 105 pounds. But in half the cases she wore a specially designed fat suit which increased her weight to 180 pounds.
Both the fat and thin versions of the actor took a large amount of food. The participants followed suit, taking more food than they normally would have. However, they took significantly more when the actor was thin.
For the second test, in one case the thin actor took two pieces of candy from the snack bowls. In the other case, she took 30 pieces. The results were similar to the first test: the participants followed suit but took significantly more candy when the thin actor took 30 pieces.
The tests show that the social environment is extremely influential when we're making decisions. If this fellow participant is going to eat more, so will I. Call it the “I’ll have what she's having” effect. However, we'll adjust the influence. If an overweight person is having a large portion, I'll hold back a bit because I see the results of his eating habits. But if a thin person eats a lot, I'll follow suit. If he can eat much and keep slim, why can't I?
1. What is the recent study mainly about?| A．Food safety. | B．Movie viewership. |
| C．Consumer demand. | D．Eating behavior. |
| A．Big eaters. | B．Overweight persons. |
| C．Picky eaters. | D．Tall thin persons. |
| A．To see how she would affect the participants. |
| B．To test if the participants could recognize her. |
| C．To find out what she would do in the two tests. |
| D．To study why she could keep her weight down. |
| A．How hungry we are. | B．How slim we want to be. |
| C．How we perceive others. | D．How we feel about the food. |
2 . When you were trying to figure out what to buy for the environmentalist on your holiday list, fur probably didn’t cross your mind. But some ecologists and fashion (时装)enthusiasts are trying to bring back the market for fur made from nutria(海狸鼠).
Unusual fashion shows in New Orleans and Brooklyn have showcased nutria fur made into clothes in different styles. “It sounds crazy to talk about guilt-free fur-unless you understand that the nutria are destroying vast wetlands every year”, says Cree McCree, project director of Righteous Fur.
Scientists in Louisiana were so concerned that they decided to pay hunters $5 a tail. Some of the fur ends up in the fashion shows like the one in Brooklyn last month.
Nutria were brought there from Argentina by fur farmers and let go into the wild. “The ecosystem down there can’t handle this non-native species(物种).It’s destroying the environment. It’s them or us.” says Michael Massimi, an expert in this field.
The fur trade kept nutria in check for decades，but when the market for nutria collapsed in the late 1980s，the cat-sized animals multiplied like crazy.
Biologist Edmond Mouton runs the nutria control program for Louisiana. He says it’s not easy to convince people that nutria fur is green, but he has no doubt about it. Hunters bring in more than 300,000 nutria tails a year, so part of Mouton’s job these days is trying to promote fur.
Then there’s Righteous Fur and its unusual fashion. Model Paige Morgan says，”To give people a guilt-free option that they can wear without someone throwing paint on them-I think that’s going to be a massive thing, at least here in New York.” Designer Jennifer Anderson admits it took her a while to come around to the opinion that using nutria fur for her creations is morally acceptable. She is trying to come up with a label to attach to nutria fashions to show it is eco-friendly.
1. What is the purpose of the fashion shows in New Orleans and Brooklyn?| A．To promote guilt-free fur. |
| B．To expand the fashion market. |
| C．To introduce a new brand. |
| D．To celebrate a winter holiday. |
| A．Nutria damage the ecosystem seriously. |
| B．Nutria are an endangered species. |
| C．Nutria hurt local cat-sized animals. |
| D．Nutria are illegally hunted. |
| A．Boomed. | B．Became mature. | C．Remained stable. | D．Crashed. |
| A．It’s formal. | B．It’s risky. | C．It’s harmful. | D．It’s traditional. |
3 . We recognize our friends’ faces. And we’re not alone. Many social animals can identify individuals of their own species by features of their faces. That's important, because they need to be able to change their behavior depending on who they meet. And a recent research has shown that some species of monkeys, birds, and domesticated (家养的) animals can even tell different faces apart by looking at photographs alone.
Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.
