1 . What’s the first thing you remember doing? It could be playing with your friends at school, or going to a birthday party and eating amazing cake.
It’s a strange concept to grasp, but according to research, about four out of ten of us invent our first childhood memory. Rather than having experienced something, we could have fabricated a fake memory from videos or photos we’ve seen. We could have been influenced by a story recounted to us that spurs our minds on to adopt someone else’s memory as our own.
So why do we create fake memories? Some experts believe that there is a clear desire for a sense of self and having a cohesive (连贯的) story of our existence.
So, the next time someone says they have a clear memory from when they were one or even before just remember that while it could be true, there’s a chance they just invented it at some point in their lives.
A.But why don’t we have clear memories from that age? |
B.It happens to everyone no matter how educated he or she is. |
C.This is possibly due to the rapid creation of brain cells in our early years. |
D.We often talk about these memories with our families as if it were what happened yesterday. |
E.Creating memories can fill in the gaps giving us a more complete structure for our early lives. |
F.Most of us have a treasured early memory of our childhood, but can we really believe those vivid memories? |
G.What it means is that memories of our younger years, especially before the age of two, may be inaccurate, or entirely false. |
Balancing Trees and CO2
Tree planting used to be regarded as an effective means of reducing climate change. Perhaps it’s time for us to rethink this practice. Trees pull CO2 from the air. This effectively removes CO2 from the atmosphere. But trees only hold onto CO2 as long as they’re alive. Once they die, trees decay (腐烂) and release that CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Recent studies have found that trees around the world are growing faster than ever. The rise of CO2, mainly due to burning fossil fuels, is probably driving that rapid growth, said Roel Brienen, a forest ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK. High levels of CO2 are increasing temperatures, which in turn speeds tree growth in those areas, he added.
The faster trees grow, the faster they store carbon. It seems like good news. However, it is known that fast-growing tree species, in general, live shorter lives than their slow-growing relatives.
In order to see whether the growth-lifespan trade-off (生长与寿命之间的权衡) is a universal phenomenon, Brienen and his colleagues analyzed over 210,000 individual tree ring records of 110 tree species from more than 79,000 sites worldwide. They found that, in almost all habitats and all sites, faster-growing tree species died younger than slow-growing species, and even within a species, the trade-off between growth and life span held strong.
The team also created a computer program that modeled a forest and tweaked (微量调整) the growth of the trees in this model. Early on, it showed that “the forest could hold more carbon as the trees grew faster”, Brienen reported. But after 20 years, these trees started dying and losing this extra carbon again. “We must understand that the only solution to bringing down CO2 levels is to stop emitting (排放) it into the atmosphere,” said Brienen.
1. What does “this practice” in Para.1 refer to?2. Why are trees around the world growing faster than ever?
3. Read the following statement, underline the false part of it and explain the reason. The team has found that the faster trees grow, the faster they store CO2, and the longer lives they live.
4. Please briefly present what you can do in daily life to reduce the emission of CO2.(about 40 words)
“I do know the pain of suffering from disease and the
With the support of fast and stable communication networks, service robots
Inside the makeshift hospital in Shanghai New International Expo Centre, the first batch of 28 “disinfection robots” have been put into use. Each of them
5 . My adult son walked to the table this morning for breakfast and opened his arms to me. I opened my arms too and gave him a big hug just like I do every morning. And this time when I did, a beautiful memory came back to me. It is
My Italian Granny had been a big hugger when I was a boy, but my mom had grown up in a more
When I was sixteen, I left on a trip with a group to
What use are arms, after all, if we can’t use them to hug each other. What use are lips if we can’t say “I Love You!” God gives us
A.incredible | B.enjoyable | C.believable | D.impossible |
A.persuade | B.instruct | C.transform | D.understand |
A.enlightened | B.reserved | C.energetic | D.silent |
A.tour | B.attend | C.present | D.quit |
A.laughed | B.beaten | C.waved | D.greeted |
A.booming | B.frightening | C.pleasant | D.horrible |
A.reached | B.turned | C.gave | D.stepped |
A.shock | B.satisfaction | C.delight | D.memories |
A.intended | B.determined | C.hesitated | D.happened |
A.practical | B.polite | C.countless | D.different |