1 . Running is often tiring and a lot of hard work, but nothing beats the feeling you get after finishing a long workout around the track.
But while it’s long been believed that endorphins (内啡肽) —chemicals in the body that cause happiness—are behind the so-called “runner’s high”, a study suggested that there may be more to this phenomenon than we previously knew.
According to a recent study published by a group of scientists from several German universities, a group of chemicals called endocannabinoids (内源性大麻素) may actually be responsible for this familiar great feeling.
To test this theory, the scientists turned to mice. Both mice and humans release high levels of endorphins and endocannabinoids after exercise. After exercising on running wheels, the mice seemed happy and relaxed and displayed no signs of anxiety. But after being given a drug to block their endorphins, the mice’s behavior didn’t seem to change. However, when their endocannabinoids were blocked with a different drug, their runners’ high symptoms seemed to fade.
“The long-held notion of endorphins being responsible for the runner’s high is false. Endorphins are effective pain relievers, but only when it comes to the pain in your body and muscles you feel after working out,” Patrick Lucas Austin wrote on science blog Lifchacker.
Similar studies are yet to be carried out on humans, but it’s already known that exercise is a highly effective way to get rid of stress or anxiety. The UK’s National Health Service even prescribes (开药 方) exercise to patients who are suffering from depression. “Being depressed can leave you feeling low in energy, which might put you off being more active. Regular exercise can improve your mood if you have depression, and its especially useful for people with mild to moderate (中等的) depression,” it wrote on its website.
It seems like nothing can beat that feeling we get after a good workout, even if we don’t fully understand where it comes from. At least if we’re feeling down, we know that all we have to do is to put on our running shoes.
1. What did scientists from German universities recently discover?| A．Working out is a highly effective way to treat depression. |
| B．The runner’s high could be caused by endocannabinoids. |
| C．Endorphins may contribute to one’s high spirits after running. |
| D．The level of endorphins and endocannabinoids could affect one’s mood. |
| A．To find what reduces the runner’s high symptoms. |
| B．To see the specific symptoms of the runner’s high. |
| C．To identify what is responsible for the runner’s high. |
| D．To test what influences the level of endocannabinoids released. |
| A．Effect. | B．Goal. | C．Opinion. | D．Question |
| A．They can help ease depression symptoms. |
| B．They are the best way to treat depression. |
| C．They only work for those with serious depression. |
| D．They can help people completely recover from depression. |
2 . Gyms that profit most from the January rush
Every year, like clockwork, many people go through the same routine. On December 26th and January 1st, as the fog of cheese, chocolate oranges and champagne lifts, regret creeps（悄悄出现）in. Online searches for “get fit” and “lose weight” increase.
Many gym recruits（新成员）will have their new sportswear on for high-intensity interval training. In the basement of Another Space, a club near London’s Leicester Square, music pumps and light flash as a trainer shouts instructions to a group of mostly young women. They are pushed through bursts of burpees, handclap push-ups and various kick and punches at boxing bags. The training is murderous.
They are at one end of a fitness market.
Pure Gym expects soon to reach 1 million members. Part of its appeal is that, unlike traditional gyms, members are not bound by a long contract. “We have taken a £500 decision and turned it into a £20 decision,” says Mr Cobbold.
| A．There will be other ripple effects（连锁反应）, too. |
| B．That will be good news for some gym goers because many will soon suffer a second round of regret. |
| C．However, the club’s luxurious changing rooms and bars relieve some of the pain. |
| D．Health clubs of all shapes and sizes stand ready to respond. |
| E．Spending on fashion items also increases around the time of joining a gym. |
| F．At the other are budget gyms, which have accounted for the big part of gym growth in recent years. |
3 . When I was four, I lost my sight by falling off a box car and landing on my head. Now I’m thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It’d be wonderful to see again, but a disaster can do strange things to people.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this belief. It had to start with the most trivial things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. “I can’t use this,” I was hurt, thinking he was teasing me. “Take it with you,” he insisted, “and roll it around.” The words stuck in my head. By rolling the ball I could feel where it went.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. Had I not done that, I’d have broken down and become a chair rocker for the rest of my life. And the path to the belief is never smooth.
