Hosting the Olympics
Today, the Olympic Games are one of the most popular and most watched events on earth. Every four years, many countries bid for the Games. Why do they do this? What are the advantages of hosting such an event?
A world-class event demands world-class facilities from the host city, and any which do not already exist will have to be built. These will remain for the local population to enjoy after the Games are over. An example of this is the accommodation which will have to be built, not only for the athletes in their Olympic village, but also for visitors. Later this can be transformed into permanent accommodation for tourists and students. The transport system must also be taken into consideration. Hosting the Olympics means having an effective wide-reaching system, which is essential to carry people safely and efficiently to their destinations. Such a transport system is a great advantage for any city and will be in service for the years to come.
Funding any great event is a costly business, but many companies fiercely compete to become sponsors of such global events as it is an ideal platform for advertising. This means that advertising profits can easily cover a large proportion of the cost involved. In addition, the broadcasting rights can be a source of finance. For example, the national American TV company NBC paid $3.5 billion to broadcast the Olympic Games between 2000 and 2008.
Another consideration is employment. High-tech video cameras are already common in most of our big cities today, and increasing the manpower necessary to guarantee the safety of all concerned provides valuable employment opportunities. Indeed, the organization of such an event gives rise to a large number of jobs in a variety of sectors including security, catering and hospitality.
It’s universally agreed that the host city gains overall in terms of improvements in facilities and infrastructure. But this is not all. Not only do the improved facilities remain after the Games have gone, but the city also becomes a significant place in its own right.
3 . The benefits of exercise have been fully noted and your resolutions have been made. Yes, you want to be fit and live a long and healthy life.
According to standard advice issued by the World Health Organization, adults should be getting at least 150 minutes of moderate physical workout or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week to extend their lives, get fit, have stronger muscles and be a healthy weight. If that didn’t already sound a lot, the WHO says to double that if you want to get further benefits.
The good news for those who dislike sports is that it’s possible to stick to these guidelines without entering a gym or breaking into a jog.
This idea is in line with evidence from a study last year of more than 130,000 people in 17 countries, which found that walking to work and housework such as vacuuming or mopping the floor are activities enough to reduce the risk of early death by 28 per cent, as long as you do 150 minutes a week. If you aren’t one for housework, you will be pleased to hear that your weekly amount of exercise can be put into the weekend with no ill effects, says Gray Donovan of Loughbirough University, UK.
| A．However, take care not to do too much exercise. |
| B．Most governments urge people to do a little every day, or at least spread their exercise over the week. |
| C．Having a busy weekend with three or four hours spent taking exercise does more good than thought. |
| D．Could you ever get too much of a good thing? |
| E．But what do you actually have to do to get the desired results? |
| F．The WHO’s definition of moderate exercise includes housework and gardening. |
4 . “In every known human society the male’s needs for achievement can be recognized ... In a great number of human societies men’s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activities that women are not allowed to. The maleness in fact has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some fields or performing some feat (壮举).”
This is the conclusion of the anthropologist (人类学家) Margaret Mead about the way in which the roles of men and women is society should be distinguished.
If talk and print are considered, it would seem that the formal liberation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of women and about the complicated system of defence which men have thrown up around their, by far and away, accepted advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types of occupation and sociable groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubt of the seriousness of women’s claims to the level of intellect and resolution that men, it is supposed, bring to the business of running the world.
There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men’s status. In the first place, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the woman Prime Minister, in India, Sri Lanka and Israel.
Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. We witness the sharing of domestic tasks, and the admission of women to all sorts of previously exclusively male pastimes.
In the ancient natural society, cave men went out and fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women kept the fire going. Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive and natural conditions of human life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaeology (考古学), but that does not matter since it’s not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardly felt expectations of people’s sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiation between the roles and the two sexes.
1. The phrase “men’s sureness of their sex role” in the first paragraph suggests that they ________.| A．are confident in their ability to charm women |
| B．take the initiative in work and life |
| C．have a clear idea of what is considered “manly” |
| D．tend to be more immoral than women are |
| A．prevent women from taking up certain professions |
| B．secretly admire women’s intellect and resolution |
| C．doubt whether women really mean to succeed in business |
| D．forbid women to join certain clubs and societies. |
| A．is based on the study of ancient societies |
| B．illustrates how people expect men to behave |
| C．is dismissed by author as an irrelevant joke |
| D．proves that men, not women, should be the breadwinner |
| A．approves of | B．takes for granted |
| C．completely rejects | D．expects to go on changing |
5 . Flooded by more information than we can possibly hold in our heads, we’re increasingly shifting from the job of remembering to search engines and smartphones. Google is even reportedly working on eyeglasses that could one day recognize faces and supply details about whoever you’re looking at. But new research shows that outsourcing our memory -- and expecting that information will be continually and immediately available--- is changing our cognitive habits.
Research conducted by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University, has identified three new realities about how we process information in the Internet age. First, her experiments have shown that when we don’t know the answer to a question, we now think about where we can find the nearest Web connection instead of the subject of the question itself. A second revelation is that when we expect to be able to find certain information again later on, we don’t remember it as well as when we think it might become unavailable. And then there is the researchers’ final observation: the expectation that we’ll be able to locate information down the line leads us to form a memory not of the fact itself but of where we’ll be able to find it.
But this shift comes with a downside. Skills like critical thinking and analysis must develop in the context of facts: we need something to think and reason about, after all. And these facts can’t be Googled as we go; they need to be stored in our internal long-term memory. Especially in the case of children, “factual knowledge must precede skill” says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology, at the University of Virginia -- meaning that the days of drilling the multiplication table and memorizing the names of the Presidents aren’t over quite yet. Adults, too, need to recruit a supply of stored knowledge in order to situate and evaluate the new information they encounter. You can’t Google context.
1. According to the passage, the term “cognitive habits” (Paragraph 1) refers to __________.| A．how we deal with information |
| B．where we locate information |
| C．what we think of information |
| D．how we get rid of information |
| A．We remember people and things as much as before. |
| B．We remember more internet connections than before. |
| C．We pay equal attention to the location and content of information. |
| D．We tend to remember where we can locate information rather than the core facts themselves. |
| A．function as a form of our external memory |
| B．improve our ability to remember things. |
| C．help us see human faces betters |
| D．work like smartphones |
| A．Web connections aid our memory. |
| B．People differ in what they remember. |
| C．People store memories on smartphones. |
| D．People should exercise their memory more. |
| A. address；B. emerged；C. harmoniously；D. withdrew E. complex； F. fashion；G. troublesome；H. understandably I. initial；J. harvest；K. novel |
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