She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side pictures by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their present keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored (忽视) the stranger’s face about 75%of the time. In fact, even though the horses didn't get it right every single time, they were at least as correct in picking out their earlier keeper as they were at identifying their present one.
The results suggest that not only can horses differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces, they also naturally understand that photographs are two dimensional representations (二维呈现) of real life, without any other intimations such as smell or sound. And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal parter, the domestic dog.
In addition, horses seem to have a strong long-term memory for human faces, like their long lifespan and history of domestication. In future experiments, the researchers would like to test whether looking at photos of people that they have had bad experiences with in the past might cause horses to act anxious or even avoidance. So maybe think twice before doing anything that might give a horse a long face.
1. Why did researchers show the horses both the keeper’s photos and the strangers’?| A．To find out what horses would do in the experiment. |
| B．To see why horses could recognize the keeper in the pictures. |
| C．To test whether horses could recognize the strangers in pictures. |
| D．To study to what degree horses can make out different people in pictures. |
| A．Clues. | B．Differences. |
| C．Photographs. | D．Senses. |
| A．Whether horses can live longer than other animals. |
| B．Whether horses can remember human's faces for a long time. |
| C．Whether horses can show their emotions at the sight of photos. |
| D．Whether horses are better at recognizing photos than other animals. |
| A．To talk about animals’ species. |
| B．To explain animals’ facial features. |
| C．To show animals’ behaviour for adaptation. |
| D．To introduce animals’ ability to identifying faces. |
4 . For several decades, there has been an extensive and organized campaign intended to generate distrust in science, funded by those whose interests and ideologies are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things.
Stressing successes isn’t wrong, but for many people it’s not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question “Why trust science?” is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. If you’ve got a high school science textbook lying around, you’ll probably find that answer in it. But what is typically thought to be the scientific method — develop a hypothesis (假设), then design an experiment to test it — isn’t what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and sometimes, scientists can be found doing many different things.
If there is no identifiable scientific method, then what is the reason for trust in science? The answer is how those claims are evaluated. The common element in modern science, regardless of the specific field or the particular methods being used, is the strict scrutiny (审查) of claims. It’s this tough, sustained process that works to make sure faulty claims are rejected. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a lengthy “peer review” because the reviewers are experts in the same field who have both the right and the obligation (责任) to find faults.
A key aspect of scientific judgment is that it is done collectively. No claim gets accepted until it has been vetted by dozens, if not hundreds, of heads. In areas that have been contested, like climate science and vaccine safety, it’s thousands. This is why we are generally justified in not worrying too much if a single scientist, even a very famous one, disagrees with the claim. And this is why diversity in science — the more people looking at a claim from different angles — is important.
Does this process ever go wrong? Of course. Scientists are humans. There is always the possibility of revising a claim on the basis of new evidence. Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are “always changing their minds.” While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that it explains what might otherwise appear paradoxical (矛盾的): that science produces both novelty and stability. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.
1. How does the author think of the scientific method?| A．Stable. | B．Persuasive. |
| C．Unreliable. | D．Unrealistic. |
| A．Explained. | B．Examined. |
| C．Repeated. | D．Released. |
| A．it is not persuasive to reject those faulty claims |
| B．settled science tends to be collectively overturned |
| C．a leading expert cannot play a decisive role in a scrutiny |
| D．diversity in knowledge is the common element in science |
| A．Put Your Faith in Science | B．Defend the Truth in Science |
| C．Apply Your Mind to Science | D．Explore A Dynamic Way to Science |
5 . The first patient who died on my watch was an older man with a faulty heart. We tried to slow it down with treatment, but it suddenly stopped beating completely. Later, whenever I would have a case like that one, I found myself second-guessing my clinical management. However, it turns out that thinking twice may actually cause more harm than good.
In a working paper, Emory University researchers found that when doctors delivering a baby have a bad result, they are more likely to switch to a different delivery method with the next patient, often unnecessarily and sometimes with worse results.