| A．I’d fail sometimes, but on average, I made progress |
| B．This gave me an idea on something I had thought impossible to achieve |
| C．As people always say, it takes steel and temper to make a difference |
| D．It came into my mind all of a sudden |
| E．It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do now if I hadn’t been blind |
| F．Life asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality |
Barry Jenkins: ‘When you climb the ladder, you send it back down’
“So, you saw the film?” Barry Jenkins is eager to ask the minute we are introduced. He gives good eye contact through those stylish thick-rimmed glasses – not the big-time, Oscar-winning writer-director speaking, but a nervous artist, anxious
Adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, Beale Street tells the story in which the personal experiences of a young black couple
Baldwin has been dead for 30 years, but his depiction of the fight against a country’s powerful prejudice is a sad reminder
Beale Street
5 . For years, studies have found that first-generation college students — those who do not have a parent with a college degree — lag behind other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created a ‘paradox’ in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has ‘continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close’ the achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper set to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.
The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree. Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial needs, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.
Their thesis — that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact — was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap.
Many first-generation students “struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the rules of the game, and take advantage of college resources,” they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don’t talk about the class advantage and disadvantages of different groups of students. Because U.S. colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students’ educational experience, many first-generation students lack sight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students like them can improve.
1. The authors of the research article are optimistic because _____________.| A．the problem is solvable |
| B．their approach is costless |
| C．the recruiting rate has increased |
| D．their findings appeal to students |
| A．study at private universities |
| B．are from single-parent families |
| C．are in need of financial support |
| D．have failed their college education |
| A．are actually indifferent to the achievement gap |
| B．are inexperienced in handling their issues at college |
| C．may lack opportunities to apply for research projects |
| D．can have a potential influence on other students |
| A．universities often reject the culture of the middle-class |
| B．students are usually to blame for their lack of resources |
| C．social class greatly helps enrich one’s educational experience |
| D．colleges are partly responsible for the problem in question |
6 . Space exploration has always been the province of dreamers: The human imagination readily soars where human innovation struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.
In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the decade's end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated(共鸣) with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous dream speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had turned out concrete results and transformed American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up conflicting with each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely practical and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is actually unrealistic in its aims.
When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised（妥协） space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no successor. The endless argument is that funds are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Among the current concerns about the federal deficit (赤字), reaching toward the stars seems an unnecessary luxury---as if saving one-thousandth of a single year's budget would solve our problems.
But human innovation struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic devices that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, mapping out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are designing a bottom-up attack on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within reach of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.
The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us---not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed on each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can get over what were once considered inborn limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, healthcare. Tomorrow we will overcome these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is capable of greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.
1. The author mentions Cyrano de Bergerac in order to show that _________.| A．imagination is the mother of invention |
| B．creativity is essential to science fiction writers |
| C．it takes patience for humans to realize their dreams |
| D．dreamers have always been interested in science fiction |
| A．They symbolized human beings' confidence in achievements. |
| B．They brought about dramatic changes in American society. |
| C．They are in complete conflict with each other. |
| D．They both sounded very much unrealistic to Americans. |
| A．Space shuttle program is too dangerous for Americans to carry on. |
| B．The tight budget is to blame for the unsuccessful space program. |
| C．More problems on Earth call for our immediate attention. |
| D．Space program, necessary to the national dream, should be continued. |
| A．They pose a serious challenge to future human existence. |
| B．They can be solved sooner or later with human innovation. |
| C．Their solutions need joint efforts of the public and private sectors. |
| D．They can only be solved by people who are intelligently superior. |
1.
| A．It comes from the heart. | B．It’s something you have to think about. |
| C．It never gets boring. | D．It’s not a feeling or an emotion. |
| A．She had long black hair. | B．She wore leather clothes. |
| C．She never wore pants. | D．She wore blue jeans. |
| A．Up Your Alley. | B．The Blackhearts. |
| C．Gary Glitter | D．Sly and the Family Stone. |
| A．She didn’t actually have much influence. | B．People still don’ understand her. |
| C．She still wants to perform. | D．She is a star on the stage. |
8 . Adolescents refer to boys and girls at high-school level—more specifically the second, third and forth years of high schools. In dealing with students at this level, we must bear in mind that to some degree they are at the difficult stage, generally called adolescence.