Because doctors make so many decisions that have serious consequences, the fallout from second-guessing appears especially large for us. A 2006 study found that if a patient had a bleed after being prescribed (开药) warfarin, the physician was about 20% less likely to prescribe later patients the blood thinner that prevents strokes (中风). However, if a patient was not on warfarin and had a stroke physicians were still no more likely to prescribe warfarin to their other patients.
These findings highlight interesting behavioral patterns in doctors. In the blood-thinner study, doctors were more affected by the act of doing harm (prescribing a blood thinner that ended up hurting doctors were more affected by the act of doing harm(prescribing a blood thinner that ended up hurting a patient) and less affected by letting harm happen (not prescribing a blood thinner and the patient having a stroke). Yet a stroke is often more permanent and damaging than a bleed.
But this phenomenon is not unique to medicine. ''Overreaction to Fearsome Risks'' holds true for broader society.
For instance, sensational headlines about shark attacks on humans in Florida in 2001 caused a panic and led the state to prohibit shark-feeding expeditions. Yet shark attacks had actually fallen that year and, according to the study, such a change was probably unnecessary given the extremely small risk of such an attack happening.
Humans are likely to be influenced by emotional and often irrational (不理性的) thinking when processing information, bad events and mistakes. As much as we don't want to cause an unfortunate event to happen again, we need to be aware that a worst situation that can be imagined doesn't necessarily mean we did anything wrong. When we overthink, we fail to rely on thinking based on what we know or have experienced. Instead, we may involuntarily overanalyze and come to the wrong conclusion.
I have treated dozens of patients who presented with the same illnesses as my first patient, who died more than a year ago. Instead of second-guessing myself, I trusted my clinical instinct (本能) and stayed the course. Every one of those patients survived. You should trust your instinct in your life, too.
1. The first two paragraphs suggest that________.| A．bad medical outcomes affect doctors |
| B．delivering babies can be difficult work |
| C．some doctors are not very experienced |
| D．doctors sometimes make silly mistakes |
| A．tend to prescribe less effective medicine |
| B．are more concerned about the patients' safety |
| C．become less confident in writing a prescription |
| D．believe a stroke is more treatable than a bleeding |
| A．Result | B．Benefit | C．Difference | D．Absence |
| A．we should not doubt our own decisions |
| B．our experience will pave way for our future |
| C．humans are emotional and irrational on the whole |
| D．instincts don't necessarily lead to wrong directions |
6 . Time and how we experience it have always puzzled us. Physicists have created fascinating theories, but their time is measured by a pendulum (钟摆) and is not psychological time, which leaps with little regard to the clock or calendar. As someone who understood the distinction observed, ''When you sit with a nice girl for two hours it seems like a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove, a minute seems like two hours. ''
Psychologists have long noticed that larger units of time, such as months and years, fly on swifter wings as we age. They also note that the more time is structured with schedules and appointments, the more rapidly it seems to pass. For example, a day at the office flies compared with a day at the beach.
Expectation and familiarity also make time seem to flow more rapidly. Almost all of us have had the experience of driving somewhere we've never been before. Surrounded by unfamiliar scenery, with no real idea of when we’ll arrive, we experience the trip as lasing a long time. But the return trip, although exactly as long, seems to take far less time. The novelty of the outward journey has become routine.
When days become as identical as beads (小珠子)on a string, they mix together, and even months become a single day. To counter this, try to find ways to interrupt the structure of your day-- to stop time, so to speak.
Learning something new is one of the ways to slow the passage of time. One of the reasons the days of our youth seems to be full and long is that these are the days of learning and discovery. For many of us, learning ends when we leave school, but this doesn't have to be.
1. What is the underlined sentence in paragraph 1 used to show?| A．Psychological time is quite puzzling. |
| B．Time should not be measured by a pendulum. |
| C．Physical time is different from psychological time |
| D．Physical theory has nothing to do with the true sense of time |
| A．Our sense of time changes. |
| B．We spend less time at the beach |
| C．More time is structured and scheduled |
| D．Time is structured with too many appointments. |
| A．excitement | B．unfamiliarity | C．imagination | D．amusement |
| A．To give various explanations about time |
| B．To describe how we experience time physically |
| C．To show the differences of two kinds of time |
| D．To explain why time flies and how to slow it down |
7 . A 2018 report found that food waste would increase by a third to 2. 1billion tons by 2030. Beyond the cost of the waste itself，thrown-away food generates a gas that contributes to climate change.
Home delivery meal kits(盒)can reduce food waste by more than two-thirds，but suppliers need to switch to reusable packaging to make them environmentally friendly.
Tailor-made meal kits cut waste by providing people with precise amounts of fresh ingredients(烹饪原料)for chosen recipes，meaning leftovers are minimized. But while the delivery services score well on reducing food waste，buying the same food ingredients from the supermarket almost always saves energy overall simply because meal kits use so much single-use packaging. The good news is that if people have meals that are tailored for consumption，they won’t overbuy and have less food waste. They fine-tune the amount of food to what they will actually eat.
Meal kits can reduce transport emissions(排放)if people go to the supermarket less frequently. If people only go and buy such goods as soap and toilet paper，they may only have to visit once every couple of months. A delivery truck can carry meals for a lot of people in the neighborhood. So dozens of car trips might be replaced with one truck trip.
However，study found that even if delivery meal kits reduced food waste to zero，they would still use up more energy overall than buying the same food from the supermarket unless the energy used for the meal kit packaging was cut by a fifth. The packaging is a killer if it’s single-use and thrown away，which can make all the environmental benefits lost. But if the packaging can be reused，if it’s glass bottles，like in the old days，we can get some benefits.
1. What can we learn about home delivery meal kits?| A．They can cut down on daily expenses. |
| B．They will totally solve the problem of food waste. |
| C．They can keep energy consumption to a minimum. |
| D．They will benefit the environment with reusable packaging. |
| A．Attach. | B．Adjust. |
| C．Raise. | D．Compare. |
| A．reduce transport emissions | B．save more food |
| C．shop only in the supermarket | D．shorten car trip distances |
| A．Supportive. | B．Unfavorable. |
| C．Objective. | D．Indifferent. |
8 . “Birds” and “airports” are two words that, paired together，don’t normally paint the most harmonious picture. So it really raises some eyebrows when China announces plans to build an airport that is for birds.
Described as the world’s first-ever bird airport, the proposed Lingang Bird Sanctuary(保护区）in the northern coastal city of Tianjin is, of course,not an actual airport. Rather，it's a wetland preserve specifically designed to accommodate hundreds-even thousands-of daily takeoffs and landings by birds traveling along the East Asian-Australian Flyway. Over 50 species of migratory (迁徙的）water birds，some endangered, will stop and feed at the protected sanctuary before continuing their long journey along the flyway.
Located on a former landfill site，the 150-acre airport is also open to human travelers.(Half a million visitors are expected annually.) However，instead of duty-free shopping，the main attraction for non-egg-laying creatures at Tianjin’s newest airport will be a green-roofed education and research center, a series of raised “observation platforms” and a network of scenic walking and cycling paths totaling over 4 miles.
“The proposed Bird Airport will be a globally significant sanctuary for endangered migratory bird species, while providing new green lungs for the city of Tianjin.” Adrian McGregor of an Australian landscape architecture firm explained of the design. Frequently blanketed in smog so thick that it has shut down real airports, Tianjin is a city---China’s fourth most populous----that would certainly benefit from a new pair of healthy green lungs•
1. The underlined phrase “non-egg-laying creatures” in Paragraph 3 refers to?| A．Visitors. | B．Designers. |
| C．Endangered water birds. | D．Planes. |
| A．People cannot watch birds up close here. |
| B．It is located on a 150-acre landfill site. |
| C．It functions as an actual airport and a wetland preserve. |
| D．It provides migratory birds with food and shelter. |
| A．The airport will become a permanent home for birds. |
| B．Tianjin will win worldwide fame in the future. |
| C．Tianjin’s air quality will improve thanks to the airport. |
| D．Tianjin will be able to accommodate more people. |
| A．Airports shut down and open up. |
| B．China is to open the first Bird Airport. |
| C．Airports turn into green lungs. |
| D．Birds are no longer enemies to airports. |
9 . One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone (无人机) into a remote-controlled pollinator (授粉媒介) by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.
Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades. Thus, the decline of bees isn't just worrisome because it could disrupt ecosystems, but also because it could disrupt agriculture and economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, but none of them are especially effective yet.
Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven't figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire. “It’s very tough work,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. His particular contribution to the field involves a gel, one he’d considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it hadn’t dried up or degraded at all. “I was so surprised because it still had high viscosity,” Miyako said.
The chemist noticed that when dropped, the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen (花粉). He and his colleagues chose a drone and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to mimic a bee’s fuzzy body. They coated those horsehairs in the gel, and then controlled the drones over lilies, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one, thus fertilizing it.
The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones whose horsehairs had been coated with the gel had about 10 times more pollen than those that had not been coated with the gel.
Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties. There’s a lot of work to be done before that's a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more controllable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, with better GPS and artificial intelligence.
1. What does the underlined word “viscosity” in Para.3 probably mean?| A．Hardness. | B．Stickiness. |
| C．Flexibility. | D．Purity. |
| A．bees disrupt both agriculture and economy |
| B．scientists have invented self-powered robot insects |
| C．bees in the United States are on the edge of extinction |
| D．Miyako found the special feature of the gel by chance |
| A．its body is made like a bee’s |
| B．its GPS works more efficiently |
| C．some flowers are coated with the gel |
| D．horsehairs with the gel are attached to it |
| A．are not yet ready for practical use |
| B．may eventually replace bees in the future |
| C．are much more efficient than bee pollinators |
| D．can provide a solution to economic depression |
10 . If you visit Uluwatu temple in Bali, be cautious. The long-tailed temple monkeys there are well-known thieves. Since a long time ago, they have made a living by robbing visitors of their possessions and then holding those objects until a ransom in the form of food is paid. But Jean-Baptiste Leca of the University of Lethbridge, in Canada, wondered whether these monkeys are cleverer still. Sometimes, they do not accept the first offer and hold out for more. He therefore asked himself whether they are able to assess how valuable an object is to its owner, and factor that into their negotiations.
Dr. Leca and his colleagues conducted their experiment by wandering around the temple with video cameras, recording the activities of the monkeys. Every time they saw a monkey show interest in a particular tourist? they recorded the interaction. To work out what was going on, they had first to establish the relative values of food rewards to monkeys, and of stealable objects to people.
To confirm which stealable objects are most valued by people, they divided them into six classes: empty containers, such as phone cases and plastic bottles; accessories (搭配物) such as hairpins and key rings; hats and shoes; spectacles and sunglasses; and electronics and wallets. They then observed how often victims bothered to bargain with the thief for the return of property belonging to different classes, and thus classified objects into low value, medium value and high value.
They found that monkeys do, indeed, have a complicated sense of what they are doing — at least, adults and sub-adults do. These animals have a preference for stealing high-value items, and will often hold out either for more rewards, or for better ones, if they are in possession of such items. But this is something that they have to learn how to do as they grow up. Young monkeys make no such distinctions, and sub-adults are less good at doing so than adults.
1. What is the purpose of Leca's research?| A．To prove monkeys are cleverer than men. |
| B．To find out what is valuable for monkeys. |
| C．To record the negotiations between monkeys. |
| D．To make sure monkeys can judge item values. |
| A．Bilk. | B．Reward. | C．Tax. | D．Rent. |
| A．By the material of objects. | B．By the preference of victims. |
| C．By the buying price of objects, | D．By the frequency of bargaining. |
| A．Young monkeys can evaluate items. | B．All monkeys prefer high-value items, |
| C．Monkeys have a simple sense of acts. | D．Monkeys' stealing is an acquired skill. |