Students at this level are likely to be confused mentally. They usually find it hard to concentrate on what they intend to do and often have romantic dreams.
Regarding school issues, although they seldom say so, they really want to be consulted and given an opportunity to direct their own affairs, but they need a good amount of guidance. They seldom admit that they need this guidance and they frequently rebel against it. But if it’s intelligently offered they accept it with enthusiasm. As to personal beliefs, most of adolescents are trying to form political ideals and they have a tendency to be sometimes extremely idealistic, and at other times conventional, blindly accepting what their fathers and grandfathers believed in.
| A．The critical abilities are beginning to develop in adolescence. |
| B．Their view on life usually falls on two extremes. |
| C．Of all periods of life, this is what may best be called the “plastic age”. |
| D．They are basically timid or self-conscious. |
| E．Despite that, it is also in this period that strong ties between teachers and students develop. |
| F．Fundamentally they want to be kept busy but they refuse to admit it. |
9 . Celebrity has become one of the most important representatives of popular culture. Fans used to be crazy about a specific film, but now the public tends to base its consumption on the interest of celebrity attached to any given product. Besides, fashion magazines have almost abandoned the practice of putting models on the cover because they don’t sell nearly as well as famous faces. As a result, celebrities have realized their unbelievably powerful market potential, moving from advertising for others’ products to developing their own.
Celebrity clothing lines aren’t a completely new phenomenon, but in the past they were typically aimed at the ordinary consumers, and limited to a few TV actresses. Today they’re started by first-class stars whose products enjoy equal fame with some world top brands. The most successful start-ups have been those by celebrities with specific personal style. As celebrities become more and more experienced at the market, they expand their production scale rapidly, covering almost all the products of daily life.
However, for every success story, there’s a related warning tale of a celebrity who overvalued his consumer appeal. No matter how famous the product’s origin is, if it fails to impress consumers with its own qualities it begins to resemble an exercise in self-promotional marketing. And once the initial attention dies down, consumer interest might fade, loyalty (忠诚) returning to tried-and-true labels.
Today, celebrities face even more severe embarrassment. The pop-cultural circle might be bigger than ever, but its rate of turnover has speeded up as well. Each misstep threatens to reduce a celebrity’s shelf life, and the same newspaper or magazine that once brought him fame has no problem picking him to pieces when the opportunity appears. Still, the ego’s potential for expansion is limitless. Having already achieved great wealth and public recognition, many celebrities see fashion as the next frontier to be conquered. As the saying goes, success and failure always go hand in hand. Their success as designers might last only a short time, but fashion - like celebrity - has always been temporary.
1. Fashion magazines today ________.| A．seldom put models on the cover |
| B．no longer put models on the cover |
| C．need not worry about celebrities’ market potential |
| D．judge the market potential of every celebrity correctly |
| A．ordinary consumers are more concerned with price rather than brand name |
| B．celebrity branded products can be an instant success |
| C．consumer’s enthusiasm for celebrity branded products prove to be inconstant |
| D．to consumers, quality matters more than the outside of products. |
| A．decrease the popularity of a celebrity and the sales of his products |
| B．damage the image of a celebrity in the eyes of the general public |
| C．cut short the artistic career of a celebrity in show business |
| D．influence the price of a celebrity’s products |
| A．celebrity and personal style | B．celebrity and market potential |
| C．celebrity and fashion design | D．celebrity and clothing industry |
| A. inaccessible B. fought C. addressing D. personally E. sharp F. hitting G. ground H. features I. aimed J. champion K. officially |
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady and secretary of state officially entered the 2016 presidential race with a video announcement to supporters on Sunday, saying she wants to be the
“Americans have
The video represented a
While she told voters in 2008 that she was “ in to win,” Clinton told voters on Sunday that she is “
It’s an intentionally low-key kickoff plotted(策划) by a campaign seeking to avoid the mistakes of Clinton’s failed 2008 quest for the Democratic presidential nomination(提名). In 2007, she entered the race as the overwhelming favorite but eventually lost
Eight years later, Clinton again enters the race as the overwhelming front-runner — though this time with no real challenger, so far. But instead of launching the same campaign
